PKD Fireside Chat

Philip K Dick

Fascinating.

Christopher Knowles & The Secret History Of Rock & Roll Interviewed By Future Quake

Christopher Knowles - The Secret History Of Rock & Roll by Charlesfrith on Mixcloud

Lessons The Coming American Revolution Can Learn From The Bolsheviks Co-opting The Menshiviks

Unfortunately John Lash who is on fire at the beginning of this interview is interrupted with a ten minute plug that would put QVC to shame and he never quite gets his momentum  back to the point where he was teaching us the occult roots of the Russian revolution and the counter revolutionary moves by Lenin and Trotsky as we learn of Edmund Wilson's To The Finland Station and a bunch of other recommendations that he never gets a chance to repeat as he usually does when he frames ideas such as America currently mirroring the history of the Russian revolution. An idea that Terence McKenna articulated as Rome fall five times a day.

John Lash's magic as one of our global elders/wise men is diminished by rushing him, interrupting him and adding superfluous commentary. There are few speakers of his calibre and every word of is golden goodness when he is in the flow. 

John claims we need a narrative to rally round in order to succeed in throwing off our central banker criminals and I think that process needs to be completely organic. No more hierarchy. Decentralised decision making is the future.

Celebrities Devoid Of Art Jamming Creativity Down The Toilet

I'm semi reluctant to plug Christopher Knowles interview here because I'd hate to see this post contributing to wider attention and better bill paying gigs that distract him from his book writing and excellent blogging. Christopher is the first person to credibly explain to me why The Clash were so good. I've never been into them but knew I was missing something from friends explanations, and it's nailed in this awesome interview about the secret history of Rock & Roll which connects straight back to the mystery schools and Dionysian waywardness.

If you don't learn a lot from this interview then you shouldn't be reading this but instead should be interviewed yourself. Christopher makes the interesting point that Rock & Roll can't be reinvented like say Nirvana did with the current hipster scene in music bars too self concious to bounce off the walls in case they look silly on Facebook pic uploads. He's a first class observer of the times and I urge everyone to listen to the excellent and erudite interview originally done by Cosmic Gnostic

Why Does The Ancient Aliens Hypothesis Drive The High Priests Of Knowledge Completely Bonkers?

Mike Clelland interviews Christopher Knowles and riff on any number of subjects but the line that comes to mind is the question of why the Ancient Aliens hypothesis drives the  high priests of opinion shaping nut?. This is interesting because the ancient alien evidence is in some ways more robust than say the dream-like, trans-dimensional, culturally influenced, conspiratorial phenomena of today. We don't have the cuneiform tablets for the 20th century, we don't have the Nag Hammadi texts or the cultural purity of UFO cave and alien paintings where the pseudo cynic can't point to the influence of popular-culture media influence or the constantly twitter trending  psychological-hash-tag-theory-of-the-moment.

I find these audio interviews essential value for piecing together the mystery which spreads into every single thread of inquiry presented by the ubiquitous alien and UFO theme. It it a new archetype that is larger than the Trickster? Maybe it's a composite. A 21st century recombinant-culture archetype mashup working it's way through and threading together every culture and every facet of every culture, from the mass media of the military industrial govcorp complex to the oral tradition of the Dogon tribe of Africa or the Australian Aboriginals.

Fascinating & Infuriating. I am however most comfortable with alien abduction information. I find time and again that the tone of voice and extensive description of the enigma most real through this lens and so paradoxically I need the least evidence to convince myself. Tone of voice and conviction over time is where I find intuition more concrete than the flakes of empirical evidence we have.

Chris Knowles & Erik Davis On The Mystery Schools, Dionysus, Ecstatic Experience & Henotheism

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Erik Davies interviews Christopher Knowles in a splendid game of cerebral tag on ecstatic transformation in popular culture, mystery cults, Oracles, the dangers of Dionysus, entheogens, Apollo, Serapis, Mithra and tracking the holistic mind online.

Well that and more but you get the picture (Henotheism is the pick 'n mix of ancient Greek deity worship, much more sensible than all that Zadokite bollocks if you must have a God).

The Trickster Archetype (Wave Particle Super Woo Duality)

One of the challenges about the poorly named UFO phenomena is how quickly and extensively it spreads into every area of super woo phenomena. I got into it by targeting quantum mechanics and mysticism for personal study at the beginning of the year and every trail led to UFOs or aliens at some point . As I was studying mysticism, hermeticism and gnosticism I thought it couldn't be that much of a side path to take a fun stroll down.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

And so it's important to say that I don't really find UFO's all that interesting. I find the possible occupants of these craft interesting and that interest doubled as I learned from the likes of Dr. Karla Turner and Niara Isley that the military has a close working relationship with, and is often performing the abductions to conduct experiments on people that are all about  the genetics, the genetics, the genetics.

So it's easy to be misrepresented as to what I'm interested in but the reality is I'm the last to have cause to complain because I've been deceiving myself. All along I've drawn the line at Cryptozoology because it's one thing to be exploring popular culture mysteries that have a military industrial complex trail of evidence, but did I really want to be investing time in Bigfoot and The Mothman prophecies? They just seemed so lo-tech to me and it is this that unveils my cultural bias.

Well, it took a British Midlander's point of view to hold up a mirror to myself because even though I don't wish to pursue CZoology (look I can barely bring myself to spell it out) as a subject I now accept that it's all one big overlapping Venn diagram clusterfuck overlap of super woo Rorschach testing and exploring of the self. Synchromysticism cranks up around UFOs, and UFO's crank up around Cryptozoology sightings and so on and so forth. You get the picture.

Listening to Nick Redfern and the likes of Christopher Knowles and Mike Clelland of late I've  had to accept that as much as I'd like to have nice neat lines of confusion the reality is I haven't got a clue what is going on with the multi dimensional and multiple tiered nuanced and highly contextual subject.

I guess I should have followed my own advice from the way back machine. Everything is contextual. The Trickster is at at play as author Christopher O'Brien explains to a witless interviewer in this interview and as Nick carefully relates below where he says 'it's not that it's just weird, it's too weird'. I didn't want to be here but here I am anyway so I might as well just accept it. It's not cut and dried. Nothing ever is.

Update: Below Nick Redfern I've posted a two part Christopher O'Brien podcast interview on a similar subject though there's some interesting 2012 perspectives in there too and below that (hopefully) is Mike Clelland interviewing Christopher O'Brien on stalking the trickster.

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John Lash - Mystery Religions, Gnosticism & The Antichrist

John Lash is interviewed here by Red Ice Radio and takes us through the real meaning of the destruction of the mystery schools around the middle of the first millennium.  He tackles the belief system of the Christians that he describes as psychotic salvationism,  victim/perpetrator meme-pushers and pernicious redeemer-class peddlers. 


I agree with that.

The mysteries were open to all people of every class from slaves to emperors. They were egalitarian and not even remotely connected to contemporary associations of illuminati manipulations. John elaborates at length how the mysteries are part of the solution for very contemporary problems when looked at as ancient ways to solve our challenges.

He also reminds us that Emperor Constantine was the most threadbare of Christians obliged to portray himself as one (much like George Bush) to codify the religion in order that the Roman military empire could subsume it. Christianity then ripped off the existing pagan ceremonies and symbols so that the people would react favourably. He talks about the emergence of Christianity originally from the Zadokite (or Zealots) cult (inspired by the shadowy figure of Melchizedek) and how the redemptive obsession of Christianity was totally antithetical to the sentiments of the day. Here he elaborates on how the messiah complex was a new and mind-like virus introduction to daily life. 


Later John questions that if Christianity really espoused love of all men it would have been able to peacefully coexist with the existing Pagan and Mystery Schools. He describes the early Christian monks as storm troopers so fanatical they raged through the temples of Luxor and Memphis in Egypt to fanatically destroy the books and engage in cultural genocide. He posits that the reason we have lost our way in the world is because we have lost our vision and our purpose.

Men In Black

I had no idea I knew so little about the subject of Men In Black. I saw the movie a few years back and yet was still unaware it is a well documented phenomenon. This interview of Nick Redfern by George Noory of Coast To Coast AM is another great example of listening to one of the most polished professionals on radio. 

I don't agree with everything George does like the quip about waterboarding in this interview which seems to diminish the immorality. I also feel uncomfortable with endless Memorial Day cliches about support our troops when so little media support for peace and keeping the troops out of death, dismemberment and slaughter exists.

Media refuse to make that kind of statement when the call for war hits up a drum beat. Instead like Pentagon fevered automatons, everyone clasps a hand over their heart in preparation for mourning dead soldiers as if never making the connection. 


Nevertheless George is one of the most knowledgeable interviewers on the planet and brilliant at playing slightly naive for great answers from subjects that he often knows in any case. He's a complete professional in the humane and interesting sense of the word professional, and he seems to drop hints when interviewing subjects that appear to have been foisted on the station. Like that last Andrew Bassagio for example.

Men In Black is a fascinating subject and one of the few that for me, really is a inexplicably spooky given the authentic testimony of the people who have had a tap on the door or a menacing smile from a parked car by a man, or men in black. It's well worth listening to, and if I get my memory back I'll point towards another interview that highlights the medieval presence of these mysterious characters during the bubonic plague and who were seen spraying 'mists' just before the latest village, town and city outbreaks. A little like our SARS and Avian Flu stories maybe?

Quantum Entanglement

Quantum entanglement gets a whole lot more intellectually concrete under these circumstances. It only takes 15 minutes or so of time and left me shaking my head for a few days but it is as it is, in so far as it's impossible to ignore. Unless one is materially  distracted.

The Rapture

I was having a chat on Sunday with AJay in New Delhi. Well he thinks five hours is more than a chat but later on I had yet another lovely time for a couple of hours with a good friend in Baghdad.

They were both forced to listen to my "three options for the species thinking" but only because it sounds so preposterous that I wanted some feedback, and good feedback it was. I'll be posting my "brave new capitalism post on that topic as soon as the time strikes right - I never know when that will be in advance. 

I know, I know. 

You can't wait can you? 

If it helps alleviate the anticipation then you might enjoy knowing that the meat of the idea was so disconcerting that Rob Campbell didn't want to read it when the inspiration struck and I emailed him. On reflection though, that was good of him to ignore me  because a) It would have scared him off b) It looks very bonkers as a raw idea and c) it's still just plain scary now I've applied some sandpaper to it. *winks at Rob*

OK, moving on because I know time is limited, I wanted to pick up that I was sharing some thoughts on eschatology (end of the world) language when I stumbled as I couldn't remember the exact word. 


I'd been explaining an article I read in terms of the self fulfilling biblical nature of Israeli archaeologists tunnelling away under Jerusalem's Old City Wall in close proximity to the third holiest mosque of Islam, the Al Aqsa mosque and of course the Temple Mount too which is considered the third holiest site in Judaism. If it weren't for the hostility between the faiths this is a subject I'd feel happy to study till the end of my days but it's just a bit too raw to be useful in this day and age.


It struck me that there's no better way of fulfilling prophecy than to either pick or respond to a fight over who owns what, at what time, and where or when, it's been articulated in scriptures. What makes that whole outcome really weird is that nobody knows if the future has been predicted or whether we are writing the future; to use Nike vernacular.

The word finally came to me. The Rapture. It's one of those provocative words because if we look at the nutty Christian fundamentalists in the US. Well they would LOVE shit to go down in Jerusalem because that fulfils their biblical end of the argument and to this end are quite happy to fight tooth and nail for the Israelis on any issue, at any time and at any cost. Which kind of leaves the door open for American backed hostility towards Muslims in the Holy Land and beyond.

I've added the Jungian art above because it fits nicely with my Baghdad learnings on evolutionary psychology, plus it looks kind of Holy Landy like, it is red (and thus progressive) and squeezes neatly into the end part of this post, where I thought if I waffle on enough at the beginning, the nutters will get bored and leave without misunderstanding my words about a Jungian analysis of UFO's. 

Basically I caught this rather interesting Youtube clip shortly after reading the Temple Mount piece and though 'that's kind of interesting' and 'somewhat coincidental'. I still have barely any idea what the video shows but if I use the Jungian approach then I ask myself, not 'what is it?' but instead the much more useful question 'what is its effect?'. 


Take a look for yourself what was filmed. Sure its a ball of light. But its behaviour is loaded with context.

And so I leave you with the final reason for posting this nonsense which is that I came across a second video of the same event just now, and while it doesn't capture the vertical action above, it is close enough for me to say finally and definitively. I DON"T KNOW.

Thank You.

Dark Matter

Quantum Science & Aristotelian Logic

It was Andrew who pointed out recently that I have a flair for pointing out the intellectual brilliance of someone and thus immodestly declaring my own brilliance. It's a fair (and funny criticism) because one of the things about branching out into evolutionary biology and quantum physics this year (along with Gnosticism and Hermeticism et al) is that the more I learn the more I realised how diminished is the full extent of my knowledge. 


And I haven't even mentioned my capacity for plain mistake making and errors that like to go large with me.

One of the benefits of trying to be as intellectually diverse as I can handle without lurking to long on the Alien Abduction scene (very interesting from a Jungian Analysis perspective) is how gorgeous and deeply orcestral is the range and tightly interlocking depth of Universal symmetry. 

Its Oneness if you will. 

I don't mind science as an approach, though the gadget-fetishists appear in my eyes to be ethically stunted. In my estimation we're measurably into morally diminishing returns when it comes to the latest technology, though it's clear they work extraordinarily well from the perspective of distraction. 

Sorry did you say something?

I find science fundamentalism ball-achingly lacking in imagination. This is why I think the mysteries of quantum physics point the way towards the limits of repeatable experiments and are thus a robust case for a cosmic deity as supra-scientist.

One of the most disappointing observations from watching the theists and atheists slug it out is the crudely empirical nature in how they both forward their arguments. This morning I came across somebody who frames these questions and thoughts in ways that are much closer to me than say Hitchens' and Blair's recent pedestrian effort.

OK, OK, so it was Einstein, but please read it if you get a chance.

A period of silence on my part would be most appreciated right? 

Well..... Robert Anton Wilson in the background?

Who is Kate Walton?

Over at Life in the middle the pressing question of the day is "Who is Kate Walton"? This sort of paralyzing Saturday afternoon existential angst is deeply troubling for us at Punk Planning, and has been known to take the edge off our evening Angel Delight and Rice Pudding. If you know of Kate Walton and why her name is on a five pound note please get in touch as soon as possible so that Paul can get on with the weekend and feel in good shape for some more rough and tumble man hugging tomorrow. Who are you Kate Walton and why is your name on that fiver? The public has a right to know.