Here We Go Again, Part Two

[ecosophia]

About a month ago I posted something here about Oberon Zell's attempt to use a collective magical working to bring about the Star Trek future he's been hoping to see since about the time the original Star Trek series first aired, and talked a little about why his working is certain to fail. I wondered at the time if Zell's project would be the last dim flicker of the once-shining Tomorrowland fantasy that misshaped and misguided so many of our collective choices over the last three quarters of a century, or if he'd be joined by others. 

Well, apparently it's going to be the second of those options. 

A longtime reader of mine -- tip of the druidical hat to LeGrand Cinq-Mars -- forwarded me a screed he'd received via email a few days ago, calling for people to unite in meditation to bring about a shining new future. (Here's the website version.) Specifically, the shopping list for this attempt to contact the Great Catalog Order Desk in the Sky is as follows: 

• Free energy technologies to power all machines with no pollution or on-going costs
• Abundant clean water for all human, animal, and plant needs
• Abundant locally grown organic food for each community
• Abundant health care for everyone using inexpensive, highly effective natural methods with no harmful side-effects

That is to say, these folks expect the laws of nature to be overturned for their benefit. 

Well, we can be a good deal more specific than that, can't we?  It's not an accident that so many people don't have adequate supplies of energy, clean water, good food, and effective health care. Where those lacks aren't caused by the laws of physics or the limits of a finite planet, they're caused by a global economy that systematically strips most Third World countries of their wealth in order to prop up absurdly extravagant lifestyles here and in a handful of other industrial nations. Every acre of farmland that's used to grow luxury crops for upscale groceries in the US and western Europe is an acre that isn't growing food for Third World families -- and yes, that same logic can be applied across the board. 

What this latest project is trying to demand from the universe, in other words, is that the laws of nature should be suspended so that the people doing this stuff can continue to enjoy their present lifestyles without having to deal with any of the consequences.  Such requests get made now and again by the more clueless of the comfortable classes; to judge by the evidence of history, the powers that guide the universe do not think much of such demands...

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Well, I suspect occultists from those nations being stripped of their wealth could have some fun with this....

[ecosophia]

No doubt they could. I suspect they will...

[(Anonymous)]

Does the Great Catalog Order Desk in the Sky typically respond to unsolicited shopping lists with a bemused fizzle or a serious attempt to move the requested goods from areas of high abundance to those of low abundance?

My gut says that, considering the track record of the intended spell workers, the intent of generating physically impossible abundance should at most result in some newly wealthy vaporware vendors.

On the other hand, given the amount of money the fed is currently printing to prop up the global economy and the proximity of the comfortable classes to the control panel...

[ecosophia]

I suspect it's going to be a fizzle. Doubtless some clever vaporware vendors will do well out of it, but even there, I've noticed that very few New Age types are even willing to invest in, say, perpetual motion machines; it's all a pretty dream that's just supposed to show up out of the sky one bright morning.

Manners please

[ritaer]

Good one, thanks for sharing this. Where was the request for a rainbow unicorn for every family?

They have neglected an important rule of correspondence. If you are writing to ask for a job interview or a favor of some kind--find out the name of the person in charge and use it. "Planetary Supervisor of Destiny" is the equivalent of "Dear Sir or Madam." Straight to the Cosmic round file with this request.

On a more serious note, how weird is it to combine a belief in the power of affirmations with a total lack of any concept that the earth plane is one on which we learn the lessons of physical life? Or as a friend of mine used to put it: "Life wasn't meant to be fair, life was meant to be life." One could substitute "perfect" for "fair" with equal truth.

Rita

Re: Manners please

[ecosophia]

Good question about the rainbow unicorns; they might have gotten further by asking for those, which are after all more believable than free-energy technologies.

As for the Planetary Supervisor of Destiny, I imagine a cosmic bureaucrat, bored and tired, sitting in her office in the magnetosphere somewhere high above the North Pole, getting the order form via spiritual email, glancing over it, checking a file, and responding with a form letter saying, "Sorry, this isn't your destiny."

[(Anonymous)]

Frequency shifts, timeships, electric moons- why are all of these kinds of collective magical workings inevitably couched in strange technological metaphors? For all the talk about healing nature, there rarely seems to be anything natural about these kinds of workings.

My favourite bit was the Planetary Supervisor of Destiny that was appealed to for aid. Not God, or Gods, not god-like beings, but something that sounds like the manager of an Amazon warehouse/sweatshop writ large.

N.

[ecosophia]

That's the Tomorrowland fantasy. It's all got to be decked out in cheap science fiction drag.

[brendhelm]

So let me get this straight - they also wanted to do this at a time when:

- Jupiter is in detriment and squaring the Sun,
- Uranus is in detriment and loosely squaring (4 degrees) both Mars and Saturn,
- Saturn is in exaltation,
- the Moon spent almost all the daylight hours void of course,
- the Moon is waning (which is technically always the case on Easter Sunday),
- the active lunation is Capricorn-heavy, and
- the active mundane ingress is Capricorn-heavy.

Got it.

[ecosophia]

Good. I didn't even take the time to look at the astrology -- my immediate response was to compare it to the last couple of dozen failed utopian fantasies, and hang it on the wall right next to Charles Fourier's lemonade oceans -- but you're quite right, of course. This one's going to go down like a lead balloon.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, it’s possible the Great Order Desk in the Sky exists—today we scored a large package of COTTONELLE! Praise the Lord and pass the roll!

JMG, did I send you a thing about a guy who says he is photographing interdimensional critters? (To me they looked like Louis Wain paintings during his mental illness.). If I didn’t, I meant to, and if I didn’t, someone else out there is staring at a screen saying “!!!What the [unDruidly word] is THIS [unDruidly word]?”

[ecosophia]

The toilet paper shortage seems to be in its waning days; I had no trouble scoring two packages of rumpwipe this afternoon. I look forward to the tee shirts that say, I SURVIVED THE GREAT TOILET PAPER CRISIS OF 2020.

No, you didn't send me that article. I actually rather like Louis Wain's crazier cat pictures, so if you can find it, I'll look forward to it!

[deansmith]

I clicked the link and read the instructions to this meditation / working. It immediately reminded me of the essay you wrote a while back about the Native American dance that was supposed to protect them from firearms being shot at them...

I dont know anything about the author or blog, but it was dripping in my opinion of something coming from the new age scene.

A couple of years ago my wife got curious about channeling, and asked if I wanted to go with her to a somewhat famous local new age practitioner who was going to channel a being (I cant remember the name of said entity). It's not something I'm generally interested in but went with my wife to see what was going on. After the lady started the channeling I got a really weird vibe and saw a sort of white clouded vision with a tunnel, but the tunnel seemed to be well,the best way to put this is "sucking". All the people there were regulars and looked sick, and were indeed, and they asked questions to this entity about healing. After it was over the medium made a bee line to my wife and I to see if we would be coming back. The answer was no. We left, were famished, and went home and fell asleep. That was my first and last experience with the New Age, and I think that whatever beings are associated with some parts of it are steering people to emotional and physical highs and lows to feed on. I wonder if this is some of the same.

[ecosophia]

Good! Yes, exactly -- this is a precise equivalent of the Ghost Dance, and I doubt it will be any more successful.

As for the New Age scene, bingo. There's a lot of psychic vampirism and a lot of really grubby magic going on there. Channeling in particular tends to be very toxic -- the entities in question very often vampirize the channelers, who then replenish their own depleted etheric bodies by vampirizing their clients. It's ugly all around.

cropland

[(Anonymous)]

It isn't even just crops we think of as upscale that occupy cropland in third world nations--coffee, tea, chocolate, most spices, bananas (of course) are all thought of as staples by most Americans. And think of the energy savings if we returned to eating locally grown fruit in season rather than grapes from Chile in December. That is without getting into dragon fruit, jackfruit, etc. Some topical fruit such as pineapples and mangos do grow in continental US, so I'll pass on criticism there. In fact, back in the 1920s parts of Florida invited Japanese farmers to immigrate to start a pineapple industry--there is a whole museum about it in DelRay Beach along with a lovely Japanese garden. Beware however, unlike most Japanese gardens there are alligators in the decorative lakes.

Rita

Re: cropland

[ecosophia]

That's an excellent point. Not buying out-of-season fruit is a useful discipline, and one of the things I do to keep my ecological footprint low.

Free energy technologies

[lunarapprentice]

"Free energy technologies"! Let's assume for the sake of argument that that wish was granted. Let's further assume that energy usage grows at 4% per year, as it has throughout the industrial era. The waste heat from all the devices you are powering would also increase at 4% per year. Eventually, that becomes significant in its own right, and in time would exceed even the heat (AKA as energy) received from the sun. In about 530 years, that growth rate would multiply human energy consumption 1 billion fold over what it is today, and I have no doubt that such a figure is comparable to the amount of energy we receive from the sun. I'm sure the earth has never been exposed to that level of incident energy, and would become uninhabitable. (I think Dmitry Orlov did a similar calculation a couple years ago, and his results showed the earth's surface would become as hot as the sun in only 360 years, so I may be naively optimistic!) Let us be thankful that "Free energy technology" is a fantasy.

Re: Free energy technologies

[ecosophia]

Nice! Yes, exactly -- and it provides another reminder that any linear extrapolation taken far enough ends in absurdity.

[thesseli]

This is why I avoid New Age type people. They have no grounding in material reality.

[ecosophia]

And even less of a grounding in spiritual reality.

[(Anonymous)]

I read it and didn’t understand any of it.

[ecosophia]

I think I can translate it fairly easily into picture form:

[lincoln_lynx]

These kind of New Agers always baffle me. Many have been in the scene since I was born but they don't seem to understand the basics. What were all those years spent doing? Smoking weed?

[ecosophia]

Nah, that's Oberon Zell. These folks have been sitting around convincing themselves that the universe will give them whatever they want just because they want it.

[(Anonymous)]

I notice that near the bottom of the webpage it says 'It will also be most effective if you can stay off of phones and internet on this day, and create Art!' What a sacrifice!

It was also necessary to look up 'focalizing' as this was a word unfamiliar to me. The definition comes with its own share of bombastic verbiage. Oh, and after following the link to determine my Galactic Signature, I find I am Kin 5: Red Overtone Serpent. I feel so enlightened now.

Every time I think things can't possibly get more absurd, they do.

JLfromNH

[ecosophia]

Whenever I want to contemplate infinity, I think of human cluelessness. ;-)

[(Anonymous)]

On the plus side, I've found the names of my next several doom metal albums, should I ever get around to making them. "Red Electric Moon" is grand, if you have as deranged a sensibility as me.

-Cliff

[grandswamperman]

I would spend very large amounts of money on an album with that name.

[(Anonymous)]

I notice they're asking for a lot, but not offering anything. They've missed the core principle of reciprocity, do ut des. Which puts their little effort even further out of balance.

[ecosophia]

Ding! Exactly -- and even less likely to produce any beneficial results at all.

[(Anonymous)]

Wait, Rainbow Bridge? Do they not know that's a metaphor for death?

[ecosophia]

I think they're referring to the antahkarana. In Hindu philosophy, if I understand correctly -- and I'll happily accept correction -- it's the link between the ordinary mental processes and the higher spiritual self. Theosophical writers such as Alice Bailey mixed that together with the Christian notion of the Fall, and taught that the antahkarana had been lost by humanity during the Atlantean period, which is why we don't experience our higher spiritual selves; rebuilding the antahkarana, which these teachings call the "rainbow bridge," is one of the core tasks of the disciple. Since a vast amount of New Age teaching is warmed-over and dumbed-down Theosophy, it makes sense that they would do that.

Me, I prefer to think of it as Bifrost. You want to cross the Rainbow Bridge, eh? Heimdall may have something to say about that -- and if he decides that you're not worthy to set foot in Asgard...

[(Anonymous)]

Hey JMG

What I’m about to say does not have much to do with the posts topic except that it involves someone of the boomer generation who had a fair amount in influence on people interested in A.I.

I was recently shocked yesterday when I read that John h. Conway, inventor of the game of like cellular automata, has died of coronavirus. I thought I would let everyone know.

[ecosophia]

Hmm! I hadn't heard. Sorry to hear that.

[(Anonymous)]

As a market gardener I struggled with the ethics of high end fare for well-to-do vs normal veggies for the people. The former actually allows you to stay in business due to our high cost of living, while the latter is much more gratifying but requires subsidies in one form or another. A lot of that is changing as the institutional growers are in chaos, and I have a feeling before this is said and done our neighbors will have developed a much deeper appreciation for us.

[(Anonymous)]

How could anyone follow their direction to dissolve all thoughts while focusing on your heart and generating feelings of love? Either they have some different meaning for thinking, focusing, and feeling than I do, or their direction is just a distracting koan. So far as I'm aware, I have never accomplished any one of those three activities independently, as all three arise together.

How could you be aware whether you had focused on your heart or generated feelings of love without thinking about it? Does an angel flit by to slip an A+ grade into your unaware and thoughtless hand? When your dissolved thoughts precipitate back out of solution, can you look down at your hand and suddenly know how successful you were? What poppycock!

Their "technology of Abundance" is more interesting — one of these things is not like the others. Clean water, organic food, and natural remedies all come from nature and do address real human needs, so why should we not pray for them to be abundant? Then there's the free energy to power all machines. Maybe this is where they intended for that direction to stop thinking to go? So many of our machines are specifically designed only to pollute water, make unhealthy food, and produce toxic drugs. So why would we want to power ALL those machines? That one technotopian wetdream doesn't seem to be a part of the same prayer as the others.

What if the Planetary Supervisor of Destiny can't figure out which of their incompatible prayers they really want fulfilled and gives them some horrible, improbable mash-up of the two? Something like: Energy technologies to power all machines with no clean water, pollution-grown food and abundant health care with harmful side-effects or on-going costs. Uh-oh, it looks like their working may have already fully manifested!

— Christophe

[ecosophia]

The practice of shutting down the thinking mind and wallowing in emotion is central to a lot of New Age practice these days. I'm sure it makes it a lot easier to deal with the hypocrisy and absurdity that's so common in that setting.

[(Anonymous)]

You know, if all of that actually came true, how long do you think it would be before various groups of humans, being humans and looking at their unlimited free energy, their abundant food, water, and medicine, and the apparent ability of large enough groups of people to rewrite reality, would decide that with all of this, _surely_ they can finally get rid of all the Bad People (see: backwards feudal-fascists, demon-worshipping commies, the other leading contenders for the geopolitical top spot, the Evil Foreign Relgion, that almost entirely identical ethnic group from the next valley over who your people have hated since time immemorial...) and make a _true_ paradise?

...And it does also come to mind that the Star Trek future of Star Trek itself came after, well, to quote the Star Trek wiki:
"World War III (2026 – 2053) was the last of Earth's three world wars. The conflict involved nuclear cataclysm as well as genocide and eco-terrorism. (Star Trek: First Contact; DIS: "New Eden"; ENT: "In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II"; TOS: "The Savage Curtain") The post-atomic horror superseding the war lingered as late as 2079. (TNG: "Encounter at Farpoint")"
I can just imagine a particular sort of fictional genie saying "A Star Trek future, eh? Oh, I'll get right on that, 'Master'! Heh heh heh..."

So, yeah, I think perhaps, even if these people actually _got_ their wish, their happiness might not be as long lived as they hope.

Reese

Why couldn't something like this work?

[(Anonymous)]

Hi JMG and everybody else.

I do not know if I should chip in, since I am entirely inexperienced.
But looking over the list it struck me it could be made workable.

1. We ask for guidance towards unison and fluid movement with our environment;
a. we ask for the will towards technologies and machines appropriate to available energy resources with pollution and on-going costs that nature and ourselves can afford.
b. we ask for wisdom to help the earth provide clean water for all human, animal, and plant needs.
c. We ask for diligence and charity towards local sustainability.
d. We ask for the knowledge of healing so we can care for everyone using inexpensive, effective natural methods with as little side-effects as our bumbling ways allow.

Why not do it like this?

Re: Why couldn't something like this work?

[ecosophia]

Yes, of course something like that could have good reuslts, but notice that you've completely changed the structure of the working. You're not asking for the world to change so that you don't have to; you're asking for help changing yourself, so that you can change the world. The latter is as effective as the former is futile.

They want what?

[ferngladefarm.com.au]

Hi John Michael,

All very strange, and they should be particularly careful of what they wish for. Tell ya why:

- Free energy technologies. Yeah, we've got this here thing called the sun, and traditionally it has performed the role that they are asking of it to do;
- Abundant clean water. Well, rainfall is pretty good most places that people live and if there are a whole lot less people about, well it ain't a problem at all;
- Abundant locally grown organic food. Sort of sounds like most peoples diets throughout the ages; and
- Abundant health care / inexpensive. Medicinal herbs and plant extracts as well as alcohol washes fit that bill. They won't cure the real nasties though.

Their wishes will eventually be granted, they might not like it much though. Their request sounds very foolish.

Cheers

Chris

Re: They want what?

[ecosophia]

Oh, granted. Try telling them that, though, and you'll get a blank look.

[ill_made_knight]

Herbert! Herbert! Herbert! lol

[ecosophia]

Lol indeed. I also remember, having watched that particular episode when I was a kid, what their paradise planet turned out to be like.

[avalterra]

Imagine the spoiled child of a family screaming at mommy that she is still not giving him enough goodies. Ignoring their brothers and sisters, ignoring the families finances, they just throw a tantrum and demand more, more, more.

That's a Doozie!

[(Anonymous)]

“Holy Moly”, as my parents were fond of saying, this is breathtaking. As soon as I read this, I was reminded of the Hindu myth of Trishanku. In brief, an arrogant king named Trishanku wanted to enter heaven in his physical body and refused to accept “no” for an answer from the sage Vasishta, so he sought the help of the sage Vishwamitra (who at that time was a rival to Vasishta). Vishwamitra agreed, and up Trishanku went, but the gods did not agree with this arrangement (as it was unnatural) and cast Trishanku earthward. In order to save Trishanku, Vishwamitra had to create a “second universe” for Trishanku, which the gods accepted under the condition that Trishanku be suspended upside down, where he remains to this day (as a constellation in the southern hemisphere)! For those who want more detail, there are quite a few versions of the story available online.

Re: That's a Doozie!

[ecosophia]

Hmm! Thanks for this; I don't think I'd encountered the story of Trishanku before, and it's a good one.