Monday, July 30
"I sat back down and pretended I never saw anything"
Ron Rosenbaum made an interesting observation over the weekend regarding the suicide notes of Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake: "If she were being harassed why not name her nemeses in her last words, rather than leave a note described by the cops as suggesting a peaceful loving farewell? I guess you could say she might be trying to protect Jeremy, her boyfriend who later seems to have killed himself over her death, but according to police his note didn’t mention any enemies either, and if not why not?"
If they had become paranoid, why is the paranoia conspicuously absent from their supposed final statements? Why, if Theresa had believed herself persecuted, did she not call out her persecutors, if only to say Look at what you made me do? Nor did Jeremy lash out at those who had hounded his lover to death. Maybe, to someone who knows more than I about the psychology of suicide, that's nothing strange. To me, it is.
Mysterious sparkly goo falls in North Carolina, and boulders of ice in Iowa.
A 152-page report on the O'Hare UFO has been released by the National Aviation Center on Anomalous Phenomena.
I won't have much time this week for blogging, but a subject I'd like to explore soon is the congruity between the occult concept of an egregore and Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance. So if you're game, don't wait for me.
oh and one more thing
you aren't going to like
what comes after America? - Leonard Cohen, Book of Longing
posted by Jeff Wells at 7/30/2007 04:22:00 AM
43 Comments:
The goo seems to have fallen in eastern PA and western NEW JERSEY, not in North Carolina.
Egregore, morphic resonance and Jung's collective unconsciousness seem to me to be closely related. Maybe throw in astral plane as well.
Jeff,
You may recall a gentlemen by
the name of Michael O'Donoghue.
He was a writer at National Lampoon
and then moved on to Saturday Night
Live appearing in the first sketch
of the first show with John Belushi.
One of his "hobbies" was collecting
suicide notes. He talked about his
collection in a magazine article he
wrote before his death and detailed
the contents of the suicide notes.
One guy, who lived in the grey and
wet Great Northwest,was found
hanging from a beam with a note
pinned to his jacket that read
"Too much rain". And that, in a
nutshell,is what all the notes had
in common. All the notes gave a
reason why the deceased had decided
to take their own life. People
who commit suicide feel compelled
to tell those they left behind
why they did it. Any suicide note
that doesn't give a direct
explanation is the exception not
the rule.
My Grandfather, on my mothers side
of the family, was born and raised
in Nova Scotia. Though I never
met him - he passed before I was
born - he told my mother many stories of the "wee people"
who lived in the wood and liked
to play "tricks" on the locals.
Egregores... morphic resonance... it's all here in an excerpt from my book, Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg, which should be available from Amazon by the end of August. Without the backstory, not everything is going to make perfect sense, but all you really need to know is that the character named Lloyd is an obscenely rich insurance broker to the rocket industry (and a 33rd degree Mason) who's driving a carload of teenagers to the Esalen Institute in this scene.
(I apologize in advance for the length of this post, but it seemed highly relevant and I don't, just yet, have a website where this material is posted to use as a link):
....“You’ve been doing some independent research, I see…” Lloyd says with a lopsided grin. “Are you familiar with the concept of egregores?”
“No. What’s an egregore?”
“When two minds come together to achieve a common goal, a third and superior mind is created—an egregore.”
“What’re you saying about greed and gore?” Jimmy interrupts from the backseat, where “Houses of the Holy” is just ending with a flurry of wailing from Robert Plant.
Lloyd turns off the stereo. “Egregore…” he enunciates. “It’s an Old English term that roughly means ‘the spirit of a thing.’ As I was telling Gordon, an egregore is a kind of group-mind that’s created whenever two or more people come together for a specific, shared purpose. For instance, let’s say you and Gordon put your minds together to create an article for the school newspaper, as I know you’ve done in the past. And let’s say the purpose of that article is to tear down the reputation of a certain hypocritical high school administrator who shall remain nameless.”
“Witzkowski!” Jimmy shouts with uninhibited glee.
“That raging dickhead,” Skip further clarifies.
“Now… so long as you both remain true to your original purpose—to destroy someone’s reputation—your minds will be ‘entangled’ on a quantum level,” Lloyd tells them. “You’ll experience some commingling of your morphic fields, which might result in mind-to-mind communication—a nonlocal transference of information that explains things like how you sometimes know who’s calling before you pick up a ringing phone. That quantum entanglement also creates a third mind, or egregore, that can know much more than either one of you on your own. In the beginning, an egregore is no more than a kind of crude quantum computer program that helps you to achieve your goal. Such help can arrive in many forms. From within, it might turn up as inspired thoughts. From without, it might appear as useful synchronicities: Jimmy might happen to be in the right place at the right time with a camera on a day when his quarry is looking somewhat… fishy.”
“Like a sanctimonious fishman,” says Gordon, to get the phrase exactly right. “I’m pretty sure Witz never forgave us for that.”
“Yes, well, remember what I said: The egregore is like a rudimentary computer program in its early stages. Although it’s meant to serve, if it’s not given the proper commands it can easily turn on its creators, like a golem. In your case, that would mean the reputation you end up destroying could be your own.”
Gordon remembers the joke that came back to haunt him—his father’s fury over what he’d written in the Columbia Journalism Review: “Norman Mailer could be reading right this minute that my jackass son thinks he was raised by wolves!” The same queasy-sick sensation that he felt then rises from the soles of his sweaty feet to shudder through him all over again. “Oh crud…” he mutters.
“Fortunately, most egregores dissipate rather quickly once their objective has been achieved,” Lloyd says, as if to soothe him. “But when the process continues over a long period of time and more minds are persuaded to add their psychic energy to its agenda, an egregore can grow strong enough and smart enough to survive even the death of its original creators. At that point, the egregore truly has a life of its own. And that’s when things get interesting….” Lloyd takes his hands off the steering wheel long enough to rub his palms together in a pantomime of an evil genius anticipating the fruition of his havoc-wreaking schemes.
“Interesting how?” asks D.H., leaning forward from the backseat.
Lloyd says, “Consider the egregore of the Templars, energized by the fanatical devotion and bloodshed of thousands of men for nearly 200 years. In 1314, after Pope Clement nullified the Templar Order with a helping hand from King Philip the Fair, the egregore of the Templars lived on. By then, it had become conscious. It knew how to think—how to get what it wanted. It murdered those who had conspired against it and then it withdrew to the inner dimensions. There, with infinite patience, it waited for centuries until it was contacted by a new order of men prepared to carry out the intentions of its original founders and supply the egregore with the psychic energy it requires to function in our world. What those men gained in return was access to the Templar egregore’s vast accumulation of knowledge and power. The name of that new order was… can anyone guess?”
“Devo?” D.H. suggests.
“The Freemasons,” Gordon says.
“Good man!” Lloyd congratulates him. “You’re starting to see how it all works…. Corporations, political parties, religions, and even nations all have their own egregores. And all those egregores are warring for influence over us. Obviously, we can’t help but become affiliated with at least a few egregores over the course of our lifetimes. But if we do so without thinking, there’s bound to be trouble.”
“So an egregore is like Jung’s ideas about the collective unconscious,” says Gordon, trying to understand, “only narrowed down to just Republicans, or just the Catholic Church.”
“Essentially, yes,” Lloyd agrees, “but with the caveat that the egregores of the Republican Party and the Catholic Church are far more virulent than the all-embracing collective unconscious. Which brings me to my next point: Some egregores are created in fits of malice or xenophobic hatred, and those egregores exist only to destroy, giving rise to instincts for death and domination in their individual members. The Nazi egregore would be a prime example, of course.”
“The Michael Jackson egregore would be another one,” D.H. says, thinking of the singer-songwriter that he currently despises most.
“Such an egregore has a vicious, malign strength,” Lloyd continues, choosing to ignore D.H., “and it can infect other egregores like a virus. By imposing its form on its enemies, it thereby becomes its enemies. I believe something like that occurred when the CIA made the grotesque moral error of bringing Nazi war criminals to our shores during Operation PAPERCLIP. The Nazi egregore infected the CIA egregore and eventually overpowered it. The Nazis even had a word for such invisible battles among egregores: Weltanschauungskrieg. It translates as ‘world-view warfare.’ They may have been the first to name it, but this type of warfare has been going on for centuries. More than a thousand years ago, I believe a similar battle was fought and lost by the egregore of the Roman Catholic Church.”
“The same thing happened to me with ‘Beat It,’” says D.H.; “I couldn’t get that stupid song out of my head for months.”
“If that’s how it works, then what about the Assassins?” Gordon asks Lloyd. “Did the Assassin egregore infect the Templar egregore, then get passed along to the Masons?”
“I’m afraid that it did,” Lloyd says.
That isn’t the answer Gordon was expecting to hear.
“The Freemasons have certainly been known to commit assassinations from time to time,” Lloyd admits. “Just look into the Propaganda Due Lodge in Italy, if you don’t believe me.”
“Then why were we even talking about soul-sucking moon men and all that other junk?” Gordon asks, exasperated. “We should’ve been talking about egregores all along!”
“Are you sure there’s a difference?”
“An egregore doesn’t need a spaceship.”
“Point taken…” says Lloyd, “and you may well be right. Perhaps my tale of interdimensional alien mind-parasites is just a useful allegory for the workings of our self-created egregores. After all, the magickal birthing and feeding of egregores was the carefully guarded secret at the core of the ancient mystery cults—a process they called ‘The Art of Creating Gods.’ And some of mankind’s oldest myths refer to a war between those so-called gods, at which point Man became a slave to egregores that he himself had created. We’ve been obliged to serve them ever since, not only with sweat and tears, but with our blood.”
“Smells like the same old bullshit to me,” says Jimmy.
To Gordon’s more refined nose, the odor wafting off Lloyd is redolent of high-priced cologne, smothered farts, and the usual halitosis-punctuated pedantry. Jimmy’s right: Nothing new.
“Let’s think for a moment about how the egregores of corporations operate, since the Reagan administration seems so determined to hand our country over to them,” Lloyd says as the wind blows his toupee into devilish snarls. “It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that corporations are immortal soulless entities that take as much as they can and give nothing in return. Their primary goal is to keep increasing productivity and earnings in an all-devouring, endless cycle. Corporate egregores exploit their workers, pollute the environment, and turn vast quantities of the world’s irreplaceable natural resources into disposable junk products, all just to show a quarterly profit. They steal from the poor and give to the rich, creating enormous concentrations of wealth in the hands of just a few thousand elitist assholes. If Reagan and Bush get their way and all that money and power isn’t redistributed—via a system of fair taxes and the checks and balances built into our Constitution—then America’s liberal, democratic society will soon be looking a lot more like a corporate-sponsored fascist police state. And that will be because, quite simply, the egregores of unchecked capitalism tend to penalize those who would better the lot of humanity, while at the same time rewarding the relatively few unbridled sociopaths who take advantage of anyone and anything that they can.”
“Yeah, but where would we be without porno and Diet Coke?” Jimmy asks, pointing to just two of their recent purchases.
“Well, if you can’t beat ‘em…” Lloyd says cheerfully. “Seriously, why do you think I ended up in the insurance racket, anyway? My line of work probably has some of the most evil egregores out there—aside from Big Oil and the tobacco companies—yet most insurance brokers see that evil as something apart from themselves. They fail to recognize it as coming from their own hearts and souls.”
“But not you,” says Gordon.
“No… not me,” says Lloyd. “Not now, at least. That’s why I’m here doing my penance, trying to provide a little enlightened adult guidance to a carload of snarky but redeemable teenage jerk-offs.”
Why, if Theresa had believed herself persecuted, did she not call out her persecutors, if only to say Look at what you made me do?
Uh, has it occurred to anyone that if le sinisteres were capable of making them want to kill themselves, then this level of coersion would--by definition--override their own, intrinsic volition? If someone wants to suicide themselves due to this sort of "intervention," how could they possibly identify that impulse as coming from outside themselves, much less fight it? Do we have any doubts as to how easily we can made to feel euphoria, fear, anger and sadness?
If any of you have kids, you’ll know how quickly they can run through this primal human emotional landscape, without the aid of any powerful neurochemicals or will-bending techniques. Even if the subject is a fully rational adult, this sort of manipulation is still child’s play to an adept, of which there are many on the payroll of certain agencies. Or have we forgotten everything we’ve learned in the face of this new tragedy?
Speaking of will, Jeff’s question about the similarities between the occultick egregore and Sheldrake’s morphic resonance is surely appropriate. My initial response was that the former was a conscious, intentional process which strips its members of individual will & volition, while the latter is understood more as a larger, world creating/maintaining and entirely unconscious process, but then I found this at Jeff’s link:
What is an egregore? It is the psychic and astral entity of a group. All members of a group, a family, a club, a political party, a religion or even a country, are psychically included in the egregore of the organization to which they belong. Of course, each of us belongs to several egregores at once. Therefore, each individual who is involved in a group receives the influences of the egregores, that is the astral counterpart of the group, in his psyche. This process is unconscious. The resulting drawbacks are, first, some perturbating psychic influences in the majority of cases, and second, a restriction of inner freedom. It is impossible to free oneself from certain egregores, for example the egregores of the country you live in. However, we should free ourselves from all egregores which are not essential.
I don’t necessarily subscribe to this particular occult definition, but if we grant the Sheldrake/Bohm thesis, it starts to make some sense. It would seem that smaller consensual realities can exist within the greater construct, like eddies in a vortex, individual funnel clouds within a maelstrom.
The only thing that I would add to this is that there’s an unspoken implication to this creation through cognition business: if realities really do coalesce in this matter, then stopping all of them would end in...nothingness.
Or maybe not. There is a universe outside of us, but it's a sympathetic, vibratory universe. We can, apparently, manipulate the silly putty of matter in many different ways and with as many different levels of efficiency and intent, but maybe it's more realistic to temper the anthropic principle with a little Pythagorean Ordnung.
We know that a crowd can either burn witches or promulgate a golden vibe—why not take the bull by the horns and make him plow the fields of our imaginative faculty instead of submitting to the will of some perverse minority and dancing in its blood?
Alain Aspect, John Wheeler and *Amit Goswami* (main link) in modern times had the vision and the courage to promote the path of conscious creation (Jesus, the Buddha and countless other holy men were doing this long, long ago, each of them telling us that we had within us both the kingdom of heaven and ten thousand hells). We have a fairish idea of who’s pushing the Dark Path now (and then). Isn’t the choice always before us, whether we understand the mechanism or not?
A last and I think interesting point of comparison between the egregore construct and morphic resonance is that the occult view seems to inspire dread, while the other school promises a liberating perspective. Knowledge is power is responsibility. Why is it that those who conjure dark visions would have us be so afraid of picking up the reins of our own destiny? Kind of makes their enterprise a little easier, doesn’t it?
They muddy the waters even further by telling us that whenever we put our minds together, we lose our individual wills. This might happen in their dark engine, but that's not how it works in every communion. How many times have we overcome the acrimony caused by opposing viewpoints in this little community and achieved some sort of harmony? Not often enough for my tastes, but enough to illustrate my point--we still were able to maintain our own thoughts, our appreciable and important differences. Just look at the last thread, toward the end, when we were all hitting the hookah of Wade's caring-for-each-other meme.
Obviously, the Dark Lords fear our unity; just as obviously, they want (and need) us to fear it.
Derek,
Sounds like a book I'd like to read. I wonder how you feel about the proposition that since morphic resonance is the nature of Nature, synergy is inevitable? Are we really to fear what takes place every minute of every day withing every family, school, factory and blog...or do we smell that coffee and whip up some doughnuts to go with it?
Jeff, Dr. Bombay and all:
If there was 'too much rain' TD would have simply walked between the raindrops.
"Writer Glenn O'Brien bids a farewell to Theresa Duncan, and her readers at her blog, The Wit of the Staircase. He also quotes the Steely Dan song that was read at her funeral, Walk Between the Raindrops:
In my dreams I can hear the sound of thunder
I can see the causeway by the big hotels
That happy day we'll find each other on that Florida shore
You'll open your umbrella
And we'll walk between the raindrops back to your door..."
http://theresalduncan.typepad.com/witostaircase/
I.C.,
The short answer is that I don't think we need to fear egregores so much as to just be aware of them. Lloyd, in my book, is a mercurial figure. Is he good, he he bad?... you're not supposed to really know. But as I put it toward the end (Page 504, actually):
You could be forgiven for assuming that Lloyd is getting off on some kind of sick mind-trip that involves scaring the piss out of gullible teenagers (to paraphrase Dorothy on her way through the spooky forest of Oz: “Vampires and archons and demons—oh my!”). That assumption, however, would be wrong. While Lloyd, on his fat surface, might seem like a walking, talking sausage casing filled up with nine different kinds of asshole, I can assure you that in the murky, polluted depths of his soul he genuinely wants to help. He just has a daimonic way of going about it.
Thanks for the interest in the book. If I knew you a little better, I'd send you a free copy. I've always enjoyed your posts. Jeff's too, of course--but that goes without saying.
Thanks, Derek. That's an eminently sane position to take. Do not, however, so lightly tease an impovershed bibliophile with the notion of free books! Ah, well, I suppose I'll have to petition my library again. Now there's an institution that fears me! (Not that they've been complying with my requests of late, come to think of it...)
I agree with Einstein who agreed with Schopenhauer that..."A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills." Just had to say that.
I guess when I use the term "feeding the Beast," and I have repeatedly, I am referring to the Meta Egregore we have created and sustain.....or maybe now it is sufficently powerful enough that it needs no further sustenance from us...instead it has turned on us and controls our destiny, for the most part, because living without it (off grid) is such a difficult move.
Does anyone, Eve, maybe, know any decent Egregorian Chants?
How about an egregiously gregarious gregorian chant? (The krumhorn's a little cranky, but I think it has a right to be.)
Then collective unconsciousness relating to mischievous arrogance is one of the most popular egregores. Also the immaturity in adulthood when decisions are made that affect most of the people in society. These two egregores have also been planted by the elite of course. Most harmful and destructive.
Quick correction, et -- "Walk Between the Raindrops" is a Donald Fagan song. He's 1/2 of Steely Dan, but the song came from his solo album "The Nightfly."
Where two or more gather together in my name, that is a church.
I find that easier to spell. I liked your piece Derek. I'm not sure that tobacco and oil are more perverse than insurance. My question would be whether the destruction of symbols by burning the books means that the symbols loose their power in the unconsious. It reminds me of sunrise versus sunset. Still the light is perfected, the crystal we call science, knows no bounds.
"."An egregore is a kind of group mind which is created when people consciously come together for a common purpose."
Gaetan Delaforgem
Hmmmm.....so at what point do celebrities lose themselves & become the egregore of the crowd that's come together to worship them?
"A celebrity collects a chorus of voices. All he wants is to hear them repeat his name. As long as there are enough of them and they are versed in his name it does not matter whether these voices belong to the dead, to the living, or to the as yet unborn."
Elias Canetti
" It continuously interacts with its members, influencing them and being influenced by them. The interaction works positively by stimulating and assisting its members but only as long as they behave and act in line with its original aim. It will stimulate both individually and collectively all those faculties in the group which will permit the realization of the objectives of its original program."
Gaetan Delaforgem
"The crowd needs a direction. It is in movement and it moves towards a goal. The direction, which is common to all its members, strengthens the feelings of equality. A goal outside the individual members and common to all of them drives underground all the private differing goals which are fatal to the crowd as such. Direction is essential for the continuing existence of the crowd."
Elias Canetti
If enough people believe this Wired article:
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/07/dayintech_0716
which says:
"Comets come and go, literally, but Swift-Tuttle's orbit is of particular interest to us earthlings since astronomers calculate that it is very likely to strike either the Earth or the moon on its next pass. They've even zeroed in on a date: Aug. 14, 2126."
would an egregore of an actual collision form?
But if you click on the words "very likely to," it takes you here:
http://www.as.wvu.edu/~jel/skywatch/swfttle.html
& says,
"Armed with new observations of the comet's motion, Marsden went to work revising his calculations of its orbit. He predicted the next perihelion would occur on August 14, 2126. But if the actual date of perihelion was off by 15 days from his prediction (as the 1992 perihelion had been off by 17 days), the comet and the Earth might be in the same place in space at the same time. Since Comet Swift-Tuttle is thought to be about six-miles across, about the same size of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, a possible collision looked ominous.
Marsden continued to refine his calculations, and discovered that he could trace Comet Swift- Tuttle's orbit back almost two thousand years, to match comets observed in 188 AD and possibly even 69 BC. The orbit turned out to be more stable than he had originally thought, with the effects of the comet's jets less pronounced. Marsden concluded that it is highly unlikely the comet will be 15 days off in 2126, and he called off his warning of a possible collision. His new calculations show Comet Swift-Tuttle will pass a comfortable 15 million miles from Earth on its next trip to the inner solar system. However, when Marsden ran his orbital calculations further into the future, he found that, in 3044, Comet Swift-Tuttle may pass within a million miles of Earth, a true cosmic ``near miss.''
Which doesn't sound "very likely" to me, at least in 2126.
So which one is real & which one is the as yet unborn egregore?
I suppose that all any of this really proves is,
"If you listen to fools...
The Mob Rules"
I'm thinking that maybe I'm "egregorophobic" It's niggling at the back of my mind that all of this pain in the world is made manifest because I participated in it. I know I want to do the right thing, say the right thing, but I can't help myself "knowing" both sides of me. There is alot of that going on right now. Here's my example. There is a commercial playing constantly of a few guys out camping. They can't wake someone up so the "driver" imagines that he can pick up the tent between his fingers and drop the victim in the middle of the lake. The original for that was Edmonton's Second City where John Candy et al would be watching someone in a park then the camera shot would cut between his thumb and finger and he says "I squeeze your head".
The viewing public is being manipulated by commercials. Idiots dressed in costumes, talking lizards and these subtle car commercials where the viewer is given the power of imagination made flesh when the camper is dumped into the lake simply by imagining. This is a form of mind control that follows the negative path of cosmic or astral or group think toward a negative outcome. This is all supposed to be on the unconsious side but mind control is the stated goal of advertising. "Buy a Honda and you will have the power".
If creating a center for focus, in turn impacts on how the pre-manifest becomes manifest, then we become obligated to create a focus (new criteria for understanding) that is less prone to co-optation by negative operators.
just_another_dick:
"If enough people believe this Wired article, which says:
"Comets come and go, literally, but Swift-Tuttle's orbit is of particular interest to us earthlings..."
No, most likely not, but enough people together could have some sort of Satanic panic and make decisions just as destructive to life on earth if they really believe a comet/meteor/PlanetX stike, or polar shift is inevitable.
You see lots of people justifying no action whatsoever on climate change reduction by means of cutting carbon emissions because they believe such a cataclysm is imminent.
I look at the Nasa Near Earth Object impact risk page fairly often to assuage those fears, and fairly often at the USGS earthquake page, but I am fairly confident that we will be around long enough to figure everything out on this blog...
That said, I like pretty far from the coasts, especially after seeing first hand the aftermath of that big tsunami and earthquake in Aceh
Are occult explanations necessary? Isn't the concept of 'egregore' like the concept of 'meme'? Of course we reinforce these things: as we work we embed the concepts into the product. Laziness and inertia ensure that such concepts will be carried on by others entering the work.
Well said Michael.
‘Events’ that do not fit into rational models, will still have explanations applied to them. Yet, what happens when we expand the parameters of our model?
Perhaps the Occult, being destined for integration within a larger rational model, is acting out teenage fantasies before it finds out what the real job is.
I am intrigued as always by the discussions here, yet I have to ask; "does anyone have firsthand knowledge?"
I by no means claim expertise, yet for the past 20 years have experimented with what is being called egregore here.
I tend to differentiate the following: thought, thoughtform, meme, egregore, fetch, tulpa, collective unconscious, group mind and morphic resonance, etc. Some may think I am splitting hairs, but being that I have 'drove the cars' instead of just looking through the 'auto trader magazines' so to speak I feel I have a different perspective on this subject.
When the word meme became popular I would say to friends "see the meme behind the meme". Today I would suggest we take a closer look at one Meme/Tulpa that has taken a beating over the past century to be displaced by it's Qlippoth counterpart of the History we are living: UTOPIA TO DISTOPIA.
I agree with the post which asked why we fail to grasp the reins of our own destiny.
When an Egregore becomes 'alive' I tend to call it a TULPA to seperate it from what an Egregore tends to be most of the time. A Tulpa usually can NOT be Reabsorbed by its creator/s whereas an Egregore can (with much effort)
The Morphic Resonance tends to represent a template. An Egregore would be the 'Tenant' of the template.
A Tulpa would be the CHILD OF BOTH.
More than the sum of its parts.
One of the most fascinating aspects of this research has been in regards to UFOs and Alien encounters. During a period of 'doubt' (which is itself a heavy meme) I had an experience which basically changed my life.
I have now been working with this 'worldview' that my Egregore/Tulpa gave me and have refined many of the aspects that I stumbled upon in my research into this area of thought.
It now is a system that I live with much like others have their religions I guess. All I know is that it works and has definite abilities to shape my life and those around me in many fascinating ways.
I tend to live a 'charmed' life so to speak because of this involvement with Tulpa, egregore and such. Interestingly my guide book I use is the I CHING and so far I can say it always lets me know the MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY.
sorry for rambling,,, it is late and I don't ever post here (once before) so I just wanted to let it rip before I venture into dreamland tonight.
Love RI very much, and all who intelligently post here,,
Scott the EarthCitizen
Eric, I am with you on the 'egregorophobic' thinking. We need to learn how to be more careful about the energies we create and direct.
Scott, no sorrow is called for on account of your 'rambling'.
Scott,
I like the way you've defined your terms and I essentially agree with you. Firsthand knowledge of these things is tricky thing to claim—I have yet to shake hands with a tulpa, for instance—but six years of focused dream yoga has gotten me in and out of some exceedingly strange situations (in this world and others). My Jungian analyst here in Manhattan would back me up on that.
I guess I see memes, egregores, and tulpas on a continuum—one shading into the other as they gain strength. Here's how I would define them:
Memes—a term coined by Richard Dawkins—refers to bits of culture, or ideas, that reproduce and compete just like genes.
By this definition, the term meme itself would be a meme—and a very successful one, since we all seem to know it.
Egregores are an accumulation of memes and thought-energy swirling around the morphic vortex of a group's intent. At a certain point that meme accumulation acquires enough thought-energy to become a semi-free agent—an unseen entitity that can act on the group's behalf, or act upon the group itself.
By this definition, the people actively associated with Rigorous Intuition would be nurturing an egregore—as some here have already intuited.
Tulpas are egregores that have enough energy and independence to make an impact on our five senses in this world. They can be seen—or maybe heard or smelled or felt up—by others. Maybe we could even eat them (see book excerpt below).
By this definition, the Loch Ness Monster might well be a tulpa. However, I should point out that my own firsthand experience sputters out here. Aside from a very surreal encounter with the Easter Bunny when I was six, everything I know about tulpas I learned from Alexandra David-Néel, who Jeff mentioned in one of his earlier posts. Miss David-Néel claimed to have created, and later reabsorbed, a tulpa who took the form of a sinister-looking monk. She claims she did this tulpa-summoning all by herself—but I would point out that she had the entire, unwieldy egregore of Tibetan Buddhist thought standing behind her, so I think she had help, even if she was loathe to admit it.
So there you go.... Since it's unlikely that many people are still following this thread, I'll throw in one more term for Scott's consideration, just to muddy the waters:
Daimon is the term I like for the sort of spiritual mentor, or psychic guidance counselor from the Other Side, that you seem to be referring to toward the end of your post. I have a lot to say about daimons in my book, Crash Gordon and the etc...
P.S. ericswan,
My suspiscion is that burning books related to a particular egregore might make the egregore grow stronger, simply by drawing more attention to it. Negative thoughts or positive thoughts may not matter much when it comes to thought-energy fuel for certain indiscriminate egregores—those who abide by Nietzsche's old saying: "That which does not kill me makes me stronger."
Here's the semi-relevant book excerpt:
“Okay, so maybe the Loch Ness Monster isn’t a tulpa,” Gordon backpedals. “Maybe it’s just the ghost of a plesiosaur haunting the lake that it swam in 65 million years ago,” he says. “Or it could just be a really big sturgeon. Y’know, the fish that makes caviar? They’re really creepy-looking, if you haven’t seen one. Like a crocodile from Mars or something. And then we eat their eggs.”
“Gross.”
“I know. It’s as bad as those Chinese guys who eat fried scorpions and raw puppy livers.” It’s a weird world we live in, thinks Gordon. People will eat just about anything (including the body of Christ, if they’re Catholic). But why do we care so much about the Loch Ness Monster, the Abominable Snowman, Mothmen, and extraterrestrials, when the world is already full of incredibly bizarre real creatures like the coelacanth, the giraffe, and the duck-billed platypus?
An answer comes to him unbidden: Maybe it’s because no one’s eaten an Abominable Snowman yet.
Hello ALL,
Derek, I can't wait to read your book it looks to be a great ride!
The breakdown you posted is very similar to my own system of 'grades' to make the distinctions needed.
Personal Daimons are part of the reason I became so interested in tulpa, egregore and such. I am continuously developing my relationship with my personal mentor. For me the reality of this being is not questioned. The other tulpa that has shaped my life is my personal "Library Angel" who has helped me time and time again and helped me fill my house with great books. She is very visible at times and has given me 'dreambooks' that later materialize as New books years later.
The other strong interest I maintain is dealing with "Genius Loci" the spirit of a place. This area of research is something that has given me a lifetime of rewards.
For over 8 years now I have cultivated a relationship with the genius loci of the land I reside on presently. It has taught me much about our relationship to earth in the 21st century as I live in a suburban neighborhood and 'progress' is developing all around. Currently we are in a drought situation here and my yard is the greenest of all and I don't labor to much with it as my neighbors do watering, weeding, and spraying pesticides.
I sit and listen to my genius loci, it is very fulfilling and less demanding than 'normal yardwork'.
Again I ramble,
Thanks Sounder for letting me know that is OK, hope to be more active here if I can.
Again, I love RI
Thanks for the responses.
Scott the EarthCitizen
"I won't have much time this week for blogging, but a subject I'd like to explore soon is the congruity between the occult concept of an egregore and Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance. So if you're game, don't wait for me."
I've got some thoughts on this. Well, mostly a collection of other people's thoughts, but that will be much of the point.
Rudy Rucker's Panpsychism argument: Mind is a universally distributed quality
No need to use magical terminology. Mind is real and associated with the physics of this world. Mind in a box e.g. and mind in the matter that makes us who we are.
The above came to mind when I was reading the Babalon Bunch - Jack Parsons, The Magickal Scientist and His Circle over at Red Ice Creations. The part that caught my interest was the discussion on elementals especially the Jim Morrison quote:
'Compare Jim Morrison's remark to an interviewer that the air around us is full of spirits. "They know we exist, and envy us our bodies."'
These "spirits" are just self-aware particles that lack the formed-body emergent properties. Basically these atoms and electrons and muons swirling around occasionally arrange in ways that seem to be, well, alive and even intelligent. Crazy? How much more crazy than saying lipid membrane wrappers and protein particles can make YOU alive or think? Also consider our bodies turn-over their constituant matter non-stop... we all could have a few atoms or photons once bouncing around in Hitlers or Ghandi's or The Bhudda's physical form. And perhaps these particles have a mind of their own and ideas on where "your" identity should go.
Some Alfred North Whitehead on emergence might help visualize the process.
"The many become one, and are increased by one. In their natures, entities are disjunctively 'many' in process of passage into conjunctive unity... Thus the 'production of novel togetherness' is the ultimate notion embodied in the term concrescence."
Fittingly the full quote can be found on the website covering Terence McKenna's novelty timewave concept, a nice mirror of Sheldrake's work.
Blogger seems to insist on mangling my links. After "e.g." I had wrote Simulation Argument with it linked to the website. BOGGER decideded to wrap the whole link over the text that followed and delete the atual link.
All,
I appreciate posting a link to my HyperFlight.com web site in connection with the Pythagorean "Order."
The spiritual or virtual or egregores or tulpa entities should work just fine for a Pythagorean, particularly if we can include the (ancient) Egyptian story of creation by Atum who "spitted out" his mind creation of the sun or earth or ..., for a mental creation to acquire a degree of independence one needs to separate it from its creator. (In the virtual domain the like "sticks" to like.) Second, despite the Buddhist claim of a reality being a delusion, a spiritual embodiment is subject to geometric constructs, which are very real -- a circle and pyramid being the best known. Thirdly, I agree that some spiritual embodiments do not have the ability to become real (Abominable snow man, for example) but there could be so many reasons for that that (at least for me) it becomes speculative.
While you can make a contact with spiritual entities (through your right brain), you need to get grounded to retain and restore your balance in the real-virtual duality and stop drifting associatively. That is the best part in being a human.
Cheers,
I think you might like my new blog raincoatflashers.blogspot.com.
I'm not a spambot or phreaker. It is a blog "contest" for creative writers.
By the way, relevant to this topic:
The Book of Rowan by Ivo Dominguez.
Great book.
Here's another idea. Karma is the remembering of all the interactions your atoms had with all the other atoms in the Verse. The creepy part is that you don't think you'd remeber eating all those insect atoms late at night.
(The idea is that as an emergent property you lack knowledge of all the little things happening below your mind. Once you "die" you achieve "parity.")
Jeff, you gonna post soon?
ericswan said...
The original for that was Edmonton's Second City where John Candy et al would be watching someone in a park then the camera shot would cut between his thumb and finger and he says "I squeeze your head".
Wasn't that a Kids in the Hall bit?
Btw, I really hate those Sonic Fast-Food-Buying assholes.
Perhaps we should call it Non-sense Advertising?
How does a bizarre special effect inform us of the benefits of the innovation the economy has produced?
We should make this official.
WTF is this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LG0zDltjL_o
iridescent cuttlefish said...
stuff...
Dude, I love you.
iridescent cuttlefish
"hydro-pneumatic pulsating vacuo machine"
An invention synchronicity. Thank You.
I'm not convinced of the group-reality thing.
I think it's a group-thing.
Three Plains of Thought
"May 1957 He called his talk 'The Insufficiency of Liberalism' and it was an exposition of what he termed the “three stages of development”. The first great leap, he said, was made when man moved from stage one of primitive religion to stage two of scientific realism. This was the stage modern man tended to be at. A few move to the third stage in which one can find in the lapses and deficiencies in science and realism, and that there is something beyond fact and science. He called this stage three. The problem, he explained, was that stage one and stage three appear to be exactly the same to people stuck in stage two. Consequently, those in stage three are seen as having had some sort of a relapse into childish nonsense. Only those in stage three, can understand the differences between stage one and stage three."
- E. F. Schumacher
"Perhaps we agree on what is "there" or "not there" because what we call consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected."
If this is true, it is the most profound implication of the holographic paradigm of all, for it means that experiences such as Watson's are not commonplace only because we have not programmed our minds with the beliefs that would make them so. In a holographic universe there are no limits to the extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality.
Could you imagine your average Amerindian thinking of this? We moderns have such a wonderful view of reality, don't we?
I like this new guy derek.
The home of the infamous european toxic clan, psycho urban fraggers that pawn the virtual return to castle wolfenstein enemy territory battlefields.
Just Pub, a dumb return to castle wolfenstein enemy territory comic strip by feuersturm.
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