The Manson Family (dir. Jim Van Bebber, 2003)

The notorious avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger once commented that he “always considered movies evil,” adding that “the day that cinema was invented was a black day for mankind.” Hyperbole aside, Anger’s assessment is undeniably prescient when one considers the staggering impact that the medium has had on the collective consciousness of Western civilization. Contemporary film not only allows us to experience volatile life and death scenarios in a manner that is entirely vicarious, but also manipulates our emotions to empathize with whatever characters are framed as charismatic and “on the side of righteousness,” silently disregarding the extent to which the latter qualifier has become increasingly relative. Jim Van Bebber’s The Manson Family represents a fist-swinging rebellion against the type of deliberately manipulative “training wheels” cinema that has long defined traditional narratives and the thinly-veiled condescension of disposable mainstream distractions.

Indeed, it is perhaps a large part of the bulletproof charm of The Manson Family that the film seems to unapologetically disregard all facets of tradition while simultaneously abandoning any semblance of restraint. Those with their fingers on the pulse of the underground have long been aware of its now legendary production trajectory: the final cut surfaced in 2003, 15 years after Van Bebber initiated production. Having intensely researched the film’s production history myself, it seems that Van Bebber and his disciples actually finished shooting around 1994, at which time the auteur was stuck between a rock and a hard place as distribution and the necessary post-production regimen for the monolith that the film had become eluded him. Whether time truly heals all wounds remains up for debate, but in the case of The Manson Family, Van Bebber’s grueling limbo period of nearly a decade finally lifted when British producers David Gregory and Carl Daft stepped in to deliver the finishing touches, not the least of which is a thundering Dolby 5.1 soundtrack that in itself warrants investing in quality surround sound speakers. “I wanted to create a symphony!” Van Bebber exclaimed, and that he did, with no small contribution by occult metal legend Phil Anselmo (Pantera, Down, Superjoint Ritual).

The finished product is pure firepower, the agonizing years and unwavering dedication that led up to its fruition shimmering through in every frame. Having had the honor to screen and introduce The Manson Family at the Detroit Underground Film Festival in July of 2012, I stand firmly behind my assertion at that time that it represents the epitome of underground. To behold an elaborate work of macabre art that was verifiably fueled only by passion and unshakable perseverance is a powerful boon to anyone that considers himself an initiate to the realm of transgressive art. A veritable fountain of inspiration.

The film is shot in a manner that is at once violently chaotic yet coherent, a balance that many aspiring auteurs consistently fail to achieve. I hesitate to belabor over the myriad plot points as I honestly believe that this is a film that best serves the viewer who approaches it blindly and with faith. With that said, one of Van Bebber’s most prominent creative choices in crafting the narrative was to shift the focus from Charles Manson himself to his giddily deluded “family” members, something which had yet to be done in any of the menagerie of low rent Manson films that had come before. The acting is uniformly prime, especially considering that much of the cast consisted of friends and theatre students at Van Bebber’s alma mater, Wright State University in Ohio.

A subplot weaves in and out of the Manson narrative, depicting nihilistic youth in the mid 90s and utilizing an aesthetic that is clearly influenced by the grimey tableaus of New York filmmaker Richard Kern. These sequences heighten the viewer’s sense of foreboding while doubling down on the explicitly conveyed “death trip” sensation of the proceedings.

To say that the film is grisly would be an understatement, with several scenes bordering on exploitation. However, the subject matter is treated with such seriousness and the footage is presented in such a hyperreal manner that I feel it fits more comfortably under the banner of “arthouse.”

The Manson Family is a rare film in that it provides the viewer with a genuine emotional experience in which dated rulebook structures are abandoned for the sake of a harrowing nightmare in which any form of redemption is off the table. Despite the inevitable whining chorus from politically-correct hack critics, the film is indisputably valid and a literal embodiment of an aesthetic and worldview inherent to the underground which forces the viewer to confront himself and question the utility of film as a medium for communicating dormant but nevertheless real dimensions of the human psyche.

Here And Now

In order to arrive at the essential truth of Being, I must begin with my immediate perception. Phenomenological experience. Anything that cannot be arrived at through my perception of the present moment must be discarded and rendered irrelevant. I am a 28 year old male homo sapien sitting on a couch in an apartment in Michigan in the United States on the planet Earth pressing keys on his laptop computer with his fingers in order to write in a word processing program that is installed on said computer. My perception of this state of affairs is arrived at through my body’s senses: I see the computer in front of me on the coffee table in the room that I am in, I feel the couch underneath me and the carpet beneath my feet and the computer keys on my fingers, I hear the humming of the refrigerator and my three cats running around the apartment. I do not smell anything at the moment. I have a pouch of tobacco between my lower lip and the gums underneath my bottom row of teeth. My thoughts are in English as this is the only language that I have ever learned. Where are my thoughts located? They can not be seen or heard or felt, only experienced as thoughts. My thoughts at any given moment are a reaction to all present stimuli. I have also begun to suspect that there is no such thing as “willing” any particular action. All actions performed by a body are reactive and therefore determined; the sensation or experience of willing an action is merely the type of experience of thought that results from the action taking place.

Society is maintained by our collective agreement to uphold a litany of illusions, abstractions, and outright falsehoods. The truth of the matter is that none of us really know anything. We are living on a planet that we have agreed to call Earth that is floating in outer space. From what we can tell, Earth is the only planet that has conscious life forms. However, our view of space is extremely limited. We can only see so far – not very far at all, in fact. We are born and we spend our lives surviving so that we may reproduce and repeat the cycle. We reproduce through the act of sexual intercourse. Our sex drive exists solely for the purpose of reproduction. But why do we want to reproduce? Why should life continue to exist? What purpose does it serve other than to continually propagate itself? We invent concepts of good and evil, which are directly connected to our survival: that which supports one’s survival is good and that which threatens it is bad. We suffer endlessly so that we can survive. We work in order to maintain our society and in exchange for currency which allows to purchase the resources that are necessary for our survival. That which threatens our survival causes us to experience pain (injury, illness, isolation). That which encourages our survival feels good (sex, accrual of resources). Science observes patterns in the natural world but it can never answer why any of this is happening.

The Second Coming Vol. 1 (dir. Richard Wolstencroft, 2016)

There’s a dearth of films that deal with the occult in a serious or informed manner, hence my excitement when I became aware that a new film by Australian director Richard Wolstencroft entitled The Second Coming Vol. 1 and described by him as both a “vision” and a “cinematic invocation of the apocalypse” had entered post-production. I initially discovered Wolstencroft through his 1999 film Pearls Before Swine, which plays like a heady blend of Kubrick and David Mamet by way of Martin Heidegger. Billed by Wolstencroft as an ode to “transcendental fascism” and starring underground noise musician and provocateur Boyd Rice, Pearls juxtaposes scenes of brutal violence with profound philosophical exposition and a twisted sense of humor. One critic described the film as “A Clockwork Orange for the new millennium.” Due to its controversial nature, Pearls Before Swine failed to gain acceptance into the Melbourne International Film Festival; undeterred, Wolstencroft founded his own Melbourne Underground Film Festival, or MUFF, at which to screen the film and others of its kind in the year 2000. The festival continues to this day, and was a primary inspiration for myself and one of my film school classmates to found our own Detroit Underground Film Festival in 2012, which was unfortunately discontinued after its sophomore year in 2013. We rounded out the third night of the 2012 DUFF with a Wolstencroft double feature, screening both Pearls Before Swine and the director’s 2010 film adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel The Beautiful and Damned, which Wolstencroft dedicated to author Bret Easton Ellis. Both films were well-received by our audience. The Second Coming Vol. 1 comes on the heels of Wolstencroft’s 2013 documentary The Last Days Of Joe Blow, which explores the life and work of Michael Tierney (nephew of the eccentric character actor Lawrence Tierney, the latter most commonly known for having played Joe in Reservoir Dogs and Elaine’s dad in Seinfeld), an actor who enters and eventually leaves the porn industry, using the alias “Joe Blow.” Tierney is also featured prominently in The Second Coming Vol. 1, which I will now get down to the business of reviewing.

The film is based on and named after the poem “The Second Coming” by Irish mystical poet William Butler Yeats. Indeed, Wolstencroft goes as far as to describe the work as a collaboration between himself and the long-deceased poet. Individual lines of the poem are interspersed throughout the title sequence (featuring archival footage of warfare, natural disasters, and other assorted forms of destruction) and used to divide the three sections of the film. Widely considered to be one of the best poets of the twentieth century, Yeats is a perfect subject for Wolstencroft given the former’s involvement with the occult (at one point he was a member of The Hermetic Order Of The Golden Dawn, alongside magicians such as Aleister Crowley and Arthur Edward Waite) and fascism (Yeats was affiliated with the Irish Blueshirts). Certain characters in The Second Coming are based on those from Yeats’ poetry, such as Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne, both of whom frequently appear throughout his oeuvre.

Part one of the film begins with the Michael Robartes character (played by the above-mentioned Michael Tierney aka Joe Blow) wandering through a barren landscape, along train tracks, and attempting to hitchhike. Frustrated, he calls out to God asking for a sign, immediately after which he stumbles upon a drain that he interprets as a magick circle. He then sets up a miniature baphomet statue and reads a passage from the book 777 by Aleister Crowley, thereby performing a ritual invocation of the baphomet to bring on the second coming. Robartes is then seen exploring the city of Bangkok in Thailand and engaging in sexual escapades (likely of the magickal variety given the character’s actions up to this point) with the local prostitutes. He meets with a shady gentleman who sells him various occult artifacts, including the baphomet statue that he had used in the aforementioned ritual, suggesting that the narrative has gone backwards in time. All of this footage was shot on location, and the multitude of exotic locations in the film, from the legendary Hanging Rock in Australia to Thailand to Denver, Colorado and Los Angeles, lend it a sense of breadth and expansiveness. It is here in Thailand that the Owen Aherne character (played by Wolstencroft, performing under his alias “Richard Masters”), a clearly malicious entity, is first introduced. Aherne meets with Robartes and informs him that he is aware of the latter’s intention to perform the “777 ritual” that will bring forth the second coming. After a brief interlude in which a young woman (played by up and coming Australian film actress Kristen Condon) wanders around Hanging Rock in Victoria, Australia (a landmark brimming with mythology), appearing to be in a sort of trance state, part two commences.

The narrative shifts perspective as Robartes meets up with Gene Ferry (the controversial novelist Gene Gregorits is essentially playing himself in this role) in Los Angeles.  Gene is the protagonist of the second act, and his first order of business is to visit his father (played by porn industry legend William Margold) and propose his theory that Charles Manson put a black curse on mankind through the murders committed by his followers in 1969. A whole assortment of underground counterculture icons hover within Gene’s orbit, among them actress and singer Giddle Partridge, documentary filmmaker Larry Wessel (who hilariously mocks Gene’s novel Dog Days by referring to it as “dog balls”), and the now deceased punk rock legend Kim Fowley in what is his last appearance on film. Gene’s “research” (which consists largely of drinking copious amounts of alcohol and doing cocaine) culminates in a visit to Spahn Ranch, the former home of Charles Manson and his “family”, facilitated by Owen Aherne, leading to a startling and haunting ending that would be a crime to spoil here and marking the beginning of part three.

Boyd Rice, the aforementioned industrial music pioneer, social Darwinist, and occult researcher appears in what is my favorite sequence of the film, playing a role that is, at least spiritually, a continuation of his character from Wolstencroft’s Pearls Before Swine. In The Second Coming Boyd’s character is named Bill Cuchulainn and is a Dick Cheney-esque political villain; Robartes and Aherne are both in his employ. The sequence begins with several beautiful shots of Boyd and his wife Karen Buchbinder walking around snow-covered Denver, Colorado, both clad in militaristic black clothing as martial drums pound in the background. Boyd recites some of his own free-verse poetry before engaging in an insightful discussion of United States politics with Aherne. He then takes a call in which he orders a bombing, hilariously clarifying to his underling that he doesn’t care if he hits “a mosque, a McDonalds, or The Southern Poverty Law Center.”

After a series of ominous shots outside of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the third and final protagonist (played by occultist and musician Jerome Alexandre of the band Deadcuts) appears, performing a ritual with his partner (played by English music journalist Nina Antonia), surrounded by the writings of Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey. The two of them proceed to study dark energy and other topics relating to quantum physics while discussing their respective experiences with the supernatural. The centerpiece of this act is an improvised jam session between Jerome and troubled British musician Pete Doherty, best known as the frontman of the bands The Libertines and Babyshambles and a former lover of model Kate Moss.

The Second Coming Vol. 1 is bursting at the seams with icons of the counterculture and underground. As you can see, much of my review consists of identifying the actors employed. For those that recognize the players involved, or are interested in discovering some truly unique artists and thinkers that reside outside of the mainstream, the film is a gift that keeps on giving, and this is not to mention the wealth of occult secrets contained within. Having come together over the course of five years, the passion, dedicated and thorough research (Wolstencroft provides a bibliography of books related to Yeats that he consulted while developing the film in the credits), and genuine occult experimentation that went into the production shine through luminously, creating a hypnotic and emotionally resonant effect for the viewer. Drawing on the tradition of cinema vérité while at the same time employing his own unique style, Wolstencroft has crafted a contemporary epic that will come as a breath of fresh air to those who are looking for something dark, unorthodox, and legitimately new.

The Second Coming Vol. 1 is currently playing festivals. A dvd will be released in 2017, along with The Second Coming Vol. 2, which will expand upon the narrative threads introduced in this initial volume.

TO THE NEW DAWN!

 

 

Exteriorization of the Senses

[The following article was originally posted to my former blog, Left-Hand Path, in March of 2011. Though my understanding of astral projection and out of body experiences has evolved since that time, I still feel that it is worth sharing as I (perhaps inadvertently) touched upon several important concepts that have shaped my thinking in the years since.]

I first became aware of the concept of “exteriorization” while reading August Strindberg’s Inferno, an autobiographical novel which details the playwright’s involvement with the occult.  During a bout of what he describes as “perverted affection,” Strindberg longs to be united with his wife (with whom he is going through a divorce) and their child.  He decides that the best way to attain this goal is to perform a black magick ritual in which he curses the child to fall ill.  “Small children are always falling ill for one reason or another,” he says.

Shortly afterward, Strindberg is informed by letter that his children from a different marriage have been admitted to the hospital.  As a cautionary tale to the reader, he says the following:

In the spring, just at the time when I was so much oppressed by my own reverses as well as those of my companion, I had a letter from the children of my first marriage, telling me that they had been seriously ill and had had to go to hospital.  When I compared the date they mentioned with the date of my experiment in bewitchment I was seized with horror.  By playing with those mysterious powers, out of pure folly I had given the reins to my evil desires, but they, guided by the hand of the Unseen, had struck at my own heart.

I am not trying to excuse myself.  I am only asking the reader to to bear these facts in mind, should he ever be tempted to practise magic, particularly the kind known as bewitchment, or witchcraft in the true sense of the word.  De Rochas has shown this to be a reality.

Strindberg is referring to the French parapsychologist, Albert de Rochas, whose seminal work The Exteriorisation of Sensibility is cited in the book as a footnote at the end of the second paragraph quoted above.  Despite a prolific career in the French military (at one point rising to the rank of battalion commander), de Rochas is most well known for his study of parapsychology and the occult, having dedicated his life to an attempt to interpret occult phenomena through the lens of empiricism.  Among the concepts that de Rochas explored were hypnosis, telekinesis, reincarnation, past life regression, and the effect of music on human emotions.

It was through working with patients as a hypnotist that de Rochas documented the phenomenon he first described as “externalisation of sensibility,” meaning that the subject is able to sense stimuli at a distance, such as feeling pain if a certain spot is pinched away from the body.

It’s interesting to note that one of the core concepts of the Church of Scientology is a practice known as “exteriorization,” during which a human subject functions independently of the physical body as a thetan (which they define as “an aware of awareness unit”).  Despite the bizarre language, this concept seems to be consistent with de Rochas’ findings.

The truth is that throughout all of history, occultists have realized that within the human animal, there exists an innate ability to “sense” objects and dimensions outside of the physical body.  Our technology has developed to the point where this phenomenon can now be induced immediately through the use of chemical agents.  That our senses expand far beyond the limits of our earthbound bodies is quite obvious, as the phenomenon of exteriorization is an intrinsic part of the human experience, but it is difficult to describe such events in words, as experiences outside of the body are far removed from the language of everyday reality, and therefore often go unnoticed.

If you get into these spaces at all, you must forget about them when you come back.  You must forget you’re omnipotent and omniscient and take the game seriously so you’ll engage in sex, have children, and participate in the whole human scenario.  When you come back from a deep LSD trip or a K trip — or coma or psychosis — there’s always this extraterrestrial feeling.  You have to read the directions in the glove compartment so you can run the human vehicle once more.  After I first took acid in the tank and traveled to distant dimensions, I cried when I came back and found myself trapped in a body.  I didn’t even know whose body it was at first.  It was the sadness of reentry.

– Dr. John C. Lilly

In waking life, one’s immediate consciousness seems to arise primarily through the senses of the physical body (of which we now know there are far more than 5).  Typically, we think of these senses as being separate, but in reality, we are experiencing, or “sensing,” each of our physical and psychic senses simultaneously, coming together as a unified whole in the form of the present moment.

However, few would argue that the vessel through which one acts in the dream world (astral plane) is of the same manner as the biologically determined animal body in which he is imprisoned during his waking life.  If not, then what is the nature of said astral body, and what is its relation to the concept of exteriorization?

In dreams, one often survives events that would immediately result in death during waking consciousness.  Likewise, one often finds himself performing feats that defy the physical laws he had known previously.  Nevertheless, this does not suggest that the astral plane is necessarily “non-physical.”  Consciousness of astral realms (an exteriorization of the senses from our “physical” bodies, attained through dream and trance states) appears to be a mode of sensory perception different from the physical universe we identify with during our waking consciousness only in the sense of modified physical laws, rather than the absence of such.

We must consider the implications of unconscious psychic material within this framework.  The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud was the first to elaborate on the concept of the “unconscious mind,” which he said consists of active psychic material which is not permitted into our consciousness for one reason or another.  To put it simply, the unconscious is anything that one is not consciously aware of at any given moment.  The vast majority of our psychic activity resides within the unconscious.  According to Freud, the physical laws of the universes one experiences through dream states are arranged in such a way that the unconscious is able to communicate symbolically with the conscious mind (and occasionally have direct communion).

Having determined that our immediate consciousness of the present moment is the totality of our perpetually active physical and psychic senses, we see that this has tremendous implications as to the scope of the unconscious.  If, as we have seen, our senses are able to “exteriorize” themselves beyond our physical bodies and well into the myriad universes that manifest on the astral plane, it follows that the unconscious and the depth of one’s perception are boundless and potentially infinite.

This is an essential experience of any mystical realization.  You die to your flesh and are born into your spirit.  You identify with the consciousness and life of which your body is but the vehicle.  You die to the vehicle and become identified in your consciousness with that of which the vehicle is but the carrier.  That is the God.  Behind all these manifestations is the one radiance, which shines through all things.

– Joseph Campbell

The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

In the following video (recorded in October 2014), I discuss The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, a massive collection of notes and essays that the author compiled in the wake of a religious experience that he underwent in 1974:

An Ode To The Overcast Sky

I have grown to absolutely loathe the sunlight. I don’t know what it is exactly, but to my eyes, the aesthetics created by the sunlight in the area that I live are deplorable. Perhaps it is that all the hideousness and flaws of an industrialized nation are exposed to a greater extent under the light of the sun while an overcast sky downplays these foul aberrations, in the same way that the dim lighting scheme of my room conveniently serves to obscure the numerous stains on the carpet (courtesy of its former tenant). However, this is not a sufficient explanation. I prefer dim lighting purely as an aesthetic preference, regardless of stains or gaudy corporate eyesores, and a cloudy, overcast sky seems to be nature’s equivalent of this particular scheme. When I wake up and am greeted with such a pale, grey atmosphere outside my window, I immediately feel more content and at ease. In fact, I feel relieved. Relieved that I don’t have to spend the daytime hours under the oppressive glow of that loathsome, reprehensible sun.

Many people apparently love the summer, considering it their favorite season and eagerly awaiting its arrival all year long. In my mind, the popularity of summer is in fact evidence of its essential mediocrity. Summer is indeed the most democratic of all seasons, and therefore the most unrefined. You’ll notice that as soon as the weather begins to warm towards the end of spring, the proles who had been hiding away all winter begin flooding the streets like roaches. The sun-drenched summertime allows access to everyone as warm, moderate weather requires no resilience of any kind. Winter of course is the exact opposite and its harsh cold serves admirably as a sort of quality filter for the types of people that venture out into public during these months. One will predictably observe that those who are predisposed to withstand or even enjoy the winter climate are often of a higher stock than the detritus drawn out by the tacky sunshine of summertime.

There are of course those who will protest that grey skies are “gloomy,” and I would argue that this is either incorrect or that perhaps these naysayers are wrong in thinking of “gloom” as an inherently negative characteristic. For me, a grey sky creates a novel atmosphere and establishes a palpable air of mystery not unlike that felt under particularly luminescent moonlight. This type of setting inspires reflection and awakens the creative impulse. For those of a certain temperament, a dark and even vaguely ominous atmosphere is greatly preferable to the boring populism of sunshine and blue skies. To those poets and dreamers, it is the latter that is insufferably dreary.

Low Magick

As I understand it, “low magick” is magick that is performed for the purpose of affecting change in the physical world in order to achieve one’s goals. It is magick performed for personal gain, in other words, at least to the extent that the “gain” relates to the material world. It could also be called “egoic magick.” Low magick can be utilized for the purpose of attracting a particular partner or making one’s self more attractive in general, financial gain, physical fitness, sexual ability, artistic ability, creativity, eloquence, health, longevity; anything that relates to that which occurs on earth. This is diametrically opposed to “high magick,” the purpose of which is to transcend the physical realm and attain spiritual union with the Divine Source of All Being.

Given that my ego is fully intact and I identify with a particular physical body while living on this planet, low magick is naturally quite useful for me. I believe that I have been performing magick all of my life in the sense that it is understood as “causing change in conformity with the will.” However, I have found that much of what can be considered “low magick” is able to be performed without any type of formal ritual. It has always been my experience that if one has a particular goal in mind, there are specific steps that can be taken toward realizing that goal. The intensity of one’s focus and effort will determine the speed and efficacy with which he will be able to do so. Of course, spiritual practices such as meditation and the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram dramatically sharpen one’s focus and are therefore greatly useful as a supplement to earthly pursuits. Vanity seems to be the driving force behind many of these endeavors, but is that necessarily a bad thing?

Determinism and The Search For Meaning

I have always been reluctant to declare the truth of hard determinism but the more serious thought that I give to the issue the harder it becomes to deny. Determinism seems most apparent to me when reflecting on my past and considering the manner in which my life has unfolded. I allow for the concession that even if humans do not have free will in the grand scheme of things our default mode of consciousness is our perception of the sensations of an individual organism and the identification with such and entails at least an elaborate “illusion” of free will which is basically equivalent to the theoretical “real thing” (which is an impossibility). It is becoming increasingly clear to me that even that illusory free will through which I enact my daily activities and write down my thoughts in the manner such as I am presently must be completely and totally determined. In the face of the countless number of forces (both internal and external) that I am at the mercy of it would be absurd to imagine that I possess some indefinable “separate” faculty by which I am able to freely make choices of my own will. It is without question that my individual identity is not real in any sense so of course this applies to the choices and decisions made within and through that framework.

Either I am one of a great many humans in the midst of the sea of confusion and dysfunction that is this planet or I am singularly experiencing a vast illusion of staggering complexity. For some reason I have been unusually conscious of the inherent meaningless of my earthly endeavors as of late. Given my firm decision to neither marry nor procreate, any romantic or sexual experiences that I seek out would ultimately be for the purpose of fleeting pleasure, a manner of which I have experienced to a great degree of intensity several times in the past. It is obvious that such pursuits could never possibly lead to any lasting fulfillment (and this would be the case even if I were to reproduce, as that too is merely an end in itself), so basically my life between birth and death amounts to an endless attempt to find novel distractions after my basic survival needs are met. This is not entirely bleak as there are many aspects of life in this current society that I do enjoy but I am nevertheless left wanting for a sense of purpose. It seems that the only things I do that have any real meaning are my various spiritual and magickal pursuits which all entail, in their essence, a deliberate attempt to transcend my individual identity and this earthly realm to that which is beyond my current understanding. “We’re here to go,” as William S. Burroughs once said.

Mission Statement

I aspire to lift the veil. Not in the fleeting sense of a psychedelic experience wherein the truth is briefly glimpsed and then promptly forgotten once the effects of the chemical wear off. Not in the sense of a revelatory dream that remains forever inaccessible to the waking mind. No, I wish to permanently transcend this world and this body and become one with the truth. This is my life’s work. I was not made for impermanent things. Ironically enough, I understand intellectually that I am in fact already there and it is not possible that the present moment could be separate from the Eternal Source of All Being, but yet I cannot help but feel that there must be some manner in which this truth can be fully realized and internalized so that it is not merely something which I must continually remind myself but is rather the immediate and ever-present totality of my experiential awareness.

What is my ultimate purpose in seeking to explore my subconscious mind? The subconscious is literally “that which is below consciousness,” so I am seeking parts of my mind or consciousness which are not immediately present in my everyday experience of the world. But why? This impulse to “pierce the veil” feels just as natural as survival. I wish to see what lies beyond the banality of consensus reality and use that knowledge to benefit myself and others. For as long as I can remember, even in childhood, I have been aware that there is more to reality than most people seem to believe or is immediately evident to my senses in a normal everyday context. While the religion of my childhood provided some answers, I had not yet had the experiences that were necessary for me to understand these answers as truth. And that is what lies at the heart of this seeking: experience. I am the type of person who is constantly seeking novel experiences, whether they be in the form of art, insights, or ideas. I trust in my own subjective experience above all else as it is the only thing that I can directly verify. I have understood for a long time now that I can never confirm the conscious experience of others, and though I do believe that each body has a subjective experience as is generated by its neural circuitry, my immediate perception is the only reality I have ever known, at least since I have identified with this particular body. None of this fully answers my question of why I seek to know that which is beyond ordinary consciousness and to obtain occult knowledge, and that may be because I do not have a precise answer as of yet. The impulse, however, is unmistakable, and I trust it and I choose to follow it. This is who I am and to pursue my interests in this regard feels as natural as breathing.

Dreams and The Unconscious

Dreams have utterly fascinated me for as long as I can remember. To this day I am proud of the fact that I read Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams when I was only 17 years old. I have been blessed with the gift of incredibly vivid and immersive dreams. On several occasions I have become lucid while dreaming though never intentionally. I would like to develop the ability to trigger lucid dreams at will as this would undoubtedly allow for a greater range of subconscious exploration. That the brain is able to construct entire realities that are completely realistic and believable to the one experiencing them is truly one of the wonders of the human experience. As many philosophers have noted, the temporal nature of the dream experience calls into question the extent to which one’s “waking life” can be considered real. Since all of us experience complex realities that prove to be mere mental constructs on an almost nightly basis, how are we to know for sure that our “waking lives” are not of the same nature? I’ve often wondered if others experience their dreams as vividly as I do because it seems that if they did the topic would be discussed far more often. How can one experience a highly vivid dream and not be totally mesmerized by it? I suspect that dreams are so completely at odds with the consensus reality that most people choose to forget (or repress, rather) these nighttime journeys immediately upon waking.

To my mind, one of the most important questions is to what extent dreams are “real?” Also, are there degrees of reality and if so how do dreams compare to what I describe as my “waking life?” What is meant by “real” in the first place?

The illusory nature of the ego has been emphasized by several mystics and religious philosophers throughout history, but it is only as of late that I have personally been able to internalize and occasionally have direct experience of its truth. For instance, at this moment, there is an office, there is a desk and a chair, there is a computer on the desk and a young adult human male seated in the chair. The human is typing on the computer. Clearly there is no “self” involved in any of this. The human has a complex brain that allows it to experience sense perceptions including a sense of individual identity, but its immediate perception is merely what emanates from the natural functions of its living body. It experiences thoughts but these thoughts are not “real” in any tangible sense. They cannot be seen or felt or heard or experienced outside of the consciousness of the human in question. These thoughts are almost always in a human’s native language, in this case English. It is humbling to consider that to the majority of people on this planet, the English language is heard only as incoherent sounds, in the same indecipherable manner that the English-speaking human hears other languages in which he is not learned. But if thoughts are not real, then what are they exactly? What is the substance of thought? As I stated above it is evident that thoughts have no substance which can be identified with any traditional human senses, but they are nonetheless experienced by the mind (which I also believe to be a fiction). If selfhood is an illusion and phenomenological experience is merely the organic body’s conditioned responses to its immediate environment, then thought is likely an evolved mental process which serves to facilitate such responses, much in the same way that the pleasure derived from the sexual act serves as an incentive for reproduction, though not exactly.

As I have mentioned before, there is no time during which the absence of self is as abundantly clear as it is during dreamless sleep. Indeed, dreamless sleep is the complete absence of any sort of experience, one of the few known physiological states through which one can abstractly conceptualize nothingness. One has the experience of getting into bed, closing his eyes, and gradually becoming more tired and relaxed. His experience then resumes without any identifiable break at the moment that he wakes up in the same bed, though he is able to conclude that some amount of time has passed during which his body was sleeping. Is such a complete absence of experience possible for a living body or is one in fact dreaming every single time that his body sleeps and is that which he has traditionally thought of as “dreamless sleep” simply an occasion on which he has no memory of the dreams that he nevertheless did experience as it would be impossible for him not to have? This line of questioning leads us straight into another dilemma, however. “If a tree falls in the woods…” You know the drill. If one’s conscious experience resumes seamlessly at the moment of waking after laying down to sleep, and there is no memory of any dream state in between, it would be an unfounded assumption to suggest that there was any experience in between. With this in mind, there exists the possibility that by training one’s memory and strengthening dream recall so that it is more consistent, one can essentially expand the scope of his consciousness and uncover aspects of reality that were previously hidden.

Given that my “self,” my ego, my sense of being a unique individual is an illusion and not real, then my true identity is “life,” the force that animates all living beings. It is tempting at this point to say that I am everyone else (and many have made this mistake) but that would be to forget that there is no “I” or “me” to be anyone else in the first place. There is only life, and it is eternal and self-existent and unbound by the limits of space or time. Space and time can only occur within the confines of human perception; these measurements are imposed on reality, once again most likely as a survival mechanism like the “ego” itself. One follows from the other. Individual identity, space, and time, are all limits. LIFE is limitless. What then is the scope of the unconscious? I pose this question as an individual navigating the world through my immediate conscious perception of this body and its environment. I have always thought of the unconscious within the traditional Freudian framework; that it consists of the individual’s thoughts and psychic processes which are not immediately available to or present in consciousness as experienced through the lens of the ego. But is the unconscious limited to content related to the individual? In light of everything I have written up to this point it is blatantly obvious that it is of course NOT limited in this sense or in any other. Jung proposed the concept of the collective unconscious which is shared by all humans on this planet and is made up of various archetypes and symbols and instincts/impulses, among other things. Let’s define the unconscious as simply “that which is not conscious.” The process of preparing and eating food is one that I perform at least semi-consciously while the flow of blood through my circulatory system is of course something I have no control over; it occurs automatically. The same applies to the growth of my fingernails and hair and many of my body’s other natural functions. These latter processes occur within the domain of the unconscious. The same life force that causes my hair to grow causes dogs’ hair to grow and the blood to flow through the veins of all the living citizens of China and all of the other countries of the world.