The Babel Effect: States of Distraction, Waves of Destruction, Avenues of Escape

We all know that the degree of distraction we are under determines our ability to function optimally. Depending on the severity of the interference, it can take us from “not very effective” to “totally disoriented.”

When our senses are seriously out of whack, and disorientation goes through the roof, we may have the experience of entering a familiar room and being convinced that things have been changed or moved around, when in reality they haven’t. We may find we can no longer find the way out of the room even though the door is exactly where it was when we first went through it.

The exit and the entrance are the same, but they may look very different depending which side of the threshold we are on.

 

Pop Cheese Will Eat Itself

Interlude. When I was growing up, the early Steve Ditko-drawn Spiderman comics were my favorite means of escape from an oppressively dysfunctional and disorienting family life. In issue no. 24, “Spiderman Goes Mad!,” the arch-villain Mysterio tricks Spiderman into seeing a psychotherapist (Mysterio) through a variety of deceptions, including constructing a psychiatrist’s office that is upside-down. Nowadays, this is called “gaslighting.”

In a recent exchange with Dave about pop music and aesthetics, I asked him: what about discerning which songs carry the Transmission and which don’t? This is the subject of Map # 16 of Hell, the final case study # 24 (David Byrne): how to take the real cheese and leave the trap behind, forever.

Dave replied: the cheese, like an Agent, might morph into any object at any time, and thereby have the desired effect, so one man’s pop prison is another’s liberation—dodgy logic but it can’t be discarded

One of the ways I think I know what he means by this (as explored in CS # 24 of MoH) is when weirdly trivial associations from my past, often around pop culture, resurface during Dave events and seem to fit neatly and surprisingly into a whole new context—as with Mysterio’s evil ploy in Spiderman # 24. (24s now? The next 8 up from 16.)

At the same time, I recognize that such morsels can also cause us to keep going back to the trap they were first found inside, and the exit morph diabolically into the entrance, like a revolving Gateway to Hell.

End interlude.

 

Two Margins & the Mainstream Between

Is any of this making sense?

On the last Oshana online event, “Dismantling Babel: Signal Calming in a State of Constant Disruption,” Dave asked who wanted to hear about Babel, who didn’t want to hear about Babel, who didn’t care, who wanted to hear about love and light, and who wanted to hear about darkness, disease, and depression. A couple of people raised their hands for this last, and Dave laughed: “All of Jasun’s people!”

Dave mentioned that he had recently spoken to someone who felt that his perspective on love and light was unrealistic, and beyond that person’s ability to experience or fully believe in. Dave asked himself: “Am I just an idealist? Maybe there isn’t pure love in the universe, with human beings?”

He then raised an ongoing email exchange between us (without naming me) on the subject of self-sabotage. Last weekend (after I launched the 16 Maps of Hell campaign), he brought it up with me in relation to the campaign and the question of whether I was playing to a select group who were, intentionally or otherwise, keeping me from reaching my full potential and thereby connecting to a larger audience.

On Sunday’s event, Dave contrasted receiving natural guidance from existence with being influenced by the things people say to us. He invited us to question how much we have been affected by other people’s words throughout our lives. On the other hand, he said, other people’s words can sometimes offer a lifeline for us. These are important questions for a writer—or a talker—to ask himself.

Regarding the 16 Maps of Hell campaign, I realized on Sunday that, though there were forty-four (now fifty-one) contributions, none of them were from the people who I have successfully “initiated” into regularly attending Dave events. I wondered what it meant. Three possibilities occurred to me.

• Whatever disposable income these reader-listeners have is now all going to Dave, so they can’t afford to support my campaign. (How’s that for self-sabotage?)
• Having successfully followed my hell-mapping to the exit (→ Dave), they are no longer interested in more maps of hell.
• Having with Dave’s help adapted their vision to better discern light from shadow, they are unsure whether supporting me with this campaign is what will actually best support me.

All of these possibilities raise interesting questions about the convergence point between Dave-world, Jasun-world, and the world, i.e., what happens when two margins meet, and the mainstream is caught between.

[NB: 17 days later, the above is no longer true/relevant; most Liminals who have crossed the threshold into the O-zone have contributed to the campaign since I wrote this blogpost.]

 

Cultural Interlopers Anonymous

Before the event, I received an email from a reader comparing my output to Plato’s allegory of the cave and to Dante’s Inferno:

I am way behind the curve I think but just had a bit of a revelation about your work today and realised you are in part reworking the myth of Plato’s cave and Dante’s Inferno for the 21st century—it’s so bloody obvious now that I can see it! I think the images used in your latest Blog posts have been speaking subliminally to my artistic mindset and now I finally get what your [sic] trying to do! I think your body of work is very important for the saving of our souls in this mad age (even if I may not agree totally with all your positions or conclusions) and feel it will be seen to be an important contribution to human enlightenment in the dark future that probably awaits us (I apologise for sounding bombastic and sycophantic!) Anyway sorry for being so slow on the uptake!

Of course this email made me feel good about myself, but it also caused me to raise a skeptical eyebrow, both at the email and my response to it. While questioning my campaign this week, Dave introduced a new thesis which he tried out on me before developing it further on Sunday’s event:

it is my observation that every group/movement is covertly manipulated, either held back or pushed forward, by [interlopers] who pretend to be aligned but upon inspection are not, in order to milk the youthful energy of those who have a cause. I think such types exist in JahO’s audience and may have steered him, effectively relegating his talents and message. Abuse victims seek to please their predators for a variety of reasons, survival, affection and a sense of meaning. Patty Hearst on a Twizzle Stick. Victims may still signal to and perform for their predators even after they have long gone. A private show for an elite men’s club. This may give a sense of control and pleasure to predators who check in on their victims from time to time, especially those victims who have reached celebrity status and/or or public visibility. Please or rebel, the predator gets pleasure from the victim’s reactions.

As Dave drove home on the Sunday event, people are suggestible. Not only am I no exception to this rule, I am (as Dark Oasis and my social engineering trilogy demonstrate, in a number of ways) something of an exemplary of suggestibility. (I blame it on my Pisces Moon, which is also why I enjoy imbibing culture so much: if the collective cultural unconscious is always affecting me anyway, I may as well let it do so consciously, and get to know the enemy.)

This was the subject of Dave’s Babel Effect address (I almost wrote sermon!): When our minds are in a constant state of disorientation and distraction throughout our lives, it increases our suggestibility and causes us to follow influences that we mistake for self-generated ideas, impulses, and inspiration. I now look back on my Aeolus Kephas output with chagrin for this reason: I was at least partially regurgitating an already rancid line of occult philosophy and thought.

Like Jason on the Argo, if we mistake the singing Sirens for the voice of our Muse, we risk crashing on the rocks of the world, and becoming perpetually stranded.

 

Two Voices

Dave on Sunday’s event: There are two voices calling to us, all of the time. One is calling us back to the world, to our old life. The other is inviting us into a wholly new and unknown life. To enter this unknown life seems to entail giving up all our old familiar patterns. From this side of the threshold, it resembles a wilderness, an emptiness, an absence of all the things that are familiar, near, and dear to us. If we cross over the threshold, the perspective changes, and the wilderness may no longer resemble a wilderness. Dave can testify to this, convincingly; but I have to experience it to know.

According to Dave, when we receive a clear, perfectly delivered message from Existence, everything in us lights up and we go fully “online,” entering into full and lasting happiness, with no possibility of backsliding.

Dave is asking me, both personally and as part of a collective, to consider this, in regards to what effect I am trying to have with my output. At the same time, since our ability to deliver what we have within us also depends on other people’s capacity to receive it, it is circular. We can develop our capacities in either direction, downward or upward. What I deliver determines who is drawn into my field of communication; and this in turn influences what I am able to deliver, even what I choose to deliver, insofar as I am open to suggestion.

The natural guidance Dave refers to, that isn’t contingent on other people’s words, relates (he says) to the energy lines in the body, the nerves, the blood and veins, the sensations and the awareness that is moving at all times, in and through our bodies.

When we encounter other people, if we ask to be shown in our bodies what that person deeply feels, and what they need, we may have an existential experience of being with and connecting to another. Only when the other person is living inside us, from our head to our toes, only when we are feeling them inside our own body system, can we know what they are feeling. At the same time, tuning in like this doesn’t mean we become the other person.

Not getting lost in the experience they are having—while still feeling it from the inside—gives us an advantage, and this is the advantage we need, if we are to help them to come out of it. We have entered into Hell again, but consciously and for the right reason. Hence our eyes remain always on the exit.

 

Daving Around

All of this is about arriving at the merge point, a merging that goes beyond the circuitry of a person, into a spaceless, placeless place.

If people do not exist except as concepts, it is because how human beings experience one another is more as verbs than nouns. I do not go to see Dave, but to witness “Daving.” And twenty years since this Daving first became an enlightened kind of Daving (i.e., today, in 2020), whatever is happening around the organism called Dave is tuning into the sense of the search that burns in all of us, wondering: “Why can’t they have what they are looking for?”

Of course, Dave, when he is Daving, is also using words, and these words may influence us if we are not careful. But according to his own words, Dave is only inviting us “to tune into the state from which he is communicating” and see if we can recognize this state also within ourselves. Once we do that, in such a way that it is total, compete, and lasting, the delivery of Daving is complete. We have fully left behind all the states of mind that appear to be real, but are not. We are “online.”

As a child, Dave recounts how his aunt would tell him he was a good boy, then ask him to do something for her. The designation of good, he said, was a “handle” by which he was made pliable, suggestible. This is the danger of taking on other people’s definitions of us: that we conform to them and feel obliged to live up (or down) to those definitions. Dave’s aunt, in this example (it may be apocryphal, no disparagement is intended to any Oshana aunties), commandeered the word “good.”

When a reader tells me I am continuing the work of Plato and Dante, there’s a fair to middling chance I will accept that definition, let it go to my head and become part of its itinerary, and in no time at all become trapped by it. Cue 16 Maps of Hell Part Two—ad nauseum, and ad infinitum. The exit has morphed into the entrance.

 

Unlocking Nervous Systems

Daving says: Our cognitive and perceptual state is learned and developed through experience and through memory. What we are seeking is a mutually beneficial interaction that allows for an exponentially increasing energy exchange. This is the gold standard.

Our mind returns to sex, for example, because we see it as the currency of love. We seek sexual gratification, as well as countless other kinds of gratification, to reassure ourselves that we are loved. This idea was instilled in us, according to Dave’s new thesis, by interlopers entering our spaces under false pretenses, talking of love while looking to cop a feel.

These fantasies that drive us are hard to maintain. If we refer to them instead of reality, we get lost in endless forms of communication that are not really communication. Babel. A communication is fully received when our perceptions are synchronized with another’s, and two or more experiences merge into one experience.

When Dave speaks to a person—we were informed on this last event—like port-knocking he speaks to various parts of their bodies in an attempt to create an opening. It is as if each of us has a combination lock around our nervous system, and only the correct sequence of touches on our bodies can open up our awareness. This is due to traumatic memories that are stored inside specific parts of our bodies.

This sort of knowledge, presumably, can also be used, by the unethical interloper, to control us: triggering traumatic body memories, generating strong emotions and the corresponding needs, and then providing forms of pseudo-relief to keep us dependent. (Stockholm syndrome, trauma-based mind control, etc.) Triggering certain reactions and then offering fantasy-based solutions keeps us dancing to a crass and soulless pop number, and prevents us from ever discovering our God-given moves.

 

Unprecedented Spiritual Warfare

Like many of the stories in the Old Testament, the story of Babel falls down if we attempt to interpret it literally. Dave suggests that what scrambled and fractured human language was akin to a deafening tone that rang through Babel: a sort of EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) that caused everything to stop working. Like a nuclear bomb inside the brain, this (metaphoric) high-pitched sound or electric frequency destroyed essential neural pathways and made it impossible for our brains to function properly.

We became so busy trying to unscramble our own brainwaves that we stopped picking up the rest of our body signals, and lost our capacity for hearing or empathizing with one another. It has narrowed down our ability to respond, until all our attention is corralled into one thing only, the experience of our identities under attack, and the corresponding defensive reactions. (Recall Dave’s previous description of how consciousness only makes it as far as our heads, but does not descend into the rest of our bodies.)

In his first newsletter about last Sunday’s event, since altered (even Dave’s event descriptions don’t stand still for long), Dave wrote: “Welcome to Babylon! Population 7.8 billion. We are about to engage in the fauda (chaos) of unprecedented spiritual warfare.”

There is some suggestion that Dave’s description of an EMP attack is not entirely poetic. On the other hand, this is strawberry fields, so nothing can be taken at face value. All imagery is dream imagery. The truth may be as simple and mundane as what happens the first time a child is cruelly punished or abused: order turns to chaos, paradise is lost.

 

Superman Goes Mad

Interlude 2. Dream from Sept 26, 2002 (with emphasis added):

In the dream, Superman is defeated by his arch nemesis Lex Luthor. Luthor has designed advanced robot beings who have the power to physically overcome Superman, and he has discovered Superman’s secret identity as Clark Kent. His final victory is by taking over Superman’s mind.

Luthor, using his robots and technology, convinces Superman that his old mind is no good. As Superman’s old mind is breaking down [echoes of “Spiderman Goes Mad!”?] and he is rejecting all its components one by one, Luthor’s technology inserts a new, false mind. As soon as Superman doubts his real mind is any good, the false mind floods out the old mind, like a wave. As soon as this happens to him, there is an immediate, corresponding effect in the world, a wave that sweeps across civilization and brings it to total ruin. I see this as a comic book enactment, but in reality, that is, in the other part of the dream, something similar is happening.

I go home through a strange, comic book town with two women and wind up in bed with one of them. We make love, then I wake in a different bed and there is this rumbling that grows slowly to a deafening pitch. It is like an earthquake, only different. And as I wake, I see that half the room is destroyed. Behind me, the back wall has come down, everything up to where I am has crumbled and fallen away, and I am on the edge of a precipice. A wave of decimation has swept through the town; everything up to the point where I am, in my bed, has been swallowed up.

 

Streets of Fire

Interlude 2, continued

I am in shock and horror. I cannot deal with this reality. Like the nightmares I had as a child, I am faced with a reality that cannot be assimilated. There’s a Springsteen song, “Streets of Fire,” playing somewhere, only the lyrics are changed. He’s singing about angels who take “pleasure that has no pain”: these angels experience pleasure, but not pain.

I am going insane. My mind cannot cope. A pulse wave has been emitted from an unknown source and caused everything to collapse and die. There’s a vision of someone (I think Tobey McGuire, i.e., Spiderman) out on the street, looking up as the wave hits and seeing birds falling out of the sky. The sound wave is some sort of ultimate weapon that kills everything in its path and yet can be precisely directed to “stop on a dime” (it is some sort of sonic technology).

Following this, I am with a small group of young guys. I tell them the experience was (for me) like “being an angel who cannot assimilate reality.” I woke up and was faced with a reality I could not deal with. The dream had broken down. “I couldn’t dream the dream any longer.”

As I speak, I recall the overwhelming terror of lying in bed and looking around at the destruction. I recall thinking about getting up and going over to touch the crumbling walls and peeling wallpaper, and how the thought was more than I could bear. Just the thought of touching reality, of looking reality square on, filled me with complete horror and despair. The sense of reality was far stronger than it ever is in waking.

As I describe this I am crying, revealing my inner feelings to the others, so they can fully understand what is happening. I tell them that this is just the beginning, that this is going to happen everywhere. These waves of destruction will sweep across the world, I say, and everything will be destroyed. Everyone is going to die. As if on afterthought, I add, “except for a few.”

End interlude.

 

When the Inner Angel Assimilates Reality

If we can catch the feeling, Dave says, identify the vibration of what triggers us, we may catch the destructive oscillation of the Babel Effect that is scrambling all of our sensory and cognitive faculties. We might then be able to apply the opposite wave, so the two waves cancel each other out in the middle. When margins meet, mainstream collapses.

Dave came to this event full of information, he said, but was unsure if he would be able to deliver it as a coherent package. Packaging the thing he has to deliver, confining it to clear descriptive boundaries, would nail it down, like a bear to a pole, or a dog on a leash. Every definition becomes a kind of prison for what is being defined. Every group Dave got involved with, in his questing for enlightenment, became a trap. He is not providing any kind of system. “Structure is death.”

“I am not a total anti-structuralist,” he says (technically, synonymous with liminalist): there needs to be just enough structure to get the attention and the bodies where they need to be, when they need to be there. Once the structure starts to close things down and dampen the life force energy, however, it prevents him from delivering what he came to deliver and becomes a prison, a kind of living death.

In the same way, all of us in today’s society are inveigled to take on certain roles. Roles, over time, lead to status, which creates a hierarchy, which is the death of a community. (It is how communities atrophy into societies.) It is like entering a pinball machine, designed to turn us into pinballs and force us to comply to the role of being forever bounced about by everything around us.

The triggers and levers of the cultural pinball machine we are born into direct us down fixed channels of expression. Primarily, they do this via a constantly appearing stop sign of FEAR: of false evidence, appearing real. Once we learn to ignore that stop sign and to inhibit reacting to the levers of inner and outer control; as we begin to move through and outside the channels of the pinball machine; we can start to draw down our life force and let it in, and let it out.

Is this what it means to begin receiving (and transmitting) our inner angel?

 

A Cliff Hanger

Can you complete this blog post? I know I can’t.

All of these blog posts are incomplete. They are all flowing from and leading into a space-state beyond words or images or time or space. They are my attempts to organize, consume, and digest the word salad that Dave has tossed and served onto my plate, in the hope that I can make it somewhat coherent for myself, by sharing it with you.

I already wrote this, moments ago, but then a foolish decision on my part, combined with technology’s tricky, sticky pitfalls, led to it being lost forever. Only words—and yet to try and recapture those words once they have been scattered, and fallen on stony ground, is a grim and thankless task; and hard on the knees besides. 

What I was trying to say (and I thought I said it quite well) was that, this blog post is an attempt to weave together the many intricacies, indications, innuendos, the clues, cues, leads and threads of Dave’s “Daving,” but it is of necessity incomplete and full of holes and missed connections. What Dave started moving in my awareness I process here, publicly, to turn mere words into lived insight. But in that process, I create more words that need to be processed by you, into your own experience, in a process that potentially, never ends.

So to appear to end it would be to impose a false structure upon it, turn a verb into a noun, and close down the space. It is this space into which you, the reader, might breathe new life, by continuing to weave the tapestry of meanings started here by Dave and myself. What did I miss? What does this mean to you? Where did it begin? Where might it end? What do you see that others might not? Where do you fit into all of this?

I wrote it better the first time. Oh well. There’s got to be a moral in here somewhere. Sometimes a lack brings out what we have in us much more than a fullness. Let my failure to end on a bang be your opportunity to shine. Maybe in the comments below?

Finding one another’s contribution is the purpose here: mutually beneficial interaction that allows for an exponentially increasing energy exchange. 

The next online Daving is Real-Life Inception: Waking Up in the Barely Perceived World of Unending Dreaming