Stanislav Grof on Spiritual Emergency

DR: In some cultures, what you are calling a “spiritual emergency” is a recognized part of growth and individuation. In our culture, at least its symptoms are frequently considered pathological. How does our culture move in a more inclusive direction?

The basic idea is that there exist spontaneous non-ordinary states that would in the west be seen and treated as psychosis, treated mostly by suppressive medication. But if we use the observations from the study of non-ordinary states, and also from other spiritual traditions, they should really be treated as crises of transformation, or crises of spiritual opening. Something that should really be supported rather than suppressed. If properly understood and properly supported, they are actually conducive to healing and transformation.

From spiritualcompetency.com:

Pranic movements or kriyas
Prana is the Hindu word for vital energy. As intense energy moves through the body and clears out physiological blocks, some people experience intense involuntary, jerking movements of the body, including shaking, vibrations, spasm and contraction.

Yogic Phenomena
Some people find themselves performing yogic postures or hand mudra gestures which they have never learned or could not do in a normal state of consciousness. Unusual breathing patterns may appear with either very rapid or slow, shallow breathing.

Physiological Symptoms
Kundalini awakening often generates unusual physiological activity which can present as heart, spinal, gastrointestinal, or neurological problems. Internal sensations of burning, hypersensitivity to sensory input, hyperactivity or lethargy, great variations in sexual desire, and even spontaneous orgasm have been reported.

Psychological Upheaval
Emotions can swing from feelings of anxiety, guilt, and depression (with bouts of uncontrollable weeping) to compassion, love, and joy.

Extrasensory Experiences
Some people experience visions of lights, symbols, spiritual entities. Auditory sensations may include hearing voices, music, inner sounds or mantras. There may also be disruption of the proprioceptive system, with loss of a sense of self as a body, or an out of the body experience.

Psychic Phenomena
A person may experience precognition, telepathy, psychokinesis, awareness of auras and healing abilities.

Mystical States of Consciousness
A person may shift into altered states of consciousness where they directly perceive the unity underlying the world of separation and experience a deep peace and serenity. (see Karin Hannigan, PhD for additional description)

The sudden onset of these experiences led many in Greenwell’s study to become confused and disoriented. Kundalini awakening is probably the most common type of spiritual emergency. The Spiritual Emergence Network Newsletter reported that 24% of their hotline calls concerned kundalini awakening experiences.
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Some practitioners, such as John Perry, MD, have argued that medication only inhibits a person’s ability to concentrate on the inner work and it mutes the psychic energy needed to sustain the effort to move the process forward. When medication is used to simply repress the inner process, it becomes frozen in an unfinished state. Suppression can impede the potential for a complete working through to a point of resolution.

Grof believes using psychiatric medication in Kundalini Awakenings can result in death for the now pathologized person. Some people recommend it. Either way informed consent is necessary in the treatment of anyone.

For more information on spiritual awakenings see the Spiritual Emergence Network.

1997 – 2007 The Art Practice of Thirza Cuthand

2007 marks the end of a ten year span of Thirza Cuthand’s practice using confessional interventions, both public and anonymous, to reflect the psyche of the world. In 1997 during her first year at Emily Carr she created a site specific installation in downtown Vancouver to address the general tone of isolation, fear, and loss of hope. Using selections from diaries she has written since 1984, she wrote parts onto tags which were glue gunned onto eggs she had cracked, cleaned, dried, and glued back together. These eggs and their accompanying diary selection were placed within the downtown core. Within 24 hours every egg had departed without a trace.

Her confessional practice continued after her positive disintegration moved into a kundalini awakening in 1998. During that time she continued using personal stories in her video practice, which garnered her international attention. Her short video works have screened in festivals across North America, Asia, Europe, South America, and Australia. She has attended the prestigious Oberhausen International Short Film Festival twice and won an honourable mention for “Helpless Maiden Makes an ‘I’ Statement.” She has also screened work at Mix Brasil in Sao Paolo, Transmediale in Berlin, Bienniale de Image et Mouvement in Geneva, Frameline in San Francisco, and various other festivals world wide. Due to government restrictions on travel grants she was often unable to attend her international screenings.

She also began to post anonymously on various diary sites such as Open Diary, Bloop Diary, and Livejournal since 1998 when she finally got internet access. These anonymous confessions briefly stopped in 2002, when she returned to Saskatchewan and began following Riel’s journey to Montreal. She lost contact with the online community until 2003, after she had endured extreme abuse in the hands of the Quebec psychiatric care system. She began writing publically under her own name in her confessional, personal, and ultimately political blog Fit of Pique. Between 2003 and 2007 she went from a psychiatric consumer to a psychiatric survivor and ultimately achieved Secondary Integration after withdrawing from her medication.

During her journey she reclaimed her identity as a Gifted woman, and spoke openly of Positive Disintegration, spiritual searches, abuse, colonization, and the experience of growing up with multiple, sometimes contradictory identities.

The last short film of her very public Positive Disintegration process takes on fascism in contemporary psychiatric care. “Madness In Four Actions” marks a departure from her earlier work. She used collage to tell a story no one would listen to in her own voice. It debuted at the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon in the middle of January 2007.

Now 29 years old, Thirza is outlining plans for a Gnostic Soteria house in Saskatchewan for future Louis Riel’s. She is also continuing to write feature screenplays and hopes to some day get funding for her 35mm projects. She is also learning her Cree language and plans to take guitar lessons. She considers herself a modern poet and is a 5th generation survivor of the Northwest Rebellion. Her mother, Ruth Cuthand, is descended from the Cree uprising. Her father, Edward Poitras, is a descendent of the Red River Metis. Both have made enormous contributions not just to the Aboriginal art world but also to the international art world in general. She hopes her work has served in some ways to heal both families. She was raised within the Aboriginal art community and has acquired the affectionate appellation of Art Brat. In 2005 she went back and completed her BFA in Film and Video at Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver BC. She does not claim copyright over the egg intervention and encourage’s it’s use in areas of the world where suffering occurs.

Her next project is a feature documentary charting her bloodlines through DNA, oral storytelling, historical research, and travel to various parts of the world where her ancestors can be found, including Ireland, Scotland, France, Blackfoot territory, Cree territory, Saulteaux territory, and the migration route which led us here.

She believes the military maneuvers of colonialist enterprise have changed little over the millenia, and can now be seen in the current Iraq conflict.

Mary

This is Tori Amos’ video for Mary, a song of her 1992 debut album Little Earthquakes. Which was one of those albums I listened to all the time.

Eggshell Thoughts

I feel like I just unblocked something significant. I don’t know what to do about it now, because it makes four years of my life a totally different me. I know right about now I’d be getting scared someone will involuntarily commit me again just because they don’t know or don’t remember how I really am. I mean, I’ve been voluminously blogging for a decade really, but it was mostly anonymous, so most people in my life never knew how much I blogged. I remember how it started too, because it had a purpose in the beginning that I forgot.

In first year at Emily Carr we had to do a site specific installation as part of our creative process class. We were randomly assigned neighborhoods and I got Downtown – Granville. I noticed it had so many fascinating little places and yet the people walked around in kind of a daze, like they had amnesia. And it felt like a really cold environment, people didn’t know how to connect to each other. They didn’t trust each other.

So I wrote out parts of my diaries onto tags, and I spent an afternoon breaking, washing, drying, and regluing eggs together. I took all my broken eggs that were hot glued back together attached to some of my most intense thoughts from my young life. And I just left them various places around Granville. It was kind of an experiment, I wanted to reflect how people felt so alone, with a little anonymous thought that also felt alone. And I noticed within hours people had taken every egg out of that place, because you couldn’t leave an object like that on the streets.

So I was really interested in this idea of public diaries. And I mean diaries, like personal thoughts. In third year of my film program I made a devastating 16mm film of collections of writings from my time in an abusive relationship, and I was shocked at how well it worked. Every time I played it people spent four minutes crying their eyes out, and that kind of terrified me. I still have this film incidentally, I never got finishing money for it and I kind of didn’t want to, because I felt guilty for making people cry so hard. But I’m thinking maybe I should release it.

At the time I was making the film I also started writing in various anonymous diary websites. It was funny because people were really instant in how they responded. And it made me feel better too because I realized all kinds of people were having eggshell thoughts. And people did argue a lot, because people do that, but there were also these beautiful transcendent moments when some particularly poignant voice spoke out about their lives in the most honest way. And I think it started sparking empathy in people, even though they squabbled a lot and tattled on various web masters and so on.

I don’t quite know why I decided to do a public blog, except that the war was starting and I thought it was time to stand proudly next to my little eggshell thoughts. So I did, and it was scary at first, and then just whatever because no one seemed to visit anyway, but I hoped that once in a while someone else with a little eggshell thought would hang around.

And they have, and I’ve met them in various ways, even if it’s just knowing someone in Prince Albert likes to visit. And I think my eggshell thoughts don’t need to be glued together anymore, I think they’re finally whole.

So yeah, that’s the end of ten years of my career, and I still have more of my career left. I’m 29 in a month. I’m not sure what I’ll do now, except that I was hoping someone would give me money to make a feature. But I’m not quite ready yet, I have some rewriting to do.

Eggshell Project, Vancouver BC, 1997, Granville St by Capitol Theatre

“God. This pain just intensifies. I don’t know where it ends and I begin anymore. Maybe I am just pain now. Maybe there’s no human left, only wounded animal, a wail, a sliver of bone and burnt flesh.”

Biological Healing

I briefly toyed with the idea of suing the Quebec Government for mind control in the psych system, but then I checked out their health laws and found out they wrote a new one since my hospitalization where if they get sued or taken to court they can open up someone’s ENTIRE medical record to public scrutiny, and give someone’s medical record to employers, and give it to people in the event of the patient becoming incapacitated mentally, it’s really creepy and it got written in under a more neutral case. And I know weird shit is written in mine, so I’m not terribly interested in giving them that power. On the other hand, I’m perfectly happy to continue describing my experience in the Montreal psych ward through this blog.

One thing which does kind of bum me out is that sometimes I worry no one has been paying any attention to this blog, but I think that’s just some weird program I have. I tried to get as many people to pay attention to me when I was disintegrating because I knew I needed people to carefully watch what happened to me. But sometimes I’m worried people just kind of wandered off in disgust along the way, and a lot of people did. I remember afterwards my dad was just like “Thirza! You have to pick your friends better!” And it was so cute because it was like the understatement of the year. At this point I’m pretty cognizant of people who might try to influence me back towards that kind of programming, but I think I’m starting to regain mastery over myself. I don’t want to state that completely though, because I don’t know if I’ll have flashbacks from heavy neuroleptics.

I’m healing my brain as well as I can though. I’m taking Natrum Sulphuricum for head injury as prescribed by my homeopath, along with 3 capsules of Omega 3 6 9, iron, vitamins, and kelp just because it’s recommended for people in awakenings. And some other stuff, but those are the ones directly related to my brain. In fact, the entire depression thing could be explained just by my low iron levels, because my iron was REALLY low. And my Gramma had to take iron pills her whole life too. I’m interested in this idea of biomagnetism, because the theory is that you can replace damaged brain tissue with magnetite crystals. And that’s not doing creepy brain surgery, it’s just figuring out a way to consciously spark the natural formation of those crystals, how that’s done I’m not sure. But it does make Buddha’s Diamond Mind thing sound like he was talking about more than a metaphor. So for now I’m looking at Buddha again and his concept of cultivating a diamond mind. Magnetite has some funny characteristics in crystal work, but I’m not really doing it to get that, just to repair what’s been taken. But I’m aware it might have other implications.

I am going to keep making movies though, and I think I’m more interested in doing “fictional” work to talk about history and issues. The funny thing is the entire time I was in the hospital I kept telling them “I’m making a movie” and what I meant is that I was observing so that I could write a screenplay about it later. I think it just seemed like a bizarre rambling though, which is good. I mean, they genuinely thought that me being a filmmaker was a delusion, until my friends said it was true. And the first psychiatrist was convinced I spoke French, for who knows what reason. I didn’t. And there are various mistakes altogether, including the fact that Montreal psych ward survivors recognize each other and talk about it because it is so overt.

But fucking hell, it’s been so frustrating trying to tell people around me that I was ritually abused in the psych ward, because of programming. I don’t know what would happen to me if I hadn’t studied mind control long before I ended up there. And when I say I studied mind control, fuck, I spent two years off and on reading all about it. I’m trying to figure out how to intelligently disarm the programming in the people around me who keep trying to keep me involved with psychiatry. Telling my mom about the hate-your-mother programming changed something in her, but I don’t know if she knows about how the other programs work. I can’t really tell people “Hey! Pay attention to this!” because then it looks like I’m “manic.” So I’m just hoping people eventually start listening to me, but it’s going to take a while. I only did my healing turn around this weekend. And I know people might try to intimidate me through the threat of psychiatric force again, so that will be interesting. But I do have reams of evidence to confront them with, or the appropriate questions to get them to reveal their thinking around it, which is probably the better tactic.

It frustrates me though that I bothered to spend time around R.A. survivors, because they did put their shit on me and that sucks. I think I’m developing boundaries though, especially since every time I make friends with an R.A. survivor I set them off at some point and I know it. I don’t want to hurt them, but clearly there is something about me that hurts them, and I don’t want to change myself just so they feel at ease. It’s time to let some of those people go. And I have, the seriously programmed people are for the most part out of my life. And it’s getting easier, to trust that even though R.A. survivors seem to be everywhere, there are people who never went through it. I think sometimes if you attract that kind of energy, it seems like EVERYONE is an R.A. survivor, it just blocks out reality through a generalized feeling. Mostly though, if someone starts putting their issues on me I’m not going to take it on anymore, it confuses me.

I also wonder, why is it so many people don’t remember stuff they say? I have this bizarrely good memory (when not drugged) and I can somehow quote people verbatim once in a while. But even if someone says something really mean, they don’t remember it. I guess it’s selective memory. But it used to fuck me over all the time.

Anyway, even if the drugs did make me feel better (which they didn’t) I was going to die from them one way or another. I just couldn’t handle those neurotoxins in my system anymore.

New Tactic

Based on what I know, I predict that Bush will be deposed this year. BUT, I know how they’re going to do it, because they’re so damned predictable. He’ll be diagnosed with a heavy duty mental illness, and the agenda of fascist psychiatry (a distinct sect of psychiatry) will be advanced on peoples world wide. Don’t be like Bush, he was mentally ill, take this pill and you won’t have to worry about turning into a war lord. It will be a type of health act, working under the guise of keeping people from becoming evil, but because of the nature of the pills it will really eliminate high cognitivity.

Bush is not normal, but I think his brand of weirdness corresponds to psychopathy more than things like “schizophrenia” or “bipolar disorder.” And realistically there is no known therapy for psychopaths, drugs or otherwise. They just fit in really well on level one societies (according to Dabrowski’s Positive Disintegration model).

On the other hand, if a society was willing to go to a higher level, then psychopaths wouldn’t fit in anymore. They would be exposed because they wouldn’t really know how to work on say, a Level five society. Lacking empathy, they would become really obvious. And from the case studies of psychopaths, empathy is competely out of reach for unknown reasons. I think we have to distinguish between R.A. survivors and psychopaths, because an R.A. survivor had their empathy used against them, and that is very different than having no empathy whatsoever. One can heal and the other can’t.

But it’s not up to us to try and hunt down psychopaths, because a lot of people would get hurt since they blend in really well. No, it’s up to us to simply recognize them, which takes a while to learn. And after recognizing them, you can just know who not to follow anymore. It’s very non-violent, and simple. But again, there are a lot of pitfalls because like I said, they do fit in with a primary integrated society really well, and also psychosis/spiritual emergence/positive disintegration/kundalini awakening, which can be positive developmental features, gets mistaken for psychopathy. It’s a tricky route, but not entirely impossible.

My Riel Theory

I have a theory, which is only a theory and yet I kind of like it because as a story it’s fascinating.

A lot has been coming out in the press these days about the Holy Grail being a bloodline of descendents of Jesus. And people get weird about it, and people hope it’s true, and people wonder who those people are and some people say they are it but no one can really be sure. What people have deduced so far is that the chalice is a metaphor for a female, and that makes sense because in european indigenous religions a chalice really does represent the female.

If you were a woman with a seriously heavy duty bloodline to carry on, you would do several things. One is that you would relocate to a land with a matriarchal type of religion. Which if you believe that the bloodline went to France, makes sense, because there was a pagan religion there which honoured women, and men of course. It was safe to be a powerful female dynasty there. But we know that Catholicism took over France, for whatever reasons. So suddenly it’s a patriarchal place again, which means you would run with that matrilineal bloodline to another land without patriarchal rule. You would go to the New World, because the aboriginals were egalitarian. And the reason the bloodline would stay matrilineal is because that’s the most guaranteed way of keeping a bloodline going. Even in geneology research these days people are warned of non-paternal events, which really messes up some people’s identities.

So you’re in the New World and your bloodline mixes with the local Aboriginal bloodline, because that’s how bloodlines work, they find other strong bloodlines. Bloodlines don’t stay pure because then people start looking funny and being stupid, you have to get outside of your bloodline to avoid getting genetically impaired. But this would mean that a church looking for a saviour from a pure bloodline (read: incestuous) would miss out on the person they were looking for.

Louis Riel was a learned man. Something happened which tipped him over the edge into feeling the strain of being a messiah. What was it? My theory is that he discovered he was carrying the bloodline of Jesus. He used the name David in quotations all the time. Was he? I don’t know, it’s a fairy tale still, and so many Red River Metis say that he’s their father that it’s all a bit unsure. But it makes sense why he would trust the church, because he assumed that was a safe place for him since they talked about Jesus all the time. He didn’t realize that the church was fundamentally racist at the time and that the fact that he was a halfbreed automatically made them assume he was a throw away garbage person, because they were looking for a “pure” bloodline.

When he was having his positive disintegration he was thrown into a montreal asylum. Not only that, but to “fix” his messianic delusions he was deprived of information, including spiritual texts he was studying to figure out what to do next. I believe he wanted to be a Gnostic saviour, which means someone who transcends being sacrificed into someone who teaches. He never meant to be a martyr. But his psychiatric treatment in Montreal froze him in one state. He could have used his time to research more things and maybe he would have let go of the title of Messiah and just become the great statesman he was meant to be, and unite English, French, Aboriginal, and Metis Canadians. Because that was his dream really.

But a united Canada was something really unwelcome at the time, for all types of people. And especially forces in Quebec which had already decided to eliminate the indigeous population and form some kind of twisted holy land. I don’t think they cared about his bloodline, because ultimately it didn’t matter, he was a halfbreed. So he was turned into a martyr, because a martyr could advance the cause of a divided Canada much better. And if you want to keep someone from becoming a Gnostic saviour, you limit their access to information, and you isolate them, which were two things the psychiatric care system knew how to do really well.

And maybe he wasn’t from the bloodline, maybe he was just a Gifted halfbreed living in the wrong era. But I kind of like the idea of the church crucifying their saviour again just to make a political point, because that’s the kind of ignorance I want to expose.

And of course we live in a patriarchal society again. So if there is that female driven bloodline, it might have left already for some other place, and various people will claim it just so that it can be obscure again.

Canaries

I think I know why I came back. Apparently I visited my sister when she was born, and I think I must have just been so delighted with her, because I fell in love with her right away. And not romantic love, just love. But I also realized that my mom was going to have to raise her by herself, and that was worrying, because I knew what happened to disabled people, I knew they are practically the canaries of the world. What happens to people with disabilities indicates the health of the society. And I didn’t want my mum to raise a little canary all on her own. So I came back to be with my sister. And in a lot of ways it was to protect her and make sure she ended up with a community of people who totally loved her for who she is. But I think it was also a lot of responsibility for a tiny baby soul, and sometimes it was overwhelming. But it was really worth it, because she was the best spiritual teacher I ever had. And I made mistakes and she made mistakes and mom made mistakes because none of us really knew what we were doing except trying to make sure we all survived life as well as possible.

But what I hadn’t realized is that gifted people are also the canaries of the world. And I don’t think mum realized it either, because I don’t know if Sarain ever let anyone see his particular positive disintegration process. So when I was seven I suddenly hit the beginning of positive disintegration, and it didn’t make any sense to people around me because I got really depressed. But I think part of the depression was just that I was always hearing kids yell words like retard, and I knew that my sister was some kind of supreme spiritual figure, and to hear her diminished by hateful stupid people was really horrid. And then of course my own overexcitabilities just made me pick up on EVERYONE’s weird crappy feelings. So suddenly coming back so I could look out for Sky made my mom’s job twice as hard, because now she had two kids that didn’t fit with the child rearing model at all, and plus she had no idea how to deal with my sensitivities because I would just seem to crumble when something bad happened. I got out of it often though, just by continuing to think about things. But when I crumbled I really crumbled hard.

I knew I was a reincarnation, but I never remembered much of my previous life, only the life before then when I was on the run from the nazis. But I think there was a reason I remembered that life, because I would remember that the first people damaged by the Nazi party would often be the disabled people. And I knew instinctively that the second world war wasn’t really won, it just moved to a different location. And so when the Ashley X thing happened, I thought oh fuck, it’s those damn Nazi’s again. And I’ll bet I could tell you what the politics are of the doctors who sat on the ethics committee for Ashley’s treatment.

Here’s a tidbit which is why I think the Nazi’s actually won the war. Ewan Cameron, the man who pioneered psychic driving in Montreal, sat on the tribunal at Nuremberg. Logically this means the Nazi’s actually tried and convicted themselves, to present some kind of justice. But they saved key figures and moved them around, including Mengele, who went to the Americas. And if you look at the family which sponsored the Nazi party, at least one of them was the Bush dynasty, Prescott Bush, George W. Bush’s grandfather. Families usually learn from the mistakes of their ancestors, but not all families. Prescott Bush made a lot of money from the fascist party, all that jewish gold got transferred around, it was a capitalist venture that ultimately worked. And Hitler was a great fall guy, we all know he was a bad dude but we never really acknowledged that there were people who supported him for a long time. He preyed on German nationalism, and the fact that they had a failed war they wanted to make up for. They used the weaknesses of the people, again, to advance a particular agenda. And they also perfected a type of psychiatric care that has been highly influential in both Canada and the US through experiments on prisoners. And they also puffed up the idea of what spiritual powers they had because they were toying with lower level energies and thought they’d hit the pinnicle of spiritual knowledge.

They have a major fatal flaw though, and all it is is ignorance. They’re not even doing stuff they believe in anymore, they’re following computer programs that were invented ages ago, but their psyches are so flawed that they don’t get it. They have dissociative identity disorder, and the problem with DID is that it works in predictable ways, which is why if you learn how programming works you can anticipate every move they make. Scarier still, if you really understand how programming works you can actually tell someone what happened to them to put in that program, and that freaks people out. And it’s not because you can read minds, it’s just because you know what happens. For instance, if someone tries to tell you who you are, it’s because that’s who they are. If someone accuses you of something, you know that it’s because that is in their past. They might be empathetic, but screen memories block what’s really going on in the world. The fact that the Reagan administration believed in Armaggedon in and of itself is fucked up, because they advanced things to make a metaphor a reality. And it’s a common block in the spiritual growth process, it’s the half way mark that people feel content to stay at because it implies power and wealth.

I don’t think everyone should read about programming though, because it sounds really scary and can bring on trauma in more empathetic individuals. But I do think empathetic people can learn to block other people’s energy, which is something I’m interested in learning now.

Exonerating Tōpīltzin Cē Ācatl Quetzalcōātl

I think Tōpīltzin Cē Ācatl Quetzalcōātl often gets conflated with God, and so I just want to talk about this person in a historical sense, because there really was a historical figure in Mesoamerica.

The character is an androgenous figure, so just for my own sake I’m using the feminine word because based on Gnostic writings I’ve been reading, the female body holds male and female energy really well. Basically it’s a two spirited figure, and so just to honour the female side that was lost in translation I’m going to use female pronouns. Whew, what a disclaimer!

Okay, so this woman was an important leader, she brought peace and a renaissance and diverted certain needs of the psyche of her people into more enlightened and peaceful forms. Then something happened, she was overthrown by a sect which gave her a neurotoxin and then suggested she go find her afterlife because she was going to die soon. Did she die? I assume so. She got on a boat and headed east in a total daze, but aware she would return because she knew how to consciously reincarnate in the same way Buddha’s been reincarnating over and over (and he has been and is on the planet today). But before she left she’d given the people a vision she had of Cortes. She described who he was and probably tried to describe what he would do, but people didn’t know how to pay attention at the time or how to properly interpret a vision. They were really convinced they knew how to govern without her.

The fact was, they soon realized they had no idea of the concept of governance, their community started to fall apart and a peaceful era came to an end.

But her vision isn’t what caused them to welcome Cortes, it was bad leadership that did that.

Montezuma, from what I can gather, was leading a bit of a police state, he didn’t know how to use power properly and it started to show when a series of supernatural events began occuring just before the arrival of Cortes. Historical records state there was a comet in the sky, and they knew it meant something but they didn’t know what. It got worse. A giant stone head started talking all on it’s own and they tried unsucessfully to move it to Teotihuacán to get it away from them. What that head was saying, I’m not sure, but it was probably criticising Montezuma’s leadership capabilities and talking about Cortes. They could hear female spirits screaming in the night about death. Montezuma freaked and required EVERYONE to tell him their dreams and visions, because he didn’t know how to interpret anything. But dreams and visions don’t make sense to the people who don’t have them, so I’m sure he got all kinds of strange imagery from the people’s subconscious that made even less sense than what he was dealing with already. And at this point he wanted Quetzalcoatl to return, because they needed that kind of insight. So Cortes comes along, the one who those people were warned about, but because of various confusions he wasn’t just killed on the spot. Because he could be Quetzalcoatl. He fit the historical description of that person, sort of. He came from the east. All kinds of stuff fit. And I think when Cortes realized that there was that figure they were waiting for, he used it to his advantage.

He was the Anti-Quetzalcoatl, to borrow a biblical idea.

I don’t know that Montezuma really believed it was Quetzalcoatl, but times were really unsure, and in a way I think he just hoped it was true. But obviously Cortes went on a rampage and started hacking off people’s limbs if they didn’t give him enough gold and most pronounced was when he didn’t understand the use of Jadeite. Because Montezuma gave him four jadeite beads, knowing Quetzalcoatl would understand what they were for, and Cortes failed that test completely. I think by then he knew it was too late.

But Cortes was still just a guy who wanted gold, and so he completely missed various things about that culture that were important. They were brown people, so the fact that they had advanced knowledge was overlooked. They were brown people with vast gold reserves, which blinded Cortes to other possibilities. Two bad leaders, really bad leaders, had the misfortune of coming together in history to create the current situation we see in the New World. And basically since then it’s been a constant struggle between a leadership displayed by Cortes and a leadership displayed by Montezuma, both of whom were stupid leaders. And in the end the person who unfortunately takes the blame for it was Quetzalcoatl, because she had a vision no one understood and it was misread as a type of revenge on her people. I don’t think she ever wanted revenge, she just wanted to say “Look out for this guy, because you could be really hurt by him.”

I mean honestly, ignoring a frickin’ stone head telling you that a destructive guy was coming, come on! I don’t see how any of those signs could be misinterpreted, it was all “Look out!” Which makes one wonder if it was guilt driving the people to accept Cortes, they knew they fucked up with Quetzalcoatl before, and they assumed naturally that because they were the kinds of people who wanted revenge, Quetzalcoatl was the same. Which wasn’t true. Likewise I think people mistakenly assume if Jesus returns he’s going to be out for vengence, like some action flick sequel. And I don’t think Jesus would do that, I think he’d just avoid the people who he could recognize from his last life. I think at a certain point enlightened beings have given up on particular souls that seem for some reason to be beyond salvation, and it’s not because they hate those people, it’s because they’re just totally impossible to teach. You can’t expect a professor in a Doctorate program to go teach a kindergarden class, that’s just dummying down it too damn much. I think some teachers figured out how to teach a kindergarden class, but it’s definitely not me! I gave up on the kindergardeners when I was in kindergarden.

Gabbing

Okay, I have to talk about demons just because I know it’s a word being bandied about a lot. And that’s the last ace up the sleeve of corrupt spiritual individuals, a number of them have been passing on “demonic” beings through the ages, but demonic is kind of a harsh word. I think it inspires too much fear. How about we call them lower level spirit forms. I don’t mind talking about this either because I’ve seen them at work and they tend to be really enslaved confused spirits who lack a certain spark.

The thing however is that the knowledge around the particular spirits used by corrupt individuals is that they’re holding limited knowledge, because like anything you come across in the world you have to look at it critically, and it’s the same with encountering spirits. Some spirits are just causing trouble, and some are useful in that they pass on information, and then some were just hanging around a particular site. They’re as diverse as people really. And being on drugs lowers the ability to fight off negative energies, spiritual or otherwise. So that’s why people say you have to be careful with drugs or drinking, because if you do it too much you’ll attract those spirits. And I find that psychiatric medication also lowers spiritual resistance to negativity.

Which you can also call these energies, just balls of negativity that sail around latching onto vulnerable people. I know one house I spent time in recently that had a lot of negative energy was a party house, like an almost all the time party house, and so all kinds of weird stuff walked in. And it’s not necessarily that they’re doing it to freak you out, sometimes it’s just that they were addicted to something when they died and they got confused and kept coming back for it over and over. I know this sounds weird, but it’s true. And then also there is another theory that poltergeist activity is manifested by the people who it surrounds, I don’t know if that’s true, but I have noticed it sometimes follows certain people around.

But yeah, don’t take spiritual advice from an alcoholic ghost. Or a ghost which is just very very bitter about everyone. And I’d stay away from ouija boards too, just because it’s a clumsy and imprecise tool.

I’ve been thinking about this stuff forever by the way, paranormal and spiritual stuff isn’t a new influence in my life. I used to read everything I could get my hands on about ghosts and ask questions about these things when I was a little kid. I am just always one of these people, crazy or not I like gabbing about spirits. It’s the way I have fun.