Saturday, April 23, 2011

Occultism and its Relationship to New World Order Resistance

I stumbled across this documentary about Belita Adair and her role as a subject of MK Ultra experiments while browsing through black metal blogs and was instantly fascinated. I took the time to transcribe the most relevant parts because I have a hard time absorbing auditory information and wanted to return to it at a later date. So here is an extract of those parts of the documentary which pertain to the subjects covered on this blog. It was necessary to make minor grammatical corrections in a few places to clarify otherwise confusing sentence structures:


"Belita started to play classical and medieval piano compositions after being visited by a large, dark horned presence at the age of three. Soon after, she would sing and speak in ancient and modern languages in a spirit possessed trance with different voices coming through her. Belita was a psychic test subject, studied by noted parapsychologist Dr. Andrija Pujarich at the Stanfor University Paranormal Research Department and also at UCLA by Thelma Moss. In 1977, Belita was studied by Pujarich in the secret Farraday cage in Ossining, New York. While she was in a trance state, Pujarich brought Belita to a nearly lifeless state due to the lack of air in the cage. These sessions were taped by Pujarich and turned into top secret transcripts. The information Belita spoke of during her trance included Atomic numbers and Sound Wave to Atom theories and formulas. During the same year, Belita was presented by Pujarich to do private, invitation only channeling sessions in London, England. He wanted for all this to remain stealth and for Belita to remain a well hidden secret. He said there was a threat that Belita was a target of kidnapping by all the governments wanting this covert information. From the strain of the tests, Belita became very ill and lost so much weight that her condition was life-threatening. In the mid 1980s, she was diagnosed with an illness called Lupus and by February 2006 she was in a near death state with her
body rotting and blue. But somehow Belita came back to life. In the latter half of 2006, she created her musical project Satanic Corpse. Belita is a follower of the dark Left Hand Path and a Satanist."

Incidentally,many other subjects of the MK Ultra Project have discussed having been confined to Farraday cages, so this part of Belita's story can be confirmed elsewhere. The documentary brought up a few issues for me, namely the ethical/religious motivations of MK Ultra researchers, which led into a series of questions regarding the New World Order and its primarily Christian resistance movement. To begin with, it is likely that most people can agree on the basics: performing oxygen deprivation experiments on a small child is flat out wrong because of the threat of permanent brain damage and death. This should be evident to any reasonable person, although unfortunately it probably isn't for some who only see the mention of demonic possession and either laugh or think of Belita as the next Aleister Crowley with reverence and no thought to the damage inflicted on her by unscrupulous researchers. However, there is a growing number of people who realize that child abuse is, and always has been, an intrinsic part of the MK Ultra experiments in mind control and paranormal research. Where I part ways with this crowd is in the issue of occultism itself, which I think is a valid academic subject worthy of scientific research in its own right. But not for a minute would I trust the CIA or any other covert organization that has been involved in the project to conduct these experiments in en ethical way, given their history of destroying people's minds and bodies without so much as informed consent.

So although I'm extremely appreciative of the recent negative attention the MK Ultra issue has been receiving, I'm also somewhat skeptical as to the motives of said critics as well as those aspects of the project they've chosen to focus on. Most of this criticism is from a fundamentalist Christian viewpoint which objects to the use of occult symbolism, much which is derived from polytheism, which is a bit confusing to me since virtually all of Christian iconography can be traced to polytheistic cultures. I've covered this subject at length elsewhere, although scholars like Acharya S are far better versed in the subject than myself. Interested parties should refer to their research instead of my own as source material. So, to restate the basic point for those who missed earlier posts, what I take issue with is human rights abuses, not the study of occultism, which can be quite beneficial to society depending on the way it is handled. As for the issue of demonic possession, or the more commonly occurring astral parasites, I tend to believe that this is a very real phenomenon whose prevalence could be markedly reduced if occultism was less vilified by fundamentalists, since a lesser number of people would be attracted to unethical occult practitioners like Crowley if they weren't rebelling against hysterical Christian dogma in the first place. In other cases, genuinely benevolent forces may be mistaken for demons simply because their image doesn't conform to that of Judeochristian mythology.

Personally, I can't identify myself with any one religion, although neopaganism is probably the closest fit because it leaves the most room for interpretation and combination of varying traditions. However, like many people I can find much to be inspired by in particular aspects of each tradition, whether a shamanistic indigenous ceremony or a hugely centralized monotheistic religion like Christianity. Even Islam, by far the most repressive religion in the modern world, is rooted in a tradition of mysticism through the Sufism of the whirling dervishes. What unifies all of these cultures is the esoteric interpretation of symbolism found in occult studies, as well as the practical application of those ideas in occultism's trashy cousin, paranormal research. It is fascinating that traditions of Christian mysticism hold many parallels with exploration of the paranormal, including spirit possession, astral journeying, telepathy and precognition. Unfortunately, these traditions have largely been suppressed by church orthodoxy which regards submission to church hierarchy to be a precondition of revelation. What makes these issues tricky to deal with is the fact that pantheistic mysticism, including Christian esotericism, has been preserved and reinvigorated by mystery schools such as Freemasonry, groups that have a vested interest in securing geopolitical centralization. This elite version of pantheism is quite different than that of the autonomous groups and individuals who make up the vast majority of the modern neopagan movement, so it is important to differentiate between the two even though there is surely a certain amount of overlap. Failure to do so means invalidating the spiritual traditions of not only esoteric Christianity but thousands of other cultures as well, since mysticism and exploration into the paranormal is a tradition that simply cannot be owned by Freemasonry or other facets of the global power structure.

One of my first religious experiences happened while viewing the artwork in the Faeries and Gnomes books by Brian Froud. Spirituality has always been central to the way I interact with the world, which exists (in my mind anyways) not only in fundamentalist terms of good vs evil but also as a palate of infinite colors, where any and all beings intermingle and coalesce in the ether just outside the confines of our perception. Froud's faeries gave shape to this nebulous community of beings, who were both outside of my grasp enough to elude capture and accessible enough to have human flaws and desires. What made them beautiful was that I could relate to them. They were "human" and most did not demand obedience, merely requiring a mostly unnoticed coexistence.

The God of my Christian relatives, on the other hand, did demand obedience and to what end? Most of my God-fearing relatives were divorced, addicted to drugs, cheating on their spouses, abusing their children or similar. The faeries, on the other hand, promised no salvation and neither did they deny it. I liked them better than Jehovah back then and I still do today. However, there are beings in the faerie universe which closely approximate the Christian concept of angels and demons and recent experiences have brought me even closer to believing in these beings. Yet Western civilization's monotheistic paradigm has been strictly limited to cycles of cultural dominance and forcible conversion, actions that time has shown lead only to further warfare and societal degradation. Could it be that we may, in fact, have something to learn from earlier and comparatively less chaotic civilizations such as polytheistic indigenous tribes, the mythological remnants of which can be found in Froud's faeries? Make no mistake: these cultures were not perfect and many of them were outright cannibalistic. Clearly, these are not practices that any contemporary civilization would wish to emulate. Yet many other tribes managed to formulate a relatively non-hierarchical society in which resources were equitably distributed in a fashion quite foreign to the present world's democratic societies. Could Western civilization's bloody extermination of these cultures have set up a karmic cycle that relegates us to an existence of warfare and inevitable reverse colonization? Considering all the technological achievements in recent centuries, the thought is disturbing, but it also allows for a potential solution by way of restoring those cultures through respect to varied spiritual traditions, complementing and not opposing those of Abrahamic faiths. This approach may not sit well with many in the anti-New World Order crowd, who see Christian supremacy as the only solution to global governance and its accompanying One World religion.

But recent findings in the scientific community have established that the need to give respect to indigenous polytheistic cultures is one that is not exclusively metaphysical, instead being rooted in very practical concerns that affect every one of us. Foremost among these discoveries
is the knowledge that industrial farming methods have led to a loss of genetic diversity in the environments where they are practiced, meaning that people are increasingly dependent on pesticides because of the way that parasitic species can take over in an imbalanced ecology. In many places of the world, indigenous communities have an encyclopedic knowledge of their bioregion, yet pharmaceutical companies are rushing in to patent individual plants without consulting local tribes or considering the long lasting consequences of species collapse. The loss of topsoil, as well as the almost completely emptied aquifers, natural resources whose destruction would have catastrophic consequences, have also been sped along by wasteful and environmentally toxic farming practices. In recent decades, an ecologically sustainable system called permaculture has integrated knowledge from a wide variety of scientific disciplines to confirm that hundreds of different indigenous communities created intelligent designs for human settlements, designs that academically trained scientists are still learning from today. Indigenous practices of sustainable horticulture and city design have since been successfully combined with the appropriate use of technology to form resilient permaculture communities that could serve as a model for future human settlements. Beyond the scientific, many indigenous communities believed in animism, the idea that living things are imbued with spirit, and that the spirits of plants can teach the shamans of those communities about how they can be used medicinally and otherwise. Here is an amusing video by herbalist Susun Weed that clearly illustrates this point.


So how does all this information tie into New World Order resistance and MK Ultra research? Well, what it indicates is that, if social dissent against political centralization has any hope at being successful, there is a need to let go of the idea of jealous gods and religious supremacy, since fundamentalism of this variety is what would be used to justify the establishment of massively coordinated "peace keeping" forces to begin with. Additionally, techniques of indigenous permaculture can be used to avert the ecological catastrophes that would result in the reductions to standards of living recommended by the United Nations for global populations. A popular movement that values decentralized religious freedom is different than a One World religion in which religious freedom is suppressed in favor of a homogenized spirituality used to enforce the dominant paradigm. In the area of occult symbolism, typically occurring in the media, that means losing the hysteria about masks, pentagrams, enlightenment, and other facets of cultures differing from Judeochristianity. A more reasonable approach would be to focus on the values of the organizations behind these symbols, since any other approach risks alienating huge numbers of people who might otherwise be sympathetic to the agenda being criticized. For example, when the all-seeing eye is employed in the logo of Homeland Security, discussion about the surveillance state may be more effective than condemning Buddhism and the New Age movement, because many people who identify with these cultures may also see huge problems with the policies being promoted by the global establishment. Unfortunately, the term "controlled opposition" often conjures the idea of people who are willing agents of the state, perhaps paid off by intelligence agencies or other nefarious groups. But I think what happens more often is that people become unwitting collaborators with elite agendas, and their unintentionally destructive ideas are allowed to proliferate specifically because, again, those ideas reinforce the values of the dominant paradigm. So, ironically, what may be needed to counter the rise of a One World religion, as well as centralization in other areas, is respect for spiritual and cultural diversity, a respect that need not be policed by a global authority.