New Skin for Old Ceremony: Community Building & Space Industrialization (Prisoner of Infinity XIX)

Solar-Tour-NASA
“Why industrialize space? The answer must be essentially economic. There must be important commercial operations which can be done only in space or which can be done better in space.”
—William M. Brown & Herman Kahn, “Long-Term Prospects For Developments in Space (A Scenario Approach)
Most of the preceding material (besides the material about Edgar Mitchell in chapter XV, and barring some minor tweaking) was written back in the spring of 2013. Now it’s May 1st 2015 and I’ve spent the previous few weeks going over the old material and getting it into shape for submission to publishers. In those two years, the main thing that’s happened (externally speaking) is that I bought a broken down old crack house in a small Canadian town, using money inherited from the sale of my mother’s Hampstead apartment after she died in late 2010. It’s been exactly a year since I took ownership of the house and the time since has been spent less on writing than on renovating, tearing out old walls and floors, building new ones, dry-walling, and plumbing. It’s a large project not just because of the amount of work required but also because, barring some help at the start, my wife and I have been working on it alone, and neither of us had prior experience of this sort of work.
The building is a commercially-zoned residential and was split into two parts when we bought it. We spent the first eight months or so getting the larger, back portion in order, where we planned to live, and moved in about halfway through the renovations process. The front part, the future commercial space, we left for later. Spring came early in 2015, and I went back to work in March. Our plan was to turn the front part of the building into a local community radio station. Becoming part of the community in which I live (as opposed to the virtual realm of the alternate perceptions community) is something I have never attempted. The closer I got to completing the renovations, the more acutely aware I became of how daunting the idea of integration with a community is to me.
Fort St Transformation
One thing that was clear to me even before I bought the property was how the process of renovating an old, dilapidated, literally poison-filled house (in the early days we had to remove countless used drug needles) was a kind of psychic enactment. The crack house stood in for my body: old, worn-out, polluted after decades as a poison container, both passively as a child and more actively as a decadent teen and young adult, then proactively, in my twenties and thirties, as a heaven-storming psychonaut hell-bent on heightened awareness at any cost. Transforming a demolition-condition drug den into a home and a business—i.e., to function on both inner and outer, private and public levels—was a means of embodying the dissociated/fractured psyche. It was the work which my whole life had been leading towards—and until it was accomplished, I couldn’t even start to live.
The irony, if irony is the word, is that this was not a work for the intellect but for the instinct, not a task of mind but of body. Here the pen is not mightier than the hammer and my mind is no weapon at all (mostly an encumbrance). Of course, this is precisely what makes it a necessary challenge and opportunity, and the means of my embodiment. It’s difficult to say with any certainty how profound a shift in my psyche this renovation process has allowed for, difficult because so many changes have occurred in the years leading up to it (such as marriage and two deaths in my close family). I suspect that the internal changes closely match the external ones, which is the point of an enactment. How do we bring the contents of our unconscious into consciousness to integrate them, when by definition they are beyond our awareness? The answer seems to have to do with placing our attention, paradoxically, on the outside, on our immediate circumstances, and fully engaging with whatever process is occurring there—as in a marriage. This allows the unconscious material to emerge into the inner space created, once our attention moves—however subtly—away from our thoughts and onto our senses. Unconscious material enters into consciousness and is integrated, not when we are watching for it or trying to make it happen, but while we are looking the other way. Like Christ, the soul comes like a thief in the night. Provided, at least, that we have created the space for It through close self-examination (which signals the unconscious that we are willing?), that we are fully engaged in what we are doing, and that, rather than using it as distraction from inner turmoil, we are allowing it to be an enactment and reflection of that turmoil.
montage
To give a current example (rewriting this chapter a month later), yesterday I found myself inside a small closet area in the front of the house, tearing down drywall. Judging by the hole in the floor and the dark brown marks on the walls, it was once a toilet. I had originally thought I would simply paint or drywall over the surfaces until my wife pointed out the unpalatable truth of the matter, and I realized that, to complete this work in the spirit which it was started, I would need to be as thorough as possible. Certainly I could just drywall over those shit-stained walls and no one would be the wiser. But I would know.
Through the course of the work, I was aware that clearing out the toxic remnants of the house’s history was not merely a question of hygiene and aesthetics. It was energetic. A few weeks earlier, on May 13th, I had a dream that I was in a house and it was full of ghosts. Every door I opened, there was a new apparition. I finally became exasperated and demanded of one of them (a teenage girl) what they were doing there, what they wanted. I was told that they simply wanted to be heard. I then realized (in the dream) that these ghosts had formerly occupied the building, but that the toxicity of the lifestyle there, over the decades, had driven them underground. Now they were returning to reoccupy the space: I had cleared it out sufficiently to make it safe for them to haunt again! This was progress: the returning of those splintered fragments of the psyche, now the body had been sufficiently cleared of toxins to accommodate and integrate them.
Tearing down the drywall in that small space (while listening to Michael Parenti talking about conspiracy and class power) was an unpleasant experience (especially since one of the walls had solid wood behind it). It was an extremely hot day and within less than an hour I was feeling overwhelmed and had to stop. It wasn’t so much the physical exertion of it as the mental discomfort. Physically, I could have continued for another hour without exhausting myself; mentally I felt like I needed to stop before I got locked into an overly negative frame of mind. While I often compare working on the renovations to a form of meditation, it’s certainly not the usual kind of meditation that’s designed to bring about internal peace and harmony. It is more like a cathartic ritual in which my inner “Basil Fawlty” (the raging hotel manager played by John Cleese in “Fawlty Towers”) gets to come out and have its day. I curse and rage throughout every job because every job entails a degree of unfathomable, non-negotiable resistance (even painting the front of the house meant dealing with gale force winds that threatened to blow me off my ladder). It is this lack of control over my environment—or rather being in a set of circumstances that forces me to experience it fully—that makes the work therapeutic. It is a form of reality induction. Carry water, chop wood, hammer nail, tear down shit-stained wall; finish the cycle, and then start all over again.
Writing is a way for me to live inside my mind. Renovation and construction work is a way for me to get a little more inside my body. The mind can’t contain the psyche or the unconscious, only the body can; it’s precisely this that the body was designed for—like a house.

*

To read full essay, order Prisoner of Infinity: UFOs, Social Engineering, and the Psychology of Fragmentation

16 thoughts on “New Skin for Old Ceremony: Community Building & Space Industrialization (Prisoner of Infinity XIX)”

  1. I’m curious abt why do you think Icke’s experience could have been engineered. His “facilitator” was the late Zoe Seven, who actually described his encounter with Icke in the second book of his unfinished trilogy. Zoe’s books are extreme –taking high doses of psychedelics while experimenting with consciousness altering machines; his experiences are also extreme and very sci-fi-ish –but the models he uses to explain them have this “futurist-new-agey” (for lack of a better term): Barbara Marx Hubbard and so on. Not to discard a conscious-agency , but having read Zoe7’s formative story –as in the case of Star Wars– i’m hesitant to put it in that box. So, may i ask your specific reasons leading to the social engineering angle?

    Reply
    • I remember listening to Icke’s account of driving past some sacred site in Peru(?) & getting zapped by some sort of cosmic transmission, & thinking how well it fit the pattern. Icke’s belief that he was chosen for his mission by some sort of nonhuman intelligence, combined with his clear usefulness to/within the dominant paradigm as a conspiratainment guru in which he disseminates solid info (which validates him as a spokesman) laced with something considerably less solid, inc. a message of hope, as per usual (i.e., buy my books and attend my presentations and wake up and the world will change). It just seems like all the pieces are there, inc. Icke’s weirdly disembodied kind of charisma (which I personally find appealing, and do have a soft spot for the guy, as I have often said).
      As a side point/trivia, Icke’s regular interviewer claimed that Icke always accepts invitations to podcasts, no matter how small. Not true: I asked, and got no response.

      Reply
  2. A friend in Toronto, who happens to be a Scientologist and the wife of a naturopathic doctor, alerted me to the fact that the recruitment of writers has been going on for generations. She recalled how university literature programs and the “great works” we studied in the 60s were carefully selected to program students along hidden, possibly Fabian (or Masonic) lInes. Looking back, i remember staggering out of a literature class on William Blake as his cosmology, as taught by our woman prof and Blake scholar, seemed all too real and trance-inducing and I nearly fainted in the hallway…
    My Scientologist friend also referenced the popular (1940a, 50s) novelist AJ Cronin (whose novel The Citadel was an influence on her husband’s decision to become a doctor). She’d read Cronin was recruited and coopted by JJ Reese of the Tavistock Institute, birthplace of MKULTRA. In The Citadel, Cronin’a idealistuc doctor finally commits suicide – shocking at the time and also a message to readers searching for ethical alternatives to the new industrialized medicine. One of Tavistock’s hidden psychological agendas, along with drugs and counterculture, was to promote ‘suicide’ to the masses as a way out of the dystopian world they were actively building.
    I think the collaboration between intelligence agencies and artists probably goes back to Elizabethan times and John Dee.

    Reply
  3. Hey Jaysun, are you familiar with Robert Anton Wilson? More and more I begin to suspect his complicity in all this (regretably – used to be one of my faves). Cronies with Sarfatti, Leary, etc etc; heavily pushed transhumanism and space migration… on and on.. totally syncs up with the program, imo. What do you think?

    Reply
      • RAW definitely had some dubious beliefs & affiliations. I remember when i first read Cosmic Trigger at aged 20, I was loving it until i reached the part about his having his daughter’s brain frozen after she was killed, and his blind belief that she would be resurrected some day. A blind spot like that throws everything else into question. Whether RAW was knowingly complicit or himself duped, culturally engineered, I wouldn’t like to hazard a guess. Unlike those other suspects, the high quality of his work would seem to suggest the latter, but maybe not. Even Hakim Bey was a pedophila advocate: https://libcom.org/library/paedophilia-and-american-anarchism-the-other-side-of-hakim-bey

        Reply
    • So wtf is wrong with space migration? Leave RAW alone freak! The human condition has been trans human since homo sapiens were genetically formulated by the Shining ones eons ago. Dennis

      Reply
      • It’s a bit hard to understand how someone who’s been reading this blog for a while can ask this question. Or is this a satirical comment & am I am being dull and humorlessly literal-minded?

        Reply
  4. John Dee was certainly an occultist (magician) and intelligence agent, and is presumed to have been the origin of Ian Fleming’s “007”, since that is how he signed his letters to Queen Elizabeth I. Though some accounts refer to a rivalry between his more benign, “humanist” intelligence methods, in contrast to those of the more ruthless Cecil family, which won out…
    I had not seen that photo of Burgess before – it would seem to show him with a young Paolo-Andrea, his “son”, though in fact the boy’s biological father was an Anglo-Scottish man named Halliday – a reason why Andrea may have affected a Scottish dress and accent in later life. Though when I met him (with his mother Liana) I found he had the intonations of a robot. He was to die of an epileptic fit (having “forgotten” to take his medication) in 2002 at the young age of 38. A sad end to a sad life.
    Roger Lewis’ reference to Howard Roman’s input on “A Clockwork Orange” is intriguing, and I wish I could confirm it. But no doubt his source was confidential. What is known is that Roman, after teaching modern languages at Harvard, worked with Allen Dulles and the OSS in Switzerland in the 1940s; after officially “retiring” from the CIA in 1962 (the year “A Clockwork Orange” was published), he subsequently worked (along with E. Howard Hunt) as a ghost-writer for Dulles and was the person with Dulles when news came in of the Kennedy assassination in November 1963. While his wife Jane was the long-time assistant of James Jesus Angleton and was working at the CIA station in Mexico City in the early autumn of 1963, at the time when Oswald was supposed to have travelled there in a failed attempt to get to Cuba – though it is more likely that this was a concocted attempt by the CIA to connect the patsy with Cuba and the Communists. I would say that it is more than likely that Roman had knowledge of MK-Ultra. One of his own novels (published in 1960) was described as “unpleasant”; while a later work was a play entitled “The Holy Terrorist”.

    Reply

Leave a Comment