As for UFOs, I used to think it was probably true but nowadays I think it's an artifact of humanity, much like other supernatural experiences. We have more cameras with sharper focus and still there's nothing clear... Even the so called military flight where they were following a dot was bs, flown by a contractor, aka 3 letter agency guy.
"Daimonic Reality by Patrick Harpur examines UFOs and a wide variety of “paranormal” phenomena from a rather unique angle. Although Harpur never fully defines the daimonic—“the daimonic that can be defined is not the true daimonic,” as Lao-Tse would say—it seems to exist both inside us and outside us. Like the Greek daemon and unlike the Christian demon, it takes both good/healing and bad/terrifying forms, depending on our commitment to rationalistic ego states.
In a sense, the daimonic is like the collective unconscious of Carl Jung, inside us as a part of our total self that the ego wishes to deny, outside us in all the other humans who ever existed and in the dreams, myths, and arts of all the world. But Harpur follows Irish poet (and Golden Dawn alumnus) W. B. Yeats as often as he follows Jung, and traces some of his ideas back to Giordano Bruno and the alchemical/hermetic mystics of the Renaissance. The daimonic is just a bit more personalized and individualized than Jung’s species unconscious.
Harpur’s major thesis is that unless we recognize the daimonic (make friends with it, Jung would say) it takes increasingly malignant and terrifying forms. For instance, the Greys of UFO abduction lore, he says, are deliberately mirroring our ego-centered and “scientistic” age—showing no emotions of the humans they experiment upon, just as the ideal science student feels no emotion and has no concern with the emotions of the animal being tortured in his laboratory."
Despite dealing with many subjects common to conspiracy theories, this book does not quite fit into that category. We are the conspirators, so to speak. We have repressed the most creative part of ourselves and now it is escaping in terrifying forms."
As usual, I’m commenting on various points as they come up whilst watching this podcast.
It’s a shame I couldn’t have joined earlier since that David Icke stuff is right up my street – not that I believe it but it fascinates me.
“They Live” is a movie based on a very PK Dick-ish idea. Indeed I seem to recall a PKD story in which objects disappear to be replaced by little cards with the objects’ names on them. And doesn’t that movie have an echo of Roland Barthes’s notion about how cultural objects signify something other than their superficial meaning? Though it’s interesting how the movie itself instantly plays into a macho posturing theatre in which the central feature is a seemingly interminable punch up between two hunks. The fact that this conceptually curious movie focusses on an actor who is a wrestler seems to me to indicate that bizarre kitschy disorientating crossover phenomenon that works as gaslighting in our emergent fascism.
As I think I mentioned before, it wouldn’t surprise me if the moon landings were a hoax but I have zero interest in getting drawn into that since it beckons towards another endlessly receding horizon of claims and counter claims etc. UFOs never interested me – perhaps because I always thought that they were an “update” on the old religious longings for angels to be watching over us. Or, for that matter, a longing to believe in devils. Though it might seem odd to say, I think that the distinction between angels and devils isn’t important. People want to believe that SOMETHING is there.
Hence Icke’s lizards. He insists that he doesn’t mean Jews but then again he seems to be obsessed with bloodlines. So there is an inevitable hint of racism.
(One thing that Icke illustrates is the paucity of a non-dialectical approach. With Icke – as with so many others – it’s a case of THIS against THAT and, in the futile attempt to enclose all of reality within this rigidly separated duality, there is an eventual slide into an all-enveloping despair such that EVERYTHING is a product of THEM. It seems that there is no famous personage in all history that wasn’t a lizard!)
On the normalisation of violence, I just resumed an old guilty pleasure – catching up with later offshoots of The Walking Dead. This is a staggeringly successful franchise – all the more remarkable for its utter lack of development. Curiously, the last episode of the very first season had the survivors shacked up in a fortress laboratory where some scientist was researching the roots of the zombie plague. I recall reading an interview from the director who said he wasn’t happy with the science fictional direction the series was going into. And sure enough, this topic was totally dropped from then on.
What we end up with is a remarkably candid expression of the bourgeois capitalist outlook in which a small number of survivors (the middle class) are constantly menaced by an interminable ocean of zombies (the masses) who keep coming and coming and coming. There is no logic to these undead automatons. They are pure mouths that don’t have to be connected to stomachs. All they do is eat and eat. It’s the ultimate Malthusian nightmare of the ferociously unproductive masses. And they never starve because they are already “dead”.
And the violence dealt out to the zombies far exceeds the violence dealt BY the zombies – but then again, one bite from a zombie makes you a zombie i.e. demotes you from middle class to this slimy underclass. And the various methods of killing zombies become ever more gruesome and “humorous”. (Perhaps significantly, the zombies can be killed by stabbing through their brains.)
I have started to feel that it is through these post-apocalyptic scenarios that those in the West are being influenced in an echo of the kind of indoctrination that Israelis undergo re: the Palestinians.
I’m glad too that Shaenah is here as a young voice otherwise it might devolve into a grumpy old man fest!
Re: the rise of the invisible (microscopic) with the arrival of the 20th century, one other matter is the increasing collapse of the old close knit communities and the rise of a vast “atomised” anonymous population in which there is an inevitable anxiety that arises when people have less and less confidence in making their opinions known since there is an erosion of collective notions and increasing uncertainty as to what you are “permitted” to say.
Sign off: I was dreading seeing myself but I think I’ve adjusted to it now! (Apparently Doris Day had the same problem!)
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As for UFOs, I used to think it was probably true but nowadays I think it's an artifact of humanity, much like other supernatural experiences. We have more cameras with sharper focus and still there's nothing clear... Even the so called military flight where they were following a dot was bs, flown by a contractor, aka 3 letter agency guy.
https://library.lol/main/F0FFF93E5BDCCCD182B46BCC074E05BB
"Daimonic Reality by Patrick Harpur examines UFOs and a wide variety of “paranormal” phenomena from a rather unique angle. Although Harpur never fully defines the daimonic—“the daimonic that can be defined is not the true daimonic,” as Lao-Tse would say—it seems to exist both inside us and outside us. Like the Greek daemon and unlike the Christian demon, it takes both good/healing and bad/terrifying forms, depending on our commitment to rationalistic ego states.
In a sense, the daimonic is like the collective unconscious of Carl Jung, inside us as a part of our total self that the ego wishes to deny, outside us in all the other humans who ever existed and in the dreams, myths, and arts of all the world. But Harpur follows Irish poet (and Golden Dawn alumnus) W. B. Yeats as often as he follows Jung, and traces some of his ideas back to Giordano Bruno and the alchemical/hermetic mystics of the Renaissance. The daimonic is just a bit more personalized and individualized than Jung’s species unconscious.
Harpur’s major thesis is that unless we recognize the daimonic (make friends with it, Jung would say) it takes increasingly malignant and terrifying forms. For instance, the Greys of UFO abduction lore, he says, are deliberately mirroring our ego-centered and “scientistic” age—showing no emotions of the humans they experiment upon, just as the ideal science student feels no emotion and has no concern with the emotions of the animal being tortured in his laboratory."
Despite dealing with many subjects common to conspiracy theories, this book does not quite fit into that category. We are the conspirators, so to speak. We have repressed the most creative part of ourselves and now it is escaping in terrifying forms."
As usual, I’m commenting on various points as they come up whilst watching this podcast.
It’s a shame I couldn’t have joined earlier since that David Icke stuff is right up my street – not that I believe it but it fascinates me.
“They Live” is a movie based on a very PK Dick-ish idea. Indeed I seem to recall a PKD story in which objects disappear to be replaced by little cards with the objects’ names on them. And doesn’t that movie have an echo of Roland Barthes’s notion about how cultural objects signify something other than their superficial meaning? Though it’s interesting how the movie itself instantly plays into a macho posturing theatre in which the central feature is a seemingly interminable punch up between two hunks. The fact that this conceptually curious movie focusses on an actor who is a wrestler seems to me to indicate that bizarre kitschy disorientating crossover phenomenon that works as gaslighting in our emergent fascism.
As I think I mentioned before, it wouldn’t surprise me if the moon landings were a hoax but I have zero interest in getting drawn into that since it beckons towards another endlessly receding horizon of claims and counter claims etc. UFOs never interested me – perhaps because I always thought that they were an “update” on the old religious longings for angels to be watching over us. Or, for that matter, a longing to believe in devils. Though it might seem odd to say, I think that the distinction between angels and devils isn’t important. People want to believe that SOMETHING is there.
Hence Icke’s lizards. He insists that he doesn’t mean Jews but then again he seems to be obsessed with bloodlines. So there is an inevitable hint of racism.
(One thing that Icke illustrates is the paucity of a non-dialectical approach. With Icke – as with so many others – it’s a case of THIS against THAT and, in the futile attempt to enclose all of reality within this rigidly separated duality, there is an eventual slide into an all-enveloping despair such that EVERYTHING is a product of THEM. It seems that there is no famous personage in all history that wasn’t a lizard!)
On the normalisation of violence, I just resumed an old guilty pleasure – catching up with later offshoots of The Walking Dead. This is a staggeringly successful franchise – all the more remarkable for its utter lack of development. Curiously, the last episode of the very first season had the survivors shacked up in a fortress laboratory where some scientist was researching the roots of the zombie plague. I recall reading an interview from the director who said he wasn’t happy with the science fictional direction the series was going into. And sure enough, this topic was totally dropped from then on.
What we end up with is a remarkably candid expression of the bourgeois capitalist outlook in which a small number of survivors (the middle class) are constantly menaced by an interminable ocean of zombies (the masses) who keep coming and coming and coming. There is no logic to these undead automatons. They are pure mouths that don’t have to be connected to stomachs. All they do is eat and eat. It’s the ultimate Malthusian nightmare of the ferociously unproductive masses. And they never starve because they are already “dead”.
And the violence dealt out to the zombies far exceeds the violence dealt BY the zombies – but then again, one bite from a zombie makes you a zombie i.e. demotes you from middle class to this slimy underclass. And the various methods of killing zombies become ever more gruesome and “humorous”. (Perhaps significantly, the zombies can be killed by stabbing through their brains.)
I have started to feel that it is through these post-apocalyptic scenarios that those in the West are being influenced in an echo of the kind of indoctrination that Israelis undergo re: the Palestinians.
I’m glad too that Shaenah is here as a young voice otherwise it might devolve into a grumpy old man fest!
Re: the rise of the invisible (microscopic) with the arrival of the 20th century, one other matter is the increasing collapse of the old close knit communities and the rise of a vast “atomised” anonymous population in which there is an inevitable anxiety that arises when people have less and less confidence in making their opinions known since there is an erosion of collective notions and increasing uncertainty as to what you are “permitted” to say.
Sign off: I was dreading seeing myself but I think I’ve adjusted to it now! (Apparently Doris Day had the same problem!)