2017.
A preoccupation with the dark side of human experience.
Someone who reads this blog recently opined that it might be beneficent if I managed to get more lightness, more of a focus on the positive, into my writing. I told him I’d think about it.
In my last conversation with Gary Heidt (today’s podcast, The Logic of Empathy), I told Gary about a recent dream I had in which I understood human existence as being suffused with “endless malevolence,” the purpose of which was for consciousness to find the transmission of the divine in the midst of all that noise.
In other words, the darkness of apparent negativity exists to deepen our capacity to recognize, and follow, the light that is hidden within it, or rather, hidden within us. To learn to experience our connection to the divine under the most onerous of conditions, and so to know, really know, that the divine, which is us, can withstand anything.
My aim with all of my writing about “endless malevolence” seems to be similar: to immerse myself and the reader/listener in these dark materials in such a way that it allows for an experience of the light within them in a way that is profound and lasting.
2017, the year I turn fifty, is also the year I once predicted (in Being the One) would be the beginning of the end of civilization. For many Americans, it probably already feels like it. For them, the Trump card is indeed the Tower. We’ll see.
For me, it is time to deepen my connection to the ancestors and the transmission of that collective soul.
Time to spend time away from Faceborg, away from RI, away from movies & TV shows.
In lieu of these I will be posting more updates & participating more at this blog, and I hope also at the Kubrickon forum, that’s if anyone else is. I have altered the board settings to allow easy registration/instant access, & it only takes two or three regular posters to get things moving along again at the Overlook.
Too much cultural immersion is no doubt accentuating the focus on the negative in a way that isn’t necessarily productive. Judging by the sort of cultural entertainment we choose, we also wallow in dark stuff to distract us from our own darkness.
*
This maybe relates to some thoughts I received while sleeping late this morning (yes, I work stuff out while I sleep). I understood that the whole you-create-your-own reality Secret shtick was designed to direct our attention away from a much subtler, less mystical truth. As I explored in part two of Prisoner of Infinity, when we are led to believe certain things, we will act in ways that turn those things into realities. In POI, I looked at how seeding the culture with narratives about possible futures (e.g. space travel) was a way to engender belief in those possibilities and a desire to realize them.
There is a variation on this, which relates to making people believe that something already exists, and so shaping their actions that way. I think this works especially well when the imagined reality is not desirable but undesirable. Making kids believe in Santa Claus may influence their actions but not in a way to bring about the existence of Santa Claus (adults make Santa real for kids, not because they believe he exists but because they know he doesn’t). On the other hand, if people can be made to believe in the reality of something that they are afraid of, they will react in ways that, over time, will bring the imagined fear into reality.
The example on the table currently is the dreaded alt-right white supremacist movement. Other obvious examples are misogyny, homophobia, racism in general, anti-Semitism in particular. These things exist in some form, but when they are named and categorized, when people and groups of people and other beliefs or viewpoints are associated with them, they are turned into social phenomena, even imagined as movements, and over time they become real. I think this is because, the more something is resisted as an idea, the more it is obliged to come into form as a reality. What we resist grows stronger, what we suppress increases in power and urgency.
These psychological and social principals are understood well enough to be applied and so, of course, they have been. A large part of cultural engineering has to do with seeding us with fantasy-based fears that, over time, give rise to the social realities that control us.
*
Culture is a form of negation, a negative image of reality. It’s transfixing, spellbinding, and like an X-Ray it is full of potentially useful data. But also like an X-Ray, it takes its toll on us each time we expose ourselves to it, and it is no substitute for a direct relationship with our interior spaces. Nor does culture facilitate this relationship, so much as provide a distraction from it or an alternative to it. Our interior spaces, after all (mine at any rate), include areas of intense discomfort and distress.
*
2017. The Auticulture Questionnaire has been updated so as to double as a submission form for anyone who feels like they might benefit from speaking with me, on the record or possibly off, with the option of making a podcast out of it.
I may not quite know what it is, but all of this output is meant to provide a service to people. It is meant as orientation by example, to facilitate interior exploration towards finding the light of your soul’s transmission. That is the only thing that matters in this life or in the life to come–if there is to be one.
The only purpose for our being here is to uncover, nurture, develop, and deepen that connection to the light, and to thereby allow the light to penetrate the endless darkness both inside us and outside of us, in the world.
Like gold with its supreme atomic weight, the transmission is found always in the deepest, darkest, most hidden spaces within us. The treasure is temporarily lost in the deep, and this is the why of all our diving. Acclimatization to the depths.
May 2017 be a wonderfully deep and dark year for us all. May it even be the year “the black hole will arrive.”
Happy New Year, Jasun. 🙂
Happy New Year JH, and thank you for being a total badass. 🙂
Best of luck in the “Knew Yer” old boy. The dream is unfolding for all of us.
I add with the others my own Happy New Year to you, Jasun. I haven’t replied here in a while, but I have been reading your posts and comment sections, finding your whole endeavor challenging, stimulating and illuminating. You have something good going here. Your open and exploratory mind, questioning every assumption, working to sift out the grain of truth from so many heaps of rubbish, is both mad and maddening but also impressive. I’ve come to realize that you break up clots of certainty not unlike one who tills and prepares a field for growth.
“Someone who reads this blog recently opined that it might be beneficent if I managed to get more lightness, more of a focus on the positive, into my writing. ”
Eh, I guess I’m guilty as charged. I would say a more accurate rendition (or at least my intended meaning) is that you would benefit from a counterbalancing lightness in your offline life, but that since my perception of you is only through your writing and our correspondence, it is impossible for me to know whether your life offline does in fact counterbalance the dark themes of your work. Anyhow, I think it’s a good plan to stay off RI and FB, as those are both black holes that now seem unnecessary. It’s good advice to follow myself: more light.
I am resigned to the fact that our civilization is irredeemably broken and that the angular velocity around the drain will pick up speed in 2017. But my intentions for the new year are to create spiritual momentum towards light, because that is the only thing one can do in the face of this darkness (other than to surrender entirely to it, which I refuse).
Happy New Year Jasun! And to the rest of you as well!
Gday and happy new year J-Sun !
All this crap about embracing the light is ludicrously perverse . Some of your readers perhaps are struggling to hold the tension of the level of darkness you are able to engender and embrace are begging for it to please stop and cant we all run home to mommy . It was Jung who said ” one does not become enlightened by imagining beings of light but by making the darkness conscious “- wise words from that filthy philandering pagan nazi eco fascist .
By chance i am reading Babara Ehrenreichs ” bright sided ” about the sick cult of positive thinking that permeates our decadent culture , and have ordered her other work ” smile or die “.
Keep up the good work mate and ignore these narcissistic wimps , keep taking us off the map where Here Be Dragons !
Cheerio
Kut
Dear Jasun,
I am thrilled to hear that you are re-committed to your work and I agree 100% with your take on the ‘ black hole or is it the black whole’- it is so ying/yang-the dark required for the light. And your work has been an invaluable resource for others who are exploring and reshaping their consciousness of purpose and meaning. Thank you, thank you.
You rock. 2017. Huzzah!
‘to find the transmission of the divine in the midst of all that noise’
I would say that this is true, especially for the human experience as it exists right now. But I can also imagine a scenario so immersed in light (say in a kind of golden age, eden, or insert cliche here) wherein the purpose would be to find the signal of darkness/chaos amidst the light in order to discover how essential it is as well. Too much heaven and there is stagnation. Too much hell and we are drowned in despair and pulverized into dust. Purgatory seems like the best catalyst for my fragmented consciousness.
‘My aim with all of my writing about “endless malevolence” seems to be similar: to immerse myself and the reader/listener in these dark materials in such a way that it allows for an experience of the light within them in a way that is profound and lasting.’
You do achieve this in me. The darkness isn’t just in the subject matter you are exploring, it’s in the approach as well- groping around in a state of liminality for things to only loosely grab onto, experience, and then discard as necessary. I’ve been a reader/listener since the infamous Neil Kramer interview. I still follow and enjoy both of you, but I’m so glad I discovered your work because I was about to jump headfirst off a cliff into the second matrix and you were that little twig growing out of the cliff face that helped me to catch myself. Your work helps remind me not to get too dogmatic, or take any particular model of reality too seriously- to never commit to the growth destroying thought that I’ve got it all figured out.
Happy Yew Near, Jasun and all. Yes, keep yew near to you in 2017. The light of that self-nurtured and self-natured human-yew bond will dissolve both the false light and the false dark of this pseudo-culture, so say I.
Best to stay off RI…
I was just there- to get some kind of, analysis or confluence of opinions and information and dot connection on what’s going down in Turkey- and, No go-
Anyway, one’ve them discovered your last blog post. They even put the comments up- Oof, reading yourself in a comment section is Shriiiillll… No caffeine in 2017 for this guy.
You come across good tho, man.
Happy New Year
Some really ugly stuff in that thread. More incentive to just not go there.
Beware the II -des of March. That’s when that username will show up eh Jasun? LOL
Happy New Year! Oh shiiiiit…….
Giant Ball of All Seeing Eye Pyramids Drops In NYC 2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3OCg_RHypM
JJ: barracudas need raw flesh to survive. Their job is to keep blood in the water and discourage the sensitive from diving in.
I didn’t notice any comments quoted, only referred to? Seems like that would be a bridge too far?
KK, we are indeed waiting for the double “I.” Or is that now LL (Liminal Lab, over at Kubrickon?)
Our very own alphabet agency.
Thanks to everyone for well-wishing here in the deepest corner of the wishing well.
The Mad Monarchist (blog)
“Oh, God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams”.
Happy New Year to one and all.
Hi Jasun and all,..I read often and posted only once.
My feeling lately is “dont belive the hype ” spelling mistake intended,..and ive always been a rebel with a cause and now i interpret that as i dont like doing what everyone else does and its serving me quite well so far.
I know my own take on things and when i read small words or sentances from most of what i read in this blog i know im in the right place.
I came across this blog from a place of lifes experiences and I suppose wanting a deeper understanding of what is it all about…critical and original thinking maybe too.
When I read Yevauds response as balancing out the darkness with the lighter side i remember expressing that to someone else who looks at a lot of online stuff and I couldnt agree more…ive had to do it by starting to meditate, not many people can escape online or the news these days…it filters in regardless so balance is a must.
Even some spitituality i dont agree with…i dont believe we are nothing as some practices seem to say, and we should remove or stay away from an ego…whats the point in that..? I am human,..i was born with an identity with certain qualities and attributes and experiences which are valuable…im saying that here because id be afraid to say it elsewhere.
when i read this one sentence i see how my rebellion against that statement for a couple of years has served me well again.
.” I understood that the whole you-create-your-own reality Secret shtick was designed to direct our attention away from a much subtler, less mystical truth. ”
My spirituality is my spirit…what suits me is for me.
I genuinely appreciate all your work and the peoples comments I love equally.
Thank you !
Elaine
Jasun,
Your dream first strikes me as a bit of Gnostic and/or Neo-Manichean self-proselytizing – perhaps echoes of some very early childhood guilt complex? But then the exhortation from the reader and your guilt-tinged reaction already gives me real psychic fatigue. I mean, it requires so much work to accomplish this light separating from the darkness or goodness from malevolence. (Yes, fuck alchemy!) Now I begin to think: Protestant Work Ethic. Gotta DO something for salvation, instead of just BEING someone, or anyone, even if not yourself.
So what if the Darkness IS the Light, and the Light the Darkness? And by moral extension, what if the Malevolence IS the Goodness? Or better the Blessedness? Does not the Good Book say through Cheesus in Matthew 5:45: “That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.”
Isn’t it time we children of the Father grew up to become proper autistic adults and turn this verse around? Light and Dark, Good and Evil, Just and Unjust. Hey that’s existence itself and there ain’t nuthin’ nobody can do about it, so may I present you with my new updated version of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” which I retitle:
================
NO MORE GODOT
by Tom Mellett
(with apologies to Samuel Beckett, who is still dead.)
———
(A country road. A tree. Evening.)
(Estragon, sitting on a low mound, is trying to take off his boot. He pulls at it with both hands, panting. He gives up, exhausted, rests, tries again.)
(As before. Enter Vladimir.)
ESTRAGON: (giving up again). Nothing to be done.
VLADIMIR: (advancing with short, stiff strides, legs wide apart).
I’m beginning to come round to that opinion. (Pause) Well? Shall we go?
ESTRAGON: Yes, let’s go.
(They do not move.)
Curtain.
Fade to Black.
—-THE END —-
==================
You see, all I did was take away the MacGuffin, which is Godot. No MacGuffin, no waiting, thus no unfolding in time and therefore timeless eternity.
So Jasun, to that reader who told you in short:
Goodness Gracious! Endless Malevolence!
You may reply to him or her:
Goodness-Malevolence = Endless Grace.
Or, even better, Existence Trumps (pun intended) Duality
Oh, and for the epilogue of my “No More Godot” playlet, I would have Woody Allen come out and quote himself: “Yes, eternity is a very long time . . . especially towards the end.”
With a hey nonny nonny and a Nyuk! Nyuk! Nyuk!
Hollywood Tomfortas
Hierophant to the Stars
(and occasional asteroid)
To shine forth is key. Keep writing, you touch many souls. 87
Sync incoming. Just saw this stuff in my travels…..
“Be not ye therefore partakers with them.
For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord: walk as children of light:
For the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness and righteousness and truth;
Proving what is acceptable unto the Lord.
And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.”
Good advice never goes out of style!
An interesting twist. Some bible versions say it this way:
http://biblehub.com/ephesians/5-11.htm
“Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.”
Expose instead of “reprove” as in the case of the KJV…hmmmm weird.
http://biblehub.com/topical/r/reprove.htm
“Reprove” in Elizabethan English had a variety of meanings (“reject” “disprove” “convince,” “rebuke”)
If you merely expose things…you get this situation?
Jasun – “On the other hand, if people can be made to believe in the reality of something that they are afraid of, they will react in ways that, over time, will bring the imagined fear into reality.”
“These psychological and social principals are understood well enough to be applied and so, of course, they have been. A large part of cultural engineering has to do with seeding us with fantasy-based fears that, over time, give rise to the social realities that control us.”
Ponder on that a bit.
Your Journey and explorations are a shared experience, by looking at the dephts of our soul we may find answers, in my case I see a multiplicity ideas by reading your insights. Sometimes I don´t know where I´m standing, the world is more complex than I ever thought, but whe analizing in simple terms it´s just a malevolent game of nonsense.
H appy 7102
Male-volent is much discussed yet {fe}malevolent is skipped over. Funny thing.We keep looking in the same old dark spaces hoping to find a new answer/path. Freud lost me with the notion of penis envy which makes all psychology schooling suspect.
Look at the mothers{females} and the men who did as they were instructed (for sex) then one might find it.We are told, the beginning of modern civilization is traced to Greece – beginning of the end – >2017<- look to the original Greek stories, particularly the parts that are glossed over.
Look at Hillary… not so much Savile.
It's just about the journey.
Timing. Just wrote this at the K forum:
Mother-bondage. That’s the culprit. The psychic womb. The matrix has you.
….
Mother bondage, caused in part by emotional incest, mommas turning baby boys into husband surrogates. ‘Course, they wouldn’t do that if their own hubbies weren’t doing their own de-grading. But where’s it all start, what’s the original poison fruit? The snake in the grass?
http://kubrickon.com/maze/viewtopic.php?f=1&p=2490#p2490
They do it to their daughters, too, ref. the enmeshment horror show of Grey Gardens.
I agree, it’s not that women want a penis so much as they would like to have all the social privilege that goes with having one in a patriarchy.
I think Freud did miss the boat with P.E; maybe making up for his auto-suppressed seduction theory, had to pull something else out of his, urm, penile gland.
Keep posting man!! More posts I mean! I wish I had the sense of urgency I have these days five years ago. Urgency for applicable truths, I guess applying them in our culture is the difficult part. I don’t even know if I’m making sense but I’m looking for solutions and results I know that. Happy new year and best wishes.
Thanks. I will try to post more often. To those who want more of my, um, wisdom, I suggest joining the forum. I’ll be posting their everyday, at least insofar it’s currently waking up.
Thank you. You defiantly have wisdom. And sorry for sounding pushy. I think I came across your blog years ago from Neil kramers site which I haven’t seen in years, but saw his name mentioned here recently and remembered I totally forgot about him and his site, don’t even really remember what he wrote about besides some stuff on crop circles. Anyway there’s so many things to talk about, I will have to check out the forum. Some of my big influences in life have been the book shidartha, jack Kerouac, Sam Harris, vegetarianism, professor Arnold ehret, learning about”conspiracy theories” around 2008, terrance McKenna, Howard zinns a people’s history of the u and just listening to and the power of music to keep us in touch with our emotions and the importance of family and friends. Often I wonder the point to everything and how can there be so much trouble in the world. How can people do some of the terrible stuff that happens, is it that they just don’t care, is it biological, or is there really a spiritual battle of good and evil and if so are there actually evil spirits that possess people or have people’s brains just become damaged by disease and circumstance. I guess it’s all too much to think about. If it really is a spiritual battle that the results of this life will live on and continue to be dealt then I guess all we gota do is be good and do what we can. I quit smoking weed recently and I’ve been feeling a lot more emotion coming back and have realized I’ve just been carrying all this pain around and I’m just scared , scared of the future, scared of not being able to open up or feel happy, scared of being a failure and scared of people not caring for me and one another.
Happy New Years. Hopefully your transmission will continue to find fresh places to plant its signal.
Happy New Year! I have enjoyed your articles and podcasts in 2016, looking forward to more in 2017.
“Culture is a form of negation, a negative image of reality. It’s transfixing, spellbinding, and like an X-Ray it is full of potentially useful data. But also like an X-Ray, it takes its toll on us each time we expose ourselves to it, and it is no substitute for a direct relationship with our interior spaces. ”
That is beautifully stated, and something I never considered before. Although I’m an artist myself, I never equated art with spirituality myself. The above paragraph states exactly what I feel in my subconscious, and have felt for a long time. I find your ideas so unique and mind blowing to my personal perception (but paradoxically so in line with my own experience) I find it difficult to comment coherently except through baby steps of banality.
Like you, I’ve always felt that something in my life never added up. I came from a loving home and family with parents and a sister who were very engaged, who I never doubted loving me, yet, I’ve often felt low self -esteem. Although women find me attractive and I have no problem getting dates, I never could find marriage or a loving relationship. I doubt whether I was the subject of MK ULTRA experiments, but I was severely bullied in junior high school and I know that traumatized me.
When I was sixteen, my sister gave me a book on Gurdjieff, and I began a spiritual journey that led to a degree in theology with an emphasis in comparative studies of mystical spiritual traditions. I reread Gurdjieff a few times and felt that he encapsulated merging eastern traditions with Western temperament better than most any other writer. I was on the track for seminary, but ended up in law school instead.
I discovered John Taylor Gatto about ten years ago and read and reread “Underground History ” several times. I have told so many people about that book and you are one of the few bloggers who addresses it. I consider this and “The Triumph of Conservatism” by Gabriel Kolko to be the two most important political books I’ve ever read.
I don’t think my coming across this site was an accident!
At the risk of a banal response: welcome to this space, and thanks for picking up my rather irradiated (culture-battle-fatigued) mood today by reminding me my thrashings have some meaning beyond the few cubic cms inside this skull.