ecosophia | Magic Monday

It's getting toward midnight, so we can proceed with a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. With certain exceptions, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note: Any question or comment received after then will not get an answer, and in fact will just be deleted. (I've been getting an increasing number of people trying to post after these are closed, so will have to draw a harder line than before.) If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 143,916th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.0 of The Magic Monday FAQ here. Also: I will not be putting through or answering any more questions about practicing magic around children. I've answered those in simple declarative sentences in the FAQ. If you read the FAQ and don't think your question has been answered, read it again. If that doesn't help, consider remedial reading classes; yes, it really is as simple and straightforward as the FAQ says.

The picture? I'm working my way through photos of my lineage, focusing on the teachers whose work has influenced me and the teachers who influenced them in turn. I'm currently tracing my Martinist lineage. That's rendered complex by the Martinist tradition that one does not name one's initiator, so we'll have to go back via slightly less evasive routes. The last two honorees, Constant Chevillon and Robert Ambelain, both received part of their many lineages from this week's honoree, Jean Bricaud. Bricaud was a student of Papus and a leading figure in the French Martinist movement, as well as a major figure in the French Gnostic church of the time. He became head of the Martinist Order on Papus' death in 1916, and played a significant role in many other alternative spiritual scenes of the time. He died in 1934.

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***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***

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I read a fascinating, if chilling account of the 'astral war' between the Soviet Union and the USA during the cold war. The article is here if it is of interest to yourself and your readers https://medium.com/truly-adventurous/the-hades-environment-fab4434e8bdd

Essentially, it seems that both governments actively encouraged astral travel for various means, including warfare, but that chillingly, the amount of travelers awoke something ancient and nasty from the past, a name I won't repeat, which began killing people or trapping them whilst out of body.

It also seems that both governments became aware of the dangers, and rapidly closed down their programmes and actively censored the astral travel methodology that was in circulation at the time.

This all occurred around the time of the rise of the arch skeptics and angry atheists, and it has me wondering if that movement originally began as a psyop literally because of the dangers of the astral at that time. I can see that being a tactic employed by a desperate CIA and Pentagon to shut down a portal they were losing control of.

It's a chilling read actually, but a side of history I thought needed to be shared.

I lived through those years of very wide-spread popular experimentation with astral travel and other such things. Certainly, now and then someone died experimenting with it, as with almost any esoteric technique. But most empahtically there was no effective censorship of how-to-do it books and articles: they could be widely found in pulp magazines and among cheap news-stand paperbacks, and academic research also continued in this or that university laboratory for a while. Some government agencies did indeed research such things for a while, with covert activity in view; and some of the resulting papers and documentation was eventually destroyed -- as much out of embarrassment at being thought to have been gullible as out of fear of their power in other hands.

The article strikes me as writtn not so much to inform as to titillate and chill.

That's a fine piece of horror fiction, but as Robert has pointed out, it's not very accurate as history. I knew one of the generals involved in the military end of psi research, the late Gen. Albert Stubblebine -- the original of the character General Hopgood in the movie The Men Who Stare At Goats. He was retired when I first met him, and was an associate and friend of my teacher John Gilbert. His account was that the government pulled funding for all that research when the Reagan administration took charge and Christian fundamentalists became too politically influential. He was better at psychic spoon-bending than anybody else I've ever met.

I had a relative on the Stanford Research Institute's internal review committee for CIA-funded mind control studies on things like spoon bending with Uri Geller. I saw Geller myself try to do a demo in front of a small audience at an SRI auditorium as a child. Another relative helped set up a test for him at a restaurant with people wholly unconnected with SRI. Spoon bending, ESP and the like I know are 100% real but back then 45+ years ago no one had been found so far guaranteed to do those skills on demand.

I find the idea the Reagan Admin could have killed off all those mind control programs ludicrous given the vast amounts of US federal dark budgets especially when it comes to human subject experiments where contractual Funny Bunny Twister Games are common.

My best contacts who worked for the US Air Force insist the current US military seriously think they can control any battlefield with just electronic warfare and A.I.. Electronic warfare includes mind control technology. One thing the US military has been known for almost 200 years is brute industrialized force. If they've figured out how to achieve dominating mind control with electro/magnetic tech with or without drugs or ESP they'd do that in a heartbeat with no moral scruples whatsoever.

Correction - not sure if it was CIA or US Department of Defense funding those SRI studies 45+ years ago.

I simply repeated what Gen. Stubblebine told me. You're free to make up your own mind, of course. As for what your contacts in the USAF told you, keep in mind that the US military also believed that the Ukrainian counteroffensive launched a month ago was going to sweep through the Russian lines and reach the Azov Sea by day 6 or so. Nor did the US show any particular ability to control the battlefield in the last days of our tenure in Afghanistan...

Edited 2023-07-03 21:24 (UTC)

Sorry to have used the harsh word "ludricrous." I don't doubt at all what that general said but the Pentagon and too many other federal departments today are so compartmentalized, while I hope all those psyic ops and studies were killed off I retain my doubts.

As for Ukraine battles, I listen to the shifting stories from DC about why the USA is involved there. First it was to prop up a "democracy," then to "weaken" the Russians, and now who nows why truly given the head of Ukraine just announced no more elections until he wins the war. Perhaps just a big write-off of old military equipment to grease the rials to buy newer stuff?

As for Afghanistan, I know a lot who served on the ground there from the start of US involvement, at least one who also served the USA during the Soviet battles. Terrains full of caves and lots of different tribes already at each others throats reminded me a lot of the old American 13 Colonies full of forest with American rebel sharpshooters lurking in the trees of their home ground as the British Redcoats and their equally well-uniformed mercenaries marched through, A bizarro guerrilla war terrain when any invader with too much hubris, like the Old British Army in the 13 Colonies or Afghanistan, could get delayed fairly easily.

Oh, doubtless some projects kept going. The problem with paraphysical technologies is that they won't work reliably unless the people who are doing them undergo the necessary spiritual growth, and if that happens -- why, like Gen. Stubblebine, you take early retirement and go do something else with your life, like become a Gnostic bishop. The enlightened aren't interested in being cogs in the system's machinery. As for Ukraine and Afghanistan, I also know people who fought in the latter, and their consistent report to me was that the morons in the Pentagon and the morons in Kabul were duking it out over which could be more utterly clueless about what was actually going on. (I've heard the same story about Vietnam, except in that case, of course, the second batch of morons was in Saigon.) This is why I always include slack-jawed, drooling stupidity on the part of our would-be lords and masters as a core element in understanding what's shaping our world.

Magic Monday

Astral travel history and dangers

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