Spendy liveblogs "Jim Morrison: Secret Teacher of the Occult"

[sus]

You mentioned when you started the Master thread

I read an interview with him and he said that he read somewhere that after a war, new religions form. And he wanted to examine that.

This seems very relevant to the discussion at hand, about a post-War questioning of theologies. An openness to alternative because the current system doesn't seem to be working

Lachman:

Good or bad, it seemed the collective imagination was hungry for something new, alien and other... After the dark days of Hitler, World War II, and the shadow of the mushroom cloud, the midtwentieth century mind seemed to be reaching out for the otherworldly and unearthly. This, of course, could have been nothing more than escapism, a desire to obscure a dreary and dangerous reality with dreams and fantasies... But there seems to have been something in the postwar appetite for the unusual that suggests something more...

 

[catalog]

In engaging in shamanic practice, one moves between what I term an Ordinary State of Consciousness (OSC) and a Shamanic State of Consciousness (SSC). These states of consciousness are the keys to understanding, for example, how Carlos Castaneda can speak of an "ordinary reality" and a "nonordinary reality." The difference in these states of consciousness can perhaps be illustrated by referring to animals. Dragons, griffins, and other animals that would be considered "mythical" by us in the OSC are "real" in the SSC. The idea that there are "mythical" animals is a useful and valid construct in OSC life, but superfluous and irrelevant in SSC experiences. "Fantasy" can be said to be a term applied by a person in the OSC to what is experienced in the SSC. Conversely, a person in the SSC may perceive the experiences of the OSC to be illusory in SSC terms. Both are right, as viewed from their own particular states of consciousness.
The shaman has the advantage of being able to move between states of consciousness at will.

(Michael Harner)

 

[catalog]

He has been thoroughly critiqued tho, worth saying. "Astroturf shamanism" article. But he was a proper anthropologist I think

 

[sus]

And I know I'm always banging on about how the 2010s/20s are the return of the 60s—the protests, the political radicalism, the assassinations, the widespread psychedelia, the cults & offgrid living, questioning straight life/40 hour work weeks, polyamory and 'free love' in its bastardized Tinder form, etc

But there's also this strong connection between the Bomb and climate change as two sources of apocalyptica.

We're having a resurgence recently in UFO sightings/speculation which was also an early Cold War phenomenon, and one Lachman points to as part of the escapism/romanticization inherent in such times

 

[catalog]

You have to think of wars as situations that engender neuroplasticity cos you see new possibilities

 

[sus]

Yes you have to fall into the Pit in order to learn to Fly again.

 

[catalog]

Yes you have to fall into the Pit in order to learn to Fly again.

OUT-SIDE-IN-G

 

[catalog]

You can point to rise of conspireacy theories during covid as a similar tendency. The world is melting away, the new is coming.

 

[sus]

OK last thing before I go to bed, Wyld via Wilson ties boredom to the meaningless, to desensitization, in a way that feels important

Boredom as literally deadening. "Boredom is lack of the capacity for registering subtle variations. And the definition of a living organism is being capable of responding to energy vibrations. These vibrations constitute 'meaning'."

Probably not a coincidence that one of the canonical post-rationalist texts is called "That's Interesting!" by a guy named Murray Davis and it's all about how being interesting is more important than being technically 'right.' That 'interesting' is the feeling our antennae make when they perk up and notice anomalies in our worldmodel that need to be paid attention to. "Subtle variations."

And if you pay attention to these variations you develop richer ontologies, you tune yourself

 

[catalog]

Gut nacht!

 

[sus]

There's a mood or emotional valence, I don't have a word for it, maybe one exists

But it's basically "the capacity to be interested by something." Enthusiasm, curiosity, excitability—these come close.

But we all have mood shifts where it's easier to feel the flowing meaning of things and times when it's totally impossible the text or artwork or whatever is dead in your hands you don't care. "a slackening of the will due to a feeling that 'it's just not worth it.'" I want better words to talk about this.

According to Wilson, boredom is what causes crashes. Speaking in exquisite science terms. Leads to "total demoralization." Morrison: "We're perched headlong / on the edge of boredom."

 

[sus]

Buenas noches

 

[catalog]

I want better words to talk about this.

I think at this point, where you need better words, you have to stop using words and do something more experiential: touch, smell, dance etc

 

[luka]

I was reading this interesting essay by Wyndham Lewis on shamanization

And he talks about the trope of how, if strangers are around, or someone is watching, “the spirits don’t come out”

The shaman is very sensitive to the energy flows, the judgments and expectations, the vibrations around him. gets very self-conscious. The walling off in a longhouse or private ceremony is crucial for the shaman to slip into these visionary peak/flow states.

I thought this was interesting

The voices go away

They need something, trust faith receptivity something, to come out

You need people to believe. If you have someone determined not to the whole thing falls apart. You don't need to be alone though. You can see these dynamics played out on dissensus sometimes

 

[luka]

It's a bit like getting them to share your hallucination

 

[luka]

That seems true but I still want a stable conceptual metaphor for the occult vs the accepted reality, I guess

Typically the sun is apollo rationality visibility objectivity as opposed to moon muse madness but the sun is a big symbol so it contains heaps

 

[sus]

You need people to believe. If you have someone determined not to the whole thing falls apart. You don't need to be alone though. You can see these dynamics played out on dissensus sometimes

I was actually gona ask about the shaman/spirits thing visavis Thameswriting, but perhaps this is already an answer

 

[sus]

You need people to believe. If you have someone determined not to the whole thing falls apart. You don't need to be alone though. You can see these dynamics played out on dissensus sometimes

Lucy Schiller, talking to Arthur Russels sister Kate

He knew so, so much: every kind of fish, every Jules
Verne sentence, every steam engine. And then magic. He would throw
himself into these things body and soul. The showmanship part, said Kate,
was what he didn’t excel in. He would set up over here, and we’d sit here and
something would happen, you know, the screen would fall over, or that kind
of stuff, or you could see the back of the trick. The duckweed pond glinted
and glints outside. I always made fun, and I was teasing. He would just die
a thousand deaths because all I had to do was smirk, and it was all over with.
It was all over with.

 

[Murphy]

Like finding out The Grateful Dead played bohemian grove, the layers of the US intelligence community are so vast entanglement in show business is/was inevitable - The Doors were box office

Terrible terminology deliberately reductive to spare any reader the obvious

One way to portray to the Soviets just how free the West was (without compromising Control) could’ve been to empower and partially cultivate anything related to countercultures just enough, just a tickle here n there, to say “see, see how free we are, how free could you be too if you joined usssssssss ..?”. Evidence of intelligence operations on the west coast alone is vast. Has anything changed?

It’s what antisemitic attacks on entertainment always miss - govt and corporate intelligence services and how easy it is to compromise an entire ‘artistic’ community, ie McCarthyism has never ended; it simply shapeshifts to fit and influence the times

Summary, exactly like sketchy Clockwork Shining doc but more coherent - individual and collective attempts at systemising belief into collective forms of agency much more potent than the sum of their parts, all courtesy of Agency X, Agency Y, Agency Z, Mind Kontrol, or Evolved MK Ultra, or Moloch or Satan or whoever. What gets ignored are the sheer volume of women ’traded’ by modelling agencies and multiple supply chains channelling human talent/flesh/toil/organs into the entertainment industry’s sadism machines - “yes, of course you’ll be on the new series of Friends, cherub, sign here small print: yes to double anal” ..

.

 

[vershy versh]

I have noticed in some of @luka's poems an ecstatic cosmic communion mediated by grass. There is a way the blades like tendrils come up and greet and surround you and engulf you, a bed of connections while you face toward solar energy