Lately, I've been diving into podcasts on fringe topics I might have previously ignored, not necessarily as research, but as entertainment to pass those long hours.
It can be interesting to explore modes of thinking you may not agree with or even relate to, because you can often learn about deeper currents at work in the nooks and crannies of the Collective Unconscious.
Yesterday, I was checking out some podcasts on the phenomenon/mythos known as "Black Eyed Children." My normality bias would generally have me file the BEKs in with Slenderman and other post-prosperity icons of the New American Nightmare, so I was surprised to hear there's been some extensive research on the alleged phenomenon.
I also found one of the defining characteristics of the phenomenon compelling; that these strange children-- who some theorize are human/alien hybrids, others identify as interdimensional demons-- usually show up knocking at your door and asking to come inside. As with the old vampire stories they need permission to enter your home. The lore goes a bit soft when dealing with stories of kids who are invited in, but apparently nothing good comes of it.
I haven't done enough research on the BEKs to decide whether I believe it's simple urban legend or genuine paranormal phenomena (the kind that people scoff at until it happens to them) but I was reminded of my late night encounter with a numinous intruder back in 2010.
Actually, not my own so much as a very similar encounter a man in England had back in the late 70s, an event I read about in a Jenny Randles book I bought sometime after my own face-off with the weird (I discussed all this on Mike Clelland's podcast back in 2011). Whereas the strangeness of the encounter instilled an abundance of caution on my part,
Yesterday, I was checking out some podcasts on the phenomenon/mythos known as "Black Eyed Children." My normality bias would generally have me file the BEKs in with Slenderman and other post-prosperity icons of the New American Nightmare, so I was surprised to hear there's been some extensive research on the alleged phenomenon.
I also found one of the defining characteristics of the phenomenon compelling; that these strange children-- who some theorize are human/alien hybrids, others identify as interdimensional demons-- usually show up knocking at your door and asking to come inside. As with the old vampire stories they need permission to enter your home. The lore goes a bit soft when dealing with stories of kids who are invited in, but apparently nothing good comes of it.
I haven't done enough research on the BEKs to decide whether I believe it's simple urban legend or genuine paranormal phenomena (the kind that people scoff at until it happens to them) but I was reminded of my late night encounter with a numinous intruder back in 2010.
Actually, not my own so much as a very similar encounter a man in England had back in the late 70s, an event I read about in a Jenny Randles book I bought sometime after my own face-off with the weird (I discussed all this on Mike Clelland's podcast back in 2011). Whereas the strangeness of the encounter instilled an abundance of caution on my part,
It inspired curiosity in the poor Englishman. Unfortunately, he would soon show symptoms of radiation poisoning following his entity encounter, symptoms that led to a fatal bout of cancer not long after.
I was thinking about all this while having some email discussions with a podcast host who many of you might be familiar with. We were discussing possible topics for a rising of the Secret Sun on his show and the topic of The Nine came up.
I knew that I'd be asked who and what I believed The Nine actually were and given some of the research I've been doing into psychedelic research, the ancient Mysteries and related topics, I've come to believe that The Nine are some kind of otherdimensional entities that the Round Table group encountered during their balls-trippin', mind-bending "seances" back in the early 50s. That in fact these beings appeared to an earlier group of occultists connected to the whole Jack Parsons/Marjorie Cameron* circle in California.
What's that Kenneth Grant line? "Jack Parsons opened a door and something flew in?" That was very probably The Nine.
What did The Nine bring to those who answered when they came knocking? In the case of Andrija Puharich and Dick Price, not much good. In other cases the results are more uncertain. But the usual explanations about the Nine- usually that of the psyop variety-- really don't stand up to serious scrutiny when you look at the secretiveness, elitism and devotion attached to this group.
The hoax explanation doesn't really wash, given its longevity. A serious look at this group seems to reveal that The Nine had a grip on some fairly influential people, for reasons that are at best obscure.
Certainly The Nine's profile is pretty low (to say the least) these days, but it could well be that they've simply gone back underground, as they were for 25 years following the Round Table workings. It may well be that these entities have a much different concept of time than we do.
All of this supposition about the nature of The Nine resurfaced following a recent rewatch of DMT: The Spirit Molecule and some reading on Strassman's DMT trials. To be honest, I was a bit alarmed with this rewatch, being more familiar not only with the ancient Mystery traditions the talking heads in the film are constantly stumbling over (every goal of DMT research laid out in the film was already codified in the Mystery traditions) but also more keenly aware of the consequences of the negative aspects of the trials that the film so irresponsibly papers over.
Strassman ended the trials in part because he felt he was opening doors that were better left closed. Here we see the flaw in New Age optimism, that every "higher power" or otherdimensional creature is going to have your best interests at heart. Strassman's own research conclusively proved that was not so.
Increasingly, his subjects began to encounter malignant beings, some described as "alien insects" and experience bad trips. Strassman:
And we all know how that turned out.
For myself, I avoided DMT after some friends had profoundly negative experiences with it back in the 80s. One of these was very badly shaken by her encounter, so much so that she refused to even talk about it.
But back to those entities; when one person encounters an alien insect, it's a good chance it's a hallucination. When several people, under controlled experimental conditions, encounter these entities there's a good chance those entities exist somewhere outside our imagination.† Terence McKenna, another DMT evangelist, named these beings "machine elves" or some variation thereof, a term veering close to Lilly's paranoid Solid State Intelligence. Not very comforting precedent here.
Where DMT: The Spirit Molecule fails and where the more noble ancient Mysteries succeeded is that the former offers no moral framework in preparation for the psychonaut, whereas the Mysteries were extremely rigorous in instill positive moral guidance in the initiate. This served to protect the initiate from anxiety and fear, emotions that are often express tickets to a bad trip.
The Mithraic Mysteries- with their ordeals and tests, were especially demanding in this regard. And we know from their literature that their trips brought them to some pretty wild destinations.
You don't even need to believe in the objective reality of alien space insects for all this to work. You can believe they are just artifacts of the human imagination given form by powerful psychopharmacology. Either way, the same rules apply.
It's something we're beginning to understand now as we see the pharmacological roots of all of our great spiritual traditions. Meditation, intensive study, acts of charity and other traditional time-tested means help to calm the activity of the adrenal glands and the amygdala, which in turn will make the psychonaut a less tempting target for negative emotions/entities/whatever you wish to call them.
I have a strong feeling that a lot of young people are going to find all this out the hard way, however. All this "Satan is Sexy" brainwashing we've seen in the media (primarily in pop music) seems to have had some effect, even in the Age of Atheism (an age which is always a mere transition). Of course, no one tells these kids that Satan is the payday loan broker of the Archonic spiritual realm.º
Every generation needs to learn that for themselves.
* In a previous post I explored how a certain comic artist-slash-channeler-slash-remote viewer seemed to pay unconscious tribute to Parsons and Cameron in a strange story about the Fourth Dimension. In that tale, a haberdasher enters an alien dimension only to return to this one and discover the love of his life, a woman from Mars. Marjorie Cameron famously claimed to be a Martian. There are other interesting subtextual currents in the story as well that may well merit another post on the story. Jack Kirby wasn't an artist- he was a radio.
† This revelation is why I began to reclassify my own encounter with a malign entity as youth from "hallucination" to something else, in large part to hearing Graham Hancock describe several similar/identical encounters by ayahuasca experiencers. I was familiar with hallucination, even as a child and knew how it worked. My giant chevron attack experience was more typical of a hallucination- non-linear, indistinct, non-narrative.
º I'm not kidding about that. Another friend from that 80s circle moved to San Francisco in 1985 and eventually ended up on Anton LaVey's block of California Street. He said that the house exuded an aura of gloom, not menace. LaVey was voicing disillusionment with his "faith" in the early 70s, according to Jacques Vallee's diaries. If a certifiable genius like LaVey couldn't get the better of Ol' Scratch, you can be certain the numbskulls fiddling around with Satanism today will get taken to the metaphysical cleaners.
I was thinking about all this while having some email discussions with a podcast host who many of you might be familiar with. We were discussing possible topics for a rising of the Secret Sun on his show and the topic of The Nine came up.
I knew that I'd be asked who and what I believed The Nine actually were and given some of the research I've been doing into psychedelic research, the ancient Mysteries and related topics, I've come to believe that The Nine are some kind of otherdimensional entities that the Round Table group encountered during their balls-trippin', mind-bending "seances" back in the early 50s. That in fact these beings appeared to an earlier group of occultists connected to the whole Jack Parsons/Marjorie Cameron* circle in California.
What's that Kenneth Grant line? "Jack Parsons opened a door and something flew in?" That was very probably The Nine.
What did The Nine bring to those who answered when they came knocking? In the case of Andrija Puharich and Dick Price, not much good. In other cases the results are more uncertain. But the usual explanations about the Nine- usually that of the psyop variety-- really don't stand up to serious scrutiny when you look at the secretiveness, elitism and devotion attached to this group.
The hoax explanation doesn't really wash, given its longevity. A serious look at this group seems to reveal that The Nine had a grip on some fairly influential people, for reasons that are at best obscure.
Certainly The Nine's profile is pretty low (to say the least) these days, but it could well be that they've simply gone back underground, as they were for 25 years following the Round Table workings. It may well be that these entities have a much different concept of time than we do.
All of this supposition about the nature of The Nine resurfaced following a recent rewatch of DMT: The Spirit Molecule and some reading on Strassman's DMT trials. To be honest, I was a bit alarmed with this rewatch, being more familiar not only with the ancient Mystery traditions the talking heads in the film are constantly stumbling over (every goal of DMT research laid out in the film was already codified in the Mystery traditions) but also more keenly aware of the consequences of the negative aspects of the trials that the film so irresponsibly papers over.
Strassman ended the trials in part because he felt he was opening doors that were better left closed. Here we see the flaw in New Age optimism, that every "higher power" or otherdimensional creature is going to have your best interests at heart. Strassman's own research conclusively proved that was not so.
Increasingly, his subjects began to encounter malignant beings, some described as "alien insects" and experience bad trips. Strassman:
Parts of twenty-five people's sessions landed in this "bin." (adverse reactions). These adverse effects ranged from being subtle, minor, and extremely brief to those that were terrifying, dangerous, and lingering. Twenty-five out of sixty volunteers seemed like a lot. At the time, I never sensed that nearly half of our volunteers were having problems. Was I minimizing difficulties in my desire to forge ahead in the research under any and all conditions?
The fact remains that the spirit molecule does not always lead us to love and light. It can open our eyes to terrifying realities, too, and mark us with those experiences for as long as do any beatific ones. DMT is a potentially dangerous drug. For that reason, we must think long and hard about using it in ourselves and on one another.The documentary-- essentially a propaganda recruitment film for the drug-- seriously fails the viewer in preparing them for the negative potentials of the experience in favor of a string of New Age happytalk. In my view, this fails not only the viewer but the drug, since it's basically repeating the same mistakes of over-promising and under-cautioning made by Timothy Leary et al in the 1960s.
And we all know how that turned out.
For myself, I avoided DMT after some friends had profoundly negative experiences with it back in the 80s. One of these was very badly shaken by her encounter, so much so that she refused to even talk about it.
But back to those entities; when one person encounters an alien insect, it's a good chance it's a hallucination. When several people, under controlled experimental conditions, encounter these entities there's a good chance those entities exist somewhere outside our imagination.† Terence McKenna, another DMT evangelist, named these beings "machine elves" or some variation thereof, a term veering close to Lilly's paranoid Solid State Intelligence. Not very comforting precedent here.
Where DMT: The Spirit Molecule fails and where the more noble ancient Mysteries succeeded is that the former offers no moral framework in preparation for the psychonaut, whereas the Mysteries were extremely rigorous in instill positive moral guidance in the initiate. This served to protect the initiate from anxiety and fear, emotions that are often express tickets to a bad trip.
The Mithraic Mysteries- with their ordeals and tests, were especially demanding in this regard. And we know from their literature that their trips brought them to some pretty wild destinations.
You don't even need to believe in the objective reality of alien space insects for all this to work. You can believe they are just artifacts of the human imagination given form by powerful psychopharmacology. Either way, the same rules apply.
It's something we're beginning to understand now as we see the pharmacological roots of all of our great spiritual traditions. Meditation, intensive study, acts of charity and other traditional time-tested means help to calm the activity of the adrenal glands and the amygdala, which in turn will make the psychonaut a less tempting target for negative emotions/entities/whatever you wish to call them.
I have a strong feeling that a lot of young people are going to find all this out the hard way, however. All this "Satan is Sexy" brainwashing we've seen in the media (primarily in pop music) seems to have had some effect, even in the Age of Atheism (an age which is always a mere transition). Of course, no one tells these kids that Satan is the payday loan broker of the Archonic spiritual realm.º
Every generation needs to learn that for themselves.
* In a previous post I explored how a certain comic artist-slash-channeler-slash-remote viewer seemed to pay unconscious tribute to Parsons and Cameron in a strange story about the Fourth Dimension. In that tale, a haberdasher enters an alien dimension only to return to this one and discover the love of his life, a woman from Mars. Marjorie Cameron famously claimed to be a Martian. There are other interesting subtextual currents in the story as well that may well merit another post on the story. Jack Kirby wasn't an artist- he was a radio.
† This revelation is why I began to reclassify my own encounter with a malign entity as youth from "hallucination" to something else, in large part to hearing Graham Hancock describe several similar/identical encounters by ayahuasca experiencers. I was familiar with hallucination, even as a child and knew how it worked. My giant chevron attack experience was more typical of a hallucination- non-linear, indistinct, non-narrative.
º I'm not kidding about that. Another friend from that 80s circle moved to San Francisco in 1985 and eventually ended up on Anton LaVey's block of California Street. He said that the house exuded an aura of gloom, not menace. LaVey was voicing disillusionment with his "faith" in the early 70s, according to Jacques Vallee's diaries. If a certifiable genius like LaVey couldn't get the better of Ol' Scratch, you can be certain the numbskulls fiddling around with Satanism today will get taken to the metaphysical cleaners.