Jack Kerouac and The Golden Eternity

via brainpickings

In the mid-1950s, literary iconoclast and beat icon Jack Kerouac (March 12, 1922–October 21, 1969) became intensely interested in Buddhism, which began permeating his writing. It was the golden age of Eastern ideas drawing Western minds, from legendary composer John Cage to pioneering philosopher Alan Watts, credited with popularizing Zen thinking in mainstream Western society. Watts, in fact, at one point criticized Kerouac’s writing as being “always a shade too self-conscious, too subjective, and too strident to have the flavor of Zen.” But when stripped of his literary self-consciousness, as he was in his private letters, Kerouac had a special way of articulating the most beautiful and eternal concepts of Zen Buddhism with equal parts expansive awareness and crystalline precision.

Kerouac sent one such letter to his first wife, Edie Kerouac Parker, in late January of 1957, a decade after their marriage had been annulled. Found in The Portable Jack Kerouac (public library) — an altogether terrific treasure trove of his stories, poems, letters, and essays on Buddhism — the missive is nothing short of exquisite.


 Kerouac writes:

I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don’t worry. It’s all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect.

Echoing Watts’s philosophy on death, Kerouac considers the illusion of the solid “self” as he contemplates the life and death of mountains:

We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing. It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born.

He ends the letter with one of his free-flowing, uninhibited poems:

The world you see is just a movie in your mind.
Rocks dont see it.
Bless and sit down.
Forgive and forget.
Practice kindness all day to everybody
and you will realize you’re already
in heaven now.
That’s the story.
That’s the message.
Nobody understands it,
nobody listens, they’re
all running around like chickens with heads cut
off. I will try to teach it but it will
be in vain, s’why I’ll
end up in a shack
praying and being
cool and singing
by my woodstove
making pancakes.

Chris Hedges: a revolution is coming

via Salon

In recent years, there’s been a small genre of left-of-center journalism that, following President Obama’s lead, endeavors to prove that things on Planet Earth are not just going well, but have, in fact, never been better. This is an inherently subjective claim, of course; it requires that one buy into the idea of human progress, for one thing. But no matter how it was framed, there’s at least one celebrated leftist activist, author and journalist who’d disagree: Chris Hedges.

In fact, in his latest book, “Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt,” Hedges argues that the world is currently at a crisis point the likes of which we’ve never really seen. There are similarities between our time and the era of the 1848 revolutions throughout Europe — or the French Revolutionary era that preceded them — he says. But in many ways, climate change least among them, the stakes this time are much higher. According to Hedges, a revolution is coming; we just don’t yet know when, where, how — or on whose behalf.

Recently, Salon spoke over the phone with Hedges to discuss his book, why he thinks our world is in for some massive disruptions, and why we need revolutionaries now more than ever. A transcript of our conversation which has been edited for clarity and length can be found below.

Do you think we are in a revolutionary era now? Or is it more something on the horizon?

It’s with us already, but with this caveat: it is what Gramsci calls interregnum, this period where the ideas that buttress the old ruling elite no longer hold sway, but we haven’t articulated something to take its place.

That’s what that essay I quote by Alexander Berkman, “The Invisible Revolution,” talks about. He likens it to a pot that’s beginning to boil. So it’s already taking place, although it’s subterranean. And the facade of power — both the physical facade of power and the ideological facade of power — appears to remain intact. But it has less and less credibility.

There are all sorts of neutral indicators that show that. Low voter turnout, the fact that Congress has an approval rating of 7 percent, that polls continually reflect a kind of pessimism about where we are going, that many of the major systems that have been set in place — especially in terms of internal security — have no popularity at all.

All of these are indicators that something is seriously wrong, that the government is no longer responding to the most basic concerns, needs, and rights of the citizenry. That is [true for the] left and right. But what’s going to take it’s place, that has not been articulated. Yes, we are in a revolutionary moment; but maybe it’s a better way to describe it as a revolutionary process.

Is there a revolutionary consciousness building in America?

Well, it is definitely building. But until there is an ideological framework that large numbers of people embrace to challenge the old ideological framework, nothing is going to happen. Some things can happen; you can have sporadic uprisings as you had in Ferguson or you had in Baltimore. But until they are infused with that kind of political vision, they are reactive, in essence.

So you have, every 28 hours, a person of color, usually a poor person of color, being killed with lethal force — and, of course, in most of these cases they are unarmed. So people march in the streets and people protest; and yet the killings don’t stop. Even when they are captured on video. I mean we have videos of people being murdered by the police and the police walk away. This is symptomatic of a state that is ossified and can no longer respond rationally to what is happening to the citizenry, because it exclusively serves the interest of corporate power.

We have, to quote John Ralston Saul, “undergone a corporate coup d’état in slow motion” and it’s over. The normal mechanisms by which we carry out incremental and piecemeal reform through liberal institutions no longer function. They have been seized by corporate power — including the press. That sets the stage for inevitable blowback, because these corporations have no internal constraints, and now they have no external constraints. So they will exploit, because, as Marx understood, that’s their nature, until exhaustion or collapse.

What do you think is the most likely way that the people will respond to living in these conditions?

That is the big unknown. When it will come is unknown. What is it that will trigger it is unknown. You could go back and look at past uprisings, some of which I covered — I covered all the revolutions in Eastern Europe; I covered the two Palestinian uprisings; I covered the street demonstrations that eventually brought down Slobodan Milosevic — and it’s usually something banal.

As a reporter, you know that it’s there; but you never know what will ignite it. So you have Lenin, six weeks before the revolution, in exile in Switzerland, getting up and saying, We who are old will never live to see the revolution. Even the purported leaders of the opposition never know when it’s coming. Nor do they know what will trigger it.

What kind of person engages in revolutionary activity? Is there a specific type?

There are different types, but they have certain characteristics in common. That’s why I quote theologian Reinhold Niebuhr when he talks about “sublime madness.”

I think that sublime madness — James Baldwin writes it’s not so much that [revolutionaries] have a vision, it’s that they are possessed by it. I think that’s right. They are often difficult, eccentric personalities by nature, because they are stepping out front to confront a system of power [in a way that is] almost a kind of a form of suicide. But in moments of extremity, these rebels are absolutely key; and that you can’t pull off seismic change without them.

You’ve said that we don’t know where the change will come from, and that it could just as easily take a right-wing, reactionary form as a leftist one. Is there anything lefties can do to influence the outcome? Or is it out of anyone’s control?

There’s so many events as societies disintegrate that you can’t predict. They play such a large part in shaping how a society goes that there is a lot of it that is not in your control.

For example, if you compare the breakdown of Yugoslavia with the breakdown of Czechoslovakia — and I covered both of those stories — Yugoslavia was actually the Eastern European country best-equipped to integrate itself into Europe. But Yugoslavia went bad. When the economy broke down and Yugoslavia was hit with horrific hyperinflation, it vomited up these terrifying figures in the same way that Weimar vomited up the Nazi party. Yugoslavia tore itself to pieces.

If things unravel [in the U.S.], our backlash may very well be a rightwing backlash — a very frightening rightwing backlash. We who care about populist movements [on the left] are very weak, because in the name of anti-communism these movements have been destroyed; we are almost trying to rebuild them from scratch. We don’t even have the language to describe the class warfare that is being unleashed upon us by this tiny, rapacious, oligarchic elite. But we on the left are very disorganized, unfocused, and without resources.

In terms of  a left-wing populism having to build itself back up from scratch, do you see the broad coalition against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as a hint of what that might look like? Or would you not go that far?

No, I would.

I think that if you look at what’s happened after Occupy, it’s either spawned or built alliances with a series of movements; whether it’s #BlackLivesMatter, whether it’s the Fight for $15 campaign, whether it’s challenging the TPP. I think they are all interconnected and, often times — at least when I’m with those activists — there is a political consciousness that I find quite mature.

Are you optimistic about the future?

I covered war for 20 years; we didn’t use terms like pessimist or optimist, because if you were overly optimistic, it could get you killed. You really tried to read the landscape as astutely as you could and then take calculated risks based on the reality around you, or at least on the reality insofar as you could interpret it. I kind of bring that mentality out of war zones.

If we are not brutal about diagnosing what we are up against, then all of our resistance is futile. If we think that voting for Hillary Clinton … is really going to make a difference, then I would argue we don’t understand corporate power and how it works. If you read the writings of anthropologists, there are studies about how civilizations break down; and we are certainly following that pattern. Unfortunately, there’s nothing within human nature to argue that we won’t go down the ways other civilizations have gone down. The difference is now, of course, that when we go down, the whole planet is going to go with us.

Yet you rebel not only for what you can achieve, but for who you become. In the end, those who rebel require faith — not a formal or necessarily Christian, Jewish or Muslim orthodoxy, but a faith that the good draws to it the good. That we are called to carry out the good insofar as we can determine what the good is; and then we let it go. The Buddhists call it karma, but faith is the belief that it goes somewhere. By standing up, you keep alive another narrative. It’s one of the ironic points of life. That, for me, is what provides hope; and if you are not there, there is no hope at all.

Even the world's deepest trench is full of garbage now

from Gizmodo:

The Mariana Trench is the deepest spot in the ocean—and it’s home to some strange sights, sounds, and creatures. But there’s one thing down there that’s very familiar: a whole bunch of garbage.

Researchers from the University of Aberdeen presented their early findings of the first measurements of pollutants in the trench at Shanghai’s deep-sea exploration conference. Nature got an early look at the data there—and reported with some surprise that high-levels of pollutants, especially PCBs, were already floating around down there—and being eaten by the life. In fact, not only were PCBs present, they were there at higher levels than seen in many rivers and coastal waters.

At over 36,000-feet deep, the Mariana Trench is one of the most remote—and mysterious—places on Earth. We’ve only just begun to get a look at the unusual ocean life living down there, and what we’ve seen so far seems utterly alien. That makes finding out that is already heavily polluted all the more disappointing.

Earlier this month, University of Oxford researchers finally gave up on their quest to find a single still pristine spot anywhere on this Earth, saying that it simply didn’t believe one existed anymore. It looks like, even 36,000 feet below the seas, they were right.

Synchronicity is real: Kirby Surprise

from Skeptiko:

Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris and guest host Robert Perry for an interview with Dr. Kirby Surprise, author of Synchronicity: The Art of Coincidence, Choice, and Unlocking Your Mind. During the interview Surprise discusses how synchronicity relates to other paranormal experiences:

Alex Tsakiris: Is there ever a reality to a synchronistic event beyond my personal internal psychodrama interpretation of it?

And that also bridges us into the other transformative realities of near-death experience or out-of-body experience or other transformative experiences, is there a parallel? Is there a reality to any of those?

Dr. Kirby Surprise: Synchronistic events are objectively real. Absolutely 100% real. But they’re a mirror. So when I say that what you’re seeing is subjective, I’m not saying that these are parlor tricks the brain does on you. I’m saying that both your psychodynamic projections and the mirroring effect are real and they’re external. They are actually out there and you are actually changing the environment that you’re in by 3% to 6%.

And the book is about a reasonable explanation, an expository fiction on how that’s possible. Now the easiest way to prove that people are the source of synchronistic events rather than another supernatural source is very simple. You create them yourself. Everybody does this all the time. This is not a specialty skill. Every single living human being is walking around in clouds of synchronistic events they themselves generate. Those events are changing the environment slightly to bring them the patterns they’re seeking.

Now the sort of Flat Earth explanation to this is that we’re changing the environment. The reality is we’re moving through probabilities. String theory is telling us we’re sitting in a virtually infinite amount of alternatives right now. I’m saying that instead of people thinking that we’re jumping between universes we already span an infinite amount of these probabilities at once. We’re moving through them and we’re steering through them by what we’re thinking, feeling, and paying attention to.

These things like out-of-body experiences and the more paranormal stuff I don’t look at as paranormal. I look at it as extremely normal. And I think that slowly the verifiable part of the science is gradually catching up to what our mystic, Shamanic, ancestors already knew. It’s all science. Metaphysics is physics. It’s an extension of it. The modern part of science is that there are some things we can verify and some things we take a best guess at. The thing about synchronicity being a mirror is it’s easy to verify, you know? You go out and create your own.

Kirby Surprise’s Website

Robert Perry’s Bolg Post Re This Interview

Naive realism and reality tunnels

“We think this is reality. But in philosophy, that’s called naive realism: "What I perceive is reality.” And philosophers have refuted naive realism every century for the last 2,500 years, starting with Buddha and Plato, and yet most people still act on the basis of naive realism.

Now the argument is, “Well, maybe my perceptions are inaccurate, but somewhere there is accuracy, scientists have it with their instruments. That’s how we can find out what’s really real.” But relativity, quantum mechanics, have demonstrated clearly that what you find out with instruments is true relative only to the instrument you’re using, and where that instrument is located in space-time. So there is no vantage point from which real reality can be seen.

We’re all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels. And when we begin to realize that we’re all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels, we find that it is much easier to understand where other people are coming from.

All the ones who don’t have the same reality tunnel as us do not seem ignorant, or deliberately perverse, or lying, or hypnotized by some mad ideology, they just have a different reality tunnel. And every reality tunnel might tell us something interesting about our world if we’re willing to listen.
The idea every perception is a gamble, seems to me so obviously true that I continually am astonished that I could forget it so many times during the course of 24 hours. But to the extent that I remember it, I just can’t stay angry at anybody, so it’s a thing worth keeping in mind.”

~Robert Anton Wilson

Dealing with the psychological burden of knowing things our culture doesn't want us to know

From Era of Wisdom:

This is an incredibly real thread on Reddit, which you can find at this link.

This is the text of the original post, we recommend visiting the original post here and reading the valuable comments.

    “I’ve been here for 8 years on reddit, and things sure have changed a lot. /r/conspiracy is one of the few remaining places on reddit for real news. This sub looks like what the front page of reddit looked like for the first 3 years of its existence. It was about exposing things, the real truth, and learning about the world. This is what Aaron Schwartz wanted, before they killed him and killed reddit.

    All the uncomfortable truths are delegated to this ridiculous-sounding “/r/conspiracy” which drives people away who are on the fence. These things that are often talked about on this sub are conspiracies, but they’re also news, they’re speculation or facts about how the world actually works beyond the face of things as we see them. This label of “conspiracy” is a form of censorship in itself, it pushes all the big deal stories to this one small corner of reddit.
    
    If you’re newer to reddit, 4 years or less, I bet there was one day when you found this sub. I bet you went through the frontpage of this sub and couldn’t believe what you were reading. You probably thought “Why aren’t these things being discussed on the news subreddit or the politics subreddit, if they are true?” You may have looked in to a specific story or two, and started realizing that there is something to many of the things talked about here. So you subscribed to the sub, you started reading it regularly. Maybe you decided you don’t care about this divisive label of “conspiracy theorist”, that it means nothing to you. What idiot would be afraid of theorizing about potential conspiracies, given the endless lists of historical examples? What kind of sheep is so trained to be afraid of the truth that they run away from it thinking they’re doing themselves a favor? You start to question things in a deeper way once the tricks of culture become more obvious.
    
    Obviously not everything in this sub is true, far from it. But there are some startling facts that have been presented over and over and have basically been proven to be true. Things like the actions of the intelligence agencies in overthrowing and controlling governments of foreign countries. The funding and support of ISIS by the US and Israel, via Turkey and Saudi Arabia. The fact the BRICS banks and the IMF/World Bank are run by overlapping groups of people. The fact central banks and corporations have far too much control over government, wresting control of it away from the people. The US-Israel connection of funding and arms and police training. The connection of Greater Israel with Zionism and the six-day war. The drug trade from Afghanistan, where 90% of the worlds poppies are grown, for US pharma and illegal drug trade profits. The drug wars caused by the US in Central and South America, for profit. The way the biggest oil companies have infiltrated the governments of the world for their own profit. The demolition of Building 7. Regulatory capture. Compartmentalization. Divide and conquer.




    These things are very real. These things matter, and drive current events. They are generally provable to be true. They are “open secrets.”
    
    This is the difference between the MSM (including the front pages and main subreddits of reddit) versus places like this subreddit that actually care about the truth, is that they will actually look in to those open secrets. They will expose certain interesting tidbits that are selectively ignored by the corporate media.
    
    Once you start to realize this is the case, and that really sinks in, then if you’re anything like me you experienced a psychological trip of sorts where you realized how bullshit many aspects of our society really are. That deep down advertising is actually predatory and evil, it’s not that people just say that as a funny cliche. That there really are a bunch of psychopaths with no morality or compassion in many many positions of power, because those are generally the only people with the motivation and willpower to go to the terrible depths necessary to acquire a billion dollars or a high political position. They will sacrifice anything for it, including their morality and the lives of others. They have no problem sleeping at night.
    
    You see the ideologies people believe in, like Christianity, or nationalism/patriotism, or sports, or even scientism (belief in the findings of the scientific establishment above scientific theory itself). You see the greed, people borrowing and spending their lives away, trying to get some sort of emotional perk out of it to make up for the hours of drudgery they had to put themselves through to get the money in the first place. People trapped in cycles, in bad patterns that merely reinforce how fucked we are as a society. You see the denial, you see people shut down when you try to talk about the edges of what they think’s “allowed” to talk about. You see people safeguarding their emotions beyond what’s reasonable, beyond facts themselves.
    
    After a while, it crushes you to see it too openly, how many people fall for the bullshit. Everything is so messed up. It’s practically unbelievable. If you were like me, you are probably still in some stage of disbelief at certain aspects of reality even though they are provably true. Cognitive dissonance is something we all suffer from after living in this bizarre culture, the only difference is some of us try to rectify it and others just essentially distract themselves until they die.
    
    This is serious business. These topics strike at the heart of what we think about society, how we think we should treat each other, and what we think of ourselves. What we should be honest about, and what we should hide. What we consider important, and what we consider frivolous.
    
    We here are lucky to have the emotional motivation to seek out true important information, even if it is uncomfortable to digest. Others are not so lucky and hide from the truth out of fear, generally fear of losing social standing or losing income. You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink. You cannot save the willfully ignorant, they must save themselves. All you can do is actively make important information available to those who have not been exposed to it yet. There are many thirsty people out there who simply can’t find water, so to speak. If you’re “in the know”, it’s your job to share this information with others so that we can see our world and our human behavior more clearly. This is the information that our culture, media, and schools deliberately ignore despite being true. Once we can clearly see what we as humans are actually doing, then we can start to make adjustments and modifications to it that will have an impact. Otherwise we are just shouting at mirages and illusions.
    
    Did you know that 40,000 people worked on the atomic bombs that blew up Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but only a few hundred of them actually knew what they were making? This is the power of compartmentalization. Everyone makes their little part, and only certain people have the knowledge to see how all the parts come together. Those people are playing the rest, in a sense. Human society is like this in a way, we are all “making our piece” and the pieces come together in ways many of us don’t anticipate that profit a very few, like a war or bank bailouts. We each only see our little world, our motivations and fears in our daily lives. We react correspondingly to the avalanche as best we can. Few question where those motivations and fears came from in the first place, and fewer question if they’re even necessary at all.




    We program ourselves like a computer, our actions in the present create the conditions that allow the future to occur. “Be the change you want to see in the world” as Gandhi said. But also be the change you want to see in yourself. You can do it, you’ve been doing it your whole life. Just take their reigns of your own mind for yourself. Take off the training wheels of mainstream culture. It is not your friend, it is there to control you. To put your motivations and fears in to little boxes that serve the corporate and governmental machinery, all through your TV or internet connection. 5 corporations own 95% of American all media, from TV to movies to magazines. And it just keeps getting more propagandistic and consolidated, week after week. Did you see one of the biggest Hillary funders just bought The Onion?

    The first casualty of war is the truth. The time to talk is before there is a war. Now is the time to spread the truth.”

Bonus video: How to shut a conspiracy theorist up

Chapel Perilous

from tekgnostics

- Beware! -

If you value normalcy... if you value a comfortable, predictable world... turn back now.

Once you cross the threshold of Chapel Perilous, there is no going back... for to enter this portal is to enter into the realm of magick, meaningful coincidence and synchronicity. Here the laws of common sense do not apply. Chapel Perilous is guarded by that ancient trickster... Fate.

Should you proceed... you have been warned.

"Chapel Perilous" is an occult term referring to a psychological state in which an individual cannot be certain whether they have been aided or hindered by some force outside the realm of the natural world, or whether what appeared to be supernatural interference was a product of their own vivid imagination.

From the (Tek) Gnostic perspective, to enter Chapel Perilous is to come to the shocking realization that "the Gods are Crazy." This is the epiphanous moment when one realizes the ambivalent... or worse... malevolent nature of what the Gnostics identified as the Demiurge. This deranged entity is not to be confused with the ultimate, transcendent creative power, which cannot be named.

Chapel Perilous was used as a Discordian term by the late writer and philosopher Robert Anton Wilson in his 1977 book Cosmic Trigger. According to Wilson, being in this state leads the subject to become either stone paranoid or an agnostic... there is no third way.

The concept of "Chapel Perilous" was used by Antero Alli, in his 1986 book, Angel Tech: A Modern Shaman's Guide to Reality Selection which is based on Timothy Leary's Eight-circuit model of consciousness. In Alli's book, Chapel Perilous is regarded as a rite of passage, when moving between the four lower circuits of consciousness to the higher circuits. In Chapel Perilous, the integrity of the lower circuits is tested in preparation for activation of the higher circuits.

The term Chapel Perilous first appeared in Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur (1485) as the setting for an adventure in which sorceress Hellawes unsuccessfully attempts to seduce Sir Lancelot. T. S. Eliot used it symbolically in "The Waste Land" (1922).

Students of the Grail romances will remember that in many of the versions the hero... sometimes it is a heroine... meets with a strange and terrifying adventure in a mysterious Chapel, an adventure which, we are given to understand, is fraught with extreme peril to life. The details vary: sometimes there is a Dead Body laid on the altar; sometimes a Black Hand extinguishes the tapers; there are strange and threatening voices, and the general impression is that this is an adventure in which supernatural, and evil, forces are engaged.

- Jessie L Weston

The history of the term is interesting. Traditionally, the Chapel Perilous or Grail Castle has been the ultimate destination for knights questing after the Holy Grail. For most people of my generation, this brings up an image out (those great tekgnostic saints) of Monty Python, as well it should. The story has been around for a long time, though. The mystical experiences within this chapel are the climax of many an Arthurian adventure story. Those who entered were typically subjected to a rigorous battery of challenges, some of which seem to be training exercises of sorts, while others are ultimate tests of purity, conviction, and understanding.

Dangerous traps are to be found there, often tailored to force a confrontation with an individual knight’s personal weaknesses. Those who failed would not be allowed to access the Grail and might even be killed or driven mad in the attempt. On the other hand, a candidate who proved worthy might hope to be granted great power and priceless treasures.

The idea of Chapel Perilous as it is commonly used in psychedelic parlance comes from Robert Anton Wilson’s countercultural classic The Cosmic Trigger. Uncle Bob defines Chapel Perilous as: "A stage in the magickal quest in which your maps turned out to be totally inadequate for the territory and you’re completely lost." He has quite a lot more to say on the topic, having spent a good deal of time there himself:

"Chapel Perilous, like the mysterious entity called ‘I,’ cannot be located in the space-time continuum; it is weightless, odorless, tasteless and undetectable by ordinary instruments. Indeed, like the Ego, it is even possible to deny that it is there. And yet, even more like the Ego, once you are inside it, there doesn’t seem to be any way to ever get out again, until you suddenly discover that it has been brought into existence by thought and does not exist outside thought. Everything you fear is waiting with slavering jaws in Chapel Perilous, but if you are armed with the wand of intuition, the cup of sympathy, the sword of reason and the pentacle of valor, you will find there (the legends say) the Medicine of Metals, the Elixir of Life, the Philosopher’s Stone, True Wisdom and Perfect Happiness.

That's what the legends always say, and the language of myth is poetically precise. For instance, if you go into that realm without the sword of reason, you will lose your mind, but at the same time, if you take only the sword of reason without the cup of sympathy, you will lose your heart. Even more remarkably, if you approach without the wand of intuition, you can stand at the door for decades never realizing you have arrived. You might think you are just waiting for a bus, or wandering from room to room looking for your cigarettes, watching a TV show, or reading a cryptic and ambiguous book. Chapel Perilous is tricky that way."

I myself tend to think of Chapel Perilous as the place where you find yourself when the sheer absurdity of it all can no longer be ignored. When it all starts to add up and multiply while remaining somehow stubbornly indivisible. When synchronicity spirals out of control and you finally discover that you really are, in fact, the center and purpose of the universe after all. Either that or you’re stone-cold crazy. Or maybe it’s both. It’s the dark night of the soul, and it’s generally understood to be some kind of a trap. But it’s also a doorway, if one has the courage, strength, intelligence, and luck to pass through it.

- Teafaerie

CHAPEL PERILOUS is the place "souls" go after leaving their robot bodies...while these bodies are still alive and walking the planet's surface. Also known as "The Dark Night of the Soul." It relates to post-Factor X activities in that both refer to "out-of-body" states. However, CHAPEL PERILOUS is where souls go when they are lost and Factor X communications refer to how souls are found. Can also be seen as a negative activation of the "neurosomatic circuit," which is endured for as long as it takes the neophyte to effect a positive activation, or permanent body rapture.

- From The Game of Life by Dr. Timothy Leary