Ask your doctor if Rolex is right for you.
Showing posts with label Drugs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Drugs. Show all posts
Sunday, July 7, 2024
Sunday, December 24, 2023
Milkommen
One of the main sources of William Wright's unusual ideas is what he calls "words" -- strings of text which he receives in what I guess is something of a dream-like manner, and which appear to be strange multilingual concoctions incorporating English, the fictional languages created by Tolkien, and sometimes other languages such as Spanish and German. He tries to decipher these and extract a story from them. Although I sometimes enjoy this kind of sleuthing (I was a big Finnegans Wake reader in my early twenties), and although I find William's ideas stimulating, I haven't been able to muster much interest in his "words" themselves. On December 22, he posted "Jan-Feb 2022 Words Part 1" -- the type of post that typically makes my eyes glaze over -- but in this case one of his "words" (literally just one word) captured my imagination:
This same chessboard imagery appears in the Ava Max music video "Kings & Queens," on which I have recently posted:
Lest the Masonic connotations of the black-and-white tiling be lost on the audience, we have a couple of pillars thrown in for good measure. Later, Ava demonstrates a Masonic penal sign while singing "Off with your head" -- a phrase with Lewis Carroll resonances.
Feb. 5MilkommenCommentary:It was just this one word, kind of just hanging there, and I took it to be perhaps a play on words of the German "Wilkommen" (Welcome), but now with Milk, since the German language had been part of my 2019 words. The Promised Land is associated with Milk and Honey, and so that is where my mind went, whether that accurate or not.
This is a pretty solid reading, obviously. The reference to the well-known German word Willkommen seems undeniable. Besides the "milk and honey" angle, I note that Wilkommen is transformed into Milkommen by turning the first letter upside down, inviting the reading "Welcome to upside-down world" or "Welcome to the looking-glass world." (The word milk is already associated with such inversions in my mind, since Klim is a popular brand of powdered milk here in Taiwan.)
My first thought on seeing Milkommen, though, was that it could also be read as Milkom-men -- meaning the Ammonites of the Old Testament, whose national god was called Milcom or Milkom. Since William's "words" seem to be more oriented to the Book of Mormon, it could be a very indirect way of referencing an unrelated people in that book who are also called Ammonites -- Lamanites converted by the preaching of Ammon, son of Mosiah.
Of course, Milkommen would be a rather inefficient way of saying "Ammonites" if that was all you wanted to convey, so I figured there must be more to it. On a hunch, I looked up kommen on Wiktionary. It's German for "come," of course, but I scrolled down and found this at the very end of the entry.
The very last line in the entry for kommen is a partial quotation of Isaiah 55:1, where it is Swedish for "come ye." Here's the whole verse:
Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye [kommen] to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.
So looking up kommen led me directly back to milk!
It was quite late at night that I was making these connections. I went to bed and had a strange dream in which I was praying the Rosary but my prayers were being "blocked" by an enormous black spherical spaceship hovering above me, an effect caused by some obscure correspondence between the physical structure of my rosary and that of the ship. The dream seemed to go on for an extremely long time. I kept saying "Pater noster," only to be aware of the words being absorbed by the blackness of the ship, prevented from rising to Heaven. In the dream, I began to think that this was because of the words themselves. Pater noster, my dreaming mind reasoned, must mean something like, "homecoming father" in Greek, which means Odysseus, who captained a black ship, and therefore this black ship has the right to "claim" my prayer. Nevertheless, I kept on using those same words, never thinking to switch to a different language or a different prayer.
I was awakened suddenly by what I thought was the sound of something exploding in my study. I got up and went into the study without bothering to turn on the light, and satisfied myself that nothing had happened and that the noise must have been part of the dream. I was just about to go back to bed when I noticed a particular book, dimly visible behind the glass door of one of my cabinets, and thought, "What's that funny-looking book? I don't remember owning a book like that!" I turned on the light and opened the cabinet, and the book in question fell out and landed face-up on the desk below. I photographed it exactly as it landed, without touching it:
The Milk of Paradise: The Effect of Opium Visions on the Works of DeQuincey, Crabbe, Francis Thompson, and Coleridge. That is, the effect of the milky juice of the poppy on four men. The effect of milk on men. In rapid speech, the final consonant of on would be assimilated to the m that follows it, yielding milk-om-men.
The title of the book is of course a reference to the famous closing lines of Coleridge's Kubla Khan:
For he on honey-dew hath fed,And drunk the milk of Paradise.
That's a major sync with what I was reading last night: The Desert, the first installment in Colin Wilson's Spider World series. The main characters have just been welcomed to Dira, a vast underground city (cf. "caverns measureless to man") ruled by Kazak, a king said to have about 180 wives. (A pen friend of mine recently wrote a great deal of imaginative, possibly schizophrenic, material about Kubla Khan, much of it dealing with his practice of polygamy on a vast scale.) The people of Dira keep domestic ants, which in turn keep aphids. (All insects in this book are much larger than their real-world counterparts.)
[The aphids] were farmed like cattle, and milked of their honeydew several times a day; the honeydew was one of the most important food sources in the "palace."
Milk and honeydew juxtaposed, with the latter referenced as a food rather than a drink.
In my friend's writings about Kubla Khan, paintings of the Khan show him accompanied by two kittens, one white and one black:
To complete Kubla as a Proper Man, perched precariously on the folds of Kubla’s dark cloak are two mysterious Entirely Separate Beings depicted as two tiny cute small kittens, one white and one black, that he has taken in and sheltered in his cloak from the bitter cold. The two harmless-looking kittens make quite a contrast with the stern and barbaric and pitiless visage of Kubla himself. When Kubla returns to a mortal world and sees the two kittens in portraits of himself and realizes who they represent, he also snorts, but somewhat fondly, as if the portraits reminds him of a great Cosmic Joke that the painter is not fully aware of.
I referenced Through the Looking-Glass above without remembering how it begins. This is the first sentence:
One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it: -- it was the black kitten's fault entirely.
The looking-glass world, you will recall, is laid out in the form of a chessboard:
The "Kings & Queens" video begins with a shot of white doves in flight and later shows champagne being poured into overflowing glasses:
What made me think of the looking-glass world in the first place was the way the W in Wilkommen is turned upside down (or reflected) to create Milkommen. Back in 2018, I wrote about W/M reversals in "The Rider-Waite Magician." The Rider-Waite Ace of Cups features a white dove and an overflowing cup marked with a W that looks more like an upside-down M.
"We would pop champagne and raise a toast" is a recurring line in "Kings & Queens." Near the end of Through the Looking-Glass, the Red Queen and others drink a toast to Alice by turning their glasses upside down:
'Meanwhile, we'll drink your health -- Queen Alice's health!' she screamed at the top of her voice, and all the guests began drinking it directly, and very queerly they managed it: some of them put their glasses upon their heads like extinguishers, and drank all that trickled down their faces -- others upset the decanters and drank the wine as it ran off the edges of the table . . . .
Coming back to Isaiah 55 (sorry, it's hard to write about this non-linear web of associations in a linear manner), here's another passage from the same chapter:
For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it (vv. 10-11).
Rainwater is no good if we just collect it and let it stagnate. It's supposed to be used and transformed, that it may give seed to the sower and bread to the eater -- and the same is said of the word of God. This reminds me of a poem I wrote in 2010 about manna -- which must be eaten and internalized, or else it quickly goes bad.
Who on the bread of life will feed,will live forever -- so we readin that same book which oft is readas if it were itself that bread.But in that book is also toldhow manna stinks when it is old,in but a day breeds worms and reeks --Then what if it were kept for weeks?Or months? Or many a yawning year?How would the manna then appear?When centuries had past it paced,how would the bread of life then taste?And were it served at such a date,what would become of them that ate?
The historical manna is often understood to have been something produced by desert insects, so there's a possible link to the idea of feeding on honeydew.
I'm not sure which, if any, of these many disparate associations will lead anywhere worthwhile. I just wanted to get them all written down first before I forget them.
Saturday, October 7, 2023
Freeman Zimmerman
Last night, it suddenly crossed my mind that I wanted to listen to some Bob Dylan -- but not by that name. The thought that came to me was, "I'm in the mood for some Bob Zimmerman." That's not how I usually think -- I know the dude's real name, of course, but as a singer he's always "Dylan" -- so instead of putting on any music, I got sidetracked trying to figure out why his birth name had suddenly popped into my head. I finally traced it back to a September 27 blog post by a notorious anti-Semite (sorry, too radioactive to link from a Google blog) which mentioned "my favorite Robert Zimmerman song," adding parenthetically, "Zimmerman was for sure overrated, but claiming he didn’t have a few good ones is a type of anti-Semitism too extreme even for me."
Calling Dylan "Zimmerman" was obviously done in the spirit of "naming the Jew," and this idea of Zimmerman being a distinctively Jewish name made me think of the fact that the only Zimmerman I've ever known in real life was definitely not Jewish. When my family lived in Fallston, Maryland, in the late eighties, our Mormon ward was led by a Bishop Zimmerman, known for his enormous house featuring several secret passages and a Q*bert arcade machine. Thus I forgot all about Bob and his music, instead trying to remember as much as I could about this other Zimmerman.
The name Freeman has been in the sync-stream recently -- see "Syncs: Tropical dreams and not-dreams, 555, Freeman and not-Freeman" (September 29) and "Where Dreamers Become Doers" (September 30). So when I checked the Junior Ganymede last night and found a post referencing a "Sister Freeman" who had spoken at the recent CJCLDS General Conference, I clicked the link in case it should turn out to be synchronistically relevant. Sister Freeman's talk didn't do anything for me -- it falls into the travelogue-as-testimony genre all too familiar to anyone with a Mormon background -- but this part got my attention:
When I returned home from Israel, I listened more closely to the conversations around me regarding covenants. I noticed people asking, Why should I walk a covenant path?
My immediate reaction was: No, you didn't. Why should I walk a covenant path? Who the hell talks like that? Not Mormons! Did I somehow wander off lds.org onto Radix Fidem or something? It turns out I'm just behind the times, though. A word search on lds.org reveals that for the past several years they've been meming the living daylights out of covenant path -- a phrase which did not exist at all in the Mormon discourse of my day. (There's a 2018 Rameumptom post about how Russell M. Nelson -- the M stands for Man -- manpropriated the phrase from some unsung female genius and deprived her of her Nobel Prize. Many such cases.) I also feel I should point out that a single tap of the space bar transforms the phrase into coven ant path.
(This "covenant path" digression doesn't really have anything to do with the rest of this post, by the way. As Charles Kinbote would say, I trust the reader has enjoyed this note.)
This morning I did a bit of desultory browsing on /pol/, including this thread asking "How'd you even first discover /pol/." One anon, responding to the claim that "no one cared about /pol/ until the Trayvon Martin case," posted this dated meme:
Trayvon Martin was a while back (2012), and I wasn't paying much attention even at the time, so I don't get this. I don't recognize any of the faces or understand what the joke is. What I do understand is that it says George "freeman" ZIMMERMAN, followed by a bunch of anti-Semitic buzzwords.
Freeman first entered the sync-stream when I was reading Mike Clelland's novel The Unseen and somehow misread Foreman as Freeman. George Foreman is a household name, but here we have George Freeman. It's also a reference to a non-Jew named Zimmerman (like the Mormon bishop) but still in an anti-Semitic context (like the original Robert Zimmerman reference).
One final sync-link: Yesterday's post "Bigfoot? Bigfoot" included a photo of a T-shirt for sale in Taiwan, printed with rap lyrics referencing the cough syrup-based beverage Purple Drank -- a drug I don't think I've ever had occasion to mention before. The next day I get this Trayvon Martin stuff. You may recall that the justice-for-Trayvon contingent adopted as their symbols the Purple Drank ingredients he had bought just before his death.
Sunday, September 10, 2023
Physical constitution as a barrier to understanding, "juice" as a solution
If you really want to rip up your mindIf you want to take the lid off your life . . .Might as well get juicedMight as well get juiced
-- the Rolling Stones
This is some very strange stuff from a rather eccentric Mormon thinker, but, hey, sync is sync.
The juice is designed to change his body, quite literally. . . . On the cosmic scale of intelligence, we here on Earth are morons, I think, and it is the extreme limits and fallen nature of the bodies we inhabit that makes this so. Our brains are part of these bodies, and though our spirits can and do shape these brains to our use the best that we can, still we can't get past the fact that the hardware we are working with is pretty bad.
Thus, I think without this juice, the interaction between [Heaven and Earth], at least for purposes of transferring complex thought, ideas, words, etc., would probably be as effective as me trying to transmit what I consider complex thought to my dog. My dog might understand that I love her, and even gather general words and meaning, but would be unable to fully grasp what is being said. She would need a significant change or boost in how her mind operates for that to be possible. . . .
Another example would be Moses and his interactions with God, in which a change was needed for Moses to be able to both abide God's presence as well as understand what was being said. It is likely, in my opinion, that although not recorded in any account we have, Moses likely also needed to drink this juice-nectar as part of his own experiences.
This "juice" is apparently not something like a psychedelic drug which temporarily cleanses the doors of perception, but rather something that effects a permanent change in one's body and thus in one's ability to understand.
We are not accustomed to thinking of our limited understanding as "mere mortals" as being a physical problem with a physical solution. It's an unusual point of view. Less than an hour after reading Mr. Wright's post, though, I ran across the same idea again. This was in Vol. 4B of Daymon Smith's Cultural History of the Book of Mormon; the author is quoting 20th-century Mormon leader Joseph Fielding Smith, great-nephew of the Prophet.
[Smith] counseled patience about understanding intelligences, for "there are many things that we will know when we receive the resurrection," things "which we cannot understand in this mortal state even if they were revealed to us."
The implication is that a resurrected body can understand things that a mortal body cannot. Mr. Wright, too, suggests that the effect of the "juice" is to confer not only enhanced understanding but physical immortality: "Moses was changed so as not to experience death (translated, essentially), I think by means of this drink."
Juice itself is a sync with something, too, but I can't put my finger on what. Quite recently I ran into the word juice used in a strange non-sequitur way -- maybe in a dream, or on an Engrish T-shirt, or in something a student had written -- but the precise memory eludes me. Maybe it'll come back to me eventually.
Saturday, December 3, 2022
And Saint Joan again
In both of my recent do-re-mi sync posts -- "Doremi, Dori me" and "What does 'do-re-mi' mean?" -- I mention the similarity of those three syllables to Domrémy, the birthplace of Joan the Maid (a link first noticed by S. K. Orr).
The musical scale begins with Domrémy and ends -- until the 19th century, and still in most non-Anglophone countries -- with an acronym for Sancte Iohannes, "Saint John." It did not escape my notice that it could just as easily be an acronym for Sancta Iohanna, "Saint Joan."
Last night, having started Terence McKenna's The Archaic Revival and found that the first chapter was just a republished magazine interview, I wondered if the whole book was like that, so I flipped forward to check, opening to a random page. As the synchronicity fairies would have it, that page was p. 27, from which a familiar name stared up at me:
There are certain parallels that are quite obvious, and one of them that comes to mind is Saint Joan hearing voices and gaining direction. Granted, she was a farm girl, and perhaps she was growing mushrooms in the backyard. . . .
I consider this a fairly specific sync. My having been thinking about my patron saint is nothing new, of course, but I typically call her "Joan of Arc" or "the Maid." In this case I was specifically thinking of the title Sancta Iohanna, "Saint Joan," the same title used by McKenna's interlocutor (yes, this was another interview). It is really a rather unusual way of referring -- especially in passing, in a secular context -- to the personage for whom the most common name by a very large margin is Joan of Arc.
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| Google Ngram Viewer |
I'm sure if we could somehow filter out references to Shaw's play, and instances where Saint Joan is followed by of Arc, the difference in frequency would be even starker.
As for the suggestion that Joan may have been "growing mushrooms in the backyard," my first reaction is of course to roll my eyes, but I suppose I should be less dismissive. In the context of McKenna's belief that "entheogens" allow us to make contact with the divine, this proposal does not amount to calling Joan's visions pathological, and it is well established that God sometimes uses altered states (e.g. dreaming, fasting, meditation, the prophetic trances of the Old Testament) as vehicles for revelation. Nor does the mushroom hypothesis "explain away" what made Joan exceptional. After all, most people who take mushrooms become New Age doofuses, not saints.
Sync: Archaic Revival and the serpents and birds of paradise
I'm normally reading several books at once. I'm still in the middle of Valentin Tomberg's Lazarus, Come Forth! but last night I randomly decided to start reading a book I'd picked up some time ago but never opened: Terence McKenna's The Archaic Revival (1992). I only read a few pages. Between the table of contents and the foreword was this full-page illustration by the German collage artist Wilfried Sätty.
A naked couple in a jungle with a huge snake -- a pretty obvious Garden of Eden reference, presumably chosen by McKenna because of the forbidden fruit's character as a "mind-altering plant." There are also a lot of birds in the picture -- vultures or cormorants or something, but also, by virtue of the setting in which they appear, "birds of paradise."
I didn't really think much about it until today, when I picked up Lazarus, Come Forth! again and read this:
The madness in which Nietzsche's great adventure ended was not personally deserved; nor was it brought about by addiction to a personal lust for power, position, and greatness. Nietzshce was a sacrifice to the superhuman force of the collective all-human subconscious, which came to a kind of volcanic eruption in him. And what broke through there was the archaic evolutionary drive itself, belonging to the most archaic layer of humanity's subconscious. Here lies the most general and most hidden drive working in the subconscious of man: this is the impulse and promise given by the serpent in Paradise.
Here again the word archaic and the idea of revival (one of the main themes of the book, as indicated by its title) are paired with the serpent in Paradise.
My decision to start reading a book by a drug guru was probably inspired in part by the experience recounted in my recent post "Nutmeg is a drug." In that post, I mentioned that nutmeg belongs to the same class of drugs as datura, and I told how I had tried in vain to track down a novel I had read as a child in which a bird became intoxicated by eating nutmegs. I had reached the tentative conclusion that it must be one of the many English versions of The Swiss Family Robinson, but Kevin McCall has discovered that it was actually 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. (Oddly, in the post I had mentioned dreams of the sort "where you wake up feeling as if you've been underwater.") Check out the context:
Some inoffensive serpents glided away from us. The birds of paradise fled at our approach, and truly I despaired of getting near one, when Conseil, who was walking in front, suddenly bent down, uttered a triumphant cry, and came back to me bringing a magnificent specimen."Ah! bravo, Conseil!""Master is very good.""No, my boy; you have made an excellent stroke. Take one of these living birds, and carry it in your hand.""If master will examine it, he will see that I have not deserved great merit.""Why, Conseil?""Because this bird is as drunk as a quail.""Drunk!""Yes, sir; drunk with the nutmegs that it devoured under the nutmeg-tree under which I found it. See, friend Ned, see the monstrous effects of intemperance!"
Another book I am reading at the moment is Divination in Ancient Israel by Frederick H. Cryer, a lot of which is devoted to preliminaries. (Not until p. 229 does the actual discussion of ancient Israel begin.) In a passage I read a few days ago, Cryer is commenting on the book Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande by E. E. Evans-Pritchard and cites, of all the things to cite in this rather pedantic book, The Teachings of Don Juan.
[Evans-Pritchard's] distinction between "empirical reality" and "Zande explanations" of the same cannot ultimately be maintained. Just how meaningless the distinction in question can be may be illustrated by an event in the course of Carlos Castaneda's initiation at the hands of a Yaqui "man of power", Don Juan. Having been taught how to prepare the datura plant for a psychic excursion, Castaneda has an experience of being transformed into a bird and soaring above and away from his mentor. . . .
I've posted about this business of transforming into a bird before -- and no prizes for guessing what specific kind of bird! See my 2020 post "Whitley Strieber and the thing that turned into a bird of paradise."
I also note in passing that the Spanish don derives from Latin dominus, while Juan is the Spanish form of Iohannes. Both Latin words featured prominently in my recent post "What does 'do-re-mi' mean?" as they are the reason the scale begins with do and ends with si.
Friday, December 2, 2022
Nutmeg is a drug
I guess I've known that in theory since I read The Swiss Family Robinson as a child (on which more below), but I'd always assumed it was only psychoactive in very large doses. When I was a teenager, one of my favorite beverages was buttermilk with a pinch or two of nutmeg, and I never noticed any psychotropic effects. About a week ago I decided to try that drink again after decades of not drinking it, and I guess this time I put in a little more nutmeg than was good for me. It wasn't much -- two cups, each with a bit more than half a teaspoon, I would guess -- but it was enough!
No, I didn't see a styracosaurus or anything, but I was in a trance state for the better part of two and a half days. It was a fairly light trance, and I was able to function more-or-less normally. In many ways it was comparable to the light trances I sometimes used to put myself in when reading or preaching, the chief perceptual symptom of which was what I used (incorrectly) to call "tunnel vision." Tunnel vision properly refers to the loss of peripheral vision, but in my childhood I used it as a name for the feeling (in certain trance states) that everything around me was immensely distant, as if it were at the other end of a long tunnel I was looking through. (This was usually induced by intense concentration, so I suppose it did have some connection to "tunnel vision" in the colloquial sense.) Another way to express it would be that it feels as if you are looking through binoculars at everything -- everything is as large and clear as it would be if it were close to you, but you know that it is not in fact close to you.
Aside from this, there was a strange idea -- an idea more than a sensation -- that there was something unusual about the surface of my body, that I was "prickly" or "covered with moss" or "bristling with triangles" (some of the phrases that came to mind at the time). I experienced no hallucinations in the strict sense, but I did have unusually vivid mental imagery, somewhat reminiscent of the abstract art of Stanslaw Kors. I was quite sleepy throughout the trance period, and when I slept I had "deep" dreams -- that kind where you wake up feeling as if you've been underwater -- of which I remember very little. I remember that the dreams were entirely in Latin, often with a disembodied "running commentary" in that language, and that at one point I had a conversation with a mantis shrimp, which also spoke Latin. (I had never dreamed in Latin before, nor have I since.)
After the effects of the nutmeg had worn off, I tried to find out more about it. Apparently nutmeg is classified as a "deliriant," alongside such drugs as datura, hensbane, deadly nightshade, and -- quelle coïncidence! -- mandrake.
My experience was not at all pleasant or mind-expanding, and I do not recommend it to anyone.
⁂
I remember that as a child I read a lot of different books -- all oldish, 19th century or so -- about people surviving on desert islands. I understand that many such books were written after Robinson Crusoe -- a whole genre called the robinsonade -- but I can't name any of them. There was Robinson Crusoe itself, The Swiss Family Robinson, and -- what else? I remember I read a lot of them. Searching the Internet for lists of robinsonades, I only turn up such works as Treasure Island and Lord of the Flies, which are not at all the sort of thing I have in mind. Anyway, in one of those books I read, the protagonists encountered a bird behaving strangely, as if intoxicated, and then discovered that it had been eating nutmegs. This was my first exposure to the idea that nutmeg could be intoxicating. Before reading that book, I had read something -- it may have been Tau Zero by Poul Anderson -- that mentioned people getting drunk on eggnog, and I had inferred from that that some forms of eggnog were alcoholic. (As a Mormon, I knew only the non-alcoholic version.) After reading the robinsonade, though, I decided it must have been the nutmeg that made them drunk. Only much later, I think not until my early teens, did I learn that I had been right the first time and that eggnog is typically an alcoholic drink.
After my own experience of nutmeg intoxication, I wanted to track down the robinsonade episode, so I tried to remember as many other details about the book as possible. All I could get was that there were agoutis and bustards, and that the plural forms nutmegs and lichens -- slightly odd in modern English -- were used. Searching for agouti bustard nutmegs island turned up only one book: The Swiss Family Robinson. This surprised me a bit -- I had remembered that it was not Swiss Family but one of the other nameless similar books. Searching the Gutenberg version for nutmegs, I found this:
In a short time nest-building commenced, and among the materials collected by the birds, I observed a long gray moss or lichen, and thought it might very possibly be the same which, in the West Indies, is gathered from the bark of old trees, where it grows, and hangs in great tuft-like beards, to be used instead of horse-hair for stuffing mattresses.My wife no sooner heard of it than her active brain devised fifty plans for making it of use. Would we but collect enough, she would clean and sort it, and there would be no end to the bolsters, pillows, saddles, and cushions she would stuff with it.
For the discovery of nutmegs we had also to thank the pigeons, and they were carefully planted in our orchard.
In a way, this is obviously my source -- nutmegs, plural, are discovered via birds, and lichen is nearby -- but lichen is singular, and there is no indication that the birds were intoxicated by the nutmegs. But it seems highly unlikely that any other novel would borrow the very specific plot point of birds helping the protagonists discover "nutmegs," and I don't see how I could have misremembered it. The idea that nutmeg could be intoxicating was a new idea for me, learned from the book, not something I could have read into a book that does not mention it.
(Incidentally, was my nutmeg-induced idea that I was "covered with moss" somehow influenced by this passage as well?)
According to Wikipedia, "Over the years, there have been many versions of the story with episodes added, changed, or deleted," to the extent that "Wyss's original narrative has long since been obscured" -- so were all those books I read just different versions of The Swiss Family Robinson? And was the version on Gutenberg bowdlerized so as not to suggest to impressionable young readers the idea of trying to get high on household spices? Now I'm going to have to spend some time trying to track down the version I read as a child, the one with the nutmeg-intoxicated bird.
Sunday, May 1, 2022
The corvid and the rattlesnake
On April 29, Craig Davis left this comment on my blog:
TMBG lyrics never mean just one thing, though, and today I happened upon a reference to a hallucinogenic drug called STP, which I had never heard of before.
Driving through northern Colorado towards Wyoming yesterday, on the side of the road, I saw a raven (corvid, birdemic) eating a rattlesnake (serpent). And since the Synch Fairies seem to like numbers, I was on highway 287. As I drove by I immediately thought "William needs to know about this."
I replied:
Interesting. The rattler (Gadsden flag) represents freedom, individualism, and a willingness to fight back against coercion, so a corvid eating one is a very appropriate omen-after-the-fact.
An hour or so after posting that reply, I was searching for something entirely unrelated, and one of the sites I ended up on had a link to a recent news story: "'Princess Bride' Star Cary Elwes Airlifted to Hospital After Rattlesnake Bite."
He was apparently bitten on April 23, a week ago. Running into a rattlesnake so soon would be a synchronicity in its own right, but the fact that it was Cary Elwes makes it even more significant. Craig Davis's rattlesnake was paired with a raven, which he interpreted as a symbol of the birdemic. Cary Elwes also ties in with the birdemic because of one of his lines in The Princess Bride. Asked "Why are you wearing a mask?" he replies, "It's just that they're terribly comfortable. I think everyone will be wearing them in the future."
Davis saw a birdemic-symbol eating a rattlesnake. In Elwes's case, it was the rattlesnake that attacked the birdemic-symbol.
Cary Elwes has featured in syncs before. In my December 11, 2020, post "Robin Hood," I used him to link the legendary outlaw with Dr. Seuss's Fox in Socks.
The corvid-and-serpent combination has also appeared here before, in the January 15, 2022, post "The St. Benedict Medal and the Peck."
⁂
One other random sync which I'll note here because it's too small to merit its own post. In April 16's "Be he moth or be he bird," I discussed the TMBG song "Bee of the Bird of the Moth" and quoted these lines:
Send a tangerine-colored nuclear submarinewith a sticker that says STP
I assumed this was a reference to the motor-oil company, which used to produce stickers or decals you could put on your car to show everyone that it had (favorite crossword-puzzle prompt) "The Racer's Edge."
Thursday, April 14, 2022
The Star Whale, Brian Wilson, and God
Back in 2014, I dreamed of seeing a whale with many eyes on TV, and the dream "came true" the next day when I saw a very similar image in a Keanu Reeves movie on TV. It seemed like such a pointless thing to be made precognitively aware of, and I commented at the time, "None of my precognitions so far have been of anything that could even remotely be considered important or meaningful."
That was eight years ago. The arc of the synchronistic universe is long, but it does sometimes bend toward meaning.
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In a comment yesterday, Carol has alerted me to the possible relevance of "The Beast Below," an episode of Doctor Who which was first broadcast on April 10, 2010. I've never seen it, or any other Doctor Who episode, but judging from Carol's summary and others found online, I think she's right.
"The Beast Below" is set in the distant future (29th century), when Earth has become uninhabitable due to solar flares. The British population, led by Queen Elizabeth X, survives aboard the gigantic Starship UK. They are all unaware of the fact that their starship has been built around the body of a "star whale" which serves as its means of propulsion, and the whale is controlled by sending painful electrical impulses into its brain. It is believed that if they stop torturing the whale, it will break free and the people of Starship UK will be doomed. This unpleasant fact is revealed to each citizen from time to time, at which point they must choose either to accept it and have their memory of the revelation erased or else register protest and -- well . . .
Amy is taken . . . to one of many voting booths set up on the ship . . . . She is shown a video about the truth of Starship UK, and then asked if she wants to protest the truth or forget it, the latter causing her short-term memory to be wiped. Amy chooses to forget, and creates a video to herself to prevent the Doctor from learning the truth, before the mind wipe. The Doctor is curious as what "protest" will cause and activates it, sending him and Amy into the maw of a giant creature below the ship. The Doctor induces the creature to vomit, allowing them to escape back to the ship. The Doctor and Amy meet Queen Elizabeth X, known as Liz 10, the ruler of the ship.
The Doctor's meeting a Queen Elizabeth parallels Dr. Dee's relationship with Elizabeth I -- and just like Dee, the Doctor enters the maw of a otherworldly whale and survives. As you can see in the illustration at the top of this post, the "star whale" shares an unwhalelike feature with the many-eyed whale (also called a "beast") I saw in my 2014 dream: "feelers on the sides of its mouth like a catfish."
In "The Beast Below," it is eventually discovered that the star whale came to Earth willingly, moved by compassion, to help the people of the UK escape, and that none of the torture had ever been necessary in the first place. The people had thought they had captured this beast and forced it to serve them, but in fact the whale was motivated by selfless love and willingly endured the unnecessary tortures inflicted on it by the ignorant humans. In the end, the torture is stopped and the starship continues on its way. It is decided that the people should no longer be kept in ignorance of the whale. Amy recites this rhyme:
In bed above, we're deep asleepWhile greater love lies further deep.This dream must end, this world must know:We all depend on the beast below.
I don't know if the allusion is intentional, but to me this calls to mind Zarathustra's roundelay (Nietzsche), which I translated in 2019.
O man, give ear!
Deep midnight speaketh; canst thou hear?
"From sleep, from sleep,
From dreaming deep I woke and rose;
The world is deep,
More deep than day would e’er suppose.
How deep her woe!
Joy—deeper still than heartache, she.
Though woe cry, 'Go!'
All joys long for eternity—
For deep on deep eternity!"
"In bed above, we're deep asleep" also calls to mind the chorus of the Barenaked Ladies song "Brian Wilson," which recently came up in connection with Dee's whale.
Because I'm lying in bedJust like Brian Wilson didWell I am lying in bedJust like Brian Wilson did, yeah
Carol ended her comment with this:
Final point: John Dee's whale was God - Doctor Who's star whale was a savior, responding to the cries of frightened children.
Carol is not the only one to have made this connection. When I was searching for an image of the star whale with which to illustrate this post, one of the first hits that came up was an old post by Carmen Andres called "The great love of star whales and God." Andres writes:
I’m thinking more of the idea of a being enduring suffering of great proportions and yet responding not by withdrawing life giving and sustaining power and salvation but increasing it. I see that a profound echo of Jesus, who came to earth in love and compassion to save us from destruction and darkness. Yet none of us understood; even the best of us who did not abandon him did not comprehend who he really was and what he could do, and the worst of us tortured and executed him. And after voluntarily enduring unimaginable pain and suffering, he could have justly and understandably abandoned us, even destroyed us. But instead he explodes with abundance—with a profusion of unimaginable love, life and salvation.
I also think of a passage in Joseph Smiths's writings, about -- who else? -- Enoch, in which the Earth itself is the longsuffering "beast below":
And it came to pass that Enoch looked upon the earth; and he heard a voice from the bowels thereof, saying: Wo, wo is me, the mother of men; I am pained, I am weary, because of the wickedness of my children. When shall I rest, and be cleansed from the filthiness which is gone forth out of me? When will my Creator sanctify me, that I may rest, and righteousness for a season abide upon my face?And when Enoch heard the earth mourn, he wept, and cried unto the Lord, saying: O Lord, wilt thou not have compassion upon the earth? Wilt thou not bless the children of Noah? (Moses 7:48-49)
I come back again to Dee's vision of a whale on a hill, "roaring like a cave of lions." In the angels' interpretation, the hill is the world, the waters are the bosom of God, and the whale is the Spirit of God. Why is the Holy Spirit -- more often characterized as a gentle dove or a still, small voice -- roaring like a cave of lions? Is it not a cry of pain? A beached whale is in agony. The Spirit of God leaves its natural home in the bosom of God and enters this corrupt and broken world, the devil's domain, suffering whatever is necessary to save God's children. "Knowest thou the condescension of God?" (1 Ne. 11:16). "Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God" (Eph. 4:30).
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In "The Beast Below," the people are "deep asleep," wilfully deluded, having chosen to make themselves forget the uncomfortable fact of their dependence on the suffering whale. Despite their status as "sleeper," they are not passive and surrendered but precisely the opposite: They have seized the whale by force and tortured it into doing what they want -- not realizing that none of that was ever necessary, that it had come to them of its own free will and wanted to help them all along. This ties into the LSD theme of the current sync-stream and William Wildblood's 2017 post "Drugs and Spirituality." Taking psychedelics is of course an attempt to lose oneself, to abdicate will and enter an egoless state in which things just happen -- but Wildblood points out that it is at the same time an attempt to force a transcendent state.
The point is that it is an artificial means to try to take the kingdom of heaven by storm and therefore a fundamentally irreligious thing to do. It is putting your will above God’s. If he wants you to experience transcendent states he is perfectly capable of giving them to you. However he knows the strong likelihood that a person gets attached to these states and loses the reason for being on the spiritual path in the first place which is to get closer to God through the heart not by means of drugs. The latter will make the former more difficult not less so.
I have never used drugs, but many years ago when I was tempted to try to force things through roughly analogous "magical" means, I used to chide myself with a line from the Book of Job: "Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?" -- the point being that what is forced is not real, that if you can draw it out with a hook it's not the genuine Leviathan. I haven't thought about that for years, but now how strange it seems that I should have chosen landing a whale, of all things, as my metaphor!
To the Doctor Who line "In bed above, we're deep asleep" the synchronicity fairies have added "just like Brian Wilson." The name Brian is thought to derive from the Old Celtic element bre, meaning "hill"; and Wilson is of course from Will (the first element of William), meaning "will, desire." There is a clear connection here to idea of forcefully drawing a whale out of the water and up onto a hill -- which is what Brian Wilson was symbolically attempting with his drug use. In Dee's vision, though, the whale comes to the hill of its own accord.
And suddenly The Firmament and the waters were joyned together, and the Whale CAME, like unto a legion of stormes: or as the bottomless Cave of the North when it is opened: and she was full of eyes of every side.The Prophet said, Stand still, but they trembled. The waters sank, and fell suddenly away, so that the Whale lay upon the Hill, roaring like a Cave of Lions
In "Whale Music," I noted Brian Wilson's (and Dee's) characterization as a naked man. This connects with another part of William Wildblood's drug post.
You see, drugs operate in the world of experience but spirituality, true spirituality, the spirituality of the saints, is a matter of innocence meaning precisely that it is a natural not artificial expression of what you are inside.
Nakedness is innocence -- in animals, babies, and prelapsarian man -- but for a grown man to go naked is an artificial attempt to force or simulate innocence (a self-contradictory pursuit), to crawl back into the womb or return to Eden. Drugs, seen as an artificial way of simulating the spontaneous mystical consciousness of primitive man, are the same sort of thing.
On April 6, I left this comment on my own post:
I could swear that when I checked the THC website last night, the latest episode was called “The Book of Enoch,” but I just checked it again now to get the link, and it’s not there. I must have dreamed it.
This drove me crazy for a week. I knew I hadn't dreamed it. I could even remember the background illustration -- what looked at first like three dark, hunched figures, until two of them resolved themselves into the wings of the other. I thought the episode must have been posted and then removed for some reason, maybe because Carlwood had accidentally posted it too soon. I kept checking THC every day to see if it would reappear, but it never did. Last night the mystery was finally resolved, when I happened to click the wrong thing on YouTube and found that the April 6 "Book of Enoch" show wasn't on THC but on Jonathan Pageau's channel: "The Book of Enoch: Fallen Angels and the Modern Crisis." I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but he begins by talking about the fall of Adam and Eve.
There's a sense in which the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil was going to be given to Adam and Eve ultimately, but the reason why it made them fall was because they took it too fast. They took it through an act of desire. It says that, you know, the woman saw that the fruit was good to eat, and so she reached up and grabbed it for herself, and because of that gesture of taking it for yourself and taking it in desire, that is what will ultimately lead to a fall.
In other words, they tried to draw out Leviathan with a hook -- or, as William Wildblood puts it, to "take the kingdom of heaven by storm." They took by force what God was actually willing to give them, just like the people of Starship UK torturing the star whale.
The ideal is to be the opposite of our metaphorical "Brian Wilson," or of the citizens of Starship UK; to do the opposite of lying in bed naked doing drugs, the opposite of torturing a star whale into submission an then lying to yourself about it. ("For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved.") This dream must end, this world must know. The ideal is to be fully awake and conscious, knowing what we do and why, and at the same time to be fully surrendered to God.
It's not meant to be a struggle uphill.
Tuesday, April 12, 2022
So hoist up the John Dee sail
Craig Davis commented that when I talk about John Dee, it always makes him think of the Jimmy Buffett song "Ellis Dee (He Ain't Free)." For me, the song it always puts in my head is "Sloop John B" as sung by the Beach Boys on Pet Sounds.
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| See how the mainsail sets |
Thinking about this led me to the Wikipedia article for "Pet Sounds" because I had a hunch that it might have been released on April 27. It wasn't, but I did find this:
"Run, James, Run" was the working title for the instrumental "Pet Sounds", the suggestion being that it would be offered for use in a James Bond movie.
The reader will recall that the current sync-storm began when I heard someone compare James Bond to John Dee (supposedly "the original 007").
I also found this:
In April, after consuming a full dose of LSD, Wilson had what he considered to be "a very religious experience" and claimed to have seen God.
This caught my attention because the first time I heard about Dee's whale experience, it was presented as a vision of God: "And at one point they even meet God, and God is not an old man with a white beard up in the clouds. God is a whale covered with eyes." And Dee's experience was also in April -- specifically, on April 27, 1584.
Trying to find more details about the precise date and content of Wilson's experience, I searched for brian wilson lsd vision of god and found this carefully constructed timeline. Lo and behold:
April 26 or 27, 1966This webpage contends that Brian Wilson drops acid for the third time on the beach located in Lake Arrowhead, California. Brian contemplates the riddle and finds the answer to the riddle he was presented with in December. It is the ultimate religious experience ("...this trip was the ultimate in LSD joyrides--everything it was supposed to be, four hours of enlightenment and spirituality") from which a new "reborn" Brian Wilson emerges. Part of the enlightening spiritual experience is the conceiving of the Beach Boys' next album and single.
April 26 is the date of my own dream about a many-eyed whale, which I posted about the next day, April 27, which is also the date of Dee and Kelley's similar vision.
Wilson's April 26 or 27 acid vision was experienced as "the answer to the riddle he was presented with in December." Here, according to the same website, is the riddle.
Several days before Christmas 1965Brian suffers what he considers an acid flashback in the Pickwick Bookstore. It is a totally unexpected experience.
"I couldn't even remember why I'd gone to the store. It was spooky. I walked into the store anyway. The clerk, who knew me, said hello and mentioned that he was crazy about "Barbara Ann," which was all over the radio. Moving slowly into the aisles, I concentrated on reading the book titles and their authors....I paged through books... I stared at the pages, tried to read, but the letters all vibrated on the pages and I couldn't make sense of anything. Then I saw the books melting down the shelves, dripping like wax down the side of a candle. The room began to spin. I was in the center of a giant spinning top. Turning, turning, turning. The moment was completely surreal."As the buzz subsided into a manageable burned-out sensation, I remembered Loren [Schwartz] once explaining that hallucinations were comparable to Zen riddles, mysteries full of meaning. What had mine meant? I had driven to the bookstore, looking for what? Inspiration? Instead, I'd seen books melting, unable to grasp the knowledge contained in them. If that was a riddle, I wanted to know the solution."
"Hallucinations were comparable to Zen riddles, mysteries full of meaning." That's how I feel about the whale vision. It seems like it ought to mean something, but I have not yet found the solution.
Saturday, November 6, 2021
The stupidest anti-drug campaign ever
When I was a kid, all the urinals at schools and churches had these things in them:
Apparently someone thought that being forced to look at the slogan "Say no to drugs" while urinating would make kids want to stay off drugs.
Apparently they also never stopped to think about the universal symbolic meaning of pissing on something.
Nor did they foresee that (of course!) kids would start using "say no to drugs" as a slang term for "urinate" -- would start saying "I've got to go say no to drugs" instead of "take a leak" or whatever -- and that any attempts to use the expression in its original sense would forever after be spoiled by unwitting potty-humor double-entendres. ("Did you always say no to drugs when you were a kid, grandpa?" "In those days, we never had to!")
Wednesday, July 21, 2021
Thank you for smoking.
Is smoking a fake health crisis, like the birdemic? I'm gradually coming around to that point of view. I've never been a smoker myself (first I was too Mormon, then too mainstream/materialist, and now, well, 42 is a bit late in the day to take it up!), but I've been questioning the smoking-is-bad narrative for years (see my 2011 post on smoking and creativity, for example). What stimulated me to finally post this, though, was Adam Piggott's recent post "Smoking is Cool," plus a growing affection for smokers as just about the only unmasked faces I see in a typical day.
First of all, though, let's take a look at this remarkable little note published in 2001 in a major international medical journal.
Over the past few months we have learnt of a number of reports regarding a paper we published in this journal on the life expectancy of tobacco smokers in Vancouver in the late 1980s and early 1990s. From these reports it appears that our research is being used by select groups in US and Finland to suggest that smokers live an unhealthy lifestyle that is destructive to themselves and to others. These anti-tobacco groups appear more interested in restricting the human rights of smokers rather than promoting their health and well being.
The aim of our research was never to spread more hostility toward those who use tobacco, but to demonstrate to an international audience how the life expectancy of smokers can be estimated from limited vital statistics data. In our paper, we demonstrated that in a major Canadian centre, life expectancy at age 20 years for men who smoke is 8 to 21 years less than for all men. If the same pattern of mortality continued, we estimated that nearly half of male smokers currently aged 20 years would not reach their 65th birthday. Under even the most liberal assumptions, smokers in this urban centre were experiencing a life expectancy similar to that experienced by men in Canada in the year 1871. In contrast, if we were to repeat this analysis today the life expectancy of smokers would be greatly improved. Deaths from lung cancer have declined dramatically in this population since 1996. As we have previously reported there has been a threefold decrease in mortality in Vancouver as well as in other parts of British Columbia.It is essential to note that the life expectancy of any population is a descriptive and not a prescriptive measure. Death is a product of the way a person lives and what physical and environmental hazards he or she faces everyday. It cannot be attributed solely to their use or non-use of tobacco products or to any other behavioral or social factor. If estimates of an individual smoker's risk of death is truly needed for legal or other purposes, then people making these estimates should use the same actuarial tables that are used for all others in that population. Individuals who smoke are included in the construction of official population-based tables and therefore these tables are the appropriate ones to be used.In summary, the aim of our work was to assist health planners with the means of estimating the impact of lung cancer on groups, like smokers, not necessarily captured by vital statistics data and not to hinder the rights of smokers worldwide. Overall, we do not condone the use of our research in a manner that restricts the human rights of tobacco users or any other group.
Just kidding! The note wasn't really about smokers at all, but about men who practice sodomy. (See the original here.) Except for switching sodomy and AIDS to smoking and lung cancer, I have left the article unchanged. It's actually the habit of sodomy that reduces one's life expectancy by 8 to 21 years. The corresponding figure for smoking is 5 to 13 years, depending on how heavily one smokes, so we're talking about the same general ballpark.
So this is how respectable people talk about a practice that is roughly as hazardous as smoking -- and it's how they could talk about smoking, too, only no one ever does. Instead, smoking is singled out and vilified in a way that is, I think, unique. In many countries, including Taiwan, cigarette producers are required by law to disfigure their cartons with large gross-out photos of diseased lungs, rotted teeth, amputated toes, and the like. I understand the US is planning to start doing the same thing this year. Meanwhile, wine bottles remain simple and attractive, and no one is clamoring for them to add photos of cirrhotic livers or puking drunks or whatever. McDonald's menu boards are not required to feature photos of morbidly obese people on oxygen. (Actually, even saying that obesity itself is unhealthy is increasingly a no-no.) Supermarket labels do not feature helpful reminders like "Warning: This chicken was factory-farmed in conditions of extreme inhumanity and received daily injections of antibiotics." Driver's licenses don't include bloody photos of traffic accidents and scary statistics. And of course, sodomy itself is aggressively promoted as something to be proud of. "Joe Camel" ads were banned for targeting children, but banning sodomy propaganda targeting children is like a Nazi war crime or something. QWERTY pride is now a well-established social institution; can one even imagine a "smokers' pride" event? When I was in college, they held such an event on campus every year, but it was promoting illegal cannabis smoking, so it was okay. A similar event to promote good old-fashioned tobacco would be unthinkable.
So what's the deal? In a culture that tolerates, embraces, or actively promotes every imaginable vice, what is it about tobacco smoking that puts it beyond the pale? Yes, it's unhealthy; yes, it's addictive; yes, those who aren't into it generally find it unpleasant -- but those are its selling points! That's what the establishment likes! So why don't they like smoking? The fact that it is a "Native American" drug -- from the same officially approved minority group that brought us such not-gonna-judge drugs as ayahuasca and mescaline -- makes the establishment rejection of it even more puzzling. Better yet, it's got a feminist background; during the first wave of that movement, cigarettes were promoted as "torches of freedom," symbols of equality with men. Today, liberated women are still encouraged to drink and swear and get tattoos, but no longer to smoke. What, I ask again, is the deal?
I don't have an answer to that question, but it's enough to make me think that there must be something fundamentally good about smoking, or it would never be attacked like this -- and that what "everyone knows" about the terrible, terrible health hazards associated with smoking may, on inspection, turn out to be about as valid as what "everyone knows" about the birdemic or global warming. I haven't delved into this at all and probably won't bother to; I'm just saying it looks like a phantom menace and quacks like a phantom menace.
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Mask compliance is currently universal in Taiwan. While I myself keep a mask handy in case I see a cop, I am very, very much the exception. Everyone wears masks all the time. The only unmasked faces I see outside the walls of my own home are those of smokers. It used to be that I would see a face and think, "Hey, a fellow mask rebel! -- oh, never mind, just a smoker." Now, though, I’ve realized that while it may be true that he just took off his mask to smoke and will put it back on again, at a deeper level smokers and non-maskies are on the same side. Whatever else a cigarette may mean, it certainly signifies a rejection of healthism and a refusal to kowtow to goodthink -- and anyone who's signaling that is all right in my book.
Wednesday, July 14, 2021
A little trip to nowhere
I dreamed that my wife and I had decided to try LSD. We got it in the form of little chalky tablets about an inch in diameter. (My waking self is pretty sure that's not what LSD looks like, but in the dream I didn't question it.) I took one and waited for psychedelia to break out, waited to see something weird or groovy or like far out man, and -- nothing. I really tried hard to feel something out of the ordinary. Did I feel a bit lighter, for instance? No, not really. Did the colors seem perhaps a bit more vibrant? Nope, vibrancy levels normal. Did I have by any chance a sneaking intimation that everything is just like you know this illusion and we're really all just like one man? Just a sec, let me see . . . sorry, negative.
I remembered Terence McKenna's slogan, "When in doubt, double the dose." I hesitated a bit because I figured my wife had probably counted the tablets and would notice that one more was missing, but in the end I popped another tablet.
Still nothing. I looked all around my study, looking at every book and tchotchke and piece of furniture, noticing everything, on the alert for, I don't know, plasticine porters with looking-glass eyes or anything of that general description. I realized that everything was sort of beautiful when you really looked at it, and I thought, hey, is that the LSD? Is this like when Aldous Huxley took mescaline and could sense that the four legs of his chair were the four legs of a chair and yet simultaneously Michael and all the archangels? No, not really. Just the ordinary beauty of earthly things.
I gave up and switched on the computer. An ad came up that said, "It's OK not to be tracked. Help us stop surveillance in its tracks!"
And I woke up.
Tuesday, July 13, 2021
License plate syncs
I have recently posted on the number 666, and on a dream about Charles Manson and Timothy Leary. This latter connection was reinforced this morning when I followed a link on Anonymous Conservative to a 2019 Telegraph article called "Making a murderer: did the CIA's secret LSD labs turn Charles Manson into a killer?" Leary is not mentioned in the article, but of course his name is synonymous with LSD.
Less than an hour after skimming the Manson article, I was stopped at a traffic light and suddenly became aware of the license plates of the three motorcycles stopped in front of me: NB6-616, MRK-75?? (I forget the last two digits, maybe 74?), and LDS-286. These entered my consciousness simultaneously and were all immediately perceived as meaningful.
I read the first one as "Nota bene: 66(1)6" -- that is, note well the number of the beast. (Some manuscripts of Revelation have 616 instead of 666.) Later I realized that NB itself could also stand for "number of the beast."
In that context, MRK obviously suggested the word mark, as in "mark of the beast." It also made me think of marek, which I (erroneously?) believed to be the Arabic word for "apostate." Back in 2002, when I had recently left the CJCLDS and sometimes lurked on exmormon.org, one of the regular posters there used the handle Al-Marek and explained that it meant "the apostate" in Arabic. Apparently, though, he just made that up; checking various online dictionaries and translators, I can find no such Arabic word.
Since MRK had made me think of my 2002 apostasy from Mormonism, the last license plate really jumped out at me. LDS of course means Latter-day Saint, i.e. Mormon, and 286 is the Simple English Gematria (S:E:G:) value of my full name. That is, if A=1 and Z=26, the sum of all the letters in William James Tychonievich is 286. (The number of the beast is also traditionally interpreted in terms of gematria, 666 and 616 being the values of two different transliterations of Nero Caesar.)
The combined message of the license plates was, then, "Mark well the number of the beast, apostate Mormon William James Tychonievich!"
Only I'd remembered the gematria wrong. As soon as I was off the road and could use a calculator, I added it up and found that the number of my name is actually 268, not 286. To make the license plate match my name, I would have to transpose the last two digits. And what about the other part of the license plate, LDS? If we perform the same transposition on it, we get, yes, LSD. (And if we transpose the last two phonemes of Latter-day Saint, we get Latter-day Satan, i.e. the antichrist or "beast." The S:E:G: value of LDS or LSD is 35; three and a half, or 3.5, a prominent number in the Book of Daniel, is borrowed by Revelation and associated with the antichrist.)
The LDS/LSD connection is made in the 1986 film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Kirk and Spock have time-traveled back to the 1980s, and Kirk tries to explain Spock's odd appearance and behavior by saying he "did a little too much LDS" in the sixties. I referenced this line recently in my April 29 post "Gadianton Canyon syncs," when a YouTuber dismissed a bit of Mormon-adjacent folklore (the Gadianton Canyon Incident) as most likely the result of "shrooms or LSD."
I have no particular interpretation of all this so far. We'll see where the sync fairies decide to go with it.
Wednesday, May 5, 2021
On the threshold of a dream
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| I cannot read the fiery letters . . . |
Since remembering that, I've been trying to observe how my dreams begin now that I am an adult, but it's been difficult to do so because, well, dreams generally begin when one is in an impaired state of consciousness and not really able to take notes!
This morning, though, I was able to pull it off. I set my alarm an hour early, woke up, and then let myself slip back into REM, deep enough for dreaming but shallow enough for observation.
My dream did indeed begin with a kaleidoscopic pattern, and I was surprised to notice that it appeared to be a kaleidoscope of written language -- not that I could actually read it, but there was a very strong sense that it was a swirling radial pattern of letters in some script that I could almost understand. I have tried to approximate the effect with the illustration above, but it is only an extremely rough approximation, limited both by my skillz and by the inherent impossibility of translating a dream into an image on a computer screen. The letter-like forms were more radially oriented than in my illustration, with a clear sense that the "bottom" of each letterform was towards the center of the wheel. The forms were moving, too -- expanding out from the center and also rotating. There was something complicated about this rotation -- perhaps different parts were rotating in different directions -- suggesting clockwork or Ezekiel's "wheels within wheels." Also, the whole thing was both more and less colorful than the illustration. I had the impression that if I had snapped a photo of it, it would have come out all gray, and yet at the same time it was positively glowing and pulsating with a sort of para-color that made it impossible not to think of a rainbow.
This "alphabetic" kaleidoscope then began to resolve itself into something blotchier, less intricate, less radiant and jewel-like, a bit (only a bit!) like the second illustration, below.
The view gradually lost all radiality and shifted to amorphous blobs of para-color, a bit like a highly "colorful" version of army camouflage. I found it odd that the shapes were becoming less clearly defined as the dream unfolded, just the opposite of what I would have expected.
Then, with an abruptness that startled me, everything snapped into focus just like that, as if someone had flipped a switch. The vague blobs of "color" immediately transformed into a "photorealistic" scene. (Not the sort of thing that could be captured in a photo, of course. I refer to the level of clarity, detail, and definition.) I saw rolling farmland in what I felt was perhaps Ohio or Kentucky, a couple of small houses with white aluminum siding, and in the distance what were unmistakably two giraffes picking their way across the fields on their spindle legs. Actually, the giraffes looked somewhat less real than the surrounding countryside, as if they might have been some sort of holographic projection. They were just-perceptibly shimmering, and the ratio of para-color to ordinary spectral color was higher than in the surrounding scene.
Is this similar to the way a hallucinogenic trip begins? I've never taken hallucinogens, so I don't know. (I was offered peyote once, as a precondition to talking religion with members of the Native American Church, but Mormon missionaries always Just Say No.) I'll have to dig out my Aldous Huxley and Carlos Castaneda books and see if anything in their descriptions sounds familiar.
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