THE
THE
EXCOMMUNICATION OF
Copyright © 1973 by The Neo-American Church
Divine Toad Sweat
His Highness,
In a famous sub-title called
"The Decay of Taste" in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
"They
held in their lifeless hands the riches of their fathers, without inheriting
the spirit which had created and improved that sacred patrimony: they read,
they praised, they compiled, but their languid souls seemed alike incapable of
thought and action ... In every page, our taste and reason are wounded by the
choice of gigantic and obsolete words, a stiff and intricate phraseology, the
discord of images, the childish play of false or unseasonable ornament, and the
painful attempt to involve a trivial meaning in the smoke of obscurity and
exaggeration. The minds of the Greeks were bound in the fetters of a base and
imperious superstition, which extender her domain round the circle of profane
science. Their understandings were bewildered in metaphysical controversy, in
the belief of visions and miracles they had lost all principles of moral
evidence, and their taste was vitiated by the homilies of the monks, an absurd
medly of declamation and Scripture ..."
To see how far we have advanced
from this, let us examine a few samples of popular thought, which, in the mass
media at least, is taken to represent the very -vanguard of
"expanded" consciousness in our era:
"What one believes to be
true, either is true or becomes true in one s mind, within limits to be
determined experimentally or experientially. These limits are beliefs to be
transcended. This is the situation when one has been freed up from one's
environment, from one's surrounding reality, and all of the usual forms and
patterns of stimulation are attenuated to the minimum possible level."
I think this rare example of
Blobovinoid philosophy is worthy of careful attention, for, although it makes
no sense at all, it is a rare example of the mental Jello which Giant Brainers
produce when they attempt to define their terms.
The famous
"...
and understand now we can
and must materialize the Group Spirit, endowing that entity with a sufficiently
material being that it can appear to all of us ... and there is also believed
to be a very great mystery surrounding the Egyptian pyramids ... The mind games
are a means of advancing towards what must be the main goal of every person in
our time - putting the first man on earth. In the near future such mind games
will be routine in education at all levels."
Let us pass on to the case at hand
-
"
The above samples of smog are part
of a miasma which, since the beginning, has threatened to envelop and
obliterate the revolution which psychedelic drugs must cause in philosophy and
religion. The descent from the original teachings of
Let's leave aside the possibility
that all of this is an outright fraud, which would involve the invention of
impressions and misrepresentation of experience. I will grant that Dr. Leary
may have heard voice telling him what he says it told him, and this voice may
have been accompanied by images of great clarity, brilliance, detail and depth
showing what might be called a comet streaking through the void, dancing double
helixes, saints attending graduate school and what not. Maybe a variety of
incidents in his everyday life have shown a synchronistic tendency to
illustrate and elaborate the same images present in the vision and the ideas he
had about them.
Since I grant all of this, most
Blobovians will be perplexed, or think that I have some conflicting
cosmological fantasy to offer. Why am I so intolerant? One man's word is as
good as another's, right? What's the fuss? You push your visions and
I'll push mine and may the better confidence man win.
I keep telling these characters
that it isn't their impressions I object to, (although I reserve the right to
discriminate among visions in terms. of beauty, utility, sex appeal or whatever
other standard I care to apply whenever I feel like it) but their ideas. This
distinction falls on deaf ears. Occultists, by and large, are not just poor
philosophers, or dishonest philosophers (if there is any difference) but rather
people who have no philosophy at all, other than whatever mixture of naive
realism and supernaturalism they acquired in childhood by contagion. The
paragraph I quoted from Lilly is a
Prior to the discovery of the
powerful psychedelics, the brilliant and awesome visions anyone can now produce
by taking a little LSD and retiring to a darkened room were in short supply and
one might have maintained, with a superficial plausibility, that rarity and
artistic quality were sufficient reasons to take them as superior guides to
correct generalizations about the nature and function of the external world -
assuming that there is an external world, and assuming some kind of agency
which confers upon rare and beautiful things a special immunity from error -
two assumptions I see no reason to make. But what is so special about such
visionary experiences now? As collectors, although not as reporters, half the
high school kids in the country are the equal or the superior to such as
Why is the comet vision of
Not in any way at all. Grandiose
notions such as these have been around for a long time, and are have crippled
human thought since the beginning of recorded history.
Dr. Leary now calls himself a
"philosopher," but to discover what philosophy he actually
represents, we are obliged to find out what is implied rather than to respond
to what is stated, exactly as one must do with Joe Blow, but not with Aristotle.
We see at once that his "cosmological" speculations, which he
incorrectly calls "ontology", are undemonstrable fancies which he
does not bother to support with any form of reasoning. If he did, it would be
revealed that he hasn't changed a bit since he was the star student in
"It is clear to us,"
By stretching things a lot, we
might say that some kind of container/contained distinction is being asserted
here. That might be legitimate '1metaphysics" and so are
similar assertions that one thing or class of things is in the service of, or
an aspect of, another thing or class of things. A very conventional supernaturalist
thesis is being asserted: a super-human entity (or entities) exists which
manipulates human lives to achieve an intended result. Human suffering, such as
imprisonment, may be explained this way, as a necessary condition of such an
operation, which, at the time, is not understood by the robot or dancing
marionette at the end of the strings. Doesn't this sound familiar? It is also
implied that the comet is not in Leary's mind but that Leary is in the comet's
mind, or, if that would represent a pseudo-Catholic, neo-Gnostic heresy, as I
imagine it probably would, the alternative would be that Leary occupies part of
this mundane sphere, but that the whole works is ruled by the comet or comets,
which (who?) are either superior to or the authors of the laws of physical
causation and randomness which ordinarily apply to those who, because of their
lack of cryptographic skills, have not been extended a special dispensation.
Living in fear of a world of indifferent matter, in which one's body is but
another thing or mechanism (at best, a "nervous system"), one is
offered "hope" in the form of "immortality" if one follows
"instructions" and "contacts" those ethereal Beings before
whose "higher intelligence" one is but an "embryo."
As
There is a peculiar isolation to
all these systems. They don't mesh, although their author's often scratch each
others backs. The Comet Being sees fit to communicate with
The understanding which the peak
psychedelic experience brings is always the same: Life is (is in the nature of)
a dream, and the externality of relations is an illusion.
This is "Zen" or
"madhyamika" Buddhism.
Everything else is repression.
"Attaining immortality"
is a supernaturalist, dualist concept. It assumes that one's life is a
particular item in a space-time continuum, along with other lives. It looks
that way in a dream and it looks that way "here" but it isn't so in a
dream and it isn't so "here."
Genuine Enlightenment involves the
realization that the distinction between "life" and "death"
isn't much. Since "life" is illusory, so is "death." Both
are fake dramas to maintain the illusion of externality, multiplicity, and
space-time. One's mind does not exist in the world, the world exists in one's
mind. What is the nature of that mind? That is the question.
This is the tradition of the
What about the comet? Kohoutek
"is" I'm sure, a "dirty snowball", a collection of atoms, a
collection of abstractions, just like everything else in the scientist's world.
But since we say that that is a dream, we are in no way restricted by the
"laws" of randomness or of physical causality when we ask what the
comet means. In a dream, as we know, everything has meaning, it's all meaning,
the randomness one might experience as a loss of cash in a dream Las Vegas, is
merely an illusion, and so is "the force of gravity" or the
"force" or "power" (words occultists love) of anything
else. If a brick falls on your lover's head in a dream, was it "the force
of gravity" that brought about the concussion?
If the comet is seen as dream
content, it's meaning will be found through the analysis of those relations in
myth, poetry, history and so forth to have a universal application and through
the analysis of the individual drama of the dreamer.
Puns. A comet, a comment, a comma,
and an exclamation point-joining name and appearance. In other words, something
important is happening so pay attention: Revolution. Invasion. The appearance
and disappearance of genius. The games you are playing at the time you see the
thing, the things you are trying to repress, your wishes and fears. Free
associate.
But what if Leary's fantasy turns
out to be correct, as some visions do. A comet in the White House? An asteroid
in city hall? What then, Forsooth? That would mean you are wrong, right?
No. What of it? That would be
"impressive," but what of it? What is the comet's philosophy? The
location and actions of a comet do not answer any philosophic questions. Leary,
like all supernaturalists, does not have any answers. He isn't the philosopher
- the comet is the philosopher. Leary doesn't provide anything but
displacement. He puts you on hold. The comet will be with you in few eons.
The naive "realist", in
his dream, is reminded by the comet of his insignificance before the mighty
works of nature, and congratulates himself on the stoical courage which allows
him to continue functioning under these circumstances without self deception.
As far as this writer is
concerned, the comet provides me with a good reason to excommunicate
It's a blow which I'm sure
V/H A
Note of
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