#so called free thinkers when angel imagery

[pompadorbz]

ranboo posted the unused angel r800 from the asmr video and then I blacked out and this appeared in front of me.

[coweatman]

there are good photos in the original, but, y’know, paywall.

Genesis P-Orridge Has Always Been a Provocateur of the Body. Now She’s at Its Mercy.

By John Leland

Neil Andrew Megson discovered Max Ernst when he was 15 years old, and it set a course for his life. The book was called “The Hundred Headless Woman,” surrealistic collages of human and animal forms. It presented the body as fluid and mutable, and the self as open to negotiation. It was the mid-1960s, and to a British schoolboy who felt he didn’t fit in — into his school, his gender, his body — this was freedom.

In the half-century since, Megson — better known as the musician and visual artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge — has steadily probed at the boundaries of the body, both literally and figuratively, evolving from art provocateur to founder of the influential British bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV to semi-established fine artist with archives at the Tate Britain. As P-Orridge now considers retiring from live music, Throbbing Gristle’s albums from the 1970s and early 1980s are newly available in deluxe reissues on Mute.

At 68, P-Orridge lives on the Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan in a body racked by chronic myelomonocytic leukemia.

“I’m stable right now, my blood counts are close to normal,” P-Orridge said on a recent afternoon at home, flanked by a snoring Pekingese named Musty Dagger. “But at some point it will finally flare up and become terminal, and there’s no way to know when that might be. Optimistically, two years. Less optimistically, a year, maybe six months. And then I’m on the downward slope to death.”

The artist at home: working-class English accent, Rogaine in the bathroom, black T-shirt reading “Thank God for Abortion.” Breast implants and a mouth full of metal teeth, an idea P-Orridge got from watching the movie “Belle de Jour” on LSD. Shelves full of books and artwork, mostly by P-Orridge, including various fetish objects and a wooden rabbit dotted in blood, the residue of hundreds of ketamine injections.

Since a series of operations with Jacqueline Breyer P-Orridge, P-Orridge’s wife, who died in 2007, P-Orridge prefers genderless pronouns, usually first person plural, but is O.K. with female pronouns. Her life, she said, was an experiment that was still playing out.

“We know that Neil Andrew Megson decided to create an artist, Genesis P-Orridge, and insert it into the culture,” she said. “Some people take their lives and turn them into the equivalent of a work of art. So we invented Genesis, but Gen forgot Neil, really. Does that person still exist somewhere, or did Genesis gobble him up? We don’t know the answer. But thank you, Neil.”

It has been a provocative run. P-Orridge first came into being with a Dadaist performance collective called COUM Transmissions, whose shows included whipping, masturbation and live sex; “Prostitution,” their 1976 retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, included nudity and bloody tampons and scandalized the British public.

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When P-Orridge and others branched off that year to form Throbbing Gristle, they added assaultive industrial noise and Nazi imagery to the mix.

“In terms of being shocking, punk was pretty tame in comparison,” said Simon Reynolds, the author of “Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984.” “They were writing songs about serial killers and cutting themselves onstage.”

In 1981, P-Orridge reversed course in the gently trippy Psychic TV, whose danceable songs echoed the occult writings of Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare, and included a tribute to Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones called “Godstar.” P-Orridge imagined the band as the center of a global consciousness raising, and recruited fans to join Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, a cross between a fan club and a cult, whose members donned paramilitary gear and submitted bodily fluids as part of their initiation.

In 1995, after a recording session with the band Love and Rockets in the Los Angeles home of the producer Rick Rubin, P-Orridge woke up to a massive electrical fire there and jumped from a second-story window, shattering her arm and suffering post-traumatic stress disorder. Psychic TV went on hiatus, but returned in the late ’90s and again with a new lineup in 2003.

But all the time she was making collages and other visual art, including a solo show at the Rubin Museum of Art that made The New York Times’s roundup of the Best Art of 2016. And she was writing books, including, most recently, “His Name Was Master,” a collection of interviews with Brion Gysin, whose ���Cut-Up” literary experiments with William S. Burroughs — splicing and recombining texts to unlock meanings — have been a driving aesthetic in P-Orridge’s work and life.

It takes a moment in the apartment to realize that the two naked blondes in a wall-sized photograph, identical of breast and chin, are P-Orridge and Lady Jaye, Jacqueline’s nickname. In the bedroom are photos of their California wedding, June 1995, Friday the 13th. Genesis was the bride. Lady Jaye wore a mustache, tight leather pants and a leather vest, nothing underneath.

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Their marriage — they met at an S & M dungeon in New York, where Lady Jaye worked — began a new creative phase, this one a partnership, in which their main medium was their bodies.

Lady Jaye was both a registered nurse and a dominatrix, a delightful combination. P-Orridge sometimes worked with her at the dungeon, as the domineering Lady Sarah. The pay wasn’t bad — maybe $200 an hour for what was called a “tribute” — but the work wasn’t steady, she said. They had money from a lawsuit after the fire, and an idea: What if they altered their bodies to become a third entity, neither male nor female, but free from the binary framework that they saw as destructive?

They called their project the pandrogyne, the fusing of two persons into a third that only existed when they were together. P-Orridge had been an early proponent of piercing and ritual cutting or scarring. The pandrogyne was their way of applying Burroughs’s and Gysin’s “Cut-Up” technique to their own flesh.

P-Orridge, the father of two daughters from a previous marriage — she attended PTA meetings in a miniskirt and thigh-high boots — remembered calling up her daughter Genesse, saying, “‘There’s something you ought to know. Lady Jaye and myself, we got matching breast implants last week.’ And Genesse just said, ‘What? You got breast implants when you could have bought me a new car?’ That was 2003. She was about 19.”

“My daughters adore me still, despite everything that’s been unorthodox,” she added. “They don’t bat an eye. They call me Papa Gen-Gen.”

Lady Jaye had surgery on her chin and nose to match her mate’s. The couple took hormones but didn’t like them; they took ketamine, daily, and liked it so much that they often went to sleep with full syringes on their night stands, so that whoever woke up first could inject the other partner in mid-slumber.

The French filmmaker Marie Losier documented their relationship in the 2012 documentary “The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye,” which ran at the Museum of Modern Art earlier this month.

The writer Douglas Rushkoff, who briefly played in Psychic TV, recalled nights in the city with Gen and Jackie, as he called the Breyer P-Orridges (like other old friends, Rushkoff refers to P-Orridge by masculine pronouns).

“He and Jackie were our most normal friends,” he said. “We’d just go to the Indian restaurant. He had weird teeth or took weird drugs or had weird art, but we would talk about what to do with savings, or how to deal with air conditioning. Just normal, mundane stuff.”

Then in 2007, Lady Jaye died of an acute heart arrhythmia. Her death left P-Orridge alone, one half of an art project that no longer had a second half.

“It became really tricky,” Rushkoff said. “To make that level of commitment, not just in marriage and love, but to do this thing to your body that doesn’t quite make sense anymore without the other half, that’s rough.”

When P-Orridge developed leukemia, Rushkoff organized a GoFundMe crowdfunding campaign that has raised almost $55,000 for her medical bills.

“We realized for the first time in a tangible way how much people care for me,” P-Orridge said. “That was really beautiful to discover. See, I’m getting teary already. That’s a good feeling, that that many people want you to stay.”

The prankishness of P-Orridge’s work sometimes distracts people from the art itself, said Jarrett Earnest, 31, an art critic and curator who met her at a performance piece by Leigha Mason called “Spit Banquet,” in which people sat at a table and spat into empty vessels.

“What she’s done as a thinker and as a maker, this has not been understood in the wider art world,” Earnest said. “People in the music world know her in a specific way. But her writing and her ideas about culture and the relationship of life to art are so profound.”

Earnest added: “She does a lot to play the part of the cartoon, because there’s a part of her that’s really silly. She is those things, but at the same time this sweet, profound, authentic person. It’s not just someone with weird teeth who looks like a cult leader.”

On another afternoon in October, P-Orridge wore a T-shirt that read “Cult Leader.” She was recovering from pneumonia, preparing to travel to Europe for two concerts, the last two dates in an otherwise scrapped tour. After that, she said, she did not expect to tour again, because her health was too unpredictable.

And she was in love, with a woman she’d met in Granada a few years back.

“We certainly didn’t expect it, at our age,” she said. “What a beautiful surprise it was to be in love again. She’s 28. It’s ridiculous, but what can you do, man?”

In the last year, an old bandmate and girlfriend, known as Cosey Fanni Tutti, accused P-Orridge in a memoir of being physically and emotionally abusive. P-Orridge said she had not seen the book, but denied the allegations. “Whatever sells a book sells a book,” she said.

And she was busy, preparing two volumes of her notebooks from the 1960s and a graphic novel called “Man Into Wolf,” whose title comes from a 1948 book about sadism, masochism and werewolves. Museums, she said, were calling about new and old work.

“Derek Jarman said, ‘Gen, when they know you’ve got a terminal illness, they start liking what you do,’” she said, referring to the director and author. “‘You wait and see.’ And now people want the art in art exhibitions.”

If there is a next chapter, P-Orridge hopes it will be to form a collective community, with people sharing resources but having more privacy than in a commune. The ‘60s dream still drives her.

“When you’ve got a terminal illness, you think about what your legacy might be,” she said. “My only answer is, we would hope that it would inspire people to see that they can do a life totally as they would like it to unfold. Live your life every day like a page in your book of life, and make that page as interesting as you can. Whenever you have a choice, say: Which is the better page in my book?”

She said she was not afraid of death. “I’d like to stay, because it’s fascinating here,” she said. “But as far as we can tell, having a physical body is a luxury we don’t often get, and too many people squander that luxury.”

She smiled, a mouthful of gleaming metal. “We’ve not squandered it,” she said. “We’ve utilized it to the maximum we could.”

A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 11, 2018, on Page AR19 of the New York edition with the headline: Provocateur of the Body, Now at Its Mercy.

[thebewisepodcast]

Kindling the Divine Spark- The Secret to Awakening

Blessed is he who has a soul, 

blessed is he who has none,

but woe and grief to him

who has it in embryo. 1 G.I. Gurdjieff  

  The United States Declaration of Independence proudly proclaims the mystical truth that,

"all men are created equal." 

What happens after that, though, is anybody's guess. 

 Once we've been created equally,

Does that mean all our lives are the same?

Do the essential differences between us come from genetics, environment, free will, the soul?

Do we all end up in the same place again when we die? 

These questions have excited the myth-making faculties of humankind from antiquity down through to the present day.

    Working for a Soul The esoteric teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff, in many ways, fly in the face of traditional Western religious thought. 

 Whereas it is accepted as a given within Judeo-Christian tradition that each human is born with a soul, Gurdjieff does not let us off so easy. Active in the early part of the 20th century, this Greek-Armenian mystic travelled the world, synthesizing spiritual disciplines into a unique path called The Fourth Way. 

 He taught that human existence is a kind of waking sleep, in which we live more or less automatically, unconscious and unaware of ourselves. 

 He even went to the extreme of suggesting that humans are not born with souls at all, and that we can only create one while alive through intense personal sufferingand what he called "work." 

 If we are not successful in this venture, he taught that our identities would not survive the shock of death, that we would "die like dogs" and that the ever-hungry Moon would gobble up our energy as part of its own evolution of consciousness. It's a teaching which sounds strange to most people today, but which was perhaps more common to the ancient world. 

 Consider the words of the Gospel of Philip, an ancient Gnostic codex recovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945:

Those who say they will die first and then rise are in error. If they do not first receive the resurrection while they live, when they die they will receive nothing. 2

Like the other Gnostic texts recovered at Nag Hammadi, this type of information was declared heretical, banned and except for in a few lucky cases, completely destroyed by the early Catholic Church in an effort to consolidate both its teachings and its power structure. 

 The Catholic story-system pivots around the idea that we will be resurrected at the end of time, not transmuted to higher levels of understanding and awareness here in our lifetimes. 

 The Gnostic texts, on the other hand, seem to teach that humans are born with a spark of divinity which can either be left undeveloped or guarded and fanned into a full-on blaze. With the popularity of books like the Da Vinci Code, and a renewed interest in Gnosticism, many people today are left wondering why these alternative esoteric Christian teachings were so viciously eradicated. 

 Who benefits by suppressing this ancient gnosis, and what happens to those of us left in the dark as a result? If Gurdjieff and the Gospel of Philip are at all correct in their teachings, then it may be that by waiting for our reward in the afterlife, by not working feverishly on our souls like a life raft on Gilligan's Island, then we are lost. We miss our chance. We remain soulless automatons, vanishing at death or being consumed by insidious forces (if not well before then).

       The Inauthentic Human Science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick saw something very similar to this scenario happening in today's world. 

 Through the lens of trashy sci-fi novels, he explored questions of what is ultimately real, and what constitutes the authentic human. He used outlandish and bizarre plot devices to fling his characters through inverted realities and distorted mindscapes. 

 And from his explorations, he came to believe that:

… [T]he bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans - as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides...

 Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. 

 So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. 3

Similar themes appear in popular and fringe culture.

 In the movie The Matrix, we see a false reality maintained by mysterious agents who can slip in and out of the bodies of ordinary people as though they were clothing. 

 The paranormal investigations of people like John Keel, Jacques Vallee and others also posit the existence of ultraterrestrials, a race of entities who evolved right alongside us on the planet Earth. 

 They are thought to camouflage themselves, adapting imagery pulled from the human minds and cultures they interact with. 

 In other words, they appeared to the ancients as angels and demons, to medieval people as fairies and goblins, and to us today as alien visitors. Others threaten that the soulless human can play host to these and other types of entities and energies, acting as a sort of empty vessel, or organic portal. 4

 Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan echoes this sentiment in The Active Side of Infinity, suggesting that malicious beings or "predators" seek to control us by,

"giving us their mind" which is filled with "covetousness, greed, and cowardice," and which keeps us "complacent, routinary and egomaniacal." 5

Unfortunately for us though, it is not just science fiction authors and occultists who have explored ideas like this.

 In "real life," similar notions of humans as fundamentally without soul took root among psychologists who espoused the philosophies of Behaviourism and Eliminative Materialism in the middle part of the 20th century. 

 In short, these thinkers (perhaps paradoxically) believed that internal human states were nothing but a fiction, a primitive "folk psychology," and that only externally observable behavior had any real significance. 

 They saw concepts such as belief, desire, fear, love - even the mind and soul - as untenable, unscientific and therefore ultimately unreal and useless. 

 Noted Behaviourist B.F. Skinner encapsulated the quest to abolish "inner man" in his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity, with this chilling passage:

What is being abolished is autonomous man - the inner man, the homunculus, the possessing demon, the man defended by the literatures of freedom and dignity. His abolition has long been overdue. 

 Autonomous man is a device used to explain what we cannot explain in any other way. He has been constructed from our ignorance, and as our understanding increases, the very stuff of which he is composed vanishes. 

 Science does not dehumanize man, it de-homunculises him, and it must do so if it is to prevent the abolition of the human species. To man qua man we readily say good riddance. 

 Only by dispossessing him can we turn to real causes of human behavior. 

 Only then can we turn from the inferred to the observed, from the miraculous to the natural, from the inaccessible to the manipulable. 6

At first glance, strong thematic similarities tie together the cores of Skinner's and esoteric philosophies such as that of Gurdjieff. 

 Both strip humans of any kind of inherent soul. 

 Skinner, however, seems to revel in the thought, because it means that human behavior may be controlled by those with the power and drive to do so. It is, in essence, the Holy Grail of scientifically-driven totalitarian systems of governance. 

 Applied to world events, it may help explain the inhuman atrocities we see played out on the global scale every day. 

 On the other hand though, we have folks like Gurdjieff who follow in the footsteps of the ancient Gnostics, and after introducing us to our fundamental dilemma rather than celebrating it, chart for us a way out of the shackles of an empty, automatic and manipulable existence.

    Is God Insane? In his ground-breaking 1967 book, The Politics of Experience, psychiatrist R.D. Laing put forward the still-revolutionary idea that mental illness is not illness at all. 

 Instead, it is (or can be) a healing process whereby an individual overcomes the impossibility of their own situation, and the insanity of the culture at large. In his vision, it was not individual humans who were fundamentally disturbed, but the culture which was dangerous and insane, warping and distorting the natural human into the artificial confines of local cultural existence. Ancient Gnostics took this idea several steps further. 

 Certain sects taught that this material world was created by the Demiurge, an insane creator god who was conceived in error, and who egotistically took himself to be the only true god. 

 Tradition identifies him either as the angry Yahweh of the Old Testament ("Thou shalt have no other gods before me"), as Satan in his role as Prince of this world, or with more overtly Gnostic variants such as,

Yaldabaoth

Samael

Saklas

Philip K. Dick mythologized this hierarchy of institutional insanity into what he called the Black Iron Prison, which is ruled over by a never-ending, infinitely destructive Empire. 

 In his Tractates Cryptica Scriptura, 7 an esoteric addendum to his novel VALIS, he 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." 

Thus it would seem that the only rational course for an individual to become and stay sane is to overcome his culture, his society, and maybe even God himself (or at least the deranged being which the Gnostics believed masquerades as God).

"Against the Empire," Dick continued, "is posed the living information, the plasmate or physician…" 

Dick identified this cosmic force with the Holy Spirit, the Christian concept of the Logos, or the divine Word (hence, living information) which was made flesh in the person of Jesus Christ.

 Like the ancient Gnostics, Dick believed that this divine entity - the plasmate - could fuse with, not just Jesus, but with potentially anyone who was worthy. 

 There is no indication that Dick believed humans fundamentally lacked souls, but he seems to have believed that the plasmate healed and restored people to sanity, and to their natural whole state.

    The Secret Gray-Robed Christians Dick himself underwent a series of transformative spiritual experiences which formed the basis of his understanding of the human situation.

 In his novels VALIS and Radio Free Albemuth, he fictionalized these experiences, describing numerous encounters in dreams, hallucinations and waking life with a benevolent higher order entity which he variously described as a cosmic artificial intelligence, ancient alien beings, the living information of the plasmate, and of divinity itself. 

 Both his fictional characters and he himself underwent extreme pain, personal turmoil and intense soul-searching, which perhaps could be correlated to what Gurdjieff meant as the "work" required to fashion oneself a soul or subtle body with which to escape the obliteration of death. The exact nature of that work seems to deal with cultivating an intense awareness and a sustained "presence" within oneself at all times - as opposed to absent-mindedness, or living on auto-pilot, which seems to be the natural state of affairs. 

 Here we may once again turn to the ancient Gnostics for inspiration and amplification.

 From The Apocryphon of John, another text recovered at Nag Hammadi, we find:

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 counterfeit spirit preys are alienated from humanity and deviated… 8

In Dick's worlds, once you have crossed that threshold and reconnected to the universal soul (or created a soul, as Gurdjieff's teachings might indicate), others who have done the same will be revealed to you, so that you may strengthen one another and work toward a common goal.

 In VALIS, Dick referred to these kindred spirits as Secret Gray Robed Christians (or homoplasmates - those who had "cross-bonded" with the living information of Christ or the Holy Spirit, thereby attaining eternal life). 

 Upon their shoulders lay the immense task of nothing less than the overthrow of the Black Iron Prison itself:

Who had built the prison - and why - he could not say. 

 But he could discern one good thing: the prison lay under attack. 

 An organization of Christians, not regular Christians such as those who attended church every Sunday and prayed, but secret early Christians wearing light gray-colored robes, had started an assault on the prison, and with success. 

 The secret, early Christians were filled with joy. Fat, in his madness, understood the reason for their joy. 

 This time the early, secret, gray-robed Christians would get the prison, rather than the other way around. 9

The idea that not all humans have souls is a fascinating line of thought which invariably leads to dangerous and even violent territory when employed by the agents of Empire.

 One need look no further than Nazi Germany's wholesale execution of what they claimed were the "sub-human" Jews as vivid examples of the extravagant danger of these ideas.

 It is one thing to explore mystical truth for the purposes of personal development; it is quite another altogether to use it as an excuse and explanation for violent, thoughtless, and inhuman action. The choice, ultimately, seems to rest in the hands of the individual as to whether or not we develop our divine spark into a full-fledged soul, or if we let it languish in darkness. 

 We may all be created equal, but what do we do after that? 

 The 12th century Sufi, Farid ud-Din Attar, in his "Conference of the Birds," offered the following:

A Sufi woke one night and said to himself,

"It seems to me that the world is like a chest in which we are all put and the lid is shut down, and we give ourselves up to foolishness. 

 When death lifts the lid, he who has acquired wings, soars away to eternity, but he who has not, stays in the chest a prey to a thousand tribulations. 

 Make sure then that the bird of ambition acquires wings of aspiration, and give to your heart and reason the ecstasy of the soul.

 Before the lid of the chest is opened become a bird of the spirit, ready to spread your wings." 10

   Footnotes

G.I. Gurdjieff, Gurdjieff's Aphorisms, www.gurdjieff.org/aphorisms.htm

The Gospel of Philip, www.gnosis.org/naghamm/gop.html

Philip K Dick, "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later," 1978, http://deoxy.org/pkd_how2build.htm

Matrix Agents - Profiles and Analysis

Carlos Castaneda, The Active Side of Infinity

B.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, see also www.conspiracyarchive.com/Commentary/Global_Skinner_Box.htm

Tractates Cryptica Scriptura

The Apocryphon of John, see also www.metahistory.org/GnosticCatechism.php

Philip K. Dick, VALIS

Farid ud-Din Attar, The Conference of Birds