Lucifer's Technologies, Revisited: The Missing Puzzle Piece

Of all the essays I've posted in the past 15 years on The Secret Sun, the "Lucifer's Technologies" series is far and away the one I get the most requests to republish. 

The problem is that it was all written during an intense and feverish manic rush, a mad blaze of inspiration, and therefore isn't really the most coherent work I've ever done. I've started and stopped work on expanding it into a larger, more structured text a number of times, but there was always something missing, something I hadn't quite put my finger on.

Pathologizing Mystical Experience

As the great philosopher Red Miller once said, "a psychotic drowns where the mystic swims." I think some other mook said something similar, but he was probably just ripping off Red Miller anyway.

Red's wisdom jibes with my notion that the difference between a mystical experience and a psychotic break is the results. If it helps you get your shit together, it was an epiphany. If you end up riding off the rails, it might have been a psychotic break. Or a dark mystical experience. Same difference.

"Ultraterrestrial Agents of Cultural Deconstruction"

 

My family and I were discussing the Mandela Effect at Sunday dinner. My daughter-in-law wasn't familiar with it, so we looked up some ME listicles. I have to confess that I remember the conventional versions of history with most of the popular examples, and a lot seemed kind of stupid to me ("Flinstones" without a T? Really?).

But I do remember KitKat with a hyphen, I do remember "Proctor & Gamble" and I absolutely do remember Ed McMahon doing commercials for Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes, not Slappy Dick's Publishing Doohickey or whatever the fuck fake company was embedded into the timeline.