Morion-thought

2009-11-04T09:15:00.000-08:00

I am a bit leery of naming some skeptics by name, as one has a reputation for suing people who piss him off and another, in my 'umble opinion, is a jock with journalist credentials and a decent background in science who seems peculiarly hostile to folks making extraordinary claims. There is one writer, however, whom I shall name and shall actually praise because of his basic intellectual honesty and his great sense of humor: John Horgan.

In 2003 he published his book Rational Mysticism and within its covers he presents eleven different people, all of whom are in some way associated with what might be called "modern enlightenment." Some twenty-five years ago such folks were happy to gather under the umbrella of the "New Age" movement, but since the New Age has produced so many quacks, charlatans and frauds, many of the more genuine people within this broad phenomenon have been steadily making distance from the aegis of the New Age. Yet, one hundred years ago, the same people might have happily accepted that they were occultists. Horgan visited with Huston Smith, Ken Wilber, Michael Persinger, James Austin and - gawd help us - the late Terence McKenna and Oxford psychologist Susan Blackmore. For those unfamilar with her, Dr. Blackmore is best known for exploring the concept of memes, but she is also a skeptic of all things paranormal and happens to be a Zen practitioner.

In each of the interviews pursued in Rational Mysticism, Horgan did what he does best, asked intelligent questions of each of these people and did some solid ruminating after. Perhaps the most profound of these was his partaking of the psychedelic brew ayahuasca with a group of others curious as to what this Amazonian shaman's "medicine" might show them about life, the universe and everything. While he was eased into the experience by very competent and compassionate guides (Tony and Kevin), at the end he experienced what any of us who have dipped into the scented vat learn, that our confrontation with the naked universe is a supremely solitary affair: he had what plausibly passes as a vision of the very end of time. Although written with an artlessness characteristic of him, the feelings of desolation of such a vision are apparent.

It is in the concluding chapter, "The Awe-ful Truth," that we meet the real man, someone who has asked the questions of those teachers and prophets so-called and has found so much in them and in their answers wanting. He recognized that while skepticism is a great tool for clearing away spiritual and scientific rubbish and nonsense, in the long run, like Zen, it produces its own rubbish. Thus string theory, parallel dimensions, the apocalypse due in 2012 and other phantasms can be disposed, but the ensuing residue is likely to consist of a growing and pathological doubt. At the very end of this chapter Horgan speculates about the notion of free will; do we humans have it? It seems from some viewpoints that we really don't but it is a social necessity at the very least and we all have some life-experience of it: he makes the point that his kids have more free will than an infant and that he has more free will than his kids. To feel that we have a free will makes us not only the arbiters of our experiences - something which any New Age guru would mercilessly push in your face - but makes us, and not some deity responsible for our lives as individuals and as a social whole. If you want to embrace the Eternal Light, then fer chrissakes DO something about the poor people in your part of the world. Any skeptic who thinks and feels this way is someone with whom I could have a great time over a coffee or dinner. Never mind that they might think that I'm deluded or that I think they're wearing blinders, bring another round of mocha lattes.

So, what then of the entrenched superskeptics who are hardnoses when it comes to mystical experiences all kinds? What of the folks who say that there is no telepathy, there are no spirits hovering about us, no afterlife of any sort and say it with such startling venom? I am here going to quote Hungarian psychiatrist Dr. Ede Frecska:

"......let us examine the soundness of Western confidence in scientism. We can summarize the basic concepts science holds about the human phenomenon as follows:

>>Man is the by-product of mere chance. This follows from the combinatiojn of evolution theory and random genetic mutations. There is no divine plan, no Almighty Creator. From the chance movements of the material world, complex systems evolved as a result of chance and were chosen by natural selection.

>>We live in a universe alien to us and ignorant of our destiny. The anthropic principle, either in its 'soft' or 'strong' form, is not able to come to the rescue of an individual person. The two forms of the anthropic principle diverge in their interpretation as to why the physical constants of our universe predispose it to be hospitable to human life, but agree that the cosmos is absolutely indifferent toward the fate of any one member of the species.

>>We have come from nothingness and will return to nothingness after death. The meaning of this is the same as the decree "dust to dust." Only the most basic components of our bodies will survive and continue on in the circle of life.

It is apparent to a mind trained in behavoral sciences that these concepts are strikingly similar to the Beck triad: the psychiatrist Aaron Beck noticed the cognitive distortion that depressed subjects perceived in self, the world and the future, calling it the negative cognitive schema of depressive thinking. Derogatory views of the self, the world, and the future are core features of the depressed individual:

'I am a worthless person.'
'The world is an inhospitable place.'
'My past is a tragedy; my future is hopeless.'

Beck suggested that depressed people draw illogical conclusions about situations, and these lead to a distortion of reality, which manifests in the magnification of negative experiences and the trivialization of neutral or positive ones. The cognitive triad is the source of the extremely low self-esteem of depressed subjects. Indeed, it can lead to 'micromanic' (the opposite of grandiose) delusions, manifesting in the extreme form as psychosis. The parallel between the these of scientism and the Beck tried is close and raises the following questions: Does the same outcome stand for scientific thinking as well? Is scientific thinking illogical or biased in its worldview in a way similar to that of a depressed patient? Of course, science is not illogical, but it may suffer from overexclusiveness [1]"

It would be easy for me to dismiss wholesale the work of those skeptics who would just as easily dismiss me and the Outlands Community as one more delusive and factless bit of bunkum. But the fact remains that not all skeptics fit the Beck triad, least of all John Horgan, whose basic honesty and good humor will forever stand in my mind as a check against the myriad snake-oil mongers rampant in the world who are ready to deprive you of your money and, illusion or no, your free will. Are the remarkable claims which we make here true? Be skeptical, inquire, question, even doubt a while if you must. But kindly do the same for those who claim there is no supernatural anything, who, in the words of my daughter, seem to be Bitter Old White men who would leave us in a world that is too similar to that of a chronically depressed individual.

[1] I wish to thank Dr. Ede Frecska for permission to quote pp 164 - 165 from his 'The Shaman's Journey: Supenatural or Natural? A Neuro-Ontological Interpretation of Spiritual experiences' in the book Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds through Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies by Rick Strassman, M.D., Slawek Wojtowicz, M.D., Luis Eduardo Luna, Ph.D, and Ede Frecska, M.D. Park Street Press, Rochester Vermont 2008; and my thanks also to Dr. Rick Strassman for putting me in touch with Dr. Frecska.

Rational Mysticism: Spirituality Meets Science in the Search for Enlightenment, John Horgan, Houghton Mifflin, Boston & New York 2003

2009-10-14T08:33:00.000-07:00

I apologize for the crummy image of the book, but the scanner has been giving me hassles as of late and I had to trim off the sides of the picture.

What you're looking at is the single most valuable resource in print about PK - a time-honored abbreviation for "psycho-kinesis." Generally when you hear about PK it is sometimes mentioned in what few news reports which make the mainstream media concerning poltergeist phenomena; a family will have been having weird occurances in which solid objects such as ashtrays, dishes and furniture seemingly move of their own accord. While the umbrella of PK does include poltergeists, it covers as well such things as fire-walking, spoon-bending a la Uri Geller and others, teleportation, non-local healing and human levitation. According to mainstream science such things are impossible - of course - and are the product of deception, hallucination, bad observation and other manner of, shall we say, bad reportage. As someone who does not take such claims lightly, I will be the first to point out that much of the material which finds its way into the media is just that - fraud, or something misapprehended. I will give as one example, the Loch Ness Monster; 99% of the photos of Nessie have been determined to be either logs, fish or frauds. The fact that the British Navy invested considerable time in hunting for this long-lost plesiosaur and came up empty-handed says a lot.

However, with PK, there is little room for doubt or such off-the-cuff dismissal of the considerable body of work which has been accumulating since the foundation of the SPR (Society for Psychical Research)(UK) in the 188os. Doctor Heath's comprehensive book covers three broad areas - the anecdotal reports of the various kinds of PK which have been recorded since written records were first made millennia ago; the scientific research, as in, carried out in numerous laboratories worldwide by reputable scientists, of various PK phenomena; and last, a consensus of the experiences of seven present-day practitioners, or "experiencers" of PK. This is a book which mainstream science cannot ignore, although it likely will; pity.

You may have seen Pamela Heath's name if you are interested in this kind of thing. She is an MD and a parapsychologist to boot, and has co-authored a wonderful work with Professor Jon Klimo entitled Suicide: What Really Happens in the Afterlife. Dare you ask, who is Jon Klimo? You shall have my retort that he is the man who wrote THE book on channeling: Channeling: Investigations on Receiving Information from Paranormal Sources. And as I am myself a channeler, I think that I'm competent to judge such things.....let me add an LOL though! This one is definitely five stars.

The PK Zone: A Cross-Cultural Review of Psychokinesis (PK)
Pamela Rae Heath M.D., Psy. D
iUniverse Inc New York Lincoln Shanghai 2003

2009-10-02T07:17:00.000-07:00

I owe a very great deal to Jane Roberts and Seth. I began reading her books during the 1980s before I realized that much of the weird material that would pop into my head was actually information coming from people that I couldn't see - but I certainly heard them in my mind's ear; if it makes sense that we see thing's in our mind's eye, it is no great jump to hear them in our mind's ear.

For those of you unacquainted with Jane Roberts and the spirit entity Seth whom she channeled from roughly 1964 until shortly before her death in 1986, she was a prolific author who wrote books of poetry, children's books, books which Seth dictated through her to her husband Robert Butts, two books which she claims (and reasonably so, methinks) she channeled from the late American psychologist William James and the French painter Paul Cezanne, and a number of her own books detailing the fascinating life which unfolded as Seth became a welcome part of their lives together. Ms Roberts was a true pioneer in channeling as we know it today; and while I was deeply saddened to learn of her death, I've often had the thought that she didn't have to be around for the tremendous amount of foolishness which arose as the "New Age" carromed into the 1990s.

The book under consideration today, Seth: Dreams and Projections of Consciousness was written by Jane Roberts during the mid-1960s and had been offered to several publishing houses, each of which rejected it. She had had her first book about ESP published in 1964 and was hoping to somehow weave a contiguous skein between the material in that book and this. The publishing world being what it is, interested editors asked her to combine material from this particular book with some other things she's written about her experiences with Seth. This eventually became The Seth Material and was published by Prentice-Hall in 1970 (as I recall). Some time after her death, her original agent for that which became The Seth Material, a fellow named Tam Mossman, called Robert Butts and asking if he knew if the manuscript for the book reviewed here today could be found. Mr. Butts promised to look and was surprised to find it as a completed typewritten manuscript; their lives with Seth had become so busily intertwined, he had forgotten about it. Fortunately for the rest of the world, Mr. Mossman had not forgotten, and the book was published by Stillpoint Press.

It is a delightful read. I can put this simply. For anyone who is unfamiliar with Jane Roberts, Robert Butts or Seth; for anyone unfamiliar with what channeling is; for anyone seeking some guidance from the unseen realm, that which we here call the "unobstructed universe," (thanks once again to Dr. Marti Barham for the term), start here. There is nothing spooky, arrogant or hidden in this marvelous little book. Definitely gets a high five from me!

2009-09-15T13:55:00.000-07:00

So I'm dusting this blog off once again and hoping to give it new life as a way for me to present book reviews. I'm not seeking to gain any popularity or anything, but with our disillusionment with Deviant Art and Facebook, where I've spent way too much time these last two years, we were left with, what do we do now? We started our blogs and phlogs back in 2005 and most of them have lain fallow. Today we all of us hope that this marks a new era in the Community's presence on line. The two books which I'll be reviewing today are:

Trytptamine Palace by James Oroc, pub Park Street Press, 2009 Rochester Vermont

and

Inner Paths to Outer Space by Rick Strassman, M.D., Slawek Wojtowicz, M.D., Luis Eduardo Luna, Ph.D and Ede Frescka, M.D., pub Park Street Press, 2008 Rochester Vermont

Oroc's "Tryptamine Palace" bears the subtitle "5-MeO-DMT and the Sonoran Desert Toad." This creature has been the subject of an awful lot of dis-information, most notably people in the American southwest and in Mexico grabbing just any old toad and licking it with the expectation of getting high. Inveterate watchers of the Simpson's TV show would remember an episode where Homer did just that and had a profound visionary experience. This book actually has very little to do with the toad in question. It is more the story of James Oroc's quest for the divine through the use of various psychedelic materials, most notably his work with the powerful 5-Me-O-DMT in the subtitle.

It can be difficult to review a book like this (or the other one, for that matter) because of the amount of prejudice, hysteria, media disinformation and U.S. government policies and laws concerning the use in any manner whatsoever of "psychedelic drugs." I wish to address this before continuing on to the considerable merits of the books, if only to clarify where your reviewer stands in all of this. To facilitate that, a little history is in order.

Those chemicals which are today usually called "psychedelic" were synthesized during the course of the 19th and 20th centuries by reputable chemists working for reputable pharmeceutical firms. Among these chemicals are mescaline, LSD, DMT and psilocybin. Some small amounts of research was begun in the 1950s with these four, usually work done by those in the medical and psychiatric fields. In 1953 or thereabout the British author Aldous Huxley ingested some mescaline after hearing about it, and was guided through an extraordinary afternoon by his doctor companion. Huxley, who for much of his life had been studying the religious mystical traditions of both West and East, wrote a book which he named after a statement of William Blake" "The Doors of Pereception," and in it all but declared that he had had the beatific vision par excellence. It was plain that Huxley felt that religious revelation was available in chemical form. Of course, despite his reputation his work was attacked from a number of quarters, most notably by an Oxford scholar named R. C. Zaehner, whose expertise lay in Islamic and Buddhist religious texts. Zaehner's claim, echoed through the years thereafter by others (most notably by Violet MacDermott), was that whatever it was that Huxley had undergone, it was not a genuine spiritual experience. Huxley took Zaehner's claims to heart to the extent that he (sort of) replied with a second work, "Heaven and Hell," the title also being a glance toward William Blake. Thanks to the egotistical shenanigans of Dr. Timothy Leary, the U.S. government outlawed all psychedelics in the late 1960s and 1970s, and legitimate research for therapeutic ends was halted at that time as well. However, in the public eye at large these substances were viewed as "dope" of some sort, something that irresponsible hedonistic hippies used to "get high." And that is where things have stayed since roughly 1969.

The first cracks in this massive wall appeared in the 1990s when Dr. Rick Strassman (one of the co-authors of the second book under scrutiny here) was permitted to administer DMT to human volunteers. Strassman is a psychiatrist of no mean standing, and he had to go through many hurdles to be allowed to conduct his research (which is documented in an earlier books by him, "DMT: The Spirit Molecule."), but research he did; and so today there are beginning to appear papers on the possible use of MDMA and psilocybin in psychological therapy. However, it will be a......while......before this work registers with approval with most Americans; overseas seems to be a different matter, but I digest ~

When it was legally available for sale and usage in America, James Oroc experimented with smoking 5-Me-O-DMT and was introduced into a world of pure light. Like many young people he had been profoundly disenchanted with traditional Western notions about God and religion, but having had experiences which literally tore his assumptions asunder (in a gracious if powerful way), he was left, as many of us who have experienced what Tuli Kupferberg has called the "scented vat," are left, with having to call his experiences "divine" and THAT which he experienced as God. I must add that 5-Me-O-DMT is apparently the strongest psychedelic we've come up with - and that the Sonoran Desert Toad, a huge creature which inhabits remote parts of Mexico, exudes the stuff from glands on its back. I shall allow the reader to connect the dots here.

Now, as this is a book review, it behooves me to say a few things about Oroc's writing. Unlike many tomes penned by young acolytes of experimental spiritualities, his is extremely well-written and flows easily from page to page, episode to episode. He has a sense of humor as well, and how often we might wish for a smile or laugh when reading about eternal verities? Simply put? If yer into this kind of thing, buy the book, you won't be sorry.

The subtitle to Strassman et al's work is "Journeys to Alien Worlds through Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies." It's easy to overlookthe subtitle if you're not paying attention: but you just might be asking, "WTF do they mean by 'Spiritual Technologies?'" Of course, it is implied that psychedelic substances are somehow a means of "spiritual technology" as well, and it is perhaps here that my little historical synopsis at the outset of this article will come to the fore: the "argument" twixt Huxley and Zaehner and all those in their trains has never been resolved, although given the current (American) climate about psychedelic spirituality, it's easy enough to suss that such a notion would be repugnant to a large number of (again, American) people. However, although this book may be narrowly viewed as preaching to the chemical choir, it does stand on its own as a collection of quite diverse works by very professional people. Strassman, as indicated above, pioneered research with DMT in the U.S. in the early 1990s and his contributions give a succinct summary of his work, including the oft-time startling reports his subjects brought back with them. Like many people who've undergone an intense psychedelic experience, these folks came back with tales of entities who communicated with them, examined them and showed them marvelous things. Strassman's initial reactions were understandable and may be nutshelled as, well, of COURSE they're going to tell stories like that, I gave them DMT. But the consistency of some of his subjects' reports gave him pause and he began to wonder: did they really meet someone? Luna, who has worked extensively with the Amazonian herbal preparation ayahuasca, reports his life-experiences as he worked with various shaman and religious guides in the use of this powerful psychedelic. Wojtowicz weighs in with material about the use of "magic mushrooms," which have also been long used by non-Western spiritual traditions in seeking the divine; and Frecska's contributions, while based upon much solid research with both the substances involved and with the people who've used them presents a breathtaking prospectus of just what might await us as we voyage - with or without psychedelics - into the future. Yes, it's well written, buy it.

2009-06-21T09:16:00.000-07:00

The following propositions are an outgrowth of something I'm writing. They are meant to be stimuli for your thoughts. Are they true? What if they are?

1. Civilization is a mistake.
2. Culture is an even worse mistake.
3. Giving another person authority over our selves is a mistake.
4. Writing allows us to lie. So does speech.
5. We ignore our emotions, feelings and intuitions to our great peril.
6. Our dreams are as real as waking reality.
7. Our natural condition as animals is not fear-filled and violent. These are learned behaviors.
8. We each of us is/are the God most people think is lording it over us.
9. There is no Devil and there is no Hell.
10. There is an afterlife and it is nothing to be feared. It's a continuation of our mortality, just in an expanded and unobstructed reality.
11. Apocalypse is every day.
12. There is no fear in love.

If you take anything with you from these propositions, take # 12.

Roy

2009-01-06T20:55:00.001-08:00

I am asking anyone across the world who reads the following to copy it and to send it to your government officials (if possible) and to the United Nations Security Council.

Be it resolved that the mixing of Church and State has caused untold human suffering for centuries, we propose that the governments of the world rid themselves of any and all theocratic encumbrances.

1. That no nation's constitution, articles of confederation or other document of national law and purpose be based upon any religious book or religious tradition.

2. That no nation will allow a cleric to hold office within its government.

3. That a nation's laws shall be based upon humanitarian principles which would ensure adequate food, housing, education and medical care for its citizens, instead of the dictates of a religious authority.

4. That all religious organizations shall be fairly taxed as any business enterprise might be taxed, and that the same penalties for failure to pay said taxes be enforced with the same rigor as it is upon individuals and businesses who fail to pay their taxes.

5. That all missionary enterprises be halted worldwide

2006-04-20T22:56:00.000-07:00

Not much to say at this point - I am back at work as of April 8 and missing my time online - although for over five months I was hard and haevy at it. QW will be returning to blog-land slowly; we had considered deleting all of them but we decided to stay.

2006-01-09T09:41:00.000-08:00

Wtf was I thinking? Here I am going on about the website and don't put up the URL. I shall take care of that right now -

http://redeyeguy.mosaicglobe.com

and this is a joint effort by everyone in the Outlands Community.

However, I, even I, Roy Waidler, am at Deviant Art, but a lot of the art is done with the Outlands Community's ArtGroup. The URL there is:

http://amanitagemini.deviantart.com

and you'll see even updated pictures of the Community. Well, of Brynna and Gwenny, at any rate! Oh dear, Terrence wants to add art to his blog, I hafta go!

2006-01-07T01:44:00.000-08:00

Our website is looking good. Finding the host was just about the best thing that happened and what was cool about it was it got set up in the last hours of 2005, thus fulfilling Llam's mandate for getting a website going in 2005. In putting it together we worked as a community for the first time in quite a while. Since everyone has sought their own voice the sense that we are one mind has dwindled. I kind of miss it sometimes; and doing the work on the various pages did bring us together in that way. I think what we have missed also is that we no longer trip together, which is something that I could take care of tonight. Ho boy, did that bring a flurry of excited outbursts! Hmmm! There's a thought! Oh look, there goes another!

2005-12-30T19:17:00.000-08:00

The Outlands Community's ArtGroup has been working full steam ahead on developing a technique which succeeds in rendering aspects of spiritual sexuality and we'requite pleased with the results. We are also looking to establish links with other groups like ours, this is more a renewal of effort upon one of the mandates that Llam had requested of us. Been on line since April, and succeeded in meeting Dori Hartley, which was miraculous in and of itself. Another of our desires / mandates is to find some scientific credibility to what we are doing here. I don't mean the old way of 'proof,' such as was done by Morey Bernstein with Bridey Murphy in the '50's. That does have its merits, but we are looking for math and mathematicians to provide us with a solid footing in Physics to describe the dimensions that people like Sara and Llam live in. That was outlined in the Everybody Book and in Stro Moon Daglo.

Another problem is getting noticed by search engines. It's a tough climb! But we shall persevere, sooner or later someone is going to notice and read all of our blogs. Llam assures us that the best thing that we can do right now is just keep posting. Considering the number of pages of text which all of us combined have posted on the blogs, we have a considerable literary / factual base from which to work.

2005-12-22T16:38:00.000-08:00

As promised, this is Maalyon as I perceive him ~ ~

2005-12-22T13:33:00.000-08:00

Good Yuletide to all!

I have been a pagan priest for many years now and a hippie for a lot longer. It means that I do not put too much stock in Christianity or its brothers Judaism and Islam. For many years I kidded myself that I was a spiritual person and I suppose that I could be - at times. Because I knew nothing personally of any form of Divinity I was really lost in a sea of ideas and visions. Sometimes Buddhism would sound so RIGHT. Then I would get going on Gnosticism and it would sound so RIGHT. Then, shading off into Neo-Platonism I would eventually become enthralled with the most ancient Greek gods and goddesses, coming to rest with Hekate and Dionysus. The former I understood for her darkness and her hurricane-like movement through me. The latter I understood, pre-Hellenic Divinity of intoxication and what to the proto-Greeks who invaded the area deigned to call "madness." It wasn't intil Socrates that we had a handy catalogue of how this madness might make manifest. Love - and he spoke of the insane attachment two lovers might have for one another - was first. Other forms included the ability to say / sing poetry (rhapsodie) and powerful discourse (sophism). While love, poetry and the ability to wow people with what you say does benefit from practice and rules, a close reading of the Symposium (and I think the Phaedrus) (or Phaedo) makes plain that Socrates was talkjing about the on-the-hoof variety. And it was in such a state that I felt picked out first by Hecate, then by Dionysus.

I have no particular "duties" as a priest. Today being the shortest day of the year (maybe it was yesterday) I note the rebirth of the sun, Sol Invictus; while I can no longer drink alcoholic joyjuice I do my best to stay intoxicated, usually with hyperstimulants and smart drugs, during the Saturnalia - that time of protracted drunkeness in the Roman Empire which became The Twelve Days of Christmas. And, yes, in years gone by, I have been very drunk for all twelve of those days, although by the end of it I was gagging on whatever I was chugging down. So my entries here and at my secret hideouts tend to be a bit loony, and the rest of the Community suffers along gladly.

SAo today I thought that I would introduce another Community member, one who has been with me for at least ten years. His name is Maalyon, pronounced May-EE-LEE-un. He is a star elemental and has his permanent abode at a double star a long way from here. The stars have a huge frozen planet which sort of revolves between and around them. Neither "Kathy" or Alfedas have succeeded in locating it. And as Maalyon is capable of being in several places at once, he does not "go home," he always is home. Or does home. I suppose it would be unjust of me not to attempt a picture to go with this introduction and I might just do that when I get done writing this. Thing is it is difficult for me to "see" him in my mind's eye.

Without too many of the gory details I went through a period of intense paranoia in the mid-nineties and grew more and more distrustful of Seima. She had the sense to withdraw from my ability to perceive her, but not before the arrival of Maalyon. One of the things Maalyon did was to screen Seima from my ability to perceive her. On the other hand he was possibly the most laid-back friendly entity I had ever met. Somewhere in my Stuff I have a dialogue that he'd begun with William Blake and Sattoo, another being with another story. It tries to define "space," which is a damned hard thing to do.

But I tell Maalyon's story tonight because nine years ago I was reflecting upon what little impact that I as a long-haired person (read "hippie") had had on the world. It seemed all for nothing that night: December 22, 1996. He listened to me for a long time and said little. He was lost in thought. Then he turned to me and said: "You say that you have had no impact. You have, but do not see it. I can see it. And as far as what you are as a social entity, well - your job is not finished yet."

He was right. Today is as strangled a world as it was in 1953, 1959, 1963, 1965, 1971, 1979, 1984, 1992, 1999. There is unnecessary war. The leaders of America are criminals, just as they have always been; America the nation of the lawyers, by the lawyers and for the lawyers. Especially corporate and insurance lawyers. Too many people starve to death every day. The ozone layer is still saying buh-bye! On it goes. But I stand fast tonight, there are things that I can do and I shall keep on doing them. Join with me this Yuletide, because our jobs are not finished yet.

Hierophantou Dionysou Hekatoessou

kyrie magiou kyrie androgynou kyrie cthoni kyrie nyx

and, steward, Outlands Community

2005-12-20T13:59:00.000-08:00

For Dori Hartley

..whom I love. Painter of angels, painter of the anima in men, painter of the night. Of the first Goths and she will be the last, no idle claim. Lover of darkness and light and all color between, the fire climbs in seven arches and bursts through seven stars, is visible across all worlds. A trans-universal entity trance-universal energy, do you sense her in the aether? Do you nort know of her see-ing?
This is my friend, my blessed friend, each of us in our cove of angels and lands out there, miraculously brought together. We never have asked why, we only know that it is so, there is work to do, together and apart...like finding a home on an asteroid between galaxies, do I believe this? it is so.
"Knowing that we're only immortal
For a limited time"
Geddy Lee yes the man spoke the truth at times
"For I am gifted, even in November
Rawest of seasons
With so huge a sense,
Of her nakedly worn magnificence,
That I forget cruelty, and past betrayal,
Careless where the next bright bolt may fall.
Robert Graves, "In Dedication." It is certainly November for me. But there is fire in my bones once again, and I am of a dead cert you are that fire.

2005-12-13T08:19:00.000-08:00

Sara deserves a lot more credit than i think we've given her for being the first one to want to express herself as an individual - not as a member of the Outlands Community - on the internet. Accordingly she set herself up on MySpace as Sara Synaptical and had a lot of fun...for about two months. When "Tom" sold out to Rupert Murdoch the place went totally to the dogs and she left, Stro left, leaving Llam, Seima and myself, but myself as representing the Community.

In expressing herself as she did in those days she was slutty, raunchy and terrifically funny by turns, and the material that consists of the "Succubus FAQ" over at the Succubi Girls originally saw the light of day there. Next to go was Stro Moon Daglo but as a musician, and he had garnered quite a number of other musicians on his page. When I got onto Blogger as Morion, Sara followed suit down the road, then Terrence Ausweiler. Meanwhile Stro set up house over at Getablog, followed by Irlene Davis, Joan of Arc and as of late, Reth. Michael Archontas set Himself up at Phlog.net, where last night a post that he worked on for seventy-five minutes disappeared; the Community has its Everybody book at Fotopages, and Llam has his at the same place. Then SonShon got into Xanga the other day. I have a journal, sort of anonymous, at a well-known blog-host, and we have one in reserve at MyOwnJournal, which seems like a clone of MySpace. By the way, Reth listed a fairly comprehensive list of URLs at his blog the other day.

For me personally I can see how it has changed us. We are certainly no longer insular as a Community, and Sara was the first to assert herself as a striking and forceful personality apart from the Community and apart from our relationship. This was scary for the both of us at times - she's laughing as I write - because when you get "out in the world" you very naturally see your home differently. And the people in it. But I must say, no-one has turned into a stranger, or ego-maniac, or turned on us and left.

Irlene I think is the most prominent example of how the changes beong in the world have affected us. She left here as a little girl with two other little girls, along with Hurrain, and when she comes back now for a visit, which she did the other day, she is a grown woman and something of a neurophilosopher as well, she can eaasily go on about neural pathways and energy-waves in the water, about different brains in different species; I don't think she could tell everything that she's come to know in the last six months. And, y'know? YOU hang out with dolphins and be in telepathic communication with them for six months, your brain would be different also. At least you'd be using it differently!

My experience of the Community members has changed as well. As we grew we were all packed into one little mental space - my head - which periodically got dosed with LSA and LSHA until the boundaries opened, or the gate got cracks...and Sara leaaked out. I was intimately aware of the presence of virtually everyone here, which was interesting...but I was drowning in the closeness, and to be honest, wasn't aware of it. When I see any of them now, they are very definitely individuals, and not cocooned or nascent or anything. Marraket is running around all over the world. "Kathy," one of our few non-terrestials, is combing this part of the universe for other sentient life-forms - as if there aren't a number here! (cetaceans, equids, corvids) Dor is still seemingly nascent but Alfedas recently indicated that he is communicating with us...we just do not know WHAT he is communicating, or how, for that matter. I know them know them all as people now, which is what I wanted, not fearing that I would never have the time to do that before I died. It just seems that every day, someone wants to say something. I got my latest chance to be Original Thinker when Naseni unwittingly got me going last week. And Michael Archontas indiciated that he is ready to go at it again at Phlog - which means I shall close and let him get going. Roy out.

Oh yeah - Michael is at http://phlog.net/user/michaelarchontas

2005-12-08T11:47:00.000-08:00

Carl Jung might have appreciated the last two entries. I was once in touch with him while channeling, but he seemed too self-absorbed to respond to my few inquiries. The fact remains that he was a most unusual man. In his time of spiritual crisis, that is following his break with Sigmund Freud, if I read it right he was basically up shit's creek without the paddle, like as in, walking around psychotic. It is probably to our benefit culturally that he found so much with which to be absorbed over the course of his life - Greek mythology, the I Ching, misunderstanding the physics of Wolfgang Pauli (Jung's synchronicities are an attempt by Jung to make a very unscientific concept sound respectable), and above all, alchemy. To this day I have my doubts about his varied interets in these areas being of direct benefit to psychology as a discipline, but those who came after - most notably Gaston Bachelard and James Hillman - did much with what Jung left in his wake.

However, there is one work which Jung created and about which he had the greatest misgivings; in fact if my memory is working, it was never meant for publication. This is a longish theological essay (very short book) entitled in English, "Answer to Job." Before I get going about it, if you have ever considered the "evil problem," how could a good God allow suffering, this may be to your interests. First, a little note about Jung himself. He was the son of a Protestant minister (Lutheran if I recall), and like Nietzsche before him, he could not help being molded by the father's continual preoccupation with spiritual things - or what were considered spiritual things. This included a thorough familiairity with the Bible and the theological concepts current in that day. However, as a practicing psychologist Jung was ethically bound to keep his mouth shut on religious matters. It took Freud - of all people - to break that little barrier in the late thirties, when, at the end of his life, he wrote things like "Moses and Monotheism." Be that as it may, Jung long festered over the "evil problem" and focused upon the biblical book of Job as the years went by. The name is pronounced "Joeb," one syllable, and not "job" as in "get a - " In the oldest (Hebrew) texts available (Dead Sea Scrolls), it is actually spelled "iyyob." It is not a story original to the ancient Semitic people who became the Jews, because numerous parallels to its many tales exist in the even earlier writings of the various Canaanite, Babylonian and Sumerian cultures of that remote time. "Job" tells the story of a very pious good man - Job - who suffers every concivable misfortune possible: his children are killed by invaders, his cattle are stolen, he is covered with "boils" (possibly leprosy or bubonic plague) and just generally is having a bad hair day. This happens because the Old Testament god, Yahweh (Jehovah, YHWH) points out Job to Satan, saying what a great guy he is. Satan responds by telling YHWH that Job is pious because he's got it good, that if Job were to lose everything he would curse YHWH to his face. Apparently the then-almighty could not pass up a wager and tells Satan to go fuck with Job...which Satan does, as outlined above. To Job's credit, I guess, he does not respond to all of the horrible things that happen to him by giving YHWH the old heave-ho. Instead he does what many of us would do in such a sitch...he asks "Why me?" The book is then filled with much too much material about three (four?) well-meaning friends who keep pestering Job with the idea that somewhere,somehow, Job SINNED. That is one thing about which Job is adamant, I do wrong things like everyone else, but I am not hiding jack. Finally, having worn the poor bastard to a nub, the self-righteous idiots leave, and Job is now wondering, why did this happen to me...YHWH? True to form, YHWH shows up in a whirlwind, wondering who it is that has the stones to question what he, YHWH, does with "his" creation. He spends most of the rest of the book scaring poor Job by awesome displays of power, mocking the guy's insignificance in comparison to his own splendid self. Job never gets an answer from YHWH, merely shuts up, apologizes for bothering the crotchety deity, and is forgiven. Job gets more kids, more cows...more than he had before all of this went down.

Jung - remember Jung? - caught something in the story that theologians and saints had missed for millenia. While Job is alone, pissing and moaning about his fate - this is after the self-righteous goons leave - YHWH starts talking out of the aforementioned whirlwind, and asks a very curious question: "Who is it that darkens counsel?" In modern English this could well be paraphrased, "Who is hiding the answers that Job wants?" That is a very strange thing for an omnipotent, omniscient deity to ask - surely, if anyone had the answers to Job's question - "Why me?" - it should have been YHWH. But as Jung noted, YHWH never answered Job, he just scared the bejesus out of him. Jung went on to hypothesize that YHWH did not answer Job because he - YHWH - did not know the answers. In Jung's words (from memory), it was YHWH himself who "darkened counsel."

That is a very scary thing to say if one is a member of the Judeo/Christian/Islamic religious traditions, because it basically says that the almighty isn't and is as in the dark as we puny mortals.

The fact is, for all of the nonsense with which I feel Jung wasted his and our time, it balances out with this one essay. Jung was all apologetic about it because he was not a theologian. But he was no dummy, and after a lifetime of successfully seeing psychological symbolism in much Greek and alchemical literature, I feel that he touched the heart of the matter - he accurately analyzed YHWH from a psychological viewpoint.

[As a sidebar, I have been a little rough-shod on Jung. He did, after all, give us two psycho-sexual concepts which are central to self understanding. One of these is the anima / anime concept, which says that every man has a hidden spiritual feminine side (anima), every woman has a corresponding "male self" (anime). Jung also gave us the idea of our having a "shadow," a dark negative self which, if you think about it, is a good thing. If we went about with nary a negative feeling or thought, we early on would have happied ourselves into extinction: think of a bunch of hippies stoned out of their gourds on a boat off New Orleans the day Katrina wiped out the Big Easy. Dude, man, like lookit those waves, they're like cosm - - blub - - ]

Llam had asked me to underscore the importance of Jung on this point - the "evil problem" - in helping us to understand that our spirituality is, in the eyes of the Biblical religious traditions, nothing short of atheism. Which is too fucking bad. Poor Nietzsche took this 'way too seriously in his final years. Fritz, you were right, you were right, we do not need a tyrant. We need - we have Other, neti, neti.

So where does this leave you - me - us? In writing to a new friend the other day I had mentioned that the Buddha advised not to name things, and by implication ole Gautama was especially keen on "spiritual experiences", and I gave this example. Someone says "I have experienced God." No, you have not. "I have had a spritual experience." No, you have not. "I have had an experience." Better; but like the Buddha, if you've really had the blockbuster Nirvana you think is "there," you wouldn't be writing or talking about it. It was a joke about the Buddha when he was alive because it's true. All of our words cannot, are not made to, convey what Deity may or may not be. To speak poetically, you could not ask Fire to describe Water, or a blind person to explain what light is like.

So we have decided to wholesale hijack these words, "god," "deity," "divinity" and the like, and to once and for all toss ideas like momotheism and polytheism out of the window. They presuppose too much.

It is so ironic that one writer in the demesne of the Church understood this perfectly; it is much more ironic that he did so when the Inquisition was at its height, and he could easily have been burned for saying what he really thought. I am not talking about Eckhardt or van Ruuysbroeke. Saint John of the Cross knew that every spiritual doorway which opened before him was but one more retelling to himself all of the words, all of the ideas and symbols with which he had all of his life imbued himself. In answer to my three exclamations above, he would merely have shaken his head "No," and would not even have said "better" about the third version, just "No." Because one day, John came to the Wall. The Wall of which I speak is built of our very ability to use words, it is our use of language, it is language. And he was smart enough to recognize that one limitation - as did Jung - and call it the sham and fake it is. Because one day, from beyond that Wall, came Other, reaching to him after he, John, stopped reaching. Like Aquinas before him, John afterward became as silent as the knowledge which he knew - or DID, in our terms - writing only of necessity about anything but THAT. And of THAT he had a premonition in that four-line poem by which he best is remembered. In hoc signo transit - "by this sign, move on."

2005-12-04T23:52:00.000-08:00

Deviant Art is quite the place. First I meet Naseni, then as we are closing yesterday I check the e-mail and find that Dori Hartley has moved in. An I say, wtf?

We are up to page forty-eight on the Psychedelic Talmud and have it up both at DA and at Webshots. Except for Matthew over at MySpace, I think that I'm the only one I know of using Webshots; Deviant Art, however, everyone seems to know. And fotopages.com and phlog.net, no-one knows them at all, it seems.

I am finding that I am here for no particular reason so I am going to boot out for now.

2005-12-02T01:48:00.000-08:00

Naseni sent me a note at DA and I've slept a couple of hours and am waking with coffee and synephrine. Since my antivirus is running at the moment it would take about five minutes just to check where I left off at the last post, other than I'd left a link to Webshots and had been going on about the Evolu series and energy-patterns.

But I think that I shall get down to it, I often ramble my way through a subject. Atheism is a long streak in me, going back to my early childhood, when I was first put in Sunday school. It was a Prrresbyterrrian hausse o' worrrship, c'mpleat wi' Scots ministerrr. Nae th' Prrresbyterrrians ha' ga' nay sense o' humorrr aboot rrreligion, an' especially theirrrs, an they ha' nay sense o' aesthetic an th' beeyootayf'll eyethirrr. The long and the short of this was that I was made to feel sorry for some guy in a dress named Jesus, who could walk on water and make food out of nothing. Since I liked taking nylon curtains and wrapping myself in them to play dress-up so I could be a girl for a while, and then get my ass whipped for it, I could feel Jesus and his dress-up friends real close. And walking on water was definitely cool. I was four, by the way, Protestant cults are very lax about getting the kids in the door from day one. The only ones who can match the Catholic and Orthodox in this particular vigilence are the neo-nazi fundamentalist groups. (Note to myself: post entry some time about my stint as Baptist Sunday School teacher) My parents had not so much as mentioned the G-word up until this time, but my mother began by leading with her left. God, she explained, was some guy who lived in the sky who watched everything that everyone did, especially when they were alone. (Nylon curtains, picking my nose) She made it plain that he was on the same team as her and the old man, which kind of was a shoot-down. Two vultures in the house was bad enough, but one in the sky who was like a super-cop who would bend the world to pumish me for putting on lipstick or putting golf-balls under my tee-shirt to mimic breasts was a total bummer. To add insult to injury, shortly after being dragged into sunday school I was dragged into the regular church service for good measure. The church's interior is dark old birch with crudely-made stained-glass windows. Its one feature of merit is a well-made pipe-organ with real sixteen-foot stops in all of the traditional voices; it was a gift of one of the few modestly wealthy members who'd founded the church back in 1890. Old Betsy was trammeled upon by an organist who'd studied organ in Europe but cancelled her career when marriage / baby carriage came along, and she could make those pipes thunder and rattle when she got going. When she did it was always something in a minor key. It is not good to be four and have your bones rattled in a minor key by an organ and choir which seemed focused upon singing about how great my new third parent, God, was. My reaction was basically, wtf? In words, it came out like this: ''Mommy, I don't need this.'' Her reaction was a very swift, ''You will go to church.'' To quote my poem War in Heaven, ''I learned the fear early, the black of the abyss in other people's eyes.'' The ''war,'' however, was not in Heaven, but within my own abused life.

To learn ''God'' as Primal Fear is a good inducement to a very practical atheism. I was, to all practical intents, a prisoner of war in a war over which I had no control and of which I had very little understanding. The natural reaction of any rational human being is, ''Lieben heis lieben.'' Any prisoner of war will tell of episodes during their captivity when they literally kiss the collective ass of their captors in an effort to reduce the stress of the knowledge of the basically powerlessness of their lives. Because Christianity in its numerous hydra-like forms is based upon FEAR, every ''good Christian'' is a terrorized inmate of a huge concentration camp called the Church. The fist in the mink glove of the Church is, you are going to hell no matter how you grovel, kiss ass, be good, give it all away. I cannot at this point in my life understand why this is not THE conversation topic for those who take this mind-control seriously: ''So, what do you think THEY'RE gonna do to you in Hell when you die?'' ''I don't know, me, I'm hopin nano-technology will be developed enough when I'm older so that I just don't die.'' ''Yeah, I feel dat.''

I have a theory that when we first began to speak, some women and men saw that they could gain control of others simply by out-Godding them. Although the Rousseau/Engels model of the origins of civilization and property-ownership has severe limitations, enough of the basic concept is sturdy enough to have survived into the Post-

Structuralism of Levi-strauss himself. (Blasphemy!) The mythical First Tribes, an essential outgrowth of Rousseau's Noble Savage, did in fact have one attribute: generally, if you wanted to eat, fuck and have a home, you did your part of the gathering, hunting, fishing, whatever. The chicanery developed when the First Jocks said, ''Hey, we're busy protecting you pussies, we ain't got time to fucking gather and hunt. Give us some of that food, and some of those sexy kids, or you can defend your own skenk ass.'' Not to be outdone, the medicine men said, ''Hey, you wanna ward off the displeasure of the Ancestors and famine and pestilence, you better give us some of that food and those sexy kids, we ain't got time to fucking gather and hunt either. Of course if you think you can do your own healing, your own warding off the displeased Ancestors..." And here you've spent sixteen hours in the bush looking for little pigs, roots, berries and birds that weren't as big as you, or out in the water hoping that Nessie was looking for fish in some other place than where you were; ''Jesus God, HERE. Matilda, Brian, you go with these guys and do what they say.'' ''But Daddeeeee!''

To the best of my knowledge there have been only a handful of Spartacus-like revolts against the tyranny of religion as FEAR. As is becoming painfully clear, in the history of Western culture there were only three all-out assaults on the Structure:

1. Gnosticism, which almost toppled the authoritarian Church. Almost.

2. The philosophes of revolutionary eighteenth-century France, almost doing the same.

3. The psychedelicism which Doctor Timothy Leary launched in 1959.

Without apology I count Marxism under the aegis of number two. Karl Marx was Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet, Marat, de Sade and any other philosophe you care to name all rolled into one scrufty little Jewish guy who haunted the Library of the British Museum for many years, and managed to unify the discordances of the Age of Reason into a single and accurate critique; the bourgeois will do anything to control the proletariat. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. America is a nation of the lawyers, by the lawyers and for the lawyers. It is ironic that the elitist aristocratic LAWYER Thomas Jefferson, who set the American law-machine in motion, is on the face of the $2 bill, while the funkier businessman Alexander Hamilton stares sudeways from the $10 bill.

Imagine the conversation in you wallet:

$10: ''Haha, Tom, I'm on a higher denomination than you!''

$2: ''Alex get real already, my laws determine where you go and how you get used.''

Think I can't bring this around? From my vantage-point as the steward of the Outlands Community, which acknowledges a Deity of other-than-the Structure or Languages' ability to conceive or even think about, in those terms we all of us are ATHEISTS. We have nothing to do with any sort of god, divinity, deity, ground of being which is about fear, control, manipulation or the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, and I am writing with the angelic steward of the Community with his hand on my shoulder saying ''Go, Roy, Go!'' We are revolutionaries and today is the day: throw of your fucking chains, kick these bastards into the cold dark depths of the universe and let them go back to hunting and gathering with the rest of us. To quote Paul Kantner:

''We are the forces of chaos and anarchy

Every thing they say we are, we are,

And we are very proud...of...ourselves;

Up against the wall, motherfucker!''

- from his We Should Be Together

2005-12-01T21:34:00.000-08:00

Naseni, this one's for you.

I met someone at DA who took an interest in the Psychedelic Talmud, but serious and deep, we've traded a few PMs aabout it and its subject, from my perspective I know where he's at, but not in some ''one day you shall understand'' look down my slightly bulbous nose sense of superiority. To be quite honest there is still so much about the life I live with the OC (hmm, three abbreviations already) that just plain bewilders me.

As a poet I know how words will turn inside out if you just let go enough. In attempting to be able to eff the ineffable, I've absorbed hundreds of thousands of pages of writing on so many subjects that I can't be bothered to list them. I keep following this illusion, or delusion, that if I absorb enough words they'll explode. I think Llam is trying to get me to understand the illusion / delusion part when he requests me to work on things like the Evolu series which is hung up at Webshots. Look at one hundred pictures and you'll understand evolution better than Darwin and Lamarck out together, and the awfulness of the flaws of Intelluhjint Duhsign. When we worked on that series I watched Intelligent Design get reduced to rubble. I never seriously entertained the 2005 screwball version, I'm much better with Sheldrake's morphogenic resonance; the Evolu is just a picture of the symmetries and assymetries in a given Thing being moved around by the plasma-like energy fields which anyone who has been Outside for a while can sense looking at a tiny chickweed flower or the patterns which dust will make acording to the Strange Attractor principle inherent - so it seems - within these energies. There is no mind here, no Creator's tools. A pair of large rocks thrown into a still lake will make ever-shifting patterns in the water very similar to what I'm talking abou, but the only ''mind'' that I had when I used to toss large rocks into the water was the very fibrous-sounding ''galoosh'' I took such delight in while full of LSDEEEE. I'm being deliberately crude here, because to follow Intelligent Design to its logical conclusion says just that, somewhere in the universe is Someone much vaster than we mortals who is high on acid and throw

ing large planets into still pools of dark matter for the delightful ''galoosh.''

I'm yawning, which means I'll be back later. Oh yeah, Webshots:

http://community.webshots.com/user/thatgemini

and look for the eighty or so red and white pics under ''Evolu.''

2005-11-30T20:49:00.000-08:00

Some of us!

2005-11-29T21:45:00.000-08:00

The Psychedlic Talmud is done for the day. We worked on it for like eighteen hours with breaks, but there are thirty pages up at Deviant Art.

We also came to a quick conclusion, all art and all journals are going to go online, no more of this losing precious stuff to viruses and ratty external hardrives. SonShon needs to find a place where she can say what she wants about sexuality, probably MSN would be the place. I have had a hair up my ass about the cultural climate about sex for a long time, seeing as how the sexual revolution began over forty years ago I do not understand why parents are still ''protecting'' their children from sex. In talking with those much younger than myself I can see them getting squirmy and uncomfortable if I get going on more than a dirty joke. Guys my age often have prostate problems (I don't), just as the woman a few years younger than moi have theirs with menopause. It is a real good idea to have that ole prostate examined once in a while once you're past 40; if it starts to grow it can cause a lot of problems. If a man's prostate starts to grow in midlife it does ot mean automatically that he has prostate CANCER. As men age there is a shift in hormonal balance and on of the effects of this is having a softball up your ass. A proctologist pokes a proctoscope up into your anus and gets a look; bloodwork and an occasional scrape are included. Point of all that: you can read it here like anything else you read online and like so what. But if I bring up ''prostate exam'' in conversation, it's shit in the easterbasket time. Really! Grow da fuck up!

2005-11-28T14:43:00.000-08:00

As there is little that we can do to recover the stuff we lost when the XHD went until I get my middle of the month check, we've made a quick decision to keep as much as possible online. This means that my personal journal is pretty much ended as an around-the-house item and I will be keeping it on-line, probably the bulk of my daily personal nonsense over at my MSN blog and things relating to my arts and the Community will go here at Blogger.

Pictures will go to Webshots, and our more serious art, like The Psychedelic Talmud and the Imaginator Cards will go to DEVIANTaRT. Some of the more Dadaist stuff, including the .gif flashers we create from here on out, are going there as well. By the way, we did like a dozen pages of the PT and have them up at Deviant, the first five pages at Webshots. Music is rather up in the air; we're fortunate that Sara created the CDs from the .wav and .wma files we have in the XHD. Until we find an alternative, no music is going into this hardrive but temporarily, like if we want to create an anthology of something - then it'll be upload, produce, make CD and delete.

2005-11-27T09:30:00.000-08:00

Another day, another computer crash. An external hardrive (XHD) which we'd installed after the virus decided it was not going to work any more when I went to shut off the computer last night. Nothing has brought it back, either: rebooting, reformatting, system restore. This means a trip to a tech $hop. $igh.

So all the art and music and writing we've done since the middle of October is locked up safe n sound in a little inscrutable aluminum box. This too shall pass, we'll just keep right on doing things.

I found this great place about a month ago - DEVIANT Art. On Thursday I joined and posted a bunch of my stuff. It comes with a journal, and you can post literature (yours) as well. I thought it would be another pace of anonymity, like Blogger, but in two days I've made like ten friends.

My surgery went well. I was given a prescription for vicodin, which has been next to worthless as a pain-killer. It makes me STUPID and groggy, allowing me 45 minutes to an hour's sleep, but then I would be awake and hurtin. This night past is the first in which I'd been able to sleep - without the V - and I really hope the need for "painkillers" is over. On Wednesday I go for an exam by the orthpaedic surgeon who did the work; according to what I've been told, I'll be out for another three months. In the meantime I am going to get that fucking XHD taken care of - maybe just blank it out and start again - but that would mean a considerable loss of art and text. Another day, another hardrive. Yawn.

2005-11-24T21:15:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving has always been a torture for me. No doubt this is a holdover from my childhood; my aunts and uncles were actually my grandaunts and granduncles - somber old people who had little use for young kids. It was always a cold, long and boring day.

My daughter Mary and her partner Keith went out of their way to make a mind-boggling dinner, which we just finished. For most of the day, though, l've been in my room, working when able at the computer. I had the surgery to repair my arm and am filled to the gills with vicodin and turkey.

l joined two places today, one is ''sonomu,'' ''sound noise music'' from the UK; looks like l can get my music going with them..The other place is the well-known Deviantart.com, a sort of phlog for artists.

Ah me. The vicodin is kicking in, so l shall log off for now.

2005-11-21T22:30:00.000-08:00

In a few hours I'll be going in for my surgery on my arm. The surgery itself doesn't scare me, it's "recovery"...those first few hours as the anaesthesia wears off and the pain kicks in. Not scared of it, just not looking forwards to it. So it will be a day or two before I do much on line.

However, I got to post some new stuff at Webshots, one is a cartoon story called The Madman. Also some graphic excerpts from the Psychedelic Talmud, another book-project we're doing. The URL:

http://community.webshots.com/user/thatgemini

We haven't put anything up there since the virus; and I think that they improved the uploading software since August, it didn't take forever to load the way it used to.

Anyhoo I've made this post just as a temporary goodbye, will be back ASAP. I'll have six to twelve weeks recovery and therapy after, so I'm not goin anywhere. Buh-BYE!

2005-11-13T19:59:00.000-08:00

Horses were meant to be a dominant intelligent species. That is the gist of some work done by our "Dolphin Girl" Irlene Davis. She had come home from her work out at Raratonga and happened to meet my shaman's guide, a horse that has been with me since 1984. I named him Bucephalus after the horse ridden by Alexander the Great. I have had conversations with him in his dimension, but I am embarrassed to say I never asked about him about himself.
Well, Irlene did. It turns out that Bucephalus is an ethereal being who was once a real, no-kidding member of the equine family some millions of years ago. This particular member has evaded the paleontologists so far;he and his kind lived in Northern America, apparently before a couple of the ice-ages. What is remarkable about Bucephalus' long-gone flesh-and-blood brain was that it was equipped for language skills, emotional intelligence and the ability to plan and use tools. Irlene said that his species, had it survived, would have been right there with dolphins, the corvidae and we humans. (the corvidae are crows, ravens, jay and I think, magpies) (yes, they have working intelligence)
Communicating with Bucephalus has always brought a very strong energy, hard to ignore. You can just bet I will be talking with him.

2005-11-10T23:05:00.000-08:00

INDEX OF OUTLANDS MATERIAL

So that anyone looking for particular information does not have to go crazy hunting it down, This is an index of what is where:

1. Outlands history - here at Morion on October 24

at Succubi Girls on September 21 & 22

2. About channeling - here at Morion on September 16-17-18-21

3. About Sara - here at Morion on October 24 and the two entries

above at Succubi Girls

Some of our URLs:

SARA: http://succubigirls.blogspot.com

TERRENCE: http://unresthome.blogspot.com

STRO MOON DAGLO: Http://www.getablog.net/stromoondaglo

JOAN OF ARC:

http://www.getablog.net/iehanneddomremydarc

IRLENE DAVIS: http://www.getablog.net/iicetaceans

RETH: http://www.getablog.net/rethynyl

...and yes, we are at MySpace:

http://www.myspace.com/outlands_community

although we sincerely recommend that you have good antivirus, antispyware, antiadware and above all do not download any files from the site. If you have Java, check your cache/jar files for trojans on a regular basis, we get them all the time, especially from MySpace.

2005-11-07T11:20:00.000-08:00

Here's some places to go and websites to see! They're not us but they have the Outlands Community seal of approval...which we reminds me, Sara, I have to feed the seal later.

http://home.earthlink.net/~wearethem/42.html

http://wesingfire.tripod.com/iniusa

The first is Robert Ferry, an artist in Oregon. I met him through an old friend I'd found on the Internet, poet-artist Mark Fisher. Along with his wife MaryClaire they are the head-

quarters of INI USA.

2005-11-04T06:03:00.000-08:00

Sara came into my life eight years ago this morning, I recently detailed the whole story here. Words cannot say the love I feel, the love I know.

Time was that I still wanted a flesh-and-blood partner, for there is nothing like the feel of flesh against your own. It has not happened and I no longer fret about it. The bonds between us have broken certain barriers- mostly in my own head - between her world and mine, and for all practical intent I have the partners for who I have longed all of my life. I am most fortunate in this regard. I feel them about me the way I would feel any flesh-and-blood partner.

I think that if I have learned anything from Sara and from the rest it is that the universe and its riches lay open for anyone who will shed their fear. There is no fear in love. Period. I have said it many times and will say it many times more. The less fear that you have, the further you go.

We all of us think in terms of "finding," getting," possessing." You know: "If I could find..." "I need to get..." "I have..." Yet this is illusory. My direct and practical experience, especially since August 2004 when the whole Outlands Community "thing" coalesced and took off, is that you need find nothing, you already have it; the only thing you need to "get" is to get rid of your false perception of lack; and generally, what you "have" is what holds you back from having anything in the first place. Many of a spiritual inclination will at once start yapping about material possessions. Fine, sell all that you have and give the money to the poor. That was Jesus' answer to this nonsense. Fact is you need certain practical material possessions to live: food, water, and a place to sleep; clothing would be a good idea as running around naked will involve you with civil authorities. It may be that the fatal flaw is in our conventional means of getting these things, working for them and theft. Money is not the root of all evil, the love of money is the root of all evil. Anxieties about money are also roots of evil as well, and betray a very practical atheism at work within the minds of those who worry about or care too much for money. I am by no means a rich person, I have lost most of my teeth due to the lack of the old buckos (read: not having food for as long as four days running), so I feel that I am qualified to say as much about the notion.

I am sure that someone will want to respond by asking me about the millions of people starving all over the world. I cannot answer because I do not know what brought these people to this brink, I do not know their thoughts and underlying anxieties, I do not know how and if their situation could have been avoided. Calamaties such as Katrina and the tsunami of the year previous really have little to do with such things, and render people's illusions of finding/getting/having to irrelevance. In an earlier age cholera, dysenterry, plague and smallpox did the same thing - Sara died, according to her father Piet, of cholera - and no doubt there will be other things in the future to cause us concern.

Yet there is much that can be done on a practical level that is not being done, and the history of disease shows as much. We do not today worry about cholera and plague; the pain once involved in surgery is long a thing of the past. I count the media scares about SARS, bird-flu, mad-cow and the like nothing but so much media terrorism; it keeps people's minds occupied so that they might not think so much about what lousy "leaders" our nations have, how corrupt our governments are, how wasteful that military action receives the bulk of the world's money. During the Viet Nam war I roughly calculated the dollar-amount spent by all of the factions involved and very quickly came to the accurate conclusion, new to me at the time, that the money could have fed every person on the planet by simply diverting it from the military. It is not being naive to say that if we weren't so busy "defending" and "invading" and "destroying" we would all have what we need. We already have the technology in place and at work to grow and raise ample healthy food for everyone. It is governmental interference with these ways that hinder the people of the world from having three squares and a home. Further, it is not naive to suggest that each person who can, act to curtail military activity worldwide. It is simply a matter of numbers here, folks; if there were really a worldwide movement of people whose concern was to end military structure, the governments of the world would soon realize that they were fighting virtually every one of their citizens by making military spending their prime concern. Bill Maher illustrated the concept very well in his recent book which contrasted World War II's effort against that of today. During World War Two most Americans were united in doing and sacrificing that the war might be brought to a close. It worked. We have no such unity today.

2005-10-30T06:00:00.000-08:00

Playing GALAfest2 in Paramus last night was a real blast. For the two months that I had to rehearse, I was in bad shape and got to play only six songs, the best of which was From Sara Who Doesn't Exist and The Next Time. I made a lot of mistakes.

The unsung heroes of the show were the artists exhibiting; I say unsung because until I opened my mouth on stage, no-one had said anything announcing them.

Opening the show was Jaymie Gerard; she had opened the show at the first GALAfest, at which time she was good. This time however she touched extraordianary. That may sound like damning with faint praise, but any performer will tell you, the times when you connect with whatever is within or without you that really powers your art are rare. Jaymie has excellent control over both her voice and guitar, and assumes the stage with a powerful elegant grace that I've only seen in Melanie and Donovan. Comparisons may be inviduous but I've been around a long time and have a keen sense of the Real Thing when I see it and this sense has been honed by seeing dozens of performers in many genres. Kind of like asking which actor played the best Tevye.

You may wonder why I would mention the artists at the show and not go on to describe their exhibits. I am less qualified to judge artwork from within the framework of artistic criticism, other than what I've read in essays by Vasili Kandinsky, Piet Mondriaan and Hugh Honour. I still go by "I like it" and "I don't like it," those innate, kind of dumb reactions we have when seeing a picture or sculpture for the first time. But as you came in you would be struck by the oils of Iulia Vinokurova-Shaternik, and several small bronzes upon her exhibit table. Ms. Vinokurova-Shaternik is originally from Byelorus, a graduate of the Byelorus State Academy of Art. Her work is definitely in the realm of Impressionism, a very bold use of large brushes, perhaps even pallette-knife, the imagery striking you as solid, permeable; imaginative use of color underlays important to this kind of work produced work that was at once vivid yet subdued. I cannot comment intelligently about the few bronzes, other than to say that I liked them. Exhibiting alongside of her was her husband Ales Shaternik. I haven't here mispelled his name, it is a shortening of Aliksandr. His oils were intensely colorful, I would say stepping somewhat beyond Impressionism with the striking chromatic contrasts he deployed. This can be a dangerous thing for an artist to do, lest they be accused of hiding lack of talent by overuse of color, but Mr. Shaternik's work shows full mastery of an intriguing talent. Immediately behind the Shaternik's exhibits were the large oils of Kseniya Bikhler. Here we had no Impressionism but surreal cartoon-like figures which threatened to leap from the canvas. As a cartoonist, I use the expression "cartoon-like" as a compliment, but I must be careful to explain something. A cartoon - whether a comic strip in a newspaper or a one-panel joke in a magazine - is pure Minimalism at its best. A cartoonist must convey a great deal with very little. I must empasize, Ms. Bikhler is not a cartoonist. Her figures, surreal as they struck me, are full of movement across their features, creatures seemingly immobile seething with movement within, cleverly and wisely portrayed with a very skilled use of brush. As you crossed the room you next saw the graphic work of Paul Moss. I regret not asking him what tools he used in the composition of his works, but hazarding a guess I would say that he works either with pen and ink or gel-pen. His many small boards were a delight to behold; and bearing in mind what I said above about comparisons, had Picasso not been such a ruthless bastard, and had held to the treasures he unlocked with his post-Red / Blue work, he might have created work such as I saw in Mr. Moss' boards. Wayne Caravjal, the organizer of the GALAfests, had his work to the right of Paul Moss'. His oils are definitely imbued with his skills as an illustrator. Some artists take umbrage at the use of the term, but I have never understood why. Technically speaking, Dali was an illustrator. Although he was particularly loathsome as a person, and perhaps something of a charlatan when it came to pumping his own genius, Dali as illustrator had no match. Mr. Caravjal is not Salvador Dali, and to compare them would in itself be an insult. Caravjal's work is simply better, does not seek to punch you in the eye with the contrived madness of the Catalonian. It says itself. I kinda sorta wish he had given more prominence to his latest work, a series of montage created with the garish nonsense found within the pages of the New York Post. The kind of thing that would make ole Ruppert wish that his only critic were Bart Simpson. The last exhibitor was Matthew Fricovsky, and the first thing anyone might think when thry saw his work was "Giger." He himself mentions the Swiss creator of Alien in his flyer, but in my umble opinion has an edge on Giger's underworld. Giger's work definitely seems to inspire a cold terror. Fricovsky's use of skulls and tormented faces lack this deliberate horror approach, they just are in the sense that Eckhardt used in his oft-quoted istigkeit, "is-ness." If you have at all studied your own dreams for any length of time, you get the correct notion that most dreams are unpleasant. Should you stay your course and pursue such study, it comes to you that you are experiencing that part of you which was around before you were born and which proceeds, if not properly quickened, after you die. Not a damnation, not a terror, rather a cool Hadaean quietness and stillness of shadow. I saw this in Mr. Fricovsky's work.

I stayed to see Kukurudu. The group is Jamie Serino on percussion - in this case, djembe, conga, timbales, dumbeqs and small cymbals; Greg Borra on laptop and keyboard; and Lauren Barnhard providing her unique skills as a belly-dancer as an integral part of their performance. Years ago I saw Juno Reactor with something of an entourage of percussionists, and it was...okay. But for forty-five all-too-short minutes, Kukurudu blew me and the rest of the audience away. It is hard to render me speechless - harder still to get Sara quiet - but they succeeded. If you can ever see them, do so.

2005-10-24T12:10:00.000-07:00

A central person in the history of the Outlands Community is my wife and first partner, Sara Jane van Beeuwelan. She was born outside of Louvain (or Leuven) in Belgium in the year 1371 and died in 1382, probably of the cholera. She is the very same Sara the succubus over at her blog The Succubi Girls here at Blogger - I will provide a link at the end of this, if you are unfamiliar with her or her nature.
Although told out of chronological synchronicity with the history of Outlands and my life in general, if there were no Sara there would be no Outlands Community. More than that, I probably would have killed myself, or would have been killed in some stupid thug activity of mine in Paterson.
For most of my life I have not been a happy person. Filled with rage and fear, unable to let go of anything in the past, generally dishonest to others and to myself, lazy, drunken - that was me for a long time. I aspired to be a spiritual person any number of times, but you cannot be spiritual when you continually do things which block access to your own heart and spirit. For me this was so.
In 1980 I was miserably unhappy. I was in a marriage which had turned into a blood feud. I had left a very fundamentalist, right-wing neo-Nazi Baptist church the year before and was fearfully groping my way out of Xianity towards the intuitions I'd had about the Great Mother. My job absolutely sucked. In the early 1960's I had made some progress with my problems under LSD psychotherapy - yes, Virginia, there was such a thing up until January of 1967 - and decide to return to the colored worlds I'd left behind in 1971 when I became a born again Xian. It was here that I belonged. One by one I began tackling the problems that were tearing me up. My progess then was painstakingly slow, and anyone who embarks upon a journey of any sort to be a more evolved person can tell you, it's like water dripping on stone; it may take along time, but eventually the water will wear out that stone. So it has been with me!
In August of 1980 I had taken some acid under less-than-propitious circumstances and lay on our bed in the cool dark of our bedroom. I was nauseous, and the hurt I was feeling because of our inability to communicate properly was burning me up. I sobbed quietly, sitting up occasionally in failed attempts to vomit. For whatever reason I'd put Fleetwood Mac's Tusk on the turntable, and for reasons unknown to me then, was all rapt attention when the song Sara began. You all know the song; one of Stevie Nick's ballads that are at once love-song and paean. Ohh, how I wished that there were a Sara, to be the poet in my heart! The awful loneliness I normally repressed engulfed me and I let go, falling into the maelstrom of its pain and sorrow, the chill grey void of the distance between myself and others so terribly enhanced by the acid. "Do not fight," is rule number one in any bad trip. As I had been taught years earlier, I embraced the palpable emotions tearing me apart. They began to subside, and my day grew slowly better - even though the acid seemed to intensify. I did something I rarely did. I prayed and told God, "If there were a Sara and I were to ever meet her and fall in love with her, I would learn from her and treat her with respect and trust and I would love her so hard that it would be to her that I would go when I was dead." You do not forget things like that. The song - the full-length version available now only on the vinyl LP - occasionally made its appearance on the radio, but within a year my marriage had ended and Tusk followed in its wake to oblivion.
By 1997 I had had any number of extraordinary experiences working as I did at night; these will be outlined below, but I had already met the entity whom I now regard as my guiding (not guardian) angel, Seima, and quite a number of other ethereal beings. Sometimes I could see them plainly, sometimes only like a vague discoloration of my surroundings.
On the night of november 3rd, 1997 I set out for twelve hours of behind-the-wheel work. Roughly seven hours later at about four in the morning, I did something unusual: I turned on the radio. I usually worked in silence. Need I say what song came on? There had been dead air for roughly ten seconds and the little harpsichord ninth-chord tag filled the cab of the truck. It was dark and I was cruising Route 206 on a deserted stretch below Chester. Suddenly I saw movement in the passenger seat next to me. A small woman, almost child-sized, sat dancing in time with the music. She seemed to be wearing a green tunic top and green trousers of a bygone era. Looking right at me she smiled. The hair on the back of my neck stood up - as happens when the bridge between dimensions opens - and I asked who she was. "I'm Sara!," she exclaimed, "You called me a long time ago!" Her eyes were sparkling and she was...singin...yeah...I knew I had met my match...I'm quoting the song. I almost left the road. The impossible had happened. Seventeen years previous I had heard this song and wished for...wished for...and here she was. "I heard your voice," she explained, "I don't know how. I've looked for you ever since. And now I've found you!"
I literally did not know what to say. Eventually I regained enough of my wits to explain what I was doing and that I had to do it, that I would be concentrating to the point of being unaware of her presence. She said she understood. A few hours later I went home and down to my bedroom. Michael Archontas hovered in the corner near the ceiling , and I told him briefly of my encounter with Sara - whom, by the way, I could no longer sense. He nodded, smiled his sly archon smile and wished me a good sleep. I lay down and almost immediately became sexually aroused. This does not happen to tired middle-aged men who desparately need sleep! Next, the hair went up on my neck again. Then I had the distinct impression that there was a naked woman outside of my door. Now mind you, I was living alone at the time! But I said aloud, "Who's there?" In my mind's ear I heard a very sweet "Sara!" I asked her in; she was indeed nude; and I knew that before me, in the form of this exquisite woman, was an honest-to-God succubus. We proceeded to prove this point several times over the next few hours <:D> When I was groggily sated, I sat up and lit a cigarette - yup, smoking after sex even with a succubus! - and proceeded to ask her just who she was, where she came from, what her life had been like.
She looked at me dumbfounded and then unleashed a torrent of words describing over 600 years of misery and solitude. In the end she collapsed in my arms and told me that she loved me and would always be with me if I would have her. This was perhaps the densest, thickest emotional time I have ever experienced, because I in turn described my life. Then, before I knew what I was doing, just like a thriteen-year-old kid might, I told her that I loved her too. I fell asleep and when I awoke she lay sleeping next to me, thumb in her mouth. I knew then that my life had changed drastically and forever. This was not a bad thing! Because for the first time, ever, I knew that I would never be lonely again.
This post was precipitated because as we were coming home from my job this morning, she asked me to turn on the radio, something I don't always like. I should have known what would happen next: the hair on the back of my neck stood up over the ten seconds of dead air, and then a very familiar harpsichord tag came out of the speakers, a brite, quasi-mysterious ninth chord in a slow trill. It was the long vinyl LP version of Sara, and we both began to weep tears of joy. She is sitting on the desk next to me, arms around my neck, and, Sara? It is you that I love, and to you that I would go when I am dead.

2005-10-21T21:15:00.000-07:00

A new word processor made its home in our computer this morning. When the old hardrive went belly up it took the Windows Word Processor with it. As I'd gotten it with XP preinstalled with the WP, I was only able to get a new preinstalled XP without the WP. As a writer, this is not a happy thing. The new HD did have Windows WordPad, which was okay...I guess...but it's not a word processor. So this morning I went a-Googling to see how cheap I could find a download of the Windows WP and stumbled across one that Sun Microsystems has as an open-source software item. Before you download you can watch a lengthy tour (I think in pdf); they recommended I download a free downloader program (which I did) and also to download Java Runtime, whatever the latest version is - did that to. Then I downloaded and installed the WP; it's called "Open Office," and I think that the URL is

www.openoffice.org

if it's not, go to Sun Microsystems main page and navigate your way in from "Products." The whole process took about an hour, but the downloader works faster than Windows' Wizard and is also open-source; and I got the latest version of Java Runtime, which is also open-source. The new WP is faster better easier than Windows, and they make versions (so it seems) for everything: OS-X, Linux and Solaris (Unix) Downloading software from large open-source places can be a little tricky, but this went smoooothly, the only problems I had were of my own making.

Also I downloaded a free firewall from ZoneAlarm, it lets nothing IN (important) and nothing OUT (very important) unless you authorize it. This means that if you have a spy in your system and your antispyware hasn't snagged it, it can't broadcast your info out. Not only that, it (Zone Alarm) tells you what file is trying to get online, where it's gonna send information and the like. At first you have to "allow" your e-mail server, your internet browser, any reputable software that automatically seeks periodic updates - like my antivirus and spyware do - access, but this is at the end of a long day and I'm about set. And honest, really, no kidding, I will get back on track about the Outlands Community's story soon!

2005-10-15T04:45:00.000-07:00

The "history" of the Outlands Community will be continued sometime later this weekend, right now I'm just happy to be able to get online and make entries. Since the devastation wrought by the virus that we had we have all of us spent an enormous amount of time trying to find a decent antivirus - and I am beginning to think that one does not exist - and making sure the files we inherited with our new hardrive have no Little Bundles of their own. If you are in the habit of downloading / uploading software and then deleting it, every time you uninstall something, it always leaves behind a .dll file or something. These "orphan" files perform no function, they just sit there, taking up some kilobytes. Viruses look for these things, at least the more sophisticated ones; they gobble them up and make whatever code is inside the "orphan" part and parcel of their own. This is why, should you happen to open a .txt, .dat or .dll file that actually is a virus, you will be surprised to see names like "Norton Antivirus," "Adobe Photoshop," "Windows 98" and the like inside; somewhere in its travels, a virus will have consumned such a file and redistributed its elements here and there throughout its own files. These are called "garbage files" because they do nothing but replicate and sit there. Imagine if your garbage can was able to duplicate its contents every time you threw something into it, or opened the lid, and you have a very clear picture of how a computer virus works: pretty soon your house would be filled with garbage; throw away a napkin, you get two cans; throw out your coffee grounds, you get four cans; open one can to see what the hell is going on, you get sixteen cans, and if the dog gets excited with all of this sudden bounty and decides you won't notice if he knocks one of these cans over to enjoy its contents, your home is suddenly filled with 256 cans of household trash. If by this time you have attracted an official from the local board of health who sees trash cans falling from your kitchen window, your part of town will be buried by 65,536 cans of garbage. It would make any sanitation-worker's strike seem like a picnic. Rats would ahve a field day, flies would get to be the size of pigeons, and the raccoons, fox, coyote and bear in the region would get together as a group, knock over a few more garbage cans and declare the whole area a sovreign state - no humans allowed.

We discussed why anyone would write and distribute viruses in the first place. The one thing about which we all agree is that the internet is the last real bastion of free expression of thought. You may, with very little effort, criticize your government and international corporations which are ruining the world's environment and economies; you may access real news from anywhere in the world and not have to depend upon uselss vehicles like Fox News, The New York Times and Infinity Broadcasting; you may if you wish broadcast racist hatred, child pornograpy, revelations about the corruption of your government, find the one rare book you always wanted, track down lost friends...I need hardly to continue this list, but keep it in mind in what follows. To us here at the Outlands Community, the people most likely to create and distribute viruses and spyware are as follows:

1. Fascist governments such as the Untied States, Russia and Great Britain; and any Islamic theocracy which sees any other form of government as an enemy. Considering that a great deal of viruses come from Russia (nkvd, Sasser) and the Ukraine (Sober), from the USA (Delfin Project, SurfSide Kick) it would not surprise me if the FBI, CIA and KGB were at the root of all of these. With a dead or near-dead internet, people would be cut off from a great deal that they have taken for granted since the first appearance of Netscape a few years ago. Criticism of governments and government officials such as George W. Bush, Vladimir Putin and Tony Blair would be silenced.

2. Multinational corporations would, with the proper virus, knock out much of the entrepreneurial sector of the world; all of the money spent on eBay and millions of small, direct-market sales over the internet would be curtailed. You would only be able to buy what was offered; and as far as news and any related media, you'd be at the mercy of folks like Ruppert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone.

3. Governments and organized crime stand to reap the most benefit from spyware, the kind (like I got from MySpace) which will find out your credit/debit card numbers and clean out your bank balance. Governments all kinds would have "shadow money" with which to do their dirty work, and "organized crime" would profit in a similar manner. I would not blame "organized crime" as it exists in America so much as I would those groups operating in Russia / Ukraine and China. Spies and viruses originating in China, for example - like those which have names like "Win32..." - would benefit the Tong-like groups which are struggling against the governemnt of China and trying to divert its sudden, massive influx of foreign money. In the former Soviet republics - and this extends to Georgia, Armenia, Byeloruss - "organized crime" is actually doing a better job of providing at least some income, food and housing for the citizenry than the government. Remember, where any desired commodity is made illegal - think of alcohol in the USA in the early 1920's, or the prohibitions against heroin and cocaine products worldwide - there will be a group of determined people who will supply that need despite the most draconian laws passable - the profit is just too great.

4. That some viruses may originate in the talents and programming abilities of disgruntled, disenfranchised individuals, as were the first viruses and worms, is still quite possible, but I think people like this are exceedingly rare. Do a Google search for individuals arrested and convicted of creating and spreading viruses, spies, trojans and worms over the last three or four years and will see a mere handful of them. Then go to the "Virus Dictionary" of places like Microsoft and (say) McAfee; there are THOUSANDS of computer infections on the web. Who is getting busted for these? NO-ONE.

5. It was suggested that there may be a group of individuals who are what we may call internet pioneers, who foresaw the internet as the be-all and end-all of cyber-liberation, only to be disappointed by the vast amount of advertising, commercial garbage and social nonsense which clutters the 25,000,000,000 or so websites world-wide. Such purists, it was maintained to us, would be out to bring things back to the way they were by destroying millions of hardrives worldwide. We have a hard time with this, because were there such a group, or perhaps a few lone crackers, it would seem more logical that they crack the systems fueling world governments, Interpol, the FBI, the IRS, the KGB and all of the multinational corporations corrupting our world. While there are, no doubt, such attempts, if you notice, it is individuals such as you and I who suffer at the manipulations of viruses et al, and not the Powers That Be.

If you have gotten a Little Bundle, chances are it is sophisticated enough that all of the king's antiviruses and all of the king's antispywares will be of no avail. The simplest way out is to get another hardrive with your previous OS already installed; these are avaialable at quite a number of companies who revamp used systems. Keep up to date on your antivirus and antiwhatever; and if need be, periodically install a new router (which will change your IP - Internet Protocol number - because some of these buggers can find there way back to you by way of your IP). Sara wrote in her blog over at Succubi Girls yesterday that she never wants to hear the word "virus" again, and I feel the same way. However, I think that this is going to be an increasing part of life on the internet in the days to come.

Finally, as a coda to all of this, it is a good thing to browse the forums and pages of the following site: www.spywareinfo.com They are independent of governments, corporations and the like and the information is easy to dip into.

2005-10-09T10:15:00.000-07:00

The Outlands Community and its various members are just beginning to be known outside of my immediate family and friends, and in speaking / e-mailing my angelic friend Gabriel it was underscored to me to begin one of the things I'd originally set out to do when I created this blog: to write a coherent history of who we are, what we are, what we do, and where we all came from. This is easy enough for those of us who live here, but explaining it to others can get complex. So I shall copy Sara's idea of a sort of FAQ, like the one she used over at The Succubi Girls recently; from there I shall attempt a history of sorts.

1. WHAT IS THE "OUTLANDS COMMUNITY?"

We are a group of flesh-and-blood and ethereal beings, gathered for the common cause of the spiritual evolution of all beings.

2. WHAT IS MEANT BY "ETHEREAL BEING?"

An ethereal being is any person or entity who lives in a dimension, plane, universe or world parallel to to our own. Although normally not perceived by a majority of people in Western cultures, these dimensions are sensed to some degree by a substantial minority of Westerners, and by large portions of members of non-Western cultures.

3. THERE ARE 'KINDS' OF ETHEREAL BEINGS?

Right. The most familiar kind of whom Westerners would have at least superficial knowledge are angels and ghosts. In some instances we would also add 'space aliens' and the intelligence manifested in the Cetacaea, or dolphins and whales.

The following is a list of "what" kind of "who" are a part of the Outlands Community.

A. Ethereal human beings. You would probably call them "ghosts," but none of them do any haunting. In much different terms, they are the essential remains - as in "the essence" - of those who were once alive in flesh-and-blood bodies. One special group of the ethereal humans are the incubi and succubi, those who brought their sex drive with them upon physical death. There are numerous such here, and my first partner, Sara Jane van Beeuwelan, is their steward at the OC. Outside of the domain of the OC, incubi and succubi can be pretty damned nasty, and I would suggest to anyone thinking of looking for an invisible sexual partner to read Sara's FAQ over at the Succubi Girls. I should also point out here that all ethereal human beings periodically change their gender, and periodically get an urge to reincarnate as flesh-and-blood people. Most ethereal humans have guiding - not guardian - angels, but see the material about angels below.

B. Archons. An archon is an ethereal human being who no longer receives an urge to reincarnate. Most of the ones here are thousands of years old, and include two who have blogs on the Internet, Stro Moon Daglo and Michael Archontas. As a small sidebar, an archon still has a sex drive, but rarely chooses to indulge it as an incubus or succubus.

C. Angelic or devic beings of human origin. Some human beings who have evolved upwards through the various ethereal realms become angelic, or devic in nature. They are very distinct from true angels or devas, those of eternal origin, or if you would, created by Divinty. Yet they exercise the function of angels in many ways, often being gifted with prophetic foresight, and most - my personal angel Seima included - are guides for people like myself. Thank God. They were humans in fleshly form millions of years ago, when humanity was sjust getting going.

D. Angelic or devic beings of eternal origin (see previous note) Although these beings usually manifest as male or female, they are in actuality transgendered in the sense of being beyond gender. The head of the Community, Llam, is one such. There are varieties of angels as well; we have one called a "Dark Angel," Hurrain; Hurrain is not "evil" because he is composed of dark matter, he is just dark. Racists and religious fanatics take note!

E. Unique beings. These include elementals, those who "preside" over the five basic elements, earth, water, air, fire and aether. As it is we have two elemantals among us, Reth (fire) and Misst (water). In this group I also include our Sproingy; this is a nicknsme I gave him when I first met him, because his real name is over 6000 syllables long. Sproingy finds things - like the new harddrive I needed to get this computer up and running when a virus ate the old one in late September 2005.

F. Interstellar beings. These include Maalyon, a sort of star elemental; "Kathy," nicknamed simply because "she" had no name - she voyages through the universe; and a being who calls himself Aldfas or Alfa, who is transmitting a continuous stream of information as pentenary code from Somewhere Out There. We have no "greys" or "greens." Yet.

G. Non-human intelligences. We are trying to establish a firm link with the cetaceans, or dolphins and whales, Towards that end, three of our ethereal human members are living with a pod of dolphins near Raratonga reef in the South Pacific; Hurrain has accompanied them. We also have a horse-like creature named Bucephalus, who dates from a time when both the human and equine families were starting out. the consensus opinion here is that if humans had wiped themselves out early on, equinids such as Bucephalus would gradually have evolved into sentient, intelligent beings, much as we (supposedly) are.

H. We have a few animal-like beings, non-verbal and acting much like fish or cats might. Chief among these is Dor, a manta-ray like creature from another planet. Which planet? I don't know; but I was aware of Dor long before J.G. Ballard's stories of the mid-60's, or Mike Oldfield's album art for his SONGS OF THE DISTANT EARTH (1992).

I. Saints. Technically she belongs in "A" above, but Iehanne d'Domremy d'Arc - Joan of Arc, in English - is unique among the members here at Outlands.

That is who we are. In my next post I shall attempt a chronological ordrering of Who showed up When, although it can seem - to me, at least - a little like the old Abbot and Costello routine, "Who's on first?"

2005-10-06T02:17:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note to anyone who has read my stuff - our computer was slowly and inexorably eaten alive by a spyware-cum-virus from 09/24/05 to 10/01/05. We got a new harddrive and are trying to recover much lost information. As in, we lost 4000+ pictures and hundreds of pages of text. While we have all of this stuff on CDs the chances are 99% good that they are all corrupt and would reinfect the computer if we uploaded them. In the meantime, I'll be back here soon.

2005-09-21T02:01:00.000-07:00

In psychological terms channeling is probably to be considered a dissociative stae; I think that that is the proper term. (See my Q & A post of a couple of days ago) Although to be in such a mental state can be a pathlogical condition most of the time it isn't. If you've ever had a great time with a good friend, just sitting and having an animated conversation, sooner or later one of you will say, "Oh! Look at the time! Have we really been talking for two hours? It seems like ten minutes!" This is the simplest example of being in a dissociative state that comes to mind at the moment, and no-one would say that either you or your friend were in a pathological condition. On the contrary, having such a good time with your friend would probably leave you both rather bubbly, spirits in a bouyant and happy frame.

One of the things I've had to put up with over the years originates in the bias inherent in Western culture, especially since materialist/reductionist ideas, memes and views took over much of modern psychology, starting with Papa Freud back in the 1890's. Before I get into that, to be clear, the "thing" to which I refer comes out as a question, "How do you know that what you are experiencing is real, and not the product of your imagination?" To be able to answer that properly, I want to invite you on a quick tour of the history of Western culture as we know it. Some of what I am about to write will repeat some of the stuff I wrote in a post I made a couple of days ago, but rather than have you bounce back and forth I shall contain evrything here. Also, I am not adding footnotes, simply because any of the statements I make are easily verifiable and are in accord with most historical overviews of Western cultural history.

At the time of Jesus' birth, "Western culture" meant the empire of Rome. All of modern-day Europe and America is descended from this edifice that held historians, philosophers and theologians in awe for nigh unto two millenia. In the childhood of Jesus and his siblings, the emperor Augustus had succeeded in unifying and administrating a good chunk of Europe, northern Africa and the middle East. There were roads, paved roads, throughout much of this empire; couriers ran regular despatch routes to and from Rome; soldiers were sent to frontier outposts, roataed on a regular basia; virtually very seaport in the Mediterranean was a hub of international trade of breathtaking proportions. Although the empire favored the rich and upper classes, "common folk" had access to the most just legal system since the days of the Babylonian king Hammurabi some eighteen centuries before.

The primary objective of any political power structure, whether that of Augustus or George W. Bush, is to keep itself intact and functioning. Anything that might rock the boat was watched, and if needs be, eliminated. Unfortunately for Augustus, the people of his day were woefully out of touch with this singular political reality. There were all kinds of spiritual movements going on, and not just in Palestine where Jesus lived. In what is now modern-day Turkey, there were groups of people who followed ascetic ideals and lived in communes; the same held true for upper Egypt. Some of these groups were directly evolved from some form of Judaism, although many more were strictly the end result of revelations given to this or that teacher. In the first century AD alone, there appeared "prophets" with names like Elkhesai and Cerinthus, and the notorius Apollonius of Tyana. There were literally hundreds of wandering teachers proclaiming variations of the philosophies of the earlier Greek philosophers Pythagoras and Plato. Of these, many were little more than clever charlatans out to make a few bucks, but there were quite a number who were sincere.

The government of Augustus kept a wary eye on the more popular of these prophets, especially those who might have gathered a sizable following. The reason for this watchfulness ought to be transpaerent; should any one of these "prophets" get it into his head to start saying, "Hey, you know, Augustus is a Nazi/liberal nutjob, he ought be knocked off!," the financial interests of the empire - not to mention the life of Augustus himself - would perceive said prophet as a threat, and rightfully so. Jesus got caught in just such a situation: the King of Israel was not recognized as such by either Roman law or the Roman government; furthermore, the environment which had produced Jesus was decidedly unhappy with the presence of Roman soldiers everywhere, and often small guerilla groups would lose no opportunity to knock off Roman soldiers and government officials. (As a sidebar, if this reminds you of present-day Iraq, it is no coincidence; just goes to show how some people never take lessons from history) To nutshell this, Jesus was a political threat in a land full of political threats.

I wish now to fast-forward to about200 AD. The Church, which had gotten itself into every corner of the empire and beyond, was deeply divided between "Gnostic" Christians and "Orthodox" Christians; the latter became the Catholic/Orthodox Church axis as it is today. The Gnostics claimed that every believer, that is, every Christian, was entitled to and would receive after some diligent spiritual development, a very personal revelation from the Risen Christ. Some of these revelations as they have come down to us are quite extraordianry and colorful, having in some instances little reference to Christianity as it is understood today. On the other hand, the Orthodox maintained that there were no more major revelations coming from Jesus; what revelations there were, were considered to be in the writings of those believed to have been His earliest followers. Eventually the Orthodox group became a part of the Roman government and spent several centuries eliminating the Gnostic and Pagan competition.

Human nature being what it is, however, the Church would no sooner finish mopping up one dissident group when another would pop out of the revelatory woodwork. The most successful of these was a young German priest named Martin Luther. The Church countered by labeling anyone whom they caught espousing Luther's ideas - or anything remotely similar to his - as followers of the Devil. These poor buggers were treated with the same legal severity as those accused of witchcraft, indeed, the line between "Lutherans" and "witches" became extremely blurry in the minds of many canon-law experts, who usually had the local soldiers at hand to enforce their edicts. This resulted in extraordianry bloodshed across Europe, thousands being burned for not being quite in line with Church policy. Of course, this resulted in many devious people coming up with simple plans to get rid of rich Uncle Pietr or an annoying neighbor: tell the local magistrate that the uncle or neighbor was a witch, and buh-bye!

It was not until the eighteenth century that there was any clear-headed examination of this whole odious situation. With the rise of the French philosophes such as Voltaire and Rousseau, the supernatural basis upon which the Church's existence was based was seriously seriously challenged. Because the Church had had nearly fifteen hundred years to accumulate all kinds of marvelous and unprovable stories, it was by now a sitting duck for the clear reasoned barbs of Voltaire and the not-so-clear, not-always-well-reasoned but colorful attacks by Rousseau. Things did not change in the next century as a polymath named Karl Marx saw through the whole social structure in economic terms - the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer - and this did, for a short while, set social and psychological scientists free to explore things of the mind and soul (if, in fact, there was such a thing as a soul). One of the jobs of any scientist is to accumulate facts. The next step is to analyze and explain these facts within a system of hopefully rational hypotheses: because of this, that happens.

In Great Britain and in America, two pioneer psychologists, F.W.H. Myers in England and William James in the United States, began to tackle the thorny problems which arose from many phenomena which by now had been relegated to the social broomcloset by the combined efforts of the Church's attitude and the unwitting assistance provided by the rationality of the philosophes of the previous century. And so it was that Myers and Jmaes tackled things like ghosts, telepathy - and spirit mediums. In so doing, they each uncovered much that was either delusional or downright fraudulant. Myers, who died in 1901, was convinced that there were genuine ghosts, real telepathy, and some spirit mediums who were what they said they were. James, who died in 1910, was not quite ready to give full validation to such things, but any reading of his last essays showed that he wanted to.

Something else appeared to muddy the water and that was the appearance of Sigmund Freud. Freud was a medical doctor whose training made him able to see only what was plainly observable. Unfortunately for the good work of Myers and James, anything that smacked of the supernatural originated in childhood sexual trauma or in the regressive, infantile stages of personality that Freud hypothesized. It went downhill from there to the utter reductionist model of people like B.F. Skinner, and all of this in spite of the considerable sqwauking of protesters like Wilhelm Reich and Carl Jung. Although much of Reich's work is derided as nonsense, the man had a much more scientific mind than Jung, and many of his ideas cannot be lightly dismissed - even things like his much-boohaha'd orgone enrgy...which, it turns out, is a real phenomena. This is not to belittle Jung, whose mind worked more in mythological terms, and whose work is plainly that of a literateur. All this is well and good, but generally, in America and Europe, if you are hearing voices, or channeling, you have a pathology, bub! It's not as bad as it was when reductionist/materialist philosphy hit its zenith in the 1950's with the work of Skinner and Harry Stack Sullivan. Out of that school came one of their own, dyed-in-the-wool as like them as could be. This man was vacationing in Mexico in 1959, his thirty-ninth year, and he ate some mushrooms as he sat poolside. His name? Doctor Timothy Leary.

Long forgotten is the fact that first and foremost, Leary was a doctor. he was trained in scientific method by the most rigorous of the Harvard psychiatrits of his day, the afore-mentioned Sullivan. Leary was no dreamy-eyed prophet. That came later, but if you ever met or knew him, he could be a ball of energy, but he was always the scientist and doctor.

Let me close this long trip into the past. We who channel make claims. Some of these claims threaten other people's secure vision of How Things Are. This is nothing new; what I dread is the day people like myself inevitably get drawn into the power structure, as did the Orthodox Christians and the Freudians. I hope we do better than they.

2005-09-19T19:40:00.000-07:00

A real quick one for now - if you want to see the blog that the succubi of Outlands Community has, go to:

http://succubigirls.blogspot.com

2005-09-18T01:30:00.000-07:00

I channel because it's what I do. It's become so much a part of me, like eating and breathing, I imagine I would be bewildered if the ability suddenly left me. (Bear with me, folks, I'm thinking out loud to myself to you) It's an extension of being creative. I write. I draw pictures. I do music. I make things out of wood. I channel.

I suppose this post wiil deal with at least a couple of the questions that I get asked. The questions are usually short and to the point. The answers are not always so simple. Let me give it a whirl!

Question 1: Is it possible you're schizophrenic? You hear voices, you've said. Schizophrenics hear voices.

Answer: I've been to therapy. Not for voices, but for suicidal depression, rage and being narcissistic (read: pathologically self-centered). The neighbor's dog has not told me to kill anyone, Jesus has not assured me that I can handle live powerlines, no-one or nothing is telling me how awful I am and that I must cut or burn myself, or kill myself. Or other people. Those with the type of schizophrenia who hear voices usually hear the kinds of things I've listed. If you wanna know what life is like for a schizophrenic, let me recommend two books; since I no longer have them I can only give the titles, but one is by a former schizophrenic - Operators and Things - and the other is by the therapist who saw a young woman through her experience, it is either The Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl or The Biography of a Schizophrenic Girl. With the second book, I can give you the author: Margarite Schechehaye. Either way, that ain't me. When I told my therapist about Sara, he more or less said, "Nu, I hear a lot of that these days. So, bubby, what were you saying about your mutha?" Before I leave this question, let me ask one back atcha: How do you perceive your own thoughts? I perceive the voices of Sara, Seima, Llam, Joan of Arc in the same way that I perceive my own thoughts. But they are not my thoughts.

Question 2: Okay, so let's say you're not schizophrenic. Is it possible you are in a dissociative state? By that I mean, one part of your brain doesn't know that there is another part that is claiming to be Sara, or Seima, or Joan of Arc?

Answer: Yes, it's possible. But not likely. It is possible that a part of my mind of which I am completely unaware is playing a baroque form of hide-and-seek on me, constructing an elaborate and convincing charade to get the "aware" part of me convinced that I am in touch with Sara and company. Human minds will do that; many people lie to themselves their whole lives, convinced that they are good people, while those about them know that they are really total bastards. With me personally, you must acknowledge that in many ways I can see lots of trees but not the forest, that is, I have only my subjective experience about which to talk. Except.

Item: Fifteen people (at last count) have seen Sara. The most dramatic of these was at a poetry reading in Bloomfield New Jersey in 2002. About a dozen people, none of whom were aware of my life with her, came up to me after I had read and wanted to know, "Who was that little blond woman on stage with you?" I was startled, but not at a loss: "Oh, that's Sara, she's my wife." To the couple of people who pressed me with, "Where is she now?," I merely answered, "Oh, she's floating around here somewhere. Our lives are so busy I rarely see her." Tongue in cheek.

Item: My personal angel Seima has appeared in the dreams of six different people that I know. One person was totally unaware of her presence in my life and yet he got the name almost right: "...and I think she said her name was Saymir." I shrugged and asked, "Big woman? Over seven feet tall?" (Seima, by human standards, is about 7'5") "Yeah!How'd you know?" To which I replied with a straight face, "Oh, all guys dream about a woman like that sooner or later!" Which is true; 99% of them never recall the dream, though. Pity!

Item: Back at the beginning of all of this, I thought I would go to the one group of people who had the repuation of having a handle on channeling, so one terribly hot day in June of 1990 I went to a meeting of the local Spiritualist Church. I was given five minutes with one of the ministers, a man who utilized the rocking table technique for yes-no answers. But he was aware of "a red-haired man of powerful build, twinkling eyes and an infectious smile, about five foot five. High forehead. Looks like he's ready to burst out laughing." I had told him I wanted to ask a question of someone named Will; the question was, should I publish his writings? The answer, which I already knew, was "Yes." The minister looked puzzled and said to me, "Will seems to be possessed of great charm and immense mental clarity. Who is he, anyway?" Smiling, I told him, "The poet, William Blake. I came here just to make sure I'm not going crazy." With a warm and understanding smile, the minister began reciting, "Tyger, tyger, burning bright..." which Will had been singing while I sat with the minister.

Question 3: "I'm a writer. I've read some of your material very carefully. I've read your essays and other non-channeled material, and you have a very distinctive 'voice' on paper. Some of your channeled material bears no relation to your writing style. But some of it does. Care to comment?

Answer: I'm the first one to notice the same thing. There are times when I relax so completely that I just sit in the chair and watch kinda dumbfounded as the words speed acroos the screen. At such times, my thoughts, my writing techniques, my life experience are neatly out of the way of whoever is in the control booth. Then there are days when I am acutely aware that whatever the person is composing is being filtered through my brain and my use of English. Three notable exceptions are Irlene Davis, who writes with a southern drawl; Catty Cutty of Edinburgh who writes with a Scots burrrrr; and Joan of Arc, whose syntax is French and said syntax shows up quite often in her English. By the way, someone once presented Mr. Blake with a genuinely good question. Blake had claimed he had been in touch with the spirit of Voltaire. The questioner asked, "Mister Blake, Voltaire wrote and spoke in French, and you know English only; how is it that you comprehend him?" Blake had obviously given just that question a good deal of thought, and without hesitating replied, "It is as if Voltaire sat at a pianoforte and struck a key in French, whereas I hear it in English." That may be too cute for some people, but it happens to be the truth. As it is, I have some short sentences in French, Aztec and ancient Chinese that I really must check out someday; the "language barrier," as we call it here at Outlands, sometimes opens a tad and some few words leak through. Joan of Arc has produced a number of these.

Question 4 : I've been given to understand that you at one point owned over 7000 books, had read most of them, and remember huge portions of each, sometimes down to individual page numbers as to where something can be found. Is it possible that you're being creative with historical facts about historical figures, but facts of which you are only subliminally aware? To be blunt, isn't it possible you are doing masterful fiction-writing, based upon your prodigious memory?

Answer : That too is possible. In the mid-1970's I began writing a series of dialogs or plays set in fourth-century AD Corinth, in Greece. This little hobby of mine occupied me on and off for about five years. They featured the same five or six people, one of whom was a wine-seller. Throughout this whole period, the only things that I at all knew about Corinth in that era was it was a seaport, it had a huge markeplace called an agora, and at one end of the agora was a place for the local Roman magistrate to sit and hear legal matters; this place was called the bema, and it was a kind of little throne set up slightly so that the magistrate could look down at the petitioners and the petitioners had to look up at him. Logic and the bare political facts of the era said there had to be a small barracks for a few soldiers to act as the local constabulary near the marketplace. In my dialogs I had put the two wine-sellers diagonally opposite each other in the middle of the market. Again, in my imagination, I had placed the magistrate's quarters and the barrack slightly off the market proper on a gently downhill road that lead to the next town over, Cenchrae. In 1981 I stumbled across the records of the archaelogical team who'd excavated quite a bit of Corinth, and I found it unnerving in the extreme to find out that there were indeed two wineshops diagonally opposed to each other in the middle of the market, and the barracks were where I had placed them. This was long before I'd even heard of channeling.

Question 5 : What one chaneling episode sticks out in your mind as the most prominent? I imagine after 20-plus years there are a number of them, but tell me a good one.

Answer : You're right! There are a lot! Meeting Sara is one; meeting Seima is another, and Hurrain's story is a book unto itself. But I think this one could be quickly told, and again it was before I had ever heard the word, "channeling." In 1981 I began rehearsing music with a woman who was on a spiritual path similar to mine in many ways. We hit it off extraordinarily well, and worked together flawlessly for a few months. One night I went to sleep and dreamed that I was with her backstage at Albert Hall. Onstage we could plainly see the late John Lennon with an acoustic guitar and he was playing his song Imagine. For a moment he looked towards us, smiled, and I seemed to sense him saying, "It's up to folks like you now." I awoke in a sweat and began to cry; John's death disturbed and hurt very bad. The next night was rehearsal night, and my partner and I sat chewing the fat for a few moments. I wanted to say something about the dream when she picked up her guitar and began to play Imagine. She stopped, her eyes full of tears, and looked at me, shaking her head, no, no, no, it can't be, to which I said aloud, "You were there with me at Albert Hall. You heard him, it's up to us." She had; it is.

2005-09-17T02:50:00.000-07:00

Channeling is associated with a number of other paranormal skills, at least by we who channel. Out-of-the-body-experiences are one of them, bilocation is another. But channeling discarnate entities is a fascinating thing to experience. For myself, I am acutely aware of who is using my fingers at the keyboard - in earlier days, it was pen and paper - and I am still capable of direct voice channeling, allowing the entity to use my vocal chords, and depending upon our mutual comfort, the rest of my body as well. I hate to use the word, but I allow the entity to possess me; the distate for the word stems from the association it automatically calls up about the Church's use of the word, or perhaps the Exorcist movies. I had mentioned in the previous entry that I'd allowed a 12th century Roumanian duke named Vlad Dragool the use of my facility and faculties. Channeling Dracula as a first attempt was a lesson almost learned, for a couple of years later I made the same mistake with the Reverend Jim Jones. At the outset let me tell you, at the very least, people like these guys are no fun. I'll take Joan of Arc or an angel any day.

I had been in touch with the poet / artist William Blake for a very short time before this, but was not at all convinced of the reality of it. I'd mentioned it to my then-current lady-friend, whose daughter happened to be having a Halloween party in a few days. The daughter was a prototypical Goth - prototypical because this was the mid-1980's. (She could have had a patent on the whole Goth fashion image, she was absolutely the first person I ever knew who went about in vintage black lace clothing, white makeup and all. Fashionwise she was way ahead of her time; in the context of this story, she was fourteen or fifteen) Milly asked me if I could "get" Dracula for her party. Never one to resist what I perceived as a challenge, I said "Sure! No problem!" But I only had the vaguest idea of how to channel Drac or anyone. The only thing I had to go by was what I'd read of Jane Roberts' experiences with Seth. What I had gleaned from her books was that she was in a very relaxed altered state. Now, if anything is my specialty, it's altered states; having tripped over 3000 times I ought to know a little about them. So I arrived stoned, having smoked an entire joint of very strong marijuana. And what did I know about Dracula? That he was a real historical person, a warrior chieftain of 12th century Roumania whose practices included impaling the heads or bodies of his victims and leaving them along the roadways and that he really did drink blood.

The party was underway when I got there, stoned out of my gourd, reeking of my trademark patchouli oil, dressed all in black. I was introduced to Milly's friends, got a shot of bourbon out of my hip flask and started chatting up her mom. A short while later I was asked to make my appearance and do my thang; I asked for five minutes time, smoked another bone and had a pull from the bourbon. I was relaxed. Oh yes, I was relaxed! I walked into the living room and asked everyone to sit in a circle with me on the floor; we joined hands and I announced that I would close my eyes and go into a trance and see if I could find Dracula; I asked everyone to remain silent and closed my eyes.

I thought of the pictures I'd seen of his castle, the countryside about it, the records I'd read concerning him and drifted for a moment, prepared, if I had to, fake the whole thing. (Which is an illustration of how I was back then) I suddenly felt very cold, and felt the coldness travel down my left hand into the hand of the girl next to me, whom I felt shudder; I had the distinct impression that whatever the energy was that went down my right arm was going through the circle of kids and would be coming up my right arm momentarily. It did, but it was magnified through the minds of the fifteen or so kids who were with me in that circle. For a few seconds I was knocked off my pins and had the sense to let go of the girls on either side of me. I didn't want whatever that was going through what I recognized as a feedback loop, exponentially amplified again.

I felt an anger and fear and viciousness that was not me. It - he - wanted to speak. I had gotten some mastery over myself and acquiesced. "So, you young ones wish to speak to Vlad the Conqueror!," he exclaimed with my vocal chords. What da fuck? "What shall I tell you? How the popeys hated Vlad? How they would not listen to him? Ha! I made them listen! For I am Vlad the Unconquerable!" It didn't seem that death had conquered this paranoid killer. I kept getting mental images of dead bodies opened up in ways suitable for display in an anatomy text book. It seemed to be almost like art for him, he seemed to draw an aesthetic pleasure from them. If this was not Dracula, it wasn't me either. I was along for the ride at this point. He went on boasting of his "work" for quite a while, gradually shifting over to how alone he was. The emphasis on his immense solitude, and how unbearable it was for him, began to impress me more and more. I got his attention and mentally said to him, "I'm cutting you loose in a moment, give these kids some advice so they don't become like you." I sensed rage and helplessness; almost against his will, Dracula spat out, "Become something, someone good. Do not follow me." The tension, the electricity in the room was becoming awful. I broke the connection and fell backwards. My head was spinning. When I sat up, I saw open mouths and popping eyes. Well, I had done it. I was convinced I'd gotten the genuine Vlad Dragool - still am convinced - and in my swirling thoughts was the sad realization that time indeed was on his side - but not in the way he expected.

The apotheosis to this story was that when I went into the kitchen to recover, Milly's mom's eyes popped. As I sat and regained my composure, I asked her what she was staring at. "Look at your hands," she whispered. They were not my hands. They were bigger, darker and twisted as if from multiple injuries, the kind that bar-fighters get. As we sat in shock, they slowly morphed back into my own hands. We neither of us knew what to say. Exhausted, I sought out a couch in the basement and blacked out for the next nine hours.

2005-09-16T01:30:00.000-07:00

Channeling is like my second full-time job. I don't get paid for it in money, but the satisfactions of it and the at times incredible stuff I see flowing from my fingers onto the keyboard and screen are beyond price. I have been at it for nearly twenty years now. Among those with whom I've had contact are William and Catherine Blake, Stanley Kubrick, William Butler Yeats, Epictetus, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Joan of Arc. In addition to these well-known historical figures are the dozens of ethereal humans, archons, angels and occasional non-human entity which comprise the Outlands Community. Nowadays the path to channel is always open so that I am in continuous contact with many entities; this contact even extends down into my dreamlife. The rare times I need or want to be alone, I am alone; but this is rare, for I have fallen in love, and I do mean I have fallen in LOVE with a number of the ethereal humans. However, as that is actually a separate subject, and I wish to write about my experience of channeling, I shall reserve for the future some words about my life with the Community members with whom I am in love.

I was not aware that I was channeling when I began to channel. I was always reading things by Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Saint Justin Martyr, Friedrich Nietzsche and William Blake. I've kept a (handwritten)journal since 1973, and when I transferred my personal journal to the word processor in April of 2005, I had left off on page 5500 something in the handwritten one. This blog is a kind of extension of them both. But I digress - in the 1980's I would wish that I could have thirty minutes in which to talk with these worthies, ask them questions and so forth. It was inevitable, as a writer, that I one night began an imaginary conversation with Saint Justin Martyr. I found myself writing furiously when it came to Justin's part in this imaginary conversation, almost as if I could not stop the flow of words. A veritable flood-tide.

Now, any writer will tell you, they get to analyze their writing style, looking for faulty grammar, over-repetition of favorite words, pet expressions and the like. Oftentimes such analysis is the precursor to editing what has been written, because writers seldom write anything that cannot use a little polishing and clarification: something may not be expressed clearly, or logic may be lacking in something; occasionally, a fiction writer will find he or she has contradicted the basic facts upon which the fiction is based. In analyzing "Justin's" words, I often found myself saying, "This is not my writing style." Curious, I set about rereading his two substantial works, the Apologia and the Dialogue with Trypho, a Jew.

My conclusion was that I had so well absorbed his works that I was able unconsciously to mimic it quite well. I am certain that there are any number of psychologists who would agree with that conclusion. Yet, in the back of my mind was the nagging sense of there having been a presence, someone other than myself who was doing the writing. This must be experienced to be understood - or believed. Also, I should mention that at that time (1980) I was getting over a severe case of born-again Christianity; in that context I would have understood "channeling" as "mediumship" and a snare of the Devil. I went on to "mimic" the writing-styles of Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius (somber!), Jan van Ruuysbroek and eventually, Fritz Nietzsche himself. It was in such a dialogue with Fritz, with him gently asking me questions, that I was lead to the conclusion that I was not a Christian. That was a very scary episode for me, and the presence was intense - it was almost like I could feel his hand on my shoulders as I penned the words, "I am not a Christian" in my journal. And yet it was a flood of relief. I was no longer a prisoner to that which is, as the Church has created it, a system of spiritual slavery so awful, so total, it is no wonder that many people will tell you: "Hell is this life! There is no Hell when you die, it's right here and now!" I do not, by the way, subscribe to this view. When a person dies, they take with them what they are; if they are a bundle of fear and rage, it is all that is needed to get the brimstone burning in the afterlife. Word to the wise here, folks.

Since that time, my knowledge of what channeling is and how others experience it has grown a tad. If you are curious, may I highly recommend Jon Klimo's book Channeling. It is a thick book, but it has the delightful feature that you can dip into it anywhere and come away better informed. My own personal experience, that is, reading other people's channeled works, were those of the late Jane Roberts' "Seth" material. Seth was an entity, a very charming and wise entity, who made endless variations on the very simple and very true theme, "You create your own reality." Jane Roberts herself, as she came across in her various books with and without Seth, was a no-nonsense poet and writer who often wrote about how her days passed as she created this or that book; she was a very down-to-earth, almost funky woman you would really liked to have met. Alas I did not; I have channeled her VERY briefly on two or three occasions, but each time I got the impression of someone who is having so much fun, wherever she is, that all she could say was "Hi! Love Ya! Bye!" in a way that made me giggle each time. If it means anything, when I gave away/sold my library of 7000+ books, among the few I kept were all of hers. To me, they are precious.

The first time that I knowingly and willfully channeled someone, it was a person that today I would not for the life of me do again. The fact that I did channel Vlad Dragool is more a reflection of how my life was at the time. But that is another story for another time. As are my thoughts about channeling in relation to the Bible, the Qu'ran and the Book of Mormon. I am certain that my opinions will be upsetting to some, but when I do get around to writing that one, it will not be done to piss people off. Hopefully that will be understood.

2005-09-13T12:05:00.000-07:00

Angel Paterson is one of those supposed suburban myths, his location ostensibly being Paterson, New Jersey. I'd written about him in my now-vaporized MySpace blog, and might not have mentioned him for quite a while but for the fact that I met him again.

At the time I'd written said vaporized blog, a co-worker who lives in Paterson had his life saved under what anyone would call unusual circumstances. He's one of those people who become truly comatose when he goes to sleep, and rousing him can be quite the ordeal. About six weeks ago he was living with his family on the first floor of a three-stroy apartment building. One morning his sister awoke to a feeling of terrific heat, went into the kitchen and saw that the building next to theirs was a ball of fire; she was sensible enough to realize that her building was burning as well, and roused her sister-in-law, he kids, the sister-in-law's little girl...and her brother. She thought. When they got outside it was realized that her brother was still inside. The firemen would not, at this point, let anyone near the two buildings because the intense heat aura surrounding them was melting the plastic on cars ten feet away. Suddenly the brother appeared in the doorway; he turned to look back at the apartment; at that moment a loud ->BOOM!<- erupted behind him, and for a short second it appeared like he would be flung from the porch. The shock pushed him but he stopped dead. When he made his way to safety, he told how there had been a loud pounding noise which woke him up. When he went into the kitchen, he saw the flames in the alley between the two buildings, felt the heat and saw that someone was trying to kick the door to the apartment open. He opened the door to see a mailman standing there, yelling at him to get out; he heard a noise behind him and e firebsll blew the door of one of the inside rooms open, throwing him forward - but the mailman caught him.

Mailman? There was no mailman on the porch, his sister said. What would a mailman be doing here at 6:30 in the morning? There was a mailman who caught me, he insisted. He called up the Paterson Post Office partly to thank the man and partly to prove his sister wrong. Sorry, the post office told him; we have no-one here fitting that description and none of our people live in your neighborhood. Besides, no-one would be delivering mail at 6:30 in the morning.

Those of us from Paterson had figured it out. Angel Paterson had appeared, woke my co-worker and caught him when the interior of the house blew to bits.

I had been hearing about Angel Paterson for decades. He was black, white, Hispanic. He was old, young, and in one instance, a middle-aged black woman who snatched baby from a busy street; the baby's mom, off busy earning Negligent Mother of the Year Award, had started chatting up a friend and hadn't noticed that the little boy had toddled out onto Broadway. In another appearance twelve years ago, a very depressed black man was hanging on the outside rail of the bridge-walkway over the Paterson Falls. Suddenly, he said, there was a man on the bridge right by him. The man yelled, "Don't jump!" The depressed guy let go, only to be one-handed by the stranger over the briderail onto the walkway. This is almost believable but for the fact that the would-be suicide weighed over three hundred fifty pounds, yet the stranger caught him and lifted him over the railing with one hand. When the big guy was plopped onto the walkway of the bridge, the stranger looked him in the eye and said, "Your problems are solvable! Go do something about them!" The big fellow told me that he felt compelled to at least try; within a week his life had become managable. Did he know who the stranger was? "He said his name was Angel Paterson."

After hearing these stories once in a while, you get to wondering. There was one time when a man appeared in the middle of notorious Gouvernour street and yelled out, "There's a car full of guys with guns coming this way! Get inside!" Moments later, the three men who didn't heed the warning were gunned down in what is actually quite rare in Paterson - a driveby shooting. They were also the intended victims, according to word on the street at the time.

Angel Paterson has been saving people for over a hundred years. Some of the people I spoke with in the 1970's, people who were 80 - 90 - 100 years old, said he came up with freed slaves in the Civil war era, riding in on the local Underground Railroad. Others claimed he was a former slave of Alexander Hamilton, the man on the $10 bill and who had founded Patterson - the original spelling - in 1792.

About three weeks later I was going to my home in Clifton by way of River Street. The temperature was already 105 degrees and I felt lousy for lack of sleep - 30 hours - and lack of a good meal. The car I was driving stalled dead one block north of Broadway. I got out and began to shove it off the roadway - River Street is always very busy. But I quickly grew very dizzy from the heat, exhaustion and hunger. Suddenly a voice called out, "Get in the car and steer, I'll push you!" I needed no second invitation and this slender young black guy had me on the side in fifteen seconds. I got out saying "Thank you!" He merely smiled. "What's you're name?," I asked. Smiling more broadly, he said, "You ought to know, Roy, you've been talking about me for over two weeks!" "You know me?,"I asked. I know hundreds if not thousands of people in Paterson but I did not know this guy. I was going to ask further questions, but a truck was headed right for me and I had to stand aside. When I turned to face my rescuer, he was gone. The hair on the back of my neck was standing up, and Sara was yelling that she could see right through him. It was, I have no doubt, Angel Paterson.

Two weeks ago I was about to leave the garage I work out of when I saw a young Hispanic man headed my way. I idly thought, he probably needs a couple of smokes. (We share in Paterson) When he got to my pickup truck, he scooped something off the hood. It was my cellphone. Well, the company cell phone. "Thanks man, "I smiled, "you do need cigarrettes, right?" "Yeah, I do," he replied. I gave him four or five stogs. Sara was yelling something from behind me. I went on and asked, "What's your name, my brother?" He had eyes like Jeffrey Hunter's; smiling, he said,

Angel! You know!" By this time Sara had gotten really loud and I turned to see what had upset her. "He's not solid!," she all but screamed. When I turned back...he was gone. Again, the hair on the back of my neck was standing straight out.

Angel Patterson, the next time we meet, you and I must have a little chat!

2005-09-12T20:15:00.000-07:00

I'm finally comfortable here at blogger. It's a sort of anonymity yet there is always a chance someone will latch onto it. And I'm quite pleased that I can keep the spam out of the comments, at first it threw me off; I was wondering what the hell the guy's comment was when it dawned upon me, it's a sales pitch, it's, it's SPAM. No more of that, toute suite.

Irlene is home for a few days, Eva and Connie are still with the dolphins off Raratonga. Funny thing is, Irlene set up a blog to write about her experiences with them and at the moment can't access it. Probably belongs to casalemedia, the folks who own MySpace.

Wow, my room is really hot for the first time in about ten or twelve days.

With prices on everything spiralling upwards, I bought a can of cigarette tobacco and a couple of packs of EZ Wider. Was gonna roll a few cigarettes when Stro asked me to wait while he reminded me of something. Cigarettes, he said, originated in Brazil and somehow came to the attention of the emperor Napoleon III in the 1840's, and the rest is history. But, he added, the first cigarettes were much, much bigger, they were cigar-sized and lasted much longer. Hmm. Stro's way of making a suggestion. Eight sheets of rolling paper later, I'd made a fair-sized godfatha out of tobacco, and ya know what? Milder, more nicotine, seems like less tar and it lasted almost twenty minutes. They're a pain to make, at the age of fity-seven I don't like doing tedious work with small results, but if I make three or four a day I think I can live with that and cut the cost of what I spend on stog's. By the way, any of the buy-one-get-one offers are pretty much a ripoff, they're like one-sixteenth of an inch shorter and they burn faster, so you wind up smoking four packs in the time you'd smoke three. When I was a kid my mother would time things (like cooking) by the number of cigarettes she smoked; in1954 an unfiltered Pall Mall would last for just about seven minutes. Today you're fortunate if you get five minutes out of anything beside Amercan Spirit or DuMaurier. Or Dunhills or Nat Shermans.

Since I'm on a roll here, many of the brands I knew when I was young have disappeared. They fall into two categories, those that had been around forever and those that began appearing in the 50's and 60's. Among the older brands were Picayune, Home Run, Sweet Caporal, Fatima, Murad (named for an Egyptian sultan who executed anyone using tobacco); later introductions included York, Oasis, Sano, Waterford, and Newport. Only Newpies survived.

One of the best books I ever read about tobacco was written by pipe-maker Carl Weber, the title is The Pleasures of Pipe-Smoking. He gives a lengthy and well-written story of how tobacco was introduced into Western culture, discusses the different species of tobacco, different kinds of pipes; mentions things about cigars and cigarettes (I think Stro was referring to the history of cigarettes as Weber wrote about them; he (Stro) read the book several times) I don't know whether it's still in print, it was published as a small paperback in the mid-60's.

To shift gears here a bit: on the MySpace front, it was gratifying that quite a number of people sent me their home e-mail addresses, now I won't have to worry about what i write falling into the void. And with that I shall close for the day; God be with you all.

2005-09-10T19:05:00.000-07:00

My second night off in a row, it's like I hafta pinch myself.
I just selected Arial for my font, only what I got was not Arial; so I've switched to Verdana, and this font is not Verdana. Ah-HUHH? Maybe the fontfile here should pinch itself.
We spent a lot of time over the last three weeks doing art for our phlogs and can finally take a breather on that. Our biggest one is at Webshots, I think we have like close to 500 drawings there now. Their software is a little quirky but with a little tweaking it settles in and does its job. I'd like to be able upload whole folders of pictures - there's one which has like 100+ drawings in it - but as it is they hafta be uploaded one-at-a-time, and when you reach number sixteen or thereabouts, you must load, because each picture is a separate link back to your picture files, and even with tons of memory like we have, ever-y-th-ing-s-l-o-owss---downnnnnn. So fer half an hour ya sit preparin fifteen pics then hit upload. Still, the end result is worth it. You can see us there at:

http://community.webshots.com/user/thatgemini

...it turned blue, so the software here recognizes a hyperlink. Cool. You can go look and come back.
We're excited because we got Joan of Arc on line in her own blog and she'll be posting the texts to the Testimony that I've been channeling for a little over a year now. As it is today there is a half-page introduction that she wrote specifically for the blog, there will be additions from time to time. Check that at:

http://getablog.net/iehanneddomremydarc

I am aware of at least four other people who have had some form of visionary contact with the saint of cellphones (what the hell was the pope thinking of?!), each is anywhere from somewhat to strikingly different from our experience of her. We at Outlands maintain that this "heterodoxy," if you will, is essential to the transmission of whatever it is that she is saying. (By the way, I would need the permission of these other four people to say who they are and how they may be contacted; if I get enough traffic on this specific subject, I shall ask, but not until then) The bottom line is, Joan of Arc is active in the world right now. If, counting Outlands, there are five people channeling or experiencing her in somevisionary manner, it must be fairly widespread...I should Google her name in its various forms. (her parents and neighbors called her Jehannette when she was little)(Other variations are: Jeanne D'Arcy, Jehanne d'Arc, Jehanne the Maiden, Iehanne d'Domremy d'Arc)
If you are not familiar with her story beyond the movies, you should definitely learn about her. When she was thirteen she saw a light and heard a voice calling to her from across the fields of her father's farm. It was the archangel Michael, although she often refers to him as Elixe. She approached the uncrowned king of France (le Dauphin) and told him that God had sent her to him to ask for soldiers to take the French holy city of Rheims from the English, that he might be crowned king of France. God gave the Dauphin a sign, he gave her the soldiers, she drove the English from Rheims as predicted and Charles was duly crowned.
That all is an oversimplification, especially in light of what followed, but it is well worth checking out in its own right. Joan said that her father had heard a prophecy local to her home town (Domremy) that a girl from the area would begin the campaign to drive out the English and would have the Dauphin crowned; she added that her father had said that if he had any idea it was her, he would have drowned her in a well. That may sound strange and harsh, but pere d'Arc could ill afford attention from either the English, the Lombards or French who were bleeding the populace dry. (Imagine three different George W. Bushes, each claiming the legal right to screw you as a citizen - and getting out the KY when he was in the neighborhood...Ms/Mr Taxpayer, look, you dropped your soap)
Hope I've piqued your interest! Gonna check out for now.

2005-09-04T15:25:00.000-07:00

Been running a little ragged. Working seven nights a week again, and Llam gave us an assignment to create a non-alphabetic form of communication. That sounds simple, but what it means in practical terms is that all of us in the ArtGroup, with Seima and Llam himself pitching in, have been creating hundreda of pictures from simple drawings that I make. We have a large chunk of them on line over at Webshots - which is truly a phlog site. If you'd like to visit, we have as of today over three hundred pictures online:

http://community.webshots.com/user/thatgemini

- okay, cool, it lit up and turned blue; the software here recognizes a URL and provides links.

It's good to be able to go off by myself for a bit and piss and moan and tell little stories of the day. Any pissing and moaning I might do today would be about MySpace, which is getting more and more treacherous. You write an e-mail - it disappears. Post a blog - never gets there, it vaporizes. Sending Tom or anyone else gets a robot response which does not answer direct questions. I read a post here at blogger by some young woman whose Space at MySpace just disappeared one day - a year and a half of blogs, pictures, links with MySpace friends - you can make them there - all gone. She got zilch for a response. She'd said she had no porn-pictures, no abusive or racist language in her blogs, just - POOF! And repeated e-mails did nothing.

As far as Webshots, I started off with the free service and upgraded to premium a few days ago. Their software for downloading pictures from your computer to their/your site is a little quirky, and for my taste slow; but it does the job. I think that eventually we'll leave MySpace, not today, not tomorrow or next week, but one thing is definitely certain. As far as the genuine friends whom we've made there, when we do go they'll have plenty of notice and will be asked to trade personal e-mail addresses.

I see that I am rambling about everything and nothing which is my style. I shall close this and go visit Stro Moon Daglo's blog, then maybe Michael Archontas. Ciao.

2005-08-17T13:58:00.000-07:00

I figured out/had revealed to me why I'm here at Blogger. I need a public space by myself, just they way Sara did over at MySpace. I was asked to keep the name of the group in the background from now on;we are individuals operating in a rhizomic network in both etherealspace and cyberspace. I will be referring to reference material in a near-future post.

Goes like this:

We are not going to have one big central website. We will be nodes, all over the Internet. Pictures here. Music there. Fun someplace else. Philosophy? Go to www.________________ and check it out. Perhaps that will be Nietzsche or Bachelard.

The fun, Seima told me, is just beginning.

2005-08-16T21:22:00.000-07:00

This I feel is easier to use than the previous blog we'd tried. I will get around to posting pictures, by the way. If anyone's interested, my name is Roy Waidler, and I will let it go at that for now. "Morion" as a word is a type of 16th-century helmet; however I am more familiar with it as a the name of a comic-book character from the early 1970's. As I recall this Morion was not a Good Guy; but the name stuck with Stro Moon Daglo and myself over the years. (Oh my goodness! Stro Moon Daglo?) (Yes. As a matter of fact ole Daglo has a Space on MySpace. I'll get the full URL another time)

Without going into too much detail, I am the steward for the Outlands Community here in America; we are QUITE distinct from the agricultural group of the same name that I've seen on Google a few times. We are a spiritual community, not agricultural. No, we don't take money, we are not seeking acolytes, proselytes, electrolytes or even a lyte beer.

Since we are about quite a number of things, we initially discussed having a website; you know, a page for this, a page for that, lots of pictures, lots of links, a Q&A email center....and being on a limited budget and having just got my first computer in April we jumped in feet or head-first. Inna meantime, some young friends turned me onto MySpace. Huh? Looks like a fun place...for young kids. But it's what you make of it, I swear it is worth browsing every nook and cranny, even if you don't sign up. And it's free. As of today, four of us have Spaces on MySpace. Almost like a website. Almost.

Because you can only have ten photos in your photofile, and you need to know HTML (we don't - yet) to add more pics at MySpace, we tripped over a place called WebShots. It too is free and is owned (I think) by the same company that owns MySpace, casalemedia. At the moment we have over 100 pieces of art there with more to come.

Now we have added Blogger. Rhizome-like, not centralized, that is how we are appearing on the web. Nietzsche would approve!

2005-08-15T17:44:00.000-07:00

August 15 2005 So here I am, trying a new blog service. They made it sound easy. They made it sound free. I've gotten to distrust a lot of so-called free services on the web, simply because they have too many ads crawling over your whatever, or they're to simple/complex for any sane person to use, or their services are crashing, or they leave shit in your computer that has no business being there, or their service/help consists of a bunch of endless and vague FAQ's that get you nowhere.

Originally I had thought of having a blog simply because I have been keeping a hand-written journal since 1973 - that's right, thirty-two years' worth of my rambling, bitching, moaning, poetry, scholarly research (back in my biblical-historical days), copying of favorite quotes (I was quote the literateur) and other things one writes. Since I got this computer back in early April of this year, I have several on-going journals stacked inside of it, but I wanted some things public. Provided that this service delivers, I should be posting some pungent material when I do show up here. Although I do not believe that I am a total singularity, the chances are good that I do not think like most of the people in America upon a variety of subjects.

Politically I am a libertarian with strong anarchistic leanings - the less government the better.
I have not been happy with the present administration so-called, but in this I am hardly alone. Still, there are others who like the Guy. Sheeesh! What a woild!
I am not in favor of religion. I am in favor of spirituality. Religion binds and kills the heart. Spirituality opens and liberates it. I am not an atheist. I listen to others on this subject, and will answer questions if they are not too nasty or not obviously leading to my having to read a bunch of Bible quotes about why I am going to hell. A note to those who feel obligated on this point: A Biblical text is not proof that you are right about something. A Biblical text is a Biblical text, period. To say it is proof for something which you may believe (or say you believe but do not) is a poetic statement, it is using the poetic function of the mind, and is not open to logical analysis. Should you attempt such, you are then on my turf - I am a poet among other things and not very good at logical analysis...but I really don't wanna be bogged down on this point.
I believe in total sexual liberty. I do not think that the government, any government has the right to interfere with the sexual nature of anyone. I am, however, a civilized person, and in proclaiming sexual liberty for all, this does not mean that I approve of rape and/or the imposed, unwanted sexual torture of others. To rape someone is to take away another person's sexual liberty. Don't know why some people find that so hard to understand.

So far this has been a piece of cake. I have a bunch of 1"x1" miniavatars which I may splatter across the blog as days go by. In the meantime I really oughta get one of those books and learn HTML.

Look for future entries, at least one of them anyway, to have URLs to my favorite places. Also, I'm not the only one who will post material here. I'm "Morion," and others will have their own made-up names clearly visible in the blog. So you all - whoever you are - have a good day now, y'hear?