Monday 31 August 2015

The Hundredth Monkey and The Grateful Dead



The HUNDREDTH  MONKEY

and


The GRATEFUL DEAD




1995 was an eventful year for me.  Two visits to Glastonbury, a performance at a minor music festival, the Hundredth Monkey Camp out of which came my book ‘Waking The Monkey!’, and two deaths.  The closer of these to me was that of my father, late in the year.  The other was that of Jerry Garcia, on August 9th, Nagasaki Day, and it coloured my experience of the late summer of that year.



At the Hundredth Monkey Camp two weeks later I happened to arrive on my father’s birthday and brought with me the memory of Garcia’s recent passing and a pocketful of songs by him and his fellow band members The Grateful Dead. 



We had been invited to bring with us artefacts or associations with whatever tribal group or otherwise that we felt we had some identification with, as well as to wear what was described as ‘shamanic dress’. The Grateful Dead tribe had primacy in this for me.  I had a flag which I had recently made of the bands emblem, the Skullflash as it is known, as well as an Afghan style sheepskin jacket on the back of which I had painted a design based on that from the cover of Aoxomoxoa, famous for being probably their weirdest album.



This was partly meant in jest, and indeed the correspondence with the court minstrel on their record label was not lost on me, but it also seemed to take a more serious note after Garcia’s passing.



I played several times at the camp, and while it probably sounded rough and mangled to my listeners, I was the only person on site with a guitar, so it seemed that I had somehow been put there for a purpose.  If we were to spend the week trying to get in touch with cosmic intelligence and divine levels of being, then it was only right that God’s Own Rock’n’roll band should be there in spirit and I was probably a sufficiently odd enough misfit to take their part. 



One of the reasons why the Dead have inspired such loyalty amongst their fans is the metaphysical and transcendental poetry of Robert Hunter, long time song writing partner with Garcia and on occasion with others.  There was a frequent background theme that would break through of mysticism and spirituality, at times gothic in its feel, and this was perfect for the vibration of the camp, at least as I felt it.  This was not mere Rock’n’roll, but poetry and devotion too.  I was pleased to find that I was not the only Deadhead on site, and that one had even seen them at Woodstock.



A small group of singers practised Taizé chants daily in the late afternoon, and there were the occasional beats of drums, or drones of a didgeridoo or two.  My guitar and singing seemed to fit comfortably between them.



As the week progressed I found myself going through an intense series of experiences and emotional states, and woven into the backdrop of it all were the words of Hunter, occasionally Barlow, Dylan or Kantner and Slick.



It was an inner journey, my own long strange trip, that was so much the richer for the metaphysical engagement with the unlimited weirdness of the Grateful Dead, but without which it would probably not only have been bare, but also empty. 



There is a core thread with the Dead that is about both community and self reliance, surely values we should espouse and propagate.  It is these that I believe embody the spirit of the Hundredth Monkey of human consciousness.



The Dead have been at the centre of much controversy over many years, but we should look beneath the surface and understand these virtues which have enabled them to survive and prosper.  Many people and interests have attempted to control, manipulate and direct them, but they have survived as an entity, with some notable casualties along the way, admittedly, but the Community has survived.  If the Spirit wasn’t in there somewhere, the old engine would have come off the tracks a long ago and ended up in a ditch. 

As an American national institution they can be summed up by Hunter’s words in the song ‘Liberty’ ‘Say what I mean and don’t give a damn, I do believe I am who I am’.  You can’t really say fairer than that, can you?  And the President sends them a congratulatory message on their achievement, seeking to bask in some reflected glory, when all this demonstrates is that they have achieved a status beyond needing to pay heed to such things.



It pays off in the end, being your own man.


 

You can purchase a paper or e-book version of my account of my shamanic rite of passage at The Hundredth Monkey Camp ‘Waking The Monkey! ~ Becoming the Hundredth Monkey’ (A Book for Spiritual Warriors) at

http://www.lulu.com/shop/claire-rae-randall/waking-the-monkey-becoming-the-hundredth-monkey/paperback/product-22175832.html

 

My other blogs

 http://pcnewspeak.blogspot.co.uk/

Deconstruction of politically correct material, such as feminism and immigration.

 http://cosmicclaire.blogspot.co.uk/

Sunday 23 August 2015

The Asymptote



The Asymptote



There is a concept that I have been wishing to explore on my blogs now for some while, however it is somewhat abstruse and being rather beyond popular conceptions of reality I have hesitated for too long.  But I must grasp the nettle.



Firstly let me say that it is my belief that we should be applying an understanding of mathematical and physical laws to the analysis of history.  The flow of events which we know as human culture and civilisation is a mass process which is subject to an immense number of factors.  Economics, psychology and environmental influences are some of the major ones.  While theoretical frameworks and formulae to describe these and predict their interactive effects are to some degree in their infancy, we can nonetheless postulate such hypotheses as that fractal recurrences of types of events may be predicted.  By this I mean that just as in a fractal series such as growing leaves an endlessly repeating set of shapes that are all slightly different but all having certain key pattern in common, so in the flow of history there will be recurrent patterns with similarly structured types of events.  Empires rise and fall.  Also, as with some fractal series, the pattern can jump into new repeating structures for a variety of reasons.  It is my belief that the history of human civilisation must be subject to these basic rules of mathematical pattern, and the better we understand that, then the better we can navigate and ride the unavoidable waves of reality which they produce.



A related idea I came across in the work of Robert Anton Wilson some thirty five or so years ago in his ‘The Cosmic Trigger’ was that human society, invention and activity was increasing at something like an exponential rate.  He stated then, in 1977, that the graph of this was expected to hit an asymptote somewhere between 2012 and 2016.  (More about asymptotes in a bit.)  I don’t know where he got his figures, perhaps he was just getting into some predictive programming, but it happened to coincide with several other predictions for something around the same date.  Ken Carey in ‘The Starseed Transmissions’ said that ‘the gods would return’ on the Mayan Calendar date of 21 December 2011 (yes, he said 2011).  This year was preferred by Carl Johannes Calleman in his work on the Mayan Calendar.  Jose Arguelles who had a lot to do with promoting the Mayan Calendar concept used the 2012 date. Terence McKenna’s ‘Timewave Zero’ theory http://www.fractal-timewave.com/ also ended up producing a date of 2012 for a peak of ‘novelty’ and ‘habit change’.

Many other writers have elaborated on this theme.



I am as much interested in these as Jungian phenomena as in them as rational or ‘channelled’ information.  There seems to be some sort of spike around that date however one interprets it.



This is where the concept of The Asymptote comes in.  These may be helpful if you want to understand the maths.



An Asymptote of a curve is a line such that the distance between it and a curve approaches zero as they tend to infinity.  Fortunately I’m not concerned with the mathematical niceties of two lines meeting at infinity, or at least not here and not now.  What I am interested in exploring is what happens to the curve when it passes this.  For instance, the graph of the trigonometric function of tanθ approaches infinity on the Y-axis when the X-axis reaches 90º  ( radians). While we don’t know what went on up at infinity above our heads, we do know that the moment one passes that point, 90º, the line has gone way beyond infinity and is returning from a negative numerical direction.  That’s mathematics for you folks.  Something like this.



 

Which I found on this site




If you convert the x-axis in your mind to time, you will see that the moment the clock ticks past the point at which the graph reached infinity,  it starts to return from negative infinity.



So what has this to do with 2012 and fractals in time?



Consider the curve of the graph as human activity, novelty or change, and take the 90º point to be 2012, or thereabouts.  One is then left to consider what the meaning of ‘negative infinity’ would be in terms of human activity, or new habits.



I’ll leave you to chew on that for a little as I bring in a conspiracy element.  You may, or may not, understand or believe that there are groups on this planet committed to controlling it by whatever means they find necessary, but personally I take it as axiomatic.  It is quite certain and obvious to me that if such groups or individuals believed that some cosmic fluctuation, or merely a mathematical inevitability, would lead to major reversals in human affairs, then they would likely do all that they could to exploit such an opportunity, whilst at the same time hiding it from as many people as possible.


Hiding secrets in plain sight is their preferred modus operandi, and so it would make sense to hide the truth where it would be best ignored.  Whatever the bona fides of Carey, Arguelles or Calleman, it was certainly the case that a great deal of interest, of the wrong kind, was generated around the 2012 date, by the likes of Roland Emmerich with his movie of the same name.



I was fairly certain that no obvious catastrophe or revelation would occur on the 21 Dec date of that year, and I was unsurprisingly proved correct.  However, I remain interested in the larger picture, and the larger process.  For a start, in the material world, processes take time to work through into their effects and outcomes, and so, being as it is a human process that we are concerned with, and not simply a mechanical one, we might expect that the outcome of reaching this threshold might take a while to fully express itself.  We may have reached a ‘Tipping Point’ (a book of this name was published some time before 2012, another Jungian event) but the see-saw takes time to fall.  Perhaps when translated into our human and material world the instant realignment from positive infinity to negative this change might take a while, say a few years?  So, if we are, or have experienced some kind of conceptual or human reversal of infinite change, then we may still be in the middle of the realignment, and not be fully aware of what is actually happening.



Events recently which have prompted me to write about this include, amongst others, the simultaneous tearing down of Confederate flags and the raising of rainbow flags in their place.  Say what you like about the meaning of the Confederate flag, but it seems an immense coincidence beyond coincidence to me, that these two, ostensibly unrelated events should coincide in such a way.  Clearly we are supposed to make an equation in our minds between the emancipation of slaves and the granting of marriage rights to gays.  This is the kind of instant quantum change that one might expect to see associated with an asymptote infinity reversal.



In fact the whole collapse of Western Civilisation in the face of immigrant hordes is a case of infinite reversal which would have been inconceivable only a few years ago.  The Grauniad would doubtless object to the term ‘hordes’, but when it is the Mongols sweeping across the steppes in a remote century, it is acceptable.  At least the Golden Horde never reached out shores, although braver nations to the east had to face them.  But now we are conquered by hordes bearing no weapons and wielding weaponised compassion against us.  Talk about reversals.



And the revision of history which continually drip drip drips from the Second World War, when 86 year old women are jailed for asking questions to which they are not given answers. 



Everything is back to front, upside down and inside out. 



I remember thinking in the run up to the 2012 date that it seemed to be the case that the power elites wanted to set up their own hegemony before the new cycle of history began, but I had never anticipated that there would be so much social reversal involved.



The point I would suggest here is that in a temporal singularity such as the 2012 moment may be postulated to have been, it might be natural for certain characteristics of reality or phenomena to reverse themselves.  The earth having an electromagnetic pole shift for instance would be an example in the material world.  Indeed the widespread belief that we may be about to experience such an event may just be an intuitive interpretation of the actual, more subtle, shift of polarities within our own human reality.



However, there could well be those parties who would want to exploit opportunities such this.  Perhaps by reversing polarities of human reality which don’t need reversing or which should not be reversed.  It seems that many things are being overturned and reversed just for the sake of it.  We are in a time of great turmoil.



I have recently been reading ‘The Aquarian Conspiracy’ by Marilyn Ferguson (1981) and am finding it very interesting.  I hadn’t realised during the 1980s how much the ‘New Age’ had been crafted by the likes of Teilhard de Chardin and Gregory Bateson.  I still believe that mass changes in consciousness are possible, and indeed happen, but I don’t buy the kind of automatic transmission and general ‘rapture’ that those such as Ken Carey predicted.  The Hundredth Monkey principle is not a free lunch.  Some members of the monkey troupe for instance took much longer to pick up the new behaviour than others, and some never got it at all.  It's as much about personality as intellect.  And I would suggest that the first monkey on the next island is a special sort of individual who has already demonstrated some originality.  Those who have already put energy in to their own evolution will be the first to make new adaptations.  Energy flows where the easiest channels present themselves, like water down a scoured out course.  It is not instantaneous, and not everyone gets it.  That's just how nature works.



And there are those places where energy will not flow at all, or from where it flows away by the natural lie of the land.



When I look back at ‘The Aquarian Conspiracy’ and all that it promised, and then look at the world it has delivered, I feel cheated.



Yes, the realisation that human potential could be tapped and activated was truly wonderful.  There are still hundreds or thousands or even millions of ‘Success’ teachers and ‘Life Coaches’ applying techniques to improve lives.  Marvellous stuff, and I myself have benefited from some of these.  But the weakness of the Aquarian vision is that it sees no dangers.  Indeed, it shouts that to see dangers is to be playing out negative fantasy projections, and casts out those who would say this.  And so it has gone on ignoring the dangers in the shadows from then until now.



A topical slant on this is the current migration issue.  The book discusses much the ‘Aquarian Vision’ of ‘One World’ which abandons borders and refuses to see ‘the other’ as ‘other’.  This wonderful world of ‘fully realised beings’ that was promised has become the chaotic and predatory world we see today since those who pursued this vision refused to acknowledge that there was any element of that predatory nature that they should take account of.



This absolute unwillingness to defend and maintain our nations and our homelands is a sort of collapse like the New Orleans levees when Katrina struck.  The absolute inundation which ensued is an example of total reversal, from land to sea, but the inundation of our peoples is a greater collapse and reversal.



Will the natural order reassert itself, or is reality so plastic that a false paradigm can be imposed and prevail?  As reality is turned inside out and upside down are there enough of those who have found their own true path through this to help stabilise it all?



The Hundredth Monkey is a seed, a starting point and a leader but not a Saviour.  One still has to attend, to focus and commit to energies and paths to make them effective.



The ‘New Age’ has in many respects been fooled into believing in some of those very things which are its enemies.  Individuality and expression of genius should not be controlled by the collective.  This flowering of human potential as it should have been has been turned to the promotion of social movements which actually go against human nature.  Human nature is neither good nor evil, but a composite of survival adaptive drives.  If these drives can be carried out and brought to some fulfilling conclusion within socially acceptable parameters then that is good.  If not, then bad outcomes will arise.  But the more freely these can be carried out and fulfilled the better.  The ‘New Age’ has become a danger to us all in its collectivising of the world.  Our individuality is at peril.



If this should be a reversal that we cannot save and remedy then it would be a tragic end to our civilisation.



What is needed is a survival adaptive drive to find the strength to believe that we can indeed shore up the levees and assert our identities.  It seems possible to me that in the face of a false hundredth monkey which hypnotises the crowd to conform to a certain meme or moral concept that threatens survival, then a far stronger survival adaptive drive is likely to be triggered. 



The politically correct way of thinking is very Piscean, that is to say dependent on authority fixing things, and the people complying to the mass consensus.  The Aquarian way of thinking would see the solution as coming from within from responsibility.  ‘No one else is going to do anything to save us, so it is up to us to get down to it.’



It is not the conforming to consensus values which  will save us but an emergence of conscious will to act with agency and responsibility.  We can no longer be sheep but must think and act.



As we move on past the moment of the Asymptote, which I think we have done now, these reversal effects begin to become clear and we are faced with this dilemma between agency and sheepdom.  Only agency can save us, and so this must be the seed kernel of what the Hundredth Monkey is.  Imagining that we should use this principle to collectivise the world in its beliefs and behaviour is an error which I believe many in the New Age movement have made over the years.  Collective endeavours are wonderful when they are embarked on in a sense of willing co-operation, but when one group, however large, coerces another, however small, to behave in ways against their will, then such endeavours as these have left the path of wisdom.  It is the seed of agency, not that of conformity which we should be nurturing as we find our way back to balance from the infinite change of the moment of the asymptote.

Explore and follow my other blogs