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Evil Is Boring
excerpted from PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia
When an old tree in the rain forest dies and topples over, it takes a long time to decompose. As it does, it becomes host to new saplings that use the decaying log for nourishment.
Picture yourself sitting in the forest gazing upon this scene. How do you describe it? Would you dwell on the putrefaction of the fallen tree while ignoring the fresh life sprouting out of it? If you did, you'd be imitating the perspective of many modern storytellers, especially the journalists and novelists and filmmakers and producers of TV dramas. They devoutly believe that tales of affliction and mayhem and corruption and tragedy are inherently more interesting than tales of triumph and liberation and pleasure and ingenuity.
Using the juggernaut of the media and entertainment industries, they relentlessly propagate this covert dogma. It's not sufficiently profound or well thought out to be called nihilism. Pop nihilism is a more accurate term. The mass audience is the victim of this inane ugliness, brainwashed by a multibillion-dollar propaganda machine that in comparison makes Himmler's vaunted soul-stealing apparatus look like a child's backyard puppet show. This is the engine of the phenomena I call the global genocide of the imagination.
At the Beauty and Truth Lab, we believe that stories about the rot are not inherently more captivating than stories about the splendor. On the contrary, given how predictable and ubiquitous they are, stories about the rot are actually quite dull. Obsessing on evil is boring. Rousing fear is a hackneyed shtick. Wallowing in despair is a bad habit. Indulging in cynicism is akin to committing a copycat crime.
Most modern storytellers go even further in their devotion to the rot, implying that breakdown is not only more interesting but far more common than breakthrough, that painful twists outnumber vigrous transformations by a wide margin. That's just absurd disinformation. Entropy does not dominate the human experience. Even factoring in the misery in parts of Africa and the Middle East, the Global Bad Nasty Ratio never exceeds 50 percent. And here in the West, where most of you reading this live, the proportion is lower. Besides that, the fact is that a vast majority of the people on this planet love to be alive, and the preponderance of their experience is a YES, not a NO.
Still, we at the Beauty and Truth Lab are willing to let the news media fill up half their pages and airwaves and bandwidths with poker-faced accounts of decline and degeneration, misery and destruction. We can tolerate a reasonable proportion of movies and novels and TV dramas that revel in pathology. But we also demand EQUAL TIME for stories about integrity and joy and beauty and bliss and renewal and harmony and love. That's all we ask: a mere 50 percent.
I had been drawn to and in contact with the other side of the veil long before resorting to psychedelic technology. I regularly remembered and treasured my dreams throughout childhood, and when I was 13 years old I also began to record them. This ongoing immersion in the realm of the dreamtime imbued me early on with the understanding that there were other realities besides the narrow little niche that most everyone habitually inhabited. My psychedelic experiments only confirmed and extended that certainty.
As I gained confidence in the suspicion that my formal education had concealed from me nine-tenths of reality, I tuned in to the paper trail documenting the existence of the missing part. It had been mapped by shamans and alchemists and magicians for millennia: So my readings of Jung and Campbell and Graves and Eliade revealed. Their work in turn magnetized me to the literature of Western occultism, whose rich material was written not by academics but by experimenters who actually traveled to the place in question.
The myriad reports were not in complete agreement, but many of their descriptions overlapped. The consensus was that the other side of the veil is not a single territory, but teems with a variety of realms, some relatively hellish and some heavenly. Its names are many: dreamtime, fourth dimension, underworld, astral plane, collective unconscious, afterdeath state, eternity, bardo, and Hades -- to name a few.
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There was another issue on which all the explorers agreed: Events in those "invisible" realms are the root cause of everything that happens here. Shamans visit the spirit world to cure their sick patients because the origins of illness lie there. For Qabalists, the visible Earth is a tiny outcropping at the end of a long chain of creation that originates at a point that is both inconceivably far away and yet right here right now. Even modern psychotherapists believe in a materialistic version of the ancient idea: that how we behave today is shaped by events that happened in a distant time and place.
As I researched the testimonials about the treasure land, I registered the fact that dreams and drugs were not the only points of entry. Meditation could give access, as could specialized forms of drumming and chanting and singing and dancing. The tantric tradition taught that certain kinds of sexual communion can lead there. As does, of course, physical death.
I wanted to try all those other doors except the last one. Pot, hashish, and LSD were very good to me (never a single bad trip), but their revelations were too hard to hold on to. As I came down from a psychedelic high, I could barely translate the truths about the fourth dimension into a usable form back in normal waking awareness. At least in my work with dreams I had seen a steady growth of both my unconscious mind's ability to generate meaningful stories and my conscious mind's skill at interpreting them. But my progress was sketchy in the work of retrieving booty from the exotic places where drugs took me.
The problem was that unlike the other techniques on the list, psychedelics bypassed my willpower. Their chemical battering ram simply smashed through the doors of perception. No adroitness or craft was involved on my part. One of my meditation teachers referred to drug use, no matter how responsible, as "storming the kingdom of heaven through violence."
Gradually, then, I ended my relationship with the illegal magic. Instead I affirmed my desire to build mastery through hard work. Dream interpretation, meditation, and tantric exploration became the cornerstones of my practice. In time, I learned to slip into the suburbs of the mysterium via song and dance as well.
I must confess, though, that my plans did not immediately bear the fruit I hoped they would. Even my most ecstatic lucid dreams and illuminated meditations did not bring me to dwell on the other side of the veil with the same heart-melting vividness once provided by psychedelics. Even my deepest tantric lovemaking and music-induced trances failed to provide the same boost.
But then into my life came a consolation: the 19th-century artist and visionary William Blake. My encounter with his work alerted me to the fact that there is yet another name for the fourth dimension -- a name that also describes a common, everyday human faculty that most of us take for granted.
Here's the special message Blake seemed to have written just for me in A Vision of the Last Judgment:
This world of Imagination is the world of Eternity; it is the divine bosom into which we shall go after the death of the Vegetated body. This World of Imagination is Infinite and Eternal, whereas the world of Generation, or Vegetation, is Finite and Temporal. There exists in that Eternal World the Permanent Realities of Every Thing which we see reflected in this Vegetable Glass of Nature. All Things are comprehended in their Eternal Forms in the divine body of the Saviour, the True Vine of Eternity, the Human Imagination.
American Dream wrote: John Lennon describes his first acid trip
There was, however, another, equally intriguing side of Mike Jeffrey: He frequently hinted that he had powerful underworld connections.
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Hendrix must have seen something that made him desperately want out of his management contract with Jeffrey.
Elvis wrote:There was, however, another, equally intriguing side of Mike Jeffrey: He frequently hinted that he had powerful underworld connections.
...
Hendrix must have seen something that made him desperately want out of his management contract with Jeffrey.
To add to & confirm this a bit, an anecdote:
Around 1980 a musician friend who knew and had toured with Hendrix shortly before Jimi's death, told me he firmly believed Hendrix was murdered. He said Hendrix's management was "Mafia" and was ripping him off. According to my friend, they'd been giving Hendrix something like $1000 a week for party money. This kept Hendrix happy, for a while. Then he began to 'wake up' a little and realized he was being taken.
The last time my friend saw Hendrix was shortly before his death, following the last tour. Hendrix was in good spirits and excited about the future, says my friend, and was planning to dump his management, sue the hell out of them, go in some new musical directions and start his own record label.
Very shortly after that, Hendrix was dead.
My friend's own band had been ripped off by their manager, who basically just stole all their money (quite a bit, from records and touring) and was slippery enough to get away with it (or at least the lawyer they hired told them it was useless to go after the guy). I have no reason to doubt any of what my friend told me. All told, it was enough for him to quit the music business. Fucked up all around.
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