Like its namesake the Eleusinian Mysteries, this site will serve as a doorway to initiation towards higher realms: artistic, creative, and spiritual. As such, it features my neo-symbolist/quasi-Beat poetry, and in due time it will feature more work by the talented writers and artists of my print zines Hieroglyph Gumbo and Whoof Session. The dandy poetry selections by my farflung colleagues Joseph Wheeler and Thomas Shea, and the incendiary socio-political essay by Daniel Calabrese will have to suffice for now. The subtextual assumption of this growing assemblage of work will be that a realm of imaginative authenticity, spearheaded by a new creative vanguard, can help us to transcend the mundane and to connect with the lineage of our artistic forebears: the Romanticists, the New England Transcendentalists, the Surrealists, the Beats, and other ists and isms of your choosing. Simultaneously, the original pieces presented herein will help establish the online world as one that can indeed offer new art that is substantive and perdurable, in an ephemeral, pop culture-obsessed age of the soundbite and the next frantic mouse click hyperlink.
Whether ephemeral or perdurable, however, art is no panacea for the perhaps terminal ills which afflict our planet. Just as I am under no illusion that art alone can change the world, so too am I doubtful that the socio-political arena is the place of ultimate global transformation. As human beings, we are not just creative aspirants, we are certainly more than political animals, and I contend that we are more than just a mass of protoplasm seeking satisfaction and power. In truth, we are beings of celestial origin (of angelic and extraterrestrial derivation), though born of the blood and the soil of this earth.
The spiritual viewpoint of this site will be that the universe consists of more than just matter and energy; mind, soul, and spirit must be included with the physical realm when we account for the basis of our true selves and when we try to create an accurate picture of nature's endless fluidity. Natural science and quantum physics will be viewed as necessary but not sufficient representations of ultimate reality. That is to say, any comprehensive map of reality will include not only the physical universe, but also the territory of the emotional/astral, bioetheric, mental, celestial, and causal/spiritual planes of existence which inform the great insights of the Perennial Wisdom. This branch of spiritual tradition holds the central metaphor of the Great Chain of Being, the notion that these levels interconnect with and interpenetrate one another, each one functioning as an equally real dimension of existence.
The metaphor of the Great Chain stands opposed to the materialist conception that the physical plane is the only real one, while all others are hallucinatory projections of this physical brain. The Perennialist might retort that the materialist is under the actual illusion; he uses his physical brain to construct such an argument, while the emotional/astral, bioetheric, and other realms that swirl all around and through him provide the very ground of being allowing him to breathe and think at all. I will respect science for much of what it affirms in the laws of nature, while strongly critiquing the dogmatic scientism of inflexible skeptics for what it denies: the metaphysical dimensions which underly all reality in Universe.
Contrarily, when New Age dogmatism rears its head, I will quickly let the Light Warrior emperors know when they wear no clothes, which Robert Morning Sky has already done with subversive wit and clarity. He is quite justified in his wrath over the intolerant priests of the "UFO/New Age Community Church" who kicked him off stage at a 1997 conference in Mesa, Arizona for his radically denunciatory views. Among other dogmas of the New Agers, Morning Sky has pointed out that their unquestioned (and to them, unquestionable) belief in aliens as Benevolent Space Brothers has little basis in the abduction literature. The "encounter" experience (at least when commited by the Grey-Reticulan archetype) actually seems closer to rape. Even so, Morning Sky emphatically does not deny the reality of extratraterrestrial visitation to the earth (in his essay "The Real U.F.O. Cover-Up," formerly posted at his website), only the misinterpretation of this experience by pie-in-the-sky naifs.
Which is more pathetic: suffering from a delusory interpretation concerning the nature of a phenomenon proven to be real, or complete denial of the reality of this phenomenon? The dogmatic skeptics, alas, endure this latter condition. An ironic flip-flop has taken place, call it the New Paradigm or the New Age Movement or dismiss it as flim-flam, it won't go away. Where once belief in ghosts and channelings and UFOS and things of this bumpy nature easily could be dismissed as superstition and nonsense, the tide has turned. The shrill, party line skepticism in the vein of CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) has revealed itself as an irrational form of hyper-rationalism. Much to the skeptics' dismay, millions of people are finding the "para" aspect of the paranormal more and more normal and pervasive, and this is not simply mass insanity, no longer explicable with another TV talking head's tiresome academic shibboleth about modern mythmaking.
The worldwide presence of the UFO and alien visitation phenomenon is an established fact, interpret it as you may. Thousands witnessed the Mexico City sightings of 1991 (corresponding to the solar eclipse predicted by the Mayan Calendar), as well as the etherial lights over Phoenix which criss-crossed Arizona in 1997. Both sightings were captured in countless videos. A veritable mountain of evidence for contact and cover-up has accumulated in modern times, despite the flabbergastingly elusive nature of these events. Dismissed but not refuted is the preponderence of evidence suggesting that the foundation of ancient history lies in alien genetic harvesting and sponsorship of the civilizations, monuments, and monoliths which were the glory of old.
After all this, only the most body-armoured dogmatists can keep up the debunkings; the cynical vested interests of the "politics of ontology" continue to control their perceptions. A few simple clicks into Crop Circle Connector offers vivid proof to anyone with a semi-open mind that the earth often has been visited by non-human intelligences. A deeper perusal of this site demonstrates that the particular beings responsible for these complex pictograms have a profound - if cryptic - message to convey unto us. The crop circles indeed are the work of jokers, precious few by "Doug and Dave," most by Cosmic Tricksters. In such a worldwide milieu, the skeptic must really twist his mind into logical pretzels to maintain his supposedly airtight position. The hardline skeptics are a dying breed. Those of integrity can no longer explain away the phenomena around and within us in mere psycho-sociological terms.
Hear me out: I am not necessarily attacking an agnostic or even an indifferent attitude towards these quirky subjects. Some of us may have more important things to do, like paying the rent or raising a child or signing a petition for clean drinking water. Those who have not stared too long into the abyss may not know what is there. What I am saying is that if the hardcore skeptics want to play hardball, they eventually will lose on ontological, historical, political, and scientific grounds (and they may even come to realize it). The coming tsunami surely will wash away into irrevelance their mean-spirited diatribes. And the UFO/ET issue is indeed a political one, and not only for this reason: How many have been murdered or harmed for their forbidden knowledge? Why threaten or take someone's life over swamp gas?
These outward experiences reflect inner spiritual thresholds we all must undergo. The current transformations the earth is undergoing relate most fundamentally to realignments (sometimes cataclysmic) of energy and consciousness; they are not understandable simply by reference to the natural and social sciences. Despite this millennarial thrust, this pervasive sense of something forthcoming that is unprecedented and universally destructive and regenerative, I tend to doubt a complete transformation soon will come about. This may mark me as a cynical "negative energy-spreading" New Ager, but think about it. Openings of the higher chakras and psionic neural circuits, angelic messengers, and ET visitors from the Pleiades and Sirius (or elsewhere or elsewhen) are great and wondrous portents, and I say this without facetiousness. All this positive energy faces great nemeses here on this beastly earth plane, however, not just from malevolent spirit-entities - personify them as demonic or Satanic if you must - and duplicitous Service to Self aliens of the collective unconscious (where astral imagination crosses into the borderlines of reality).
Let's really pull it down to earth: What pie-in-the-sky ET spacecraft can reverse the psychotic and violent power dramas, fractured lives, and urban blight of East L.A., South Tucson, and the Middle East? Third world, inner city, and Appalachian poverty and starvation? The world's totalitarian and cryptocratic governments, absolutely corrupted, who will never willingly surrender their reigns of power? The endlessly contending kooky worldviews of True Believers, all of whom know the One True Way to crack the egg and will fight to the death anyone who seeks tolerance or urges a more relativistic worldview? The spectre of nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare which hangs over our heads like the most ominous cloud of collective doom? Global warming, pandemics, terrorism, all the insoluble societal and private psychological dilemmas which are the bitter fruits of our mismanagement of this spinning globe, the surest signs of our disconnection with our Higher Selves?
We all have the right, nay the obligation, to work towards the amelioration of these nasty, brutish conditions, and to create a future for ourselves and for society which is more positive and life-affirming. But will anything short of being utterly layed to (physical) waste teach us as a species to stop our errant ways and truly begin anew? Can the earthly wonderland depicted in those Jehovah's Witness Watchtower magazines found in laundromats and on doorsteps, depicting green fields and smiley happy people in harmony with animals and nature, at one with God, ever come true when we consider the way things now are going - unless world civilization is completely Reconstructed? Not just to be flippant, can a real heaven on earth or utopia be ushered in (instead of the theocratic police state or Orwellian/Huxleyian nightmare where these visions have taken us before)? Under the present scheme of things, can we really reconnect with and reclaim the celestial selves where we have our true being?
In Politix & Conspiracy Corner, we come face to face with the creepy forces which would drag us down from these heights of human potential; learn the hoary truth of the statement that the cost of freedom is eternal vigilance. In this section, I differentiate between the humane, critically minded brand of conspiracy buff from the rabid fanaticists who use conspiracy theory as a vehicle for their own xenophobic and religious prejudices. The former are more apt to view conspiracy theory through a postmodernist (even post-postmodernist) lens of relativism, as a landscape of fractious, competing factions where little can be known with apodictic certainty, save the undeniable reality of the process of conspiracy and cover-up. The latter present themselves as being absolutely right in their belief in a total, all-pervasive worldwide conspiracy, be it Communist, Zionist, Illuminist, or all three. And the dumb-founded mainstream news media and crotchety skeptics stand in the middle, dupes or pawns or players in these perfidious games.
The long range goal of this site is to become a complete online magazine of multi-arts, cultural commentary, and metaphysical studies. It will archive my own original creative works and the many Gumbo/Whoof Session contributors (including a portfolio from the spectacular South African painter Nico Vosloo; go here for a sample of his work, on another site, or here, if you want to be really astonished) plus more extensive versions of the features already underway and planned. Soon I will post my essays of socio-cultural commentary, as well as insights into metaphysics from a sympathetic, New Paradigm perspective (including "UFOs, Strange Phenomena, and the Politics of Ontology," in which the debunkers get debunked!). Also featured will be a freewheeling book and music review section (with links to amazon.com and cdnow.com), and oodles of links to satisfy literary, artistic, and spiritual curiosities, as well as a master launching pad of info resources for navigating the internet.
I am indebted to Mark Woodhouse, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgia State University, whose hugely ambitious book Paradigm Wars provided some of the insights expanded on in this editorial. Also, a tip of the hat goes to Robert Anton Wilson. Although at a later date I will take issue with some of his more extreme guerilla ontologizing, his writings on the necessity of viewing belief systems through the quantum/postmodernist (or is that post-postmodernist?) lens of "neurological relativism" have been an abiding influence.
For a more pithy exploration of many of the themes and conflicts discussed in this editorial, I refer readers to the lyrics to Throwing Stones by John Perry Barlow, occasional Grateful Dead lyricist and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.