“When he lay down to prepare himself for sleep, he no longer sought amusement, but printable and profitable tales; and after he had dozed off in his box-seat, his little people continued their evolutions with the same mercantile designs. [A]nd, for the most part, whether awake or asleep, he is simply occupied—he or his little people—in consciously making stories for the market. This dreamer (like many other persons) has encountered some trifling vicissitudes of fortune. When the bank begins to send letters and the butcher to linger at the back gate, he sets to belabouring his brains after a story, for that is his readiest money–winner; and, behold! at once the little people begin to bestir themselves in the same quest, and labour all night long, and all night long set before him truncheons of tales upon their lighted theatre.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Chapter on Dreams”
The next day I got up, thinking about finishing off part one of the opus that never ended. I wondered why I had included the detail of listening to Strieber’s audio in the bathtub. It occurred to me that I had unconsciously chosen a “safe,” womb-like space in order to let myself to see certain things I might otherwise not have been able to see. While all of this apparently related to Strieber, it was just as much about my own psychic formation, or deformation, and presumably a lot more so, since the secret subject of every written piece is always its author. Rather than going straight to work, I decided to read some more of Greg Mogenson’s A Most Accursed Religion while having my morning porridge. I began to read chapter two, “An Infectious Savior.” It begins with a description of a woman’s dream of being in a bathtub, a light shining out of her head. The woman takes batteries out of her head, after which she finds herself in her apartment, watching workmen replacing the glass from her windows with blank sheets of writing paper. I read these words: “He told her that he believed the dream was suggesting that writing could provide a container for what her life could not contain.”
The man in Mogenson’s narrative (who is interpreting the woman’s dream) describes how, after hearing the dream, he reads a book (by Northrop Frye) called The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. The day before, I’d had an email exchange with a spiritual teacher about this present work. He had asked me: “Have you got [Strieber] locked inside a punchbag?” I replied: “It’s more like The DaVinci Code, with the Strieber Body (of work) as the Mona Lisa.”
The man in A Most Accursed Religion (Mogenson’s stand-in?) finds a clue to the woman’s dream when the book he’s reading refers to the Leviathan, whom he identifies with the woman. Less than an hour after reading about Leviathan, I came across this among some Lloyd deMause material:
What I found was that the cartoons, past and present, of the enemy in war were dominated by an image that was even more widespread than that of the dangerous mommy: it was that of a seabeast, often with many heads or arms, a dragon or a hydra or a serpent or an octopus that threatened to poison the lifeblood of the nation.[1]
The man in Mogenson’s narrative asks himself: “How is it that this modern woman in a bathtub with batteries in her head manifests the chaos monster?” The man goes to sleep and has a dream of his own, also with a bathtub in it, this one covered with crosses. He receives a telephone call; a male voice tells him “The anti-incarnational ideas you are now conceiving are very, very evil.” The dream continues some more, and then he wakes.
“Jesus,” he thought, “is it through you that the spirit of the flesh enters, that Leviathan enters bathtubs and persons? Your cross scales the non-human, archetypal world down into man. Are you the carrier of the contagion from which we suffer?”
The crucifixion, writing, Leviathan, and the killing mother were all being linked together by the image of a bathtub! The next passage in Mogenson’s book was about Gnosticism compared to psychotherapy:
Gnosticism is based not in holy writ, but in the holiness of writing itself. It is not the story of Christ that brings salvation; it is the storying Christ. The incorporeal (non-incarnate) Gnostic-Jesus is metaphor, and metaphor is the uncanonical solution for the Old Testament trauma, the Old Testament God. Gnosticism is healing fiction. The nailing of Christ to the wooden cross was, in the Gnostic view, the crucifixion of the capacity to make fiction, the nailing of metaphor, literalism (p. 78, emphasis added).
I realized that this might be a key to the whole project. What I was attempting with my ever-expanding psycho-history of Strieber was a gnostic kind of therapy, “healing fiction.” Perhaps that was even what Strieber was attempting? But, like Frankenstein’s monster or the sorcerer’s apprentice, it had all somehow gone horribly wrong, and the metaphor-maker had become the literalist, the storyteller the scientist, pinned to the cross of his own salvation story. (The fictional Strieber was even pierced in “Pain,” as part of his execution fantasy.)
The Gnostic idea of the Christ-Deity is very different from the Christian (or Catholic) one: Christ is the kingdom within us, the authentic self. He/It is eternally present, waiting for us to discover it. The Christian idea is that Christ was a Man who was also God, who died for our sins in a single historical act of self-sacrifice on which we are forever compelled to gaze. The difference between an external sacrificial event and an internal discovery is the difference between history and fiction, fact and metaphor. To take a psychic reality as a physical one is to take metaphor for fact, externalize it, and give it power over us. It turns trauma into God—which is when transference fails, and religion, accursed religion, triumphs over the soul.
I read on:
But the job of analysis, at least a Gnostic analysis, is to liberate spirit from the contingency of the patient’s life through metaphor. [It] does not aim to repeat the intercourse that has made for the patient’s first birth. Rather, by means of a subtler union, its aim is to reveal the primal scene, interrupt the parental coitus, and free the soul from its Oedipal bondage . . . Reclining in the repose of metaphor, the patient is released from the prose of his incarnational life. By restating in poetic terms the incidents of his life which the language of prose had preserved as trauma, the patient frees his soul to follow its desires (p. 78-9, emphasis added).
Strieber insists the contact experience is universal, and it may well be. What I have seen, however, and what he himself has described—while apparently unaware of the metaphors he has employed and been shaped by—is a psychotherapeutic theater of archetypes. It is a form of daimonic transference process by which Strieber—and by extension the whole of humanity—is being forced to re-witness the primal scene of his/our mimetic desire/Oedipal longing, and have it interrupted.
Strieber’s bondage is the human bondage: that of the infant who wishes to please his caregivers by doing what he is told but who is being told to go his own way. So far he has apparently been unable to reconcile that double bind—the oldest human dilemma of all, fate and free will—and obey the imperative of autonomy. He is forever falling back into the mother’s breast, even as he picks up the pen, the surrogate phallus of his emasculated manhood, to prove that he is free to write his own life story. Yet all the while, silently and in secret, he continues to receive dictation. Judging by the signs (that of his own fiction, intentional and otherwise), Strieber has yet to recognize the metaphor which the visitors have presented to him (that he was mothered and fathered by trauma), and so remains enslaved by the fantastic and horrifying fact of their existence.
“The familial metaphor is called into play as a basic model of propitiating any overwhelming event whatsoever” (p. 80). Whatever trauma we experience in later life, we must always refer back to the original family dynamics, inherent within our psyche, in order to make sense of it. Yet paradoxically, maddeningly, being aware that an original trauma has happened at all depends on our making sense of it. Not only that, but the re-enactment event (Strieber’s close encounter experience of 1985, for example) is likewise limited by our capacity to make sense of it. It is shaped by the sense-making apparatus which we inflict upon it. An early and formative experience of trauma will therefore turn all subsequent experiences that are beyond our comprehension into traumata. Since the nature of God is beyond our comprehension, God (and the psyche) inevitably becomes trauma.
To read full essay, order Prisoner of Infinity: UFOs, Social Engineering, and the Psychology of Fragmentation
Auticulture 
Godamn have you seen the light? What a fresh look at Gnostic thought. Thank you. Dennis
Call it denial or whatever but I doubt I have/had penis envy nor did I have life-long birth trauma. I lived a very peaceful (not perfect )childhood with 3 older siblings. I knew absolutely nothing about sex before the age of 16, the age I started dating. I had no interest in boys as a sexual substitute for my father but since Freud or Jung says I did then, I must be wrong.
Recently, I have discovered the role very bad parenting has on the life of adults who are forever kept prisoner of their perpetual childhood/powerlessness. One doesn’t need to look to aliens nor a secret government program (MK-Ultra) to find horrific child sexual abuse – one only needs to look next door. It happens all around us behind closed doors.
The biggest propaganda going on currently is that the ‘Father Figure’ is being deliberately destroyed in order to keep many locked in that same constant state of powerlessness. Take Jimmy Savile * (dead men tell no lies), Bill Cosby, Brian Williams (most trusted news anchor), police officers (Ferguson) and any man in authority – the controlled media needs us believe these men are all corrupt and cannot be TRUSTED so we’re left to fend for ourselves. The Father Figure cannot be trusted.
Jasun with your essays, you are projecting your own childhood trauma (namely Father Figure trauma) onto Mr Strieber, hoping he can guide you through his so-called metaphors out of your own familial darkness.
*Jimmy Savile may be a ‘Satanic’ child abuser but the fact that his crimes only made headlines after his death and are only reported on at this moment in time makes me take a long pause. A bigger agenda is at work here folks and the men in blue suits are playing on our own fears and perceptions.
thats what i like about you Jasun , you are admitting Whitley is you
Poor Whit is probably thinking , ” bugger me Horsley is getting his moneys worth … Why cant he just read my penny dreadfuls and keep quiet like everyone else ?”
LOL
I’ll have to read this chapter many times over an extended period to fully absorb some new meanings I can hunt and gather from this. Transformation is found within.
On first reading this chapter seemed to make little sense, but the second time around, it does. Two things: why are you do certain Leviathan is female? I could have sworn the opposite. It seems monsters take on the gender of whichever parent traumatized us the most. Therefore, you enter a subjective world when you make these declarations – leviathan is female to you, for reasons that seem to boil down (in your writing) to the “toxic placenta” but as i’ve commented before, placentas only become toxic in a toxic ENVIRONMENT. Who poisoned Earth? Which gender is dumping most of the chemicals? Eventually the Father has to be implicated in the poisoning of the child.
Two: nowhere do you adequately describe the Toxic Feminine in a way that persuasively establishes her guilt. It’s all still a rumour. We have to take your word for it.
Presumably the woman in the Bathtub is undergoing purification. A light has appeared on her forehead that no one seems able to comprehend, or is even interested in comprehending. Then its back to monsters and the UFO. I suggest the UFOs represent the divine feminine in exile circling overhead with a message for humanity that you might be able to read if you could harness your night terrors.
This is an example of offering your own interpretation of the material and then asking me to answer to/for it. I never said the Leviathan was female, I only described the clues coming to me and the connections appearing between this imagery as they did so. Leviathan is not female to me, Leviathan is simply Leviathan. Nor is the toxic placenta an element of my writing, it comes from Lloyd de Mause & I cited it once again as a clue that arose “spontaneously” (albeit due to my own focus) at a specific moment. The father is implicated indirectly in the poisoning of the child because he is responsible, either directly or indirectly, via his absence/neglect, for the atmosphere in which the mother gestates the child. My mother was directly responsible for poisoning the womb in which I grew (drinking heavily); but what are the elements that caused her to become an alcoholic before she was a wife or mother (her own sexual abuse, unknown, probably at the hands of a man or men, but probably also by women, since she went to a Catholic school run by nuns). I don’t really understand the desire to assign blame/guilt according to gender, facts have nothing to do with gender or for that matter with guilt (tho there is some form of accountability). These seem to be your own issues more than mine, which is not to say I don’t have issues, but why do you think I am trying to establish anyone’s guilt?
As for not adequately describing the toxic feminine, I think what’s being mapped here is not the toxic feminine per se but the effects on the male psyche, in this case Strieber’s, and my own. The mother’s accountability is not so much my concern, as the need to recognize distortion for what it is, and reach a clearer, less “polluted” expression of the masculine.
I’m glad you cleared that up but you seem to contradict yourself elsewhere when you write
“The crucifixion, writing, Leviathan, and the killing mother were all being linked together by the image of a bathtub !”.
Maybe that needs more “unpacking” ?
Rather than “assigning blame” – i’m pointing out recurring themes.
It seems to me if you’ve got a woman with a light emerging from her forehead, you have an obligation as a writer to explore that image, at least to the tune of a fraction of the ink you devote to Whitley’s psychosis or the toxic mother.
It feels like a clue, so why not follow it like Ariadne’s thread or at least give it lip service so we know you tried
…
“Nor is the toxic placenta an element of my writing, it comes from Lloyd de Mause” …
Okay, but it came up in a conversation with your sister a while back and is obviously a central concern of yours, even if you don’t use that phrase except in quoting de Mause.
All this describes your perceptions but there is also a world beyond this prison. There’s a point where a story takes a turn, foreground and background are reversed, the fixed self (along with its perceptions) shatters or dissolves, what was dark appears light and vice versa… and we (reader and writer) experience transcendence.
I’m saying this could be the moment. In that bathtub.
I don’t really recognize any obligations as a writer, save to represent whatever’s happening in my conscious and unconscious as honestly as I can. Maybe you are feeling your obligation as a reader to follow the clues that leap out or resonate for you and extrapolate your own meanings, and that pull manifests in a desire to get me to see something? But we can’t ever depend on other’s seeing something in order for us to know it’s there. So what does the battery-powered light in the woman’s head mean to you?
Writing is not a one-sided occupation. Obviously you’re the boss of your universe and we are eavesdropping but we are also participating here and can switch you off at any moment when we’ve had enough. Or we can switch on the lights, change the channel, go get something to eat, talk about something else and you’re helpless to control that. The fact that we keep coming back has to do with faith, or expectation that a reward is coming. Usually that involves a release from darkness or a sudden or gradual illumination. A woman in a bathtub with a light shining out of her head seems to prefigure that, no? It’s a surreal image from a dream, not some ordinary occurrence therefore it raises hope that a transformation is coming.
And since its a woman, and the feminine = Immanence we can assume this transformation is already here, awaiting recognition by the (masculine) viewer or dreamer. Or writer. Although he seems to be in a hurry to leap over her and get back to his monologue.
So from a writing pov, it’s like that rule of dramatic writing: if you introduce a gun in Act One it has to get fired by Act Three. And if the gun (or woman) is more than a prop, once it’s fired, nothing is the same. Original causes are brought into play and its the writer’s obligation to deliver the climax…
So to answer your question:
The battery powered light suggests stored energy, waiting to be used. The light suggests a solution that can be found in the darkness. The fact that it’s in her forehead suggests this is the “conscious feminine” – purified in the bathwater and ready to be deployed.
obligation
[ob-li-gey-shuh n]
noun
1.
something by which a person is bound or obliged to do certain things, and which arises out of a sense of duty or results from custom, law, etc.
2.
something that is done or is to be done for such reasons:
to fulfill one’s obligations.
3.
a binding promise, contract, sense of duty, etc.
4.
the act of binding or obliging oneself by a promise, contract, etc.
5.
Law.
an agreement enforceable by law, originally applied to promises under seal.
a document containing such an agreement.
a bond containing a penalty, with a condition annexed for payment of money, performance of covenants, etc.
6.
any bond, note, bill, certificate, or the like, as of a government or a corporation, serving as evidence of indebtedness.
7.
an indebtedness or amount of indebtedness.
None of this describes anything I feel or want to feel as a “writer.”
The fact that we keep coming back has to do with faith, or expectation that a reward is coming.
Why “we”? Why not “I’? I doubt if everyone reading this blog or listening to the podcast feels the same way you do. By using the royal “we” and talking about writer’s obligations and stuff (as a fellow writer), is it a way to avoid zeroing in on the subjectivity of your experience?
I’m not especially interested in the light inside the woman’s head (the battery part seems more significant to me) but I am interested in the fact that you are and seem to think I am obliged to be also (because you are); That’s what’s happening right now: the feminine asking ~ or is she demanding? ~ to be acknowledged as conscious, and not merely as toxic.
“That’s what’s happening right now: the feminine asking ~ or is she demanding? ~ to be acknowledged as conscious, and not merely as toxic.”
That’s what you’re experiencing: the feminine as toxic, unconscious and “demanding” to be acknowledged as “conscious” — but that’s not what’s happening. The feminine is conscious of (your) suffering but wants to bring in some light and play. Which you for some reason interpret as aggression.
You introduced her as bearing light, but you want her to be toxic. That’s called a choice.
Communication, being a reception as well as a transmission, isn’t only what is said but also what is heard. What I am receiving, that you aren’t aware of, is an unconscious load: those leaky batteries, and the artificial light they generate. This can go back & forth forever, like ping pong. The feminine is unconscious of her own suffering and wants to bring attention to it, and clumsily disguises toxins as light and aggression as play. There’s nothing “light” about it. If there were, there wouldn’t be the need to heavily assert it, or words like “obligation,” which is the inverse of play. But I wouldn’t call this a choice, since choice happens at a conscious level. Maybe there’s an element of choice in letting ourselves see rather than reacting in a big song & dance to cover it up….
Batteries are toxic with limited lifespan.
Light is ever expanding and lasts forever.
Obligations dont have to be binding. Limitations can be springboards to liberation. Tension is fundamental to creation.
I wonder who else here failed to notice that woman with the headlight?
I think these are mosrly projections, Jasun. I’d take back “obligation” and substitute writer’s “job” but i was thinking of “obligatory” in the sense of “inevitable” i.e when you introduce a subject/image/character there is a “need” to follow up.
When you initially took offense i should have just apologized and logged out. This same image of the lightbearing woman in the bathtub came up twice today – not just here — it seems to be some kind of archetype implying creative fusion of opposites. So that’s why I insisted on its significance in your chapter.
I found this line of argument confusing, because of that striking image which you introduce at the beginning, and connect to an apocalyptic theme of water-crucifixion-the beast Leviathan-woman..
I think its natural to expect that theme to go somewhere.– otherwise why bring it up? It appears as a possible antedote to the New Age/ NWO illusions spun by Strieber the fake father figure leading his followers deeper into trauma.
Correction: i found this CHAPTER (and its line of argument) confusing.
It’s strange to hear you say that “choices happen at a conscious level” – when so many choices obviously don’t.
I have just started an online arts degree and am astounded by the lefty feminist tropes constantly being shoved at me by the lecturers and other students .I have a similar mother to Jasun and presumably , Whitley and believe thats why i am here . Its posssible that this entire narrative is an exploration of the dark mother , which i will presumably move on from at some stage . I dont expect Jasun to rehape his personal expeeiences or expressions to satisfy my narratives , i wouldnt want to dictate anything he writes , he has no obligations to anyone here, i dont care which way his story turns , its up to him .By attempting to bully him in this way perhaps you are filling the role of dark mother , Anne ? . Neither the feminine nor the masculine is inherently or exclusively dark or light , but differing shades of both . This seems like an attampt to ramrod a highly politicised meme into the discourse , so bourgeois , so boring . You seem to be frustrated by Jasuns ” lack of progress “? , is he not pushing the conspiracy / mkultra side if things hard enough for you ? …
You seem to end up rocking backwards and forwards , reciting mantras , are you ok ?
Seems to me Jasun has plenty of “light feminine ” in his life , in the form of wife/ sister / niece , and you i thought , until this extraordinairy attack .
Like a lot of readers , we are all getting bored with Whitley ad nauseum , and there is a sense of rising frustration , and tension , to which you seem to have succumbed , but its an act of love to try to hold that while the transference plays out .
Hang in there , Anne , its performance art
@anndiamond) If it occurs at an unconscious level, how is it a choice? (Not saying it isn’t, just that it introduces a different meaning than what we usually assign to choice.)
I thought the Leviathan image went where it needed to go, hence I couldn’t respond to your citing of obligation. For me the chapter was complete. The argument in it relates to how, when there is toxicity of the womb ~ i.e., a lack of a true, healthy mother-attachment ~ mother-bondage or psychic enmeshment occurs, & the son is possessed by the mother’s unconscious (and vice versa?).
I wasn’t aware of taking offense, only of not agreeing with you. Is it one or the other? When the child rejects the mother’s version of reality, the mother may experience it as an offense, because until then agreement has been total and unconscious, the male child has been subject to the unconscious will of the mother (that tentacled Leviathan). By the same token, the male child begins to experience the mother’s thoughts and judgments as suffocating and oppressive, and simply disagreeing doesn’t feel sufficient for him to overcome her influence; from both sides, disagreement = a form of defiance. Neutrality is not possible.
I just reread all the comments and i really dont see how mine can be interpreted as aggressive or heavily politicized. I think i was asking for clarity and movement through dialogue.
I do get the sense i’ve wandered into a toxic womb that has failed to flush. Does the following really describe your world, too, kutamun? Is that why you are so attached to the “western.esoteric tradition” aka occult? Because no forgiveness is allowed in your universal trauma toilet? All the more reason to follow Whitley into the purple cloud and keep “Writing those Wrongs.”
Does this really describe your childhood?
[1] “Most early cultures believed in this beast as a dragon that was associated with watery caves or lakes; modern wars show the beast as a blood-sucking, many-headed enemy. This serpentine, poisonous monster I soon began calling the Poisonous Placenta, since it resembled what the actual placenta must have sometimes felt like to the growing fetus, particularly when the placenta fails in its primary tasks of cleansing the fetal blood of wastes and of replenishing its oxygen supply.” “Restaging Fetal Traumas in War and Social Violence,” by Lloyd deMause
The placenta has obviously failed some in here. Bummer. But this is not true everywhere and not for all time, i.e. some don’t share the same rage at the Mother, or your attachment to that rage. Which is not to deny the truth of rage but it’s subjective truth – it’s not the Whole. And therefore it’s a work in progress that seems to invite opposition.
Lets say “i had a toxic father” – which I did. Would i be justified in spinning a whole theory of consciousness around my memory of him handing me over to scientists who abused me and then erased my memory of the abuse?
At.some point wouldnt i have to summon my dead father and listen to his side in order to move forward? So that’s what I’ve done in fact. I wrote a book telling his untold story in order to understand and partly undo what happened, through which i came to realize he was unwitting. And I’m just assuming Jasun could do the same for his mother – enter into her consciousness and retell her life and in the process give birth to himself.
But maybe I’m naive.
“@anndiamond) If it occurs at an unconscious level, how is it a choice? (Not saying it isn’t, just that it introduces a different meaning than what we usually assign to choice.)”
We often make choices at a conscious level thinking we know what are choosing when in fact we’re just slipping into and repeating old unconscious patterns conditioned by emotional trauma that we can’t even remember let alone change.
It is rare that, in a discussion about writing, i find myself compared to a tentacled Leviathan and told that anything i might say that is not gushing praise will get me labeled a predatory beast. I also wasnt expecting you to shapeshift into a “male child” trapped in a life and death battle with his mum, or that just by opening my mouth i would be exposing rows and rows of teeth … i didnt even know i had all these stomachs filled with battery acid for dissolving the bones of men i have attacked. This is all new to me. I guess i’m not welcome here. Sorry. Wrong blog.
Everyone has their own knowledge base and experience here that is our own inescapable lens on “reality”. Some things are missing from Jasun’s story that would be helpful to know.
1) You indicated in a podcast here that you did not know you were autistic until after your wife told you were this too? Meaning, she has autism too, and you never knew this until you were 40 something years old and met your wife? Is this correct?
Podcast link is here: http://media.blubrry.com/liminalist/p/auticulture.com/podcasts/Miracle2.mp3
If you have another podcast or something written with more detail about your autism history, then it would be helpful to know more. Can you provide links or fill-in this missing information about you please.
2) It is still very unclear to me how you can connect whatever childhood traumas you experienced to whatever Strieber has experienced. What are the specific matching trauma connections you think you have with Strieber about this?
This will help me understand this chapter and many other chapters too. Thanks.
There are several podcasts in which I discuss autism inc. my own, such as the one with Alexandra Bal and with Ogla Bogdavich. The whole of Prisoner of Infinity, and then Occult Yorkshire, answers question 2. Also Seen & Not Seen. If there were short, easy answers then there’d be no need for the long hard investigation process. Nor is my story of special interest or offering up answers to anyone but myself; it is only a means for others to experience viscerally the process of self-examination and to go deeper thereby with their own journey, perhaps largely by seeing how it is safe to do so.
I’ve listened to those podcasts, but nothing was said about when your diagnosis of autism occurred? Was this diagnosis not known to you until you met your wife? When did you know that you had autism with some official diagnosis? Thanks.
The western esoteric tradition dating back to plato and the occult , which is a movement that begins from and runs parallel to our cultures most materialistic standpoint are two very different things …
Yes , that very accurately describes my personal experience of the mother .
Making her magically disappear by ” forgiving her ” is easier said than done . One must keep plunging in again and again to grapple with the squid until its integrated , Jasuns experience runs parallel to mine hence i find it an interesting exploration .
There is no ” one truth ” or ” whole truth ” for me to experience .
At best , this blog is a shard , or fragment , i dont recall Jasun ever stating its ” true everywhere and for all time ” , that would be simply naive , but what he wrote seems to have triggered you somehow , maybe you have more mummy issues than you realise ?
I dont see how it has triggered me. I’m not expressing extreme emotions, just asking fairly straightforward questions and looking for some balance in all the imagery of bloodshed, foetuses and war.
Definitely forgiving is easier said than done but what’s your alternative? Endless repetition of childhood scenes? Projecting the Dark Mother on every female you meet?
I see Jasun’s work as having the potential to reach a wide audience not just a circle of those who share the same trauma imprint. But that’s up to him.
I dont think its a simple binary choice between forgiving and not forgiving , there are several more alternatives , and this is just one chapter in his story , which is not for us to write . Jasun has a wife ,( i have a wife ), to carry the projections of light , and i think this narrative is a fairly safe container in which to ensconce the dark feminine who although integrated , is never annihiliated , she is now part of a legacy which must be carried , like luggage . Would we deny him this , and force him to start another blog under another name where he xan express her , diving ever deeper into the murky waters of the internet , a web by name and nature .
I agree with you its disturbing , but that is the beauty of our good Romantic friend Mr Horsley .
Cheers Anne , i enjoy the banter and no hard feelings , enjoy your thoughts
Dear Kutamun
Do wives really exist to carry “projections of light” ? That’s a new one on me. In my experience most women lug around men’s dark mother projections because they’re so powerful and unconscious and spill all over the place. A few have told me they don’t even see women as human, and they may be right. These are usually the men whose mothers have abused them.badly. I dont mind, because i like men but sometimes they get stuck in the placenta of their own fantasies and fears and then i can only step back and let them go at it. It doesnt affect me. It’s their world not mine.
I’m the type of woman that sometimes acts as a Muse which is a light-and-dark business by necessity. What i like about Jasun’s work is that he doesnt respect boundaries – he’s a very brave writer. I just don’t think this is his best chapter – it’s very clotted with quotations and congealed emotions. In my stupidity i thought i could unclot certain passages by inserting questions but that doesnt work with toxic placentas. I guess they just have to be hacked up and eaten.
Now that i’ve said that i feel a bit nauseated. But thats okay. Morning sickness.
I found the answers, and this is copied below for everyone’s benefit. If your family did not understand you had autism or how to help you with it, then I expect most of your trauma issues are rooted to this issue alone! I seriously doubt you have much in common with Strieber’s issues other than your obsession to identify with him [past and present] in some ways. Considering your history with Eastwood and Castaneda you should consider you have other autistic issues going on besides the theoretical traumas of Strieber’s issues that have no real relation to you, imo.
Have you gotten psychotherapy about these identity issues with someone very familiar with autism too??? Seriously, you should do this, imo.
You wrote in your movie book Seen and Unseen: “I was forty when I met my wife. She considers herself autistic, and early on she suggested that I might be too. I looked into Asperger’s syndrome and found I agreed with the “diagnosis.” Not only did it fit my current personality and nature but I found plenty of evidence for autism in my childhood behavior. I was a solitary child to a notable degree. I remember hardly anything from my first seven or so years, but I do know people often referred to how I would go off and be by myself all the time, and that I was seen as an unusually serious child who rarely smiled or laughed. I disliked being touched, or at least kissed, and it was a running joke how I would put my head down whenever anyone threatened to kiss me, offering them only the top of my head.”
” I suffered from what’s now called “depersonalization”: the feeling that I was unreal or trapped in a dream world/state (or movie?). A lack of a clear sense of self is typical of the autistic experience. I immersed myself in fantasy worlds such as reading comic books and drawing. I was extremely fussy about what I would eat. As a pre-adolescent I fantasized about being a robot with an on/off switch, as a way to deal with my insomnia. I was a compulsive nose-picker, and remain so to this day. While nosepicking isn’t considered an autistic characteristic per se, “stimming” is. I now think that nose-picking was (and is) a form of stimming for me, a way to feel more connected to my body. I was a day-dreamer. I lacked body awareness, and I had occasional shocking experiences of cognitive dissonance while looking at my body, as if looking down the wrong end of a telescope.”
You might consider your autistic condition was very traumatizing on your family too! Not knowing how to help you or understand your autism would certainly create a very traumatizing situation for all concerned.
HP: This kind of care-trolling is unacceptable. I imagine you mean well but I request you go away and spend some time (some considerable time) familiarizing yourself with my output before commenting any further. I have been working through my own past trauma and conditioning for three decades now, so you can keep yourself busy. You on the other hand discovered my work less than a month ago, yet you are already telling me what to write, who I am, what my problem is, what my family suffered, and what I need to do about it. Your insistence on imposing your will upon me and spray-painting your version of me and my work onto this space is inversely proportionate to your understanding of me or my output, which is extremely minimal, I would say almost non-existent. I don’t mean to be harsh, but comments like this your last leave me no choice, besides blocking you entirely, which I try never to do, because everyone we draw to us brings something of meaning, no matter how unconscious or even insincere they may be. Policing this space is no substitute for ensuring that self-examination is the rule, every step of the way. All of your comments suggest to me that this isn’t something you have much experience with, which only becomes my business when you make it so, by intruding into mine.
I have a difficult choice when this sort of invasive energy enters the blog-space, such as anndiamond’s recent comments, comments which, even before Kutuman spoke up, I was pretty sure were objectively objectionable (as Kut pointed out, I have a wife to keep me briefed on the feminine perspective). It is a difficult choice because such behaviors are usually wholly unconscious, which means there is no way to confront them directly. Unconsciously destructive behaviors generally amount to attempts to control and dominate others and make them conform to our own needs in order to feel safe. Examples are HP telling me to rewrite POI or see a therapist under the guise of being “helpful,” or AD telling me my focus is wrong and I have obligations as a writer while insisting she is only “asking straightforward questions,” and so on. Of course, I can draw my own boundaries by as simple an act as saying “no thanks” or just ignoring the “request” (really a command); but since this is a public space, there are others to think of who may be being negatively impacted by such displays, particularly when what is entering the space is the unconscious/destructive feminine (aggressively self-identifying as the opposite). Such readers who may be less experienced or embodied than Kutuman or myself may be quietly paling into cowed silence in the margins, at which point (as when I hear HP’s grotesquely ignorant remarks about autism) my responsibility becomes to say no in thunder, if possible without angering the inner/outer guardian further, by exposing it to too much light of awareness, in an unkind or overly forceful way.
This is not easy when, I freely admit, there is nothing that causes me more anxiety, or rage, than the unconscious-destructive feminine making irrational demands upon me. I am certainly triggered by these recent displays of unconscious & aggressive behavior & I don’t mind admitting that either. I imagine Kutuman and other men reading have been discombobulated too. If AD (in this case embodying the powerful feminine) is unable or unwilling to recognize her own participation in the trigger-fest and chooses (or “chooses”) to remain unconscious so as to keep the moral high ground and play the dominatrix a little longer, all the worse, since that means the space continues to feel unsafe for any wounded males still emerging, one step at a time, from the shadow of the dark mother.
All that leaves for us guyz is not to trust those feelings, and continue emerging anyway ~ which is very much what this space is for.
Hey, wait a minute
You blog about the Dark Feminine but get pissed off when she talks back? I’ve read this chapter 3 times and i still can’t understand what it’s about other than “disappearing into one’s own imagination.” Unlike much of your other writing, it’s hard find a logical thread, or structure on which to base comments. It seems to have emerged from your unconscious like a Leviathan and so i grabbed an image of the woman in the bathtub shining a light, but that seems to have triggered an outpouring of bile and resentment that’s unprecedented but maybe it’s part of the process too.
You’re projecting aggression onto me that I don’t feel. I’m trying to separate and get some perspective because, like Honey Pot, i’ve let myself get sucked in and now I’m on the receiving end of some quite dark projections. But you’re the Boss here. I’m just passing through.
I thought this book was almost finished but i’m starting to see it’s a vortex. Whitley is still an overpowering father figure overseeing a bloody sinkhole where everything is collapsing. I think that’s an accurate description of life on earth unless we find a bathtub (container, vessel) in which to process and purify our unconscious contents.
Which this is.
One final thing. Honey Pot asks “2) It is still very unclear to me how you can connect whatever childhood traumas you experienced to whatever Strieber has experienced. What are the specific matching trauma connections you think you have with Strieber about this?”
This question is imho the whole crux and may be unanswerable but I believe Jasun and think I know why he is so intertwined with Strieber. I think Strieber’s confusion is caused by an inability to access his most traumatic memories. I tried to share a story recently about the Jack-in-the-Box experiment which I believe my brother was in but couldn’t remember during his lifetime. I believe this experiment was extremely common therefore its not a stretch to think it happened to many, if not all, little boyz who were singled out as especially gifted. This is something i now want to write about.
There are certain experiences that are not accessible to us because they rip our psyches to shreds. So as boyz begin to repair themselves they need unconditional love, the kind that women are no longer capable of, if we ever were. Men keep asking for this kind of love and women keep asking for secure answers which shattered men can’t provide, so the abuse just perpetuates itself, getting worse as the wounds multiply.
So what’s needed is consciousness raising, and bathtubs where even the Jeffrey Dahmers can pour out their contents and not feel judged. And it’s unrealistic to expect that to happen on earth but it needs to. I hate to say it but we all have to raise our vibrations to Cloud 9 levels where we can process the horror we’ve been subjected to. And we need to help and support, not judge each other. And men and women both have to be honestly involved.
When men bleed, they need nurses not judges. I think some men are really just looking for a place to bleed in public, but they’re withholding a part of the truth that would trigger our compassion. They cant even share it with their own conscious mind and since their mothers are also unconscious, they blame their mothers or mother substitutes for not bringing in enough light.
We all switch roles parent-child roles constantly. I’m not downplaying mother-son abuse but the giant “Squid” strikes me as a possible screen memory. Based on what i know about my own brother, who was in the MKULTRA program as a small boy, i think the squid-mother sometimes covers over something the “fathers” did to the sons that they are unable to bring out of the unconscious because they risk shattering to pieces.
As a result of what happened to my brother (and our whole family) in the MK program, my mother’s immune system collapsed, turning her into an invalid at age 50. I think what she had lived through was the psychic eqiuvalent of a warzone. But since she was a strong, emotionally generous woman, she tried hard not to burden us with her suffering. In many ways she was a giant of endurance and love. So that’s what i try to retain of her — it’s been a lesson.
When i’m harsh it’s in imitation of my father, who was flawed but tried to do the right thing. Unfortunately what seems like the right thing isn’t always good for your children.
I don’t see any way to heal this other than for men and women to do it together. A father figure like Whitley who cant even remember his real trauma, is only repeating his program and as Jasun says, retraumatizing himself.
Quoting Jasun: “You on the other hand discovered my work less than a month ago, yet you are already telling me what to write, who I am, what my problem is, what my family suffered, and what I need to do about it. Your insistence on imposing your will upon me and spray-painting your version of me and my work onto this space is inversely proportionate to your understanding of me or my output, which is extremely minimal, I would say almost non-existent.”
I’ll respond to each allegation:
1) ” yet you are already telling me what to write, ”
I’ve only suggested you will need to rewrite part of Chapter 3 based on my analysis I have NOT posted yet in your chapter 3 comment section. That is a critique you invited me personally to make my opinions known as feedback for your book.
2) ” yet you are already telling me what my problem is, ”
Nowhere have I suggested what your problem is. Asking if you have gotten psychotherapy with a specialist in autism was a question. If not, then, yes, it’s just my opinion, I suggest you should consider doing it.
3) ” yet you are already telling me what my family suffered ”
No, I have not. I only know by listening to the two experts on autism you did podcasts with that it would be traumatic for all concerned to raise a child with autism not knowing this person is autistic. Autistic children will require special needs and care and understanding that is quite different than children without such conditions.
4) ” yet you are already telling me what I need to do about it ”
You personally invited me to come here and read your chapters, and, especially, you were asking for commentary and feedback too. Are you going to block my post to your Chapter 3 now? I have spent at least 40-60 hours listening to your podcasts and reading your material. I have NOT taken a casual or careless approach to understanding your 12 Chapters you’ve posted here. The only thing I’m suggesting you do is rewrite part of Chapter 3 in a post I have not made yet! Ok? If not, then you should not invite people to comment honestly about what you write.
At least allow me to make my post to your Chapter 3 comments section. Ok?
Could you please provide the links to your Occult Yorkshire history. Thanks. [Those chapters or articles are missing now.]
Also, fyi, some of your [graphic art] links have gone missing linking to several of your earlier chapters too.
You both need to take a break from this space for at least a couple of days, whether to self-examine or brood or simply put your attention somewhere besides me and this material. I have made myself clear in my last comment & have nothing to add to that.
As a new Canadian, I’m sure you can appreciate the US presidential election. I haven’t been paying much attention to it myself but I know Canadians can’t get enough of the US political game. As it appears now, Hillary Clinton will be the new president, the writing is on the wall. Trump is a distraction always has been. How does this relate to you and all the ‘wounded males’? Hillary is the all-encompassing bad MUM! Hillary and Angela Merkel are the answers to your prayers – to get answers to your inquiry about your childhood.
The Father Figures are no where to be found …..but you and the countless other ‘broken’ men will have to find their way through their Dark Mum pain. Anyway, we’re all just actors, part of some grand play, some of us play starring roles others just support actors. Hillary’s role is to be the medicine that will cure your ills. In a year’s (+/-) time, the pain will become unbearable but the light is showing the way.
The story of Odysseus wasn’t just about a broken man returning home but about the journey itself. And for the happily- ever-after story, even Eros was re-united with Psyche.
Enjoy the journey, Jasun. In the end, love is The Key/Communion.
I don’t follow elections but of course I’ve caught wind of Hilary’s ascent. I don’t see how she/they are the answer to my prayers or to anything else. The theater of electing a woman, like the theater of a “black” president seems more about cementing a delusion than anything, by showing how the more things change, etc.
It occurred to me that Ann may have thought the lady in the bathtub was Jasun’s dream? I hope so, because in that case I could understand the feeling that he had something resembling an obligation to unpack the symbol more… As it was someone else’s dream encountered in a book, it seems totally reasonable not to delve further than the coincidence of a bathtub (especially since the bathtub is in fact given a feminine attribution that’s not toxic (a womblike ‘safe space’))…
Disembodied letters are sharp. Aggressively abstract. It’s easy to lose control of a tone, especially when it’s ‘playful ribbing’ about serious subjects.
Honeypot and i have been banned for embodying the Dark Feminine on here. But it turns out HP is a man so now it’s down to me
I knew whose dream it was. I assumed it might be there in the opening paragraphs for more than just decoration.
In fact, what happened was this: i had just got off a plane and hadnt slept in 24 hours. And a friend was telling me about visiting a psychic and asking her about a “ghost” that hangs around his apartment. The ghost’s name is Joyce and was his girlfriend briefly before she died. And the psychic said: “Joyce wants you to remember her when you’re in the bath”… Joyce had a lot of unexpressed sexual energy, according to the psychic. So: bath plus stored energy.
As he said this i had Jasun’s blog open on my phone and my eye fell on the paragraph about the woman in the bath with the light shining from her head. Which seemed coincidental.
Soon after, i received a Skype message from some internet guru talking about women and how they radiate a rare form of light when they bathe.
So I took it for a surfacing archetype (3X in 24 hours) and possible solution to the Strieber riddle and Dark Mother complex. I dont understand what happened after that.
I’ve even heard that gazing on the Black Madonna is the cure for western civilization.
And so were the Eluesinian Mysteries http:// http://www.ancient.eu/article/32/
(So central to the western esoteric tradition that kutamon forgot to mention them)
@anndiamond
You misspelled “eleusinian”. It is spelled with an “eu” rather than “ue”. The “eu” was crucial to those forgottened mystery rites; I know that much. Without the memory of the “eu”, the eleusinian mysteries don’t mean much or, worse, those rites will be perceived as some sort of MK-Ultra psy-op. The consensus view of the eleusinian mysteries sees it those rites as a “mystery” because the consensus view doesn’t know much about “eu” (as the result of a MK-Ultra type of psy-op which has been ongoing for thousands of years, IMO).
That’s a pretty potent and precise little synchro-storm, especially since that dream is presented here in an explicitly synchronistic context. I would certainly want to get into it too… ((the batteries seem to be foreign and intrusive, hence her removing them despite the light, which could suggest something like the pseudo-visionary effects of a brain implant… and the papered windows seem perfectly appropriate to the theme of fixing a written screen-content over reality)) … I even tend to think I have some kind of an obligation to share synchronicities that involve someone else’s parallel synchro-processing, but instead of relating these interesting and relevant actual reasons why you were focused on this particular symbol, you projected some bullshit 🙂 I chafe at the phrase “objectively objectionable”, but I can’t disagree with it either, since it’s not a matter of degree, but of kind.
From there, you know, you were responding with caricatures, like the rows of teeth and such, which could be lighthearted but now you’re posting that you were banned! Come on, that’s a provocative exaggeration. The fact that Jasun didn’t so much ask you to take a time out but ordered you to is uncomfortable, but it’s entirely consistent with your compliment about personal boundaries, and I think justified.
Even if you’re not exactly wrong to think he overreacted unfairly relative to your established good intentions, in this specific context “overreaction” is probably wise policy, in terms of curating what aspires to be a safe space for unsafe topics.
There are other particular aspects of the current context that encourage a sort of ‘zero tolerance’ attitude as well, but the fact is that what was said about the meaning of the lady in the water had to do with his fundamental caution and commitment to some sort of cleanliness in exploring these minefields. So I don’t think it’s too hard to understand
now you’re posting that you were banned! Come on, that’s a provocative exaggeration.
& and a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s true that I am moderating ann’s comments & have held up the last one. I may feel differently in the morning. I suspect some of the more “feisty” commenters underestimate how much energy it takes to maintain a safe, civil space for discussion of these matters, & how difficult it is to keep an even keel once the mud starts flying. It’s true that AD’s explanation (the sync-storm) amounts to leavening circumstances for her outburst, & it would have gone very differently if she’d led with that and given it (the outburst) the proper personal context. But she didn’t do that, nor has she apologized or changed her tune since then. Her last post, the one I held up, is more of the same.
As a concession to ann, it’s true that her unruly, abrasive, & domineering energy (which Kutuman called bullying) is a close match for that of my late mother (also an aries with a tendency towards vitriolic explosions which she was blissfully oblivious to the effects of), hence my tolerance for it is … quite low. My challenge is not not to overreact, but not to react, at all.
One of the reasons I refused to engage with Honey-Pot was because, if s/he was posting in good faith, I didn’t see any way to do so without addressing his-her psychological issues, & I didn’t want to engage at that level. The same applies with anndiamond: I don’t feel like I’m being drawn into a fruitful discussion but a therapeutic engagement with already well-advanced transference (always a risk of being a public personality). And obviously, this isn’t the space for those sorts of one-to-one engagements.
I’m aware of the irony of people wanting to sling mud at me under the guise of psychoanalysis (so what I am saying can be dismissed) ~ since I can easily be accused of doing the same at this blog with Strieber. The difference is that I’m doing it on my own tuft and Strieber is free to ignore it for as long as he likes. I don’t have the same luxury if & when people decide to bring their issues to the comments section (get triggered by me or what I write or say). All I can do is request that they take some time to process whatever they are experiencing, and if the request is ignored, put them on hold indefinitely, & just hope it doesn’t make things worse.
It occurred to me that Ann may have thought the lady in the bathtub was Jasun’s dream? I hope so, because in that case I could understand the feeling that he had something resembling an obligation to unpack the symbol more… As it was someone else’s dream encountered in a book, it seems totally reasonable not to delve further than the coincidence of a bathtub (especially since the bathtub is in fact given a feminine attribution that’s not toxic (a womblike ‘safe space’))…
Disembodied letters are sharp. Aggressively abstract. It’s easy to lose control of a tone, especially when it’s ‘playful ribbing’ about serious subjects.
Yes, yes, & yes. I wondered about that too. When we are triggered by material, the first casualty is reasonable thought. POI carries a trigger warning at the start, but I haven’t been repeating it for each chapter. I figure people just know by now what they are getting into. Maybe I should rename the site “Trigger Warning”? Except that’s already a book by the rather naff (IMHO) Neil Gaiman.
Typos abound … i know how to ‘spell’ them without glasses
There is no editing function in these comment boxes but there is an unbroken mother-daughter line stretching back milennia
even the idiots who made mkultra cannot break those ancient links or enter that sacred space where Oedipus was taken, old and blind, by his daughter at the end of his life
Eleusis is an unquenchable spring
Yes, of course, I knew that you know how to spell “eleusis”. I just saw that “misspelling” as an opportunity to insert “eu” into the conversation seeing as how you came up recently in the “eu” thread that I’m currently working on at the Kubrickon forum (where I say that words with the “eu” letter combo are originally related to yew and the human-yew bond … like eugenics, euthanasia, eulogy, Europe, eleusinian , etc. , for example).
I guess you also mean “yew” as in “ewwww”?
What about euch and beurre? Or are you only concerned about English?
Eleusis is from the Greek where “u” is pronounced and written as a “v”
Therefore dont think the Greek ‘eu’ can have much to do with a “yew” tree but obviously this needs more study. I’m being polite (“evgeniki”)
Origin of yew
Middle English ew, from Old Englishīw; akin to Old High German īwa
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