Don't Eat my Pineal Gland!

I recently picked up the magical pineal gland activator kit from Jonathan Goldman. I'm glad I did. Use it along with the pineal gland activator cream (from Daily Om) and listen to Goldman's "Cosmic Om" on full blast and you're really resonating! Another way is to guzzle a lot of Robitussin.

But Robitussin really only works well if you have a fever, and then you want to keep that ball in the air and the fever is gone. How you gonna do that? You can feel Maya's nets closing down on you, lowering you back into the egoic third density slime of time-space and me-first consciousness! Well, that's where Goldman's tuning fork, the music, and the cream and the long periods of meditation come in. Take the time! It sure is worth it. And by all means, research the miracles of the pineal gland. It's your ticket out of here. Don't believe me? Look back through history and you'll see, with your third eye!

There's a veritable treasure trove of trenchant pineal pics over on this Secret Knowledge of the Ancients page (part of logoschristian.org). Though it's funny because after all of this awesome pagan stuff, a pastor shows up and says "no thanks, I'm already bound for heaven via my faith!' Well, I salute this pastor's confidence but sometimes it's good to know about all the exits, rather than just the one you've been promised. Beware a spiritual tradition that says all the other traditions are whack. It seems shady, and I doubt Jesus would have run around telling Buddhist they were going to hell if they didn't convert. In the East for example they respect all the other traditions-- "many paths with the same destination." At any rate, logoschristian points out the patterns well. This one fairly dropped my ball:

"Here is a picture comparing the Eye of Horus, an Egyptian god, with the pineal gland in the human brain. Can you see it?"

Now there's a theory going around that the whole mummification ritual thing was to leave the pineal gland "on" and transmitting, perhaps via one of their strange casqued batteries? In their way, the ancient Egyptians were light years ahead of us. Of course they had "help."

As I wrote over on Divinorum's sister site, Pswar of the Saints: 

And as I've written elsewhere, mummies as receivers for space broadcasts is no fiction, unless the Inca mummy on the moon is some foolish hoax! 

Not called the MUMmers for nothin' 

The pope hat, the conehead of Ackroyd and Newman, the Pine cone, the Pineal Gland, the Saint that come marchin' in Mummer's Day parades and Mardis Gras Gris Gris - it's all the same resonance, as seen in the mummy space stations of the moon and Egypt. Notice the recurring ideas - energy transmuted- beamed - across vast distances of time and space - instantly through the crystaline structures of the pineal gland - the transmigration of soul energy - peace that sutures together the stray strands life and death, time and space, and body and soul. Vibrate along, without judgment if you dare! Snicker if you choose at the pineal's resemblance to the circumcised mushroom cap head, but then wonder which came first, the pruning of the phallus to resemble the pineal / mushroom, or --- no, that one came second. the pruning came second, there's no wondering. I was just beamed the answer.

Hahha --- mirth activates healing and serenity! Never let your insecure ego confuse spirituality with piety; never confuse serenity with sanctimony; never confuse dour righteousness with right-thinking. Truly it is written (in the script for HEAD), "Never loan money to a man with a sense of humor.

Erich's Strangest Art - Slideshow (from the Pratt site)

I'm very proud of my place of employment for the last 12 years, Pratt Institute. This year is also its 125th anniversary. Way to go, Pratt! When you love where you work, what can stop you? You are like a plant thriving in its soil. No hurricane can disturb you, no shockwave from and earthquake ruffle your petals. So I took the time to add my own slide show to their website, and you can see it here! dd

One Weird Moon: films by David Childress and Kenneth Anger

Herewith are two films about the moon which together I think really illuminate the high strangeness of this incredibly bizarre planet. They are by David Childress and Kenneth Anger,

"The more you know about the moon, the more far out it gets, and the less you really know!" so raves extraterrestrial archaeologist David Childress, who you might know well from the History Channel's beloved show ANCIENT ALIENS.

 

He makes a good point about how strangely the moon is situated, and so perfect in size, that it covers the sun perfectly during eclipses are very, very telling - the equivalent of an alien astronomer signature. Was the moon brought here and shaped just so ancient astronauts could view the aurora? I love his excited nasal enthusiasm,



This video is Rabbit's Moon by Kenneth Anger, which I like but never dug the soundtrack he did, which was basically an LP side of moon-related doo wop. This is the shorter version Anger re-cut in 1980, about half the length and with a different rock song-track as a present for Stan Brakhage's son. Man oh man, don't you wish Kenneth Anger was your dad's friend? Or that we could escape the hypnotic pull of that old rabbit moon? AUMmmmmm

Amy Mainzer and Her Brown Dwarfs

She may be stunningly gorgeous, young, healthy skinned and possessed of an impossible Buddha calm, but Amy Mainzer is no mere NASA spokesmodel. She knows her stuff and lays it out strong. She is NASA's Snow White, illuminating the Brown Dwarfs to come through the WISE telescope program.

Last weekend I was having a huge conscious raising DNA vibratory powwow that I thought was going to kill me but I opened up, took the storm energy and smashed my mirrors and now the whole universe is illuminated like the cry of a dawn rooster. I feel like Scrooge on Xmas day throwing money to the goose-buying street urchins. I shall save my own coughing cold-suffering inner Tiny Tim, because I am involved in mankind.

One phrase that kept coming to me again and again was 'Brown Dwarf' - it cropped up in my writing and thoughts like the voice of Allen Ginsberg reading his "Sunflower Sutra" and Bob Odenkirk acting a Buddha reincarnation writing to his metalhead old school chum, saying, of Led Zeppelin, "like the lotus, they bloom for you again and again." (Mr. Show - S4, EP5)

The radiance of a new awareness courses through me and everyone seems a glow with illumination and higher resonance, or else darkened by unnecessary attachment and murky agendas of dark agencies. One person who definitely seems aglow with calm illumination is Amy Mainzer - the beautiful brilliant star of NASA's WISE program, the Snow White to the Seven Brown Dwarf stars revolving slowly around our solar system, one of which may be what our intergalactic pineal pope hat conehead spy plane telescope calls Nibiru.... but probably not.

If she knew, though, would she tell us?

Through a Dark Symbol: Imaginary, Symbolic, Real = Rock, Paper, Scissors

There's a war going on right now, and it's not between us and them, or good and evil, it's between the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. The reason is that the 'real' - the immediate issues of food, shelter, warm clothing, electricity, gasoline -- are suddenly 'not there' for so many of us in the northeastern U.S. after Hurrican Sandy. The 'real' really scores one when a natural disaster wipes away our access to the symbolic and imaginary. Stop signs and traffic lights no longer apply. No electricity for phone charging or modems, without the electronic umbilical to the imaginary, the 'real' slowly comes into focus. All the TV could do, for us who still had power, was warn us to stay indoors. Then came the massive clean-up and now we're moving onto elections and marathons and other quintessentially imaginary / symbolic endeavors, but for those who have not yet been able to resume their gentle electric sleep, whose sole pursuit is still the seeking of warmth, food, clothing, shelter, it must be horrific, since so little of the real remains for them to move in. They've inherited a world mostly abandoned as we live so much of our lives in 'the cloud.' Use it or lose it, reality warns. We've lost it, twice-over.

This is important to know in understanding why animals and plants exist only in the 'real' and not the imaginary or symbolic. They don't recognize themselves in photographs (though sometimes in mirrors); they seldom speak, except in a grotesque howling or barking, as if to mock us, we who have dared to leave their realm. Who's laughing now?

In the ghost shows I watch (see my mind-numbing reviews) there's the common belief that any demon would be afraid of crosses, attracted by pentagrams, repulsed by the sting of holy water. This has always fascinated me as my favorite film as a child was DRACULA (1933). Why would a vampire be afraid of a cross? Is it just the symbolic reminder, like a text message from mom coming right when you're trying to break your very first law? Is it like Michael Moore waving a picture of a slain little girl at NRA president Charlton Heston? If it works mainly as it's a blessed item, imbued with holy power, what does a priest's blessing actually accomplish? Does it leave some electro-magnetic charge too sophisticated for modern methods of scientific measurement to detect?

I think horror movies get these symbol-imaginary chains confused, probably because their writers got too much Christian conditioning growing up, so that crosses and holy objects are themselves seen as threatening through a kind of Pavlovian dread response - the mere sign of a cross makes the grown Christian writer scratch ghost echoes of his itchy wool church suit, makes his legs fidget with restless boredom. Before engaging in sex he has to cover up the crosses and pictures of his mama. To such a person, attacking or defacing the symbols directly becomes a very first chakra kind of rebellion, albeit one mired in an id-less prison mentality, like defacing a stop sign, but after you've already stopped for it.

School of the Holy Beast (1974) is an example of this, a 70s Japanese pinku wherein, amongst other things, a nun is stripped and beaten with thorny roses and then made to urinate on the holy cross. This is actually considered pretty subversive in the context of the film, but really, in the end, it's kind of silly and not very interesting. A representation of someone desecrating a representation of someone else. I ended up selling my copy on eBay. I was expecting so much better.

But then again, I went to public school.

Don't Deliver us from Evil (1968) finds two best girlfriends home for the summer from Catholic school, performing similar symbolic 'atrocities' - such as stealing holy articles from their school's chapel and even tossing out a bunch of sacramental wafers into the nearby lake. The shizz with the passing swinger/rapists the girls pick up along the way are one thing, that's human life, that's real, but their litanies and rituals with the pilfered holy items are purely symbolic. It's a very odd breech of the walls between the levels of imaginary, symbolic, real, like a picture of a fire (symbolic) burning up. It's no accident I saw my idol Kim Morgan's picture with her kneeling before a poster for the film while I was writing this and I felt compelled to smudge in some flames. 

Imagine you could see through your own image's eyes, the way characters spy in old dark houses through the eyes of an old portrait. Imagine you could see out of all reproductions of your image, all photos as long as they were of yourself, and so you would look down from gallery walls at the throngs judging whether to buy you (and force you to observe their home life in the room where you're to be hung) and out of scrapbooks and from atop fireplaces in little reproductions, postcards, TV, god knows the horrors you would see.  Is this not what we do to poor Jesus on this cross?

That sounds crazy, yet such symbol-confusion abounds in cinema, and in real life, and especially the hypocrisy of censorship: curse words, offensive gestures such as the middle finger, mean nothing outside their culture, but are pixelated out of movies that have no problem showing graphic cannibalism. Meanwhile, wrongs performed in the real world are presumably righted by other symbolic magic words ("I'm sorry"). Men live and die for one particular symbol, the "$" sign, the three digit mark, an employee makes 'six figures' and you know he's doing all right.

In a wacky 1932 movie I saw recently, THE PHANTOM, the financial jackpot everyone's been scheming and killing for in the haunted house basement turns out to consist of now worthless confederate bills. Did the crazy old lady lie when she said she had three million dollars? No. Then again, if her relatives still had that money it might be worth something as a collector's item probably a lot more than face value!

Similarly, if society falls apart, the US dollar bill will be worth nothing. Gas and cans of corn will be the new gold. We use the gold standard today, it's universal, so all our paper money is allegedly connected to some store of bullion somewhere in Fort Knox, but there's some conspiracy theories that Fort Knox's biggest secret is its staggering emptiness, which we must keep hidden from the other nations lest they see we're broke. But then again, why waste all that gold? It's just sitting there, locked deep in a vault, no good to no one. If we were led to believe it was there, it wouldn't really need to be there, hence could be two places at once.

The shiny base underwriting everything ever created by man - all unused

Undertanding the sheer nonsensicality of this all became easier for me after working at a high end art gallery for eight years. We specialized in original work by Dubuffet, Matisse, Picasso, and Chagall, mostly oils (and Sam Francis gouaches). Though generally lesser works, they were still worth a fortune by most standards. Many of them seemed to me as the artist probably dashed them out in an hour or less. The average price: $100,000. It makes no sense. Did someone like Picasso have to hold onto his shopping list, because the minute he set it down on the desk someone would grab it to sell through Christie's?

So prized was Picasso's signature that it is said that when he paid for things by personal check, the odds were that the recipient of the check would save it rather than cash it. Seeing as a simple Picasso autograph can easily fetch $1,000 today, perhaps this wasn't such an irrational decision. (...) The value came not from any intrinsic source -- it's a fraction of a cent's worth of ink on a piece of paper worth scantly more. Anything touched by Picasso becomes in the eyes of many that much more valuable. It was something that he could have used (and perhaps did use) to his advantage. Why not keep paying with checks if people aren't going to cash them. (fool.com)

Warhol's $ sign silkscreens (which his assistants made, he only signed them) showed he understood the tragic joke at the core of this symbol blindness - but does Dracula? Why would a vampire or a devil need to disgrace religious symbols if they got this cosmic joke? Would the devil create holy statues just to desecrate them? It's not very rational.

Top: Warhol silkscreen; Dubuffet Personnages 5
both on paper - est. $50-100,000. (as of 1998)

The idea of a presumably 'real' vampire or ghost stopped cold by religious iconography is only the tip of the iceberg but since we all know the drill (he runs from a cross, is burned by holy water, etc), let's use it as a springboard into this illogic: If a vampire were 'real' -- even merely within a film's diegetic reality -- why would it be cowed by an image within said diegesis, i.e. a brandished cross? We grant the makers of holy objects too much credit if we imagine that every cross on the assembly line has been somehow imbued with holy spirit power. Maybe some priest has blessed the holy water, but what if that priest was just phoning it in that day, not really delivering the required god power? Does that render all his holy water ineffective?

Just as when the head vampire is killed and all his victims are freed from his spell, does a vampire's scars from holy water disappear when the priest who blessed the fountain is found in the rectory with a choir boy? What if it's a pedophile priest waving a cross at a very decent sort of vampire, one who only targets deserving mobsters like Anne Parillaud does in INNOCENT BLOOD? Could you scare away a priest by waving a pentagram in his face?

I imagine the priest even breaking his vows one tiny bit and BooM! all his slain vampires come back to life.

Every kid in the 70s had seen most of Hammer's Dracula films at least once and we remembered Peter Cushing using two candlesticks to form a cross; so we'd all practice with holding our two fingers together to form crosses, presuming that would work on real vampires the way it did in the movies. We'd make them from popsicle sticks, pipe cleaners, anything handy, better safe than sorry, and wave them at whomever was playing the vampire to drive them off.

So.... let us consider, is defending yourself from vampiric attack merely matter of calling the vampire's attention to the cross patterns abounding within the field of his vision? Can he weasel out of his adverse reaction by not paying attention as you frantically gesticulate towards the cross shapes in the tile floor? Did vampires have to avoid checkered floor tiles? Would the cross have power if Dracula couldn't see it, nearsighted and merely needing to take his glasses off to reduce the holy gross to a fuzzy blur? If a gun can shoot through a sack cloth, can a cross repel a vampire through one's coat?

The only answer is that the symbolic is as real as the 'real' and that it is the wellspring from which the daemonic flows. On the surface this wouldn't make sense, but surface is perhaps an illusion more than even the symbolic. A deep, deep down reading leads to a lot of Sesame Street-style fun. Imagine scaring off a vampire with the word 'cross' - One ringy dingy! Two Ringy Dingy!

Behold the word!

Or what else? Why not a photo of a cross? Or even the word 'church' written on a postcard?

This would seem to stem a lot from our own beliefs, the power of the human mind. For example, as a child I was terrorized by a monster in my closet until my dad posted a sign on the door where he'd written in big letters "no monsters allowed" and they never came back. My dad didn't believe in either the monster or the power of the sign in the sense of their being 'real' but as a pharmaceutical market research analyst he understood the importance of symbolic over the imaginary, like the way placebos are so often effective medicine, or the way paper beats rock.

Ohmigod - Rock Paper Scissors = Imaginary real  symbolic: the Paper is the imaginary (the vampire and the monster in the closet); the scissors is the symbolic (the cross); the real is rock (our general well being, i.e. food, shelter, tobacco, warmth, more food, and decent plumbing and all our blood safe in our veins).  Right now in the northeast we are the rock -- reduced to pure 'real' - until our electricity is back and our lives restored. Once the power is restored, scissors and paper will once more manifest. Paper, get ready to be cut!

Why didn't I smoke? -Overpopulation, the Elderly, War, Social Security, and Reasonable Life Spans

Have you ever seen this show NOVA? I hate it so much I want to make its head explode with my mind. As a voiceover artist I have to say it's got the most insultingly smug, patronizing voiceovers I've ever heard, clearly meant to 'humor' elderly viewers the way my old friend Alan used to patronize the old folks at the home where he worked. My dad was watching NOVA when I visited him at the hospital. One episode was all about growing ears on mice and how that might lead to even longer life spans than we already have. Oh thank the lord, why should anyone have to die?

I love my dad and dreaded his passing, but at the same time I applauded his decision to refuse a $200,000. enzyme treatment that would postpone his death (cancer) by a few months... maybe. Regardless of its dubious benefits, he could have received the treatment, paid for entirely by Medicare, AKA by you, me, and our unborn grandchildren, but decided he didn't want to burden us just to suffer a few more months. He couldn't in good conscience waste our money. The doctors were pissed! No doubt they had boat payments to make. But I thanked him on behalf of future generations.

Now my family comes from a long line of cynical English and Germans, drunks, artists, witches, and WW1 German draft dodgers -- all sneerers at, and runners from, death. My great-great-great-great-great-etc. Aunt Mary Easty was hung as a witch in the 17th century Salem. (Her family kept excellent records, all now in my possession). When I was born the earth's population was 3.75 billion. Now it is twice that amount. When I was a kid, even at that relatively low number we worried about overpopulation more than we do now. So I'm always a little outraged when some documentary worries that we might lose a few billion in a plague or nuclear war. Good lord that would be great, After all, we have plenty to spare.

Three things run in my family: addiction, wit, and gallows humor. My great grandmother on my dad's side lived to 107 but practically deaf and blind, joking about wishing she'd been a smoker, as the last 20 years of her life were very very boring without being able to read or even hear books on tape (she could still talk in a perfectly measured and eerily intelligent voice). My grandmother on the same side is now closing in on 100, and is in the same boat... why didn't she smoke?

Why? Why do we prize longevity even at the cost of quality? My grandmother joked with the staff of her retirement home about going off her meds and dying a natural death and they put her on round the clock suicide watch. God forbid a woman of 98 years young even consider checking out so soon!


Social Security Reform Bill Encourages Americans To Live Faster, Die Younger

Now you might think its a Hippocratic thing but I know firsthand a lot of this comes from Medicare scamming. I used to volunteer at an alcohol clinic and if you were on medicaid, they wouldn't let you leave. They charged each patient $70 per 45 minute session of group therapy, each (in 2001) so considering there were on average 20 people per session and ten sessions or so a day that's $1,400. they made off medicare through making 20 drunks hang out with me for 45 minutes (I was not making any money) in a crumbling institutional white room. So while the medical industry sucks our future up their snouts to keep the elderly alive for a few more miserable years, NOVA cheerfully assures them death is in the process of being eradicated so we can all live... forever, on Medicare and government pensions... until the retirement age has to be raised to 90 and the voting bloc majority is so old they vote to enforce a mandatory 11 PM bedtime for the entire nation.

The only way we're going to keep health costs and pensions going in this country is if people die at a reasonable age. Otherwise -- your kids and grand kids will inherit nothing. So they buy nothing, because they're too broke from paying your Medicare bill and government pension. Why rack up another half a million dollars on Uncle Sam's tab just to keep shuffling along for another miserable 20 years? I'm not saying institute death panels, but let the old folks die with dignity if they want. I think some of them, like my granny, would dig the chance to attend their own funeral like they were Huck Finn or Robert Duvall.

In closing, fear not death. For death is part of life. But fear doctors, for they love to take our money, promising to stave off the scythe for a few more months no matter what the cost to your children ... do the math and set my granny free!

POST-SCRIPT: I wrote this shortly before my dad died and was saving it til now to make sure I felt the same way after a year. He died one year ago today, just a few months shy of his 70th birthday. He told me about the Medicare $200,000. enzyme treatment he had refused during the last night we spent together while watching, interestingly enough, Long Day's Journey into Night. My dad and I, watching old movies, love you pops! And I even got to say it before he passed, bonus.... RIP, James Kuersten. 1943-2012