by Thad McKraken on May 26, 2015
Going full on into a shamanic or Occult practice is beyond weird, because the vast majority of people think you’re completely nuts for gasp, actually paying attention to your inner world (let alone blasting it all over Facebook, friend me). “Do you mean that stuff is real?” they’ll ask. Well, yeah, but ultimately insisting on dividing thoughts and visions into convenient categories of “real” or “not real” is a pretty ridiculous way of conceptualizing consciousness. Aaaand you’ve already lost them. Which is why maybe the best thing you can do as a mystic is point out over and over how utterly batshit and illogical western spiritual thought is in the first place. We should never ever forget that this is the refractive lens through which we view everything having to do with the soul. In a culture that prides itself on a bizarro academic sense of rationality, there is zero rationality in the popular way we view spirituality period. None whatsoever.
So like, even though nothing else in our society works this way, the best way to understand spirituality is by obsessively reading the same book over and over again. But aren’t there like, other books? Well, sure, millions of people have written about various spiritual practices and disciplines throughout history but all that stuff’s just crazy woo woo nonsense. Just keep focusing on that one book. Everything you need to know is in there. Each religion has their own special book and it’s rather sad that I can sum up the underlying philosophies that have come to define their more conservative strains in 2 words: more babies.
I couldn’t make up anything that fucking simplistic and nuts if I tried, but oddly, I did in fact try to abide by the primary dysfunction when I was a kid. I tried all the prescribed Christian rituals to a tee. Never really did much of anything, but when I tripped balls on mushrooms a few years after abandoning the faith, that freaking changed me. Here was a direct conscious interaction with I can best describe as a rapidly-mutating-art-form-hyper-intelligence. Nothing even close to that weird or profound ever happened in church. As a matter of fact, at complete random the other day I found myself contemplating the strange truth that I literally cannot remember a single concept that was imparted on me in any of the sermons I sat through as a kid. This is sort of unreal because I went to church every week for over a decade. I can remember odd tidbits from a ton of my boring college classes, but church? Errr, you got me. So what did they talk about in all those sermons? I haven’t a clue because apparently my brain deemed it not interesting enough to embed into memory. The one thing I do recall is that there was at one point a skit my step sister put on where she mentioned that God wasn’t a fan of pornography. This lead to me trying unsuccessfully to give up watching smut for lent in high school. I think I lasted less than a week.
So when I talk about a vision I had during a solstice themed sex magick ritual in 2010, and how I still contemplate the meaning of this particular vision to this day, most people would just stare at me blankly. What a weird thing to do with your time? Why would you be paying any attention to something that’s “not real”. But the subtext is really: why would you be analyzing a spiritual encounter that didn’t happen 2000 years ago, to someone else? Well firstly, because it was so spontaneous, strange and seemingly beamed in from another source, but also because despite supposedly being crazy, it actually made a ton of sense. If it was crazy I would have been able to dismiss it no problem. The vision went like this (and I wrote about it in my book which you can check out super cheap here): I was at some sort of press conference and coming up to a podium to give a speech as I’m supposedly the ambassador between humans and what people have increasingly come to view as the grey aliens or extraterrestrials. The sightings have continued to spike and the weather is starting to go bananas so finally, after all these years people are ready to listen to a freak like me solely because things have gotten so unpleasantly weird. I nonchalantly walk up to the podium to deliver my channeled communique and this is what I have to say:
“People of earth, legalize psychedelic drugs, NOW! We’re not asking you, we’re telling you! If you don’t, bad shit is going to continue to happen (and with this declaration my field of perception is flooded with a cavalcade of super storms and other various environmental calamities). When it does, you’ll know why this is happening. Legalize psychedelic drugs, NOW!”
Again, a vision with this level of specificity and detail spontaneously uploading itself into your existence isn’t something you forget, but more to the point, what was being communicated is actually quite logical. In reviewing my FB magick journal while compiling my next book I realized that for roughly a 4 month period in 2013 I was being shown how I need to focus my magick on turning the dark overly masculine energy coursing through our culture against itself. Now, I was always contemplating this in a more, we’ve made so much shit with all our conspicuous consumerism that we could live off the spoils of what we’ve created forever and ever if we were at all smart about it sort of sense. But there’s another angle right along the same vein that’s even more compelling. Maybe the tools necessary to spark the spectral fire which will ultimately transform our society are already in place.
Think about it, capitalism is all about competition, which is ultimately what’s wrong with our culture in the first place. Instead of helping one another and working as a team, we’ve divided ourselves into separate squads and are trying to outpace each other to oblivion. This is the daemonic expansionary plot structure we’ve been infected with. More babies. This competitive cult of hyper-materialism pervades pretty much everything we do, but maybe in that there’s a fail safe. Lord, I just bought an iPod and digitized the CD’s I’d been collecting my entire life roughly 8 years ago. Already downloading mp3’s is getting phased out in favor of streaming. The cycles are moving faster and faster and I can barely even wrap my head around it all. Most people wouldn’t use a smart phone from 5 years ago, and yet, our major religions are several thousand years old? Why is this one aspect of our culture not evolving or progressing at all while everything else screams to a frentic fever pitch? Christ, I’ve now started seeing Scientology commercials on cable and really? That’s the best we have in the form of new divergent faiths? How does this make any sense?
Of course it doesn’t at all, because despite all the creepy right wing posturing about the supreme power of the free market, there’s never been anything even close to a free market in regards to spirituality. The ancient and shamanic tradition of neurologically blasting your brain to infinity has been calculatedly taken out of the equation.
We’re so superstitious about this sort of shit we made it freaking illegal. So what would happen if we just all of a sudden tweaked that one little variable? Well, suddenly all these antiquated institutions (who get tax exempt status I might point out) would be forced to compete on a free market level with a superior product. That wouldn’t go so well for them. It’d be like a business 20 years ago taking the staunch position that they weren’t going to use computers and expecting to stay relevant. In the headline I said that capitalism would destroy religion, but transform is probably a more accurate assessment. As mentioned, I tried all the conservative Christian rituals as a teenager and never really got the vibe they did much of anything other than make me feel guilty about my sexuality. What if the pastor up the street was like, come to our psilocybin solstice concert and see if you feel like you make contact with god? Our mushroom Christ thinks recreational sex is awesome and is totally cool with gay people, contraception, and abortion too. Young people are already leaving the church in droves because of their conservative positions on sexuality. If legalized, their failure to update their position on psychedelics would be their fucking death knell. If people were given the Coke/Pepsi challenge between faiths that incorporate shamanic and Occult means of inducing ecstatic spirituality and those that don’t, it’d be either adapt or die. Of course, by the time the more conservative breathren started doing an about face, it’d already be too late. The internal UFO’s have landed.
I’ve got a new book coming out here soon enough about the dialogue I initiated with my “Holy Guardian Angel” by means of calculated ganj-i-tation and hallucinogen ritual. In it, I do fun things like redefine the ancient concepts of angelick and deamonic per channeled internal intel and quite demonstrably predict my own future on a pre-cognitive level repeatedly. It really is something and in putting it all together even I was like, wow, this is so far out of left field at this point in human history it’s sort of unbelievable. As established, what’s really unreal however is how we act as if the “more babies” crowd somehow have anything relevant to say in the year 2015. As if the idea that obsessively reading a two thousand year old book as a means to gain spiritual wisdom makes any logical sense. As if we’ll never understand the meaning of dreams, the meaning of death. As if we’ll never evolve away from destroying our planet and propagating war. One little tweak in the laws and those antiquated ideas about the potentiality of the human imagination would disappear forever, relegated to the cultural landfill with last year’s iPhone. Mark my motherfucking words.
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