Deceptive Circuits and Honest Cycles: Conspiracies and Qi Gong

It's been a while since I've posted here and I feel like rambling for a bit and we'll see how that goes. What's on my mind at the moment, lying at the center of a spectrum of other issues, is the central yin-yang like duality of the Truth and the Lie. It underlies everything in our existence, a shifting matrix of gradual contradiction and periodic correction, continually reconfiguring our world into new images. Of course a yin-yang, as fantastic an image as it might be isn't necessarily the best image to use for the process, really you have to picture a nested hierarchy of cycles, for some lies are larger than others just as some truths are more profound, and are exposed with lesser frequency - and greater consequence - than their more trifling, little white kin.

I'm sure anyone reading this can think of several examples of what I'm talking about here, both within the wider world and in their own personal experience. Perhaps a lie we ourselves fabricated and spread, or a lie fabricated by another that we believed, and sometimes no doubt a little of both because after all, doesn't all lying involve a little self-deception? There are numerous motives to lie, though all ultimately come down to the desirability of wielding some sort of power over others. It is in the nature of a lie, after all, to centralize information within a limited sphere, and thus through deception to alter the perception of reality which is almost, but crucially not quite the same thing as reality. Information is power: allowed to flow and it becomes a current, bottle it up, however, and gain potential.

The temptation to use a lie to gain power is therefore quite great, and we might naturally assume some lies to be greater and more powerful than others. The bigger the lie, the longer it would take to be perceived, the larger the numbers deceived, and thus the more potent the power derived. Most lies of course are small, benefiting perhaps only a single individual's marital infidelity and affecting only those in his immediate family (as well of course as secondary and tertiary consequences in those affected by the actions arising out of the neuroses of any children, due to their home being broken, assuming of course the affair is eventually revealed.)

What's in the brackets there really gets to the crux of the whole lie vs truth thing, because the problem with a lie is that when it runs into the truth it tends to be negated, along with everything directly connected with it. Lies can be used to build things: returning to the image of the electric circuit, a lie acting as a battery can drive a circuit. The larger the potential, the greater and more complex the circuit that can be driven off of it. Maintaining the potential requires keeping the negative charge out of contact with the positive; however, in order to provide a source for the current, some contact must be allowed. It is this fundamental issue that consumes both electrical engineers and conspirators: not enough contact between the poles, and the circuit will not run; too much, and it shorts out.

Of course in one case we're talking electricity and in the other we're talking a fundamental element of consciousness. Discerning falsity from truth, T from F, 0 from 1 is really what consciousness is all about, even at such a simple level as, is something in one place, and not another? You can draw parallels with this process right down to the subatomic scale and I don't think this precise metaphorical mapping is at all an accident though this essay, right now, isn't the place to go into that. Right now I'd like to talk about another similarity, one between the logarithmic scale on which lies make a perfectly straight power law distribution, and the idea of fractal cycles of nested time.

Daily rotations of the earth, cycles of the moon, the motions of the Earth and other planets about the Sun, precession, and the orbit of the Sun within the galaxy combine to make a nested hierarchy of cyclic time that uses natural rhythms of the cosmos to map time on various scales. You could go in the other direction, too, and derive time using the same principles from the vibratory motion of atoms, providing a comprehensive map of time at every scale. Many modern thinkers have suggested that there are direct correlations between time and human consciousness, pointing to the rise and fall of empires, civilizations, and even civilization itself as resulting from the influence of various cyclic effects. This suggests of course that there would have been previous civilizations, arising during previous cycles and interestingly enough as the 21st century has progressed evidence of these has turned up at sites around the world.

Now, if there were to be a connection between cyclic time (and all time, ultimately, is based on cycles) and cycles within human consciousness and civilization, what sort of stares at me in the middle of all that, pulling the two together and uniting them as one is the dynamic between truth and lie. The larger the lie, the longer the cycle; the greater its power, the more its consequences when the truth negates it. The greater the negating truth, the longer its calming effect ... until some time later, another lie, large enough to again displace the truth, comes sidling up and into people's minds.

One of the reason's the whole 'cyclic time' idea is becoming so fashionable these days is that we're at the transition point for a whole lot of cycles. A lot of people are sensing this and it's showing up in our personal lives and in world events: human consciousness mirroring the cosmic cycles that gave rise to it. Right now is a pretty special time: with the flow of information within the circuit of human consciousness at such massive levels, it's become impossible for the truth to be entirely bottled up. The only way to keep the current from shorting out is to make sure there's plenty of distractions around, so that what grains of real truth escape are protected by obscurity. Still, that's an imperfect defense, and as events proceed ... the current rises ... the flux increases ... and more and more of the circuits 'short out'. More people have a run-in with enough truth that they stop being useful to the wider system, because they've started questioning everything about it and these days, once you go looking for truth you're bound to come across it.

The problem of course is that a system that's been built to run on lies can't run anymore when the lies are exposed. That needn't be the case but it's the situation we find ourselves in now and perhaps, it's been that situation for a very, very long time which again of course brings us back to the idea of cycles of time. Some lies, after all, are very much older than others.

This explains, of course, the massive growth in the conspiracy movement for a conspiracy, after all, is nothing more than a group agreeing to lie together, and very often of course to lie a great deal to one another as well which is what things like initiations and security clearances and need-to-know are all about. Any lie, if the truth is to be known by more than a single individual, must become a conspiracy to survive and given the way in which lies pervade our shared cognitive world (advertising, propaganda, victor's history, religious manipulation, censorship, faked research, secret research, fraud, to name but a few examples) we might reasonably expect conspiracies to be similarly pervasive. In fact to anyone who bothers to look it becomes obvious quite soon that there are quite vast conspiracies operating today that have exerted great influence over the course of human history for periods reaching perhaps in some rare (or at any rate particularly deep) cases back for thousands of years. As but one example, the Catholic church might be seen as a conspiracy on the part of the Roman Empire to extend its domination to the level of the soul and thus obviate the need for legions, a conspiracy that itself drew on magicoreligious mind control techniques (an old an sophisticated form of conspiracy) pioneered in Egypt and Babylon.

I am not saying that there is one, overarching conspiracy that guides the whole of the world. Some are larger than others and many larger conspiracies contain smaller ones (the CIA is a fine example of this), of which the wider conspiracy remains ignorant. Thus, it is certainly not my suggestion that there is some singular Conspiracy that wields overwhelming control, for that is not the case, and as often as not one conspiracy is in conflict with the interests of another. And yet a great deal of what overt control does exist, exists due to conspiracies ... conspiracies that become more easily exposed every day, in less time and to more people ... and those whose minds are touched by a few encounters, grow more sensitized to subsequent run-ins.

So when things like swine flu happen, it's no surprise that for a lot of us, the very first instinct we had was to suspect a conspiracy, and sure enough the warning shout of 'bioweapon!' has been heard across the internet.

These are dark, doom-laden times we live in. The economy is an ongoing train wreck in slow motion, the globe teeters on the brink of a war more catastrophic than any in history, the biosphere is stretched to the breaking point and the Earth herself shudders as though in sympathy. Yet at the middle of that we find that our species is being confronted all at once with the truth about all of the lies we've been telling ourselves, individually for our whole lives or just a few years, collectively for our entire history or perhaps, only since 9/11. It's in the nature of a lie that when it comes down, its collapse is catastrophic for everything connected with it and that, I think, explains a lot of what's happening now.

Of course it doesn't have to be this way. It never did. At any moment we always have the choice of telling the truth, or continuing the lie ... even if it's just telling the truth to ourselves, and ceasing to believe a lie that we've swallowed. That choice is always present, and sadly few take it with any regularity but, that could change. It really could. It's as easy as telling the truth, starting right now.

There's something interesting going on in China right now, symbolic perhaps of the whole theme of this essay. When one thinks of China these days, one imagines giant sweatshops, rank upon rank of identical residential towers housing standardized workers, spirits broken through decades of ruthless Communist party suppression (and lets not forget to the Communist Party, one of history's great conspiracies.) Whatever comes out of China seems to be tainted, whether it's baby formula or children's toys, as though they cannot help but export back some of the pollution engendered by their pursuit of one lie (limitless growth) in exchange for another (fiat currency.) This is no accident; from the fruits shall ye know the tree, and China's been planting its orchards in some pretty rotten soil, recently.

I'm sure, however, that you've also heard of Falun Gong, the dissident movement that, for a decade now, the Communist Party has done everything in its power to stamp out. The Falun Gong are a loose-knit crew, united only by their practice of the Qi Gong (or Falun Dafa) energy discipline and their following of the short text spiritual text Zhuan Falun, authored in 1994 by Li Hongzhi. The movement's central tenets are Truthfulness, Compassion and Forebearance (their characters, 真，善，忍, shown above) and it's due to their cleaving to that first principle that the government, it seems, has taken such a dislike to them and invented, just for them, things like the death-bed, a modern innovation on the good old medieval rack. I myself just found out about this new innovation in torture whilst searching for a picture to illustrate this point and ... something else that struck me, was that all the pictures that came up were re-enactments. No doubt the government claims that these wild tales are all overly exaggerated, even flagrantly fabricated but ... then we come running up against that Truthfulness thing and really, do you think such people would lie about these things?

Of course, such people must be persecuted. For how useful is a woman who has made truth a pillar of her life, to a system of control based on manipulation through lies? Ultimately, force must be used instead, in such a case ... but even the most brutal of regimes prefers to minimize physical violence, expensive and inefficient as it is, and so any movement towards a general truthfulness amongst the controlled population must be stopped.

Of course, history teaches that such a movement is simply made stronger on its own persecution, and that remains the fact today. According to the Chinese government's own statistics, the number of Falun Gong practitioners is currently between 75 million and 100 million people. The latter estimate edges up on 10% of their total population. Now, you might argue that the government is inflating the numbers in order to justify their own continued crackdown, but you might also argue that their downplaying the true extent of their problem, in order to make the situation seem better than it is to the global investment class to which they owe fealty. Either way it seems apparent that there are a very large number of individuals in China who have dedicated themselves to truth, compassion, and forbearance.

How useful do you think they will prove as soldiers?

Well, that seems like a good note to leave off on for today. Light at the end of the tunnel, or just the bright circle in the big patch of yin, either way it is darkest before the dawn but even in the blackest of nights the light remains, if you look for it, for there must always be the seeds for the rebirth of the next cycle and those are everywhere you care to see them.

The Paraself

I enjoy taking long walks, even if, down the subdivision of dirt roads that is my rural areas' equivalent of the suburbs, there is not actually anything to do but look at the same old, same old scenery. Of course, the scenery isn't the point, it's mainly to keep my body occupied, get away from the house for a smoke or two, and free the mind from having to do anything save sit there and do its thing. Every once in a while, if I walk long enough and meet certain other still nebuluous conditions, something gets jogged loose, and I have one of those moments when large ideational chunks calve like glaciers and rearrange themselves, instantly, into a new configuration.

Lets back up for a second. You've heard at some point I assume of quantum mechanics, and may have come across the Many Worlds Interpretation of that theory, a speculative but very credible formulation wherein quantum effects give rise to an invisible multiverse that consists of every possible world. Conventionally, there can be no contact between parallel universes: once they split, in the quantum of time in which one state has the possibility of shifting to one or the other outcome, no further influence is possible. Just as the present is untouchable save for its immediate past and can touch nothing but its immediate future, so parallel universes are out of bounds.

(Well, that's not entirely true. The formulation of gravity within brane theory indicates it as the one force able to radiate through all dimensions, and due to this by far the weakest. That it would be gravity that has this property is especially interesting to me in light of where I'm going with this piece.)

This doesn't stop science fiction writers from speculating on travel between those universes, however, and it's thanks to their efforts and shows like Sliders that I can be so confident that you've come across this particular idea before.

Now, consider for a moment Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance, in which like not just attract like (as in the law of attraction) but like forms affect like forms. This explains not just heredity but also instinct, as well as personal memory and a whole host of other tendencies within the universe. Although Sheldrake is a biologist and did his early work in botany, his morphic resonance theory is not, strictly speaking, a biological theory but a quantum one.

Now, hold on to that part about the theory regarding its explanation of personal memory. In the theory it is advisable to think of the brain as a transciever rather than a computer, as its function is to more closely resemble itself than anything else in the universe and thus to take advantage of morphic fields to send information within itself. Broadly speaking, the reason you remember recent events more accurately and fully than distant ones is that present-you is more like recent-past-you than she is like little-kid-you. But, there's still enough in common between the the quantum form of you now and you when you're very young that you can retain some memories of even very distant events.

What about you-in-the-future? I can already here some of you asking. Well, at any given moment the universe is splitting off into new, irreconcilable daughter universes, and so as you think into the future you're inevitably confronted with a combinatorially increasing number of potential yous. And so, in contrast with past you (of whom, at any given moment, you can remember only one) the signal from all those future yous, while present, is diffuse and mostly cancels itself. Which isn't to say, of course, that no contact is impossible. Only that it would take something pretty remarkable that got a large enough number of future-yous shouting at you in unison, in order to push some amount of signal through the noise.

But I'm not really here to talk about the future, though it is I grant you a fun thing to talk about.

Really, it's the present that interests me. What is the presnt, really? This infinitesimal moment on which our awareness balances its journey through time? We live in it but how well do we know it? Well, I needn't belabor the point, given the readership here, so I'll get right to another one: it's very possible to imagine each moment as one amongst the almost uncountable infinity of possible configuration states of the universe.

No doubt you've seen it on TV. One moment, frozen in time, motionless as a painting but in three dimensions (and often as not, one of the characters can move around in it.) Imagine your immediate surroundings frozen in this way, and now expand that to include your whole city, country, the world, and then the universe. That is what a moment looks like. Now,picture it moving one step forward, one little infinitesimal change: some parts almost certain to undergo no change at all, others as uncertain as the wind and it's out of that chaos that a tree is woven of the timelines.

In fact, this brings us back again to morphic fields: one moment is most like its immediately preceding moment, and its immediately subsequent moments, and so we experience time as we do, from effect/cause to cause/effect and so on, endlessly rolling forward through the cycles.

Now, sometimes, on a bad day when you're in a really terrible mood and thinking all kinds of despondant thoughts about life and the lack of justice of your place within it, you've wondered no doubt about how things might've been. About the other lives you might have led, if you'd done this differently, gone that way, went out with that girl instead or trusted yourself a little more (or a little less, depending on circumstance.) How different of a person would you have been? Happier, better, stronger, richer, married to a prettier woman or more skilled, able to play that guitar or write that code or catch that fish ... then again, there's other yous that are dead in a ditch, or about to be with a needle in your arm, or bankrupt or merely unloved. Past a certain point, there's no knowing where the path of a different you might take them.

According to the Many Worlds Interpretation, all of those others yous exist. All of them. Even the ones you just thought of now, the impossibly ridiculous ones you thought of just to test the theory, them too (that said, they're likely very unlikely, a small infinite set within a vastly larger fractal system ... but then, measured against the expanse of the multiverse, we are all of us both hugely unlikely and inevitable. What seems likely and what not is a measure only of distance between two moments, rather than an inherent superiority of one versus the other. From the standpoint of a ridiculous you, you are yourself impossibly silly.)

I call this vast, wistful cloud of potential and might-have-been other yous the paraself. The paraself, strictly speaking, might be thought of as all potential selves, past, present, and future, including as a matter of course the past you actually remember, and the future you perceive as likely. Or you might define it as all of the moments within the multiverse that include you as a character (supporting or starring, depending on how you look at it.) At any rate I imagine your mind is boggling somewhat now so I'll let it do that a second and then we'll get back to business.

Yes, I hear some of you say, this is all very interesting in an abstract sort of way but give us something practical, damn it! We're busy people. We've people to activate, societies to build, a world to save!

So here goes: might morphic resonance be used to contact other probabilistic 'locations' within the paraself? Similarity allows the communication, after all, and while of course any self that would be interesting enough to want to contact would also be quite different but ... how different is that, really? After all, you're probably pretty different from how you were ten or twenty years ago and yet ... you remember, don't you? At least, you remember some of it.

How then might one establish contact? Well, the logical way to go about it of course would be through thought. Obviously, this other you within the paraself branched off from an otherwise shared past at some point, so to follow them it might be wise to remember as clearly as possible everything about that time, to be there inside as fully as possible and then ... give things a slight nudge, perhaps, in a different direction.

The interesting question of course is how much contact one might gain with another self, how much information might actually pass between you and the paraself. It's all well and good we're talking about an elaborate sort of day-dreaming here but ... if the other self is truly there, might it be possible to transmit useful information through the paraself? To use it as a sort of referrence library, from which knowledge and skills might be accessed?

I wanted to illustrate that last bit with a scene from the Matrix, any of several shots of Neo plugged into the chair in the command room of the Nebuchadnezzar, learning kung fu in the time it takes ordinary mortals to learn what's on TV tonight, but, as luck would have it ... I can find no such image. So I'll just leave this off here, encapsulating finally more or less the sum of the epiphany I had on that walk two weeks ago and leaving the subsequent experiments (their logical subject, the aptly termed myself) for a later essay.

Finding Heaven in the New World Order

After my recent Moon Food posting, Headlines in Hell, I felt the need to balance things out with an appropriate essay here and so, here we are. I stated at the end that our earth is a kind of hell, and I truly believe this because all the trappings of hell are to be found, right here on Earth. Coming back for another go 'round is the 'eternal damnation' that's always talked about by the descendants of the Council of Nicea, who suppressed the Gnostic strain of the faith which argued that, in fact, the lord of this world was none other than the Devil himself.

At the same time, though, this world can be heaven. None of us would have any pleasant memories whatsoever if this were not the case. All those perfect moments in your life, in the company of friends, family and lovers or alone with nature or one's own private epiphanies, all of these are refractions of the heavenly kingdom, as it were, into our own 3-dimensional time-space continuum. In exactly the same way the nether regions of the cosmos refract themselves up into our experience, and so our world becomes a mixture of one and the other, in greater or lesser ratios depending on the particular moment in history that one looks at.

Now there's a lot of people out there talking about this thing called the Law of Attraction, which states more or less that you draw into your experience those things you focus your attention upon. What then are we to make of the general perception that things on this world are less-than-heavenly? You might say that's because they aren't, and you might also say that merely holding that perception enables that situation to continue and worsen. I'd add that there are those who profit by chaos and take their sustenance from suffering and have thus been cultivating this perception over great spans of time both by directly perpetrating the sort of acts that lead to it and then bringing those acts to as wide attention as possible.

And so we find ourselves in a world where parents don't trust the safety of the streets to let their children run around unsupervised, where every act must be minutely scrutinized and controlled lest something untoward take place. And all the while the grim tally of terrible occurrences continues to grow, with school shootings and suicide bombers and SWAT teams shooting grandmothers and pedophiles and rapists and muggers and embezzlers and.... Every day there's more cops, and more crooks to keep them busy; more laws, and more breaking them.

There's a shift I see, or I should say feel, within the noosphere. I'm not the only one to feel it, and though it's yet of a subtle nature, it's everywhere if you know what to look for. Here, for instance, is the Health Ranger's experience of it. Here's what Reality Sandwich is giving birth to as a result of it, and if you poke around there you'll see that the consensus seems ... positive. It's not a positive consensus that the slumbering, lumbering masses are feeling, of course, and while they are awakening they don't yet know why and there's still the danger that they might be successfully stampeded, like a herd of buffalo, off a cliff. But the awakened minority, that tiny handful who over the past few years have used the internet to free their minds rather than further distract them, are beginning to redirect their efforts, focusing less on exposing the lies and more on building something new and brilliant around the few grains of truth each has been able to collect. And as for our opposite numbers in this, those cold manipulators of reality that have for so long ruled by secrecy, fear, and misdirection, even they seem somewhat less sure of themselves, now. There's a fear in their eyes that wasn't there before, a realization perhaps that despite all their hard work, all their sacrifice of self and 'other' and soul and spirit ... despite that, they still might not pull off a win.

And the consequences, for them, of loss are catastrophic beyond anything we can imagine. Just as the prize for winning - immortal dominion over the material earth - is tantalizing to a degree few can fathom. It's a high-stakes game these high-rollers have been playing, and for a long time it's been the centrepiece of a fantastic ongoing party, but now....

Of course a large part of them losing inv0lves their opponents in this game simply walking away from it and starting a new game with their own rules, one perhaps in which concepts like 'win' and 'loss' are done away with altogether. If there's no one left to sit in the casino for the high-rollers to card-shark, there'll be no one left playing but them and the house. And we all know who always wins at the end of the day.

We can build a new society if we want to. A few people, focused on creating an experience of life fundamentally different from anything in recorded history, who have the patience and determination to become the change they wish to see, will be enough to shift the momentum (in fact, it feels like it's already shifted, or started to) towards the growth of a new and vastly better world.

There's this idea that's been kicking around Christianity essentially since the dawn of the faith called the Kingdom of Heaven, the gates of which, it's said, are to be found within. That's pretty much what I'm talking about here: a few people, focusing inside on their own personal idea of heaven while supporting each other in this will begin drawing the experience of that world towards them. The first manifestations of it will take place around those who are doing the work of manifesting it, but those early signs will give others a taste, thus drawing their attention away from the Spectacle of Death and feeding more emotional energy into the blossoming new paradigm, accelerating its growth still more until it becomes rampant and claims the world for its own.

The phase shift in consciousness that our world is approaching will be something fundamentally new: a social system shaped like a circle rather than a triangle; a reorientation from 'self and other' to self-as-other; a respiritualization of matter that reformats crass materialism into spiritual self-discovery; a change in values, such that narrow economic specialization and competition in the accumulation of stuff is dethroned in favor of a new guiding ideal, Self-realization through full development of all human faculties. The society that will arise from this will be the first truly ordered society in history, for the order will be built of mutual agreement and allowance from the bottom up, rather than clumsily imposed from the top down.

Conspiracy theories often talk about a New World Order, but isn't that exactly the same thing as what I'm describing here? Not the prison camps and the police states and the global banks and all that rubbish. What's new about that, outside some of the technology with which the finishing touches are to be completed? Where in that control system is real order to be found? Properly speaking a 'New World Order' should be our rallying cry, rather than their snickering in-joke, because what they represent is the Old World Disorder.

It's sad that the Old World Disrder we're all familiar with had to happen. But by succumbing to fear and greed throughout history its rise became inevitable, and so we find ourselves now, as a species, with the greatest challenge we have ever faced arrayed before us, a challenge that as of yet few admit the existence of let alone have a precise idea of what, exactly, is to be done about it. Perhaps it was always inevitable; life must include challenges, after all, and they must above all be convincing because otherwise, what's the point? And so, as a sort of final exam before graduating to the next grade, we are presented with the current conundrum. And what will our answer be?

No one knows, exactly. But if we don't know precisely what the answer will be, I think we have a pretty good idea about how we are going to answer. Maybe that'll be enough?

One thing I do know is that I'm not worried, really. I've never really suffered from test anxiety so, your mileage may differ, but ... cheer up, man. One way or another we're coming through this thing.

My Date With Fractal Time

Anyone who's ever looked into novelty theory - you know, Terrence McKenna's theoretical exposition underlying and centered around the (in)famous Timewave Zero program that first and most famously highlighted the possible importance of the date 2012/02/21, at least for those of us in the West - has doubtlessly come across the concept that time is fractal, that is, that rather than being simply a featureless metric against which the accumulation of history is measured, it has a certain structure to it, one in which similar archetypal patterns of events repeat in a self-similar (though not identical) pattern at all scales of time. Thus, for example, the rise and fall of an empire might be reflected in the story of a business mogul's life or the events of a single day. Of course, it's possible that you've never heard of McKenna or the Timewave but have noticed this very same dynamic on your own, simply through observing history, and if that's the case then my hat goes off to you as being a profoundly observant and original thinker.

At any rate, this past Sunday I was given a vivid demonstration of this dynamic, in the context of what I believe to be a very important life lesson. It was nothing so grand as the rise and fall of a great empire, mind; but it was for me something just as significant. You see, I experienced a recapitulation of my entire romantic life in the space of a single day, and if you follow along with this piece you'll learn more than you've ever known about me. Quite possibly far more than you wanted to know for things may come out here that may well change how you view me, aspects of my shadow self that I myself prefer not to dwell on though I am, of course, quite aware of and ... in the final analysis, it is perhaps best to be fully open about. For concealment, after all, is the very definition of lying and lies are not what this blog is about although they are of great relevence to this particular post.

Let me define terms, here. By 'romantic life' I really mean, the ways in which I've interacted and can interact with the female energy of the cosmos.

Backing up a bit ... for some time now I've had a profile up at a certain large dating site. A month or two ago I updated it, for the first time in a long time, in order to let the ladies know I no longer lived in Tokyo and of course to change my profile information to more accurately describe the person I'd come to be at that point. I searched a couple of time, finding two lovely young women who seemed in many ways exactly what I was looking for, but neither of them replied to my overtures and for the most part I simply kept an eye on anyone who viewed my profile or whoever the algorithms determined I was a good match with (and which determinations were, as a rule and not at all unsurprisingly, utterly worthless.)

Now, I know what you're thinking. Come on, man, a dating website? Really? Don't you know how dodgy those things are?

Well, yes I do know as a matter of fact, and of course also knew, and realizing the deeper reasons for why that's the case is a large part of what the lesson was but I'll be getting to that.

Of course, using an online dating service is mark of desperation, isn't it? Well, it has been a long time, and especially so since I had a real relationship with emotional and spiritual levels of committment and so admittedly I had reached a certain point of, not despair so much as a deep and aching loneliness.

I haven't been limiting myself to a dating website, of course. Though I'm also not in a position to really go looking for a mate, isolated as I am for the most part in cottage country. However, that's no reason no to be proactive about things, and so it was sometime in the past month that I sat down one night and defined, for myself, my ideal mate. Not in overly specific terms, or at least I don't think so, but rather, in broad outlines, I described to myself the kind of person - body, mind and soul - that I wished to meet. Since then, periodically, she (whoever she may be) has come to me in the midst of my meditations (or prayers? Increasingly I make little distinction) usually at my own behest but sometimes at her own. I've seen her, seen flashes of our life together drawn in the holographic imaging system of the imagination, whilst feeling our love radiate from my heart to suffuse every moment with a its glow.

And so, of course, I set in motion the process by which the world will guide us together, knowing not when or how it will happen, simply that it will. Until such a time and for such a one I'm 'saving myself' as the euphamism goes amongst those who most often call themselves Saved, for when I meet her I want there to be nothing standing between us.

It was with this in mind that I found myself on a date this past Sunday. I found her, of course, through the aforementioned dating site and this was by stumbling upon her picture whilst searching for a suitable candidate from amidst a seemingly endless parade of deeply uninteresting faces. I was reviewing another - her friend - and saw a blurb she had written at the bottom extolling the friend's virtues and, intrigued, clicked through to see her own profile. Her picture was quite attractive and there were aspects of her profile that triggered a certain 'button' within my sexual psyche that I'm hesitant to discuss, whose disclosure I've been mulling over for some time and am currently with some difficulty forcing myself to get out because it is, I believe, of some relevence to this tale and ... I'd rather this kind of thing was revealed by my own hand, for it's utility as a potential weapon is in that way largely nullified ... and its efficacy in healing is that much more enhanced. That, and it's a quarter past two in the morning, a fine hour of the day for rash disclosures.

Well, now that I've got you all squirming in your seats wondering what terrible grinning skeleton I'm about to jerk out of the closet and and commence a macabre dance ... What, you are asking yourselves, is the big secret?

This kind of thing turns me on.

Now some of you are no doubt disgusted (as a part of my own personality is.) Others are bemused. Still others are probably chuckling to themselves thinking, 'that's all?' while others - those who know me, perhaps, in on offline context - are thinking, ah-hah! That explains some things that didn't make any sense before. It's a rare and odd kink, I know, and not something I'm proud of ... its origins and significance I've only recently started to come to terms with, though it springs from an early experience so deep and overwhelming that its effects on my psyche may well never be fully dealt with. There are quite a bit of things I could go into in that direction but it is beyond the scope of this current post and so, I'll just leave the map that territory undrawn for now and get on with the story.

So, the profile of this woman pushed that button; what was of course just as important, she seemed attractive enough; from the information available her personality seemed congenial enough and so the combination of these influences was enough to motivate me to forgive the small defect 'a few extra pounds' ('a few' to me suggesting just what it is, a numeric and not a literal handful) and the observation that she was not, perhaps, as activated a person as I might have liked (which observation later led me to have the premonition that our paths were meant to intersect perhaps precisely so my influence might help begin the process of her own activation.) I sent her a message, to which she replied; the flirtation moved to instant messaging; and before long, a date was settled upon. Throughout this she seemed perfectly charming, and my beguilement grew to a pitch of anticipation. Perhaps, I dared myself to speculate, she might be the one?

Of course I knew it would not be, as one so often does, and yet I did not listen to that inner voice and so ... the lesson began.

The night before, I slept at a friends' place, and began the day with them and their two children, a one year old boy and a four year old girl. Their daughter is a wonderful, bright, enthusiastic energetic and sunny child that I get along with effortlessly in a sort of 'cool uncle' mode, and whenever I go over there we inevitably spend some time playing together. Thus my morning featured a miniature recapitulation of my own childhood relationship with females, the uncomplicated and innocent mutual pursuit of simple fun and laughter. That the parents are high school friends of mine - and the father, an elementary school friend (with whom I spent the rest of the morning playing Magic: The Gathering, the sort of activity I loved as a child) the sense that the morning was in many ways symbolic of my childhood becomes for me even stronger.

Afternoon, of course, came, and with it the lunch date. My friends drove me into town, I bid them goodbye and went on my way to the pub, where I waited until she arrived, centering myself and going through a chakra-opening visualization in order that I might be fully centered when she came and....

She'd warned me she was short, which she was, but were you to balance us on a scale I believe she'd likely tip me in the air. I am not by any means small, so that perhaps gives you some idea. There was in addition a mustache and a hairy mole, neither of which were present in any of the (apparently dated) pictures just as the gap between every single tooth had been so artfully concealed. Of course the back of my mind immediately went into overdrive, alert for any way to draw the encounter to a close at the earliest graceful opportunity. At the same time another part of me was struck speechless, for not two days before I'd emphasized to her, over MSN, the importance to me of truth, as a principal (perhaps she'd thought I'd just been saying it because I liked the sound of the word?)

In keeping with the theme of this essay, let me mention that my first sexual experience (not my first girlfriend, mind you) was with a girl whose face was not at all unattractive, but who was quite ... husky and whom I selected as a vessel with which to put an end to my virginity due primarily to adolescent desperation. In retrospect that was a poor choice whose consequences lingered for quite some time, and my encounter with this woman was a stark reminder of that episode, though thankfully confined to an hour and a half rather than months.

Well, we finished our food - and she is lucky to have gotten my company for even that duration, for many men would not have given her even that much after their expectations were so betrayed, and one of my friends went so far as to say that she would have simply stated 'Sorry, wrong person', gotten up and left - after which I made up an excuse and fled, regrouping shortly after at my sister's house where, upon stepping in the front door, I learned that my presence was urgently required at the artists' coop where she works. Thus drafted and so with no time to mope I went over to the store, where I spent the next few hours lifting heavy things, sawing wood, and helping the artists to redecorate.

As soon as I walked in the door my sister asked, of course, how the date had gone and at my curt reply one of her friends looked over, our eyes met and a spark that I felt through my whole being seemed to jump through our gaze. I was instantly certain the attraction was mutual and over the next few hours casual touch and verbal flirtation more than confirmed that intuition. An interesting thing was that the pull was so strong that although the little button I mentioned earlier wasn't being pushed, I couldn't have cared less and ... when I later found out that she did push that button, it seemed the most natural thing, given everything about her, a normal outgrowth of who she was and thus nothing at all to be ashamed of.

In virtually every way this amazing young woman lived up to the 'ideal', as I've conceived it. Self-actualized, creative, intuitive, independent, wise beyond her years and in my eyes very attractive. That said she is also 19 and lives with her mother a fair distance from me (who in turn lives with his parents) so I don't expect anything to happen between us however ... the very fact of her age is perhaps significant because in this tale she stands in for my second girlfriend and first love, who embodied and expressed many of the same virtues, albeit in a less developed or conscious fashion (and whom I expect was in many ways perhaps a reverse temporal echo of the woman I will, I am more sure now than ever, be united ... or is it reunited? No telling what has happened in previous rounds through the material plane....)

Now, let's review. There is a key point that is being illustrated here, which is quite obvious I think once you see it, but which I want to emphasize. In the former case, I went looking for a certain set of attributes, and as a result creations of artifice lodged as figments in my imagination and I was led down a primrose path towards a dead end of disappointment. In the second, I met entirely by chance, while not looking for anything at all, a far more congenial dance partner who expressed all the attributes I am looking for, with whom our interactions and discoveries were in every respect both spontaneous and delightful. The lesson I think is a clear one: essentially, Life was telling me that the way I am going to find my soul mate is not by looking for her, but simply by being so clear about who she is that when fate draws us together I will know, well free of any creeper of doubt, that this is the One.

The story is not over yet, for our ways parted for the night long before the night, for me, was over, and I found myself at a small housewarming party whose hostess was a graduate student, slightly older than myself. She'd completely remodelled the interior of the house so that the living room was dominated not by a ring of couches around a screen but by a bar and its surrounding stools, behind which she stood for most of the evening mixing a drink I dubbed the sangrita (wine mixed with frozen organic fruit.) A few of her friends, other grad students from the same department, were present at the intimate gathering and as the ice was broken I had the opportunity of several fascinating and enlightening discussions that have strengthened my certainty in an oncoming intellectual revolution within the moribund departments of an academia fragmented by hyperspecialization, whose various incoherent disciplines profer understandings of the world that offer fantastic detail on their own but taken together make no sense at all ... an intellectual (or is it a spiritual?) revolution understood in its principls if not all of its details by many if not all of the fine minds that grace this blog with their readership, and whose nature I will thus say no more about here.

One by one those friends of hers left (at each occasion, the hostess or one of the other remaining revelers would ring a fire bell, for she seemed determine to alienate every property-value conscious yuppie neighbor within earshot ... blind as they are to the essential part people such as her play in the gentrification without which their property values would go nowhere) and as if I'd passed a test by earning at least the tentative intellectual respect of her friends I found myself in conversation with the hostess herself. Her head was shaved, and full sleeves of ink coverded both arms, a butch appearance that takes a great deal of courage for a woman to adopt (yes, it does take courage, even if she's a lesbian ... which she might be and ... well, some of my best friends are lesbians....) Beneath that appearance, as though deliberately concealed, lay a striking beauty, and as it transpired she was also entirely brilliant, not to mention aware and activated in a way few yet are. We made contact very quickly at a level that was more spiritual than physical, and before long I found myself slightly besotted (and yes, both of us were also a bit sotted, myself only a bit and her more than that but not at all to the point of embarrasment.)

You'll have noticed perhaps that I failed totally to mention a certain hot button issue ... and here, too, there was a lesson, a certain emphasis upon the crucial importance of careful attention to the deeper issues of the soul, of the necessity of looking beneath surface appearances and moving beyond the mere physical reactions of chemistry in order to make space for the more refined actions of alchemy. The former is a necessary precursor, of course, for the latter to take place but ... it cannot be the sole or even primary focus.

Thus it is that this fascinating woman represents, perhaps, some taste of what the future has in store for me and that, my dear and patient readers, is the story of how I was given a recapitulation of the significant features of my romantic history within a single day. I'm still reeling from it all myself as you can no doubt tell however ... I also feel that I have learned a great deal, or at the very least gained some small grains of wisdom with which to continue the quest that this aspect of my life has been and for now continues to be.

And that, I think, seems a good place to wrap this up.

A Stranger Makes Contact Through Facebook

Just a few minutes ago, I got an anomalous message to my facebook account. It came from one Simon Solomon Faust (a pseudonym? Naww) and the subject line was 'Can You Recommend a Good Trepanist?' The body of the message ran as follows:

I just want to get these spirits out of my head. I am also curious as to how your own transcendence of the human condition is proceeding. Gotten any good implants lately?

I was about to reply to the effect of 'Who are you, who or what led you to me and why?' when my eye caught the following notice underneath the reply box:

If you send Simon Solomon Faust a message, you will give him permission to view your list of friends, as well as your Basic, Work and Education info for one month.

No doubt this has been the case for a while but for some reason ... my hackles rose a bit and I didn't reply.

But since he'd already messaged me I could see his information and so:

Sex: Male

Birthday: May 27, 1962

Hometown: Centralia, PA

Relationship Status: It's Complicated

Looking For: Networking

Political Views: Theocratic

Religious Views: Gnostic

Employer: The Foundation

Position: Consensual Reality Maintenance engineer

Description: security through obscurity

Clicking through to find out what, precisely, The Foundation is I found that half of the other people in that network are Japanese.

I'm not at all sure what to make of this....

Update

Talking this over with a friend of mine I found that she'd come to the conclusion - quite independently - that this character found me through this blog.

And his MySpace page is public. The blog is ... interesting, quite a bit on an obscure branch of gnosticism relating to Mephistopeheles (ahhhh, the reference to Herr Doktor Faustus starts to make sense....) He is also, apparently, the Right Reverend Most High Minister of the Gnostic Church of the True Light.

So, my good doctor, if you did find me through these pages then I shall assume you will read this and let me commend you on your detective work on finding my true name (it's not a secret, just not obvious) but let me add that I'm still not exactly ... convinced about you if you take my meaning which you no doubt do. So, consider this my reply and you are of course welcome to reply in any fashion you so choose.

A Reconsideration of Technique

Recently I've had cause to take a closer look at myself, and at some of the beliefs I've allowed to influence that self and the esoteric techniques I've been using to get in touch with mySelf (or is it ourself, in Jj's excellent formulation?) What I'm talking about here is the Hathors, and their Holon of Ascension, which as I mentioned in the last post I've been practicing diligently, attempting to master the technique in preparation for the Planetary version this coming Sunday.

Well, Visible read that post too and with the single comment, "Interesting that these people you refer to are meeting in Seattle on the Weekend," touched off the re-examination I mentioned. Because, you see, there's been a lot of bad, weird energy swirling about Seattle recently, with some speculation that it's the - or one of the - sites for the Event we all know is in the works, and likely sooner rather than later. Now maybe it's coincidence that this gathering is being held in Seattle and maybe it's not, and if it's not it still doesn't follow than anything negative is involved. The Event itself, after all, will involve the release of considerable negative energy and perhaps Seattle was chosen as the gathering site in order to at least partially neutralize whatever it is that's coming down the pike.

Now, I haven't been too sure myself of the Hathors and that's right from the beginning. I've always been leary of channeled information, at least initially, but the Hathors seemed to be more or less in line with the information that was coming from those entities referring to themselves as the Pleiadians and the Cassipaeans, as well as with the nameless creatures who (might have) penned the Handbooks. They're somewhat more vague, yes, but then again the messages are considerably more compact and so a certain degree of vagueness seems necessary. What information is there doesn't seem to contradict what I've found elsewhere, and so, I've been inclined to trust it.

Perhaps, however, I've been too hasty. It wouldn't be the first time and probably won't be the last that I've jumped in without looking closely enough and, thus, gotten myself into a spot of trouble or caused some damage I might otherwise have avoided.

But I thought they were telling the truth? Well, so far as I can tell, they are. That does not, however, automatically get us out of the woods, so to speak. How can I put this? Think of a lighthouse. The beacon it puts out is real enough, but how can you know that it wasn't deliberately placed in order to lead your ship onto some rocks? Ahhh, that's the trick.

Here's the thing: any source even initially worth your consideration will tell you straight up that the best misinformation will consist of a whole lot of truth wrapped around a single, very significant lie, like a cyanide pill stuffed into a thanksgiving turkey. Whatever truth is included is strictly for the purposes of delivering the payload, namely the lie, and that lie if accepted unexamined will get you every time. This is why discernment - listening to the heart's reaction - is so crucially important, and that's something else that any source even initially worth your consideration will not fail to emphasize. Trust, but verify ... and sometimes you have to verify within.

So where does that leave us with Tom Kenyon's Hathors? Do I have any proof that they're cosmic COINTELPRO? Well, no, I don't, nothing damning at any rate. But ... one thing that's crossed my mind is that there is absolutely nothing analogous to the Hathors 'holons' in any other channeled sources. And this might be significant.

For anyone who hasn't bothered reading the Hathors' messages, a Holon (in their formulation) is essentially a thought-form that you create around yourself, with different forms having different effects. There's the Holon of Healing (a sort of streamlined dolphin-like shape), the Holon of Balance (an octohedron), and the Holon of Ascension (a rotating disk with the rim at eye level and the axis connecting perineum to BA, a point above the head where the hands would meet.) The Holon of Healing is meant to increase immune system function, the Holon of Balance supposedly helps keep energies and thoughts balanced in chaotic situations, and the Holon of Ascension is intended to charge up the KA, or etheric body, by creating a vortex of thought-energy and sending up feelings of appreciation for the good things in ones life.

So, that's all very well and good, yes? And maybe the whole point of the Hathors was to deliver those Holons to humanity, which they claim to be very simple, yet highly effective techniques and practices. That 'simple yet effective' formulation sets alarm bells ringing, now that I think about it, bells that should have rung quite some time ago but ... C'est la vie. You see, if those methods are so simple and effective, then why weren't they mentioned by any of the previous sources? Sources whose information runs into the hundreds of pages.

Lets have a look at those Holons, forgetting for a moment what the Hathors say they do and considering only their forms. The Holon of Balance, for instance ... 12 bars of light arranged in an octohedron ... might it not also be a jail cell? And the Holon of Ascension, which involves sending feelings of appreciation to a point just above ones head whilst sitting in the middle of a rotating disk ... might this not also be a great way for an entity to suck up emotional energies from a subject no longer available as a source of fear-food? In that context I have noticed, myself, that on those occasions when the H of A seems to have been performed 'successfully', I'm left with a curious emptiness. Everything inside goes dark, and ... it becomes very difficult to appreciate anything.

Something to think about. And that's the spirit it's intended in. I'm certainly not going to tell you 'don't trust Tom Kenyon!' because I don't know. For myself, however, I think I'm going to discontinue this business with Holons and let my practices become less defined and more intuitive, because the one way I can be sure I'm not being manipulated is to follow only those practices that grow naturally from within.