(Attached is a photo taken at Taman Sari in Yogyakarta, Indonesia circa 2007. It's an 18th century structure, sometimes called the "Water Palace" for its extensive hydraulics (now no longer operational) which provided a large, open air bathing area for the sultan's concubines.
There is a lot of local mysticism associated with the place. It's located on the grounds of the Kraton -- or Sultan's Palace -- and some believe it is haunted, in one especially persistent story by the figure of Lara Kidul: a kind of Green Goddess of the Sea with whom the Sultan must cohabit in order to ensure the safety of his sultanate.-PL)
Well, it depends on how you define positive and constructive. There were those who felt that the assassination of JFK -- for instance -- was a positive development (!); and we all know how many coincidences and synchronicities surround that event. Also, on a more local level, these synchronicities work often in my favor when I am researching a book. It may be a question of energy displacement: the more intensity surrounding any given event, the greater the probability that coincidences and synchronicities will be present or multiply. How to define "intensity"? Extreme focus by one or more persons, I suppose. An assassination of an important political figure or celebrity would attract enormous conscious focus, and this may contribute to a kind of re-ordering of consciousness elements surrounding that event, the way psychological trauma seems to produce behavioral responses years after the event itself, which may or may not be obvious or conscious to the person who suffered the trauma.
The paranormal aspects of what we are calling the "Phenomenon" are inescapable. Every time we get close to a definition of what the Phenomenon "is" we get explanations that run the gamut from quasi-religious, Biblical-sounding terms to attempts to put the whole thing in a context of consciousness, quantum mechanics, or something similar. If you read the transcript of the first official Air Force press conference on UFOs -- which took place after the famous July 1952 sightings over DC -- you'll see the numerous Biblical references even then. More recently we have heard Greek mythology used as a way to describe certain aspects of the Phenomenon, and we included this theme in Sekret Machines: Gods.
I got a copy of The Matrix by Valerian years ago and did not know what to make of it! There were a lot of newspaper clippings and similar material and all of it was suggestive, but then I grew up in New York City where there are a lot of wild-eyed people wandering around with notebooks full of newspaper clippings so I wasn't bothered. It seemed to me that Valerian was/is re-ordering his cosmos around the material he collected. We are all guilty of confirmation bias to some extent, of course (otherwise why do we do what we do?) but I would refer to The Matrix every few years or so to try to see it from a fresh perspective. It's one of those things that seem somehow important when you look at it at arm's length, but when you delve into it you find yourself trapped in the labyrinth of an alien mind with no way out!
Oi vey. This would require a chapter of a book to even begin to address. Let's take it one at a time, for brevity's sake. The Holy Guardian Angel is a personal or individual "entity." It is the link between our conscious self and our super-conscious self (at least, from the perspective of "below the Abyss"). It is more than that, according to modern western esoteric thought, but it is never a universal being but something innately personal and individual. Valis might have been Dick's HGA in a sense, and in perceiving it the way he did he was either in error (from a western esoteric point of view) or he was supremely prescient (from a quantum consciousness POV). Valis as an alien craft or machine, however, comes close to what we are doing with Sekret Machines. I go into this in more detail in the books that follow, but basically we have to redefine what we mean by "machine": do our attempts to create conscious machines represent an unconscious desire to recreate ourselves, to understand ourselves, and thus come close to the "Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel" as per the Abramelin Working? Do our sightings of alien craft represent an oncoming point of convergence between our linear human history and the source -- the fons et origo -- of consciousness itself?
An excuse for Liam Neeson to make Taken Four ...?
Clarified and expanded. I have always been sympathetic to the diffusionist theory while not abandoning certain aspects of the independent inventionist perspective. Why is it acceptable -- for instance -- to accept that ancient humans walked across a putative Bering Strait land bridge from the Asian continent 20,000 - 30,000 years ago but the idea that civilizations could have traveled across the Atlantic or the Pacific more recently is considered impossible?
Oi vey, again. I am working on what has become a very long blog post about this very subject, with a special emphasis on Alexander Dugin, Julius Evola, etc. and the mysticism of Nationalism. So, I guess my answer is ... sure!
Without naming names or being too specific, it's pretty much the latter. I'm a documents and sources kind of guy, and I am not able to take the word of people I don't know, haven't interviewed myself, or whose accounts are not verified in any way. Otherwise, it's all Dungeons and Dragons. I am open to all sorts of possibilities, but you gotta give me something, man.
As Israel Regardie once said, about a year of psychotherapy before you even begin. You have to know your own strengths and weaknesses, and have an idea of how you will be blindsided by what you do. Psychoanalysis is a passive process, like analyzing your dreams or your emotional reactions to things that happen to you. Occultism is an active process: you don't wait around for your unconscious to give you material to work with, you go into your subconscious using the various tools that occultism provides. It's inherently a dangerous process for that reason. Medical students work on cadavers before they are allowed to perform surgery; a good analogy, I think!
