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(and perhaps the world?)”
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Category Archives: Philosophy
The Tyranny of Entitlement
We read earlier about socialism for the rich, now lets read a bit on the idea of entitlement. One can often hear objections to socialism, re-appropriation of wealth, and entitlement when it comes to the poor and exploited, but what about when it comes to the rich?
. . . A perpetual-growth economy is not only insane (and impossible), it is also by its very essence abusive, by which I mean that it’s based on the same conceit as more personal forms of abuse. It is, in fact, the macroeconomic enshrinement of abusive behavior. The guiding principle of abusive behavior is that the abuser refuses to respect or abide by limits or boundaries put up by the victim. As Lundy Bancroft, former codirector of Emerge, the nation’s first therapeutic program for abusive men, writes, “Entitlement is the abuser’s belief that he has a special status and that it provides him with exclusive rights and privileges that do not apply to his partner. The attitudes that drive abuse can largely be summarized by this one word.”
The relevance of this word applies on the larger social scale. Of course humans are a special species to whom a wise and omnipotent God has granted the exclusive rights and privileges of dominion over this planet that is here for us to use. And of course even if you subscribe to the religion of Science instead of Christianity, humans possess special intelligence and abilities that grant us exclusive rights and privileges to work our will on the world that is still here for us to use. Growth economies are essentially unchecked and will push past any boundaries set up by anyone other than the perpetrators: certainly the fact that indigenous cultures already are living on this or that piece of ground has never stopped those in power from expanding their economy; nor is the death of the oceans stopping their exploitation; nor is the heating of the planet stopping the exploitation; nor is the grinding poverty of the dispossessed.
And the truth is, you cannot talk abusers out of their behavior. Perpetrators of domestic violence are among the most intractable of all who commit violence, so intractable, in fact, that in 2000 the United Kingdom removed funding for therapy sessions designed to treat men guilty of domestic violence (putting the money instead into shelters and other means of keeping women safe from their attackers). Lundy Bancroft also says this: “An abuser doesn’t change because he feels guilty or gets sober or finds God. He doesn’t change after seeing the fear in his children’s eyes or feeling them drift away from him. It doesn’t suddenly dawn on him that his partner deserves better treatment. Because of his self-focus, combined with the many rewards he gets from controlling you, an abuser changes only when he feels he has to, so the most important element in creating a context for change in an abuser is placing him in a situation where he has no other choice.”
How do we stop the abusers who perpetrate a perpetual-growth economy? Seeing oiled pelicans and burned sea turtles won’t move them to stop. Nor will hundred-degree days in Moscow. We can’t stop them by making them feel guilty. We can’t stop them by appealing to them to do the right thing. The only way to stop them is to make it so they have no other choice.
Read more . . .
And remember, “The only way to stop them is to make it so they have no other choice.”
the love police
Bellow is an excerpt from the love police website. I pulled the information from the About page, and posted one of their videos so you can get an idea of what they are about and what you may find there. Please do visit http://www.cveitch.org/wordpress/
About
Hello everyone.
This is a bio written by me so I will be honest and open. I am no different to all the other apes with over-clocked brains running around on the surface of this beautiful planet we call Earth. I have been very lucky in that I have had the opportunity to live in various cultures around the world, most notaby Brazil, Guinea (West Africa), Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Caribbean and of course the United Kingdom.
Growing up I had a very pleasant family life, with parents who nurtured me and provided me with unconditional love. Being someone who always had to change schools (Whenever my Dad got another job in the oil industry), I found myself having to think very quickly in terms of how to make new friends, seeing as I was always “the new kid” at school. This raised fantastic opportunities to make new friends and learn a lot about myself.
Anyway, enough about my distant past. Around the age of 17 I got very interested in the nature of things and of reality, and so I did a degree at Edinburgh University in Scotland with Philosophy as my major for the four years of attendance, with other subjects such as Anthropology, Criminology, Forensic Medicine (The autopsy was intense. I had to leave the room feeling unwell) and Sociology. Still something was always missing. There was some truth which I felt none of the lecturers or tutors were able to give me.
Upon graduation, I promised myself I would never wear a suit, nor would I work in an office. Fate threw me suited up into an office for seven years, and seven years exactly. This was my tour of duty in the illusory world of hierarchical control, greed, fear and systemic hypnosis. It’s fair to say I tried to push aside my yearning for more esoteric explanations of the reality I found myself in and distracted myself with womanising and drug taking at weekends, not to mention exotic holidays and fun hobbies. I was living a half-life, and no-one was more aware of this fact than I was. There were, of course, moments of stunning humanity in my time in “the office” working as a financial adviser and all round salesman for the corporate control grid. I met people who inspired me, people who helped propel me out of the locked way of thinking that a big corporation (in my case HBOS PLC) demands of the minds in attendance. But still I remained a slave, wearing my tie as I woke up before dawn to go and sell investments to unsuspecting people.
But fate had different ideas in store for little Charlie. The economic controlled demolition of the world monetary system had me out on the street by the 1st May 2009, jobless. Suddenly I was able to do what I wanted to do, and the destiny I was too scared to enact for myself was thrust upon me, a truly humbling experience – because without losing my job would I be where I am today, megaphone and camera in hand shining a light up the asshole of evil, seeing what it is made of? Who knows…
I bought a camera because I’d had a few experiences where I was spiritually inspired by people in the real world and I thought “If I can do the same for my fellow people, then I want to share with them the best way I know…”, and the spiritual videos were born. We can call them spiritual, we can call them humanistic, we can call them political, some may even call them comedy, though they are not always funny. What I have managed to always be in my work is honest, as dictated by my own beliefs that nothing should be hidden. If I make mistakes, I know that the people will forgive me, as I have to forgive myself. But I hope I can bring my own special method of waking people up to those who need it the most – those, who like I used to be, are trapped in the corporate matrix AND think it is real; those who believe working greedily in an office whilst children die like dogs in Africa is the pinnacle of human evolution. No, none of us think the world is the pinnacle of the way things could be, but we are too scared to change ourselves and the world. The many temptations of money, respect and authority are always with us…until now. You can almost taste the electricity in the air with people waking up and simply not being a part of the consumerist-mediocrity that we hold up. We can now speak to people about conspiracy theories, about spiritual matters, about the esoteric…and we are understood.
Even my father, a conservative-hawk who watches Sky News and has old fashioned views supporting the Empire, now sees that September 11th was not as explained. I wasn’t there, and most probably you, the reader, were not there in Manhattan that day, but like the Swine Flu scare, we have no reason to trust the lies of the governments when we can see with our own eyes a building demolished and blown to pyroclastic smithereens…
I search for the truth. It exists inside me somewhere, and the more work I do for the greater spiritual awakening of all, the more the universe/the source/the absolute cares for me and gently nudges me towards my true path. Again, I feel small than when I contemplate the Absolute Consciousness, but though I feel small, I never feel alone, I never feel unloved, I never feel misunderstood. This is what I want to share with you; the power of working towards losing ego and trusting that Everything is OK…if only we could make it so.
The work that myself and my friends do is purely to inspire you to look within yourself and realise that there is nothing to be scared of. Do not follow us, do not think of us as leaders, do not emulate us, for we are imperfect fools searching as much as you are. The work we do out on the streets is to bring the message of peace and unity to the people who need to hear it most. By holding our ground against the uniformed/costumed Police officers and security that try and tell us how to act, we show a microcosm of the big issues we all face. Think of your fears in a bullet-proof, flourescent jacket, holding a pair of handcuffs. Learn how to stand up for the inviolability of your own soul. I promise you brothers and sisters that there is nothing they can do to you once you realise you are a spirit having a temporary human experience; that you hold all of the secrets of the universe inside your heart, and that you will never die. YOU WILL NEVER DIE. You will live on forever and you are infinitely loved. I cannot tell you this, but you will feel this for yourself soon. This I promise. We all used to think like this, but many of us have forgotten. The glory of remembering is for us all to take.
In the meantime, I hope you to make you smile and help you in the same way my friends have helped me.
With so much love and affection which words cannot do justice to,
Charlie
Class War in the U.S.A.?!?!
Love & Theft
And I’m still carrying the gift you gave,
It’s a part of me now, it’s been cherished and saved,
It’ll be with me unto the grave
And then unto eternity.”
(Bob Dylan)
Script, direction: Andreas Hykade
Design, animation: Andreas Hykade
Animation assistance: Angela Steffen
Art work: Natalia Eck
Compositing: Christof Hoffmann
Sound, Music: Heiko Maile
Funding: MFG and FFA
Production assistance: Simone Fischer
Production: Thomas Meyer-Hermann
Studio FILM BILDER 2010
Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence, and the Occult.
Check out this podcast from http://www.panopticonpodcast.com/2010/04/episode-4-aleister-crowley-british.html
Episode 4 – Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence, and the Occult with Dr. Richard Spence
On this episode we speak with Dr. Richard Spence, author of the fantastic book “Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence, and the Occult.” We get into all sorts of weirdness concerning the Beast and his connections to British Intelligence, from his days as a student at Cambridge and initiate of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, through Mussolini’s Italy, World War I and the mysterious goings on of Montauk, New York and many others. The conversation was very fun and intriguing and we thank Richard for taking the time to come on the show. Enjoy!
Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World
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Religion and Sustainability
by Cameron Burgess on Mar 9, 2010
via http://www.elephantjournal.com/2010/03/religion-%E2%89%A0-sustainability/
Your politics & religion are my concern.
Religion’s getting a bad rap these days – and with good reason. Between the Jihadi’s, the Israelis and the fundies on their compounds, the world is increasingly looking like something out of Dante’s Inferno (and yes, I did just have a crack at Israel – and no that doesn’t make me anti-Semitic; just as criticising the USA doesn’t make one ‘anti-American’).
Of course, the arguments are that the conflicts in Palestine, the Middle East and just about anywhere outside North America where the US military is stationed are purely political (or related to energy security).
Yet wherever you have Presidents, Kings, Sheiks, Prime Ministers and various other political leaders invoking their god(s), praying in Parliament or printing scripture on their currency, there is a case to be made for asserting that there is absolutely no separation between church and state.
And if that’s true, a rigorous analysis of the dominant religions and the part they play in shaping policy is essential for determining whether consumer sentiment or political activism really stands a chance of shifting us away from a path of almost certain self-destruction and onto a path of survival.
Many wiser and more erudite people than me have discussed this already, and the point of this post is not to seek to restate their positions, but to bring a particular focus to it in the hope of continuing to stimulate debate and enquiry.
Sam Harris in The End of Faith makes a compelling case for the dangers of faith-based religion, whilst The Ranting Gryphon makes a far more impassioned (and amusing to some) case through his two minute video on Global Warming. And then there’s Richard Dawkins, Bill Maher and a plethora of others asking similar and equally valid questions about whether religion has a future in humanity’s future – or if humanity even has a future as long as religion does.
In a recent post I commented:
It’s time for discussions about politics, religion and consumerism to take centre stage, for all of us to call into question the irrational and dangerous beliefs that have brought us to the precipice. It’s time to wage war on superstition and unsubstantiated belief and embrace reason.
Your lifestyle choice is my concern – your diet is my concern, your means of transportation is my concern, your politics are my concern, your religion is my concern.
We all know that thought precedes action. I often hear discussions about the ‘lack of thoughtful action’ when it comes to addressing global sustainability concerns – yet I’m pretty sure that it’s the quality of the thinking, and not its absence that is the primary problem.
We’re so busy hammering away at a culture of consumerism – and blaming that for the problems that beset us – that we’ve failed to recognise that each of the three largest monotheistic religious groups have spread their influence throughout politics, the courts, economics, science, philanthropy and education; due in no small part to our unwillingness to really discuss their place in our societies. Our imam’s, rabbi’s and priests are the original thought-police – not only telling us what we are permitted to believe, but threatening to ostracize us from our communities if we either fail to agree or, heaven forbid, exercise our own intelligence in contradiction to what they teach.
… and now they’re supported either covertly or explicitly by government policy, tax concessions and grants.
The time for religious tolerance is long past. And by saying this I’m not agitating for racial or cultural intolerance.
Religious tolerance seems to pretty much equate to “you leave me alone to believe what I want, and I’ll leave you alone to believe what you want”.
Yet when our beliefs, collectively, appear to represent a significant threat to our capacity to survive as a species, is this really a reasonable basis for continuing?
What it seems we need is an intolerance for foolishness. An intolerance for irrationality. An intolerance for the beliefs that have not only ‘brought us to the precipice’ but now threaten to tip us over the edge.
What I really want to know is, why, in our quest to save ourselves from self-induced extinction, is everything else up for discussion but God?
Religion and Sustainability
by Cameron Burgess on Mar 9, 2010
via http://www.elephantjournal.com/2010/03/religion-%E2%89%A0-sustainability/
Your politics & religion are my concern.
Religion’s getting a bad rap these days – and with good reason. Between the Jihadi’s, the Israelis and the fundies on their compounds, the world is increasingly looking like something out of Dante’s Inferno (and yes, I did just have a crack at Israel – and no that doesn’t make me anti-Semitic; just as criticising the USA doesn’t make one ‘anti-American’).
Of course, the arguments are that the conflicts in Palestine, the Middle East and just about anywhere outside North America where the US military is stationed are purely political (or related to energy security).
Yet wherever you have Presidents, Kings, Sheiks, Prime Ministers and various other political leaders invoking their god(s), praying in Parliament or printing scripture on their currency, there is a case to be made for asserting that there is absolutely no separation between church and state.
And if that’s true, a rigorous analysis of the dominant religions and the part they play in shaping policy is essential for determining whether consumer sentiment or political activism really stands a chance of shifting us away from a path of almost certain self-destruction and onto a path of survival.
Many wiser and more erudite people than me have discussed this already, and the point of this post is not to seek to restate their positions, but to bring a particular focus to it in the hope of continuing to stimulate debate and enquiry.
Sam Harris in The End of Faith makes a compelling case for the dangers of faith-based religion, whilst The Ranting Gryphon makes a far more impassioned (and amusing to some) case through his two minute video on Global Warming. And then there’s Richard Dawkins, Bill Maher and a plethora of others asking similar and equally valid questions about whether religion has a future in humanity’s future – or if humanity even has a future as long as religion does.
In a recent post I commented:
It’s time for discussions about politics, religion and consumerism to take centre stage, for all of us to call into question the irrational and dangerous beliefs that have brought us to the precipice. It’s time to wage war on superstition and unsubstantiated belief and embrace reason.
Your lifestyle choice is my concern – your diet is my concern, your means of transportation is my concern, your politics are my concern, your religion is my concern.
We all know that thought precedes action. I often hear discussions about the ‘lack of thoughtful action’ when it comes to addressing global sustainability concerns – yet I’m pretty sure that it’s the quality of the thinking, and not its absence that is the primary problem.
We’re so busy hammering away at a culture of consumerism – and blaming that for the problems that beset us – that we’ve failed to recognise that each of the three largest monotheistic religious groups have spread their influence throughout politics, the courts, economics, science, philanthropy and education; due in no small part to our unwillingness to really discuss their place in our societies. Our imam’s, rabbi’s and priests are the original thought-police – not only telling us what we are permitted to believe, but threatening to ostracize us from our communities if we either fail to agree or, heaven forbid, exercise our own intelligence in contradiction to what they teach.
… and now they’re supported either covertly or explicitly by government policy, tax concessions and grants.
The time for religious tolerance is long past. And by saying this I’m not agitating for racial or cultural intolerance.
Religious tolerance seems to pretty much equate to “you leave me alone to believe what I want, and I’ll leave you alone to believe what you want”.
Yet when our beliefs, collectively, appear to represent a significant threat to our capacity to survive as a species, is this really a reasonable basis for continuing?
What it seems we need is an intolerance for foolishness. An intolerance for irrationality. An intolerance for the beliefs that have not only ‘brought us to the precipice’ but now threaten to tip us over the edge.
What I really want to know is, why, in our quest to save ourselves from self-induced extinction, is everything else up for discussion but God?
θέλημα
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
θέλημα is a blog to collect the thoughts of The Beast 666 – known as Aleister Crowley, Frater Perdurabo, To Mega Therion, etc. – on various subjects.
The Beast was the prophet of the Law of Thelema, and initiated the Aeon of the Crowned & Conquering Child upon reception of The Book of the Law in 1904, era vulgaris.
Therefore, while the Beast is neither the Absolute Beginning nor the Absolute End to Thelema, His words are of utmost importance in understanding this Law of Liberty.
The very Comment of The Book of the Law states, “All questions of the Law are to be decided only by appeal to my writings, each for himself.”
We therefore offer these writings without any opinion or interpretation on our part.
Love is the law, love under will.
Myths & Logic Of Shaolin Monks
Myths & Logic Of Shaolin Monks Pt 1
Myths & Logic Of Shaolin Monks Pt 2
Myths & Logic Of Shaolin Monks Pt 3
Myths & Logic Of Shaolin Monks Pt 4
Myths & Logic Of Shaolin Monks Pt 5
Thoth
Haunting and enigmatic, S.K. Thoth built a reputation as one of America’s great street performers. Chronicling his life from childhood to the present, “Thoth” captures the spirit of an individual who has made personal freedom his occupation. Directed by Sarah Kernochan, the film won the 2002 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short.
comic book heros and magick
Check out these excerpts from an interesting post on comic books, animism, magic, saints and super heroes, psychology, history, alchemy, and Catholicism, by Jules Evans @ The Politics of Well-Being
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[This is an edited version of the first chapter of a book I wrote but didn't get published, about how modern animation, and particularly superhero comics, have their origins in animist beliefs that were pushed out of the mainstream by first the Protestant Reformation and then the Scientific Revolution. These animist beliefs may have been suppressed and discredited, but they remain in the folk consciousness, and give rise to cultural phenomena like our love of superhero stories.]
. . . Superheroes are a flight from the rationalism of the modern world, from what Max Weber called the ‘Iron Cage’ of rationalism in Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism. Part of that rationalism, as Weber noted, was the bureaucratization of modern life: the welfare state, the NHS, the web of government agencies and regulations through which the modern individual must try to find their way. The superhero was born in the 1930s, during the New Deal, which was the greatest increase in the size and power of state bureaucracy yet seen in politics.
Superhero myths express a longing for a simpler kind of politics, for an earlier age, when the people felt a strong emotional bond to a charismatic warrior or prophet.
Weber defined the charismatic leader as akin to a superhero, in that the charismatic is “endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These as such are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as divine in origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader.” We remember that charis means gift in Greek, so it’s not so far from the Greek or animist belief that superheroism is granted as a gift by the Gods or the spirit world.
In a century of mass movements, mass production, mass employment – a century of the masses in other words – superhero myths celebrated acts of individual heroism. They hark back to tribal times when an individual could make a difference to the future of the tribe, could ‘save the day’. The heart of superhero myths, like other heroic narratives, is the trial by individual combat, the wrestle, the boxing match, the fighter-pilot dog-fight, the Western duel.
As Weber noted, the modern bureaucratic state asserts a monopoly on violence, while we long to escape from this cage, to indulge our pre-civilized desire to beat up, torture and kill our enemies. Comics give us an outlet for this bloodlust. They release the wild man from the iron cage. . .
. . . So superhero comics are imperialist, jingoistic, anti-democratic, anti-civilization and devoted to the worship of uninhibited violence and (in manga) frequently rape as well. They come from the same dark, tribal and irrationalist part of the psyche that led to fascism.
But we can’t say that comics created this part of our psyche. Perhaps they help us become more aware of it. Indeed, the present generation of comic book writers is very much aware of the amoral and even fascist strains in superhero myths, and they consciously explore them. The costume and character of Judge Dredd, for example, was consciously modelled on Franco-era Spain, although this, and the fascist tendencies of Dredd himself, did not seem to put readers off. “The more fascistic we made him, the wilder the readers went”, notes Dredd’s creator, Alan Grant.
Jamie Delano, creator of Hellblazer, has said that comics “are shining a light on the beast which crouches in the corners of our minds, giving us a chance to both recognize it and oppose it”. This is true of the most conscious hero myths – they make us aware that the demon the hero is fighting is actually a manifestation of his own psyche, a reflection of himself. This point is made in Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver, in the famous scene where Robert De Niro stands in front of a mirror and says ‘you talkin’ to me?’, practicing playing the heroic vigilante to his own reflection. The point Scorcese or writer Paul Schrader seem to be making is that this particular violent ‘hero’ is fighting his own shadow, his own demons, projected onto external figures.
We see a similar exploration of the hero myth in Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy, which to my mind is the greatest hero myth we have in our culture. At the beginning of it, Oedipus the heroic slayer of the Sphinx and saviour of Thebes is trying to discover what evil lurks in the heart of Thebes. As the play carries on, Oedipus realizes that in fact he himself unconsciously committed the crimes he is investigating. He is the monster he is seeking, the shadow he is pursuing. When he discovers this awful and humbling truth, the chorus says:
“Some demon of the night,
Some destructive impulse in man, prowling
Silently around you, waiting its chance,
Has sprung with inhuman strength, howling
At your throat.”
And yet Oedipus’ true heroism is that he doesn’t project these demons onto others, and then blame them for his mistakes and suffering. He takes responsibility for them. He says: “I’m the one / Who must bear the guilt and the punishment / And the shame. And I must bear it alone.”
While the rest of us run from our demons or project them onto others who strike us as strange, alien or threatening, Oedipus has the moral courage and self-awareness to confront his demons, to endure their wrath, to endure the loss of everything he has. And yet this submission, this annihilation of his ego, leads to a transformation.
By the second play in the trilogy, Oedipus at Colonus, the demonic spirits that tormented him are placated, and become his helpers, granting him magical powers. He becomes a shaman-hero, in touch with the chthonic spirits, able to see the future and to read the signs of nature, and his body has magical powers to protect the city where he is buried. So the hero goes from being a demon-slayer to the integrator of the daemonic.
Why do we need such heroes? Civilization, as Freud told us, forces us to repress or hide the primitive aspects of our self – the violent, the sexually uninhibited, the wild.As we hide or repress these parts of us, they become demonic and hostile to our conscious selves. They attack our realities, trying to gain expression and release. Our selves become divided and at war, like Jekyll and Hyde.
At a simple level, comics, like dreams, provide an outlet for that which is forbidden by civilization. Manga, in Japanese, means “irresponsible pictures”. Comics take us to the forbidden underworld – that’s why so many superheroes live in caves, like the Batcave, and why comic book stores like Forbidden Planet in London are so often underground themselves.
The underworld is home to demons and monsters. But, if Jung is to be believed, it is also the source of our divinity, and home to powers and forces that we have forgotten, and to spirits that guide us on our journey. Joseph Campbell wrote: “the human kingdom, beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling we call our consciousness, goes down into unsuspected Aladdin caves…There not only jewels but also dangerous jinn abide: the inconvenient or resisted psychological powers that we have not thought or dared to integrate into our lives.”
Campbell suggests, rightly, that the highest hero myths provide us with a map for this journey. They “carry keys that open the whole realm of the desired and feared adventure of the discovery of the self”. And a crucial part of that discovery is the confrontation with our daemonic self, the parts of us we have hidden or left behind in the progress of civilization.
We must confront the Unconscious, recognize it, take responsibility for it and integrate it, if we are to continue on our journey to enlightenment. Campbell writes: “The hero…discovers and assimilates his opposite (his own unsuspected self) either by swallowing it or by being swallowed. One by one the resistances are broken. He must put aside his pride, virtue, beauty, and life, and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable. Then he finds that he and his opposite are not of differing species, but one flesh.”. . .
. . . in Princess Mononoke, the world of humans has become out of balance with nature. The spirits of nature, no longer heeded or respected by humans, have become demonic, and try to attack and destroy human civilization. The nature spirits are led by a magical warrior-princess called Mononoke. The only person who doesn’t try to fight the spirits is Ashitaka, a warrior who has been wounded by a demonic boar. He sees that the nature spirits are just trying to restore the natural balance, and that they are necessary for the flourishing of life on the planet. He risks his life trying to intercede in the battle between civilization and the spirit world, and though the humans’ city is destroyed, a new and better civilization is born, one which will perhaps be more in harmony with the planet.
The superhero, in these films, is like the Romantic poet or the tragic hero. They are the heroic intermediaries between civilization and the spirit world of nature that humans have left behind. They are seized, possessed, by spirits, who drag them down to the underworld. The hero manages to overcome this challenge, this death of the ego, and to make peace with the spirits.
He or she then returns to civilization, as the ‘master of both worlds’, helping us to accept the daemonic parts of us that we feared, helping to re-connect us to the spirit world, bringing the conscious world into balance with the unconscious, and thus protecting the conscious world (or the City) from destruction at the hand of demonic or unconscious forces. And this re-connection to the spirit world is also a re-connection to the world of nature. As Coleridge put it, the poet (or hero) helps overcome “the enmity of nature” – that feeling that our civilized selves are fake, inauthentic, out of touch and even at war with our deeper nature.
This old belief in the possibility of an animist relationship with the spirits of nature has been rejected from the mainstream of Western liberal, rationalist and capitalist society. And yet we find it, like a diamond in a junk shop, in the cheaply-printed pages of superhero comics, through which is expressed the longing, as Michael Chabon puts it, “truly to escape, if only for one instant; to poke one’s head through the borders of this world, with its harsh physics, into the mysterious spirit world that lay beyond”.
So superhero comics can turn up a lot of nasty parts of the psyche – nationalism, tribalism, sexual violence, moral simplification, the demonization of enemies. They speak to a primitive part of the psyche, which often feels itself at threat from invisible forces that it does not understand and before which it feels helpless. At their most basic level, they can appeal simply to the longing for violence and domination which civilization forces us to repress.
But higher forms of the medium can do more than this. They can help us to recognize, accept and transform the darker parts of our psyche. They can make us feel re-connected to our selves and to nature. Our divinity, Jung suggested, lies waiting for us in the dark underground of our souls, if we have the courage to descend there.
The artist, in this model of art, is the real superhero. He or she has the courage to descend to the depths, like Orpheus descending to the underworld, in order to re-connect us to the spirit world, and thus to our divinity.
This belief in the artist as superhuman medium between the mundane and the spirit world goes back to the earliest human art, to the idea that the shaman drawing a picture of a buffalo on the side of a cave would somehow win the favour of nature spirits for the tribe’s next hunting expedition. Shamans, as we’ll see, are artists as much as they were priests or doctors. They go into trances, become hosts to spirits, and then sing, dance, declaim verse and paint pictures. . .
. . . When the Protestant Reformation and the ensuing scientific revolution pushed animist and magical beliefs to the sidelines, this belief in the magical power of art was also marginalized. The polite eighteenth century poet Alexander Pope might describe the spirit world in his poem, The Rape of the Lock, but his description is reduced to little more than an amusing literary device.
The Romantics, however, passionately resurrected this idea of the artist as spirit-vessel in their rebellion against the rational and mechanistic world-view of their era. The poet, in the works of Coleridge or Wordsworth, was a man possessed, seized by the spirits of nature and made to act as their conduit, their lightening conductor, in order to communicate their message to mankind. Or the artist was a sorcerer who created Golem-type animated figures, like Dr Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s Gothic fantasy.
The last gasp of this exalted view of the artist in European culture was probably in the 1920s, with modernist artists like Kandinsky or Duchamp, both of whom were influenced by alchemical or shamanic ideas, and with modernist writers like TS Eliot or Antonin Artaud. But the anti-democratic and often pro-fascist stance of some of the key figures in modernism helped to further discredit the view of the artist as some sort of exalted emissary from the spirit world.
As our idea of art has become less and less exalted over the last century, so our conception of the poet or writer has calmed down, until the writer is now, in the modern mind, simply a peevish and vain man trying, like the rest of us, to get paid and get laid.
But at the margins of culture, below the radar of mainstream literary culture, the comic book artist rebels against this mundane and commercial view of art, and reclaims the exalted conception of the artist as shaman. Thus Alan Moore, one of the most famous writers in comics today, said in a recent interview: “I think that artists have been sold down the river… I think that over the last couple of centuries, Art has been seen increasingly as merely entertainment, having no purpose other than to kill a couple of hours in the endless dreary continuum of our lives. And that’s not what Art’s about, as far as I’m concerned. Art is something which has got a much more vital function.”
Moore takes the view that European art, up until the last two centuries, was profoundly influenced by magic, and even in the last hundred years some of the best art was connected with occult beliefs. The artist communicates with the spirit world, and connects mundane society to that world. Comics, he suggests, are resurrecting this old tradition.
He is himself a practicing sorcerer, seeing himself as in the tradition of scholarly magi like John Dee and Girolamo Cardano. Like those figures, he believes he has been visited by spirits from other dimensions, including by a snake god called Glycon that he connects to the Greek snake-god Aesculapius. In this, again, he is connecting to an old tradition in European culture – Sophocles also believed he was visited by the god Aesculapius in the form of a snake.
Other comic artists are also practicing magi – Alejandro Jodorowsky, for example, who wrote the cult comic series The Incal, is also a practicing tarot magician and healer. And the idea of the artist as shaman or spirit-conjuror is very much alive within comic narratives. The father of the modern comic is considered to be the German artist Rudolph Topfer, whose works including a graphic re-telling of the myth of Dr Faustus, who sells his soul to the Devil in return for superhuman powers.
Another of Goethe’s stories of spirit conjuring, a poem called the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, was a main influence on Disney’s Fantasia, where the sorcerer Yensid (Disney backwards) has extraordinary powers to channel spirits into household objects and make them dance at his command.
We see the neo-Platonic idea of the artist as a being possessed by spirits in the first ever issue of Spiderman, in which we see the writer Stan Lee sitting at his desk in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, with superheroes leaping around his head and resting on his shoulders like spirit familiars. The comics writer Neil Gaiman has also repeatedly explored the idea of the artist as someone who channels or makes pacts with spirits from other dimensions, in his comic series The Sandman. And the tradition has its most recent addition in the figure of the artist Isaac Mendez, who goes into a trance and paints the future in NBC’s Heroes.
So there’s a strange situation where comics, supposedly the irresponsible child of the ‘serious’ arts, is actually arguing for a more dignified and exalted conception of the arts than exists in the cultural mainstream. The comic artist, at least in their own conception, has a crucial role to play in our society, in connecting us to the spirit world that we left behind some two and a half centuries ago after the Protestant Reformation. We may not literally or consciously believe in these animist beliefs anymore. But the success of comics and superhero myths in the last 70 years shows that, whatever we say publicly, these myths still resonate powerfully in the folk imagination.
Read the whole post @ http://www.politicsofwellbeing.com/2009/10/everything-is-full-of-gods.html
8-Circuit Brain
Robert Anton Wilson 9a : Circuits 1-4
Robert Anton Wilson 9b: Circuits 5-8
Peyote Last of The Medicine Men
Peyote Last of The Medicine Men Part One
Peyote Last of The Medicine Men Part Two
Schizophrenic or Shamanic?
Terence Mckenna giving his view on how we define the mentally ill because we haven’t got any place in our society to put these strange perceptions of reality that some people experience and how we should not fear these states but be confident and turn them into some sort of planetary worldview. The video speaks for itself.
“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
A Hopi Elder Speaks
Via http://www.evolver.net/user/chibione/blog/hopi_elder_speaks
“You have been telling the people that this is the Eleventh Hour. Now you must go back and tell the people that this is the Hour. And there are things to be considered . . .
Where are you living?
What are you doing?
What are your relationships?
Are you in right relation?
Where is your water?
Know your garden.
It is time to speak your Truth.
Create your community.
Be good to each other.
And do not look outside yourself for the leader.”
Then he clasped his hands together, smiled, and said, “This could be a good time!”
“There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the shore. They will feel they are torn apart and will suffer greatly.
“Know the river has its destination. The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above water. And I say, see who is in there with you and celebrate. At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally, Least of all ourselves. For the moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey comes to a halt.
“The time for the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves! Banish the word struggle from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.
“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
– attributed to an unnamed Hopi elder
Hopi Nation
Oraibi, Arizona
Via http://www.evolver.net/user/chibione/blog/hopi_elder_speaks
Visionary Psychedelic Surrealism by Myztico
via http://myztico.mosaicglobe.com/
InterDimensional Art Zone
“The creative process is truly a spiritual transcedental gift that allows one to co-create with our Divine Creator, to put it simpley “Creativity is my Religion”. It gives me a deeper purpose in life much more gratifying than the quest for impermanent materialism. We are all blessed with certain gifts that we bring to this world while we are here on this earth plane. Each of us are part of a complex matrix of consciousness that spans across the inter-dimensional cosmos. Some of the images in this gallery were inspired by entheogenic sacred teacher plants that I have explored throughout the years. Others appear through Dreamtime cycles behind the veil of perceptions, beyond the superficial everyday experience that the naked eye and our limited 5 senses can decipher. Therefore “ART” is the 3rd eye of human evolution, it is a sacred gift not to be taken lightly. It informs, educates, heals, enlightens and defines our humanity on various levels. Here, I share with you some of the imagery I have experienced within a variety of inter-dimensional realms. I have attempted to capture these visions to the best of my natural abilities”. This is the first gallery of several on this site, take your time to absorb what is here. There is something here for just about everyone and if you can learn something new while visiting here and if the art, music, poetry, videos and educational materials contained within this site resonate with you please share this site with your family and friends. I have put together this site as my small contribution to the human family with the intention of spreading positive energy about the state of our fragile planet and that collectively with our love for all life and the unknown that we can each contribute towards dreaming a better world for generations to come! NAMASTE!
Recent Spotlights of Myztico’s Art & Website: Myztico Art has been recently spotlighted on REALITY SANDWICH at: http://www.realitysandwich.com/interdimentional_art this is a wonderful online publication with talented writers covering a wide spectrum of topics I urge you to pay a visit! Myztico’s latest Blog titled: “Shamanism, Surrealism and the Age of the Visionary“, can be seen exclusively at The Gravaton Collective at: http://www.thegravatonblog.com Myztico has also been featured in the 4th edition of The Visionary Revue by Laurence Caruana along with other outstanding Visionary Artists: http://visionaryrevue.com/webtext4/mystico.html
The 2nd Annual International Surrealist Exhibit 2008 http://www.surrealismnow.com/intsurrealistshow2008.html
To see a world in a Grain of Sand, and a Heaven in a wild flower, hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, and Eternity in an hour”- William Blake
http://myztico.mosaicglobe.com/
A Gathering of the Tribe
Via: http://www.realitysandwich.com/gathering_tribe
By Charles Eisenstein
Once upon a time a great tribe of people lived in a world far away from ours. Whether far away in space, or in time, or even outside of time, we do not know. They lived in a state of enchantment and joy that few of us today dare to believe could exist, except in those exceptional peak experiences when we glimpse the true potential of life and mind.
One day the shaman of the tribe called a meeting. They gathered around him, and he spoke very solemnly. “My friends,” he said, “there is a world that needs our help. It is called earth, and its fate hangs in the balance. Its humans have reached a critical point in their collective birthing, and they will be stillborn without our help. Who would like to volunteer for a mission to this time and place, and render service to humanity?”
“Tell us more about his mission,” they asked.
“I am glad you asked, because it is no small thing. I will put you into a deep, deep trance, so complete that you will forget who you are. You will live a human life, and in the beginning you will completely forget your origins. You will forget even our language and your own true name. You will be separated from the wonder and beauty of our world, and from the love that bathes us all. You will miss it deeply, yet you will not know what it is you are missing. You will only remember the love and beauty that we know to be normal as a longing in your heart. Your memory will take the form of an intuitive knowledge, as you plunge into the painfully marred earth, that a more beautiful world is possible.
“As you grow up in that world, your knowledge will be under constant assault. You will be told in a million ways that a world of destruction, violence, drudgery, anxiety, and degradation is normal. You may go through a time when you are completely alone, with no allies to affirm your knowledge of a more beautiful world. You may plunge into a depth of despair that we, in our world of light, cannot imagine. But no matter what, a spark of knowledge will never leave you. A memory of your true origin will be encoded in your DNA. That spark will lie within you, inextinguishable, until one day it is awakened.
“You see, even though you will feel, for a time, utterly alone, you will not be alone. I will send you assistance, help that you will experience as miraculous, experiences that you will describe as transcendent. For a few moments or hours or days, you will reawaken to the beauty and the joy that is meant to be. You will see it on earth, for even though the planet and its people are deeply wounded, there is beauty there still, projected from past and future onto the present as a promise of what is possible and a reminder of what is real.
“You will also receive help from each other. As you begin to awaken to your mission you will meet others of our tribe. You will recognize them by your common purpose, values, and intuitions, and by the similarity of the paths you have walked. As the condition of the planet earth reaches crisis proportions, your paths will cross more and more. The time of loneliness, the time of thinking you might be crazy, will be over.
“You will find the people of your tribe all over the earth, and become aware of them through the long-distance communication technologies used on that planet. But the real shift, the real quickening, will happen in face-to-face gatherings in special places on earth. When many of you gather together you will launch a new stage on your journey, a journey which, I assure you, will end where it began. Then, the mission that lay unconscious within you will flower into consciousness. Your intuitive rebellion against the world presented you as normal will become an explicit quest to create a more beautiful one.
“In the time of loneliness, you will always be seeking to reassure yourself that you are not crazy. You will do that by telling people all about what is wrong with the world, and you will feel a sense of betrayal when they don’t listen to you. You will be hungry for stories of wrongness, atrocity, and ecological destruction, all of which confirm the validity of your intuition that a more beautiful world exists. But after you have fully received the help I will send you, and the quickening of your gatherings, you will no longer need to do that. Because, you will Know. Your energy will thereafter turn toward actively creating that more beautiful world.”
A tribeswoman asked the shaman, “How do you know this will work? Are you sure your shamanic powers are great enough to send us on such a journey?”
The shaman replied, “I know it will work because I have done it many times before. Many have already been sent to earth, to live human lives, and to lay the groundwork for the mission you will undertake now. I’ve been practicing! The only difference now is that many of you will venture there at once. What is new in the time you will live in, is that the Gatherings are beginning to happen.”
A tribesman asked, “Is there a danger we will become lost in that world, and never wake up from the shamanic trance? Is there a danger that the despair, the cynicism, the pain of separation will be so great that it will extinguish the spark of hope, the spark of our true selves and origin, and that we will separated from our beloved ones forever?”
The shaman replied, “That is impossible. The more deeply you get lost, the more powerful the help I will send you. You might experience it at the time as a collapse of your personal world, the loss of everything important to you. Later you will recognize the gift within it. We will never abandon you.”
Another man asked, “Is it possible that our mission will fail, and that this planet, earth, will perish?”
The shaman replied, “I will answer your question with a paradox. It is impossible that your mission will fail. Yet, its success hangs on your own actions. The fate of the world is in your hands. The key to this paradox lies within you, in the feeling you carry that each of your actions, even your personal, secret struggles within, has cosmic significance. You will know then, as you do now, that everything you do matters. God sees everything.”
There were no more questions. The volunteers gathered in a circle, and the shaman went to each one. The last thing each was aware of was the shaman blowing smoke in his face. They entered a deep trance and dreamed themselves into the world where we find ourselves today.
****
Who are these missionaries from the more beautiful world? You and I are surely among them. Where else could this longing come from, for this magical place to be found nowhere on earth, this beautiful time outside of time? It comes from our intuitive knowledge of our origin and destination. The longing, indomitable, will never settle for a world that is less. Against all reason, we look upon the horrors of our age, mounting over the millennia, and we say NO, it does not have to be this way! We know it, because we have been there. We carry in our souls the knowledge that a more beautiful world is possible. Reason says it is impossible; reason says that even to slow — much less reverse — the degradation of the planet is an impossible task: politically unfeasible, opposed by the Money Power and its oligarchies. It is true that those powers will fight to uphold the world we have known. Their allies lurk within even ourselves: despair, cynicism, and resignation to carving out a life that is “good enough” for me and mine.
But we of the tribe know better. In the darkest despair a spark of hope lies inextinguishable within us, ready to be fanned into flames at the slightest turn of good news. However compelling the cynicism, a jejune idealism lives within us, always ready to believe, always ready to look upon new possibilities with fresh eyes, surviving despite infinite disappointments. And however resigned we may have felt, our aggrandizement of me and mine is half-hearted, for part of our energy is looking elsewhere, outward toward our true mission.
I would like to advise caution against dividing the world into two types of people, those who are of the tribe and those who are not. How often have you felt like an alien in a world of people who don’t get it and don’t care? The irony is that nearly everyone feels that way, deep down. When we are young the feeling of mission and the sense of magnificent origins and a magnificent destination is strong. Any career or way of life lived in betrayal of that knowing is painful, and can only be maintained through an inner struggle that shuts down a part of our being. For a time, we can keep ourselves functioning through various kinds of addictions or trivial pleasures to consume the life force and dull the pain. In earlier times, we might have kept the sense of mission and destiny buried for a lifetime, and called that condition maturity. Times are changing now though, as millions of people are awakening to their mission all at the same time. The condition of the planet is waking us up. Another way to put it, is that we are becoming young again.
When you feel that sense of alienation, when you look upon that sea of faces mired so inextricably in the old world and fighting to maintain it, think back to a time when you too were, to all outside appearances, a full and willing participant in that world as well. The same spark of revolution you carried then, the same secret refusal, dwells in all people. How was it that you finally stopped fighting it? How was it that you came to realize that you were right all along, that the world offered to us is wrong, and that no life is worth living that does not in some way strive to create a better one? How was it that it became intolerable to devote your life energy toward the perpetuation of the old world? Most likely, it happened when the old world fell apart around your ears.
As the multiple crises of money, health, energy, ecology, and more converge upon us, the world is going to collapse for millions more. We must stand ready to welcome them into the tribe. We must stand ready to welcome them back home.
The time of loneliness, of walking the path alone, of thinking maybe the world is right and I am wrong for refusing to participate fully in it… that time is over. For years we walked around talking about how wrong everything is: the political system, the educational system, religious institutions, the military-industrial complex, the banking industry, the medical system — really, any system you study deeply enough. We needed to talk about it because we needed to assure ourselves that we were not, in fact, crazy. We needed as well to talk about alternatives, the way things should be. “We” should eliminate CFCs. “They” should stop cutting down the rain forests. “The government” should declare no fishing zones. This talk, too, was necessary, for it validated our vision of the world that could be: a peaceful and exuberant humanity living in co-creative partnership with a wild garden earth.
The time, though, for talking merely to assure ourselves that we are right is coming to an end. People everywhere are tired of it, tired of attending yet another lecture, organizing yet another discussion group online. We want more. A few weeks ago as I was preparing for a speaking trip to Oregon, the organizers told me, “These people don’t need to be told what the problems are. They don’t even need to be told what the solutions are. They already know that, and many of them are already in action. What they want is to take their activism to the next level.”
To do that, to fully step into one’s mission here on earth, one must experience an inner shift that cannot be merely willed upon oneself. It does not normally happen through the gathering or receiving of information, but through various kinds of experiences that reach deep into our unconscious minds. Whenever I am blessed with such an experience, I get the sense that some benevolent yet pitiless power — the shaman in the story — has reached across the void to quicken me, to reorganize my DNA, to rewire my nervous system. I come away changed.
One way it happens is through the “gathering of the tribe” I described in this story. I think many people who attended the recent Reality Sandwich retreat in Utah experienced something like this. Such gatherings are happening now all over the world. You go back, perhaps, to “real life” afterwards, but it no longer seems so real. Your perceptions and priorities change. New possibilities emerge. Instead of feeling stuck in your routines, life changes around you at a vertiginous pace. The unthinkable becomes commonsense and the impossible becomes easy. It may not happen right away, but once the internal shift has occurred, it is inevitable.
Here I am, a speaker and a writer, going on about how the time for mere talk has ended. Yet not all words are mere talk. A spirit can ride the vehicle of words, a spirit that is larger than, yet not separate from, their meaning. Sometimes I find that when I bow into service, that spirit inhabits the space in which I speak and affects all present. A sacredness infuses our conversations and the non-verbal experiences that are becoming part of my events. In the absence of that sacredness, I feel like a smart-ass, up there entertaining people and telling them information they could just as easily read online. Last Friday night I spoke on a panel in New York, one of three smart-asses, and I think many in the audience left disappointed (though maybe not as disappointed as I was in myself). We are looking for something more, and it is finding us.
The revolutionary spark of our true mission has been fanned into flames before, only to return again to an ember. You may remember an acid trip in 1975, a Grateful Dead concert in 1982, a kundalini awakening in 1999 — an event that, in the midst of it, you knew was real, a privileged glimpse into a future that can actually manifest. Then later, as its reality faded into memory and the inertial routines of life consumed you, you perhaps dismissed it and all such experiences as an excursion from life, a mere “trip.” But something in you knows it was real, realer than the routines of normalcy. Today, such experiences are accelerating in frequency even as “normal” falls apart. We are at the beginning of a new phase. Our gatherings are not a substitute for action; they are an initiation into a state of being from which the necessary kinds of actions arise. Soon you will say, with wonder and serenity, “I know what to do, and I trust myself to do it.”
Image by foreversouls, courtesy of Creative Commons license.
Alice in Wonderland or Who is Guy Debord?
Alice in Wonderland or Who is Guy Debord? excerpt 1
Alice in Wonderland or Who is Guy Debord? excerpt 2
Situationist International
Situationist International – Part 1 of 3
Situationist International – Part 2 of 3
Situationist International – Part 3 of 3
Jean Paul Sartre
Human, All Too Human (BBC) – Jean Paul Sartre: Part 1
Human, All Too Human (BBC) – Jean Paul Sartre: Part 2
Human, All Too Human (BBC) – Jean Paul Sartre: Part 3
Human, All Too Human (BBC) – Jean Paul Sartre: Part 4
Human, All Too Human (BBC) – Jean Paul Sartre: Part 5
Human, All Too Human (BBC) – Jean Paul Sartre: Part 6
KRS-ONE: Hip Hop Beyond Entertainment
Hip Hop Beyond Entertainment Part 1
Hip Hop Beyond Entertainment Part 2
KRS-ONE: Hip Hop Beyond Entertainment Recorded Live at Hip Hop 101 Temple University April 2004 A Video by Alex Goldblum Special Thanks to the Philosopher of Hip Hop, Knowledge Reigns Supreme Over Nearly Everybody http://www.templeofhiphop.org
