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

WTF is Magick?

by Gabriel Roberts via Disinformation

In an attempt to not sound absolutely crazy to anyone who might see me mention magick, I’d like to bring some illumination of what magick is.  This may prove to be a challenge because the term itself is a moving goalpost of sorts.  To some, magick means a man on a stage sawing a woman in half as an act of illusion. Ironically, this can also be seen as a metaphor for our own subjective predilections toward illusion in all aspects of our life.

In order to explain this correctly, I must try to get you to set aside what you think you might know about actual magic and allow yourself to hear me for what I’m saying unencumbered by preset notions.

The Buddhist might say that everything is Maya (illusion) and the ancient Gnostic might say the same, but with the twist that this material construct is a kind of incubator for us to occupy ourselves why Archons feed on our thoughts and feelings without our knowing it (think, people being batteries for the machines to live off of like in the film series, The Matrix).   Whether these ideas are true, or not the metaphor that they produce is indeed powerful.  In many different ways, these concepts can be seen as true.

Ok, on to actual explanation.

Magick is first a method of transforming the world you see by changing the way you see the world.  This requires one to willfully change hard-wired behavior and practices through mental gymnastics.  Much of this involves understanding and playing with the thought-form.

A thought form is the primary way we construct ideas; it is exactly the formation of our thoughts.  A thought form can also be in some ways associated with what Jung referred to as archetypes.  Archetypes are overarching themes and images that we associate with primary things in our life.  For example, for many, our fathers represent an image of what God might be like; If our father is cruel, then we may see God as inherently cruel.  The thought form of who God is creates a landscape for our reality in a highly subjective and personal fashion and may be entirely incorrect in contrast to the actual truth of the matter.

But we are not looking for truth with a capital T here, because of the paradoxical nature of truth itself.  It is like the problem scientists have with the idea that the observer changes the results of behavior simply by nature of observing.  Instead we are looking to change the nature of our thoughts and tinkering with the wiring we have in our minds.

So how exactly does one manipulate one’s own thought forms and for what purpose?  This is the crux of the magical practice.  One must in many ways trick one’s own mind, which is no small feat, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be done.

Think of a time in your life in which you radically changed stances on a subject.  Did the way you see the world change?  Did some kind of transformative experience catalyze this change?  In one way, or another, something changed the wiring of you mind on that particular subject.  In one sense, you received gnosis (experiential understanding) on that particular thing.  But the fact that this experience happened to you through your particular lens means that it may not have happened to others in the same way, even if the experience has happened to many people.  For instance, no two people lost their virginity in the same way, but all were transformed by the experience in some form.  The event is highly subjective and personal, though many themes may be similar within the broader context of the experience.

The greatest act of a magician then is to transform one’s self and therefore change the world that they see.  In changing our perception, we change the nature of reality.  And this toying with perception can change the world from something banal into something divine.  Regardless of our cosmology, we can see how this happens to everyone, hence my assertion that everything is magick.  If you ask a Kung Fu master what Kung Fu is, he might say the same thing.

In many ways magick is a western term for a traditionally assumed eastern idea, but our western traditions have much to contribute, though they have been stamped down and literally burned in books and people by two millennia of monotheistic suppression.  The stigma is palpable and yet our disciplines of science came through these occult channels from ancient sources.  Astronomy and Astrology were once one and the same, Pharmacology, Chemistry and Herbalism were once Alchemy.

So in short, the manipulation of one’s own mind to achieve a specific goal in one’s self, or in the world around them is the core of magick.  To those who might think magick to be a foul and odious working with demons and other fancied creatures, this is a misunderstanding brought forth by a long tradition of slander.  Consider what it means to work on yourself in such a way that your goal is personal growth for the highest goal of society through your own contribution.  Consider this quote from the much maligned and misunderstood book, The Black Pullet:

    “Do you feel, my son, do you feel this heroic ambition which is the sure stamp of the children of wisdom? Do you dare to desire to serve only the one God and to dominate over all that is not God? Have you understood what it is to prove to be a man and to be unwilling to be a slave since you are born to be a Sovereign? And if you have these noble thoughts, as the signs which I have found on your physiognomy do not permit me to doubt, have you considered maturely whether you have the courage and the strength to renounce all the things which could possibly be an obstacle to attaining the greatness for which you have been born?”

    At this point he stopped and regarded me fixedly as if waiting for an answer, or as if he were searching to read my heart.

    I asked him, “What is that which I have to renounce?”

    “All that is evil in order to occupy yourself only with that which is good. The proneness with which nearly all of us are born to vice rather than to virtue. Those passions which render us slaves to our senses which prevent us from applying ourselves to study, tasting its sweetness, and gathering its fruits. You see, my dear son, that the sacrifice which I demand of you is not painful and is not above your powers; on the contrary, it will make you approach perfection as near as it is possible for man to attain. Do you accept that which I propose?”

If I have explained myself correctly, you will understand that magick is simply a broad term for one working on the improvement of one’s self for the betterment of self and humanity at large through the manipulation of one’s own thoughts and ideas, questioning every notion and challenging each one in practice and critical review.

The automatic writings of Jung

By Phillip Coppens

Watkins’ bookstore in Cecil Court, just off Charing Cross Road in London, was founded in 1891 by John Watkins, and is still London’s premier hermetic bookstore. One of its many notorious visitors was Carl Gustav Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist who would, together with Freud, define the field. Watkins was later to become Jung’s publisher, bringing out the private 1925 edition of Jung’s “VII Sermones ad Mortuos”.

For a well-known psychiatrist to chose a hermetic bookstore as the publisher of a book might seem odd, and it is. The text is purportedly by “Basilides of Alexandria” and is a Gnostic text – a religious document, largely Christian in nature. Why Watkins was chosen as the publisher however becomes clear when we know that Jung had received this document via automatic writing – something most psychiatrists would push towards the lunatic fringe… but not Jung.

Freud and Jung are considered to be the instrumental characters of defining psychotherapy. Both originally worked together, but Jung broke with Freud in 1911. Jung felt that psychotherapy was too narrow in focus – and his ideas were based on personal experience. Jung had “spirit guides”, one of whom was named “Philemon”. Jung observed that “Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. […] Psychologically, Philemon represented superior insight.” To anyone else, Philemon might be a figment of Jung’s imagination, or evidence of his madness. But Jung felt that Philemon was real – yet somehow dead, and somehow “talking” to Jung – to Jung’s mind.

Jung thus felt he was not insane; he felt that Philemon was a source of information that was legitimate: somehow, Jung was able to receive information from a source of information outside of his head – not existing in this physical reality. It opened the way for his theory of the collective unconscious, a type of library containing everything ever known, and archetypes, “active principles” that interacted between that “dimension” and ours.

Was Jung sane? He had a life-long fascination with Nietzsche, but he realized the need to distance himself from Nietzsche for fear that he might be like him and therefore suffer the same fate: Nietzsche (1844-1900) became hopelessly insane. But more than 15 years later, Jung spoke to a “highly cultivated elderly Indian”, who told Jung that his experience was identical to many mystics. In his case, his “spirit guide” or guru had been a commentator on the Vedas who had died centuries ago. Rather than be mad, Jung felt that he had stepped into the same shoes as the ancient priests and others thought have experienced the divine.

Thus, in 1916, Jung received the best-documented help from demons: Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, or “The Seven sermons to the dead written by Basilides in Alexandria”, “transcribed by Carl Gustav Jung”.

Jung stated that the start of the work was very identical to a possession. “Then it was as if my house began to be haunted. My eldest daughter saw a white figure passing through the room. My second daughter, independently of her elder sister, related that twice in the night her blanket had been snatched away; and that same night my nine-year-old son had an anxiety dream. Around five o’clock in the afternoon on Sunday the front doorbell began ringing frantically. It was a bright summer day; the two maids were in the kitchen, from which the open square outside the front door could be seen. Everyone immediately looked to see who was there, but there was no one in sight. I was sitting near the doorbell, and not only heard it but saw it moving. We all simply stared at one another.”
With such madness about the house, Jung felt he had to act. He shouted: “For God’s sake, what in the world is this?” Then they cried out in chorus, “We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought.” Over the next three evenings, the book was written, and as soon as he had begun to write, “the whole ghostly assemblage evaporated. The room quieted and the atmosphere cleared. The haunting was over.”

Basilides was a real person, born in Syria, teaching in Alexandria during the years 133-155 AD. Whereas most channelled material is often nothing better than that which can be found in gossip columns, Jung’s text has been labelled a “core text in depth psychology”.

The text is intriguing for several reasons. For one, he uses the name Abraxas to describe the Supreme Being that had first generated mind (nous) and then the other mental powers. Still, Jung did not teach the return of human essence to the Gnostic pleroma, where individuality was lost, but instead adhered to individuation, which maintained the fullness of human individuality. Most metaphysics today argue that both possibilities can be encountered – and are encountered in many religions: that the soul at its final stage can chose to melt with the One (the pleroma) or maintain its separate identity inside the One (individuation). The easiest parallel is with the hologram, in which each “replica” is unique, yet also the whole. If any “replica” was aware, and would at one point have to ask what it wanted, some would ask to surrender into the greater hologram, whereas other “replicas” would ask to retain their individual memories – even though they are part of the whole.

It is clear that this experience created the framework in which later the collective unconscious would take a prominent place. He described it as such: “The collective unconscious is common to all: it is the foundation of what the ancients called the sympathy of all things. It is through the medium of the collective unconscious that information about a particular time and place can be transferred to another individual mind.” But analysts have stated that it was not just the automatic writing, but the contents of the writings themselves, that shaped his ideas. Jung himself wrote: “These conversations with the dead formed a kind of prelude to what I had to communicate to the world about the unconscious . . . All my works, all my creative activity, has come from those initial fantasies and dreams which began in 1912, almost fifty years ago. Everything that I accomplished in later life was already contained in them, although at first only in the form of emotions and images.”

As early as August, 1912, Jung had intimated in a letter to Freud that he had an intuition that the essentially feminine-toned archaic wisdom of the Gnostics, symbolically called Sophia, was destined to re-enter modern Western culture by way of depth-psychology. Of primary sources, the remarkable Pistis Sophia was one of very few available to Jung in translation, and his appreciation of this work was so great that he made a special effort to seek out the translator in London, the then aged and impecunious George R. S. Mead, to convey to him his great gratitude.

Subsequently, he stated to Barbara Hannah that when he discovered the writings of the ancient Gnostics, “I felt as if I had at last found a circle of friends who understood me.” Gnosticism would remain his main dedication for the rest of his life. With the success of books such as Holy Blood, Holy Grail, The Templar Revelation and The Da Vinci Code, all which carve out a special place for the feminine, and often the Pistis Sophia itself, it is clear that Jung successfully predicted the “return of the feminine”.

Philemon and Basilides are but two of the “spirit guides” that were in contact with Jung. The list of other guides also included one “Salome”. In 1926, Jung had a remarkable dream. He felt himself transported back into the 17th century, and saw himself as an alchemist, engaged in the Great Work. Jung felt that alchemy was the connection between the ancient world of the Gnostics and the modern era, which would see the return of “Sophia”.

For Jung, alchemy was not the search for the substance that would transform lead into gold, but the transformation of the soul on its path to perfection. Jung’s dreams in 1925-6 and thereafter frequently found him in ancient houses surrounded by alchemical codices of great beauty and mystery. Inspired by such images, Jung amassed a library on the great art which represents probably one of the finest private collections in this field. Jung’s collection of rare works on alchemy is still extant in his former house in Küsnacht, a suburb of Zurich. His work culminated in his chef d’oevre, published in 1944, and entitled Psychology and Alchemy.

Jung believed that the cosmos contained the divine light or life, but this essence was enmeshed in a mechanical trap, presided over by a demiurge: Lucifer, the Bringer of the Light. He contained the light inside this reality, until a time when it would be set free. The first operation of alchemy therefore addressed itself to the dismemberment of this confining structure and reducing it to a condition of creative chaos. From this, in the process of transformation, the true, creative binaries emerge and begin their interaction designed to bring about the alchemical union. In this ultimate union, says Jung, the previously confined light is redeemed and brought to the point of its ultimate and redemptive fulfilment.

Jung made it clear that his theory was not new. It is similar to the Cathar doctrine and he himself stated that he was restating the Hermetic gnosis and explaining the misunderstood central quest of alchemy. Alchemy, said Jung, stood in a compensatory relationship to mainstream Christianity, rather like a dream does to the conscious attitudes of the dreamer. It has been “underground”, part of a secret tradition that ran throughout Christianity, but always “subconscious” – visible by its shadows and theh traces it leaves only.

He also felt that this process allowed for a better understanding of male-feminine relationships, and notions such as love. It is in this approach that he no doubt left Freud the furthest behind. In The Psychology of the Transference, Jung stated that in love, as in psychological growth, the key to success is the ability to endure the tension of the opposites without abandoning the process, even if the process and its result appear to have been brought to naught. In essence, it is the “stress” that allows one to grow – to transform.

The union of opposites, the focus of the alchemist, was for Jung also the focus of the Gnostics, whom he felt had been incorrectly labelled as radical dualists, i.e. believing in the battle between good and evil – without any apparent union possible between the two. For Jung, dualism and monism were not mutually contradictory and exclusive, but complimentary aspects of reality. As such, there was no good or wrong, no order or chaos, just two opposites, who constantly created grey, and demanded of mankind to be united, transformed.

It is clear that Jung’s psychology is that of the end of the 20th century. In essence, he was the father of the New Age, giving a theoretical framework for channelling and other “New Age practices”. Still, it is clear that Jung is seldom if ever mentioned in this line. Instead, he is referred to as the “opposite” of Freud, who was fixated in trying to reduce the entire human psychology to the sexual constitution of Mankind. However, it was Jung who stated that such opposites had to be integrated…

Daniel Dennett and Cornel West Decode the Philosophy of The Matrix

From Open Culture

Apotheosis of cyberpunk culture, 1999’s The Matrix and its less-successful sequels introduced a generation of fanboys and girls to the most stylish expression of some age-old idealist thought experiments: the Hindu concept of Maya, Plato’s cave, Descartes’ evil demon, Hilary Putnam’s Brain in a Vat—all notions about the nature of reality that ask whether what we experience isn’t instead an elaborate illusion, concealing a “real” world outside of our perceptual grasp. In some versions—such as those of certain Buddhists and Christian Gnostics, whose ideas The Matrix directors borrowed liberally—one can awaken from the dream. In others, such as Kant’s or Jacques Lacan’s, that prospect is unlikely, if impossible. These questions about the nature of reality versus appearance are mainstays of intro philosophy courses and stereotypical stoner sessions. But they’re also perennially relevant to philosophers and neuroscientists, which is why such academic luminaries as Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers continue to address them in their work on the nature and problem of consciousness.

Dennett, Chalmers, the always captivating scholar/theologian/activist Cornel West, and a host of other academic thinkers, appear in the documentary above, Philosophy and the Matrix: Return to the Source. Part of the sprawling box-set The Ultimate Matrix Collection, the film comments on how The Matrix does much more than dramatize an undergraduate thesis; it takes on questions about religious revelation and authority, parapsychology, free will and determinism, and the nature of personal identity in ways that no dry philosophical text or arcane mystical system has before, thanks to its hip veneer and pioneering use of CGI. While some of the thinkers above might see more profundity than the movies seem to warrant, it’s still interesting to note how each film glosses the great metaphysical questions that intrigue us precisely because the answers seem forever out of reach.

See the video at: https://vimeo.com/53000177

Don Juan on Wetiko

A science fiction novel just waiting to be written...

Don Juan and Carlos Casteneda:

«Ah, that’s the universe at large, ‘ he said, ‘incommensurable, nonlinear, outside the realm of syntax. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were the first ones to see those fleeting shadows, so they followed them around. They saw them as you’re seeing them, and they saw them as energy that flows in the universe. And they did discover something transcendental. They discovered that we have a companion for life…

We have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos and took over the rule of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners. The predator is our lord and master. It has rendered us docile, helpless. If we want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it demands that we don’t do so. You have arrived, by your effort alone, to what the shamans of ancient Mexico called the topic of topics. I have been beating around the bush all this time, insinuating to you that something is holding us prisoner. Indeed we are held prisoner! This was an energetic fact for the sorcerers of ancient Mexico. »

« ‘Why has this predator taken over in the fashion that you’re describing, Don Juan?’, I asked. ‘There must be a logical explanation. »

« ‘There is an explanation,’ Don Juan replied, ‘which is the simplest explanation in the world. They took over because we are food for them, and they squeeze us mercilessly because we are their sustenance. Just as we rear chickens in chicken coops, the predators rear us in human coops. Therefore, their food is always available to them. »
I felt that my head was shaking violently from side to side. I could not express my profound sense of unease and discontentment, but my body moved to bring it to the surface. I shook from head to toe without any volition on my part.

« ‘No, no, no, no,’ I heard myself saying. ‘This is absurd, don Juan. What you’re saying is something monstrous. It simply can’t be true, for sorcerers or for average men, or for anyone. »

« ‘Why not?’ don Juan asked calmly. ‘Why not? Because it infuriates you?’

« ‘Yes, it infuriates me,’ I retorted. ‘Those claims are monstrous! »

« ‘I want to appeal to your analytical mind, ‘ don Juan said. ‘Think for a moment, and tell me how you would explain the contradiction between the intelligence of man the engineer and the stupidity of his systems of beliefs, or the stupidity of his contradictory behavior. Sorcerers believe that the predators have given us our systems of beliefs, our ideas of good and evil, our social mores. They are the ones who set up our hopes and expectations and dreams of success or failure. They have given us covetousness, greed and cowardice. It is the predators who make us complacent, routinary, and egomaniacal. »

« ‘But how can they do this, don Juan?’ I asked, somehow angered further by what he was saying. ‘Do they whisper all that in our ears while we are asleep? »

« ‘No, they don’t do it that way. That’s idiotic!’ don Juan said, smiling. ‘They are infinitely more efficient and organized than that. In order to keep us obedient and meek and weak, the predators engaged themselves in a stupendous manoeuver – stupendous, of course, from the point of view of a fighting strategist. A horrendous manoeuver from the point of view of those who suffer it. They gave us their mind! Do you hear me? The predators give us their mind, which becomes our mind.
The predators’ mind is baroque, contradictory, morose, filled with the fear of being discovered any minute now. »

Don Juan continues: « ‘I know that even though you have never suffered hunger… you have food anxiety, which is none other than the anxiety of the predator who fears that any moment now its manoeuver is going to be uncovered and food is going to be denied. Through the mind, which, after all, is their mind, the predators inject into the lives of human beings whatever is convenient for them. And they ensure, in this manner, a degree of security to act as a buffer against their fear.' »

It’s not that I can’t accept all this at face value, don Juan, » I said. « I could, but there’s something so odious about it that it actually repels me. It forces me to take a contradictory stand.

« If it’s true that they eat us, how do they do it? » Don Juan had a broad smile on his face. He was as pleased as punch. He explained that sorcerers see infant human beings as strange, luminous balls of energy covered from the top to the bottom with a glowing coat something like a plastic cover that is adjusted tightly over their cocoon of energy.

He said that that glowing coat of awareness was what the predators consumed, and that when a human being reached adulthood, all that was left of that glowing coat of awareness was a narrow fringe that went from the ground to the top of the toes. That fringe permitted mankind to continue living, but only barely.

As if I were in a dream, I heard don Juan explaining that, to his knowledge, man was the only species that had the glowing coat of awareness outside that luminous cocoon. Therefore, he became easy prey for an awareness of a different order; such as the heavy awareness of the predator. He then made the most damaging statement he had made so far. He said that this narrow fringe of awareness was the epicenter of self-reflection where man was irremediably caught.

By playing on our self-reflection, which is the only point of awareness left to us, the predators create flares of awareness that they proceed to consume in a ruthless, predatory fashion. They give us inane problems that force those flares of awareness to rise, and in this manner they keep us alive in order for them to be fed with the energetic flare of our pseudo-concerns.

There must have been something in what don Juan was saying which was so devastating to me that at that point I actually got sick to my stomach. After a moment’s pause long enough for me to recover, I asked don Juan, « But why is it that the sorcerers of ancient Mexico and all sorcerers today, although they see the predators, don’t do anything about it? »

« There’s nothing that you and I can do about it, » don Juan said in a grave, sad voice. « All we can do is discipline ourselves to the point where they will not touch us. How can you ask your fellow men to go through those rigors of discipline? They’ll laugh and make fun of you; and the more aggressive ones will beat the shit out of you- and not so much because they don’t believe it. Down in the depths of every human being, there is an ancestral, visceral knowledge about the predators’ existence. »

My analytical mind swung back and forth like a yo-yo. It left me and came back, and left me and came back again. Whatever don Juan was proposing was preposterous, incredible. At the same time, it was a most reasonable thing; so simple. It explained every kind of human contradiction I could think of. But how could one have taken all this seriously? Don Juan was pushing me into the path of an avalanche that would take me down forever.

I felt another wave of a threatening sensation. The wave didn’t stem from me, yet it was attached to me. Don Juan was doing something to me, mysteriously positive and terribly negative at the same time. I sensed it as an attempt to cut a thin film that seemed to be glued to me. His eyes were fixed on mine in an unblinking stare. He moved his eyes away, and began to talk without looking at me anymore.

« Whenever doubts plague you to a dangerous point, » he said, « do something pragmatic about it. Turn off the light. Pierce the darkness; find out what you can see. » He got up to turn off the lights. I stopped him. « No, no, don Juan, » I said, « don’t turn off the lights. I’m doing okay. »

What I felt then was a most unusual, for me, fear of the darkness. The mere thought of it made me pant. I definitely knew something viscerally, but I wouldn’t dare touch it, or bring it to the surface, not in a million years! « You saw the fleeting shadows against the trees, » don Juan said, sitting back against his chair. « That’s pretty good. I’d like you to see them inside this room. You’re not seeing anything. You’re just merely catching fleeting images. You have enough energy for that. »

I feared that don Juan would get up anyway and turn off the lights, which he did. Two seconds later, I was screaming my head off. Not only did I catch a glimpse of those fleeting images, I heard them buzzing by my ears. Don Juan doubled up with laughter as he turned on the lights. « What a temperamental fellow! » he said. « A total disbeliever, on the one hand; and a total pragmatist on the other. You must arrange this internal fight, otherwise you’re going to swell up like a big toad and burst. »

Don Juan kept on pushing his barb deeper and deeper into me. « The sorcerers of ancient Mexico, » he said, « saw the predator. They called it the flyer because it leaps through the air. It is not a pretty sight. It is a big shadow, impenetrably dark, a black shadow that jumps through the air. Then, it lands flat on the ground. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were quite ill at ease with the idea of when it made its appearance on Earth. They reasoned that man must have been a complete being at one point, with stupendous insights and feats of awareness that are mythological legends nowadays. And then everything seems to disappear, and we have now a sedated man. »

I wanted to get angry and call him a paranoiac, but somehow the righteousness that was usually just underneath the surface of my being wasn’t there. Something in me was beyond the point of asking myself my favourite question: What if all that he said is true? At the moment he was talking to me that night, in my heart of hearts, I felt that all of what he was saying was true, but at the same time and with equal force, I felt that all that he was saying was absurdity itself.

« What are you saying, don Juan? » I asked feebly. My throat was constricted. I could hardly breathe. « What I’m saying is that what we have against us is not a simple predator. It is very smart and organized. It follows a methodical system to render us useless. Man, the magical being that he is destined to be, is no longer magical. He’s an average piece of meat. There are no more dreams for man but the dreams of an animal who is being raised to become a piece of meat: trite, conventional, imbecilic. »

Don Juan’s words were eliciting a strange, bodily reaction in me comparable to the sensation of nausea. It was as if I were going to get sick to my stomach again. But the nausea was coming from the bottom of my being, from the marrow of my bones. I convulsed involuntarily. Don Juan shook me by the shoulders forcefully. I felt my neck wobbling back and forth under the impact of his grip. The manoeuver calmed me down at once. I felt more in control.

« This predator, » don Juan said, « which, of course, is an inorganic being, is not altogether invisible to us as other inorganic beings are. I think as children we do see it, but we decide it’s so horrific that we don’t want to think about it. « Children, of course, could insist on focusing on the sight, but everybody else around them dissuades them from doing so. The only alternative left for mankind is discipline. Discipline is the only deterrent.

« But by discipline I don’t mean harsh routines. I don’t mean waking up every morning at five-thirty and throwing cold water on yourself until you’re blue. Sorcerers understand discipline as the capacity to face with serenity odds that are not included in our expectations. For sorcerers, discipline is an art; the art of facing infinity without flinching; not because they are strong and tough, but because they are filled with awe. »

« In what way would the sorcerers’ discipline be a deterrent to the flyers? » I asked. Don Juan scrutinized my face as if to discover any signs of my disbelief. He said, « Sorcerers say that discipline makes the glowing coat of awareness unpalatable to the flyer. « The result is that the predators become bewildered. An inedible glowing coat of awareness is not part of their cognition, I suppose. After being bewildered, they don’t have any recourse other than refraining from continuing their nefarious task.

« If the predators don’t eat our glowing coat of awareness for a while, it will keep on growing. Simplifying this matter to the extreme, I can say that sorcerers, by means of their discipline, push the predators away long enough to allow their glowing coat of awareness to grow beyond the level of the toes. Once it goes beyond the level of the toes, it grows back to its natural size.

« The sorcerers of ancient Mexico used to say that the glowing coat of awareness is like a tree. If it is not pruned, it grows to its natural size and volume. As awareness reaches levels higher than the toes, tremendous manoeuvers of perception become a matter of course. The grand trick of those sorcerers of ancient times, » don Juan continued, « was to burden the flyers’ mind with discipline.

« Sorcerers found out that if they taxed the flyers’ mind with inner silence, the foreign installation would flee, and give any one of the practitioners involved in this manoeuver the total certainty of the mind’s foreign origin. The foreign installation comes back, I assure you, but not as strong; and a process begins in which the fleeing of the flyers’ mind becomes routine until one day it flees permanently.

« That’s the day when you have to rely on your own devices which are nearly zero. A sad day indeed! There’s no one to tell you what to do. There’s no mind of foreign origin to dictate the imbecilities you’re accustomed to. My teacher, the nagual Julian, used to warn all his disciples, » don Juan continued, « that this was the toughest day in a sorcerer’s life for the real mind that belongs to us. The sum total of our experience after a lifetime of domination has been rendered shy, insecure, and shifty. Personally, I would say that the real battle of sorcerers begins at that moment. The rest is merely preparation. »

I became genuinely agitated. I wanted to know more, and yet a strange feeling in me clamoured for me to stop. It alluded to dark results and punishment, something like the wrath of God descending on me for tampering with something veiled by God himself. I made a supreme effort to allow my curiosity to win. I heard myself say, « What-what-what do you mean, by taxing the flyers’ mind? »

« Discipline taxes the foreign mind no end, » he replied. « So, through their discipline, sorcerers vanquish the foreign installation. » I was overwhelmed by his statements. I believed that don Juan was either certifiably insane or that he was telling me something so awesome that it froze everything in me. I noticed, however how quickly I rallied my energy to deny everything he had said. After an instant of panic, I began to laugh, as if don Juan had told me a joke. I even heard myself saying, « Don Juan, don Juan, you’re incorrigible! »

Don Juan seemed to understand everything I was experiencing. He shook his head from side to side, and raised his eyes to the heavens in a gesture of mock despair. He said, « I am so incorrigible, that I am going to give the flyers’ mind which you carry inside you one more jolt. I am going to reveal to you one of the most extraordinary secrets of sorcery. I am going to describe to you a finding that took sorcerers thousands of years to verify and consolidate. »

He looked at me, smiled maliciously, and said, « The flyers’ mind flees forever when a sorcerer succeeds in grabbing on to the vibrating force that holds us together as a conglomerate of energy fields. If a sorcerer maintains that pressure long enough, the flyers’ mind flees in defeat. And that’s exactly what you are going to do; hold on to the energy that binds you together. »

I had the most inexplicable reaction I could have imagined. Something in me actually shook, as if it had received a jolt. I entered into a state of unwarranted fear, which I immediately associated with my religious background. Don Juan looked at me from head to toe. « You are fearing the wrath of God, aren’t you? » he said. « Rest assured, that’s not your fear. It’s the flyers’ fear, because it knows that you will do exactly as I’m telling you. »

His words did not calm me at all. I felt worse. I was actually convulsing involuntarily, and I had no means to stop it. « Don’t worry, » don Juan said calmly. « I know for a fact that those attacks wear off very quickly. The flyer’s mind has no concentration whatsoever. » After a moment, everything stopped as don Juan had predicted. To say again that I was bewildered is a euphemism.

This was the first time in my life ever, with don Juan or alone, that I didn’t know whether I was coming or going. I wanted to get out of the chair and walk around, but I was deathly afraid. I was filled with rational assertions, and at the same time I was filled with an infantile fear. I began to breathe deeply as a cold perspiration covered my entire body. I had somehow unleashed on myself a most godawful sight: black, fleeting shadows jumping all around me wherever I turned.

I closed my eyes and rested my head on the arm of the stuffed chair. « I don’t know which way to turn, don Juan, » I said. « Tonight, you have really succeeded in getting me lost. » Don Juan said, « You’re being torn by an internal struggle. Down in the depths of you, you know that you are incapable of refusing the agreement that an indispensable part of you, your glowing coat of awareness, is going to serve as an incomprehensible source of nourishment to, naturally, incomprehensible entities. And another part of you will stand against this situation with all its might.

« The sorcerers’ revolution, » he continued, « is that they refuse to honour agreements in which they did not participate. Nobody ever asked me if I would consent to being eaten by beings of a different kind of awareness. My parents just brought me into this world to be food, like themselves, and that’s the end of the story. »

Don Juan stood up from his chair and stretched his arms and legs. « We have been sitting here for hours. It’s time to go into the house. I’m going to eat. Do you want to eat with me? » I declined. My stomach was in an uproar. « I think you’d better go to sleep, » he said. « The blitz has devastated you. » I didn’t need any further coaxing. I collapsed onto my bed, and fell asleep like the dead.

At home, as time went by, the idea of the flyers became one of the main fixations of my life. I got to the point where I felt that don Juan was absolutely right about them. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t discard his logic. The more I thought about it, and the more I talked to and observed myself, and my fellow men, the more intense the conviction that something was rendering us incapable of any activity or any interaction or any thought that didn’t have the self as its focal point.

My concern, as well as the concern of everyone I knew or talked to, was the self. Since I couldn’t find any explanation for such universal homogeneity, I believed that don Juan’s line of thought was the most appropriate way of elucidating the phenomenon. I went as deeply as I could into readings about myths and legends. In reading, I experienced something I had never felt before: Each of the books I read was an interpretation of myths and legends. In each one of those books, a homogeneous mind was palpable.

The styles differed, but the drive behind the words was homogeneously the same: Even though the theme was something as abstract as myths and legends, the authors always managed to insert statements about themselves. The homogeneous drive behind every one of those books was not the stated theme of the book. Instead, it was self-service. I had never felt this before.

I attributed my reaction to don Juan’s influence. The unavoidable question that I posed to myself was: Is he influencing me to see this, or is there really a foreign mind dictating everything we do? I lapsed, perforce, into denial again, and I went insanely from denial to acceptance to denial. Something in me knew that whatever don Juan was driving at was an energetic fact; but something equally important in me knew that all of that was guff.

The end result of my internal struggle was a sense of foreboding; the sense of something imminently dangerous coming at me. I made extensive anthropological inquiries into the subject of the flyers in other cultures, but I couldn’t find any references to them anywhere. Don Juan seemed to be the only source of information about this matter.

The next time I saw him, I instantly jumped to talk about the flyers. I said, « I have tried my best to be rational about this subject matter, but I can’t. There are moments when I fully agree with you about the predators. » « Focus your attention on the fleeting shadows that you actually see, » don Juan said with a smile.

I told don Juan that those fleeting shadows were going to be the end of my rational life. I saw them everywhere. Since I had left his house, I was incapable of going to sleep in the dark. To sleep with the lights on did not bother me at all. The moment I turned the lights off, however, everything around me began to jump. I never saw complete figures or shapes. All I saw were fleeting black shadows.

« The flyers’ mind has not left you, » don Juan said. « It has been seriously injured. It’s trying its best to rearrange its relationship with you. But something in you is severed forever. The flyer knows that. The real danger is that the flyers’ mind may win by getting you tired and forcing you to quit by playing the contradiction between what it says and what I say.

« You see, the flyers’ mind has no competitors, » don Juan continued. « When it proposes something, it agrees with its own proposition, and it makes you believe that you’ve done something of worth. The flyers’ mind will say to you that whatever Juan Matus is telling you is pure nonsense, and then the same mind will agree with its own proposition, ‘Yes, of course, it is nonsense,’ you will say. That’s the way they overcome us.

« The flyers are an essential part of the universe, » he went on, « and they must be taken as what they really are- awesome, monstrous. They are the means by which the universe tests us. We are energetic probes created by the universe, » he continued as if he were oblivious to my presence, « and it’s because we are possessors of energy that has awareness that we are the means by which the universe becomes aware of itself.

« The flyers are the implacable challengers. They cannot be taken as anything else. If we succeed in doing that, the universe allows us to continue. » I wanted don Juan to say more. But he said only, « The blitz ended the last time you were here. There’s only so much to be said about the flyers. » »

VALIS

From Wikipedia:

VALIS is a 1981 science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick. The title is an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System, Dick's gnostic vision of one aspect of God.

It is the first book in the incomplete VALIS trilogy of novels, followed by The Divine Invasion (1981). The planned third novel, The Owl in Daylight had not yet taken definite shape at the time of the author's death.

 VALIS is a story of a man, named Philip (same as the author), and his journey to find God with his alter-ego, Horselover Fat. Most of the story is a narrative that disguises a set of theological ideals established by Dick. The major subject of this narrative is spirituality, as both the protagonist, his alter-ego, and the author (who are all essentially one and the same) are ostensibly obsessed with several religions and philosophies, including Christianity, Taoism, Gnosticism, and even Jungian psychoanalysis. They are searching for a cure for what he believes is simultaneously both a personal and a cosmic wound.

Synopsis:

VALIS begins with the attempted suicide of Horselover Fat’s friend Gloria, offered in a standard third-person point of view. Almost immediately, however, a first-person narrator interrupts to declare, “I am Horselover Fat, and I am telling this in the third person to gain much-needed objectivity.” This first-person narrator, named Philip K. Dick, is for all intents and purposes identical to the author of the book. As a result of a mystical experience involving the Christian fish symbol and a beam of pink light, Fat is convinced that the world as he sees it—that is, California in 1974—is in fact an illusion laid over Imperial Rome. This illusion is the product of an evil entity opposed by VALIS, the Vast Active Living Intelligence System, which—depending on Fat’s mood and who he is talking to—is either an alien intelligence, an immensely sophisticated mechanism, or an incarnation of pure living information.

Halfway through the book, the character Philip K. Dick has a dream that convinces him that much of what Fat says, if not strictly true, is at least not crazy. Even though Fat proposes that he is a sort of superimposition of a man who lived during the time of Jesus Christ and that through this man benevolent aliens have begun to communicate with him, Dick begins to take him seriously enough to argue that what Fat is seeing as a divine being is in fact himself in the distant future. Shortly after this, the three (four) of them go to a movie called Valis, which includes an experience much like Fat’s pink-beam epiphany. Believing that the film has encoded a message to him, Fat goes looking for its maker, whose daughter is an incarnation of Sophia, or wisdom. In her presence Fat and Dick are healed and made whole. They become one again.

Sophia dies shortly after this, and Fat separates from Dick once again. Fat searches for a new savior he believes is about to be born into the world. He comes back with the words KING FELIX, which Dick then sees in a television commercial. This provokes Fat to go searching again, and Dick himself remains in front of the television, watching carefully for the next signal from VALIS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VALIS