The Oz Mix

Life Extension - The Master Key

2012-03-02T13:54:00.008-08:00

Continuing our discussion about surviving death ... we have formulated two axioms, so far:

1. Some part of us can survive death. We call that part a bardo voyager.

2. Work on self helps the death-survivable bardo voyager grow stronger.

Our third axiom will go something along the lines of how the Tibetans perceive the initial transition of the bardo voyager from the human biological contraption they've been renting out for this lifetime. They say you go into an intense space called the Clear Light, a space very difficult to maintain consciousness in. The common tendency seems to result in blacking out after a very short time and getting bounced out of it. Part of bardo training consists of learning to tolerate and stay in this space longer by simulating it before death.

English artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare gives a resonant description in his book, The Focus of Life (p. 36):

Death is named the great unknown. Assuredly, death is the great chance. An adventure in will, that translates into body. What happens after death? Will it be more surprising than this world? Could I say? My experience may not be the commonplace . . . Without doubt all will experience the 'rushing winds' that blow from within, the body beyond perspective, into cosmic dust, - till consciousness again develops.

I just received a copy of The Writings of Austin Osman Spare yesterday. He is a bit of a new discovery for me though I've long considered him quite knowledgeable in affairs of the bardo from reading of his methods in the works of Kenneth Grant. Along with that book came a copy of Last Words by William S. Burroughs which consist of the transcripts of his final journals.

The last word in Last Words echoes the last words of both Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary. These last words all give the Master Key for surviving death. It can also be found in the ecstatic poetry of Sufi mystics, Finnegans Wake, Illuminatus!, Schrodinger's Cat, Against the Day, some Woody Allen films, The Beatles, John Coltrane, Crowley, the popcorn exercise, the Starship Enterprise, and countless other places. Wake up and smell the roses burning.

Why would Leary and Wilson freeze their entropic carcasses if they each apparently had the Master Key for surviving ecstatically, that is to say, without a body?

Woody Allen, whose main concern about the afterlife at one time was how far it was from Midtown, confronts death a couple of times accidentally with the character he plays in Hannah and Her Sisters. It wakes him up a bit and leads to an amusing search for meaning and God before discovering the Master Key. It's the same key for death that Hemingway speaks of in Allen's recent Midnight in Paris film, reviewed here. Fans of Robert Anton Wilson's Maybe Logic might especially appreciate how Allen agnostically resolves the God issue in Hannah...

This Master Key seems like something you can learn about in a very short time but spend a lifetime learning how to apply. This Master Key, willing it into existence and functionality, represents our fourth axiom for surviving death

Bardo training includes getting familiar with the conditions, feelings, and sensations of death before dying. This can be done in a variety of ways and we'll cover some of those ways in the course of this examination. It does NOT include any kind of life threatening risk taking to get closer to death.

One technique recommended across the board in a variety of different systems and teachings aims to constantly remember that death is always only one heartbeat away. Don Juan says that Death is always just over your left shoulder, if you turn around fast enough you can see it. Remembrance of death becomes a shamanic aid because, personal observation will show, that all kinds of spiritual energies get activated and accelerated - that's the best way I have of putting it right now - around death. When someone dies, the Star that they are shines forth and radiates powerful spiritual energies, a cyclone of energy especially felt by their loved ones ... and not always easy to handle.

Robert Anton Wilson places a quite vivid reminder of death in his play Wilhelm Reich in Hell. He has a computer monitoring the growth of nuclear arms and emitting an ear-splitting whistling sound every time the firepower goes up equivalent to the bomb at Hiroshima. At the beginning of the play it goes off every few lines ... very chilling. Here's an excerpt to show what kind of resistance the Master Key works against:

"SADE: And what is the truth Freud dared not speak?

REICH:Everybody knows it by now. Look at the crime news on TV --

Computer whistles again.

REICH:or go into the emergency clinics and talk to the rape victims. Talk to the battered wives and the abused children. Our whole species is mad, emotionally plagued. We have been mad so long that every attempt to break out of the Trap just unleashes unconscious rage and increases the violence.

Computer whistles again.

REICH:We all know we're in the Trap, but nobody knows how to get out of it. We attack each other thinking that's the way out.

SADE: What? That is the truth Freud dared not speak? I thought he said all that in Civilization and its Discontents.

REICH:He would not say there was a way out of the Trap -- one way only --

SADE: Your way, of course.

REICH:The way I discovered, gradually, after many mistakes.

SADE: Which is?

REICH:Work on the breathing and the muscle tensions. And tell people frankly that there is no metaphysical Good and Evil in the human world any more than there is in the animal world or the chemical world or the physical world of gravity and mass."

I would add to that, deep relaxation. The final posture we did in every yoga class was called the Corpse pose and just consisted of laying on the ground with arms and legs comfortablely placed and deeply relaxing every muscle. It can become a great way to practice dying if one can arrest and slow down the headbrain chatter. Floatation tanks are also great places to relax deeply and practice death.

Life Extension - Surviving Death

2012-02-26T13:00:00.014-08:00

Three general categories will be covered in this subject over the course of a few posts:

Music
Magick
Teachings inspired by the Bardo Thodol; what I call Bardo training.

As previously mentioned, I've been researching the area of Death for about 30 years now. It began with the discovery in "Jung's Collected Works" that the death/rebirth archetype made an excellent blueprint for reprogramming the brain and nervous system. Intelligence increase seems a side effect from this strategy. The Death archetype got further imprinted into this impressionable young mindset from reading "High Priest," Timothy Leary's classic, biographical, journalistic account of brain change both personal and historical. The book that really drove home the effectiveness of this technique is one I might have mentioned once or twice before, Cosmic Trigger Vol. I.

My researches naturally lead to the science of liberation through sound, aka the Bardo Thodol; working with Death in its literal sense.

Surviving death relies upon the axiom that some aspect of our individuality has the capability, or potential for developing the capability to live beyond the death of the body and brain. You don't have to "know" for sure, or have complete faith to at least stay open to the possibility that it could happen. Complete denial of this kind of life extension would likely dampen efforts at bardo training. The opposite, complete, unquestioning belief in the form of blind faith in an afterlife of some kind would appear equally a hindrance - why bother to do anything about death if what's going to happen is a given?

It appears completely a matter of personal experience as to how one views the possibility of surviving death. Yes, you can point to much convincing evidence that indicates crossover contact - Aldous Huxley giving a convincing sign to his wife Laura after he died is the classic example given in Cosmic Trigger.

We have countless accounts of Near Death Experiences from people who have apparently witnessed some form of life after death.

Cultures around the world, independently of one another, have developed myth based technologies, Books of the Dead, for helping the bardo voyager survive and respond to the transition of death. These include the Tibetan, Egyptian, Mayan, Aztec, and Hopi Indian. The Tibetan Book of the Dead translates to English as 'Liberation by Hearing'. The Egyptian Book of the Dead is based on a body of ancient texts that collectively translates as 'Manifestation in the Light' or 'Coming Forth By Day. '

In recent times we see Burroughs' version of the Egyptian death technology in his book The Western Lands which morphed into musical form on Seven Souls by Material, envisioned and produced by Bill Laswell. Whether he knew it or not, Douglass Adams wrote a very educational science fiction Book of the Dead called The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Quite a bit of valuable bardo training data in that one. By far, the most practical work for jumping into it is the American Book of the Dead by E.J. Gold. It's basically the Bardo Thodol put into an American cultural context. It also contains simple, precise instructions for how to begin and how to do it. I also consider Finnegans Wake by Gentleman Jim Joyce and Against the Day by St. Thomas Pynchon as Books of the Dead.

Yes, objections can be made to all the non-scientifically vetted evidence above - it's superstitious nonsense, fantasy, hallucinations near death etc. That's why I say personal experience determines the key factor in how one sees this.

The most easily obtainable personal evidence, in my experience, can be had by doing readings for people immediately after they've left their body or as close to the moment of death as possible. Learning to contact and unmistakeably feeling that contact with a being whose body just died will provide this kind of evidence.

I found it interesting and telling that Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary, both proponents of any and every kind of life extension, turned down the cryogenics option - having their brain and/or body frozen with the hope of getting it reanimated at a later date when issues of mortality had been extended or resolved.

Bardo training proves to be very useful even if it turns out that nothing survives death, that no afterlife exists. Stanislav Grof put it well in his "Books of the Dead - Manuals for Living and Dying:"

The experiential practice of dying, or 'dying before dying,' has two important consequences. It liberates the individual from fear of death and changes his or her attitude toward dying, and so prepares him or her for the experiences at the time of biological demise, and by eliminating the fear of death, it transforms the individual's way of being in the world. For this reason, there is no fundamental difference for the preparation of death by exploration of dying, on the one hand, and spiritual practice leading to enlightenment, on the other. This is the reason why the ancient books of the dead could be used in both situations.

Gurdjieff, in In Search of the Miraculous, talks about a "crystalization, " a fusion of a person's inner qualities that can gain a certain independence from external influence:

If there is anything in a man able to resist external influences, then this very thing itself may be able to resist the death of the physical body.

In this way he relates self-development with surviving death. That quote is from p. 31; on the next page he talks about how to go about getting this crystallization to happen. It's very relevant to this discussion if you have that book available. One of Gurdjieff's heresies taught that humans don't automatically possess a soul, only the potential for making one.

Monty Python also addressed this issue in the Meaning of Life:

Our second axiom: Inner growth makes it possible to form something that can survive death.

Erin & The Project S x SW Time Change

2012-02-25T11:19:00.001-08:00

Some late breaking news related to the previous post on this blog:

"On another note...we just got a change in our time slot for the unofficial SXSW showcase. We are now playing earlier at 4pm. It's still the same day, March 17th, but of course this would change right after it was announced in your blog and in our bulk email. We aren't paying to play for this showcase, so that explains the last minute feeling of it all. The promoter says that this new time slot will not change, so we're happy to hear that, cuz we've got a lot of friends out in Austin and don't want to confuse people as little as possible."

Birthday - Erin and The Project

2012-02-22T14:59:00.011-08:00

We interrupt the S.M.I.²L.E. transmission to bring you a message from our sponsors, another S.M.I.²L.E. transmission:

Hot off the press, published for the first time ever in our Solar System, is the latest worldwide musical pantacle from Erin and the Project, Birthday. Yesterday was the album's official release timed to coincide with the birth of the New Moon, and also with the start of Mardi Gras carnivals in New Orleans, Rio de Janerio, Quebec City, Mazatlan, Port of Spain (Trinidad) and probably a few other places too.

It's interesting to me when artists plan their release using magical principles because it indicates some awareness of the potent magical vehicle they've created. Magic in it's most basic, common sense definition - something that can cause real change to occur.

From their press release:

"First off, we just released our new album, "Birthday", and it is currently available on iTunes!! Follow the link below to preview and purchase the album.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/birthday/id502538113

As many of you know, we had the great honor of working with producer/engineer/mixer, Oz Fritz (Grammy Award winner: Tom Waits "Mule Variations"), on this album. The album features guitar and bass tracks by Jon Axtell (Psychofunkapus, Notorious, etc.), adding an entirely new psychedelic dimension to the solid drums, keys and vocals that you get at one of our live duo performances. We are very excited to be able to bring our new sounds to all of you listening out there!

Next on the list: We recently booked an unofficial showcase during the South By South West 2012 music festival in Austin TX!! On Saturday, March 17th @ 9:30pm, we'll be opening for Love Hate Affair at Stacks Bar located at 208 W. 4th Street!

Also, our good friends from House Band Wines (www.housebandwines.com/) are
participating in Sideways Media's "Manic Fest Destiny" FREE Day Party at SXSW on March 15th @ Rusty's on 405 E. 7th Street, and they will be supplying guests with thousands of their free music download drop cards featuring songs by multiple artists, including a track from Erin & The Project!"

* * * * * *

As music industry insiders are aware of, the South by South West festival in Austin represents a prestigious showcase for up and coming artists, as well as presenting what's perceived as the cutting edge from more seasoned performers. It seemed quite serendipitous how the booking came about. I'm not quite sure how the booking agent first heard of Erin and the Project; he was supposed to catch their performance in San Diego but something happened and he couldn't make it. So they sent him the Birthday single which had just gone out as a preview to the Birthday EP. The agent "got it" and booked them immediately.

The core members of Erin and the Project consist of the dyadic cyclone of Paul Ezekiel and Lindsay Erin. Paul plays drums and percussion. Now, they are full time musicians but in the past, Paul was a sound engineer, former studio owner, and general contractor. He likes to build things ... out of wood, out of sound, and out of more rarefied materials. Lindsay was a student of Maestro Ali Akbar Khan ( whom I mentioned here re time dilation effects) and attended his music college. I can tell that they were close by the reverence she has for him. Lindsay is an amazing singer with a powerful soaring voice and a passionate delivery though she's also trained and adept with classical Indian vocal phrasings - that probably has a technical name but I don't know what it is. She also plays the keys.

I was as honored that they chose me to work with as they were to work with me. Daniel Lanois and others had expressed interest in working with their music, so I felt fortunate to end up with the gig. Lindsay and Paul said they got the idea to look me up when playing in Grass Valley, an audience member shouted out in-between songs, "you should record with Oz Fritz." Well, ok, now I'll confess, it was actually me in a disguise who gave that unsubliminal suggestion. You gotta get your work somehow, right? It worked didn't it?? So, I'll try it again, why not?? Birthdays are always good for making wishes: Attention, Bob Dylan, you should record with Oz Fritz.

Lindsay and Paul have the distinction of being only the second ones I'm personally aware of who have actually taken up my suggestion and dived in to the rabbit hole of Cosmic Trigger Vol. I. I've recommended it to dozens. That might hint at the archetypal nature and point of contact their music has with the deeper layers of the collected consciousness. They both appear young so I feel free to use a Jungian descriptor. What that means is that they have the breadth and depth of background in the spiritual arts to effectively transmit ecstatic, exalted, solve et coagula moods and images through their music. Anyone who appreciates Cosmic Trigger will likely key in to their music and vice versa also.

The manifestation of Birthday seemed very fortuitous. My schedule turned insanely busy last fall but somehow we found 4 days to record it onto a Pro Tools rig I brought and set up in their living room. This turned into Bear River Studios. Guitar ace Jon Axtell had a couple of days free to drive in from the Bay area and track various shades and hues of electric, acoustic, slide, synthesized, and distorted acoustic feedback guitars as well as bass. His musical instincts were spot on. He had an obvious chemistry with "the Project" evidenced by how his largely improvised parts flesh out the sound.

I will give a completely objective, unbiased review of the music at a sooner rather than later date. For now, the music is quite able to speak for itself.

Enjoy!

Life Extension extended

2012-02-20T11:15:00.012-08:00

We finished our last episode with the startling assertion that raising consciousness can potentially dilate our subjective experience of time passage. I'm not alone with this suggestion.

Timothy Leary begins his autohagiography, Flashbacks, with Chapter 1. Search for the Key. At the top of the page, above the chapter title, a short biographical note on Dante Alighieri, author of the The Divine Comedy appears. He concludes this note with:

His [ie Dante's] later works included The New Life, a treatise on love, the Convivia; a dissertation in support of humanistic science; and De Monarchia, an eloquent defense on secular as opposed to papal power.

The story begins in a very dark place with Leary entering his own personal Inferno.
Flashforward to the Hag's conclusion and he's obviously a completely different person, talking about the future:

Survival in the future will be based on intelligence increase: expanding the spectrum of information we receive, improving our models for analyzing these facts, and developing more powerful modes of transmitting up-dated signals to others.

I make this prediction with confidence and serenity: the Young Ones are ready to Turn On the higher circuits of their brains, Tune In to the awesome strength of their numbers, and Take Charge of evolution.

It's about time.

In his bio on Dr. Tim, John Higgs suggests that his closing words, It's about time, seems "a small coded message, not aimed at casual readers ..." Higgs also points out that at one time Leary named the book about his jailbreak escape, It's About Time, eventually published as Confessions of a Hope Fiend. Could time be the key that Leary searched for and found?

Time appears important to whatever Intelligence contacted Robert Anton Wilson in the early '70's.. As he writes in Cosmic Trigger I (p.91):

The entity or entities contacted by me during July 1973--October 1974 had most of the characteristics of the "beings of light" described by persons who have been resuscitated after what is called near-death experience....

...Christians generally describe the "being of light" as Jesus. Jews as "an angel," and non-believers agnostically say it is luminous, telepathic, and intensely loving. The author found it to possess all of these qualities, and also a damned peculiar sense of humor ... But the entity always intently urged that I should try to understand time better.

on p. 179 he mentions an experience of time dilation:

I had a classic experience of being taken into fairyland, undergoing the usual time-warps characteristic of fairy-lore -- I thought I was "over there" for several hours, but it all happened in a few minutes of the consensus-time of the witches with whom I was working.
... Later, I found the whole experience entered as a dream in my diary, two weeks before it occurred. And, of course, all the time I was over there in the Cosmic Fun House, they kept trying to tell me something unintelligible about time."

I had a similar experience with respect to a precognitive dream. In 1993, a friend of mine, Nancy Burns, told me of a dream she had about me in a vehicle that drove from the right side, English style. She gave a clear description of the vehicle and the scene and asked if it was familiar to me. I didn't recognize anything from her dream, it didn't sound like any of the recording trips I'd been on.

In January of 2001 I finished a session in Miami and immediately boarded a plane for Mumbai, India. Had an all night layover in Mumbai spent eating and taking in the art and ambience of a luxury hotel before catching a morning flight to Bangalore. A driver met me at the gate in Bangalore. I was exhausted, hadn't slept since Miami but when I got into the backseat of his van, I had a very strong deja vu. Then I realized that this scenario perfectly fit the description of Nancy's dream. She had apparently "seen" it 8 years before I experienced it.

The final mention of time in the Cosmic Trigger I occurs in the Egyptian fable which begins Part 3, Trigger (p. 221). It concerns the story of the resurrection of Osiris by Isis after he was murdered by our old friend, Set:

... Set dismembered the body of Osiris and scattered the pieces up and down the Nile River.

When Isis learned what had been done, she called upon Thoth, the god of Eternity, to stop the flow of Time, so that she could find all the parts of Osiris before the sun set. And Thoth stopped the wings of time, and the universe stood still, and Isis went forth weeping and griefstricken to hunt one by one for the pieces of the dead Lord Osiris. And when she had found all of them, she performed the Black Rite, and eternity gave birth to Time again, and Osiris was alive.

This story suggests that the passage of time stops at death but that the awareness of the deceased can survive this eternal moment and take rebirth. Relativity theory tells us that the passage of time will stop for anything traveling at the speed of light. The Tibetan Book of the Dead talks about the Clear Light as the first chamber the voyager goes through after death. It seems very difficult to hang out in that space without getting overwhelmed and blacking out. A common report from people who have had near-death experiences describes moving into an intense light. Could these describe consciousness accelerating to the speed of light at the moment of death thus causing time to stop?

Could the flashes or chambers of light that mystics experience in their deeper meditations arise from the acceleration of their conscious awareness until it reaches the speed of light? The flashes might be from only momentarily reaching that velocity. The sensation of awareness seeming to pick up speed and go much faster in deeper states appears familiar to shamanic explorers. The acceleration of consciousness would account for the effects of time dilation in accordance with Relativity.

This acceleration of consciousness explains why Crowley, Gurdjieff, and others emphasized concentration and attention exercises. High attention becomes a necessity for entering certain rarefied chambers seemingly invisible until a higher velocity of consciousness blooms forth. Lack of ability, or strength to focus and concentrate attention will simply keep one out of those chambers for the most part. I say for the most part because, from time to time, a practicing voyager will gain admission to rarefied chambers with insufficient attention. Perhaps by having the direct experience of how weak your attention works in the macrodimensions will enough motivation be gained to make it much stronger.

Crowley, in his textbook Magick Book 4 (p.31 Bluebrick first edition) talks about an experience called dhyana, a result of a particular yoga practice:

One of the simplest forms of dhyana may be called "the Sun." The sun is seen (as it were) by itself, not by an observer; and although the physical eye can not behold the sun, one is compelled to make the statement that this "Sun" is far more brilliant than the sun of nature. The whole thing takes place on a higher level.

Also the conditions of thought, time and space are abolished. It is impossible to explain what this really means: only experience can furnish you with apprehension.

The emphasis is Crowley's in the book .... well, I might have helped a little :)

He repeats the statement a few pages later (p. 38):

Dhyana resembles samadhi in many respects. There is a union of the ego and non-ego, and a loss of the sense of time, space and causality. Duality in any form is abolished.

As Crowley says, and I repeat, only experience will furnish you with apprehension.

I'm going to keep these posts on the shorter side because we have much to digest. I say we because some of this sounds new to me also, at least in the context of how it appears here.
Another friend, Jerry Berman, once advised me to pay attention to what I was saying. Not in the sense of carefully choosing words but listening to what you yourself say when communicating. Take it in as you give it out. He pointed out a phenomenon where lecturers can be giving incredible talks, the information just flows right through them, yet they themselves don't listen as they deliver it.

Jerry acquired expert status in the field of ancient Egyptian antiquities from assembling a museum in Los Angeles. Going with him to the Egyptian wing at New York's Metropolitan Museum increased my ancient Egyptian information exponentially. He can, and does, talk for hours on the subject. One time I was in London working with the band Blur with Bill Laswell on bonus songs for a Greatest Hits package. We had an unexpected day off, so I went to the British Museum. I was walking around the museum recording the ambient acoustics of the different rooms onto a portable DAT when I heard a familiar voice as I approached the Egyptian section. There stood Jerry lecturing away; I suddenly felt right at home. He didn't even seem that surprised to see me ... like if you're giving an impromptu talk on ancient Egypt, seeing Oz walking around recording the ambience seems a totally normal thing!

And now for something completely [not] different:

Some television producers in the '60's apparently time traveled to the '80's and developed a show based on Flashback's last words:

Stay tuned for more on Life Extension...

Life Extension

2012-02-15T19:50:00.000-08:00

The two big topics that concern Life Extension: Time and Death

Time appears as the enemy- connected to entropy, the wearing down of life and growth, the complete opposite of Life Extension. Entropy, related to Newton's Second Law of Thermodynamics, basically states that energy in any closed system tends to run down.

Gurdjieff called Time the "Merciless Heropass". He regarded it as a cosmic problem which "Our Endlessness" solved by creating the material universe. In his view, the problem of life extension reaches far beyond our biological containers.

In Gurdjieff, Making A New World, J.G. Bennett maintains that Gurdjieff's ideas could all get traced back to his centrum of gravity question: " What is the sense and significance in general of life on the earth, and in particular of human life?" This may seem like straying far afield from the topic of life extension yet I feel if one can gain a deep sense of the value of life through realizing a purpose or purposes to it; life extension will seem a necessity, and as a result of that driving necessity, the problems facing it will get solved. To be blunt about it, you will tend to live longer if you have something to live for, something(s) you have to live for. A teleological direction that requires life extension to meaningfully proceed will eventually solve the problems of time and death because it has to.

Buckminster Fuller's answer to Gurdjieff's question appears in an essay he wrote near the end of his life called Guinea Pig B:

For exploratory purposes we will now tentatively adopt my "working assumption," later described in detail, that humans are present on Spaceship Earth only because they have an ultimately-to-become-operative, critical function to perform in Universe -- a function of which humanity, in general, is as yet almost unaware. . . .

We will now also assume that this biosphere's omni-controlled environment can successfully nurture, grow, and develop such an abundance of ecological life support as to be able to accommodate the only by shockingly wasteful trial and error education of humans in preparation for their ultimately-to-be-employed-and-maintained semi-divine functioning in Universe, as local Universe information harvesters and local Universe problem solvers in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative scenario Universe, provided, however, that, if after the billions of years of their development, those humans living right now can and do pass their final exam for graduation into this semi-divine functioning.

Living and functioning past our normal life-span would qualify as semi-divine functioning. My thanks to C.J. Fearnly's blog for exposing this essay to me.

Gurdjieff shared Fuller's view that humans had a role to play in "cosmic maintenance." Interestingly, Gurdjieff and Fuller met several times, in the 1920s, at a popular bar in Greenwhich Village on 8th street just a few doors down from where Jimi Hendrix built his recording studio, Electric Lady, in the '60's. Fuller decided he didn't want to be a guru like Gurdjieff because he didn't want the dead weight of followers.

I once arrived early for a Robert Anton Wilson lecture. He showed up early also and said to the dozen or so of us, "alright, now's your chance. Ask me anything you want to, anything at all." No one else spoke up so I asked him my version of Gurdjieff's question, " what is the purpose of human life on earth?" Wilson replied, " to be the eyes and ears of God." His answer kind of floored me, to say the least.

The teleologic argument for life extension gets based on the formula:

Form follows function.

This phrase, coined by an American architect Louis Sullivan in 1896 described his building philosophy. He developed the shape of the steel skyscraper, and served as a mentor to a young Frank Lloyd Wright who also adopted this formula. I like the poem he wrote:

It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic,
Of all things physical and metaphysical,
Of all things human and all things super-human,
Of all true manifestations of the head,
Of the heart, of the soul,
That the life is recognizable in its expression,
That form ever follows function. This is the law

So if you find a function that requires extending life then your form will follow.
This "law" seems isomorphic (ie same organic shape) with Crowley's "law."

As we proceed in this essay, I will show how much progress has already been made in the direction of going out of time and into space, and in the science of bardo training - preparing conscious awareness for surviving the onslaught intensity and energy release of biological death. I will also show how, basically, Bardo Training = Life Extension. Not necessarily living longer, but extending life by waking up and experiencing more of it. Bardo training eventually leads to time dilation. You get more life by going out of time.

Bardo training likely does extend physical life because it advocates and highly recommends intimate awareness and personal application of what Leary called the 14th stage in his 8 circuit model. Self-directed hedonic engineering, which concerns learning the bio-chemical nature of your human machine for maximum energy efficiency. Learning nutrition, what foods work for you, which ones slow you down; practicing some kind of yoga or maritial art; sensing and controlling the subtler energies of the nervous system etc. etc. In other words, taking a health-conscious, knowledgeable and respectful approach to maintaining the temple of the human body, emotions and intellect seems to help with the production of vital life energy. There's much more to it than I'm mentioning here ... you get the idea.

The human biological container appears programmed for obsolescence. To attempt to live longer, in whatever fashion, we again appear as going against nature. We, again, struggle with Set - both poetically as the Egyptian God symbolizing our nature, and also perhaps psychologically with a set of assumptions programmed and conditioned into us to consider death as some kind of finality we get resigned to with no hope or recourse of action. Break that set, why don'tcha?

A key to life extension turns up on page 194 in Leary's, The Game of Life 1993 New Falcon edition. Titled, Einstein's Relativity Applied To Mind and Matter, he gives it all away ( don't take my word for it) in this anecdote about Einstein:

The thought that Einstein had in his teens was this: "What would the world look like if I rode on a beam of light? Suppose this tram were moving away from that clock on the very beam with which we see what the clock says. Then, of course, the clock would be frozen. I, the tram, this box riding on the beam of light would be fixed in time. Time would have a stop . . . in keeping up with the speed of light I have cut myself off from the passage of time."

To get the full effect of this 'key" one really should get the book and see this page because it also has a photograph of an Egyptian temple carving of Akhenaton. Actually, here it is online:

Akhenaton, founder of
the Star-cult of Egypt,
learns how to indulge in
solar-energy.

- how it reads in The Game of Life.

Another way to state the S.M.I.²L.E. formula: Time tends to dilate as one begins to go ahead with intelligence increase and space exploration.

We cannot put our bodies on a vehicle traveling at the speed of light but Leary suggests that conscious awareness can accelerate and even reach the speed of light and he gives a formula for how to do this. Again, don't take my word for this, you won't ever know or accept the possibility until direct experience occurs. I know this sounds farfetched to most, but it only seems slightly more farfetched than the notion of extending the human life-span 200, 300 years or more which is what they were talking about and projecting when S.M.I.²L.E. first hit the airwaves.

I'm not up on the latest longevity science and don't intend to research it for this essay. I'll leave that to my esteemed colleague Dr. Michael Johnson and others. I'm approaching life extension from the point of view of experiencing it more directly, intensely, wakefully - extending it experientially within the alloted biological time given. Activating higher brain circuits extends life by dilating time. I have experienced this myself, have witnessed dramatic instances of it more than once, and have heard a few reliable and convincing eye-witness accounts.

Also would like to make it very clear that I'm am absolutely not talking about, alluding to, or suggesting using drugs of any kind in any way. Timothy Leary's name and reputation often incurs a reflexive association with LSD advocacy due to a thick fog of media gloss still looming over his name in repressive, conservative circles, yet he clearly had moved on in later life. LSD can act like an atomic explosion on the nervous system and this analogy holds true with potentially lethal radioactive fallout.

I can tell you right now how to have an experience that feels psychedelic without taking any drugs. It's called the presence exercise and requires either a partner or a mirror. You sit facing each other about 3-4 feet apart. Relax each of your body parts starting with the toes, then the feet, etc. working your way up. You don't need to spend too much time with this. Then drop the facial mask. Look at the other person or into the mirror and diffuse your vision. This means, without moving the eyes, looking straight ahead, define your full visual range then try to see everything in that field without focusing on any one thing keeping your vision diffused the whole time. Try this for at least 15 minutes to start. A variation on this starts the same way but when concentration appears to get broken by someone, their partner will say, "break, what happened?" The person will say something like, "I thought something funny and smiled," or whatever it was. Any response gets accepted and the exercise resumes. Break if anyone feels at all uncomfortable or it gets too heavy. This is also called a "being-contact" exercise - a great way to get past social games to know someone on a deeper level. Also, see what it does with your sense of time.

To Be Continued . . .

Space Migration Number B

2012-02-08T17:20:00.001-08:00

Tom Jackson over at RAW Illuminations posted an old essay by Robert Anton Wilson circa 1977 relevant to the recent topic here: S.M.I.²L.E.

I hadn't seen this before, and a few things stood out for me. Didn't know Mark Train wrote an essay called Man, A Machine. First heard this idea from Ouspensky via Gurdjieff. Currently, the most complete investigation and practical application of this model in book form exists as The Human Biological Machine as as Transformational Apparatus by E.J. Gold. Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson works in similar fashion but makes less overt reference to the model 'Man as machine.' However, he makes it quite clear in I Robot, the title of the essay.

The last few sentences invokes I.²:

When the robot awakens and becomes a self-programmer, it can easily have all the goals promised by the alchemists: The Stone of the Wise, the Medicine of Metals, True Wisdom and perfect Happiness. All of those traditional terms are metaphors for the awakening of Intelligence-squared.

Usually people are libertarians or fascists or snake-worshippers or Republicans or nudists or whatever, because of conditioned networks that fit smoothly into their imprints. People achieve Intelligence-squared, and become effective libertarians, only if they work for it.

Practicing the exercises in Prometheus Rising and/or The H.B.M will expand the mind and therefore constitutes neurological space migration. Finding ways to break free and go beyond conditioned belief systems, getting out of habitual reality tunnels, even just temporarily, inevitably results in space migration. We bias Here to Go, as Burroughs, Gysin, Crowley, and Groucho cheer us on with this slogan. Changing out of a reality tunnel suit if only for a casual stroll down Alternity Way also goes by the modern psychological term "breaking set." Christopher Hyatt (not his "real" name) describes breaking set very clearly in an Introduction to The Eye in the Triangle by Israel Regardie. To see examples of breaking set in action, watch any of the classic Marx Brothers films. The Brothers Marx constantly messed with and agitated reality tunnels in playful, humorous, non-violent, and non-hateful ways.

"By a commodius vicus of recirculation" breaking set recalls the Egyptian deity Set whom I called the cousin and enemy of Horus last post. Since then, I found a poem by Crowley in his collection, The Winged Beetle called The Twins. It portrays Set slightly differently, fleshes out the metaphor more. Started reading it because the first stanza grabbed my attention:

Have pity ! show no pity !
Those eyes that send such shivers
Into my brain and spine : oh let them
Flame like the ancient city
Swallowed up by the sulphurous rivers
When men let angels fret them !

It recalled the theme of confronting, overcoming, transforming obstacles or challenges. The protagonist of the poem describes the nature of the antagonist, their own nature and the intensity of their battle. In the fifth stanza their identities get revealed:

Look! in the polished granite,
Black as thy cartouche is with sins,
I read the searing sentence
That blasts the eyes that scan it :
"HOOR and SET be TWINS."
A fico for repentance !

The shock that your mortal enemy unveils as a different kind of you, your twin. Hoor represents another name for Horus. They get reborn in the tenth stanza after using the Death formula in the ninth:

Wherefore I solemnly affirm
This twofold Oneness at the term.
Asar on Asi did beget
Horus twin brother unto Set.
Now Set and Horus kiss, to call
The Soul of the Unnatural
Forth from the dusk ; then nature slain
Lets the Beyond be born again.

This poem has a dedication to Austin Osman Spare ironically Crowley's oppositely charged twin of sorts in some occult circles. Phil Baker in his Spare biography suggests this could read as an encoded love letter. Perhaps on a base level this holds true, but it overlooks the inner alchemical symbolism that Set = the individual's natural tendencies and habits. In this scenario, the reception, integration, and crystallization of expanded consciousness goes against nature. It doesn't seem natural to wake up the robot. The H.B.M. talks about a defense mechanism to the waking state.

In terms of Leary's 8 circuit model the first four "terrestrial" circuits take shape, through imprinting and conditioning, as a natural course of living and growing up in whatever culture and society one gets born in. The four "extra-terrestrial" circuits usually remain below conscious awareness. For the potential meta-programmer getting to know hirself, resistance gets encountered as soon as they attempt to permanently reimprint/recondition the terrestrial circuits or activate the post-terrestrial circuits. Some systems suggest not trying to change anything at all at first but instead observe the self and gather data. This, however, results in some change by the principle that the act of observation changes the thing observed. Reimprinting/reconditioning shows up metaphorically in Crowley's poem as the death/rebirth archetype.

A highly recommended film that has as one of its themes - higher consciousness learning to get along with ordinary conscious - is Beetlejuice. They won't let me post this clip here but if you watch it you'll see a good personification/representation of the atavistic, chthonic type of critter that crops up when starting to shine the light of awareness into the subconscious mind. I highly recommend viewing this clip when you have an extra 5 minutes. Seeing film segments outside the context of the whole film puts them in a whole new light. This clip also demonstrates a classic 'loser script' the subconscious likes to throw at most, if not all of us from time to time when it gets annoyed from being prodded out of quiescence. Robert Anton Wilson refers to this same loser script somewhere in Prometheus Rising, if memory serves. See if you can tell what I'm talking about.

Space and Time

Relativity theorizes that the faster an object travels the slower time goes by for it in relation to other objects not going as fast. In 1971 two scientists, J.C. Hafele and R. E. Keating set out to verify this idea by putting four atomic clocks on regular commercial flights and flying them around the world twice, once traveling eastward, then going west measuring the change in time relative to another atomic clock positioned on Earth at the U.S. Navel Observatory. Their findings said: These results provide an unambiguous empirical resolution of the famous clock "paradox" with macroscopic clocks." Time sped up relative to the Earth's surface when traveling west and slowed down, or dilated when traveling east in the same direction as the planet's rotation.

Time dilation as allowed by Relativity means that someone traveling on a rocket away from Earth will age more slowly than the people they left behind. It's been suggesting that a practical application of this phenomena would allow travel to nearby stars without having to spend a whole lifetime getting there. However this requires a new, as yet undiscovered system of propulsion. The Orion Project was a serious effort at designing spacecraft with a new method of propulsion using a series of atomic bomb explosions. Concern over fallout ended it in 1963 even though these explosions were supposed to occur in Space. This interests me because in at least one instance in Against the Day Pynchon lets some dynamite explosions get used as a metaphor for migration to alternate spaces. This apparent non sequitur leap into literature makes more sense if you saw the last pos t, maybe.

The image of a rocketship speeding away from Earth into Space powered by a carefully timed series of hopefully non-radioactive explosions at a high enough velocity to enable serious time dilation recalls one of William Burroughs' instructions for humankind to "get out of time and go into space." He echoes this theme with the last words in The Western Lands ( his take on the Egyptian Book of the Dead) "Hurry up please, it's time."

Burroughs had some interesting techniques for self-metaprogramming and breaking set like this example from The Soft Machine:

Whatever you feed into the machine on subliminal level the machine will process--So we feed in 'dismantle thyself' [...] We fold in writers of all time in together and record radio programs, movie sound tracks, TV and juke box songs all the words of the world stirring around in a cement mixer and pour in the resistance message "Calling partisans of all nation--Cut word lines--Shift linguals--Free doorways--Vibrate 'tourists'--Word falling--Photo falling--Breakthrough in Grey Room."

Can literature take us out into space, that endlessly vast space and spaces outside our conditioned reality tunnels? Shaking William Burroughs hand as we met catapulted me into a heretofore unknown space and awareness which I wrote about here. If part of that dude's awareness really existed out of time in some alternate space then it had a magnetic effect because it certainly felt like a timeless moment to me.

I can recall two other instances where it distinctly felt like time became suspended a little, or stretched out. One happened the first time I ever saw Robert Anton Wilson lecture. It was at the Open Center in New York sometime in the late '80's; Peter Lamborn Wilson introduced him. Seemed like RAW took us all on a free form journey through cutting edge ideas of brain-change technology, conspiracies, zen jokes, zen riddles, and witty commentary on current events. To be honest, I don't remember exactly what he talked about, only that I got a very strong contact high. He took a break about 90 minutes in but it felt like I'd been there forever and could have stayed forever. I told my ex-wife as we got into this large elevator, that it felt like time dilated, which I'm sure is the first time I said those words aloud, not realizing that RAW was on the other side of this freight elevator. I glanced over at him to see him looking intently at me; he had overheard what I said.

The other time I'll mention was at a Ravi Shankar concert at Carnegie Hall with his classic band of Ali Akbar Khan on sarod and Alla Rakha on tablas. When it ended it felt like I'd only been there for 10 - 15 minutes although three hours of clock time had elapsed. The music definitely entered timeless chambers and disconnected me from consenual reality except in the most basic navigational sense. It felt like traveling through the heavens on sound and trance with Shankar the Guide steering the way. Somewhere Gurdjieff talks about the excellent acoustics of Carnegie Hall, and how they had a sacred quality unlike anywhere else in the world. He directed several dance performances there. Good acoustics + top of the world music = a non-chemical pyschotropic effect of great magnitude - seems how it works for me.

A less artistic, more scientific and sobering examination of the idea of going out of time into space gets told by Franklin Merrell-Wolf in his classic PATHWAYS THROUGH TO SPACE A Personal Report of Transformations in Consciousness:

The time principle dominates in the case of consciousness manifesting in primitive forms. It is thus in the massive or numerical sense preponderant, for not only is the bulk of human life under its sway, but as well all of subhuman life. In the historic sense Spengler is right when he says that spatial comprehension comes into dominance only as a culture flowers. It is born and sustained in this world with difficulty. But, on the other hand it wields the ultimately victorious force. The cosmic integration of Sir Isaac Newton is a good illustration of the power of the spatial principle. He gave an especially strong impetus to the conceptual grasp of the universe under law. By supplying a command over a planted time mystery that had held humanity in its thralldom before his day, he effected a substantial degree of liberation for human consciousness. A considerable sector of time-mobilized nature now stands definitely conquered by man as a result of the spatial understanding introduced by Newton and other men like him.

When you have an extra 10 minutes, theoretical physicist Michio Kaku gives an excellent interview on how new data from the WMAP satellite project can quite possibly redefine our concepts about Space. He also mentions another satellite system called LISA - Laser Interferometer Space Antennae - scheduled to go up in five or six years which again could radically change our understanding of Space. LISA consists of three satellites to be positioned in a triangulated formation three million miles apart from each other.

Space Migration

2012-02-03T23:02:00.000-08:00

Dare to be naïve.

- Motto of R. Buckminster Fuller; used in many of his speeches and writings, including Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking

"Whatever is asserted (i.e. derived) of anything as a whole is linear, tautologic evidence that it is partitative of an unpredictable multiple untotality of the thing."

- Austin Osman Spare as quoted by Phil Baker in his excellent biography subtitled, The Life and Legend of London's Lost Artist. It was part of an annotation on a Christmas card he sent to a close student, Frank Letchford, that consisted of a self-portrait sketch he called, "Arabesque of a 'thing' in thought thinking."

Shortly after the last post here, Newt Gingrich talked about establishing a colony on the Moon. Then I saw an interview on Facebook with my brother-in-law ( not technically - married to a close family friend) John Matson, an editor with Scientific American, pointing out on MSNBC that, currently, the U.S. has no way to launch someone into Space, and has to rely upon the Russians to get to the Space Station.

Space Migration, in case you are just tuning in now, is the first element in the formula Robert Anton Wilson gave in the Cosmic Trigger as:

S.M.I.²L.E. = INFINITY

Meaning limitless, I guess. An open-ended, mutually interactive, interdependent and reciprocal feedback system of infinite growth and potential. Space Migration (S.M.) will make you more Intelligent (I.²) and extend your Life (L.E.). Likewise, getting smarter leads inevitably to space migration of some sort and extends life. What are you going to do when you live longer? Go places and increase intelligence ... learn about different stuff!

Back in the day, Leary and Wilson spoke of space migration strictly in terms of establishing residence off of this rock. Getting out of this, however-many-mile gravity-well that keeps us mostly stuck to the Earth's surface. The assumption then, that Higher Consciousness would flourish in Outer Space freed from the constraints of gravity. I guess it would turn into constant levity... who knows?

At the moment, it doesn't appear happening anytime soon though interest remains strong in certain quarters. Therefore, I will look at space migration in a completely different way, what could sometimes be called inner space exploration. Yet this doesn't hold strictly true because space migration also includes all the spaces you go through in your everyday life. The simultaneously apprehended awareness of both inner and outer environments fits the description P.D. Ouspensky gave for Gurdjieff's instruction to "remember yourself" in his book In Search of the Miraculous.

Inner space exploration, or at least the possibility of such exploration and mood alteration, occurs naturally, all the time. Whenever we pick up a book to read, listen to some music, surf the net etc. etc., we enter different kinds of spaces that affect us one way or another. Many of these spaces seem quite useful to enter - they can influence and inspire.

* * * * * *

Any localized environment either internal or external to the mind signifies a Chamber in bardo terminology. We travel through several localized environments every day. Waking up in the Chamber of our bedroom, breakfast in the kitchen Chamber

drive to work in the car Chamber to the Chamber where we're employed, surf a few Chambers on the web etc. etc. A Chamber includes the physical or metaphysical ( in the case of books, music etc.) space and anything in it. Most of these routine spaces seem commonplace, often barely noticed. However, each space, each localized environment, each Chamber can affect our mood, consciousness and state of well-being ranging from so subtle as to fall below conscious awareness to strongly life changing ... usually somewhere in-between. Anyone, through sufficient self-observation, can verify that environment affects consciousness in lesser or greater degrees. Sometimes quite profoundly which gets popularly described as 'a religious experience.' This explain Timothy Leary's emphasis on the importance of "setting" in his 3 guidelines for shamanic space exploration: set, setting and dosage. I want to stress that these guidelines apply with or without using drugs. Dosage doesn't necessarily refer to any ingested substance.

Gurdjieff mentions somewhere in All and Everything that the physical space made by the architecture of a building alters the consciousness of anyone who enters it. Even a resolute atheist materialist who knows absolutely that all spirituality, religion and metaphysics comprise sham and mumbo jumbo can't help but having an exalted feeling when they enter places like St. John the Divine Cathedral in New York or Notre Dame in Paris. These spaces appear intentionally designed to raise consciousness without need of religious dogma. It definitely works for me, partly, no doubt, due to the rich harmonic acoustics in those Cathedrals and what they do with the sound. Wonderfully sonorous acoustics makes music for my ears no matter what the sound source - a door closing, someone coughing. John Cage's 4'33" constantly plays in spaces and places like that for me. I've made a whole library of ambient recordings of interesting architectural and cultural buildings from all over the world.

The conscious awareness of moving from Chamber to Chamber goes by the term "voyaging" in bardo training parlance.

Bardo training ostensibly drives from the teachings of the Bardo Thodol, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, but has widespread applications in life as well. Bardo training essentially deals with navigating space, and handling, overcoming or circumventing all the obstacles that spring up along the way. One theory suggests that the obstacles and blockages encountered in life- some of which correspond to what Wilhelm Reich called emotional armoring - will crop up as the same issues to handle in death. This makes sense according to another theory which postulates that bardo spaces entered right after the body dies consist of the unraveling of the subconscious mind combined with an extreme dilation of subjective time in the moments before brain death.

* * * * * *

S.M.I.²L.E. seems to connect space and time into a single continuum as do current theories in physics. Becoming generally familiar with some of these theories can increase intelligence regarding space travel ( of any kind) and time dilation. Einstein pointed out in his Relativity theories that the measurement of anything physical depends upon the frame of reference of the observer, and that no absolute frame of reference observably exists that can make absolute physical measurements. James Joyce, Aleister Crowley and others applied relativity to metaphysics and consciousness research.

The spacetime continuum gets measured in dimensions. Theoretical physicists don't agree on how many dimensions exist, some string theorists postulate as many as 26, Bucky Fuller listed 14. The commonly held view consists of three spatial dimensions and one of time. Herman Minkowski devised a four-dimensional coordinate system and measurement grid known as Minkowski Space. Points in this space signify "events" in spacetime.

The way Buckminster Fuller put it in Synergetics:

Time and space are simply functions of velocity. You can examine the time increment or the space increment separately but they are never independent of one another.

The velocity of what one might ask. This may relate to Fullers cognition:

I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe.

* * * * * *

Musical spaces, the reception and integration of them in recording studios or concert halls followed by their transmission through mass media will be the focus of another post. Suffice to say here that the 4 dimensions physicists use to measure spacetime have their correlations in the construction of an audio sound environment even with stereo sound ( as opposed to 5.1 surround sound.) The frequency range corresponds to height, the pan position defines the width dimension, dynamic range gives depth, and rhythm measures time. Robert Fripp, who I got some of these correspondences from, wrote an article many years ago for Musician magazine where he pointed out patterns in architecture follow the same mathematical relationship as patterns in some musical scales. It follows then that a mixer can speak of an architecture of sound, and that this 'architecture' can potentially have similar consciousness altering properties that Gurdjieff talks about above.

One of the intentions of invocational magick, or shamanic exploration, involves accessing nonordinary spaces that may provide some kind of gnosis. It's sometimes done by creating a model of a Higher Dimensional space in an isolated chamber and forging some kind of connection through the principle of sympathetic resonance. A recording studio makes for a good isolated chamber to experiment in this way. More on this later.

Another future post related to the value of space migration will examine the powerful effect Rock Concerts can have to alter consciousness in profound ways. Right now I'll discuss one such instance because it lead to an understanding about a book I'm currently reading. As I pondered over what the Hell I was going to write about space migration, I recalled spaces I'd migrated to that had life changing results. I'd had a significant epiphany at a Who concert circa late '70s early 80's that led me to experiment going to concerts after engaging upon certain shamanic type activities that I'd picked up from the usual suspects. I went to David Bowie's Serious Moonlight concert at Calgary's McMahon stadium about 3 hours before the first act in order to ensure a spot up front. For about 2 hours I sat in the warm afternoon sun and did rhythmic deep breathing unnoticeable to my fellow attendees. While breathing and while waiting right before the start and in-between set changes, I auto-programmed the suggestion to "open myself to receive Higher Intelligence." I also had a small dose of a very potent South-East Asian herb just before Bowie went on. I considered the experiment a success.

One of the highlights came when Bowie sang Heroes. I had the very distinct irrational sensation that Bowie channeled these lyrics from somewhere else and that they carried great importance.

I, I wish I could swim.
Like the dolphins,
Like the dolphins can swim.

At the time, well-steeped in John Lilly's theories suggesting the higher intelligence of dolphins, this read to me as actively playing in the field of transcendent consciousness or something like that.

Though nothing, nothing can keep us together.
We can beat them, forever and ever.
For we can be heroes,
just for one day

I wondered, why just one day? Fast forward approximately 30 years and I'm reading Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. That book migrates through many spaces often nonlinearly in a way that recalls bardo voyages. Does Bowie's just for one day correspond to Pynchon's Against the Day? Are they referencing the same kind of day? Pynchon's book has many archetypal motifs so logically it makes sense for the title to refer to an archetypical day.

Then I recalled a movie Robert Anton Wilson said ( in a forum post) was the best example of magick he knew of on film: On A Clear Day You Can See Forever.

Wilson wrote a haiku about it posted on his website:

On A Clear Day You Can See Forever

"Witchcraft" not spoken
But still the best film ever
About Wise Women

What can we tell about this Day? Well Bowie, who on an earlier album sings of being immersed in Crowley's uniform of imagery, says that we can be heroes on that day. Robert Graves in The White Goddess linguistically connects the Hero archetype with Horus. Robert Anton Wilson has a character in Illuminatus! named Doris Horus.

Perhaps Qabalah can shed some light. Through the method of Notarikon ( creating an acronym):
On A Clear Day = 83,
Malkuth, the material world, the spacetime continuum = 10
83 + 10 = 93 which represents the Horus current among a few other very interesting and relevant things.

Pynchon writes knowledgeably, if obscurely, of various obstacles that crop up in the way of "seeing forever." Against the Day. A main character, Webb Traverse whose name suggests bardo voyaging, gets killed pretty early but his death continues to inform some of the plot lines well into this thousand plus page tome.

In my opinion, Pynchon alludes to Horus when he writes of a young boy trying to earn money to get back home to East 93rd street. He works for a Mr. Archer and has to learn how to handle a horse driven wagon.

In Egyptian mythology the enemy of Horus is his cousin Set. Set is the god of the desert, storms, and foreigners as well as darkness, confusion, and chaos. Kenneth Grant writes:

In magical terms Set is the epitome of dormant subconscious atavisims.

These gods may then represent various evolutionary processes to the individual. Horus, perhaps, symbolizes newly awakened abilities and functions of some kind. Set, perhaps, as the subconscious complexes and emotional armor that resists the leap to a permanently realized higher velocity. This relates to a saying I heard years ago: In the bardo you have no enemies, you have yourself. Maybe you have enemies in other areas particularly if you are in law enforcement or the military or politics, but in the science of brain- change, magick, bardo training, the biggest obstacle appears to be yourself.

As mentioned earlier, some theories say that bardo spaces cross the observer's event horizon as a result of the conscious apprehension of the subconscious mind which seems to unravel more and more as you approach the point of biological death. Bardo training therefore consists, in part, of diving in and attempting to perceive and become familiar with areas of the subconscious mind long before death. Making the subconscious conscious also represents stated goals of both Gurdjieff and Crowley in their systems of voluntary evolution.

Be aware that I'm presenting speculations and ruminations - my abstract truths, not necessarily relevant to anyone or everyone else. In Relativity, contradictory views may each be 'right' from their own frame of reference. As Bucky Fuller puts it:

Relativity is inherently convergent, though convergent toward a plurality of centers of abstract truths.

I welcome and would love to hear dissenting, opposing or alternate views.

We can be heroes just for one day...

Heroes was produced by Brian Eno and features guitar playing by Robert Fripp.

Bowie was inspired to write Heroes after seeing two lovers kiss at the Berlin Wall. To him it symbolized overcoming all obstacles.

This is the live version from the Serious Moonlight tour:

I.2

2012-01-31T14:32:00.001-08:00

Leary wrote:

We are designed to use our Heads (I²) in order to Use Time (L.E.) in order to Use Space.
Of these three associated imperatives Intelligence Increase is the most important.

So we'll start there, in the center of S.M.I.²L.E. It seems appropriate that I.²finds itself placed between Space on one side and Time on the other. The quote is from Info-Psychology. Note the unusual capitalization in the first sentence.

I found a useful definition of Intelligence given by Robert Anton Wilson posted by Mark Frauenfelder on Boing Boing.net's RAW week celebration:

Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode and transmit information efficiently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point. Bigotry, ideologies, etc. block the ability to receive; robotic reality-tunnels block the ability to decode or integrate new signals; censorship blocks transmission."

How do you Increase Intelligence? A good question, however a definitive answer would defy the principles of Relativity, in my Newtonian Opinion. Everyone is different, and every circumstance different, therefore the answer changes from person to person, and even from moment to moment with one person. It can make for a highly enjoyable artform. Suggestions can be made for the taking or leaving of. All the information on how to Increase Intelligence is out there, just a matter of finding what works for you.

The relativistic nature of Intelligence Increase appears built into the formula.

I.² = I x I which, if you look at them as personal pronouns suggests self-study, self-examination and contemplation. Not a formula of the old time, Eastern imported, going to a Guru and following everything they say unquestioningly in order to merit, accidentally stumble upon, or get bestowed with some kind of Enlightenment or Intelligence Increase. One of Leary's other slogans offers an alternative, "Think For Yourself, Question Authority," which fits right in with I.².

I.², I multiplied by I, ("I an' I" as Bob Marley sings) implies finding a way to become your own Guru. In Thelemic terms, I would call this discovering the connection that eventually leads to the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. My recommendation for initiating this line of work: as much as possible, discover what you would really like to do in this life. This is called formulating a True Will. It doesn't have to be anything earth shattering or utterly altruistic, like bringing down Wall Street, it can be as basic and ordinary as playing music, gardening, cooking a meal, road repair, anything !, as long as it doesn't interfere with anyone else doing their thing. You can start by looking at what you like to naturally do along with your desires, hopes and dreams. The ancient Greeks called this process gnothe seaton which means Know Thyself.

The Crowley connection with Intelligence Increase makes sense ( apart from the fact that it works) when you remember Leary's letter quoted in the last post where he gave S.M.I.²L.E. as his response to Crowley's 'Do what thou wilt.' Leary states on record that he felt he was carrying on Crowley's work.

Following your own path as it grows and changes over time effectively Increases Intelligence due to a simple principle the television news show 60 Minutes used to employ: " zero interest, zero attention, zero information." This means that if you have no interest in something, your won't pay attention to it and won't learn anything from it. On the other hand, your attention gets naturally drawn to what interests you.

In the 60 Minutes Principle, which I first came across in The American Book of the Dead, the second component, after finding out what you're interested in, is learning how to use attention effectively. Attention can be placed, withdrawn, focused, concentrated, split, diffused, distracted, seduced, etc. You can direct it, or it can direct you. It can get strengthened, like a muscle, through use by doing things that require heightened attention like playing music well. Various exercises exist that strengthen attention, any martial art or yoga has that effect. My favorite is a kit called Zen Basics.

More on the art of applied attention can be found in a book called The Human Biological Machine as a Transformational Apparatus by E. J. Gold which also contains a scientific and detailed approach to Intelligence Increase along the lines of gnothe seaton.

Crowley stressed the importance of developing strong concentration skills as one prerequisite for effective magick. As he recounts in his Confessions, Crowley took to concentration exercises with great gusto after one of his teachers, Oscar Eckenstein, showed him how to discover for himself just how weak his attention functioned. You can discover how strong or weak your own attention operates through some basic feedback techniques. For example, focus your attention on the second hand of an analog clock and see how long you can keep it there before the mind wanders.

You can, perhaps, research some I.² methods through finding out what people possessed of genius do to increase their intelligence. Over at RAW Week, Propaganda Anonymous asked Phil Farber how he rates Robert Anton Wilson as a magician:

Phil Farber: I rate Bob up there with the best. More so than any other writer on the subject, he was able to reconcile critical thinking, modern physics and linguistics with the ancient traditions of magick. Privately, Bob was a devoted practitioner and explorer. He brought his wide-ranging intellect and his personal spark of creativity to the job of understanding and updating the techniques. He did the work, for real.

Ingesting the entirety of Propa Non's interview will I.² . It features a panel discussion with a number of RAW luminaries, Douglass Rushkoff, RU Sirius, David Jay Brown, Antero Alli, along with Farber. Perhaps that panel rates more like I.⁵ or I.⁶?

I also recall an interview DJ Fly Agaric did with Wilson where Fly asked him when the last time he did yoga was and RAW replied, that morning. That's consistent with the advice he gave to 'do it every day.' Meaning, whatever practice or discipline you're currently taking up - do it every day. If learning to play the guitar, practice every day, etc.

Another great resource with suggestions for I.² is Timothy Leary's The Game of Life, his kabbalistic rendering of the 8 circuit model of consciousness that also contains contributions from Robert Anton Wilson. Leary formulated this model to articulate a comprehensive Map of the Levels of Consciousness. Based on an eclectic blend of previous maps of this kind, occult knowledge, Cabala, scientific research, comedy, Leary and Wilson's gnostic realizations, and who knows what else, this model portrays itself more along the lines of a speculative taxonomy of consciousness, both physical and metaphysical, than a dogmatic Absolute Truth with rigid boundaries to be believed in at all costs. The fact that the authors revised and updated the theory over time makes this evident. Any useful theory of consciousness, vital and alive, will change, develop, and grow in light of new research. Parts of it will get rejected and modified as people and circumstances change. You don't have to unquestioningly accept any theory hook, line and sinker, to get some useful, practical benefit from it. Wilson lucidly illustrates this in an interview with Lewis Shiner when he writes of moving to Yellow Springs, Ohio early in his writing career:

I was offered a job editing a magazine for a place called the School for Living, which later moved to Maryland. The School for Living had a very interesting philosophy, which was "back to nature, live on the land, eat health food" — and a bit of anarchism and Wilhelm Reich. I agreed with about half of that and thought the over half was kind of flakey, but it was interesting. I thought it would be a great idea to live on a farm and see how I did at it.

The whole of this excellent interview lives in the Resources links at RAWIllumination.net

I'm not necessarily recommending anyone study and/or memorize the 8 Circuit Model, but it can't hurt. Just wanted to point out that numerous exercises, research experiments, suggestions for Intelligence Increase, whatever you want to call them get hinted at, alluded to, or downright explicated in The Game of Life.

As an example of the density of Intelligence Information found there, I'll briefly quote from "Caste 14." Leary divided each of the 8 brain circuits into 3 stages ( related to Gurdjieff's Law of Three - discussed about 2/3rds into this post) making 24 stages or what he called castes.

Caste 14

NEUROGENETIC TECHNOLOGICAL STAGE:

Self-Actualized Intelligent Control of the Body .../ Physiological Feedback Control/ The Yogin/The Artist-Aesthetic Reality Architect/ The Resurrected Body/Driver-Seat-Control of the Soft Machine/Body Engineering/The Sorcerer-Warrior/ The Reichian Adept/ The Holistic Health Healer.

That's from p. 172 in my 1993 New Falcon edition. The next page talks about the tarot card associated with this caste:

Stage 14

Tarot Death (card 13) DEATH-REBIRTH (Aries II) ... The disciplined control of one's body function... The science of conscious body performance. Karate. Yoga. Dance. Non-competitive sports designed to get high, to stretch body and mind. The direction of one's own aesthetic environment and responses. The conscious acceptance of one's life as a Work of Conceptual Art.

p. 173

A piece of common senses advice from Dr. Tim I personally benefited from - if you want to learn something, hang out with people who seem smarter than you at the subject you wish to learn. This relates, in a gentler way, to P.D. Ouspenky's stern dogmatic pronouncement that transformation is absolutely impossible unless one finds a School. At a stage in my life when I took Ouspensky way too seriously, I attended a workshop given by RAW and got a chance to ask him what he thought about Ouspensky's statement. RAW simply said, "I think it's a good idea," and bypassed commenting on Ouspenky's insistence, who, by the way, has doubt surrounding whether he followed his own advice.

This kind of a "School", sometimes called an Esoteric or Mystery School can sometimes exist very briefly, informally, and nondoctrinaire. Any group working together for the purpose of Invocation makes for the broadest definition of this type of School, but it could just as easily read: any group gathered together for the purpose of Intelligence Increase. They don't necessarily have to work closely together in physical Space or simultaneous Time to function as a School. Some extraordinary online courses I've attended operationally existed as this kind of a School, in my opinion and experience. The community of musicians around Bill Laswell comprise an informal, nondoctrinaire School that has greatly increased the transmission of Musical Intelligence over the years.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Many different kinds of intelligence exist. Here in the West we often reflexively associate intelligence with one particular type, intellectual intelligence. Modern education emphasizes acquiring knowledge through extensive intellectual intake. This doesn't seem the case everywhere. Anyone who has spent time in Africa sees evidence for different kinds of intelligence that the average Westerner likely remains largely or wholly unaware of.

We can start a list of different kinds of intelligence we know about: instinctual, intellectual, intuitive, physical, emotional, political, psychological, musical, poetic, symbolic, allegorical, alchemical, morphological, occult, etc. We can speculate, postulate, theorize, and research, (I xI) as others have: plant intelligence, mineral intelligence, the DNA intelligence resulting in the unfoldment of our biological vehicles, etc. - see The Game of Life for further examples.

Gnosis describes an accelerated form of Intelligence Increase. It refers to the direct experience of knowledge as opposed to knowledge taught in the ordinary way which requires belief for it to get accepted. The "aha"moment of sudden realization signifies gnosis.

The articulation of gnosis derives from Ancient Greeks:

Among the gnostics, gnosis was first and foremost a matter of self-knowledge ^{... [12]} Knowledge that first relieved the individual of their cultural religious indoctrination and then reconciled them to their personal deity.

Sounds reminiscent of 'Do what thou wilt,' and of the Knowledge and Conversation of the HGA.

A little more on this archaic sounding abstraction, the Holy Guardian Angel. How it gets perceived, and oftentimes its definition appears relative to the observer. Even Crowley gave personally contradicting accounts of this motif at different times in his life. Many magicians consider this experience a uniting of the microcosm with the macrocosm. This corresponds with the gnostic aphorism to :

make the inner as the outer, the outer as the inner, then make the two one.

Crowley also called it the epitome of one's True Will. In my experience, the HGA functions as a Guide. It doesn't have to get believed in as "real" in order to serve as an extremely effective, practically useful metaphor. I see it connected with John Lilly's Coincidence Control. It can occur and issue forth in a seemingly endless variety of ways and forms. Robert Anton Wilson illustrates the relativistic, shape-shifting nature of the HGA in his epic Illuminatus! Trilogy, another superior source for I.²:

"You look like an angel," Chips admitted grudgingly, "but I don't believe any of this. Time travel, talking trees, giant toads, none of it. Somebody slipped me a drug."

"Yes, somebody slipped you a drug, but I'm your holy guardian angel, and I'm slipping you this envelope, and it'll make everything all right back in London...

"Who are you, really?"

But the tree only repeated, "Don't lose that envelope," and walked away, turning into an Italian teen-ager again, and then into a gigantic woman carrying a golden apple."

S.M.I.2L.E.

2012-01-25T12:50:00.000-08:00

" It was 20 years ago today Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play
They've been going in and out of style but they're guaranteed to raise a:

S.M.I.²L.E. ..."

S.M.I.²L.E. represents Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, and Life Extension. Timothy Leary coined this acronym as a formula for the next step in human evolution. The way he put it in his book Exo-Psychology (later revised to Info-Psychology) :

We are designed to use our Heads (I²) in order to Use Time (L.E.) in order to Use Space.
Of these three associated imperatives Intelligence Increase is the most important.

Back in the day, circa late 1970's and into the '80's, when Leary and cohort Robert Anton Wilson were barnstorming around the country and the world communicating this magick formula with boundless enthusiasm, passion and optimism, they expected this vision to manifest quite literally in their near future. Space Migration meant Space Colonization, the development of High Orbital Mini-Earths (H.O.M.E. s), living off-planet. Life Extension meant the extension of the human biological machine beyond normal life expectancy and/or the reanimation of biological life after death. Robert Anton Wilson gives detailed explanations of the S.M.I.²L.E. formula in his book Cosmic Trigger Volume I. Wilson revealed some of the background behind its genesis in Cosmic Trigger by publishing excerpts of letters Leary wrote to him from prison:

By the way, I have always felt that Crowley's "Do What Thou Wilt" is good ... The question then becomes "What do we will to do." Most of the Crowleyites I've met (yourself excluded) seem to have decided that they will make pompous asses of themselves which is fine with me. But I'm delighted that we've found the three obvious steps that a reasonably educated God takes:S.M.I.²L.E.

- p. 167

Nowadays S.M.I.²L.E. seems an overly optimistic, anachronistic product of the cultural explosion that began in the 1960s. Space Migration doesn't appear scheduled to happen anytime soon. The expected breakthroughs in biological life extension have not yet occurred. Intelligence Increase seems confined to a small minority. It seems useful and worthwhile to update, re-examine and revitalize this formula from a XXIst Century perspective. Though circumstances and expectations have changed, the individual aspects of S.M.I.²L.E. remain as cogent as ever. I will show how.

But first, let's look at the overall image S.M.I.²L.E. presents. It obviously evokes the association of positive energy. Cosmic Trigger Volume I closes with a Leary smile:

"What do you do, Dr. Leary, when somebody keeps giving you negative energy?"

Tim grinned that special grin of his that so annoys all his critics. "Come back with all the positive energy you have."

- p. 238

Wilson's last sentence in the book promotes this as the final secret of the Illuminati, also the book's subtitle.

Anyone aware of the histories of Doctor's Wilson and Leary wouldn't confuse this with the insipid, stick your head in the sand wishful dreaming of the typical new age mentality. Both Doctors experienced tremendous hardship and tragedy in their lives, way beyond the norm, yet both maintained this life affirming outlook.

S.M.I.²L.E. recalls the Chesire Cat from Alice in Wonderland, a critter completely invisible except for its smile, who asks Alice where she wants to get to after Alice asks for directions.

I associate the positivity of S.M.I.²L.E. formula with some dramatic instances of the word YES. John Lennon first became interested in Yoko Ono after climbing a ladder at her art exhibition in London's Indica Gallery and looking through a magnifying glass tied to the ceiling by a string to see the word "yes." Together they helped change the world.

James Joyce's Ulysses ends on a similar positive note:

... O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Almameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gilbraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I say yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Both Wilson and Leary read Joyce, particularly the most experimental works, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, avidly. Leary credits this literature with preparing him for inner space explorations. Wilson included Joyce as a character in one of his immortal novels, Masks of the Illuminati.

The character Yassun Dede appears as the narrator in several stories found in Autobiography of a Sufi by E.J. Gold. Apparently Gold originally used this as a pseudonym for one of his most significant musical recordings, Epitaph for an Ego.

The ending of Monty Python's Life of Brian gives a humorous take on positive energy:

This video also shows another interesting key.

A lot of music can be cited that relates to S.M.I.²L.E.'s positivity. The best known classical example occurs at the end of Beethoven's 9th Symphony which uses words from the poem Ode to Joy. A favorite of mine is What A Wonderful World sung by Louis Armstrong. I like the way the BBC production of Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy used it:

I'll be approaching this examination of S.M.I.²L.E. from an esoteric rather than an exoteric point of view, making it relevant to the individual not expecting to move off the planet anytime soon, or hoping to extend their biological lifespan. An archetypal precedent for a magickal formula's dual points of view presents itself in Crowley's cosmology with the twin aspects of Horus, the reigning deity of the New Aeon. The active side of Horus manifest a warrior god known as Ra Hoor Khuit. The apparently more passive side of Horus, called Hoor Par Kraat signifies a more introverted or hidden aspect. The practitioner of magick embeds this archetype in their bones through education by posture in the Star Ruby ritual. Posture invokes mood. It's been suggested that this dual nature of Horus symbolizes the two approaches to Crowley's system, magick and mysticism.

This twin archetype of opposites plays out in Isaac Asimov's The Foundation Trilogy. The Foundation describes a collective meant to preserve art, science, and technology through barbaric times. Largely unknown to the Foundation, another collective called the Second Foundation formed with the intent of preserving the psychic arts.

Leary changing the title of his book Exo-Psychology to Info-Psychology also suggests this archetype. In Cosmic Trigger, Wilson hints at the mystical side of S.M.I.²L.E.:

Space Migration plus Increased Intelligence plus Life Extension means expansion of humanity into all space-time. S.M.I.²L.E. =

to be continued ...

Woody Allen and Uncle Al

2012-01-21T23:46:00.000-08:00

I have no idea if Woody Allen ever studied Aleister Crowley, however I now strongly suspect he has after watching his most recent film, Midnight in Paris a few times. It comes across as a Crowley tale par excellence, a story about a writer, played by Owen Wilson - the Woody Allen character in this film - trying to connect with his true voice and live the life he feels most drawn to and aligned with. Through his good fortune and/or ability to enter into Parallel Worlds, Alternate Realities of different time frames, Wilson's character receives knowledge and conversation with Higher Intelligence, who take on the forms of his literary heros, and gets useful, practical information about his current work in progress.

The film begins with a 5 minute musical and visual love letter to the people and places, sights and jazz of Paris; then Wilson's voice in classic Woody Allen stutter opens with:

"This, is ..., is ..., unbelievable. Look at this, there's no city in the World like this, there never was..."

You soon discover he's talking about Paris yet those opening lines appear general enough to apply to the same archetypal city Crowley writes about in The City of God, A Rhapsody. It's a favorite of mine. The same archetypal City also showed up for me at the beginning of Thomas Pynchon's, Against the Day.

Some more opening dialog:

"... What did Hemingway call it, a malleable feast..." - referring to the City of Paris

"... Following down the rabbit's hole..." conjures the Qabalistic classic, Alice in Wonderland, a Crowley favorite, and presages events to follow, journeys to take in the film.

There's a mention of a James Joyce sighting and what he was eating that night. Crowley called Joyce a genius.

Later, there's a truly incredible and enlightening, slightly over the top, rap about love and death given by the Ernest Hemingway character, one of Gil's (Owen Wilson's character) bardo guides. I would post it in it's entirety if I didn't respect the Gods of Copywrite. This film is worth seeing by anyone who is a transit practitioner just for that speech.

Further on, Gertrude Stein gives some great advice to Gil about his writing, "The artist's job is not to sucumb to despair but to find an antidote to the emptiness of existence. You have a clear and lively voice, don't be such a defeatist..."

Gil's adventure's with Parallel Worlds finally gives him the knowledge, experience and Will he needs to live his life genuinely as he wishes to do.

Midnight in Paris movie photo

The opening of the time travel portal in this film always occurs just after midnight. I was doing some timed breathing using the second hand of a clock while watching Midnight in Paris for the third time in preparation for this blog. One of the midnight chiming, time portal openings in the film happened exactly as my clock reached midnight. As mentioned earlier, I'm in an online group reading Pynchon's Against the Day at a rate of 4 pages/day. I just reached a part where they go into a Time Machine then attend a Time Travel Convention.

One of the most brilliant, surrealistic examples of guerilla ontology resides in the pages of God, a one-act play written by Woody Allen circa 1975. In it you'll find a line towards the end of the play that closely correspond with Crowley's statement: " There is no god but man." A subtext in that play illustrates another famous Crowley statement about God. It also cites goals of Buddhism, Qabala and some conclusions of theoretical physics. Densely information rich and extremely funny. It was meant to accompany two other one-act plays, Sex, and Death. If Allen could only refrain from writing about such trivial subjects he might have a career for himself!

Yesterday I mixed an instrumental track called City of Joy by a band from Australia and San Francisco called Beaten By Them. It was the final song of their project, Kinder Machines that combined and contrasted the organic sound of a harmonically rich and sweet acoustic guitar with electronic drum machine samples, a grand piano, cello, synthesizers,and a solid rhythm section - drums, bass, and guest percussion. After we finished, Max McCormick relayed quite an interesting story regarding the genesis of the album. He was in the Honduras some time back walking in a town when he noticed a black dog following him. This went on for an unusally long time, wherever Max went, this black dog followed even when leaving town to go hiking up a nearby hill. The dog started to follow Max up the hill until he yelled at it to shoo it away, and it stopped following him. Max went for his hike. When he returned, the black dog was waiting for him at the same spot and resumed following him back into town. As they were about to reach the town, Max looked back to see if the dog was still there and was startled to see a man where the dog had been. The black dog was nowhere to be seen, Max never saw him again. Max had the shocking impression that the black dog had shapeshifted into a man. He acknowledges the possibility that the dog took off at the same time a man quietly slipped in behind him, nonetheless the perception occurred so sudden and shocking to the point of making him want to jump out of his skin. It does sound like something a trickster or teacher would do. The next day Max saw the name "Crowley" on a shipping crate. It made him think of Aleister Crowley whom he said he knew nothing about, but he then immediately had a vision of what his next album would be - the one we just finished, and how he would go about doing it. Max said that he saw the whole thing in detail right after seeing Crowley's name on a shipping crate. He said it turned out pretty much as he envisioned it. He had no idea that I had any interest in Crowley until after he contacted me and I sent him The Oz Mix link. That was a coincidence, he said.

Hoist

2012-01-20T03:06:00.000-08:00

I'm a longtime proponent of that particular kind of synergy generated by what John Lilly called, "The Dyadic Cyclone", a two unit group of opposite polarity that works and functions in a special way.

The Dyadic cyclone is the combination of two personal centres. In this book it is a male and female combination -- two rotating cyclones with their enclosed centres, one rotating to the right and the other rotating to the left. In The Dyadic Cyclone, Toni and John ask the question 'Is it possible to merge two centres, two cyclones, one male, one female, in such a way that there can be a rising, quiet centre shared by both?

A question arises: can a Dyadic Cyclone make great music? Recently I've worked on 3 different projects motivated by highly creative Dyads, and the answer, so far, is yes. Two of these remain "in progress" and will be spoken of later. Soon you will be hearing about a powerful new 7 piece group from Norway called Hoist.

The core of Hoist, and their primary songwriters, comprises lead vocalist Stian Leknes and pianist/lead vocalist Marita Røstad. Stian and Marita are a marvelous contrast of opposites in sound, style and background. His vocal sound is rough and gruff, reminiscent of Louis Armstrong, Howling Wolf, Dr. John, and Tom Waits. Stian didn't set out to sound like any of these characters, his voice naturally evolved into it for some unexplained reason when he made the switch from singing death metal songs to Hoist's repertoire which encompasses several genres. Her voice is very sweet and delicate. Marita teaches voice and piano at a prestigious Norwegian conservatory. They both have strong control over their instruments and both sing with tremendous passion. The dynamic of their contrasting vocals recalls the legend of Beauty and the Beast.

Hoist

Hoist's rhythm section is solidly anchored by the brothers Elide, Daniel on drums and Allesandro on percussion. Magnus Mortensen holds down the low end on the acoustic double (upright) bass. Kurt Sprenger's guitar playing ranges from haunting atmospherics to energetic metal style leads. Kristoffer Lo on tuba and flugabone ( as its name suggests, an instrument combining a flugelhorn and a trombone) adds a free jazz sensibility along with low end reinforcement, and dark atmospherics. Lo at times ran his horns through a pedal board and a bass amp.

Their music is existentially electric, eclectic, at times ecstatic, beholden of great beauty hidden inside tales of darkness and tragedy. Folk with really heavy tones is how my assistant described it when asked. Piano driven, storytelling, space exploring, bluesy, jazzy, metallic, tragic and real. The songwriters of Hoist have clearly tapped into reservoirs of knowledge far beyond their own, reaching into what some people call the Collective Consciousness.

Track 2, "Rosemary " tells the tale of a misunderstood, disaffected Illuminatti:

No, it's not what you would think,
Nor is it obvious in anyone's dream,
No it's not the beauty and the peace,
So, she took her love, she took her smile,
does anyone know how her eyes could shine

Hoist.

The third track, "Darkfriend" bears strong similarity to a character known as the Dweller on the Threshold. The description given in the song sounds quite accurate. This character also makes an appearance in Robert Anton Wilson's Schrodinger's Cat trilogy.

"The Murders You Did Not Write," this one written by Lo, is a very heavy, slow New Orleans style dirge, a requiem for the victims of the brutal tragedy that occurred in Norway last year. They told me that everyone in Norway knows people who were killed there because it's such a small country. Songs like these show one way how artists can help heal this kind of psychic pain. I mixed it on Thanksgiving and brought flowers in to help bring the mood out.

After recording "Room 123" I asked them why they chose that number, they said no particular reason other than it fit. I told them about the 23 Conspiracy. The next morning Daniel and Allesandro mentioned a couple of small coincidences with 23 and this project. When they flew back to Norway after the recording, Gate 23 was their connecting gate. Last week I mixed an instrumental track called "Room 122" for the band Materialized.

This project was not without difficulty. To start, Hoist's intention was to record and mix the album at Prairie Sun in California. Unfortunately the State Department turned down their work visa request for some obscure, inconsequential reason. So they asked me to record them in Europe then mix it at Prairie Sun. I chose to record at my favorite studio in Europe, La Fabrique in St. Remy, France.

On the ride from the train station in Avignon to St. Remy I found my attention drawn to the trees and foilage that passed by in the crystalline clear light unique to the south of France. The light still had its intensity despite the overcast skies and stormy weather. The various kinds of trees looked intentionally arranged as if forming some kind of language and engaged in an other-wordly dialog beyond my comprehension. I remembered that Gaul ( ancient France) was home to Druids at one time. Also recalled Robert Graves' investigation of the Celtic Tree-Alphabet language, Ogham, in his classic work, The White Goddess.

A storm began shortly after my arrival at La Fabrique. At around midnight all the power went out and stayed off. We began our session the next morning without any electricity but with news of its expected return in a few hours. The power was restored on time as promised and stayed on for the duration.

While waiting, I gave the band my rap about how strong resistance inevitably accompanies very positive endeavors. Gurdjieff's Law of Three states that every phenomenal event has 3 aspects which he called holy affirming, holy denying, and holy reconciling. Positive, negative, and neutral. Ohms Law, the law that describes how electricity functions, appears a perfect example of Gurdjieff's "second fundamental cosmic law" ie the Law of Three.

Ohm's Law describes the relationship between current (affirming force), resistance ( denying), and voltage (reconciling) in an electrical circuit. Current is equal to Voltage divided by Resistance. If you have a high resistance value, you need to get much more voltage to maintain a strong current. Power describes the rate at which electricity gets used, transferred, or transformed. Power is equal to Current multiplied by Voltage. The amount of Power over time defines the Work done.

In optics, or radiometry, the term power sometimes refers to radiant flux, the average rate of energy transport by electromagnetic radiation, measured in watts. The term "power" is also, however, used to express the ability of a lens or other optical device to focus light. It is measured in dioptres (inverse metres), and equals the inverse of the focal length of the optical device.

- Optical Power

Watts, coincidently, is the name of the Zen Master (first name Alan) who turned Robert Anton Wilson on to Aleister Crowley.

Whether related to Gurdjieff's Law or not, I have repeatedly observed over the years that the more powerful and real the music I'm working on, the stronger the resistance to it. A great example of this occurred when Bill Laswell was producing Yothu Yindi in Australia. The music was powerfully shamanic and vital. All kinds of resistance surrounded the project the epitome probably being when Bill and I were threatened to be taken to jail if we didn't explain what we were doing in Australia. Apparently another producer, the guy who worked with all or most of Australia's pop groups at the time, had phoned Immigration Authorities and filed a complaint. It was true, the label who hired us, Mushroom Records, hadn't given us proper work visas. Bill just told these Feds that we were only rehearsing at the studio in preparation for recording them for real back in New York. They accepted our story with very few questions and appeared even more relieved than we were with our legally approved reality scenario presentation.

This "resistance" to music doesn't seem intentional or malevolent, or maybe I'm just not that paranoid. Like the storm at La Fabrique it appears more like a blind, mechanical occurrence that has to happen to make the circuit as powerful as it can get. Even when a human agency is behind the denying force the action appears mechanical and reflexive. I was amazed that Bill mentioned socializing with that same rival producer in Australia as if nothing had happened, clearly holding no animosity against him. But then why would any conscious individual, out of danger's way, get upset over a mechanical act of nature whether human or not?

O.T.O. reviver Grady McMurtry alluded to the strong resistance against gnostic teaching in the statement, "the gnosis always gets busted" as told in Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger. While making a valid point, the pessimistic ( in that moment) McMurtry seems clearly wrong with the always part. I have never had a music project overwhelmed with resistance so much that it failed to be brought to completion once it had started. Some proposed projects didn't get off the ground due to blind mechanical resistance. Bill Laswell was set to make an album in homage, and about the influence of film director Alejandro Jodorowsky on music. The funding was in place and we met with Jodorowsky in his Paris apartment. He was agreeable to the idea, and also very generous with his hospitality. Unfortunately, due to the childish and boorish behavior of some American politicians against French interests around the start of Iraq War II (blind, mechanical resistance), the funding dried up, the project cancelled. Any album that has been able to start working in the studio has never failed to be completed, in my experience. Readers of my interview in Tape Op a couple of years ago heard of my story of out of control electricity frying our Pro Tools rig and 2 expensive mics when recording Sibiri Samakein in Mali, West Africa. Despite the challenge, the recording got made ( the studio had a back-up DAW ie a digital audio workstation) came out on KSK and sounds amazing. I welcome resistance, bring it on!

Once Hoist and I were up and running things were going well - sounding incredible as the World will soon hear- until one rocking take picking up steam suddenly had the sound abruptly stop. Quite a shock, last thing you're expecting. Turns out the mute switch on the Studer A800 Multitrack was engaging without permission, as if anything blind or mechanical needs permission.The able technical staff at La Fabrique found a solution after wrestling with it for a bit. After that, our space was set, our circle drawn, and nothing major further interfered with what turned out to be a substantial and powerful musical document called Ami Noir.

Friend of the Devil

2011-12-25T12:12:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to post a blog on what I learned about Aleister Crowley that I didn't know before after reading Tobias Churton's excellent ALEISTER CROWLEY - the BIOGRAPHY. Quite a few very interesting and insightful details about his life and work get revealed in this book. An excellent review of it lives on the lashtal.com website.

Today I'll discuss one of these new insights: the fact that Crowley identified with Christ. This becomes apparent relatively soon to anyone who has spent time working with his exercises and learned his lexicon but I've not seen it stated so directly as it appears in Churton's book. Apparently it's from a diary entry.

How can it be? The Great Beast Himself, whose number is 666, a number considered the number of the Anti-Christ in popular religious superstition .... identifying with Christ????

For one thing, this doesn't mean that Crowley identified with the historical Jesus. Christ is a title that refers to a position, a post, or a station - one way of being and working. Christ was not Jesus' last name, his parents were not Mr. and Mrs. Christ. It would appear more accurate to call him Jesus the Christ.

That Crowley identified with both Christ and the Great Beast of Revelations seems to me like an honest portrayal of his situation ie that the expansion of his morphology in the role he identified with reached both god-like heights and beastly depths. Nothing sinster, depraved or indulgent about that, just a condition of that work. Maybe, maybe not.

Another answer could turn up in Crowley's love of the teachings of the tao and it's doctrine regarding the union of opposites. As it goes in this example, the Anti-Christ appears as another aspect of Christ, two sides of the same coin.

The Great Beast, as Crowley understood and ran with it, has absolutely nothing to do with malevolence or evil. To Crowley, the Devil didn't exist, a unified being of chaos making for too much of a contradiction for manifested existence.

The Devil seems descended from the Old Testament concept of Ha-Satan, the Holy Adversary, an Angel who instigates tests and provides challenges and obstacles to mankind to ultimately help it to evolve. From this view, 'he' seems another, perhaps sometimes annoying, function of the Creative Principle.

Good ole Wikipedia has:

the Devil has assumed more of a dualistic status commonly associated with heretics, infidels, and other unbelievers. As such, the Devil is seen as an allegory that represents a crisis of faith, individualism, free will, wisdom and enlightenment.

The youth culture of the 60's sees the devil evolving into more of a trickster role. The Rolling Stones sang for sympathy and had the line, "but what's puzzling you is just the nature of my game." with the game as described above.

Crowley's role as a devil in contemporary society also fits the description given by wiki.

And so I offer this video of Jerry Garcia and David Grisman playing Friend of the Devil, a song with an adventure to tell:

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

- William Butler Yeats

Shall We Dance?

2011-12-24T12:56:00.000-08:00

My favorite Season's Greetings e-card this year so far comes from Erin and the Project:

This talented duo, Lindsay Erin and Paul Ezekiel, have an album in the works produced by yours truly due out near the beginning of next year. At the moment it's a work in progress, so more on that when it's finished.

Their fresh, vivifying version of We Three Kings makes for a nice preview. Lindsay also sent me a link that investigates the song's history suggesting that the Magi may have been Zoroastrian Pilgrims. It also makes a connection between the fabled Star of Bethlehem and Sirius:

What about the Star that the Magi were following? The Christian story is intended to recall the "star of Jacob" mentioned in Numbers 24:17 : "A star from Jacob takes the leadership..." A star was symbolic of a god, or a deified king, in the ancient Middle East - stars appear on carved signature seals and wall-carvings. There are Zoroastrian legends about the Star of the Magi, that identify it as Tishtrya, or Sirius, the star whose rising heralds the coming of rain. Sirius first rises in late summer, just before dawn, and in winter nights around the solstice and Christmas it blazes in the sky in the early and middle evening. Tishtrya is a yazata or guardian spirit, now known as "Tir," whose festival, Tirgan, is celebrated in the summer with much splashing of water. But remember that this is Story, not History, so that the element of the Star of Bethlehem is not a real, identifiable star or celestial event. (That hasn't stopped generations of scholars from trying to find it.)

. . . . . . . . .

In other news, the African roots music label, Kanega System Krush has a new release of music by Master djembe drummer Taga Sidibe. A review of it is here.

Taga is a renown figure throughout Mali drawing crowds into the thousands. He is both a revered hunter and musician versed in Sogonikun, a kind of music typically performed during ceremonies meant to uplift and beat back negativity. He is often called on to hype up audiences and entertain the occasional bush spirit, he says.

Drumming aficionado's will certainly find a wealth of listening pleasure in this album’s percussive mastery yet the epic level of musicality and pairing together with ‘Tu’ Sinayoko’s divine vocals makes it a must-have for music lovers the world over.

Taga represents one of the last bastions of traditional djembe drumming played in contrast to the all too common ballet style. Steady and true, his répertoire has been passed down through an ancient lineage. Learning at the hands of Mansa Bagayoko, Taga was hand picked to rigorously study drumming to continue an authentic tradition and integrate it into daily life. Whatever challenges one might face, music remains a source of wisdom and healing for the soul.

Last but not least on the Bari Dun Dun and Konkoni is Taga’s lifelong musical companion, Yakoub Sidibe. The incredible interplay between Taga and Yakoub has been honed since childhood when they first began playing together more than thirty years ago on the Kamalen N’Goni. The keenest of ears can sometimes hear up to forty variations of a single rhythm.

I found it consciousness altering in a useful way when mixing it.

The cd liner notes mention that :

Besides being considered a Master of the Djembe, Taga is a traditional medicine man, a healer, a hunter, and a farmer. When he is not engaged in ceremony or ceremonial music, Taga spends his time in Wassoulou (a region in Mali) with his family where he grows millet, rice, and corn.

More Great Guitarists of All Time

2011-12-16T22:43:00.000-08:00

As expected, I left out a number of the great guitarists of all time that I've worked with. My excuse for that and not posting more is that I've been working an average of 12 hrs/day engineering every single day for the past 2 and 1/2 months except when on a plane or a train.

The first rock star guitar player I worked with was Rick Derringer - amazingly fast but soulfull blues/rock guitarist, a very nice guy, and excellent producer. He was playing a Steinberger guitar which was relatively new at the time; he seemed kind of a perfectionist with his playing, searching for, and finding the ultimate solo. I had this impression because he would reject what I heard as amazing performances until he was satisfied completely. Lots of punch-ins until every detail of the solo cooked to perfection. Punch-ins consist of going in and out of record for one specific part of a performance. Got to work with Rick on a remake of his classic song, Rock & Roll Hoochie Koo.

Jimi Hazel came into Platinum Island with his band, 24-7 Spyz in 1989 or so and burned up the place. Jimi's guitar playing was on fire, living up to his namesakes Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Hazel. It was very exciting and energizing seeing someone of that caliber close-up. I would call his style at the time, virtuoso punk rock. The energy of punk by someone who could really play. I know that engineer Robert Musso was quite impressed with Hazel, and he's worked with the likes of Steve Vai. 24-7 Spyz recorded an entire album live in the studio in 2 marathon sessions and called it Harder Than You releasing it on the In-Effect label. They got compared to the legendary punk/reggae band, Bad Brains.

Some song titles from it are:

#1 Grandma Dynamite
#4 Social Plague
#5 I Must Go On
#6 Ballots Not Bullets
#8 Spill My Guts

Stevie Salas blew my mind one day with a solo he did for Ronald Shannon Jackson's Red Warrior album. Stevie's very fast with both his playing and sound manipulation on his pedals. He plays with a lot of heart, and the knowledge and confidence to set a course and take a solo somewhere definite. His solos tell stories. I've worked with him on a few different projects - his album Color Code for Island, with Buddy Miles, and with his longtime collaborator Bernard Fowler whose day job for the past 22 years has been singing background vocals with the Rolling Stones.

Marc Ribot gets truly possessed by an otherworldly spirit of guitar playing, or whatever you want to call it. He can get truly OUT with it, as we say in the vernacular. He's a guitarist who has inspired imitators but I've not seen anyone do exactly what he does. His playing conjures up bardo spaces for me. Worked with him on a Tom Waits record and with Arto Lindsay's band in the early '90's, Ambitious Lovers. He told some great stories about touring with Wilson Pickett.

Smoky Hormel has incredible feel. Worked with him with Waits and with rockabilly legend Wanda Jackson.

Lobi Traore I wrote about here.

Derek Bailey was a legendary avant garde British guitarist. Only worked with him once at a concert with Jack De Johnette, Bill Laswell, and DJ Disk.

Eric McFadden, Volker Stifler, and Johnnie Axtell are my go to guitarists when the opportunity arises to bring in musicians for projects I'm producing.

I listened to a lot of great guitar playing in my early years doing live sound in Western Canada: Gerry Neufeld and Luch Giacchetta from Sargent, Fast Eddie and Rick from The Tickets, Ronnie Champagne from Frantic, Steve from Blade Runner, and others whose names escape me. It was a real education for me. Sometimes we were obvious collaborators - them on lightening fast playing, me on the PA and Space Echo. For psychedelic guitar passages, I would put delays on the guitar, turn up the feedback significantly, then pan the guitar and effects opposite each other to create a swirling effect of movement in space. I did this with Gerry Neufeld during his guitar solo space explorations in the Van Halen cover of You Really Got Me. Ronnie Champagne and I would sometimes do sound improvs on guitar and Space Echo on breaks from the band's set.

Regular readers of The Oz Mix know that I tend to use the Qabbalistic Tree of Life as a compass and map for just about anything so it won't surprise them to hear that I sometimes associate guitarists and guitar playing with the path of Gimel on the Tree of Life. Gimel connects the spheres of Tiphareth and Kether in a vertical ascent up the Middle Pillar. It crosses a vast, largely unknown territory known as The Abyss said to separate the Real from the Illusory. By all accounts, crossing The Abyss seems like no picnic. It's been called the Labyrinth and finds itself compared to a desert for feeling so very hot and dry.

The writer who wrote under the pseudonym Christopher Hyatt once noted that the emotional quality of yearning accompanies this work of what Gurdjieff called 'waking up to the Real World.'

One of the best songs for illustrating this idea I'm getting at of using guitar music - either playing or listening, as a trigger for journeying up the path of Gimel, is 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps.' Here's a version by one of my favorite Canadian guitarists, Jeff Healy. Jeff no longer plays from that body having died a few years back. He was blind, so, like Ray Charles, Jeff used sound as a primary means for navigating through space. I used to see him play at a small club in Calgary, it was like seeing Hendrix just a few feet away - quite intense, naturally theatrical, and took you out. Last time I saw Healy was at the World Expo in Vancouver in 1986 with my Mother, and my wife at the time after having just visited John Lennon's psychedelic Rolls Royce that was on display.

This one looks good on the big screen. The footage of World Events they show seems quite relevant with what's going on in the world today.

Here's another version, this one lead by Eric Clapton and an Allstar band at the Concert for George tribute. Very big sound, lots of incredible musicians including Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. Note the edit cut to Ringo Starr at about 1:07 after the line, "I don't know why no one showed you how to unfold your love??" Also looks good on big screen. Clapton's soloing in the outro chorus seems to have that yearning quality I spoke of. The very last shot of the video looks quite interesting too.

I wrote most of this late last night then passed out before I could finish. My assistant Isha, who doesn't know my recent posts, came in wearing a red Hendrix T-shirt today. I asked him why he wore that particular shirt and he said, "oh it just came around on the guitar, I guess..." Actually, he didn't say that, he said it was just at the top in his drawer.

Greatest Guitarists of All Time

2011-12-04T18:09:00.000-08:00

Rolling Stone just published their 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time list as voted upon by "top guitarists and other experts." They didn't ask me but I'm not shy about offering my observations as a longtime observer of superb guitar playing, some by guitarists who did make the list.

First of all, this concept of All Time, more of a grandiose poetic flourish than a literal truth, subconsciously (now consciously) brings magick into the equation. The Qabalistic Cross, a very basic, preliminary ritual goes: "Unto Thee, the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, Unto All the Ages" ( ie All Time).

The ritual of the Qabalistic Cross is a
basic psychic exercise of the modern
Hermetic tradition. Its purpose is to re-inforce a sense of the Here and Now",
the conscious self awake in the present moment.

- W.C. Eichman

Not many would disagree with their top choice, Jimi Hendrix, and I don't either. Hendrix had way more going on than just flashy guitar playing. He transmitted something very soulful along with, and sometimes instead of, the pyrotechnics. Lots of Universal keys in his oeuvre, for instance, giving a version of Crowley's 'Do what thou wilt' with the lyrics:

"With the power of soul, anything is possible
With the power of you, anything that you wanna do

Also, the first song title from his 3rd studio album Electric Ladyland suggests the Great Work in practice. This song lasts 1:21 . The second song title asks Have You Ever Been ( To Electric Ladyland). The answer, in my case, is yes if he means Electric Lady, the recording studio Hendrix built with Eddie Kramer on 8th Street in Greenwich Village. I recorded and mixed a track for another great guitarist of All Time ( on my list, not RS) Buckethead for the film Last Action Hero.

Related to some of my earlier blog (a)musings:

The original North American-only Reprise release album cover featured a "fiery" photo of Hendrix' head.

Rolling Stone gives "The Star Spangled Banner" as one of his key tracks.

Jimmy Page came in at number 3. I thought he should have reached 2 instead of Clapton but figure that Coincidence Control must have put him at 3 for Crowley/Qabalistic associations. As is well-known, Page is quite experienced with magick and it definitely got channeled through his music. Page had Do what thou wilt inscribed in small letters on the innermost part of every vinyl copy of Led Zeppelin IV. According to Wikipedia, that album has sold over 23,000,000 copies in the U.S. alone making it 23 times certified platinum. With all those spinning discs, Page instigated a Crowleyan flavored Tibetan prayer wheel.

Do what thou wilt isomorphs with Gurdjieff's instruction to "create for yourself a real I." For those into pluarity like Robert Fripp with his signature quip, 'I am resplendent in divergence' it could read, 'create for yourself real I's.' For punsters with a visual orientation or for remote viewers I would offer, 'create for your Self real eyes.'

"Dazed and Confused" shows up as the first of Pages key tracks. Live performances show Page using a bow on his guitar which he also appears to use, 'as if' a magick wand. He also quotes Gustavf Holst's Mars, the Bringer of War a couple of times in the long piece. Mars represents the active energy of Horus, the Egyptian god of force and fire who symbolizes this new time of self-determined, voluntary evolution and reality creation. The War means the war on sleep in whatever form. The war against getting programmed into robotic compliance with external societal game rules about what you should do with your life. The war against becoming a Marching Moron as Cyril Kornbluth put it in a famous SF story. Bill Laswell and associates call this war Method of Defiance.

"Dazed and Confused" a title that suggests anyone going through a strong transistion such as 'birth' into a new life has the curious lyric:

"Lots of people talking, few of them know
Soul of a woman was created below..."

Something that perhaps only a fool can understand, as it seems related with a later song title Fool in the Rain from the 1979 album In Through the Out Door. Perhaps the lyric should read 'Soul of a WoMan was created below. It also connects with the 'bringing the woman to life' idea I mentioned recently, an idea that's one expression of the formula symbolized by the tarot card The Chariot which Crowley called the formula of this new period.

The lyric could indicate the idea that 'the Work is in Hell' - to qabalists Hell means the space-time continuum - not in escaping to a blissed out nirvana or fantastic wishful paradise but right here, right now in the nitty gritty of the physical Universe.

Keith Richards at number 4 becomes the highest rated guitarist I've personally seen. A Stones concert in 1981 at the Kingdome in Seattle convinced me of his brilliance. His new book, Life, holds some real gems about songwriting and guitar playing. Jumping Jack Flash was his gardener at his Redlands estate, and now we're somehow back in Mars' territory. Martin Scorsese's favorite Stones song, Gimme Shelter turns up as one of Keith's key tracks.

Pete Townsend at #10 ranks as my personal favorite of anyone guitarist I've seen live. Incredibly powerful when I saw the Who, the proto-type punk band but with class, in 1980 or 81. A future blog on that concert will relate a drug-free, musically inspired OOBE that forever changed how I listened to and received music.

Got the chance to see #22, Frank Zappa with the Mothers of Invention at the Pier on the Hudson River in New York. Always very much loved his playing. I give him credit for best title for a guitar based compilation, Shut Up 'n' Play Yer Guitar, a title that also resonates with Do what thou wilt. Trey Anastasio mentions this collection in the RS piece and finishes it by saying:

"But when he picked up his guitar or a solo, 'he was completely in communion with his instrument... It just became soul music."

Got to work briefly with #28, Johnny Ramone on the mixes for Brain Drain by The Ramones.

Once had lunch with #32 Billy Gibbons and Bill Laswell. I'd seen ZZ Top some years earlier and enjoyed them. Gibbons was wearing what looked like a stylized shower cap. Got the sense it had a protective function for Billy.

Mick Taylor, #37 was a delight to work with. He was laying down solos and guitar lines on a Golden Palominos record for over 4 hours at Platinum Island.

I have to disagree with Carlos Santana's statement about Mike Bloomfield, "He didn't get a chance to expand the mission of his soul..." As mentioned in an earlier post, I feel he did on Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited.

#62, Robert Fripp rates as genius, to me, based on the King Crimson albums and the 3 times I've seen him play. He appears the only serious guitarist I've seen who can translate Gurdjieff's theories about the octave into consciousness altering music. I could be making that up about his creative approach. I do know that he studied Gurdjieff extensively to the point of making retreats from the commercial music industry to further his researches. I also know that certain intervals he played on the guitar when I saw him live, corresponded with strong mood lifts in me. Lifting to the point of temporarily stepping OUT of consensual reality into a timeless present. Hard to describe exactly ... you start to feel a lot bigger.

#82 Nels Kline showed his creative mastery when I worked with him on Eric McFadden and Wally Ingram's Alektorophobia. Very nice guy to work with too!

I could have been the last person to record #83 Eddie Hazel. I remembered doing some overdubs with him with Laswell at Bill's old studio in Greenpoint. I don't recall for whom. I remember liking his playing but I didn't get the sense of being in the presence of a legend though he'd been billed as such, and probably was in better days. He was quiet and didn't look in the best of health. A few weeks later we were scheduled to record a trio with Eddie Hazel, Bootsy Collins, and Buddy Miles at Greenpoint. I was really looking forward to it - Bootsy and Buddy a were masters of their instruments ( Bootsy still is!) and I'm sure they would have inspired Hazel to new heights. Unfortunately, a call came through about a week before the session that Eddie had died.

In Rolling Stone they relay the legend that George Clinton inspired Hazel's epic solo in Funkadelic's Maggot Brain by telling him to imagine that he gets the news that his mother has died ... and then discovering that she is, in fact, alive. RS also writes:

Hazel... brought a thrilling mix of lysergic vision and groove power to all of his work.

#87, James Hetfield, seemed ridiculously polite when I recorded him for AntiPop by Primus. Pleasant and quick to work with.

Once flew to LA to audition for a tour with #100 Lindsey Buckingham. Was told on the way to the rehearsal studio that I likely wouldn't get the gig because I was his manager's choice. So goes it in the music biz. I enjoyed watching him put a show together for a couple of days, and they gave me an honest try-out. Buckingham does have amazing guitar chops which he showed off from time to time. In a conversation with me about Bill Laswell producing Laurie Anderson, he seemed concerned about getting taken seriously as an artist. He was friendly and nice.

Amazing guitarists I've worked with who should have made the list but didn't include Fred Frith (my favorite), Mark Ribot, Sonny Sharrock, Nicky Skopelitis, Buckethead, Raul Bjorkenheim, Trey Anastasio, Mike Stern, Smoky Hormel, Poison Ivy from The Cramps, James Blood Ulmer, Andy Hawkins from Blind Idiot God (their name comes from a H.P. Lovecraft story). I'm probably leaving some out...

Jimmy Page playing the guitar.

Ustad Sultan Khan

2011-11-29T10:51:00.000-08:00

One of the world's Music Masters, Ustad Sultan Khan, passed away a couple of days ago. He was a Sarangi player and an incredible vocalist. His voice really sang out. I had the great fortune to work with him with the band Tabla Beat Science, a group formed by Bill Laswell, Zakir Hussein and Karsh Kale in the late '90's. Sultan Khan contributed beautiful soaring melodies balancing out the rhythmic intensity of TBS and adding to it a whole new dimension. The power of this music seemed to authorize transcendence of all planetary limitations and mundane concerns. At least that's how I heard it most of the time.

Sultan Khan's contribution to the music of the world was put well in a bollywood obituary:

His demise has marked the end of an era. The ‘Sarangi’ will no longer produce the same tune. The sufi probably will not sound as mystical as it sounded when Ustad sang. The soulful voice will never be heard again. But, Ustad will remain singing forever in our hearts. The songs he gave us, will forever be treasured.

Sultan Khan was always a pleasure and very easy work with. He was relaxed and unassuming but knew exactly how he wanted to sound including the type and amount of reverb he wanted on his voice. One of the greats!

Bob Dylan - Bringing the Woman to Life

2011-11-22T08:21:00.000-08:00

I was 18 years young when Bob Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone dramatically surfaced in my life and changed it forever. Had just finished 3 months of voluntarily living the life of a homeless wanderer hitchhiking back and forth between Vancouver and Calgary stopping off once or twice to get recharged at the ranch my Mother lived on in Vernon, B.C.

The homelessness came about during the summer of my 17th year, the last year of High School. Came home one day from school to find the locks on the doors changed and the windows locked. At that point, I was the only one living in that house, my roomates had moved out the month before. I did not pay that months rent; expected the damage deposit to cover it but apparently the Lord of that particular land thought otherwise. Naturally, I broke into my own home. Someone saw and called the cops who showed up and promptly arrested me in the belief I was a thief. They did get me for possession of pot and hash. Also had a "failure to appear" warrant due to a bureaucratic mix-up from another marijuana possession charge - the arresting officer put the wrong court number on the summons with result that I spent 5 days in jail.

While in jail, the Landlord got rid of everything in the house I used to live in. Friends managed to rescue my stereo, record collection and some clothes.

A month or so later, my legal issues were cleared up but decided to take a break from "trading my hours for a handful of dimes." So I lived off the land for the next 3 months until it got cold.

Sometime in October, 1977 I to got a job and rented a room to live in from a family near my work. One friend had stored my stereo which I retrieved. Another friend, who later unfriended me, refused to return my record collection saying I owed him rent. As luck would have it, I soon discovered that the local library to where I'd grown up had begun lending out records. Kind of absent-mindedly picked up Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited. I heard it was supposed to be good.

Back home, I got into a receptive space, turned out the lights, put my headphones on and put the record on. It's quite impossible to describe exactly what happened next, suffice to say it was one of the most powerful peak musical experiences ever felt in this Universe by this one. I connected immediately and deeply with the street poetry of Like A Rolling Stone. I finally found someone else who had lived a similar street education and could articulate it so well. I'd been on my own since I turned 16. None of my peers, at that point, could relate to what that felt like. Dylan had quite obviously been there. I could hardly believe anyone else ha so profoundly found me. It seemed that the lyrics, accented and driven by Michael Bloomfield's searing guitar lines and Dylan's bright, loud harmonica, drew things out of my subconscious mind I barely, or never realized were there.

Bob Dylan and Michael Bloomfield on electric guitars, Al Kooper on organ, and a bass player at Newport.

I've read interpretations that describe Like A Rolling Stone as bitter and cynical. I don't know, for me it resonated so strongly of joyful recognition for what it's like to die to childhood illusions and to directly confront and survive the beauty, brilliance, disappointments, twists and turns, ups and downs of the Real World in all its glorious, sometimes harsh, sometimes comic, always interesting Majesty. In short, I took it as a celebration of Life.

Comparisons have been made betwixt Dylan and Shakespeare. Never saw that myself, maybe because I don't know Shakespeare enough. I do know, with 99% certainty, that William didn't have an amplified electric guitar and harmonica to help him out. One commonality I do recognize: the beginning of Like A Rolling Stone's chorus, which Dylan and others (not long ago The Rolling Stones themselves) deliver with so many different kinds and degrees of passion in various recordings that it qualifies for ' the eight and ninety rules of art', seems a corollory question to Hamlet's famous soliloquy which begins "To be or not to be, that is the question..."

Timothy Leary asked another related question: "What is the question for which Life is the answer?" in his book What Does WoMan Want? Leary juxtaposes Dylan onto himself making him the protagonist in this autobiographical adventure:

The central plot is the Quixotic saga of an evolutionary agent, Dylan, a confused but sincere minstrel. He has been assigned to a primitive planet in the latter years of the Roaring 20th Century to perform those small but precise jiggles needed to cause chaos in the old, outmoded gene-pools, thus allowing creative individuals to start exploring and settling the next habitats. Dylan's mission is none other than to rediscover what woman really wants.

Leary seems to have had a hate/love relationship with Bob Dylan over the years. It couldn't have helped that Leary's wife Rosemary said that she learned everything she knew from Bob Dylan.

E.J. Gold also asks the question, 'what is it that a woman really wants?' in the chapter, Bringing the Woman to Life from the book The Human Biological Machine as a Transformational Apparatus:

With the deepest part of herself, with all her heart, she wishes to be found and to be known.

... warming her heart and bathing her in the intense radiation of total adoration.

Many of Dylan's songs seem to lyrically touch upon this theme but I actually hear it stronger in his harmonica playing. It often resonates with the active, functional manifestion of the magickal formula abbreviated YHVH, Yod, He, Vau, He ( explained in Crowley's, The Book of Thoth). This formula reads more like Yod Harmonica, Vau, Harmonica in Dylan's presentation but has the same intention as I hear it, to bring the woman to life.

A brilliant example of this occurs in the film I'm Not There in which 6 different actors portray Dylan's various character identities. The Like A Rolling Stone era Dylan is played by Cate Blanchett. No footage of the real Bob Dylan appears in the film, he's not there, except at the very end where he plays a lengthy harmonica solo to close the film.

Dustone Angel Photo

2011-11-05T03:36:00.001-07:00

Kelly Rooney kindly and generously sent along the photo with the clearest image of the Dustone Angel. See for yourself.

There wasn't any smoke burning or any kind of Northern Lights type of phenomena occurring. It looks much closer than that, anyway. This apparition wasn't visible to the human eye, only showed up on camera. Its presence was sensed by Kelly. When she felt contact with it, all of her pain was lifted off, vanished and didn't return.

Three months ago, Healing Angels got blogged about here. Then I encounter a genuine contact experience, and it's connected with music as well. Makes you wonder ...

The Dustone website has launched. May it continue its work of "tootling the multitudes" with similar higher dimensional results.

Dustone Angel

2011-10-26T09:53:00.000-07:00

Have been quite busy of late, unable to post here, but plan to get into more of a regular schedule.

Two days ago I saw a photograph of an Angel. Well, I don't know exactly what it "is" I saw, however for purposes of communication "Angel" appears the best descriptor, or perhaps, "Healing Angel." I'll explain.

I'm part of an informal collective of improvisational musicians, producers and engineers called Dustone Cinema. Their website launches any day now. I was working at their studio located in a house atop a hill near Sebastopol, CA day before yesterday helping Richard Fisher set-up some 5.1 Surround Sound mixes. Later in the afternoon Richard introduced me to a woman who lived there,

"Oz, this is Kelly, she's Mickey's daughter."

At first I thought he meant Mickey Hart from the Grateful Dead. Earlier we'd been discussing Bob Weir's new recording/performance facility in San Rafael. Richard worked for Mickey Hart for about 3 years. But then he said,

"Rooney, Mickey Rooney."

Regular readers of of the Oz Mix will easily recall the startling synchronicity I had regarding Mickey Rooney in the last post here, Bond 23. I told Kelly Rooney that story. She smiled, then a few minutes later recounted an amazing occurrence she had experienced just the night before.

She said that she had come home that night in a great deal of pain. She had a very graphic analogy for the pain that I don't remember verbatim, something like the feeling of a sharp knife going through your throat then down the back of your spine. She went to bed but couldn't rest so got up to get some air on the front deck which has a beautiful panoramic view of the land below. The pattern of lights down below caught her attention so Kelly decided to take a photo with her cell phone. Looking at the photo, she saw what looked like a kind of whitish smudge off to one side that wasn't visible to her eyes except in the photo. Thinking that she may have accidentally had her thumb over the lens partially, she took some more photos being careful that nothing was blocking the lens. The subsequent photos show a white, viscous light pattern morphing into different shapes like a lava lamp might. It looks more substantial than smoke ( nothing was burning), less substantial than a biological body. I saw about 4 photos like this. None of the apparition's shapes resembled anything humanoid, to me, yet it definitely appeared to have cohesiveness. It also looked very close, like it was right in front of the camera in contrast to the lights from the bottom of the hill.

Well, sure, maybe it could have been some weird defect in the camera and/or lens. I guess taking more photos from that camera would either confirm or rule that out. However, Kelly's experience, what she sensed and felt in the presence of this entity makes me suspect that a mechanical anamoly doesn't adequately explain this phenomenon. She said that she felt something touch her and when it did, all of her pain immediately vanished. She said it was like all the pain just lifted right off of her and didn't return.

From the way Kelly appeared when telling this story it seemed clear to me that she had a genuine contact experience. The owner of the Dustone studio, Paul Bareilles, was there and encouraged Kelly to write the account down. Perhaps more details will come to light. I don't know what she plans to do with the photos. I asked her permission to write this up. She said, please do and offered the explanation that one reason this might have happened was to let others know about it.

Also interesting to me is that this occurred in a location dedicated to the production of music intended to transform and heal.

Bond 23

2011-10-13T10:52:00.000-07:00

Heard on the radio yesterday that the new James Bond movie will be called Bond 23. I'm not a huge James Bond fan, just find it interesting that the number 23 finds itself receiving more and more attention in the public eye. The 23 Enigma first became more explicitly known to a small segment of the public in Robert Anton Wilson's book Cosmic Trigger. The engima basically concerns the preponderance of strange coincidences with the number 23.

I wrote this whole post then discovered an article online claiming that Bond 23 was a working title only. It won't be the final name apparently. The info I heard on the radio appears wrong. I'm so disappointed! Who can you believe if you can't believe talk radio? Oh well, what follows gives my take on the subject regardless.

Wilson first heard about the 23 Enigma from William Burroughs who began noticing it from peculiar synchronicities with that number and death. Both writers began keeping records of odd coincidences and both noticed that 23 occurred an inordinate number of times. Wilson writes:

I accepted the 23 enigma as a signal that I should attempt to decipher.

23 also turns out to carry much significance in Crowley's Qabalah as the group who participated in RAW's online Crowley course discovered. Burroughs associated 23 with Death from experiences he had. Key number 23 corresponds with the Hanged Man in the tarot which suggests death. The 23rd Hexagram in the I Ching is called Splitting Apart which also suggests death.

From the List of Primes in 777 we see that 23 = The glyph of life - nascent life. A glyph is:
A hieroglyphic character or symbol; a pictograph. In other words 23 = a symbol of new life.

From the Sepher Sephiroth list of words equivalent to 23 we see it correspond to:

Parted, removed, separated
Joy
A thread
Life

All this suggests to me the death/rebirth archetype. But there's more. The association with a thread recalls the classic, albeit cliche instruction when in the bardo to: maintain the thread of consciousness. Cliche it may seem but it also happens to convey extremely good advice. Obviously we would easily remember our past lives if able to maintain the thread of our consciousness through physical death. But we don't have to go there, to postulate reincarnation or speculate about life after death to benefit from this invaluable instruction.

P.D. Ouspensky gave the same advice, I don't remember where, when discussing the attempt to keep consistent practices of inner work. He said something to the effect that sometimes you'll fall so far from your work that you'll feel much more asleep than you ever have before, but if you try keeping even a very slight thread of remembrance to your aims and practices you can get through this negative side of the cycle.

Anyone who attempts the slightest amount of self-observation will soon discover a collection of self-contradictions. One moment I'm resolutely determined to lose weight. That evening my wife makes an incredible banana split with hot chocolate sauce and nuts for dessert that I can't pass up. This crude example seems common to everyone's experience though the details vary.

Further self-observation reveals that we seem to be slightly, sometimes drastically, different in every new situation. As the environment changes, we change with it as we react to different circumstances. In the Gurdjieff system they refer to this phenomena as "many I's." They say that as we appear now, we do not possess a unified "I" but rather a collection of small "I's" liable to change on a whim and often at odds with each other. If you stand between two mirrors angled in such a way to see multiple reflections of yourself you'll get a poignant graphic display of this idea.

So how do we go about forming a unified "I", one consistent from moment to moment and day to day? One method I recommend appears the first and most basic task in the Crowley system: discover, formulate, find your True Will and align yourself to it. Why am I here? What is my purpose or mission in this life? If I could do anything I like, money and time being no obstacle, what would I do? Answering these questions can help with that discovery. In Crowley's system, the Holy Guardian Angel represents the unified "I."

Another method harks back to the aforementioned instruction to "maintain the thread of consciousness." If I can remember my resolution to lose weight when presented with the temptation of a banana split then I might get unified enough to pass on it or only eat half.

To bind together as one seems exactly what we wish for a unified "I" also called a "Big I" - as opposed to all the little I's with their own agendas. To bind together as one appears as an original definition of the word religion. In the 60's Timothy Leary suggested, to anyone who would listen, the advice: start your own religion. Pretty sure he didn't mean to impose an ideology to oppress others with dogma and get rich as some of the new fangled "religions" have, probably taking their cues from some manifestations of traditional organized religions. From the context Leary gave this suggestion, I suspect he meant religion as originally defined: to bind together as one which we see as a method for forming a big, unified I or, alternatively, as a method for discovering and aligning to True Will. Leary saw himself carrying on Gurdjieff's work as well as Crowley's.

Starting your own religion introduces the idea of regarding your life and daily activities as sacred, which brings about the use of a special kind of presence and attention. Perhaps the aspect of Joy from the 23 glyph enters here? A good literary presentation of making daily life and ordinary routines sacred occurs in James Joyce's Ulysses, a book modeled in form after Homer's epic poem the Odyssey which concerns the ancient Greek hero Odysseus and the adventures on his prolonged journey home.

Like many fans of Robert Anton Wilson, when I first encountered his works and for several years after, I began having lots and lots of unusual coincidences with 23. Too many to write off as selective perception though there were some that fit that category. I usually regarded them as an indication of my awareness of a new life as a spiritual being, evidence of going in the right direction.

To give one example: On July 23rd, 1983 I did pay attention to any 23s that might crop up. The band I was worked for at the time, The Tickets, had a small party the night before in honor of my leaving the band to attend recording school in New York. Got up at noon. Went to a convenience store and saw a photo in a magazine with the caption, " on Aug. 23, 1974 John Lennon saw a U.F.O. flying over New York City." Fans of Cosmic Trigger will recognize the July 23rd date as the day the star system Sirius reputedly has the greatest effect on Earth, so the U.F.O. sighting over where I was going seemed relevant. A small coincidence there. The one that really got me though - at 2:30pm an old movie came on which was about a young man preparing to leave his home to go to school in New York - exactly what I was going through. To top it off, the actor playing the young man was a young Mickey Rooney. Mickey was the name I was called by until High School because my given name was the same as my Father's and Grandfather's and they had first dibs. Then I found that some of the dialog, when interpreted in a different context, sounded like communications from an Inner School of some kind. So I took all this as an indication of alignment to True Will by making the decision to move to New York.

The unique thing about the 23 glyph as a symbol of the death/rebirth archetype/formula - it specifically references the bardo by the correspondence with thread. You don't instantly go from death to rebirth, an in-between phase occurs even if it eludes awareness most of the time. This in-between death and rebirth phase, aka the bardo, marks the space where meta-programming can be done ie programming your programming. A formula suggesting how to do this appears in Cosmic Trigger. The bardo has also been called the space of choice-points.

So I now also see the 23 glyph as one communication device to make the death/bardo/rebirth formula more explicit as a viable and extremely useful technique for brain change. If you look at the pathway that lies between 2 and 3 on the Tree of Life you might get some useful hints there relative to bardo voyaging and brain change.

23 corresponds to the Hebrew letter Mem which opens up other avenues of useful inquiry. I'll just say that (perhaps this stretches it too far but sometimes you don't know how far to go until going too far) mem occurs as the root of remember which recalls Gurdjieff's prime instruction to remember yourself ie maintain the thread of consciousness.

So I'm glad to see 23 emerging more and more in popular culture. The first instance I'm aware appeared in the Max Headroom television show. Network 23 was the station the main characters worked for.The Movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit begins with a Baby Herman cartoon that seems a very accurate illustration of the trials and tribulations regarding the birth of the new Aeon of Horus. Immediately following is a comment about how they did 23 takes of it. This movie has a lot of useful information.

Whether Bond 23 relates to the 23 enigma, I do not know, except that ... I wrote this blog, so it does now. It's the first Bond film to only use a number in the title. The director, Sam Mendes, has a track record that includes a good film narrated from the bardo perspective called American Beauty.

James Bond creator, Ian Fleming was an acquaintance of Aleister Crowley's. He was the agent for British Intelligence who suggested that Crowley interview Rudolph Hess when Hess defected to England in W.W. II

Finally and unrelatedly, although I'm a bit late getting this out, a group is assembling over at alt.fan.rawilson to do a read through of the Thomas Pynchon book Against the Day. It starts in a couple of days with a plan to read 4 pages a day. Anyone is welcome to join in.

Rise Again

2011-10-09T14:32:00.000-07:00

On Rise Again, Bill Laswell and Method of Defiance Technologies craft exotic, dub-groove beats and solid, fluid, moving, intelling bass lines set in depth-field micro-worlds born from the reverberations, oscillations and modulations of du du du dubbed out, stretched out, phase shifted, time twisted, pitch bent, frayed, delayed and parlayed sound FX forming the foundation and environment for the crazy-poetic, broadband nursery rhyme chants, mantrums, slogans and idiosyncratic, polypantheistic relativistic, revelatory transmissions of HIMOG Dub Messiah Lee Scratch Perry. At 75 years of age, sounding more God-intoxicated than ever yet also freely copping to his insanity, Perry delivers his vision with astonishing clarity and directness. It seems like he's reached the age where he just wants to cut out all the crap and get to the core of the message. Perry's pallette includes references to martial arts, sanskrit chants, the Ark of the Covenant and other Old Testament stories, Magick, Nietzsche, Little Richard, Reincarnation, Islam, vegetarianism, Astrology, extra-terrestrials, Japanese food, and of course, Rasatafari among other things.

I've been listening to it for awhile, got my copy in Ethiopia appropriately enough, but checked it out with headphones for the first time yesterday. Delighted to discover that the very first sound you hear on Rise Again is an ambient recording I made outside the crypt at the Basilica du Sacre Coeur in Paris, France. It was raining slowly and the church bell was ringing slowly. It has a very strong mood which you can hear in its entirety on the 7th track, Bells of Sacre Couer/ Showtime at Giza, from my cd, All Around the World mentioned a few posts back.

It's interesting that this record starts with a distant bell ringing because that's also how you begin a bardo reading. Bells reputedly open up entry portals to the Invisible World. You ring one at the start of a reading to indicate the intention and vector of your concentrated and directed attention. It helps to establish contact. Bells also see use in magick rituals, in particular Crowley's Mass of the Phoenix. In that ritual Crowley gives us the Thelemic rendition of the Lord's Prayer. Lee Perry gives his Rasta rendition of the Lord's Prayer on this CD.

Eleven tracks on this release. 11 = the number of Magick.

The tracks:

1. Higher Level - after the bell, the beat starts and Perry comes in right away establishing his direction or misdirection with:

Let there be light
Let there be no more parasites
Let there be light
Eating up the peace,
Removing grief
Condemning beef
Condemning meat

( I am not a vegetarian - this is LSP's vision/religion)

Peter Apfelbaum's flute wafts and punctuates like reflected, refracted light dancing through a diamond-like crystal prism.

Later in this song and on subsequent jams Perry's raps remind me of the spirit of 6th century Celtic poet Taliesan in particular the Hanes Taliesan riddle as presented in Robert Graves, The White Goddess.

You see Lee Scratch Perry everywhere
You see Lee Scratch Perry flying through the air

2. Scratch Message starts by quoting an old tune from the 1920's, Keep On Knocking But You Can't Come In that Little Richard made famous in the rock-n-roll era. Slowed down, chilled out and reggaeified it serves as the Greek Chorus to his message.

Then he riffs on the 23rd psalm:

Jamaica is thy shepherd
And I shall not want
I always reap what I sow
I walk through the valley, the valley of life

Chorus:
Death, I conquer Death.
Beth, I conquer Beth
Elizabeth, I conquer Elizabeth
Prince Charles, I conquer Prince Charles ...
I am the power

Showing true ambition, Perry manages to conquer death, the 2nd letter of the Hebrew alphabet (beth), and the Royal Family of England all in one verse.

3. Orthodox introduces the lovely, smooth as silk voice of the incomparable Gigi and the musical atmosphere of the Coptic Orthodox Church in this hymn to Ethiopia/Abyssinia. Haile Selassie, the Ethiopian Emporer considered the Messiah by the Rastafarian religion, makes a lyrical appearance . Most appropriately on this, the third track as his name means Power of the Trinity. Lee proceeds to evoke more of his Taliesan-like characteristics. Also appropos, Taliesan's name means radiant brow as shown in his creation myth:

The baby was found by Elffin, the son of Gwyddno Garanhir, 'Lord of Ceredigion', while fishing for salmon. Surprised at the whiteness of the boy's brow, he exclaimed "dyma Dal Iesin", meaning "this is a radiant brow." Taliesin, thus named, began to recite beautiful poetry, saying:

Fair Elffin, cease your lament!

....Though I am weak and small,

On the wave crest of the surging sea,

I shall be better for you

Than three hundred shares of salmon.

Elffin of noble generosity,

Do not sorrow at your catch.

Though I am weak on the floor of my basket,

There are wonders on my tongue....''

Amazed, Elffin asked how a baby could talk. Again Taliesin replied with poetry:

"Floating like a boat in its waters,

I was thrown into a dark bag,

and on an endless sea, I was set adrift.

Just as I was suffocating, I had a happy omen,

and the master of the Heavens brought me to liberty."

4. Wake the Dead:
O father who art in Heaven heaven
. . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . heaven
. . . . . . . .. . .. . .. . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .............. . heaven
.................................................................................................heaven
........................................................................................................................................... .......heaven
..................................................................................................................................................................heaven ...
Allah, Allah be Thy name
.............................................Thy name
.................................................................................Thy name
...................................................................................................................Thy name
............................................................................................................................Thy name ...

Chorus:

Come to wake the dead
Come to wake the dead
Me come to wakes the dead
Me come to wake up the dead
Wake up the dead
To shake up their heads

Phased drum fill on shake up their heads introduces a horn section leading to Doctor Israel methodically, defiantly announcing FIRE .... FIRE ...

LSP calls forth the Ark of the Covenant to wipe out evil government

Chorus

Parasite get down and go down
Six foot six parasite
I am the light
Six foot six vampire
I am the light
You know that Jesus Christ is super black Rastafari

Chorus

5. Rise Again - The title track begins, once again, with distant Church bells chiming. Mellow, hypnotic, trance dub frames Lee's celebration of transcendence/rebirth/victory. B section chant starts out Aum Tat Sat. a sanskrit mantra. It means the Truth of Absolutely Reality.

6. African Revolution - notice how the titles of tracks 5 and6 have the same initials but reversed. 5 = 6 in that regard. From the joyfulness of the song I'd guess it advocates a non-violent revolution. Sounds like Hawk sings on this one.

7. Dancehall Kung Fu ode to martial arts, Geminis and Supermen?

With a Gemini mind
And a Gemini hand
Playing Gemini bass
With a Gemini feel ...

A litany to all things "Super" occurs later on

8. E.T.

Off-planet soundcapes conjure alien environments.

Transmission report: RED ALERT

Love the enemies
like you love yourself

Thou shall not hate
I don't debate
If you want to be reincarnate
Don't hate
If you wish to be reincarnated
Don't hate your enemies

Lee summons the Space Brothers to make a new race. This is the song where he admits his insanity, if you can believe him.

Love your enemies
People preach
Love your enemies
Parasites
Love your enemies
Bloodsuckers
Love your enemies
Blood drinkers ...

Look at the Sun
Throw away the gun

9. House of God - starts with the sound of an emergency vehicle siren.

Explict dub hymn to Scratch's vision of the Singularity. Sounds like my friend Jahdan Blakkamoore raps on this one. Jahdan was part of the KSK artist contingent performing in Mali one year.

Quotes a line I first heard from Robert Anton Wilson:

Me: What is the ultimate purpose of human life on Earth?
RAW: To be the eyes and ears of God.

10. Butterfly

Transformation is achieved, mission accomplished.

God bless my daughter
And my daughter is water
God bless my starter
And my starter is fire.

Good info in this song for further research re Instant Karma

11. Inakaya (Japanese Food)

Japanese dude
Japanese dude
I am a lover of the Japanese food

Japanese food give you good mood
Japanese food give you good mood

Perhaps the most profound track on the record. Ecstatic religious visions are great but everyone has to eat! The record ends with:

I am in a fire
Rastafari - all dubbed out

It might be easy to write off Lee Scratch Perry as a naive eccentric who maybe smoked a little too much ganga in his time but you need to remember this is the person who brought reggae music into the world. Hooking up with Bill Laswell (like Herbie Hancock, Iggy Pop, and William Burroughs before him) rates as genius in my book. It's good to hear Lee's voice strong as ever. Another aesthetic transmission communication from Method of Defiance.

Lee Scratch Perry

Franklin Merrell-Wolff

2011-10-08T11:46:00.000-07:00

This is related to the Instant Karma Part 2 post where we gathered evidence in support of the premise 'Every man and every woman is a star'. I made the statement:

"This release of light and energy upon death can be sensed and felt, particularly by someone very close to the person who died."

What follows is an eyewitness account of the death of an extraordinary explorer of Higher Consciouness, Franklin Merrell-Wolff. It's quoted from a biographical piece on Merrell-Wolff by Dr. Richard Moss who knew him well. The whole piece is worth reading.

"When I entered his room, I stood silently at his bedside, gently holding his hand. I could feel his energy, exquisitely fine and open, but nearly gone. He didn't seem to be conscious. Reaching deep inside myself, I began to speak softly to him. I told him that his work was now complete, that his body had been prepared for release by the illness and was now ready. Then I was silent for a long moment and told him from the depths of my heart, "We all thank you." Suddenly, he roused himself, and with what seemed at once like genuine sincerity and the old mischievous humor I loved so much he replied, "You are all entirely welcome." These were his last words. He passed away peacefully a few hours later.

His body was brought back to his home where he was dressed in his finest teaching suit and laid on the couch in the room where for years he had had his Sunday meetings. Then, because it had been his request, I and two of his oldest students began to whisper the First Bardo from the Tibetan Book Of The Dead repeatedly into his ear. He had been quite clear that he wanted to have the First Bardo read to him, and only that Bardo. The words instruct the "Nobly born" to receive the Pure White Light of Consciousness-without-characteristic of any kind. For him it was to be the Pure White Light or nothing. We took turns reciting the First Bardo for six hours until dawn.

In those hours and throughout that first day after his physical death the energy that radiated from him became stronger and stronger. It was like standing before a door onto the Infinite. I realized then that we can do our deepest work in service to Consciousness, as the Tibetan Buddhist's teach, in the final moments of life if we can release all self-contraction and become transparent to the Infinite. Forty-nine years before, exactly half his lifetime ago, this is what happened to Dr. Wolff at the time of his realization. Now it seemed it was happening again in the hours after his physical death."

Franklin Merrell-Wolff

I'm currently reading and enjoying Wolff's book Pathways Through to Space - A Personal Report of Transformations in Consciousness. The title explains itself. The New York Times blurb on the back says:

"Beautifully written ...
a prolonged soliloquy by one who ...
sought to arrive at his own liberated self."

Another description of it by Ron Leonard:

"Henceforth, he began writing, not merely about Transcendental Consciousness, but from it. Because he intends Pathways to be primarily an autobiographical report on the process itself, including spontaneous reflection on a variety of topics and issues, he presents the philosophical dimension informally, rather than systematically. He is sharing the journey, which may provide personal inspiration for the reader’s spiritual path. "

3 Films

2011-10-06T17:19:00.000-07:00

Three films that all include a common theme very pertinent, in my opinion, to the pain and difficult times we are collectively going through.

Generally speaking, this theme could be said to illustrate what brings down, or defeats an Invocation. These films each present the theme in completely different ways. Each film also reveals much more under the microscope of qabalistic analysis, and at least two of them work well, with repeated viewings, as exercises in that elucidating art.

This theme also turns up and develops out as one of the subtexts in Aleister Crowley's 91 chaptered Book of Lies, a crucial title for understanding the esoteric work he presented.

The first film is Animal Crackers by The Marx Brothers. Marx Brothers' films come highly recommended for several reasons. The humour they give provides nourishment to the soul. It can even heal the body as the famous story with Norman Cousins shows. He was diagnosed with a life threatening disease:

Cousins read of the theory that negative emotions be harmful to the body, and so hypothesized that if the negative emotions were detrimental to your health, then the positive emotions should improve health. Cousins, still battling his ailment, was being treated with high doses of painkillers, which he realized were being harmful to his body. This realization motivated him to prescribe himself a medication of a different sort. He hired a nurse who would read him humorous stories, and play for him Marx Brothers movies. This proved to be effective, as in very little time, Cousins was off of all painkillers and sleeping pills. He found that the laughter relieved pain and would help him sleep. Since Norman Cousins declared that he "laughed himself out of" a deadly disease, scientists have theorized that laughter has the ability to strengthen the human immune system.

- Jackie Chew

Another important function of Marx Brothers comedy is what's known as "breaking set" which means breaking down or breaking through our conscious and unconscious beliefs and habits.
In their excellent Preface to Israel Regardie's, The Eye in the Triangle, Christopher Hyatt and Daron Peter von Gundlach write:

"Breaking Set" is the spirit of Crowley. Psychological Set Theory defines set as the predetermined way we have of looking at the World. Set, funny enough, is the "evil" god of Egypt, who killed his brother Horus. Horus, the new aeon symbol, is opposed by the rigidities of the past (Set). Set is restriction and for Crowley's "morality" restriction is "evil," whether it be the restrictions and rigidities of our own conditioning and prejudices, or those of an entire culture and civilization."

"Breaking Set" is another form of the death/rebirth archetype/formula. To break set is to temporarily "die" to your preconceptions. Experience shows that a new, and hopefully expanded (be it ever so subtle sometimes) set forms fairly quickly. That's the rebirth part.

Crowley covers the same ground in the Book of Lies chapter 1 in clear but also cryptic fashion:

THE SABBATH OF THE GOAT

               O! the heart of N.O.X. the Night of Pan.
               {Pi-Alpha-Nu}: Duality: Energy: Death.
               Death: Begetting: the supporters of O!
               To beget is to die; to die is to beget.
               Cast the Seed into the Field of Night.
               Life and Death are two names of A.
               Kill thyself.
               Neither of these alone is enough.

Kill thyself = breaking set - one possible meaning of several, perhaps. By Gematria, the 5th line indicates a method I've discussed much already so I shan't belabor the point.

In the Legominisms post I quoted Gurdjieff:

and we shall secure its transmission from generation to generation through initiates of a special kind, whom we shall call initiates of art.

"initiates of art" qabalistically relates to Crowley's formula of N.O.X.

In Alchemical terms breaking set is called solve coagula which means dissolve and coagulate( ie resolidify)

Naturally, it always involves a little trip through the bardos.

The good news is that this process can become more familiar, learned and practiced, by watching Marx Brothers films. Ergo, watching Marx Brothers films can act as a form of bardo training.

In Animal Crackers, the stolen painting, represents the Invocation that gets defeated.
Harpo does finally return it in the end but then proceeds to knock everyone out with sleeping gas . I should note that in all these films there is a whole lot more to them than the points I'm making.

The second film is Beetlejuice. The theme I'm alluding to is shown in the first scene immediately after the opening credits sequence and in the first words of dialog. Unlike Animal Crackers the force that would bring down the Invocation is turned around to become the force that powers the Invocation.

Beetlejuice also communicates on many levels. It one scene it satirizes caricatured notions about death. In it the Maitlands, who are dead and haunting their house, are trying to scare off the Deetzes to get them to move out by putting sheets over themselves and moaning. Their daughter, Lydia discovers them playing ghosts and wants to know what's under the sheets,
"What do you look like under there?" she says trying to peer through the eye-holes.
"Are you gross under there? Are you Night of the Living Dead under there? Bloody veins and pus?"

Another level of the film can be seen as an allegory of how awakening consciousness ( the Maitlands in the bardo) "haunts" the body it lives in ( their house in the film) and how higher consciousness has to learn to get along with ordinary consciousness ( the Deetzes and friends except for Lydia) and vice versa.

The last film seems particularly relevant in this day and age with so many wars breaking out, wars continuing and threats of war elsewhere. Kubrik's film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb remains one of the best satires on war ever, in my opinion., desoite its setting in a different era. The Invocation brought down in this film could be called "All Life on Planet Earth as we currently know it."

The video clip below graphically shows, in a Freudian way, this theme I've been getting at:

Thanks to the Overweening Generalist for pointing this vid out.

The same theme appears quite obviously evident in one of the final scenes:

Aircraft commander Major T. J. "King" Kong goes to the bomb bay to open the damaged doors manually, straddling a nuclear bomb as he repairs arcing wires overhead. When he effects his electrical patches, the bomb bay doors suddenly open, the bomb releases and Kong rides it to detonation like a rodeo cowboy, whooping and waving his cowboy hat. The H-bomb explodes and the Doomsday Device's detonation is inevitable.

Maybe Kubrik's next film, 2001: A Space Odyssey was a response to the nihilism of Strangelove?

Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T12:17:00.000-07:00

A special word from our "sponsers" ie computers, computer interfaces, the internet, apple, all the i-devices etc.

Steve Jobs rocked this world with his vision. He was a true friend of Humanity. Some of his last public words are worth listening to:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Bon voyage ...