luciferianism – Page 27

What Armistice Day Could Mean to the Psychonaut

The cessation of conflict that was tearing one apart – whether physically in the form of war or spiritually – is celebrated on Armistice Day

Armistice Day – 11 November – is a celebration that marks the armistice that ended hostilities at the conclusion of World War One. On this day in 1918, soldiers on all sides put down their guns, bringing an end to what had been, until then, by far the most mindless display of human savagery, ruthlessness and murderlust in history. The retrospective sense that it may have been better to not have fought in the first place echoes in the life of the psychonaut.

In the life of an ordinary person one struggles, and fights, and desires, and wins and loses, and always it’s a tremendous battle to satiate the demands of one ego, which yearns to be exalted. And then, if one ever sees the brick wall at the back of the theatre, one laughs because the battling is all so silly when there’s no way for you to ever really lose.

This is a microcosm of the struggle of nations to exalt themselves on the world stage – a struggle which is so bloody that if it ever stops being violent even for a moment we commemorate it almost a century later, in the hope that we never forget the price of peace.

Like the Great War soldier, the psychonaut has to learn how to put down his guns, but in a metaphorical sense. He has to learn how to be open to the world and to reality, to not be afraid of the inevitable, the indescribable, the ineffable or the incomprehensible. His is the path of the shaman, one who sees beyond, and who returns with knowledge that is not accessible from ordinary perspectives.

Putting down one’s guns might mean, spiritually speaking, that one puts down one’s more aggressive egotistic defences and accepts that one will die one day, and therefore that all victories on this earthly plane are fleeting, transitory, and not worth losing one’s dignity over. It’s the kind of realisation that one might just as well get on the battlefield as from a psychedelic.

Believing this means to value peace in one’s life.

Part of this might be to accept the inevitability of the future death of one’s physical body, and thereby to prepare oneself for the profound change to the contents of consciousness that will follow, instead of repressing it, panicking at every mention of it, or denying the magnitude of the chaos that will befall one over the horizon of death.

The vast majority of people, being materialists, can only look at the prospect of the future death of their physical body with whimpering horror, because materialists almost always bear the delusion that the brain generates consciousness and therefore that the death of the brain necessarily means the extinction of that consciousness.

A person who has seen beyond has had cause to put down his guns, because he knows that living a life that expresses an acceptance of the inevitable will cause the environment around him to be more harmonious than it otherwise would have been.

This doesn’t means that the psychonaut must martyr himself on the spot out of guilt. Putting down one’s guns does not imply that one become passive, or submissive, or self-debasing.

It simply means that one stop behaving like a traumatised dog, ever on the ready to lash out in self-defence, and ever vigilant to all possible new threats from any direction. It means to relax, to let go and to forgive. This teaching is in many ways at the core of all religious and spiritual sentiment.

The lesson of Armistice Day is that conflict has a time and place and when those qualities no longer obtain then it’s time for peace. A genuine interest in peace means tuning oneself into a frequency from which conflict does not arise, a place that a Pyrrhonist would all ataraxia, a Luciferian would call apotheosis and a Buddhist would call nirvana.

New Zealand Should Celebrate Halloween on ANZAC Day

Halloween is an autumn festival that recalls the spirits of the dead. There’s no sense in New Zealand celebrating it at the end of spring

All Hallow’s Eve, modernly known as Halloween, is a festival that marks a time of death and dying in the yearly cycle. In some rituals, the dead are invited to partake in the celebrations, either through being summoned by music or remembered in prayer. Commonly, stories are told about people who have passed. All of this makes sense on the Northern Hemisphere calendar, but not so much in New Zealand.

The purpose of the Halloween festival, befitting the harvest, is to remember the dead. This is fitting because it occurs at the end of October, which is near the end of autumn in the Northern Hemisphere, where the leaves have fallen dead from the trees and the nights are quickly becoming longer, colder and darker.

This is why it is associated with graveyards and skeletons and cobwebs and spiders and mummies, and any other symbol of death that one can think of. At the end of October in the Northern Hemisphere it’s closer to the midwinter to come than it is to the midsummer gone, and is only getting darker and colder, which naturally feels like death for those experiencing it.

What is understood by few, in New Zealand at least, is that the old festival schedule represents a deep natural understanding of the connections between the physical and the metaphysical world. Celebrating Halloween near the end of autumn when Nature is dying is the kind of tradition that deepens the connections of people to the natural world and gives their lives meaning.

This means that we in New Zealand shouldn’t celebrate Halloween on the 31st of October, when it’s light until almost 9p.m. and is sometimes as warm as summer (if the winds are blowing from the North or from Australia). Seven weeks before the summer solstice is a time when we should be conducting a fire festival to celebrate the return of light and warmth into the world at the apogee of the yearly solar cycle.

New Zealand already celebrates these natural traditions at the correct time in the yearly solar cycle in the form of ANZAC Day and Guy Fawkes’s Day.

ANZAC Day has become a de facto national festival with an emphasis on the remembrance of the dead and a dawn ceremony – exactly as Halloween was practiced at the end of autumn in old times. On this day we listen to a bugle call that is the same as that our ancestors would have heard a century ago, and we stand in silence to make it as evocative as possible, which symbolically summons those ancestors to stand by our side once again.

Seeing the world as a Great Fractal, this is analogous to how people like us celebrate Halloween in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s also around this day – April 25th – that the trees are either bare or yellow and red as Nature falls into the peak yin part of the cycle.

Guy Fawkes, while not a national holiday, nevertheless involves a public display of fire in a very similar fashion to Beltane in the Northern Hemisphere, or the bonfires of Walborgafton in Uppsala and Walpurgisnacht in Northern Europe. The purpose of the fireworks and bonfires in either case is to celebrate how the Sun itself will soon be lighting up the night as it approaches the zenith of its yearly cycle.

In other words, ANZAC Day and Guy Fawkes’s Day have become the Southern Hemisphere equivalents of Samhain/Halloween and Beltane/Walpurgisnacht respectively. These festivals occur at almost exactly the same times of the seasonal cycle, and feature the same themes of death and fire respectively, but if a person in the Southern Hemisphere was primarily following the calendar they could easily fail to notice this.

How to Not Sound Crazy When Talking About Your Psychedelic Experiences

It’s hard to talk about the world beyond to people who aren’t familiar with that range of frequencies

Even though the Internet has led to a sharing of shamanic knowledge completely unprecedented (and impossible) for any other point in the world’s history, it hasn’t filtered down to the mass consciousness yet. Probably it never will – the men of silver and iron and clay cannot be expected to concern themselves with what lies beyond this veil. This essay gives some tips for talking to them about the world beyond without sounding insane.

The most important thing is to have a feel for what the person you are talking to is likely to be able to handle. This means that you have to look for clues from what you already know about them to give hints about what they already believe.

The easiest way to sound crazy is to express a belief that does not accord with consensual reality of the mass consciousness of the people around you. This is true whether you are in meatspace or cyberspace. The lower the intelligence of the person you are speaking to, the less likely it is that they will have challenged any belief widely-held by the people around them.

It is in this will to challenge consensual reality that most people judge sane from insane. All you have to do is to assert that things are not as they are commonly believed to be, and some people will start to consider you crazy. Essentially you only have to contradict the television, or in other cases the radio or FaceBook.

You might start a conversation with a suspected normie by questioning the narrative that you are fed by the network news, or by the broadsheet papers. Even that is enough to sound pretty crazy to most people, who are on the level of “they couldn’t say it if it wasn’t true.” If a person is on this level they are in no way ready to handle the idea that the government has lied to them about psychedelics for the sake of making them easier to control.

A useful tactic here is to point out how the governments and mainstream media of Anglosphere countries colluded to sell the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in order to manufacture consent for the Iraq War. It’s possible now, though, that a person remembers those times differently and will choose to remember it in a way that denies this collusion.

It pays to be wary of the fact that most people are materialists, which implies that they believe that the brain generates consciousness, and that upon the death of the physical body this consciousness somehow “disappears”. These people consider all kinds of religious ideas like karma and God to be superstitions, and the bitterest contempt is reserved for those religious who believe that the consciousness survives the death of the physical body.

Unfortunately, this belief is also one of the major insights of psychedelics – perhaps it is this psychedelic insight that forms the foundation of most religious beliefs.

Psychedelics are hard, and integrating their lessons extremely hard

Mathematics is the way to get at people who are the hardest to reach. Expressing a sense of awe and wonder at how, for example, the Fibonacci sequence reoccurs in the state of Nature is a good way of getting a person to ask themselves whether there’s something other than sheer chance going on. Other ways are to express similar sentiments about the non-reoccurring nature of pi or the import of Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem.

The way to talk about it so that it makes sense is by talking about previous beliefs that you once held that you either questioned or abandoned after taking a psychedelic. Usually this makes it possible to apply logic to dismantle one erroneous idea after the other, and it’s seldom necessary to mention that this destruction of illusion was achieved by means of psychedelics (any insight that psychedelics have brought you can be plausibly credited to either meditation or a near death experience as well).

For example, a psychedelicised person might be able to conduct a conversation with a normie about the boundaries of the human body, and how it’s not clear where inside ends and where outside begins. The very idea of selfishness starts to unravel if the idea of what it is that one might be selfish about is challenged, and by such means light can shine through.

This column believes that the ultimate goal of consciousness expansion is apotheosis, where an individual consciousness reunites themselves with the universal consciousness and becomes privy to certain mysteries, such as that there is no such thing as time and that the death of the physical body does not impact the true self.

Contemplation of this alone is liable to induce a psychiatric breakdown in a lot of people. Most people are so utterly terrified of the concept of their future death that they have pushed the very idea of it into a deep, dark part of the mind, only to be ventured into in an emergency. Even fewer people have looked deeply enough into their own minds to have made a surgically precise distinction between consciousness and the content of consciousness.

Starting with such subjects is probably too much. Most people will declare you crazy for talking about them rather than risk psychosis by dwelling on them.

Questioning the materialist dogma that the brain generates consciousness is the quickest way to be seen as crazy. This dogma is taken by many to be the absolute, inviolable and axiomatic truth of reality and conversation along these lines is likely to make materialists fear or despise you.

The best thing is probably to declare skepticism of the claims of a mutual enemy. The Government, the Church or Big Business can all serve as excellent mutual enemies. Skepticism of the claims of these mutual enemies might then be generalised into skepticism about other claims and dogmas.

Thoughts of a Luciferian Occultist on the Occasion of His 36th Birthday

My life has been divided into four nine-year blocks that correspond to the four masculine elements of clay, iron, silver and gold. This has culminated in my own apotheosis as someone who no longer fears the death of the physical body. Such thoughts became apparent to me when I marked the occasion of having been around the Sun thirty-six times, and reflected upon the wobbly path that was taken.

The phase of clay, representing the first nine years, was when simple survival skills were learned. This phase is shared by all creatures that need to survive, right down to the dumbest herbivore. This is the phase that we are born into, one that is characterised by fear as we learn to balance our innate curiosity with staying away from dangers.

In the first nine years of my life I was little different to a sheep or chicken. Essentially all actions I took were reactions. Usually I was guided along by well-meaning adults, and usually I had no reason to not comply. In this phase a basic civilising process took place, and I learned to enjoy life.

The alchemical culmination of this phase is tin, which corresponds to the planet Jupiter. Like Jupiter, it is large, larger-than-life in some ways. It’s bombastic and narcissistic but it is grounded in a healthy affirmation of life and therefore is necessary before the next phase can begin.

The iron phase began when I learned to take competitive sport seriously. Here the enjoyment of life becomes strong enough that a desire to challenge oneself and others arises. This happened at about the same time as puberty began, and with that came a desire to kill other males.

This is the phase when it becomes useful for a child to learn a martial art, or when it becomes enjoyable to seriously develop a set of skills for a competitive sport. Fittingly for iron, during this phase I became a harder individual, but in becoming so I also became a more useful one, in the same way that tools of iron are much more useful than tools of clay.

Its apogee was an incident on a rugby field where I hit an opposing ball carrier so hard in a tackle that I broke my own collarbone on impact and was knocked to the ground. He and I had developed a grudge over the course of the game, hitting each other harder and harder in tackles to try to show off who was strongest. I was about 15kg lighter than him and resorted to a shouldercharge to make up for it.

Unfortunately, he saw he coming and put the shoulder in himself, and I came off second-best (in an odd coincidence, that player, Simon P. Murphy, went on to become the author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, published by this company!).

The incident taught me to appreciate the limits of the sphere of iron. It was effectively where I learned the limitations of aggression and violence, and that knowing how to guide aggression intelligently was much more important than sheer volume of aggression.

It represented a softening to something of greater value, and this was represented alchemically by the phase of silver. This was also where I learned the value of intelligence. On the rugby field it didn’t seem like intelligence was worth much, as it appeared to me mostly about strength. But knowing how to direct one’s strength, not strength itself, was the real ability of value.

This phase began around age 18 and involved going to university. At university it is expected that one has gotten over the testosterone-fueled dominance battling of the phase of iron and therefore that one can work on polishing oneself up.

For me, embarking on the path of silver began with a Bachelor’s degree in psychology, and with losing my virginity to a Swedish nursing student. Upon managing both of these things I developed an appreciation for what intelligence had to offer the world.

I learned to use my own intelligence to go travelling and work around the world, spending three years in Europe and a year in other foreign climes. During this time I learned a few languages, and upgraded my education to a Master’s degree, and by the end of this nine-year block I was capable of thinking logically and rationally.

Being able to think intelligently is an ability that dazzles those still on the level of iron or clay, and as such it corresponds to the reflective ability of sunlight off a mirror. But intelligence itself is not, by itself, necessarily an expression of the will of God.

The silver became, in itself, more alive, and this moved me into the realm of mercury. This was represented in the material world by doing a lot of bar work. Here I learned to become silver-tongued, and to crack jokes, and to parry insults into harmless banter, and to be glib and slick and easygoing.

Seven grams of psilocybin mushrooms, taken shortly after I turned 27, marked the end of this phase of silver and mercury. These I had been given by a hippie workmate upon expressing to him what I felt to be the mental health benefits of smoking cannabis, especially for someone like me who had long suffered problems from nausea and insomnia.

I recall, at the peak of the trip, standing before God and being asked how much I thought I could handle, and replying that I wanted the full measure. In that moment I became entirely reunited with God and understood that I was forgiven for all errors, past and future.

This experience obliterated my mind, and taught me that everything I knew was wrong. I had been granted a glimpse into the face of the divine, but because of my ego and attachment to false self I was not immediately able to manifest the knowledge that I had been granted in my everyday life.

I had two options: to abandon the shamanic path and dismiss the insights gleaned from psychedelics as delusions and insanities, or to accept the challenge of the phase of gold.

I accepted the challenge of the phase of gold, and this involved a willful refusal to allow myself to forget the insights that I had been granted at the peak of the mushroom trips, such as an insight into the true nature of consciousness, or the fact that the contents of consciousness could be represented as a Great Fractal.

The culmination of this phase was writing a manuscript called The Pyrrhonist, an exercise in questioning reality from first principles. This caused the complete disintegration of my entire personality and of everything I believed to be real. I systematically questioned every belief I had, even the most fundamental, and by the end of that process I had questioned the fundamentals of reality so thoroughly that I was mad.

At the nadir of this phase I spent ten days in a mental health unit.

This dark night of the soul served as an nitric acid, dissolving all of the less pure elements of my soul; I was completely humbled. I was forced to stand before the judgment of God and concede that the maintenance and preservation of my ego was a fool’s errand – not only did I make myself less happy, but everyone who encountered me got less out of it than they otherwise would have done.

At this point I had been completely broken, and was ready to rebuild.

This took another three years or so, and involved a kind of self-nurture that, ironically, I had been too selfish to previously allow myself, lest the softness made me weak. It also involved smoking a tremendous amount of cannabis, for the reason that this medicine prevented the pull of the body from dragging my frequency back down to clay because of pain and nausea.

I had to learn to accept that I was not and could never be judged by ephemeral concerns. I embarked on an attempt to purify my soul, which involved abstinence from all of tobacco, alcohol and women.

This last of the four nine-year blocks of my life ended this week, upon turning 36. It ended with my acceptance of the fact that I feel entirely at peace and that there is nothing, fundamentally to fear. I am absolved of all sin and can take my part in the play.

This, I feel, is the lesson of the element of gold. It cannot shine directly on people, in the manner of silver, because where people become blinded and dazzled by silver they become humbled by gold, and in being humbled they become resentful, and in becoming resentful they become destructive.

Gold, being the softest of all metals, can least tolerate that destructive will, and so it has to learn to be subtle. Its essence is therefore gentleness and precision. Working on the level of gold means learning to influence on the level of spirit, not just the level of mind (as is silver).

I feel that now, at age 36, a certain alchemical process has come to its end and that now I can live on whatever level of clay, iron, silver or gold is necessary for the environment that I am in, now that I know how to tune into the appropriate frequency.