Part One: Being the None

“I cannot accept that the products of the mind are subject-matter for belief.”                                                                                                                    —Charles Fort

Thesis thought after the first of two-day Easter Oshana online event, “Saturday Fever in Jerusalem: An Enlightenment Transmission Easter Weekend Unlike No Other”:

When I was “being the One” in 2002, did I go too far, or not far enough?

Let’s pretend that the dream never died, that it just carried on playing at a deeper, unconscious level, where my identity couldn’t monkey with it. Let’s imagine that, over time, it slowly started seeping back into reality, only now in such a way that I wouldn’t really, fully grok it, or grasp it, and so would be unable to turn it into another beautiful delusion about my own latent greatness. What happens as I start to grok this time? Will I make the same mistake again? Or is Icarus, once burned, fully learned?

Think of what follows as Jake’s fantasy version of Saturday’s Oshana Easter event. Imagine Morpheus saying to Neo:

The reason we have sex is because of death. Via reproduction we transfer the same old, same-old into the next generation. All these iterations are necessary because something went wrong in the original creation.

And Neo nodding sagely and saying: “Hmmm”

Whereupon Morpheus said:

Think about it this way; when you reproduce the image of your grandmother in your brain, and send it from one side to the other, you reproduce the image many, many times, to be sure it doesn’t get lost in the transition. Crossing over from the right hemisphere to the left, there’s a bridge (called the corpus callosum) it has to pass over. The bridge has been blocked, and now it is policed to prevent undesirable contraband from getting across. Bad things you would rather not think about.

Neo’s mind has already started to wander.

Death is one of those things. You walk around thinking that death is something that happens to other people. Ironically enough, this is not far from the truth. The you that is worried about death does not exist.

That gets Neo’s attention again.

Once upon a time there was a loss of connection within yourself. Now it has proliferated throughout all of your existence. All around you see it: the failure of human souls to connect to one another. This is because we no longer have the shared meeting space of the Garden. We are not all in the same place, the place of the senses, and so we cannot meet there.

The Christ story provides the answer. It is the proposed solution to the Garden of Eden problem.

And Neo nodded and said, “Uh-huh. . .” And then he nodded off.

Bad Blood

And then Morpheus said, his words seeping through into Neo’s dreaming:

The human race is a sperm race. The waters that sperm moved within became toxic. Something got into our blood. “It is by Christ’s blood that we are cleansed and redeemed” means—how do we get the bad out of our blood?

Ancient sacrificial rituals of scapegoating put the badness into an animal and then released the animal’s blood. They were trying to correct a vibration passed down through the generations, carried in the liquid of our bodies (though it is even more etheric than liquid). The human body is a liquid container, and that discordant vibration went into the soft matter of our bodies.

Death is now the one thing we have in common, Morpheus said, to get Neo’s attention. Neo stirred awake and blinked.

This discordant note split the creation into a near-infinity of parallel lines or timestreams: like a parallel distributed processing system that is trying to work out a problem, via countless different simulations.

Neo said, “Riiight . . .” So Morpheus said:

The evidence of this is all around you. Although you exist in eternity, everything you see, touch, taste, and smell is temporary. Your very body is temporary. The atoms around you are full of holes.

And Neo nodded again and tried hard to look like he was getting it. But he wasn’t. But then, nor was he meant to.

 

Mind the Gaps

This world is like a porta potty toilet [said Morpheus], a temporary construction. Everything is temporary. If I hit this wall, it is not solid. My arm might pass through the atoms if I shift my attention to the gaps, and notice that the wall is disappearing and reappearing, a million times each second. Reality comes and goes. This is so they can change the scenery whenever they need to.

At this, Neo said, “Aha!”

Well, I did anyway. This is why.

If there’s anyone reading this who was around back in the Matrix Warrior daze, they may recall that I wrote a follow-up called Matrix Sorcerer. It never got published, though I did share it online. Of course, even though Dave Oshana liked Matrix Warrior well enough and recommended it to his “students”—and even though it accrued a small cultish following from just the sort of alienated youth I wrote it for—it was never meant for mass consumption, and there was no demand for a sequel. 

The following excerpts come from Matrix Sorcerer. They were reproduced more or less verbatim from my journal at the time, a time when Mitch Fraas, my Morpheus before Dave Oshana, was taking me around Guatemalan whorehouses, trying to help me sort out my libido, filming every failed erection for a “found footage” mockumentary version of Apocalypse Now that was to be called The Miracle of Sin.

Look upon my works, ye mighty, and yada yada.

 

Fertile Ground for the Imagination

These experiences took place inside a mosquito filled room, under the flimsy sheets of a shit-hole hotel in Esquintla, Guatemala, in January, the year 2000 [six months before Dave became enlightened]. They constitute my first fully conscious recall of second attention training outside “the matrix.” In fact, the similarities to the movie’s scenario were so uncanny that, towards the end of the experience, I had the following dialogue with my own personal “Morpheus,” Mitch.

He: “If you could write all this down, Jake, they’d call you a genius.”

Me: “No, man, they’d just say I ripped off The Matrix.”

And I am sure they will. In fact, they already have.

Here’s what happened.

I am in a room, a dingy place. It’s a nightmare feeling: entities seem to be coming out of the walls. I am lucid, and I know that I have to take the nightmare in hand and turn it around. I look at my hands and there is a nightmare element to what I see: I have eyes on my fingertips! No, don’t want that. I focus, and get my hands sorted out. I go over to the mirror, bracing myself for what I am going to see, knowing it will be pretty nasty. It is. In a few seconds, I bring my normal features into focus, and attain full lucidity.

I know I have to go out, into “the Zone,” the nightmare realm, and I figure I’ll need some protection. I decide on a gun, reaching into a little cubbyhole and bringing out a piffling little thing, more like a kid’s toy. No good at all: I have to manifest a real gun. I want a .44 magnum, but instead manifest an ordinary revolver. Good enough. I test the weapon by firing it at the black door: the bullet goes through it, leaving a little round hole. It is very satisfying to see. Lucid, I leave the shack.

After at first using the gun to protect myself from enemies (police), I get sidetracked into the dubious pleasures of shooting women from a distance and watching them go down. Very realistic, contact, squib effect, everything. I have to stop after a while, however, because I know I’m going to wake up if I keep on indulging like this. [In those days, I still had a lot of repressed misogyny to work through.]

I run into Mitch, and we walk down the hill, back to the room. He is talking about how we need to stick to sordid, sleazy areas because they are fertile ground for our imagination. He explains that they have a sort of reverse effect: the darker and more squalid our surroundings, the more positive and inspired our imagination. I realize that the imagination thrives on—is fed by—negative or horrific imagery and feelings, hence the way my lucidity arose as it were from nightmare, and from the need to control and amend the situation in which I found myself.

 

Meeting the Enemy

Here the transition is lost. I move into heightened awareness. I am flying over a great city, which I know to be a city of the future. It’s a place, an alternate universe or dimension, for people to take refuge during the turbulent times ahead. It looks like a normal, ultra-modern city, super clean and spacious; all the buildings are pyramid-shaped, made of glass and metal. I see trains on tracks and pedestrians and such, and am slightly disappointed, confused, by how normal it all is. (Later on in the dream, Mitch gibes me for how “pedestrian” my vision of the future is.)

After this vision, Mitch and I and some others move back into “the real world.” It is similar to how, in the movie, the crew enter into the matrix: to navigate it and perform certain, specific functions. I realize at this point the following fact: the whole dream tapestry is in the process of mutating as the collective consciousness adapts and expands to incorporate new concepts. Chief among these new concepts is the whole black iron prison, global conspiracy, New World Order/Mark of the Beast thing, by which the occult truth becomes manifest in an overt, political fashion. This is necessary for humanity to confront its situation, finally, albeit in a metaphorical form.

The irony here is that physical “reality” is a metaphor for a hidden energetic truth: that we are enslaved at a soul level to a tyrannical, vampire-entity; and the State or the Machine—AI as seen in the movie—is both a metaphor for and a manifestation of this hidden, energetic truth.

The moment all of this becomes “real” (acknowledged as part of Consensus) within the “matrix” itself is the moment we can break out, once and for all. The only thing I recall from the scene is the realization that these “glitches” are occurring, and that more and more people are becoming capable, without even being aware of it, of altering their reality. As such the illusion is beginning to break down. The laws of physics are no longer holding up.

I am shown that even the “Enemy,” as such, is learning to override the program and perform impossible actions; and that when this ability comes without the necessary awareness (cops don’t know that reality is an illusion), it blows a fuse in the experiencer. It’s scary as all hell to think of police using these occult techniques, but the consolation is that, the more they do, the more it causes the very system they are supposed to be defending to break down. Reality is a limited prospect. From here, where?

 

Back to Reality?

“Burned all my notebooks, what good are notebooks? They won’t help me survive.”                                                                                                                                   —Talking Heads, “Life During Wartime”

There is a missing piece in the dream here: a gap in the narrative. And yet what’s missing is the precise element that caused this dream to push its way back into my awareness during last Saturday’s online event. In the dream, I was watching a prison guard wielding a truncheon against a problematic prisoner who was on the other side of the bars; the prison guard became so consumed by rage that his reality skipped out of its groove and his truncheon was able to pass through the bars as if they, or the truncheon, was no longer solid. The guard was able to beat the prisoner, but then he was unable to retract his truncheon, whereupon he realized that something impossible had occurred, and blew a cognitive fuse.

My arm might pass through the atoms if I shift my attention to the gaps, and notice that the wall is disappearing and reappearing, a million times each second.

So why did I leave this essential detail out of Matrix Sorcerer? Was it because it was too messy, too hard to describe? Or was something else working beneath consciousness? Did I know someday that I would come seeking it and so conceal it from myself? Then, while working on this blogpost, finding this key element missing, I became desperate to find the original account! When I couldn’t find it in any of my other Word documents, I even thought about finding the original hand-written journal that contained the dream! But this meant seeking through dozens of such journals half of which are in another country and some of which no longer even exist. It was futile. The crucial element about the gaps in reality had itself fallen into a gap in reality. I had erased it from my own account!

Instead, what comes next is this:

Somewhere around now I dream of waking. I am writing it all down, the first part of the dream, on a yellow parchment. I realize halfway however that I am still dreaming and that when I wake this record will not be available to me. On the other hand, I know it will exist somewhere, in the position of the assemblage point. On realizing this, I comment to someone: “I didn’t move my AP far enough.” . . . I struggle for a while, and at one point I can even feel the notebook and my sleeping body, and I know I have the option to return to them. I realize, however, that I have more important, or more desirable, things to do right now than scribbling in a notebook. I allow the assemblage point to slide back to its previous position, and resume the visions.

Twenty years later, Morpheus said this:

One morning I woke, and I couldn’t find the identity I had gone to sleep as, the one that every previous morning had been waiting to capture me again. That particular morning, I woke and it was gone. I wasn’t even sure at first what had changed. I only knew that everything was brighter and clearer, more vibrant and beautiful than before. 

The reason we see things is not because matter creates energy fields but the reverse: there are energy fields that brought your body into manifestation. Most people, however, are not incarnated; they are bodies running around with no one inside them.

Non-player characters, thinks Neo.

If we are eating each other’s pain, we need to let that pain pass through us, not hold onto it. If you get a fly in your eye, and you close the eye, the fly cannot get out again. If you keep your eye open, the tears will wash the fly out.

Adam and Eve, sin and separation. Anywhere in existence, terror is available to you; an ant nearby may be feeling terror. What terror are you accessing right now?

Meeting the Matrix crew (for real this time)

I am taken now by Mitch to meet some people. Dream people. Morpheus and his crew, as it were. I’m not afraid, but at the same time it’s like nothing I can describe. (Thank God for the movie, saves me a lot of work.) These people mean business. They are for real. They come and go like phantom travelers, unbound by the mind. Their assemblage point moves as freely as we roll our eyes. They are the keepers of Eternity. I don’t actually see them or meet them, so far as I recall, but they are around. I am out the matrix now but I’m not in any vision. This is a real world.

There’s one woman there I do meet. She’s called Nora. She sits in a mirror; so far as I can see, she is just an image. Mitch glimpses his own face in a mirror at this point, and sees that he has a bloody figure 8 scrawled or cut into his cheek, some sort of mark or ID. He comments dryly that he better get himself a better mark, that he doesn’t look too good with this bloody 8 on him. I tell him jokingly not to be so vain. There is a lot of laughter in this realm. Even so, we are all business. I am given an assignment: to move consciously into a new, all-inclusive vision. I am told to situate myself in the basement of a school building. I slide directly into a different perception, or dream, but I continue to hear Mitch and the woman in my head: they are with me the whole way.

I find myself in a basement, climbing stairs to get out. I have to create the vision even as I move through it, to sustain it, to weave the dream. I take off and start flying, initially concerned about being seen, but soon realizing that it is not an issue. I am flying over a vast green landscape, high in the sky. Beautiful vista, total freedom. I look closely at the grass below, wanting to see a “flyer,” to witness the parasite entities for myself. I am not sufficiently focused for the task, however; apparently it’s only a personal whim and not part of my assignment, which involves a subtler and more sophisticated maneuver of perception. I realize then that I am flying between giant bookshelves, higher than skyscrapers; it seems like the fields are actually carpet, possibly in a library of some kind, and that I am a tiny point of perception, no bigger than a grain of dust.

Everybody Falls

I am supposed to now shift to a reduced perspective, but I can’t make the leap. I can hear Mitch and the woman discussing me like I’m not there. There’s a certain joviality to it but also annoyance or disappointment. They bring up the movie: “C’mon Jake, you’ve seen the movie. You have to believe.” Indeed this seems to be the crux of the problem.

To effectively imagine a scene so that it becomes real, one has to commit totally to it and abandon all doubts about the nature of reality being anything other than a position of the assemblage point. Somehow, in the period of blackness, I have lost my clarity and am unable to imagine the designated scene with sufficient conviction to actually manifest it. I feel palpably at this point their expectation and frustration: like Neo I am supposed to be “the One” (something about a natural capacity to imagine); and yet, like all the rest, I am failing, or falling, the first time out the gate. Oh well.

Next thing I know I am moving down the levels with Mitch: we are bringing the assemblage point back to its customary position, and find ourselves walking down a stony Guatemalan road, a road that leads back to Atitlan. We even get to ride some sort of cart. Mitch makes a comment about humor, and I realize that, despite having no recollection of it, much of the time throughout these experiences we were laughing our heads off. Then he makes the comment about writing it all down. I realize I will never be able to recall one thousandth part of the experiences, and that no one would ever believe it, anyhow.

Do I even believe it and what does it even mean to believe something? I cannot accept that products of the mind . . . But at what point does the power to imagine cease to be a means to escape reality and become the way to re-enter reality? And vice versa, when did our primary tool for organizing the senses and making sense of sensory data become our foremost obstacle to doing so? And how does this relate to the Fall, the loss of the garden, the imprisoning power of knowledge, the serpentine intrusion of false identity, and to a dream that never fully died because it was never fully real-ized? Or to a multitude of timelines and parallel life-streams still trying to converge into a single DNA strand of being?

“Fortress of Knowledge,” Part Two of this piece on the Oshana online Easter event, will be up on Thursday, the 16th April, 2020.