06.03.10
Posted in Uncategorized
at 12:09 pm
by nemo
Whistleblower: working for Scientology
Paul Sims speaks to Marc Headley, the Scientology escapee now revealing what life is really like on the inside
If David Miscavige, the head of the Church of Scientology, had delivered a Christmas Day speech he might have described 2009 as an annus horribilis for his organisation. In October, a French court convicted the Church of fraud, following a trial over allegations by two women that they were conned into paying tens of thousands of Euros for Scientology training materials; and a bookshop belonging to the organisation was fined 600,000 Euros. A month later in Sydney, an independent senator, Nick Xenophon, stood up in the Australian parliament and denounced Scientology as a criminal organisation that “coerces its followers into having abortions” and one “that defrauds, that blackmails, that falsely imprisons”. He then called for a parliamentary investigation into the tax-exempt status enjoyed by Scientology in Australia.
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05.03.10
Posted in Uncategorized
at 3:03 pm
by nemo
Marrs on the fourth reich
I finished reading Marrs’ book, and my opinion at the end is indeterminate. Because Marrs’ Crossfire on the JFK assassination is well done I give him a temporary benefit of doubt, to the extent of reading his book (s).
I am not sure how far I go with him on the issue raised by his title, thence the purported main theme of his book: on one level however his thesis is, if not obvious, then a referral to some important hidden strains of post-fascism fascism.
But as you read the text something else happpens, it is so packed with secondary issues, and mini-research findings that you are left gaping. A good example is the suggestion that the Nazis actually did produce a nuclear weapon, and that the uranium used by the Los Alamos team was in part produced in Germany by Nazis, brought to the USA near the end of the war.
The book is filled with ‘hypotheses’ like this, which are hard to assess.
In general, I find the book of interest for the way a ‘conspiracy theory’ thesis comes into being willynilly, on the basis of the stark contradictions emerging at many points in twentieth century history in general and the post-JFK legacy in particular.
More on this later. If you can follow the maxim, read all, believe nought, the book is well worth reading.
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03.03.10
Posted in Uncategorized
at 6:16 pm
by nemo
I was looking quickly at: The Rise of the Fourth Reich: The Secret Societies That Threaten to Take Over America
Jim Marrs
This book (which I haven’t yet read) is of interest because its author wrote Crossfire, one of the best factual explorations of the JFK assassinations. I think he deserves a read through of his other books, although I am wincing a little bit at the content, here secret socities, and also the history of secrecy, and the issue of alien life.
But, well, c’est la vie. We can add this to the already considerable confusion here.
Marrs nailed the JFK assassination, so I can’t reject his other insights sight unseen. We shall see.
In general, the issue, as Sillykitty noted several times, of intelligence orgs, mind control and the Gurdjieff legacy as intertwined has to be faced. And thus Marrs book is directly relevant in the way it braids the issue of fascism, and American intelligence histories to that of various occult traditions.
My problem is that noone can get the issues here straight.
But, we will see.
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Posted in Uncategorized
at 2:34 pm
by nemo
‘Conscious evolution’ and its confusions
This consideration is prime for this blog, and Gurdjieff’s references to ‘evolution’ are misleading, as usual.
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27.02.10
Posted in Uncategorized
at 1:37 pm
by nemo
Comment on Gurdjieff/sufism
It is very easy to be misunderstood by dabblers in Gurdjieffianity. The ‘vitriol’ springs from the concealed fascist malevolence of Gurdjieff’s conspiracy, and the general attack on modernity and freedom.
People get angry when you try to destroy their freedom, OK?
People are easily impressed by Gurdjieff’s ‘teaching’, but most of it is junk thinking, leaving his case unmade for an ancient teaching.
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Posted in Uncategorized
at 1:32 pm
by nemo
Comment on Gurdjieff/sufism
grey hat said,
27.02.10 at 12:42 pm ·
Some thoughts for you.
The attribution of Sufism to the Gurdjieff teachings is a false one. It was created entirely by Idries Shah and his cohorts, as means of exploiting the aspects of “legacy” and “transmission”. Regardless of his reasoning for co-opting the movement, Shah was determined to become the new head or “prophet” and even leveraged his budding support from this community to take control of the Coombe Springs property, which he was given by Bennet for free. He sold the property for 100k sterling a few months later.
Gurdjieff and his teachings are certainly not for everyone, but I was somewhat surprised with how emotionally charged your perspective is. It seemingly borders on pure vitriol. Unfortunately this precludes rational discussion of the matter, IMO. We can attempt it, of course – if you are interested in the possibility of new understanding, either for you or me. Feel free to email me.
Some quick notes I have for you is that I regard G as very much ahead of his time in many aspects, and one of the more impressive examples of those is his artistry; of “meme” creation, propaganda, etc. In particular the synthesis of vast amounts of previous knowledge into a new coherence, AS WELL AS a vibrant living understanding, and a visceral energy of persuasion. I never knew the man personally, and therefore dont consider myself qualified to truly know much about his personality or “what he was like”. I have studied a wide cross-section of first hand accounts by those who did know him personally, and lived with him, etc. I certainly dont consider him a saint, but then again I certainly dont consider him a devil either. He seemed to be one of the first in a new, modern line of trickster teachers. Blavatsky was also a trickster, but much more of a b-rate snake oil gypsy, and not much of a teacher at all. Idries Shah was of this line, but his priorities were different – he was much more concerned with his own personal matters than those of the greater community of knowledge.
I regard Gurdjieff’s works as the penultimate modern representation of this kind of art, the only others in this field I would consider close are Carlos Castaneda, and the Church of the Subgenius. These all could be considered a modern form of thoroughly urgent taoism – the inner alchemical art of self-cultivation.
In all of these works of art produced by these people, there is a deliberate obscuration and deception, as well as a deliberate manipulation. There is also the deliberate effort to arrange things in such a way that anyone who is a blind believer in the system will become utterly and completely ridiculous to everyone else, invalidating their views in the eyes of society. The only way to make effective use of these teachings is a simple “do or die” scenario. The church of the Subgenius takes it further, by having no practical systematic methods per se, as well as an almost impenetrable wall of humor.
The common thread of these systems is the use of both “wholesome” and “unwholesome” methodology. If you wanted to, you could say they bounce between “black” and “white” “magic”. Its dangerous stuff. That is the point, you dont play with fire unless you want to get burned.
You may have realized that disruption of the coherence of your current perspective will threaten its emotionally reinforced (and therefore most likely comfortable) status. If not, you should look into it – this is a handy realization to have.
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22.02.10
Posted in Uncategorized
at 6:31 pm
by nemo
As per the last post I am sorry to pursue a line of critique of Hinduism, and such as line doesn’t really mean what it seems to mean.
If you have followed this blog you may recall our enquiry into the AIT/OIT (Aryan invasion question), then the works of Danielou on the history of Indian religion, and it suddenly became clear that we might have solved the obvious problem stuck in the craw of many Hindu Indian religionists: the Vedic tradition, as Danielou points out, is a late addition and not the source of the great yogic or tantric traditions. This insight is not even controversial really. The term Hinduism itself is very late, almost nineteenth century, and repair of a false tradition would be a lot simpler than one might think. But obvious one of the factors arresting progress is the tradition of caste, Brahminism, the code of Manu, and, finally, somewhat sadly, the impostor tradition of Vedism.
That’s why a way toward the future, like water seeking a path around obstacles, seems to have spawned a future tradition in the Jain cultural context, where the immense obsession and red herring of Hinduism is rendered irrelevant.
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Posted in Uncategorized
at 5:44 pm
by nemo
A few weeks ago someone asked what we recommend here in the light of our critique of Gurdjieff and Sufism.
As I noted I am not a teacher, or guru, so I recomment nothing, except to note that secular modernism, attacked by Gurdjieff et al., has far more potential for a spiritual ‘path’ than the archaic societies of tradition.
Whatever the case, hightail it out of sufiland and Gurdjieffianity forthwith, and don’t look back.
One of things in the Gurdjieff corpus is the idea that there are three main traditions, of which the Indic is somehow the lowest. The path of the will, supposed source in some obscure other Shangri La of Central Asia has been used to create a false authority and in the process deflect attention from the Indic line. I have learned the hardway that this is probably a lie created by Moslems with a cultural inferiority complex trying to repackage Indian spirituality in a monotheistic form.
In any case, the ordinary westerner has no future whatsover in any of these sufistic mafia games, so I recommend abandoning all that completely.
It is just hypnotic advertising by a truly clever Madison Avenue propagandist (Gurdjieff) that makes converts to his exploitative and sadistic pseudo-path whose concealed aims are anti-modernism, destruction of democracy, creation of spiritual slavery, experiments on ‘low class’ victims, and concealed aristocratic paths for a select few.
You have no future whatsoever in that world, and the dummies who write books on the subject to do the free promo for these gangsters are the biggest rejects of all. You can glimpse that from the life of Ouspensky who realized at the end of his life that he wasn’t included in the game at all, and that he had produced a masterpiece of propaganda for others, just as he was being ejected forever from the ‘work’.
So as I suggested hightail it out of that realm. It is a strange world, too obviously a strange creation by gnostics who had found power but never really connected with a spiritual domain.
In another post I can make a suggestion: check out what’s left of the Rajneesh world, the ruins of that ashram have a lot of open gateways leading to the Indic tradition.
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Posted in Uncategorized
at 5:27 pm
by nemo
Going through Bennett’s material on ‘evolution’ could backfire as solemn (and mostly stupid) converts to Gurdjieffianity suddenly get an idea of what is being said, and proceed to a mystical belief system or screed on evolution.
But I think not: Bennett’s view is New Age hokum, if you like, but actually still close enought to science to collapse via falsifying challenges. But this view is of use, not as a theory, but as a sketch with a set of questions that ordinary science tends to filter out of its deliberations.
We may need to set up a permanent stalemate between reductionist scientism and New Age evolutionism, as a set of potential dialectical positions.
In any case Bennet is useful here on evolution because he is a reminder that no living being, NOONE whatsoever, NOT EVEN such as Gautama or other enlightened beings, really understand the mystery of evolution. That can set you free from the authoritarian matrix the Eastern traditions threaten to create around religion and now evolution.
The point is obvious in one way: the scale of evolution as depicted by Bennett stretches over the entire period since the origin of life on earth, and computes in unites thereof in the stages of speciation: four milliion to seven million years since the division of man and chimpanzee.
Noone farting around claiming to be enlightened can tell us anything much about that, or about the evolution of man. Gurdjieff let loose a few ambiguous tidbits, mostly sadistic and violent, but clearly he does know what he is talking about.
So at least Bennett carries out the calculations of many New Age ideas of evolution. We can judge them on their merits, and in the process undermine the false authority of those staking a claim on evolution (like Ken Wilbur and Andrew Cohen).
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21.02.10
Posted in Uncategorized
at 3:44 pm
by nemo
As noted before several times Bennett’s thinking is less outlandish than it might seem.
To speak of the ‘will’ of the sun doesn’t really mean what it seems to mean in Bennett who has very carefully built up the ‘triad of being function will’ as this applies to all forms of existence in the degrees of manifestation of the will.
The problem is that none of this is ‘falsifiable’ or empirically verifiable, of course.
Gurdjieff, the ultimate source of this ‘ray of creation’ thematic claimed great esoteric antiquity for this thinking. I would be wary of anyone who thought such speculative confusion was in the realm of the esoteric.
I think this material was made up some time in the nineteenth century by some sufi idiot who was knocked senseless by a dose of baraka and went off the deep end.
To present such ideas as beyond criticism because they are esoteric (in his own version Bennett never did so) is balderdash.
The world needs to release those hooked on these illusions from their bondage.
In Bennett’s version (already at a considerable distance from the Gurdjieffian version) this thinking has a vague kind of plausibility, but since it is beyond verification obviously nothing can come of it.
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Posted in Uncategorized
at 3:14 pm
by nemo
Comment on I. Shah/R. Graves post
Jim Buck said,
21.02.10 at 1:26 pm ·
Moore invariably declines invitations to debate, ‘too busy’ he says. However, he does find time to tinker with the article as its inexactitudes are exposed. For instance, he accuses Idries Shah of conflating Mevlevi and Bektashi dervishes—the implication being that the Bektashi do not dance. The Bektashi are in fact reknowned for their Kirklar Semahi:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=6731nThTqCM
As for the slanders against Iqbal Ali Shah’s veracity…well, frankly, anyone who takes the British Foreign office as an authoritative source ought, at least read a few John Le Carre books (better still, watch an hour or two of the Iraq war inquiry on BBC 24).
The notion that Idries Shah (as opposed to Omar Ali Shah) damaged Robert Graves reputation is highly questionable. Read a few biographies of Graves; it should then become clear to you that, as far as the English establishment was concerned, Graves was always an outsider. He was “half German, half Irish”– a particularly unfortunate stigmatisation during the second decade of the 20th century. His war memoir ‘Goodbye To All That’ is now regarded as a classic, but was regarded, by many of his comrades-in-arms, as a catalogue of betrayal.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Uncategorized
at 3:11 pm
by nemo
tag: DUvol4
Continuing with some more stuff from Bennett: the treatment starts getting wild at this point, with talk of the ‘mind of the planet’ and outrageously teleological conceptions. It is of interest to go through this stuff anyway, because it does constitute a challenge, not to agree, but to be wary of our more reductionist views of evolution. Bennett is consistent and self-refuting in a way that most New Agers would not be, and there is little chance his views will spawn New Age dementia. They seem to dissolve into thin air as you think about them, leaving a genuine set of questions about Darwinian equal idiocy.
The footnotes will suddenly appear in the middle (originally at the end of a page)
Planets are improbable modes of existence. If our experiences were
associated with a star lacking a planetary system, we could scarcely
imagine that such bodies as planets could exist. If we were accustomed
to temperatures of tens of thousands of degrees and upwards-which,
contrary to popular ideas of hell-fire, would not incommode the soul-
we could not conceive matter in the solid state, nor bodies in any way
resembling those of plants or animals. Read the rest of this entry »
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