#somewhere... between the little sisters of eluria

[lcngdays-archive]

@itsdeadlights found the gunslinger

“See the Turtle of enormous girth,” Roland mutters to the hardpan ground beneath him. He had squatted, head bowed, dark hair wrapped in a tight bun under his hat. One strand had fallen out and into his face in his position, reminding him of the woman who had come and gone just as quickly as everyone else in his life seemed to. How long had it been since then? The gunslinger had little idea. Why did he squat here, speaking to the dirt, as though he could breathe life into it?

Again, he knew it not. Such a question did not even grace his unimaganitive mind. He did as he was bid, and something had bid him to do this. Or, perhaps, he was simply, finally, going insane. That idea had crossed through his mind, but he’d let it fall aside all the same. If he was, there was nothing much he could do to stop it. 

“On his back he holds the earth,” his lips are dry and cracked, “his thought is slow but always kind.” Tongue like leather inside the dry cave of his mouth. Something insists he finish the rhyme, and so he does, as he’d been taught it. 

“ He loves the land and loves the sea. And even loves a child like me."

[postapocalypsecomedownblues]

Dub 3 Ketaphysics 2

(Note from Kirk: The following material is compiled from Dub’s 2018-2019 journals, I’ve omitted a few details but left the rest intact)

As we move into the Coptic New Year 1735 (or 8-8 to the numerologically inclined) my thoughts and prayers are with Charlie Sheen, as they so often are. Depending on who you talk to, there either was or wasn’t a Jesus Christ. But there isn’t a person alive today who doesn’t know Charlie Sheen. And while Jesus may or may not have died for our sins, Charlie Sheen lives a life of sin so that we may celebrate our freedom of choice, even if all that means now is we know for sure that we spend most of our lives choosing to live vicariously through others.

FOUR LINES ARE REDACTED ketamine treatments, which I underwent last month as part of a program to help mitigate my depression and PTSD. 

Sunday, 8/5/18

3 space missions down, 3 to go.

I keep a notebook right next to the official medical beanbag that serves as my Launchpad for these experiments. A lot of it is, not surprisingly, utter gibberish. There are moments though…

So the big thing today happened on the first “lower” dose. I remember being about 10 minutes in, and very aware of gravity. I lay on my back, sprawled out, swimming in the Great Beige. It was like trying to dance while strapped in to the Gravitron at the county fair. It was more than this, but that’s the best I can do. I sat up, heedless of the crystalline wires that the beings I’ll call “The Little Sisters of Eluria” (thank you very much, Stephen King) spent all that effort stitching into my head. They can get back in there whenever they want. Anyway, I sat up, feeling very much like a half-sentient monkey balancing on a rock hurtling through space at 77,000 miles per hour, grabbed my pen and furiously scrawled out the following:

YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO KNOW HOW THIS GOES

Then I lay back down, caught my breath and danced a little while longer.

Getting shot up with medical grade ketamine on a Sunday afternoon by a licensed medical professional in the back of an office complex in Salt Lake City nothing like vomiting your guts out in a tent somewhere in Peru. Instead of icaros, I’ve got a playlist of songs I downloaded from the internet. I’ve seen people check their Twitter feeds between shots.

I’m not judging. What I want to express is how utterly unglamorous any of this is. Everyone is here to do work. This shit gets spooky.

I think one of the hells ketamine has to offer is the “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” (thank you very much, Shirley Jackson) feeling as you start to come out. No matter how groovy things might be on the other side of the abyss, when you come back, there’s no getting around the fact that you have voluntarily allowed another reality to alter this one. You are the one who signed the waiver, rolled up your sleeve. You watch a needle puncture your skin. This is your life, your mind, and there is something about the reality that you were handed that is so unsatisfactory that you are here now. The Little Sisters of Eluria can do their work if you call on them, but it’s still you laying there getting the work done. You can’t escape you, no matter what you shoot into you.

Here’s something else I wrote towards the end of today’s final trip:

“I was told there would be bright colors.”

For the Tarot, I didn’t even try to make predictions last night. I watched half of a bad movie and fell asleep early. Here’s today’s draw:

Page of Wands

King of Wands

8 of Pentacles

Ace of Swords

Queen of Cups

That’s all for now.

8/6/18

Monday morning – No work this morning due to crane issues. That’s okay, beige hell has very much been on my mind since yesterday, and last night’s post sounds crankier than I really think I felt at the time.

Lately at work, I’ve been re-listening to the Exegesis of Phillip K. Dick (actually it’s my first listen, but second read, if that makes sense). A few years ago I was listening to somebody interview Tessa Dick, and I remember becoming very stressed out at the description of how he passed away. I know that brain embolisms are rather quick and painless affairs, but the description of him laid out in his living room, behind the couch, really affected me. I thought of how active his mind was, contrasted by the banality of his final surroundings. I don’t know why this upset me so much, but that’s the human experience in a nutshell, right? Everybody gets freaked out by different things.

Anyway, when I’m fully in ketamine’s tentacle-y embrace, as we are waltzing through space into Saturn’s orbit, the gates to the abyss where the big C-motherfucker lies waiting… I’m trapped – paralyzed really – in a setting that probably looked quite analogous to what P.K.D. saw when he breathed his last in that bodily form. And it still freaks me the fuck out.

So there’s one theory. Another is that beige hell is our karma as Americans. We send our kids to beige deserts to kill. We ignore the plight of starving millions while driving to work in beige upholstered bubbles, until we sit in beige offices and go home to beige colored apartments. When our parents grow too old, sick or forgetful to take care of, we send them off to beige colored retirement homes where they breathe their last while staring at beige colored curtains until a nurse in beige scrubs starts unhooking them from the final few strands that held them tethered to this earth…

God this is depressing.

Be good to each other, and spend some time staring at some flowers or cuttlefish today. It’s probably good for the soul.

8/7/18

Tuesday, how predictable; a breakthrough. I’m using sarcasm (poorly) to mask the very real feeling of awe that I experienced today.

So, where to begin. For the record, I’m not entirely straight yet. Not by a damn sight; I got my final injection about 2 hours ago, and the world is still only behaving semi-normally; as if it would be a breach of etiquette for everything under my feet to pop.

I’m super into semi-colons right now. They’re like the Swiss Army Knives of syntax.

So, if you’re good then life is good. If you’re lucky enough to do good a hundred percent of the time, congratulations on being an Ipsissimus; the rest of us are stuck here in the trash strata. But for whatever reason, today I started meditating on what’s good here in the trash strata – and maybe that’s where years of listening to bands like Kyuss and Fu Manchu paid off. I started seeing gold.

Gold sunlight, gold refracted through junk lenses

Old timey Defender video games and T-top Trans-Ams with golden fiery Phoenix wings that spread across the sky – Hail unto thee who are Ra in thy rising, Hail Tiphareth, Hail the Christ Consciousness.

You aren’t supposed to know how this goes, but also you aren’t expected to know how to be good in every possible situation; only the situation you are actually really in at this very moment.

Let’s hear it for the semi-colon.

This is the way out, the release in here. I’m not trying to unravel the secrets of the universe. One of the many, many differences between PKD and me is that I have no use for a weltanschauung.

So, how to explain this then? Mother Earth is the trash strata sphere, informed primarily by Mother Saturn. But it’s not just those two; simply that they are the most powerful symphonies (I’ll explain this in a minute). But there are many spheres between the two Mothers, some beneficent, some maleficent, and even these are only descriptors for forces that beggar description. I know that Manly P. Hall does a decent job talking about the crystalline sphere metaphysical models that permeate much of the classical magical texts, and I cannot stress enough that I have no investment in these ideas as truth, more of an teleological lens through which one can view things when the reality goggles get yanked.

So if Earth is everywhere (which it is – under normal circumstances you can’t detect anything but the Earth sphere with your 5 senses), and through the influence of Saturn everything is beige, what if one was to focus through a different sphere? I think I did this for a moment on Sunday to horrific effect. I was thinking about how sucky this all was and then boom! Everything went Dario Argento-red, and I think that was Mars.

8/8/18 

Wednesday – I almost cut all of this stuff out because it’s weird to talk about it openly. I’m going to admit some things that I don’t talk openly about, because I’ve always thought one’s metaphysics should be kept to oneself. Also, it just feels weird talking about it publicly. But, my original purpose for posting this online was to help anyone who might be interested in trying something like this. And if I can’t talk about the methods “I” used to deal with the really heavy trips, then how the fuck am I helping people?

On the flip side, I have a hard time with stating anything that sounds boastful. In a weird way, I’m sort of proud of the fact that I was able to come out on the other side of this. And 99% of the time, if I do something I’m proud of, announcing it to people either across the internet or at dinner parties seems like a terrible breach of etiquette. So here’s the dilemma.

But even that’s bullshit. Because “I” didn’t really do anything. If anybody did something yesterday, it was Dr REDACTED. He’s led who-the-fuck-knows how many people through this very same hedge-maze, and probably knew all along what he was doing with me. So, I survived this in the same way somebody survives a Class-5 river rafting expedition by hanging onto the side-rails. “I” was not doing the paddling.

But I did some stuff before the trip this time, and maybe it gamed the results some. (Here’s the openly admitting stuff). I have an ancestral altar in one of my rooms, and yesterday I made an offering to both my pantheon and my ancestral lineage. The offering was frankincense and myrrh, plus a copy of the receipt from my payment to REDACTED. I made a promise at my altar to try to let my heart lead the way through the parts of the trip that my head couldn’t tolerate. Then I meditated on the new hypersigil I’ve been working on for 10 minutes. This was the last thing I did before heading out.

So the sphere of Binah/Mother Saturn sits on the left shoulder, Chesed/the Sidereal Realm/something like the Akashic Records hovers just above the right shoulder. These are the devil/angel dynamics depicted in religious woodcuttings and Tom & Jerry cartoons (the fucking best). Mother Saturn speaks to you through the Gates of the Abyss where Choronzon dwells. This is Daath and the awareness of speech programming not only your operant paradigms but the construct that you mistake for you.

To realize that you are simply a story that you are told is to realize that the story began long before your comprehension of language existed in your own temporal reality. I realize that this is a little dense, so I’ll try it a different way. You process the world through language, and somewhere in all of the language you have picked up is a single through-line; the “you-code”. You aren’t the code any more than the story of the Giving Tree is an actual tree. But the story of you started before you became you. Therefore, your primary source code was written by something other than you. And that game of “pass the baton” has been going back since before we knew how to build campfires.

So you have to surrender that story to pass through the gate of understanding beyond where our capacity for language lies. I think this is where you have to allow your heart-center to take the reins. To do this is to view the Earth Sphere through the lens of Tiphareth. This can be done. I did this, and the only way that I can admit it is to admit that “I” wasn’t the one doing it.

This is another step on the path to individuation.

More about the gate, and what it does. Concurrently, I’m thinking about something Ouspensky wrote about the tarot trumps and how they pair off with each other (or in his words, how I would have understood him to have written abo…). To further his (rather, my understanding of his) position, this metaphysical/archetypal gate could be the flashpoint where they meet – in this metaphor I guess the flashpoint is the “burning now” that one only experiences when the idea of self is dissolved – and how in some cases this can induce specific forms of madness. In particular, I’m thinking of the pairing between the 7th and 16th trumps; these being the Chariot and the Tower.

With respect to religion, these two provide glimpses of the lead-up to and fall-out from a damaging experience of kratophany. In this case, the chariot represents an attempt to experience the numinous, but conflates an attitude of proper reverence with self-righteous piety. At the omega-point of kratophany, the chariot meets with the Godhead, and the Tower is the fall-out. You can see physical evidence of this phenomenon by checking out some of the odder-looking fundamentalist churches within the US “Bible Belt”. I don’t doubt that any of the more freakish snake handlers and faith healers have had genuine spiritual encounters. But not having prepared for it, the fallout makes them even more armored, fearful and xenophobic.

To someone who has encountered “other” with a nothing but a head full of Old Testament fire & brimstone and some American exceptionalism to fall back on, xenophobia might seem like a valid reaction. This is the poison of Yaldaboath at work; a sentient mind-virus spawning 3 new 700 Clubs every time a Pat Robertson passes away.

The flip side to this madness is the form of hardcore Satanism described by theorists like Maury Terry and Linda Blood. Animal and human sacrifice erase the primary you-code, but instead of Yaldaboath, something even darker and more immediately dangerous can slip in.