benblog

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UPDATE: 6-23-007

When I first realised people doing similar research to my own, with slightly different tatses, would yield vastly different conclusions from mine - that was when my heart broke. Discussing the "right" translation of "ruach" with Bryan Rebenstorf ("Thyroros" - the "gate-keeper," who later attempted suicide and blamed it on me - this was before I'd ever tried it myself), that was when my heart broke. Not because someone else had blamed me for their wanting to die. I'd laid that head-trip on my ex-, and she survived just fine. No, that was when my heart broke because that was when I realised what a terrible thing teaching is, because I was right, but Bryan refused to give up his belief that I was wrong. My heart broke beneath the weight of wasted time I then foresaw, and much of which I have since experienced.

Arguing with students has been a constant during my time online. If one agrees with the physics, they question the magick. If one sees value in the ethics, they find equal value in questioning the math.

Most of the people I butt heads with are 180 degrees away from the people who I should be, and deserve to be, brushing shoulders with. Most are just "class-clown" types, and I have to asuage myself by thinking of the majority of my readers, who choose to remain silent. I only hope I can reach them, I pray for the "class-clown" type's expulsion from their imaginary role.

I respect people with wisdom, but age doesn't always work out that way. For every wise older person I meet, I meet two ornery old coots. For every one wise person I meet at all I meet three or four other total jerks. I try to politely explain to such people the same information I share with the wise, but they betray my trust every time and act out their imaginary roles. I do not believe in the philosophy that labels my egalitarian generosity as intellectual "casting perals before swine." Instead, I subscribe to a unique idealism: I think of everyone as being equally infinite in potential.

I know the evil ones all by name, but of the good, the calm, the wise, the peaceful, I know only a few. The evil ones lie, and by their manipulating people's pereceptions of potential choices, usually slither into leadership roles and, where none exist, they will create them. The evil ones tell you straight to your face one thing is their God's honest truth, then go around behind your back whispering that their story to you was false, spreading a thousand and one other versions of their story. As Jim Morrison said, "When the true kings murders are allowed to roam free a thousand magicians arise in the land." (the Ghost Song, from "An American Prayer")

The evil ones are not evil by nature, not inherently evil in their core essence. They simply perpetually choose to remain mis-guided fools rather than accept their lot in life as the same as everyone else's - cause and effect present as options for stimuli in our external environment and the free will to choose present as adaptive genetic mutations inside our DNA. What begins as evil, or intentionally wrong, will end in evil; two wrongs never make a right.

Some simply choose to try something that may or may not be wrong and, into the vacuum of their doubt, they become filled by regrets. These plague them like unrelenting demons, haunting them with memories and remorse. This is what the pathway downward into psychosis looks like at its yawning gateway. Here we are, standing in the entryway to the choclea, whispering murderous insanity into the echoing drum of the ear. Here we are, living cameras in our own eyebrows, bacterial sensory-recordings being made; miniature replicas of our experience die each moment as our cells regenerate over the decades; we are literally born again into whole new bodies, leaving our larval gestation period as pupae behind and metamorphosing into imaginary shapes and forms.

They feel trapped, the experience of the poison womb, suspended like a bucket from a rope hung down a well. They see little hope for, nor reason to desire, change from their socially ingrained habits, and I tell them the truth when I say neither do I. It's not a bad thing necessarily - society needs its drones to sacrifice their time like bloody life-wine. Society needs its perpetually pubescent class-clowns and its ornery old coots. Demons are just a second part of nature, behind what we normally can see and hear. The wrongs of this world, universal-seeming injustices, they can pile up like an invisible mountain pressing down on someone's psyche until it cracks. Then the voices we overhear all turn against us, and we forget the true Torah, the letter and intent of the true law, "Do What Thou Wilt."

But such people do exist. I've been beyond the mouth of madness myself, down the throat, past the craw of Abraxas and through the nine-stomachs of Aditi, the cosmic cow. Many stories are about things that I have done. I fail sanity exams for a living, personally, so I am not the judgmental type of those whom the "high and mighty" dub "swine" and those who society would call "drones." I tame Mara by teaching the subtle classes; I refuse to compete for the attention of the silent All with those who know that, deep down, they are selling "snake-oil" and cannot connect with their own, true, deep emotions, but who persist in seeking the spotlight. Such people are novices, narrators of others' actions, believing their fellow audience members in the darkened theatre of their reality blind, deaf and mute.

I tell you that if you do not forgive the three ugly beggars at the heal of the true prince then his royalty is of no worth to you, and if you do not offer them your coat across a puddle, you are not even fit to be spit on by one of them, let alone to kiss the hem of his majesty's royal garment. I tell you this because of karma. What you work in one moment yields multiple results in the next. If a man has bad karma it will follow behind him in his wake wherever he goes. Consider the cop racing to the distant crime scene who recklessly leaves behind a wave of run red-lights and dangerous near-misses with simple citizen traffic, or the ever-ready resourcefulness of the junky in finding a fix.

The worst kind of students think, wrongly, they are teachers. They can regurgitate the information of others ad nauseum, but they have not completed their own grimoire of magick, nor published their own textbook on metaphysics, let alone posess such a large personal library of these and other studies, as I have myself, however they still come to me, demanding acknowledgement of thier superior credentials in my own fields of study. This must have been how Stan Tennan felt when I contacted him after writing the FSOM. Luckily that experience sparked motivation in me that propelled me through writing the MPDR. In alot of ways I proved Stan Tennan right by trying to prove him wrong. By proving him wrong when he said "you don't even know what a tachyon is," I proved him right when he said I was "just attempting to steal all his work." In some ways I have probably stolen some of Stan Tennan's thunder. If he were to ever read this, I would hope he would see I am sorry. When I corresponded with him in 2001, had I been able to see the future, our exchange would have been greatly different. I had hoped to become his student, and instead, in a very real way, I have treated my superior as an inferior, and stood a good man on his head. I have been the worst kind of student myself.

I have been all these "places" in my mind, and I have experiential knowledge of all these uinque prismatic refractions of states of consciousness. I have been a disruptive sophormore, a class-clown, an old coot - a Watcher, and I have been to Hell and despised, and I have lived in blind denial, an existential Samael, a humanist Satan. I am the Wizard of Oz, the "crazy" Jon, I am Just Jon, and I am all these things. All in all just a very bad student who stood up too soon during the ceremony and left to go preach the Almighty Word. A dove that never returned to its ark.

I have been all of these imaginary roles myself, so I recognise them most in others - the wanderer, the scribe, the philosopher, master occultist - but instead what interferes between myself and such true archetypes are only my own ghosts, only my own demons, my own baggage, my own negative karma - the environment I have helped to create by my previous actions. I am responsible for the karma in my aura. I know that. I simply prefer not to care anymore about maintaining all-good karma in my aura because, by now, doing such would require actively weeding out the destructive elements that have already germinated and come to fruition. So I simply drift on the cosmic currents.

So I am way beyond all labels that could limit me. I am beyond "insane," beyond "psychotic," likewise I am beyond "Messiah," beyond "god." I am beyond "good" and "evil," beyond "Satan" and "the devil;" I am beyond "heaven" and "hell" and I am even beyond "Light," "Love" and "Life" altogether. I am so new I haven't happened yet, about to emerge from prior early-retirement. Someday I will be considered a "great man" and, I hope, even perhaps "the brightest young mind of my times." But none of these could ever truthfully be applied to me. I am beyond all possible attempts by others to apply a definition to describe. I am in a mental "state" known only to myself alone.

And I have been in worse "states" of mind than this. I remember spending the entire year 2000 on the couch, awake at night and watching out the front windows of my darkened house, cursing paranoid ramblings to myself and still using heavy, blunt blows to the head as relief. I have been in much worse "places" than I am in now, emotionally speaking. I remember very little about my visits to the behavioural health center, (ie. the lunatic asylum); I have some dim recollection of feeling like a lab rat. I have been through far worse "situations" in terms of my overall comfort and contentment. I have had a few close-calls, black-outs, and near-death experiences too many to mention "recreationally" drunk-driving. I still have nightmares about my car being stolen and joyrided (thanks Bill!), All in all my life is decent and I can't complain. I have had worse friends, I have had worse habits and wasted much more time than I am now. I am honestly doing quite well.

All in all, I would say I live a pretty average life. It is probably just above stagnant existence in an unrequiting quagmire, but far below the hallowed heights of the seventh heaven. I am living a lie if I say so. It can all drop out from under me at any moment, so they say.

I consider my friends my equals. Those I know online as intellectual equals I consider my friends as well. So, around my friends and equals I act differently than I do when I am around online students at the various forums I've attended, or when I am around strangers while out at a show. Each of these requires a different imaginary social-role. I am eager to make friends online because I dislike having only students, but I am equally eager to avoid strangers at a show because I prefer to have only a few close friends. I love long-distance friendships, even though these are usually too fleeting, but I prefer a small, personal circle of friends.

Ultimately I can't save anyone else from making the same mistakes that I've made. All I can really do is be as thourough as possible in my research, and make as few mistakes as possible there. If the people who are out there now, learning from me, can mainly concentrate on my work itself, then my own life, my personal karma, can easily be overlooked in the present, and will change the future as little as possible in itself; I leave my historical impact to the work itself.

To quote Albert Einstein, "I feel the insignificance of the inndividual, and it makes me happy." If I could walk between the moments of time like drops of rain without getting wet, I would. In my opinion, karma is the nature of the demiurge, a mirage of an oasis, and is never all-good, and the only way to defeat one's own negative karma is by sacrificing the good along with the bad, "throwing the baby out with the bath-water," and ignoring karma altogether. Only when we see through our aura by looking beyond its immediate karma can this karma become clear and the aura remain cleansed.

There is little hope for me that, at this point, my life will remain totally without historical impact. I sometimes wish I could have been a serf, a corporate wage-slave. However each of us is only an autonomic organ, a particle without choice, a monkey without fore-knowledge that believes it posesses free will. Each of us has our own "calling," our own destiny. If we postpone answering it, it will only redouble its chastisement of us. True miracles are all natural to the environment.

But I'm not going to speculate on the future - the potential results of my plans (the ~GOD~ or "FNORD" projects, the "benpadiah" material), because I cannot depend on the results I foresee occuring. The future is a garden of forking paths through an ever-changing sea of uncertainty. And besides, I don't practise chaos theory.

Instead let me say that many of my plans depend on my being able to convey my findings as information autonomously of communication involving events in my personal life. In other words, I'm going to have to teach students in addition to only having equals and friends. Because of my philosophy that we are all equal in potential, the need to assume this imaginary role is difficult for me.

I have taken some steps toward assuming this responsibility nonetheless. I have established the "Order of Death" as a teaching lodge for much of my Gnostic research, and will (eventually) be teaching a class at the Crystal Connection, local metaphysical bookstore. However, these projects will take alot of time before the knowledge will really be able to become dispersed. As I said before, it's wasted time that breaks my heart the most. And with teaching comes alot of that. That's the main reason most academicians are so old.

The fact that I am not old should work to my benefit, however because my findings require grounding by further research into their implications' different fields, my broad and general work so far is only laying a foundation for much more work to come, and so long as I do not teach well enough to spread my findings quickly, that is only so much more pushed back and buried behind wasted time.

Meanwhile, events involving my personal life continue to pass me by like so much water under the bridge because I don't feel like I'm truly myself without the presence in my life of my ex-, for whom I've put my life on hold (for nearly a decade). Whether I did this for fatalist romanticism, or simply to spite her since she would not have wanted me to have done so, either way it's irrelevant what my original motives were because by now there have been too many passed oppurtunities that I will probably never achieve what could have been my full potential. In effect, the damage has already been done, and for this ailment there are only treatments, no cure. As you can tell if you know me (in "real" life or online), this wound will infect more and more, growing like radiation cancer, so long as I continue to cling to it as my ideal of Love, ie. forever.

And yet, the oppurtunity to become a dub-fx "sound-guy" for Trial By Stone, my friends' reggae band, looms in the shadowy abyss of my invisible future, on the one hand, on the other there is no word from my ex-lover with whom I remain forever in love. As I say, my personal life just slides away while my life as a writer grows. So long as I desire the opposite, life will appear to me as suffering.

It only goes to show how deluded and removed from "reality" I've become the more I remain in his rut of my imaginary role of "writer." No matter what I say, how I feel, how open I am, behind it all is an imaginary wall, or a one-way mirror, behind which my true self remains, hiding and watching, seeing and observing all, looking out from behind my eyes.

All is well and I can only complain of loneliness. However my teaching progresses and I believe my "target audience" will be reached. All of these opinions and all of my "beliefs" I hold copyright to, and will slowly turn my "illness" dealt me into a professional "winning hand." Some days are obviously better than others, than before. But it could all end at any moment. I am not destined for fame and stardom, but neither am I only "almost" famous, bold and fortunate. I tell you, there is not much to my life right now. Given the oppurtunity to allow myself to be uprooted from my current rut in my contented "dissociative" (imaginary) role as writer, I could be molded as easily as putty.

Perhaps the only real tragedy in all of this, that is my "real" life as a loser and my "online" life as a teacher (even if not a good one), is in my own over-drammatisation of it all in my writings in this blog. If I were the person who, for charity, had fucked me once upon a time long ago and far away, and I read these insane ravings (such as this one now) I would feel more revulsion than sympathy. But that's just me.

-Jon

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