The Turkish Just Don’t Get It

Sigh. This is distressing. Here’s an article about what’s going on in Turkey. The government had moved to lift a ban on head-scarves in school, so that women who want to wear the religious emblem can do so, arguing that preventing them from wearing them to school was inhibiting some Muslim women from receiving educations (a valid argument). But the courts have struck it down.

Now, I’m a secularist. But you can’t exclude the religious from participating in public life. You can’t ban head-scarves any more than you can demand head-scarves. It’s about freedom, about unity in diversity.

Egads. I’m proud of the Turks for keeping religion out of government. But that can’t mean excluding the religious from participating in other aspects of life. It just means not legislating religiously motivated laws or establishing any state-sanctioned religion.

I fear this sort of thing will cause a backlash against secularism. I hope the Turkish secularists get their heads out of their butts and figure out what freedom means before that happens.

Lost verses of Lao-Tzu

Two fun selections:

1

“Man’s desire for control is always greater than his desire for justice.  Therefore:

The people submit their freedom for stability, the control over disorder.

The government commits any atrocity for wealth, a greater control over more subjects.

And the mystic seeks to understand, to gain control over confusion, rather than confront.

And so folly is heaped on folly until we learn to desire justice more than control.”

2

“Every day a young man took a fishing net to the river.  He would fill his net with a certain number of smooth, small river-stones.  Then he would lift the bag from the ground clear over his head with a mighty push.  Every day he added one more stone to the bag, day after day, year after year.

He noticed that sometimes he was sad, but he would lift his duty of stones easily.  Sometimes he was happy, or maybe had too much wine and fun the night before, and the stones would be hard to lift.  He learned that his being happy or sad was like a dream.  If it didn’t matter to his own arms and legs, what did his happiness matter to his wife, his children, his friends, or his government?  He also learned that when something weighed on his mind, he had to put it aside, or that burden and the stones together would be too much to lift.

In this way the stone-lifter grew very strong and very wise through work and duty.”

We Are the Most Lied-To, Gullible Populace on the Planet

Wowsers. This book of Noam Chomsky’s, Failed States, is just chock full of facts that show up our media and our government as a pack of liars.

The list of atrocities committed by our own government (like the 1985 bombing in Beirut, Lebanon, which was actually committed by the CIA, a known fact at this point, though the media never bothered to correct the perception they created by passing along the government’s story that it was a terrorist) just boggles the mind. Presidents from both parties over the years have protected the oil companies’ interests in the Middle East with crime after crime against civilian populations over there. Some of them we’ve never heard a word about, some we’ve heard about but with a twisted slant to blame it all on terrorism. Wherever, in the Middle East, South America, or Asia, real democracy has flowered, we’ve stamped it out in favor of fascist regimes (like that of Saddam Hussein, who was put in power by JFK in the 60s) willing to cooperate with our interests.

If you want to know the facts about what’s really going on in the middle east, get this book. Like they’re stamping on our mail these days, those words of one of my cousins however many times removed and however imperfect himself, John Adams, “Let us dare to read, think, speak and write.” We need to wake up as a country and deal with the fact that we are living under a long-term fascist regime that started long before any of us were born, right back to the founding of our country, which purports to value freedom but which only gives it lip service, and which is actually set up to benefit the few, the super-rich, who head these multi-national corporations. It started with cotton. Now it’s oil.

The primary obstacle to progress for us as a species is America and our corrupt government. This is not a partisan issue, either. The Democrats are just as complicit, though BushCo, with its clumsy handling and constant underestimation of our intelligence, has certainly taken it to new heights, or should I say lows?

Please, let’s stop acting like mushrooms, kept in the dark and fed a load of BS. Let’s seek the truth, and it doesn’t have anything to do with Illuminati or reptilian hybrids. It’s got to do with money and power.

The DNC Are a Bunch of Fools

Here’s a BBC article to ponder. It’s about the confusion in Florida over the primary and whether or not they’ll be able to have their delegates at the convention. It seems there’s a power struggle between the national party and the Florida dems over control.

I didn’t think they could do it, but I’m afraid they’re going to hand it to the Grand Old Poopheads AGAIN. I’m afraid we’re going to end up with McCain, with his crazy ideas and lack of understanding of personal freedom, just because the Democrats can’t get their heads out of their heinies long enough to see past next week. I’m so exasperated.

We’ve Escaped!

We’ve been offline, relocating about 1,500 miles to the north. We no longer live in the Buckle of the Bible Belt (or anywhere near it). Now we’re in an area where tolerance of diversity is a value, where intellectual freedom is a given, where education is a priority rather than a threat to religious faith.

I look forward to the transformation this will bring about in our lives and in my work (and in our very selves, for I’m certain that one’s location has a bigger affect than we realize on one’s sense of self). We’d lived in our former city in Louisiana for almost ten years. I knew going into it that it wasn’t going to be a comfortable cultural fit. We’ve chosen our new home with the culture in mind. I’m so glad our children are going to be able to come of age here, rather than there.

Bayer Ranks High in the List of Evil Corporations

If you’re concerned about a shadowy group of Europeans pulling our political strings and ruining good people’s lives (what some like to call the Illuminati, though anyone with sense has to see that these folk are not enlightened in the least), check out the Wikipedia article on Bayer AG.

Here are some interesting snippets:

As part of the reparations after World War I, Bayer had its assets, including rights to its name and trademarks, confiscated in the United States, Canada, and several other countries. In the United States and Canada, Bayer’s assets and trademarks were acquired by Sterling Drug, a predecessor of Sterling Winthrop.

Bayer became part of IG Farben, a conglomerate of German chemical industries which formed the financial core of the Nazi regime. IG Farben owned 42.5% of the company that manufactured Zyklon B, a chemical used in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. When the Allies split IG Farben after World War II for involvement in several Nazi war crimes, Bayer reappeared as an individual business. Bayer executive Fritzter Meer, sentenced to seven years in prison by the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, was made head of the supervisory board of Bayer in 1956, after his release.

Isn’t that great? I’m thinking of writing a short story based on the transactions…imagine, businessmen making a deal over boxes of poison gas. “Thanks for doing your part for the Final Solution, Fritz. And here’s a bag of money for it, to boot.”

Bayer AG is involved in an ongoing controversy with French and Nova Scotian beekeepers over claimed pesticide kills of honeybees from its seed treatment insecticide imidacloprid. France has since issued a provisional ban on the use of Imidacloprid for corn seed treatment pending further action. A consortium of U.S. beekeepers has also filed a civil suit against Bayer CropScience for alleged losses.

I’m wondering if this could explain the problems bee keepers in America have been having with the as-yet unexplained hive collapse syndrome which is threatening our food supply.

Austrian journalist Klaus Werner alleged in his Black Book on Brand Companies, that the Bayer subsidiary H.C. Starck financed the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo by trading illegally with the mineral coltan. The allegations were also confirmed by a U.N. panel of experts. Bayer alleged that since 2001 it didn’t trade any more with congolese coltan, but never proved where their resources came from.

How much these people care about human lives: zero. Which would explain the following:

In October 2001, Bayer was taken to court after 24 children in the remote Andean village of Tauccamarca were killed and 18 more severely poisoned when they drank a powdered milk substitute that had been contaminated with methyl parathion.

The white powder that resembles powdered milk and has no strong chemical odour was packaged in small plastic bags that provide no protection to users and give no indication of the danger of the product within. The bags were labelled in Spanish only, and carried drawings of healthy carrots and potatoes but no pictograms indicating danger or toxicity.

Let’s worry about reality, folks, not science-fiction human-reptilian hybrids. There are evil homo sapiens on this planet. No extraterrestrial DNA needed.

Song of Anat

Please abandon fear. Realize that everyone is divine. We all live in a world spun of language, imagery, and sheer vibration emanating from us that we embed in every vase, wall, plant or animal around us. These beings, the company we keep in our heads and in the world we choose to live in, are fabricated out of the music of our hearts. The song we sing from the center of our skulls, deep in the pituitary, pumping out serotonin, neuroepinephrine, dopamine like a giant umbrella of psychedelic eminence, radiating pastel skies, rage, sadness and joy in undulating protrusions. Not only does this song ring in our ears as sound, but sings in our eyes as light, and our nose as smell. Hormonal waves ripple emotion and physical throbbing through our bodies in cycles of minutes, hours and years. We do yoga all day, how we hold our spine, whether we look down in command, surveying our creation in confidence, or look up in awe, mothered by the great divine. Small to large we are a continuous pole of vibration living in a world of vibrating beings, some made by us, some made by others. We are also made by others, and our children spiritual and physical make others. We are one and we are many, carving each other with our song. Remember we are free to move. We are free to be crazy. We are free to smash myths. We are free to give sex to all beings, as many or as few as we desire, to sing of love as we please. We are also free to break morals, to lie, to cheat, to take without permission from those screaming in pain. Or instead, we are free to plant love, to raise all up to be the radiant stars of divinity they are but have forgotten. The cultural symbols of the past drift through us like seaweed along with our personal song waving through the waters of life we shroud ourselves in. Despite your habits and your wrappings, your bonds, remember your freedom. Sex is rhythm, work is rhythm, breathing is rhythm, let your song and your love be pure. Rise queen. Rise king. Take to your throne as lord of the universe. You are god. Sing into being a world of beauty. Your lover is waiting for you to remember who you are. Break through that wall, overcome that hurdle, abandon that fear, cut loose those chains. Remember who you are. You are god. Sing loudly. Sing strong. Sing peace. Sing so no one lies in any gutter, no one falls in any fear, no one trembles afraid, unloved. To let a soul go down unloved is the only sin I know, because you failed as the lord to not create beauty and peace. To let such wrong blacken your world is to throw down your crown and roll in the despair of amnesia. A divine being powerless to sing love deep into the four directions? I love you and I miss you so much, my great one. Arise and take your crown. Dispense your song and dance your dance. Beat the drum of your world loudly, for you are god.

Why smoking bans are wrong

Mr. McKultchison was my chemistry teacher. I loved chemistry, the boiling flask, the dripping tubes, like some sort of nanotech city of atomic construction. He was very old, 85 or so, wore the same maroon sweater every day for four years, and chain smoked constantly. This was in the day when at the ivy’s everyone smoked unfiltered cigarettes everywhere, library, cafeteria, classroom. Although the eighties had dawned and with it came Reagan, shitting on the poor, disrespect of science and reason and embrace of the irrational with a surge in fundamentalism, and worst of all, an obsession with flabby, iridescent spandex “fitness”. Not the fitness of weight-lifting or skiing, some functional activity with man against gravity and other forces of the earth, controlling his movement and action in a perilous sphere, but sad people sweating in a mirrored rec room, raising a stink of mediocrity.

Mr. McKultchison smelled like old classical pillars, and fields of tobacco stretching before the graven steps of Monticello or something. He stood for arcane wisdom and peace, and Buddha’s smile perpetually gracing his dry lips. There was talk of outlawing smoking, and he was on the list. We were doing a reaction one day involving cyanide as a catalyst. With his age, the politics of the time, and the growing purist and shallow trends in public mores weighing heavily on his shoulders, Mr. McKultchison this day was stooped, weighed down, looking as though he was feeling as though he could no longer hold up the values that mattered anymore as the other people around him, head to toe, turned to brightly colored assemblages of plastic. He no longer seemed timeless as he always had, and within a day it seemed, he had begun to appear as someone whose time was very close at hand. He was talking, wistfully, of how many friends he had known who had died, died in fact doing the same reaction we were now doing. He explained how cyanide is so deadly that a tiny vapor can kill you before you even know something is amiss. He explained how like old soldiers of science, he and his friends were taken out one by one, with attendant mourning, planning of funerals and firing of gun salutes, all to show the best method of an isomerization, in general to show overall that we are dancing in a swirl of constant vibration and movement, a ballet of particles and forces, like twirling lovers in an endless dance. He explained that one crack in the pyrex reaction vessel may not even be visible to the human eye, but those one or two cyanide balls, those sentinels that open the doors to death for the two more molecules that follow and slice apart your hopes, dreams and memories, come unannounced. The human brain naturally sounds no alarm right before its destruction by cyanide. It was discovered though that smoking cigarettes while doing this reaction so vastly increases one’s sensitivity to smell that the invisible microscopic sentinels of death now smell profoundly like acrid almonds, sending noxious alarms throughout the body and giving rise to a call to action and self-preservation.

For sixty-five years he had, with each drag, felt the certainty of life, the confidence that he was at his sharpest and most vibrant. Smoking had saved his life, made his life, and he felt tobacco was the wife he never had. She protected him, kept him warm at night, soothed his brow when he was troubled, and most of all, tuned his body so as to be sensitive in the extreme to any threat to remove them from each other, to remove him from the vibrant dance of this life. He dared any man to do this reaction, to understand deeply the nature of this life, this dance to which we cling, to this depth, without the mistress of tobacco to accompany him. As I took my drags with difficulty, he reminded me it took at smart man to do the necessary thing and smoke, as the alternatives were to never be privileged to see this reaction or to be taken out, in all probability, with my cold blue hand being tucked back into the body bag. I never did forget his greater lesson, that the earth is our mistress, and she has given us all manner of plants and animals as tools so that we may have joy and give back that joy in science, art, and loving those around us. This is what we are, alive animals on earth, and purity, non-smoking, drug-free lifestyles are modernist delusions.

2008 Is Going to Be a Very Strange Year

After we invaded Iraq, I repeated at the forums I frequent the phrase, “Is it 2004 yet?” to sum up what I felt. Silly me, I actually assumed the American people would have the sense to evict these liars from the White House.

It was too depressing to follow that with “Is it 2008 yet?” Not only did it seem way too far away, but now I have no confidence that the American people will have the sense to vote for change.

The only candidate I see who could offer real change is Dennis Kucinich, and, as usual, he’s hardly in the running, because he has common sense, and I’ve found there’s nothing actually common about common sense, and it’s not something the American people seem to appreciate in their politicians.

Now, we’ve got Obama, whom half the nuts in the country think is part of the Illuminati (a group that doesn’t really exist anymore, and never did anything real while they did — the OTO and the Golden Dawn accomplished much more in terms of opening up possibilities for astral exploration, for example), Clinton (talk about more of the same — egads, having the legal and insurance lobby running things? no thanks), Romney, who’ll never be elected because he’s Mormon (a religion many Christians don’t recognize as part of their club), and Huckabee, a former Baptist preacher (please save us from such a fate…having lived 13 years in the Bible Belt where Southern Baptists behave like Hilter’s brown-shirts in their evangelical zeal, I can’t imagine what would happen with one of theirs in charge). And McCain. Well, at least he’s been to war, and doesn’t approve of torture. But something about him doesn’t seem quite right, either.

Last night I finished reading Milan Kundera’s excellent book The Curtain, an essay in seven parts on the history of the art of the novel. It’s fascinating, and of course, as an escapee from Czechoslovakia after the Soviets invaded, he’s got real perspective on the importance and relevance of politics on people’s daily lives (and deaths) — he knows that when things go badly, artists are often eliminated by the powers that be. It makes me glad to live in America, where we do have some small protections, but I don’t take such things for granted. I don’t put it past Big Money to assassinate uppity poets.

One of his themes is the omnipresence of stupidity. And boy is he ever right. Folks are stupid. What really scares me about the current situation, though, is that the stupid have been in charge for so long now in America, they don’t seem to want to give up power even though they’re running the country into the ground. What is this distrust of intelligence? Why wasn’t Kerry elected? Why won’t Kucinich be elected?

I guess I’m going to buy a farm and live far away from people, and watch, like Robinson Jeffers did, while the stupid people of this country continue to elect stupid men who will continue to behave stupidly and make America the fool of the world.

Kabbalistic glyphs in Masonic Baal-guided scrying

Session V

Since the last time I used DMT and had the realization that it was my own brain that was imposing the consistent narrative of sexuality, I realized the need to have an effective means of controlling this astral plane as well as some means of stocking it with new narratives so as not to fall back on old patterns. Relying on a stereotyped vision of reality that has always been comfortable to me, I fell back on the use of kabbalistic meditation techniques. As I understand it, the kabbalah is, most simply put, the art of viewing the universe as made entirely of atoms, but rather than like the atoms of the physical materialist being merely physical balls or entities, the kabbalist has the universe made up of vibratory thought-energy-atoms. This allows the practitioner of the kabbalah to, in theory, utilize her thought energy to manipulate matter, or to utilize matter to manipulate the practitioner’s thought energies in precise ways, and would also allow the practitioner to have special insight into reality by understanding the relationship between reality, sound, and thought at its deepest level.

When I find it necessary to pursue mystic paths, though being a physical materialistic atheist myself, I find it most satisfactory to fall back on kabbalist paths as they require the least compromise of my daily conscious beliefs. This necessity to rely on spiritual techniques despite a philosophical unwillingness to the contrary reminds me of a statement made by William Burroughs during an interview shown in the movie The Source. At one point, William Burroughs is describing the terrible physical side effects of the drink yage, which contains DMT and an MAOI. The interviewer asks why a person would punish themselves in such a manner. At this question Burroughs gets quite angry and says, “If you’re going to take yage, you take yage!” Therefore, by analogy, if you “smoke DMT, you smoke DMT!”; you may have to utilize spiritual techniques alien to your waking consciousness to have that special experience you seek. You must accept the negative as an expedient means to an joyful end. If these techniques become sufficiently and consistently useful for survival as to seem more necessary for a comprehensive world view than mere appendages of expedient means, then it becomes mandatory as a scientist to modify one’s daily beliefs and move on with a new world view. However, for now, it was still an expedient means to utilize kabbalistic techniques to begin to control the journey.

I initially thought about using the Hebrew letters, from which I learned about the kabbalah. But there is a lot of baggage with this culture’s letters, and I have always found it difficult to remember Semitic letters made of brush strokes and points. Furthermore, never really understanding the kabbalah in past study, I set about researching the origins of the Hebrew alphabet and came to learn about proto-Canaanite, proto-Sinaite, and it’s descendant Phoenician, from which we get ancient Hebrew and subsequently Biblical Hebrew. Furthermore, the Phoenician alphabet influenced the Latin (therefore the Germanic and Romance languages), Greek (Cyrillic and Slavic), Semitic (Arabic and Hebrew), and even Indian (Sanskrit) languages. It can certainly be argued to be the primal alphabet of all magical cultures and traditions of the mid-East and West. In examining the forms and glyphs of the original letters, which are quite like the Egyptian hieroglyphs by which they were inspired but from which they were not copied, or Druidic runes, the proto-Sinaitic glyphs and those chronologically before are quite clear as to what they represent in nature. An ox is quite clearly the head of an ox, etc. While there is some occasional argument, for example as in gimel, as to whether it is a crescent, camel or boomerang, the use of any one of these will suffice, and a narrative that links all three will suffice as well if that suits the experience better. I set about using the Phoenician alphabet because it is well-standardized, whereas the prior alphabets require some interpretation and reconstruction subject to the investigator’s personal bias, well defined (due to the survival of a fair number of scripts over time), and while the identity of some letters is in question still, by combining the interpretation of previous reconstructions, I found it possible to settle on a personally satisfying explanation for each glyph. There is also tremendous agreement over time as to the meaning of some letters, for example, Mem, as ‘water’. I set about learning the Phoenician alphabet and it’s letter signs and associating them with the Hebrew, which gave me great inspiration as to how Hebraic and Arabic scripts, and Semitic scripts in general, function. After sufficient practice with the glyphs over days, I was ready to scry.

I then prepared a dose of DMT in scrying range ~ 50mg. I took a small warming dose to make sure I could control the imagery of the letters through a slight rush. Then I took a deeper dose. On doing so I entered into a psychedelic space, but a very comfortable one. The sense of a being was there, same as before, but only as a helpful guiding female voice, not visually. I could peer through a triangular doorway into another world made of a pale blue sky with a pillar of white, non-stormy, fluffy clouds at the center, like a UFO of clouds. There were multiple psychedelic rainbows dripping from the entry way. It was the epitome of blue sky and peace. I realized I was peering through the shape of daleth like a doorway. I heard the voice urge me to try other letters and I did. Each one opened up another hallucinogenic space. For example, vav opened up a flaming yellow desert-like hallucinogenic space, with burning orange trails, a hot Mars-like environment. Shin opened up a crystalline world, each of the three points serving as seeds of extensive crystallization. At one point I utilized lamed and had a beautiful vision, which does escape me, because it wasn’t anchored with the symbol’s meaning, which I couldn’t remember at that moment. Now I remember it means ‘goad,’ ironically. I had remembered the letter by a mnemonic with ‘L’, so the voice chided me in the future not to utilize such mnemonic tricks and to remember the meanings. I nodded. As usual, she reminded me not to criticize myself overly much, assured me of universal love and benevolence, and encouraged me to move on to other glyphs. I moved on to mem with great success. By the time I reached nun, I could feel the effect of the neurotransmitter beginning to leave. With characteristic and usual sadness, I wished I could never go. She encouraged me to practice as long as I could, especially as the drug was leaving, so the ability might stay more permanently. I did so until the scrying no longer had the sense of reality, but pushed fantasy. I came to and delivered this narrative.

I feel I was encouraged by the female spirit of DMT to continue using kabbalistic meditation techniques based on the Phoenician alphabet of 22 letters as doorways to different hallucinogenic spaces. I saw them as vibratory spaces or levels, co-existent, adjacent or interwoven with our own, somehow participating or interacting with ours on a perpetual basis in some important manner. My questions now are what are the nature of these spaces? What is the nature of their interaction with our space? And how is mastery, control or vision of these spaces useful to my character, development, or identity as a human being? I suspect the answer to the latter question is probably the easiest. To know the real situation one is in is always of greatest value.