America doesn't have a president

"It has been reported that trillions of collective dollars not shown in government budget reports are shown through government CAFR reports and they are virtually never openly discussed by the syndicated news media, both the Democratic and Republican Party members, the House, Senate, and organized public education, and as in such over the last 50 years the domestic and international investment assets of US Federal and Local Governments as a whole have taken over the Stock, Derivative, Insurance, and Debt Markets. The collective private sector's assets and investments as of 2000 are now insignificant in comparison with what US Government now owns by and through investment.. [...]
Ask the school district for a letter as to who funded the School District's last several bond issues (get the investor information). Then get a letter from the treasurer that the school district does not use their own investments funds to fund their own debt. Local governments through shell investment firms that they may start themselves or contract out with will use their own investment funds to fund their own debt and thus move money out of sight of the public to lock in a long-term investments for themselves and a debt under their 'Budgetary' expenses for the public to repay. No reply, or an illusive reply not answering that specific question is in any light an admission of their participation.
Put that can of worms out for the public to digest of their local governments over the last 20 to 30 years have transitioned into funding their own debt (bond issues) and see what happens. (The best result would be for much of the standing debt held is vacated against the standing investments held by the same local government entity.) The only justification I got from the local government financial managers was that 'look at what a good job we are doing investing the public's funds, we got them a .25% (quarter percent) lower then they could have got from the private sector.'
This practice of self-debt funding by local governments now exceeds several trillion dollars in composite totals. The cost of interest for that debt is shown on the 'Budget' report and the returns from the investment that funds the debt is shown in the note sections of the local government's corresponding CAFR 'Comprehensive Annual Financial Report'.
Note: It is some times better to go to the State run Enterprise Authority handling the financial investment and do a reverse look at what local governments are participating and for how much."

"The public maintained the illusion that government 'survived' off of tax income (with the help of the bought and paid for Media and Political talking heads monopoly), and as of 2000 only 1/3rd of the gross income when looking at the big picture was tax income.
Now, here is the key for comprehension: government's attitude was: anything we collect in tax income we are responsible to the public for oversight and disclosure given to the public. Anything we accomplish pertaining to our gross income that is non-tax income, we are only accountable to ourselves and we can invest, spend, and transfer that income as we choose without public oversight and disclosure given. Well, that amount has now blossomed into 2/3rds of the gross income. Publicly promoted budget reports given for public consumption are almost exclusively showing tax income. [...]
I was a CTA for 14 years and traded the derivatives market for 31 years. Additionally, I was national sales manager for the US Trading Championship, US Investing Championship, and Money Money Managers verified Ratings for a period of ten years (1982-1992). Per the Money Managers Verified Ratings, I was dealing with a few managers that had 150 to 750 billion dollars under management. When I learned of Governments true scope and size of their participation and ownership in the International Investment arena, in 1994 I called a few of the big boys I had dealt with and gave them a brief of 'the forest'.
They were unaware until told and their minds alerted to the comprehension to look (they were to busy dealing with a few trees in the forest). Additionally they were only given information that the forest controllers wanted them to see. Any comprehensional direction towards discussion, qualification, consolidated total reports, or validation of or what the forest had become was intentionally omitted in and from the learning curve. Most managers were only dealing with a few leaves or branches and knew there were a few big trees around them, but that was as far as it went – due to the money control and ownership involved. [...]
Being that 'Government has already taken it all over by investment' the TRF comes in and reverts ownership back to direct benefit to the people through phasing out 'all taxation', the biggest organized crime inflicted on the population of this earth, and makes visible the hidden influence peddling for profit accomplished to start war, genocide, or stripping of taxpayer revenue into shill investments held to guarantee a massive profit for the inside players at taxpayer expense and loss, with this being the second biggest crime on earth.
They are using taxpayer funds to shore-up their own investments of which out of their own greed for profits through the use of expanded derivative vehicles, those arenas were destabilized in the first place. Now that's the definition or arrogance and blatantly a lack of open non-disclosure to the public. The new Amerika with a fascist twist, and the bought and paid for political and news media talking heads keep the masterfully orchestrated misdirection rolling along for business as usual to continue, due to the money, profit, and control involved. Stripped from the American people over the decades I may add."

"Here is the basis for what is going on here.
Cecil Rhodes, British statesman and empire builder, in his last will he says [...] in the first five wills Cecil Rhodes repeatedly called for a 'secret society, the true aim and object whereof should be the extension of the British rule throughout the world and eventually the ultimate recovery of the United States of America'. So there is a secret society operating around the world that has as its true aim and objective the destruction of the freedom of our country. And these people are British royalty. Not the English people! The English people are a beautiful people, have a very beautiful history, the country and even the U.K., all three of the countries are beautiful countries with beautiful people. But the British royalty, in my humble opinion, are the most evil operation on the face of the earth. I believe they're behind the drug trafficking, mafia, blood loaning ...

Now, the main thing that I wanted to talk about today [...] I want you to understand something very clearly. When anyone asks you in this country: Are you a citizen of the United States? [...] What do you think that they're asking you? Is it: Are you lawfully in this country? Are you lawfully here to do business and be here? That's not what they ask you.
The country is called America. America is the name of the country.
But in the late 1860s, a group of men got together and incorporated a privately owned company. Anyone can incorporate a privately owned company, and a group of men did. They incorporated a company privately owned, and they called the company 'The United States Company Corporation'. And according to corporate law – and anyone who has a corporation in business knows according to the corporate law – all corporations must have a president. That's the law. And it must have a vice president. And it must have a secretary of treasury. That's corporate law. So the corporation had to have a president and a vice president.
Today when you see, once a year, at the State of the Union, when you see the president comes out and the Speaker of the House says: 'Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States', everybody in this country thinks this is the President of America. America doesn't have a president. This is a corporate term used in business. The United States Corporation is a privately owned company. It's privately owned!
And it's a ten miles square that it operates in called 'The District of Columbia'. 'Columbia' simply means universal. This is what 'Catholic' means: universal. When you start tracing back the ownership of the corporation called 'United States' privately owned company, then you began to see that, if you say that you are a citizen of the U.S., what you're saying lawfully is that you are an employee of a foreign corporation on the International Maritime Admiralty Law.
You are an employee of a privately owned company.

Therefore, if you are living in any state such as California and you're making money here, then what you are doing quite literally is moonlighting, because you are already working for an employee of a privately owned company called United States Corporation. But you're earning money in California. Therefore you are a franchisee of a foreign corporation under maritime law. You're a franchisee! It's like opening up a McDonalds here.
You can open up a McDonalds but you're not the boss of McDonalds. The McDonalds Corporation is the boss. They tell you what you can sell and what you can't sell, and how much it is gonna be, and they call the shots. You can really be a franchisee operating under their jurisdiction. So consequently each one of us who call ourselves a citizen of the U.S. is in point of fact a franchisee of a foreign corporation. And once a year you have to pay what is referred to as California Franchise Tax Board because you're a franchisee of a foreign corporation on the international law.

Let me explain something to you.
There are two kinds of law on the earth, basically two kinds of law: Roman Civil Law and Maritime Admiralty. Roman Civil Law comes from the word civil or civili, in Latin meaning [...] Civil Law is referred to as the law of the land. But there is a higher law that governs the whole earth. (That's the one where I think the reptilians are into.) There is a higher law that operates on the earth, and it has nothing to do with the civil law of any country. Because civil law is different in any country. You can do things in Africa, you can't do in Spain. Or you can do things here in America, you can't do in France. Because the people's law, the law of the land, is different according to the culture. But when you talk about the Maritime Admiralty Law ... what we're talking about is the law of water, the law of banks. Banking law is called Maritime Admiralty.
And consequently ... This is why incidently the Statue of Liberty could not be put on land in this country. It had to be put in a port. It had to be put in water. Why?
Because it's not the Statue of Freedom, – It's a statue of liberty! Liberty is what a sailor gets when you pour in the port, because the admiral gives the captain on those boats, those ships ownership of your body. You ask permission to leave. And if he lets you what he is most slightly not going to, but if he allows you to leave, you have liberty. You don't have freedom! And as long as you call yourself a U.S. citizen, you are an employee of a foreign corporation incorporated under international maritime law, and consequently you're a franchisee of a foreign corporation. They. Own. You.

Now, let me show you how they own you. When a ship pours into port say from Japan and brings an estate 800 million dollars worth of Toyotas and televisions, the first thing the captain has to do is, fill out and give to the port authorities something called a certificate of manifest. He has to give them a certificate showing how much each car causes whether has four doors or two, if it got air conditioning, if not. Every car has to have a certificate of manifest showing exactly what you're bringing into this country, how much it is gonna cost our banks, how much we're gonna have to pay for this, and so is business – It comes in on water. It's Maritime Admiralty Banking Law. So therefore, each item has to have a certificate of manifest. And the ship when it pours into, it parks at the dock, and where it parks is called 'the ship sits in its birth.' Now, when you were born, your mother ... her water broke, and when your mother's water broke, you came out, and therefore you're a maritime admiralty product on the international maritime banking law. You are a product! Because you came out of your mothers water, and therefore you have to have a birth certificate. And the birth certificate has to be signed by the doc. Okay? And consequently, if you go to Sears and you buy something that's to large to take home, they'll bring it to you. And so they will tell you what time they're going to deliver the product. That's why your mother was in a delivery room. She was delivering a product on the international law.

Now, when you get the birth certificate, that is a Maritime Admiralty certificate that shows you are a 'human re-source'. And the corporation called United States went to your mother and asked her: Would you donate this body to us as a colateral for a loan?
Because each birth certificate is worth when it first started in 1933 ... I am told it was like $ 630,000 per birth certificate on the international exchange.
And your birth certificate today is on the stock market.
Look on the back of your social security card, and you will see numbers in RED. Any time you see red numbers, they represent your blood. You turn it on the other side, and you'll see it in BLUE. Blue is Maritime Admiralty, the Navy Blue.
So consequently you are a product that was bought. And on the birth certificate, there on the bottom right where your mother signed, it doesn't say mother or parent, it says 'informant'. [...]
My mother had an uncle when I was growing up. My mother had an uncle who worked in the Vatican's Secretary of States Office. I'm Italian. My mother also had two federal judges as uncles when I was growing up living in my home town. So I know the Catholic church, I know the Jesuits, I understand the Mafia, I understand the Cosa Nostra. I mean, when I saw Godfather that felt at home. This was the way I visioned life. So I know what I'm talking about. I have spent 42 years reading and studying and researching theology – that's my subject. Government is not my subject. [...]

The Pope of Rome made a proclamation in the late Middle Ages. He said that the Pope is the Vicar of Christ. You may have heard that term, 'Vicar of Christ'. The word vicar in Latin simply means 'one who stands in for'. [...] which means, he is standing in for Jesus.
Consequently the idea is that god created the whole heavens and the whole earth and he owns everything on it. And so therefore, he turned it over to his son, Jesus, his son. But since Jesus isn't here, somebody has to run this place. So since Jesus isn't here, the pope said I will be the Vicar of Christ. I'll stand in for him till he gets back. Then when he gets back, I'll turn over the whole world to Christ, but until he gets here, I'm in charge! Okay? As long as you understand that, we're going to do just fine.

Now, the first thing the pope did after declaring himself the Vicar of Christ, made himself the owner of all life on the earth, for Jesus. Jesus owned the whole earth but he ain't here, so I do. Second: He made a contract with the King of England. It was a commercial treaty of sorts with the King of England in which he gave the possessions of Jesus, which he held as the Vicar of Christ, to the King of England, as a corporate holding company. So, the whole world would be under the King of England FOR the Pope. So the Pope owns it, but the President of the Corporation is the King of England, and that whole corporation menagerie is called 'The Crown'. So when you hear about the British Crown, you have to understand that there is a world of difference between being Engl-ish and Brit-ish. British comes from an Hebrew word, berith. A 'berith' is a contract in the old Hebrew language, and 'ish' is a man or men. Therefore berith-ish becomes british – man of the contract. That's why any time you do anything of any importance in this country or in the western world you got to sign a contract. When you get married you get to have a Marriage Licence. The same reason why attorneys have to have a licence."

Cojo) The self-appointed majestic position of being "god's vicar" in person, quasi as the only legal embassador of an allmighty, unknown, fatherly souled creator of landscapes and lifes, entitles or raises in my eyes the claim to absolutistic world dominance quite automatically!
Declaring then himself "infallible" seems merely the next consequent move on the project of entering the throne of a "King of the World" someday, and finally inaugurating the long built-up Catholic "World Pharaoh" of Rome resp. Jerusalem, who represents with one universal religion the "all-seeing" power of a global monarchical constitution under the no longer smoked, implants-based Jesuit Shepherd's Fold.

"Mr. Speaker, in order that the American people may have a clearer understanding of those who over a period of years have been undermining this Republic, in order to return it to the British Empire, I have inserted in the record a number of articles to prove this point. [...] Andrew Carnegie, in his book entitled Triumphant Democracy. In this he expresses himself in this manner: 'Let men say what they will, I say that as surely as the sun in the heavens once shone upon Britain and America united, so surely is it one morning to rise, to shine upon, to greet again the reunited states – the British-American Union.'
This statement is clear, and the organizations which Mr. Carnegie endowed have spent millions in order to bring this about. [...] organized to bring about a British union, a union in which the United States would again become a part of the British Empire. However, this has been upset to some extent by the attempt of the internationalists to establish their own government as an International or world union."

"A human being is not a person because he is a human being, but because rights and duties have been ascribed to him. Specifically the person is that legal subject or substance of which the rights and duties are attributes. But not all human beings are persons, as was the case in Old England when there were slaves."

Cojo) Slaves? Rome?
Sheeps? Shepherds?
No.
There is no conspiracy.
Of course not.
That's absurd. Totally.
Absolutely groundless!
Exceedingly after that totally non-absurd Towers-to-Ash global television event with it's daily bombardment of "9/11"-like terror monger by now two main memestreams of opinion, the old corporate and the new conspiratorial one.

Serious crimes which aren't cleared-up stay reproducible with the greatest of ease. Logically.

Are you a sovereign yet?

Secret societies operate through intelligence agencies

02/28'07 Vyzygoth interviews Darryl Eberhart on Beyond The Grassy Knoll

Darryl) And then just the last couple of years, I all of the sudden decided to discover that there was a real superpower behind the scenes, orchestrating things in the religious world, in the financial world, in the geopolitical world, and of course, that's what I have recently termed the "Vatican-Papacy-Jesuits-Knights of Malta cabal". And I believe they are the real real powers behind most of the powerful governments in the world, clearly with the Roman Catholic religion over a billion adherents and with super financial stockholdings etc. through their fabulously rich Knights of Malta. So by far, they are the biggest people out there. […]
Keith V-Goth) What I find people having a hard time with is the fact that this could be so perversive. And they still have a hard time believing it because of the PR that comes out of the Vatican etc. [...] The government, you know, they are not our friends. At the behest of the listener, I put up on my homepage links to three New York Times stories that tell you, the FBI was involved, you could say, and also pulled off the 1993 World Trade Tower Bombings, okay? There is three stories out there, straight from the New York Times, and they implicate themselves, they convict themselves. […] This is only the beginning of it, it's not all the FBI's fault. But the fact is, we have a problem: Our government is not our advocate, it's our adversary. […]

Darryl) The way to control governments is to bribe people, to give them money, to give them power and sexual favors. And I think, a lot of Congressmen in the past and probably to this very day, the new ones they come in, they get them in compromising position. Basically, secret societies operate through intelligence agencies. I think, we hung up on this idea of 'oh, all the CIA couldn't be bad, or all the FBI couldn't be bad, or all the national security agencies couldn't be bad – no one can pull of a conspiracy without a whole lot of people knowing.' Well, can I give him a little bit of my background? And I'll tell him why they can do that.
Keith) Absolutely.
Darryl) I spent 26 years in the intelligence community. I had a Top Secret Special Intelligence Clearance that entire time. I was at the top of my profession as a technician – eleven and a half of that was in the old U.S. Air Force Security Service. I learned Russian and Arabic languages. I was a linguist, a traffic analyst, and a reporter in the Air Force. And then I spent eight and a half years in what would be the army's equivalent to that: the old army security agency – military intelligence. And then I worked six years for the National Security Agency, after I retired from the military. And the reason that they're able to pull so many things off is, that within those intelligence communities, where you have people with top secret clearances, everything is on a need-to-know basis, and it's very compartmentalized, so that you could be in one room and the room down the hall you can't get in despite all your Top Secret Special Intelligence Clearances, because it's on a strict need-to-know basis. But the key thing is that most of the people in the CIA, the FBI, the NSA are good, red-blooded, patriotic Americans who are working hard to do their job, especially during the Cold War that they were fighting against Communism and America's enemies. And they are at the bottom, they have no idea – just like a secret society: they are at the bottom, they are popping information up, and the people at the top feed off that information, correlate it, provide it to whom they will, keep what information from whom they don't want it to get to, and that's the way they are able to control things. The Kennedy Assassination is a beautiful picture of that because you have Knights of Malta all over the intelligence community.
The FBI Assistant Director Cartha DeLoach for the FBI was the liaison to the Warren Commission. Then the CIA liaison to the Warren Commission was another Roman Catholic military order Knight of Malta James Jesus Angleton. So any information going back and forth between the Warren Commission, which is an interesting commission, had some of Kennedy's enemies on it like Allen Dulles () also a lot of top-level Freemasons were at the heads of these organizations. So again, you don't have to have all of your people in these organizations, all you have to do is have them at key choke points, key leadership positions, like Angleton was the head of the CIA's counter-intelligence – probably just as powerful as the head of the CIA – for like decades. He also set the Vatican desk, he set the Israel desk, but the key thing was: he was the liaison to the Warren Commission. So that any information going back and forth between them were handled by a couple of Roman Catholic military order Knights of Malta and, of course, you had Roman Catholic Knights of Malta involved in other areas [...] they're all over the map in the intelligence community.

Keith) Would it be fair to say that, when you do have sort of black bag operatives in the intelligence communities, that they are necessarily there because of their membership in a secret society?
Darryl) I think, if they get into any of a top position, they are either in the secret society or they're being controlled by the secret societies, whether it's through, like I said, sexual gifts, whether they give them monetary gifts ... If somebody that's either in, with them, or totally controlled by them, you're not going to be in a powerful position – I don't think – and last very long. John Kennedy is the perfect example. If you start to bug the system, they're going to either try to buy you off, give you something special, or bribe you if they know of sexual indiscretions etc., and if none of that works very quickly ... if you very powerful, very high up, that you might reveal secrets or break up like Kennedy was going to do break up the CIA into a thousand pieces, especially take the black ops from them and transfer it over to the Pentagon, then they're going to kill you. And most likely they will kill you. [...] I think, John Kennedy, and Bobby, and a few others were really trying to run stuff out of the White House, and when they started to go against some of their advisers, when he started to print money outside of the Federal Reserve, when he decided to shut down he war in Vietnam, there were just to many powerful interests in the background that decided, 'hey, he is double-crossed, thus he has got to go.'
Keith) Do you wonder if the old man hadn't taken a very debilitating stroke at the end of '61, if he would allowed those to – perhaps what I would say – 'go rogue'?
Darryl) That who had that debilitating stroke?
Keith) Joseph Kennedy
Darryl) Oh! I heard from some folks that when they said, 'your boy's got to go,' that he just nodded his head. There has been several books written about his ties with Sam Giancana and others. Joseph Kennedy – he was the mob.
Keith) Of course the fiction work which I don't think it's fiction, obviously, and the name excapes me – I think it's also the individual who wrote The Manchurian Candidate () which heavily, heavily innervates that the father knew, it was the price of doing business.
Darryl) Exactly.

Another example of good patriotic Americans, you have like Navy Seals or Special Forces that are sometimes ... especially Special Forces – I don't know if you ever had Lt. Colonel Daniel Marvin on?
Keith) No.
Darryl) He was asked to kill Lt. Commander William Bruce Pitzer [...] and he was trying to get that information out to the public, thus he had a Top Secret Clearance as Navy Lieutenant Commander, and so Marvin, Colonel ... he was then a Captain of Special Forces was asked to take him out at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. He refused because he said, you know, 'Special Forces are only used to assassinate people overseas, and you guys use the CIA here, in the U.S. I'm not gonna do it.' Well, they asked another captain and I think, he might have been the one Special Forces' Captain that killed him. But the point I'm trying to get here is that they were saying that Pitzer, Lieutenant Commander William Bruce Pitzer at the Bethesda Naval Hospital, was gonna tell secrets to the Soviets, so, you know, 'you need to kill this guy!' And that's how they get good patriotic people like Special Forces () to assassinate one who's actually a guy trying to bring important information to the American people or to reveal evil that's going on within government. And they ask a guy that's been highly-trained in assassination technics () sniper etc., 'hey, you need to kill this guy because he's selling secrets.' So, you can see, how it works. They can get a good patriotic American to kill another good patriotic American by lying to him. And that's very sad, but that's going on.

Keith) Whenever people talk about ... You know, I'm not saying people. I mean, when Wilcox, yourself, Phelps, Tom Richards, when we have discussed, or/and they had written about the Vatican and the Jesuits, everybody says, 'oh wow, they can't be into everything.' But they certainly are, I mean, their diguise is a one that nobody thinks they are capable of it, because there are supposedly ecclesiastically into, that they could have such an expansive and efficient organization. But I also want to mention one other thing: (And we had a gentleman on here () by name of Greg, who has a website that kind is devoted to occult history: http://rochester92.vox.com, and Greg if you're listening, you can be insulted by this as well.) I'm gonna to have another guest on, who are really starting to bother me with his tone. And if he's listening today, he probably won't come on, because I'm directing it to him. And that is, he writes me an email saying he will come on the show – he said, 'but my own views are very different from those who focus on the Illuminati, Freemasons and such distractions and trivia.' Well, I would love to send him back a very measured email. Because this is the kind of "locked head" that is out there, that makes so many of these things happen. This also includes people not believing that the Vatican, the Jesuits, and – as you said before – the Knights of Malta can be involved in this stuff. But now, having set that all up, there is a hierarchy! And when you mention this along with the temporal coadjutors, you're looking at a framework, so that when you mention this, it involves all this but it makes others think perhaps that we've gone loony. Your take.

Darryl) Yeah, the reason for that is, and it's very sad, and to some American I can say this: We Americans, for the most part, are extremely "history-challenged". Not only do we know very little about real church history, not only do we know very little about european history, world history, but we know very little about true American history. I ran into Europeans, Keith, when I was over in Germany and other places, that knew far more about American history than a lot of Americans do. And I talked to you earlier about this: we need to be doing more reading. You mentioned about the Jesuits – most people they can't just believe that the Jesuits are that powerful. Let me just give you a couple of quotes here. You know, a lot of people try to blame it on the Jews, to blame it on Freemasons, and it's just like I said, the last couple of years, every stone I started turning over, I started finding Jesuits, Knights of Malta, which is controlled and co-located with the Jesuit Order, involved in almost any key assassination of heads of state, important ones and throughout history, involved in fomenting wars like WW I and WW II. So here is that great quote. It's by a Canadian historian, J.E.C. Shepherd, and if the Jesuits aren't so powerful and so bad, then why would a quote like this be made.

Between 1555 and 1931, the Society of Jesus was expelled from at least 83 countries, city states and cities, for engaging in political intrigue and subversive plots against the welfare of the State, according to the records of a Jesuit priest of repute [i.e., Thomas J. Campbell]. [...] Practically every instance of expulsion was for political intrigue, political infiltration, political subversion, and inciting to political insurrection.

So, and most of the people that threw them out, Keith, were Roman Catholic monarches! They were thrown out of places like Spain and Portugal, like two and three times each, France, they were thrown out most of the Central American countries, they were thrown out of Russia several times. Of course, almost any time that that occurred, they came back with a vengeance. They were responsible for assassinating not only President Abraham Lincoln, which is something that's totally disappeared from American history text books and from encyclopedias, but they killed Czar Alexander I and Czar Alexander II of Russia, they killed King Henry III and King Henry IV of France – one of them tried to give religious liberty to all of the French people. They've got such a track record of murder, not to mention religious genocide like happened in Croatia in the 1940s.

There is another great quote – () some people, you know, try to say, the Masons are running everything – this is by another historian, it's an American historian named James Parton. Very short quote, he says:

If you trace up Masonry, through all its Orders, till you come to the grand tip-top head Mason of the World, you will discover that the dread individual and the Chief of the Society of Jesus [i.e., the Superior General of the Jesuit Order] are one and the same person.

So clearly, these guys are big power players. If we go back and study european history, we'll find out for centuries ... and of course the Jesuits are kind of – as far as the Roman Catholic Church goes – a relatively new order: they have only been around 400 and plus years. But for those 400 years, almost every single King, Queen, the mistresses of the King, the top generals in those countries – all had Jesuits for their father confessors. Their children ... of any royalty, or anybody that was important went to Jesuit colleges. In universities they were at the forefront of setting all those up. So, when you become the father confessor to the King, or the Queen, or to his mistresses, and all of the sudden you want the King to launch – let's say – a religious genocide against the Waldenses or somebody, you just go in and say, 'hey King, we want you to kill all these people, even in your own country,' and if he starts to hesitate, 'well, how about we tell the Queen about your ten mistresses?' That's why I wrote an article about the confessional. It's the greatest intelligence gathering system that the world has ever seen.

Octopi

Nevertheless, our cultural crisis is deepening. Deepening mainly because we have very poor connections between our fragmented and autonomous psychic structures - within ourselves as individuals and within ourselves as a society. Our whole problem is that we can't communicate with each other, we can't express intention. And the psychedelics are sitting there waiting to unify us, to introduce us to the trans-linguistic intention. To carry us forward into a realm of appropriate cultural activity, which is to my mind the realm beyond history. Beyond history lies effortless and appropriate cultural activity. And nature has proceeded us, as it always does, by laying out models that can be followed to realize this.
As an example and by request, I'll point out that the 19th century had a titular animal. Its titular animal was the horse, idealized as the steam engine, the Iron Horse. Marx talked about the locomotive of history, and there was this whole focusing on the horse archetype, which in the 20th century gave way to the titulary animal, the raptor, the bird of prey, as exemplified by high-performance fighter aircraft, as the kind of ultimate union of man and machine in some kind of glorification of the completion of a certain set of cultural ideals. You see?
Well, in thinking about this and in thinking about how language is the cultural frontier of our species, I went to nature looking for models of how we might move beyond the bird of prey, which when you think about it, it is the American symbol. It was also the symbol of the Third Reich. A lot of creepy scenes have actually been into birds of prey ... when Alaric the Visigoth burned Eleusis, it was the crow that fluttered on his battle standard as the greasy smoke swept by. So these dark birds have been with us.
Anyway, in looking for a new titulary animal and drawing the conclusion of what it would mean, I was drawn to look – strangely enough – at cephalopods, octopi. Because I felt, first of all, they are extremely alien. The break between our line of development in the phylogenetic tree and the mollusca, which is what a cephalopod is, is about 700 million years ago. Nevertheless, and many of you who are students of evolution know, that when evolutionists talk about parallel evolution, they always drag out the example of the optical system of the octopi. Because: Isn't this astonishing? It's very much like the human eye, and yet it developed entirely independently, and this shows how the same set of external factors impinging on a raw gene pool will inevitably sculpt the same organs or attain the same end, and so forth and so on.

Well, the optical capacity of octopi is one thing, what interested me was their linguistic organization. They are virtually entirely nervous system. First of all, they have eight arms in the case of the octopods, and ten arms in the case of the squid, the decapods. So coordinating all these organs of manipulation has given them a very evolved, capable nervous system as well as a highly evolved ocular system. But what is really interesting about them is that they communicate with each other by changing the color and texture of their skin and their physical shape. You may have known that octopi could change colors, but you may have thought it was camouflage or something very passive like that. It isn't that at all. They have a vast repertoire of traveling bars, dots, blushes, merging pastels, herringbone patterns, tweeds, mottled this-and-thats, can blush from apricot through teal into dove gray and on to olive ... do all of these things communicating to each other. That is what their large optical system is for. It is to be able to see each other. The other thing which octopi can do – besides having these chromatophores on the surface of their skin – they can change the texture of the skin surface: can make it rugose, papillaed, smooth, lobed, rubbery, runneled, so forth and so on. And then, of course, being shell-less molluscs, they can hide arms and display certain parts of themselves and carry on a dance.
When you analyze what is going on here, what at first seems like merely fascinating facts from natural history, begins to take on a more profound aspect. Because it is an ontological transformation of language that is going on in front of you. Note that by being able to communicate visually, they have no need of a conventionalized culturally reinforced dictionary. Rather, they experience pure intent of each other without ambiguity because each octopus can see what is meant – this is very important – can see what is meant.
And I think that this heralds, or could be made to herald, a transformation in our own definitions of language and communication: what we need is to see what we mean. It's not without consequence or implication, that when we try to communicate the notion of clarity of speech, we always shift into visual metaphors: I see what you mean, he painted a picture, his description was very colorful. It means that when we intend to indicate a lack of ambiguity and communication, we shift to visual analogies. This can in fact be actualized. And in fact, this is what is happening in the psychedelic experience. There we discover, just under the surface of human biological organization, the next level in the organization of language: It's the ability to generate some kind of acoustical hologram that is manipulated by linguistic intent.

Now don't ask me how this happens, because nobody knows how it happens. At this point it's magic. Nevertheless, the fact is it does happen - you can have this experience. It represents a synesthesia in the presence of ongoing communication. It is, in fact, telepathy. It is not what we thought telepathy would be, which I suppose if you're like me, you imagine telepathy would be hearing what other people think. It isn't that. It's seeing what other people mean. And them also seeing what they mean. So that once something has been communicated, both parties can walk around it and look at it the way you study a Brancusi or a Giacometti in an art gallery.
By eliminating the ambiguity of the audio signal and substituting the concreteness of the visual image, the membrane of separation, that allows the fiction of our individuality, can be temporarily overcome. You see? And the temporary overcoming of the illusion of individuality is a much richer notion of ego-death than the kind of white-light, null-states that it has imagined to be. Because the overcoming of the illusion of individuality has political consequences. The political consequences are that one can love one's neighbor, you see, because the commonalty of being is felt. Not reasoned toward, or propagandized into, or behaviorally reinforced, but felt.
This is why there is this persistent notion, which accompanies these psychedelic compounds, of a new political order based on love. This was a hard thing to say in the panhandle in 1965, it's not easy to say in heavy-metal L.A. in 1987. But it seems to be the fact of the matter that love, which poets have celebrated for eons as inaffable, may in fact have certain inaffable dimensions attached to it, but it may in fact be more affable than we had previously cared to imagine. And it's the invoking of the affability of love that has to do with discovering the shared birthright, the atemporal dimension that is co-present with this reality, a dimension that is a vast reservoir of anchoring – existential anchoring – for each and all of us in our lives.
So my response to feeling the political pull of this, feeling the power to transform language, that resided in these things, was to go to the people who I thought would know most about it: the shamans for whom hallucinogenic shamanism has never been an issue, for whom the notion that you're supposed to do it on the natch is a patent absurdity. I mean, if you're serious about doing it on the natch I suggest you eliminate all food. Because this notion of the pristine self somehow riding above the muck of the world, carrying on a spiritual evolution is absolute foolishness. We are made of the stuff of the world.
People, who do not confront the presence of the hallucinogenic possibility, are turning their back on their birthright. In the same way that if you do not experience sex throughout your life you are turning your back on your birthright. After all we could argue that to allow another person to touch you, is to not do it on the natch, right? But, dear friends, we're slicing too close to the bone here to take that approach. It's much better, I think, to open to the world. The world is communication. Nature is the great teacher. All human gurus are simply distillations of the wave of nature that is coming at you. So you can just short-circuit the whole human boil-down, and go straight to the executive suite by putting yourself under a tree in the wilderness. The Great Ones all have said this but they need to be taken more seriously on the subject of their own expendability. Me too.

Going to the Amazon with these kinds of notions and looking at what had been achieved there, I came to have a vision then of the future that could be. That we are sort of hurling ourselves into a new Stone Age where the fruits of the prodigal wandering, that I discussed in such detail last night, can be used to infuse new meaning into that paradise. The imagination of man and woman is so incomparably rich and exerts such an attraction on us as the builder-monkey that we have to honor that. We cannot demonize that and preach a kind of naturalism that if actually put in place would cause the starvation of tens of millions of people. We have passed the point where some kind of Luddite reform can save us. It's only, I think, very self-indulgent elites that can preach voluntary simplicity, because a lot of people are experiencing involuntary simplicity. And, unless you're one of them it rings rather hollow to be told that Zen values are best.
Re-inserting ourselves into nature is inspiration for cultural design – that's what it is, it's not flight from the design process but a re-invigoration of it. Some of you may be aware of the concept of nanotechnology in which everything is built at the molecular level. By studying the mechanisms of the cell and the immune system and DNA, we begin to have a picture of how molecules and atoms are the machine parts of a microcosmic world, that if we were elf chemists, we could make our way into and create anything that we could imagine. I mean, I can foresee a world where all machines will be made by DNA-like polymers that will code base materials into larger and larger aggregates.

The minaturization of our world is a great frontier. As culture becomes more enveloping, its physical manifestation should become less material. You see? So the ultimate notion is of the world turned back to the form it held – let's say – 35,000 years ago, in which people lived in an environment of entirely climaxed natural perfection. However, behind their eyelids lies a culturally and consensually validated data phase space that is culture, civilization. Turn each of us into a telepathic aquarium that has a direct pipeline to the general ocean of mind and being. This is possible. In fact, its not only possible, it may be the only decent solution: to download ourselves into another dimension. (And I want to note in passing the collapse of Max Headroom. What a tragedy I think that is that his last show was tonight. This was a weird force for cultural transformation, but to be applauded. If anybody here tonight has anything to do with it, I wish them luck.) But this sort of notion ... the Max Headroom people and the William Gibson people have a very high-tech take on this, because they are interested in accentuating this tight blue-jean, cyber-punk kind of notion. But in fact the worlds that they describe will have many many different social sub-groups and social eco-systems forming in them. What the future really means is choice to become who we are, to flower out, to find our own way.
McLuhan saw all this 20 years ago: He said that the rise of global electronic feudalism would create an atomistic fragmentation of culture. It may well be that within 50 years the largest organizational entity on the planet will be corporations with a few million loyal employees, and all larger social institutions will have disappeared because they were unable to command loyalty in a social environment where direct experience has become empowered. And this empowering of direct experience, this return to the feminine, this legitimizing of the presence of the vaster regions of the unconscious – these are all aspects of this emerging paradigm of the spirit. "Understanding and Imagination in the Light of Nature", which is what this two-night party has been called, is a definition of the spirit. Understanding and imagination in the light of nature – in other words, true understanding, poetic imagination, standing as a mirror before nature as object, will cause the hologrammatic presence of the spirit to magically appear. It will be then seen to be a kind of emergent quality of the situation that was previously masked, simply because the elements had not fallen into the correct arrangement. And as we move forward through time over the next 25 years there will be many prophets of the transcendental object at the end of time, many takes.
The important thing is to recall Godel's Incompleteness Theorem and to always recognize the provisional nature of the metaphysical goods that you're going to be sold. Nobody has the faintest notion of what's going on. It's important to keep that in mind. If you have that in mind, then the game proceeds much more cleanly. What is ahead of us is true high adventure.

Elizabeth Gilbert: Being a genius or having one

I am a writer. Writing books is my profession but it's more than that, of course. It is also my great lifelong love and fascination. And I don't expect that that's ever going to change. But, that said, something kind of peculiar has happened recently in my life and in my career, which has caused me to have to sort of recalibrate my whole relationship with this work. And the peculiar thing is that I recently wrote this book, this memoir called "Eat, Pray, Love" which, decidedly unlike any of my previous books, went out in the world for some reason, and became this big, mega-sensation, international bestseller thing. The result of which is that everywhere I go now, people treat me like I'm doomed. Seriously. Doomed, doomed! Like, they come up to me now, all worried, and they say: "Aren't you afraid ... aren't you afraid you're never going to be able to top that? Aren't you afraid you're going to keep writing for your whole life and you're never again going to create a book that anybody in the world cares about at all, ever again?"
So that's reassuring, you know. But it would be worse, except for that I happen to remember that over 20 years ago, when I first started telling people, when I was a teenager, that I wanted to be a writer, I was met with this same kind of, sort of fear-based reaction. And people would say: "Aren't you afraid you're never going to have any success? Aren't you afraid the humiliation of rejection will kill you? Aren't you afraid that you're going to work your whole life at this craft and nothing's ever going to come of it and you're going to die on a scrap heap of broken dreams with your mouth filled with bitter ash of failure?" (Laughter) Like that, you know.
The answer ... the short answer to all those questions is yes. Yes, I'm afraid of all those things. And I always have been. And I'm afraid of many many more things besides that people can't even guess at. Like seaweed, and other things that are scary. But, when it comes to writing the thing that I've been sort of thinking about lately, and wondering about lately, is why? You know, is it rational? Is it logical that anybody should be expected to be afraid of the work that they feel they were put on this Earth to do. You know, and what is it specifically about creative ventures that seems to make us really nervous about each other's mental health in a way that other careers kind of don't do, you know? Like my dad, for example, was a chemical engineer and I don't recall once in his 40 years of chemical engineering, anybody asking him if he was afraid to be a chemical engineer, you know? It didn't ... that chemical engineering block John, how's it going? It just didn't come up like that, you know? But to be fair, chemical engineers as a group haven't really earned a reputation over the centuries for being alcoholic manic-depressives. (Laughter)
We writers, we kind of do have that reputation, and not just writers, but creative people across all genres, it seems, have this reputation for being enormously mentally unstable. And, you know, all what you have to do is look at the very grim death count in the 20th century alone, of really magnificent creative minds who died young and often at their own hands, you know? And even the ones who didn't literally commit suicide seem to be really undone by their gifts, you know. Norman Mailer, just before he died, last interview, he said: "Every one of my books has killed me a little more." An extraordinary statement to make about your life's work, you know. But we don't even blink when we hear somebody say this because we've heard that kind of stuff for so long and somehow we've completely internalized and accepted collectively this notion that creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked and that artistry, in the end, will always ultimately lead to anguish.
And the question that I want to ask everybody here today is are you guys all cool with that idea? Are you comfortable with that? bbecause you look at it even from an inch away and, you know, I'm not at all comfortable with that assumption. I think it's odious. And I also think it's dangerous, and I don't want to see it perpetuated into the next century. I think it's better if we encourage our great creative minds to live.

And I definitely know that, in my case, in my situation, it would be very dangerous for me to start sort of leaking down that dark path of assumption, particularly given the circumstance that I'm in right now in my career. Which is, you know, like check it out: I'm pretty young, I'm only about 40 years old. I still have maybe another four decades of work left in me. And it's exceedingly likely that anything I write from this point forward is going to be judged by the world as the work that came after the freakish success of my last book, right? I should just put it bluntly, because we're all sort of friends here now: it's exceedingly likely that my greatest success is behind me. Oh, so Jesus, what a thought! You know that's the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at nine o'clock in the morning, and I don't want to go there. (Laughter) I would prefer to keep doing this work that I love.
And so, the question becomes, how? And so, it seems to me, upon a lot of reflection, that the way that I have to work now, in order to continue writing, is that I have to create some sort of protective psychological construct, right? I have to, sort of find some way to have a safe distance between me, as I am writing, and my very natural anxiety about what the reaction to that writing is going to be, from now on. And, as I've been looking over the last year for models for how to do that I've been sort of looking across time, and I've been trying to find other societies to see if they might have had better and saner ideas than we have about how to help creative people, sort of manage the inherent emotional risks of creativity.
And that search has led me to ancient Greece and ancient Rome. So stay with me, because it does circle around back. But, ancient Greece and ancient Rome ... people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then, okay? People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons. The Greeks famously called these divine attendant spirits of creativity "daemons". Socrates, famously, believed that he had a daemon who spoke wisdom to him from afar. The Romans had the same idea, but they called that sort of disembodied creative spirit "a genius". Which is great, because the Romans did not actually think that a genius was a particularly clever individual. They believed that a genius was this sort of magical divine entity, who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist's studio, kind of like Dobby the house elf, and who would come out and sort of invisibly assist the artist with their work and would shape the outcome of that work.
So brilliant! There it is, right there: that distance that I'm talking about. That psychological construct to protect you from the results of your work. And everyone knew that this is how it functioned, right? So the ancient artist was protected from certain things, like, for example, too much narcissism, right? If your work was brilliant, you couldn't take all the credit for it: everybody knew that you had this disembodied genius who had helped you. If your work bombed, not entirely your fault, you know? Everyone knew your genius was kind of lame. And this is how people thought about creativity in the West for a really long time.
And then the Renaissance came and everything changed, and we had this big idea, and the big idea was: Let's put the individual human being at the center of the universe above all gods and mysteries, and there's no more room for mystical creatures who take dictation from the divine. And it's the beginning of rational humanism, and people started to believe that creativity came completely from the self of the individual. And for the first time in history, you start to hear people referring to this or that artist as being a genius rather than having a genius.

And I got to tell you, I think that was a huge error. You know, I think that allowing somebody, like one mere person to believe that he or she is like, the vessel you know, like the font and the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery is just a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile, human psyche. It's like asking somebody to swallow the sun, you know. It just completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance. And I think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years.
And, if this is true, and I think it is true, the question becomes, what now? Can we do this differently? Maybe go back to some more ancient understanding about the relationship between humans and the creative mystery. Maybe not. Maybe we can't just erase 500 years of rational humanistic thought in one 18 minute speech. And there's probably people in this audience who would raise really legitimate scientific suspicions about the notion of, basically fairies who follow people around like rubbing fairy juice on their projects and stuff. I'm not, probably, going to bring you all along with me on this.
But the question that I kind of want to pose is, you know, why not? Why not think about it this way? Because it makes as much sense as anything else I have ever heard in terms of explaining the utter maddening capriciousness of the creative process. A process which, as anybody who has ever tried to make something, which is to say as, basically, everyone here knows, does not always behave rationally and, in fact, can sometimes feel downright paranormal.
I had this encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, who's now in her 90s, but she's been a poet her entire life. And she told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would like feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And when she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet, she knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to – in her words – "run like hell". And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. And other times she wouldn't be fast enough, so she'd be running and running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking – as she put it – "for another poet". And then there were these times – this is the piece I never forgot – she said that there were moments where she would almost miss it, right? So, she's running to the house and she's looking for the paper and the poem passes through her, and she grabs a pencil just as it's going through her, and then she said, it was like she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. She would catch the poem by its tail, and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. And in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwards, from the last word to the first. (Laughter)
So when I heard that I was like ... that's uncanny. That's exactly what my creative process is like. (Laughter)

That's not all what my creative process is ... I'm not the pipeline, you know! I'm a mule, and the way that I have to work is that I have to get up at the same time every day, and like sweat and labor and barrel through it really awkwardly. But even I, in my mulishness, even I have brushed up against that thing, at times. And I would imagine that a lot of you have too. You know, even I have had work or ideas come through me from a source that I honestly cannot identify. And what is that thing? And how are we to relate to it in a way that will not make us lose our minds, but, in fact, might actually keep us sane?
And for me, the best contemporary example, that I have of how to do that, is the musician Tom Waits, who I got to interview several years ago on a magazine assignment. And we were talking about this, and you know, Tom, for most of his life he was pretty much the embodiment of the tormented contemporary modern artist, trying to control and manage and dominate these sort of uncontrollable creative impulses that were totally internalized.
But then he got older, he got calmer, and one day he was driving down the freeway in Los Angeles he told me, and this is when it all changed for him. And he's speeding along, and all of a sudden he hears this little fragment of melody, that comes into his head as inspiration often comes, elusive and tantalizing, and he wants it, you know, it's gorgeous, and he longs for it, but he has no way to get it. He doesn't have a piece of paper, he doesn't have a pencil, he doesn't have a tape recorder. So he starts to feel all of that old anxiety start to rise in him like: "I'm going to lose this thing, and then I'm going to be haunted by this song forever. I'm not good enough, and I can't do it." And instead of panicking, he just stopped. He just stopped that whole mental process and he did something completely novel. He just looked up at the sky, and he said, "Excuse me, can you not see that I'm driving?" (Laughter) "Do I look like I can write down a song right now? If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment when I can take care of you. Otherwise, go bother somebody else today. Go bother Leonard Cohen."
And his whole work process changed after that. Not the work, the work was still oftentimes as dark as ever. But the process, and the heavy anxiety around it was released when he took the genie, the genius out of him where it was causing nothing but trouble, and released it kind of back where it came from, and realized that this didn't have to be this internalized, tormented thing. It could be this peculiar, wondrous, bizarre collaboration kind of conversation between Tom and the strange, external thing that was not quite Tom.
So when I heard that story it started to shift a little bit the way that I worked too, and it already saved me once. This idea, it saved me when I was in the middle of writing "Eat, Pray, Love," and I fell into one of those, sort of pits of despair that we all fall into when we're working on something and it's not coming and you start to think this is going to be a disaster, this is going to be the worst book ever written. Not just bad, but the worst book ever written. And I started to think I should just dump this project. But then I remembered Tom talking to the open air and I tried it. So I just lifted my face up from the manuscript and I directed my comments to an empty corner of the room. And I said aloud: "Listen you, thing, you and I both know that if this book isn't brilliant that is not entirely my fault, right? Because you can see that I am putting everything I have into this, I don't have anymore than this. So if you want it to be better, then you've got to show up and do your part of the deal, okay? But if you don't do that, you know what, the hell with it. I'm going to keep writing anyway because that's my job. And I would please like the record to reflect today that I showed up for my part of the job." (Laughter)

Because ... (Applause) Thank you.
In the end it's like this, okay? Centuries ago in the deserts of North Africa, people used to gather for these moonlight dances of sacred dance and music that would go on for hours and hours, until dawn. And they were always magnificent, because the dancers were professionals and they were terrific, right? But every once in a while, very rarely, something would happen, and one of these performers would actually become transcendent. And I know you know what I'm talking about, because I know you've all seen, at some point in your life, a performance like this. It was like time would stop, and the dancer would sort of step through some kind of portal and he wasn't doing anything different than he had ever done, 1,000 nights before, but everything would align. And all of a sudden, he would no longer appear to be merely human. He would be lit from within, and lit from below and all lit up on fire with divinity.
And when this happened, back then, people knew it for what it was, you know, they called it by its name. They would put their hands together and they would start to chant: "Allah, Allah, Allah, God, God, God." That's God, you know. Curious historical footnote: when the Moors invaded southern Spain, they took this custom with them and the pronunciation changed over the centuries from "Allah, Allah, Allah" to "Olé, Olé, Olé" which you still hear in bullfights and in flamenco dances. In Spain, when a performer has done something impossible and magic, "Allah, Olé, Olé, Allah, Magnificent, Bravo!" incomprehensible, there it is a glimpse of God. Which is great, because we need that.
But, the tricky bit comes the next morning for the dancer himself, when he wakes up and discovers that it's Tuesday at 11 AM, and he's no longer a glimpse of God. He's just an aging mortal with really bad knees, and maybe he's never going to ascend to that height again. And maybe nobody will ever chant God's name again as he spins, and what is he then to do with the rest of his life? This is hard. This is one of the most painful reconciliations to make in a creative life. But maybe it doesn't have to be quite so full of anguish if you never happened to believe, in the first place, that the most extraordinary aspects of your being came from you. But maybe if you just believed that they were on loan to you from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life to be passed along when you're finished, with somebody else. And, you know, if we think about it this way it starts to change everything.
This is how I've started to think, and this is certainly how I've been thinking in the last few months as I've been working on the book that will soon be published, as the dangerously, frighteningly overanticipated follow up to my freakish success.
And what I have to, sort of keep telling myself when I get really psyched out about that, is, don't be afraid. Don't be daunted. Just do your job. Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be. If your job is to dance, do your dance. If the divine, cockeyed genius assigned to your case, decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed, for just one moment through your efforts, then "Olé!" And if not, do your dance anyhow. "Olé!" to you, nonetheless. I believe this and I feel that we must teach it. "Olé!" to you, nonetheless, just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up.
Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) June Cohen: Olé! (Applause)

The transition had been a matter of seconds

A theme was touched on last night which is one of the centerpiece themes of aboriginal shamanism: the felt presence of some kind of alien intelligence. An intelligence that is somehow co-present with the human sense of self, for different people, in different ways, with varying degrees of intensity in different times and places. At the bedrock of shamanism is the notion that life is really finally a mystery wrapped in an enigma, but without resolution. Nevertheless as you close distance with this mystery there are a series of analogical metaphors that don't really suggest themselves but that are communicated to you by the other.
One of these analogical metaphors is the presence of an alien intellect, an organized other that is folklorically present in tradition as fairies, gnomes, elves, jinns, afreets, sprites, tree spirits – that sort of thing – and anecdotally present in rural cultures throughout the world as the poltergeist and the milk-souring fairy – these things seem to reside in a curious area that is not epistemically clearly defined for the culture.
Among aficionados of these domains the question of, "is it real or not?" is thought to be mildly tasteless. You would intuitively sense if you were drinking in an Irish pub and people began to spin leprechaun stories, that the question "is it real?" is a real bring down. It isn't really like that because the question "is it real?" can ultimately be shown to be infantile in any situation. I mean, is the Bank of America real? Immediately we realize that ordinary experience is simply assumption skating over the mystery.
But I choose to talk so much about the felt presence of the other because it was for me such an astonishing personal surprise. I was raised Roman-Catholic and indulged in the kind of theological fiddle-faddle that that involves. And then grew out of that into atheism, into agnosticism. By the time I got to college, I was reading Jean Paul Sartre, Husserl and these people. My intellectual ontogeny had followed historical phylogeny and I had arrived in the 20th century. And then having thought I had absorbed the lessons of LSD, which seemed to me to be to reinforce and confirm the theories of Freud concerning the dynamics of the psyche: that it was about repressed memory, repressed desire, sexual neurosis, parental foul-ups and the imprinting of traumatic behavior experienced in infancy.

And then someone came to me one rainy February evening, in 1967, really a mad person, a kind of a social menace and intellectual criminal. A person who had said to me only months before, "we must live as if the apocalypse has already happened." Here he was on my doorstep and he wore little black suits that he buttoned up to the throat. Anyway, he came in and he said: "here's something that you might be interested in" and brought out a sample of di-methyltryptamine that he had somehow come into contact with. And I said, "well what is it?" And he said, "well, it's short acting – it's a flash." And I said, "how long does it last?" – that was my first mistake. He said, "oh it doesn't last long." So I said, "okay, we'll do it," and we did it.
And I discovered, I had, I guess it's called a peak experience, or a core revelation, or being born again, or having your third eye opened, or something, which was a revelation of an alien dimension: a brightly lit, inhabited, non three-dimensional, self-contorting, sustained, organic, linguistically intending modality that couldn't be stopped or held back or denied. I mean, I sank to the floor ... I couldn't move. I had become a disystolic hallucination of tumbling forward into these fractal geometric spaces made of light, and then I found myself in the sort of auric equivalent of the Pope's private chapel, and there were insect elf machines proffering strange little tablets with strange writing on them. And I was aghast, completely - appalled - because the transition had been a matter of seconds and my entire expectation of the nature of the world was being shredded in front of me. I've never actually gotten over it.
And it all went on: they were speaking in some kind of ... there were these self-transforming machine-elf creatures, were speaking in some kind of colored language which condensed into rotating machines that were like Faberge eggs, but crafted out of luminescent super-conducting ceramics, and liquid crystal gels, and all this stuff was just so weird, and so alien, and so "un-english-able" that I felt like it was a complete shock. I experienced the literal turning inside-out of the intellectual universe and I had come to this – I thought – fairly intellectually prepared: a kid, but nevertheless double-Scorpio, art history major, Hieronymus Bosch fan, Moby Dick, William Burroughs.
And as I came down ... this went on for two or three minutes, this situation of disincarnate dimensions orthogonal to reality engulfing me. And then as I came out of it, and the room sort of re-assembled itself, I said: "I can't believe it. It's impossible. It's im-possible!" That to call that a "drug" is ridiculous. It means that you just don't know, you don't have a word for it and so you putter around and you come upon this very sloppy concept of something which goes into your body and there's a change – it's not like that, it's like being struck by noetic lightning.

The other thing about it, which astonished me, was: there is no clue in this world, you know. In the carpets of Central Asia, in the myths of the Maya, in the visions of an Archembolo or a Fra Angelico or a Bosch – there is not a hint, not a clue, not an atom of the presence of this thing. When you look at the religious hierophanies of the human species, it doesn't have the same vibe, it doesn't the same charge. Religion is all about dissolving into unitary states of love and trans-linguistic oceanic unity and this sort of thing. This was not like that. This was more multiplistic than the universe that we share with each other. It was almost like the victory of neo-Platonic metaphysics – everything had become made out of a fourth-dimensional tesseractual mosaic of energy.
So, I was quite knocked off my feet and set myself the goal of understanding this. There was really no choice, you see? And I don't know how it hits other people. I mean, there are many things that can be said about introducing a chemical into your body. They've shown that certain people are 50,000 times more sensitive to the odor of certain compounds than other people. And part of the unique genetic heritage of each of us are our complement of synaptic receptors for psycho-active alkaloids. So that there may be something to the notion that the Celts tend to be poets, that certain peoples tend to be expressive in certain artistic modes, or certain senses seem to be accentuated for certain human sub-groups. But whatever the explanation for how it hit me, I felt it like a call: there was no turning back from trying to understand that, because there is no place for it in our world and yet it is overwhelmingly, existentially real. You see? And easily accessed. I'm not peddling that you have to go some place in India with poor sanitation and put yourself at somebody's feet for a dozen years or something like that. The enunciation of the presence of this dimension should inspire some kind of coming to terms with it. It's preposterous that we can entertain in our popular journalism the titillation of the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, and prop up all these reductionist guys and trot them out to give the statistics on the distribution of G-type stars, and all this sort of thing. Because the fact is, what blinds us to the presence of alien intelligence is linguistic and cultural bias operating on ourselves. The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world. You see?

We operate on a very narrow slice based on cultural conventions. So the important thing, if synergizing progress is the notion to be maximized – and I think, it's the notion to be maximized – is trying to locate the blind spot in the culture: the place where the culture isn't looking, because it dare not. Because if it were to look there, its previous values would dissolve. You see? And I think, for Western civilization that place is the psychedelic experience as it emerges out of nature. And as human societies interact with the psychedelic experience in nature, they inevitably secrete the institution of shamanism. Like a pearl around a sand grain, a nexus point, a loci of interdimensional data flow, which is really what it is. It's the point that under certain conditions, which have to do with these molecules that have evolved in these species which have this weirdly quasi-symbiotic relationship to our species, you punch through the veil! You know, Melville said: "if you would strike, strike through the mask." And that's what's done, you strike through the mask of the coordinates of apparent reality. And then, this thing is there which to me is a miracle. It transcended any miracle I could ever ask for, because it not only had the quality of a miracle as I imagined it, it had the quality of a miracle as I could not have imagined it. It was entirely charged with the energy of the other. It had the ambiguity of a pun: a kind of zany, impossible, improbable, hysterical revelation of the joke, the self-contradiction, the provisional nature of it all – that it really is a Marx Brothers movie in some sense.

So I pursued it. First to Nepal, and involvement with pre-Buddhist shamanism in Tibet. The thing that puzzled me most – I guess because I was an art historian – was this absence of the theme in the artistic productions of human kind. I felt that maybe there was a trace of it in the artistic conceptions of the old pantheon of Tibetan shamanism. And that Central Asian Tibetan shamanism had actually created astronauts of inner space that had gotten good recon on this same area. The Dharmapalas, the guardians of the Dharma, are not Buddhist deities per se, they are autochonous Tibetan folk demons that protect the Dharma by virtue of the fact of having been overcome in magical battles by great Buddhist saints who came to Tibet. In fact, there are, or were before the Chinese occupation, monasteries in Tibet where the vow of fealty to the Dharma, on the part of the Dharmapala, had to be renewed by the monks every 24 hours or the thing would run amok and be on its own and bust up the countryside – I'm just telling you what they told me.
It seemed to me that the raw sense of the shamanically accessed demonic realm was there, and I also saw traces in Hellenistic gnosticism and alchemy. But such thin traces. So I went to Nepal, immersed myself in those studies, and decided ultimately that it was inaccessible. I wasn't sure whether it was there or not. And then I placed myself in the context of nature by moving my sphere of operations to eastern Indonesia. To the climaxed, continental rain forests of the ancient continent of Sundaland. You see Indonesia was a continent until as recently as 120,000 years ago. And then with the melting of the glaciers and the subsidence of the land, it became a vast group of islands. It was my good fortune, or the fortune of my fate – because it was prudent for me at that time in the late sixties to remain outside the United States – and so I sort of had to become the hero I had pretended to my friends that I was. Which I wasn't, I had an around-the-world air ticket and was entirely a preppie poseur, but suddenly, return was not a possibility. So I became, and my apologies to Buddhists in the audience, a professional butterfly collector, and I pursued this blood sport for many months in these remote montane jungles of eastern Indonesia.
And it was there that the missing link in the quest for the resolution of the meaning of DMT and spirit fell into place. Because I saw what most of us only see on National Geographic specials, which is the real fact of the rain forest, the real fact of organic nature, and how nature is communication. Not only are the species that comprise the biota linked by pheromones and acoustical signals and color signals and other various methods by which communication is seeping around. In fact, nature ultimately resolves itself into a self-reflecting, syntactical metasystem – you can pursue this right down to the DNA. DNA working as it does with nucleotide sequences that code – code, right? code that means arbitrarily assign association – code for certain amino acids: it means that organic objects are essentially utterances in three dimensional space and express of some kind of universally distributed linguistic intent. This is what it means when it says, "In the beginning was the word." Nature is that word. This infinitely self-adumbrating, fractal, syntactical hallucination that has an infinite number of facets for potential regarding and self-regarding.

And having said all of this, I might invoke here Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, which as I'm sure many of you know was Kurt Godel's brilliant contribution to theoretical mathematics where he showed that the possible set of true formal statements, generated by any formal system, exceeded the possible set of true formal statements, which the rules of that system allowed. He showed this for simple arithmetic. And what this means, friends, is that what was called truth up until the beginning of the twentieth century, is absolutely impossible – that's what Godel's Incompleteness Theorem secures. It shows that there is no ultimate closure in an effort to describe.
And so in a way, my take on nature, and culture, and man, is that human language is a meta-linguistic system, generated out of the necessary formal incompleteness of nature. You see? If that nature is a self-describing genetic language and yet out of it arises something which is not formally predicted by its constraints and rules. There's a symmetry break there, and a so-called emergent property comes into view. This emergent property is our unique ability to provisionally code sound to meaning, so that we then can freely command and reconstruct the world. We imagine that we do this for our own purposes of communication. The analysis that I'm suggesting would seem to indicate that actually we do it, because we are complicated enzyme systems that are moving linguistic charge around inside some kind of metasystem. A metasystem that is very important for the emergence of new order out of nature. You see? And I talked about that a little last night: the fact, that it is contrived, provisional, is very interesting. It doesn't arise out of the gene structure. Rather it is agreed upon by individuals who are living at the time that the linguistic structure, whatever it is, emerges into consciousness. Since individuals are replaced, the language is much more in flux than the genome. You see? The genetic component of an organism is a physical structure, stabilized by atomic bonds, possibly stabilized by a phenomenon like room-temperature's superconductivity. The way nature works is to conserve the genes. And so molecular machinery has evolved to do that. But there is no mechanism in nature with the same kind of binding force that conserves meaning. Meaning is some kind of freely-commanded, open-ended, self-evolving system. The rules are that there are no rules.
Meaning consequently addresses itself to a much larger potential modality of expression than the genes. The genes basically repeat themselves, over and over. Almost like Homeric poetry, where the idea is that it be memorized and repeated. And that's what sexuality is about, is memorizing and repeating gene structures, handing on parts of the story. But the epigenetic domain is different, the creation of linguistic systems, where meaning can be freely commanded, allows very rapid evolution of cultural norms.

And what I suggested last night and want to say more about it tonight is, that this process is mediated by plants. It is synergized in human beings by plants of all sorts. I mean, we are obsessed with drugs and short-term spectacular effects, but think about the effect on a culture of the presence or absence of say: sugar, or the presence or absence of coffee. What human culture can essentially be seen to be, is a series of plant-established developmental creodes for a higher mammal. The fact that we are omnivorous lays us open for the formation of weird relationships to things in our food chain. Everybody is taught in school that the Renaissance, the close of the Middle Ages, the rise of urban culture all had to do with the search for spices, right? Bringing spices back to Europe. Why was it so important, you know, that a drive to simply broaden the palate of Europe is given credit for the re-defining of post-medieval civilization? Very strange.
Hofmann and Ruck and Wasson showed that the Eleusinian mysteries, which were the philosophical and experiential linchpin of the ancient world's cosmology, the Hellenistic cosmology, was a cult of ergotized beer. There every September at Eleusis, this mystery was carried out, and everyone who was anyone participated in it. The rule was that you only got to do it once in your life so you had only one opportunity to understand it.
The point is clear: as you look in human culture in all times and places, the way in which our cultural institutions have been molded by these so-called tertiary compounds in plants is very suggestive. It seems to me that the felt presence of the other, the alien intelligence felt as being from outer space, is actually co-present with us on this earth. And that the problem is not the finding of it, but the recognizing of it when it is seen. In the same way that in the present cultural crisis everyone is crying "answers, answers, we have to have answers," the fact is we have the answers. The question is to face the answers.
The answer to self-empowerment lies in the psychedelic experience. The answer to dissolving the hierarchically-imposed set of mythical conventions that disempower us, lies in the psychedelic experience. Because what is really happening is a return to the primacy of feeling. And feeling is not something you convey to people the way you convey facts to them. Facts can be handed down every week through Time magazine, and the latest issue of Science News and Nature. But feelings will not lend themselves to that marketable, hierarchically-distributed system. And consequently, feelings represent a backwash against that. Yet feeling is the modality in which we all operate. So as long as we are under the umbrella of the print-created, linear, post-medieval institutions that promote the myth of the public, the notion of the atomic individual, the notion that we are all alike, basically, then we are going to be unempowered.
The amazing thing to me about the psychedelic experience, is that it can be kept under wraps. That people don't insist. That somehow we're leaving it to experts to figure it out. But did you know that the experts are not allowed to work it out? That in this particular area, the entire human race has been relegated to an infantile status. It is not really professionally possible to do work with these things. Nevertheless, our cultural crisis is deepening ...

Columbia is a very interesting word

Jordan Maxwell

"Occult is simply a word meaning hidden, and so much of our powers in this world and the way things work are hidden. And the more one looks at this subject of how the world actually works, you begin to see that there is a magical system, and I'm telling you, there really is a magical system dominating the world of the Western civilization.
For 1000 years before the Roman empire existed, in Northern europe, basically Western europe, there was a magical priesthood called the Druids, and the Druids still even exist to this day. It was a very legitimate political, social, educational, religious institution dominating Europe for thousands of years, and they were refered to as the Druids. They were actually from the Phoenician Canaanites system in the Middle East. The Phoenician Canaanites formed the basis for the ancient Druidic system, and that's even older. But in the ancient Druidic system there were many powerful symbols and emblems.
One of the most interesting symbols in Druidism was the "Magic One" like Merlin the magician with his Magic One. Magic Ones were always made out of the wood of a holy tree, was made out of holy wood, and we're still seeing the magic of the wood of the holy tree: Hollywood, motion pictures, television. Once you begin to see the symbols and realize that the symbols for the national cults of arms, for countries, the flags, the seals, the presidential seals, the logos and emblems that are in corporations, especially the corporate emblems for motion pictures and television companies like Columbia Broadcasting System. CBS has the eye.

The Columbian system goes back to the Columbian faction of the Illuminati, back in the early 1700s, not the late 17th. You began to see why Space Shuttle is called Columbia. You have Columbia University, Columbia Pictures, Columbia Broadcasting. Columbia is a very interesting word, and it's connected to the Jesuits. Incidently, the Jesuits are very pronouncely involved in the destiny of this country. The Jesuit order is very much involved in the founding of this country and the direction of its politics. Georgetown University, from which many of the presidents and big shots in government get their education, is a Jesuit university.
Once you begin to see how words and terms and symbols are used, and of course symbols are extraordinarily important in world affairs. If you don't think so, if you don't understand the concept of how important symbols are, put a swastika on your arm and go to your local synagoge and watch the reaction you get. Symbols mean things to people, and the powers that be in this world have set up a world of symbols and emblembs and terms and catch phrases, and once you understand how this system works, it's fascinating! Because for the first time, the world opens up to you a whole new perspective on how government works, on how banks work, on how institutions and education ... why we have something called "The Police". Where does the word "Sheriff" come from? Why do you have "go-vern-ment" …
Once you begin to see how these words are used and put together, all of the sudden it opens up a whole new perspective on how stuff is happening. Because in the world today most people look at the things which are happening in this world and they can't make heads and tails out of it. It doesn't make any sense at all. It's destructive, it's lunacy, it's chaos. But in point of fact, the things which are happening in this world are not chaos at all. It is very well planned, organized and directed. There is an hidden agenda, so to speak. […] The CIA was originally founded by men who are members of an order called the Knights of Malta. It is a Roman secret society of powerful freemasons who have operated in Europe for many many hundreds of years."

Supreme Knight appointed to board of Vatican bank

Vatican City, September 23, 2009) The Commission of Cardinals which oversees the activities of the Vatican's bank, formally called the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), has renewed the membership of the institute's board and made a few new appointments. Among the new appointees is the head of the Knights of Columbus Carl A. Anderson.
The IOR is a financial institution governed by a Board of Superintendence, which is, in turn, regulated by a Commission of Cardinals led by Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican Secretary of State. The main function of the institute is to manage bank accounts for religious orders and Catholic associations.
The Supreme Knight's appointment to the IOR is the latest of his Vatican appointments, which include being appointed a member of the Pontifical Council for the Laity, as well as to the Pontifical Council for the Family. In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI appointed him as a consultor to the the Pontifical Council for Social Communications.
Mr. Anderson currently serves on the the Board of Trustees of the Catholic University of America and the the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. He is also a member of the bar of the District of Columbia and is admitted to practice law before the U.S. Supreme Court.
He will be serving the IOR alongside newly appointed President of the Board Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, an Italian banking magnate, and vice president Ronaldo Hermann Schmitz of Germany.

Gottes neue Geldgeber
Der Banker des Heiligen Vaters
Die Geldwäscher Gottes

Marx hatte Recht, sagt der Vatikan

Rom, Nähe Vatikanstadt, 21. Oktober '09) Der Vatikan fordert eine Rückbesinnung auf die Theorien von Karl Marx. Der Philosoph "kann nicht als überholt gelten", mahnte die Vatikanzeitung "Osservatore Romano" am Mittwoch. Sozialistische Diktaturen hätten die Lehren des Kapitalismuskritikers "bis zur Unkenntlichkeit entstellt", schreibt der deutsche Jesuit Georg Sans von der Päpstlichen Gregoriana-Universität.
Papst Benedikt XVI. würdigte Karl Marx (1818-1883) wegen dessen "eingehender Genauigkeit" sowie "sprachlicher und denkerischer Kraft" bereits 2007 in seiner zweiten Enzyklika "Spe salvi" (Durch Hoffnung gerettet).
Nach Auffassung des Historikers Sans muss zwischen dem "Marx der Kommunistischen Partei und dem wahren Gesicht des Trierer Philosophen" unterschieden werden. Die materialistische Geschichtsauffassung des Autors von "Das Kapital" hält Sans für einseitig. Analysen über Entfremdung in der Arbeit sowie die Herkunft des Profits hingegen hätten seiner Ansicht nach nichts von ihrer Aktualität eingebüßt.
Dazu gehöre ferner Marx' Auffassung, dass Lohnarbeit allein als Mittel zum physischen Lebenserhalt nicht dem Wesen des Menschen entspreche. Auch habe der Philosoph Unterschiede zwischen Armut und Reichtum zu Recht als Ausdruck von Strukturen gesehen, die von Menschen geschaffen und nicht naturgegeben seien, schreibt Sans.

Knight of the Holy Sepulchre Archbishop Reinhard Marx (Trier/München): Das Kapital (2008)

Jean Ziegler 1992: "Marx, wir brauchen Dich"

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