A few days ago I wrote that "most" of the people I knew in Grand Rapids whom I met who were working along the same lines as I was were garbage.  That’s some kind of error, whether a silly exaggeration on my part or just a typo.  I should have said "a lot" of the people I met who claimed to have an "alternative spirituality" were garbage.  Or possibly "enough that the whole concept of alternative spirituality lost all its glamour for me so that I no longer give your average wiccan or new ager any more automatic credit for being a good person than your average non-magical person, and in fact some people who have alternative spirituality that claims to be of the light are actually digging themselves vile holes which they’ll never get out of and you have to watch out or they’ll pull you in with them."

But of course my lousy experiences came from my own lousy energy, and my own lousy taste in people.  And this is in fact a lesson that is very obvious to many people a lot sooner in their experience than it was for me.  So I can’t really complain because just about everyone I know who’s tried to break away from the mainstream gets suckered into some kind of nonsense.

So where is peace in this?  How is writing this teaching peace?  Because it certainly felt good to slam that old city, even though there’s nothing objectively wrong with it, I guess, just my own bad memories.  And expressing that negativity did in some way allow me to make a psychic break with the past that I probably wouldn’t have made just by thinking positive thoughts.

It’s the age old question of course, the one that’s always frustrated me about spirituality.  If we’re supposed to be without resentment, why does the Great Spirit bother to allow this resentment in the first place?  

However I do know that our thoughts create our future and so I will now entirely avoid brooding over this question and focus on happier things, allowing my subconscious to work on it a bit.

Well Gordon here is my answer to that question:

I believe that there is an energetic state that human beings can attain which includes mastery of the physical existence, telepathy, and the knowledge and conversation of beings in higher worlds.  Some people call this "The Ascension", some "Nirvana", some "Nagual", or "Self-Realization".  

 Many people who have attained this state have tried to describe it and lead others to it, but they can never fully succeed because the world is designed to be irrational.  Since everything is known to be possible in the spirit world, which is generally a world of light and peace, spirits have to have special places to come in order to experience the impossible.  This world is one of those places.  Idiotic suffering and delusional misery are part of the purpose of this plane.    

Paradoxically there are also divine and semi-divine beings who come here specifically to alleviate this suffering and dispel these delusions.  They never succeed fully because that would end the game.  But while no one can ever succeed in alleviating another’s spiritual suffering and delusion, many people can and do succeed in alleviating their own once they have received a certain amount of assistance.  Unfortunately they can never really explain how they did it. 

And furthermore there are beings who come here for entirely different reasons and good luck to them all.  

So "war" and "peace" and "enlightenment" are just words to me.  They’re only ever useful in a narrow context and for limited purposes.  

Now in this context I can say that I personally want peace because I don’t want to get robbed or shot or anything.  I want to have tons of money and enormous amounts of free time to read all the books I want.  So, yes, there’s definitely the appearance of conflict going on but I’m sick of it and I want out ASAP.  And whether you want to call it Thelema or The Art of Allowing or the Peace that Passeth Understanding I’m perfectly happy to let everyone else do whatever they want while I go about my business.  

I got stalled in my studies of A Course in Miracles because it was too intense and had too many occult implications.  It’s difficult to place it in an occult context but I think it can be done.  At this time I am willing to accept that the "Ascended Master" Jesus (though I hear that they don’t like that term anymore) gave the raw information behind this document to its authors, although one must still allow for the usual inconsistencies and contradictions that seem to be inherent in channeled information.  

Unfortunately my mind (which I truly hope is the illusion that ACIM says it is, and which I truly pray the Holy Spirit will relieve me of) is full of antagonistic thoughts about the pathetically backward spiritual condition of the people around me.

I’ve spent my life around antagonistic people.  I love to watch action movies and horror movies which are all about people sucking each others’ blood and stuff.  I love rock music about being pissed off and ironic and lustful.  In some ways I feel as though to give up antagonism would be to give up being an American.  And that doesn’t even include the nagging memories of that long list of horrible people I’ve known personally.  

I suppose an important step towards peace would be acknowledging that although I am overjoyed with my life, although I am continually in a state of bliss and companionship with the spirit world, I am still often brought down by sheer disgust at many of the people around me, while at the same time indulging in a melodramatic lust for psychic warfare and the coming apocalypse.  Obviously it’s something I need to get over since I know from personal experience that all of life is Divinely Synchronized and there is some kind of plan for us to be following which involves forgiveness and light.

I’ve been studying the Faery Kingdoms for the last week.  I’m developing a theory that humanity has failed in its spiritual development because we have ignored these kingdoms and they are now plaguing us with diseases and disasters as a last resort.  I do believe that over the next hundred years we will probably experience a massive reduction in population due to warfare and a general loss of interest in being a human being.  

O God, how does a person teach peace when he believes that a war is coming which will annihilate much of our civilization?  

It’s too difficult to be clear about this now.  I can only record my feelings and hope for a solution to come.

Man, I am so peaceful tonight.  I had a gong bath at Synphoria and then I went to Chi! Ka! Go! at Yoga Now and had a dijeridoo bath in addition to dancing.  I was radiating Genny’s patented golden flame to the masses and someone even said they saw  it.  Last week I channeled this same energy to Ken at Alchemy Arts and it was a palpable reality for me of the intensity that Carl Jung would call "psychoid".  It’s a very specific trance that I am developing and I am so grateful to have clarity about this after ten years of struggle trying to perceive her.

Of course I have a lot of unpeaceful thoughts too.  I thought a lot about Grand Rapids and all the horrible people I knew there.  I knew some good people but a lot of the people I thought were working along the same lines as I was turned out to be garbage.  I wish I was exaggerating or being bitter, but it’s just true.  You can check the police records, or even just go by there and use your own intution to realize what a psychic toilet that place is.  I’m so glad I left all that behind.  

— I wrote the above yesterday but didn’t publish it because I didn’t feel it was teaching peace.  I have a lot of bad memories in my life.  But now I’ve decided to have faith in the process and allow the alchemical transmutation to occur as I continue to write.

I was just at Woodfield Mall and Armani Exchange had a Valentine’s Day display in its window composed of three black and white photos, each more than ten feet high, of couples getting up close and steamy.  It’s a very familiar kind of image so I had to do a double-take to be sure of what I saw — that there was only one hetero couple, flanked by boy-boy and girl-girl pairs.  How wonderful to see a display like that in the most mainstream retail center in the West Suburbs.  

I also saw a teenage couple dressed as old-school punks, in tartans and leather and high-tops and spiked mohawks literally 2 feet high.  

Thirty years ago homosexuality and punk rock were shocking and horrifying.  Now they are almost completely mainstream.  Who even knows whether those two kids even identify themselves as "punk"?  When I was in high school during the 80s, kids dressed like that at Pekin Mall would have known they were sending out an open invitation for Metalheads to fight them.  Maybe these were just having fun on a Saturday night.

Peace can come from knowing that dramatic changes can happen in our society in a matter of "only" a few decades.  Although I must admit I still want to gloat that the struggles of conservative religionists will ultimately prove to have been meaningless and resent the fact that so many people still have to struggle so hard against what seems to be the American love of stupidity for stupidity’s sake.   

But I’m learning not to think about people I don’t like, and as much as I sympathize with the struggles of the oppressed I know that the less I think about oppressors the better.  

Still, how can I really claim to be teaching peace when I have no explanation as to why some people have to struggle?  

There are times when reading ACIM that I feel a very powerful presence within me and everything makes sense.  Then there are other times when I can’t read it because I know it’s going to mess up my good mood.  There are certain things I enjoy about being an inverted misfit occultist.  I love having weird and ancient books to read that will lead me down arcane paths of knowledge.  I love piecing together the bits of occult history like a jigsaw puzzle.  I love looking for the occult imagery in popular films and tracing the shamanic significance of popular culture.  

For instance Angelina Jolie, the kalki-avatar of Hollywood, has a new movie coming out called "Salt".  Salt, of course is one of the principal elements of alchemy.  Will we find alchemical imagery in this film about shifting identities?  Who can know?  What an exciting drama!  I found both "Beowulf" and "Wanted" to have serious occult implications for the collective unconscious.  

I suspect Dakota Fanning will be some kind of new psychic "it girl" for the younger generation.  "Push" and "Twilight" are both loaded with transformational virtues.  If she keeps going with roles like that she may get "tagged" with that kind of aura.

In fact the entire "Twilight" phenomenon may be the concluding chapter in the vampirization of America that began with Anne Rice thirty years ago.  As far as I know, Lestat was the first popular vampire to listen to rock music and kill only bad guys — the first one who was actually a hero and not a villain.  Now that vampires are known to play baseball and shop at Abercrombie and Fitch it’s probably going to be considered politically incorrect to call them monsters.  

But to return to the subject of peace — I know that continuing to read ACIM will give these things a new and different significance.  It’s certainly my ego that loves all this knowledge.  Peace is something else.  Peace is a kind of connectedness and occultism is, almost by definition, a kind of separateness.  

Now certainly I personally couldn’t begin to accept the Course without a firm foundation in occultism and Jungian psychology.  It’s only because of all the weird things that I’ve experienced down other roads on this ego-journey that I can begin to accept this document as valid.  However the Holy Spirit is beyond the rational — in fact transforms the rational into the irrational in order to lead us to the super-rational — and therefore through this alchemical process of teaching peace, I can expect to find some sort of Temperance there.  

So I began this entry and, just like yesterday, I got lost in some thoughts and now I have to come back and fulfill my purpose.  Teach Peace!

Peace comes to me from knowing that our world is ordered by divine beings of infinite compassion who have been known in all cultures.  They are the Celestial Bureaucracy, The Secret Chiefs, the Mahatmas, the Aeons . . . that these popular books and films that reach us through the mass media are like shadows of some original dream — the collective unconscious — but that this dream is somehow ordered and that although some transformations may appear to be nonsensical or even horrifying at first they will ultimately bring us greater love.

Peace comes to me from knowing that even though I don’t have a clear answer about peace today, I believe this process will work and that I will probably get an answer later.

Normally I would ignore the impulse to write anything, as I have been ignoring most such impulses for years.  I gave up on this kind of self-expression long ago.  I am, however, struggling to teach peace which is of course an inherent contradiction — hopefully one I will have overcome by 2011.  According to A Course In Miracles, our egos are false creations, and the Holy Spirit enters into us to work with these creations and transform them so that they can ultimately be (I think) dissolved into the reality of God’s Kingdom.  Initially there is an absurd struggle to overcome the confusion between ego and reality.

How closely does the action of this Holy Spirit resemble the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel of Thelema?  Or the Beloved Mighty I Am Presence of the "I AM" temple? Or the "Alignment With Source" of the Abraham-Hicks teachings?  It is all yoga of one kind or another.  

Although I think the word yoga is a little overused and tends to evoke people who just exercise a lot and eat well.  

I am teaching peace because as I wrote this I got distracted from peace a few times, allowing my thoughts to intrude, but I keep pulling myself back.  From my current perspective, peace is an objectively real state of the human aura.  It isn’t just a mood or a state of mental calmness.  It is indeed a state of alignment of subtle energy bodies which allows the transmission of energy from higher planes.

It may be a hindrance to think of peace as "the end of war" or "the end of conflict" because that leads one to focus upon conflict as real, which it is not.  Though of course if everyone was transmitting subtle energies through alignment there would not be any apparent war or conflict.  

And of course the statement "conflict is not real" depends upon the contextual use of words.  

I’m working my way through the workbook of "A Course in Miracles" this year.

According to the Course, the Holy Spirit’s second lesson is, "To have peace, teach peace to learn it."  So even though I don’t feel peaceful very often I am going to try in 2010 to somehow teach peace with my blog and my web presence in general.  I’m going to gradually revamp my entire image.  By the end of the year perhaps I will be able to practice what I preach.  Of course I shall never abandon my love of Aleister Crowley, action-movie bad girls, voodoo sex magic, and rock nostalgia, but I am now summoning from the universe some sort of balance point among all the conflicting elements.  

I’m taking a class in channeling from a professional of over 25 years and I am truly channeling Genvieve in front of people for the first time.  For a while (even since before I completely believed she was real) I’ve been able to channel her somewhat via the keyboard, chatting with Jer and Kathleen and others.  Years ago I did a bit of theatrical channeling of some other spirits, and of course there were those insane nights with Agent COCO that no one but God will ever know about, but this is the first time Genny has come through with such clarity and been fully verified by those with professional-quality auric vision.  I’m very gratified to have succeeded fully after 14 years of strenuous effort, plus three or four before that of struggling with Qabalism.

When i was in high school and everything in my life was thoroughly unpleasant and I was surrounded by unrelenting evil, Pink Floyd put out a song that went, 

"A dream unthreatened by the morning light
Could blow this soul right through the roof of the night
there’s no sensation to compare with this
suspended animation in a state of bliss"

If only a dream could extend beyond sleep, I thought, then I could believe in love and put up with this ugly horrible species I belong to.  It would mean there were higher worlds that aren’t this bad, where the people aren’t so shallow and hateful.  It would mean that humanity’s continual failure to live up to its ideals could be forgiven just one more time.

Well, 20 years later I do indeed have dreams that are unthreatened by the morning light.  I see the future and learn about people at a distance.  I have my proof that there are higher worlds and what’s even better I never had to be normal — not once!  

So there is indeed peace to be found at the end of such a struggle, hovering above the roof of the night.