The Lion of Idaho series: Borah the orator

Sen. William E. Borah

     One of the big differences between William Edgar Borah’s heyday and the current times are the speeches – who, popularly, today is renowned for their oratory?   Today, presidents, get that spotlight.  In the early 20^th c. Borah would pack the Senate chambers in scenes currently reserved for the State of the Union Address.  This is the time when radio was still being developed and televisions were a dream of the future.

     In 1911 Arizona was seeking statehood and found one major stumbling block: it was attempting to keep a provision in its constitution that allowed for the recall of judges.  This comes down to allowing the judiciary to be independent and make difficult choices that may be popularly disapproved of – without fearing reprisals through getting recalled.  Borah made a speech on the subject and the New York Sun printed it in its entirety.  The Sun’s editors had this to say:

“We believe that this speech will take high and permanent rank among the great efforts of philosophical statesmen, not only for the dignity of its thought and expression but also for the quality of the patriotism shown by the conspicuous leader of the so-called progressives who dares thus to expose and rebuke the dangerous error of purpose so prevalent among his associates.

 . . . to every person promoting this insidious movement of the overthrow of the established system, to every state wherein the poison is progressively operating, Senator Borah says: ‘We owe it to ourselves and to posterity, to the institutions under which we live, and above all to the common people of this country, to see to it that the judiciary is placed, as nearly as human ingenuity can do so, above the reach of influence or of any of the things which may cloud the mind with passion or dull the conscience to the highest demand of even handed justice.’”

     Today we have different methods of discourse – no need to make a judgment and place one form of media over the others.  But what today would be the equivalent of one of these blockbuster speeches?  What could capture that energy where a leader uses language to convince his opponents of the righteousness of his argument?  The senate chambers packed with auditors clamoring to listen to the orator, the speech to be published in the papers the next day.  Not to make a judgment call, but that is a better world.

(Fiction) reader's block

     It’s been awhile since I’ve picked up a good novel.  Non-fiction has become my area of interest and I’ll be honest why: fiction presents a world – however beautifully wrought – that has the mark of its creator on every page.  The author chooses whichever way, however lyrical, that he wishes to present his story and does so proudly and intentionally.  Plato regarded art as a copy of something that was already a copy, our reality itself just a shoddy version of the true world of the Forms.  Art, novels, are just copies of the already crappy “real” world.

Plato


 May as well enjoy non-fiction, a perhaps unvarnished – okay less-unvarnished – view of reality.

     But the artist is capable of great things.  I can’t forget all those moments I’ve been hooked on a work of literature and I’m talking something here more like Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children than Brown’s The DaVinci code.  Writing has the power to venture into mysterious realms and help us look into ourselves.  This is the domain of the liminal.  As Peter Levenda relates to Jasun Horsley: “I think that writing in itself if a liminal occupation. You’re in world where something is uncreated and yet wants to be created, you’re an interface between an idea and something that appears as a physical artifact.” 

 

Peter Levenda

     Pretty amazing.  Who would criticize the novel, beside Plato?

     Georg Lukacs was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, aesthetician, literary historian, and critic. His work The Theory of the Novel “begins with a comparison of the historical conditions that gave rise to the epic and the novel”: “In the age of the novel the once known unity between man and his world has been lost, and the hero has become an estranged seeker of the meaning of existence.”  Something Lukacs called “transcendental homelessness.” 

     So novels, those wonderful stories, are tools to smooth the edges, to let everyone belong in a world that has been separated from nature – ouch! 

     Lukacs later took it back.  Regardless, though, I admire the perspective that this gives – what are the uses of the novel?  What are the uses of language?  Nothing is simply just what it seems.  Every little thing occurs in an interconnected web and has history.  Dang it but I find Lukacs idea to vindicate my recent disdain of fiction.  It’s complicated but perhaps I will someday overcome my fiction reader’s block.

UFOs - a new paradigm that began five decades ago

     Besides being another way of making my wife question my sanity, my interest in ufos feels necessary and provides rewards: even if those rewards are questions.  To further preface, yes, I’m into ufos and, yes, I know that it does grant entre to ridicule and dissmissiveness.  I would say while the term “ufo” has some usefullness it would be best to take the term out to the Black Rock desert and leave it with another concept whose original meaning started well but has been subverted.

     So what, then, does an interest in ufos entail?  The nuts and bolts idea is the part of the phenomenon that should placed on the pyre, lit and left.  That the phenomenon is actually beyond matter, paraphysical, is part of the new paradigm that I am interested in.  This “new” paradigm actually has run alongside the nuts and bolts conception almost from the beginning, though the nuts and bolts view was more easily manipulated because it is so much more easily understood in the popular mind.  On the face of it, though, if you stop looking for a physical object and start thinking of, well, something, else, you very rapidly get rid of a lot of confusion.  And unfortunately, but also satisfyingly, you invite more questions.

     So not necessarily physical . . . hmm.  What else is in the non-physical club?  God, ghosts, demons and angels.  Auras, healings, curses and premonitions.  And here comes the satisfying speculation: Could all the members of this club hang out at the same clubhouse?  I’ll entertain a “yes” answer for now and see where it gets me.  To sum it up a quote quoted in John Keel’s Operation Trojan Horse.   This from the wonderfully credentialed RAF Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard, KCB, CBE, MA from a 1969 speech:

That while it may be that some operators of UFO are normally the paraphysical denizens of a planet other than Earth, there is no logical need for this to be so. For, if the materiality of UFO is paraphysical (and consequently normally invisible), UFO could more plausibly be creations of an invisible world coincident with the space of our physical Earth planet than creations in the paraphysical realms of any other physical planet in the solar system. . . . Given that real UFO are paraphysical, capable of reflecting light like ghosts; and given also that (according to many observers) they remain visible as they change position at ultrahigh speeds from one point to another, it follows that those that remain visible in transition do not dematerialize for that swift transition, and therefore, their mass must be of a diaphanous (very diffuse) nature, and their substance relatively etheric . . . . The observed validity of this supports the paraphysical assertion and makes the likelihood of UFO being Earth-created greater than the likelihood of their creation on another planet. . . . The astral world of illusion, which (on psychical evidence) is greatly inhabited by illusion-prone spirits, is well known for its multifarious imaginative activities and exhortations. Seemingly some of its denizens are eager to exemplify principalities and powers. Others pronounce upon morality, spirituality, Deity, etc . All of these astral exponents who invoke human consciousness may be sincere, but many of their theses may be framed to propagate some special phantasm, perhaps of an earlier incarnation, or to indulge an inveterate and continuing technological urge toward materialistic progress, or simply to astonish and disturb the gullible for the devil of it.

Hints of a greater reality, part 3 - Review, again

Don’t really need to say review since it is all review, or going over of what I have thought till now.  Feel a little jejune looking back.  This is because I have real/listened to more and got more and more perspective.  To sum up (and hopefully my summaries have remained or grown more concise – is that needed?): something greater is going on.  By greater I mean not necessarily better, just that something that is not commonly acknowledged is going on that that presents a form of knowledge that by simply existing makes our understanding of reality more complex. 

To naysay: there is no greater other form of consciousness.  So far anything such as exists outside our material worldview has gone unmeasured.  That some people do report such encounters and interactions are experiencing something confined to their minds.  And just because similar delusions occur amongst many folks does not mean these delusions come from an outside source.  No, it simply means that the common brain structures and operating means have become similarly altered.  There is no collective unconscious or the like only a similar physical, evolved mechanism – the brain – that we are share and subject to occasionally bizarre whims thereof.

 

This . . .
 

You have to acknowledge something like the psychology of Freud at the very least and at the very most must accept Jung.  Freud talked about events distant in humanities time on the planet.  Imprints of primal reactions.  Perhaps encounters with other forms of existence are simply these primal reactions manifesting in a idiosyncratic culture ways.  While strange these experiences are shared due to the experiencers shared culture.  Or generally are similar due to a shared humanity. 

 

. . . or this?

 

The collective unconscious that Jung describes takes things to another level.  If not a higher level, then a different level.  Something “out there” that we can tap into, access.  I’m not familiar enough with his thought as to whether the collective unconscious could, like, exist if not people existed.  And I don’t know if the idea of the collective unconscious wipes out the need for Freud’s theories.  More reading required.

The point here, to conclude, is to erase a bit of that jejune feeling.  To understand the most fundamental fundamentals.  To establish an epistemology.  To see what these far-out ideas bring to the table.  Are they exceptions that prove the rule, that confirm us in a Western worldview?  Is what I take for proof merely quirks of the brain, explainable within the framework of neurobiology?  Dammit, when I say that I consider how much religion is still so common alongside a materialistic world view.  People that believe in whatever faith (am I developing my own new faith?) already have this component included in their theories of what it is to know (to their detriment say/believe the Dawkins’ and Harris’). 

However much this seems like a needless retracing of the understanding of first principles I can at least say that I have taken maybe more than a few steps down the road paved with more, for lack of a better term, spiritual dimensions.

The Timothy Good stumbling block

Okay, I’ve come to realize (in good part due to this posting’s subject matter) that my focus has shifted in recent months from thing political to things more metaphysical.  The rich vein of researcher’s material that I have recently discovered crashed into a wall of a few days ago when I heard Timothy Good on Red Ice Radio.
 

 

Timothy Good

 

For full “disclosure” I must say that T-Good is someone that helped me secure my foothold in the topic albeit a foothold in the nuts-and-bolts end of the UFO spectrum.  Early lectures of his saw a self-effacing, eloquent Englishman presenting the results of research that were astonishing even to him.

I think I may have even heard T-Good on in the past Red Ice – a show I greatly admire.  Henrik Palmgren is a tireless interviewer with an intent to expose audiences to a wide breadth of alternative research.  He’ll have an obscure researcher into Illuminati-based global financial market manipulation on day and then later in the week have a solid analyst like James Bamford on – Henrik can talk to anyone.

 

Henrik Palmgren

 

 

But with Good’s latest appearance there was an added undertone, as though Henrik was trying to call out Good on his BS and Good almost acknowledging that his work is BS by giving obviously elusive answers.  Henrik really grilled him a few times.

Held up against the work/views of Vallee/Keel/Hopkins/Mack/Bishop/Clelland listing to the Red Ice Radio interview with T-Good makes me want to drop the subject entirely.  The just mentioned researchers actually want(ed) to find out about something that may fundamentally inform us about the human condition.  T-Good just seemed to be presenting material in a stylized way, his tropes equivalent to the white make-up on Kabuki performer’s face.

But good – it has instigated some soul-searching.  Is looking into the subject as important as looking at international relations and domestic policy, foci of past posts?  Well, politics are boring – is what I would be saying in a world without a looming government default.  I still must maintain/reaffirm that the work of (in the past) Vallee and (representing the present) Bishop and Clelland help to define what ultimate reality is.  And that is pretty important.

Hints of a greater reality - Part 2, Good directions

Already going in the direction that I was headed in my last post, I subsequently hit a rich vein of resonating material.  The writers and lecturers – if not legion – turn out to be rather numerous.  Jacques Vallee, Budd Hopkins, John E. Mack, Mike Clelland, Greg Bishop, Karla Turner, Peter Robbins – and more and more who I am discovering each day who usually are associated with those just mentioned.  What is it that these new folks resonate with/what was my last post about?  To sum up, I feel that events that run the gamut from ghosts to UFOs, from psychic phenomenon to angelic visitations are perhaps (gasp!) real.

Budd Hopkins

 

Thankfully the concern with which I entered into my recent post is still valid: there is no comprehensive/definitive theory about these phenomenon.  The question as to what it means and how it relates to us remains.  My recent searchings led me to the debate between Budd Hopkins and John E. Mack terrifically presented in this video – to a large extend this debate both presents and summarizes fundamental concerns in this area of thought.  Both men agree that something is going on.  However, on the one hand, Hopkins thought the interactions to be deceptive/malevolent while on the other hand Mack finds a source of enlightenment.

John E. Mack

 

Both Hopkins and Mack are eloquent and, more importantly, passionate – they involved themselves in the issue of abduction because that was the only thing that they could do. So too Peter Robbins, and Karla Turner, and, well and everyone else on the list of names above.  I said that there is no comprehensive/definitive theory: that is not true.  There are those that do present a narrative.  The listed folks above, however, are quite willing to go ahead and say “I don’t know.”

That is an important thing in research in this field.  Sure you have to talk about what is known but a line needs to be drawn at times.  You gotta have a good Hemingwayesqe bullshit detector and the folks above of mostly getting through unscathed.

Hints of a greater reality - Part 1

Hints of a greater reality

Let’s take the claims of mystics and religion-forming revelators at their words, accept that they are being divinely inspired but that the inspiration comes not from multiple divine and seemingly competing point but from a single point catering to individual’s beliefs and customs in different times and places, the wisdom imparted sometimes amazing and true while at other times being quantifiably erroneous.  The goal of this is to encourage us humans to keep and keeping on.

Is this coming from helpers who genuinely try to help but ultimately are not perfect – their revelations do not cohere to a set morality and their predictions not coming to pass or do come to pass as described only at the wrong time?

Is this coming from a programmed intelligence that is tasked with overseeing man continue as some experiment, the helpers helping men to overcome existential ennui?

There seems to be a supernatural source that is interacting with people – their purpose: they give people a purpose and unify groups.  The inspiration may occur at the individual level and remain there – the revelation being important to that person to the extent that it becomes a guiding light if not raison d’etre.  But this person does not tell many others.  Another situation is the individual revelation that is shared.  If given to the individual, and kept at that solitary level, the purpose is to spur them on, to give them a chuck on the shoulder and an affirmation.  If given to the individual and then shared the purpose is still an affirmation only at a group level.

On the one hand you have the mystic in the cave.  On the other you have Mohammed or Joseph Smith.

And then there are the cases – call them “holy spirit” cases – where a group is contacted.  The results are the convulsionnairist Janesists of France who would engage in group glossolalia and would all see the same miraculous apparitions.  They would also balance their bodies on sword points without being driven through.

 

“Stab in the throat Monsieur? – it has no effect on me.”

 

Also in this category are the possessed dancers of the medieval ages.  From the 14^th through 17^th centuries people would at times dance uncontrollably, even to the point of death.  The famous Dancing Plague of 1518 occurred in Strasbourg, Alsace and at its peak had 400 dancers.  To this day only theories exist as to the cause.

“Dancin' in the streets”

 

 

Why do we keep on keeping on?

In our daily affairs – in our collective and individual day-to-day lives – I am struck by what motivates us all.  We all respond to challenges and what other challenge can meet the one that we all respond to, namely the will to keep living each day?  The French existentialist philosopher/author Albert Camus (1913-1960) posited that the only question is why not commit suicide?  (fyi: while he died young it was in a car wreck.)  While this makes sense to someone immersed, however cursorily, in existentialist thought, it otherwise seems an absurd thing to say.  If this is a question everyone must face then the overwhelming response is to affirm life.  Though not many delve into the worlds of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, et al. – or for that matter any level of philosophical examination of their lives – I think people do form fairly comprehensive narratives of their lives and their place and role in the world.  People keep on keepin’ on.
 

 

 

"Oh, Meursault!"

 

Beginnings

Listening to John Lash may be the primary inspiration for this work.  Sure, with our perfect hindsight history makes sense – trends, influences, demographic shifts having effects that last millennia are mapped out, correlated.  But I still find the idea of Archonic influence, which I first heard from Lash, to be intriguing.

Perhaps I’m falling prey to scare tactics or maybe there really are grave concerns – either way I think there are some (dare I say?) evil influences out there.  The quest for money is something anyone can understand whether you are trying to just survive or if you are trying to out-do your competition in the billionaires’ club.  There is also a drive for control by those that have a vested interest in keeping things going down the same track – in the directions that most benefit them.  Who are “they”, anyway?  Are they the members of the billionaire’s club?  Not necessarily – I think here in America we make personal decisions sometimes in a manner that (to me) makes us little fascists in our own right.

Is the overcompensations of an evolved psychological need solely to blame?  Can it be chalked up to a base greed?  I would say that incremental changes  may develop an inertia.  Take for instance the history of the lobbying industry presented by Robert g. Kaiser – lobbyists outnumber our congressmen now but it didn’t use to be that way.  The data show votes can be bought and the will of non-paying citizen constituents is sold out.

But before I explain the Archons as presented by Lash I must take a step and continue giving credit where credit is due and acknowledge David Icke.  A figure of no small fame/notoriety, I have appreciated much of what he has said, especially his critiques of corporate culture.  However, when he starts getting into describing how elites of a certain bloodline are really reptilians and ritual-based pedophiles my mind is forced into metaphor-mode.  Metaphorically or in a spiritual sense the actions that , say, take a nation to war which subsequently kills million while simultaneously lines the pockets of those that make the weapons – those are the base actions of people that behave like animals, whether their actions are due to viciousness, fear or whatever else.

With that concept in mind I listened to John Lash on Red Ice Radio and the influences that Icke was citing soon become more realistic.  Lash is working from Gnostic texts that describe entities called Archons.  Only able to live on a spiritual plane, they envy man-the-kind . . .

This entity which may actually lurk behind something as simple as a negative thought is terrifying.  That something like this goes out its way to contact and manipulate those in power is even more terrifying.  If these Gnostics where writing allegorically then these fears morph malignly into paranoia.

Is this something to just pause and think about, trying it for a theory one day and then moving on the next?  Say it is true, 100% correct and not metaphor.  Well, first – phew!  Bye-bye paranoia and yea! I’m not crazy.  But secondly and most importantly you are presented with a radically different way of understanding the world and your place in it.  A different understanding of a different way of life is called for.

Having come to similar conclusions via social science/dissatisfaction with the way the world is I can at least (healthily) entertain Lash’s ideas.  And when our take history/social science and combine it with the work of John Keel, Archons start to sound more and more real.

 

This is only a test

Are men in black Archonic agents?  Is every Channeler just a mouthpiece for a manipulative Archon even if what is spoken seems benign and helpful?  If we knew out of the gate they are evil then we could say all their actions are therefore evil – even seemingly pleasant , affirmative guidance.  Let’s discuss this a minute.  Some folks perhaps do not actively channel but may have heard a voice that, say, guides then on a career path that proved enlightening and rewarding.  Or a channeler may speak to as an alien who is concerned with detrimental human activities such a nuclear weaponry and environmental degradation.  How are these bad?  The one answer that I’ve heard others like Jim Marrs discuss is that some entities are simply tasked with a job keeping an experiment running with humans as the test subject.

Here that metaphysics of this argument get murky – however we can still partially hang on the Occam’s sharpened implement.  The Gnostics have done our spiritual homework for us in the sense that now we have the concept of a spiritual entity with their own interests intertwined with and put in front our ours.  From there it easy to come to various perhaps evil conclusions.  Actually the evil intent may be partially removed as some of these entities could be considered simply nothing more than elaborate recording put in place to keep humanity thinking there is mystery and purpose in the world. 

Take the case of the individual who maybe goes into a trance while a child and hears a spirit guide offer them advice.  No matter how specific or vague – “become a pilot,” say, versus “be a force for good” – the power of suggestion may put their plans successfully into action.  The subject carries forth and their behavior monitored and measured.  The anomalous suicide is duly measured and perhaps expected.  Overall though, the influence of these being provides an environmental stimulus that meets either a control condition or, conversely, adds a bit of cocaine to the lab rat’s water beaker: just to see what the results are.

 

 

The eloquent and far-out Terence Kemp McKenna

 

I admire graham Hancock and Terrence McKenna but when they see “machine-elves” while on their DMT trips the idea of a recorded message is something at least Hancock says is a possibility.

 

The experiment idea nets all kinds of theories.   Perhaps a Deistic God exists who set up creation and then left, letting things run on their own (with Archon-like stimuli?)  Or, perhaps regardless of his fudged translations, Zechariah Sitchin was right and we are genetically modified slaves created to mine gold.  Or rather yet, we are one alien student’s creation, his entry among others in some difficult to imagine science fair.