The Watchers

Another Message From Beyond

2005-06-25T23:24:00.000+02:00

Went out today to find the fence in front of the chateau had been snipped. So ended a relatively peaceful couple of months (as you would have noticed from my lack of postings). We’ve been working away, getting books ready for publication, organising a conference at a local university that the Doctor was involved with, and setting up a few other projects for the future.

So, was someone trying to case out the joint as they say in the detective novels? Not very likely. A few meters away is a gate that can be opened by anyone wishing to enter. Why would a prospective thief leave a calling card? Unless they were as stupid as this guy.

No. It’s a message, a warning, that the folks that loosened the car nuts and video’d the Writer in the market are still keeping us in their sights. And it came a few days after a court case for defamation against the Writer and the Doctor was heard. We’ve noticed a connection between other incidents with the person accused of defamation and the incidents above.

He is the former landlord.

One of these days I’ll have to tell you that story.

One Bad Apple

2005-04-03T21:03:00.000+02:00

One bad apple spoils the bunch.

There is a profound truth in this old saying. It is easier to destroy than to create, and it takes but one destroyer to undo the work of hundreds or thousands of well-meaning, good-intentioned builders. Not very good odds for the builders. And one of the hardest things to grasp is that there are people whose essence it is to destroy, and those whose being is aligned with Creation cannot grasp the person who seeks to tear down, or who only wishes to build on his or her own terms, which amounts to the same thing because true creation is a dance that cannot be controlled. Creation within a group canot be dictated. Each person must be able to follow the music in his or her own way. From this dance, the partners match up naturally, forming groups of colinear individuals whose spontaneous acts of creation build one upon the other and create something greater than the sum of its parts.

Or so it works here in the château.

But one person who is not co-linear will destroy the relations among the others. It may not be done consciously, but that one person blocks the flow of energy. Or it can be conscious, in which case everyone must be extremely careful, attentive, aware. The psychopath, and in Washington and other world capitals at the moment we have far too many of them for anyone’s health, has no empathy, no ability to put himself in someone else’s shoes. If someone is hurt, his reaction is that they should just ‘get over it’. If thousands of workers must be laid off to ensure profits, ‘get over it’.

The excellent new film, The Corporation, shows us that the organisation that forms the core of our economic life has the symtoms of a psychopath. Robert Hare has shown that psychopaths rise naturally to the head of our business, legal, and political structures. They have no qualms about doing whatever is necessary to reach the top, and, then, no qualms about doing whatever is necessary to increase profits for the shareholders at the expense of the people who make up the organisation. The people working there exist only to fulfil the demands of the portfolios of the stockholders.

We live in a society where the standards are set by psychopaths. We must adopt the traits of the psychopath to succeed. The existence of psychopaths and their dominance means that there is no way out of the problem. Far too few people are even aware that it is a problem. Psychopathy remains something we see in films. But the smart psychopaths don’t get caught. They don’t end up in the prison system. They are as charming as they are cunning.

When Hare did a study of brain scans of psychopaths, his article was refused publication because the editors said the scans could not have been human; they looked like they were from apes.

In a very profound sense, they are not human. Yet they walk, talk, dress, and live among us, with the rights and duties of humans, unable to fulfill them.

And when we look at the world, we see the result of their work.

Another Guest

2005-03-14T23:08:00.000+01:00

There are many people the world over who feel that the Writer’s books and writings on the web have changed their lives. She gets emails from them recounting their life stories in great detail. In fact, she is flooded with these stories. I know because it comes to the Watchers so that the Writer isn't innundated and has time to work.

Many are politely thankful and leave it at that.

Others begin recounting the various and numerous bizarre experiences they have had in their lives, and of those, a large number interpret these events as meaning that they are somehow special, chosen, and destined to play some great role in the near future.

Sure. And for a euro-thirty the café in town will give you an expresso.

They may believe that the explanations given by the Writer in her work for the experiences they have lived make the Writer their surrogate sister and mother. It is as if she can see into their souls. If they understood that in a mechanical world made up of mechanical beings, and that the mechanical actions of the Matrix attempting to encourage us in our illusions about ourselves are nothing special, they might interpret the Writer’s books differently.

Although the Writer has chronicled the very strange character of our world, the kinds of things that are not fit to print in the New York Times, she believes that these events are important only to the extent that they illustrate that things happen in our world that mainstream science cannot explain. The people to whom these events occur, rather than considering themselves the Chosen of our Space Brothers of some such, would be better to run as fast as possible in the opposite direction. These are the realms where the Seeker can get lost in maya, illusion. A couple of years ago, one such correspondent wrote about an experience he had at his home. He was working late at night when he heard a noise outside. The backdoor was open, with only the screen door closed. He looked up to see a strange pink creature staring at him through the screen. He flipped – as I certainly would – and then ran out the other door, jumped into his car, and sped off to his girlfriend’s house. What never occured to him was that these strange experiences began at the same time as the new girlfriend appeared in his life. If anything, the appearances of these creatures from who knows where were a sign that he had entered into some strange territory, territory he have been best to vacate by splitting with the new woman in his life. The woman, however, was a hot number whose hold over the guy was strictly fixed in a motor centre highly charged with energy from his sexual centre.

Certain death, at least for his soul, if it were to continue.

And it did.

We recently had another such visitor. An Internet correspondent for over a year, he came to show his appreciation for the Writer’s work. He spent three days talking about himself, responding “Of course” every time the Writer tried to point out something that might shake him awake to his own self-importance. His “Of course” meant “I know it all”. His cup was full and there was no room for anything new.

He wanted to talk about the strange things that kept happening to him. No matter how many times we let on that these bizarre happenings were designed to make him feel special and that he should ignore them, he couldn’t shake it. No matter how many times he agreed that he wasn’t special, you could feel he didn’t really believe it. Deep down that little voice was screaming “I am too special!!!”

As much as I would love to tell you some striking details of his experiences, I must admit I wasn’t listening all that carefully. Something about finding a message on a bench in a metro station that seemed to be intended for him, a message that mysteriously disappeared within 24 hours while the other graffiti on the bench remained. He was transfixed by this event, an event that had occured several years prior and of which he had been unable to let go.

He wanted to know what it meant. He had to find out what it meant. He came to us for answers.

The Writer sugggested that maybe he would never know, that he should put it on the shelf and maybe later, after he had done more work, he would figure it out. Maybe he would never figure it out. Maybe it wasn’t necessary to figure it out.

But he couldn’t let go.

“Of course,” came the response as the visitor continued on with his story, completely missing the point of the Writer’s words.

After he departed, we were left with the question “How exactly did this guy think he was showing us his appreciation for our work?” By allowing us to bask in his presence for three days?

At least we got him to chop some wood and till the garden.

Lead into Gold

2005-03-12T20:18:00.000+01:00

The Alchemist came by this morning with a group of his students. The five cars filed up the driveway and parked. We went out to greet them. It was the first encounter with his students, a varied group of people from their twenties to their seventies. We shook hands, introduced ourselves and invited them in. The Alchemist began unloading his equipment from the boot of his car: gloves, tongs, furnace, crucible, propane tank and rubber tubes, all the modern accoutrements of a 21^st century Philosopher.

We carried the material into the kitchen. The Alchemist and his apprentice began installing the furnace in our fireplace, a 16^th century fixture that is the oldest part of the house. It is large enough to roast a sheep. We were there to see if it was adequate for turning lead into gold.

The furnace set into place, the propane tank and its two jets fixed and placed into the holes on the side of the furnace, the Alchemist lit the gas and two intense flames began shooting into the furnace. The crucible was passed around for inspection before it was lowered into place between the flames with the tongs.

Onto the kitchen table, he placed a candle, a vial of mercury and a piece of lead cut from a lead pipe. The pipe was brought in as exhibit A and placed next to them on the table. From his pocket, he brought out another vial of a reddish material. The Philosopher’s Stone.

Onto a pyrex plate the Alchemist began shaving off slices of wax from the candle. When he had a good pile, we placed the plate onto the stove and melted it down. When the wax was malleable, he began mixing half of the Stone into the wax, forming a ball. Everything was ready.

Were we feeling the same excitement as had the participants under similar circumstances a little more than 80 years before when the famous Fulcanelli had performed the Great Work before a select audience in Paris?

With his students grouped around him, as well as the members of our little tribe, his apprentice lifted the top off of the crucible with the tongs. In went the lead, followed quickly by the mixture of wax and Philosopher’s Stone. The top was put back on the crucible and the top part of the furnace was gently set into place. A large cloud of smoke rose from the concoction like the smoke in a magic act and the top of the furnace was removed. We went outside to escape the fumes.

And so it cooked for several minutes as we enjoyed the early spring sun shining down upon us outdoors. After a certain time, the Alchemist returned to look into the crucible to see the state of his creation. It needed more time. We chatted and enjoyed the sun’s rays. Another check at the furnace, and the Alchemist annouced the deed was done. His assistant lifted the crucible out of the furnace and poured the contents into a mould held by the Alchemist. A small piece of solid material appeared among the ashes in the mould.

After it cooled, the material was picked out and circulated around the kitchen. It was about the same size as the original piece of lead. However, the silver appearance was gone. It had a golden appearance. Someone broke the piece in two so that we could see the interior. Gold through and through.

The Alchemist began the second transmutation, the mercury. Once more the wax was softened and the Stone was mixed in to form a small ball. The mercury was poured into the crucible, the ball was dropped in afterwards. Covers were put into place and the cloud of smoke reappeared. The cloud became even larger as the top was taken off the furnace. The Alchemist ushered everyone back out into the sunlight as the fumes of the mercury were toxic. Once more we waited. The furnace was hotter this time around so we had less time to wait. Once more the Alchemist went back inside to check his furnace.

Once more the contents of the crucible were poured into the mould. Once more we saw the golden sheen from among the ashes of the Stone.

Had we just seen two base metals transmuted into gold? Were we privy to one of the secrets of the ages?

Of course not. Such things are the hallucinations of madmen. The Skeptics Dictionary informs us in words unopen to question or appeal:

Alchemists may have tried out their ideas by devising experiments, but they never separated their methods from the supernatural, the magickal, and the superstitious. Perhaps that is why alchemy is still popular, even though it has accomplished practically nothing of lasting value. Alchemists never transmuted metals, never found a panacea, and never discovered the fountain of youth.

So obviously, the substance in our kitchen could not have been gold.

DDOS Attack

2005-03-03T22:25:00.000+01:00

Today's attack came in the form of a denial of service attack on our server through our IP address. Everyone in the world could get to our site except us. Cute.

As a great man once said: "Coincidence? We think not."

Never a dull moment....

US-inspired "Soft Revolution" for Lebanon?

2005-02-28T22:08:00.000+01:00

A new tactic of US imperialism is to promote "peaceful" regime change inspired by the work of Gene Sharp, a specialist in non-violent political change and the author of many books on the subject including studies of Gandhi. Financing a series of phoney "grass roots" organisations in the targeted countries that are fronts for money from the USAID/NED, "spontaneous" demonstrators take to the streets, logistics bought and paid for by US dollars (tents, food, blankets, etc). It worked in Georgia. It worked in the Ukraine.

Is this what is now happening in Lebanon?

The assassination of al Hariri was clearly the work of a foreign state, with the best bet being Israel. Syria, who is being branded as the guilty party throughout the US media with no evidence (where have we seen that happen before?), had no reason to commit international suicide in this way. That the bombing in Beirut has been followed by another "suicide bomb" in Tel Aviv, once again being blamed by the Israelis on Syria and just in time to scuttle the new round of "peace talks", is too convenient and stretches the credulity of even the most jaded observer.

How can Israel get away with this time and again?

Watching the World

2005-02-27T00:46:00.000+01:00

When the Writer is safely hidden away in her office where the Doctor can keep his eye on her, which is most of the time, Watcher Two, Watcher Three, and I watch the internet news. We spend many hours a day browsing from site to site to keep our eye on events down here on the blue and green ball, to try and see the world as it is, unhampered by our own preconceptions and prejudices. This attempt at seeing the world as it is is our primary esoteric work.

We have been doing it now day in and day out for nearly two years. Every day of the week, fifty-two weeks a year. It is a curious crucible. It can be mind-numbing as well as invigorating, provoking rage as well as incredulity. All in all, it is a chance for us to watch ourselves while we watch the news. How am I reacting today? Is it an effort to stare down the same bloodthirsty acts, the same stupidity on the part of the Christian Right in the US, the same horror as yet another ten year old Palestinian child is butchered by an Israeli soldier who will not only go free but will be patted on the back for a job well done by his superiors with a sly wink as they watch yet another report on the US news that carefully explains that the IDF will investigate and that it was most assuredly “just an accident”.

That is what I see when I watch the world. When I watch myself, is it any better? Do parts of me wink at each other as I become complacent? As I forget that one's mind cannot be trusted?

I notice that I operate in waves. There are periods when I feel up for it, when I have something to say, a new relationship to draw between disparate elements, when as nonsensical as it all is from any sane person’s perspective I am able to see the real sense behind it. At other moments, it is a Sisyphian task to put together a series of articles even with no commentary whatsoever -- because we produce a daily news site that brings metaphyics and esoterica to the world news, that is, we are looking for the underlying energy dynamic that is pushing the planet to its destruction. And here, please note, I am not speaking of a Christian-type “end of the world”, but rather the end of what we would know as modern life. There may once have been a chance for a different outcome, for the happy ending, but I don’t think it is possible any longer. The world is beset by too much ignorance as we are all the while convinced that we are the sharpest thing on two legs. We even think we may be alone in the universe, the pinnacle of God's creation! If there are an infinite forms between the smallest object and Man, why should there not also be an infinite number of forms between Man and God?

What guarantees that we are anywhere near the top?

As I look out on the world, I see a train without brakes hurtling out of control down the mountain side and towards the valley. There are too many hair-pin turns to think that the train will make it safely to the flatlands.

When it finally goes over the precipice, it is not the whole world that will go with it, only the club cars, the dining cars, the engine and the baggage, but take out the major sources of energy, transportation, and food production and put large portions of the globe under snow and ice, and you’re looking at something that in a few hundred years might well come down to our descendents in story and myth as something resembling the “end of the world”. But we fool ourselves into thinking that somehow we have evolved beyond that possibility, that with all of our technical prowess, it is an impossibility that we could kill ourselves off, or at least a large portion of the planet’s population, and destroy the technological underpinnings of our modern life.

But didn’t humanity feel that way in June 1914. And after the Great War was over, didn’t Europeans believe that it could never happen again? For sixty years the wars have been fought elsewhere, as in, not in our backyard, but fought we have for all the same wrong reasons our ancestors fought. Are we so different from our grandparents or great grandparents? Have two or three generations really been enough time to permit us to evolve into something new, something less aggressive, self-interested, and emotionally dominated?

Let's put it differently: Is there any society on the face of the planet that is not motivated by the three basic desires of fear, food, and sex?

Gurdjieff said the following about evolution:

“This is the basis of the correct view of human evolution. There is no compulsory, mechanical evolution. Evolution is the result of conscious struggle. Nature does not need this evolution; it does not want it and struggles against it. Evolution can be necessary only to man himself when he realizes his position, realizes the possibility of changing this position, realizes that he has powers that he does not use, riches that he does not see. And, in the sense of gaining possession of these powers and riches, evolution is possible. [...]

“In speaking of evolution it is necessary to understand from the outset that no mechanical evolution is possible. The evolution of man is the evolution of his consciousness. And ‘consciousness’ cannot evolve unconsciously. The evolution of man is the evolution of his will, and ‘will’ cannot evolve involuntarily. The evolution of man is the evolution of his power of doing, and ‘doing’ cannot be the result of things which ‘happen.’

“People do not know what man is. They have to do with a very complex machine, far more complex than a railway engine, a motorcar, or an aeroplane—but they know nothing, or almost nothing, about the construction, working, or possibilities of this machine; they do not even understand its simplest functions, because they do not know the purpose of these functions. They vaguely imagine that a man should learn to control his machine, just as he has to learn to control a railway engine, a motorcar, or an aeroplane, and that incompetent handling of the human machine is just as dangerous as incompetent handling of any other complex machine. Everybody understands this in relation to an aeroplane, a motorcar, or a railway engine. But it is very rarely that anyone takes this into account in relation to man in general or to himself in particular. It is considered right and legitimate to think that nature has given men the necessary knowledge of their machine. And yet men understand that an instinctive knowledge of the machine is by no means enough. Why do they study medicine and make use of its services? Because, of course, they realize they do not know their machine. But they do not suspect that it can be known much better than science knows it; they do not suspect that then it would be possible to get quite different work out of it.”

We are machines. Right there most people will get up and storm out. They feel slighted. Their self love has been abused. They react in a mechanical way and run away. Fight or flight, very basic.

The evolution we see around us is the evolution of the machine in its natural mechanical habitat. Our cities, homes, and workplaces are built for machines, from the cars that transport us (we can no longer walk anywhere), to the computers on our desks. We come second in our own society. How can it last? How can it not all come crashing down upon us?

Meanwhile our interior life, what is left of such a thing, rots. It smells of rancid beer and the bag of half-eaten burgers on the table in front of the TV. Can we even imagine what it would be like to BE something more than a lump on the couch or the cog at the office?

Until we take a conscious decision to do things differently, nothing will change. Certainly, our environment can deteriorate. But the decision, the choice to change oneself, to master the machine, can only be taken in the depths of one’s nascent soul. The soul knows that a way out exists, even if the exact and precise character of that road remains to be discovered. But the seed of divinity within us knows that the road is there, somewhere. Sincere searching brings help.

Once we know it is possible to get on the path, we need to be convinced that we can no longer go ahead living in the old way. This is where most people hit the wall. They are not ready to give up their old lives. Things are not bad enough yet. They have not yet suffered enough, been driven beyond all reason to seek a new way of being, to look at things in an entirely new way.

And that is why the world is lost. In order for the world to awaken, it will take an amount of suffering that we have not seen here for probably thousands of years. And after the twentieth century, that is certainly saying a lot. And when that suffering comes, when people are pleading for someone to come and take that burden off of their shoulders, how many people will there be who know what to say, who know what to tell them, who know the truth? For the only answer that can help will be the truth, that truth that is staring everyone in the face today while they go about their daily lives with the illusion that they will live forever, or that, at least, this world that they are part of, this society of inhu-man, will live forever.

Fragile are the links of man with another, hard is his heart, and suffering alone is the only certain chemical of change.

Fear and Loathing in the Mirror – Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

2005-02-25T22:37:00.000+01:00

I had already fled the United States when Thompson produced Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. When I read it, I knew I had done the right thing. Thompson had the ability to see the truth and then the guts to put it to paper. Now he, too, has fled.

In one passage in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Duke and his Samoan lawyer have arrived in the famous gambling city. They are surrounded by Middle America’s best representatives there to attend a convention on law enforcement and drugs. As Duke moves through the lobby, the others begin to morph into reptiles. Who can travel through America without sensing this cold-blooded pulse?

The reptilian brain is the instinctual part of the brain, the part that is most closely connected with survival, with fight or flight, with fear. The essence of the wave patterns being given off by the people in the hotel was reptilian. In his Las Vegas hallucination, Thompson interpreted that wave pattern and saw that American culture is reptilian at its core. It searches not for something higher, something ineffable, something holy – by whatever meaning that word has at its origins before it was raped by religion – , but only for mammon, for the Almighty dollar. It lives instinctually, without thought.

Oh, it can plan and calculate like a good predator, compute the information it needs to be better able to pounce, sizing up its prey’s weaknesses and blind spots, but it is incapable of those flights of abstraction necessary to real thought. It is unable to tap into its neo-cortext, and its only emotions are fear of being caught and pleasure in the kill, a world circumscribed by three words: fear, food, and sex..

Those who are raised in this environment become reptiles themselves unless for some strange reason, the link between words and deeds, between what one says and what one does, carries a certain reality that it does not within the culture itself. Look at Bush. His words have no link whatsoever to the real world. He speaks of democracy and freedom while killing and plundering. Look at the US news. It bears as little resemblence to reality as Bush’s words. Look at the average American’s knowledge of the rest of the world.

To move beyond this vale of tears we must learn to bring the three brains into balance one with another. Gurdjieff calls us “three-brained” creatures in his epic Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson. This is what he is talking about, the three centres we have within us: the motour/instinctive, the emotional, and the intellectual.

Thompson saw the problem on some deep level. Unfortunately, he never found the solution.

In the intervening years, I found it wise to add a few thousand miles to the distance between myself and the Beast. Nixon pales next to the monster in the White House now.

Might Makes Reich

2005-02-24T17:16:00.000+01:00

Can you feel it?

Something has changed.

Perhaps it is simply the physical presence of George W. Bush slithering his way through Europe, but suddenly the world feels like one of those dark, clammy, and humid passages with a giant, multi-legged insect, or worse, lurking just around the corner. We are all about to make the turn, and the audience is shouting “Don’t go there!” but we can’t hear it because we can no longer hear ourselves think or feel or react in any way that is not a programme, some bit of code carefully inserted into us with great malice through the TV or other media while the strobe lights on the squad car opened the connection to some deep reaches of our psyche known only to a few psychologists whose work has never been published for reasons of national security.

The Telegraph has this:

Charm offensive offends the Germans
By Alec Russell in Mainz and Kate Connolly in Berlin
(Filed: 24/02/2005)

Empty autobahns, abandoned streets, shuttered windows and lines of soldiers and policemen stationed for mile after mile of his route - President George W Bush had a distinctly frosty reception yesterday on his arrival on the banks of the Rhine in the German town of Mainz.

At a lunch hosted by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, Mr Bush made much of how he was literally following in the footsteps of his father, who made a memorable trip to Mainz in 1989.

But the contrast between the two visits could not have been more marked. Mr Bush’s father, the first President George Bush, was hailed as a friend and statesman when he appealed for a special relationship between Germany and America. The current president suffered a hail of insults from the moment Air Force One touched down at nearby Rhein-Main military air base.

Air passengers were left fuming as the authorities bowed to the wishes of American officials and took the unprecedented step of clearing the airspace for Mr Bush’s arrival and departure. Hundreds of flights at Frankfurt’s main airport were delayed and dozens cancelled.

As the presidential entourage sped over the Rhine into the seemingly abandoned city in a snowfall and along streets lined by police, the imagery was reminiscent of a Cold War summit.

Much to the outrage of many locals, five autobahns had been closed, the Rhine was blocked to traffic, and most businesses were shut. Residents had been told to step on to their balconies “at their own peril” for fear that the president’s security “might misunderstand the gesture and act accordingly”.

But by midday the centre came back to life as demonstrators gathered to vent their anger at Mr Bush. “We don’t want your type of freedom” was emblazoned on the back of one float, in a pointed reference to Mr Bush’s call to spread freedom around the globe.

Don’t go out on their balconies because the President’s men “might misunderstand the gesture and act accordingly”?

Bush later went on to a US airbase where “thousands of soldiers cheered and roared as he addressed them.” The split between Bush, his American zombibots, and the rest of the world is close to the point of snapping. It is that tension that has become palpable.

Might makes Reich.

Bush must continue to push the envelope of his illusion to meet the needs of his Maker, that voice he hears that commands the blood sacrifice of thousands of Arab children. He’s doing it Yahweh, and you can hear him on his knees in Air Force One as it flies overhead as he sings to himself “and not the words, of one who kneels”. For if Bush goes down on his knees, it is before no man, no. It is before the metallic voice that rings in his head, bounced off the cavity formed in the atmosphere during the sixties’ nuclear blasts, a cavity now used to beam mind control messages into each and every one of us.

And who is pulling that switch and pushing that button?

The grey street. Snow. It is quiet. Everyone is inside, afraid to move. The police have formed lines of protection along the corridor. The neighborhood enforcer is back in town.

The black cat....

2005-02-22T13:50:00.000+01:00

Remember in the first Matrix movie when Neo saw the black cat for a second time? It was, he learned, a glitch in the reprogramming of the Matrix, a sign of what we might call a Reality Shift, appearing as a doubling, déjà vu, as if time had been manipulated and one end of the tape had a few extra frames left where there was meant to be a splice.

Reality Shift.
Reality Shift.

Something like that.

Sometimes the universe gives you a sign.... but as the Writer says, "If the truth was staring out at you like a black-eyed pea in a plate of grits, would you eat it?"

Some people can't seem to bring the fork to their mouths, no matter how much they have been going on about how delicious it looks!

Reality Shift

2005-02-21T23:15:00.001+01:00

Sometimes you wonder whether it is real, that is, whether or not the sensation that something has changed is valid. It started during Condi's trip to Europe a couple of weeks ago. She was putting on the smile, the expensive suits, and a taste for Brahms in order to convince Old Europe that not all Americans are coke swizzling, track suit wearing cultural illiterates. She circled Europe, through the new American colonies in the East, and then off to pay her respects to war criminal Ariel Sharon.

And today she's back with her boss wining and dining Jacques Chirac in Brussels.

It all has a very creepy feeling about it as in the meantime, another false-flag operation killed Chirac's close friend Hariri in Lebanon, and everyone is attempting to portray Syria as the bad guy.

I don't buy it. Syria has been bending over backwards to appease the US recently. They are denounced by Bush as being part of the Axis of Evil, and Hariri's death is only going to make things worse for them. It isn't Syria that wants an unstable Lebanon, that is, a Lebanon that provides Israel with the excuse that it must occupy the country for its own security.

So was it a coincidence that this took place shortly before Bush's trip to Europe? I think not. Bush is trying to set up Chirac. Chirac, however, was a wily politician while George was still AWOL from his stint in the National Guard.

But it is hard to know what the feeling of reality shift really means. Is it positive or negative? How many flapping butterfly wings does it take to bring Bush and company before an International Tribunal for War Crimes?

How many more will have to die before America wakes up?

Reality Shift

2005-02-21T23:15:00.000+01:00

Chemical Warfare

2005-02-21T15:22:00.000+01:00

Working with the Writer, there are items that one never needed to think about before that now take on new potential meaning. Like getting sick. I remember when my son started school that every bug that entered the building was dutifully passed down from student to student. It is the same thing here. The last ten days have been spent "fighting the bug".

However, we received an email today from someone claiming to be a Palestinian writer in the US that adds another possible dimension to our bouts of illness. He writes, refering to a well-known intelligence agency from the only nuclear power in the Middle East: "They have tried several times from shooting at me to loosening the nuts on my tires, to spider bites, to poison."

"Loosening the nuts on my tires"? So, where have we heard that one before? Should we start looking at the spiders in the house, of which there are many, as potential killers rather than as friends who rid us of unwanted bugs?

The regularity with which we get sick is startling. The idea that these illnesses were somehow introduced quite consciously is not new. The email didn't cast a light on our health problems that hadn't been cast before.

It is the coincidence of the thing that becomes intriguing. A sign sent by the universe as a warning? A threat sent by the poisoner under the guise of a warning from another victim?

And trying to figure it out while looking out at the world through a ball of cotton and with a chest that sounds like the creaking floorboards of an old house.

Short Update

2005-02-08T18:31:00.000+01:00

The Writer's new book is finally off to the printer. She decided to add an extra 150 pages to it two weeks ago. I was not amused, being the one who has to redo the layout. However, after reading her additions, I had to agree that they were necessary and rounded out the book in a way the earlier manuscript did not.

That done, I should have more time to maintain this account... until the translator sends in finished translation.

Transparency

2005-02-01T19:14:00.000+01:00

So what is it we are attempting to do?

We know that we can’t change the nature of this world. It is as it is. For thousands of years mankind has been attempting to improve his lot, to make a world where his children can grow and live in peace and prosperity.

He hasn’t been very successful.

Philosophies and religions have attempted to chart the course to this better new world. They have all failed.

Doesn’t leave much hope that things can improve. So why not look reality in the face and admit the obvious: this world is not going to change, and there is nothing that we can do about. Accept it.

But what about the injustice, the oppression? We have to accept that it is part and parcel of how things are.

Does that mean that there is nothing that we can do? No. It merely changes the level on which we work. If you think it appropriate to march against the war in Iraq, go ahead and do it. We did in the winter of 2002 when Bush was telling his lies and Powell was standing up before the world community and telling us that Saddam had to go. But we never for a moment thought it was going to change anything. We did it to stand for what was right. We did it to stand up for the truth.

All that any of us have any control over is ourselves, and we only have that if we set out consciously to gain it through long and painstaking work on the self. The hitch is that there is only so far that one can go on one’s own. At a certain point, you need the eye of another, or several others, to help you root out the programmes that you can’t see on your own. You need a network of people who are doing the work.

This network is one of the things the Writer and the Doctor and attempting to build. The household is a laboratory. We are the subjects of our own experiment. The goal is to be oneself in an environment where each of us has the same freedom to be. But to be, one must allow others the same freedom, and learning to overcome the frictions that are inherent in an environment of such a diverse group is the crucible in which we work.

I mentioned before that we must be transparent with each other. We must learn to see ourselves as others see us, to step out of our conditioning that tells us we are each the centre of the universe in order to make a place for others. And the funny thing is that as soon as one stops fighting for his or her place, but works to create a space where all of the others can be, one finds that the others are also working to create a space in which you are allowed to be. If everyone is giving, there is more than enough to go around.

So if we cannot change the world, we can build a space around us, a secure enclosure, which we can shape and make as we see fit. But to do that one must give up all of one's secrets.

A couple of years ago I had one of those “Aha!” moments that dealt with this issue. I realised that we are all caught up in our own mental fantasies worried that others will see us as we really are. We are all in hiding. Therefore we erect masks of various sorts: the clown, the intello, the good mother, the hard-working father, and the many others. The great cosmic joke is that everyone is doing the same thing, pretending to be something they are not for fear of really being who they are.

We are all caught in the same trap and have not the courage to admit it to each other. And admitting it to one another is the only way to break down that wall and to help each other by comparing notes. Of course, you have to be careful with whom you are sincere. As Gurdjieff put it, “Sincerity with everyone in general is weakness, slavery and even a sign of hysteria.” The psychopath is quite willing and able to use any show of sincerity against the person, so one can only be sincere with others who have made the same choice.

How to Save the Planet

2005-01-31T19:28:00.000+01:00

Curious week.

We have been approached by two people representing groups who wish that we work with them in one manner or another to “save the planet”. I have mentioned the first, the representative of the anti-imperialist front. The other is a consultant with a rather nasty think-tank whose work the Writer discovered when she was researching plans afoot for population reduction. Now he is writing asking for help! Of course, population reduction is coming into public awareness through the work of Michael Ruppert, one of the early voices questioning the veracity of the official story of the events of 9/11, who has shifted his focus onto the somewhat dubious agenda of Peak Oil.

Now he tells us that the truth about 9/11 is not important. We need to start talking about population reduction in order to do it in the right way! One wonders whether Mr. Ruppert learned anything from his 9/11 researches. Does he think the people in power are going to roll over and play dead?

Don’t worry, Mike. Mother Nature is going to take care of both our overdependence upon oil and oil supposed population problem!

The Writer wrote, in part, in response to the consultant:

[I]t seems that you perceive that we may, indeed, have a pretty good track record of seeing and predicting, even if we point out that prediction can only be statistical, and attaching dates is a fool's game.

It also seems that what you are seeking to do is a sort of “let’s tell people as much as we have to in order to make this or that adjustment, but we can’t tell them everything...” approach.

It’s already way too late for that.

There is more than a little scientific support for the idea that consciousness - the root of existence and BEing - has two fundamental states: on, or off. In the final analysis, it seems that the metaphor of humanity and its collective “higher selves” being a movie and an audience, may be simply anthropomorphizing creative and entropic forces of the universe for the purposes of “self-calming.” The stakes, it seems, are a lot higher and more real.

This brings us to the issue of subjectivity vs. objectivity. [...]

Pierre Laplace, a French mathematician and physicist who worked about two hundred years ago, wrote:

We must regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. Consider an intelligence which, at any instant, could have a knowledge of all forces controlling nature together with the momentary conditions of all the entities of which nature consists. If this intelligence were powerful enough to submit all this data to analysis it would be able to embrace in a single formula the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atoms; for it, nothing would be uncertain; the future and the past would be equally present to its eyes.

Certainly, such an intelligence as Laplace describes would be “Godlike,” you agree? And certainly, no one of us human beings is capable of such “seeing,” you will also agree. However, what does seem to be true is that this is a significant clue to the solutions to the pressing issues of our day: knowledge that leads to awareness.

Here I will insert a major clue: As the brain interacts with its environment, synaptic circuits combine to form synaptic maps of the world perceived by the senses. These maps describe small segments of that world - shape, color, movement - and these maps are scattered throughout the brain. As the brain’s synaptic network evolves, beginning at birth - or even before - these maps process information simultaneously and in parallel.

Based on our synaptic maps of the world, we are enabled to have e more or less objective view of reality.

[snip]

The view of the Bush Reich is, as it happens, diametrically opposed to the our view, a view that can be stated quite economically as follows:

Life is religion. Life experiences reflect how one interacts with God. Those who are asleep are those of little faith in terms of their interaction with the creation. Some people think that the world exists for them to overcome or ignore or shut out. For those individuals, the worlds will cease. They will become exactly what they give to life. They will become merely a dream in the “past.” People who pay strict attention to objective reality right and left, become the reality of the “Future.”

[big snip]

We are not in the business of telling anyone what to do. We are only here as a lighthouse, a constant sweeping illumination that goes around and around and says, basically, the same thing over and over again. Our readership is growing by leaps and bounds, and we know that there are new readers every day who have not read every daily report for the past couple of years. We also know that there are regular readers who, after reading the page, go back to sleep and think “it can’t be THAT bad.” And so, again and again we shine the light, ring the alarm bell, and try to think of different ways to get through to others the extreme peril in which we stand.

This brings us back to the issue of how does Knowledge Protect?

In the past three years, we have made some considerable progress on our mandate of discovering what really makes reality tick and how does humanity fit into it. Much of this work is pure science - physics and mathematics - but I’m not going to give you the formulas or the computer simulation codes, I’m going to explain it to you in simple terms.

Our universe seems to be made up of matter/energy and of consciousness.

Matter/energy by itself “prefers”, as it seems, a chaotic state.

Matter/energy by itself doesn’t even have a concept of “creation” or “organization”. It is the consciousness that brings to life these concepts and by its interaction with matter pushes the universe towards chaos and decay or towards order and creation.

This phenomenon can modeled mathematically and simulated on a computer using Quantum Theory that has been enhanced with a recognition of Events. Whether this theory faithfully models the interaction of consciousness with matter, we do not know. But chances that it does because it seems to describe correctly physical phenomena better than just the orthodox quantum mechanics or its rival theories (Bohmian mechanics, GRW etc.)

What we learn from a Quantum Theory that has been enhanced with a recoognition of Events can be described in simple terms as follows:

Let us call our material universe “the system”. The system is characterized by a certain “state”. It is useful to represent the state of the system as a point on a disc. The central point of the disk, its origin, is the state of chaos. We could also describe it as “Infinite Potential.” The points on the boundary represents “pure states” of being, that is states with “pure, non- fuzzy, knowledge”. In between there are mixed states. The closer the state is to the boundary, the more pure, more ‘organized’ it is.

Now, an external “observer”, a “consciousness unit”, has some idea - maybe accurate, maybe false or anywhere in between - about the “real state” of the system, and observes the system with this “belief” about the state. Observation, if prolonged, causes the state of the system to “jump”. In this sense, you DO “create your own reality”, but the devil, as always, is in the details.

The details are that the resulting state of the system under observation can be more pure, or more chaotic depending on the “direction” of the jump. The direction of the jump depends on how objective - how close to the reality of the actual state - the observation is.

According to an event enhanced quantum theory, if the expectations of the observer are close to the actual state of the system, the system jumps, more often than not, into more organized, less chaotic state.

If, on the other hand, the expectation of the observer is close to the negation of the actual state (that is when the observer’s beliefs are closer to being false than to being true according to the ACTUAL state - the objective reality), then the state of the system, typically, will jump into a state that is more chaotic, less organized. Moreover, it will take, as a rule, much longer time to accomplish such a jump.

In other words, if the observer’s knowledge of the actual state is close to the truth, then the very act of observation and verification causes a jump quickly, and the resulting state is more organized. If the observer’s knowledge of the actual state is false, then it takes usually a long time to cause a change in the state of the system, and the resulting state is more chaotic.

What this means is that order can be brought out of chaos by observing chaos as it IS and not pretending that it is otherwise.

In short, everyone who “believes” in an attempt to “create reality” that is different from what IS, increases the chaos and entropy. If your beliefs are orthogonal to the truth, no matter how strongly you believe them, you are essentially coming into conflict with how the Universe views itself and I can assure you, you ain’t gonna win that contest. You are inviting destruction upon yourself and all who engage in this “staring down the universe” exercise with you.

On the other hand, if you are able to view the Universe as it views itself, objectively, without blinking, and with acceptance, you then become more “aligned” with the Creative energy of the universe and your very consciousness becomes a transducer of order. Your energy of observation, given unconditionally, can bring order to chaos, can create out of infinite potential. […]

Now, you are a smart guy - no question in my mind about that - so I am sure you can do a bit of extrapolating from the above and understand that there is one, and ONLY one way to “save the earth.” Since humanity - as a whole - is an “organ for transducing cosmic energies onto our planet”, the condition of humanity - as a whole - is reflected by the planet. The suffering of humanity, the lies that humans believe, all have a profound effect on the planet.

VERY IMPORTANT: it is not whether or not one “believes” in good things or bad things that makes good things or bad things happen. It is the factual observation of reality and whether or not it leads to a true assessment or lies.

The effort to view the universe AS IT VIEWS ITSELF with love and acceptance even in the face of what might be termed “horror” can actually lead to amelioration of that horror. To view the universe and to deny the truth and to insist that one can believe whatever one wants and thereby make it so, is to deny reality and contributes to the chaos, the destruction, the suffering.

And so, what is the solution? The TRUTH - as close to it as we can objectively get - MUST be propagated as widely and as soon as possible.

That is the only thing that will “save the planet.” Because it is in the creative centers of humanity - both kinds, those with souls and those without - that the fate of the earth lies.

Ah, yes. The Truth. What are the chances of it being propagated as widely and as soon as possible?

The Russian Bear Awakes

2005-01-30T16:16:00.000+01:00

Following up from the last post, I ran across the following article today that discusses the recent visit of Syrian President Bashar Assad to Moscow, Russian bear makes Israel jittery by K Gajendra Singh. Here is the conclusion:

Assad's visit to Russia marks the first stirrings of the Russian bear, which was sent into hibernation after the USSR's power was partly dismantled by Mikhail Gorbachev, without leveraging anything in return. A drunk or drugged Boris Yeltsin then set Russia on the road to economic ruin, robbing it of public property, which saw the emergence of a handful of dollar multibillionaires.

Putin, a karate expert, has come of age. He no longer appears to trust Bush. Russia is still a world nuclear power and can defend itself and its interests. A majority of nations, almost all of the Muslim countries, oppose the United States' unilateralist policies and targeting of Muslims. Russia has accumulated more than 500 billion rubles ($16.7 billion) in its energy-stabilization fund because of unprecedented high global oil prices: its economic situation is getting better. Putin will follow his own path.

The next year should be interesting.

Anti-Imperialist Front

2005-01-27T23:46:00.000+01:00

There are serious crimes being committed on the face of this planet daily. Look at Iraq and Palestine for two glaring examples. Innocent people are slaughtered in the name of…well, let’s not go there right now. What has been astonishing is that the entire world community has apparently sat aside and allowed it to happen.

We have no doubts that other governments of the world, and here we are referring to others than the US and Israel, have some sort of material proof that the events of 9/11 were orchestrated and carried out by factions in the US and Israel. The results have been too beneficial to the extremists at the helm in those two countries for it to have been the result of a conspiracy hatched in a cave in Afghanistan.

Forty years ago there were satellites in orbit around the earth that were capable of reading a license plate. Think of how much better they must be today. In this case, there are very likely satellites that could have tracked the routes of the various hijacked planes on 9/11. We have often speculated about this in the intervening years, wondering why no one has made them available.

So why are the other countries remaining silent? When will someone stand up to the US and say “Enough!”?

However, if the question is approached differently, there are some interesting possibilities that open up.

Moves on the world scale are often compared to a game of chess, that is, one must think in terms of a long-term strategy. This approach carries with it the consequent loss of life while the strategy plays itself out, one of the facts of life in our fallen world.

Let us say there are governments that are aware that 9/11 was an inside job. Why stay silent?

One reason might be that proof that 9/11 was an inside job could be used to blackmail the guilty parties. Well, if that is how the proof is being used, we wonder what they are getting in return. So much happens in secret that it is impossible to know.

However, there is another possibility. Initially, there may have been little that the holders of the proof could have done. Satellite photos, or other evidence, might have been dismissed as faked, especially during the initial shock. During those first months after 9/11, the adrenalin was pumping ferociously through the American body politic. It was not yet the time to act. Even the evidence put forward by 9/11 researchers is dismissed.

Subsequently, the US went into Afghanistan and then Iraq. While this has led to the loss of a great number of innocent lives, was there a way for other countries to prevent the invasion other than the diplomatic channels they used? Probably not, short of war. Was the invasion of Iraq worth the risk of global war?

However, the consequences of US occupation were clear: long, drawn out occupations of both Iraq and Afghanistan, a mounting federal deficit as the cost of war grew, growing discord and dissent within the US as the lies of the neocons became more apparent. The longer the occupations continue, the weaker the US becomes.

But, still, who wants to risk open, military confrontation leading possibly to war? So the strategy would have to avoid open confrontation, using covert means, such as allowing the US to get sucked deeply into the Middle East, allowing it to be drained, put into a corner where its economy becomes more and more unstable, until the point when applied economic pressure might bring it to its knees.

There are indications that this economic pressure is beginning. China flew a trial balloon today, through one of its leading economists, that it would seek ways of loosening the hold of the US dollar on the Yuan. The Yuan has been pegged to the dollar for years, permitting Chinese exports to the US to remain inexpensive compared to goods from the European Union whose euro has been increasing in value.

China holds a large part of the US debt. The US needs to sell nearly 2 billion dollars of debt each day. Will the monthly bond auctions have buyers in the future?

What if the countries that are against US imperialism decide that they are willing to write off a certain amount of losses in a devalued dollar if the result is a crippling of US power?

What if the Arab countries move to selling oil for euros?

What if the world abandons the US dollar as its international currency of exchange?

These could be the weapons of choice in the coming war of economic pressure. As usual, it will be ordinary people around the world who suffer from an economic crisis. Could the moves at clamping down in the US and elsewhere be being put into place to control the population when such a crisis begins?

American Tyranny

2005-01-25T20:12:00.000+01:00

We were discussing recent American history at the table during supper last night.

As the months and years of Bush Imperial rule go by, it is becoming clear that words are being given new meanings, meanings that are redefining the very nature of American life. Conservative commentators are now openly suggesting on America’s airwaves that anyone who criticizes the war in Iraq should be put into jail as “terrorist supporters”. With their families.

Some of the younger members of the discussion were asking us “old folks” about the fifties and sixties, about the differences between then and now. As one who lived through the “America, Love it or leave it” rhetoric of the 60s, I find the current environment much more frightening. While leftist groups would denounce Reagan or Nixon as fascists, I never for the moment thought that the US was on a course for fascism under Nixon. Maybe that’s why they got rid of him.

However, now that has changed.

Older now and having studied the question more thoroughly than thirty years ago, I know that the seeds for today were being planted then, and that many of them came out of the supposed victory over fascism in World War Two. With programmes like Operation Paperclip, which saw hundreds of Nazi scientists brought to the US, and the hiring of former fascists and fascist collaborators in the Stay-Behind networks in Europe to serve American interests in the fight against the “Soviet threat”, it seems as if the Powers That Be in the US made the choice to become the fascist enemy they had vanquished in order to defeat communism. A certain number of the US elite had thought that the US should have aligned itself with Hitler to fight against the greater threat, the Reds.

Those of you who were alive in the fifties and sixties will remember how the terror of the “Communist menace” was used to instil a deep emotional and psychological wound into the American people. The repeated elexoshocks did their job. Fascism never provoked the same emotional dread in Americans as communism. The Writer recalled that with the threat of nuclear annihilation in every newspaper and on every TV, we lived in constant fear of a Russian attack. When those damn Russians put the first satellite, Sputnik, into orbit in 1957, America was in shock. We were no longer the uncontested leader in space and technology. The Russians could put bombs onto those rockets and hit us at home.

The Russians shot down an American U2 spy plane in 1960, and Francis Gary Powers become a household name.

In Berlin, the Russians built a wall to cut off the Eastern part of the city from the “free” West.

With the revolution in Cuba and the coming to power of Castro, the psychological warfare got more and more intense with the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and culminating in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 when we were told we were on the verge of nuclear war. Russian nukes were only 90 miles off the coast of Florida.

We were not safe.

As a response, the Joint Chiefs of Staff came up with a proto 9/11 false flag plan called Operation Northwoods.

As always, there are profiteers who find the means of making a buck off of the fear of the populace. Remember “Bomb Shelters”, those concrete doll houses people began to sink into their backyards, loaded with water and canned goods, that would, we were told in the sales literature and in the newspapers and on TV, save us during a nuclear attack?

Then, of course, there was the famous Duck and Cover propaganda film with Bert the Turtle shown to American kids in school. In case of nuclear attack, duck and cover under your desk!

We discussed the deep scars left in the psyche of the population as years passed thinking that we could be wiped off the face of the Earth at any minute. During the seventies, this fear abated somewhat as our attention turned to the internal problems of Watergate, the collapse of the US-backed government in South Vietnam, and the Carter years when the US put its faith in Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan.

The Reagan years revived the fears of nuclear annihilation with his talk of the “Evil Empire” and the flowering of the work of George H.W. Bush., Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and “Team B”, the kernel of today’s neoconservatives, who had been working behind the scenes since the Ford Administration to convince us that the Soviet Union, rather than being on the verge of collapse, continued to pose a threat.

The depths of this nuclear despair were used as a trampoline to propel the world to new heights of hope on November 9, 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. Only those who had lived with this image engraved in their fear-soaked psyches could feel the intensity of the relief of that day. It was a day when anything seemed possible.

But that joy was not to last for long. The rebuilding of the former Soviet countries turned into a feeding frenzy with Western companies competing with the Russian Mafia and the new class of Russian oligarchs who made a killing on the privatisation of Soviet industry. The former Soviet countries were infested with US agents, and, through CIA backed “soft revolutions”, they are being brought under the sway of the new American imperial power.

But the threat of nuclear extermination had been lifted from our heads. For the first time in our lives, we could see the future, and even if it was difficult, at least it was there.

Until September 11, 2001. Then all that changed. No longer was the threat from the “Communists”. Now it was far murkier, far more diffuse and ambiguous. Was it that man next to you on the bus in a turban? Ooops. No, that is the Sikh. Was it the Semitic looking fellow behind me? No, he’s wearing a skull-cap.

But we knew they were here, somewhere, ready to strike like the commies of old, hiding under our beds ready to spring at the slightest loss of vigilance. And they were getting nukes from some lab that was poorly guarded in some God-forsaken corner of Siberia, suitcase nukes that could be brought into the US by any traveler with his luggage, aimed at innocent Americans in any city in the country.

And the wound reopened.

All the emotional energy that had been generated and cultivated and so carefully nurtured into an irrational hysteria against the Reds was attached to a new illusion: the terrorist threat – Al Qaeda! Moreover, the great threat from the communist era had been realized – America had been attacked at home, on its very own soil. When would it happen again? Where will they strike next? Because the hysteria insisted that it was not a question of it, but of when. The fear was stoked and fanned by the mass media with Orange Alerts and confirmed reports from anonymous sources that had it on good authority that the threat was real.

And the fear is real, even if the threat is not.

Many Americans are scared, even if they are frightened of the wrong people. There is a lot of energy stored up there, traumatic energy. But there the questions: How will it be released? And who is holding the fuse?

Can we take a pill and make it go away? “Red pill or blue?”, as they say.

Your choice.

Back to Work

2005-01-25T19:50:00.000+01:00

Catching up after a hastily arranged trip over the weekend. Will fill you in, to the extent I am permitted, later.

The DaVinci Code

2005-01-20T17:03:00.000+01:00

I came into the kitchen this morning to find the Writer in front of the fire with a somewhat dazed and depressed expression on her face. She had just finished reading an article about The DaVinci Code and its great success.

“How is it junk like this can get published and serious studies of the question can’t?” she asked. Yes, it was a rhetorical question. She knows very well why and why not.

I haven’t read The DaVinci Code, neither the original nor in any of its sixteen translations. I read The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail when it came out twenty some years ago, the book that “inspired” (its authors would you the term “plagiarise”) Dan Brown. But the Writer has and she is baffled that so many people can be taken in. You see them visiting Roslyn Chapel, at the Louvre, and gazing from the panoramic view at Rennes-le-Château, their annotated copy of the best-seller under their arm. Next they’ll queue up for the film.

Having studied the question of the mystery of Abbé Saunière, the Writer is convinced the whole thing is not what it seems. It is much more sinister than that, connected to anti-Republican currents in France (which means Royalists who would like to see an end of the French Republic and the Bourbon family back on the throne, not Bush-bashers), fascists, and neo-Templar sects involved in illicit arms trading.

The first thing she discovered as she read up on the Rennes-le-Château mystery is that many people assert things as facts that are not verified or that are simply unverifiable, merely reporting what they find in books as facts, going back to the very basis of the mystery, the legend that Saunière found old parchments in a hollow column when he undertook to restore the local church. Her conclusion is that most likely the old Abbé knew little or nothing at all and was being used by others as the front man to promote the descendents of the Merovingian dynasty.

Beginning in the Sixties, a series of books began to appear about the mystery and the treasure of Rennes-le-Château. The story they tell is that Saunière had uncovered a great secret on the parchments in the Visigoth column, a secret that had led him to uncover a great treasure that made him not only a rich man, but enabled him to hobnob with the rich and famous of his day. Not bad for the priest in a small village lost in the south of France.

What is curious about the story is how so many researchers, when they take up the challenge of getting to the bottom of Saunière’s mystery, make the most amazing discoveries through the most fortuitous of circumstances. Over and over again, researcher after researcher. The only trouble is, no one can agree on how the story ends. Serendipity leads each in his or her own direction. Some to the Merovingians, another to the site where “Jesus” is buried, and yet another to some sort of portal leading to… other worlds perhaps?

The more the Writer studied the question, the more she became convinced that there was another hand at work, guiding the researchers on a wild goose chase, or is that a bleu pomme chase, whose real goal seemed to be the promotion of the idea of the mystery and the treasure itself.

Which is not to say that there is no more to the story of the man known as Jesus and some connection to southern France than the Church, be it in Rome or the Bible Belt, would have us believe. After all, there is much terrestrial power attached to Christianity. Its modern forms are more interested in crushing than raising the spirit, a fact that indicates that the teachings of the man known as Jesus, such as one can glean from the New Testament, resemble nothing of the teachings of either the Catholic or Protestant Churches. Some say his teachings are better preserved by certain monks on Mount Athos.

The big shocker for readers of The DaVinci Code seems to be the idea that “Jesus” had married. The DaVinci Code, picking up from The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, tells us the lucky lady was Mary Magdalene. There is quite the cult to La Magdalene in the south of France, including a cave near Marseille where she supposedly lived as a hermit. But the kicker, the idea that really intrigues and upsets, is the idea that “Jesus” had children, the Grandchildren of God as it were. And many writers would have us believe that his descendents live on, waiting for the moment when they can return and seek the terrestrial power due to them.

George W. isn’t going to like that!

Neither is the Catholic Church. And therein lies the conspiracy, an age-old conspiracy against the rightful descendents of the Son of God, at least according to the movers and shakers of the DaVinci/Rennes myth.

Our friend the Alchemist has reached the same conclusion: the whole thing is a manipulation.

But as he sees the world through the lessons learned from years working in his laboratory in front of the athenor, he further thinks that the entire region is an alchemical crucible. The stories of strange happenings, what might be called Fortean phenomena, in the hills and vales of the region go back generations. That these “natural” phenomena are today being helped along by other, darker, forces seems likely. He thinks the area might one day be the site of a stage-managed UFO display designed to give even greater credence to the shadowy figures that lurk behind the mystery.

Given the play The DaVinci Code has gotten in the international press, we think these figures have a reach that extends far beyond the quiet village of Rennes-le-Château, across oceans and international frontiers, perhaps even to the front-left tyre of certain cars.

I See Empty People

2005-01-19T23:19:00.000+01:00

Have you ever felt like the world is a party that you somehow got invited to by mistake? Bad music, indigestible food, and people with whom you have little or nothing in common?

The Register recently ran a piece on Jaron Lanier. Something Lanier said stuck in my little grey cells:

[Lanier]’s assured enough of his status to poke fun at his friends Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, and still get invited back for tea. In speeches questions, satirically, if these proselytizers for the mechanistic, gene-eyed view of evolution are really not robots themselves. This he articulated in his most cited essay, Half A Manifesto. After the 2004 Election, it reads better than ever - especially his observation that scientism and religion have been poking fights with each other than they can’t win. […]
Neo-Darwinists have declared that we’re just machines, and so all metaphysics is junk, and all our beliefs are a simple illusory machine state. While the evangelicals, who also know how to kick where it hurts, are now going after the science funding. Much older cultures who’ve found that religion is wholly compatible with scientific enquiry, such as India and China, are looking on this collapse with some wry amusement, as well as confidence. For the 85 per cent of the public in the West who are neither atheist nor evangelical, it’s a catastrophe. For the United States in particular, which has defined its national identity on this agreeable division between the secular and the religious, it’s beyond expletives. […]
“Is this recording?” he asks, as your reporter pokes optimistically at a Symbian phone. “Oh, it’ll fuck up! It’s digital and digital things suck.”
Why’s that?
“The blandness of digital culture is a problem. It’s believed that experience isn’t anything really special. And it undervalues things that are subjective. So the world of aesthetics starts to become ignored, or rebelled against, or rationalized, or just handled very poorly so you get this feeling to digital culture of hyperblandness. Everything has a blurring into everything else, and nothing has an identity or flavor.”
He’d made the joke in the past, one with a serious purpose, that perhaps Daniel Dennett is just a robot.
“That’s a puzzle I’ve made up: that some of the folks around actually don’t have any internal experience, and there’s no way of telling whether they do or they don’t!”
“Experience is the only metaphysical data point that we have. It’s there for me and it can’t be reduced to an illusion - some epistemological channel. It doesn’t imply religious beings or survival after death are true; but there’s something going on there: it’s a very legitimate thing. So it surprises me when people totally dismiss experience with logical explanations because they don’t happen to have that internal experience themselves. Are they actually lifeless automatons? Dan Dennett, could be … Richard Dawkins, who knows?”

While Lanier may be poking fun at his friends, I think, however, that he has put his finger on something important. There are people who are convinced that any idea of a hereafter or that there is something greater than ourselves is nonsense. There are as many other people who are convinced that this ineffable something does exist, even if they cannot put their finger on exactly what it is. What if Lanier has identified the reason: there are some people that don’t have any internal experience. What if there are two categories of people on the planet: those with the type of internal experience Lanier is discussing, and those who have not? Those who have it and those who are forced to mimic it mechanically?

Those who do would be able to grow in ways that the others could not.

Would this not be an ontological divide that would be impossible to cross? How could the two sides ever understand one another?

On the one hand, we would have the “automatons”, explaining everything through neo-Darwinist evolution of self-replicating systems, complexity coming from the interaction of simple routines and agents, not from some divine spark. These explanations would be true for them, would be an accurate representation of their inner life. For this category of people, such a description is a true, accurate, and objective picture of the world. Of course they would dismiss notions of a different type of reality because they would be incapable of having any first-person experience of it. They would be translating others’ such experiences into their own “subjective” experiences, reducing them to the mechanistic behaviour of the interaction of a multitude of simple algorithms.

And they would be frustrated by what they saw as the metaphysical ranting of those who insisted their own experiences, so different from their own, were real.

On the other hand, we would find those who feel deeply within that there is more to life than what we can see or know through the five senses. This intuition is a sort of knowing, but it cannot be transmitted to those without the hardware to receive.

The second group would also be unable to imagine that there exists someone who cannot experience such an inner life, and they would as a consequence constantly attribute to others feelings and states of being that they do not have. This misunderstanding of the root of their differences could only lead over time to greater and greater incomprehension, and so their frustration would mount in the face of the neo-Darwinist explanations that appear to be so deeply seated in mainstream science.

There would be no basis for dialogue between the two camps, only a spiralling sense of frustration on both sides.

And what would be the consequences within a couple if the two partners came from different camps, so to speak? Could they ever understand each other? To what extent could the one with no internal experience ever hope to understand his or her partner? To what extent could the second ever hope to be understood when such an important part of one’s life was nothing but pantomime and mimicry for the other?

And is this not the situation we see before us today? A vast chasm between two outlooks on the world?

Lanier describes it as the fighting between science and religion, but it is much deeper than that. He is describing but one manifestation, and, that, in the Anglo-Saxon world where the rise of Christian fundamentalism has hijacked the debate and reduced it to Darwin vs. Creationism. However the debate is felt throughout the world, from the existence of different visions for modern physics (what role does Consciousness play in the universe?) to the emphasis on life in the body and the importance given to material success. If there is nothing but this life, then why not get all one can from one’s passage?

One might even suggest that this is the fundamental question of our existence, for if there are two types of people, there must be a reason. And if there are two types of people, then those who “know” that there is more to existence than what we can see or touch or hear or smell or read off of the meters on our scientific equipment may well be correct, for why would that knowing exist if it had no object?

One might go further. For if the existence of two peoples offers a form of evidence for the existence of something higher, for it is normal to consider that if there is something “else” to life, it is what we would call the spiritual, exactly that which the “automatons” deny, then it may perhaps be the object of the lives to have that spark to pursue that path, the higher path, rather than the path of those who see nothing more than matter. The promotion of material success, material pleasures, and material life might well be the wrong direction for those who are on the other side of this divide, perhaps even a fatal direction for that part of themselves that is permanent, eternal.

This world with all its trappings would seem to be made for the first type of human, for in many ways they are quite comfortable and at ease within it. You see them out jogging before work, very conscious of their bodies. They are preoccupied with sex and are quite content to accept that “men are animals” and leave it at that. It a very profound sense, the world appears to be theirs. They appear content and satisfied by what others see as a world of illusion.

Perhaps those others are the ones who do not belong.

As we have identified it as an ontological divide, let us call it a divide of being. On the one side, people whose goal in life is to explore the material world to its fullest, to be in the material world and to express themselves fully within it, driven by the three basic drives of fear, hunger, and sexuality; on the other, people who have awoken to a new reality, but one that is in some sense still nascent, one that must be developed. To move in this direction, one can no longer be in the material world in the same sense. One must seek to be in the spiritual world, or as a representative of that new world in the old.

“In the world but not of it,” as the well-known adage puts it, while looking for the exit.

There is an exit, isn't there?

Optical Illusion

2005-01-18T19:07:00.000+01:00

The Doctor found this today:

The two squares marked “A” and “B” are the same colour.
You can “see” for yourself.
In discussing the effect, we were agreed that it is one of the most impressive optical illusions we have ever seen. The Doctor was having trouble understanding how it worked, not how the effect is achieved, but, rather, why once we know how it works are we unable to see it as it really is. He was wondering how it is that we can’t train ourselves to see what we know to be true. It is an excellent example of the problem people have with subjectivity.

We see the image and see two different colours for the two squares. In context, relative to the colours around it and to the shadow cast by the cylinder, the squares look different. Objectively, isolated from the surrounding squares and placed side by side, they are the same.

When we know this, why are we not able to see it for what it is?

The Writer says that it is possible and that she is able to do it. Subjectivity is part of the solution, but not all. She thinks the question of relativity is also important. We see the squares relative to the others.

Then she went off on one of her philosophical riffs.

In the same way that the image fools us because of relativity, “the universe fooled Einstein”, she said. The Doctor has long suspected that there was a serious problem with Einstein’s theory of relativity. He has not uncovered yet what that problem is, but he continues to work on it.

It comes down to the question of the observer. Can there be such a thing as an objective observer, one who is more than just another frame of reference among frames of reference. Does the universe only exist because it is looking at itself? Much pop physics, especially in relation to quantum physics, turn a lack of understanding of what this really involves into recipes for happiness of the “You create your own reality” type. In fact, this attitude has even made its way into the White House. The trouble is, the writers who popularise these ideas don’t know, much less understand, the math; they are stuck in the stories and metaphors used to translate the math for the layman and think that they therefore “know” something. But as I have learned from the Doctor, it is the math that makes it science; it is the math that must describe the actions of the forces of gravity and electromagnetism, of the strong and the weak atomic forces. Stories of cats in boxes only go so far, they can illustrate a point, but they can never explain it.

In the meantime we are stuck with the fact that our minds lie to us. If we can’t trust our own minds, who or what can we trust?

Alone at last

2005-01-18T13:45:00.000+01:00

The guests have finally all departed. It is a relief to finally be back to just the “household”. Time to decompress.

We found a pair of women’s underwear under a robe, grey, laying on the bed in M.’s room. Another symbol? Conscious or unconscious on M.’s part?

Now it is back to the routine of our daily work.

No one has fallen since Saturday night.

Wrap Up

2005-01-17T14:29:00.000+01:00

M. has finally left. We took her to the train this morning. It started when she asked the Doctor to sign a paper for her new lodgings. She had told us it would be a simple letter of reference. It turned out to be a document that would have made the Doctor and the Writer liable for her rent payments if she or her roommates, who none of us knew, defaulted. And this for the next three years!

Obviously it could not be signed. Especially after our problems with our former landlord.

M. handed the document to the Doctor and asked him to sign it. When he asked what it entailed, she said it was simply a reference. In reading it over, he discovered it was much more. M. feigned surprise. She had no idea. It wasn’t what her landlord had said to her. Would we call the landlord for her to straighten it out?

She must have read the expressions on the faces of those around her. Her demeanour changed as quickly as if a new programme had been downloaded into the system.

“No. I need to take care of this myself. It is my problem, and I will deal with it.”

We put her on the next train home.

Over lunch, we asked P. and D. for their impressions. P. is hurting from the cracked rib he received from his fall on Saturday night, which is colouring his perceptions. He said he thinks that M. has a lot of unresolved anger that she is unable to deal with. It is apparent when watching her that she is fuming underneath.

The Writer asked P. how he was feeling as he spoke, as his words were loaded with an emotional force that indicated he was not rationally viewing what had happened. She asked if he might not have his own issues with anger. Was what he saw and revolted against in M. not in fact a reflection of himself?

You know the expression “he took it like a punch to the jaw”? This remark took him like a punch to the jaw. You could see him recoil. But he took it. Others haven’t been so strong, like M. When the truth hits, you either roll with the blow and see where the momentum takes you, no matter how hard it hurts, or you fight it by redirecting the energy onto someone else. “Yes, but….” P. let go and rolled with it.

The tears came quickly as P. talked about his childhood and his relationship with his parents. Yes, he is angry. Very angry. He spent the afternoon alone in the park surrounding the chateau. You need time to really see and feel the Truth. You need to sit in that fire as it burns, feel that heat. Whatever it is burning off is not you, now matter how badly it is screaming otherwise.

D. was honest about the attraction he felt for M. As he had told us on Saturday night, he had felt a certain pulsing sexuality emanating from her, the gravitational field of a black hole, as he now described it. When he became aware of this, he said his whole way of looking at her changed. She was a completely different person.

Isn’t that the truth.

M.’s Background

2005-01-16T22:23:00.000+01:00

Maybe it would help you to understand what is playing out here if you knew a bit more about M.

She initially contacted the Writer saying that she was a friend of a friend who had recommended that M. write about some strange events that were occurring in her life. M. had dreams, and she was convinced that these dreams were IMPORTANT. They contained CLUES. With these CLUES, M. was going to help the Writer SOLVE THE MYSTERY, finish the MISSION. M. was never more certain of anything than her own importance.

The Writer clearly had doubts about this from the start, yet she is never quick to dismiss someone, especially when they appear sincere in their letters and have no conscious agenda. She prefers to let time pass, giving the benefit of the doubt to one and all – which, at times drives the Doctor and the Watchers completely crazy! Why does she have to take these risks?!

So M. and the Writer began an exchange of letters several years ago. M. poured out what she had of a soul to the Writer in long, detailed, and heart-rending accounts of her childhood, of her parents, who she so dearly loved but who had never understood, and would never understand, her, of her passion for the artist J. who so badly used her before casting her off. (When we later met J., his side of the story was quite different.) She believed that she had suffered many alien abductions and was perhaps the recipient of implants. If the aliens were interested in her, she reasoned, it was obviously because she had an important role to play in the mission.

While the Writer didn’t believe any of it, she thought she saw, at least in the beginning, a poor, lonely girl who was looking for love in a hostile world. And as she said: “Aren’t we all?” M. was able to tap into the Mother in the Writer, drawing on the deep compassion that welled within. By the time of M.’s arrival this weekend, such sympathy had long before been replaced by a recognition that we were dealing with a master manipulator who had never learned to ask directly for what she wanted, and who, moreover, was most probably scared to death to admit to herself the nature of her deepest desires. Even if this manipulation was completely unconscious. M. was not malevolent; she was merely deluded.

However, if you can’t even be honest with yourself, how can you be honest with others? Honestly with yourself is the starting point of the Work, the first step in the long struggle towards mastery of the Self.

She recently moved to a city close by. Although she didn’t speak the language and had no means of support, she insisted on leaving a secure life elsewhere to be closer to us. The Writer knew what she was up to. M. wanted to insinuate herself into the household. She had broached the subject of her moving in openly at first. The Writer told her no. That is when the games began. We knew she was intending, whether consciously or not we were not certain, to create a situation where she would be “forced” to turn to us for help, that is, a place to stay, while she sorted out her problems and her life.

We are not running a kindergarten for wayward Seekers. If you don’t have the wherewithal to manage your own life, how can you expect to embark on the Quest for the Holy Grail?

After arriving in her new home, the phone calls started.

“Can I come for a visit?”

“No, M.” responded the Writer. “We have too much work at the moment. We just had a house full of visitors, and now we need time by ourselves. Phone back in two weeks.”

Three days later, M. rang up again.

“Do you have a copy of Fulcanelli’s Dwellings of the Philosophers?”

“Yes. But we need it. It can’t leave the house.”

“I didn’t want to borrow it. I wanted to come and read it there.”

“M., do you remember what I said when you phoned three days ago?”

“That you needed to rest. But I won’t disturb you!”

And so on. Every three or four days, M. would phone with the feeblest of excuses either for her to come here or for us to visit her. When we finally did invite her out for this weekend, she offered to come early to help prepare for the weekend. You have seen how that turned out.

As patient as the Writer may be, there comes a time when the knot must be untied. In all the years that the Writer had been in communication with M., for all her hours of emails attempting to give advice on how M. could sort out her lot, M. had shown a marked tendency to ignore that advice and only get herself deeper into trouble. She was incapable of change, incapable of applying any of the suggestions offered to her by anyone. The Writer doesn’t impose any advice on those to write to her with their troubles. They are free to take it or leave it. However, if they ask for advice, get it, don’t apply it, and then end up in exactly the circumstances the Writer warns them to avoid, and this repeats itself over and over and over again, the Writer, convinced that the person has no Will to change or work on the Self, decides that they aren’t really interested in hearing what she has to say and she must cut them loose. She has too much to do to continue to waste her time on a lost cause. Let them prove they’re serious, and then we’ll talk again.

That time has now come for M.

Poltergeists?

2005-01-16T19:18:00.000+01:00

The x-rays confirmed that P. does indeed have a cracked rib, but there is nothing that the doctor can do for it. He must live with it until it heals. The most difficult part, P. says, is keeping himself from laughing. Nothing hurts him so much as laughing. We have tried to honour this request, but it isn’t easy. But then, he hasn’t stopped cracking jokes, either. It will be a great exercise in self-remembrance for him, and in external consideration for the rest of us.

We had a short meeting this afternoon, just the small group of the Writer, the Doctor, and the Watchers. The Writer has been ruminating over the situation with M. When she gets like this, we think of her as Miss Marple in leopard skin as she replays over and over the events, seeing every detail clearly in her mind’s eye. She is an expert at picking out just the trifle that pulls everything together.

One thing we have learned from her is to take seriously the symbols in our environment. Three falls in two days is quite the symbol. But what is it a symbol of?

The Writer passed around a passage from The Haunted Mind by psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor for us to read:

The Thornton Heath case received a great deal of publicity as a classical poltergeist case. Poltergeist is a word compounded from two German words meaning “noisy” and “spirit.” According to spiritualistic beliefs, it is a particularly obstreperous ghost, operating through the medium of some person’s body, that throws items and objects about a house and in general causes a great deal of damage and disturbance.

Dr. Frank Podmore, a skeptical early investigator for the Society for Psychical Research had made note of the fact that, in the majority of these cases, the “medium” is a boy or girl, about the age of puberty or in late adolescence. Nevertheless, in the Thornton Heath case (named after the suburb of London where it took place), there was no adolescent in the center of events; instead there was an attractive married woman of thirty-five – whom I called “Mrs. Forbes” in my report.

I shall never forget my experience on the first day I visited the house. For five days the breaking saucers, flying knick-knacks, and overturned furniture had been reported in the newspapers, and my assistant had visited the house before me. On the day I arrived, accompanied by Dr. Wills, I observed twenty-nine unusual occurrences, five of which could not be ascribed to any normal causes.

However, as the four-month investigation following this day progressed, it became clear to me that the basis of the disturbance was not to be found in any discarnate spirit, but rather in Mrs. Forbes’ own mind and personality. By using interviews and personality and word association tests, I discovered that the problem was related to her own guilt feelings springing from sexual traumata and frustrations. Many of the events took place when she was in altered states of consciousness, or semi-amnesia. [pp. 9-10.]

Fodor is not the only investigator to link the appearance of poltergeists to sexual energy gone haywire. It was clear that M. was suffering from some form of sexual frustration. In the three cases, the people who fell had reported feeling that they had been pushed. Could M. be provoking poltergeist occurrences stemming from the mixture of sexual frustration and rage?

Watcher Two noted that the night before, when P. was laying into M. at the table, he’d been studying M.’s face. He said he had the impression that “If looks could kill….”

Had that thought form taken shape in a burst of poltergeistic shoving?

If so, is M. conscious of the effect she is having on others, or is she so unconscious of her own motives and desires that she is completely unaware?

Regardless, we need to get her out of the house.

A Third Fall

2005-01-16T13:34:00.000+01:00

At breakfast we learned that there had been a second fall last night, the third in two days. P. went for a late night walk along the road. The sky was vast and the view unimpeded, the air was clear, and he had imbibed enough alcohol to decide that all that was missing to make the evening perfect was some Shakespeare declaimed under the heavens.

As he walked, he saw the lights of a car approaching him. The road has a deep ditch on either side separating it from the fields. It is a drainage ditch. P. was passing through a small hamlet with a few houses. The houses are much lower than the road, and there is quite a drop between the sidewalk and the level of the houses. As he saw the car come nearer, he decided that it would be in his best interest to give a little extra space to the driver, so he moved to his left and tumbled onto the front step of the house, a drop of almost a meter. He hit his side on an edge of concrete, and it seems he may have cracked a rib.

The curious thing is that he says he felt as if he were pushed….

A Second Fall

2005-01-16T01:02:00.000+01:00

The Writer has had another fall.

Before retiring for the evening, she decided to get some fresh air on the terrace. She enjoys watching the stars at night. As we are away from any lights, the sky is beautiful on a clear night with the silver band of the Milky Way overhead passing over the house pointing towards the mountains, shooting stars in abundance, and the great myths strung out over us in heavenly lights.

As the Writer stepped onto the terrace, she felt herself get dizzy, lost consciousness, and fell. She said later that she felt as if she had left her body and hovered over the terrace as the Doctor and Watcher Three came to her aid.

“It was as if I had to make a decision whether or not to return,” she told us later. “Whether or not I would come back and finish my mission.”

The sight of her soul mate so upset at the fall pulled her back into her body with a snap.

Once more, she felt as if she had been pushed as she fell.

After supper, M. passed the evening sitting in a chair off from the group, alone, brooding. The door to the terrace was just behind her chair.

The mission continues.

A Discussion with M

2005-01-15T23:07:00.000+01:00

We had to sit down with M. tonight after supper and confront her with her manipulations. She told I. that she would talk about the incident at lunch with the Writer this afternoon, but she never did. She spent the rest of the day acting as if there was nothing wrong when she was in public, even though her actions have created a tension in the household that is unbearable while at the same time clearly avoiding the Writer’s presence.

Perhaps some background is in order.

It should be clear by now that the household lives under a certain amount of stress. Day in and day out, we get by. It hovers in the background of our awareness, but we can deal with it and get on with what needs to be done. But this is only possible when there is complete transparency among the members of the household. There are no secrets here. There can’t be. We must each become an open book with each other because only then are we in a state of awareness that permits us to sense when something is off – and that awareness could be the difference between life and death.

We come from different backgrounds, different countries. We are of different ages. We have different likes and dislikes. We all have our personal character traits that make us loveable and detestable at the same time. The only way to work well as a group is to recognize this in ourselves and each other, to accept that none of us is perfect, and to know each other well enough to sense when someone is having an off day.

We all have them.

The counterpart is that when we are feeling upset, cranky, or volatile, we need to be able to express this irritability to the others in ways that don’t set off any explosions by coming across as personal attacks or criticisms. Usually, it simply amounts to letting the others know that today you feel cranky or out of sorts. When we are able to voice such an avowal, the others, as accepting a lot of the foibles of humanity as you could ever find, give us the chance to run our programs without creating any devastation in their wake. Having admitted how you feel, you are also better able to keep a watch on it, a tighter rein. It is what they used to call in school “consideration of others”. Here we call it “external consideration”. When you are able to put another’s needs before your own, one’s dynamic with the rest of the world fundamentally changes.

When the household is running on transparency, we can each feel the slightest disturbance in “the force” as we jokingly refer to it. It is as if one of the channels of communication between us becomes blocked. The effect is palpable. We definitely feel it when guests arrive. While not everyone can achieve the level of transparency that those who are regulars in the house can attain, we easily spot differences between those who come in sincerity and those who come with agendas.

M. always has an agenda.

The trouble with M. is that she is unable to be open, unable to be honest, unable to be herself without the masks, the manipulations, and the little games that she uses to get people to do her bidding. She is unable to ask for what she wants or needs, therefore she schemes to get them.

It may even be that she is afraid of what she wants, afraid of those dark desires that one reads so clearly on her face, in her body language, and in the way she can’t keep her herself from giggling over the most mundane and insignificant of topics. While playing the obfuscated virgin, it is clear to one and all that what she most ardently desires is a passionate go at the two-backed beast.

As we served coffee after supper, the Writer brought the subject of M.’s manipulation of I. M., of course, denied any such thing. The Writer then asked each person who had witnessed the incident to give their own account, as clearly and as objectively as possible, sticking to the facts, to what each had seen or heard personally, without falling into hearsay.

The important facts that emerged were that only M. had been upset by an act that was innocent of sexual innuendo or provocation. That I. had not even seen that had happened. That I. got upset when M. started posing questions to her with a notable bias of “Wasn’t that outrageous?”

When the round of the table had been completed, it was clear that M. had tried to get I. to do her dirty work for her.

M. then went to work to “defend” herself. “Yes, but…” is the major line of attack in this case. She first pushed I. to tears by attempting to shift the blame onto her, accusing I. of being the manipulator, and letting us know that M. had had a very bad feeling about I. from the start, that is, the moment she heard she would have to share a room with her.

P., who may have been feeling that his thespian talents were being challenged by M.’s depiction of a rapacious shrinking violet, lashed into her and told her that she was lying to herself and trying to manipulate everyone in the room. We have heard he was an intense performer; tonight we saw it for ourselves.

D., who had never met M. and who had apparently been within the pull of her sexual field until that moment, said he had been feeling what he described as a “pulsation” emanating from her during the day. It was only with the discussion that he had recognised it and had managed to pull himself free of her influence. He described in very lucid and analytical terms the effect she had been having upon him, a certain fogginess of thought that came over him as they talked, an awareness that any talk between the two of them was laced with double-meanings.

I. saw how she had fallen into M.’s trap at lunch and felt somewhat embarrassed by the whole experience.

I remembered a discussion from a year ago when M. had turned to me when we were alone and asked, “What do you think of me?”

“Why is it important to you what I think?” I responded. She had no answer. She also stopped asking me that type of question, although the Writer did take great pleasure in telling me several months later that M. had asked her about the meaning of one of her dreams in which I played a prominent part. She then assured me that she had given M. an answer that would spare me any romantic fantasies or entanglements…unless I so desired, she added with a mischievous grin. She’s a stickler for free will.

The Writer summed up the general appraisal of the people around the table. While she was firm, she was also very understanding towards M., trying to help her see herself as others do. By then, M. had turned on the tears and was playing the poor, pitiful, and helpless, victim, the “I’m going to eat worms and die!” routine. The Writer looked at her and said, “M., that is not going to work with me. Pull yourself together. You are allowing yourself to be completely controlled by your chemicals.”

The Writer then invited us to retire to the salon for drinks.

An Incident with M

2005-01-15T19:54:00.000+01:00

A small group went to market today. When I. returned, she was very upset. She tried to talk around the subject with the Writer, without coming out directly with what was bothering her. Finally, the Writer asked her point blank what the problem was.

M. had made a comment at lunch about the actions of another woman at the table. M. found the woman was conducting herself in a promiscuous manner with the men, something to do with a pair of women’s underwear, and wanted to pull I. onto her side. This is typical of M.’s modus operandi. She works through manipulation. I. wanted to express her disapproval to the woman, but knowing that she was a friend of the family, wanted to ask the Writer’s advice beforehand.

After discussing the matter, I. saw that she had been manipulated by M. and that the great sin was nothing at all. M. had completely exaggerated the act – and I. had to admit that she had not even seen the woman do it.

I. will suggest to M. that she discusses the matter with the Writer.

Now that he Writer is back on her feet, even if she is only mobile with some difficulty and much pain, M. is not to be found.

The Guests Arrive

2005-01-14T23:33:00.000+01:00

Everyone is here for the weekend. P. and D. arrived by train. I. drove.

We served drinks before supper on the terrace. M. was fascinated by D., trying to find out more about him while he was discussing mathematics with the Doctor. She attempted to participate in the discussion, but M., who doesn’t know anything about math, was having difficulty following the exchange. Her contributions amounted to sustained giggling and the batting of her eyes in D.’s direction. Her humour is much improved from her earlier sulking in her room.

The Writer spent the evening resting. She has trouble walking and her wrist and elbow are very sore and swollen. She is, however, in good spirits and is taking the opportunity to read the backlog of books that has been collecting on her desk and by her bedside.

Of course, she could be hiding an Agatha Christie mystery behind that academic tome….

Details of the accident

2005-01-14T18:37:00.000+01:00

The Writer has filled us in on her “accident”.

This morning, the Writer was bringing some clean sheets through the front hall to take them upstairs to put on the beds. Yesterday the hall had been waxed. She was treading carefully on the throw rugs knowing that the floor was slippery and that the rugs have a tendency to slip. It was at that moment that she felt as if someone, or something, pulled the rug out from under her. She began to fall forward, her head about to take the brunt of the fall on the tiles. Her reflex was to pull the sheets up in front of her face to protect herself.

Her knee and her right arm are swollen. She is having trouble walking.

But the most curious part of this incident was her feeling that the rug was being pulled out from under her. Do we now need to contend with ghosts as well as spooks?

The Fall

2005-01-14T14:58:00.000+01:00

It is getting weird again. Watcher Three and I were in the office. Just after my last post, we heard a crash and then muffled groans. We looked at each other and then ran out of the office towards the front hall from whence the moaning was originating.

The Writer was in a heap on the floor, unable to move and unable to speak, with sheets and blankets in a disordered pile around her. Watcher Three went for the Doctor who was already on his way downstairs. It’s as if he has some sort of telepathic link with his bride. He took her in his arms, worried the fall was serious. The Writer slowly came to life.

“I’m fine,” she said, although the ashen face and the feeble character of her words belied the statement.

We looked at each other, worried. The colour gradually came back to her face. The Doctor helped her upstairs and into bed.

Hopefully we’ll learn more after she rests.

Odd & Ends

2005-01-14T14:03:00.000+01:00

A note arrived from D. suggesting a book for our research, something about language, memory, and time. It looks interesting and has been ordered.

We just made it to our noon appointment yesterday. We thought we’d miss it because of a prior rendezvous at the house.

M. is still making herself scarce. Perhaps the arrival later of the men will bring her out.

Why Am I Writing This Account?

2005-01-13T23:24:00.000+01:00

It is simple. No one believes it when we tell them our various adventures and misadventures, and so I need to keep a day-by-day record of everything that transpires. If I don’t, I’ll forget too many things, and as I have learned from the Writer, often it is the smallest things that really count, that can give you an entirely different perspective on a situation.

One new piece of data can completely change your hypothesis. That is what the Doctor says. And it is true. I have seen it with my own eyes. So it is vital to get as much down as possible in real time, as the events unfold.

If the readers think that this is a novel or some new form of electronic fiction, let them. They most likely wouldn’t be open to the ideas of the Writer in any case. Most people aren’t. Try explaining to people that there are quantum leaps on the macrocosmic level, and that our research indicates that we are on the verge of the next one, and they’ll think you’re nuts.

Sometimes I think I’m nuts.

The thing is, that no matter how arrogant we as a species have become, we really don’t understand much about our world and its underlying laws. We have somehow fooled ourselves into believing our technical progress is proof that we know something of the world. We have a utilitarian view that tells us that if we can use something, if we can manipulate it to serve our purposes, then we know it. If we can build nanochips and start controlling atoms inside of computers or else split an atom apart and blow things up, we think we know something of the atom. If we can clone a sheep, we think that we know something about biology and life. If we can synthesise chemical compounds, we think we know something about molecules.

Yet in the face of such “progress”, society itself is on the verge of a major crisis and the trigger could be one or several of many things: the environment, famine, disease, war, economic collapse, civil war, or geological upheaval. Or maybe one of those fireballs in the sky that are being reported with ever greater frequency.

The discrepancy between what man thinks he knows and his ways of organising his life are at the breaking point, and when the tenuous binds that still connect them snap, the entire world will be caught in the middle.

It isn’t going to be pretty.

Man knows nothing about himself. He is an automaton that goes about his busy work like a well-programmed mechanical device.

M. Arrives

2005-01-13T16:27:00.000+01:00

M. has arrived and already the drama has begun. Just before her entrance, we had word that I., our translator, would be coming for the weekend to go through the manuscript. As we are short of rooms, we have put I. and M. together in the same bedroom. When M. was told, you could see the blood rise within as her fiery Latin character sought to find an excuse to have a bedroom to herself.

She started to get one of her “feelings”, letting us know that she had a very strong intuition that I. was not to be trusted, something about her disturbed M. greatly.

The Writer, who well knows M.’s games, would not allow any change to the plans.

M., who had come a day early to help us prepare for the weekend, was finally of no use at all as she kept to her room while the rest of us cleaned and readied the chateau. It was obvious that she is furious. But she is unable to be honest about her anger, and so she sits alone and stews.

Something is brewing.

More on Death Threats

2005-01-12T22:45:00.000+01:00

You asked why the Writer and the Doctor were receiving death threats.

When the Bush Administration began its drive for war in Iraq, it was already clear to the Writer that the events of 9/11 had been orchestrated by elements of a secret government within the US, most likely with links to another foreign power that would also benefit from the new US agenda of pre-emptory war in the Middle East. Being genetically unable to remain silent in the face of such horrors, the Writer began to sound the alarm of the fascist tyranny that was overcoming America. This is when the death threats resumed.

But that was only half of it.

She had received death threats prior to that, stemming from her publishing the results of her years of research into the mysteries behind the illusion of the world. She remembered a quote from FDR she had read having to do with the fact that if something happens in politics, you can bet it was planned. That really bugged her because so much was going on that seemed to be against what she thought of as human nature. She was a mother. Everyone on this planet has a mother, and mothers want their children to grow up in peace and prosperity. But it was clear to her that this did not describe the world in which she lived, and she wanted to know why.

She refused to accept the admonishments of those around her that “It had always been that way” and that “There is nothing you can do about it”. And then there was the kicker: “You think too much”. Yup, using your brain is going to get you into trouble, and here she was, thirty years later, receiving death threats and having her communications with the outside world monitored.

Simply because she was asking questions and not accepting the pat answers accepted by everyone around her. And the answers she was coming up with? We’ll get into that later. You wouldn’t believe them now if I told you.

For the moment, all you need to know is that the US is well on its way to fascism. If you don’t believe that, you aren’t ready for the rest. If that idea compels you to stop reading any further, then perhaps you could treat what I have to say as a science fiction yarn, something like Son of the Man in the High Castle.

I should state clearly that none of us are either right wing or left wing. Some people say we’re liberals or leftists because we think the US is being governed by a more and more open tyranny, but it isn’t only on the left that people are drawing this conclusion. As for politics, we don’t think the world can be changed or saved, so there goes our “support” on the left. Our world is the Fallen world, the world of the Devil, of the Archons, of Matter that holds Spirit enchained, but, again, if we use these terms, it doesn’t mean that we’re religious, simply that the old stories tell us something very important, and we think we need to listen to them, to understand the message they are attempting to convey to us underneath the Machiavellian gloss they have been given during the intervening centuries. Religion today is a control system for keeping the people under the thumb of the rulers. Just look at Bush and his fundamentalist Christians, Sharon and his fundamentalist Jews, and bin Laden with his fundamentalist Moslems. They dance together in perfect step.

One might think it was planned that way.

Visitors

2005-01-12T22:38:00.000+01:00

Although we must be careful, we are neither hermits nor anti-social. Several guests are coming to stay with us for a few days. There is P., the Shakespearean (or is that Oxfordian?) actor; M., the Latin beauty, or so she believes, whose favourite means of seduction is to play the innocent virgin; and D., a mathematician with an interest in American Indian rituals. The Writer thinks that it will be an explosive mix. M. has apparently been “alone” for quite some time. The presence of two eligible bachelors may prove to be too much.

On the other hand, we may see whether P. or M. is the best actor in the house.

How did we get in this mess, anyway?

2005-01-11T22:34:00.000+01:00

You’ll need some background material.

How did the three of us end up here in old Europe protecting the Writer from intelligence agencies from God knows how many countries, working with her to solve the greatest mystery known to man, and struggling night and day to keep her out of troubles brought on by her keen sense of justice married to an unstoppable impulse to action?

It became clear that the Writer, and her husband the Doctor, would have to leave the States when the death threats began. They had been mulling over the idea of moving to Europe, from whence the good Doctor hails, for some time. High level scientists who refuse to support the war machine don’t receive research grants in the US, so there was the question of being able to work and pay the bills. So that was the first issue. The second was the research interests of the Writer and what she was discovering about the true nature of our reality. There were secrets she was uncovering that someone wanted kept as secrets.

The arrival of the unordered webcam in the mail was taken as a message: “We are watching you.”

And she knew they were.

But the Writer kept putting off the move. Her entire world was that part of the US where her family had put down roots generations before. Even the North seemed like alien territory to her. What would Europe be like? For someone who spent years in front of a computer screen, whose idea of adventure was a trip to Sam’s Club, boarding a plane and crossing the Atlantic, giving up everything she had always known, was too much to bear.

So she put it off and put it off.

Until a suspicious death in the family tipped the balance. Then she was gone in a matter of weeks. Packed and shipped, never to set foot in her home country again, at least until the fascist threat was gone. She told no one where she was going. It was safer like that. Only a few trusted people were brought into the secret. I was one of them. So were Watcher Two and Watcher Three.

Little did we realize what we were getting ourselves into.

The Incident at the Market

2005-01-11T11:09:00.000+01:00

I forgot to fill you in on the details of the incident in the market. That happened several months ago. The Writer was in town on market day. The kiosks were up in the street. While she was doing her shopping, she noticed a man with a video camera who appeared to be following her. While someone in her position has every reason to feel paranoid, she does like to verify her paranoia when she can. She stopped and turned towards the man with the camera. He turned away and shot something else. As she began moving again, she noticed that once more he was filming her way.

The man sat down at a café. She went and sat down on the other side of the terrace facing him. He got up and went inside. A moment later, a woman and child sat down at his table. He returned, and they got up to leave, walking towards and passing the Writer. He didn’t look at her as she followed their movement. As soon as they got behind her, she got up and sat down on the other side of the table. She watched as they walked down the street. At the first kiosk, they stopped to shop. The man looked up, directly at the Writer, then turned and left with his “family”.

She was shaken by this encounter and wasn’t certain whether she was imagining things or whether her gut was telling her the truth. We’re trained from the time we are kids to ignore that early warning system we have built inside, trained by our parents and our teachers to be nice, not to listen to our instincts when they tell us not to trust someone, that there is danger present.

The next day, however, when we saw the photos of the agents wanted for passport fraud in New Zealand, a shudder went up her spine. The guy they hadn’t found was the spitting image of the man in the market.

Accident?

2005-01-10T22:28:00.000+01:00

We have taken the decision. The Writer can no longer be allowed to leave the house alone. The Doctor agrees with this. We should have made this move after the incident in the market, but it is now obvious that the risks are too great. Thankfully the wheel was only loose and did not fall completely off the car. It was the front-left tyre and would have pulled her into the oncoming traffic.

The Writer was out alone. Normally one of us is with her. We let it pass this time because it seemed like a simple enough errand. A few miles from here, she began to hear a rumble from the front of the car. She thought it was a puncture. She pulled over and checked the tyre. Nothing.

By the time she arrived at her destination, the rumbling was so bad that she thought the car needed to go into the shop. She phoned and told Watcher Three that he should come with the other car to pick her up. When Watcher Three arrived, he did a check on the car. There was nothing in the motor. He decided to verify the wheel. When he took off the hubcap, one of the nuts fell into his hand. Of the three others, two were almost off and the fourth was very loose.

Was this only a warning?

Until we have more data in hand, that is the hypothesis. They obviously could have killed her if they wanted to. But if they kill her, she won’t be able to lead them to…well, who knows. Do they have a better idea than we do of what we are looking for?

We don’t think it very probable that all four of the nuts would come loose at the same time. The car had recently been in the shop, and the wheels had been tightened using the power tools by the mechanic. The day before the incident, Watcher Two and I had been meeting with the Alchemist downtown. They could have been listening in on the phone while we chose the time and place. We assume that all of our communications, including this one, are monitored. While the car was parked, they could have come and done the deed. We don’t think they came here to do it the night before; the guard dog and the automatic lights should have kept them away, even if the wall isn’t much of an obstacle.

She's calling. More later.