X-Meditators vs CIA. part 7
Dream Wars, the Last Part for now
The first time I heard Ben Bentov explain how the universe works I was thrilled by his ideas. I immersed myself in them like you’d put on a whole new set of clothes to see what it feels like.
I’m still in the dressing room, haven’t taken his ideas off and haven’t bought them yet.
I’m also still watching what I now see as the Gateway Project 2.0, brought to us by TikTok. What if 1% of the TikTokers who try out the program develop paranormal skills? You’d think we would have heard more about their amazing new powers if it was happening, unlike CIA, where you wouldn’t.
From watching the videos, I believe the program is too difficult for most viewers.
What I do know is that Ben always spoke of the training needed for serious Astral activity as a program of purification. The meaning of that is specific, embodied in his understanding of higher frequency ranges always present to be downloaded and decoded.
‘Pure’ doesn’t mean conforming to a set of Ethical or Political Standards. It means free enough from distracting deadweight that pull our attention down and away from higher-level transmissions.
I have distracting deadweight, but less than I had a year ago and much less than I had ten years ago. I am meditating with more presence. The right thing to say (Right Speech) just happens on its own for me more.
I am uncertain about Astral Warriors.
One of the many people who is not uncertain about Astral Warriors is Ben’s daughter, the author Sharona Ben-Tov Muir.
Her mother and Itzhak Bentov divorced and her memoir, “The Book of Telling,” (2006) is subtitled, “Tracing the Secrets of my Father’s Lives.”
She is an accomplished writer, a published poet and scholar, and a professor of creative writing. She knew her father, maybe even idolized him in his early years in the U.S., when he was known as ‘Invention-a-Minute’ Ben.
Later on, when he became something like ‘New Age’ Ben, she felt that he had descended into “a form of madness.” To her, in his version of spirituality …
“ … meditation didn’t just improve your mind, it helped you evolve into a being with a more skillful ‘observer,’ a higher consciousness.
Those two words? They still make me sick.”
She is not uncertain.
She believes that her father’s work in the measurement of meditation’s effect was his undoing and that, as someone with great losses in his life and as someone who had never fit in — he was seduced by semi-celebrity into a world that isn’t real.
That was her unequivocal view when she began tracing his secrets and as far as I know it still is now.
However …
The work her father did in Israel is so extraordinary and ties so deeply to the present moment, no matter when you are reading this, that the people she brings to life in her book do not share her certainty.
The work Itzik Ben-Tov did in the early years of Israel was a secret, to her and to most people. She sets out on a journey of discovery that is revealing in ways she did not expect.
She learns historical facts and events involving her father that turn the clock back to the impossible times in Palestine after the World War 2 was officially over but before the current state of Israel was established. Jewish people there were not allowed to have weapons, but they kept coming anyway, by any means possible, because there was no where else to go.
When Egyptian tanks attacked, which began in 1948, Jews were defenseless. A small group of DIY scientists set about developing an anti-tank defense, secretly and with almost no money. Itzik Ben-tov, the only one who was not highly educated, brought not just his inspired mechanics touch — but his firm grasp of matter and energy at any level.
The concept of Hollow Charge ballistics, also called Shaped Charge, has been understood for centuries.
The idea is concentration of explosive force and the advantage of a gun with a barrel over a fire cracker is obvious. Concentrating enough force to penetrate a tank is another matter.
Swiss engineer Henry Mohaupt demonstrated an anti-tank weapon in 1939 and is now credited as the inventor. Making one from scratch that could be fired from anywhere was once again, another matter.
As the image shows, a propelling charge [E], drives its force into a steel core [B] with its lead inlay [D], guided all in one increasingly-constrained direction by the Hollow Point [C].
Safecrackers know that a directed explosion will make a dent in a safe and since the safe isn’t moving, they can work the dent with more until it’s open. Anti-tank forces don’t get a second chance.
The first Israeli trials failed.
It was pure genius to realize the copper layer [A] is the key, with the soft metal continuing to lead the whole explosion into the hard metal of the tank. After that, everything changed.
As Itzik Ben-Tov’s daughter puts it:
“ … soft copper shoots out at about 5 or 6 miles per second like a molten bullet. Thus copper, which is soft, can actually penetrate steel armor.”
The Hollow Charge penetrates steel because it is soft, and as such it can keep moving ahead, creating a Hollow, still directing the force of the explosion. It was fired from a special gun, called the Loretta (after Loretta Young), mounted to a jeep for quick deployment. Unlike anything anyone had ever see before.
The idea of something soft leading already-focused force into something stronger was a Big Idea.
It also may be why the State of Israel, for better or for worse, made it through its first year at all.
Where do non-obvious ideas like this come from?
Sharona Muir interviewed several people who knew her father or worked with him. She quotes one of them as saying that, “An R&D project should be very clear but a little impossible. After all, what does the mind do?”
She asks, he answers, “It searches in a multidimensional space.”
Directing force by following nothing in a soft jacket is also the idea Ben brought to meditation. We synchronize the energies in our body when we follow nothing (just notice), wrapped softly in an object of meditation. Like a mantra.
We may say now that in deep meditation the human being and the planet system start resonating and transferring energy. This is occurring at a very long wavelength of about 40,000 km., or just about the perimeter of the planet. In other words, the signal from the movement of our bodies will travel around the world in about one-seventh of a second through the electrostatic field in which we are embedded.
Stalking the Wild Pendulum, p. 41
I have been in states of deep meditation, in no small part because of Ben’s encouragement a long time ago.
The deeper the practice takes me, the more I feel at peace and the more I feel like one neuron working in a bigger brain. I like the feeling of being connected to something larger but I understand that not everybody does.
I see Sharona Muir as a deep thinker and a great writer. My second time through The Book of Telling, admittedly a short book, was more thought-provoking for me than the first. The third time was the best.
I realized she is asking all the same questions that I have been.
She brings experiences and the deepest emotions that no one else does to the process. It feels to me like she went into the journey of discovery angry and absolute about the paranormal. Those emotions haven’t gone away and they are the strongest voice I hear in the book.
Also in the book, if not in her view of the world, she has let other voices have a moment. She met a few people on her journey who see her father and the universe a bit differently and she lets them speak. Softly, briefly.
That’s how I’ve always spoken about Ben in the years since he died. Softly, because I’m not making an announcement, and briefly, because there’s too much to say otherwise.
I never stopped meditating, even though I didn’t always bring my full self.
I’ve wanted to ‘make a difference’ all those years and at least my foolish goals got me off my ass and out doing things with people and when you look back from semi-old age, you see that’s all life is and all it could ever be.
Now I can do whatever I want within the constraints of a compromised immune system in a world on unpredictable lock-down with nothing even remotely adequate for the task at hand.
Looks bad.
I’ve seen, ‘looks bad’ before, but not like Ben saw, ‘looks bad.’
I have tuned myself better over the years, but not like Ben tuned himself. I have had paranormal experiences, softly and briefly, but I have not knowingly been in the spaces Ben and Ram Dass talk about.
Calling these spaces ‘higher’ makes them seem like an exclusive club I didn’t get invited to. I think that is part of the reason Sharona Muir says higher consciousness makes her sick.
I don’t like it either and I felt a lot of it swarming around Ben.
She would have seen then-me as one of the enablers pumping up her father with fake self-esteem. I saw myself as one of the lower level people in the crowd, knowing I was about as non-attached as chewing gum on a sidewalk. It wasn’t a great feeling and since I thought Ben knew my mind, I was sure he knew I felt that way.
One of the themes in all of the different tracks I have been loosely following — Spiritual, Secular, and CIA— is Speed, and linked to speed, Scalability.
I don’t care how long ‘it’ takes, and I’ve cared less as I’ve meditated more and have less years ahead of me. I’m not trying to accomplish anything although I was once. I meditate now because I like doing it, especially when I don’t like doing it, which is when I like it the most.
There are Spiritual, Secular, and especially CIA people who are hung up, in my opinion, on Speed.
I think there can be short-term ‘gains’ of some functionality, based on cognitive technologies that accelerate some of the skill development that comes naturally from meditation over time.
I think there is also a cost to speeding things up and I’m not sure what that is because I don’t think it’s always the same. Sometimes it might make people act in ways that get them labelled, ‘mentally ill.’ Sharona Muir sees her father’s last years that way.
Ben spoke like a perpetually inspired mechanic in a way that Spiritual, Secular, and CIA people could all take in, up to a point. They could each hear something addressing their realm of needs. He described mechanisms, which everybody craves.
Craves is attachment. Mechanisms themselves are an attachment to a form of explanation and certainty.
Ben drew me in a long time ago because he appeared to be offering clear explanations for processes I believed in and hoped for. A lethal combination.
Looking back, he is the most uncertain person I have ever known and his model has been my working hypothesis for almost 50 years. I am mentioned in the Acknowledgements of Stalking the Wild Pendulum with a few of my friends as ‘knowers of the relative and absolute.’
I appreciate it, but couldn’t you say that about everybody? I don’t think there are levels. I think there’s only noticing the contents of your own experience and then going back inside the soft jacket over nothing.
Original Documents & Sources
Paranormal Briefing, RAND Corporation, 1973
Analysis and Assessment of the Gateway Process, Lt Col Wayne McDonnell, 1983
An Evaluation of Remote Viewing, American Institutes for Research, 1995
Intelligence Resource Program: Star Gate, Federation of American Scientists, 2005
