Doubt.
That's what these Logs have been about so far, isn't it? Doubt. Self-doubt – doubt of you – doubt of your society – doubt of Rob and the viability of this project. Doubt – it's what it's all about.
Gods damn. I'm clever as Hell.
Is my irony clear in the subtext?
But, more than anything, really, it's about addressing your doubt – or encouraging you to share it, maybe?
You can't ever know what's wrong with a work until you've shared it. And you definitely can't learn what's wrong with your thinking until you speak aloud. Or write it down, as the case may be. Now, I'm no Kierkegaard – or maybe I am; what do I know? But I find inspiration in his publishing things he knew his audience were going to hate. His observations were his, and the only way to test them is to put them to the fire of other men's scorn.
Men, of course, replacing humans. I read a lot of archaic language – and really don't care if your feelings are hurt by the proper usage of the term. Any female who thinks that a male isn't assuming her scorn is a female who knows nothing of males – and should maybe be less quick to criticize their use of words and quicker to consider their meaning. (He already knows you're not going to like it, and has already decided it is the most expedient way to express his meaning. You do it, too.) Fear, though, is the response to what we think we know but don't understand.
But we could all be better at that, couldn't we?
Taking that extra second not to say the thing that's going to upset people.
Maybe that's been my mistake lo these past five years. I most certainly got bitter and vengeful toward the end of my time in Columbus over it. It's easy to take the mindset that no one is considerate of your feelings – they're only considerate of what is expedient to them – when you work behind a counter or with an apron around your waist. You are paid to feel that way – actually, you are paid to make the customer feel that way, and your own feelings of insignificance are a byproduct - and insignificant.
You know, the same way you condition generations of slaves to accept their bondage.
So I doubt.
And most of all I doubt myself.
Why am I doing this? I should be taking someone's drive-thru order. What do I know of anything? And why should anyone care about the wizard-turned-detective who hangs out in my brain like that guy who just won't leave the bar.
Actually—
If you've ever worked third shift anywhere in customer service, but specifically a gas station or similar convenience store – Rob is that guy that comes in at 2 am and hangs out at the coffee machines, fiddling with the magazines and candy bars until 5 am when your shift is over. The whole time talking your ear off about insane nonsense – and whom you really wish would leave.
Until he says something about fulminated gold
Or Bigfoot
Or UFOs
And you're like – Alright, this guy can keep coming here, but he has to only talk about this nonsense. And then you're plumbing him for every story he's got – and soon enough you're producing his memoirs, because, holy shit, this guy thinks he's 1100 years old and has been involved in every major world event since the turn of the tenth century!
Kinda like the guy who made that documentary - Confessions of a Time Traveler - The Man From 3036. Man, the things I consume are really going to come out in these, aren't they?
Doubt is, indeed, the operative word to describe my life.
When I was in high school, all of my online presence used to be signed, “Believe nothing, question everything.” I stopped repeating that like a mantra at some point in my life, but it's remained there at the back of my head, an ever-present reminder that everyone and everything is lying to me at all times.
Even my own eyes lie.
That was never more clear to me than the first time I dropped Acid.
I understand why people are so terrified of psychedelics.
I mean, I used to be. I was very worried that the very real and very constant nightmares and stress dreams which were my sleeping reality would manifest in the altered reality as well. They haven't yet. But that isn't why we're really afraid. It's not the Bad Trip. That isn't why I was really afraid, as it turns out. And it isn't even an addiction thing, as a person with addiction-anxieties.
It's the fear that you're going to look into the darkness on a lark and it's going to look back – and you're going to want to keep looking. More than that, that you're going to not be able to stop yourself from reaching out to touch it.
That never happened for me.
If I were to tell my experience - well , in addition to your Trip stories being like your DnD stories, that is, no one wants to hear them under any circumstances because you always had to be there – mine are just boring. There were no visuals. No ego death. No sense of oneness with everything like reality were literally talking to me.
But there were profound conversations had with myself – and music is just another experience altogether.
Rob and Peitho talk about this, a little, on their trip from Venice to Pavia – looking into the darkness.
Society has taught us to fear that darkness. And for good reason. Good reason you can find elsewhere in our work. The darkness is frightening. But least so because of why I brought it up in the first place:
Your eyes very clearly lie to you.
Even if it's just the wooblies – and not pink elephants and flying whales. You will inevitably find yourself looking at something – like a stick – and asking yourself, Is that... - a snake?
I kind of made myself persona non grata in whatever they call themselves, Esoteric Twitter, over the Spring and Summer. I'll have to talk about it a little deeper elsewhere, because I've crossed my self-imposed halfway point and I still haven't really landed on what I wanted to actually talk about today – but it's funny to me, seeing practicing witches and pagans of all stripes, denominations, genders and identities shun psychoactive chemicals – while still maintaining that they're practicing the ancient traditions of our pre-Christian ancestors.
It's hilarious.
Just read Brian C. Muraresku's The Immortality Key, if you want to know why.
Priestesses the ancient world over were apothecaries for sacred psychedelic rituals. The oldest cult for which we have a name, the Eleusinian, was an LSD sex cult.
It's hilarious – hysterical – to me to think that we can separate understanding of the cosmos – of, for instance, the UAP phenomenon – from a deep and personal understanding of the psychedelic and ritual psychic space. The unification of science and religion, if you like. To the ancient peoples, it wasn't a metaphor. It was literal. It was real, an experience which would forever change your life - but more than that, your very perspective on reality. They freely wrote about it.
And then, during the several-hundred years on either side of Jesus's life and mission (doubt it's reality, we just can't talk about it here, I'm almost out of time!) Experiential Religion was banned - and persecuted with extreme prejudice.
Why?
I don't know. But what if the answer is something like--
Because what if the ideas of Little Green Men and Flying Saucers and Anomalous Lights in the Sky are like the ancient world's gods? What if it is our interest in these things which causes them to happen to us? What if it is a self-perpetuating cycle; and rather than there being a pre-existant Extra Terrestrial presence on another, more advanced planet, all of these things are just Tulpas, as the Tibetans might warn us?
What if the idea comes before the god? What if the god is the representation?
And what if the representation is what gives us power of the god? Over the idea?
What if the idea, which anthropologists scoff at as primitive and superstitious and savage, that cave paintings were a sort of sympathetic magick, isn't just what those peoples believed and practiced – what if it actually worked?
You won't have to hear me out for much longer on this. Today.
I was reading The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (aka: A Study in Comparative Religion) a few months ago. Ultimately, I got bored/felt I'd heard enough, but throughout the author, James George Frazer, is laying out in no certain terms the rituals and their whys of peoples all over the world, and he is dismissing them as easily falsifiable. Now, this book is a book of its time. You can't separate an author from his time – including his inherent racism, Frazer and Lovecraft fans and haters alike.
It struck me, however. Continues to strike me, if I'm honest - nearly everywhere I look:
Humans have been fully modern humans for 200,000 years.
If you have trouble understanding the scale of Christianity, multiply that by two orders of magnitude. That's how long we've been running around the world as we are today. If you think it's nutty that it's taken 2000 years for us to shed the yolk of Christendom, think again. The Human Experiment dates back some million years. There's no way to guess how intelligent those antecedents were – but we know how intelligent we were 200,000 years ago: On average as intelligent as we are now.
So, I have to ask myself. How is it that an outsider can walk into a tribe, observe their rituals, hear the why of them, and dismiss them as having no efficacy – but no one, for potentially thousands of years, raised significant enough doubt to impact the ritual? Did that people never once produce an above-average intellect? Never once a divergent thinker? How is it that these people don't have a history of rebellion, of heresy and inquisition and schism and perpetual conflict? I have a hypothesis, but it goes counter to everything history would teach us.
If the Abrahamic faiths have taught us anything – because don't kid yourself that Judaism and Islam aren't just as fractious and contentious within themselves as they are without – it's that whatever that kind of religion is, it has to be reinforced by the sword.
So why don't these savage tribal faiths have to reinforce their rituals by force? Because they aren't Empires? Possible. But neither was Biblical Judaism – Abraham was certainly not the leader of an empire when he and some of his male family members – on donkeys – rode out and slew their neighbors for whatever slight it was I'm thinking of. Nor Joshua when we cut off all those dude's dicks for abducting his sister. It was Joshua, right? Yeesh. What a guy for Jesus to be named after.
I don't know. And I want to end on some mystery today – and another question that I just cannot come up with an answer to:
Why is it that radically different systems of government from those we currently have (and have had for some 200 years and much, much more) are doomed to fail?
As – only a very very very limited – set of examples, I present the Gnostics, the Cathars, and Communism.
What is it about these intellectual contagions which made them priority targets for destruction – either by genocide or by internal corruption and decay?
I think the answer has something to do with the prejudice with which the Roman-pagan orthodoxy attacked the Dionysus cult contemporary with the first stirrings of the Jesus cult.
Something. I'm just not sure what, yet.
More on this, that, and many other things - later. Thanks for stopping by.
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