Bergman from Beyond

Is it a coincidence that the mysterious 'portal' of "Desteni" looks so much like a Bergman character herself? She's got thousands of videos up on youtube. Her hair cut is about the only discernible evidence she ages. She's a little pixie combination of the young boy in PERSONA and Bibi Andersson. On the one hand I'm vaguely enthralled. On the other, vaguely ennervated. Watch too many of her weird 'interviews' and you get the feeling you've simultaneously learned the secret of life and been subjected to a 20 hour performance art piece by your precocious niece who may or may not be trying to get you to join some Scientology-ish UFO cult.


(NOTE the videos posted here originally were deleted, and now exist only in Spanish with subtitles. Not sure what that means as far as Destini being too phony for Nortamericanos or not. But I found some, so here be what I can find).

And Bergman comes back through her to say howdy!! "I'm in HEAVEN! I'm alive but... in a different way." Needless to say, if you are positive it's NOT Bergman's spirit talking through her then are you really less dogmatic than someone who is positive it is? Don't dwell in absolutes, my friends! There are none. Be like Charles Fort! Be like Sherlock Holmes! Be like Carl Jung. In this case I'd advise being very Jung, for regardless of your vote, the whole Bergman Nordic blonde waif death connection is fascinating in and of itself, an example of the gray area where art, death, blondes, and the Unknown all meet.

But I'm impressed by the sheer volume of information coming out of this Nordic alien-looking portal chick, and the way you think well, if anyone would come back from the grave to say "Hi! I'm not sad anymore!" It would be the man who gave us CRIES AND WHISPERS, PERSONA, THE SILENCE, and PASSION OF ANNA. Oh and so many more!

The Future is Written in the sci fi genre

Recently there's been a commercial for PCs, part of the "I invented Windows" campaign, with a college nerd happily sitting outside his dorm room (while his stud roommate runs a "tutoring session" which presumably never ends.) Said nerd's happiness stems from his ability to get movies beamed directly into his laptop, which he then watches with his handsomely clunky headphones on, presumably cranked for all the sci fi explosions.

The message: you don't even need a place to "live" if you have a PC. What is contentment after all but endless streams of free movies that you can play as loud as you want, all by yourself regardless of the size of the crowd around you? I'm not judging. Just seeing the writing on the wall, admitting my part - for no one loves avoiding people in favor of the internet as much as me, well, that's probably not true, not anymore.

I want to connect this commercial in your mind with a novel by William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties, in which a character lives in a box, inside a box owned by a weird figurine maker inside a subway. The guy lives on cough syrup and shivers in his cold sleeping bag, but he's plugged into the web, so he's barely in his body at all. He's sneaking into secret areas trying to rendezvous with the first totally cyber superstar, or something like that. I never finished the book, but well I remember that character. Other notables in the future of Gibson herein include lightweight electric cars, and rampant shanty town living. Even the Golden Gate Bridge is a long row of makeshift housing with no electricity. (The guy in the box is in Tokyo, not that it matters where you are, by then).

I've long imagined a future which is already here, wherein a stranger coming out of, say, a Russian gulag, finds the whole world seemingly asleep, sprawled on streets, sleeping on one another in train stations, barely moving, just hooked up to their laptops, directly, for screens and speakers will soon seem stupid, why have anything interfering when you can just tune directly in?

If then, everything is a fractal of everything else, as I believe it is, then this has already happened, and space time itself is a virtual illusion. I believe this to be true. The proof snakes before us in an endless Moebius Strip.  Therefore, the grays are us in the future, and the future is us in the grays. Beware the fictions you create, for they are more true than you will ever be able to fully know. But you know just the same.

The shamans are the techs!

Through the Worm: Scientists, Intergalactic Travel, and daemons

 
It's charming to see scientists on 'legit' space documentaries like Morgan Freeman's Through the Wormhole on the Science Channel explain how unlikely it is that UFOs could travel from other galaxies, since they're millions of light years apart - and yet these same scientists posit the existence of worm holes and parallel universes, and superior technology, but then if anyone puts two and two together they get scoffed upon.

If you'd have posited that in the future everyone in the world would be walking around with tiny phones that can reach anyone in the world anywhere at any time, they'd have told you flat out such things were impossible. Wireless radios, maybe... but satellite telephone service affordable to even the local ghetto youth? Pshaw! The only one, way back in the 1980s, who saw and wrote about a future where our external world is all poverty stricken but everyone's a king in a digital realm? William Gibson.

I'm not even sure I 100% believe in it even now, and I have a cell phone like everyone else. But unlike most people, I'm skeeved out by the thought of what sort of inter-dimensional space dust might be on those bouncy signals I'm sticking in my ear. Frankly, I don't believe it works. I think it's just a hypnosis machine that convinces people they've called each other in the past. The voices are echoes, of the windmills of your mind.

A materialist, but with an eye for the beyond

It's hard to imagine these kind of vast spaces between solar systems being traveled, even at light speed, but try to think of it in fractal terms - the distance between our galaxy and the next may correlate to the distance between one atom and the next in a single molecule of our fingernail. Would scientists really be so blind as to theorize that humans could never get from point A to B on a fingernail just because of all that space between atoms?

It's really a matter of point of view, which makes everything relative, including science. In this case the relativity is the size of the being wanting to do the travel, the notion of time as well. Imagine for example a planet that spins faster than ours, with days and nights scrolling by. They come visit us and move so fast we can't even see them, like the Flash. We say they are poltergeists, we say they are angels, blurs in the sky. They see us as this slow creatures stuck in a kind of melted time freeze frame life, just begging to have our pockets picked.

Another aspect to consider is anti-gravity, as explained by Bob Lazar who allegedly reverse-engineered UFOs for the government. Basically the way it works is by projecting a gravitational field that basically sucks the ship forward, so inside the ship it doesn't actually feel like you're moving at all, because your field of gravity is artificially maintained; essentially your falling towards your destination, no matter which direction it may be, but since the gravity is constant on board, you don't even notice. Questions to ask abductees who've been aboard spacecraft seldom asked: what is the gravity like? Do you see the aliens with your eyes closed, open, or both? Do they seem 100% real in 3-D, or are they kind of blurred and shape shifting, like hallucinations?

If we're foolish enough to think we begin and end in physical bodies trapped in time space on this spinning rock, then yes of course, we'll never get to drive to the far side of the universe. If we realize that the entire contents of the universe, from the big bang to now, exists in every facet of our entire being, then reaching Orion's belt is as easy as buckling up before driving to the store. But first we have to think bigger. Materialists believe in cell phone technology because it works. They hear the evidence. But what if, just as our cell phone signals are beamed back and forth through space so we can hear each others' voices, far away planets are beaming themselves, or their own cosmic messages, to our brains? Bypassing clumsy technology and going right for glands and organs they themselves planted inside us via manipulated DNA, they've been communicating with us for centuries! Do we just scoff at that? We don't know what the evidence would be since we can't tell, and don't try, to discern where our own thoughts end and transmitted thoughts begin, but if we meditate deeply it becomes more and more obvious.

Smoke 'em if you got 'em

We shouldn't be training astronauts but psychonauts (hence this blog's title) and maybe we are, in art school, or yoga class, shamanism, Buddhism, Aboriginal ceremonies so secret we know nothing of them, or through Reiki. The human soul is not bound by size, dimension, time or space, and so we can reach the other side of the universe as easy as going to sleep if we allow ourselves that kind of release. But instead we hold ourselves tight in our bodies like a hermit crab in its shell who dreams of floating free with the current instead of being weighed down by his cumbersome housing and the draining gravity of real estate tax.

Imagine a hermit crab trying to cross the ocean floor in a huge conch shell... it takes forever, but if the crab lets go and just floats in the current it's across in no time. First though it has to let go of the fear it will be eaten as it will have no protective shelter. That's faith, though.You need faith to let go of yourself and slip between the cracks of reality, without the comfort of a physical body. But once you do, then you're really going places.

If you want to really 'see' beyond our three dimensions, you only need to meditate, or sleep, or go on a hunger strike, become a vegan, ingest psychoactive molecules, or just become schizophrenic; you'll see and understand it all... and then you will read of these haughty scientists speaking of space light year distances making interstellar space impossible and laugh like a giant who knows he has the whole Milky Way galaxy captured like a dot on the center of his tongue, which is to say, you will laugh like an infinitely small atom along a vast DNA chain who knows he dwells safely in the center of a giant's mouth. What enduring harm is possible to that hermit crab if he accepts the entire ocean as his shell? Even the devouring squid is just himself, drawing him into a faster, larger network.

"Wormhole" has two meanings: we go into one and out of the other (the worm's anus) goeth our body back to soil. As Hamlet said, "a man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a King, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm, and so may a King may go a progress through the guts of a beggar."

See you soon, King!