President Kennedy's Assassination & No-thingness

[Albert Rossi]

Thomas Ligotti, in his book The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, takes the "puppet show" theme to more pessimistic extremes, where nature has accidentally created self-conscious puppets who have the illusion of free will.

There are many others who share this view. One of the more elegant is Douglas Hofstadter, esp. his recent I am a Strange Loop. What is original there is that he moves in the direction of saying that, illusory as it may be, consciousness is miraculous because it allows us each to contain a bit of everyone else, through memories, perceptions, language.

[Stan Wilbourne]

Albert,

You ask some great questions. The right questions, as I see it.

I asked in my initial post above:

Is all "being" conditioned? And, if there is no conditioning, what is being? To me now, this is a worthwhile question. Worth tracking down.

We struggle to understand, to survive. We seek to conquer what will ultimately be our own destruction and to "be safe." What if it is all nothing? Not in the way the mind conceives of nothing. That is "something" again. Not the opposite of form and things. But, actually nothing. Completely empty.

Can all frames be ended? Is it even a valid question? I think it is. We are so distracted, so absorbed, so shocked and fearful, so divided, these types of questions don't enter the human mind with any weight behind them. We are the cat, chasing the feather.

No-thing. It encompasses mind, but the mind cannot approach it. The movement of time and thought (the frame, no matter how it is shifted) is not significant to it. No-thing is the shattered frame. Empty and still. Unmovable. It holds everything and nothing. Right? Does that make sense?

From my interpretation, this is what Kubrick was getting at in "2001." The monolith being perception. And, when the glass breaks the total mind is awakened. Death on the one hand to the nonsense and the imposed limits of self. But, the arrival of total being, which is really no arrival at all. Because that implies the frame again. No-thing is beyond all of it. This-ness?

The murder of President Kennedy created a deep layer in the frame of our consciousness. Fortified its existence in the limited field of time. That was the intent. We, I think, are pushed into our own suffering, used as a resource and denied our birthright to the infinite. That works only as long as we are checked into the Coma Hotel. When we check out, hotel rules no longer apply.

David, good to see you here.

Phil, Sibel Edmonds, Gladio and Allen Dulles. Thanks.

[Albert Rossi]

Albert,

You ask some great questions. The right questions, as I see it.

I asked in my initial post above:

Is all "being" conditioned? And, if there is no conditioning, what is being? To me now, this is a worthwhile question. Worth tracking down.

We struggle to understand, to survive. We seek to conquer what will ultimately be our own destruction and to "be safe." What if it is all nothing? Not in the way the mind conceives of nothing. That is "something" again. Not the opposite of form and things. But, actually nothing. Completely empty.

Can all frames be ended? Is it even a valid question? I think it is. We are so distracted, so absorbed, so shocked and fearful, so divided, these types of questions don't enter the human mind with any weight behind them. We are the cat, chasing the feather.

No-thing. It encompasses mind, but the mind cannot approach it. The movement of time and thought (the frame, no matter how it is shifted) is not significant to it. No-thing is the shattered frame. Empty and still. Unmovable. It holds everything and nothing. Right? Does that make sense?

From my interpretation, this is what Kubrick was getting at in "2001." The monolith being perception. And, when the glass breaks the total mind is awakened. Death on the one hand to the nonsense and the imposed limits of self. But, the arrival of total being, which is really no arrival at all. Because that implies the frame again. No-thing is beyond all of it. This-ness?

The murder of President Kennedy created a deep layer in the frame of our consciousness. Fortified its existence in the limited field of time. That was the intent. We, I think, are pushed into our own suffering, used as a resource and denied our birthright to the infinite. That works only as long as we are checked into the Coma Hotel. When we check out, hotel rules no longer apply.

David, good to see you here.

Phil, Sibel Edmonds, Gladio and Allen Dulles. Thanks.

Stan, yes indeed I follow you. In terms of Kubrick, I think your reading is definitely on track, for that broken glass is the moment of transcendence -- out of the Cartesian, Enlightenment (French Provincial!) prison (of the rational? or even of the body, which at the time is engaged in the most basic activity, feeding itself), into some sort of Nietzschean transcendence/rebirth. "... the arrival of total being, which is really no arrival at all." A mise en abîme, as Derrideans would say, though you are giving it a more mystical inflection than Derrida would -- more like the Pseudo-Dionysius, John of the Cross, or even Heidegger. At any rate, that is what I was driving at when I said that what was left was no longer perception; and by the question mark itself.

I must confess, however, that this kind of framing of the political events of the 60s is strange to me; I don't say it is wrong, it is just that personally I am not in the habit of seeing those questions and cognitive/metaphysical ones inside the same "framework" [sic!] . That's why all of this is rather intriguing. Can't say I'm a convert yet, but I am certainly open to new perspectives, and love to hear new ideas, as unusual as they might seem at first.

[David Guyatt]

I would add, if I may, a slight variation on Twain (who I greatly admire too).

Who is the dreamer and whom made the dream? Any why the dream at all?.

Lewis Carroll is indeed also appropriate here! (Through the Looking Glass, Chpt 12).

'Now, Kitty, let's consider who it was that dreamed it all. This is a serious question, my dear, and you should NOT go on licking your paw like thatas if Dinah hadn't washed you this morning! You see, Kitty, it MUST have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream, of coursebut then I was part of his dream, too! WAS it the Red King, Kitty? You were his wife, my dear, so you ought to knowOh, Kitty, DO help to settle it! I'm sure your paw can wait!' But the provoking kitten only began on the other paw, and pretended it hadn't heard the question.
Which do YOU think it was?

Lewis Carroll knew of what he wrote, methinks, Albert.

Even the title Through the Looking Glass, speaks volumes, especially when we recall that the "glass" was used for "looking" in occult operations dating back to Dr. John Dee - for example. And, of course, The Red King has a White King for balance, and these two colours presented in the form of opposing king's are clear indicators of Carroll's interest, or involvement, in the occult and esotericism and the Rosicrucian movement in particular.

If we were to dig deeper into many of the enduring classics we would find similar connections to esoteric subjects. Ditto with many of the great artists too.

I should add that these days, the need for a dark glass to look - although it remains in use - is by no means essential. Just imagine the dark space i.e., inside your forehead, as the screen upon which images, events and experiences are projected. As in a dream. And other things too.

This is straying into more complex and difficult matters which would take quite a lot of elucidation, so I'll leave it there.

[David Guyatt]

Thomas Ligotti, in his book The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, takes the "puppet show" theme to more pessimistic extremes, where nature has accidentally created self-conscious puppets who have the illusion of free will.

There are many others who share this view. One of the more elegant is Douglas Hofstadter, esp. his recent I am a Strange Loop. What is original there is that he moves in the direction of saying that, illusory as it may be, consciousness is miraculous because it allows us each to contain a bit of everyone else, through memories, perceptions, language.

And dreams and visions I might also add.

In other words, the sub-soil of all things that we are all connected too, Jung's Collective Unconscious.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Frames.

Some earlier thoughts from the Interview with Peter Levenda October 9, 2009 Sinister Forces thread:

Borges:

An armchair implies the human body, its joints and members; scissors, the act of cutting. What can be told from a lamp, or an automobile? The savage cannot really perceive the missionary's Bible; the passenger does not see the same rigging as the ship's crew.

Lovecraft:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

Occult knowledge is primarily concerned with the caverns and crevices of the mind, the world outside waking time and space.

Grimoires contain precarious bridges, crossed by fools, seekers and those who lust for power and control.

Here is a page from a grimoire:

The People's Temple also used electroshock treatments to modify the behavior of the children entrusted to their care. In a locked room of the San Francisco Temple was a machine that only the children to be disciplined and an attending nurse were allowed to see. The machine was named "The Blue-Eyed Monster" though later reports referred to it as "The Blue-Eyed Demon". Some said this Aryan devil was a simple cattle prod, others claimed it was a heart defibrulator or the shock treatment machine the Temple had acquired from Mendocino State Hospital. Few children would describe the apparatus; but those who did said it was a scaled-down version of an executioner's electric chair. The child was strapped into the metal chair and electrodes were attached to various parts of his or her body. Though the machine itself was hidden from the general adult congregation, Jones would call out the names of those children to be disciplined and they would be taken into the Blue-Eyed Monster's den. A microphone, attached to the public address system, was placed in the room. The general congregation heard no noises from the machine only the screams of the children attached to it. The child emerged from the room and ran to Jim Jones; grovelling at his feet to say "Thank you - Thank you" in robot-like repetition.

Later, in Jonestown, the physical beating and shock treatments of the Temple children were replaced with sheer terror in the form of "Big Foot"; a monster that Jones told them lived in a shallow well on the outskirts of the jungle community. Children who misbehaved were lowered into the well, where, unknown to them, adults were hiding in the darkness. The adults made animal sounds and grabbed at the child's dangling legs in a feigned attempt to pull him into the abyss.

[Tracy Riddle]

The whole "problem of evil" (and suffering, chaos, etc) for which I never found a satisfactory explanation in name-brand religion, is at the root of a lot of the topics we discuss on this forum.

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902):
"There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it positively refuses to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth...And just so we might speak of a 'pain-threshold,' a 'fear-threshold,' a 'misery-threshold,' and find it quickly overpassed by the consciousness of some individuals, but lying too high in others to be often reached by their consciousness. The sanguine and healthy-minded live habitually on the sunny side of their misery-line, the depressed and melancholy live beyond it, in darkness and apprehension. There are men who seem to have started in life with a bottle or two of champagne inscribed to their credit; whilst others seem to have been born close to the pain-threshold, which the slightest irritants fatally send them over. Does it not appear as if one who lived more habitually on one side of the pain-threshold might need a different sort of religion from one who habitually lived on the other?"

Soren Kierkegaard:
"One sticks one's finger into the soil to tell by the smell what land one's in; I stick my finger into existence - it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? How did I come to be here? What is this thing called the world? What does the world mean? Who is it that has lured me into the thing, and now leaves me here?...How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted, why was I not made acquainted with its manners and customs...If I am compelled to take part in it, where is the director?"

Colin Wilson, The Outsider (1956):
"This is the sense of unreality, that can strike out of a perfectly clear day. Good health and strong nerves can make it unlikely; but that may be only because the man in good health is thinking about other things and doesn't look in the direction where the uncertainty lies. And once a man has seen it, the world can never afterwards be quite the same straightforward place. Barbusse has shown us that the Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality. He sees too deep and too much,' and what he sees is essentially chaos."

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death:
"It can't be overstressed, one final time, that to see the world as it really is is devastating and terrifying. It achieves the very result that the child has painfully built his character over the years in order to avoid: it makes routine, automatic, secure, self-confident activity impossible. It makes thoughtless living in the world of men an impossibility. It places a trembling animal at the mercy of the entire cosmos and the problem of the meaning of it....I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. How do we know ... that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow?"


And back to the idea of life as a dream:

Alan Watts, The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are:

"There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again. But just as the hour-hand of the watch goes up to twelve and down to six, so, too, there is day and night, waking and sleeping, living and dying, summer and winter. You can't have any one of these without the other, because you wouldn't be able to know what black is unless you had seen it side-by-side with white, or white unless side-by-side with black.

In the same way, there are times when the world is, and times when it isn't, for if the world went on and on without rest for ever and ever, it would get horribly tired of itself. It comes and it goes. Now you see it; now you don't. So because it doesn't get tired of itself, it always comes back again after it disappears. It's like your breath: it goes in and out, in and out, and if you try to hold it in all the time you feel terrible. It's also like the game of hide-and-seek, because it's always fun to find new ways of hiding, and to seek for someone who doesn't always hide in the same place.

God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear.

Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that's the whole fun of it just what he wanted to do. He doesn't want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending not to be himself. But when the game has gone on long enough, all of us will wake up, stop pretending, and remember that we are all one single Self the God who is all that there is and who lives for ever and ever.

You may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible people, or pretends to be people who suffer great disease and pain. Remember, first, that he isn't really doing this to anyone but himself. Remember, too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find out how the good people will get the better of the bad."

Bill Hicks, comedian:

"All matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. That we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves.

The world is like a ride at an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it, you think it's real, because that's how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round and it has thrills and chills and it's very brightly colored and it's very loud. And it's fun, for a while.

Some people have been on the ride for a long time, and they begin to question: 'Is this real? Or is this just a ride?' And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and they say 'Hey! Don't worry, don't be afraid -- ever -- because... this is just a ride.' And we kill those people. 'Shut him up! We have a lot invested in this ride! Shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry; look at my big bank account, and my family. This has to be real.' It's just a ride. But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that -- ever notice that? -- and we let the demons run amok. But it doesn't matter, because... it's just a ride, and we can change it any time we want."

[Carl Brego]

Total Heavy-ocity, in the immortal words of Mr. Allen. . .

--

The balance of this post has been moderated due to it's intemperate nature.

[David Guyatt]

When it comes to the subject of evil, we need to address the subject of man.

The occult significance of the number 666 - beloved by Crowley - actually is the Gematriac number that equals "man".

Or put another way:

Man "is the origin of all coming evil..."

The foregoing extract is from the 1959 BBC Face to Face interview of Carl Gustav Jung.

Jung's essay Answer to Job, published in a smallish paperback these days, specifically deals with this divine drama, namely the evil face of God.

[David Guyatt]

Total Heavy-ocity, in the immortal words of Mr. Allen. . .

Ignorance always intrudes. It's to be expected.