X-Meditators vs CIA, part 4
Dream Wars
The Boston Area was a central New Age node and Ben Bentov had one foot in the medical side and the other foot in the broader, more radical, holistic health movement.
Meditation did too.
Meditation is just one of several thousand practices included in the Wikipedia List of Forms of Alternative Medicine.
Activated Charcoal Cleanse is first, in alphabetical order. Zang Fu is the last.
All you need to do is browse for a minute and you’ll see that Meditation is by far the most accepted, even appreciated, by the medical establishment.
Ben explained why.
To help organize his own ideas that would become ‘Stalking the Wild Pendulum,’ he spoke to small groups of us informally and in larger gatherings on some occasions. He sketched the funky diagrams that went into the book right there in his lab, down in the basement of a normal looking house in Wayland, MA.
It wasn’t that hard to grasp the idea of Us being made up of oscillating systems. Brain waves are just one of many expressions. Synchronizing the hemispheres is part of the process, one aspect. Heart rate and breathing patterns slow down in meditation and in the Gateway Process, overcoming the normal wave interference in the Heart-Aorta system.
Ben would talk his way carefully all the way to a clear picture of the whole body resonating synchronously at 7–7.5 Hertz, about seven times per second. That’s where the Pendulum comes in. Everything that oscillates must have resting points at the top and bottom of the wave where there is no motion.
A resting point with no motion is a portal to everywhere in Ben’s model. We can couple with higher frequency activity not limited by time or space in those openings. Interactions in the Astral Plane can be encoded in our apparatus. It just isn’t presented in clear linear form like the tablets Moses received.
If a clear-eyed, Army Intelligence Lieutenant Colonel said there’s real potential in tuning the mind for astral activity, it is difficult to believe that the story ends there, in 1983. Why would it? You’re CIA.
Why would CIA declassify material that makes the military-paranormal marriage look like a bust?
To use the language of the Report: Isn’t it at least plausible that U.S. Military personnel have had encounters with ‘intelligent, non-corporal energy forms.’ And that efforts have been made to ‘repulse unwanted out-of-body presences.’
Maybe they repulsed ’em and maybe they didn’t.
What would U.S. Military personnel deployed to the Astral Plane consider an unwanted presence?
Jon Kabat-Zinn?
Maybe they were able to develop the Accelerator Programs, maybe not.
Significant tensions in the Astral Plane since the early 1970s might explain a lot of things.
Dream Wars.
Marvel Comics reached into our dreams and pulled out the X-Men and dozens of other parts of a shared cultural gallery and told us they were super.
In order to survive and prosper, Marvel’s Universe has to present a much larger vision of reality than what is obvious. The Astral Plane is part of that larger vision and the astral illustrations, especially in Dr. Strange and X-Men, help us imagine it as a Place.
It’s not a Place like the physical world because everything is ectoplasmic, but there are still recognizable shapes and forms, with clear boundaries.
What else could you draw in a little comic book box?
Once you have to draw anything at all in a fixed way so you can publish many copies of it, you’re already in trouble, I think, when it comes to imagining the Astral Plane.
I think Marvel Comics limit our imagination in many ways and visualizing the Astral Plane as ‘mostly like the world we’re used to only more diaphanous’ is one of them.
An accurate artistic rendition of the Astral Plane might not contain recognizable forms. It might be impenetrable. If the artist used words, it would read like ‘Finnegan’s Wake,’ the last work by James Joyce, said to be a rendition of the night world of our mind.
riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
The famous opening line is also the closing line and is said to be the most comprehensible sentence in the whole work.
That might be just how it is in the Astral Plane.
Once people thought that everything we can see, all the stars and everything else, Revolved Around Us.
I would say it is still the prevailing view.
It is very easy to hold a modern, scientific heliocentric idea of the sun and the earth and still believe everything is about us. The belief in our exceptional position is deeper than astronomy, but it is still cultural.
We are not born believing that humans are a phenomenon outside of nature, able to look at the interplay of things from an external perspective and make Universal claims.
Being special as humans and explicitly separate from the rest of everything is what some Buddhist traditions refers to as Samskara, usually translated as a conditioned mental formation. I think of it as a framing stage that processes raw sensations and perceptions and goes right to action without assessment.
Some mental formations are obvious algorithms that activate threat networks when stimulated by Otherness input. The deepest levels of Samskara are the unquestioned assumptions we never thought of as assumptions, like, why do I think of the outer layer of my skin as the ending boundary of me? Or, the mental formation:
humans are special and not enmeshed in the overall entangled field of everything we call the Universe.
We can look at the whole Universe and anything in it from the outside. We can control all variables and comment on results and make observations that will be absolutely true.
I don’t know the origin story of that mental formation but everyone knows it found its most receptive environment at a particular time and place — prominent early 17th century European intellectuals claimed to have discovered the fact that humans are separate entities, capable of learning about nature by objective, removed observation.
This form of Sanskara is known as The Enlightenment and it worked, depending on how you define ‘worked.’
The mental formation of Human Exceptionalism leads to a Super Power: You can be ‘objective’ and removed and not part of the overall field everything else is in. This Super Power allowed Western Europeans to make measurements and assume pure cause-and-effect and build more and better instruments of expansion than any other humans had before.
In that sense, Sanskara worked. Until now, about 500 years later, when it isn’t working any more.
Human Exceptionalism has always been a Ponzi Scheme with new territory to colonize, robbing Peter to pay Paul. It had to run out. Everyone knew it would. Peter is broke and Paul is just a few people now who get most of what’s left.
Except no one told the mental formation. It is still active in the neural processes of many if not most of the people on the planet.
It is still in me. I am training myself to notice it. That is my understanding of how mindfulness can lead to Right Thoughts and it is a cause that links all X-Meditators.
