Since my last post got linked at Facebook, some readers over there (none over here, evidently) are asking for the back-story. I don’t really think it’s that important, because I think it’s all there in my letter to Chris. The danger of adding more information is that people will get lost in the details and start arguing over the finer points of Netiquette and suchlike. I really want to stress that this isn’t about putting CK under the microscope and judging his behavior. That isn’t going to help anything unless it happens in a larger context of understanding and compassion.

My motives for posting the letter were threefold (my conscious motives, I can’t talk about my unconscious ones, that would be just crazy!): 1) to confront CK with what I see as unreasonable behavior in the hope of giving him a helpful pointer or two. 2) To let others who may have been, or felt like they were, subjected to a similar kind of treatment, know that it’s OK to speak up and say “No” to it. 3) To work through, in my usual public and slightly painful fashion, my own issues around power, status, influence, right and wrong communication methods, and the like.

What this has definitely helped me see is that there is a very good reason I don’t have the sort of following Christopher Knowles does, which is that I feel the need, for whatever reason, to connect to people as individuals and to see everyone as equally important. This approach becomes less and less viable the larger one’s audience becomes (at least when it’s an interactive audience, as both Chris and I encourage). Disregard for the finer points of discussion and eventually for other people’s points of view (and feelings) becomes increasingly necessary, or at least justifiable, the larger the crew being “managed.”

I now think, based on what I’ve learned from this last experience, that this is a wholly unavoidable pitfall of creating groups to lead, and that there’s probably no way around it, which only leaves the question of how deep the pit grows before you fall in, and whether you make it out or not. Any implied criticisms of Chris Knowles, therefore, should be seen as criticisms of the fundamental machinery of social grouping and of the accepted forms of leadership, which I think are not only corrupting, but corrupt from their very inception onward. The reason for this is that they are, perhaps invariably, compensatory, being sourced in early patterns of trauma and driven by an infantile (and wholly unavoidable) need to feel powerful, and to be seen that way in the eyes of others.

Now that’s all spelled out, here’s the requested “back-story.”

Ever since I first talked with Chris Knowles for Stormy Weather in 2009 (see episodes 27 & 27.5, here, for downloads, go here), he’s been my favorite alternate perceptions guy. Affinity is a strange thing. I didn’t follow his work, probably for the same reason (I assume) he didn’t follow mine, because it wasn’t central to my research; but I regularly cast an eye at what he was doing and looked forward to dialoguing with him again.

It seemed as if he felt the same way. After our talk he said it was probably his favorite interview; a few months ago, he invited me onto his Mystery Hour podcast. I said I’d be glad to but didn’t hear about it again.

A few weeks ago, before launching the Crucial Fictions site, I emailed Chris, along with a bunch of other people, inviting him to look at the “Prisoner of Infinity” material so we could discuss it together, as part of the audio series currently underway. He said he wouldn’t be able to, for personal reasons.

I let him know when the site was up, and also pointed out that the link at his blog (to “Vagabond Blues,” my old, old blog) was way out of date and asked if he could update the link, to this current blog. I’d made the same request a couple of months before, but then, as now, I didn’t receive any response from him and the old link remained up.

Meanwhile, over at Facebook: during the previous few months, I’d been hearing stories about Chris’s dismissive treatment of his followers, and been curious enough to observe it up close. (I mostly avoid posting at FB but have an account there, since sometimes it’s the only way to contact people.) One of the first things I saw was that Chris had instituted a rule after the Boston bombing incident that anyone who posted about it being a “false flag” operation would be “defriended.” A friend of mine (Keith Z) questioned this decree, and/or made a comment that didn’t meet Chris’s approval, and was promptly defriended. Chris had also posted that the whole notion of “psy-ops” was the invention of the (“right wing”) author Michael A. Hoffman, and he seemed to turn his nose up at conspiracy lore in general. More recently, my attention was drawn to someone being rebuked by Chris for talking about satanic ritual abuse, and for saying a friend of theirs had experienced it. Chris’s response was that “people who make these claims are usually delusional fantasists who have no evidence of this alleged abuse.” The person left the group soon after.

Hearing these stories gave me a feeling of foreboding, since my own writing was delving, at least peripherally, in just such forbidden waters.

Then the day before yesterday, my wife emailed me a link to the latest post at Chris’s blog, here, which I read with growing interest. Chris was posting about UFOs again, and in relation to dystopian sci-fi futures, a dead match with the “Prisoner of Infinity” material. Excited, I made a comment at his blog, thinking to kill two birds with one stone: attract some Secret Sun readers to the Crucial Fictions site, and lay the groundwork for a future dialogue with Chris. Fools rush in. . .

I can’t link to the blog comment because it’s been deleted. It was a friendly comment about how we both seemed to have returned to similar subject matter at exactly the same time, and it included a link to the Crucial Fictions site and a quote from one of the chapters, about Strieber, trauma, daimonic inner agencies, and the body. Here’s a screen shot for the record:

An hour or two later, I received an email from Chris. He apologized for not replying to my last email, and then wrote this sentence:

“I’m really not comfortable with the imagery on the title page. Let me know when you take it down and I’ll see about linking.”

The words gave me a jolt. The friendly tone which opened the email (he called me “Jase”) was instantly replaced by one of cool command. More stunned than angry, I noticed that I had immediately come down with a headache: a somatic reaction. The sentence, casually delivered, contained an unmistakable edge of accusation. It implied that the image at the site was somehow in poor taste, and even an infraction of some kind. It took it as a given that I would fix this error. The use of the word “when” instead of “if” did not seem like it was inadvertent.

Yet I hadn’t asked Chris to link to the Crucial Fictions site, only to update the blog link at his own blog. . .

I sent a reply clarifying this point, with a comment about how the image wasn’t meant to make him comfortable. Oddly, there was some confusion as to whether my email went through (I couldn’t find it in my sent folder), so I emailed him again to ask if it had. I didn’t receive any response from him, and the following day I sent another email, challenging him on (what I saw as) his unreasonable behavior.

He responded with a couple of words of dismissal. Shortly after that, I noticed he’d deleted my comment at his blog.

In Chris’s last post, he wrote this passage:

“The problem is that too many people plant their flags in one plot or the other (or the other), and zealously lob grenades at their neighbors rather than focusing all of their aggression where it belongs; the defenders of the corrupt establishment. . . . But for me, that’s not only a waste of energy, it’s also extremely short-sighted and self-limiting.”

The words seemed ironic to me now, now that Chris Knowles had lobbed a grenade of his own making into my inbox, without warning and for reasons unclear to me. Did he see me, because of an image which offended him, as a defender of a corrupt establishment? (I presume his discomfort over the image was for “moral” reasons and not aesthetic ones.) If so, he must be seeing demons in his soup.

There’s another passage in the post that caught my eye, since it intersects directly with “Prisoner of Infinity”:

“In between all of this I was invited by Jeff Kripal to lecture about Jack Kirby at the Esalen CTR, where I discovered that despite all the frothing nonsense you hear from little fascist weasels, Esalen itself is about as sinister as (and in fact was eerily similar to) an episode of Portlandia.”

So based on the fact that he had a good time at Esalen and everyone was nice to him, was Chris Knowles really suggesting that anyone who pointed out the (fairly well-documented) ties between Esalen and, for example, SRI (and therefore military intelligence) was a nonsense-frothing fascist weasel? That would include me then. I knew that Knowles had recently proposed the creation of a “Level Above Facebook” space, to be called the “Reality-Based High Weirdness Community.”  Apparently, being OK-ed for this space required renouncing all non-Reality-based Weirdnesses such as satanic ritual abuse or psy-ops. I would also guess, tentatively anyway, that questioning Chris Knowles’ ability to know when he’s having smoke blown up his ass is also going to be a No-No in that New Reality Zone.

But this is all by-the-by, and not really any of my concern.

The bottom line of this melodrama is that I fell into an unconscious trap, laid not by Chris Knowles but by the forces of our combined unconsciouses, and that I wound up feeling abused and distressed over what he (and probably others) no doubt sees as a triviality, but which for me is a deeply entrenched childhood wound: being bullied by a male figure I respect and having my offering dismissed and then erased from the record. My own (five years older) brother wanted to do exactly that: to make me disappear before I could steal his thunder. These things tend to repeat in our lives because we reenact the trauma unconsciously, as a way to try and re-experience it and thereby resolve it. Which, ironically enough, is what crucialfictions.com is all about.

So while all this might seem like a storm in a teacup and much to-do about nothing, for me it has at times felt like a bona fide life and death struggle. And since like always attracts like, I have no doubt, no doubt at all, that’s how things are for Christopher Knowles right now.

And of course all this has real world consequences, because the work I’m doing with Crucial Fictions is vital and a lot of people can benefit from it. In fact they already have, including people who follow, or followed, CK’s work—I would say “religiously,” except that it’s probably the ex-communicated and/or the apostates who are going to benefit the most from it. But the point is, between us, with our ancestral trauma and the unexpected explosion of those patterns coming into premature(?) contact, we’ve more or less burned to the ground whatever bridge might have been constructed.

Or maybe, in a strange and unforeseeable way, this is that bridge?

There’s a back story to this, but it will have to wait.

Dear Chris Knowles,

Although you’ve indicated you’ve no desire for a dialogue, I will give it one last shot. I’m posting this publicly because your last email was in the form of a dismissal and it seems safer, somehow, to bare my soul in public, so to speak.

I’ve always respected you and your work, and more than that, had a lot of affection for you. Maybe it’s projection but there it is. Because of my own issues with my (late) brother, it’s hard for me not to feel competitive and/or defensive with other men, especially men I admire. One unfortunate result of this is that I tend to unconsciously provoke conflict with them, as if to test, or prove, my own existence.

That might seem like too much information, but the point is, to some degree I probably provoked your unreasonable behavior without intending to. I regret even the possibility that’s true and so naturally I want to make it right. Since I’ve no idea how to do that, all I can do is try to be frank and lay out the facts as I see them.

Fact 1: I envy the amount of attention your work gets and how you have over a thousand followers who seem to hang onto your every word, while I feel like I’m doing well, and I mean really well, if I get half a dozen comments in a week and at least know that a few people are even aware of what I’m doing. (Yes, I am insecure.)

Fact 2: I consider my latest project at crucialfictions.com to be vital and ground-breaking work that deserves to be taken seriously.

Fact 3: I wanted to get not only your own attention and approval with it, but that of your many followers also.

Fact 4: Your only response so far has been to tell me, implicitly, to take down the image at the site before you will even consider linking to it (even though I never asked you to link to it).

Fact 5: That hurt.

Fact 6: I responded, or reacted, to your attempt to control and direct (i.e., bully) me with a challenging email.

Fact 7: You took that as the end of our relationship, so far as there was one, and deleted my comments at your latest blog post, despite the fact that there was nothing overtly hostile or disruptive about them.

Fact 8: Rightly or wrongly, I’ve noticed a change in your communication style over the past few months and a move towards a more aggressive, macho, and bullying kind of persona.

Fact 9: Quite a few other people have, rightly or wrongly, come to the same conclusion, and have expressed concern, as well as experiencing discontent and I suspect hurt feelings, because of this.

Fact 10: You’ve started to defriend people who express points of view which you don’t agree with under the guise of trying to keep the group “reality-based.”

Fact 11: From what I have heard, from people closer to you than I am, you’ve managed to create an atmosphere in which people are afraid not only to challenge or confront you but to disagree with you at all.

So much for the facts. My own opinion is that you’re wrestling with some powerful inner demons and you have my every sympathy. I MEAN THIS SINCERELY. If I could help, I would. But instead I’ve managed to wind up (exactly as happened with my brother before he died) on the side of the demons in your eyes (or at best, as one of those nonsense-frothing fascist weasels who you disdain in your last post).

Fact 12: That sucks for me. I mean it really sucks.

Fact 13: We are both so much bigger than our differences.

If there’s any way to see past them, even for a few minutes, then I suggest we talk about what’s really going on. What you’ve communicated to me is that it doesn’t matter to you if I live or die, much less whether we have a relationship or not. Maybe I’m deluded, but I don’t believe that.

My brother used to say (in one of his many carefully scripted and impeccably delivered bon mots), “Nothing matters much, and very little matters at all.”

What does matter, and what I’ll stake my reputation on to defend, is kindness, compassion, sensitivity, and a willingness to be vulnerable and to show weakness with those we care about. This goes especially for guys, and especially, I think for guys like us.

That’s it. That’s all I’ve got. The ball’s in your court. You are on your own – unless you don’t want to be.

brotherly love,
Jasun

Check out the latest installments

What are the psychodynamics of trauma and how do they pertain to alien abduction lore?“A Life Full of Holes: Daimonic Defense & National Security” (PDF), “The Ardures of Atheism” & “Space is the Place” (MP3s) are now up, at http://crucialfictions.com 

Please take the time to participate.

Thanks, Jasun.

Meanwhile, here’s some feedback from Mr. Panda and my responses, as before, CAPS for Mr. P’s comments, italics for original quotes, bold for my responses.

I LIKE THE IDEA OF “ATTRACTION TO THE LACK”. THE NOTION THAT WE INSTINCTIVELY HONE IN ON GAPS IN KNOWLEDGE. WE CAN SENSE A VOID WHERE NECESSARY INFORMATION IS NEEDED. FOR SOURCING INSPIRATION AND NOVELTY A GOOD WRITER, SCIENTIST OR ARTIST NEEDS A RELATIONSHIP WITH THAT WHICH DOESN’T EXIST (YET).

Which is paradoxical. It brings back to mind a thought I had recently, that if there are no ‘things,’ only relationships, then what exactly is there that is relating?

Prisoner of Infinity is about seeking a secret that we keep from ourselves, knowing that it’s inevitable we will turn that seeking into a way to conceal the secret, because that’s just what we do. The trick is to spot the ways that we are deceiving ourselves – to see the blind spot by seeing how things aren’t adding up – and hopefully before we get blind-sided by the Universe.

 …Strieber bridges this apparent gulf by suggesting that “the close encounters were real, and that they involved literally breaking through into another level of reality in order to escape the hell I was enduring in this one.”10 Yet what Strieber is describing is classic dissociation; even if the encounters were psychically real, it ignores the fact that his body was still being submitted to equally real physical and psychological abuse while the supposedly “transcendental” lessons were taking place. Unless, that is, he believes he was physically taken away by these beings.

COULD THE ACT OF “BREAKING THROUGH INTO ANOTHER LEVEL OF REALITY” OUT OF DESPERATION, HAVE A PARALLEL TO THE ACT OF RAPE? AN UNINVITED INTRUSION.

On the new “Space is the Place” mp3, we talk about how, for Strieber, the reality of the experience revolves around having his body penetrated. This may be a universal requisite, that only when something that is outside of us enters inside us and becomes us do we experience it as fully “real.” The relationship, in other words, has to be intimate (Biblical knowing), even if that entails violation (or self-violation). Trauma is the alpha and omega of consciousness.

…Put more baldly: I propose, for the sake of argument, that there is a socio-political agenda using a combination of “traditional” beliefs with newly created ones, or new arrangements and interpretations of old ones, for the creation of a “scientistic religion.”

SLIGHTLY BESIDE THE POINT, BUT, I FIND IT INTERESTING TO NOTE THE SIMILARITIES BETWEEN THE STORY OF CREATION IN THE BIBLE AND THE BIG BANG THEORY (“AND THEN THERE WAS LIGHT”). BOTH HELPFULLY NEGATE THE CONCEPT OF INFINITE TIME AND THE ASSOCIATED FEARS IT CAN INSPIRE. MOST PEOPLE CAN ONLY VISUALISE INFINITY IN TERMS OF ENDLESS REPETITION. ENDLESS VISUAL NOVELTY? NOT SO MUCH.

Only the body can know the eternal – never the mind, because the mind is designed to categorize, and the infinite can’t be segmented.

…This agenda includes the psychological manipulation of individuals (possibly from an early age) in an attempt to access and harness the human potential for psychism, while in the process creating leaders, teachers, and spokespeople for the new paradigm. Finally, most disturbing of all, the basis of this (hypothetical) socio-political agenda, or at least one primary aspect of it, would appear to be the appliance of trauma as the means to activate the psychic centers of the human brain, ushering in a new evolutionary stage for the species that (it is hoped) will act as a socially acceptable (i.e., manipulable) surrogate for authentic (full body) spiritual enlightenment.

FULL BODY SPIRITUAL ENLIGHTENMENT IS DEATH, WE ALL GO THROUGH IT. ANYTHING ELSE IS JUST A PREVIEW*

*this response just popped onto the page fully-formed. I didn’t think about it, I’m not sure if I fully agree with it.

I don’t agree with it, in fact I vehemently disagree. The body is eternal delight, Eros. Mind is Thanatos. The body can’t know death, only the mind can. Maybe that’s even what it’s for. To become fully identified with the sword, the instrument of death/segmentation? To sever the connection to the group mind (matrix pod life, thanatos) so the body can experience full surrender to universal flow (eros).

This is losing one’s life to gain in – experiencing full mind/identity death while the body lives. Otherwise we take our illusions with us, without even having a body to set us straight.

Those holes are inevitably filled by other energies, and whether they come from the environment or from our own unconscious—or as is generally the case, both at once—those energies have their own agendas. Identifying what sort of energies have filled the holes and what their agendas might be was

WHERE WOULD THE GENERATION OF WHITLEY’S ALIEN INSIGHTS FIT INTO THIS PICTURE? IF THE INSIGHTS WERE SELF-GENERATED WOULD IT BE A CASE OF A HIGHER INTELLIGENCE BEING HIDDEN WITHIN A MIND OF LOWER INTELLIGENCE?

Can you rephrase the question?

One of the more interesting movies of recent years – and also more socially relevant (if I read it right). Its incomprehensibility seems somehow accurate to the subject matter (if I read it right).

It could even be seen as an alien abduction narrative, without aliens.

Also, a story about attaining enlightenment?

Watch it and tell me your take on it.

 
Of special interest to the CF research:

 
After the cold war ended, Mack studied consciousness expansion with Stanislav Grof, a Czech-born psychoanalyst who had experimented with L.S.D. Grof and his wife, Christina, had developed a breathing discipline called Holotropic Breathwork to induce an expanded state of consciousness. In one breathwork session with Russians at California’s Esalen Institute, Mack recounted that he became, “a Russian-father in the 16th century whose four-year-old son was being decapitated by Mongol hordes.’’ He owed a lot to the Grofs, Mack later said. “They put a hole in my psyche, and the U.F.O.’s flew in.” [Italics added]

 
Also this:
 

“With 78,000 applications in two weeks, this is turning out to be the most desired job in history,” Mars One CEO and co-founder Bas Lansdorp said in a statement. “These numbers put us right on track for our goal of half a million applicants.” [Mars One's Red Planet Colony Project (Gallery)]

“Mars One is a mission representing all humanity, and its true spirit will be justified only if people from the entire world are represented,” Lansdorp said. “I’m proud that this is exactly what we see happening.”

The announcement of Mars One’s application flood comes in the middle of a big week for manned Mars exploration. Scientists, engineers, NASA officials and a range of other Red Planet exploration advocates are currently meeting in Washington, D.C. for the Humans 2 Mars summit, which runs through Wednesday (May 8).

And today, famed Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin released his new book, “Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration” (National Geographic Books), which was written with veteran space reporter (and SPACE.com columnist) Leonard David.

Full article here: http://www.space.com/21005-mars-one-colony-applications.html