Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Lambs to the Marketplace



The world of illusion is at my door,
I ain't a-haulin' any of my lambs to the marketplace anymore. - Bob Dylan


In 1905 Aleister Crowley led an experienced team of Swiss and Italian mountaineers to Nepal's then-unscaled Kanchenjunga, the world's third highest peak. Showell Styles tells what happened in his On Top of the World:

The party advanced up the glacier and reached a height of 20,400 feet on the face below the main peak and to the west of it; and here, at Camp VII, the Swiss called a conference at which Crowley was formally deposed from leadership because of his sadistically cruel treatment of the porters. Crowley refused to accept this. The expedition was then called off, and all except Crowley started down for the lower camps. There was a slip which set off an avalanche. All of them were swept down and buried under the snow.... Pache was dead, and the porters too.

Crowley had heard the frantic calls for help but had not troubled to come out of his tent. That evening he wrote a letter, later printed in an English newspaper, commenting that he "was not over-anxious in the circumstances to render help. A mountain accident of this kind is one of the things for which I have no sympathy whatever." Next morning he climbed down, keeping well clear of his late companions who were toiling to recover the bodies, and proceeded to Darjeeling by himself. As a Satanist, it seems, he was doing rather well.


But what is a Satanist? Crowley would have said he wasn't one, and he would have made a strong argument, since the figure "Satan" is the adversary of a God he didn't acknowledge in a religion he despised. Many occultists have made similar cases, resisting the simple either/or's of the dominant culture. And even though much of the religious aesthetics and dogma may appear similar, we should probably concede this point.

But there's something else that distinguishes Satanism, at least if we may use it as shorthand for an ethos rather than as an attitude of devotion towards a fallen angel. And that's the Ye shall be as gods come on, that manifests both as radical individualism ("Do what thou wilt") and a lack of pity towards the "herd." ("We should not protect the weak and vicious from the results of their own inferiority," said Crowley.)

In The Occult, Colin Wilson writes that Crowley "had almost no capacity for natural affection. It is this that makes him a 'monster.'" The metaphysics and the sex magick were not beside the point, but they were another point. It's by his profound lack of charity that we can rightly call Crowley Satanic, and his conduct on the slopes of Kanchenjunga was a magnificent example.

As was George Bush's contemptuous behaviour during Katrina, eating cake and strumming a guitar while the poor of New Orleans were purged. Or his mocking of Karla Faye Tucker, and his sniggered lynch joke before Coretta Scott King. It's in the way all of these people smile when they speak of tragedy, and use the sufferings of others for their own political alchemy. (That the tortures of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay quickly took on aspects of ritual sexual abuse are not tricks of the light.)

I don't know if Dick Cheney dons a black robe and drinks cats' blood. It wouldn't surprise me, but I don't know; though I do remember he was dressed for a duck hunt at Auschwitz. But I have no qualms about calling him a Satanist.

Many of the elite, for whom Cheney is a factotum, obtainted and maintain their privilege by the application of Satanitic sentiment, whether or not they know it as such. They exalt their will and make it the vector of their ambition, and are merciless to those weaker than themselves unless there's something in it for them, for a while. Natural affections are stunted, and unnatural passions - the perogative of the old gods - are indulged. Sociopathologies of power are perhaps, also, the demonstration of a Satanic disposition.

At least this helps me to accept as true as well as horrible a story like this from last week, updating a post of last February:

Ties Between Elites and Child Sex Rings "Beyond Imagination"

The complicity in Mexico between child sex rings and the political and business elites "goes beyond what we can even imagine," says activist Lydia Cacho, who faces death threats and was even thrown briefly into prison for revealing those ties in a book. "What we have just seen is only the tip of the iceberg," Cacho told IPS, after the local media aired Tuesday recordings of telephone conversations between two prominent politicians and a hotel owner now in prison, and a wealthy local businessman.

The number of Mexican politicians and businessmen involved in child pornography and sex rings "would shock us if we knew the real extent of the phenomenon," said Cacho.

...

"Los demonios del Edén" contains the personal accounts of minors who talk about the sexual abuse they suffered at the hands of a ring in which prominent figures were allegedly involved. The youngsters describe how the hotel owner sexually abused them himself, set up a prostitution ring to allow others to abuse them, and photographed them in order to sell the pornographic images on the Internet.

Only those dead to pity would take such lambs to the marketplace, and such people could properly be called Satanists. But then, the market may be more than just a place.

Magician J Edward Cornelius writes of opening gateways for astral creatures in Aleister Crowley and the Ouija Board that "some people have wondered if an elemental is really dangerous when it shape-shifts into our wildest dreams or fantasies.... The more a person communicates with an elemental the stronger it becomes. It gains its strength by feeding on your life-energy. This relationship is properly or magickally called a marriage - more precisely, a Lesser Marriage."

That is to say, entities evoked by a magician to fulfill a certain need will also take something in return. They have to feed.

Cornelius again:

Every Medium will attest to the fact that after communicating with the spirit world they become very tired or drained. Where did their energy go? Energy cannot dissipate; it has to go somewhere even if it is absorbed by an invisible entity. When I once asked a similar question of my own teacher, he said, "Look, I eat, you eat and they eat - what's the problem?" I thought about it and replied, "I guess there is no problem."

The danger, Cornelius writes, is in "allowing the entity to use you as the source of its feeding," drawing psychic energy to the point of burnout. He compares the "elemental" that may be called through a gateway to a microscopic parasite accespted as part of nature, but also to a lion: "The consequences of its feeding can often be disastrous where a human is concerned. Whether one loses body or psyche to any "feeder," visible or invisible, is not a reality one wishes to embrace."

The danger, he warns, is greatest to children, who are regarded as tastier food, because their spirits are naturally more open to finer planes of existence:

The choice of feeding off the youngest person by an elemental, although seemingly baneful, is simply because of the nature of a human's psychic system. The older a person gets, the harder it is to open that which time has begun to close down; we become earthbound with age.... The more earthbound or wrapped in Maya we become, the more destined we are toward an earthly grave. Most children, on the other hand, are simply "open" for anything. Magicians must learn to be like children.

And to survive, children made to be meat for hungry spirits of this world or another need to close down.

In The Secret Spiritual World of Children, Tobin Hart tells the story of Liz, a six-year old girl who began reporting strange visitations in her bedroom. A green and purple monster would appear in one corner, followed by a man who seemed "a little scary." Her parents noticed an unpleasant smell, like filthy socks, would fill the room after a supposed encounter, for which cleaning and doing laundry would have no effect. The smell was accompanied by a feeling of disgust and fear.

Hart writes:

When the smell and the feeling seemed present, they would discover that Liz would often masturbate. In and of itself this, of course, is no reason for concern, it is normal for children to masturbate. But in this case it seemed excessive and also remarkably tied to her reports of this visitor; it was as if a wave of energy wafted over her. Was this some invisible sexual predator? they wondered.

The parents prayed and sought advice on ritual cleansing. These seemed to work a little, but the visitor kept returning until Liz began to recognize the power to establish her own boundaries. She told it to go away, and when it did, she began to pity it.

"It's a hard world for little things," Lillian Gish says aloud in Night of the Hunter as she watches an owl snatch a rabbit. It's hard to be prey. It's harder to be prey that can pity the predator. But empathy is a big part of that which makes us us, and not them. And perhaps that can be a weapon, as well, to help distinguish the many from the few. They can't eat us all, but they may die trying.

But first of all, we need the eyes to see what's on the menu.

97 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"It's in the way all of these people smile when they speak of tragedy."

Utterly true. An excellent observation.

Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were two of the most egregious offenders in this regard. Bush jr. is actually better at faking it. Or maybe he's just emotionally dead.

Tim Russert is another non-poker face in this regard. His eyes light up when he speaks of war and torture. It's creepy and demonic in appearance.

Becoming aware of this tendency is a first step toward seeing some of these people as they really are.

9/20/2006 05:37:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"It's in the way all of these people smile when they speak of tragedy."

Utterly true. An excellent observation.

Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were two of the most egregious offenders in this regard. Bush jr. is actually better at faking it. Or maybe he's just emotionally dead.

Tim Russert is another non-poker face in this regard. His eyes light up when he speaks of war and torture. It's creepy and demonic in appearance.

Becoming aware of this tendency is a first step toward seeing some of these people as they really are.

9/20/2006 05:38:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Fearful symmetry alert: about spilled my coffee when I saw your quoting from 'Night of the Hunter'. Man, I had that DVD in my hands 2 nights ago at a rental place. But it 'd already been rented out.

***

"It's in the way all of these people smile when they speak of tragedy, and use the sufferings of others for their own political alchemy."

Before reading this entry, I'd posted some info on the discussion board at the 'presidential doodles' thread. In it, I noted one of HW Bush's notes to his secretary in which he is responding to a request to sign "a stack of letters as part of a mass mailing addressed to people he knew. Looking over the names, Bush realized that one intended recipient was dead and another might be."

On the note to his secretary, HW draws a mock unhappy face with tears and writes below it:

"Rose, 1 confirmed dead. 1 possible dead. How about all the rest? Any more dead ones?"

9/20/2006 06:02:00 AM  
Blogger Sounder said...

Elemental forces are the echoes of unresolved desires from ex-living people. It is not supernatural, simply continuation within a less tangible framework, of the ignorance found within this more tangible expression. Earth bound spirits attempt to connect by resonance to currently incarnated expressions (people) so as to continue their resolution process. Their false sense of self will dissipate, when we the living, learn to resonate with more refined elemental forces. (Hence the possibility for empathy in letting your controlling spirits go.)

Ignorance is displaced to the degree that our framework for understanding corresponds to actual expressions of reality. Dualism has helped us in defining many categories, yet the correspondence between categories seems weak and shallow in mho.

Psychopathologies encouraged by the elites serve to insure the continuation of our distopian nightmare. They exist to maintain unresolved desires and reactive mind structures. So we, despite the invitations and glamour of dominant social structures, must seek to create new ways to resonate with deeper and more substantive elements of reality.

By the by, speculation is encouraged because existing ‘knowledge’ is little more than scholarship based on deeply flawed premises.

9/20/2006 07:07:00 AM  
Blogger iridescent cuttlefish said...

Jeff,
I've got to disagree with the praise heaped upon this post. You start with an extremely important characterization of the ruling class:

Many of the elite, for whom Cheney is a factotum, obtain(t)ed and maintain their privilege by the application of Satanitic sentiment, whether or not they know it as such. They exalt their will and make it the vector of their ambition, and are merciless to those weaker than themselves unless there's something in it for them, for a while.

In other words, as you later say, it doesn't matter whether Cheney really drinks cat's blood, he acts in accordance with the predatory principle we associate with satanism. Your link to the duck hunting at Auschwitz was even better. This is how these people view us: as weaker specimens who have no right to reproduce themselves or to clamor for a bowl of gruel from the gilded halls which have been cleansed of that nagging noblesse oblige their class used to "feel" (this was replaced by trickle-downism and improved their bottom line remarkably.)

But then you undercut this characterization by parading the purple and green monsters looking for tasty young morsels yet again. You just said that it didn't really matter whether they were satanists since they act like them, but then you have to go and dive into that swamp again, which suggests the opposite: that it does matter because they are drinking blood and God knows what else.

Look, we know there are child sex rings (playgrounds of the elites), and investigations like the one in Mexico are important and should be followed up with subsequent reporting. But why would you want to undercut your bigger point--that it doesn't take an SS uniform to make a Nazi--by immediately reverting to the kind of spooky speculation which actually heightens interest in the methodology of evil? (I do not mean to suggest that this is your intent, but it is a consequence.) Can't we focus just one time on the legacy of the eugenicists without getting all occulty?

9/20/2006 10:37:00 AM  
Blogger jules said...

Hi Jeff and crew. I have been away avoiding the media, and I am glad, google Naomi Robson, Wa Wa and saving children from cannibals if you want to jnow what I am glad about missing.

Empathy as a weapon made me think of this:

"The vampires gather around me
Angle in to take a bite
They want to drink my blood of courage
Take away my fight
But no no no they can't do that
nno for one ruth I learned in life
you want to scare away the vampires
You simply guide them into the light"

Its from a song on Spearheads latest record.

I been avoiding the media like the plague, but its bizarre the way that commercial tv can do a whole week of shite about some current affairs talking horse head rescuing a child from jungle cannibals in Irian Jaya or West papua or some "other" where the heart of darkness beats. (Not here where we are all sooo good.) The ironic perversion of compassion into a ratings game, and the half arsed failure of an attempt to get into the jungle to rescue some kid who is gonna be eaten by his or someone elses tribe in the next ten years maybe (ie after he is 16), compared to your blog, Jeff, its bizzare.

I dunno if you know about the debacle I am talking about, but ...
I basically caught up with whats been happening in the world, same old shit, apart from Naomi Robson, anchor of TodayTonight (she has huge scarey teeth for added irony,) making a mercy dash to the jungle to save a kid from some supposed cannibals. (Heard rumours the cannabilism bit was just bullshit anyway). He was apparantly marked to be eaten in a few years (about 10).

I am really sorry you all missed the irony that the MSM provides such drivel, and a visit here such a better job of reporting current affairs, well some specific ones in such a light.

Hearing all about that and the coming online here and reading this latest post - what an Umberto Eco moment.

That poor kid, the elementals that stalk the souls of those at channels 7 and 9 in Australia must have been salivating up a flood at the prospect of that kid...

Its very true about kids and their connection to the infinite. Its scary how we lose it as we get older.

Is that what Chronos or Saturn eating his children is really about? Sense of time being how we feed that particular beast.

Just random thoughts,

"And to survive, children made to be meat for hungry spirits of this world or another need to close down."

Thats the MC nexus again for anyone who forgot, that process. But there is more to it than that too. As Liz's story shows, it doesn't need networks of abuse and the like (tho who knows what she has been through?) to get nasty vampires associating with your sexuality.

Sex must be a powerful boundary breaker, if it lets souls into the world, so of course entities will be attracted to its energy. Even non materialistic ones. But we already lknow ths sorry just rambling...

Using empathy with evil dodgy pricks is a bit sus tho, do you really want to expose youself to that energy.

I guess not. But then again, Micheal Franti may nave been onto something when he wrote about scaring vampires by guiding them into the light. There was some Native american healer I read about years ago. he said when he healed he used little hollow bones, and that was a metyaphor, for what got did with him.

he was a hollow bone for gods/godesses power to flow through. Maybe thats the difference between true divinity (whatever thatis) and the predatory multiverse populated by ravenous entities - that one source provides energy in abundance and others need to eat, but don't want to feed at the source. (maybe the source is just a subtle and celverer one tho...)

Blah this is disjointed.

Being away from a keyboard for a while structures your thoughts differently.

9/20/2006 10:44:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Many of the elite, for whom Cheney is a factotum, obtainted and maintain their privilege by the application of Satanitic sentiment, whether or not they know it as such. They exalt their will and make it the vector of their ambition, and are merciless to those weaker than themselves unless there's something in it for them, for a while. Natural affections are stunted, and unnatural passions - the perogative of the old gods - are indulged. Sociopathologies of power are perhaps, also, the demonstration of a Satanic disposition."...

""It's a hard world for little things," Lillian Gish says aloud in Night of the Hunter as she watches an owl snatch a rabbit. It's hard to be prey. It's harder to be prey that can pity the predator. But empathy is a big part of that which makes us us, and not them. And perhaps that can be a weapon, as well, to help distinguish the many from the few. They can't eat us all, but they may die trying.

But first of all, we need the eyes to see what's on the menu."


Some of the most outstanding paragraphs you've written in a bit, Jeff...not an easy thing, given your high basic standard.

The dark union of blood and semen isn't unstoppable. It just seems that way most days.

GH

9/20/2006 11:06:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"How can empahty be a weapon?"

We all have an achilles heel, a vulnerable point in our psyche, but for people who are deeply out of balance it can be crucial. I used to spend a lot of time on IRC, a group of us from a newsgroup, and I remember getting onto these converstations with these internet assholes. I tend to be kind of empathic so after talking with these guys awhile you just get a sort of feeling, you get a sense, a gestalt, of thier being. That's when you can, with some people, just sort of "see" that weak point. It is a point that their whole emotional life revolves around and yet they are unaware of. so you just look at it...

and you touch them there and they crumble and fall.

Jung said "To show another their shadow is to show them their strength." For people who have never done any inner work they have no strength there. George Bush would be one of those. Cheney, on the other hand is pure sociopath, he is evil and should be destroyed at the first opportunity.

9/20/2006 11:30:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

IC, just replying to your post from the last thread.

I don't disagree with you, for the most part...

My point, which my for-shit writing abilities obviously murdered, was that the attitudes of the "elite" can be found in all levels of society.

To quote one of my wife's co-workers from the Gingrich welfare reform days, "We can't let "those people" take what we've worked so hard to get." "Those people" being the leech-like po' folk.

Or my brother-in-law, who is about as "elite" as I am, who said, "I just don't have any sympathy for the weak & the helpless."

I'm not trying to be defeatist, I'm just trying to point out that the attitudes of the so-called "elite" aren't outside the human emotional sphere. If anything, I think that compassion & empathy are becoming the abberrations. This may be intentional, but the mechanism for its implementation is way beyond my limited IQ. Without the willing collusion of those being propagandized I don't actually understand why propaganda works.
No one forces anyone to partake of "the plan." Television, the largest 'carrier" of the "capitalist disease" has a fucking off switch. I know because I discovered the bastard years ago. People partake of this crap out of their own free will. Why? Beats the hell out of me, although I'd imagine it has to do with our social nature. People want to fit in. At the lunch table, around "the water cooler" or coffee machine, etc. Why? Again, beats the fuck out of me.

On the other hand, long before mass media, everyday un-elite Americans have been quite adept at displaying an (in)human(?) ferocity when it suits them. Just look at any of those lovely lynching photos with picnicking families smiling gleefully around the Tyburn jig victims.

As far as "the elite" not finding common cause with the rest of us....well I think "the rest of us" is a way debatable point. You're assuming a lot here. In my misanthropic opinion I think that you could probably break society into thirds. 1/3 wants to save the world, 1/3 wants to own the world, & 1/3 doesn't give a fuck either way.

You can see this in the Iraq debacle. At first, those against it were in the minority. Now that the body count has mushroomed & the cost has ballooned, the pendulum is swinging the other way. But do you seriously think that if Bushco would have committed the troops that Shinseki wanted & actually secured Iraq that Bush would be viewed as anything other than a great prez?

The illegality of the actual invasion coupled with the non-existent WMDs would, in my misanthropic opinion, not matter one teeny tiny bit.

The entire anti-Bush camp is floating their little dinghy on the blood of dead soldiers &, to a lesser extent, the blood of all those dead Iraqis. Without it, the audience for 911 Truth or Loose Change or whatever would be way fucking smaller.

I mentioned that I avoid the adults at my kids cross country race like the plague. Curious as to why? It's a direct result of all those Bush/Cheney bumperstickers that festoon their minivans. & while these folks aren't "elite" they do appear to find "common cause" with the Bushco worldview.

I will agree that folk have been fed a steady diet of bullshit but, at the same time, I'd wonder why they appear completely unable to discern the taste of bullshit when it's on their tongues unless, on some deep level, they enjoy the taste.

You, my friend, are an optimist.
I, on the other hand, am not.

Since it's obvious, to me anyway, that we're on the same side, I am content to agree to disagree, ok?

9/20/2006 11:32:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

What baneful and depraved forces could these people worship?! An under what guise?! I am reminded of Barbara Bush’s statement regarding those forced to flee Katrina to the superdome, how it was working out well for them. There is also the incomprehensible treatment of Robin Bush’s death to leukemia. The dead shall fertilize the living as this ball of evil continues gathering force like a Katamari match gone horribly awry. What do we gain from this knowledge? They eat their dead…their lack of concern for ‘underlings” isn’t just systemic, it’s tacit. Well, we may have known that this ideology existed in the “ptb’s” play list for quite some time. Interesting how this applies to capitalist models as well, who cares for the sycophants and petty minions who feed off the scraps of the well-to-do? I don’t know about your vocation, but I haven’t met a manager yet who placed the concerns of the hires above their own selfish interests. And isn’t this the message that is sent to anyone plugged in to mass media. “Get rich or die trying…” does it matter who gets in the way of your own selfish desires? “Do what thou whilst”, welcome to new American century, same as the old American century, now with improved pain and suffering!

-tlg

9/20/2006 11:36:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

It is not necessarily true that possesion leaves people drained. Often people come out of possessions no more tired then can be explained
normally and more often than not come out refreshed.

I think Yeats wrote about Gods draining energy out of possessed Irish dancers. Most likely the dancers got up and worked the next morning as if they had had a full nights sleep.

His wife's mediumship, however was very hard on
her. Many spirit mediums apparently did suffer. I don't know what causes the difference, but losing energy is not inherent in possesion itself.

As for expressions in peoples eyes. Eyes can light up with sadistic pleasure as they see suffering. Or they can light up because in Christian terms they see the suffering Christ.

Mother Theresa smiled and her eyes lit up when she talked of pain and suffering perhaps Jimmy Carter does the same. Alberto Gonzales eyes shine too, but I think for a different reason.

9/20/2006 11:56:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The little girl was masturbating to distract herself from whatever was in the room and to put herself to sleep. Children do react to mundane anxieties that way, why not supernatural ones too.

9/20/2006 12:16:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"In 1905 Aleister Crowley led an experienced team of Swiss and Italian mountaineers to Nepal's then-unscaled Kanchenjunga, the world's third highest peak. Showell Styles tells what happened in his On Top of the World:..."

Im just reading Aleisters "Confessions" and i must say, beside the fact that he may have been or may not have been a "satanist", he definately waas a skilled and experienced montaineer(is that the right word? sry im no native speaker). anyways if you read his acccount of the story a very different picture emerges... his swiss and italian comrades where anything but "experienced", in fact crowleys friend eckstein, from whom he learned most about mountaineering, did not join the expedition because of the incompetence of those men. Crowley was in no way responsible for the accident, he actualy tried to stop them from leaving the camp in the dark. you dont have to be a hillary or sb like that to know it is not wise to jump around a glacier by night. i dont want to make crowley into a saint, but in this case i must say that his account of the expedition seems very reasonable, and his actions seem very logic to me. those people died because of their stupidity and not because of A.C.

9/20/2006 12:23:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Why do you always equate Crowley with Bush & Co? Crowley didn't smirk or joke about the others who were killed by their own ineptitude. While he may have had no empathy, he didn't go out of his way to cause their demise. Nor did he take pleasure in it, unlike the real Satanists.

Crowley was NOT a Satanist. And your quote of "Do what thou wilt" is truncated. It's "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. And the law is love."

I'm sick of Crowley-bashers.

9/20/2006 01:12:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

As if 'shall be the whole of the law' actually changes anything about 'do what thou wilt!' Give me a break. Crowley was just another charlatan, only without the entertaining flair of a Houdini or the mass emotive appeal of a Hitler. All he ever did was give other people the appearance of knowing his arse from a hole in the ground.

I'm sick of Crowley supporters.

9/20/2006 01:33:00 PM  
Blogger iridescent cuttlefish said...

Richard,
Great, thoughtful response. We are on the same side, and I do agree to disagree with you about our chances of survival, which in large part will depend upon our ability to come out from under the anaesthetizing blanket of propaganda. I was struck by the similarity between something you said just now (about how the minivanners, while not themselves of the elite, "do appear to find 'common cause' with the Bushco worldview...I'd wonder why they appear completely unable to discern the taste of bullshit when it's on their tongues unless, on some deep level, they enjoy the taste") and something I was just reading yesterday.

In Charles Stross' Glasshouse, there's this alleged "social experiment" which is actually a sort of macro petri dish growing the "seedlings" for what Stross calls cognitive dictatorships. The tools of compliance are, despite the story being set in the relative far future, basically from the old toolkit: the social pressures which drive conformity through elaborate systems of rewards for the score whores and ostracization for the rebellious. The connection is, I think, that the programmers are exploiting something that is central to human nature as it's evolved over long spans of time: that we are essentially social, not solitary creatures and are therefore quite vulnerable to manipulation through well-defined triggers.

If you'll pardon the mention of yet another clichéd psychological study, only very few of those third-graders were able to resist the programmed fascism/racism in Jane Elliott's famous blue eye/brown eye experiment, and yet, paradoxically enough, this fundamental sociobility that's become such a vulnerable part of our make-up is also the key to building a world based on empathy rather than competition. Our mission, should we choose to accept it, will be to first illuminate how we are being twisted and exploited in this fashion (as Jane Elliott did), and then imagine & implement a society that turns this vulnerability into its central strength.

As far as the optimism/pessimism thing goes, consider the following thought exercise: You gather a representative sampling of the populace (1 elitist, 30 minivanners, 30 sensible persons, and 30 long-term out-to-lunchers, to borrow your apt breakdown.) Then, you tell them two stories, one a typical ruthless American Rambo/Corporate Raider adventure, complete with lots of collateral damage and general carnage to innocents, and the other an inspired re-telling of the Christmas Truce of 1914. Then, you conduct a secret (anonymous) survey asking which of the two stories a.) was more enjoyable/interesting, b.) they'd rather have children exposed to, and c.) was more emblematic of human nature. Then, with a second group, make the voting public (show of hands, actual names used, etc.) What conclusions do you suppose could be drawn from this experiment? I'm guessing empathy & peace would win out over competition & war, and that there would be differences within and between the two groups along the fault lines of the "background" (which third) the participants come from, as well as demographic variance (18-34 year-old natural born/heavily-programmed killers).

But maybe I'm wrong about the expected outcome of my little empathy test--I can't, for the life of me, understand how anyone could even watch slasher movies, much less profess to enjoy them. Regardless of my possibly unwarranted optimism, I still stand by my point that our sociobility is both the key to our oppression and the basis for the eventual just society. I'd be very interested in your response, Richard (as well as anyone else's) to this notion of empathy as social glue/defense against the dark arts.

9/20/2006 01:54:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Richard wrote:

"If anything, I think that compassion & empathy are becoming the abberrations."

Interesting observation. Are there studies showing the percentage of sociopaths in society increasing? Of course, interacting with computers doesn't make a person compassionate or empathic, probably the opposite. We never know what a new technology is doing to us until it's too late (good website that's been discussing this for years is Steve Talbott's Netfuture

http://www.netfuture.org/

There is a fine line between healthy adaptation, on the one hand, whereby
a tool is made to serve the highest human purposes, and "going native" --
going machinelike in our own habits -- on the other. In a healthy
adaptation we always sense a certain resistance from the tool, however
subtle. This is just to say that the boundary between the tool and
ourselves remains available to our awareness even as we work continually
to transcend the boundary through our own mastery. Without such a
resistance and awareness, we cannot summon the work necessary in order to
remain masters of the technologies we employ. Putting it paradoxically:
we have to be aware of the tool's difference from us, its opposition to
us, in order to work effectively at making it "part of us". When we lose
the awareness, we have no way to direct this work, and we can't know
whether we are using the tool or it is using us.

It is not hard to see that a single-minded drive toward transactional
efficiency always puts the meaning and value of the transactions at risk.
Not that efficiency and meaning are brutely opposed to each other.
Rather, they stand in necessary creative tension with one another. This
prevents us from making a goal of efficiency. If we don't have an aim
separate from efficiency, we have no way to tell whether we are going in
the right or wrong direction, and nothing by which to gauge our
efficiency.

So trying to be efficient is rather like trying to be happy. If you aim
for happiness, you will be disappointed. But if instead you take on some
worthwhile task in the world -- a task that will doubtless require you at
times to assume burdens you are not particularly happy about -- you may be
surprised to discover in your work and sacrifice and achievement a degree
of happiness. In the same way, efficiency is an elusive, indirect, and
never absolute consequence of keeping your eyes on an intrinsically
meaningful goal that may demand many "inefficiencies" of you.

In more concrete terms: any two spouses and any two friends can testify
that the drive for mere efficiency is the quickest way to dissolve
a worthwhile human bond. If you make a goal of efficiency, people will
have the unpleasant habit of distracting you and getting in your way.

This is trite. Everyone knows it. Everyone already knew it when the Net
was coming along and being celebrated for its efficiency. So why were the
praises of efficiency not more effectively counterbalanced by expressions
of concern for the "inefficient" goals and values that might be lost sight
of? It appears there are some dots we just prefer not to connect."

Sorry for the long C&P. Talbott is a bit deeper than quick reading allows.
He's been a voice in the wilderness for years, begging us to consider what it means to be human.

Sociopaths make better CEOs because they sacrifice human feelings for machine efficiency. If sociopaths make better electronic coal miners in the slaveworld of the future, then so be it. "Survivor" written on a planetary (or national) scale is double plus ungood--you'd have to be a sociopath to argue about it.

Is there hope? Of course! Ultimately, humanity will come to perceive the sociopathic gene (or lack of empathy sequences) as a non-desirable mutation. People with the trait will receive counseling.

Crazy? We stand at the dawn of genetic medicine. Heck, maybe in 50 years it will be standard practice to insert "empathy" sequences into people to correct the deficiency. Who knows?

Anyway, enough Panglossalia for one afternoon. Richard, this is for you:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uI7-aTt462M&mode=related&search=ten%20years%20after

And to "a. magnus" (he was a Catholic priest, you know, teacher of Tomas Aquino, and a saint), who said he was sick of "Crowley-bashing:"

So is Crowley.

9/20/2006 01:56:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Oops, my last comment should have been directed at "Colonel Quisp." When I scrolled up it showed a. magnus as the author--sorry for any misdirected sarkasmos.

9/20/2006 01:59:00 PM  
Blogger iridescent cuttlefish said...

On the other hand, peace won't necessarily break out when the truth about being lied to is made public, as evidenced by this amazing little story which has somehow not been aired by our loyal mainstream media:

The Honest Liar
By Björn Hengst and Philipp Wittrock
(excerpt:)
After a few shockingly honest words, Ferenc Gyurcsany is in trouble. He said his government had "screwed up" and that voters were lied to morning, evening and night. A secret tape of a closed MSZP meeting played over Hungarian radio over the weekend unmasked Gyurcsany's own deceptions. Riots in the capital since Monday night have amounted to the worst street violence in Hungary since the anti-Soviet uprising in 1956, and opposition leaders as well as many citizens are calling for Gyurcsany to step down.

I wonder how that would play out here, assuming such news could get through the filter...

9/20/2006 02:05:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

IC, I promise to answer at some point...you give me oodles of stuff to think about but I have responsibilities to my soon to be out of school children & I don't want to rush it & taste my own shoe leather.

Quickly, in keeping with Mr. Wells Satanic meme, I thought that this was an interesting coincidence.

UNITED NATIONS - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez took his verbal battle with the United States to the floor of the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday, calling President Bush "the devil." The impassioned speech by the leftist leader came a day after Bush and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sparred over Tehran's disputed nuclear program but managed to avoid a personal encounter.

9/20/2006 02:07:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

from the NYT story--

''The devil came here yesterday,'' Chavez said, referring to Bush's address on Tuesday and making the sign of the cross. ''He came here talking as if he were the owner of the world.''

Dude made the sign of the cross when mentioning Bush's name! Gotta love that.

9/20/2006 02:30:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

aah...tasty! I had been feeling a bit parched for your more-than-parapolitical views, Jeff.

And, sure enough, this posting was quickly rebuffed with an "occulty" accusation.

As though one should fault a mechanic for looking under the hood. Much more palatable for him to simply kick the tires and honk the horn.

As valuable and insightful as this place is as a rallying point for parapolitical truth, I for one cannot ignore the fact that weeds have roots.

9/20/2006 03:35:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them, they show us the state of our decay.

— Brian Aldiss

9/20/2006 04:49:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"It's in the way all of these people smile when they speak of tragedy." Not only do the personalities named do this, but watch any TV news interviews of the common folk when they describe a current disaster/crime. They're usually smiling while they tell their terrible tale. I find this very strange and inappropriate. Is it that they're "happy" that something interrupted their lives of quiet desperation? Is it a confused, nervous physical reaction to the adrenalin coursing through their systems? Or, perhaps, the happy realization that they escaped the grim reaper one more time: A kind of survivalist sensation. Just how empathetic are they really to their fallen brethren with grins plastered all over their faces? Also disconcerting, is that the newscasters smile, too.

Which brings to mind the Crowley reference, "...Crowley was in no way responsible for the accident, he actualy (sic) tried to stop them from leaving the camp in the dark." While no fan of Crowley, if true, this certainly changes the complexion of empathy from feelings of sorrow to, rightly, disdain for stupidity. In a strange way, Crowley's reaction could be interpreted to an honoring of his fellows' free will, which is, ironically, quite Christian. Wonder if he was smiling when he reported the incident?

Which, now, brings to mind the concept of helping my fellow man. Do I continue to have empathetic feelings for people who refuse to educate themselves about the people and laws they vote into office and law as in, "Forgive them, for they know not what they do," or do I join the ranks of Richard and his brother-in-law in their misanthropic view of the world and smile inappropiately when the fascists take Richard away and not me (this time) for internet terrorism? Do I mutely stand by smiling while I let "...'those people' take what we've worked so hard to get." 'Those people' being the leech-like po' folk." I think not. It's a deterministic world: I do not smile at others' misfortune nor do I interfere with their free will or confuse empathy with stupidity. As a pilot once said during rough weather coming into New York, "We're just going to have to take our lumps."


An Innuit myth tells of the Carribou herd without enemy and that absence of an enemy eventually destroyed that herd and left the people starving. They prayed to their god to remedy the situation, and in answer, their god sent the wolf. The wolf, doing as wolves do, quickly weeded out the sick and weak of the Carribou and the herd recovered and became strong and the people thrived. BTW, this is a happy tale and the speaker smiles in the retelling. No misplaced empathy for sick and weak here.

9/20/2006 05:07:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Whoa, Jeff.

What's with this use of "Satanitic"? A look on google shows only a few dozen uses of the word, most coming from incoherent bulletin board or Myspace postings. You've used "occultic" as well sometimes, a word I associate with rightwing fundamentalist use.

And this use of "Satanist" to encompass Bad People We Don't Like, whether they belive in Satan or not.

Jeff, you usually are far more careful with your language.

9/20/2006 05:19:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"In a strange way, Crowley's reaction could be interpreted to an honoring of his fellows' free will, which is, ironically, quite Christian."

Not hardly. Christians (true Christians, that is, not the current breed of power-mad antiChristian wolves in sheep's clothing) would have helped with the rescue, even if it was the people's fault.

Do unto others. Or, the OT form: do nothing to others what is hateful to yourself. Not assisting in a rescue is pretty hateful.

Even Randians would argue on a certain self-interest in assisting in a rescue. Normal folk just see it as common decency.

Odd that such a thing would have to be clarified.

9/20/2006 05:23:00 PM  
Blogger ericswan said...

I have seen and in fact taken pics of unknowable entities. This past weekend I got closeups of what I think is an "orb". I know they appear to be glitches of sunlight but the one pic was taken at 2pm and the second at 10 am and are on separate days. What intrigues me is that the "shape" of the object and it's colour are uniquely similar if I can use that term. Posted at my blog http://cygnid.blogspot.com/

>Small black holes are in thousands in our solar system - how did that happen?

According to brane theory (as proposed by physicists Lisa Randall of Harvard University and Raman Sundrum of Johns Hopkins University) a mathematical description of how gravity shapes the universe that differs from the description offered by the General Theory of Relativity is available.

According to some scientists the Hyperspace has five spatial dimension with no time dimension.

Monday, September 18, 2006 10:10:35 AM

9/20/2006 05:24:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

some one asked above how can empathy be used as a weapon? noen responded by saying,

----------------------------
"We all have an achilles heel, a vulnerable point in our psyche, but for people who are deeply out of balance it can be crucial. I used to spend a lot of time on IRC, a group of us from a newsgroup, and I remember getting onto these converstations with these internet assholes. I tend to be kind of empathic so after talking with these guys awhile you just get a sort of feeling, you get a sense, a gestalt, of thier being. That's when you can, with some people, just sort of "see" that weak point. It is a point that their whole emotional life revolves around and yet they are unaware of. so you just look at it...

and you touch them there and they crumble and fall.

Jung said "To show another their shadow is to show them their strength." For people who have never done any inner work they have no strength there."
----------------------------

i'll just add to that what i was thinking. i just watched the ghandi movie with ben kingsley on hbo...and i am still amazed by the things he did and believed. and so i was already thinking from a certain place when i read jeff's new article.

i like what noen was saying about empathy. true strength is gained from the inner fight. and these guys, do not know how to look at themselves at the core. and when you cause them to truly face themselves they would absolutely implode on themselves as they made the twin towers do....

here's what i'm trying to say....ghandi said this shortly before he left his residence to visit the muslims in pakistan:

"I'm simply going to prove to Muslims there, and Hindus here, that the only devils in the world are those running around in our own hearts – and that's where all our battles ought to be fought."

here is something else he said:

"Whenever you are confronted with an opponent. Conquer him with love.”

he also said:

"The Roots of Violence are: Wealth without work, Pleasure without conscience, Knowledge without character, Commerce without morality, Science without humanity, Worship without sacrifice, Politics without principles."

as jeff said "It's harder to be prey that can pity the predator...But empathy is a big part of that which makes us us, and not them." now, i was thinking about how empathy by us could be a weapon... because the average person who eats the propaganda and enjoys it, well they also seem to fall prey to and feel empathy for their leaders, even though they don't know those very leaders are trying to do harm to them. whether they know it or not they feel empathy for their predator. the average citizen joe empathies with his leaders, by giving them the benefit of our doubt. well that began to make me think what if empathy can be a weapon if we withhold it? what if realize the ones who do care and those who don't and act accordingly?

and Iredesent Cuttlefish i like what you said:

"only very few of those third-graders were able to resist the programmed fascism/racism in Jane Elliott's famous blue eye/brown eye experiment, and yet, paradoxically enough, this fundamental sociobility that's become such a vulnerable part of our make-up is also the key to building a world based on empathy rather than competition. Our mission, should we choose to accept it, will be to first illuminate how we are being twisted and exploited in this fashion (as Jane Elliott did), and then imagine & implement a society that turns this vulnerability into its central strength.


I still stand by my point that our sociobility is both the key to our oppression and the basis for the eventual just society."

absolutely.

9/20/2006 08:54:00 PM  
Blogger Vanished friend said...

The smiling...Reminds me of Tenet and Negroponte at the UN, with that deranged look of excitement as they listened to Powell et. al. testify, as they realized to themselves "Holy shit, we're going to get away with this." You see that look on a lot of faces. Collect those smiles and you'd have visual, psychological evidence of an evil elite.

9/20/2006 08:56:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

i didn't say that part about ghandi leaving for pakistan right..it should read:

here's what i'm trying to say....ghandi said this shortly before he left his residence to visit the muslims in pakistan:

"I'm simply going to prove to Muslims there, and Hindus here, that the only devils in the world are those running around in our own hearts – and that's where all our battles ought to be fought."

he was then shot and killed about 5 minutes later.

9/20/2006 09:01:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

one more thought...there was a kind of undercurrent in my comment there that i was trying to convey, that i believe jeff has been trying to convey at various times about how the elite unconsciously manifest their inner consciousness to us, like the smiling while speaking of human destruction.

so just as they had to remove the core to destroy the twin towers, they would innately understand this because they themselves have no core....

9/20/2006 09:21:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Great post Jeff, easily one of the top ten of your posts in my book!! Nice job with very accurate firepower leveled at precisely the scum trying to install a living hell on this plane.

9/20/2006 09:48:00 PM  
Blogger AJ said...

"..as a rallying point for parapolitical truth, I for one cannot ignore the fact that weeds have roots."

Well said km.

Jeff, I again commend your expertise in these post as well as your courage to post them.
I do not know if Crowley or the Bushes were Satanist, but it seems the old axiom is in order: by their fruits..
another: If past performance is not an indicator of future results, what the hell is?

Dugoboy opined "they themselves have no core". But I disagree. It is my observation that in the pursuit of power/enlightenment there are many U-turns one can take. It is not a question of whether they have 'a core', but of their use of it -for selfish/evil purpose; akin to a singularity in physics.

But to Richard, who admits not being an optimist:
Perhaps you should take up smoking again? You'll probably get hit by a car going out for some chewing gum anyway.....

9/20/2006 09:52:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Do unto others. Or, the OT form: do nothing to others what (that) is hateful to yourself. Not assisting in a rescue is pretty hateful."

That's a judgement call. What you're missing is the idea of integrity. An impecciable integrity of being true to oneself regardless of how others might construe whether they're in accord or no. Of course, there's the last part of that sentence, "...as you would have others do unto you," and that's the consequence of what one does. For example, if I were one of the people who were digging out my foolish companions on that mountain, while I would hope Crowley would help, I would never fault him, or think him hateful, for living by his sense of integrity and not suffering fools one more time. I would thank him for a valuable lesson and take myself to task for endangering my life by my own decision. Live by the sword, die by the sword, but never fall on your sword.

9/20/2006 10:42:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

How absolute ironic! You are so incredibly intuitive indeed, I mean, with all the brouhaha with Chavez calling you know who a you know what! Great timing.

9/20/2006 10:54:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Crowley is certainly a puzzle. Everyone has a different opinion of him, and there seem to be plenty of reasons to think both well and badly of him.

One thing I have observed, though. Nineteenth century occultism was largely elitist, hierarchical, and traditionalist. Twentieth century occultism has been increasingly populist, democratic, and experimental. And whatever you may think of the change, Crowley appears to be right there at the nexus.

There's a *significance* to Crowley that may outweigh any dispute as to whether he personally was good evil.

9/20/2006 11:06:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Some Anonymous wrote "As for expressions in peoples eyes. Eyes can light up with sadistic pleasure as they see suffering. Or they can light up because in Christian terms they see the suffering Christ."

Two little words:

Bullfuckingshit

9/20/2006 11:15:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Perhaps the same misguided/ misguiding Anonymous wrote: "The wolf, doing as wolves do, quickly weeded out the sick and weak of the Carribou and the herd recovered and became strong and the people thrived. BTW, this is a happy tale and the speaker smiles in the retelling. No misplaced empathy for sick and weak here."

EXCEPT we (well, maybe not you) are human beings. Not wolves and caribou.

Just a slight difference.

Nice twisted little bit of social Darwinist false analogy though. Maybe you should go on FOX (pun intended). Kind of a four-legged predator consciousness that you are promoting, eh?

9/20/2006 11:20:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Mojo Filter -

Thanks for giving me the chance to exercise some empathy. Sorry for you as "the people who thrived" in the myth are, uh, duh, humans, and you are either "sick and weak" in your reading comprehension or just plain illogical. So sorry, you have my deepest compassion.

9/21/2006 01:16:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

" "sick and weak" in your reading comprehension or just plain illogical"

so, by this 'logic', the Inuit have quite neatly acquiesced to their own demise, extinction, and, so to most of the rest of humanity, in the face of the 'wolf', the psychopathic military-industrial might. a gift bestowed by this 'god'.

"deepest compassion"

were you smiling and was there a gleam in your eye when you wrote that ?

9/21/2006 03:32:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Lost then in the curiouser-ness again
now having re-read, then of the
Original Poster Here's portrayal
of the closeness and severity this problem has always had. Now we have a
chance to all of us be seeing evidence of what is at hand. In other words I hear the incredulity cry "WHY ISN'T IT NEWS YET?"
Let people know about this any time the coast is clear (safe) and you are inspired. Most days it is the most I can do.

9/21/2006 03:48:00 AM  
Blogger Sounder said...

I think that Crowley would more correctly be considered to be Luciferic in motivation. That is if one is willing to distinguish Lucifer (the principle of indiscriminate change), from Satan (the static principle).

This may be speculation gone to far, but I think that some unbalanced expressions, of order and liberty, can be positive if it is a natural reaction to imposed negative imbalance of an opposite nature. I am thinking here of the Illuminati project to destroy the Church and Monarchy. While its original intent may have been positive, its own imbalance allows it to be used negatively by later practitioners.

We are caught on a Dadaist playing field where the goal post placement is always changing. Less developed consciousness requires a more rigid ‘father’ figure, hence more order than liberty is called for. Conversely the ‘parent’ would be considered quite a freak if a thirty year old child were to be treated like a two year old.

IC, the idea that empathy and our inherent social nature is both our weakness and our strength is worthy of extended consideration.

9/21/2006 07:09:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I spoke with a survivor of ritual abuse a few nights ago. the subject of empathy was touched on in the context of her offloading some grief about and for the youngest member of the abusers circuit, who was used as a lure and had befriended her to order, and in order to obtain her for the group's abuse. This child (the lurer) was abusing from the age of 5 - yet, survivor said, had shown on occasions the desire to escape the group. one time she lay down in the road, waiting for a car to run her over, for a while, when a little older, maybe 8 or 9, she isolated herself in th eplayground, standing alone in the middle, refusing all offers to come and play, as if trying to draw attention to herself.
survivor was talking about a nasty abusive 'session' when lurer was about 5, and had participated, enthusiastically. (ie adding her own bits not just following orders) we talked about how this was possible from a 'friend'. I said I thought that empathy was maybe present in people as a talent, like intelligence, in variable amounts, capable of being developed or smothered - that maybe her's had been so smothered that she did not feel the victim as a person who was being hurt. survivor said very emphatically that I was wrong, that she KNEW she was hurting, and wanted the victim to KNOW that she ENJOYED hurting her.She said that it was like survivors self harming, the violence had to come out somewhere, but that in perpetrators, they could not think as fast, could not think that it was wrong to hurt someone else.
This idea of perpetrators being less good at thinking has stuck with me - because, what is most striking about a life dedicated to violence, is the stupidity of it - irrespective of the IQ rating or material success of the perpetrator. and what jars about 'do what you like' whether or not its qualified with an ye harm none - is its basic stupidity , its inadequacy as a commandment, suggestion or philosophy of life..
perpetrators are inside a mental box, and on a treadmill. their choices are more, not less, limited than those who think there is merit in serving others.

9/21/2006 08:01:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I think a lot of things are open to interpretation. The Inuit story, to me, is wonderful. It all depends on how you interpret the words 'sick and weak'. Here's a hint, who is it that is 'driving the herd to extinction'? Try applying the concepts of sickness and weakness when describing them...

9/21/2006 08:35:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

To anon 5:07 & AJ-

Thanks for proving my original point far better than I could have.

Oh & aj, maybe I'll oblige you one day. The road in front of my house has already claimed one 12 year old. Splattered his brains all over the tarmac. Quite sad it was.

Hey, if you post an address, after I'm splattered I'll have my wife send you a piece of brain matter or a chunk of my lung & you can masturbate into it on full moons while you conjure optimistic images of a better world.

I'll have to nix the smoking thing though. That would be a step backwards & it would make me as stupid & weak as you are.

Can't have that. Nosireebob.

Anon 5:07-buddy...pal...

...you sound like you're up for some bloody culling. I happen to work with the weak & helpless & I'd be glad to give you the address.
Then maybe we could expand your parameters to encompass all those stupid poor people. I'm sure that you'd even find a few nubile 13 year olds who'd offer to blow you in exchange for their lives.

C'mon bub, admit it. Just the thought is slipping a little lead into your normally flaccid pencil, isn't it?

Hanging here with the RI Surf Nazi Brigade is always a pleasure beyond what words could possibly convey.

9/21/2006 09:08:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

How we create false idols of Crowley. Read section one:

"It Was Twenty Years Ago Today,"...That Crowley Drugged World Away: CIA psyops of 1960s-

extended comments from Jeff Wells' Rigorous Intuition "v.2.0" post at:
http://rigint.blogspot.com/2006/06/chant-down-babylon_23.html

--on the CIA infiltration (and creation) of the 1960s, in a right wing attempt to steer culture toward some rather dark goals and keep rock and roll "from going leftist".

full article here has this section on Crowley:



TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART ONE: CROWLEY: 33RD DEGREE MASON CROWLEY AND THE GNOSTIC CATHOLIC CHURCH (THE OTO). (Really literally Ordo Templi Orientis, "Order of Eastern Templars")

PART TWO: THE OTO AND THE OCCULT EUROPEAN AND U.S. INTELLIGENCE SERVICES AND MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

PART THREE: UPDATING DIONYSUS: FUTURE SHOCK, SYNTHETIC DRUGS, RECORDED MUSIC, AND THE MASS ELECTRONIC MEDIA

PART FOUR: OTO, SEX, AND U.S. ROCKET ENGINEERS WHO CALLED THEMSELVES THE ANTICHRIST

PART FIVE: TAVISTOCK'N'ROLL: MEET THE BEATLES AND THE STONES (SIGNED BY ELECTRICAL AND MECHANICAL INSTRUMENTS (EMI), ONE OF U.K.'S LARGEST PRODUCERS OF MILITARY ELECTRONICS AND POST WWII NAZI LEANING MUSIC RECORDINGS)—FORGET JFK AND KING

PART SIX: MKULTRA SEX, CIA DRUGS, AND SATANIC ROCK AND ROLL

PART SEVEN: PENTAWOOD AND THE FOURTH REICH: VISUAL PROGRAMMING BY THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL-ENTERTAINMENT COMPLEX

INTRO QUOTE

"Clearly, the Beatles' album was dedicated to Satanist Aleister Crowley. It was released 20 years, nearly to the day, after Crowley's death in 1947, and its title song began with the lyrics, "It was twenty years ago today..." The album's cover featured a picture of Crowley. [Eerie, eh?]

~@~@~@~@~@~@~@~@~@~@~@~@~

PART ONE: CROWLEY

Aleister Crowley is probably the Black Magician who is the most popular foreground figure in Hollywood and the Music Industry today. He is considered being the one who "invented" backward messages on music recordings (used by The Beatles, Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones to name a few).

He was also a drug- and sex addict and was addicted both to opium, hashish, cocaine, mescaline, amphetamines and heroin, in order to perceive higher states of beingness (drug abuse is very common to occultists in general). When he discovered mescaline, he developed seven rituals, Rites of Eleusis, and rented Caxton Hall to demonstrate them.

Later, he opened up a Temple of Satan in London, where many high society ladies became his pupils. By that time Crowley had shaved his head and filed his canine teeth so sharp that he could initiate every new woman with a "kiss of the snake", as he gave them a bite either on the wrist or in the throat.

"Do what thou will shall be the whole of the Law" (The work of the OTO ... is geared towards the achievement of a world-spanning empire ... The Law "Do what thou wilt" is the law of this new state - a One World Government) was his motto for the OTO, which was the secret order he himself was the Grandmaster of.

[This left out that the OTO is the Gnostic Christian Church as well, a combination of all of the esoteric higher ritual grades and information (if you call it that) from many different Masonic, Misraim, Memphis, Jewish Cabbalistic, and Martinist secret societies. They had pretty much infiltrated the real Roman Catholic Church by the early 1900s-- though the last emperor of Austria exercised a long unused veto he had in papal elections, and vetoed the OTO cloaked candidate for next pope--named Cardinal Rampolla, Vatican Secretary of State. He was second only to the pope in power before his attempt at the papacy, a Mason, and a member of the OTO; Rampolla's OTO network in the Roman Catholic Church survived however and "made popes" by the 1930s.

The OTO is additionally inbuilt into the intelligence services of Britain and the U.S.A.--as well as the rocketry and avionics groups in California.

Crowley was chosen for the OTO headmastership/grandmastership by German Theodor Reuss, who, had Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia contacts across England and Germany.

Ruess is known to have been "thanked for loaning us the Illuminati papers, which have been successfully received and will be translated [from German]" according to some personal letters to Reuss, to his English brethren in SRIA, which are printed in the appendix of Edith Starr Miller's posthumous masterwork Occult Theocracy, published in the early 1930s. She only had it printed it posthumously because she feared for her life. She additionally published a copy of Crowley's 33rd degree induction certificate into the Scottish Rite Masonry.

Edith Starr Miller (perhaps from the same family of the Starr that was involved in the founding of the OSS in the next generation) was the second American wife of Lord Queenborough, whose first wife was another American of high family power (likely occult, even Illuminated) hyper-rich Whitneys.

Back to Crowley:

Crowley rejected traditional morality in favor of the life of a drug addict and brutal womanizer ("I rave; and I rape and I rip and I rend" is a line from one of his poems). This was his favorite poem. I have read he wanted it--and it was--recited as his funeral.

He even enjoyed being called the "wickedest man in the world". All press is good press, as they say, when you are really out to found a separate religion like Crowley was--the OTO/Gnostic Christian Church.

He was married twice, and both his wives went insane. Five of his mistresses committed suicide.

Crowley was also the man who came up with putting backwards messages into musical recordings. Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin used this on some of their albums. Jimmy Page [supposedly] put a backward satanic message on the mega hit "Stairway to Heaven" ("Here's to my sweet Satan").

Page also bought Crowley's mansion in Scotland and was/is a true follower of his teaching, as was the late drummer John Bonham from the same group.

Beatles also used backwards messages and Crowley's head is present on the cover of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band".

Aleister Crowley was born in Warwickshire where he revolted against a strict religious childhood. He left his studies and became initiated into the secret order of the Golden Dawn in 1898.

After some time he came into conflict with its leaders and went to Mexico.

From there he traveled a lot, to India and Ceylon, where he studied yoga and Buddhism.

Buddhism replaced his occult interests for a while, until he got a strange experience in Cairo, Egypt in 1904.

By curiosity his wife Rose asked him to do an occult ritual. She then went into a state of trance and brought down a message from some strange being. "He's waiting for you", she told Crowley. "Him", she said, was Horus, the God of wars and the son of Osiris in the old Egyptian mythology.

At first, Crowley didn't believe her, so he started asking her a few questions to reveal her as a fraud.

But Rose, who didn't know very much about the occult, gave the correct answers. The message that was sent to Crowley, told him to sit down by his desk a certain time three days in a row. He obeyed and in these three days he wrote "The Book of Law" with automatic writing. This means his hand was moving by another force than his own.

Crowley's messenger taught that the old Age of Osiris soon would follow by the new Age of Horus. But first Earth must bathe in blood. There should be a World War.

The Book of Law told about a race of Superhuman and condemned the old religions, the pacifism, democracy, compassion and humanity.

"Let my servants be few and secret, they shall reign over the many and the known", the Superhuman continued. The rest of the message goes in the same spirit. The lower races should be humiliated and condemned and even killed. It taught "no mercy".

(Long before the Roswell incident, where a flying saucer crashed in the desert and dead aliens were found, Crowley made a drawing of one of his "messengers" called Lam - the drawing is almost identical with the Grey Aliens, who nowadays are so broadly mentioned and used in movies and among abducted).

The messenger also declared that Crowley was the Beast 666 from the "Book of Revelations" (13:18), who had come to destroy Christianity.

He tried to forget the whole thing, but from 1909 and forwards, he started taking the messages seriously. Crowley then left his former occult teacher MacGregor Mathers, who by that time was a broken man.

Long after his death, in 1947, Crowley became a hero for many young people within the flower-power movement.

The irony in all this is that these young people cried for peace and love. Crowley in his turn welcomed the First World War, as necessary to sweep away the old age and start the new one.

Since he revealed his revelations, he became the head of the OTO (Ordo Templi Orientis) in Germany, which gave him a great influence over similar people in Germany. [The Germans balked at having an Englishman--with known British Intelligence connections, over their German esoteric order during WWI].

It's also well known that Hitler was influenced by him and that Crowley himself tried to contact Hitler during the 2nd World War.

In his book "Confessions ...", Crowley claimed that he had been initiated as a 33rd Degree Mason in the Ancient and Accepted Rite of Masonry (A&AR). [Edith Starr Miller published a copy of the certificate in her Occult Theocrasy].

He probably did this in Mexico, where he went after breaking up with the Golden Dawn.

At this time and a hell of a lot earlier! cite: _Puzzling Neighbors book, around 1900 there was a lot of Masonic activity in South America. However, there is some confusion regarding this, as you have to be a Master Mason to be initiated on the Higher Grades, and by this time Crowley hadn't gone through the grades required, so either he made it up or was granted the 33 degree without prerequisites necessary.

In his own words he received the initiation after he had helped an individual with another mystical order called LIL. No one knows for sure what the real truth is.

It looks though, as if he at one point or another was initiated, as a copy of his recognition still exists. It was ratified and signed by "John Yarker 33~M.^.P.^.S.^.Gr.^.of Gt. Britain & Ireland", who is a close friend of German Theodor Reuss, who picked Crowley for the OTO grandmastership, and Yarker had Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia connections as well.

Though it is beyond doubt that Crowley had connections with Freemasonry, he didn't seem to have a high opinion of their teachings.

He used some of their techniques in his own OTO later, but most of his own grades in that order was and is quite different from Freemasonry...Crowley, who had the idea that he stood above everybody else on this planet, chose other ways to accomplish his magical goals. So he took over another secret society, the OTO, and changed its rituals dramatically.

PART TWO: THE OTO AND THE OCCULT EUROPEAN AND U.S. INTELLIGENCE SERVICES AND MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

In the beginning of the 20th century, a manufacturer from Vienna, Dr. Karl Kellner, and a German theosophist, Dr. Franz Hertmann, founded a secret occult lodge which they named "Ordo Templi Orientis" (O.T.O.). [Order of Oriental/Eastern Templars]

Soon after, Theodore Reuss (1855-1923) who had connections with many lodges joined the Order.

It was he who led Rudolf Steiner, the later founder of anthroposophy, into such a group. Steiner broke from the group though continued its frameworks in many ways in anthroposophy, particular in Steiner Educational/Waldorf Schools, organic farming, etc.

Reuss, whose lodge-name was "Brother Merlin", contacted Aleister Crowley in 1912 and he became a member of this additional lodge receiving the name "Brother Baphomet". Baphomet, the symbol of the satanic goat, usually portrayed as a half-human, half-goat figure, with a goat's head and one hand up and one hand down, the "as above, so below" archaeo-astronomical motif of astrologers and star cults. The 'star of David' (not a Jewish religious symbol at all) is an occult "as above, so below" rendition using triangles as the pointing tools, overlapped and in unison; appears on many Templar era churches in south of France as well, a real hotbed of Templarism, Albegensianism, and the Jewish princedoms in the Pyrenees areas.

Baphomet...is often misinterpreted as a symbol of witchcraft in general.

The origin of the name Baphomet is unclear. [Hardly, it's the ancient Jewish 'Atbash cipher' version of the Greek word "Sophia" (the worshippers of Sophia (Wisdom), i.e., material and spiritual knowledge). Incidentally, this is the same Jewish/Atbash cipher word used by the Templars back in the 1100s-1300s in Europe and the Middle East--likely gained from the booty from their multi-year archeological digs below the Temple Mount (in the years before they were formed officially as a warring monk monastic order that had a lot of social structures similar to a Gnostic graduated induction society which was incredibly secreted within the group). This pre-Templar Templar archaeological treasure hunting, is confirmed by later 1800s British military digs below the Temple Mount, where they found various Templar-era artifacts in tunnels. Many of the tunnels were there already that British didn't dig, though stumbled across.

The O.T.O. developed its sexual rites quickly under Reuss and later broadened them under Crowley. Male anal penetration is the top rite.

Other rituals, as according to the OTO/Gnostic Catholic Church, are male-female sex acts/initiations, worship of the female nude body to chant and submission, in "Catholic Mass" modeled rituals.

Not long after, Crowley took over the leadership of the lodge. Crowley wrote for example about the traditional "black magickal" practice of child or animal sacrifice (also referred to in AL), and almost certainly performed it occasionally himself, ....


Crowley claimed that, on the 8th of April 1904—in Cairo at 12 noon exactly and for the following two days at the exact same time—he actually heard a voice in his ear, dictating the words of the text (as if through some transmitter in his brain), and that he transcribed them faithfully. It was not "inspired," then, so much as received. The voice itself claimed to be that of Aiwass, or Aiwaz,...

It seems rather as though the book partakes not of the qualities of Crowley, but that, conversely, Crowley himself grew over time to partake of the qualities of the book. And this he did, by his own admission, with boundless reluctance and distaste.

Crowley's involvement in espionage on both sides of the first and second world wars (he worked for both US and British intelligence writing deliberately "absurd," i.e., counter-productive, German propaganda during the first [i.e., meaning perhaps he was pro-German]) is well known and presumably well-documented.

Nevertheless it is extremely difficult to find any author anywhere who will admit to Crowley's involvement with Hitler, despite the fact that Crowley himself confessed, or more accurately bragged, about it to his associates.

The late Jim Keith writes extensively on the subject in Casebook on Alternative 3:

As can be seen by the activities of US and British business, statecraft, occult groups, and "aristocracy,' the Nazis were no isolated phenomenon, only one expression of a multi-faceted and murderous world wide game... Shortly after the collapse of the Third Reich... General Reinhard Gehlen, Nazi spymaster and Knight of Malta-to-be, began negotiations with Allan Dulles and the American O.S.S. Using Nazi intelligence networks as a hole card to provide for his own survival and the survival of his huge spy network, Gehlen made a separate peace with Dulles, resulting in the clean grafting of Nazi spy apparatus to the American clandestine services. This was the birth of the C.I.A, and part of a nexus of betrayal that continues to this day."

To read many of his other writings, however, leaves one in little doubt that Crowley, like Nietzsche before him, was a kind of proto-Nazi.

SS—and Nazism as a whole—was established upon an occult basis, and that its inner structures and purposes were not merely political, but also magickal....

[rest at link]

Don't set up this child sacrificing, double agent intelligence networking bastard for your surrogate godhead, folks. To do so, is to basically say you worship the same international elites who attend Bohemian Grove and watch mock (or not so mock) human sacrifices with joy. Surely you can think of something else to admire. Ick. If you have empathy, limit to to before 1909--after that he consciously made strides to become the thing that his supposed "autonomatic writing" directed books wanted him to be. He probabaly would have fit right in working for the CIA's "The Finders".

9/21/2006 09:25:00 AM  
Blogger ericswan said...

Jeff...here's that job you bin lookin for...

Wed Sep 20, 8:25 AM ET



OTTAWA (Reuters) - The chairman of the publicly funded Canadian Broadcasting Corp. has resigned after remarks about bestiality and ruminations about defecation, Canadian Heritage Minister Bev Oda said on Tuesday.

Guy Fournier created an uproar in Canada's Lebanese community and in the media when he claimed that Lebanon allowed men to have sexual relations with female animals, but reserved the death penalty for those who did so with male animals.

In comments made in May, and replayed in a CBC weekend interview, he talked at length about the joys of bowel movements.

"He has increasingly lost the confidence of Canada's new government," Oda told the House of Commons. "I inform this House that I have received the voluntary resignation of Mr. Fournier effective today."

9/21/2006 09:42:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

To anon 8.01 am

There's a very good book by psychologist de Zulueta called "From Pain to Violence" which explores what you were speaking to the survivor of ritual abuse about.

9/21/2006 09:46:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Speaking of Zeppelin, there's a book series called '33 and 1/3' that examines different aspects classic records. The Zeppelin 4 book is an analysis of the occult aspects of the record that 'launched a million bong loads in the seventies'.

http://www.techgnosis.com/zep/index.html

9/21/2006 10:15:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Here's the complete list of people who appeared on the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts CLub Band cover (hmm... a Lonely Hearts Club, eh? Must be some sort of secret society which aims to take over the world...)

Top row:

* Sri Yukteswar Giri (guru)
* Aleister Crowley
* Mae West (actress)
* Lenny Bruce (comedian)
* Karlheinz Stockhausen (composer)
* W. C. Fields (comedian/actor)
* Carl Gustav Jung (psychologist)
* Edgar Allan Poe (writer)
* Fred Astaire (actor/dancer)
* Richard Merkin (artist)
* The Vargas Girl (by artist Alberto Vargas)
* Leo Gorcey (actor) (removed)
* Huntz Hall (actor)
* Simon Rodia (designer and builder of the Watts Towers)
* Bob Dylan (singer/songwriter)

Second row:

* Aubrey Beardsley (illustrator)
* Sir Robert Peel (British Prime Minister)
* Aldous Huxley (writer)
* Dylan Thomas (poet)
* Terry Southern (writer)
* Dion (singer)
* Tony Curtis (actor)
* Wallace Berman (artist)
* Tommy Handley (comic)
* Marilyn Monroe (actress)
* William S. Burroughs (writer)
* Sri Mahavatar Babaji (guru)
* Stan Laurel (comedian/actor)
* Richard Lindner (artist)
* Oliver Hardy (comedian/actor)
* Karl Marx (political philosopher)
* H.G. Wells (writer)
* Sri Paramahansa Yogananda (guru)
* Sigmund Freud (psychologist) - barely visible below Bob Dylan
* Anonymous (wax hairdresser's dummy)

Third row:

* Stuart Sutcliffe (artist/former Beatle)
* Anonymous (wax hairdresser's dummy)
* Max Miller (comedian)
* The Petty Girl (by Artist George Petty)
* Marlon Brando (actor)
* Tom Mix (actor)
* Oscar Wilde (writer)
* Tyrone Power (actor)
* Larry Bell (artist)
* Dr. David Livingstone (missionary/explorer)
* Johnny Weissmuller (swimmer/actor)
* Stephen Crane (writer) - barely visible between the hand above Paul McCartney's head, and the next head to the right
* Issy Bonn (comedian) - his hand is above McCartney's head
* George Bernard Shaw (playwright)
* H.C. Westermann (sculptor)
* Albert Stubbins (soccer Player)
* Sri Lahiri Mahasaya (guru)
* Lewis Carroll (writer)
* T.E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia")

Front row:

* Sonny Liston (boxer)
* The Petty Girl (by George Petty)
* Wax model - George Harrison
* Wax model- John Lennon
* Shirley Temple (actress and diplomat)
* Wax model - Ringo Starr
* Wax model - Paul McCartney
* Albert Einstein (scientist)
* John Lennon
* Ringo Starr
* Paul McCartney
* George Harrison
* Bobby Breen (singer)
* Marlene Dietrich (actress/singer)
* Gandhi (Indian Leader) (removed)
* Tin Tan (Mexican Actor) (Changed )
* Legionnaire from the Order of the Buffalos
* Diana Dors (actress)

Yep, Crowley is there. But so is Gandi. But since Crowley is there that means that the Beatles were tools of the CIA and the OTO and the Illuminati, right? And I must just be a fool to not see it, right?

9/21/2006 11:37:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"And I must just be a fool to not see it, right?"

Yes. Or at least you are acting like one. It's awfully easy to cherrypick out one thing as you do and attempt to build a disagreement on that. However, the original article didn't base everything on this one point.

9/21/2006 11:54:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

To anon (naturally)--

I bow down before you're superior intellect and grasp of irony.

9/21/2006 12:10:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

M. K. Gandhi

When I despair...I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it ... always.

9/21/2006 12:38:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Not that I'm an expert on Crowley (or much of anything for that matter), or even a fan for that matter, but his famous "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Love is the law, love under will" is still an interesting take on human nature. If looked at as a statement of fact, and not a moral code, it actually makes quite a bit of sense. What it is saying is that all human 'Laws' are quite arbitrary, and don't reflect "reality" in any way. It may very well be "against the law" to murder, or steal, or, in some cases, speak your mind, but creating a law that forbids something in no way implies that it is contrary to the rules of the universe. Regardless of the written law, the actuality of human behavior is that people do the things that they wish to do, or "As they wilt". That's not to say that people may restrict their behavior based of the fear of reprisal from the government, or their family or community, but in that case, you could just as easily say that, given the possible consequences of their actions, it is the will of that person to follow the written law. Of course, this also does not imply that whatever action a person engages in will not have repercussions (most of them unexpected), if one believes in Karma, or at least in physics.

9/21/2006 01:39:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I might also add that the "Love is the law, love under will" section implies that the ultimate law or power which drives all things is, in fact, love, and that is you dig deep enough, it is in the pursuit of love that all action (however misguided) is undertaken. Of course, you know what they say about good intentions...

9/21/2006 01:46:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Predators..............
Darkness had descended very quickly, and the foliage of the trees that
had been glowing green a little while before was now very dark and heavy.
Don Juan said that if I paid close attention to the darkness of the foliage
without focusing my eyes, but sort of looked at it from the corner of my eye,
I would see a fleeting shadow crossing my field of vision.

"This is the appropriate time of day for doing what I am asking you to
do," he said. "It takes a moment to engage the necessary attention in you to
do it. Don't stop until you catch that fleeting black shadow."

I did see some strange fleeting black shadow projected on the foliage
of the trees. It was either one shadow going back and forth or various
fleeting shadows moving from left to right or right to left or straight up in
the air. They looked like fat black fish to me, enormous fish. It was as if
gigantic swordfish were flying in the air. I was engrossed in the sight. Then,
finally, it scared me. It became too dark to see the foliage, yet I could still
see the fleeting black shadows.

"What is it, don Juan?" I asked. "I see fleeting black shadows all over
the place."

"Ah, that's the universe at large," he said, "incommensurable,
nonlinear, outside the realm of syntax. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were
the first ones to see those fleeting shadows, so they followed them around.
They saw them as you're seeing them, and they saw them as energy that
flows in the universe. And they did discover something transcendental."
He stopped talking and looked at me. His pauses were perfectly
placed. He always stopped talking when I was hanging by a thread.

"What did they discover, don Juan?" I asked.

"They discovered that we have a companion for life," he said, as
clearly as he could. "We have a predator that came from the depths of the
cosmos and took over the rule of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners.
The predator is our lord and master. It has rendered us docile, helpless. If we
want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it
demands that we don't do so."

It was very dark around us, and that seemed to curtail any expression
on my part. If it had been daylight, I would have laughed my head off. In the
dark, I felt quite inhibited.

"It's pitch black around us," don Juan said, "but if you look out of the
corner of your eye, you will still see fleeting shadows jumping all around
you."

He was right. I could still see them. Their movement made me dizzy.
Don Juan turned on the light, and that seemed to dissipate everything.
"You have arrived, by your effort alone, to what the shamans of
ancient Mexico called the topic of topics," don Juan said. "I have been
beating around the bush all this time, insinuating to you that something is
holding us prisoner. Indeed we are held prisoner! This was an energetic fact
for the sorcerers of ancient Mexico."

"Why has this predator taken over in the fashion that you're
describing, don Juan?" I asked. "There must be a logical explanation."

"There is an explanation," don Juan replied, "which is the simplest
explanation in the world. They took over because we are food for them, and
they squeeze us mercilessly because we are their sustenance. Just as we rear
chickens in chicken coops, gallineros, the predators rear us in human coops,
humaneros. Therefore, their food is always available to them."

I felt that my head was shaking violently from side to side. I could not
express my profound sense of unease and discontentment, but my body
moved to bring it to the surface. I shook from head to toe without any
volition on my part.

"No, no, no, no," I heard myself saying. "This is absurd, don Juan.
What you're saying is something monstrous. It simply can't be true, for
sorcerers or for average men, or for anyone."

"Why not?" don Juan asked calmly. "Why not? Because it infuriates
you?"

"Yes, it infuriates me," I retorted. "Those claims are monstrous!"

"Well," he said, "you haven't heard all the claims yet. Wait a bit
longer and see how you feel. I'm going to subject you to a blitz. That is, I'm
going to subject your mind to tremendous onslaughts, and you cannot get up
and leave because you're caught. Not because I'm holding you prisoner, but
because something in you will prevent you from leaving, while another part
of you is going to go truthfully berserk. So brace yourself!"

There was something in me which was, I felt, a glutton for punishment.
He was right. I wouldn't have left the house for the world. And yet I
didn't like one bit the inanities he was spouting.

"I want to appeal to your analytical mind," don Juan said. Think for a
moment, and tell me how you would explain the contradiction between the
intelligence of man the engineer and the stupidity of his systems of beliefs,
or the stupidity of his contradictory behavior. Sorcerers believe that the
predators have given us our systems of beliefs, our ideas of good and evil,
our social mores. They are the ones who set up our hopes and expectations
and dreams of success or failure. They have given us covetousness, greed,
and cowardice. It is the predators who make us complacent, routinary, and
egomaniacal."

"But how can they do this, don Juan?" I asked, somehow angered
further by what he was saying. "Do they whisper all that in our ears while
we are asleep?"

"No, they don't do it that way. That's idiotic!" don Juan said, smiling.
"They are infinitely more efficient and organized than that. In order to keep
us obedient and meek and weak, the predators engaged themselves in a
stupendous maneuver-stupendous, of course, from the point of view of a
fighting strategist. A horrendous maneuver from the point of view of those
who suffer it. They gave us their mind! Do you hear me? The predators give
us their mind, which becomes our mind. The predators' mind is baroque,
contradictory, morose, filled with the fear of being discovered any minute
now.

"I know that even though you have never suffered hunger," he went
on, "you have food anxiety, which is none other than the anxiety of the
predator who fears that any moment now its maneuver is going to be
uncovered and food is going to be denied. Through the mind, which, after
all, is their mind, the predators inject into the lives of human beings
whatever is convenient for them. And they ensure, in this manner, a degree
of security to act as a buffer against their fear."

"It's not that I can't accept all this at face value, don Juan," I said. "I
could, but there's something so odious about it that it actually repels me. It
forces me to take a contradictory stand. If it's true that they eat us, how do
they do it?"

Don Juan had a broad smile on his face. He was as pleased as punch.
He explained that sorcerers see infant human beings as strange, luminous
balls of energy, covered from the top to the bottom with a glowing coat,
something like a plastic cover that is adjusted tightly over their cocoon of
energy. He said that that glowing coat of awareness was what the predators
consumed, and that when a human being reached adulthood, all that was left
of that glowing coat of awareness was a narrow fringe that went from the
ground to the top of the toes. That fringe permitted mankind to continue
living, but only barely.

As if I had been in a dream, I heard don Juan Matus explaining that to
his knowledge, man was the only species that had the glowing coat of
awareness outside that luminous cocoon. Therefore, he became easy prey for
an awareness of a different order, such as the heavy awareness of the
predator.

He then made the most damaging statement he had made so far. He
said that this narrow fringe of awareness was the epicenter of self-reflection,
where man was irremediably caught. By playing on our self-reflection,
which is the only point of awareness left to us, the predators create flares of
awareness that they proceed to consume in a ruthless, predatory fashion.
They give us inane problems that force those flares of awareness to rise, and
in this manner they keep us alive in order for them to be fed with the
energetic flare of our pseudoconcerns.

There must have been something to what don Juan was saying, which
was so devastating to me that at that point I actually got sick to my stomach.
After a moment's pause, long enough for me to recover, I asked don
Juan: "But why is it that the sorcerers of ancient Mexico and all sorcerers
today, although they see the predators, don't do anything about it?"
"There's nothing that you and I can do about it," don Juan said in a
grave, sad voice. "All we can do is discipline ourselves to the point where
they will not touch us. How can you ask your fellow men to go through
those rigors of discipline? They'll laugh and make fun of you, and the more
aggressive ones will beat the shit out of you. And not so much because they
don't believe it. Down in the depths of every human being, there's an
ancestral, visceral knowledge about the predators' existence."
My analytical mind swung back and forth like a yo-yo. It left me and
came back and left me and came back again. Whatever don Juan was
proposing was preposterous, incredible. At the same time, it was a most
reasonable thing, so simple. It explained every kind of human contradiction I
could think of. But how could one have taken all this seriously? Don Juan
was pushing me into the path of an avalanche that would take me down
forever.

I felt another wave of a threatening sensation. The wave didn't stem
from me, yet it was attached to me. Don Juan was doing something to me,
mysteriously positive and terribly negative at the same time. I sensed it as an
attempt to cut a thin film that seemed to be glued to me. His eyes were fixed
on mine in an unblinking stare. He moved his eyes away and began to talk
without looking at me anymore.

"Whenever doubts plague you to a dangerous point," he said, "do
something pragmatic about it. Turn off the light. Pierce the darkness; find
out what you can see."

He got up to turn off the lights. I stopped him.

"No, no, don Juan," I said, "don't turn off the lights. I'm doing okay."
What I felt then was a most unusual, for me, fear of the darkness. The
mere thought of it made me pant. I definitely knew something viscerally, but
I wouldn't dare touch it, or bring it to the surface, not in a million years!
"You saw the fleeting shadows against the trees," don Juan said,
sitting back against his chair. "That's pretty good. I'd like you to see them
inside this room. You're not seeing anything. You're just merely catching
fleeting images. You have enough energy for that.

I feared that don Juan would get up anyway and turn off the lights,
which he did. Two seconds later, I was screaming my head off. Not only did
I catch a glimpse of those fleeting images, I heard them buzzing by my ears.
Don Juan doubled up with laughter as he turned on the lights.

"What a temperamental fellow!" he said. "A total disbeliever, on the
one hand, and a total pragmatist on the other. You must arrange this internal
fight. Otherwise, you're going to swell up like a big toad and burst."
Don Juan kept on pushing his barb deeper and deeper into me. "The
sorcerers of ancient Mexico," he said, "saw; the predator. They called it the
flyer because it leaps through the air. It is not a pretty sight. It is a big
shadow, impenetrably dark, a black shadow that jumps through the air.
Then, it lands flat on the ground. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were quite
ill at ease with the idea of when it made its appearance on Earth. They
reasoned that man must have been a complete being at one point, with
stupendous insights, feats of awareness that are mythological legends nowadays.
And then everything seems to disappear, and we have now a sedated
man."

I wanted to get angry, call him a paranoiac, but somehow the
righteousness that was usually just underneath the surface of my being
wasn't there. Something in me was beyond the point of asking myself my
favorite question: What if all that he said is true? At the moment he was
talking to me that night, in my heart of hearts, I felt that all of what he was
saying was true, but at the same time, and with equal force, all that he was
saying was absurdity itself.

"What are you saying, don Juan?" I asked feebly. My throat was
constricted. I could hardly breathe.

"What I'm saying is that what we have against us is not a simple
predator. It is very smart, and organized. It follows a methodical system to
render us useless. Man, the magical being that he is destined to be, is no
longer magical. He's an average piece of meat. There are no more dreams for
man but the dreams of an animal who is being raised to become a piece of
meat: trite, conventional, imbecilic."

Don Juan's words were eliciting a strange, bodily reaction in me
comparable to the sensation of nausea. It was as if I were going to get sick to
my stomach again. But the nausea was coming from
the bottom of my being, from the marrow of my bones. I convulsed
involuntarily. Don Juan shook me by the shoulders forcefully. I felt my neck
wobbling back and forth under the impact of his grip. The maneuver calmed
me down at once. I felt more in control.

"This predator," don Juan said, "which, of course, is an inorganic
being, is not altogether invisible to us, as other inorganic beings are. 1 think
as children we do see it and decide it's so horrific that we don't want to think
about it. Children, of course, could insist on focusing on the sight, but
everybody else around them dissuades them from doing so.


------------------
Now for the more mundane type.

Psychic Vampires should be avoided at all costs. These people will not contribute, obviously.They are an energy drain. These people are known by their incessant problems which they put forth little or no effort to fix. The problems never go away. These people are attracted to strong sources of energy as much as Dracula is attracted to the blood bank. They are found everywhere. They are usually known on a first name basis with those who work with local social service providers and on crisis hotlines. These are the professional victims and whiners. They take up energy like a black hole.

.....................


it's especially hard because energy vampires are freakin' clueless about what they are. At least, most of them.


And there are SO MANY energy vampires these days. Right now the masses are so time starved, love starved, and peace starved, they are outnumbering those who choose not to live in chaos.....and they are circling around like packs of hungry velociraptors (remember Jurassic Park?)

When a "pack" crowds you, either in the etheric during an astral hijacking or in live time on the physical plane on the streets of the city where you live, your energies are usually going to get sucked dry. It's a numbers game. More of them than you.

H'mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

9/21/2006 01:47:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

SYNOPSIS for the scrollers,,,,,


Loosh - another term for lifeforce/emotional/spiritual energy. Term coined by Robert Monroe in his astral voyages where, upon interacting with nonphysical entities, he learned this energy was called "loosh" and that mankind was being farmed for this energy.

9/21/2006 01:55:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"I make my living off the Evening News
Just give me something-something I can use
People love it when you lose,
They love dirty laundry
Well, I coulda been an actor, but I wound up here
I just have to look good, I don't have to be clear
Come and whisper in my ear
Give us dirty laundry

We got the bubble-headed-bleach-blonde who
comes on at five
She can tell you 'bout the plane crash with a gleam
in her eye
It's interesting when people die-
Give us dirty laundry
Can we film the operation?
Is the head dead yet?
You know, the boys in the newsroom got a
running bet
Get the widow on the set!
We need dirty laundry
You don't really need to find out what's going on
You don't really want to know just how far it's gone
Just leave well enough alone
Eat your dirty laundry
Kick 'em when they're up
Kick 'em when they're down
Kick 'em when they're up
Kick 'em when they're down
Kick 'em when they're up
Kick 'em when they're down
Kick 'em when they're stiff
Kick 'em all around
Dirty little secrets
Dirty little lies
We got our dirty little fingers in everybody's pie
We love to cut you down to size
We love dirty laundry
We can do "The Innuendo"
We can dance and sing
When it's said and done we haven't told you a thing
We all know that Crap is King
Give us dirty laundry!

9/21/2006 02:00:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Here's an explaination of the Innuit myth:

The Innuit people depended on the Carribou for their food, clothing, tools and shelter (skins). The point of the myth is that when the herd was not culled all the animals grew sick and weak and began to die which, therefore, affected the Innuit as they then starved and died. The myth's moral is that without the wolf, all will die.

Here are two more examples, while not mythical, support the Innuit's wisdom:

Yellowstone Park was overrun with elk and that threw the whole eco of the park out of whack. Since all the wolves of the park had been eradicated, in the 1980's, wolves were imported from Canada to bring back the balance so that all could live.

There is a small island off the Carolinas that some biologists discovered as a perfect natural lab. It was an ecological paradise in that there was no predator for the existing herd of deer that populated it. Long story short, once a year the biologist checked the herd, and after a number of years of ongoing balance, were stunned to find the entire herd dead. None of the animals had any obvious pathologies as there was plenty of food and each carcass looked to be in excellent health. Of course, the herd had hugely increased its' population. Upon autopsy, it was discovered that the herd had perished from from stress in mass as certain organs had burst.

Point being that in nature this is the way things are whether it offends your sensibilities/philosophies or not. If you have a problem with this take it up with God or whatever/whomever you believe created the world. I originally brought this up to point out how inappropriately some people, who have strayed far from nature, currently are acting, i.e., smiling when relaying a sad story and to emphasis the natural phenomenon of self survival as in the case of Crowley's not wanting to become another victim of an avalanche.

This has nothing to do with the occult, it's just the nuts and bolts of our world. Empathy is also part of our world, elephants do feel for their own as shown in their mourning burying their dead, etc., but never at the expense of their own survival. It can be seductive to be carried away with high weirdness and the rest of the claptrap of the human imagination, and I think it's important to have an firm anchor in nature so that we don't confuse the wolf with the devil.

By the by, Richard, I'm not an owner of a "flaccid pencil" or any such protuberance as I'm strickly ovum. I question your defensiveness in regards to the children for whom you care as shown by your vulgar attack. Nothing to be defensive about as there's no shortage of food and the society we humans have constructed can afford to care for its weak. As a matter of fact, I am the caretaker of my husband who's suffered massive brain damage from a stroke. He's happily oblivous to his state, but one day out of nowhere, he became lucid
and in those minutes of self-consciousness begged me to kill him as he despised his weakened condition. He tearfully begged me to drop him off on some deserted highway to die. If there were no man-made laws against it, I would have done it as this would honor who he is (was), a true warrior who's not afraid to die and has (had) very definite ideas of how he wanted to live. How far should I allow my empathy to go? Should it go all the way to where all our resources are gone to pay for a hopeless situation. Should I spend the next ten/twenty years without a viable companion? The wolf knows the answer.

9/21/2006 02:26:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I read this long ago.

A young boy asked the Indian what the necklace meant.

It was a necklace with two wolves of equal stature.

One white and one black.

The boy asked which one is stronger?

He replied,"Whichever one I feed the most.

Symbolic of BALANCE in life, nature and the cosmos.

9/21/2006 02:36:00 PM  
Blogger blogbart said...

A lot of things mixed up in Lambs to the Marketplace.

The survival of the fittest, trophic levels - predation and such, majick, human social behaviour (and lack of it), politics and more.

Empathy appeared as a final, perhaps central point. Empathy has no place in this "natural" such as predator-prey or evolutionary arguments of survival of the fittest. Empathy belongs solely within the realm of human behaviour. The rabbit is not to have any empathy with the raptor, nor vice versa. They are automatoms, eating and being eaten, and eachother, by others, on all sides via parasitism, higher-order predators, opportunistic scavengers, etc. It is a network of eating and being eaten.

There is also a good argument that empathy has no place in certain human interactions as well. Empathy of the greedy, cruel and psychopathic, is inappropriate. As in "nature", in human interaction, the parasites are to be ruthlessly plucked off and out. Predators and scavengers fought off with as much viciousness as is necessary.

PS re Mitch: The smiling...Reminds me of Tenet and Negroponte at the UN, with that deranged look of excitement as they listened to Powell et. al. testify,

Wasn't this unbelievably bald-faced? The smiling and near glee? Remarkable that isn't remarked on more often.

9/21/2006 02:37:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

That is why I like MDMA the empathy you feel.

They gave this to terminal patients and many said it was one of the best experiences of their life. It helped them empathize and melted the barriers that stood in the way of truly expressing yourself.

So many stone cold hearts out there.

9/21/2006 02:54:00 PM  
Blogger blogbart said...

Re Inuit Wolf myth is as much Inuit rationalization for the existence of wolves as much as it is practical acknowledgement of its purpose.

This is no different from a child's asking why God would allow people to suffer or to die.

Something else which needs to be emphasized, though for some reason people forget it. Humans are animals too. We are part of "nature". We are just as much bound up in the automation of life's cycles as is the caribou and wolf. Our behaviour is as easily explained in the same way.

Much research has helped to explain that psychopathy has some evolutionary reason for existing. That doesn't make it right or wrong, nor good or evil. However, with the advent of modern human social organization and large scale technology, specifically those with destructive capacity, psychopathy may very well limit its evolutionary utility.

9/21/2006 02:59:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

So the warfare is to close peoples hearts to feelings about others.

Uncaring and unfeeling equals no action.
Checkmate


Lack of empathy.
It is used to isolate the victim for the kill.

9/21/2006 03:00:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

To Anons.

Thanks for that wonderful parable, 2:36. Well said. And thanks, 1:47, for the Cassanada story. I once was on my way to a talk by him, and as I was entering the crowded doorway to the lecture room, a small, dark man in front of me turned around and said my name, smiled mysteriously, and literally evaporated! A few minutes later when I entered the room for the lecture, there he was - Carlos himself - the same man I had just seen evaporate. He had sought out my husband, the one previously mentioned in post, Anon. 2:36, to give the lecture and after the lecture, had then invited him to jump into the abyss. My husband showed up for the jump, but Carlos didn't. We never heard from him again.

9/21/2006 03:03:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

So we're just gettin all kinds of freaky deaky up here huh? The don J passage was hauntingly similar to that "Confessions of an Insider" link someone posted a few weeks back. Does anyone personally believe in the "prisoners on Earth" line? It sounds viable in some soul echoing sense. Can anyone please expound upon the whole meaning of the "As above, so below" belief that is held by Masons and other secret orders....it is odd to me....do they mean "as in heaven/ as on earth" or do they mean "as on earth
/so in hell"? I cant quite grasp this phrase. (please excuse my ignorance)

9/21/2006 04:01:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

For "postrchild":

"As above, so below" typically referrs to calling upon and believing in the powers of astrology and astrological religions.

That if you model your actions here on earth on the motions of the heavens--and by mimicking or taking into account the actions of the stars, while here on earth, you will succeed by going with the heavenly flow. From the point of view of the user, it is form of applied magic, and assuredly has the effect of mental calming that there is now "external proof" or blame for ones own success or failure. Sort of like fingering rosary beads.

And it ain't over:

Many of Western European and Washington D.C.'s capitals were laid out on an these astrological and astronomical principles. So was Alexandria and other cities in Egypt.

The Europe Renaissance craze for this really expanded after some translations of a small number of books in the late 1400s, that created an Egyptian craze--though such things didn't die out in other more esoteric groups.

Nazis used astrology to find particular "correct dates" for invasions.

Reagan of course used astrologers as well to find correct dates of speeches and announcments, novel plans undertaken, etc--

--or even in choosing the 'right dates' for state terrorism I am sure...

It's typically symbolized in statues (or in people making signs among each other) by one arm raised pointing upward, and the other arm pointing to the ground.

9/21/2006 04:43:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

astral plane equals above

earth is below

Power in the word


What we bind or forgive in one is also done in the other also.

We use the word to curse, to blame, to find guilt, to destroy.

Of course, we also use it in the right way, but not too often.

Mostly we use the word to spread our personal poison—to express anger, jealousy, envy, and hate.

The word is pure magic—the most powerful gift we have as humans—and we use it against ourselves.

We plan revenge. We create chaos with the word. We use the word to create hate between different races, between different people, between families, between nations. We misuse the word so often, and this misuse is how we create and perpetuate the dream of hell. Misuse of the word is how we pull each other down and keep each other in a state of fear and doubt. Because the word is the magic that humans possess and misuse of the word is black magic, we are using black magic all the time without knowing that our word is magic at all.

............

Controlled through Various Means

Humans are mostly unaware of the forces driving man into conflicts.
Fueling the entities that use this energy.
Heirarchies, secret cabals, secrets, witholding of information, false notions
and so on are all " constructs " of the " alien " mind. Being secretive and talking about others in negative ways when they are not around, assuming things,
creating little sequestered, compartmentalized cliques.....all of this type of behavior is rooted in the alien mind.



........................


MORE From Active Side of Infinity:

"But why is it that the sorcerers of ancient Mexico and all sorcerers
today, although they see the predators, don't do anything about it?"
"There's nothing that you and I can do about it," don Juan said in a
grave, sad voice. "All we can do is discipline ourselves to the point where
they will not touch us. How can you ask your fellow men to go through
those rigors of discipline? They'll laugh and make fun of you, and the more
aggressive ones will beat the shit out of you. And not so much because they
don't believe it. Down in the depths of every human being, there's an
ancestral, visceral knowledge about the predators' existence."

----------------

"The more aggressive ones will beat the shit out of you."

I have experienced something along these lines - not in the physical sense (although of course that can happen) but more in a psychological sense - in terms of late night discussion. A sort of pounding: "You're wrong!" and then later "But what if you're wrong!?" and then later "You may be correct (in part at least), but think of the trauma that revealing this information will cause. Think of the harm you will cause in discussing these things. People are not ready for it."

---------------------

From Active Side of Infinity:

"The flyers are an essential part of the universe," he went on, "and
they must be taken as what they really are-awesome, monstrous. They are
the means by which the universe tests us.

"We are energetic probes created by the universe," he continued as if
he were oblivious to my presence, "and it's because we are possessors of
energy that has awareness that we are the means by which the universe
becomes aware of itself. The flyers are the implacable challengers. They
cannot be taken as anything else. If we succeed in doing that, the universe
allows us to continue."


"In order to keep
us obedient and meek and weak, the predators engaged themselves in a
stupendous maneuver-stupendous, of course, from the point of view of a
fighting strategist. A horrendous maneuver from the point of view of those
who suffer it. They gave us their mind! Do you hear me? The predators give
us their mind, which becomes our mind. The predators' mind is baroque,
contradictory, morose, filled with the fear of being discovered any minute
now." - Castaneda.


"They discovered that we have a companion for life," he said, as
clearly as he could. "We have a predator that came from the depths of the
cosmos and took over the rule of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners.
The predator is our lord and master. It has rendered us docile, helpless. If we
want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it
demands that we don't do so." - Castaneda
............

The predator don Juan had described was not something benevolent. It
was enormously heavy, gross, indifferent. I felt its disregard for us.
Doubtless, it had crushed us ages ago, making us, as don Juan had said,
weak, vulnerable, and docile. I took off my wet clothes, covered myself with
a poncho, sat in my bed, and veritably wept my head off, but not for myself.
I had my wrath, my unbending intent, not to let them eat me. I wept for my
fellow men, especially for my father. I never knew until that instant that I
loved him so much.

...................

9/21/2006 05:06:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Blogbart said, "Empathy belongs solely within the realm of human behavior. The rabbit is not to have any empathy with the raptor, nor vice versa. They are automatoms, eating and being eaten, and eachother, by others, on all sides via parasitism, higher-order predators, opportunistic scavengers, etc. It is a network of eating and being eaten."

That feels a bit reductive to me. It's a mistake to assume that the evolutionary process is only fueled by competition. Cooperation/symbiosis also plays a very important role. Though empathy (beyond an instinctual urge within particular species to protect their young) is fairly limited or nonexistent in "lower" classifications of organisms, it isn't the sole province of humanity, even if we do seem to express it more universally.

"There is also a good argument that empathy has no place in certain human interactions as well. Empathy of the greedy, cruel and psychopathic, is inappropriate. As in "nature", in human interaction, the parasites are to be ruthlessly plucked off and out. Predators and scavengers fought off with as much viciousness as is necessary."

Leaving out the scavengers, which provide a VERY useful function in the food chain, and who are arguably less violent that even herbivores, as their food is already dead, this still seems like a very dangerous argument to me. Without our empathy for the predator, we run a high risk of becoming them. It's a short step to the conclusion that vast chunks of the human race fall into the greedy-cruel-psychopathic category, at least in some contexts. It's another short step towards the arguments for eugenics.

9/21/2006 05:47:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Re the long string of Carlos (the jackal) Castaneda's expository writing on predators and predation:

It seems one or more of you had contact with this man. As did I...through mutual friends who were in grad school at UCLA together with him such as Peter Furst, and through members of his cult, one of whom was one of his lovers and who was with him in the weeks and months leading up to, and at the very moment of, his death.

Carlos Castaneda was a pathetic and ignoble creature.

He was a pathological liar throughout his life, indeed, a psychopath to the nth degree, by every definition of the word.

When Carlos found out he was dying, more than a year before his death, he tried to get a lover of his to commit suicide with him, promising to take her with him "to the Pleiades." He begged her, like a little boy, in tears.

I shit you not.

She demurred.

He was, in short, a complete fraud ~ as a shaman, as a man, and as a human being.

All Carlos did was completely embrace the dark side, like Crowley. And he received in return the expected material rewards, those of zero true spiritual value, which one typically receives in making such a Faustian bargain.

One of the anonymi quoted him replying to the non-existent don Matus: ("Those claims are monstrous!"

"Well," he said, "you haven't heard all the claims yet. Wait a bit longer and see how you feel. I'm going to subject you to a blitz. That is, I'm going to subject your mind to tremendous onslaughts, and you cannot get up
and leave because you're caught. Not because I'm holding you prisoner, but because something in you will prevent you from leaving, while another part of you is going to go truthfully berserk. So brace yourself!"

There was something in me which was, I felt, a glutton for punishment.)

That latter statement is probably one of the most true things little Carlos ever wrote. If that statement also describes you, well then, line up and receive your due.

The rest of us are free to leave that house of punishment, and breathe freely the untainted air of our beautiful humanity, and appreciate fully this mysterious world that only hints at what is behind the innumerable veils.

It's like the tv show "Let's Make a Deal." You can choose the life of the body, mind, heart, and spirit which embraces life, love, and empathy ~ which is your best and only protection from the dark and predatory forces, and which will ultimately reveal all the mysteries you could possibly handle ~ or you can choose to go with the dark shadow behind door number three and end up holding nothing but a bag of shit.

Or worse.

It IS your choice to make.

Like the muppet said, as did so many more real folks before him:

Choose wisely.

Free will.

Empathy which may lead to physical death is a form of ALTRUISM, not weakness.

While I certainly don't advocate martyrdom ~ I'd rather fight for my loved ones and live ~ the consciousness of such willing sacrifice, which when misplaced leads to being nothing more than simple-minded cannon fodder ~ when exercised with insight, it can indeed save not merely lives, but the soul of existence itself.

Wisdom is in knowing the difference.

9/21/2006 05:48:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Wolf in sheep’s clothing
Saubhik Chakrabarti
Posted online: Monday, September 18, 2006 at 0000 hrs Print Email

When George Bush appointed Paul Wolfowitz World Bank president, continental Europe was aghast. Plenty of Indian commentators were aghast, too, at Bush picking the neo-con who helped “con” the world on Iraq. In European criticism they again found validation of the hypothesis that America is an ogre and Europe understands “our” pain.

The bad manners of talk-show hostsViewer-friendly: Too much isn’t too goodHow the channels lost the plot on the campus dramaMacaulay, Hitler and usDead and exclusive...

Last Friday Wolfowitz delivered the verbal equivalent of a cluster bomb to Singapore, host of this year’s World Bank-IMF meeting. The city-state that made gum-chewing a penal offence played to its character and banned and/or deported many protesters planning to demonstrate at the Bank-Fund meet. Wolfowitz met protesters’ representatives and called Singapore’s decision “authoritarian”. That was unusually refreshing — a high dignitary plainly criticising the host nation and defending the rights of those who, among other things, had planned to trash him and the organisation he leads.

No doubt those who reckon Europe is a civilised, sympathetic friend of the non-Western world will dismiss this as trivial. They may not have the same easy option over what will happen in Singapore in the next two days, 19th and 20th September. As part of Bank-Fund deliberations, the IMF will debate reforming the formula that determines how power is apportioned between its 184 member-countries. The formula is arcane. Much of the debate will be technical. But the principle involved is simple — does Europe understand our pain?

Power distribution in the IMF is fixed by a quota that was calculated in 1944. The quota determines how many votes an IMF member can cast, how much it has to contribute to the Fund’s kitty and the extent of its soft loan facility (beyond this limit loans will attract penal interest rates). So it’s obviously important. Also important to remember is that the number of quotas overall is fixed. A quota increase for some members may come at the cost of some others.

The original, horrendously complicated formula for fixing quotas was drawn up on the basis of three things: the size of a member-country’s economy, the quantum of its foreign exchange reserves and the economy’s propensity to volatility. It made sense in 1944 that China’s quota was less than that of the Netherlands or Belgium. But does it make sense in 2006? China’s economy is now twice the size of the Belgian and Dutch economies combined. But both Belgium and the Netherlands still have larger IMF quotas than China. What about us? India’s economy is now twice the size of Belgium’s. Belgium has a larger quota.

Europe as a whole commands around a third of IMF quotas. Since that is roughly the same as Europe’s share in the world economy, it may seem that overall the continent has a fair claim. Not true. America’s share of the world economy is roughly a third. But America’s share of the IMF quotas is around 17 per cent. So you would expect America, especially Bush’s America, especially an America that sends Paul Wolfowitz to head the IMF’s sister organisation to rabidly push for a quota increase.

But here’s what Timothy Adams, US undersecretary for Treasury, said on the issue: “Many countries in the world are woefully underrepresented in the IMF. Just as America’s quota has gone down, so must Europe’s.”

Here’s what Axel Weber, chief of German Bundesbank (Germany’s equivalent of India’s RBI) said: “A broad package has to be found for a more transparent and fair representation of all IMF members. To that extent EU countries should not prematurely relinquish their own justified position and claims” (italics ours). Translation: Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg — combined share of IMF quotas around 6.7 per cent — must fight to preserve what was given to them 60 years back. China, South Korea, India — combined share of IMF quotas around 3.5 per cent — must forget their contribution to changing the world in the last 60 years. They should be happy with crumbs.

And crumbs are exactly what the IMF is offering. Rodrigo de Rato, the Fund’s European chief has been saying since he took the job in 2004 that quotas must be reformed (courtesy a cosy postwar arrangement, Americans always head the Bank and Europeans, the Fund; it is to preserve this privilege that Europeans didn’t fight Wolfowitz’s nomination; if they had, America would have fought Europe’s next choice for the IMF).

What Rato’s offering and what the IMF will debate is a one-time small increase in the quotas of China, South Korea, Turkey and Mexico. The increase will cover just one-third the distance between these countries’ current quotas and what even internal IMF calculations have fixed as their ideal quotas. India doesn’t even figure. Neither do big Latin American countries like Brazil and Argentina.

The IMF proposes to take two years to ask rich countries to sacrifice some of their quotas and to work out a new formula by which a country’s GDP would be the biggest determinant. Guess which countries will lose out the most? European nations, of course, especially the smaller ones.

Europe enjoys another unfair advantage in the current formula. Since 2000, 12 European countries have formed the euro zone. They all have the same currency. This means trade between euro countries doesn’t have the standard balance of payment implication that applies to trade between countries with different currencies. Trade between the Netherlands and Belgium is no different in this respect from trade between Delhi and Bengal. Neither should show up in IMF quota calculations that take international trade into account. A May 2000 IMF staff paper calculates that if intra-EU trade is excluded, the EU’s quota comes down by more than 9 percentage points. Among the biggest losers are Belgium and the Netherlands. Since euro-using countries are a huge majority in the EU, the same conclusion would hold for a study of the euro zone.

All Indian commentators who look at Europe for sympathetic understanding should ponder this question over the next two days as the IMF tries to get the 85 per cent support it needs for all members to accept its crumb: Is it Paul Wolfowitz who thinks Belgium matters more than India in the world?

saubhik.chakrabarti@expressindia.com
© 2006: Indian Express Newspapers (Mumbai) Ltd. All rights reserved throughout the world.


http://www.indianexpress.com/story/12898.html

9/21/2006 06:06:00 PM  
Blogger ericswan said...

Mexico 'haven for pedophile priests'
From correspondents in Mexico City

September 21, 2006 08:33am
Article from: Reuters

WEAK law enforcement and compliant Church authorities make Mexico a haven for US pedophile priests fleeing justice, a victims' group said today.

The Survivors' Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, which helped bring a lawsuit this week against two of North America's top cardinals, said it knows of 46 mostly US priests hiding out south of the border.

"Mexico has really become a secure place because here judicial authorities don't track them down and nothing happens," said group spokesman Eric Barragan.

The US Catholic Church has been tarnished by a pedophile priest scandal that erupted in Boston in 2002 and spread to almost every diocese in the nation.

Several US Catholic priests have been prosecuted, multimillion dollar payouts have been made to scores of pedophile victims and church files revealed that some bishops repeatedly transferred priests accused of abusing minors to other parishes rather than reporting them to police.

Mr Barragan said Mexican pedophile priests, to a lesser degree, often flee to the United States.

His US-based group helped filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles yesterday that accused Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles and Mexico City's Cardinal Norberto Rivera of allowing a priest wanted for multiple sex abuse to flee California for Mexico.

Cardinal Rivera is Mexico's most senior Catholic clergyman and was mentioned as an outsider candidate last year to succeed Pope John Paul II.

The suit was brought by Mexican former altar boy Joaquin Aguilar, 25, who says he was raped by Catholic priest Nicolas Aguilar in Mexico in 1994.

It claims that Cardinal Mahony facilitated Father Aguilar's flight to Mexico in 1988, when a US warrant was issued for his arrest, without notifying law enforcement in Los Angeles.

Prosecutors were investigating allegations that he had abused more than 20 boys in the Los Angeles archdiocese.

Cardinal Mahony's spokesman, Tod Tamberg, said the conspiracy charge was "preposterous and without foundation" and the Mexico City archdiocese said Cardinal Rivera "feels at ease because there was no cover up".

SNAP said it had hired private investigators who tracked down Father Aguilar to rural southern Mexico where he has been saying Mass at a convent and three different parishes and living out of his car with no fixed address

9/21/2006 06:24:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Caribou/wolf anon I hear you and concur.The backlash from the overfed and self absorbed was indicative of the"thats not nice" mindset.

The irony is these are the same individuals who refer to the masses as sheeple.

Nature is not a Disney cartoon and we as a species are not above or beyond nature and just because you care doesn't make you a more wortwhile human being.

Ghandi great copy,shame about the content.How many perished in the partition of India/Pakistan?

Give me cynicism over sophistry any day.Everyone gathered here has more options/wealth than they know what to do with.

Modern civilisation is merely stage dressing in the great show known as life.

Methinks sudden violent death will be making a comeback in our lifetimes.

The middle class in Rwanda paid to be shot rather than be hacked to death.

sorry to piss on your parade-diddums

On a more positive note, shrubageddon has buggered off to MYspace.

Takecare flowerchildren.

9/21/2006 06:29:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

thank you mojo.

9/21/2006 06:38:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

caribou/wolf anon, i do get what your saying. in short things are pretty complex, dependency leaves many questions to be answered.

i also don't think ghandi intended for the civil war to break out between the muslims and hindus. it was their own fault and ghandi had been wary about it, he knew that cooler heads should have prevailed but that only happens in the just world, when people choose to be responsible for their every action...as ghandi often pondered to himself and others...maybe we're not ready yet?

9/21/2006 06:50:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

to Dugoboy: Thank YOU. Desde el fundo de mi corazon.

To Nutlicker, who wrote: "Give me cynicism over sophistry any day."

You got it. Enjoy your bag of shit. Indeed, you probably will.

Ain't no Disney movies here, bro'. That's what you bees watchin'. Dark-side Disney.

Nice try with the techniques of straw man argument and projection, but it doesn't wash. "Sheeple" is like "cattle", which is what the Kabbalistic/S&B-ers call the masses of humanity, no doubt you and me included.

Or, maybe not. Does it say BOVI QVIPPE BARI over your fireplace?

Or are you just a wannabe cheerleader for the exploiters?

Either way,

Pax vobiscum.

9/21/2006 06:54:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

PS to the Nutlicker,

Sophistry IS cynicism, the ultimate in cynicism, in case my implication hadn't made that clear.

And that's the cargo in your truck.

9/21/2006 06:56:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

This past weekend I got closeups of what I think is an "orb"
Welcome to the wonderful world of photography. Remember to clean your lens, and don't point your camera at the sun. :-\

9/21/2006 08:12:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Eighth allegation of sexual assault filed against Katsav
By Roni Singer-Heruti, Haaretz Correspondent

An eighth allegation has been filed against President Moshe Katsav accusing him of sexual assault, it was revealed on Wednesday.

...

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/765549.html

Katzav is the one who recently publicly lauded the Mossad terror team that hit United States targets in Egypt during the Lavon Affair false flag terrorism events.

Par for his course...

Israel Honors Lavon Affair Terrorists Who Attacked U.S. in '54, attempted to blame "Arabs"

Date: 2005.04.03 09:20

In 1954's "Lavon Affair", Israeli Mossad agents, working in Egypt, planted bombs in several civilian buildings targeting particular European/Americans including a United States diplomatic facility.

They left 'evidence' to implicate Arabs. It didn't work. Israel was exposed in its 'false flag operation.'

The goal was to destabalize U.S, Britsh, and Middle East relations, and to put the U.S. on Israel's side exclusively. It perhaps would have worked though one bomb detonated prematurely. This accident in the Mossad plan let Egyptian law enforcement capture and identify one of the Israeli terrorists, and Egypt rounded up a large spy ring.

It's a fact that Israel has a prior history of setting off terrorist bombs in other countries and killing civilians if it suits Israeli foreign policy ideas--with the intent to blame Arabs for them.

Recent public awards ceremony in Jerusalem, Katsav, THE PRESIDENT OF ISRAEL SAID: "Although it is still a sensitive situation, we decided now to express our respect for these heroes." He then presented the three surviving members of the terrorist cell with certificates of appreciation. President Katzav handed letters of thanks to Marcelle Ninio, Robert Dassa and Meir Zafran, three survivors of the group in their seventies, last Wednesday. Letters were also given to families of other deceased militants, some who were sentenced to death in Egypt for the terrorist attack. Egypt expressed astonishment at Israel's honouring of 11 Egyptian Jews who planted these bombs. Cairo on Sunday described them as terrorists... "This is a decision that calls for astonishment," said Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmad Abu al-Ghait. "These individuals can be labelled as terrorists as far as international standards go," he added.

Some of the spies were from Israel, while others were recruited from the local Jewish population. Israel responded to the scandal with claims in the media that there was no spy ring, that it was all a hoax perpetrated by "anti-Semites". But as the public trial progressed, it was evident that Israel had indeed been behind the bombing. Eventually, Israeli's Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon was brought down by the scandal, although it appears that he was himself the victim of a frame-up by the real authors of the bombing project, code named "Operation Susannah."

---

Hey, sounds like Israeli "Mossad Moving Company" activities on September 11, 2001, where they filmed the WTCs and cheered and jumped for joy when the planes hit the buildinds, and while it and dead people were smouldering behind them, they took photographs of themselves giving each other high-fives and holding their cigarette lighters lit, like it was a concert they were attending and approved of as a moving experience.

At this rate, when will we see Israel honor its updated 9-11 Israeli terrorist "heroes", as well!

If so, it should be a joint US-Israeli, Bush-Katsav, commemorative event...Marvin Bush could give out the awards for Bush.

Or. They should all be sentenced to death for mass murder and international terrorism.

9/21/2006 08:12:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

As I understand it, "As above, so below" is a great deal broader than astrology, as well as older.

In its widest sense, it might best be comprehended as the lesson taught by Plato's parable of the cave -- that somewhere there is a more perfect, more complete, more fully realized realm of being, of which ours is only a shadow or base counterfeit.

A belief of that sort can lead in either of two directions, depending on the times and the cultural assumptions that accompany it. In times of corruption and despair, it can lead towards world-hatred and asceticism undertaken in an attempt to get closer to that other world by despising this one. In more optimistic times, it leads instead to attempts to recreate our world to make it a more perfect mirror of its ideal original.

The Egyptians appear to have been the greatest optimists of antiquity in this sense. They saw the starry heavens as a literal manifestation of a celestial reality, took the Nile as a mirror of the Milky Way, and built pyramids and other monuments in imitation of the patterns of the stars. Other ancient lands also aspired to be celestial kingdoms.

But then, under the pressure of war and empire-building and oppression, this optimism broke down. From late classical times through the Middle Ages, the prevailing tone was pessimistic, ascetic, horrified by and seeking escape from the natural world. Though never entirely so -- as one example, the words of the Lord's Prayer, "Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven" -- retain much of that old Egyptian flavor.

The Renaissance was sparked by a conscious revival of the optimistic Egyptian attitude. The 16th century idea of utopia, the 17th century idea that the moderns might be superior to the ancients, the 18th century idea of progress, and the 19th century idea of evolution all reflect it.

It was only in the 20th century -- and specifically after the great disillusionment of World War I -- that a sense of the human world as depraved and fallen began to take hold again. From the Nazis to the millenialist Christian cults, that revulsion from the world explains much of what has been worst about the last hundred years -- though it may be unfair to single out those two groups, since it has to some extent touched all of us. What's more, those who embrace the fallen state of the world may ultimately be far more destructive than those who attempt to flee it.

However, it's not just our world that we can perceive as either fallen or striving upward. The idea of man as microcosm is intimately related to the most positive interpretation of "as above, so below" -- the sense that every one of us is a mirror of a higher heavenly state and, moreover, that each of us contains within ourself all the knowledge of that state.

If we took that truth seriously, I do not believe we could behave as we do -- either towards ourselves or towards one another. But we live in an age where the concept of human dignity can be dismissed as incomprehensibly vague, and I cannot see that turning around either quickly or easily.

9/21/2006 09:24:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Operation Northwoods. Interesting name. Norse ... Kennedy scribbles "911" ... "conspiracy"...Lemnitzer wanted to shoot down planes, blame it on ...

They're a bunch of liars...lied about WMDs...lied about the nuclear threat...

lies...lies...the father of lies... they're evil

Let's demonize the demons ... they're Nazi filth ...

WTC 7 fell straight down...crooked tongues dispute it ...liars...they are filth...

Those who speak truth to power get smeared by filthmongers ... old tactic ... if you can't dispute the facts ... attack the fact-bearer ...

Watch the tape ... it fell straight down ... crooked men dispute it

It's a war against truth ... by filth

They kill children with impugnity ... filthy liars ...

"In a world of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act..."

Speak truth to the filth

Fight back

9/21/2006 09:31:00 PM  
Blogger ericswan said...

Orz said...
This past weekend I got closeups of what I think is an "orb"
Welcome to the wonderful world of photography. Remember to clean your lens, and don't point your camera at the sun. :-


Some of my best pix are directly into the sun. The dirt on the lense must have picked itself up and moved to the other side. On the other hand, I have to admit that the object "orb" was in the pic but I didn't see it when I snapped the pic. Most of the objects that have sun "spectral" images are rather circular where the object in my pic is totally irregular with consideral content in it. Even if it is a feature from "sunlight" it is revealing.

And don't believe looking into the sun is somehow going to "mess you up". I'm sure every one of you has been forced to look directly into the sun just to stay on the road and wow, you survived sunspots and all.

9/21/2006 09:43:00 PM  
Blogger AJ said...

"...you can masturbate into it on full moons while you conjure optimistic images of a better world."

Richard, my my. I do believe you've missed your calling.
Dr. Seuss (Enterprises L.P.) have need of your highly developed....literary skills for their more, ah, mature, editions- for the aging baby boomers, but only as a treat.

9/21/2006 10:58:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

To Anon 2:26-

I understood the Innuit myth. It was sort of...ummm...self-explanatory.

The bit at the end...well, you could have saved yourself some typing & just said, "Fuck off, asshole!"

Why am I defensive?

Gee, maybe I just naturally put the wagons in a circle....

....poor upbringing I suppose....

...or I'm not sure that I disagree. When you spend 15 effing years as fleshy TP for guys who can't move anything other than their eyes you tend to wonder, "What the fuck is the point to this? I'm just keeping this guy alive to die. He has nothing resembling anything that I'd call a life. He has assholes like me essentially forcing him to do the most inane activities."

The state requires something called "age appropriate activities."

Age appropriate? what a hoot that is.

Now I primarily work with 35-55 yr. old men.
To me, an age appropriate activity for middle aged lonely guys would be a 6 pack & a football game. Instead, we make them color. & play board games, the rules of which they couldn't possibly understand, over & effing over. They can only watch G rated movies.

On the bright side though, I'll soon get to move back with the violent ones. Yeebahabba!

These guys have some serious issues.
& the state, in its infinite wisdom, has ordered them stripped of all psychotropic medication while , at the same time, stripping staff of the ability to physically restrain them.

The State wants us to reason with them. They say that, by restraining them we, we've failed.

Reason with them?
I think the State napped during the class describing
the concept of mental retardation.

It's like when you take an MR client to the emergency room, and the intern says, "Can he tell me what's wrong?"
& you dutifully say, "No. He's non-verbal."
& the intern says, "SO WHAT"S WRONG?"
& you think, "Great, another idiot physician who doesn't know what non-verbal means. I wonder what other Med School classes did boy wonder here miss."

So, I'm sympathetic is what I'm long-windedly saying.

But who gets to decide?

Hell, we could put Rush Limbaugh & Ann Coulter in charge & they'd stretch the culling till it reached evry liberal everywhere.

The simple fact, to me anyway, is that when you have a problem like you described, it should no longer just be your problem. It should be all our problems

Do you remember the much bandied 911 buzz phrase, "We're all in this together."

Of course, it's just bullshit, right?

But it doesn't have to be.

9/21/2006 11:48:00 PM  
Blogger iridescent cuttlefish said...

starroute,
I've got to think about that.

Richard,
Did you notice how you put that last optimistic thought in there? And after all that ugly-ass realism? Very nice.

And now for something completely different...sort of.

Back to empathy as a weapon. I was thinking about how to go about investigating this notion a little deeper and ran into a kind of wall, although little associative bells were ringing, in the form of some lyrics to an old Rush song I hadn't heard in a long time, so I started there (even though it turns out I was mis-remembering the words as "be cruel or be cast out," but more on that later.) I did recall that the song was called Subdivisions, so I put that into the Google matrix (with my faulty incantation) and up popped some really strange, but strangely connected stuff.

The strangely connected stuff I found was at the site of a guy who calls himself a psychonaut exploring the role of ego-death in the Transcendence of Rationality through the study of "Rush Lyrics Alluding to Mystic Dissociative Phenomena." I'll let the theory speak for itself, but with this helpful hint: it is compassion which saves us from spiritual death, the same death-spiral we see manifesting itself in the physical aspect of reality. That said, here's how and why we save ourselves by saving each other:

Transcendence of Rationality

If the Ground is conceived of or experienced as a dumb, uncaring space-time block that controls and authors my every action, the problem of the goodness of such an empty machine-like puppeteer arises. That is why one might postulate a compassionate controller of the block, or a Mithras-type rescuer who defies the tyranny of Fate and Destiny and rescues this spiritually killed person out from the block-universe prison.

The enlightened robot is commanded by reason to transcend reason and postulate stability and higher, transcendent self-identity that is "somehow" higher than the deterministic Fated cosmos. This is the cybernetic meaning of faith, which one can only claim to have authored if one is identified with the transcendently postulated "higher, transcendent self", the Mithraic transcendent robot who is somehow held to be able to operate upon the Fated cosmos, grab the cosmic axis, and shift the orbits of the stars, even -- in some sense -- changing the future, though of course such is impossible.


If you have been given Faith by the postulated *higher* Ground of Being or the postulated *higher* self, you can simultaneously maintain that the future is eternally frozen and yet maintain that we have transcendent freedom. This may mean transcendently postulating a transcendent cosmos higher than the Fated cosmos. Such a move does not deny determinism/Fatedness or the fixed future; it forcefully affirms the block-universe model and all its problematic ramifications.


Yet this move knowingly, boldly dares to postulate that there is a rationally as well as morally justified way in which we are forced by reason, so to speak, to move beyond what reason can achieve. This may very well be the true heart of Gnostic thinking. If the Ground of Being is experienced as leading only to death, insanity, and the termination of viable control upon which further existence depends, the kind of Reason that delivered that awesome achievement dictates preserving yet transcending such a type of Reason.

Such logic leads to the death of itself as a viable logic, and leads to some sort of higher-logic which we only need to define as "some perfect and justified transcendent logic which, in particular, is immune to the self-cancellation of ordinary logic." That right there is the complete explanation, justification, and religious principle of transcendent logic, which is the door and key to heaven. It is transcendent, life-enabling compassion.

Without that key, without that bit of transcendent logic, we would all be condemned to destruction -- jail, insanity, harm, madness. Abraham's angel saw his gesture of transcendence of his will, and transcendence of reason, and transcendence of moral agency, and gave him a religion: the religion of the sufficient and justified mental-only sacrifice.

Part of letting go of delusion, letting go of the deluded mental-model of self, time, control, and freedom, is letting go of strict adherence to remaining within a system of logic that is only able to cancel itself out, as personal control of the will cancels itself out during the mystic state. The loose-cognitive computer calculates a logical result that says "you must exceed logic: you must either postulate a higher logic that permits viable self-government, or this machine will hit a divide-by-zero error and enter the anti-control, control-beyond-control, or 'run amok' mode."

If it becomes practically necessary to postulate possibly meaningless things such as a compassionate controller of the ground of being who is immune to Fate and the power of frozen time, or to deliberately postulate ego and free will only 30 seconds after having seen them to be essentially illusory, is that perfectly rational, or less than rational?

It is a kind of coherent rationality that is more than perfect; it is transcendent; it is rationality that includes the practical ability to fudge to save your life as a practical, virtual self-controller agent who wields the power of will even though the world is a frozen spacetime block.


Circular, you say? Solipsistic, even (or at least hopelessly self-referential)? Maybe so, but isn't all mystical experience? Sure, you've got charlatans like Carlos running around, ripping off other people's traditions for their own fun and profit, but wouldn't the real deal sound that way, too? I doubt our psychonaut is exactly profiteering off this trip, so I'd like to believe in his authenticity. Besides, it does give empathy-as-key-to-transcending-evil a bit of cosmic underpinning, which we could all use...

So at last we come to those Rush lyrics which started this mad quest:

Subdivisions

Sprawling on the fringes of the city in geometric order, an insulated border
in between the bright lights and the far unlit unknown.
Growing up it all seems so one-sided, opinions all provided
the future pre-decided, detached and subdivided in the mass production zone.
Nowhere is the dreamer or the misfit so alone.
Subdivisions in the high school halls, in the shopping malls, conform or be cast out.
Subdivisions in the basement bars, in the backs of cars, be cool or be cast out.
Any escape might help to smooth the unattractive truth
but the suburbs have no charms to soothe the restless dreams of youth.


The actual wording ("be cool or be cast out") seems to work just as well as my false memory ("be cruel or be cast out"), since the two are often nearly synonymous...

9/22/2006 12:53:00 AM  
Blogger blogbart said...

Without our empathy for the predator, we run a high risk of becoming them.

I didn't post this previously bc it seems too glib, but empathy requires stepping into someone else's skin, to feel what they feel. By definition, the non-psychotic cannot do this with psychotic, though it is possible with the greedy and cruel. But do you want to do that? Do you want to become like them, just to understand them? To empathize with them?

It's a short step to the conclusion that vast chunks of the human race fall into the greedy-cruel-psychopathic category, at least in some contexts. It's another short step towards the arguments for eugenics.

This doesn't follow. Don't know why you make this leap. However, maybe it is necessary to state while no empathy is accorded them, they are to be humanely "plucked off and out" of ourselves, and resisted with "visciousness" necessary. (Visciousness in sense of non-human animals defend and agress.) No death but isolation from society.

9/22/2006 01:20:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Blogbart: Having empathy for a greedy, psychopathic killer doesn't mean sharing those emotions nor experiencing them. It means understanding on an emotional and also on an intellectual level how the mad killer got to be that way and how he thinks feels. More like feeling what he felt BEFORE he became a mad killer. Admittedly, it can be a very fine line, but the line is there, nonetheless.

I can actually feel sorrow, pity, empathy for George W. Bush on the one hand, realizing the family hell in which he grew up with Babs and Geo. Sr. as parents, the dead sister, and God knows what horrors of abuse and initiation he must have experienced.

I can even feel empathy for Geo. H W Bush when I think about him being initiated in Lodge 323 at Andover as a pre-pubescent lad, smeared in feces, placed in a coffin, and what have you. (See Webster Tarpley's Unauthorized Biography of George Bush, available free online, if you are curious about the details.)

On the other hand:

Feeling this empathy, this compassion, for these now dastardly men saves me from hatred, a deadly spiritual sin that leads to an abyss.

But this empathy does not contaminate me or endanger me with becoming like these men. Quite the contrary. It would be feeling hatred that would do that, tempting me to drop the barriers of conscience and become like what I allowed myself to hate, just another rapacious killer, demonising in my mind what are already clearly demonic souls. I don't need to do that in my mind or in my heart.

All of that said, this empathy does not prevent me from finding these men and their deeds utterly execrable, nor of needing them to be stopped. Nor even does it prevent me from working to see that they be held to a bar of international justice before all of humanity, and suffer the most dire penalties for their terrible crimes.

If anything, empathic understanding furthers these ends by keeping my mind clear, and my heart safe.

9/22/2006 03:02:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

but for the grace of god go you
and i
to blogbert etc

empathy is not compassion, but if often discredits itself trying to be

I work in the "adults persons with MR" field. As a "professional" i may use the phrase "mental retardation" amongst other professionals, but not in polite company.
regardless of that, it is clear to me that we are all damaged goods in the realm of our endocrine systems and our hormonal balances, and the associated emotional reprecussions resulting in a wide variety developmental disabilities and mental illness'.
Any of us could have, and many of us will still, succumb to the rigors of the mechanized diet and the resulting mineral imbalances, gastronomical distress. this obviously is downwind from the innoculations that most of us rec'd as kids. Can you still say mercury poisoning?
There are uncountable ways to die, yet society countinues to put new ones out there at an alarming rate. Only some of these ways are black market and many of them are medical mandates by big pharma and the FDA.
and the AMA. and the API. the list is quite long ant it is just of the perps not the crimes.
Most of the "psykick vampires" at street level are victims to a much greater degree than most of us will ever be. Victims of brain poisoning that will allow the typical person to be very easily led to a wide variety perversities of personhood.
The state of course is up to the armpits in this one. psychotropic meds are HUGE profits in the mental illness/mental retardation nexus and "doctors orders" are the rule of law.
So you see, my friends, many of us were saved from this path by, unmetrically speaking, the "brea(d)th of molecules". be it at the point of our conception, most any time in our gestation, in the first few months of life, and for that matter in many, many passages of childhood and beyond. a toxic system crash of the liver/pancreas, a sudden heart attack, tumors or wasting in the brain, all this and more is yours if "the metabolism is wrong"
What we call sanity is by way of tendencies a measure of health. And the health of the metabolism, as a system, is of the utmost import.
It is possible, perhaps necessasary at times to regain a sense of empathy in the midst of on-going pain and severe illness, but it would be difficult to sustain it.
Such is true ov an individual, thus it is also indicated in the
collective culture.

As above so below.

I think they meant
to finish it with..."the belt"
get it?

You can get your head out of your ass, but you can't get your bowels out of your brain. peaceoffood

9/22/2006 04:47:00 AM  
Blogger Sounder said...

Mojo Filter said;
“Feeling this empathy, this compassion, for these now dastardly men saves me from hatred, a deadly spiritual sin that leads to an abyss.”

This sentiment expresses both the motivation and the shape of my own quest. We can find a way to redeem and forgive ignorance and poor choices. Namely, the resonance patterns created by our belief systems have co-opted the pure intents (and even more so the impure intents) of most all people. Better decisions will be made when we recognize more accurately the actual sources of causation, rather than current habit of accepting or rejecting, but still arguing around shallow explanations of cause.

Lostwaxmthd said;
“empathy is not compassion, but if often discredits itself trying to be”
That and the rest of your screed is some really good stuff. You sir, seem to have it going on.

9/22/2006 07:13:00 AM  
Blogger AJ said...

empathy is not compassion..

Cheer up Richard,this ones for you:

That reminds me of a story .

Two friends-one Canadian the other American are setting up camp but need supplies. The American wants to run out and get some Budweiser and Camels while the Canadian wants to run out and score some refer and some Ale. Since they are close to the border they decide to have some fun and exchange Tee Shirts before going. The American gives his Tee Shirt to his friend that has a picture of a burning WTC and the words: "Kick their Ass thenTake their GAS!"
The Canadian has a large Red Maple Leaf with the words: "Give Peace A Chance!" They exchange and head out to their side of the border.
. When the American gets to the store he accidentally nicks a Harley Davidson Rider 's bike when opening his door.. After taking one look at his tee-shirt the MC rider head slams him into his car and takes $200 for " repairs" then drives off. The Police/ambulance/ and FBI come to take statements .. They gave him a subpoena to appear in Circuit Court and a bill for $579.29 for medical assistance.

His Canadian friend only makes it to the camp entrance where a bear attacks him. Some fellow campers hurry to help the wounded camper and chase the bear off.


When the American makes his way back to the camp he is greeted by
a cheery scene with laughter and song . Several guys stocking a hearty fire while helping to cook a delicious meal , and two beautiful girls attending his friends bruises with cases of Molsons
icing in the coolers.
"Hey dude! What happened to you eh? his friend asks. Want a cold one, eh? Rock on, right?"

Moral: smoking (cigarettes) kills.

9/22/2006 09:42:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The question was posed by Jeff viz. how can empathy be used as a "weapon"?

I would prefer rather "How can empathy be used as a constructive tool?"

To a recent commentor, empathy and compassion are indeed the same thing, even sharing the same linguistic roots:

Empathy derives from "suffering within", from pathos, suffering and the preposition em, within.

Compassion derives from "suffering with", from pathos, suffering and the preposition com, with.

Either way, the posting below seems to answer the question quite fully:

Having empathy for a greedy, psychopathic killer doesn't mean sharing those emotions nor experiencing them. It means understanding on an emotional and also on an intellectual level how the mad killer got to be that way and how he thinks feels. More like feeling what he felt BEFORE he became a mad killer. Admittedly, it can be a very fine line, but the line is there, nonetheless.

I can actually feel sorrow, pity, empathy for George W. Bush on the one hand, realizing the family hell in which he grew up with Babs and Geo. Sr. as parents, the dead sister, and God knows what horrors of abuse and initiation he must have experienced.

I can even feel empathy for Geo. H W Bush when I think about him being initiated in Lodge 323 at Andover as a pre-pubescent lad, smeared in feces, placed in a coffin, and what have you. (See Webster Tarpley's Unauthorized Biography of George Bush, available free online, if you are curious about the details.)

On the other hand:

Feeling this empathy, this compassion, for these now dastardly men saves me from hatred, a deadly spiritual sin that leads to an abyss.

But this empathy does not contaminate me or endanger me with becoming like these men. Quite the contrary. It would be feeling hatred that would do that, tempting me to drop the barriers of conscience and become like what I allowed myself to hate, just another rapacious killer, demonising in my mind what are already clearly demonic souls. I don't need to do that in my mind or in my heart.

All of that said, this empathy does not prevent me from finding these men and their deeds utterly execrable, nor of needing them to be stopped. Nor even does it prevent me from working to see that they be held to a bar of international justice before all of humanity, and suffer the most dire penalties for their terrible crimes.

If anything, empathic understanding furthers these ends by keeping my mind clear, and my heart safe.

9/22/2006 04:28:00 PM  
Blogger blogbart said...

Mojo Filter said...

Admittedly, it can be a very fine line, but the line is there, nonetheless.

I can actually feel sorrow, pity, empathy for George W. Bush


There, do you see? You have just given the pass. The behaviour is thus enabled.

lostwaxmthd said...

It is possible, perhaps necessasary at times to regain a sense of empathy in the midst of on-going pain and severe illness, but it would be difficult to sustain it.
Such is true ov an individual, thus it is also indicated in the collective culture.


It is difficult, and inappropriate to sustain empathy. Empathy is a tool to be used only where necessary and appropriate. There is a need for action after empathy.

Rojo Lift 'em said...

All of that said, this empathy does not prevent me from finding these men and their deeds utterly execrable, nor of needing them to be stopped. Nor even does it prevent me from working to see that they be held to a bar of international justice before all of humanity, and suffer the most dire penalties for their terrible crimes.


Ahh, here we find action. This is the appropriate sentiment which must follow.

If anything, empathic understanding furthers these ends by keeping my mind clear, and my heart safe.

Yes, but do not wallow in it. Do not provide exit for what should be condemned.

9/22/2006 07:22:00 PM  
Blogger Sounder said...

Blogbart;
You agreed with me, in an earlier post that we needed to encourage and appreciate ‘insiders’ that wanted to come clean. (Because they did not know what they were getting into when they started their projects.)

Call me drunk, and an idiot; I am- and I am, but I want to find an exit from what (perhaps) should rightly be condemned.

9/23/2006 12:46:00 AM  
Blogger blogbart said...

but I want to find an exit from what (perhaps) should rightly be condemned.

That's forgiveness which is not the same as penance.

9/25/2006 02:54:00 AM  
Blogger Kratoklastes said...

There is often reference in RigInt work to the quasi-ritual sexual abuse of children; I wondered - on reading today about the resignation of FL Republican Rep foley - whether this would merit a quick discussion piece.

Not yet, seems to be the answer. But it must come soon, Jeff.

The ludicrously significant synchronicity of a republican "family values" type who actually CHAIRED the group of lawmakers who wrote the anti-pandering legislation... all the while having gay fantasies about a page. If it was part of a novel it would be viewed as inane - cliché and hackneyed and obvious.


It is precisely the lack of empathy (i.e., the sociopathy) of the entire political class, that makes them such a danger to humanity. It is the same kind of lack of empathy that makes a person think "Well, I find this child sexually attractive, so it MUST be OK for me to fiddle with them for a bit."


Now don't get me wrong - when I was 13 I would have given my eye teeth to have slept with our 20-something gym teacher (a woman, in case you're wondering - I am nowhere near tidy enough to be homosexual)... but if SHE had wanted to sleep with ME, I think I would have found her creepy. (She wasn't creepy in the least - she was a doll).


"The eyes have it"; look at the eyes in any photo of any politician, and you will see dead pools.

9/30/2006 04:37:00 AM  
Anonymous wolfet said...

The home of the infamous european toxic clan, psycho urban fraggers that pawn the virtual return to castle wolfenstein enemy territory battlefields.

7/19/2010 10:19:00 PM  
Anonymous justpub said...

Just Pub, a dumb return to castle wolfenstein enemy territory comic strip by feuersturm.

7/19/2010 10:19:00 PM  

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