The hardest part about keeping track of these energy transformations is keeping it going past the first step. Once the ball gets rolling things happen so fast that it’s almost impossible to remember what has happened, let alone describe something so ethereal. So let’s go in bits and pieces.
All that stuff I wrote about Metallica is a memory of a really horrifying experience I had at one of their shows almost 20 years ago, when they got the whole crowd chanting “Die! Die! Die!” with their fists pumping in the air, lights sweeping the crowd, frighteningly reminiscent of film footage of fascist rallies, and I had a horrifying flash on the basic power of society — the power to command obedience. I asked a bunch of people after the show why they were doing that, and none of them could really answer me, although there was something along the lines of wanting everything bad in society to die, which is kind of a crap answer and at the time I thought it was basically a copout. At the time I did think Metallica were ugly thugs, especially since a little while later an old woman got kicked to death in the stairwell of her apartment building and the paper said the perpetrators were chanting Metallica lyrics (though you can’t believe everything you read in the papers, and really you can’t blame artists if their fans are assholes). I’m older now and I try not to make those kind of judgements (unless I’m really pissed off). But while I was writing I was going back in time, digging up a horror story . . . It was a kind of trance in which I could feel my attention descending into a “lower” level of consciousness.
At this point there are three possible routes: describe what I was personally going through at the time and why this experience hit such a nerve, go through all the observations on the magical symbolism of political power, or get back to what happened to my personal energy after I wrote those last posts.
Maybe none of them would be necessary if I could understand objectively the “taste” of heavy metal music, the way it enters into the body and directs the attention toward a certain energy state. Then maybe I could figure out what the spiritual purpose of it is, how it benefits the individual. Because I am sure that it is somehow necessary for a person’s development to indulge in that kind of powertripping.