Budhist SNOoze

In all the time we have been satirizing the semi-competent Board who have ruined Home Farm for the rest of us, we've left Val Taylor alone. We had hope for her that her feistyness might drive her to act for Principle, instead of always settling for not confronting the dysfunctional family within which she likes to act out the role of perennial rebel. But in the end she never manages to "come out and be separate," instead allows abuse to go on before her eyes and turns away.

Today's Guest Post is dedicated to Val who claims we live in a "pig pen," while she seems to miss the cosmic irony that she continues to support the pig pen at Home Farm that has driven out so many experienced students who simply cannot take any longer the phoney swill served up there.

Measuring Results

How can we compare the purposes of ISNO v. SNO?

SNO was the vehicle for Vitvan as Ralph, a giant who capitulated the wisdom of the Past Cycle. His job was to do a write-up of the wisdom of his Cycle and bequeath it to those who followed. His day job was lecturer, and he made his living running a school, selling books, etc. He anticipated the New Cycle, and tried building a bridge into it, but like Moses, he did not pass over into the Promised Land.

What was his Valuable Final Product (VFP)?, the goal of his methodology?

Answer: after a period of sanctuary, recuperation, and mental instruction, to rev things up until SOME students broke consciously into the First Crossing, and embraced this process actively, instead of passively waiting for “life to be their teacher.” For such students to touch upon the root of their being, that Field in which their personality bubble floats, the I AM of Mind level, and now know that the Master is already in them, not outside; and henceforth to listen and follow that inner Teaching given just to them.

How many did he get to this point? He said only 5 or so made it thru the First Crossing to a birth upon Mind level. We don’t know how many developed practices wherein they actively could step outside the egoic personality state into that space of Grace attained again and again in Level 2 First Crossing, but it won’t have been too many. He estimated only 2% had what it takes to persist.

How did he find students? He let the Field find them. He advised against advertisement in publications for the normals. He followed the “cattle-guard rule,” i.e., if someone finds their way to him, they are welcome until the Field moves them away.

ISNO obviously is not an SNO, and does not wish to reach a broad audience in order to make a living. None of us are “Ralphs” either, but simply students working our way through Level 2, who now are capable of mentoring others by sharing what we have learned so far, letting down our hair, being honest about the ups and downs to encourage those who think they struggle alone.

The Sufis have a saying “when you feel the urge to teach,... don’t.” Also, make your living independently of giving teachings. The Spirit is not a product that can be delivered on demand. We serve It, we don’t serve It up. As soon as one depends on “teaching” for a living they will compromise their integrity cranking out new product to pay the bills.

I prefer to follow the “cattle guard” rule. If the Field cannot bring those to us who can use what we have to share, then this whole Process doesn’t work.

It is quite likely that in the end those working behind the scenes may help as many through the First Crossing as Vitvan did looking for that 2% amidst the throng of Old Cycle people who came and went looking for a quick fix, a gold star, or cool initiatory bling. It’s not about numbers anyway, but rather serving the Plan as it comes, rather than making effort to conceive a plan from the little self.

When Feel-Good replaces Feel-Know

ORGANIC FARM ADVISORY

For repeated violations of standard accepted practices of Organic Gardening, the following are De-listed:

Home Farm Garden Club

Susan Wetmore

Dan Hathaway

Jane Murray

Pat Murray

History: Home Farm, headquarters for Vitvan’s School of the Natural Order, included in its Articles of Incorporation, the purpose of pursuing Biodynamic and Organic gardening.

a)      Biodynamic is a form of Organic gardening that takes into account etheric and/or spiritual forces of the plant growth cycle, and strengthens them with special preparations to be added to the compost or soil.

b)      Organic in common understanding means the non-use and avoidance of exposure to synthetic chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, or fungicides. There is no such thing as being semi-organic just as one cannot be semi-pregnant.

Home Farm does not practice Biodynamic gardening, even though some members such as Dan Hathaway, self-promoted compost expert, understand the principles.

Recently Home Farm again voluntarily called in Tri-County Weed to spray the grounds, including resident areas inhabited by children and pets, with commercial toxic herbicides as part of an annual eradication program for “thistle.” Note that co-operation with this program is voluntary.

Susan Wetmore is a member of a cooperative weed management group and using her position as SNO Board member promotes the use of toxic herbicides all around the Home Farm property, while dismissing the complaints and concerns of other residents who have repeatedly objected over the past years.

Thistles are a problem for commercial agribusiness monocroppers. Home Farm does not grow crops. Thistles are a problem if grazing animals eat them. Home Farm does not graze animals.

Even though Susan received notification more than 12 hours before the day for the spraying, she did not send out warning to the residents until 5 a.m. one hour before the sprayer would arrive at 6 a.m. This left no time for those who are concerned about the side-effects of toxic herbicides, to remove children’s toys or animal feed from areas of possible exposure, or to leave the property before you might be surprised to find a strange man in protective gear walking around your house and yard area spraying unknown chemicals.

According to the representative Brandon at Tri-County Weed, these are the chemicals that were loaded onto the truck going to Home Farm:

1. Telar
2. Milestone
3. Weedestroy AM-40
4. Spreader 90
5. Detonate
6. Escort

It is up to the man doing the spraying to choose and mix whatever cocktail he decides based on the conditions he finds.

Tri-County is full of assurances that there will be no wind drift of herbicides onto gardening areas due to the skill of the sprayer; that warnings about contaminating streams, springs, ponds, and other aqueous areas will not be a problem. He says if one is worried about a exposure around your residence, one needs to “take precautions.” WHAT does that mean?

Persistent toxicity by Milestone has previously contaminated compost and caused thousands to lose their garden crops and organic farmers relying on outside compost to lose their certification. See

http://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/milestone-herbicide-contamination-creates-dangerous-toxic-compost.aspx#axzz2aLLWUlcZ

If you come to Home Farm hoping to harvest organic vegetables, are you willing to trust a commercially motivated company, or the judgment of Susan, Pat and Jane? Would you be concerned if the compost Dan has applied to the garden was prepared from herbicide contaminated grasses?

Those who have repeatedly heard for decades the assurances of for-profit chemical companies like Dow with Agent Orange, Monsanto with Round-up, and the list goes on, are not convinced.

Therefore for ongoing Failure of Stewardship Home Farm must receive the Toxic label.

Wee Willie and Mom & Dad

A guy posts in Egodeath web forum (egodeath@yahoogroups.com):

I've had some involvement in a reformed church founded on Calvinist principles recently, and the discussion of the Holy Spirit in relation to the will of man came up. The position asserted was that the Holy Spirit descends on the elect, through the concept of Grace -- these elect few are pre-destined for Salvation. Then, the degree to which the elect is filled with the Holy Spirit is dependent on how one submits to the Holy Spirit. By becoming an empty vessel -- total submission, one can become completely full of the Holy Spirit. However, if one clings to the flesh -- continues to rebel -- there will be no fertile ground for the Sprit to take root.

This oddly sounded very much like the theory of egodeath, minus the entheogens of course, but it left me slightly bewildered. First, the elect have no choice whether they are chosen or not. However, being chosen, they are provided a choice: submit or rebel. Yet, is it not God's Providence that determines whether we will submit or rebel? This seemed like waffling to me, and contradictory to the "compatibilist" position the church has professed in the past: i.e. man can do what he wills, but not will what he wills. Then how can man will to be submissive?

Surely, one can experience the cancellation of the will in the altered mystic state. However, can one cancel one's will in the ordinary state of consciousness? Can I will myself to be an empty vessel, in anticipation of being filled with the Holy Spirit? How does this relate to ego transcendence as state in the egodeath theory?

Thanks for any insight.

---

My answer to him, see how this resonates:

My take on this derives from enough "egodeath" experiences with entheogens to find a sense that "I" have a continuity before this birth and after this coming death. Sort of a reincarnationalist type view, but that the "I" that is my true self (Self) is more than this present personality.

Therefore the will that this current personality possesses is a smaller amount that the Over Will of the Higher Self. (That Self may also be an integrated unit within a yet larger Greater Self. The whole thing is likely a fractal reflection)

So "my Father in Heaven" is my Higher Self, who as in the parable of the talents, has given me a small "trust fund" of will, and whether I remember this fact or not, I am still operating at His sufferance.

Many people using 5 MeO have reported being expanded back to Godhead and then they remembered laying out the script of this lifetime. Coming back down has the sense of being "squeezed" into a smaller more limiting little self.

Taken in the way, your current lifetime is not by far your only one, and the only expression of your will, or His Will. In this level of the "video game" you have to achieve "beating the level" or the "boss" of the level, in order to start the next level. This may involve some kind of body upgrade too, with a new nervous system capable of sensibilities now undeveloped.

As a child has limited will under the Will of the parent, so we too act out our part at this level, knowing there are aspects we cannot yet understand.

All of this is predicated on having some kind internal initiations or experiences which you can begin to trust, rather than the kind of "faith" that comes from reading other people's opinions. I believe if you continue to explore taking the sacred communion with the INTENTION of finding out what is next, and opening to there being an invisible support group of higher beings in whose tribe you are already integrated, they will carry you to your next level. You are already surrounded and live in the womb of the Great Light Mother, or Holy Spirit, and your life derives from Her. She will give you what you need at the moment, so don't bewilder yourself by trying to solve the entire puzzle now! You have to grow, and keep growing.

Thus in the end, every act of your "will" small as it is, derives its force from the greater Intention or Will of the Mother-Father who has carried you to this moment of questioning. "They" will not abandon you. In my opinion this "threat" of making a mistake in your decisions is some kind of mind control bullshit laid on us by priests and mind-slavers to cultivate our obeisance so they can milk our "soul juice", pick our pockets, and misdirect our forces. You are made "in the image of God". Follow your spiritual umbilical cord back to Source, and feel it like a substance, a Rock, the Foundation. Now trust your will, even when it makes mistakes.

Does a plant "decide" to grow, flower and fruit? No, the interior force of the Holy Spirit carries it. Thus friend, be like the Lilies of the Field. Be yourself warts and all, allow mistakes, and accept Father-Mother's forgiveness and GRACE and trust that "they" will carry you onward, knowing you must fall many times in learning to walk.

Goodbye Ralph Hello VITVAN

I notice a pattern now; I go out at night on various adventures, but when I come back it is like re-entering an astral atmosphere. I start feeling pressure in the solar plexus.

Normally I then explore, feel-know, grok around the pressure until I get some image that releases the pressure. I assume I have done my part in the archeological race psyche excavation, revealing some old Namshub (psychotronic implant vide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namshub_%28incantation%29) (reference http://cista.net/marpa where I sensed the underlying code in the paleopsyche calling it the Nam-Shub Hive Dome).

Today I ended with release upon finding a paleolithic bowl, meaning a container, some kind of gear in the old old psyche, possibly left by aliens. Then I remembered McKenna saying all is language, and these “objects” we find are really expressions of higher ideas (like I would decode some snippet of psyche code as “bowl”) . The images are used by higher dimensional ones to convey to us a symbol we can associate with the feel-know signature of that “gear.”

This seemed to relieve some pressure. But my mind returned as usual to the “battle” with Home Farm, either my attempts to understand HOW such a mess has manifested so as to undo it like some Gordian knot; but this time I got a different view, and probably why I keep returning to stick my nose into this puzzle, because I am missing seeing something.

And the thing was: “there is something wrong with Vitvan.” My pressure relieved at once.

We don’t want to admit it, but "by their fruit ye shall know them." He may have touched and walked some form of higher level, some old Theosophy retreat, some Vedic roadmap that has been fucked over by thousands of years of decline into the Kali Yuga, until we get sex-repressive Brahmins like Mozumdar, all these radiant guys who preach run-away-to-Nirvana.Vitvan was coming out of and away from that, getting down to earth here, rejecting their old metaphysical run-away worlds.

But where are the results? Look at who followed? I read Laurel, she is annointed in the ancient stream (blah blah drama) but what does he teach her? He sends her out to fake it on her own. Same as my teacher Judith Drake. Where is the inner world instruction? Laurel starts some weight loss club to restore women’s self-esteem. That doesn’t rate very high on my radar. Any ayahuascero can open the door and show the initiate a whole new inner world to explore. WHAT did Vitvan ever show them?

Remember when Laurel Keyes recounted the story of she and Vitvan and others going to hear Walter Russell, and Russell invited them to dinner? Vitvan wouldn’t go, he sort of put the whole thing down. That had a bad vibe to it for me. WHY wouldn’t Vitvan want to socialize even on a “lower” level with someone he could chew the fat with? I think it is because he was jealous, and felt he would look less intelligent by comparison. Same thing when Evans Wentz came to his lecture and he got embarrassed, and fumbled the guy’s name a couple of times. He wanted to be in the respected intelligensia crowd, but held back. He didn’t want Laurel to fall in love with Russell and jilt Vitvan. I mean, if Vitvan didn’t want to have dinner with Russell, why? He preferred to go home and eat with his groupie hens, served by giggling women in his harem?

We keep asking ourselves, WHY hasn’t Vitvan spoken much at all of these inner worlds so many of us are experiencing?? All we hear is “that’s not true development. Avoid the astral.” And then what? Nothing happens to all these people who take the sanctimonious attitude that they are “above” such phenomena, when it has now become 100% clear to us that they don’t KNOW shit about shit. They sit around anesthetized pontificating, “one day my prince will come."

So Vitvan (via Ralph) is being downgraded in my book. Maybe it’s time to take down his picture. He took me as far as he could, which was up to the gates of the First Crossing, but he didn’t get me through, that came from my other practices, and then entheogens. Vitvan’s supplements are for shit. That’s why he said it was a major intent for SNO to figure out a way to accomplish the First Crossing. I don’t think he had any deep water diving techniques, nothing to compare to Grof. Vitvan didn’t even know about birth incidents and the traumatic effect this has on one's psyche and incarnation!. Some missing aspect of “wisdom teaching” that is!

Now there is a possibility that he comes from some deva line other dimension and that there is a certain stream of go-for-Nirvana wisdom teaching that is out there for those devas who wandered in here, and that it is aligned with their DNA as it were, for certain triggers they have, to get them a bus ticket back home in heaven.

But as far as solving things on earth now, or helping people with the layers of shit in our ancient psyche, they got nothing much to work with. Raise your forces! Smile. Pretend. Don't question. Wait.

I hate to admit it because if I cut lines with Vitvan Ralph, then I have to walk away from Home Farm. They get what they deserve. They belong in that dump, on that bus that goes nowhere, listening to the cackling cracker from Kansas’ promises that never come about. Your life is to work around the place as part of his little fiefdom.

It’s these deva types who think Ralph was so great. Because they came and got a buzz, their heads got hot on top, but what the fuck has that done for anyone???  Didn’t help my close friend in the least to analyze the dynamic of her marriage, or to realize all the stuck places in your psyche you can't access... All promises that if you keep muddling on it will magically get right. I don’t see it. With all your energy buzz getting, get UNDERSTANDING.

Now my ego is tweaked. I’ve sort of committed myself to carrying “Vitvan” forward. But why, what parts? Semantics is good. Most of the center stuff is passable, slightly usable, but people need an initiation so that they SEE that they look at the world with veils. Semantics talk has FAILED to deliver. It’s only good afterwards to explain some part of the process after you've really watched your mind construct "reality," watched yourself abstract consciously.

Explanations are Level I. How many times has Ralph said that taking thought will not add one iota to your understanding? But in frustration, he just kept explaining things over and over again. These deluded farts sit and listen to a tape every Sunday and nothing changes for them.  I used to go after micro-dosing with a Soma, and I would sit there hearing a lecture designed just for me! Brilliant. I filled pages with notes and diagrams; then I looked around at the zombies sitting on their asses, not in the least excited by the frequencies going out. Marj doing needlepoint, Bill sleeping, Dan picking at his toes, Susan knitting, Jane having a nervous breakdown, Pat stolid in some non-communicado world... Afterwards they would immediately start talking of sports or gardens or catalogs. What? Hadn't they heard Ralph channeling VITVAN at all??

Like I have said before, VITVAN is not a man, it’s a collective of beings, helpers, ancestors, that we are integrated with, our heavenly (and earthly) family. We have to become Vitvan Jimi, Vitvan Kari. This picture on the wall we have worshipped is only a symbol for our own interior guide, our own Self.... which is just what Vitvan Ralph told us. STOP looking to make contact with Ralph... the only contact that counts is the VITVAN in you.

Ralph didn't like having his formal portrait taken; but the groupies insisted, so he did it for the children. He knew they would objectify him and put him up on a pedestal, just as they have done now. If Ralph didn't say it, then Marj the Literalizer Scholasticist cannot hear it; she's like a pattern recognition machine that cannot UNDERSTAND if the words are different from what she has memorized. Exile DC has stated she cannot register people and thus is fooled by Jane the Toxic.

Ralph even insisted they put a plaque on his portrait to remind them: don't make a fetish out of this body thing that resembles me.

Look beyond it into your own self. He said:

Do not, under any combination of circumstances whatever, 

build up expectations in any person or thing.

Look constantly to the over-all field in which you are integrated for support, protection, supply and fulfillment of all needs

Black Wholes

Two articles collided today in my perfervid mind, inspiring this commentary.

Once was on a new type of computer chip called the V chip, which is from a company working on creating a Quantum Computer, one of the current holy grails. In a QC instead of the energy state of a bit being either a 0 or a 1(as in our normal binary world of polarization), the bits are entangled and dropped to a low energy state. As a result certain kinds of calculations can be performed thousands of times more rapidly.

Let me quote from the article:

“Back in 2007, a company called D-Wave made waves by claiming it had built a 16-bit quantum computer at a time when most academic labs could only manage a handful of bits. What they demonstrated, however, wasn’t a quantum computer in the sense that most people use the term. The company has since started calling its device a ‘quantum optimizer.’ Although it’s not a general-purpose quantum computer, the hardware does seem to be capable of tackling some computationally hard challenges.


The actual performance of the hardware and the software that controls it (called, somewhat ironically, the Black Box) hasn’t really been described in detail. That situation seems to be changing this week, as a pair of academic researchers will be presenting a set of problems tackled both by D-Wave’s hardware and by software running on more traditional computers. The results generally show D-Wave’s equipment performing well, but it doesn’t always beat the more mundane computers.

In a quantum computer, a set of qubits are both entangled and placed in a superposition state where they have a mixture of the two possible values (zero and one). The system is manipulated to perform a calculation, and then the actual values held by the qubits are read in order to provide the solution.

Although it’s quantum in nature, D-Wave’s computer doesn’t work that way. Instead, it uses a process called quantum annealing, which involves a set of interacting bits that are dropped to their lowest energy state. The energy of the system is then altered so that its final state represents a solution to a calculation. If this process is done gradually enough, the system will remain in its ground state throughout the process. When the process is complete, reading out the state of these bits—which are in a new ground state—will provide an optimal solution to the problem” …..

The Travelling Salesman Problem

“The TSP involves a salesman who has a number of cities where he must sell his goods. Being an efficient sort, he wants to plan his sales trip so that he only goes to each city once, and also wants to drive as few miles as possible. Planning the sales trip is the TSP. It is an NP-complete (nondeterministic polynomial time) problem, meaning that there is no simple way of generating an optimum solution. On classical computers, rather simple sets of cities can require billions or trillions of hours of computation to find the true minimum solution. However, the TSP is a natural to be solved by quantum annealing.

How did the D-Wave computer do on the tests? On the largest problem sizes tested, the V5 chip found optimal solutions in less than half a second, while the best classical software solver required 30 minutes to find those same solutions. This makes the D-Wave computer over 3,600 times faster than the classical computer in these tests.

This puts the effective speed of the D-Wave quantum computer on this class of problems at roughly the same as the tenth ranked supercomputer in the world as per the November 2012 Top500 list – the IBM/DARPS Trial Subset, with 63,360 64-bit cores that produce a maximum floating point performance of 1.5 petaFlops. The comparison shouldn’t be taken too seriously, but suggests that the 439 qubits of the D-Wave computer can solve such problems as quickly as do huge massively parallel supercomputers.

An ordinary computer has to try and calculate all the possible routes, dealing with all the discrete paths that exist on this world level of relationships (Logos). The QC deals with a pre-determinate state before paths are fixed, thus running thru possible outcomes from a “higher” level.

In the analogies I am making here, this entering into a “low energy” state corresponds to entering that zone in contemplation where we hover between the indeterminate and determinate, and thus can “get the answers” in some way much more quickly than slow mental calculations running through all the combinations.

For decades I have been a student of classical alchemy, which is not the Jungian model (but includes it), nor the entheogenic model (but includes it), but that expression which says that after you have plumbed your own psychic nature (Jungian), perhaps thru archaic underground initiatory streams (entheogenic), and you have contacted the Mysterium Tremendum, and observed by feel-know how the Unmanifest becomes the Manifest through polarity, you THEN enter the laboratory, and attempt to either reverse-engineer this process, Or, find that there are dribbles of the Tremendum that have entered our world yet retain their androgynous pre-polar nature. Once captured this Root Seed can be developed into something unique, the Philosopher’s Stone, that which is in the world but not of the world.

One of the phases that I most was drawn to is the stage of Putrefaction, wherein two subject matters, opposite in nature, and confined, and accelerated into cross-cancelling each other out, until they fall back as it were, into a pre-polar state called Prima Materia. This very much seems to correlate to that Ocean of Dirac, the world of Quantum indeterminacy where a particle has not yet emerged, where possibility is all, locality is not yet, and this magic cross-over zone is the zero point wherein the potential of free energy is boundless.  

The texts say that to accomplish the Great Work one must become the Work in themselves, and this certainly aligns with Vitvan who reiterates that the I AM is our true self, but we remain separate from the feel-know of this.  Unless we go through the First Crossing clarifying our vehicle of perception until we can reflect this truth in our self, finding the Self behind the self. Here we can substitute the word Putrefaction for First Crossing and see that process is one and the same. Except we must understand Putrefaction as the farmer making compost does, not a dissolution into stinking uselessness, but a breakdown into constituent elements which are teeming with Life energy supporting all seeds planted in its dark soil.

If this construct I call my personality is a mix of off-the-shelf parts (from an astrological charted blueprint) creating a vehicle or quantum computer for the I AM to make use of, then thru meditation and contemplation “I” should be able to observe in myself that cross-over zone where the Undeterminate Plenum expressed Itself into locality as “me.”

This act of self-observation is in fact a sort of self dissolution, by pervading the component parts with the fluidity of consciousness, knowingness juice, Gnosis by touching, direct perception without the mental step of labeling. It is a self-induced Putrefaction.

It’s a conundrum, a hovering on the edge of self-suicide. When I spent 10 days in complete darkness (Darkroom Incubation tech) the neurotransmitters, endogenous amritas, mutate from the juices of waking problem-solving consciousness (beta), into dream state (alpha), into transcendent mind (theta to delta), by the 4^th day pinoline had accumulated to the point where I transcended (decended?) into the primary field body, prior to the manifestation (and subdivision or fragmentation) of the so-called chakras. This is almost like a blastula type “body” which has not yet undergone the specializations into the embryo and then foetus, until sexual polarity enters on the 7x7 49^th day.

On the 49^th day the soul or spirit enters the body, and it can be a scary or grisly experience for the soul (as I saw on another Soma induced vision), for the embryo is a weird shrimp like monster form, and one feels they are being trapped into a Frankenstein form. This soul memory might lie at the fascination many have for horror themes of bodies turned hideously wrong.  But I digress...

On the 4^th day in the Darkroom I felt a presence, which announced itself as the Hydranos, and gave the explanation that this Ur-body I was sensing was the Autonomous Field, the original egg form within whose membrane I was incarnated. It called this also the Auric Egg, or the Child Body, for underlying the world of chakras and centers remains the sleeping Christ child, latent. More could be said but we’ll leave it there.

This intelligence answered my questions as fast as I could ask. When I said WHO are you, It said “your future self” and it threw up a holographic displace of the galaxy, explaining that all life in the galaxy flows out of its Mysterium center, like a white blazing sap down the spiral arms of the magnificent Tree of Life. We call this entity our Logos, the One in whom we live and have our being. All of my future self already existed but it was flowing at “me” creating a sense of time, just as in the metaphor of a phonograph needle traveling thru the vinyl groove, experiencing event following event as a “progression thru time” even though the Reality was that the entire composition already existed in the Now in the wholeness of the recorded disc.

It showed me that my desire and fascination to penetrate to the Root of my being (thru this so-called Putrefaction) would end in destroying me as I drew closer to the unimaginable power, majesty, and Awe-full center of the Logos. Like a moth to the flame, the end result of looking for the Root would be an end to my being. This is the stuff junkie dreams are made of.

If the Cosmos is a dream exercise of the Self reflected down hallways of looping fractal Self-reference, then what happens to the Oroboros serpent if it keeps consuming Its own tail? Hah! Maybe it shits Itself into a composted state of putrefaction called Pralaya.

And now onto the 2^nd article that synchronized with this quantum computing metaphor. Here we come at this same zone of the Prima Materia of consciousness, of indeterminate androgynous bits neither/either 0’s or 1’s, but something we can touch in ourselves, contact with the Unrational.

Remember, the word Logos means set of rational relationships. That is, once the Plenum has barfed forth fields and their luminous particle waves, a cascade of relationships begins, giving us a Field of interconnectedness that we sense as “meaning”, as in the “mean” being centeredness. Contact with the Mysterium Tremendum is, according to my current perception, that cross-over zone where we hover over our own coming-into-being.

And to make my Reform based point relating to the Work of undoing the corruption and stuckness that has overtaken Home Farm, let’s be clear: the essence of Vitvan’s Work was to first describe the process to the newbie, and then, the real work was to go thru the Putrefaction until one contacted the Mystery of the I AM. The farm, the buildings, the books, are all exoteric shells to house this numinous truth, of which Ralph was an expression and he knew it, he vitvan’ed it.

These children, these demented idiots who play act at “preserving” that which they have not tasted, is a sacrilege, for they defile something holy that was brought to this world through great effort. A portal into the numinous was opened but it can be lost.

When the lady asked Ben Franklin what kind of government the Constitutional Convention has wrought, he said “Madam, a Republic, if you can keep it.” To which we add, what did “Saint Ralph” leave us? A portal to the numinous, IF we can keep it open.

Home Farms death unto compost is natural order too; the carpetbaggers and parasites have just about devoured the host, spending the banked up energy left entrusted to them, but one day the Father will grade them and ask how they spent their talents, did they multiply them, or squander them playing mine-mine-mine?
______________________________________________
In The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational, Rudolph Otto identifies and explores the non-rational mystery behind religion and the religious experience (“non-rational” should not be confused with “irrational”); he called this mystery, which is the basic element in all religions, the numinous. He uses the related word “numen” to refer to deity or God.

Forced, necessarily, to use familiar words, like “dread” and “majesty,” Otto insists that he is using them in a special sense; to emphasize this fact, he sometimes uses Latin or Greek words for key concepts. This fact is crucial to understanding Otto. Our feeling of the numinous and responses to the numinous are not ordinary ones intensified; they are unique (I use this word in its original meaning of “one of a kind, the only one”) or sui generis (meaning “in a class by itself”). For example, fear does not become dread in response to the numinous; rather, we cease to feel ordinary fear and move into an entirely different feeling, a dread that is aroused by intimations of the numinous or the actual experience of the numinous.

The word “absolute” is used in its metaphysical sense of “existing without relation to any other being; self-existent; self-sufficing” (OED); its adjectival form, “absolutely,” is used with the same meaning. Finally, by “creature,” Otto means a “being which has been created.”

The Numinous
The numinous grips or stirs the mind powerfully and produces the following responses:
Numinous dread. Otto calls the feeling of numinous dread, aka awe or awe-fullness, the mysterium tremendum. C.S. Lewis’s illustration makes clear the nature of numinous dread and its difference from ordinary fear:

Suppose you were told that there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told “There is a ghost in the next room,” and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is “uncanny” rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread. With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous. Now suppose that you were told simply “There is a might spirit in the room” and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking–described as awe, and the object which excites it is the Numinous.

The mysterium tremendum implies three qualities of the numinous:
a. its absolute unapproachability,
b. its power,
c. its urgency or energy, a force which is most easily perceived in the “wrath of God.” It has been suggested that Gothic fiction originated primarily as a quest for the mysterium tremendum.

Stupor. Because the mysterium tremendum is wholly Other, i.e., is unlike anything that we have encountered or ever will encounter, it arouses in us a mental state of stupor, a “blank wonder, an astonishment that strikes us dumb, amazement absolute.”

The shudder. In this state, the soul, “held speechless, trembles inwardly to the farthest fibre of its being[;] … it implies that the mysterious is beginning to loom before the mind, to touch the feelings.”

Creature-consciousness and the simultaneous experiencing of the self as nothing. Creature-consciousness is the awareness of ourselves as having being or of existing. The nothingness is not a sense of guilt for a transgression, but the sense of being profane, which is the opposite state to the holy or holiness, which is an absolute quality belonging just to God. Only the person who is “in the spirit” can experience profaneness, which Otto describes as a “piercing acuteness… accompanied by the most uncompromising judgment of self-depreciation, a judgment passed, not upon his character because of individual ‘profane’ actions but upon his very existence as creature before that which is supreme above all creatures.” I think of profane nothingness as feeling, “I am nothing in the presence of that which is all.” In this state, we are moved to praise the might of the numen, because its might demands praise and even more because it is absolutely deserving of praise. This sense of nothingness, which Otto calls “disvalue,” becomes a sin or sacrilege if the numinous is perceived in or confined to a moral framework; it has no necessary connection to moral judgments.

Sense of unworthiness and need for “covering.” Accompanying the disvaluation of self is the feeling of being unworthy to be in the presence of “the holy one” (we fear that our presence might even defile him). Being profane, we need a “covering,” in Otto’s term, or a consecration or grace, “that renders the approacher ‘numinous,’ frees him from his ‘profane’ being,” so that he is no longer unfit to relate to the numen.

The numinous has another aspect which co-exists with the mysterium tremendum, the power to fascination. The numinous fascinates or draws us to it with a force that is nearly irresistible. Otto calls the alluring quality of the numinous the mysterium fascinosum. At its most intense, this fascination becomes “exuberant” and transforms into the mystical “moment” or direct, complete contact with the numen, a state which few people experience. The numinous dread and the fascinating “combine in a strange harmony of contrasts,” which Otto calls the mysterium tremendum and fascinosum.

Human beings as a species have the a priori capacity of mind to perceive or experience the numinous. This is not to say that the ability to perceive the holy, let alone the perception itself is innate; it merely means that every individual has the potential to perceive or experience the numinous. The numinous state of mind or the feeling of the numinous must be evoked in us or brought into consciousness; it cannot be taught. But not everyone has the same degree of receptivity to the holy. The revelations of those who are specially receptive, like the prophets, stimulate the numinous capacity of the less receptive. Otto, who believes in the superiority of Christianity, awards the highest stage of revelation to the Son or Christ, who embodies holiness.
The human soul has parallels with the divine or numinous; it too is “mystery and marvel,” undefinable, and “wholly alien” to our understanding. Insight into the soul comes, when it does, as an eruption, a flash or burst of illumination. The numinous-ness of the human soul is what enables the mystic to apprehend the numinous.

The Connection of the Numinous and the Gothic

Connection 1: “daemonic dread.” “Daemonic dread” is the first stage in religious development. Primitive people misunderstood their experience of the mysterium tremendum or the dread inspired by the numinous, to which they were drawn by the fascinating power of the numinous. Otto explains, “The daemonic-divine object may appear to the mind an object of horror and dread, but at the same time it is no less something that allures with a potent charm, and the creature, who trembles before it, utterly cowed and cast down, has always at the same time the impulse to turn to it, nay even to make it somehow his own.” Still, “daemonic dread” is a genuine religious experience and from it arose the gods and demons of later religions.

Otto regards the “dread of ghosts” as a “perversion, a sort of abortive offshoot” of “daemonic dread.” Even after purer, more highly developed religions have evolved, the primitive “daemonic dread” may assert itself. Otto points for proof of this to the attraction of horror and “shudder” in ghost stories. The ghost attracts us because it is wholly Other, and as such “falls outside the limits of the ‘uncanny’ and fills the mind with blank wonder and astonishment,” which are responses to the numinous. Ghosts have another connection with the numinous; in the primitive experience, the feeling of the presence of ghosts produces the stupor which the wholly Other arouses.

Connection 2: other interpretations of the numinous. Other Gothic elements originate in the misapprehension of the numinous. The feeling of the numen as mysterious stimulates “the naive imagination, inciting it to expect miracles, to invent them, to ‘experience them,’ recount them.” Terrifying, baffling, and even astonishing natural events have inspired “daemonic dread,” a response which transformed them into portents, prodigies, and portents. Demons and specters, in Otto’s view, are not part of the true development of religious consciousness but “spurious fabrications of the fancy accompanying the numinous feeling.” Nevertheless, these fabrications do serve a positive function, one which may operate in Gothic fiction; though feelings of horror and shudder at spectral hauntings are caricatures of authentic numinous emotions, they enable us to break through rationality to contact “feelings buried deep in religious consciousness.”

Connection 3: the sublime. A counterpart to the numinous, the sublime provides another connection to Gothic fiction. Though Otto distinguishes the numinous and the sublime as separate categories, they have a close connection. Like the numinous, the sublime cannot be explicated, is mysterious, and is both daunting and intensely attracting. Because of these similarities, the sublime may stimulate the capacity to perceive the numinous, and there is a tendency for the sublime to pass over into the numinous and for the numinous to pass over into the sublime.

Otto explicitly connects the two categories; the sublime is the most effective, if indirect way of depicting the sublime in the arts. The eighteenth century Gothic novelists were aware of theories of the sublime; Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Inquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful presented the most widely accepted theory. They incorporated the sublime into their novelists. Radcliffe was famous for her landscapes, which were imbued with the sublime. Otto identifies portrayals of darkness and silence as a means of presenting the numinous; he stresses that the darkness must contrast with a flickering or dying light, the semidarkness creating a “mystical” effect. “The semi-darkness that glimmers in vaulted halls or beneath the branches of a lofty forest glade, strangely quickened and stirred by the mysterious play of half-lights has always spoken eloquently to the soul.” And the Gothic novel abounds in these particular effects and similar ones over and over. For Otto, these effects expression the numinous in contrast to Burke, for whom they express the sublime.
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We can understand that if a child takes the Soma medicines of Self-inquiry, and encounters only confusion, then they should not have been initiated. And worse, they may assume that there is no value in use of such Tremendum revealing sacraments, for they derived no wisdom from it. Worse still, they come into control of an expression of this portal opening stream, and defile it with their unknowingness.

It's easy for the shallow to say "just go and make another portal" but they don't know what they defile. The Work brought to earth is the result of a Herculean labor. These squatters in a cathedral shrug and say, "Go build your own cathedral." Squatters, turning a cathedral into a hovel. 

In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions

Just watched a great video Room 237, about Stanley Kubrick, as a number of film makers try to dissect what The Shining was really about. Each one of them noticed different elements that Kubrick has seeded and salted into the multi-layered movie.

If you don’t recall, on the surface it’s about Jack Nicholson bringing his family to the luxury Colorado mountain lodge called the Overlook Hotel, where he becomes possessed by the memories and subconscious of the “hotel” as it were, as the madness rises up and overtakes him. If you thought this was an adaptation of the Stephan King “horror” story, you would miss the point. It is about the layers of horror “civilization” is built upon, and thus, if you dig deep enough into the Collective Psyche which is the soil in which we grow, we have to face that history is one long interleaving cycle of growth and bloody compost. It is raw energy some Evolutionary Gardener tends, in which we have our little momentary coming and going like the life of a sprout. Blood is life and it is returned to the Collective Soul Soil, we are all cut down and recycled. I would like to believe that the synthesis of this warm, wet, pleasurable horror is the birth of some spiritual fruit, which lays in the center of the Garden on the Tree of Life and Knowledge, a fruit we can eventually eat from.

But to get there we have to accept the entire ongoing process of life and slaughter in death, not by evading it by going detached and “rising above it all”, but I believe by looking at it in its rawness, by penetrating into it and extracting its essence. Those scary demons in the mandala tankha have to be embraced like Neo jumping into the agents in the Matrix, and then they will let you pass to find the Lake of Joy. My guides advised me as a psychedelic newbie, if you start to loop into a bummer, don’t resist, but turn and run into its center. And true enough, like the dragon guarding the treasure in the Dark Wood, once past, the dragon becomes the Wise Old One who initiates. 

But how can I ask you to follow me unless you watch this movie too? Well, you will have to email me and I will provide a way (isnoshaman@gmail.com). If you are internet savvy, Google for it and you will find it as I did. 

The Shining opening shot: enter the world of Reflections

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” says Stephan Dedalus in Ulysses by James Joyce.


Kubrick got swept into this waking nightmare and attempted to decode it and leave us clues how to get out of the Daedalian labyrinth, which extends back to when that Minotaur Monolith of black abstracted Perfection first got laid into our primate wetware as in Kubrick’s 2001. As that alien meme worked its way through our DNA on its pilgrimage back to the astrums by way of Campostella, it watered vineyards flowering in high art and beauty, nourished with blood meal and sweat. The Hamlet Mills of God grind slow and grind fine.

The 20^th  century was the culmination of the last great 2500 year cycle, taking us to the bottom of the Kali Yuga, ending in torrents of blood as one “civilized” country tore apart another in numbers of dead sacrificed upon astronomical altars beyond anything before. If we believe as I do with McKenna that this is the phoenix birthed at the end of history, then Kubrick was the poet who embodied that shamanic passage.

You have to know more about Kubrick, that he was a genius who absorbed so much information that it synthesized in him to a higher vision of the Mythos of mankind’s bloody journey. As a boy in Britain he was saturated in the movies with war footage of the clashing colonial powers which ride on waves of lofty idealism while they crush their own peoples like clusters of grapes in a bacchanalian frenzy. His themes were of the awakening spirit of freedom in individuals breaking out of the murderous worlds of slavery, war, perverse sex, Secret Societies and Overlords who play chess with humankind. 

His obsession for detail and information is shown in a video of Kubrick and his boxes. Boxes of information meticulously gathered on every subject he looked into. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k3BzPXMaPw&list=PL7080338AB4EEEBCA

He hired professional photographers to drive down a long street and photograph every store, house, doorway, and structure, and bound it into a book, so he could find just the right look for a doorway. He sent a team to the Hotel of The Shining who did intensive research on the history of Colorado and photographed every inch of the hotel. He absorbed himself into all the intertwining threads whose confluence created the present moment of time he was depicting, but as he did so, he conveyed all the hidden layers from the past that were seeping into the action of the present. Like we do each morning we return to the dream of being awake, and for a brief time we may also remember the nighttime dream that underlays this world we call “reality.”

I see in him the act of a shaman who knows that the current disease cannot be healed or exorcised unless we dig up and travel back on the timeline that lies underneath. This becomes a hypervisorial role like a coder who realizes the ancient bugs in the human software must be cleaned up, not just patched over and over again, pushed down into forgetfulness. One must REMEMBER, for the very definition of Truth, as the shamanic Greeks understood it in their etymology was “a-lethia”, “not to forget”, not to drink the waters of the River Lethe, of forgetfulness. Each life we die and cross the Lethe into the Underworld, composted, recycled, and when reborn again, we remember nothing of the memories and memes our psyches are made of. To cure our disease we must Re-member our fragmented selves.

One director saw images linking back to the (so-called) Jewish Holocaust; another saw repeated themes of the holocaust laid on the American Indians by Europeans; another diagrammed out the Hotel showing that Kubrick while making an elaborate labyrinth, introduced Escher-like dimensional play of impossible loop-backs, halls that got longer, floor levels that mixed, windows that couldn’t be there. There is nothing in the Kubrick created world that was not intentional, that did not have a multi-layered pun of meaning. And if an object disappeared from scene to scene, it wasn’t an error in continuity, but a comment on how objects in our own construction of the movie of our present are constantly edited by our selective forgetfulness.

Kubrick’s “Overlook” Hotel isn’t a place that exists in one dimension or one time. It is the Collective Memory and Subconscious History of Mankind, it is the Father’s House with Many Mansions.  Night after night a different visitor may occupy the same room, and share memories left in the same bed. We all pass through this Hotel of Human Culture, psychotronically sharing our lives in resonance with the thoughts and emotions of every other human. We are embedded in each other’s dreams. Until we awaken and see that our personalities are constructs in this dream we share with all the Others, we will remain in the dream. Jack Nicholson is only beginning to awaken in The Shining; but he is more possessed by all the ghosts who have gone before, than awake. But Kubrick is the one who is the real director of the “Overlook” and he wants to shake us awake, if we can't look into the horror and the machinery that runs this psychic life we dream, we won’t awaken from the nightmare of history. And when we do, when we can See as Seers, then the Light begins to illumine the dark places of memory, and we begin to become The Shining Ones.

The Jay Weidner take on Kubrick is my favorite for Weidner is drawn to the teleology and Chiliasm of Fulcanelli, of the strange attractor at the end of time that draws us on,...the Black Monolith. Weidner has shown how Kubrick was seduced into the world of the Black Illuminati, the Secret Societies who want to recover the knowledge of physics of the Lost Civilization that crashed around 12,000 years ago; these are the Overlords, the Banksters, the war-traders, the mind-slavers whose aristocratic parasitism has lead us to the bottom of the Kali Yuga. When he made Dr. Strangelove his technical expertise made him the man the Societies needed to produce the fake footage of the moon landing. How heady it was to sit around in Arthur C. Clarke’s London apartment with Clarke and Werner von Braun; Clarke who seemed to know details of the planets and moon before we had gone there; von Braun and his Nazi space scientists who openly said that they had help from extra-terrestrials. 

They promised him carte blanch to make whatever movies he wanted as a reward, full editorial control, but it was a deal with the devil, as he came to find he was now their plaything. Invited to Black Illuminati parties as in Eyes Wide Shut, he entered a world of secrecy and lies, a world that brought death to friends when he spoke out of school of things he now knew, of lies he had to tell his friends and wife to keep them out, which then divided him off from them, until he ended his days living in seclusion, his home a fortress. At the end he left us images of this secret perverse world of these Societies in his last movie Eyes Wide Shut, but died under suspicious circumstances, as happens in high level spy thrillers, and his version was edited by other interests to muddy the revelations.

Now we too must enter the Father’s Many Mansioned House of the hidden Race Psyche and find out our true history as spiritual beings who have come to take lives incarnate in this human Amusement Park. At some point we must leave the Park instead of repeatedly going on the rides designed by others to keep us in thrall. Our eyes must no longer be wide shut, but wide open. 

It is time to be good children. If we don’t take our Medicine, we won’t get well.