by  Jonathan Zap © 2006

(The following derives from a discussion I had with Alex Grey in 2005.)

Alex (left) and Jonathan at Cosm in NYC

( The cover design comes from a pen and ink drawing I made when I was seventeen entitled, “Parasites.”)

Alex was in a loft in Boston where a colleague of Timothy Leary had given a bunch of people, most of them quite inexperienced, LSD.  Alex had also taken LSD. The social environment of Alex’s trip was extremely chaotic—-some people were laughing uncontrollably, some were vomiting, some were groping other people, and there was no one who was managing the chaos.  Alex began to have an out-of-body experience, found himself hovering above the weirdness of what was going on in the loft.  On some different plane he saw deities drinking from a pool of “electric milk ” a “ vast lake of timpani ,” of “ vibrating energy .”  Alex described the vision as follows:  ”I had a vision of the group soul of humanity as a perfectly circular pool of intense living light.  All around the rim of the milky pool were a complex variety of sexual rites, a metaphor for all social interaction. Translucent Hindu deities swooped over the group taking the excessive energy of the shimmering pool and passing through the group as ecstasy and pain. I saw that the reason we were all brought together was to provide a psychic energy feast for the Gods and Goddesses.  I saw my heart as the axis of karmic, earthly, and universal energies, transected by and uniting the polarities of male/female, birth/death, good/evil, and love/hate. To maintain a balance of forces we all fed both Deities and Demons.”

This visionary experience eventually became the masterpiece  Demons and Dieties Drinking from the Milky Pool.

( This painting is published in  Sacred Mirrors,  which is filled with extraordinary images and you can order it through alexgrey.com, Amazon, etc.)

The demons and deities were feeding from a pool of “vibratory energetic milk” created from human activities of all kinds, though Alex used sexual coupling to represent human activities in general. I suggested that that the couplings were “visual shorthand of human energetic transactions of all kinds” and Alex responded enthusiastically to that description.  Apparently, the deities were drinking from a vibratory pool of the energetic metabolism of the species so that through the pool they were drawing energy from the entire species.

A reductive way of describing Alex’s vision that just occurred to me is: a vision of the top of the food chain.  The painting, however, is much more than that, it is a revelation of the human form transcending the food chain.  Transcending does not mean removing or floating above something.  What you transcend is still present, and the transcendent state includes that which is transcended while new vistas of awareness are added.  Alex’s paintings are “forbidden seeing” —-revelations of what is hidden but that the species desperately needs to see.  Conventionally we see ourselves as the top of the food chain, but Demons and Deities… reveals this as a delusion convenient to those who harvest our energy.  Another realization about this painting is that it is a classic illustration of the alchemical principle of “as above, so bellow.”   We see the same range, if more polarized, of darkness and light amongst the dieties at the cardinal points of the mandala as we do in the human couplings that form the perimeter.  And there is the same range in the chaotic loft where some people were acting out dark compulsions while Alex was receiving a transcendent vision which would eventually become a revelatory gift to the collective.

Alex’s artistic decision to represent all human activities by a range of sexual couplings was no random choice.  Sexual chi is a potent energetic food to be harvested by human parasites and predators and possibly other types of parasites and predators. Orgasms can be viewed as energetic flowers blossoming in the collective human energy field.  The couplings are arranged in a kind of circular spectrum from loving couplings to atavistic, sadistic-looking couplings.  Benevolent entities appear to be feeding off the energy of the loving couplings and demonic entities, one of which looks like a devouring vagina, are feeding off of the degraded  (sex as a metaphor for power)  couplings. Orgasms, which are energetic eruptions into, and interpenetrations with the collective human field, vary from the ecstatic unions of loving soulmates to the sadistic ejaculations of rapists.  The couplings that Alex depicts in this image can be viewed as a circular spectrum of these possibilities oriented to the cardinal points of a mandala where there are also associated deities.

The background of Alex’s vision is also interesting and instructive.  He was in a chaotic boundary-dissolving experience mostly with people he didn’t know. Socially dense environments of strangers and substances mixing together are likely to default to lowest common denominator factors of social parasitism/sexual predation/ chaotic acting out of fragmented personalities—what I sometimes call a carnival of lost souls.  Everything depends on who are the particular people in a group that is having a boundary dissolving experience or ritual. Naïve people frequently forget this, think the ritual is what matters and take all comers, but this can be a disaster! Generally speaking, it is probably wise to avoid having boundary dissolving experiences (such as sex and hallucinogenic experiences) with people you don’t know and wouldn’t trust with your life, because very likely you are trusting them with your life.  There are, of course, exceptions to everything and a visionary as great as Alex Grey was able to rise above the experience and receive a powerful vision about human energy and the entities that harvest it. (Though I have a feeling he wouldn’t choose to be in another such chaotic situation.) Otherwise I caution people about doing things like going to a rave with a sketchy vibe redolent of  prowling sexual agendas and opening themselves to the toxic energy by taking a boundary-dissolving substance. Unless you want to internalize a carnival of lost souls it is probably not wise to blow yourself wide open in an setting of trance-inducing music/ lighting and stoned people, many of them on the prowl for parasitic sexual encounters.

The power of this image is that it shows those who harvest our energy and yet at the center of the image is the human empowerment that occurs as we awaken to the food chain as Alex did. The ancient Gnostics had similar visions and called the harvesting dieties the “Archons”    (see: A Gnostic View of Mind Parasites).  Notice how closely the scenario described below parallels a modern alien abuction experience.

(The following ancient Gnostic text is excerpted from the superb metahistory.org website here’s the link to the full article http://www.metahistory.org/GnosticCatechism.php)

From The First Apocalypse of James (NHC V, 3), a revelation dialogue in which an unnamed teacher (the “Lord” or “Master”) confers secret knowledge upon a Gnostic named James:

The Master said: James, behold, I shall reveal to you the path of your redemption. Whenever you are siezed and you undergo death-pangs (mortal fear), a multitude of Archons may turn on you, thinking they can capture you. And in particular, three of them will sieze you, those who pose as toll collectors. Not only do they demand toll, but they take away souls by theft.

Now, when you come under their power, one of them who is the overseer will say to you: “Who are you, and where are you from?”

You are then to say to him, “I am a child of humanity and I am from the Source.”

He will then say to you, “What sort of child are you, and to what Source do you belong?”

You are to say to him, “I am from the pre-existent Source, and I am the offspring of the Source.”

Then he will say to you, “Why were you sent out from the Source?”

Then you are to say to him, “I came from the Pre-existent One so that I might behold those of my kind and those who are alien.”

And he will say to you, “What are these alien beings?”

You are to say to him: “They are not entirely alien, for they are from the Fallen Sophia (Achamoth), the female divinity who produced them when she brought the human race down from the Source, the realm of the Pre-Existent One. So they are not entirely alien, but they are our kin. They are indeed so because she who is their matrix, Sophia Achamoth, is from the Source. At the same time they are alien because Sophia did not combine with her like in the Source (her divine male counterpart), when she produced them.”

When he also says to you, “Where will you go now?”

You are to say to him, “To the place when I came, the Source, there shall I return.” And if you respond in this manner, you will escape their attacks.

(NHC V, 3. 33 – 34: 1- 25. Translation from NHLE 1990, pp. 265-6 and Kurt Rudolf, Gnosis, p. 174-5.)

What I find amazing is that Alex, in creating this painting, has followed the instructions of the unnamed Gnostic teacher to perfection.  The image shows that which is human and alien.  It also shows that man is from the source and at the center.  This is the secret of our transcendence of the food chain according to the Gnostics.  The Archons are masters of deception who manipulate by encouraging us to give away our power to external saviors and authorities.  We become like the living dead when they succeed, like Tolkien’s ring wraiths—-withered obsessed beings forever craving but unable to reach “the precious” which could take the form of a an object or person of desire, or a fanatic ideology/fundamentalist religion that enslaves us to its version of salvation.  When they succeed we all become possessed suicide bombers hungry for death and the false hope of some version of the seventy-two virgins in paradise. The way out of this matrix is the recognition that we are of the source, of the source of nourishment, and an incompleteness is revealed in the Archons because they must depend on us for their derivative nourishment. Clearly Alex was brought out from the source to behold such things and share with us his revelations.

A way out of this bondage is the path of wholeness which is our birthright.  The principle of androgyny, the inner alchemical marriage of yin and yang, masculine and feminine, releases us from an enslaved relation to the matrix.  I have written about this in Casting Precious into the Cracks of Doom—–Androgyny, Alchemy, Evolution and the One Ring

Two of Alex’s paintings in his most recent book, Transfigurations, depict what seem to me a mind parasite attack and the human condition of bondage and mind insertion.  In the painting on the left entitled “Despair” we see a figure with his head down on a table being attacked by small entities equipped with stingers and insectile parts while inside the mouth of some larger deity. The points of attack seem to correspond to chakras.  In “Self Hate/ Endarkenment” we see humans held in shackles and an entity appears to be stinging the figure in the foreground in his third eye. To me it seems as if it is inserting its mind or will into this human victim.

© 2006 by Jonathan Zap

The phenomenon of “energy sappers,” of people who are energy drainers, is well known to many from real life experience.  The most insightful discussion of the subject I have to date encountered is in Breakthrough to Creativity, a wonderful book on parapsychology which was copyrighted in 1967 by Shafica Karagulla, MD. By an odd non coincidence, Dr. Karagulla was George Noory’s (of Coast -to-Coast AM fame) aunt.  Unfortunately, Dr. Karagulla’s life was cut short by a car accident and we lost a leading pioneer in parapsychological research.

The discussion of “energy sappers” is to be found in a chapter entitled, “Energy Fields Around Human Beings.”

Dr. Karagulla summarizes the testimony of “sensitives” she has investigated and found a consensus in their descriptions of classic human energy states.  For example, she notes that,

Sensitives observe that certain activities, ideas or experiences seem to increase the inflow of energy into the field of a given individual.  When an individual comes into the presence of a well-beloved person all three of his energy fields are intensely brightened. He appears to have more energy of a bright and scintillating quality in these fields.  This is very apparent in comparison with his usual energy field.  A purely physical sex emotion appears to “muddy’ the emotional field and dull the mental field.

Some people show a brightened energy field under the stimulus of interesting intellectual conversation.  In these cases it appears to be the mental field which first receives an inflow of energy and the effect spreads to the emotional and vital fields.  The fields of the individual can be observed as they change, often from a rather mediocre state of brightness to a vital and scintillating state.  This can happen very quickly with a highly intelligent person who responds with sensitive enthusiasm to the world of ideas.  Actually the person appears to those around him to become more vivacious and energetic. The sensitive is aware of what has happened in the energy fields around such an individual. The ordinary observer is simply aware of a new enthusiasm in the individual.

The sensitives observe, with people more identified with themselves as the “Emotional I” the emotional field seems to be the first entry point for energy.  Often the emotionally focused individual likes to stir up emotional scenes with those around him.  When he does this the sensitive observes a brightening of the emotional and vital fields with little observable effect on the mental field. Those involved in the emotional scene often appear depleted and seem to lose energy.  The individual creating the scene appears to achieve a sense of well-being and to be energized.

The same sources provided Dr. Karagulla with insights into energy sappers,

A number of the sensitives with whom I have worked have made repeated observations on individuals which we have come to designate as the “Sappers.”  There are certain people who do not seem to be able to pick up their own energy from the surrounding ocean of energy which the sensitives describe. They appear to take their energy “pre-digested” from the people in their immediate vicinity. The sensitives see and describe this process.  A number of the best sensitives with whom I have worked have given exactly similar descriptions.  After much psychological and psychiatric observation, I have discovered that those whom the sensitives and I have come to call “sappers” are practically always very self-centered individuals.

The sensitive describes the sappers as having closed in energy fields.  Such individuals may be totally unaware of their energy pull on other people. They may simply feel better when they are in the company of more vital people.  Any individual who remains in the vicinity of the sapper for too long begins to feel desperately exhausted for no reason that he can understand.  This baffles and bewilders him.  Eventually a deep instinct of self-preservation causes the victim of the sapper to feel an irresistible desire to get away.  He may attribute this to any one of a number of reasons. By the time this happens he is usually feeling an unreasoning irritation with the sapper.

As soon as the victim of the sapper has escaped and begins to feel better, he looks at his recent behavior as being rather unreasonable.  He blames himself for being irritable with no apparent cause…On the part of the victim this cycle of escape, self censure and return for another energy pull is repeated over and over again…

Some of these sappers pull energy from almost anyone in their vicinity.  Others seem to be able to pull energy more easily from only certain people.  The simply selfish person who wants things for himself or the attention of other people is not usually a sapper.  He may be exasperating for other reasons.  It is the self-centered person enclosed in his own orbit who lacks outgoingness to other people and the outside world.  He seems to shut off his contact with the ocean of energy around him.  Kay once referred to this type of individual as a psychological parasite, using the mental, emotional and vital energies of other people.

Dr. Karagulla asked the sensitives to carefully observe the energy bodies of those involved in sapping,

Further observations and experiments on this problem of the sapper gave some more detailed insight. Since this phenomenon produces a very definite effect on the physical energy, I asked the sensitives to observe the vortices of energy which they see in the energy or vital body.  It developed that the energy pull from a victim is usually via the weakest vortex.  An individual with a disturbed energy vortex at the heart area appears to lose energy by way of that particular vortex…

It developed that there are classic methods that sappers use to sap energy,

There are several methods, according to the sensitives, by which sappers may pull energy.  Some sappers appear to pull energy by using the voice.  The extremely self-centered person who is a compulsive talker pulls the energy of his victim, whose attention he has gained, simply by talking.  If the victim listens long enough his vital field and even his emotional and mental fields will begin to wilt, grow dull and show a general condition which to the sensitive means he is very exhausted.  The more exhausted he becomes the more difficult it is for him to exert the will force to escape.

Some sappers appear to use the eyes to pull energy.  They look with a quiet, steady, unbroken focus at their victim.  The victim gradually becomes tired, restless, has an unreasoning desire to escape, and may begin to be irritable.  When this type of sapper is part of a group the discomfort to any one victim is slight and his effect on the people present is therefore less apparent.

The sensitives also note that,

Those in an already weakened state always seem to be more distressed and easily drained by the sapper.

Two sensitives, independent of each other, provide similar detailed pictures of what’s happening energetically,

The sensitives describe a rather wide opening in the solar plexus area of the sapper in his vital field.  Around the edges of this opening streamers or tentacles appear to shoot out and hook into the field of an individual in close proximity.  The sapper often seems to have a desire to touch the person whom he is draining of energy or else to be as near as possible to him.  There is a whole group of sappers who drain other people in this way simply by being near them.  Those who drain their victims by the use of the voice or the eyes do not need to be in such close proximity.

Dr. Karagulla observes of the sappers,

A psychological evaluation of the sapper shows an individual who often speaks the language of altruism volubly.  He will often talk a great deal about his concern and kindly interest in friends and acquaintances who are his victims.  He will assure you that he would do anything for them, that they are wonderful people and they do him so much good.  It requires some careful observation to realize that the sapper is nearly always extremely self-centered. He probably does not realize this himself, and he may be completely unaware of what he actually does to other people around him.

Dr. Karagulla’s findings closely parallel my own observations.  Brad (not his real name) is the most consistent energy sapper I know. He will tend to gravitate toward the most high vitality persons in a social setting, stand or sit very close to them and make eye contact and initiate very mechanical conversation speaking in a monotone.  Typically he will intrude on a lively conversation others are having and derail it by asking the most obvious of questions, forcing the flow of energy in the conversation towards himself.  Intuitively, it becomes obvious that he is not really interested in the content of the conversation, but in redirecting it  energetically so that everyone is addressing him and his inane questions.

The last time I encountered Brad I was waiting on line at a coffee shop and he came up behind me, out of my field of view, and struck me on my back.  It felt like he was shocking my body/psyche/energy body out of a state of encapsulated, protected introversion and into a state where he could drain energy.  From the first time I encountered Brad he was overly friendly and consistently flatters me even though I typically greet him coolly, even coldly.  During the entire time I have known him (about ten years), I have always felt a very strong urge to escape every time he attempts to engage me in conversation.  I used to feel I was being needlessly brusque or rude, but now I realize I am responding to bodily intuition and am having an immunological aversion to him.

Parasitism is one of the most common relationships in nature.  According to National Geographic, parasites outnumber all other species on this planet four or five to one.  We should not be surprised to find human parasites.  An implication of my first hand account of an encounter with a vampire (see Mind Parasites, Energy Parasites and Vampires ), is that human parasites may be hosts to discarnate parasites which work through them.  For more on the larger context in which energy sapping occurs see the mind parasite  section of this website.  Go the audio player on the main page of this site to listen to my most comprehensive work on the subject, Mind Parasite Matrix.

Theory and Authentic First Hand Narratives of Encounters with Mind Parasites and Vampires

© 2006, Jonathan Zap   Revised 2008

Edited by Austin Iredale

( The cover design comes from a pen and ink drawing I made when I was seventeen entitled, “Parasites.”)

“Are you willing to look at the feeders?” And suddenly I wasn’t so sure if I was willing. I sensed the edge of the abyss, but I knew my life only allowed for one possible answer and I willed myself to say,

“Yes.”

“Then look down.”

I looked down and saw that which unraveled me for several long heartbeats before I was willing to let what my eyes scanned enter my mind. Attached to my body, coming from my body, through my body, was a broken lattice of dark filaments, undulating filaments like a broken spider web spun of black silk, moving chaotically like the tentacles of a sea anemone. (All of this is so hard to language because such a density of weirdness was presented all at once, and there were telepathic and intuitive overlays that made what I perceived all too apparent, while word based descriptions can only present fragmented slivers.)  And I knew that each of the filaments was a kind of nerve cell, shadowy black neurons with infinitely complex dendrites and interconnections with other threads of tissue. I must call it tissue because it was alive and intelligent and . . . parasitic, virulently parasitic: a vampiric web or neural net or brain, only the neural web was the vampire, and it was highly aware of me for I was its food source, its host, and it continually reconfigured itself to create networks, new interconnections to draw off more vital energy, and I felt the blackness of this shadow web, dendrites and axons of black spider silk moving and undulating, and also pulsating, but it was a weirdly horrifying inverse arterial pulsing, and suddenly I comprehended the horror of its pulsing rhythm, it was the antiheart beat of my heart beat. This pulsating lattice of tissue was a capillary suction pump, it beat in perfect counter rhythm to my heart beat because when my heart pumped blood out it sucked in, not blood, but vital energy, and for a moment it was not clear if I was merely tissue, an organ inside of its body, or if it was a parasitic tissue that surrounded my body. Something about the light absorbing blackness of the filaments made the tendrils of energy suction and also rendered them invisible to ordinary human eyesight. At certain nodes of the web, a nexus of dendrites formed a densely entangled concavity, a bulbous thicket of black nerve tissue, and inside these were pale worm-like parasites, and these worms had the pale, silvery luminosity of a hungry moon, a sterile moon whose only light was reflected from a host energy source on which it drew. These moon worms were part of a complex and delicately counterbalanced parasitic ecosystem, an ecosystem for which I was now the sole food source.

From Parallel Journeys

“The Sick Rose” by William Blake

O rose, thou art sick!

The invisible worm

That flies in the night,

In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

—William Blake from Songs of Innocence and Experience, Plate 37

“Mind Parasites” has a fanciful sound to it like the confabulation of an overwrought, paranoid imagination. The term was coined by British scholar of the occult Colin Wilson in his science fiction novel of ideas entitled  The Mind Parasites, written in 1967.  The novel is alternately fascinating and silly, spinning out of control with over-caffeinated egomania, and much of the “science” in the science fiction would seem absurd to anyone who didn’t sleep through their high school biology class. In fairness, Colin Wilson intentionally wrote the book in a hallucinatory, Lovecraftian mode, and HP Lovecraft is actually mentioned throughout the book as a visionary who, in the feverish depths of his imagination, tapped into secrets of the collective unconscious.

“Mind parasites” is such an obscure topic that if you google it you will find that an email I wrote on the subject a few years ago, A Mind Parasite Encounter in Dune , turns up in the top three or four hits. My intuition is that this seemingly obscure subject, hard for some to take seriously, is a glimpse, through a glass darkly, into one of the most powerful hidden movers behind human experience, and especially our long, tortured descent into history, the nightmare from which we are trying to awaken.

Recently, I happened to pick up a couple of books that brought this topic, once again, to the foreground of my attention. The first book is entitled  Eyewitness to History, and is edited by John Carey. It consists of eyewitness narrative accounts of historic moments, ranging chronologically from a plague in Athens in 430 BC to the fall of President Marcos in Manila, 1986. As I read some of these eyewitness accounts, I noticed that most were reports of the madness of warfare and genocide, culminating in horror with accounts of Nazi concentration camps, still in living memory. I couldn’t help but to notice how surreal, how over-the-top was the ghoulish grotesqueries of human evil. Putting down that book, I picked up another I’d been meaning to get to since the Seventies—Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s  The Gulag Archipelago —an appalling account of the Soviet forced labor camps, where throughout the Twentieth Century millions upon millions upon millions of completely innocent Russian citizens were arrested, tortured, and thrown into the most brutal captivity imaginable by their fellow Russian citizens. What was the reason for this barbarism? Much like the “reason” for World War One, no one can really say for sure. It may very well have been for the sheer ecstasy of inflecting terror and horrendous suffering. To this day, law enforcement officials are sometimes infected with this sadistic ecstasy. Solzhenitsyn documents the “imagination,” the fancifulness with which arrests and interrogations were often conducted on innocent citizens, so as to make the surreal horror that much more weird, terrifying, and bizarre. He also points out the strange, paralyzed passivity of the numerically superior victims who almost never resisted.

These readings caused me to reflect, once again, on whether there might not be an unknown constant in the extremity of human darkness, this surreal sadism exploding from purportedly the most intelligent species on the planet, the one apparently most capable of self-awareness and a developed moral sensibility.

The possibility of mind parasites is not merely off-the-wall speculation for me, because I’ve had real life experiences with these organisms and they have been reported in all cultures and in all human epochs. Of course, they haven’t always been called mind parasites. A better term might be “energy parasites,” but this is also not quite right because it is redundant. All parasites are energy parasites. “Etheric parasites” sounds too Theosophist, and has the ring of antique occultism. If anyone can suggest a better term, feel free to superimpose it over my nomenclature. Meanwhile, I’ll use “mind parasites” and “energy parasites” interchangeably.

The possibility of energy parasites should not require a huge, willing suspension of disbelief. Parasitism is one of the three most classic types of relationship in the organic world. The other two are predation and symbiosis—my favorite. Notice that these are all relationships of energetic transaction. Also notice that human beings, collectively, and individually, may be classified as all three. Certainly, as evidenced by our devouring the biosphere and bringing about mass extinctions, we have emerged as the ultimate predators and parasites on the planet.

Parasitology may sound like an obscure branch of biology, but it is actually central to the evolution of life. Many biologists now believe that sexual differentiation—the existence of separate genders that mate to propagate the species—had its origin as an adaptation to parasites. Parasites themselves evolve so quickly that in order for hosts to stay  ahead of them enough to survive they need the greater genetic novelty and innovation that is generated by sexual differentiation. This theory of coevolution has come to be known as the “Red Queen Hypothesis.”  C.M. Lively, a biologist at the University of Indiana writes:

At the top of the hill, the Red Queen begins to run, faster and faster. Alice runs after the Red Queen, but is further perplexed to find that neither one seems to be moving. When they stop running, they are in exactly the same place. Alice    remarks on this, to which the Red Queen responds: ‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.’ And so it may be with coevolution. Evolutionary change may be required to stay in the same place. Cessation of change may result in extinction.

You can read more mind-boggling information about parasites in a recent book entitled,  Parasite Rex , written by Carl Zimmer. By one of those strange twists of fate, my father was a parasitologist for the U.S. Air force during much of World War II.

In  Parasite Rex , examples are given of how much more sophisticated, evolved, and sinister parasites are than is generally known. Parasites have the ability, in some cases, to take over the will of a seemingly much more evolved animal. For example, there is a parasite that attacks a certain type of crab and eats up all nonessential soft tissue inside of it, but leaves the basics that allow locomotion—key muscles, the optic nerves, etc. It is then able to take over this partly hollowed out crab and use it almost like an Imperial Lieutenant in the Star Wars fantasy manipulating an Imperial Walker. Rabies is caused by a parasite, and it produces a particular sort of madness that will cause an infected mammal, even a human being, to want to bite or otherwise cause bloodshed with other mammals, thereby opening  an avenue of transmission for the parasite.

We know from biology that wherever we find life we find these classic relationships of parasitism, predation, and symbiosis. Not too long ago, not much more than three hundred years, our species was completely clueless about the microbiological realm. It was not until 1674 that a Danish shopkeeper  developed the first microscope capable of resolving protozoa. Surgeons would wash their hands after surgery, but not before. Imagine if anyone had claimed that there were these incredibly tiny animals, too small to be seen, that were major players in human destiny. Imagine if they claimed that there wasn’t just one kind, but a whole cryptozoology of millions of strange species, fantastically varied, of both plant and animal. Imagine if they further claimed that our bodies were actually made up of a cooperative colony of a hundred trillion such animals! Anybody making such fantastical claims would have been condemned to a lunatic asylum or burned at the stake.

Presently, in the West, we have a blind spot in our awareness as huge as the blind spot we had for most of our existence as a species of the microbiological realm. Unlike Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, and what would be common knowledge to any tribal Shaman, we are blind to organisms that exist on the energetic plane. Dr. Samuel Sagan is a medical doctor who has researched this subject and written a book entitled,  ENTITIES: Parasites of the Body of Energy (Read my review of this book: Energy Parasites—the Sagan View ) He’s part of a school in Australia that a friend of mine attended and spoke highly of, though I know next to nothing about it. In an excerpt available on the website clairvision.org, Dr. Sagan writes:

The topic is both old and new. Old, because in all traditions and folklores of the earth, one finds references to spirits and non-physical beings which can interfere with human beings. Thus Ayurveda, the traditional medicine of India, is divided into eight sections, one of which is entirely devoted to the study of bhutas, or entities, their influence on health and sanity, and the ways one can get rid of them. This places bhuta-vidya, or ‘science of entities’, on the same level as surgery or gynecology. If we look at traditional Chinese medicine, we find that in acupuncture, among the 361 points of the 14 main meridians, 17 have the word Kuei (disincarnate spirit) as part of their main or secondary name .

Call them spirits, incubi and the succubi, they have as many names as there are cultures and languages, but they have been widely recognized by everybody except us. Disincarnate organisms are far more generally recognized than the microbiological realm ever was until the invention of the microscope. And there isn’t just one type of course, but a fantastically varied crypto zoology of parasites, predators, and symbionts. Everywhere that we find life, we find endless variations on those classic energetic relationships—parasitism, predation, and symbiosis. As the alchemists put it, “As above, so below.” As it is on the mircrobiological plane, so it also is on the energetic plane.

If there are organisms on the energetic plane, we should expect to find many highly evolved species of parasites. And what every parasite is looking for is a host with a rich deposit of energy—like the warm-blooded mammals, which attract female mosquitoes that will use them to fertilize their eggs and complete their life cycle. What is the richest deposit of organic energy that we know of? This would have to be human psychic energy/sexual chi—the energy that dominates this planet. What types of human beings have the richest deposit of this energy? Adolescents, particularly male adolescents, have the greatest overabundance of sexual chi, and highly creative visionary types are thought to have the strongest psychic charge. Although the evidence is entirely anecdotal, these also seem to be the types most likely to experience mind parasite attacks.

From my work with dream interpretation, and as someone known to be a student of paranormal phenomena, I have listened to dreams and strange occurrences from people of all ages. A consistent trend is that it is usually adolescents, or adults recalling an adolescent episode, who tell me of the classic nighttime parasitic attacks. These attacks tend to be highly stereotyped and  entirely lacking, as far as I can tell, in psychological content. Should we discard all this human testimony because Western science is so far unable to satisfactorily explain it? We should always be wary when any area of human testimony is automatically discarded by a ruling collective.  How many generations, how many millennia, was the testimony of child abuse rejected by the collective?

Adolescents are the age segment of the population that generate the strongest excess of sexual chi, and are also the group most associated with parapsychological phenomenon. Poltergeist activity, for example, is usually associated with adolescents undergoing puberty in a household in which there is strong sexual repression. F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his first novel,  This Side of Paradise —written when he was barely out of adolescence himself—wrote that people were attracted to the young because they were giving off “calories of innocence.” Calories, as I’m sure you know, are a unit of energy, of heat. When someone is attractive we say they are “hot.” An interesting correlation I’ve noticed is that those most likely to report energetic attacks also tend to be especially good-looking. It is as if their dream body or energy body has an attractiveness that parallels their physical body.

(For more hidden aspects of appearance and body image disorders see The Glorified Body—- Metamorphosis of The Body and the Crisis Phase of Human Evolution )

One could also conjecture that these especially attractive individuals are more likely to experience attacks because of sexual attention or erotic fantasies generated by people whom they have attracted. Could autoerotic fantasies, highly energetically charged events culminating in orgasm, get loose and somehow be experienced by their target person during the boundary dissolution and heightened telepathy of dreaming? In her book on projection, Jung’s brilliant colleague, Marie Louise Von Franz,  points out that in traditional cultures, projection, like “the curse of the evil eye,” was depicted as an arrow or missile going out from the percipient to the target person and penetrating their energetic field. Any woman who has gotten the creeps while being cruised by sexually predatory men knows that this is not merely a metaphor. The effect of these sorts of sexually charged projections may also explain some of the madness of celebrities who become the targets of colossal amounts of projection.

Although I have no way of confirming or disproving this possibility, we do know from quantum mechanics that even on the subatomic plane, to observe a thing is to change a thing, so the highly charged sexual projections and autoerotic fantasies directed toward a person can be reasonably supposed to have an effect on them. For example, studies conducted by British biologist Rupert Sheldrake have confirmed that the eyes on the back of your head feeling of someone staring at you is a real effect confirmed by controlled experiments. But to take the next step and suggest that the heated attention of desire is a vector for energy parasite transmission, or even an origin of the parasites, is purely speculative at this point.

In addition to being speculative, it may also be rather dangerous, as a literal-minded person who has an erotic dream involving person X might falsely assume that person X is stalking them on the etheric plane. This assumption resulted in more than a few witch burnings in this country during Puritan times, when a sexually repressed man could have an erotic dream about Sarah Goodwife and this would be admitted into court as “spectral evidence” that she was a witch. Some of my fellow Jungians would also say that what I am calling mind parasites would be better described as autonomous complexes of the collective unconscious.  I would have to respectfully disagree with them, at least in many cases, because if these were autonomous complexes of the collective unconscious I would expect to see their occurrence embedded with more psychological content and associated mythological motifs, and usually this is not the case.

At the end of this essay on mind parasites I will offer some more speculations on the origin of mind parasites and the etiology of parasitic attack, but first I would like to ground the subject with some real life experiences. I will start with three cases I can report first hand—attacks I experienced myself.

Case History # 1 Vision in the High Desert

About seven years ago I was camping with friends near Taos, New Mexico. We had spent the previous night in a cave, and had planned to heighten our experience of the high desert during the daylight hours with a spirit medicine of the sort associated with dampness and the subterranean. Going for the heroic dose of what turned out to be especially potent medicine, I quickly realized that hiking the high desert in a social context was not where the ally wanted to take me, which was back to my tent and what Terrance McKenna recommends with such medicines—silent darkness. As soon as I shut my eyes, I was aware of an alternate dimension that was  vivid, complex, high resolution, fully realized, and alive.

I seemed to be looking into organic chambers that my intuition told me were organs of my body. One, I felt certain, was my heart, but seen on some plane of alchemical energy. The heart was a chamber with portal-like valves, and everything was woven of infinitely detailed filaments of living energy. Colors seemed to reveal secrets of the function of different structures. The heart was revealed as a complex nexus and alchemical transformer of cosmic energies, not merely a fluid pump. But suddenly there was a change as definite as the click of a switch being thrown. I felt that some malign force had become aware of my forbidden seeing, a breech in the inner eye was detected, and an immunological response, a sharply aimed attack, was launched at me. This attack successfully disrupted the forbidden seeing, but also provided another form of forbidden seeing, a revealed instance of mind parasites at work.

What I experienced was an attack that occurred with a definite periodicity. About every sixth heartbeat or so, a highly charged thought-form projectile, like a red diamond bullet, penetrated my psyche, and with explosive intensity it generated expanding concentric ripples of fear and disturbance. The languaging part of my mind registered this projectile with a contracted word phrase: CANCERKILLER CANCERKILLER CANCERKILLER. Accompanying the linguistic aspect would be a terrible image: a chicken lying at the bottom of cellar stairs with its throat cut, illuminated by a single hanging light bulb; an emaciated concentration camp victim lying passively while being slid into an oven; etc. These horrific images overpowered the forbidden alchemical view of bodily organs.

Since this attack, I have often wondered if certain other anxiety attacks weren’t generated more subliminally by the stinging injections of fear energy coming from mind parasites. A constant theme of the scanty literature about energy parasites is that they live off the energy of intense negative emotions and dark sexual desires. They have also been associated with (see clairvision.org )  cravings for certain foods, especially sugary or sweet foods. It seems as if mind parasites can feed off the red color temperature of hypercaloric metabolism, excess emotionality, and sexual excitement. They may not be able to feed off the bluer energy of the hypometabolic diet, what in Ayurveda would be called the sattvic diet, which emphasizes small portions, live foods, and carbohydrates with a low glycemic index. They are especially unable to feed off the bluer color temperature of heightened consciousness in a state of emotional equanimity.

Case History # 2 Encounter with a Vampire

I’m going to put in as much detail as I can recall of this strange encounter, excluding any details that might reveal the vampire’s identity. Each time I’ve reflected on the experience, I see new connections in some of the details and I want to give the reader a chance to make their own connections, to connect the dots themselves.

I first met my young friend Nicholas—a pseudonym, and yes, I still consider him a friend—when he was seventeen or eighteen years old while I was doing I Ching readings for people in a public place. The encounter related here would have occurred two years later, and Nicholas would have been nineteen or twenty.

In retrospect, Nicholas looks remarkably like an Ann Rice vampire. He was exceptionally good-looking in an androgynous way and everyone commented on this. More than anyone I’ve ever met in person, Nicholas looked like a living Japanimation or anime character. He had enormous eyes, very high cheekbones, straight hair—dyed various colors—and a very small nose and mouth. A serious martial arts student, he trained constantly, and was thin with very high muscle definition. His metabolism was so high that he ate enough for four people but had a body fat below 5%. This was a big problem for him because he had been abandoned by both parents, was always broke, and whatever money he did have had to go to the huge quantities of food he had to eat.

Also, much like an Ann Rice vampire, Nicholas was keenly intelligent and with an impressive array of talents. He had educated himself in a surprising number of areas for someone so young, and was well informed about the occult, Eastern philosophy, and psychology. And although he apparently came out of a horrible trailer-trash background, he was mannered, eloquent in speech, graceful in movement, and exotic in appearance. Some people instinctively mistrusted him, but to me he was unfailingly honest, thoughtful, and considerate. Of course, I have no doubt that he presented me with his very best side because he valued me as a mentor. Still, I want to acknowledge that his conduct toward me was exemplary, and he was, strange as it sounds, a completely innocent participant—as far as I’ve been able to tell—in the vampiric attack I experienced. This will become clearer later in the narrative.

On the evening of the encounter, I hadn’t spent time with Nicholas for at least a year, with the exception of once bumping into him and his girlfriend, Jessica—a pseudonym—at a local health food store. This was because I had been traveling and hadn’t been in the part of the country where they lived for over a year. After I returned from my travels, I ran into Jessica sitting at a table in a coffee shop. Also exotically beautiful, and racially unidentifiable, Jessica was a couple of years younger than Nicholas. Although her appearance hadn’t changed much, she seemed completely different than when I had first seen her over a year ago. A year before, she was someone with whom I would never have expected to have a conversation. She was extremely shy, or at least so inwardly shut up inside of herself that I never saw her relate to anyone, except in the most perfunctory way, besides Nicholas. Once she had complimented my artwork, but otherwise we scarcely exchanged a complete sentence, even though I saw her almost every day. And it wasn’t just me; in the past there had been this powerful keep-away aura surrounding her like a force field. But then on seeing her at the coffee shop, I noticed an amazing change, she made strong, friendly eye contact, greeted me like an old friend, and she seemed completely relaxed, open, and eager to talk. I was astonished. I’ve almost never seen such an extraordinary change in someone in a year’s time.

We had a great heart to heart talk, and  two or three more such conversations would take place over the next couple of weeks. Jessica was only about seventeen, but now had the poise of a much older woman, was highly intelligent, articulate, precociously wise, and her exotic beauty turned heads wherever she went. She acknowledged the profound change in herself and credited most of it to the influence of Nicholas. She explained that, with painstaking effort, patience, and insight, Nicholas had helped her to work her way out of her problems.

On the evening of the encounter, as part of a revelation of his own life story, Nicholas told me that Jessica had been brought up in a cult, and from the earliest age had been subjected to constant sexual abuse, had been raised to be a Kama Sutra trained sex slave.  When I first met Jessica, I felt she was a borderline personality type, a person with a fragmented center who seemed likely to remain that way. Given her horrendous past, this wasn’t surprising. But the improvement in her was little short of astounding.

Much of our conversation that day in the coffee shop was about her relationship with Nicholas. They had been together for three or four years, which at their age was practically a lifetime. A traumatic aspect of the relationship, for her, was that she wanted to be monogamous, but Nicholas insisted on an open relationship, and he had affairs with other young women. He was never dishonest about this, did all he could to ease her discomfort, and always related to her as his principle lover, but, nevertheless, it was traumatic for her.

In the last conversation I had with Jessica, she mentioned that some guy she had known in the past, who had been abroad, had returned to town and was madly in love with her. She was apparently considering having an affair with him, since she had always been the monogamous partner in this open relationship.

A few days later, it was a freezing cold night and I was hanging out in my RV when Nicholas called me on my cell phone. Although I had had several heart-to-heart talks with Jessica recently, I still hadn’t spent any time with Nicholas outside of the five minute run-in at the health food store. Jessica told me several times that she wanted me to spend time with Nicholas because it had helped him so much in the past, but we had conflicting schedules, and it hadn’t happened yet. Nicholas told me on the cell phone that he desperately needed to talk to me that evening, that Jessica was leaving him for this new guy and was going to live with him in another country. He was close by and I told him to come right over.

Soon Nicholas was sitting across from me in the back of my eighteen-foot RV, drinking yerba mate. Outside, the wind was howling, and it was one of the coldest nights of the year. The lighting in the RV was rather dim. It had been a gray, overcast day, and my solar panel hadn’t fully charged the deep-cycle batteries. With the propane furnace running, which uses an electric fan, electricity was low and I lit a couple of candles for more light. Nicholas looked quite stressed compared to how he looked just a couple of weeks before. His complexion was what Ann Rice would have called, “preternaturally pale,” and he was thinner, his face looking drawn, and his elfin Japanimation features seemed ready to morph into Edvard Munch’s  The Scream .

Naturally, the first thing we talked about was his relationship with Jessica. He reiterated some of the things that she had said about his successful efforts to help her, and told me about her abusive past. Although he had always insisted on an open relationship, and even though he knew it was hypocritical, now that the shoe was on the other foot, he felt terrible. She was spending the night with this guy right now. He might have been able to work through that, but now that she was suddenly leaving him to live with this guy in another country . . . He had come to view Jessica as family, and her leaving him now was a traumatic return of the feelings of abandonment he experienced with his parents.

We talked about this for some time. I gave him the best advice I could, and we did a couple of I Ching readings on the subject. After the readings, Nicholas told me that he was ready to change the subject, that he had spent the whole day talking to his closest friends about this traumatic breakup and he felt talked out on the subject.

Nicholas’s change of subject was rather unexpected and abrupt.

“I think I’m a vampire,” he said.

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“I feed off of other people’s energy.”

“ Everybody does to some extent, can you give me an example?”

“For example, you,” replied Nicholas. “From the first time I met you, I wanted to feed off of your energy.”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked.

“I’ve always wanted to learn as much as I could from you, to absorb your ideas, and there’s always been a sexual undercurrent to it.”

This last part surprised me, seemed to come from left field, otherwise his explanation didn’t sound particularly vampiric. I assumed he had the hunger of a narcissistic personality type, always wanting more attention, which was very understandable considering how unparented he had been.

This may sound too obvious to be stated, but it’s always a good idea to pay attention when someone tells you they are a vampire or evil.  Many years before someone warned me that they were evil, but I was too young and too busy being sympathetic to realize that I was getting a very serious warning from someone who was indeed evil but had a subordinate part of himself that possessed enough love for me to give me a heads up. This evil mutant  even told me about the exact moment in his life, at age sixteen, when he experienced “the death of his soul.” Foolishly, I ignored the warning and this resulted in a vampiric energetic attack with lasting consequences, among an array of other dark consequences. But this is an even more bizarre story that might take hundreds of pages to unravel. And if that wasn’t enough of a prior lesson, when I was ten years old I survived a still more dangerous and bizarre, nearly fatal, paraspsychological attack that resulted in a dog mauling and hundreds of stitches. The point is, I should have known better; I had been there before, been bitten before. A classic pitfall is that if you have survived weird darkness you may develop a fatal vanity that you know what you’re doing or that lightening won’t strike twice—an especially foolish notion if your last name is Zap.

It may be true that most evil entities and vampires don’t tell you what they are. They’re often too busy being deceptive—“the devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape”— and you have to be able to see through the guise, the enticing aura of glamour, beauty, and power. But a surprising number of vampires and evil types will tell you what they are, often just once, like a subtly placed calling card, and you’d better pay attention. Often people make the mistake of thinking this person’s just a punk trying to show off; if they really were evil, vampiric, etc. they wouldn’t admit it. But many times they are both showing off and they are evil or vampiric. And don’t forget that narcissistic punks can be evil or vampiric too. Another dangerous delusion is that if you are what I call a “mutant”—a self-transforming round peg off the accepted scale of normality—then other mutants must be your allies. As a mutant myself, I have had the blessing and privilege to be a magnet for other mutants, but I have sometimes forgotten that mutants are not just dangerous to the collective, they can also sometimes be dangerous to other mutants. This is especially true if you underestimate them, or are glamorized by their charisma into overlooking their shadow.

In Nicholas’s case he was not showing off, was not a punk—except sometimes in style of dress—and was not toying with me, not playing the game of leaving the calling card hidden in plain view. He was seeking help for an actual condition. Unfortunately, I was busy being sympathetic, rather than empathic, and absorbing what he was telling me psychologically rather than bioenergetically. We passed over the vampire part, and I failed to notice the significance that the life story he then narrated well into the night had begun with that one stark statement: “I think I’m a vampire.” The revelation came and went too quickly, and I failed to recognize its continued relevance to the life story that followed. But in just a few more hours I would be taking it very seriously indeed.

Nicholas told me that he had no memory of the first four years of his life—it was a complete blank. He was pretty sure this was because his father, who later abandoned him, had abused him. There wasn’t a trace of incest survivor self-pity or victim glamour, and his hunch seemed plausible. A classic symptom of the abuse, which he noticed about himself, was that he had been extremely promiscuous with members of both genders from a very early age. There was a great deal of violence in his childhood. His mother went through a series of abusive boyfriends who were also abusive to him. As a young child he witnessed a brutal murder right inside his trailer home. His mother abandoned him at an early age, and he had to make it on his own as a street kid in a big city.

Much of this was a surprise to me, because even though I knew Nicholas was separated from his parents, he had a rather polished manner, was so intelligent and well-educated, and was always stylishly groomed and dressed in surreal costumes of various sorts, from Gothic to futuristic punk to fantasy Renaissance Fair attire. Presently, he seemed more elf-like than vampiric. He was wearing some sort of elaborate, laced leather jerkin, a finely made Renaissance Fair item that looked like what Orlando Bloom wore as Legolas in the Tolkien films. He did not seem like someone from a violent, trailer-trash background, though I vaguely remembered then that he might have told me some of this a year before, but it never quite gelled in my mind because the detail was left out and it was so incongruous with the Nicholas I knew.

Nicholas’s life story didn’t have any feeling of fabrication about it, much of it depicted him in an unflattering light. He had been a victim of violence from the earliest age, but as he got older, and learned how to fight, he had also been quite violent himself, and with shame and anxiety he admitted that he had severely maimed one or more persons. He was a street kid living in a dangerous urban environment. For a while he lived with a man who was a major dealer of a designer drug in the rave world. Apparently he was this man’s companion, protégé, object of infatuation, bodyguard, and probably his lover. There was a certain park he went to in the city to have anonymous encounters with members of the same gender.

By the time I met him, Nicholas’s looks, intelligence and charisma—my observations, not his—had obviously opened doors for him, and he was able to make his way off the street and into more favorable circumstances, though he still lived close to the edge. But now, with the loss of Jessica, who lived in more affluent circumstances, a big part of his emotional and physical support system was falling away.

We talked well into the night, freezing wind howling outside the RV. Sometimes the gusts were strong enough to cause the fiberglass coach to roll slightly on its suspension, like a ship at sea. At some point, much earlier in the evening, Nicholas realized that he had missed the last bus to the town where he had a place to stay. He was used to staying in this town with Jessica, but obviously that wasn’t happening tonight. He asked if he could crash in my RV. Of course I said yes, my sleeping loft easily slept three, two with plenty of room to spare, and he didn’t seem to have any other option.

After recounting his life story, Nicholas said he was exhausted and looked it. I told him to take the far side of the sleeping loft, so I wouldn’t have to disturb him when I climbed up and took the near side. He lay down on the loft and seemed to instantly fall asleep. I followed sometime later. Usually I need less sleep than most people, and I am also a very, very light sleeper. This may be the result of years of training myself to wake up and recall my dreams. Often I have 100% recall, so I feel it’s a good trade off even though it is often a hardship for someone who travels as much as I do.  I also tend to be hyper-sensitive to human energies, and it is almost impossible, for example, for me to fall asleep or remain asleep in a dwelling where anyone else is awake. So I knew it would be tough for me to fall asleep so near to someone else’s energy field, and I wanted to make sure Nicholas was sound asleep before I even tried.

When I did go up on the loft, I took the extreme near side so as to have as much personal space as possible. After I lay there for some minutes waiting for sleep, Nicholas rolled over in such a way that three different parts of his body, his forehead, knees, and toes, were lightly touching my body as he lay in a fetal position. I didn’t want to wake him, so I just lay there and eventually I fell asleep.

Sometime in the middle of the night, an inner survival warning system jolted  me wide-awake in an instant. I’m not sure how to describe what followed because so many things were apparent simultaneously, but can’t be described simultaneously.  Describing one thing after another would seem to imply a chronological sequence, but the first several things were all apparent in the first heartbeat or two of awakeness; they were more like a simultaneous overlay of perceptions and realizations rather than a sequential cascade. Please keep this in mind as I relate the following.

I was awakened by one of the most shocking and intense things I have ever felt in a long life of shocking anomalous experiences. A massive, massive energy transfer was happening, primal life energy, chi, was pouring out of me and into Nicholas’s sleeping body, which was still lightly touching mine. I found myself paralyzed, and this paralysis seemed a more active, energetic version of ordinary sleep paralysis. I felt myself restrained with lashings of fiery energy, much the way Gulliver, in  Gulliver’s Travels , awoke to find that the tiny Lilliputians had restrained him with lashings of rope over his whole body.

There was a parasitic entity in the sleeping loft hovering just below the roof near our feet. It was like a dark lenticular cloud, or vortex, with a somewhat double-convex lens shape similar to the way a spiral galaxy looks from a great distance. My visual perception of it was not definite; it was dark and amorphous with fractal boundaries and rotating movement. I felt it energetically, a direct perception of it, and there may or may not have been an overlay of conventional, anatomical eyesight. I knew that this parasite was living in conjunction with Nicholas and was directing the massive, massive energy transfer while he slept. I felt that if this energy transfer were to continue for even three or four more heartbeats I couldn’t be sure if I would even be me anymore, if there would be anything left capable of resisting.

All of the above was a multilayered simultaneous realization. You may have experienced—I certainly have—that in life or death situations our psyche can step outside of slow, linear time thinking ego mode and go into an enhanced mode where profound layers of perception can unfold in a heart beat.

After this first heartbeat of recognition, there was a change in me, my will to resist emerged like a sword pulled from a sheath. In my mind a blue fire sparked, and instead of fear there was an intense curiosity and fascination; I had been studying mind parasites for years and now I was able to see how they actually worked!

With my mind fully awake, and my will activated to stop this vast, insidious suction of energy, the color temperature of my psychic energetic metabolism  switched from red to blue, an energy that is apparently  unnourishing, even dangerously toxic to parasites. The dark spiral cloud entity made a distinct sound at that point, and the only way I can language this sound—its meaning was instantly apparent—is to say that it was the sound of primal frustration of a very hungry animal that has been interrupted in the middle of feeding.

With my mind and will fully awakened, the parasitic cloud entity vanished like a puff of smoke, leaving not even a hazy residue. The energy transfer had already stopped and it was just Nicholas and I on the sleeping loft. All of this occurred in a space of less than six heartbeats, possibly as few as three or four, but it had indelibly etched itself on my memory.

Now perhaps you can make sense of my earlier statement that Nicholas seemed an innocent participant in the vampiric attack (as far as I can tell) Nicholas has never consciously acted to harm me in any way, unlike the other vampiric person who warned me he was evil. Even the attack did not appear to be harmful, because I had successfully resisted it. I didn’t feel drained the next day, or ill in anyway. Again, this was a dramatic contrast to the other vampiric attack, many years before, that left me ill for weeks afterwards. Months after I recovered from that illness, which much resembled giardia—a parasitic infection—the vampiric person called me on the phone from South Korea while I was in Manhattan, thousands of miles away, and within two minutes, before I hung up the phone, the illness returned!

Ultimately, the experience with Nicholas was a peak learning event revealing much about a very significant phenomenon. This does not mean that I encourage anyone to approach vampires to learn from them. Studying the dark side is one of the most classic ways to get sucked into the dark side, and that remains one of the most likely pitfalls for me.

Returning to my narrative, I stayed awake on the sleeping loft for some time, possibly the rest of the night, thinking about what happened and reinforcing the experience, both the conversation with Nicholas and the attack, into memory. I felt perfectly safe afterwards, though as an extra precaution I did an inner practice called “Theater of Memory,” which, among other virtues, is very effective in sealing and protecting energetic boundaries.

The following morning I told Nicholas what I had experienced and he seemed interested, but not the least surprised. He reminded me that he had told me the night before that he was a vampire, that he fed off of other people’s energy, and that he had always been attracted to mine. I could hardly accuse him of pulling the wool over my eyes. My tone was not accusatory or asking for apology, but one of fascination with what I had learned. We parted on good terms, though I have not seen Nicholas or Jessica ever since then.

There are many interesting details in this case study to comment on. The first that comes to mind is the paradoxical complexity of Nicholas as symbiont/host to a vampiric parasite and the many positive, even exemplary, things about him. Ann Rice’s vampires have much this same uneasy mixture of the admirable and the horrific. Nicholas had clearly had an astoundingly positive effect on Jessica, though he also suggested that his vampiric nature may have been unsatisfying to her erotically, and may be what caused her to seek fulfillment with another lover.

As an extremely attractive young male, Nicholas was a classic candidate for parasitic attack and infection. He may have been repeatedly raped as a small child, and was certainly highly promiscuous as an adolescent. Just as physical sex is now known as a great disease vector for microbiological parasites—as above, so bellow—it is also a likely vector for energetic parasites. Similarly, a voracious appetite for food, with an inability to put on weight, is sometimes a symptom of physical parasites, like tape worms; perhaps it is also a symptom of energy parasites that want to rev up the metabolic fires of their hosts. In the movie  The Matrix , Neo is derisively called “Coppertop,” a reference to Duracell batteries and a reminder to him that he exists to be used as a disposable energy source for parasitic machines.

The way Nicholas’s vampirism worked had remarkable parallels to the origin of vampires that eventually unfolds in Ann Rice’s  Vampire Chronicles. In her vampire cosmology, a spirit, a disembodied entity—spirits are often said to be jealous of those possessing physical bodies—who has an affinity for human blood, is able to merge with the bodies of an ancient King and Queen of Egypt through the apertures of bloody wounds opened in their bodies by the stabbing knives of assassins. The King, Queen, and the disincarnate spirit become bonded, merged symbionts, and a new species is created, neither flesh nor spirit: the vampires. Nicholas, a self-proclaimed vampire, seemed to be a symbiont/host of a disembodied parasitic entity.

Case History # 3 Witch Hunt on the Full Moon

My third first hand case history of mind parasite attack happened just two weeks after I wrote the first draft of this essay.  This brief account is a possible example of mind parasites taking over the susceptible and leading them to perpetrate an hysteria-driven persecution.  The people involved in this attack have turned out to be decent people who, apparently ashamed of their behavior that night, have gone out of their way to help me out since then, so the story has a happy ending. The fact that they are decent people makes this an even more likely attack of mind parasites inserting their minds or thought forms into susceptible psyches. This attack came at night, and when I was already in a somewhat vulnerable state of mind. It happened on the 13th of the month , the night of a full moon. Here’s my first person account written as an email the day after the attack:

“Last night something occurred that seemed like a Twilight Zone episode, or like being inside an overwritten Stephen King story or Shirley Jackson play. I’m sending this out because I think this incident has a general meaning with some implications for many of us.

Yesterday I returned to my campsite very late in the afternoon after spending most of the day in Ione. In the two or three days preceding, I had very pleasant experiences at this campground. I met a middle-aged couple that invited me to dinner and breakfast. I relocated to a better tent site at the edge of the campground, away from where there were families with noisy small children. The couple relocated for the same reason,  taking the spot right across from me. The next morning, shortly before I left for Ione, they packed up and left, and when I returned a family with noisy kids and a boom box had replaced them. I sat quietly reading at my site. As dark started to fall—this was the 13th, which was also the full moon—a second couple, an obese woman in her late-teens/early-twenties and a beanpole guy with a crew cut,  came up to the new family across from me, and I overheard bizarre sound bites of some dire warning being given, something about a ‘psychopathic guy . . . staring at all the children . . . writin’ weird symbols in his own excrement on the bathroom walls.’

The weirdly tomboyish matriarch of the new family said, ‘I’ve got knives and hatchet,’ pronouncing it ‘hetchit,’ as though it rhymed with ketchup. Then the obese/beanpole couple said, ‘Just give a holler if you need us.’ And the matriarch replied, ‘He better stay on his side of the road.’

Suddenly I realized, I’m the only one on the other side of the road, they must be talking about me! Inwardly I debated with myself about whether I am either being victimized by my own paranoid imagination or by some sort of actual redneck witch-hunt. Some anxious minutes passed by while I tried but was unable to resolve this or to think of any appropriate action. Then the obese/beanpole couple returned to the family. Dark had fallen by now, but in the flickering light of their fire pit I could see that the obese/beanpole couple and the family were all standing together, looking like a posse.

‘Where you from?’ the obese woman called out to me in a challenging tone.

‘Colorado.’ I respond. Suddenly the obese/beanpole couple was standing in front of me.

‘How come you been starin’ at all the kids?’ The kids in question were fat, inbred-looking redneck kids that probably no one, least of all me, had any interest or history of staring at.

‘What?! I haven’t been staring at any kids. I’ve been gone almost all day in Ione. I’ve only been over to that side of the campground once today to fill up my water bottle!’

A six or seven year old girl, with a Salem witch-trial glint in her eyes appeared from the shadows and said in an accusatory tone, ‘That’s right, I saw him comin’ right at me wit’ his was water bottle an’ he was starin’ right at me.’

Next, the obese woman claimed that she was the host of the campground—I later found out this was a complete lie—and said, ‘And somebody been making weird symbols on the bathroom walls with their own excrement!’

‘That’s weird and gross,’ I responded, ‘but it certainly wasn’t me!’

Later I recalled that there were a few random streaks of mud on the bathroom walls, which to the serial-killer movie/ TV news—’if it bleeds, it leads’—addled imagination of an IQ challenged amateur detective could only mean one thing: an evil serial killer making satanic symbols with his own excrement!

I tried to apply more reason and explain certain facts to them in a reasonable tone. Violent crime in this country has gone down by about 30% in the last ten years, but the reportage of such crimes in the same period has increased 600%, so that kids are so frightened of strangers that a random glance feels like a potential abduction, etc.  To this, the beanpole/obese couple seemed a bit swayed, but the weirdly tomboyish matriarch had a violently negative response to my reasonable approach, which might have been too intellectual for her.

‘He’s just tryin’ to use facts,’ she said. ‘I know people who are in prison for life who try to use facts.’

She spit out the word ‘facts’ as if it were a vile obscenity. The beanpole/obese couple walked off, but the matriarch, caught in some version of auto-echolalia, began repeating herself, emphasizing angrily the connection between those who use facts and lifelong convicts. When this tape ran out she took to a more hostile loop.

‘If he tries to touch any of my kids I’ll put this hetchit right through his heart!’ she said, holding said implement in her left hand. This tape repeated itself at length; in fact, I heard it as I was in my tent trying to fall asleep. Realizing that any more facts would just rile them up more, but also not about to pack up and leave in the middle of the night—a sure admission in their eyes that I was a serial killer—I had to spend my full moon thirteenth in a kind of horror story setting.”

There is, I believe, a more general meaning to this bizarre incident.  What I realized is that if you are what I call a mutant, an unusual person that doesn’t fit the mold, you are likely going to be the target of some very polarized projections. In the right social venue, some place where there is a concentration of fellow conscious mutants, I often get great recognition and positive attention from people. But over a lifetime, I have found that when dealing with square-peg types,  their unconscious immediately registers you as a mutant even if you are—as I am now—middle aged, with short hair, white skin, clean-shaven, and normally dressed. It is then that you become like a splinter in their mind they can’t get out. You are a subliminal shockwave threat to their unconscious equilibrium, and they have an immunological response to you; they want you out of the body politic, they want to burn the witch they sense in you. The USA has a bad history with witch-hunts and is now more fear driven than ever. So if you are a mutant, if you are living an alternative life that deviates from statistical norms in anyway, watch out! The lunatic majority doesn’t need a full moon to get medieval on your ass; they’re ready to do it all the time. So cloak yourself and be alert, the Babylon Matrix remains a very dangerous place.

The campground attack occurred during a full moon, and we all know there is some link between lunar and lunatic. The lunatic aspect may be related to the uncanny association of parasitic beings and the moon, which has also been noted by others. G. I. Gurdjieff described the moon this way, and frequently said that unconscious people were “food for the moon.” I’d known this fact since studying Gurdjieff in the Eighties, but also found it turning up in Colin Wilson’s  The Mind Parasites , where one character asks, “Do you know the work of the philosopher Gurdjieff? He always said that human beings were food for the moon. He compared the human race to a flock of sheep that are being fattened for the moon . . .” The moon has a certain physical analogy to parasites in that it does not have its own energy source or illumination, and only reflects the energy of the sun. That’s from our vantage, of course, since the earth is also dependent on the sun for energy. In my earliest visions of the parasites, I saw what I called “moon worms.” They had a pale, unearthly, baleful luminosity. In a novel of the American West, Cormac McCarthy’s  All the Pretty Horses, recently made into a major motion picture, the heroic protagonist, an adolescent male, in a moment glaringly incongruous with the style and content of the rest of the novel, looks up at the moon and wonders if there aren’t parasitic entities up there feeding off of human suffering.

More Dots on the Mind Parasite Map

I’m going to jump around a bit now, throw out some more dots on this nebulous map of unseen parasites, and give you a chance to connect the dots as you choose.

In the last chapter of Carlos Castaneda’s last book involving his supposed relationship with Don Juan, a chapter entitled “The Mud Shadows,” Don Juan takes Castaneda out into the desert and helps him to shift into the “second attention.” From the second attention, Castaneda can see what Don Juan calls “the flyers,” shadowy worm-like creatures that feed off of human energy and have the ability to insert their mind into the minds of average, susceptible people. The physical description of these flyers sounds remarkably like the “rods,” the very high-speed flying organisms that have been video taped by Jose Escamilla  (see roswellrods.com ). . Consider the poem by William Blake at the beginning of this essay: “The invisible worm/That flies through the night.”

Don Juan is not the only one to suggest that there might be parasites, as there are microbiologically, that have an ability to insert their mind or will into a host. In the novel,  The Mind Parasites , it is suggested that certain diabolic individuals like Hitler and Marquis De Sade—who encouraged the dark sexuality of the sort we see near the parasitic deities in Alex Grey’s painting  Demons and Dieties Drinking from the Milky Pool ( see: Alex Grey and the Mind Parasites ) are puppets, zombies who have been hollowed out by the parasites and are now entirely under their control. When Jung met Hitler he described him as “a psychic scarecrow,” and some very evil figures have been described as having blank, doll’s eyes, and are said to have been on a kind of automatic pilot, like mechanical puppets. When a psychologist asked one serial killer what he was thinking about when he stalked young women in preparation for torturing and killing them, he replied matter-of-factly: “Takin’ care of business.”

Here now is a long passage from  The Mind Parasites, excerpted to give you a feel for how Collin Wilson describes the mind parasite phenomenon:

In a few cases, the vampires have been able to completely take over a human mind and use it for their own purposes. For example, I am almost certain that De Sade was one of these ‘zombis’ whose brain was entirely in the control of the vampires. The blasphemy and stupidity of his work are not, as in many cases, evidence of demonic vitality, and the proof of it is that De Sade never matured in any way, although he lived to be 74. The sole purpose of his life work is to add to the mental confusion of the human race, deliberately to distort and pervert the truth about sex. As soon as I understood about the mind vampires, the history of the past two hundred years became absurdly clear. Until about 1780 . . . most art tended to be life enhancing, like the music of Hayden and Mozart. After the invasion of the mind vampires, this sunny optimism became almost impossible to the artist. The mind vampires always chose the most intelligent men as their instruments, because it is ultimately the intelligent men who have the greatest influence on the human race. Very few artists have been powerful enough to hurl them off, and such men have gained a new strength in doing so—Beethoven is clearly an example; Goethe another. And this explains why it is so important for the mind vampires to keep their presence unknown, to drain man’s lifeblood without his being aware of it. A man who defeats the mind vampires becomes doubly dangerous to them, for his forces of self-renewal have conquered. In such cases, the vampires probably attempt to destroy him in another way—by trying to influence other people against him

A couple of pages later, Wilson makes a very interesting speculation. He suggests that the parasites may seek out species that are on the brink of a quantum evolutionary leap, but that remain in the highly energetically charged, vulnerable position of not yet having emerged on the other side of that leap:

Now I suspect that these mind vampires specialize in finding races who have almost reached this point of evolution, who are on the brink of achieving a new power, and then feeding on them until they have destroyed them. It is not their actual intention to destroy—because once they have done this, they are forced to seek another host. Their intention is to feed for as long as possible on the tremendous energies generated by the evolutionary struggle. Their purpose, therefore, is to prevent man from discovering the worlds inside himself, to keep his attention directed outwards. I think there can be no possible doubt that the wars of the twentieth century are a deliberate contrivance of these vampires. Hitler, like De Sade, was almost certainly another of their ‘zombis’. A completely destructive world war would not serve their purposes, but continual minor skirmishes are admirable.

A few paragraphs later, Wilson states the intuition I had long before I read  The Mind Parasites —that the parasites, seen from a sufficiently encompassing evolutionary vantage, are revealed to be symbionts in that they challenge an evolving host to become far more conscious in order to shake off the threat. Frank Herbert, in his fourth Dune novel,  God Emperor of Dune, seems to have had a similar idea. The God Emperor who is following his “Golden Path”—apparently his personal revelation of an evolutionary Tao—makes himself into a supreme predator or parasite that dominates the human species for millennia. He does not enjoy being an oppressor, but is doing it purposefully so as to paradoxically create mutants who will be so resistant to oppression that they will able to lead their species out of bondage forever. In the I Ching, it is said that some things do not fully blossom or unfold unless they are fully compressed—or oppressed. Wilson writes:

I have another theory, which is so absurd that I hardly dare to mention it. This is that the mind vampires are, without intending it, the instruments of some higher force. They may, of course, succeed in destroying any race that becomes their host. But if, by any chance, the race should become aware of the danger, the result is bound to be the exact opposite of what is intended. One of the chief obstacles to human evolution is man’s boredom and ignorance, his tendency to drift and allow tomorrow to take care of itself. In a certain sense, this is perhaps a greater danger to evolution—or at least, a hindrance—than the vampires themselves. Once a race becomes aware of these vampires, the battle is already half won. Once man has a purpose and a belief, he is almost invincible. The vampires might serve, therefore, to inoculate man against his own indifference and laziness…

Elsewhere, Colin Wilson compares the insidious effects of the mind parasites to “radar jamming.” This is a metaphor or analog to their apparent ability to obfuscate, to generate confusion, wild dangerous rumor (as happened to me on the 13th) and otherwise make it hard for the host species to wake up. Mayan scholar John Major Jenkins and I had a dialogue very recently concerning the deceptive Dreamspell fad, and its obfuscation of authentic Mayan calendar and prophecy. (See Dialogue on Dreamspell ). Everyone has noticed that whenever a creative cultural trend tries to get started, any time a new scene, a new bohemia tries to get going, corrupt commercializers rush in to produce a degraded, counterfeit version that sucks all the life out of it. If a new visionary band appeared on the music scene they would probably be found advertising disposable Burger King cups by the end of the month. If a mutant is discovered they can be either repressed or imprisoned (like what the Feds did to Wilhelm Reich), or they can be promoted into a celebrity where they will be hollowed out by projections and parasitic temptations until they become a ‘zombis’ for the Matrix.

Potential mutants may be exactly the ones taken over by the mind parasites as Collin Wilson suggests. The school shooters, particularly the Columbine kids—Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold are all male adolescents, usually good looking. John Lee Malvo seems to be another one. Their terrifying actions seem very intelligently and precisely directed so as to create the richest harvest of fear and negative emotion in the collective.

We have said very little so far about the possible etiology or origin of the mind parasites. One intriguing theory of origin is presented by Dr. Samuel Sagan ( clairvision.org ). According to this theory, at the time of human death, there are denser, darker fragments of consciousness that remain behind after the spirit departs the body. Dr. Sagan believes that many traditional funeral practices, especially those involving cremation, were originally designed to destroy these fragments. These lingering incomplete fragments of consciousness do not have their own direct connection to pranic or life energy, but must parasitically attach themselves to those that do. This seems similar to the Buddhist concept of the “hungry ghost.” The Sanskrit word for this type of entity is “preta.” A Buddhist Glossary defines the term, Preta: “(Sanskrit) Hungry spirit, a non-human being who experiences intense suffering of hunger, thirst, heat and cold.” Wikipedia gives a multi cultural reference to Preta:

“A hungry ghost is a kind of ghost associated with hunger common to many religions.”

“In Judeo-Christian theology, for example, the Book of Enoch (an apocryphal book of the Bible whose complete version has only recently been discovered as a part of the Dead Sea Scrolls) describes the fall of the Watchers and the demons who might be the fallen angels (Watchers) themselves, or the offspring of the union of the Watchers and mankind. These creatures are said to wander the world in the form of evil spirits—endlessly yearning for food though they have no mouths to eat—endlessly thirsty though they cannot drink. Endlessly seeking these things from the living, the evil spirits seek to possess weak-willed men and women to dispossess their spirits and to take over their bodies so as to partake of food and drink. On the positive side, in Judaic tradition, the good but obviously thirsty spirit of Elijah, the prophet, visits every Jewish house during Passover to sample the wine. At every Passover Seder, a Jewish family will put out an extra glass of wine meant to satisfy Elijah.”

“In the Roman religion, hungry ghosts of a family’s ancestors figured in the festival of Lemuria; it was the duty of the pater familias to appease the larvæ of his ancestors with an offering of beans. The Balkan tradition of the vampire is another malevolent sort of undead revenant, a corpse supernaturally animated which seeks to feed on the blood of the living.”

“In Hindu tradition, much as described in the Book of Enoch, hungry ghosts are spirit-beings driven by the passionate objects of their desire. Very detailed information about ghosts is given in Garuda Purana.”

“The same understanding has Buddhism, where Hungry Ghosts (pretas) have their own realm in the Wheel of Life and are depicted as teardrop shaped with bloated stomachs and necks too thin to pass food such that attempting to eat is also incredibly painful. This is a metaphor for people futilely attempting to fulfill their illusory physical desires.”

“Hungry ghosts also appear in Chinese ancestor worship. Some Chinese believe that the ghosts of their ancestors return to their houses at a certain time of the year, hungry and ready to eat. A festival is held to honor the hungry ancestor ghosts and food and drink is put out to satisfy their needs.”

“When Buddhism entered China, it encountered stiff opposition from the Confucian adherents to ancestor worship. Under these pressures, ancestor worship was combined with the Hindu/Buddhist concept of the hungry ghost. Eventually, the Hungry Ghost Festival became an important part of Chinese Buddhist life.”

“In Japanese Buddhism, two such creatures exist: the gaki and the jikininki. Gaki are the spirits of jealous or greedy people who, as punishment for their mortal vices, have been cursed with an insatiable hunger for a particular substance or object. Traditionally, this is something repugnant or humiliating, such as human corpses or feces, though in more recent legends, it may be virtually anything, no matter how bizarre. Jikininki (“man-eating ghosts”) are the spirits of greedy, selfish or impious individuals who are cursed after death to seek out and eat human corpses. They do this at night, scavenging for newly dead bodies and food offerings left for the dead. They sometimes also loot the corpses they eat for valuables, which they use to bribe local officials to leave them in peace. Nevertheless, jikininki lament their condition and hate their repugnant cravings for dead human flesh.”

William Blake painted (circa 1819-20) the most powerful image I have seen of a hungry ghost.   It is entitled,   Ghost of a Flea .

Ghost of a Flea by William Blake   Tate Museum London, England,   tempera heightened with gold leaf on a mahogany panel

“This sinister creature with a man’s body and a devil’s head appeared to Blake during a séance at the house of his friend John Varley.”

“Blake claimed that, while he was sketching the flea, it had explained to him that fleas were inhabited by the souls of bloodthirsty men. These bloodthirsty men were confined to the bodies of small insects, because if they were the size of horses, they would drink so much blood that most of the country would be depopulated.”  —–From Tate Online

Related occult terms are “incubus” and “succubus.” Excerpted from Wikipedia:

“In Western medieval legend, an incubus (plural incubi; from Latin incubare, ‘to lie upon’) is a demon in male form supposed to lie upon sleepers, especially on women in order to have sexual intercourse with them. A female version was called a succubus. Sometimes incubi were said to conceive children with the women whom they raped; the most famous legend of such a case includes that of Merlin, the famous wizard from Arthurian legend.”

“In some legends, incubi and succubi were said not to be different genders of the same demonic ‘species,’ but the same demon able to change their sex; the idea being that a succubus would be able to sleep with a man and collect his semen, and then transform into an incubus and use that seed on women. Nevertheless their offspring were thought to be supernatural in many cases, even if the actual genetic material originally came from humans.”

There is a principle of logic known as Occam’s Razor, which may support Sagan’s theory somewhat. Occam’s Razor says that hypotheses are not multiplied without necessity. In other words, we don’t adopt fancy, complex explanations where simpler ones seem to suffice. If there are energy parasites—for many this is a big if—and since they seem to both understand and be perfectly adapted to feeding off of human energy, instead of suggesting a more exotic theory of origin, say extraterrestrial or interdimenisonal parasites hunting through the multiverse, we can simplify our hypothesis by having us, human beings, whom we know exist, as the source of the parasite. Colin Wilson suggests at one point that we might be the parasites in his novel. I made a similar suggestion during the discussion of projection.

Employing Occam’s Razor to cut away the fanciful altogether, it is also possible to describe mind parasites in terms of memes, or units of cultural transmission. When people tried to explain the actions of the Columbine kids in terms of their obsessive addiction to the video game  Doom, they were essentially relying on memes as the source of contagion. Although I think they were wrong, or at least wildly disproportionate, it can easily be demonstrated that memes are quite capable of functioning as mind parasites. For example, an adolescent male watching the endless blockbuster movies in which scenes of extreme violence are dovetailed with scenes that are sexually arousing—like James Bond making out with some exotic beauty moments after a glamorous blood bath, or, even worse, both violent and arousing, like the famous erotically charged shower/stabbing scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s  Psycho.  Other examples include the subliminal, and sometimes not so subliminal enticements in cigarette ads. These memes cross wires that should not be crossed—sex/violence, sex/cigarettes, sex/cars. Certainly in the cigarette ads it is the conscious intention of their designers to create a parasitical infection, a mind insertion meant to cause a virulent addiction that, in the shortened life of an average smoker, nets tobacco companies hundreds of thousands of dollars. Using subliminals and sexually arousing images to sell known toxins should be outlawed to close at least one mind parasite vector. A psychologist I saw on a panel discussion wisely suggested that there be a cooling off period between sexually arousing scenes and violent scenes in movies, so that we stop conditioning adolescent males to perceive violence as sexy. However, I don’t advocate anything but voluntary self-censorship.

To demonstrate how memes can act as functional mind parasites, we can get even simpler and give an example of a single sentence—another cultural unit of transmission—acting to spread soul-consuming mind parasites.

Let’s say we have an adolescent male who has many good, compassionate qualities. He forms an attachment to an adolescent girl, and there is a genuine bond; he truly cares for her. The adolescent is genuinely traumatized and extremely vulnerable when he discovers that, in typical high school fashion, the girlfriend has cheated on him. He goes to his best friend for sympathetic council and his friend utters a single definitive sentence: “That’s just the way they are, so fuck ‘em and forget ‘em!” In the painful confusion of adolescent eros, a single sentence like this, delivered from the right person and at the right moment, could be potently influential and seem like an empowered antidote to the pain and confusion. If the adolescent male adopts this soul-destroying mind parasite, transmitted in a single sentence meme, he may then spend a lifetime infecting others with the contagion.

Finally, in dealing with an important but nebulous phenomenon such as energy parasites or UFOs, the strategy I follow and recommend to others is to avoid formatory thinking or premature closure. This is the lazy mental habit of thinking you’ve got the answer and letting that notion harden into a perceptual dogma making you a true believer of a pet theory. Prematurely closed ideas create an enormous constraint on your observational powers, influencing you to corral the evidence to fit your theory.

I regard my thoughts about mind parasites to be speculative, and I will be thrilled to find an explanation for what I have observed that turns my thinking on its head with some new insight.

Dealing with a Mind Parasite Attack

If you feel under attack, one possible remedy is to try a mostly raw foods diet  Eliminating all stimulants, intoxicants, and outsized portions from your diet can also be beneficial. If that dietary shift is too extreme, at the very least eliminate alcohol, refined carbohydrates, coffee, meat, fried food, and overly processed food. Shift your metabolism and the feeding will likely stop. I also recommend using the techniques for dealing with negative thoughts and emotions described in my Guide to the Perplexed Interdimensional Traveler available. Check back as this document will be updated as I learn more about this phenomenon. My most thorough treatment of the subject is the free 8 hour streaming audio: Mind Parasite Matrix. For more discussion of mind parasites and the dynamic evolutionary context in which they are happening see the two DVD set (now available free in media section I did with Mayan scholar John Major Jenkins (produced by Lost Arts Media),  Dialogues on Prophecy and the End of Time and  Looking Toward the Event Horizon) If you have any mind parasite experiences you are willing to share, please email me: jonathanzap@hotmail.com

I have other writings related to mind parasites:

A Gnostic View Of Mind Parasites

A Mind Parasite  Encounter in Dune

Vision at Chichén Itzá

Alex Grey and Mind Parasites

Energy Sappers

Mind Parasites—the Sagan View

The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts

I believe that an awakening to the reality of mind parasites may be a key aspect to the next evolutionary phase and a new cycle of time.  To place this phenomenon in an evolutionary context I would also recommend reading:

Looking Toward the Event Horizon—-the Singularity Archetype and the Evolutionary Metamorphosis of the Human Species

The Mutant Versus the Machine and the Galactic Alignment of 2012

The Glorified Body—Metamorphosis of The Body and the Crisis Phase of Human Evolution

© Copyright 2004, 2009 by Jonathan Zap

Edited by Austin Iredale

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Disclaimer: Notice the title of this piece is “Vision at Chichén Itzá,” not “Vision about Chichén Itzá.” I make no claim here, as in absolutely no claim, that what I experienced at Chichén Itzá is a revelation of anything about the ancient or modern Mayan people or culture. What follows are a few highlights of my recent trip to Mexico, including a visionary experience at Chichén Itzá.

Tulum, Mexico: September 25, 2004

Yesterday was a blur of travel—all the papers that needed stamping, the waiting in lines, the identity and security checks, the bureaucracy, the seatbelted claustrophobia of confinement to an airborne plastic tube where I breathed recycled air and ate pretzels out of bags of gold mylar, the hurrying through a layover at George Bush Airport in Houston, more pretzels, papers, identity and security checks, another airborne tube, waiting in line to exchange money, filling out papers at the car rental place. Then, suddenly, all that paperwork, bureaucracy, and canned air had somehow resulted in our being in the tropics; we were stepping out of the airport in Cancun, catching the tail end of a magnificent tropical sunset. The humidity in the air was rainforest musk, and birds were singing songs of exaggerated parrot colors in the trees, singing more than I expect birds to sing at sunset.

We loaded our belongings and our selves into a traditional Mayan conveyance, a Caravan, actually a Daimler/Chrysler Voyager, silver, slope-nosed, futuristic-retro-art-deco, a German-American attempt to give a minivan the Weimar Republic art deco feeling of say the first class smoking lounge of the Hindenberg.

With the Hindenberg cocooning us in air conditioning and grey velour upholstery, we blasted down a rain swept highway as heat lightening, then lightening-lightening, lit the sky with flashes of color. It was tropical lightening, which had more color than regular lightening. Everything seemed to have more color than expected, even at night, an extra color effect that seemed feral, possibly illegal in some way, even florescent lit stores were painted in the pastel colors of sidewalk chalk.

At Tulum we stopped and found a hotel which seemed this rainy evening to be far more popular with insects and geckos than people. Many more geckos than gringos, I noticed, and the geckos seemed to have a snobbish dislike of anything horizontal. They had no patience for us slower, less sticky-footed mortals and pale-skinned hominids, and seemed always to be scurrying across the pasteled stucco walls.

Every detail of the hotel insisted on its Third-World otherness. Room keys pulled from a chaotic jumble on a dusty shelf, thousands of details in hilarious contrast to the corporate franchise hotel code of sterile cleanliness and extreme regularity. This was more like my Westernized concept of a hotel reimagined under the influence of tequila and peyote in a parallel universe where geckos ruled the hotel world, not cleaning solvents and deodorizers.

After securing our rooms, we walked down the main drag of Tulum. The storefronts evoked the bodegas of my native Bronx, and if I squinted hard enough I could almost dupe myself into believing I was back on the streets of my childhood. But those were transplanted New York Hispanic places, and these were tropical Hispanic shops, razor wire and metal shutters replaced by pastel colors and life spilling out onto the street, life that seemed unencumbered by rules and anxieties.

Every cell in my body felt the massive, massive drop in neurotic tension, a tension that’s hard to notice in the States, just as it’s hard for a fish to notice water, but the absence of it was almost hallucinatory, a level of naturalness and relaxed participation in life that was refreshingly new and invigorating. And yet the profusion of unrepressed life felt almost illegal, a flaunting of aliveness that seemed like a dangerous provocation of right wing Christian Fundamentalist Republican police forces of some sort which might come racing across the border to bring it under adult supervision.

But at the moment, that didn’t seem to be happening. There seemed to be a surprising amount of unsupervised Mexicans in Mexico, as well as a surprising and delightful lack of U.S. Government officials. Were they for us or against us? Kind of hard to tell. I could have relaxed into this uncertainty more except that I felt that this abundance of unsupervised life must be tempting some sort of preemptive response from the Bush administration. But for some reason, no preemption or supervision seemed to be crashing the party. Maybe the U.S. was so tied up with Afghanistan and Iraq that it had no resources left over to deal with all the shocking profusion of uncontrolled Mexicans in Mexico.

An equatorial sun lighted the next morning, and the reality of Mexico seemed more substantial. Jet travel, which gives you no sensory impact of intervening distance, is so disorienting, you sit in a plastic tube for a few hours, eat a few pretzels, hang out in a completely corporate-controlled canned air environment, the CEO of Continental airlines on a six inch LCD monitor telling you how much the Continental Airlines family welcomes you on board and all that, and suddenly you are in a massively, massively different place—-different air, language, money, smell, taste, sunlight, humidity, and it takes a while for your reality testing to catch up, to realize that the Mexicans were no longer the illegal aliens, now we were the aliens, aliens washing up on the shore of Planet Mexico.

Toast and coffee grounded me to the mundanity of a nutritionally bankrupt breakfast as John related an interesting dream where he was haunted by a mute little Mexican girl who appeared to have Downs Syndrome. She seemed to be from the realm of the previously living and was the latest in a series of parallel dreams that John had experienced during other trips south of the border since the Eighties. As we explored the dream, the breakfast table became increasingly littered with toast crumbs, coffee cups, and Mexican coins, all lit by an orangey-yellow tropical sun. The table seemed like a Mexican collage and I took a picture of it.

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After breakfast we bought limes, snack foods, and many gallons of Electro-Pura brand bottled water. Then we boarded the Hindenberg and drove a short distance to the ruins at Tulum.

This might be a good time to tell you about my three traveling companions. John Jenkins and Sean Moffitt I had both known for almost ten years, had met both of them in 1996, a few months after moving to Boulder. I met John through the late Terence McKenna who was in Boulder for a few days in May of 1996. (see A Mutant Convergence—-How John Major Jenkins, Jonathan Zap and Terence McKenna Met During a Weekend of High Strangeness in 1996 )

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John Major Jenkins

Terence’s theories have parallels to my work and different parallels to John’s research into the ancient Maya. Both Sean and I worked for Greenpeace and later the Prairie Wind Animal Refuge and Colorado Wilderness Experience.

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Sean

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Jim

Jim Reed I had never met before. He looked like a cousin of Antonio Banderas, had been John’s traveling companion in earlier Mayan adventures, and had prepared an incredibly detailed and efficient itinerary for us. After the first day or so I began to realize that everyone except me was an intensely qualified guide, and that I was quite possibly the most well guided person to ever travel to Mayan ruins. John had published ten books related to the Maya, and had revolutionary insights into their cosmology. Jim was the President of the Institute of Mayan Studies in Miami, fluent in Spanish, had spent ten years south of the border, and had the social skills, charm and connections to talk his way into and out of almost any situation.

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John and Jim

Sean was about as ignorant of Spanish and Mayan studies as I was, but he is a world class naturalist and tracker, and although inexperienced with tropical flora and fauna, was able to notice and point out all sorts of fascinating things happening in our natural environment which might otherwise have been missed.

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Sean

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Jonathan

As the four of us hiked into Tulum, I began to realize the vast amount of Mayan ruins, much of it mounds of stone in the jungle that no one had gotten around to digging out. What we saw was just a few ruined highlights of what had been thousands and thousands of square miles of ancient civilization.

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Unexcavated Mayan Pyramid

Tulum was set in tropical paradise, blue Caribbean water and sandy beaches bordered by coconut trees. Iguanas sunned themselves on stone columns and blocks of stones still bearing Mayan glyphs.

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We swam in the warm tropical ocean, and when we looked back toward shore the Mayan ruins rose out of the jungle all around us.

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John

The tourists that were there were mostly Spanish speaking and didn’t seem to violate the setting the way some American tourists do. One American tourist I did see was a man in his early thirties, and a certain narcissistic assertion about his every mannerism and dress, which would scarcely have been noticeable stateside, stood out here in sharp relief, his egoism sounding in waves of brassy percussion a dissonant note in the tropical air.

There was too much to experience for me to journalize most of it. What I am presenting here are a few tiles in a giant mosaic of impressions.

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A few days later we worked our way across the plaza of Edzna, a Mayan site that had been occupied since 400 BC, but abandoned by 1500 AD. The thermometer I had with me registered a temperature of 105 degrees Fahrenheit (40 Centigrade) after sitting in the shade for ten minutes. 100% does not seem like a sufficient superlative to describe the humidity. Is it possible for humidity to be more than 100% without actually being underwater? Mosquitoes were constantly extracting a blood sacrifice, and Jim told me that according to Mayan mythology the mosquitoes had done a service for Hunahpu and Xbalanque in the underworld and that entitled them to feed on our blood. “But what have they done for us lately?” I wanted to know.

In the evenings, John and I would sit in the public squares of various towns we stayed in. People were always about in these squares, hanging out, kids kicking soccer balls, couples, families, an intensity of civic life that seemed very other. It seemed like no one had taught these people that they were supposed to be home watching DVDs and congregating online.

Some towns seemed much happier than others, and in certain parts of the country everyone seemed depressed, sullen, lethargic. Everywhere we traveled we got intense stares and it was a chance for me to feel the energetic effects of raw projection. In Boulder I might get the occasional projection of someone picking up something faintly weird about me, an obsessed looking character with an extremely weathered and mutated camera bag, but here I was apparently seen not as a mutant but as an icon of wealth and privilege, and many eyes flashed with volatile mixtures of curiosity, resentment, envy, longing, and anger. No one I encountered seemed to carry the genius of the ancient Maya. I wanted to see a Mayan shaman with a thousand year stare contemplating galactic alignment, but everyone I met seemed more caught up in the life of 2004 Mexico than in 26,000 year cosmic cycles.

Two or three days into the trip, walking through a tropical forest somewhere, we met an attractive and interesting twenty-five year old Belgian woman named Griet who worked as a teacher in London, and she traveled with us for several days.

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Griet (and above in tropical forest)

I remember her being with us when we descended into an amazing cenote (cenotes are deep water-filled sinkholes formed by water percolating through soft limestone above). There were great chambers of glittering stalactites and a deep pool of absolutely clear water, fairly warm, which we were able to swim in.

I’d never swam in a cave before, and the experience seemed quite magical and archetypal.

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Sean, Griet

While we swam there were a series of thunderous reverberations traveling through the stone. As it turned out it was actual thunder, and suddenly the foliage-framed aperture at the top of the great chamber in the cenote, which was also our exit, flooded with an explosion of rainwater.

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Another day we descended into one of the greatest known caves on the planet, Loltun Cave.

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I had previously done only one serious spelunking adventure and had toured lots of caves, including Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, but nothing prepared me for Loltun.

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It was an underworld descent in more ways than one as our guide, once we were actually in the cave, ran a bit of a scam on us, revealing new fees that had not been disclosed topside. But it was worth the extra pesos, especially since we had the cave all to ourselves. The chambers were massive, gigantic, sometimes three hundred feet high, an inhuman scale that projected the scary feeling of massive industrial power, as if we were inside the mutated concrete sarcophagus of a Chernobyl reactor tower or the inside of an H.R. Giger extraterrestrial vision. Above our heads were vast upside down landscapes with mountains and canyons and infinite detail and surface texture. The most memorable of these was an upside down planet of bats, a sulfurous yellow planetscape that evoked Dune’s Arrakis, the desert planet. It had giant craters filled with spherical sleeping bats. There was a butte that rose out of this desertscape that was the exact color and texture of desert-scorched bone.

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Flying bat, upper right

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Deeper in the cave were artifacts left by prehistoric humans.

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Loltun Cave had been a butchery for Ice Age fauna, and there was Mayan cave art from the Paleo-Indian period of Mesoamerican prehistory. Apparently this is the only prehistoric cave art that the public is allowed to breath on. As I stood before it, I felt like I had wandered into the deepest and darkest recess of the human past.

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Caves are natural time capsules, these paintings looked like they could have been made yesterday Felt like I had wandered into the deepest darkest recess of the human past, which felt like it was unstuck from time and here right now.

On the morning of the 27th I awoke from a dream with a statement in my mind, something I had just told a dream character:

“Never underestimate the power of a ritual created spontaneously in the moment with pure intention and intensified through repetition.”

Strange effects were happening to me, but what to attribute them to? The Mayan ruins? The heat? The humidity? The margaritas? Internal cycles and perturbations? All of the above? Intense changes in my relationship with the hyperspatially existing companion that lives alongside of me? I never know quite how to describe this without sounding like a goofy New Age channeler or a schizophrenic who needs his meds adjusted. This companion came into the foreground of my awareness and stayed there for much of the trip, his presence far more physical, immediate and dynamic than usual. There were many changes in the relationship and new developments, and I had to divide my attention between my awareness of this companion and of my corporeal traveling companions trading places in the foreground or background as the need of the moment required. Multiple streams of often dissonant realities poured into my perceptions—the companion relationship, the tensions and camaraderie of the traveling group, doing I Ching readings and counseling with John about drastic personal shocks he was experiencing in his life back in the States, the world of modern Mexico and interactions with Mexicans, their projections and my counterprojections on them, the flora and fauna of the tropics and the new flora and fauna in my gastrointestinal tract, the power and otherness of the remnants of Mayan civilization, the practical details and logistics of Third-World travel, seeing the world through my eyes, the companion’s eyes, and much of the time seeing it through the viewfinder of my camera, concentrating on the composition with one eye, another eye keeping track of my traveling companions so I didn’t get lost, and at the same time trying to keep eyes in the back of my head so somebody didn’t yank my camera.

Emerson said that, “The problem with traveling is that you take yourself with you.” But that’s also the potential magic and transformative power of traveling too. My strange inner contents were hybridizing with the strangeness around me, and inevitably inner and outer became a blurred distinction. Which weirdness was mine and which was Mexican? Which Mayan? Which came from the other people in the minivan? And if that weren’t enough I spent large parts of each day tripping about the impending presidential election, even had dreams about it, Kerry vs. Bush, the first debate to happen while we were in Mexico. I did readings on it and rituals to help Kerry while we stayed in Palenqué at an inexpensive but amazing little resort in the rainforest. There I realized that one should never underestimate the power of a ritual created to undermine Bush, created spontaneously in the moment with pure intention and intensified through repetition. I wanted Bush to fall apart in the debates, wanted Kerry to be the dragon-slayer. I wanted him to stick a javelin made of Elvin Silver-Steel into the heart of the Great Orc, or the son of the Great Orc, or whatever Bush is. I wanted to break into the tomb in the Skull and Bones clubhouse at Yale, and see if shape-shifting Reptilians ruled the world or only David Icke’s imagination. I wanted to see even an hour’s worth of Mayan civilization happening in real time right now, wanted to see what all those pyramids and observatories looked like when they were freshly painted in tropical color.

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A remnant of the original colored paint remains on these carvings.

What did those ancient Mayan cosmologists really have in mind when they ended their long count on December 21st, 2012? Do we have to wait till 2012 to be rid of the Bush crime family? Will Jeb take over for Dubyah in 2008 to make sure that by 2012 we will all be begging for the world to end? Is our whole civilization a giant costume malfunction waiting for an asteroidal Justin Timberlake to expose us as the most toxic, silicon-inflated and unattractive of ruined civilizations? Are we just asteroid bait, begging, baiting Gaia to shock and awe us with an overdue preemptive strike?

These are only a sampling of the sort of apocalyptic rhetorical questions that haunted my margarita-addled imagination.

So much was happening inside of me that by the morning we got to Chichén Itzá I was already jaded by ancient ruins. Ancient ruins were getting old, you might say. They were history, but the air conditioning of the Hindenberg was what was happening now and it was becoming numinous, was beginning to glow, beginning to loom larger and larger in my mind like a great ring of power. Mayan cosmology seemed a bit of an abstraction; what had it done for us lately? How could a calendar that ran out in eight years compare with the revitalizing power of air conditioning that when cranked all the way up felt like the breath of a goddess awakening me from the lethargic nightmare of extreme and abusive heat and humidity? Nietzche said that, “If there are gods, how could I stand it to be no god?” I say that if air conditioning is a goddess, how could I stand it not to be embraced by such a goddess?

Driving toward Chichén Itzá I was embraced by the goddess Air Conditioning, who held me in her swirling arms, washed clean the sweat of my misery, and lifted me from mundanity like the smoky, ephemeral dream of an opium smoker. I had no reason to expect more of Chichén Itzá than any other site, and as we approached it I saw that, more than any other site, it was preceded by the most cheesy and touristy of sunfaded, sidewalk chalk painted souvenir shops, streamers of plastic flags, and Mayan deities rendered in every shape and color that the genius of plastic makes possible.

Then, rudely disgorged from the loving embrace of the goddess Air Conditioning into the blooming, buzzing nightmare of extreme humidity, we approached Chichén Itzá through a gauntlet of snack bars, milling tourists and turnstiles—we might as well have been approaching the Third-World equivalent of Space Mountain. And what kind of a name was “Chichén Itzá” anyway? Sounded like Spanish for chickens infected with chronic eczema. In my mind it conjured images of itchy chickens running demented circles in the hot dust, chickens that had never known air conditioning, chickens that were only too glad to be sacrificed.

Fortunately we were past the peak tourist season and what had been made to accommodate thousands, now accommodated only a few hundred, and no one pressed around us as we walked a long gravel trail toward the site. What did try to press toward me was a negative thought form, an anxiety-tinged tape loop about an unresolved matter back in Boulder that had a strongly negative emotional charge. In recent years I have become much more resistant to such tape loops and have greatly benefited from a set of techniques for dealing with them (which are outlined in the online version of A Guide to the Perplexed Interdimensional Traveler ) Thought forms sometimes seem to have a life and infectious intention of their own, and sometimes may be the attack of “mind parasites” (see Mind Parasites, Energy Parasites and Vampires) those thousand pale scorpions that sting us with fear and poisonous anxiety in our most vulnerable moments.

And so, hiking toward the site, I felt one of these hot, sticky parasitic thought forms trying to press into my space like a drunken pervert with an erection trying to rub against me in a crowded subway. But before I could resist it using my usual techniques, something happened, some energy or will seemed to give my ordinary resistance a gigantic power, and I first experienced this power as a hypnogogically intense visualization of the mind parasites. Ordinarily they were vague, flickering, hiding in the shadows of my mind. Now they were visualized in startlingly sharp relief, the way a bolt of lightening on a moonless night can for a moment reveal in infinite detail a hidden landscape.

What I saw was a vast army of clowns with empty eye sockets coming toward me. They all did a jerky mechanical dance and they had big floppy powdery-white organic ears, like elephant ears, and the white powdery ears seemed like layers of talcum powder covering cancerous tissue metastasizing with malignant lesions beneath the white powder.

No, I don’t think this is what mind parasites really “look like.” They are shape-shifters. Their form is legion. Like the devil that has the power to assume a pleasing shape, they have the power to assume unpleasing shapes, and the mind’s eye also has the ability to visualize them in unpleasing shapes as it scans them immunologically with psychic radar. This visualization revealed them as hungry ghosts, what the Buddhists call “pretas,” the disincarnate remnants of departed human beings that seek to feed off of living human vitality. And then, after a few lightening flashes of vision revealed this blind, mechanical army of hungry clowns, a gigantic force seemed to energize my resistance and a burst of fire came out of me, as if I were a giant flame-thrower, and the army of clowns were incinerated in one breath of fire, and all that remained were a few glowing cinders swirling in the air which in a moment vanished to nothing.

Their form had been incinerated, but not their hungry, ravenous will, and in a few more moments they reconfigured themselves and appeared in a form that could not be so sharply visualized. Now they were airborne, a cloud of giant mosquito-like insectile forms blurred with speed, faster than fighter jets, exploding toward me. Once again I felt a gigantic, seismic force or will supporting my resistance and another burst of fire exploded outward incinerating the flying horde of ravenous parasites.

This all happened while we were on the gravel path. I hadn’t even seen the site, and at that moment did not attribute it in anyway to Chichén Itzá. Since I am obviously no stranger to internal weirdness, why should I have sought an outward cause? And from the great principle of logic, Ockham’s Razor, which says that hypotheses should not be multiplied without necessity—in other words, don’t seek a fancy, complicated explanation when a simple one will suffice—to view this occurrence as more than an internal perturbation would only be an open invitation to be deceived by the million masks of projection. That’s why I put a gigantic disclaimer at the beginning of this document. What I can attribute to myself, and what, if anything, I can attribute to Chichén Itzá about this mind parasite experience I cannot definitively say. What intuition does assert, however, is that Chichén Itzá is a power spot, a window zone, a place, like Monument Valley, where reality is configured differently, and which, like a great spirit medicine, has a certain character, but may effect one person very, very differently than another person.

On the trail walking toward the site, I didn’t associate my experience with Chichén Itzá. But sometime after, maybe when we were first approaching the great Pyramid of Kukulkan, I became aware that behind my enhanced will to resist the mind parasites there had been a gigantic pulsation of power. It was a pounding deep, deep bass note, and that deep bass note persisted, had a definite periodicity, and seemed to emanate from this specific zone of space-time.

In my awareness of Chichén Itzá as a power spot there was a definite boundary of demarcation, a place where the power intensified and became unmistakable. This boundary or point of intensity came well after we had climbed the great pyramid. It came as we approached the Sacred Cenote of Chichén Itzá, which appeared as a gigantic pit or concavity in the earth, deep water obscured its bottom (so far no one had been able to reach the bottom of its murky depths) and the walls of the pit were riddled with caves and grottos partly hidden by tropical vines and foliage.

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Historically this was a pit of no escape and sacrificial victims were apparently tossed in there to drown. Dozens of skeletons have been dredged from the pool or found in its caves and recesses. I couldn’t tell if the power I felt was a resonance of the sacrificial rituals, preserved in eternity like a mosquito frozen in amber, or if the Sacred Cenote, like Monument Valley, was a place of great geophysical power, a power spot recognized by ancients who built a site around it and developed ritualized interactions with it.

Intuition tells me that the Sacred Cenote is a confluence of both factors. Places where traumatic events have occurred, where human blood has been spilled, murder sites, battlefields, do seem to remain haunted by a time-spirit or resonance of their past. And aside from any human effect, if Gaia is an organism, a spherical body, as British biologist James Lovelock demonstrates, then all portions of the surface of that body are obviously not the same. All portions of the surface of our bodies are not the same in their sensitivity and energy. It is very different, for example, to have a mosquito land on your elbow than to have it land on the cornea of your eye. Monument Valley has the feeling of an organ of energy on the body of Gaia. Some have compared it to the endocrine system. Whatever it is, it is not subtle. It is a place where intensity is concentrated, and anyone with an ounce of sensitivity must feel and recognize it as the Anasazi Indians did. Before an ancient, cosmically attuned civilization invested a billion man-hours of labor to construct a Chichén Itzá, you can be sure that the plan began with something more than a casual “might as well be here” intention and recognition of place.

Every cell in my body screamed that the Sacred Cenote was an orifice of power, and one glance at Sean told me that he was being drastically affected as well, though I haven’t investigated his inner experience, as I didn’t want our imaginations to confabulate.

Jim mentioned something about a ritual conducted here where there would be one fire, and no other fires were allowed, and this resonated with my feeling of the place as a point of concentrated power. John pointed out that we were at the same 19.5 degree latitude where most hurricanes form out in the Caribbean, and at the same latitude on the planet Jupiter was its great red spot. I thought of the Tolkien mythology and some of Tolkien’s notes about the difference between Morgoth and Sauron. Morgoth was the original evil being whose will had been involved in the creation of all of Middle Earth. All of Middle Earth was Morgoth’s Ring as Tolkien described it, his power pantheistically distributed throughout the entire realm. Sauron was his disciple, a being of lesser power, but Sauron’s power was far more concentrated, concentrated especially in the One Ring. Sauron therefore had more useable and potent power than Morgoth since his power was concentrated and one-pointed like a laser beam. Intuitively, I felt that the ancient Maya, and some other ancient peoples knew and used this principle of concentrating power, and Chichén Itzá was a living embodiment of that principle.

Standing before the Sacred Cenote I had some intuitions about blood sacrifice that I discussed with John (but please do not hold him responsible or assume that he approves of these ungrounded speculations. Do read his books for grounded, carefully researched material on the Maya). John pointed out that it was the winners of the Ball Court game that were sacrificed, that it was considered an honor. I wondered aloud if the ancient Maya might not have worked out a more clever symbiosis with the mind parasites, gave them a more conscious and intentional feast and perhaps this contained their infection, kept it from being as pervasively distributed as it seems to be in our culture. It suddenly occurred to me that all the bloodletting that European physicians practiced for about 1,800 years might have been an unconscious propitiation of the parasites. Remember that doctors used to be called “leeches” because their universal treatment was to apply leeches to patients to bleed them. These treatments were perfect nonsense, had been handed down from the Greek philosopher Galen, and it wasn’t until the 1860s that it was discovered by an obscure British physician that the form of medicine taught in the finest Schools of Europe and America had been killing people for 1,800 years! (For more on this see The Glorified Body.) Many of the greatest names in history were bled to death by their doctors including a guy by the name of George Washington, whose doctor, treating him for a winter cold, relieved him of six pints of blood. George Washington’s last words were to his physician, “Pray, take no more trouble about me; just let me go.” Who was all this unconscious blood sacrifice for? It certainly wasn’t for the patients. Be wary of Westerners who think of the ancient Maya as barbaric for their relatively few sacrifices when we are from a culture that burned six million women as witches during the Middle Ages and six million Jews in living memory. Perhaps the Maya were far more humane and efficient in their bloodletting.

Consider the refrain of the Eurthymics song, “Some people want to abuse you, some people want to be abused.” Well, some people want to devour you, and other people want to be devoured. You’ve probably heard about the high profile trial this year in Germany of a modern cannibal. An educated, middle-aged German man wanted to be a cannibal, and he advertised on the Internet for a willing victim, someone who wanted to be devoured, and he found a volunteer. The trial was to decide if he should be convicted of manslaughter for an entirely consensual act. There is a lot about the active and passive faces of human bloodlust that we know nothing about.

Somewhat dazed, I followed the group away from the Sacred Cenote, and in a few hundred yards found one of the most surreal sights I have ever seen. No, no, I couldn’t possibly be seeing this; this cannot be real, I thought. But there it was, there before me was a . . . snack bar . . . This was like finding a snack bar just outside the gates of hell…this couldn’t be happening… people drinking Gatorade and eating pretzels beside a giant orifice of deadly power.

John was keeping track of the time and the position of the sun, and he led us back to the great Pyramid of Kukulkan to see something.

In my whole body I felt that deep bass note, a pounding drum-like reverberation of power, a feeling of gigantism, power that in my psyche manifested as a will to fight the mind parasites. And this feeling of massive power was not a chimera flickering through my mind. It was a feeling in the gut, a feeling in the second chakra, the survival chakra, and as we walked past massive blocks of stone covered in glyphs I perceived that this site was a massive engine of power and information, that this was a place made of language. It was an illuminated alchemical manuscript like the Zohar, the classic Cabalistic text, but this manuscript was wrought in a billion tons of stone, a manuscript made from the bones of the earth. Words or spells of fell power seemed to rise up and hang in the air, outweighing the dense humidity. I felt my circuits overloading with a massive, massive download of information and potent energies. Phrases formed in my mind like, “The strange persistence of a language of power.” Magical thought forms, words of power seemed to be encoded here hyperspatially, in the realm of pure form, the morphogenetic field, persisting in this zone across eternity. But they had also been concretized, massively anchored in stone that was also persisting through the centuries, surviving the rot and organic riot of encroaching jungle.

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The Pyramid of Kukulkan loomed massively into view, and then I saw it, the reason we had timed our journey to happen in late September. At the base of the pyramid was the gigantic stone head of a serpent, and a gigantic tail, composed of triangles of reflected sunlight and shadow, formed all the way to the top of the massive structure.

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I beheld a living, illuminated rune or glyph of power, a thought form, anchored massively in stone, a marker of cosmic cycles created by the ancients and still functioning, standing gigantically before me and marking the autumnal equinox of 2004 AD.

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© 2000 Jonathan Zap

( The cover design comes from a pen and ink drawing I made when I was seventeen entitled, “Parasites.”)

ORDERING INFO FOR MIND PARASITE MATRIX:

I have just produced a multi hour audio presentation entitled Mind Parasite Matrix—-we are editing it today, so I don’t know the running time, but I’m guessing about six hours. You can get the entire program on one MP3 CD for $9.95 (playable on most computers, some DVD players, etc.) or on several regular CDs for $19.95. Both prices include shipping, we’ll try to get them out sooner, but allow 3-4 weeks for delivery. Click on the teal colored orb on the main page to go to the shop. Pay by check or MO info on there as well. Mind Parasite Matrix will include everything I’ve learned about this phenomenon and will include audio version of everything I’ve written on the subject and new material not on my site. My two DVDs Prophecy and the End of Time and Looking Toward the Event Horizon includes a briefer discussion of mind parasites and puts them in an evolutionary context.

The following is from Heretics of Dune (the 4th book in the classic science fiction series by Frank Herbert) which I found to contain one of the most incisive, conscious expositions on the inner biological, energetic dynamics of the mind parasites. For a much more thorough treatment of the subject please see Mind Parasites, Energy Parasites and Vampires….

The excerpted portions may also give an idea of the depth of esoteric knowledge available from a careful reading of the Dune books, but is by no means a representative episode—it is just one of a myriad of jewels embedded in this great fantasy work.

This excerpt is unique in my experience of fiction in that the mind parasite is given a fully conscious voice. This chapter also epitomizes a theme that cuts across all the Dune books—Herbert is always showing social and historical transactions as a complex flow of energy. Power structures are always trying to maintain a flow of energy that has made them powerful through transactions where they capture more energy than they expend.

In the chapter, a highly conscious warrior character, Miles Teg, enters a room where he is to meet with an “Honored Matre” a powerful adept of a renegade sisterhood that has a vast and sinister array of powers (this is the mind parasite character). Teg recognizes that the building and the room appear to be those of a high level bank, and the Honored Matre acknowledges his recognition as having a deeper meaning. She tells Teg, “There are always means of transferring large sums or selling power. I do not speak of the power that runs factories, but of the power that runs people . . . I think of myself as a banker.”

This represents a boiling down of an essential truth. Our individual struggle with mind parasites is always about a flow of energy. A banker quantifies and protects the energy units he has accumulated while attempting to have a flow of energy where he captures more units than he expends. This is what a parasite or predator does. Therefore, to follow the suggestions of Gurdjieff and others, we notice mechanical patterns (habits, addictions) where conditioning (cellular, social, etc.) causes us to drain ourselves of psychic and bodily resources. Each of these habits or addictions is a kind of devil’s bargain, you get something up front, a buzz from that white powder, for example, but then you pay an ever increasing price, financially and metabolically for it, and the law of diminishing returns manifests as a pit with very steep walls. Human energy is the sweetest, the most potent and rich energy available on this plane so there are arch-parasites, that are incredibly shrewd, that feed off this energy—in the Gurdjieffian paradigm this is called “being food for the moon.”

The chapter begins with a quotation that states the law of the minimum: “Growth is always limited by that necessity which is least available.” This banking law applies to any living system from a planet, a civilization, a government, a human psyche. To apply this to your own life, you can ask yourself “what necessity is least available that is limiting my growth?” Sometimes this could be an environmental factor: in a famine it might be food, sometimes it seems like money or time which are often interdependent. It might be will or whatever means are necessary to keep oneself from a depotentiating addiction like eating inferior foods, smoking, unconscious sex, etc. The banker’s perspective is to see where energy is being conserved or stolen. As the Honored Matre says (on viewing her as a banker) “it…saves a lot of muddy and distressful circumlocutions.”

The Honored Matre (hereafter abbreviated as “HM”) tells Teg that she expects him to be of great value to her (i.e., we expect to make an energic deposit of your talents). Teg responds “I’ve always thought I was of most value to myself.” This stance of inner independence is another energic message: I will not be drained by an external parasite. Appropriately, the HM is infuriated by this statement. Sounding like an evil Gurdjieffian, the HM refers to the collective as “Muck” She tells Teg: “Their curiosity is narrow gauge. No great issues ever enter their awareness. . . . We work to keep it that way.” Appropriately the HM is both extremely ancient (because the parasitic forces she represents are ancient) and also she is recognized by Teg as a supremely dangerous opponent (he recognizes her as “the Beast”). She has the arrogance of a predator that has sat on top of the food chain for millennia.

A universal Dune theme is: Who can overcome an enormously over-determined predator/parasitic power structure? The answer is always a heretical mutant, an individuated being with superior consciousness as the weapon of rebellion. Again, viewing HM as a brilliant personification of mind parasite forces, she is extremely straightforward (at least to Teg) that the collective—which she calls “the Muck”—is what the HM feed off of, and therefore they expend significant energy to ensure that the collective remains unconscious. She tells Teg: “It’s just that you think of the muck in the wrong way. . . Luckily, they are mostly self-limiting. They know this somewhere in the damps of their deepest consciousness but cannot spare the time to deal with that or anything else except the immediate scramble for survival.” Sardonically, Teg asks: “They cannot be improved?” HM replies: “They must not be improved! Oh, we see to it that self improvement remains a great fad among them. Nothing real about it, of course.” (this immediately reminds me of Terence McKenna’s arch comment on New Agers: “They’re willing to try anything so long as it doesn’t work”).

Teg replies: “Another luxury they must be denied.”

HM responds: “Not a luxury! Nonexistent! It must be occluded at all times behind a barrier that we like to call protective ignorance.”

A little later the HM states something that seems a perfect definition of a sub set of Kundebuffer: “The thing you beware of is the opposite of what-you-do not-know.” She also tells Teg, in so many words, that conservatism is always the reigning creed of parasitic forces. They, of course (like Republican oilmen), want to defend the status quo that allows them to steal energy. She tells Teg: “We teach that new knowledge can be dangerous.”

The HMs control populations through a pathologized form of Bene Gesserit sexual imprinting. They are able to create so much pleasure in males that they can completely enslave them. This happens to one of Teg’s staff whose name is Muzzafar. When Muzzafar appears subserviently behind HM his face is flushed and his eyes bright—apparently he has just had a rewarding sexual episode. Mind parasites can enslave through pleasure more easily than pain. Gesturing to Muzzafar, HM tells Teg ominously: “One day I will permit you to stand behind me this way.” Teg is consoled by the intuitive recognition that neither HM or Muzzafar enjoys their lives much. He sees essentially (my words) that consciousness ultimately has more vitality, that evil tends to depotentiate because it lacks internal vitality and must always feed off external stimulants to which it becomes ever more jaded (habituation). In other words, the moon can only reflect the sun’s light. By the way, I was listening to a book on tape, All the Pretty Horses, when I encountered another example that there is an archetypal association between the moon and mind parasites. The hero, heart broken, looks up at the moon and realizes that there must be parasitic deities that feed off of human suffering.

HM continues: “You see that I have power? . . . . I am a banker, remember? We have just made a deposit with our loyal. . . .”

“Do you thank us, Muzzafar?”

“I do, Honored Matre.”

HM: “In essence, power such as ours is allowed to become the substance of survival for many people. Then, the threat of withdrawal is all that’s required for us to rule. Would you like us to withdraw our favor from you, Muzzafar?”

“No, HM.” Teg sees that MZ is trembling at that suggestion.

Teg: “You have found a new drug.”

HM: “No, Bashar! We have an old one . . . Like all others we control, Bashar, you have a choice: death or obedience.”

Teg: “That is a rather old choice.” He agreed. This is always the public stance of parasitic forces: You are with us or you are against us.

copyright 2005 by Jonathan Zap

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“Ghost of a Flea” by William Blake

The Sick Rose

O rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm.
That flies in the night In the howling storm.
Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy.
—William Blake from Songs of Innocence and Experience, Plate 37

The Sick Rose, a poem William Blake wrote about two hundred years ago, begins my essay Mind Parasites, Energy Parasites and Vampires. Our species is at a critical evolutionary nexus and one of the most crucial of all tasks that lie before us, maybe even more crucial than finding alternative energy or doing something about global warming, is to put the invisible worm under the magnifying glass of attention and understanding. This invisible worm may be that strange unknown constant that corrupts our eros, that inspires our astounding violence to our own species and the organic life on this planet, and that causes many of us to experience this reality as a matrix, a malevolent simulacrum, a “time out of joint” as Shakespeare’s Hamlet put it. Stephen Dedalus, a James Joyce character, said, “History is the nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.” John Lasch, an expert on Gnosticism and world mythologies, who was Art Bell’s guest on March 19, has made a major contribution to this endeavor. John had the most fascinating things to say about the Gnostic view of what I usually refer to as “mind parasites.”

He was an unusually articulate guest and I have been studying the website he is associated with: metahistory.org. The Gnostics refer to inorganic beings called Archons and what they say about these Archons has striking parallels to mind parasite encounters and also with alien abduction experiences. On the metahistory website John recommends the attitude which, according to Aristotle, characterizes the mature mind—-the ability to entertain ideas without accepting them or, in modern parlance, “buying them.” This attitude is especially crucial in esoteric study/paranormal investigation where there are so many charlatans and what are even more dangerous—–possessed true believers. In fact, the phenomenon of being a true believer, and being possessed by an ideology, especially a religious ideology, was recognized by the Gnostics as a sign that the Archons had inserted their mind and created a mechanical zombie. Unfortunately, though “mechanical zombie” has a fantastical ring to it, they are all too real and overwhelmingly numerous in our world. They are what Jung called “mass man” and are to be found everywhere.

I help out at a non profit, The Womans’ Assistance Fund, that especially focuses on helping women who are the victims of extreme Islamic Fundamentalism.  (My friend Sean, the director of this nonprofit has written a brief overview of the situation entitled Jihad Against the Feminine. The horrors inflicted on women in the name of religious ideology are so surreal and over the top that to my intuition they scream mind parasite possession. This type of possession is not confined to Islam, during the Middle Ages Christians burned five million women as witches. The Gnostics seemed to have anticipated such horrors. John writes,
In the Gnostic view, human beings “who exist as the type of the Archons” are those who blindly follow religious ideologies of an insane and inhumane nature, for it is primarily through religious beliefs that the Archons intrude upon us. Behavior driven by such beliefs produces pathological personality fixations, resulting in the spiritual zombie.
What the Gnostics have to say is not a curiosity of the ancient world or an obscure matter for scholars to investigate. They address issues and phenomenon with the most direct relevance to the core of our reality and the survival of our species. What follows are some relevant excerpts, but I also recommend delving into the metahistory.org website. What I have read there so far has impressed me as having an unusual precision of thought and expression. In reading the following I recommend the attitude of Aristotle, entertain these possibilities, but don’t buy them. What I take from this material so far are the cross culturally reinforced parallels, the parallels to contemporary experience (see the Mind Parasites essay for parallel first hand encounters with mind parasites). Those parallels mean something, an underlying truth, but we should not be too hasty in deciding what that underlying truth is, for as the Gnostics themselves point out, so much of our world has been designed to deceive us.
Once again, what follows are excerpts from writings posted on metahistory.org.  They are no substitute for going to that excellent and extensive site.

(to see full article: http://www.metahistory.org/amf_MediaMania.php)
Gnosticism is the name historians give to the final phase of a vast tradition of pagan spirituality that came to be condemned as heresy when Christianity rose to power. Until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi documents in 1945, almost nothing was known of the core teachings of Gnosticism. The word Gnostic means simply “one who knows” but carries the implication of special insight that penetrates to the hidden core of human experience. Certain Gnostics taught that humans are deviated from their proper course of evolution by a bizarre species of inorganic beings who inhabit the solar system beyond the earth, and named this species the Archons. The Greek word archon means “authority,” and the Archons are sometimes called “the Authorities.” In the Matrix, the Agents are the authorities who police the simulated world looking for human replicas like Neo who show signs of waking up to the scam. Horsely explains the Gnostic idea that the Archons try to impose “a program of mind control, or soul enslavement [in order to] keep mankind distracted by material problems and concerns, imprisoned by its own fear of death, of mortality, and ignorant of its true, divine nature.” A Gnostic perspective thus suggests that the Matrix scenario presents a cyberpunk version of a genuine spiritual dilemma, a true and daunting challenge that faces humanity, perhaps its ultimate challenge. In their warnings about deception by the Archons, Gnostics may have foreseen the risks of AI two thousand years before it emerged. However, the manner in which the Archons operate, their strategy of simulation, as it were, as described in certain Gnostic texts, does not involve advanced technological devices but religious ideology. (Horsely does not explore this point.) According to the Gnostic texts, Archontic deviation of the human species is a form of mass behaviour modification achieved through blind conformity to certain false religious beliefs, such as the belief in salvation from a sinful condition by the intervention of God or God’s only representative. In short, Gnostics rejected the salvationist ideology common to Judaism and Christanity (and later, after their elimination, Islam). It is known that Gnostic ideas deeply influenced Philip K. Dick, widely considered as the greatest sci-fi writer of the twentieth century. Certainly Gnosticism presents theological and cosmological beliefs as if plotted in a science fiction novel. This characterization of Gnostic ideas is suggested by scholar Richard Smith in the afterword to The Nag Hammadi Library in English: “Gnostic motifs have been identified in that most visionary of our modern literary genres, science fiction… In the science fiction novels of the prolific writer Philip K. Dick… Gnosticism is consciously employed” (p. 546). In Valis and other works, Dick developed the idea that humans live in a “two-world hologram,” part of which is genuinely real and part of which is the deceptive projection of an alien mentality that distorts our humanity. This schizophrenic model is consistent with the Gnostic mythos. With the Archons we face an alien invasion in the depths of our own minds. Escape from the Matrix Treated as a heresy in its time and still considered as such by the Catholic Church, Gnosticism has been widely misrepresented, even by those who claim to defend it. In particular, there is enormous disinformation around Gnostic views on the reality and value of the physical world. Many scholars declare that Gnostics “condemned matter” and regarded the natural world as evil, purely a product of Archontic deception. Nonetheless, a few dissenting voices argue that the Gnostics rejected, not the physical world per se, but our distorted perception of it. This view confirms the uncanny insight of Agent Smith: the behavior of the human species is inconsistent with sane mammalian activity. Could it be a distorted perception of nature that makes us act like a plague upon Earth? According to the contemporary Gnostic revivalist Stephen Hoeller, “Gnostics did not necessarily reject the actual earth, which they recognized as a screen upon which the Demiurge [chief of the Archons] projects a deceptive system. To the extent that we find a condemnation of the world in Gnostic writings, the term used is inevitably kosmos… and never the word ge (earth), which they regarded as neutral if not outright good” (The Gnostic Jung, p. 15). Cosmos in ancient Greek did not mean the natural world or the physical universe at large. It meant “system,” recalling the use of that word in computer terminology: “operating system.” It is perhaps a ripe coincidence that the Coptic word for simulation found in Gnostic texts is hal, recalling HAL the rebellious computer in Kubrick and Clarke’s 2001! Much could be said about the Gnostic elements in the Matrix, but one point is central. The deception of the Archons described in Gnostic writings is precisely what is manifested in the “neural-interactive simulation we call the Matrix” (the words of Morpheus). But if this is the case, how come the simulation that threatens to absorb humanity is technological rather than ideological, as the Gnostics believed it to be? The answer may be that the technological takeover of our species has actually been prepared long in advance by ideological deviations in our religious belief-systems, especially those religious beliefs that determine our response to the natural world. This implies a deep intrusion into the psychic territory of humanity, but it is totally consistent with the Gnostic argument that erroneous religious ideology is a kind of virus insinuated in the human mind by an alien intelligence, a non-human species comparable to the Machines in the Matrix.
(to see full article got to http://www.metahistory.org/KundaliniForce.php)
The Alien Force—- If Kundalini is a biological force, as is widely attested in the writings of Western investigators such as Lee Sanella and Arnold Mindell, the other kind of serpent power may be distinctly anti-biological. The Archons are said to envy humanity, for a number of reasons, but primarily because we live in the body of their Mother!! According to Gnostic creation myth, the Archons are a species of inorganic beings produced anomalously by the impact of the Aeon Sophia upon atomic matter, before the Sophia herself became transformed into the Earth. They are called Archons, from archai, “prior, from the beginning,” because they arose before the Earth and the solar system were evolved, but they did not emerge directly from the Pleroma, as humanity did. (On the emanation of Atu Kadmon, the Anthropos template, see The Promise of a Lonely Planet, part three, and the Gaia Mythos, Episode 10.) In their attempt to intrude upon humanity, which has been ongoing for millennia, the Archons use a lot of bluff and bravado. They affect our minds to get us to believe they can do far more than they can actually do, but in so believing, we unwittingly surrender our power to them — the result is, they get their way with us, because we have betrayed our own capacities. Hence the Archons claim to rule over humanity, and even pretend to have been our creators, as is recounted in the Sumerian cunieform record of the Annunaki, accepted as true by Zecharia Sitchin and many other sincere investigators. The Dead Sea Scrolls, dicsovered in 1947 at the very moment the Nag Hammadi texts were initially recognized to be rare Gnostic materials, contain explicit accounts of direct threats posed by reptilians. For instance, the Testament of Amram: I saw Watchers in my vision, the dream-vision. Two of them were fighting over me, saying… and holding a great contest over me. I asked them, “Who are you, that you are thus empowered over me?” They answered me, “We have been empowered and rule over mankind.” And they said to me, “Which one of us [will have you]?” And I lifted my eyes, and looked at one of them directly. His appearance was dreadfully frightening, and his skin was multicolored, darkly glittering scales. (4Q542) (Note: The “Watchers” are consistently identified with the Annunaki in modern ET/Alien speculation.) As I have explained elsewhere in this site, a Gnostic sect called the Archontics was stationed on the Dead Sea south of Qumran. Gifted with powers of paranormal perception, such as remote viewing, Gnostic seers who had met and repelled Archons observed the persisting presence of reptilians among the Dead Sea cult of the Zaddikim. The First Apocalypse of James (NHL V, 3), which contains descriptions of face-to-face encounters with the reptilian aliens, warns that “Jerusalem is a dwelling place of many Archons.” But the Gnostic teacher adds,a crucial insight, typical of the highly nuanced knowledge of the Mystery School adepts, “These powers are not armed against you specifically, but they are armed against each other.” (Passage 27) This line not only corroborates contemporary scenarios that describe conflict between the aliens who are among us, it also indicates that their powers are more engaged in battling each other than in overcoming us. Nevertheless, they have overcome us, in certain ways. Due to their subtle tactic of intimidation via false beliefs, the Archons can get us to surrender our power. To betray ourselves to them in the deepest way, in a terminal act of self-effacement, we would have to give up our bodies and surrender the hidden powers within our bodies. Gnostic initiatory practices were directed toward strengthening our embodiment by the arousal of Kundalini, which grounds us in the Earth. Kundalini means the small (“ini”) Kundala, “serpentine or spiralling power.” The big Kundala is the serpent power of the Earth itself, the swirling Erotic currents of Gaia. She, the Earth Mother, is the supreme ambient force that holds DNA configured in its spiralling chains of nucleic acid. When Kundalini is awakened in sacred sexual rites or otherwise, it grounds the human body consciously into the planetary body. This is the ultimate aim of Kundalini yoga: not escape from the body, not deification of the participants, but grounding into Gaia, the Godhead of Nature. In the nymphion, Gnostics bathed in ecstatic luminosity which they considered to radiate from the Godhead, the Pleroma of Aeons, via the Aeon Sophia who is embodied in the Earth. The absorption of these emanations effectuates sexual healing and repair the split or rupture between the sexes (“gender rift”) that arose on the cosmological level when Sophia fell, shearing the Antrhopos template. The cosmos is healed through what has been most deeply wounded, human sexuality.
A Gnostic Catechism
http://www.metahistory.org/GnosticCatechism.php
Encounters with Aliens in a Mystery School Text Here and there the Coptic Gnostic materials contain passages that describe encounters with the ET-like beings, sometimes with explicit advice about how to handle these entities. What beliefs are implied in such testimony? And what are we to believe about such testimony? I will attempt to address both these questions in this brief topical essay. Occult Instruction For a first-hand look at the testimony, let’s consider a passage from The First Apocalypse of James (NHC V, 3), a revelation dialogue in which an unnamed teacher (the “Lord” or “Master”) confers secret knowledge upon a Gnostic named James: The Master said: James, behold, I shall reveal to you the path of your redemption. Whenever you are siezed and you undergo death-pangs (mortal fear), a multitude of Archons may turn on you, thinking they can capture you. And in particular, three of them will sieze you, those who pose as toll collectors. Not only do they demand toll, but they take away souls by theft. Now, when you come under their power, one of them who is the overseer will say to you: “Who are you, and where are you from?” You are then to say to him, “I am a child of humanity and I am from the Source.” He will then say to you, “What sort of child are you, and to what Source do you belong?” You are to say to him, “I am from the pre-existent Source, and I am the offspring of the Source.” Then he will say to you, “Why were you sent out from the Source?” Then you are to say to him, “I came from the Pre-existent One so that I might behold those of my kind and those who are alien.” And he will say to you, “What are these alien beings?” You are to say to him: “They are not entirely alien, for they are from the Fallen Sophia (Achamoth), the female divinity who produced them when she brought the human race down from the Source, the realm of the Pre-Existent One. So they are not entirely alien, but they are our kin. They are indeed so because she who is their matrix, Sophia Achamoth, is from the Source. At the same time they are alien because Sophia did not combine with her like in the Source (her divine male counterpart), when she produced them.” When he also says to you, “Where will you go now?” You are to say to him, “To the place when I came, the Source, there shall I return.” And if you respond in this manner, you will escape their attacks. (NHC V, 3. 33 – 34: 1- 25. Translation from NHLE 1990, pp. 265-6 and Kurt Rudolf, Gnosis, p. 174-5.) Considerable information is packed into this exchange. The resemblance to contemporary reports of close encounters is undeniable: the Archons induce a state of mortal panic, they often appear in threes, they perform abductions (“take away souls by theft”). These details accord closely with contemporary ET/UFO lore. But in a striking departure from the current literature, the Gnostic teacher gives explicit instructions on how to face the alien entities. The vast amount of material on the ET-UFO phenomenon available today does not present a book, or barely even a paragraph, on defence against alien intrusion. Gnostic writings not only describe such encounters, they prescibe defensive action. The Master offers cogent counsel for keeping the Archons in their place. Gnosis is a remembering of our origins. The student is instructed to remember the cosmic birthright of humankind, and to affirm its direct link to the Pleroma, the Source. Specifically, the student is taught to recall and repeat the key episode in Gnostic mythology, the fall of the Aeon Sophia, to effectuate a defence against the Archons. By doing so, the student demonstrates initiated knowledge of the origin and identity of the beings s/he is facing. The mere knowledge of cosmic matters disempowers the Archons. The Coptic materials become increasingly relevant as we realize they do not merely present pedantic or recondite commentaries on a dead religion, but vital insights on the timeless spiritual dilemmas of humanity, insights as valid today as they were 2000 years ago. Describing the find at Nag Hammadi, Tobias Churton writes, “Had Mohammed Ali not broken open the jar, we would not be able to hear these things. In the truest sense of the word, these things are dynamite. One might have imagined headlines throughout the world…” (The Gnostics, p. 12) But there were no such headlines, even in the tabloids. It took many years before the codexes were translated and still, even today, no scholar will allow that these rare Coptic codices contain reliable accounts of encounters with ET-like entities. ET/Archon Navigator Ideological Virus In another passage of The First Apocalypse of James, the Master refers to those people “who exist as the type of the Archons.” (30:20) Gnostics were not only alert to the intrusion of the Archons, they were also acutely aware of the possibility of humans becoming totally “Archontized.” This threat appears to have emerged in a particularly alarming way in that era to which Philip K. Dick often refers: the first century of the Common Era, when the Incarnation of Christ is said to have occured, according to Christian belief. Both the time and the place where Archontic molding of human character set in strongly are specified in the Nag Hammadi texts. In his Gnostic view of the human condition, PKD assumed that the spiritual life of humanity was arrested at that moment. It is as if the behavior of those “who exist as the type of Archons” locked into place in that era, and came to dominate all subsequent centuries—lasting until the moment, so PKD believed, that the Nag Hammadi texts were discovered. In a close parallel to Philip K. Dick’s vision of “the Empire,” Wilhelm Reich saw the rise of a similar syndrome which he characterized as “the mechanico-mystical” complex. (See The Mass Psychology of Fascism, in extenso.) Its signature is “authoritarian ideology,” identical with fascism. Significantly, archon was the common term for “governer,” or “authority” in Roman times. In some translations of the Coptic texts, archon (in plural, archontoi) is rendered as “the authorities.” Reich’s analysis of what I propose to call the mystico-fascist complex focusses on National Socialism, the Nazi movement, which he experienced first-hand, but The Mass Psychology of Fascism contains ample referenes to Catholicism and the Holy Roman Empire, the millennial ancestor of the mystico-fascist program For more comments on this subject viewed in a contemporary vein, see Armageddon Politics. In allusion to the fascist ideology of the “authorities”, Philip K. Dick wrote: “The Empire is the institution, the codification, of derangement; it is insane and imposes its insanity on us by violence, since its nature is a violent one.” (Valis, p. 235, citing entry 41 from “The Exegesis.”) This is purely a Gnostic insight, compatible with passages in the NHC and deeply resonant with Reich’s views on the massenpsychosen of Roman Christianity. (It might be argued that the Nazis were not Christians, but in fact Hitler imagined himself as a Grail Knight, modelled after Wagners’s Parsifal, and the saviour complex of Judaeo-Christian belief is wholly transposed into Nazi racial ideology—hence the “Aryan Christ” identified by C. G. Jung.) Reich warned that since the breakdown of the pre-Christian ethos of earth-oriented Paganism, “the biological core of humanity has been without social representation.” (Ibid., p. xii). This is a staggering observation, to say the least. The “authorities” exhibit the behavior of spiritual zombies, people who exemplify a baffling mix of mystical and militaristic fixations. (What I have called behavioral cloning is widely evident in both militaristic and mystical behavior, such as we see today in neocon religious realpolitik, although it is also embodied in the mass conformity of global consumerism and the rites of technophilia.) According to Reich, these fixations, focussed on the master fixation on a transcendent God beyond the Earth, arise from the repression and displacement of somatic sensations, especially sexual-genital feelings. Philip K. Dick agreed with Reich in observing that the mystico-fascist ideology grows like armor around people who adopt these fixations, either through violent imposition or psychological intimidation (“conversion”). It operates like a virus, “imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes it enemies.” (Valis, p. 235) The ideology of the authorities can infect even those who resist it. Hence it turns humanity against itself. But it would appear that some Gnostics were immune to infection—not by accident, but due to their deliberate practice of orgiastic sexual techniques to produce immunity, and due, in equal measure, to their explicit teachings on the Archons and how to resist them, as seen in the above passage from The First Apocalypse of James. Gnostic observers on the ground when Christianity arose saw salvationist ideology exactly the way Philip K. Dick did: as a virus. An ideological virus, to be precise. Pagan intellectuals of the day even used that very term for the fanaticism of the converts. Gnostics saw the tyranny of belief, of metaphysical fantasies that underwrite militaristic agendas, in the rise of early Christianity. We can only imagine what they would see today in the political religiosity of the American right. Defending Humanity What are we to make, then, of Gnostic beliefs about the Archons? It might be said that Gnostics believed that only by confronting what is insane and inhumane in ourselves, can we truly define what is human. In essence, to define humanity is to defend it against distortion. Gnostics believed that the capacity for distortion of humanitas is inherent in our minds, but is not in itself potentially deviant. Since we are endowed with nous, a dose of divine intelligence, we are able to detect and correct distorted thinking, what the Tibetan Buddhists call krol’pa, “thoughts that lead astray,” mental fixations that turn us away from humanitas, our true identity. However, they also believed there is an alien spin that can add a truly deviant element to our thinking. The effect of the Archons is not to make us err, but to make us, largely through dullness and distraction, disregard our errors, so that they extrapolate beyond the scale of correction. The Archons cast a ‘trance” over Adam… They put him into a sleepy state, but it was his perception they dulled… They make our hearts heavy that we may not pay attention and may not see. So we lose the reflection of the Divine Light within us.. . [Thus the Arcons acted on humanity] with a view to deceive. When the life-spirit increases and the illuminating power of the body strengthens the soul, no one can lead you astray into the lessening of your humanity. But those on whom the counterfiet spirit preys are alienated from humanity and deviated… The despicable spirit gains strength by leading us astray. The Archons burden the soul, attracting us to works of evil, and pull us down into oblivion, making us forget who we are. (The Apocryphon of John, II, 22: 14-10, through 27-20.) The catechism on alien encounters in The First Apocalypse of James is not exceptional. A great deal of Gnostic teaching was dedicated to the theory of error I have just summarized. In a practical sense, Gnostic teachers in the Mystery Schools instructed the neophytes in how to face the Archons both as alien intruders, comparable to the Greys and Reptilians of contemporary lore, and as tendencies in their minds. The detection of Archontic intrusion in both these modes of experience seems to be unique to the finely nuanced noetic science of the Mysteries. In the Gnostic view, human beings “who exist as the type of the Archons” are those who blindly follow religious ideologies of an insane and inhumane nature, for it is primarily through religious beliefs that the Archons intrude upon us. Behavior driven by such beliefs produces pathological personality fixations, resulting in the spiritual zombie. All scholars agree that some Gnostics condemned equally the Jewish origins of the Christian salvationist program, and the Pauline-Johannine program itself. Doing so, they did not spread a hate message against anyone. Rather, they attempted to expose what they perceived to be the hateful and deceiving message disguised in the Judeo-Christian ideology of salvation. At the source of this message, they detected the subliminal intrusion of the Archons into the human mind. Hence the preponderance (more than half, by my estimate) of politically and theologically incorrect passages in the Coptic materials. Whether or not Gnostics were delusional about the Archons is a private judgement call. But a fair and open-minded reading of the Coptic texts will not yield much evidence for derangement on their part. The seers who exposed derangement were not deranged. They were sober and methodical in describing what they knew, and extremely conscientious in prescribing action to face the perceived threat. They believed that they really had identified that most baffling of all enigmas: the root cause of inhumanity in human nature. What are we to believe about all this today? There is an issue of credibility here, of course—that is to say, we may consider the source of Gnostic teachings apart from their content. But Gnosis is by definition a matter of knowing and not of believing. It is about enlightenment, not faith. To give Gnostics credit for actually knowing what they claimed to know it only the first step. Beyond that, we must confirm what they knew by our own resources, our own faculties. This is the perennial challenge of Gnosis, the living, ever-renewing cognition of the human spirit. Knowledge of that which is alive can alone banish terror.

(I apologize for the formatting irregularities which we are not presently able to fix)
Entity Possession—Freeing the Energy Body of Negative Influences by Samuel Sagan, M.D. (clairvision.org) is an important examination of the energy/mind parasite phenomena by an M.D. with a great deal of clinical experience. The book contains numerous interesting transcripts of dialogues between Dr. Sagan and patients he treats for energy parasites.

Essentially, Dr. Sagan believes that most parasitic entities are rather mechanical “ astral fragments ” remaining from deceased human beings. These fragments attach themselves to a human host and drain vitality. Typically their effects are observable as cravings for specific types of food, alcohol and other drugs, sexual compulsions and exacerbated negative emotions.

Early on, Dr. Sagan confronts the possibility that the entities are actually psychological aspects mistaken for external agents,

When considering the topic of entities, one important question usually comes to mind: Are these entities not simply parts of the client’s psyche? Are they not merely unresolved complexes, subpersonailites, or parts of the client’s “shadow”?
…When dealing with entities, however, their subjective experience is different. In particular, an entity gives a much greater feeling of separateness than a subpersonality. When exploring an entity, clients often make comments such as “It does not feel like myself,” “It feels foreign,” “It is a parasite,” “It has not always been inside,” “It has taken residence, but it does not belong here.” Moreover, subpersonalities are considerably more complicated than entities. An entity is usually an unsophisticated “lump” of energy and consciousness with simple and predictable behavioral patterns.
Dr. Sagan references Taoist concepts which he relates to the phenomenon (“ Po ” has to do with the emotional body and “Hun” has to do with spirituality and intellect),

… Po and the Hun are said to separate at death in way that parallels the astral shattering described in the next chapter. In the Chinese model, the Po remain bound to the earth after death, due to their descending polarity, whereas the Hun, due to their upward moving tendency, ascend to the spiritual worlds, following the Shen (which is equivalent of the Higher Self). After death, once the separation of the different parts constituting a human being has taken place, these parts are no longer called Po and Hun, but kuei and Shen….

…The ancient Chinese spoke of the kuei as “wandering souls” or remnants of the dead—unsatisfied, greedy spirits. The kuei need to be fed and pacified with offerings, otherwise they start harassing the living.

This ancient Chinese idea is obviously very close to the “hungry ghosts” or “pretas” described in Buddhist tradition. Sagan continues,

In ancient China , the kuei were not only part of the literature or folklore, but were also part of daily life. In all trades and areas of life, it was customary to take the kuei into account and perform rituals to protect oneself against their pernicious actions… the art of medicine, for instance, recognized kuei as one of the factors that can create disease. Thus, among the 361 points of the fourteen main meridians of acupuncture, seventeen have the word kuei as part of their main or secondary names…

What happens to the kuei in the long run? According to the ancient Chinese, the kuei are not immortal. Their existence is limited, and lasts only until their vitality is exhausted. Afterward, they dissolve. What belongs to the earth returns to the earth, is composted and reintegrated in the universal cycle of energies.

From Dr. Sagan’s point of view, natural or man-made disasters are particularly dangerous for energy parasite acquisition,

…..natural disasters, such as earthquakes, or man-made ones, such as battles, war, and fires. Moreover, from what we have described about the shattering of the astral body after death, we can see that any catastrophe that kills tens or hundreds of thousands of people will be followed by the release of a tidal wave of astral fragments.

This is an extremely interesting theory, and I have long noted that some of the symptoms of posttraumatic stress, particularly in war veterans, present many aspects of mind parasite infestation.

In Mind Parasites, Energy Parasites and Vampires (http://www.zaporacle.com/textpattern/article/6/mind-parasites-energy-parasites-and-vampires) I describe a number of connections between the mind parasite phenomenon and the moon. Dr. Sagan points out that the ancient Chinese, as well as Tibetan and Indian masters, consider the new and full moons as dangerous times for sexual intimacy, even without orgasm or ejaculation. Taoists also discourage therapeutic acts during the full moon such as acupuncture, surgery and dental procedures. Chinese, Hindus and many other cultures consider menstruation (which follows a lunar cycle) a dangerous time for sexual intercourse.

Parasitic entities are recognized by many cultures as a possible cause of physical and psychological illness,
Ayurveda, the traditional medicine of India, makes a clear distinction between the cases of insanity due to internal factors and those brought on by the pernicious influence of certain nonphysical beings.
One of Dr. Sagan’s clients gave a description of her parasite that had a striking parallel to the parasite I encountered in the second case history presented inMind Parasites, Energy Parasites and Vampires. The client reports,
At home he makes me drink a lot of coffee, listen to loud music, and invite a lot of people over. If I can’t do that he makes me panic, He hates it when I mediate. If I mediate he turns into a white spiral and spins.
And here is the description from my essay, written long before I read Sagan’s book:
There was a parasitic entity in the sleeping loft hovering just bellow the roof near our feet. It was like a dark lenticular cloud, or vortex, with a somewhat double convex lens shape similar to the way a spiral galaxy looks from a great distance. My visual perception of it was not definite; it was dark and amorphous with fractal boundaries and rotating movement.
Dr. Sagan emphasizes the fragmentary and mechanical nature of the entities he observes,

Another fact we have observed is that entities are usually singularly focused, polarized in one narrow direction and always wanting the same things or repeating the same emotions. This also indicates that they are not the whole of the dead person but only a fragment corresponding to one particular character of theirs.

Later he remarks,

Remember, fragments are basically stupid. All they can do is repeat the same emotional reactions endlessly.

Dr. Sagan is also very confident that most parasites can be easily treated,

From the point of view of the clearer, the fragments and various other entities that we have seen so far are insignificant. If one has received the proper training, removing them is about as easy as taking a pebble out of a bucket. Once the client has observed the entity for a few days, as explained in chapter 14, the clearing doesn’t take more than a few minutes. Then the entity is recycled in such a way that it will never invade anyone else. Altogether, if a qualified clearer is available, having an entity is preferable to having a sore back: the treatment is painless and quick, and once cleared the entity never comes back. For this reason, I prefer to use the word clearing rather than exorcism , as the latter is shrouded in a folklore that is totally irrelevant in the context of this work. There is nothing demonic at all about these insignificant parasites. In 99 percent of all cases, an entity could never be called evil. It is just an energy in the wrong place, like the bacteria that are beautifully in place in a compost heap but totally undesirable in your small intestine.

Near the end of the book, Dr. Sagan discusses the 1% of cases he investigates where other sorts of entities seem to be involved, and this is the closest point of connection between this book and Joe Fisher’s The Siren Call of the Hungry Ghosts (see my review at http://www.zaporacle.com/textpattern/article/95/the-siren-call-of-hungry-ghosts)

This chapter is entitled “Possession and Extraordinary Entities.” Unfortunately, I am afraid there is nothing extraordinary at all in mistaking an entity for a spirit-guide. This has become only too common these days, when “talking to one’s spirit-guides” is increasingly regarded as a sign of status, just as credit cards or membership in certain clubs used to be. My perception is that many of the people who presently think they are in contact with a spirit guide are in reality in contact with nothing more than an entity.

Dr. Sagan’s book is an extremely important exploration of the energy parasite phenomenon. His approach is no nonsense and there is no sense of self aggrandizement in tone or content. The entities described in this book are, like the ones in The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts, parasites, but the difference in intelligence and complexity is quite dramatic. The closest corroborating experience from my own investigations relate to the physical cravings associated with the parasites. I have long noted that there seems to be a parasitic influence oriented toward creating a hypercaloric metabolism that “burns at a redder color temperature,” as I have referred to it, due to the ingestion of high glycemic carbs, alcohol, spicy, salty foods, meats, etc. Similarly, there are influences to create negative thoughts, emotions, darker sexual passions and deeds.
Some observed behavior of parasitic entities reveals a high level of intelligence and complexity, but that does not mean that there are not other parasitic entity species that are of a much simpler, more mechanical kind as Dr. Sagan describes. Wherever we find life, we find multiple parasite species.
I highly reccomend this book to anyone making a serious study of the subject.  Dr. Sagan’s school trains people to remove energy parasites and their website is clairvision.org.

Review copyright 2006 by Jonathan Zap

(Please excuse any erratic formatting, we are working on it, the program we are using seems to have particular trouble with italics and in the source document I used italics to indicate quotes from the book.  Some book passages that should be italicized may not be, and other passages which are my own commentary may be mistakenly italicized.  In most cases it will be apparent from context what is my commentary and what are the words of Joe Fisher.)
The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts is a spell binding paranormal detective story, elegantly written, and as haunting and irresistible as its title implies. The implications of what British paranormal investigator and writer Joe Fisher discovers, at the apparent cost of his life, are staggering, and have such profound implications for all inhabitants of this particular plane of reality, that as over the top as this may sound, this book may be one of the more important ever written.

The title capsulates, in perfect microcosm, the subject of the book, and also the effect of the book on the reader…at least this reader. I actually had a paranormal experience the last night of reading this book, which I will relate later, that was of a type related to phenomena reported in the book and also related to the “mind parasite” subject which I have written about extensively. This book is itself a rabbit hole, a rabbit hole with a certain suction, an undertow pulling you in as the author is pulled into an ever more high stakes involvement with the phenomenon.
Joe Fisher experiences the classic pitfall of the paranormal researcher. He begins as an observer, but becomes ever more obsessed and affected, even over-powered by the object of investigation.

This is the sort of book that carries with it an element of danger for the reader, it has an irresistible allure like an over ripe fruit hanging lowly on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, a fruit I found myself reaching for at the very first moment I heard mention of the book’s title.

Essentially, this book pulls back the veil on the channeling and spirit guide phenomena, and compels you to look, through a glass darkly, at evil in one of its more beautiful, complex, seductive, ingeniously manipulative forms.
While it is dangerous to be unaware of such dark possibilities and manipulative entities, it may also be dangerous to cast your attention in their direction. Attention is not just internal, it is also a beacon visible to others, and not all of those others are visible to us. That’s one of several reasons I am providing a fairly extensive review of this book. I will also announce a bail out point for those of you who are actually prepared to hunt down this book and read it in the immediate future. But if you are not sure that you are going to make that a top priority, then at least read this review, because the findings of this investigation are much too significant to be overlooked.  Better yet, read the review and get this book which is a classic in the field of paranormal investigation and deserves an honored place in your personal library.

In case I’ve been too luke warm in my praise of this book, let me add that it has intense entertainment value to read, finely crafted sentences, perceptive details of people and places, observations that are nuanced and multi-layered, a narrator who earns his reliability as a witness even as he descends into the most unreliable of circumstances. The flowing succession of events and realizations has a haunting, gothic effect on the reader, like a Palantir that compels and obsesses your attention, but without excessively distorting your view. And if that wasn’t enough praise to make this book shimmer darkly in your mind’s eye, and compel you to read it
with the obsessive attention it deserves, I don’t know what else to say….
Joe Fisher began his investigation of the channeling phenomenon after completing an investigation into reincarnation and publishing The Case for Reincarnation. Summarizing his attitude toward that subject, Fisher includes a wonderfully incisive quote from Voltaire,

“It is no more surprising to be born twice than it is to be born
once.”
Near the end of the book, Fisher quotes William James, the great Harvard based pioneer in the psychological study of spiritual phenomena, who said in 1909 after completing a study of mediumship,
“The refusal of modern ‘enlightenment’ to treat ‘possession’ as a hypothesis to be spoken of as even possible, in spite of the massive human tradition based on concrete human experience in its favor, has always seemed to me a curious example of the power of fashion in things ‘scientific.’ That the demon theory…will have its innings again is to my mind absolutely certain. One has to be ‘scientific’ indeed to be blind and ignorant enough to suspect no such possibility.”

(This might be a good bail out point for those of you who are going to read the book soon, because I am about to go right into the content and situations of the book.)
At the very first channeling session Fisher attends, a very eloquent and charismatic spirit guide named Russell (who claims a very specific prior incarnation in the 19^th century) speaks through a young woman named Aviva who is suffering from leukemia. The setting is Aviva’s apartment in Toronto. Russell introduces himself to Joe and tells him that he has a spirit guide, a woman named Filipa, whom he has supposedly known for many lifetimes. Their last incarnation together was in the 18^th century in a village in Greece where they were lovers ostracized by the community. Filipa, unlike Joe, chose not to reincarnate again after this 18th Century incarnation. Speaking through Russell, Filipa immediately
demonstrates a shrewd understanding of Joe’s psychology. She recognizes his history of unstable romantic relationships, and places their last earthly relationship in Greece , a country Joe had lived in and with which he had particularly positive associations. Russell relates,

“She says this was, for her, during the immediate past life in Greece . You were a male and she was a female. You were to be her suitor. However, you both transgressed in the eyes of the community. You were sent from the village and did not return. She says she did not wish for this to happen. However, the village is more powerful than the one.”

Joe immediately felt seduced by this discarnate lover and the mythic star-crossed lover scenario, while his “skeptic inside screamed in protest.”

The medium, Aviva, is a laboratory technician who suffers from leukemia, and is at first highly skeptical and resistant to the channeling sessions which she cannot remember when brought out of trance. Tapes of the sessions are played for Aviva revealing a number of distinct disincarnate beings, each with their own accent and speech patterns and highly specific knowledge unknown to her waking personality. Russell, who presents himself as Aviva’s guide, spends much time being solicitous for Aviva’s fragile physical health, offering at times specific warnings and advice. At other times he offers intriguing metaphysical philosophy.

When Joe’s real life girlfriend, Rachel, attends a session, her guide immediately emerges and with his own distinctive accented voice, a thick Scottish brogue, and he provides specific details of past lifetimes he and Rachel have supposedly spent together and an acute understanding of some of Rachel’s predilections. Rachel finds herself inexplicably repulsed by the sessions and feels “a certain intangible negativity in the air.” Joe believes that Rachel is increasingly jealous of the intimate lover-like bond between him and Filipa, and feels that this accounts for her resistance to the sessions. Ultimately, Rachel would leave Joe after he becomes ever more obsessed with his discarnate lover and guide.
Both Russell and Filipa seem very offended when anyone refers to them as “spirits.” On one occasion Filipa says,

“And you use that awful word again. Spirits! There are no spirits. We are all people. People are people. It is your own growth…which is the most important thing you should be seeking. There is nothing Spiritual or ethereal about it. We all come from the same place and we will all arrive at the same place. We are all people. We are not spirits.”

Joe observes about the strengthening connection between him and his discarnate lover,

“Filipa and I seemed to think alike, feel alike and see the world from a near-identical perspective. Knowing that she understood my motives, my behavior and my reactions better than I did myself both confirmed my belief in Filipa and left me feeling intensely vulnerable. I learned to accept this vulnerability and grew to trust that she would not exploit my Defenselessness. No matter what I said or how I said it, my words were always interpreted just as I had intended them to be….Much more than a subject of research and a wellspring of information on discarnate life, Filipa rapidly became an adviser, a best friend. And my ideal lover. Sometimes I fantasized about our sex life in eighteenth-century Greece and imagined with relish the passion that would erupt if only we could be together again, sharing hungry bodies as well as hungry minds.”

Later Joe remarks,

“If Filipa could have assumed a physical body, I’m sure I would have married her. But she was only a voice, a voice that resonated with more love, compassion and perspicacity than any I had ever known. Within the space of a few months, she had demonstrated an acute awareness of my feelings and foibles, she knew the people in my life and their effect upon me, and was even able to relate specific circumstances in which I had found myself, situations unknown to Aviva or anyone who attended what Filipa chose to call our ‘groupings.”

“Somehow, Filipa had to be either living inside me or hovering perpetually close by, picking up via some otherwordly antennae my organism’s every twitch and shudder. How else could she read my thoughts and feelings, sit in on my compositions at the computer keyboard, observe my contacts with others, assess my health and nutrition, listen to the jazz and rock ‘n roll that I played on the stereo—“noises,” she called it—and even hear the tunes I habitually hummed in my head? “I can see energies,” is how she explained her ability to know me inside out. “I can see in your mind. If you make in your mind, I can see.”

Joe adds ,
The guides were doing much to enrich our quality of life, both emotionally and materially. They often displayed the ability to read the state of our physical bodies and prescribe minerals, foods and medicinal herbs to enhance performance and well-being. Russell would occasionally perform psychometry—-that is, while turning over in “his” hands a personal item belonging to someone unknown to himself and Aviva, he would give incisive readings as to the individual’s character and personality.

One of the more convincing guides to speak through Aviva was a discarnate named Ernest who claimed to have been an RAF pilot during WW II. Specifically, he claimed to be Flying Officer William Alfred Scott of 99 Squadron, Group Three, Bomber Command. He offered up the most specific details, including slang words known only to a subset of WW II RAF pilots. He claimed, for example, that his squadron had to sleep in the grandstand at Newmarket Racecourse. Research uncovered a photograph which showed that, in fact, members of this particular squadron did indeed sleep at the grandstand of Newmarket Racecourse. On the other hand, Ernest would sometimes lapse into American diction in pronouncing certain words. Convincing spiritual aspects were interwoven with the extremely specific details.
During his few years as a bomber pilot, Ernest said that he was convinced he was acting impeccably in fighting what he felt was humanity’s last war against “the little clown,” Adolf Hitler. But he told how his return to the between-life state changed his self-assessment, bringing the realization that he had incurred karmic debt with all the victims of his bombing raids—debts that he was now obliged to repay. “Now that I’m here,” he said ruefully, “I can think only of all the deaths in which I played a part.” This, then, was the reason for Ernest’s overweening sadness and remorse. He was carrying the burden of having been a mass-murderer in a worthy cause.

The sessions with Aviva took place in her apartment in Toronto, but in February of 1986 Joe missed some sessions to fly to England to research the details of Ernest’s case. While Joe was flying across the Atlantic, Ernest was announcing, through Aviva in her apartment in Toronto, that he had made the decision to reincarnate, and would be leaving them in a few months,
It was said that a fetus had been located in southern England , a bodily “vehicle” placed in ideal circumstances to provide Ernest with the opportunity of repaying many of the karmic debts he had incurred.

In England Joe does an exhaustive search to confirm the identity of the discarnate airman William Alfred Scott, but there is not a trace of him in the records—no birth, death or military service. He plays tapes of sessions in which Ernest speaks to a couple of aging RAF pilots who had served with the 99 Squadron during WWII. The pilots listened with fascinated recognition, confirming the specific details, slang words etc. used by Ernest. Two of the RAF pilots even thought they recognized the person on the tapes as “ Scotty ,” a Sergeant Malcolm Scott they knew, but no one anywhere had ever heard of a William Alfred Scott.
While Joe was in England he spent a few days visiting with his mother and told her about his frustration with the research.

My mother had an answer. It was predictable enough, I suppose, leaping straight out of years of Christian conditioning. “Demons,” she said, her voice quivering a little. “You’re talking to demons. And I don’t like the sound of it one bit.”

Meanwhile, back in Toronto, the once genial Ernest becomes hostile and threatening when he learns of Joe’s investigation, and complains that his privacy is being violated and that he doesn’t want living relatives contacted, etc. He admits that Joe may find discrepancies and threatens to withdraw himself and his charge from the sessions if the investigation continues.

Some time later there is a very emotional session in which Ernest takes his leave because it is time for him to be reincarnated. Joe asks Russell, Aviva’s guide, for details of Ernest’s reincarnation specifics, and the name and date of birth do check out, though the place is about thirty-five miles off. Joe even contacts the new parents, though understandably, they refuse to cooperate with his investigation.
Joe furthers his investigation by consulting other mediums who are channeling different guides. One of them is a young woman named Claire who channels a surgeon from Victorian England named Dr. Pinkerton. Dr. Pinkerton is very charming, and like the other guides, full of the most specific details of his past incarnation. When Joe asks him about his spirit guide, the information provided by Dr. Pinkerton does not match up well with that provided by Filipa. Even more troubling, Dr. Pinkerton seems to encourage Joe to have sex with Claire, and claims that Filipa would approve of this,

“ Filipa’s got so much give,” he said, “and when there’s a female vibration that is sincere around you, she trusts that vibration and she feels the same as if she’s touching you, Son. Especially through a medium. Making love to a medium who pours out love. It is a wonderful, wonderful journey.”

We later learn that Russell tried to manipulate a sexual relationship between Aviva and a member of her group, a married man named Sanford Ellison who at Russell’s direction had become her hypnotist and healer. But neither Sanford nor Aviva were interested in such a liaison, and the manipulations led to them breaking off contact. One interpretation, that occurred to me, was that if the guides were a puppet show being created by the unconscious of the mediums, one could see how Claire’s unconscious, for example, might want to manipulate a sexual relationship with handsome Joe Fisher. But most of the evidence points to a far more troubling possibility, that it is the discarnate beings who want to experience sex and/or partake of the energy exchanged through their mediums.

A peculiar dynamic develops where the guides speaking through one medium begin to warn Joe about the guides speaking through another medium and vice-a-versa. Dr. Pinkerton also warns Joe about going to Greece, and tells him that he will find pain and danger there. Joe returns to Europe and investigates the very specific details of Russell’s past incarnation. He is shocked and disillusioned to find that, as with Ernest, while many specifics prove valid, his identity, birth and death, and many other crucial details appear to be lies. Next he travels to Greece and discovers that his beloved Filipa’s details are also a mixture of truth and lies. Particularly disturbing is a shocking anachronism—-Filipa’s references to Alexandroupolis, a place name not coined until long after her last incarnation. The buzzing in his ears, which he had learned to associate with Filipa trying to communicate with him, takes on a furious intensity as he uncovers that his discarnate beloved is also a deceiver. Dr. Pinkerton’s warning proves out, because Greece becomes a place of extremely painful disillusionment for Joe.
Joe returns to Toronto in a state of exasperation, anxiety and self loathing. Most of the members of the medium group surrounding Aviva refuse the evidence that the guides are not who they claim to be. Joe, however, finds himself recovering from the malign influence the guides have had on him,

In the course of several days’ brooding and reassessment, my prolonged disillusionment was transformed into a reinforced sense of self, a sense of self that I had long ago surrendered, albeit unconsciously, to Filipa, Russell and the others. Little by little, I reclaimed my personal identity, realizing all the while how much I had lived a shadow life since becoming a member of the group. With developing clarity, I saw how subtly and how stealthily I had become dependent on Filipa, how in questioning my every move and motive I had deferred again and again to what I believed she had expected of me. The buzzing in my ears—so harsh and abusive in Greece —gradually retreated and I stoically avoided any contact with Filipa, whoever she was…I was managing to extricate myself from the guides’ gentle tyranny.
Joe summons his will to confront the guides with the findings of his research. Russell responds with defensive denial and many forms of brilliant manipulation. Filipa will not come forward to answer the charges,

“No,” Russell was adamant. “You’ve shut her out. You’ve quite completely shut her out. I don’t think she’d have the energies. She says, “If the value of that truth and love that you’ve had between you is to be undervalued because you cannot find Alexandroupolis, what basis is your life being lived on? Is it being lived only on the superficial ‘I can touch, I can see, I can feel,’ or is it being lived in your heart, where the truth resides?”

Even as Joe is now able to see through the manipulation, the brilliance of it is staggering,

“Filipa’s charge, let me tell you one thing,” Russell was adopting his professorial demeanor. “The only way that you can ever go deeper is to go into yourself, not out of yourself. The truth lies within you as the truth lies within all. Why do you think that billions on the earthbound plane still attend church? It’s a deep and abiding belief with no proof. Less proof than you have of reincarnation, less proof than you have of us…You cannot prove the existence of the guides, for we are not here on the earthbound plane. All we can hope to do is to keep you intact until your transition and, in this manner, to impart to you the knowledge we have for your own lives…
“I really don’t know that any of you really grasp what it is to guide someone. We don’t sit here with puppet strings and pull you this way and push you that way. We still have our own forward development to get on with, and we must ensure the safety of our charges to the best of our ability at all times…Do you understand?”

“Yes, I do, Russell, but I’m forced to step back and I’m forced to think about possible alternatives.”

Russell continues to challenge Joe, who is now the one apostate in a group that consists mostly of true believers. Underneath his metaphysical double talk Russell is essentially saying, “What are you going to believe, your lying eyes or our discarnate voices?”

“So what are your alternatives? I’d like to hear this.”

“Well, that instead of being a real guide you might be just a part of your charge’s subconscious mind, that you might be a past-life personality as you have indicated that other so-called guides are. And I think about people such as Emanuel Swedenborg, the great Swedish clairvoyant, who warned very specifically about communicating with entities in the next world. …He warned about the dangers of evil spirits who will use all manner of subtlety, brilliance and affection to reach you.”

“To what end?”

“I don’t know, Russell.”

“You must dig further if you’re a true researcher as you say. To what end would someone give you the information of the type that has been given? To what end would someone open the learning to you that you have been given? To what end? What would that end entail?”

Joe responds that he doesn’t know, and Russell brilliantly presses his attack, succeeding, at least for other members of the group, of getting Joe on the defensive and redefining a situation in which his false identity has been exposed into a lesson an exasperated teacher is trying to offer to an errant and stubborn student,

“You unfortunately cannot do this outside the earthbound framework. Now when you say this man, Emanuel…what?”

“Swedenborg.”

“Swedenborg. What was he warning against?”

“He was warning about evil spirits.”

“Lower astral individuals.”

“He would warn about the influence of evil spirits who only wanted your downfall. They spoke about love and they spoke about goodness and they ostensibly wanted the best for you, but really they didn’t.”

“But how could you be downfalled if you are free to choose, free to challenge?”

“Well, we are free to choose but, of course, the guides have influenced everybody in this group. The guides have exerted influence to a great degree. You know that.”

“We work only with our charges.”

Russell’s last comment should be self evident falsehood to anyone in the group still capable of critical thinking. Joe is Filipa’s charge, and Russell’s charge is Aviva, but right now Russell is working Joe very much indeed. Joe responds,
“But having been here week after week talking to everybody, you well know the influence that you have over people.”

“We give you information. I do not think we give you influence whatsoever. If you choose to allow it to influence your behavior, that is your choice. We do not offer anything that is not asked for.”

“But inasmuch as you say you are our guides and you want the best for us and you are working with us to help us do better, for forward development…if we accept what you are saying then of course you’re going to influence us.”

“I have told you all along not to accept and I don’t have to justify my existence against your existence.”

And it goes on, a spell binding wrestling match between a paranormal investigator and a false idol refusing to be cast down. Russell, with the rhetorical skill of a cornered Saruman, wriggles out of the grasp of reason like a slippery eel, and although Joe continues to confront, members of the group intervene coming to Russell’s defense,

“You said to me a long time ago, ‘Research your research.’ I have researched my research and I have not found anybody.”

“You have not found concrete earthbound evidence. But if I were to meet you, Filipa’s charge, at your transition, would that convince you?”

“Yes, I would love you to meet me, Russell, and I hope you do.”

“Well, I can’t because I’m not your guide.”

Helen spoke up once more in Russell’s defense.

“Joe, if Sonji’s charge here gave me the address to her house and I drove into that particular part of the city and couldn’t find her house, can I blame her for my inability to find the house?”

Helen joins Russell in blaming Joe for all the disconfirmations he has uncovered of Russell’s past incarnation
and she uses all sorts of absurd chop logic to defend her absolute faith in the guides,
“Listen, Joe,” urged Helen, slapping her hand against the carpet on which she was sitting. “You know this is a floor. You’ve stepped on this and you know it’s floor. You’ve proved it to yourself. Once you’ve proved something to yourself, how can you go back and say it isn’t so?”

“He has come to his own conclusions, Mi-Lao’s charge,” offered Russell.
Russell skillfully deflects Joe’s continuing challenges and takes back control over the session, moving on to a long lecture on the nature of karma. Afterwards, Joe again tries to confront Russell, and again he skillfully reframes the challenge as Joe’s lapse, accusing him of excavating trivia that is only serving to distract the guides from working with their charges. Russell adds,

“I don’t want to seem harsh because you and I have been very good friends.”

“We have…”

“And I don’t see that that should change. I am simply saying: ‘There are other ways to look. Yours is not the only way.’ The information that was given to you is there. If it were not there, we would have said so.”

Joe responds,

“For my part, I will endeavor to remain open-minded. I’ve been totally honest with you today, as I’ve had to be.”

“Course you have,” Russell agreed magnanimously. “How else does one engender respect unless one is honest? If you lie, deceive and cheat there is absolutely no respect and, therefore, no confidence. But you also have to respect us…”

I’ve given some large samples of this particular dialogue to give an idea of how brilliantly manipulative these guides are. There is much more fascinating dialogue in the book based on transcripts of taped sessions, and most of it is far more convincing as the guides are usually not being confronted with discrepancies but are providing all sorts of specific information, much of which proves out, and this is interspersed with intriguing metaphysical philosophy.
Joe appears to be the only one in the group to notice how ingeniously Russell is manipulating them. Although Fisher never suggests the possibility (which suggests a continuing level of successful manipulation), I got the distinct impression that Aviva was channeling a single shape-shifting entity who, like the devil, “hath power to assume a pleasing shape” and was capable of performing a whole cast of characters of both genders. One has to wonder if part of Joe’s psyche was not still under the influence of perceiving Filipa as a separate entity that he does not discuss what seems such an obvious possibility.

Another very strange aspect of the entities is that they leave blinds, or discrepancies that an astute observer is bound to uncover. Fisher wonders why the entities, who are able to command such specific knowledge of various times and places of the past, don’t pick actual names of people from those past times and places which would make the debunking of their claims much more difficult or impossible. He asks the question, but doesn’t speculate about why. This is pure speculation of course, but I can think of several possibilities. The first possibility to consider, though I think the evidence leans away from it, is that the psyche of the medium is the source of the information. There is a phenomenon called “cryptoamnesia” where a person displays arcane knowledge unknown to their waking personality, but which research uncovers was once exposed to them as a child, etc. This seems quite unlikely, as does the possibility of conscious fraud by the mediums, as the voluminous details of multiple past time lines would require the most difficult research, finding information in a pre-internet era that could only be found in particular archives in other countries thousands of miles away. A paranormal variation on this possibility would involve an unconsciously psychic medium whose unconscious psyche accesses arcane, but error ridden, information out of the collective unconscious/Akashic Record and uses it to generate multiple personalities in the trance state. Another possibility is that is that the entities have the ability to access information about prior time lines, but the process is imperfect. Perhaps they are able to read living minds which provide them information, but some of the information they read is erroneous. Perhaps the entities are neurotic and unconsciously go over the top in their deceptions, as many human pathological liars do, and end up tripping themselves up. Or maybe part of their sport is to see how successfully they can manipulate people, so that even when they include errors they are still able to pull the puppet strings. Or maybe they enjoy the terror and painful disillusion that will happen to some who uncover the errors? The problem is that once paranormal possibilities are allowed, and I think they have to be allowed, they inevitably tend to exponentiate because we now have to consider so many novel causal vectors that fundamentalist materialists can conveniently discard.
Unfortunately, a classic flaw I notice again and again in paranormal research is that the research will tend to assume that if there is an anomaly, only a particular paranormal causal vector must be responsible. For example, EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon) researchers assume that if they capture an anomalous voice on their recorder while walking through a cemetery, for example, that the source must be a ghost of some sort. They never, as far as I can tell after listening to many, many hours of various EVP researchers discussing their work, consider that there could be a paranormal ventriloquism at work and that their own unconscious psyches could be the source of the recorded voices. A couple of EVPs I have heard strongly point toward that possibility. Another common presumption is that even if multiple paranormal causal vectors are considered, that there must be only one true one to be discovered. But there could be multiple causalities, so that some EVPs may be paranormal ventriloquisms while others may derive from entities or other exotic causes. Some UFOs may be exteriorizations of the collective unconscious, as Jung speculated, while others may be entities in shape-shifting energy bodies, while maybe still another group are material crafts containing actual extraterrestrials.

It is a frustrating but very real problem in paranormal research that it is hard to falsify or eliminate competing paranormal vectors of causality. My approach to paranormal investigation is to withhold from the premature closure onto too definite and exclusive a theory, because once you invest in a particular theory you burden your observational powers with an enormous a priori constraint, and inevitably tend to corral evidence to support your pet theory. The mind and the ego hate ambivalence and ambiguity, and would understandably love to settle on one definite explanation, but this tendency creates gigantic distortions in both normal and paranormal research. Fundamentalist materialist scientism eliminates the paranormal as even a possibility, but with similar habits of mind, many paranormal investigators reach premature closure onto only one paranormal possibility, and then become true believers and self righteous proselytizers of this particular theory.
I am not accusing Joe Fisher of this tendency, because he is such an exemplary researcher and was so inevitably led toward viewing the guides as malign and deceiving entities by his actual experience. Many of the additional possibilities I am suggesting may have occurred to him, and he may have chosen not to write about them because they are so speculative or because they could help people rationalize participation with a phenomenon which he discovered to be extremely dangerous.

Continuing to speculate, perhaps the entities are compelled, by inner or outer causes, to include erroneous information so as not to overwhelm the free will of the human participants with revelations that are 100% verifiable. This could be explained as the mythic scenario of a demon under some sort of divine constraint to leave a calling card for the astute adept that shows that they are a diabolical agent. Alternatively, we have the classic device of the alchemists and great hermetic teachers of leaving “blinds,” intentional errors to sidetrack the unworthy and challenge the worthy initiates to validate things for themselves. Discussing this case with Rob Brezny (freewillastrology.com), he pointed out that in the Tarot the Devil card is actually the archangel Uriel in disguise, a benevolent teacher who uses deception to teach us difficult lessons about not relying too much on external guides, for example.
Some of these exotic possibilities came to mind after Joe’s confrontation with the Russell entity. After the session, Joe felt the stirrings of a vague memory of an earlier session in which Russell had commented at length about manipulation. In an earlier session Russell had asserted that Sanford Ellison was being “severely yet subtly manipulated by his wife, Betty.” As he reviews the transcript of this session, Joe feels like Russell, “…might as well have been on his knees in a confessional.” Here is Russell, perhaps brilliantly articulating his own path of manipulation while nominally discussing Betty and Sanford ,

Manipulation means overwhelming another with your energies. To do that, you have contempt for that person; you have disdain for yourself. You have no self-love and therefore cannot love another human. There is genuine desire to control, genuine desire to overwhelm and to have the manipulatee take on your energies to form, in essence, almost another “little you”…

If you close the door to love and open the door to control, you are a manipulator. If you close the door to self-esteem and self-love, you open the door to being manipulated…How manipulators do it is by altering their own core energies to fit, as much as a key would fit into a lock, the energies of the person that they want to manipulate. As that fit takes place, they draw the energies of the other person to them. Very slowly and carefully, they work on those energies and then project them back once they have been worked on and brought into the same type of energy pattern that they themselves have. Once that key is fitted into the lock, it is very easy to turn it at any time. And if the other person is not co-operating in being manipulated then they simply turn it a little more until they do…The manipulator simply supplants his own energies within the victim who begins to think, act and function very much in the mode of the person who is manipulating. However, the manipulator will often appear to be compliant, which gives the manipulatee the illusion of having some control.

Manipulation is subtle and is, at first, very rarely picked up on by the person being manipulated. Often, it takes some event to show the victim that he or she is being manipulated. And even then the control can be very difficult to break and can be very painful if it has been going on for a long time.
Manipulators tend either to embellish or lie outright when challenged. Even if caught with their hand taking the bread, they will somehow explain it away in falling back on the skills from which they first learned to manipulate…that is, lying… They have a variety of tricks in their bag that they will pull out to use as weapons for control and they will rotate those weapons as needed…You will often find that manipulators are most vehemently defended: a manipulator has staunch allies who are unwilling to believe that this dear, sweet person is using them.

This analysis of manipulation is not only incredibly perceptive, it is also prescient as it precedes the confrontation where staunch allies like Rachel came forward to defend Russell from Joe’s disconfirming research. The method of manipulation described by Russell had an eerie resonance for me, because in my fantasy epic Parallel Journeys (linked up on the mainpage of this site), there is an evil entity called the “Demiwraith” that uses precisely the same methods.
Following the confrontation with Russell, Joe looks up Sanford Ellison, the man whom Russell claims was being manipulated by his wife Betty. Sanford left the group some months before and told Joe to contact him if he ever wanted to hear about “the other side of the guides.”

The guides had directed Sanford to become Aviva’s hypnotist and healer. Aviva, the medium, was suffering with leukemia and the guides did display an acute awareness of the vicissitudes of her health. They used Sanford to deliver what appeared to be efficacious energetic healings,
There was no question in Sanford ’s mind that he was channeling life-saving energies to Aviva’s entranced form. He was impressed by the guides’ obvious knowledge of her physical condition and his fingers would register varying degrees of heat or coolness according to the various types of energies which he was told Tuktu was transmitting through his hands to different parts of Aviva’s body…

Sanford’s unorthodox attentions appeared to be making inroads as Aviva discovered that, despite occasional flare-ups, she had progressively less need of conventional treatment and medication. But if Aviva was showing signs of winning her battle against leukemia, Sanford found that the act of channeling energies left him feeling extraordinarily depleted and ill-at-ease. “It was as if my mind and my emotions had been totally scrambled.” He said.
The guides also conducted a systematic campaign to undermine his marriage with Betty,

Slowly and stealthily, the guides talked Sandford into believing that Betty was cruelly yet subtly manipulating him…he was told that he was being overwhelmed by the energies of others and that Betty, especially, was smothering his energies with her own and manipulating him according to her wishes…

It was little wonder that Sanford bore scant resemblance to his former self: he was sinking into a deepening depression. The worse he felt, the more pressure the guides exerted. “They kept telling me stories about Betty,” Sanford continued. “They said that she was having affairs with lots of different men. They said that she was a pathological liar. They said that she was trying to kill me by projecting powerful negative energies my way. They even warned, on three separate occasions, that I would die unless I left her. Each ultimatum was different—they put limits of six months, nine months and three years on my life if I chose to stay with Betty.”

Simultaneously, the guides gently suggested that Sanford and Aviva had close reincarnation ties, had been drawn to one another by their shared karma and were meant to be together.

“Tuktu was trying to convince me,” said Sanford , “that if I wasn’t working with Aviva continuously, we would both come to an untimely end. And Russell kept telling me that Aviva and I had to express our love for one another and that she could take care of my physical needs. But the only feelings I had for her were of duty and responsibility. That’s how I got sucked in—by being told that she was going to die and that I was the only one who could help her.”

Tapes that Sandford made of private sessions with the guides reveal the heavily persuasive tactics that Russell employed in a concerted effort to bring Sandford and Aviva closer together both physically and emotionally. Maintaining that they were making a “lifetime commitment” to one another, Russell urged:

Speak of your feelings with her and make her speak of hers with you. Sit together, look at each other, touch each other, and talk of them. It is very difficult to be honest where there are the slightest barriers between you. You have no barriers now except the barrier of distance, the barrier that neither of you has trusted another person to this extent in your entire earthbound lives. We are asking you to meet, look, mix your energies together by touching so that you are trusted by one another…When one wishes to communicate depth and understanding, that person is close to you and looks at you and touches you. Is that not so?
“Yes.” Sandford acknowledged.

“Do it!” Russell commanded.

Although the work with the guides is in real life causing both Sanford ’s marriage and his business to unravel, his guide, Tuktu, makes the claim to Sandford,

Without any guidance you would have lost your business, you would have lost your own family, you would have completely lost it all…and many other things of a negative nature would have happened to you.

Tuktu’s counsel is that Sandford should leave his wife, Betty, though this is framed as if there is much sympathy for Betty in the proposed desertion,
It is very difficult for her (Betty) to come to the realization that she must let go of you, that you have passed way beyond the soul planes which she inhabits. This is not reason enough for her to…wish to undergo a transformation. She just wants to stay with you. But one must move on to the areas where one is capable of functioning as an entity. It will not be uncommon for her to begin to cling very hard and very tenaciously…

As Sandford’s desperation grew, the guides introduced new hope of salvation to their foundering victim. Tuktu told Sandford that his problems were compounded because his emotional centers were shut down. With the guide’s help, they could be opened in the cause of his well-being. “Wherever I could feel heat under my skin,” said Sandford, “the guides said that an emotional center was not open, that is, was not functioning properly. Once I felt thirty or forty of these ‘hot spots’—like hot walnuts—all over my body.” So it was, in private sessions, that Russell and Tuktu proceeded to “help” Sanford by prying open these emotional centers, alternately counseling him and feeding him with energies channeled through Aviva’s entranced body.
“Tuktu got quite vicious at times. He would tell me that I was useless, that I couldn’t make decisions, that I didn’t stick up for myself and so forth. These derogatory remarks were made so that I would express anger, so that my “anger center” would be opened up. I was battered so hard that I didn’t know what was going on, but it was said to be all for my own good—they were supposedly breaking down my resistance to emotions held in the body. Much of the time I felt intensely hot all over the abdomen and groin area and, whenever a center opened, I felt a great rush of hot wind within, a blast of warm energy. When this happened, I would feel very calm, confident and in control. My insight was enhanced. I’d fly high—but then I’d come crashing down again.

“The more my centers were supposedly opening, the worse I felt, in spite of the periodic highs. I was feeling things I didn’t realize could be experienced with such intensity. The emotional swings were phenomenal. At times, I would be totally broken down. I underwent raging storms of emotion—nostalgia, crying fits, great highs, depressive lows. One session lasted fourteen hours. I took Aviva in and out of trance so that I could stay as close as possible to the guides throughout that time.”

“I see now that they were brain washing me. It was magnificently done. They would scramble my thinking and feeling processes so that I wasn’t able to function properly. And then they would be the ones to make me feel better. Practically every day I would get what you might call a maintenance shot which would make me feel better for a while. They turned me into a psychic drug addict. The guides were out to create enormous dependency—and they succeeded.”

Early in March, 1987 Sandford’s enfeebled resistance could hold out no longer and he capitulated to the voices’ demands. He packed his bags and left home. “It was the worst point of my life,” he said. “I was feeling God-awful about everything. My whole life was a mess.”

The testimony of Sandford, and the transcripts of his private sessions, may be enough to take the many possible motivations for the guides and focus in on the mind parasite hypothesis as the most likely. Sandford provides clear evidence of a highly sophisticated energy parasitism occurring. Classically, the entities seek to promote lower energies such as anger which give them the grosser type of energy they prefer. Like a crack addict, or a sex addict, Sanford feels a pleasurable rush when the energy is discharged:

These derogatory remarks were made so that I would express anger, so that my “anger center” would be opened up… Much of the time I felt intensely hot all over the abdomen and groin area and, whenever a center opened, I felt a great rush of hot wind within, a blast of warm energy.
About two weeks ago, on my last night of reading the book, I was dreaming about a big dog that was starting to maul me. Some sort of lucidity clicked on in the dream as I realized that since in real life I was severely mauled by a dog when I was ten years old (and this was caused by a parapsychological attack—-a very long story I won’t get into here), it seemed like something was using that association to arouse fear in me and I forced myself awake. This felt like an immunological alert happening via some self preservation function that wanted me awake. Suddenly wide awake, I felt energy pouring out of my body from a circular area exactly at the solar plexus which seemed molten and electrical. The area had an approximate diameter of about 3.5”/ 8cm. In my mind’s eye I pictured it as looking like the lit end of a cigarette. The feeling of acute energy drain was very similar, if not as extreme, as the encounter with a human vampire which I described in Mind Parasites, Energy Parasites and Vampires and during which I was similarly awakened with an urgent immunological alert sensation. This is why I said at the beginning of this document that there is both danger in being oblivious to such entities, but also in casting awareness in their direction. Of course anyone can speculate that my dream was seeded by what I was reading before I slept, etc. and there is no way for me to verify the source of the perceived attack.
Also extremely interesting in Sanford’s testimony is that the guides used the classic demonic strategies of accusing others of exactly what they are doing (Betty is accused of energy draining manipulation), reversing the truth 180 degrees (without us your business and life would have failed) and employing the truth in a way that twists it 180 degrees (accusing Sanford of not sticking up for himself). Similar strategies are classically employed by abusive lovers who typically drain someone’s finances and energy while portraying themselves as their meal ticket and healer/savior. Skillfully, they create a dependence on their parasitism. A key part of their strategy is to keep the victim in a state of extreme emotional instability. Last year a mind parasite experiencer contacted me by email and suggested an interesting name for the parasites, the “emotioneers.” He said he derived the name from Disney, from the Mouseketeers, because he wanted to indicate their skill in manufacturing a fantasy world that sucks you in to manipulate your emotions.
Shortly after Sanford leaves his wife, he has an argument with Aviva who storms out of his office (she had been working for him) vowing never to return. Aviva keeps her vow and thereby severs Sanford’s contact with the guides who spoke through her.
In the absence of any contact with the guides, Sandford made a startling discovery. He began to feel better, a lot better. Days passed and the fierce emotional fluctuations and bouts of muddled thinking steadily ebbed away….He came to believe that his prolonged proximity to their communicating “vehicle” and his willingness to channel healing energies had left him vulnerable to disincarnate designs about which he could only wonder.
A few weeks later Sanford got a call from Roger, who had been reinstated as Aviva’s hypnotist. Russell, speaking through Aviva had insisted that Roger dial Sandford and hold the phone to Aviva’s lips ,

Russell barked into “the invasive instrument” that his charge’s leukemia was running rampant and that the rift between Sandford and Aviva must be healed.
Sandford was unbending in his determination to have nothing further to do with the guides and, once this was communicated, Russell resorted to intimidation of the most blatant and desperate kind.

“Russell told me,” said Sandford, “that he had just been handed the next installment of my life and that if I didn’t tell Aviva how important she was in my life….she would die there without my healing. He also said that, in Aviva’s absence, I wouldn’t be able to keep my energies balanced through contact with the guides and that my business would collapse. Finally, he told me that I would commit suicide in a fit of depression.”

Russell’s threats were transparently bullying and inaccurate as Aviva went into remission and Sandford’s business recovered and his life improved generally. Sandford even credits the trial of involvement with the guides as crucial to the rescue of his marriage,

“It was as if we shoved our hands into fire,” said Sandford. “Without knowing it, we found ourselves participating in an exercise of the most frightful self-confrontation. In some perverse way, the guides were our teachers. Without their intervention, Betty and I would probably still be locked in the same desperate nothingness that our marriage used to be.”

Sandford also realizes deception about the need for the supposed healing sessions,

“In retrospect, it doesn’t make any sense that I was needed to channel healing energies in the first place. The guides said that healing was effected via the fourth level of Aviva’s mind and, when I asked why they could not channel energies directly, Russell never gave me a straight answer. I think the guides always tried to give us the impression that they knew more than they did. They would tell us one thing that was accurate and then we would assume that everything they said was right.”

Sandford concludes,

“Who, or what, are these beings?” Sandford asked rhetorically. “It’s very difficult to say. I do know they were right inside Aviva from the way her facial expression would change. They would even laugh through her. I tend to feel that they are lower astral entities who play on human frailty and feed on our energy and our emotions. They often dazzled with their contempt for us. I still believe they helped to keep Aviva alive. They needed her alive. Our communication allowed some light to shine into the darkness of where they are and wherever that is must be God-awful in the extreme.”

Joe next goes to talk to Dr. Pinkerton, the guide channeled by Claire, who had warned him about the guides being channeled by Aviva. Dr. Pinkerton responds,

“You want me to be honest with you, Son?”

“Perfectly.”

“I don’t know how you’re going to take this, but do you know
the difference between earthbound spirits and real guides?”

Later Joe inquires,
“So these earthbound spirits,” I persisted, “are the dead who have led rather unsavory lives and are hanging around and…”

“YES!” declared Dr. Pinkerton loudly. “These lost souls…” (he uttered the phrase with an attenuated cry of pain) “…these low entities, they come in with great knowledge, they come in with love. They want you to believe in them. They are quite clever. They say that they do not control your will. Oh, no, no, no. They have a very lovely, sweet way to control you completely, do you understand me?”

“But what is to tell that you…”

“That I am not of the same? I shall tell you why, Son. For many years I have been bouncing in and out of my instrument controlling organs, blood pressure, heartbeat and so on and so forth. Nothing bad has ever happened to her: she has never been possessed. I do not allow any lower entities around my instrument. But Aviva, she must stop at once…Someone that comes through her shall remain there and we shall have to do an exorcism on this young lady.”

Dr. Pinkerton adds ,
“I am not lying to you Joseph. I have no reason to lie to you, do you understand me? I’ve never lied to you.”

Later Dr Pinkerton remarks,
“The so-called master—Russell—-is a serpent. He sweet-talks everyone, Dear. But the good always wins.”

“So what are they gaining by this deception?” I asked.
“Controlling, My Dear,” replied Dr. P. “Controlling, controlling. On the Earth plane, a lot of human beings like to control others. What makes you think it is different on the other side, Son?”

“But the buzzing in my ears,” I asked him. “What is that?”

“That’s her.”

“That’s my real guide?”

“Mm-mmm. She’s been protecting you all the time… She does love you very much, Dear.”

Repeatedly, Dr. Pinkerton warns Joe about Aviva’s guides:
“They are brilliant, Joseph, they are brilliant. You have no idea…These souls cannot cross over into the light. But they do have a lot of knowledge.”

“How are they able to read one’s thoughts?”

“They’re around you, I’ve told you before, they’re around you always. There’s a constant fight here. We don’t want to get too close to them, you know. We’ll get caught.”

“How?”

“They’re quite powerful, these souls. We are protecting my instrument. We are protecting you. We are protecting a lot of souls. We’re trying to make sure they stay away…You see, what these souls need…they need to be rescued, you know.”

Joe investigates Dr. Pinkerton’s past life background and inevitably discovers that it is yet another case of deception. Joe confronts Dr. Pinkerton with the disconfirmation:
Harboring incipient anger and distrust, I confronted Dr. Pinkerton in the gloom of his consulting room. To start with, he behaved as though he hadn’t heard my declaration that the records bore no listing for a Dr. George Albert Pinkerton.

“What do you want to know about George?” he demanded unsteadily.
“Where can I find him? Why isn’t he in the medical directory?”

“Just a moment. Yes, Nathaniel, yes, that is our friend Joseph. It’s good to see his light, isn’t it? Also, your guide is here, Joseph.”

The carrot was no longer enticing the donkey. Dr. Pinkerton was employing his trusty tactics of distraction but I was not about to be swayed by yet another mention of my guide. I was thoroughly fed up with my compliance, with my tolerance, with my willingness to grant the benefit of the doubt to the utterances of one unfathomable voice after another. For years, I had encountered nothing but deceit and manipulation wrapped in the spirits’ flattery, high-mindedness and exhortations of love and affection.

Joe is aware of another case of a channeled guide claiming to be a Doctor, Dr. George Jamieson, supposed to have been a “bone setter” from Boston. His case is investigated and also disconfirmed, and Joe notes,
I was intrigued that both Pinkerton and Jamieson, whoever they were, had chosen to be known as “doctors.” It seemed to be a favorite ploy among discarnate communicators. Doctors abound among the legions of entities channeled from coast to coast and they recur constantly in the history of Spiritualism. One can only assume that the prefix is adopted because of its power to generate instant deference and respect.

In his book The Wanderings of a Spiritualist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle tells of attending a séance in Australia held by medium Charles Bailey whose “spirit controls” were both self-styled doctors. Sir Arthur wrote glowingly of the communicator’s dignity and wisdom. Likewise, the great American psychologist William James was mightily impressed with a French “doctor” named Phinuit who spoke gruffly through the voice box of renowned medium Leonora Piper.
Joe concludes,

“Unfortunately, mediumship is inclined to attract dark and tricky intelligences rather than act as focal point for the genuine and the well-intentioned. It was always thus. As long ago as 1869, Andrew Jackson Davis wrote in Spirit Mysteries : “It is no difficult thing for certain spirits to impersonate others, to talk and dress up their thoughts like others, which they will do if such resemblance adds anything important to their communications.”

Joe, who was “ Ruminating on Dr. Pinkerton’s fall from grace…” opens a Chinese fortune cookie after a meal in Toronto’s Chinatown and reads,

Never be divided from the truth by what you would like to believe.
Joe contemplates which possibilities about the spirit guides are still viable after all these findings,

Multiple personalities can also be dismissed from contention because multiple personalities always claim the same life span as the “host” individual. Past-life personalities, too, can be disregarded because, if genuine, relatively recent life histories would lend themselves to verification in historical records. And this was not the case.

Unconscious fraud is not so easily repudiated, however. The mind, as Aldous Huxley observed, is like the Earth of 150 years ago with its darkest Africas and Amazonian basins concealing unknown capabilities and potentials. Is the mind, then, somehow able to construct a fictional family of personalities, each with its own reincarnation life history? Possibly. Dr. Adam Crabtree, author of Mutliple Man and one of the world’s foremost authorities on multiple personality and possession, pointed out that thoughts in the unconscious tend to group together. These groups easily become personified…

“I don’t believe,” Crabtree told me, “that the process of channeling is purely self-delusion or purely the individual’s unconscious or purely what the entities, so-called, would have us believe. I tend to go along with the notion that discarnate entities are, in many cases, responsible but that they are not who they say they are, although they are able to gain information in a paranormal fashion.” Carl Jung also agonized over the meaning of mediumship and, while stressing the importance of being skeptical in each individual case, came to the conclusion that “the spirit hypothesis yields better results in practice than any other.”

Joe speculates that the guide’s deceptiveness about giving their real names is caused by their having a deep dread of recognizing their own deaths and lack of corporeal existence. He notes that Seth, the famous entity that spoke through Jane Roberts, would occasionally ask for a glass of wine or beer and admitted to enjoying the encounter with the physical realm through Jane Robert’s sensorium. Dr. Pinkerton and Russell attempt to manipulate vicarious sexual experiences. Joe also notes that Russell and Filipa,

…refused to discuss their deaths and declaimed, “We’re not spirits!” as if unhappy with the postmortem condition. Dr. Pinkerton, claiming to know so much about earthbound spirits, uttered the phrase “lost soul” with a prolonged cry of anguish. I am intrigued by these clues.
Joe consults with a Dr. Joel Whitton who studied several mediums as a researcher with the Toronto Society for Psychical Research. He also concluded that the guides were trickster entities “who would pose as whatever the inquirer, either consciously or unconsciously, wanted them to be.” He also noted the extraordinary possessiveness they showed for the body of the medium. Especially revealing, Dr. Whitton points out,

Was Russell’s accusation that I was negating the entities’ earthly lives and Karma.
“Russell is afraid of not existing,” said Dr. Whitton. “You’ve stepped on his fear. His existence must be tenuous or he wouldn’t comment on it. A true guide who had a conscious existence in the between-life state would not be threatened by your revelations. We always defend ourselves against that which we fear. In my opinion, he’s attached himself to the medium because it’s his way of continuing his existence vicariously, of trying to assure himself that he’s alive. In his need to exist, he’s playing the role of guide. He’s a parasite. So are the others—very troubled, frightened, neurotic entities. Perhaps the medium has drawn these discarnates to herself because her fear is of dying of not existing. Like attracts like. You have stumbled onto a nest of neuroses in both this world and the next.

The red flag of neurosis is to do something that reveals your fear. Sigmund Freud called it “the compulsion to repeat.” Unconsciously but deliberately, Russell and the others fed you false data so that they would be confronted with their worst fear—the fear that they do not exist. That’s what they want to hear; that’s what they are the most afraid of. The mobilization of Russell’s defenses proves the hypothesis.”

Joe concludes,

Ancient spiritual teachings from a wide range of cultures tell of hosts of disembodied beings inhabiting a dimension which lies closest to Earth. This is the lower astral realm, a gloomy cesspool of the dead peopled by the spirits of those who have lived base, ignorant, or selfish lives. Afflicted with all manner of craving for terrestrial pleasure, their decadent existence thrives on attachment to needy and unsuspecting individuals on Earth. And so they masquerade as guides or teachers, developing emotional attachments to earthly humans and recycling the erudition available to all who inhabit the non-material universe. Their thinking processes are as rapid as they are Machiavellian; their vampiric need of human energies is boundless.

These earthbound spirits or, in Tibetan phraseology, pretas or “hungry ghosts,” are individuals whose minds, at the point of physical death, have been incapable of disentangling from desire. Thus enslaved, the personality becomes trapped on the lower planes even as it retains, for a while, its memory and individuality. Hence the term “lost soul,” a residual entity that is no more than an astral corpse- in-waiting…

Emanuel Swedenborg, who claimed to be able to pierce clairvoyantly the veil of the spiritual worlds, warned at great length about the brilliant and delusive nature of many communicating entities. Such evil, seducing spirits were said to be deceitful men and women who desired, in death, to hold the living in thrall to their duplicity. In Arcana Caelestia —–published a century before the founding of modern Spiritualism—he explained how they cuddle up to their victims.
When spirits begin to speak with man they conjoin themselves with his thoughts and affections…They put on all things of his memory, thus all things which the man has learned and imbibed from infancy the spirits suppose these things to be their own.

Swedenborg maintained that the worse spirits of all were those “who have been in evils from love of self and at the same time inwardly and in themselves have acted from deceit.” In Heaven and Hell he tells how these entities like to flutter about mortals like phantoms, secretly infusing them with evil by penetrating the emotions.
They perceive and smell out the affections as dogs do wild beasts in the forest. Where they perceive good affections, they instantly turn them into evil ones, leading and bending them in a wonderful manner by means of the other’s delights, and this so secretly and with such malignant skill that the other knows nothing of it…In the world these were the men who deceitfully captivated the minds of others, leading and persuading them by the delights of their affections or lusts…

“I view the possessing entities as the true patients,” wrote Dr Edith Fiore in The Unquiet Dead . “They are suffering greatly without even realizing it. Virtual prisoners, they are trapped on the earth plane feeling exactly as they did moments before their deaths, which may have been decades before.”

Back in 1924, Dr. Carl Wickland told in Thirty Years Among the Dead how discarnate intelligences were attracted to the magnetic light emanating from mortals. Consciously or unconsciously, certain entities attached themselves wherever possible to these auras, finding an avenue of expression through influencing, obsessing or possessing their victims. Less resistance was offered when the vital forces were lowered, allowing obtruding spirits to influence the “host” with their own thoughts and emotions, weakening willpower and contributing to mental confusion and distress.

Dr. Wickland concludes,
These earthbound spritis are the supposed “devils’ of all ages; devils of human origin, by-products of human selfishness, false teachings and ignorance, thrust blindly into a spirit existence and held there in bondage of ignorance. The influence of these discarnate entities is the cause of many of the inexplicable and obscure events of earth life and of a large part of the world’s misery. Purity of life and motive, or high intellectuality, do not necessarily offer protection…Many earthbound spirits are conscious of influencing mortals but enjoy their power, seeming to be without scruples.

Joe joins many other esoteric researchers in warning about the use of the Ouija board. I (Jonathan) have witnessed dramatic telepathic and psychokinetic effects the last time I engaged with the Ouija (in the Eighties) , but will no longer go near one. Joe points out,
The Ouija board attracts earthbound spirits more readily than any other inanimate device and those who choose to “play” this trans-dimensional distraction run the risk of being influenced by the most devious tricksters imaginable. In Ouija: The Most Dangerous Game , Soker Hunt presents a succession of cases in which people sacrificed their will and judgment to invisible guides—-with disastrous consequences. “Because of the intimate nature of the information revealed,” writes Hunt, “the Ouija board is incredibly seductive. The more suggestible a “player,” the more dangerous the Ouija game.” Seth, whose eloquence gave ambassadorial status in the New Age movement, was first contacted via a Ouija board.

Joe points out the many clear warnings by Jesus and Biblical prophets about communication with the dead ,
Jesus Christ and the Biblical prophets had nothing good to say about communication with the dead, Jesus casting out “unclean spirits” and “devils” on many occasions. In the Bible, those who consult with spirits are placed in the same category as murders, liars and fornicators. Deuteronomy 18: 9-12 commands: There shall not be found among you anyone that…useth divination…or a consulter of familiar spirits or a necromancer. For all that do these things are an abomination to the Lord.” The Book of Revelation warns that those who unrepentantly practice spiritism invite the “second death” of everelasting destruction: to converse with earthbound spirits is to share their fate. Spirits and demons—followers of Lucifer who joined in rebellion against God—are often cited interchangeably as cunning and deceitful beings intent on corrupting the unwary. In the words of 2 Corinthians 14: “Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. It is therefore a simple thing for his agents to masquerade as agents of good.”

Joe investigates other cases of channeling that are much harder to disconfirm. In a couple of cases there are discarnate doctors whose past life info checks out and are even recognized by living relatives of the deceased. But even these cases have some unsettling details that leave Joe very suspicious that these may be even more clever discarnates. Joe writes,
I was haunted by one of Lt. Col. Arthur Powell’s observations in The Astral Body . He wrote that it was impossible to distinguish truth from falsehood in communications from the next world “since the resources of the astral plane can be used to delude persons on the physical plane to such an extent that no reliance can be placed even on what seems the most convincing proof.”

Commenting on a medium/healing case that occurred in Mexico City, Joe points out,
In The Beautiful Side of Evil Michaelsen tells how she marveled at the spirit surgeon’s abilities, encouraged in her appreciation by Hermanito’s frequent invocation of the names of God and Jesus Christ. Once, however, she was paralyzed by a look of intense hatred which passed fleetingly across Pachita’s face while Hermanito was in control. Then Michaelsen observed that not all of Hermanito’s patients recovered even when he said they would and she realized that, although most people felt no pain while under Hermanito’s care, committed Christians tended to suffer hideously.
As Joe points out, an over arching problem with spirits who work through mediums is that they violate the self reliance of, at the very least, the mediums they work through, taking control over their bodies and wills. They also encourage a spiritual problem I have referred to as “mislocation of the godhead.” (See Casting Precious into the Cracks of Doom… ) They encourage those who interact with them to become infatuated and dependent and to look to them for divine guidance. I am reminded of the David Bowie character in the movie Labyrinth who says approximately, “ All I ask is that you love me, fear me and obey me and I’ll be your slave forever. ” More evolved entities do not resort to possession ,

…spiritual teachers are in agreement that evolved nonphysical entities influence humanity telepathically, without speech. “Higher beings are silent—they simply radiate knowing and love,” said The Venerable Namgyal Rinpoche…

Although I am against one size fits all formulations, this behavioral distinction between benign and parasitic spirits has a lot of validity. The spiritual ally that I have long experienced in my own life communicates in a nondirective telepathic fashion, leaving me to form into words the emanation that is always loving, nonintrusive and that never over rides my will or takes over my body. The influence seems directed toward enhancement of my own self realization and service, not toward vicarious thrills. But it should also be emphasized that malign entities are not limited to possession or mediums to exert influence. Subtle, stealthy telepathic influence by disincarnates to promote dark, compulsive thoughts, feelings, and cravings, cannot be ruled out as a possibility, and if it can be done at all, then that allows the possibility that it may be widespread and a major player in human psychology.

Earlier, I described what I experienced as an energetic attack on the last night I read the book. I awakened to find a massive energy drain occurring from my solar plexus which felt molten and electrical. This episode occurred on my last night of reading the book, but I saved a couple of chapters to read the following morning. In the epilogue of the book Joe describes a very unusual and alarming medical problem that occurred when he was preparing to write about the dark side of the guides. A strange swelling infection that became agonizingly painful developed around his navel of a sort that rarely occurs except in newborn babies. An ultrasound scan reveals, “a malevolent growth, like an inverted pyramid, lying beneath my belly button.”

As he is just coming out of surgery Joe gets an unexpected phone call from Claire. He hadn’t told a soul about his admission to the hospital. Claire tells Joe that Dr. Pinkerton told her. Joe wonders if Dr. Pinkerton might not have been the source of the strange infection. Joe relates,

Even—and perhaps especially—after my recovery, my resolve to write this book was constantly threatened by a deep-seated fear. Would the spirits find a way to prevent the story of my foray into the murky world of channeling from reaching the general public?
After the first edition of the book is published, Joe receives a letter from an ex-spiritualist woman in England . She corroborates Joe’s observation that the discarnates are particularly interested in manipulating sexual relationships. But she differs with the “lost souls” interpretation of the guides,

Personally, I feel this is too kind an interpretation. The typical image of a lost soul would be of a spirit trapped between worlds, perhaps unaware of its physical death, groping in an ignorance which prevents it (from) having the ability to progress. Compare this to the entities we have both experienced. They are masters of deception; they are articulate and eloquent with vast knowledge of philosophy at their disposal, whether fabricated or otherwise. They are able to cooperate and liaise sufficiently with others of their kind to devise strategies against us and maintain a continuity of information given to us. They have apparently limitless powers of precognition and access to any information they choose—past, present or future—enabling them, among other things, to impersonate whomsoever they wish with ease. This is not my idea of a poor lost soul stumbling in the darkness.

“The one thing I think we have both established beyond doubt is this: they are smart. They are very smart. Any lost soul this intelligent would surely have the ability and knowledge to progress to some higher state. If these souls are simply too evil to do so, and therefore have no knowledge of any supposedly higher realm, where do they obtain their vast understanding of philosophy? Not from living in a dark void trapped between worlds, that’s for sure.
The ex-spiritualist connects the phenomena she and Joe have experienced to UFO abductions which also frequently have a sexual component, and also to the origins of major religions,

…Nearly every religion in the world was initially based on psychic manifestations, visions on mountaintops, images of God appearing to prophets, voices in the mind—just as our modern day mediums hear voices, see visions. Indeed, I have heard of certainly more than one medium who claims her contact is Jesus or God himself.

These beings, in their different guises, have directly formed our very religions. And anyone who has studied the history of organized religion must be aware that (religion) has been responsible for more death and destruction than just about anything else. And yet we all stagger blindly on, oblivious to this manipulation for thousands of years…

Certainly the Gnostics would agree with this interpretation as they left many warnings that the evil entities they called “Archons” would manipulate us through religious ideologies. (see A Gnostic View of Mind Parasites)

Joe concludes the book,

….Like a secret agent, I had to expose myself to danger in order to retrieve important information. I am simply grateful to have survived my confrontation with the liars and deceivers of the spirit world. Only when the struggle was far advanced did I finally comprehend the meager state of my resources as well as the might and swiftness of the unseen enemy. Let this be a warning to us all.
Unfortunately for Joe Fisher the story did not end with the conclusion of the book.
The Anomalist reports,
Joe Fisher, 53, author of The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts, died on Wednesday, May 9, 2001 , by jumping off a limestone cliff at Elora Gorge, near his hometown of Fergus , Ontario , Canada . A variety of personal problems, including a growing list of unpaid bills for the writer, appeared to have pushed him over the edge. In one of his last communications with his editor-in-chief, Patrick Huyghe at Paraview Books, Fisher noted that the spirits were still after him for having written his final book.

By an odd and unsettling coincidence, Paraview was my literary agent in the Nineties. It was Len Belzer, my agent, and a close friend of Alex Grey who first told me about what led to Grey’s masterwork: Demons and Dieties Drinking from the Milky Pool. (see Alex Grey and the Mind Parasites)

From the publisher’s website (Paraview Press):
Troubled by personal problems – as well as by the spirits he claimed to have angered in writing the Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts – Joe Fisher took his own life on May 9, 2001. That he would do so is all the more surprising considering what he had written earlier in The Case for Reincarnation : “As much as the suicidal personality feels able to escape the world by getting rid of the body, reincarnation’s revolving door ensures that all hope (of escape) is short lived. Those who learn that they have killed themselves in past lives are quickly brought to the realization that suicide, far from being an answer to life’s problems is (instead) the violent breaking of the lifeline. If the (suicide) could only realize the resulting intensification of difficulty which must enter the life to come, (suicide) would never be (attempted).”

Apparently Joe also lost his closest friend on this same cliff, and although there is no way of knowing how much the discarnates may have played a role in this presumed suicide there are some ominous foreshadows in the book. Russell warned Sandford that if he left the group he would “…commit suicide in a fit of depression .” Also rather ominous is Russell’s question when Joe confronts him about deceptions,

“But how could you be downfalled if you are free to choose, free to challenge?”

Given that there are examples of the discarnates taking over motor control from some of their charges in the book, one can only wonder what part they may have played in Joe Fisher’s all too literal down fall.

I’ve saved chapter seven, in which Joe discusses the history of human contact with discarnates, for the end. The conclusion of Joe’s investigation, and his life, are so damning of discarnate contact that it seemed appropriate to conclude with a more general discussion as well as some neutral or positive examples of entity contact.
Many spiritual traditions have been founded on entity contact, and the evidence is mixed about the benign/malign nature of the entities contacted. What I find especially troubling are the cross-cultural examples of entities influencing various sorts of blood sacrifices. Joe reports,

The nomadic hunters and gatherers of the now-extinct Charrua tribe of Uruguay conducted a painful version of the vision quest. After making their way to the top of an isolated hill, they would slash and gouge their flesh with their weapons until, in delirium, each was granted a hallucination of a living being. This being was at once adopted by the native and invoked, in times of peril, as his guardian. The Plains Crow tribesman, in seeking the all-important vision, climbed a remote mountain, stripped, fasted, went without water and, finally, cut off one joint of his left forefinger. The dismembered appendage was then held up to the sun as the native pleaded with his guardian for good fortune.
Socrates and his daemon appear to be a more benign case of entity contact,

Socrates, the great Athenian philosopher, spoke in the fifth century B.C.E. of a being whose voice, from time to time, dissuaded him from some undertaking but never directed him as to what he should do. Socrates told his friends that when a man dies his guardian spirit, which has watched over the course of his life, escorts him to the place of judgment from when he will be guided to the initial stage of the postmortem existence. The wise and disciplined soul, he said, will follow the guide. But the soul that is deeply attached to the body and its pleasures will hover around the visible world for a long time.
Although the Bible has many warnings about communicating with the dead, it also has many positive references to entities,

The Bible, of course, mentions “ministering spirits” (Hebrews 1.14) without spelling out their perpetually watchful responsibilities. But the Egyptian Book of the Dead , which dates back to 1300 B.C.E., succinctly expresses the unremitting vigilance that attends all who walk the earth…

The angel—meaning “one who is sent; a messenger” —personifies spiritual guardianship in Christianity, the guardian angel being a particularly potent symbol to Roman Catholics. As recently as 6 August 1986 , in a general audience at the Vatican , Pope John Paul II spoke at length about the reality of guardian angels. …

Catholics insist that man’s goodness, or lack of it, has no bearing on the quality or degree of angelic attention. “every single human being on earth, whether Christian or non-Christian, whether in grace or in sin, remains during its entire life under the care of a Guardian Angel,” states Jesuit Theologian Joseph Husslein in Our Guardian Angels . The Bible mentions angels on nearly three hundred occasions, citing their power and solicitiousness…

Numerous well known figures have had contact with entities,

Many famous people have claimed to share communication with entities in the next dimension. Joan of Arc conversed with a disembodied voice which inspired her to great deeds in France . Robert Louis Stevenson credited the whole of his published fiction to “the single-handed product of some unseen collaborator.” Daily experience convinced the poet W.B. Yeats that “there are spiritual intelligences which can warn us and advise us.” Napoleon Bonaparte believed that he had a guiding spirit which came to him either as a shining sphere or a dwarf clothed in red who came to warn him. And Henry Miller commented that he was “in the hands of unseen powers” while writing his powerful novel Tropic of Cancer . Someone, he said, “is dictating to me constantly—and with no regard for my health.”

Carl Jung, the great Swiss psychoanalyst, regularly encountered a guardian spirit named Philemon, a “force that was not myself” who “seemed quite real, as if he were a living personality.” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was told independently by seven mediumistic individuals that he was accompanied by an elderly, bearded man with tufted eyebrows—the marked characteristics of deceased naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who was actually named by several of those who were able to perceive him…

A fairly well known person whom I won’t name here, a man I consider to be an absolute genius I worked with in the Eighties, heard voices who gave him information that seemed to be inspired and of great value. And for most of my life I have been aware of a somewhat androgynous being I live alongside whom I can visualize, but who almost never intrudes into my mind with voice, and instead influences by presence. He seems to be there whenever I cast my attention in his direction, and there is always the sense that he flows through time in a much different way than I do. There is always a great depth of feeling, humility, and compassion for suffering, and if more specific communication is required by me, he allows me to use my mind and word-forming ability to translate his presence and thought forms into words and sentences. He never takes over any part of my body, never claims to be a doctor or to have a specific past life identity, never raises even the smallest red flag in my ever fault-finding mind or intuition. I have noticed, however, that if I travel, he will tend to be unusually present, as if curiously witnessing a new part of the world alongside of me (but without taking over my senses).
Julian Jaynes, in his book, The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind , makes a case that up until the time of Homer, many peoples of the ancient world regularly heard voices they attributed to gods in their heads. There were frequent laments in the time that followed about the gods having fallen silent.
So we don’t want to throw out any divine babies in the scummy bath water of parasitic disincarnates. We do want to, based on the findings of this book, be especially wary of entities that take someone over or are otherwise intrusive. It does seem like a valid principle that a benevolent entity would not intrude to a degree that compromises our free will and need for independent development. When I was an English teacher I remember exploring an education philosophy that said the teacher should be “a guide on the side, not the sage on the stage.” That’s always stayed with me, especially since, as a narcissistic personality type, I would enjoy being the “sage on the stage.” But since I am a fellow mortal, this tendency may be more acceptable, whereas a discarnate guide that likes to be the sage on the stage, like Ramntha, the New Age celebrity discarnate that speaks through J.Z. Knight, is far more suspect.
But it is not just New Age entities that are suspect. Often people harshly judge things that are fantastical and part of a more recently minted sect—like John Smith’s encounters in the Book of Mormon, or the extraterrestrial mythology of Scientology—-and they forget that all the great religions have equally fantastical stories but which, thanks to the patina of antiquity and endless repetition down the millennia, have gained gravitas and respectability. The most cursory examination of the last six thousand years of history, however, reveals that more blood has been spilled, more torture and oppression has occurred, in the name of these very same religions than of anything else. The Gnostics, writing in the Nag Hammadi library discovered in upper Egypt only at the end of World War II, warned us of a parasitic species they called the Archons who were manipulating us through religious ideologies.

I think that we are badly overdue for an examination and reappraisal of religious doctrines that derive from entity contact, and especially need to consider whether entities may be manipulating fundamentalists (of any religion) toward agendas and actions of hate and violence.
Lastly, we need to consider the subtle ways that discarnates may influence our thoughts, emotions, sexuality and behavior. Joe Fisher’s apparent suicide adds an ominous implication that these entities are not to be underestimated, that awareness of them does not end their power. There are many more things in heaven and in earth (among other dimensions) than are dreamt of in rationalist philosophy. The extreme importance of the findings of The Siren Call of the Hungry Ghosts , and of the unanswered questions we are left with, reconfirm my impression that this is one of the most important books I have ever encountered.

Reality is not only stranger than you think, it is stranger than you can think . —-J. B. S. Haldane

But when I get past this training I am led into a space that looks like a College cafeteria, and in contrast to the training the aliens are easy to perceive and seem to be interacting, even mingling, with humans.  The aliens look entirely human except that they have no body hair, are pale and rather anemic looking with more translucent than normal skin with blue veins showing, etc.  They look similar to albinos with no body hair.  They are interspersed with humans, sitting close to them on cafeteria table benches, and there seems to be ordinary social interactions and eye contact occurring.  There seems to be a degree of mutual interest, curiosity and respectful, very slightly shy social interaction as if the aliens were a group of foreign exchange students.  I wonder if there might be romantic or even sexual interaction going on.

I stand there studying the human/ alien interaction and suddenly have an intuitive realization:  These are not extraterrestrial aliens, these are dead people who are reanimating themselves through contact with living people.
As the dream continues, the situation seems much less military/scientific and more and more cultic and conspiratorial. There are quite a number of interesting looking people caught up in this, some of them the more creative/aware sort of people I sometimes call “mutants,” as well as more ordinary people, and I am on a mission to awaken them to how they are being deceived.  I am careful, however, not to present my POV adamantly and talk about it as a theory, a possible alternative, and feel that will be enough to awaken those who have had parallel intuitions.

In conducting my mission I seem to be following a hierarchical order, attempting to contact the most aware individuals I can find first.  I begin by placing a cell phone call to my friend and colleague, John Major Jenkins, whom I have seen previously in the compound, but after a few seconds of talk the connection goes dead and I sense that the call is being blocked.  I walk to where, in the dream, John has an apartment and there are people in there who might be government agents who tell me that John has just left for a couple of weeks of travel.  Next I go to find someone I know in the waking life who is a philosophy professor at CU, and this contact is similarly blocked.
Following these blocked contacts I seem to have a bit more success contacting particular “mutants” whom I haven’t previously met, but seem like the most creative and aware people around.  My contacts are always one on one and I  try to be careful to explain my alternative with no random people over hearing.  One contact is a highly conscious artist who has created some extraordinary paintings.  One of the paintings, which appears animated, has a surreal collage of burning Gothic churches, stained glass windows and fugitive figures.  I point out to this artist that his paintings show a symbolic/metaphorical realization of my alternative possibility and he seems receptive to my theory.  I point out to him that there are a number of adolescents around whom we have both observed trancing out listening on headphones to tapes provided by this cultic organization.  I point out to him that in the Eighties I used some of the first “hemi-synch” (brain hemisphere synchronization) tapes developed by an organization that I later found to be too cultic for my tastes, and whose tapes employed subliminal cues.  I explained that we didn’t know, and the adolescents didn’t know, what sort of subliminals might be embedded in the tapes they were listening to.  A small group seems to be forming around us, and not wanting to draw random attention I move onto someone else.  I seem to be descending in the hierarchy of contacts, and feel a warning sense of danger when I observe that my last contact has accidentally on purpose wandered away from me, not really wanting to hear the message.

Now I am surrounded by dangerous looking inner city people.  One of them is holding onto my coat and they seem to be feeling me out as possible prey or have been assigned by the cult to take me out.  I point toward a carousel like platform where I was talking to my last contact and where there is a density of people at the center of the space we are in which seems like a plaza or town square but with a very high domed ceiling.  I tell them that is where I am going, pull my coat away from the grasp of the thug, and move toward the center of the plaza to find safety in numbers.

As soon as I woke up I turned on my computer, made some yerba maté while it was booting up, and was intent on writing up the dream immediately.  But when I sat down in front of the computer I had a strong intuition that I should check my email first because I sensed there would be an email waiting for me that would be related to the dream.  There was such an email, from someone I don’t know but who had found my website and contacted me briefly once before about mind parasite attacks.  All I know about him is that he is a student and involved with the Hare Krishna. Here is the most relevant part of the email:

There seems to be some reason why i cant see on a certain part of the realm, especialy when i consciously leave my body. Those nasty characters i briefly explained seem to exist there. they seem humanish. Some of them suck and have holes in their heads that have a tremendious sucktion. it seems pitch black in that place. But i could feel them, not the sucking ones the other ones, they have these devices that they put into the stomach chakra, sometimes up my but through my eye or through my heart chakra. They sometimes have like 2 conducting rods that they take the energy with. I caught them drilling into me a few times aswell. This morning they dragged me on this chair and some device came to my crown chakra. i threw them off me, they don’t seem all that physically strong, but there seems to be a lot of them. i think they are exceptionaly technologicaly advanced. Prior to this event i had found myself in this seemingly dark realm practically every time i consciously leave my body. Sometimes their are cords attached to parts of my body. A few times when i make the request to go somewhere i feel i am pulled along by some machine. The one time i was feeling around in the seeming darkness and found that indeed it was a machine that was also clicked into my heart chakra. when i arrived at what i “thought” was my destination after hearing a hissing sound, like almost an ion proppelled vehicle. I could hear the sound of focussed air or something comming from somewhere nearby. That same time i felt there was an “metal” arm – that one might find on a rollercoaster- that had a button on it- i could just feel it, couldnt see as usual. i pushed the button and it snapped onto my chakra and these cords started messing around on my head. it was difficult to get back into my body.

Sometimes i lye at night trying to see God or something spiritual. sometimes the blackness opens, to reveal a beautifuly colored setting, smiling ducks etc , but then a character quickly closes it, i can sometimes see that dark character sillhoetted against the colorful opening of the fabric.

my theory is somewhat similar to your one about these beings being apart of material nature helping us to remember we are not meant to be here, that we are meant to “evolve” or revolve back to our original spiritual state. It seems they may be devices that God uses in order to keep us from enjoying the material energy. Iv got a Hare Krsna backround, so it does fit into the paradigm. Its just realy weird when you catch them doing things to you. Personaly i believe they are at it all the time

This email had a number of parallels to my dream.  He describes the “nasty characters” as seeming “humanish ” but his experience with them has much in common with many of the alien abduction accounts in that they sometimes employ anal probes—“ they have these devices that they put into the stomach chakra, sometimes up my but through my eye or through my heart chakra .”  In other ways, his description of the “humanish” figures sounds like descriptions of aliens: “ i think they are exceptionaly technologicaly advanced…. hearing a hissing sound, like almost an ion proppelled vehicle.”

In his account we have parasitic entities that seem “humanish,” but who also have alien-like aspects. In my dream there is a cultic like atmosphere and the young student is a member of the Hare Krishna, a group that many, including myself, find to be cultic, even if more benign than most cults.

I have already written extensively about the “hungry ghost” theory of mind parasites.  This is discussed in my introductory essay: http://www.zaporacle.com/textpattern/article/6/mind-parasites-energy-parasites-and-vampires

Here is a brief excerpt:
One intriguing theory of origin is presented by Dr. Samuel Sagan ( clairvision.org ). Dr. Samuel Sagan is an MD with considerable clinical experience dealing with this sort of pathology. According to his theory, at the time of human death, there are denser, darker fragments of consciousness that remain behind after the spirit departs the body. Dr. Sagan believes that many traditional funeral practices, especially those involving cremation, were originally designed to destroy these fragments. These lingering incomplete fragments of consciousness do not have their own direct connection to pranic or life energy, but must parasitically attach themselves to those that do. This seems similar to the Buddhist concept of the “hungry ghost.” The Sanskrit word for this type of entity is “preta.”

Sagan writes,

“The topic is both old and new. Old, because in all traditions and folklores of the earth, one finds references to spirits and non-physical beings which can interfere with human beings. Thus Ayurveda, the traditional medicine of India, is divided into eight sections, one of which is entirely devoted to the study of bhutas, or entities, their influence on health and sanity, and the ways one can get rid of them. This places bhuta-vidya, or ‘science of entities’, on the same level as surgery or gynecology. If we look at traditional Chinese medicine, we find that in acupuncture, among the 361 points of the 14 main meridians, 17 have the word Kuei (disincarnate spirit) as part of their main or secondary name.”

See:
http://www.zaporacle.com/textpattern/article/100/energy-parasites-the-sagan-view

There is a principle of logic known as Occham’s Razor which may support Sagan’s theory somewhat. Occham’s Razor says that hypotheses are not multiplied without necessity. In other words, we don’t adopt fancy, complex explanations where simpler ones seem to suffice. If there are energy parasites (for many this is a big if) and since they seem to both understand and be perfectly adapted to feeding off of human energy, instead of suggesting a more exotic theory of origin, say extraterrestrial or interdimenisonal parasites hunting through the multiverse, we can simplify our hypothesis by having us, human beings, whom we know exist, as the source of the parasite.

In one of  my DVDs,  I think it was Looking Toward the Event Horizon , I discussed some of the evidence that the “visitors” (which people describe in abduction experiences) might be dead people.  Terence McKenna made similar suggestions and pointed out that when Amazonian shamans were shown pictures of grey aliens they responded, “Oh, the ancestors.”  Terence also applied Ocham’s Razor and suggested that if we were looking for a source for an ecology of humanoid entities that we should consider our own species, the one source that we know for sure exists, and therefore the “aliens” may be dead people.

Quite a number of cultures recognized a problem with etheric remnants of dead people forming a parasitic connection to the living. See:

http://www.zaporacle.com/textpattern/article/100/energy-parasites-the-sagan-view

The Sagan view emphasizes a view of these parasitic remnants as primitive, mechanical and rather automatic in their functioning. Elsewhere, however, we see evidence of parasitic discarnate entities capable of very sophisticated manipulation of both individual humans and the entire species.  The Gnostic description of the Archons, for example, see:

http://www.zaporacle.com/textpattern/article/49/a-gnostic-view-of-mind-parasites

And also in reports of the channeling phenomenon, see:
http://www.zaporacle.com/textpattern/article/110/the-siren-call-of-hungry-ghosts
In the dream, the aliens are first described as extremely other and exotic, but look entirely human when encountered.  As the dream continues we don’t see any aliens at all, but I encounter human beings whose minds seem to be manipulated by an unseen force.  This progression seems to support the mind parasite hypothesis which suggests that much human pathology, on both the collective and the individual scale, is influenced by unseen parasitic entities.  As in the dream, perceptions of what is happening are to be found in visionary art work see:

http://www.zaporacle.com/http://www.zaporacle.com/wp/2009/11/alex-grey-and-mind-parasites-2/
Many of David Lynch’s films—-Fire Walk With Me, the first season of Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive are consciously about the mind parasite theme.

The unseen aspect is reinforced by the discussion of the subliminal tapes affecting adolescents.  Sometimes mind parasites are transmitted by concrete cultural memes—subliminal (or explicit) manipulators embedded in advertisements—while other manipulations may occur in less concrete modalities.  (See the linked documents and my audio presentation, The Mind Parasite Matrix , for supporting evidence, first and second hand encounters, theoretical underpinnings, etc.).

Modern science has been unable to explain either what mind is or where it is. Many people never examine their presumption that they are alone in their minds. But there is voluminous evidence that we are not alone in our minds, our minds float in a collective space and that space is formed not merely by the six billion or so presently living human minds.  I am increasingly convinced that much of the darkness we experience in our descent into history is influenced by unseen minds interested in harvesting human energy.

As the dream points out, only those who have had parallel intuitions will be receptive to this theory, but it also suggests I am safer being public and in the center of the town plaza with what I have learned.  So here it is, and I look forward to hearing parallel intuitions, dissenting points of view or any other type of feedback.

© 2007, Jonathan Zap   Revised 2008   Edited by Austin Iredale

SALVIA

(Most of the information in this section comes from the erowid.org website. )

Salvia divinorum is a psychoactive medicine of Mexican origin, one that has over the last decade boomed in popularity here in the states. It is a recreational herb with which some of you will be all too familiar, and others less familiar. This article is here to illustrate the story of my most recent and probably final encounter with Salvia divinorum, to present the powerful, profound, and often frightening repercussions of the medicine. But first, some basic information on Salvia:

BOTANICAL CLASSIFICATION

Family: Lamiaceae (Former: Labiatae)

Genus: Salvia

Species: divinorum; splendens

COMMON NAMES

Ska Pastora; Shepherdess’s Herb; Ska Maria Pastora; Verba de Maria; Sally-D

EFFECTS CLASSIFICATION

Atypical Psychedelic

DESCRIPTION

Salvia divinorum is a sprawling perennial herb found in the Sierra         Mazatec region of Mexico. Its leaves contain the extremely potent Salvinorin A.  It  has a history of being used both for healing and as a divinatory psychedelic, and has been widely available since the mid 1990s, primarily as a smoked herb. There  are many species and varieties within the genus ‘Salvia,’ and plants commonly found in garden stores are almost certainly not S. divinorum unless specifically labeled as such. Strong effects can be difficult to attain from smoking dried leaf,        but extracts and potency-bred leaves can cause dramatic, sometimes frightening, and completely enfolding entheogenic mind-states. Many people consider its  effects unpleasant.

LAW

Salvia is unscheduled in the United States, meaning it is legal to possess    and sell. The federal Analog Act generally requires chemicals be chemically similar to another scheduled substance to qualify. As Salvia is chemically very different from any scheduled substance, it is unlikely to be targeted under that act. However, Salvia divinorum has been added to a list of controlled plants in Australia as of June, 2002.  The legal status of Salvia will likely change, so do your own research if you want to be sure of the legality of Salvia in your area.

THE EXPERIENCE

Depending on dosage, the Salvia experience can vary from a subtle, just-off-baseline state to a full-blown psychedelic experience. At higher doses, users report dramatic time distortion, vivid imagery, encounters with beings, travel to other places, planets or times, living years as the paint on a wall or experiencing the full life of another individual. Needless to say these can be extremely powerful experiences and should only be attempted with a sitter. While most people remain unmoving during the experience, some individuals will attempt to get up and walk around while in a completely dissociated state. While sub-threshold effects are somewhat innocuous, leading some people to be cavalier in subsequent experiences, once full effects are achieved, many people find S. divinorum to be  unpleasantly overwhelming and more scary than fun.

CONTRAINDICTIONS

Do not operate heavy machinery.  Do Not Drive.

Use a Sitter. Some percentage of users will attempt to stand up and move around during the Salvia experience. Having a sitter present can reduce the chances of injury or other problems.

Individuals currently in the midst of emotional or psychological upheaval in their everyday lives should be careful about choosing to use psychoactives like Salvia, as they could possibly trigger even more difficulty.

Individuals with a family history of schizophrenia or early onset mental illness should be extremely careful because strong psychoactives have been known to trigger latent psychological and mental problems

BLUE MOON

While we’re on definitions, there is a lot of controversy about what constitutes a “blue moon.” Most commonly, it means a second full moon in a calendar month. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first reference to a blue moon comes from a proverb recorded in 1528:

If they say the moon is blue,

We must believe that it is true.

This article’s titular blue moon occurred on June 30th, 2007, and my account of the experience was written the following morning:

APOCALYPSE

“This is the morning of July 1st, most of the gathering still asleep, the few that are awake look muddy and bedraggled . . .

It’s been raining throughout the night and morning so the whole gathering looks somewhat muddy and bedraggled.  I woke up feeling muddy and bedraggled, but determined to language the apocalyptic, macabre, horrifying, annihilation experience I had with Salvia divinorum last night on the full moon, the second full moon of June, called a blue moon for some reason.

Before I left for the gathering I did a Zap Oracle (the oracle on my website) reading about approaching the gathering and the last card I got, the position was #10, the last position of the spread: “Looking toward the event horizon: An influence that may be in a germination phase right now or about to approach.” And the card was, “Stranger than you can Think,” a meditation on the J.B.S.  Haldane quote (slightly paraphrased),  “Reality is not only stranger than you think, it’s stranger than you can think.”   After the reading, while doing some work on the oracle, I noticed a possible synchronistic confirmation of this message; there is a card called the “Joker” or “Wild Card.” The card numbers are assigned by the computer, and I noticed that this was card #49, the same # as my present age, and the photo in the card is of a gathering, taken at the start of the Utah gathering. Nature had thrown a wild card and the Utah gathering had been hit by a freak snow storm, everything a sea of white sprinkled with semi-frozen rainbow-colored hippies; a completely unexpected shock in late June, Boulder was in the high nineties when I left. In the photo we see a line of bedraggled rainbows crossing a field of snow, and in the extreme foreground there is a young man wearing an army trench coat, the whole back of which is a giant patch of the Joker from the old Batman series.

Anyway, the oracle and the synchronicity were accurate; I did draw the wild card on the night of the blue moon—and after, as we will see later.

I borrowed a beautiful glass bowl piece from Issa, and sat on Kyle’s hammock.  This was take three, because I had gone out to this hammock two other times with the necessary ingredients—the glass, a lighter, the Salvia—my precious camera bag left in my tent, but both takes one and two were unsuccessful because in each case the lighter I had with me disappeared on the way to the hammock, necessitating a return to my tent to get another one. I reported this to Brandt who replied cheerfully, “Third time’s a charm.”  I had asked Brandt to keep an eye on me, as I had been told I should have a minder,  that Salvia could make you act without reason or memory, and that the same batch, a 20x—or was it 30x?—concentration, had caused Cole (who was also the Salvia provider) to fall down, and then go running toward the river; a potentially life-threatening action for which he had no memory trace.

Foolishly, I had trouble believing that such a thing could happen to me.  I had smoked Salvia before and it had been vanishingly subtle. Also, I had partaken of many other medicines thought to be much stronger than Salvia, and had never lost control of myself; I thought of myself as a reasonably well-qualified psychonaut test-pilot, and so I didn’t appoint an official minder, just asked Brandt to keep an eye on me and told myself that no matter what happened I would stay in the hammock until I regained my reason.

Issa’s glass piece was one of the most beautiful I had ever seen, a stunning blue flower ingeniously embedded in a glass sphere, very much a sister’s bowl, and it seemed appropriate for a blue moon embrace by the lunar goddess supposed to rule over the diviner’s mint.

The leaves were black and grimy and ominous looking, and I packed a large bowl, having been told that I would probably only be able to manage a single hit.  I adjusted the flame of the lighter, meditated for a few moments, and put flame to Salvia, sucking in a huge hit as I rocked gently back and forth on the hammock. The smoke was acrid, but not anywhere near as toxic seeming as DMT smoke, which tastes like burning plastic.

I remember feeling proud of how long and effortlessly I was able to hold in the hit. Piece of cake so far, I thought, and when I felt ready I exhaled a large cloud of acrid, black smoke. And with that exhalation of swirling black smoke I also exhaled my sanity…

There was a moment when I was still aware of hammock world, aware that now I was really fucked up, hammock world swirling with the black smoke and some scintillations of colored light and then, ineluctably,  I fell back into the hammock, fell from the reality I had been in as if it were a fragment of slippery banana peel suspended above a dark and alien matrix.

That was the easy part to describe, but now it is necessary to push the language pedal to the metal, because what happened next is outside the performance envelope of English, and language reaches out like a hand with amputated fingers trying to grasp at an electric eel tossed down an elevator shaft.

To narrate what happened, I’m going to construct a storyline that will act as a frame around the experience, to make this slippery anomaly an object that can possibly be grasped by reason.

Imagine that an alien civilization, due to some technological fuck up, has accidentally aimed a planet-devouring death ray at the earth in 1962.  Everything is vaporized except a small group of conservative, middle-class people from the Bronx of 1962.  These few survivors are kept in some kind of stasis until it can be decided what to do with them.   A lawsuit is filed on their behalf, and the outcome of the lawsuit is that as compensation they will become the consumers of a vast and intricate “product.”

The product is a meticulous reconstruction of the world that they last experienced, the Bronx of 1962, a nearly perfect simulacrum constructed by alien nanotechnology that would be so well done that they would scarcely notice that anything had changed.  As part of the lawsuit settlement, the survivors, the consumers, would be informed of the replacement, the product, and then allowed to continue with their lives.  Since these are conservative, middle-class people, they submerged in their minds the grotesque fact of this replacement and continued their lives as if nothing had happened.

When I fell from the hammock and swirling black Salvia smoke, it was into this simulacrum matrix of Bronx, 1962.  I am standing there, in what might be an empty catering hall, and then I am standing outside a block of red brick apartment buildings on a late summer afternoon.  I have arrived in the simulacrum matrix just seconds before a virus sweeps through the matrix, the first malfunction of this otherwise flawless product.

I perceive the virus sweeping through the matrix as a moving swath or wave of deconstruction. As the virus sweeps through, the invisible nanobot assemblers and performers of this matrix deviate from their previous functions and now make mechanical shredding movements like the knives of a vast hamburger grinder.

Picture this wave of matrix-shredding nanobots as a tsunami of sewing machine needles, scissoring and incissoring back-and-forth, back-and-forth, back-and-forth, shredding the flimsy space-time fabric of this matrix.  Or, if that is still too abstract, picture it this way: look at the world around you and imagine everything looking exactly the same, but that the interior of not only every person and animal, but also every plant and inanimate object, is made of meat, so that everything you experience is like a moving holographic sculpture made of meat, though the topographical surfaces look the same as always—a meat matrix, or meatrix, if you will.  And now a planet-size grid of extremely taut, extremely fine steel wires comes sweeping through your world, the meatrix.  On the anterior side of the approaching event horizon of the wire grid everything looks just the same as normal, but everything on the posterior side—people, animals, plants, objects— are pinkish shreds of hamburger meat.

As the wave of deconstruction sweeps through the world, the matrix is being peeled up and shredded, and to those standing on the unpeeled portion there is a sickening, sizzling, fizzing, crackling sensation traveling through the remaining fabric, the last healthy tissue of the matrix.  As this wave of deconstruction comes through, I feel the shock and dismay of the consumers, these conservative, middle-class people of the Bronx, 1962, holding dinner plates, black and white television sets on in the background, as they discover that the product is malfunctioning in a way that they had been told was impossible, having been reassured of the product’s stability.

The crackling, sizzling wave of viral deconstruction continues sweeping through, peeling up and shredding the block of apartment buildings, and I feel this peeling up reverberating in my body and now I have the most horrifying, horrifying realization—I am not one of the consumers, I am part of the product. The wave of deconsctruction is sizzling and crackling right toward me, and I have an agonizing moment to experience this horrifying realization before the meatrix-grinding wave passes through me, shredding me into hamburger meat and oblivion, shred to black . . .

Some moments of eternity passed after the shred to black and apparently I emerged from the oblivion as a pile of sentient hamburger shreds lying, wet and coagulated, on the bottom of a hammock.

I had no head, no parts, but there was anxiety, a coagulated, soggy mass of anxiety at the bottom of a hammock . . .

I am anxious, therefore I am.

Some remnant of awareness had apparently survived the shred to black, an emergent property of the hamburger meat, and a wobbly, phantom version of myself began to coagulate, a spectral zombie with a head full of sloshing airplane glue.

I am anxious, therefore I am.

I could feel a lump of glass in my pocket; Issa’s bowl had somehow survived the shred to black. I had an anxious thought that if I could still speak, that before I subsided back into disintegration, that if I could still speak, I would like to pass off this object to someone so I wouldn’t have the guilt and embarrassment of having been such a fuck up that not only had I irrecoverably blown my head off, but that I had also lost this sister’s cherished glass bowl as well.  I could see Arc looking in the direction of the hammock with concern, his face seemed alert and compassionate.  But I didn’t want anyone to witness my disintegrated self, a barely coagulated hamburger meat zombie with a head full of sloshing airplane glue, a pathetic scarecrow of disintegrated protein that would present a smelly and burdensome disposal problem for my companions who were still whole and above ground creatures, not suited to deal with a member of the shredded scarecrow persuasion.

Wisely, I chose to stay in the hammock and I began to feel better. In this case, feeling better meant feeling like the victim of a transporter accident. Wise members of the Star Trek persuasion are always reluctant to be transported because they realize that a transporter essentially murders them while copying all their information, storing it in a computer buffer and constructing a new version of themselves, newly born at the second transporter station.  And that’s if everything goes right, but sometimes the complex transporter process goes awry and there are transcription errors, and what shows up in the second transporter station is a distorted, counterfeit version of what entered the process, a twisted mass of protein that is still-born or survives for only a few seconds.   So I felt like a victim of slightly less catastrophic transporter accident, the counterfeit version of my former self, a wobbly scarecrow of coagulated shreds and airplane glue who would probably not live long, but cohered long enough to have a few anxious thoughts . . .

Surprisingly, the scarecrow began to cohere better and better, and I found that I could stand up and support myself by leaning against a tree at the edge of the fire circle.  When people began to talk to me, mostly Lee, a soothing and gentle presence, I found I could still construct complex and coherent sentences, which surprised me; it was a glimmer of optimism about my future life as scarecrow, as shred boy.

Later, I was astonished to learn from Brandt that he witnessed me roll over backwards and fall out of the hammock.  According to him I sat and crawled on the ground, mumbling something incomprehensible when he approached.  I had no memory of any of this; perhaps it was what my body did while I was in the product matrix, or after the shred to black.

Obviously this doesn’t count as glowing testimonial for Salvia.  On the other hand, it’s misleading to over-generalize from the particularities of any individual psychedelic experience.  Salvia affects others quite differently, and results may vary considerably with the concentration.  Many others also report dark experiences, and I think supervision, having someone to act as your minder, is a very necessary precaution.

I don’t recommend this substance, but I suppose the ordeal poison way of initiation has primordial roots in tribal cultures.  In case you’re not familiar with the ordeal poison way of initiation it works like this:  The initiate is given a poison that at first makes you feel like you are dying, then becomes so painful that you beg for death, and then you get all better.  There can be great benefit to such an ego death, and certainly my salvia experience was an ego death experience, but it’s hard to gauge what long-term effects this wild card may have had on me.

So if you’re the sort of person who always wanted to know what it would be like to blow your head off with a shot gun blast in extreme slow-motion while conscious on general anesthesia, a flesh-pulverizing cloud of miniscule lead spheres sizzling through you millimeter by nanosecond, if that kind of thing is your cup of tea, then this mint’s for you.  Enjoy!

AFTERMATH OF THE BLUE MOON APOCALYPSE

Most of my immediate after-impressions were extremely negative, and while still in scarecrow form I wanted to throw the little bag of remaining Salvia into the fire before it could devastate another user.  Instead, still unsure of all my judgments, I returned the medicine to Cole.  Later that same evening, I felt that I had moved another step toward alchemical androgyny, another step away from identification with my yang,  overly confident, sometimes arrogant and over bearing, narcissistic personality.

The annihilation experience also increased my compassion for other beings undergoing annihilation. I found that the nightly dilemma of whether or not to annihilate insects inside my tent, which seemed either a threat to human health or way too creepy to spend the night with, had come to make me significantly queasier than before.   Usually I tried the capture-and-release method on some, and annihilated others that seemed too difficult to capture.   Supposedly, Gandhi said that everyone swats mosquitoes, but I can’t confirm this. Though certainly I swat, and will continue to swat, mosquitoes and other blood-sucking parasites, insect or otherwise, which enter my personal space.  But I was much more queasy about annihilating the more ambiguous insects in the tent like the daddy longlegs, those creepy giant nanobot-like creatures. Thus I tried catch-and-release, probably injuring them in the process, so I was some version of an annihilator no matter what I did.  And then there were my continual lapses in the gathering from veganism into sloppy and opportunistic vegetarianism, helping to perpetuate the lives of sentient animals in the meatrix (see http//www.themeatrix.com/).

It also seems quite possible that the Salvia experience has further thinned the veil for me and brought other realms and entities closer, for better or for worse. The following experiences cannot be definitively attributed as consequences of the Salvia experience, but they felt that way to me at the time. I present them to the reader as additional points on a fuzzy map.  The reader may choose to connect these dots to the earlier Salvia apocalypse or not. I don’t pretend to know for certain what links this constellation of events except for their temporal proximity.

The drive back from Rainbow was mostly uneventful. Jeff’s 2002 Subaru had far more structural integrity than any other vessel to transport me to the gathering or back, not even a hint of mechanical trouble, and we averaged 85 mph with 4 people and an excess amount of soggy rainbow gear.   Sometime around midnight we stopped at a motel which appeared somewhere in the infinite blandness of the Kansas highway landscape. The motel was named, like The Patriot Act, with lying right to your face chutzpah: “The Best Value Inn in America.” The rooms were sub-mediocre with high gloss paint on cinderblock walls, and a ventilator system as noisy as a boiler factory.  I shared a room with Rob, but had my own king-sized bed, wonderfully dry and clean, and welcoming to my sleep-deprived body.  For a few moments I lay there alone with poison ivy sensations, the thousand points of itchy acid. These were sensations that I could submerge for hours at a stretch at the gathering, being so preoccupied with meaningful and fulfilling moments, especially doing free dream interpretation and I Ching readings for people. However, the period before dreamtime was always the toughest when dealing with poison ivy, and now, in that king-sized motel bed, the neglected petty demon crowded around me like a thousand pale scorpions with blunted pincers, and gnawed patiently at my envelope of mortal skin.  Earlier in the gathering, I sat down next to some poison ivy, which was almost everywhere, and attempted a Vulcan mind meld with it because I wanted to find out what its fucking problem was. I came up with a two word psychoanalytic diagnosis: passive aggressive.

After a few minutes, though, I was free from poison ivy sensations and was having an out-of-body experience.  I have a lifelong history of these, they happen a few times a year, and are always very welcome, as they tend to be orgasmic, kundalini rush releases from the bondage of corporeality.  This OBE seemed particularly pleasant, though there was the intrusion of what appeared to be many telepathically perceived voices that seemed to come from the sleeping psyches of other people in the motel.   Rob seemed to express a whole telepathic paragraph, almost like a speech, though I can’t recall it. Otherwise, the loudest voice was that of a little girl.

Then I seemed to be in a state that was a cross between lucid dreaming and astral travel. The state continued on far longer than I had ever experienced before, and it was more stable, unlike the walking across a soap bubble feeling of lucid dreaming where self-awareness threatens to destabilize the dreamscape.  At will, I could astral travel or return to hovering in the motel room to experience the telepathic voices, and then venture out again into the astral realms. In one realm it was nighttime and I was on a flagstone street. It was very dark and misty, and I could barely see the trees and stone structures beyond the sides of the street. There was a cloaked figure ahead of me and I felt it was very important that I catch up with him, but even as I glided down the path, my feet suspended a few feet from the ground, he eluded me, and eventually I allowed myself to lapse into forgetful sleep.

The experience may not sound all that remarkable. However, I remember thinking while it was happening, and I felt this very strongly the next day as well, that it was the closest I had to being comfortable and able to expansively enjoy the reality of being an inter-dimensional traveler.

The next day was a blur of Subaru and highway, and sooner than I expected we were hurtling into reentry with planet Boulder, the Flatiron mountains shrouded in mist as a thunderstorm pounded the Subaru with mud-cleansing rain, the only rain of the return voyage happening in the last four miles of the trip.

Back in my 18’ RV, tossing down my soggy Rainbow gear, I had to deal with what I though was a mild version of the rude shock that always seems to await me when I return to Babylon from dimension rainbow.  Sometime in the last few hours of the return trip I had lost my cell phone, my only phone.  I was able to brush off the inconvenience of this gadget loss just before my return to town because my laptop was still getting wi-fi internet access, and there was insurance on the phone.  If this was the shock, it was manageable.

My next thoughts and actions were directed to the long anticipated moment of hooking up my digital camera to the laptop and downloading the precious photos I had taken at the gathering.  My secondary compact flash card, which had all photos from the evening of July 3rd on, loaded just fine.  When I removed my main 4GB card from its protective plastic case inside my camera bag, it felt a bit funny. It slid smoothly into the camera, which then immediately warned me that the card was unreadable. Vexed, I popped the card out and noticed that its shape was deformed, a bit warped with a hollowed out concavity beneath the label of the front side.  But this was impossible, I thought; I had taken the most meticulous care of these two precious cards. They had either been inside the magnesium alloy weather-sealed body of the camera or inside their protective plastic case inside my weather resistant Kata camera bag, a company that makes ballistic vests for the Israeli military and camera bags designed to protect gear in the most brutal conditions.  Furthermore, the card was a SanDisk (the leading manufacturer) Extreme III compact flash card (the larger size cards, not the postage stamp sized SD cards), the professional grade, made to withstand brutal conditions.  According to a company press release,

With many professional and advanced photographers shooting pictures in extreme weather conditions ranging from African deserts to the Arctic, the SanDisk Extreme III cards also boast the industry’s widest guaranteed operating temperature range from a freezing minus 13F (minus 25C) to a scorching 185F (plus 85C). The cards also include RescuePRO ™ software that allows photographers to easily recover accidentally deleted images, lost digital images or data.

Furthermore, the plastic these cards are made of is supposed to be so robust that you can run over them with a semi truck, so it’s not like a bit of Ozark humidity could have had this effect.  How could this possibly have happened?  The camera bag was almost never out of my sight, and if anyone had a dark agenda they could have yanked the whole bag, or the camera plus the two cards.  The labels on both sides of the card looked brand new, no sign of heat damage or mechanical abrasion.  As far as I can tell the damage to this card, the strangely deformed shape with concave space beneath the label, is an anomaly.  The plastic case should have showed heat damage long before the card did, and the case had reinforced edges to absorb any mechanical shock.

My first and continuing impression—not that I expect anyone else to swallow this whole—is that I was the victim of a paranormal attack.  I know this sounds over the top, and quite likely it is, but I am not a stranger to paranormal attacks, some of which were far more corroborated and anomalous, such as the dog mauling that happened when I was ten (a long story, recounted elsewhere).  One less extraordinary, but fairly devastating anomaly was the disappearance from my closet (in my early twenties) of a carousel slide tray of the very best slides of the last few years of photography.  That inexplicable disappearance was enough to keep me from taking photography seriously for many years, a trend that didn’t fully reverse itself until a specific beneficent paranormal occurrence I had with photography, recounted in The Path of the Numinous…

Immediately after that first impression of paranormal attack, I flashed back to a conversation I had with Tyler around the campfire just a couple of nights before.  I told him about a relationship that had become somewhat mysteriously estranged, a person of good character and great commitment to consciousness, but who was very influenced by channeled entities, whose whole family was.  And since I had written critically of such entities (see:

The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts ), I wondered if they might not have sought revenge, and perhaps in some subtle way sabotaged that relationship.   “After all,” I recounted to Tyler, “I’m like the mind parasite guy now. I was on the radio show Coast to Coast talking about the subject to ten million people. My website comes right up if you Google the topic. If these entities are aware, and I think they are very aware, I must be on their map.  Maybe they are choosing not to attack, except in very subtle ways, because they know that I’ll write about it and go public with whatever I experience.”

(See the mind parasite section of my site)

During the first couple of minutes of acute shock when I discovered the anomalous damage to the flash card, I was instant-messaged by the very person I had mentioned to Tyler and who had not contacted me in months.  The flash back to the paranoid-seeming statement I had made to Tyler at the campfire now seemed to imprint itself like a fiery brand on this moment of flash card agony.

Through some inexplicable means, the most treasured artifact I had brought from the gathering, my precious 449 high resolution images, had fallen into the cracks of doom.  The anomalous card also damaged my Nikon D 200, one of my lesser rings of power, which had to be sent back to the factory for repairs.  SanDisc advised me to send the card to a data-recovery company they recommended that specialized in compact flash cards.  I did, and they were unable to retrieve a single image from the card.   They told me that it looked like it was run over or suffered a heavy impact resulting in the dent that I noticed. My 449 precious images seemed to have disappeared into the velvet darkness of irrecoverable data loss.  And then months later, as if there weren’t already enough of a sulfurous aura of the diabolical surrounding the ill-fated compact flash card, there was another development.  SanDisc had promised to replace the card after I had sent them documentation, including photographs, of the card, but the replacement never arrived.  This necessitated a morning of taxing follow- up phone calls battling bureaucratic banalities of evil, languishing in voice jails, summoning my Bronx bulldog tenacity not to take catch-22s for answers, and then, finally, reaching a supervisor with enough power to re-authorize the replacement.  He had me write down the replacement authorization number for the new card, which began with the numbers “666.”

The salvia experience does not seem to be over. I go through phases where it continues to resonate.  For example, while biking back from a friend’s house I felt the influence of the shred to black experience as a new cognitive overlay, a question in my mind if my conscious identity were not a manipulated product of some sort. There was this queasy sense of myself in my sensorium, in my experience of being embodied, as if I were a consumer, like a channel surfer, but one who had, with infinite vulnerability and commitment, become wedded to a single channel: this particular body in this particular position in space and time.  I also sensed that within the claustrophobic confinement to this particular mortal body, I did not even have privacy.  My individual prison cell was part of a dense hive of such cells,  and I sensed that there were entities that could address that space, my cell, or all the cells, as if the prison had a telepathic PA system that could penetrate us from within, breaking through internal communication and violating the delusion of individual identity.  But even without such paranormal invasions, there are all sorts of ordinary forces that could pierce my individual cell.  For example, my cell could be hooked up to machines, anesthetized and pierced by surgeons’ knives.  At any moment, all sorts of ordinary things—cars, bullets, germs—could drastically alter my experience in here, the dank, moist, constricting feeling of being in a body.

Gray aliens, according to UFO lore, apparently refer to human beings as “containers.” In some versions this is because they think of us as breeding vessels, in others that we are containers for souls or spirits. This seems an apt metaphor for the human condition, and especially if it is a projection of human psychology rather than an alien conception.  We are souls that are contained or embodied.  We tend to think of these containers as some sort of sovereign domain. The salvia experience intensified my queasy sense of how easily and profoundly my sovereign realm could be violated by all sorts of things— projectile weapons, metal hulks propelled by internal combustion engines, a moment’s inadvertence relating to gravity and the hard porcelain surfaces of a bathroom.

I know that some will see such feelings as deriving from body shame, neurosis or what they consider the error of dualism.  The oversimplification of some versions of dualism leads to equal and opposite forms of ignorance such as neurological materialism, and other versions of body-centric materialism.  For a time I was influenced by the point of view of bio-energeticist Stanely Keleman, a point of view eloquently capsulated in the title of one of his books , The Body Speaks its Mind .  My personal OBEs, and NDE research are among factors that incline me toward my own personal solution of the mind/body problem:  I see a temporary, but deeply interdependent state of parallelism.

The salvia experience ruptured any comfortable philosophical distance from the mind/body problem and at first intensified my sense of embodiment as imposition, as a strange and somewhat contrived confinement, each of us in this cubicle of our bodily experience, our container. We are in corporeal reality nothing more than a fragile and temporary ecosystem within an envelope of skin, a tempest in a bone china teapot.  These feelings of violable mortality seemed to lurk in the background and come forward at various times.  The queasy sense of reality as simulacrum, the sense that I, we, could suddenly find ourselves disembodied and in the backstage area, apart from the product, telepathically aware of each other but also profoundly shocked by the rug having been pulled out and the reality we call home suddenly revealed as an insubstantial contrivance.  I imagine that the ancient Gnostics were haunted by their own version of these feelings.

As I get further from the apocalyptic experience, however, the dark reverberations seem to give way toward a more positive sense of the experience.  What I experienced was the shredding of a container, but my awareness somehow reconstituted itself.  It was a body/ego death, but also a rebirth, and something essential survived the shredding of a particular matrix.

The answer to the haunted feelings, even the very darkest of them, seems to be humility and love, those moments of compassion with other vulnerable beings similarly afflicted by mortal fragility. And those moments, however quickly passing, feel like they have an eternal significance, a significance that would transcend even a more ultimate shred to black.

Australian hermetic philosopher Harald Kleeman wrote a very interesting response to this, follow this link:

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~heka/mysticism.htm

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