Alex Grey and the Mind Parasites (repost)

Extracted from a fascinating 19-minute podcast published by Jonathan Zap at ZapOracle...

Alex Grey was in a loft in Boston where a colleague of Timothy Leary had given a group of 15-20 people, most of them quite inexperienced, LSD. Alex took a double dose. The social environment of Alex’s trip was extremely chaotic - some people were laughing uncontrollably, some were vomiting, some were groping other people, and there was no one who was managing the chaos.

Alex began to have an out-of-body experience, and found himself hovering above the weirdness of what was going on in the loft. On some different plane he saw deities drinking from a pool of “electric milk” a “vast lake of timpani,” of “vibrating energy.” Alex described the vision as follows:

“I had a vision of the group soul of humanity as a perfectly circular pool of intense living light. All around the rim of the milky pool were a complex variety of sexual rites, a metaphor for all social interaction. Translucent Hindu deities swooped over the group taking the excessive energy of the shimmering pool and passing through the group as ecstasy and pain. I saw that the reason we were all brought together was to provide a psychic energy feast for the Gods and Goddesses. I saw my heart as the axis of karmic, earthly, and universal energies, transected by and uniting the polarities of male/female, birth/death, good/evil, and love/hate. To maintain a balance of forces we all fed both Deities and Demons.”

This visionary experience eventually became the masterpiece: Demons and Deities Drinking from the Milky Pool.


A Vision of the Top of the Food Chain


The demons and deities were feeding from a pool of “vibratory energetic milk” created from human activities of all kinds, though Alex used sexual coupling to represent human activities in general. I suggested that that the couplings were visual shorthand of human energetic transactions of all kinds and Alex responded enthusiastically to that description. Apparently, the deities were drinking from a vibratory pool of the energetic metabolism of the species so that through the pool they were drawing energy from the entire species.

A reductive way of describing Alex’s vision is to say that it represents the very top of the food chain. The painting, however, is much more than that; it is a revelation of the human form transcending the food chain. Transcendence does not mean removing or floating above something. What you transcend is still present, and the transcendent state includes that which is transcended while new vistas of awareness are added.


Alex’s paintings are “forbidden seeing” - revelations of what is hidden but that the species desperately needs to see. Conventionally we see ourselves as the top of the food chain, but Demons and Deities… reveals this as a delusion convenient to those who harvest our energy. Another realization about this painting is that it is a classic illustration of the alchemical principle of “as above, so below.” We see the same range, if more polarized, of darkness and light amongst the deities at the cardinal points of the mandala as we do in the human couplings that form the perimeter. And there was also a similar dark/light range in the chaotic loft where some people were acting out dark compulsions while Alex was receiving this transcendent vision.

Sexual Chi as Food Source


Alex’s artistic decision to represent all human activities by a range of sexual couplings was no random choice. Sexual chi is a potent energetic food that can be harvested by human parasites and predators and possibly other types of parasites and predators. Orgasms can be viewed as energetic flowers blossoming in the collective human energy field.

The couplings are arranged in a kind of circular spectrum from loving couplings to atavistic, sadistic-looking couplings. Benevolent entities appear to be feeding off the energy of the loving couplings and demonic entities, one of which looks like a devouring vagina, are feeding off of the degraded (sex as a metaphor for power) couplings.

Orgasms, which are energetic eruptions into, and interpenetrations with, the collective human field, vary from the ecstatic unions of loving soulmates to the sadistic ejaculations of rapists. The couplings that Alex depicts in this image can be viewed as a circular spectrum of these possibilities oriented to the cardinal points of a mandala where there are also associated deities.

A Carnival of Lost Souls


The background of Alex’s vision is also interesting and instructive. He was in a chaotic boundary-dissolving experience with a group of people who were predominantly strangers. Socially dense environments of strangers and substances mixing together are likely to default to lowest-common-denominator factors of social parasitism/sexual predation/chaotic acting out of fragmented personalities - what I sometimes call a carnival of lost souls.

Everything depends on who are the particular people in a group that is having a boundary-dissolving experience or ritual. Naïve people frequently forget this. Such people think the ritual is what matters and take all comers, but this can be a disaster!

Generally, I think it unwise to have boundary-dissolving experiences (such as sex and/or hallucinogenic trips) with people you don’t know and wouldn’t trust with your life, because you are trusting your life with them. There are, of course, exceptions to everything and a visionary as great as Alex Grey was able to rise above the experience and receive a powerful vision about human energy and the entities that harvest it. (Though I have a feeling he wouldn’t choose to be in another such chaotic situation.)

Otherwise, I caution people about doing things such as going to a rave with a sketchy vibe redolent of prowling sexual agendas (in other words, almost any rave) and opening themselves to the toxic energy by taking a boundary-dissolving substance. Unless you want to internalize a carnival of lost souls it is probably unwise to blow yourself wide open in an setting of trance-inducing music/lighting and stoned people, many of them on the prowl for parasitic sexual encounters.

An Ancient Gnostic Text on Parasitic Abduction


The power of this image is that it shows those who harvest our energy, and yet at the center of the image is the human empowerment that occurs as we awaken to the food chain. The ancient Gnostics had similar visions and called the harvesting deities the “Archons” (see: A Gnostic View of Mind Parasites). Also, notice how closely the scenario described below parallels a modern alien abduction experience.

(The following ancient Gnostic text is excerpted from the superb metahistory.org website. Here’s the link to the full article.)

LISTEN TO JONATHAN ZAP'S PODCAST HERE.

Alex Grey (left) with Jonathan Zap at Cosm, in New York City

Paintings by Alex Grey

For more background on Alex Grey, go here!

[First posted 24 February 2011, reposted 24 October 2014 & 9 January 2016]

Jonathan Zap on Inner & Outer Riches

Appreciating Inner Riches
By Jonathan Zap
14 November 2009

What good fortune can possibly surpass the value of a rich inner life? Yes, for thousands of years, the earth's resources have largely been ruled by extroverted men of action, but as Mark put it, "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" [Mark 8:36]

Outer resources can be great too — after all, it is only through the grace of outer resources that you are able to read this right now, but the experience only has value if you have inner resources.

Which would be preferable, to be a financially struggling genius or a vacuous billionaire? Most people reading this would probably choose to be the genius, because a genius, even if her outer circumstances are challenged, has great inner riches, but a vacuous person is impoverished no matter how opulent the outer circumstances.

Of course, it would be great to have some of both, inner and outer resources, and most of us do, but if I could only choose one it would be inner resources, because those are intrinsic, and if I don't have the inner resources there's no one there to experience the outer resources.

Often, people with great inner resources underestimate the treasure they have. Even those people, like myself, who value inner resources, still underestimate the blessings and abundance of their inner wealth. We live in a world that through advertisements, and other relentless engines of conditioning, focuses our attention on surfaces, appearances and outer resources. The message that underlies every one of the millions of advertisements you have seen is that outer resources are the key to a good life.

If only you had the new pill, the shiny new gadget, or indispensable service, only then would you have the good life. For example, Subaru says, "The All-New 2010 Legacy. Feel the Love. Bigger and better, the 2010 Legacy is one dynamic drive. Feel the difference starting at $19,995.*"

If only I had the All-New Legacy, then I would feel the love, then I would be bigger and better, but I don't have the $19,995* to obtain such a love. Since I don't, I'm going to have to settle for the inner feeling of love. Unable to obtain the love of a new SUV, I will have to settle for loving and being loved by people, and on my death bed, I will have to settle for that legacy, knowing that the love of the 2010 Subaru Legacy eluded me.

Research in Motion (Blackberry) says of their new gadget, so elemental it is called Storm - "Touch it. Love it. Share it." Here is another lover, beckoning me, inviting me into its stormy depths. If only I can commit to a contract with Verizon, this lover, so ready for me to touch it, to share with it, could be mine.

And I do love gadgets, and sometimes they really do make life better, in fact, I already own a Blackberry, and it is a great gadget, it allows me to talk to people I love with better sound quality than other gadgets I have owned, but the value of that is due to my inner resources, my capacity for love, and the inner resources, the capacity for love in those other people.

But what if I could replace my Blackberry, which is not All-New, with the more loving, more touchy-feely, Storm II, but at the cost of my inner resources, would I be better off? Suppose I had both the Storm II and the All-New 2010 Legacy so I could text while driving, but this was at the cost of my inner resources, so I could only send instant messages like, "Whad up? r u hot?" would I really be better off?

No advertiser will sing the praises of inner riches. And yet with inner riches, the world has higher definition, has better colors, better audio quality, and the potential for a type of love so profound that it even surpasses the love of cars and phones. With inner riches I have something that is worth sharing, and can build my own legacy of relationships and creative works.

People who visited J.R.R. Tolkien found his house to be depressingly ordinary and middle class, but what inner riches he had! Tolkien created new languages, cultures, races and worlds. Tolkien called fantasy writing "subcreation."

Nietzsche said, "If there were gods, how could I bear not to be a god?" The consumer culture gets you to say, "If there is a new gadget, how can I bear it not to own such a gadget?"

I say, "If there are subcreators, how could I bear it not to be a subcreator?" If it is possible to have the inner riches to give birth to whole worlds, the inner riches to find portals and multitudes within, to generate artistic creations, empathic intuitions and new revelations, how could I bear it not to have such inner riches, such magical fertility? What car, what phone, even a touch screen phone, could possibly compensate me for the loss of such inner riches?


Outer resources can be great, but they can never replace the value of your inner kingdom. Consider this a propitious time to appreciate your inner riches.

Jonathan Zap, Interdimensional Traveler

"Interdimensional Passport" ~ collage by Jonathan Zap (1990s)

Cosmic Orgasmologists: Alex Grey and Jonathan Zap

THE INTERDIMENSIONAL TRAVELER'S CODEX
by Jonathan Zap

At all costs, the interdimensional traveler must never surrender multi-incarnate identity and essence to the Babylon Matrix, or any other such matrix. Since so many readers are most familiar with the hideous strength of the Babylon Matrix, we will give it particular emphasis in this Codex.

From a thousand thousand angles, the dark magnetisms of the Babylon Matrix would love to pull travelers into the wrong ends of telescopes. Essentially, the Babylon Matrix has a tunneling effect that can easily shrink your incarnation until it is like a twisty wormhole burrowing into the festering tissues of a rotten apple. When you choose the wormhole over the rabbit hole your incarnation shrivels and descends like the slow intestinal twisting of an endless, monotonous colonoscopy, winding its way down the wrong end of a telescope.

The Babylon Matrix seeks to remake you in its own image. It would like to play you out as a tragicomic retread, the six billionth remake of Honey, I Shrunk the Interdimensional Traveler.

Teal People are funkier than Real People (photo: Jonathan Zap)

The Babylon Matrix churns out remakes by shrink-wrapping hominids into stock characters. It would love for you to be a frat boy, a homeboy, a drama queen, a geek, a couch potato, a yuppie, a workaholic, a celebrity, a celebrity stalker and so forth. Surrender to its shrinking rays and you might find yourself living out your incarnation as one of these diminutive caricatures, a skin job with a limited shelf life.

In the Eighties, in the early hours of a smoggy and overcast Monday morning on the Cross Bronx Expressway, I first saw what would become a ubiquitous bumper sticker. It read, “I owe, I owe, so off to work I go.” It was as if the veil had pulled back right there on the Cross Bronx Expressway, and something I wasn’t supposed to see, one of the underlying black magical spells, actual source code of the Babylon Matrix, suddenly became visible in the manifest realm.

"Parallel Journeys" ~ collage by Jonathan Zap

What potency such spells of darkling magic have! A spellbound victim, laboring under the power of malign enchantment, discovers the spell, the actual contract the devil made him sign in blood, and yet cannot break from it. There it is, the devil’s contract, turning slowly in the spinner rack of a convenience store, rendered word for word onto self-adhesive vinyl. The victim purchases this perfect copy of the spell that rules him and attaches it to the bumper of his car where he sees it every day, and yet he never awakens from its power.

"Interdimensional Traveler" - collage by Jonathan Zap

An interdimensional traveler must never surrender to such spells! These spells are swirling around us like sheets of self-adhesive shrink-wrap spun by a tornado. The tornado is a dark and smoky twister. Spinning within the twister are newspaper headlines, faces, fragments of video, sound bytes of neurotic conversations, glossy magazine torsos---a swirling shrapnel of sticky cultural memes. Lose your footing and the twister rips you out of Oz, out of agrarian Kansas, out of all the infinite places you could be, and shrinks you into an anxious meat puppet, stuck in traffic, worried about being late for the florescent-lit cubicle, unpaid bills and debts stinging like pale scorpions at your shrunken kernel-like mind animated by coffee with non-dairy creamer, kept afloat by serotonin specific reuptake inhibitors and propelled by spell-induced fears.

Is there an engine driving the twister that eludes us, adding invisibly to its torque and stickiness? The interdimensional traveler will at least keep that an open question. He knows that there are other worlds than these, and who can account for all the forces that interpenetrate the Babylon Matrix?

Certainly there is no ambiguity about the existence of the agents of the twister, the enforcers and minor black magicians of the Babylon Matrix. They are all around us, uttering their obvious and yet potent and insidious spells from school yards, televisions, street corners, classrooms, boardrooms and bedrooms, from the thousand thousand blind alleys of the Babylon Matrix.

Jonathan Zap earns his stripes as an intrepid explorer of ontological rabbit-holes

The interdimensional traveler must not step through the wrong ends of telescopes! The interdimensional traveler must not let anxious voices, inner or outer, hurry them down narrowing corridors. The interdimensional traveler must not step onto the conveyor belts of degrading and dreary timelines!

God as the Ultimate Narcissist (self-portrait by Jonathan Zap)

Some foolish interdimensional travelers will perceive these injunctions through the exciting, intoxicating and scintillating distortion fields of the archetype of the eternal youth. These archetype-possessed travelers will see the injunctions of what not to do as an infinite license to indulge, and though they emulate Peter Pan on steroids, they end up as flabby Peter Pans with kidney damage, divorcing the Babylon Matrix only to marry flaccid Never Never Lands where obese lost boys play video games in their mothers’ basements. The path of the interdimensional traveler is not a license to indulge, it is a space that opens when the imagination of the eternal youth and the impeccability of the Warrior meld. It is a path that demands prodigious will and discipline. If you try to follow the path of the interdimensional traveler without will and discipline, you will end up as a pathetic lost boy of some sort, sucking weakly at the soured edges of the Babylon Matrix, caught in a grey limbo where embittered contempt for the realm of shrink-wrapped, spell-driven drones melds with a parasitic dependence on the fruits of drone labor.

Mr Zap getting his crown chakra refurbished

Portals open for the traveler on a mission of compassion who is aligned with his true will. Different portals may open for a dark traveler possessed of and by a dark will. Still another set of portals open for the young fool traveler who may, for example, step through the wrong end of a kaleidoscope. Certain intentions beckon certain matrices, for better and for worse.

Interdimensional by Herban Mama

An interdimensional traveler must be a Warrior, must have a moral purpose, and must be aware of all the shrinking rays that press upon us. The price of freedom for the interdimensional traveler is eternal vigilance about the sticky enchantments that would like to bind us to the Babylon Matrix and turn individualized travelers into hordes of automatons and hungry ghosts. To step across the event horizon you need to molt the many layers of malign enchantment encasing your soul.

Go then, there are other worlds than these...

[GET COMPLETELY ZAPPED @ ZAPORACLE!]

Interesting read: Zapped by the Blogospheric Multilinkverse

Zapped by the Blogospheric Multilinkverse

Folks, meet Jonathan Zap (above) - one of the brightest, most articulate, and most thought-provoking holistic thinkers I've come across (and perhaps also the most narcissistic and neurotic too - but that only makes him more human and, therefore, more accessible!) Here's what another amazingly articulate and intelligent visionary has to say about Mr Zap:

Rob Brezsny (left), whose Free Will Astrology column appears in 140 newspapers, described Jonathan Zap as a "Visionary Philosopher and Dream Worker Extraordinaire." In his Free Will Astrology Newsletter he wrote:

THE BEST DREAM WORKER I'VE EVER KNOWN

Over the years, I've had the pleasure of working on my dreams with some fine dream workers, but recently I discovered the best ever. His name is Jonathan Zap. Highly intuitive, schooled in the wisdom of archetypes, and really smart, Jonathan has helped me crack the codes of some of my major dreams. His cost is quite reasonable, too. I exuberantly recommend his services. (He's not even paying me to say this. I'm simply motivated by the desire to share his treasure with my readers.)

NOTE FROM JONATHAN ZAP: The following blogpost was loosely inspired by a 2012 conference I participated in where I got to spend quality time with some brilliant people like John Major Jenkins, Richard Tarnas, Stanislav Grof, William Henry and several others. Some of the best lunch and dinner conversations I can remember.

NEXUS 2012
Jonathan Zap © 2009

May 31, 2009, early hours of the morning...

I find myself standing on a murky surface looking toward the dark rift at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. I am thinking about the galactic alignment of 2012, and more particularly about the conference I have just attended on 2012.


But now I think even more particularly about the fact that I have been recruited to write about this conference, and now I feel like I am tumbling down the wrong end of a telescope, and my ever more particularized thoughts narrow and splinter:

What exactly should I write about? Should I meticulously and laboriously thank and recognize and appreciate all the amazing people that were at the center of this conference? Should I... what? Recapitulate everything that happened?

As I think these frantic thoughts I see the creative muse staring at me with the corners of her mouth drooping. She has the sullen look of an old, stubborn peasant woman who has put in a full day in the fields, has worked from dawn to dusk, and is now being asked to carry a basket of stones on her head and walk sixteen times around the block. The look she gives me is the telepathic version of an old, stubborn peasant woman saying, “What the fuck is your problem?” Except that she’s not saying it in an old, stubborn peasant woman’s tone of voice, but in a voice that is more like James Earl Jones as Darth Vader speaking in synthesized baritone from within his breath mask. Or, more precisely, like Vader’s voice slowed down and warbley, a voice recorded on crinkled magnetic tape playing at slightly uneven speed on an old reel to reel tape recorder. It is, in other words, a fell voice of power, a voice of hypnotic and uncanny command, and I have no choice but to obey such a voice.

So no, no way am I going to write any of that stuff that splintered my mind to even think about writing.

Instead I look back toward the dark rift in the Milky Way. Somewhere, cloaked and spinning in that dark rift is a singular object. But this singular object is a non-object, a black hole, a no-thing of unimaginable power, stranger than you think, stranger than you can think.

I had always thought of this strange, attractive no-thing as a really black sphere. It was so black that it made regular black look like white. But now they are saying no, it’s not spherical, it’s toroidal, it’s a coital portal as well as a ring of such fell power that it can give birth to and devour a galaxy. It’s a ? Who knows what the fuck it is? The story keeps changing. But whatever it is, this ?, this no ring of fell power, this hyperdimensional toroidal on galactic steroids, this whatever it is, it is starting to line up with the horizon line of my world, and that feels like it is effecting my world in massively, massively parallel ways.

But what is this world? I look down at the murky surface of the world. My feet are covered in what seems like colored fog flowing all around me. And there is this strange sponginess and humming beneath my feet.


This world is still young and unformed, molten and chaotic, a world where things have not yet crystallized and differentiated. It is a murky world, but out in the murk there are moments when the fog seems to clear and I see that there is a fine webwork that extends outward, outward to the vanishing point of my vision. I am standing on this webwork, and it is a humming and elastic webwork. It is a webwork made of ethereal filaments, filaments that sparkle, and scintillate with motes of light, an intricate jewelry of lights in all directions.

Obviously this is not earth that I stand upon, this is not that all too familiar sphere that some call “Gaia,” a sphere that is so riddled with issues and problems, a sphere that is burdened with the heavy luggage of millennia of history, a sphere both organic and machine, increasingly machine, a troubled sphere, a sphere with many issues, a sphere that you could still live on, but living on such a sphere involved a self-to-sphere relationship that is high maintenance to say the least. No, no, this is not that sphere that I am standing on. Standing on the earth sphere is an unmistakable feeling, a heavy, heavy feeling where a thousand-thousand worries gnaw at your mind like pale scorpions.

The sphere I stand on now is not heavy at all, it is light and elastic, for this is the Blogosphere, and on the Blogosphere things are mostly unformed and chaotic, and there is only the merest suggestion of gravity, just enough to keep you from flying off into cyberspace. This is a sphere on which you only plant cut flowers, because flowers without roots are the only kind that can grow here. because this is a sphere without roots, a sphere where the gravitational field of the past is extremely weak and vanishingly subtle. After all, how much gravity can you expect from a massive aggregation of ones and zeros flowing through a webwork?

As I gaze out at the dark rift from my position on the blogosphere I realize that I am living on a sphere where there is little history, and almost no rules. On the Blogosphere there is no six thousands years of patriarchy to structure things, no rule masters telling me what to do, no norms to regularize things.

The only explicit rule on the Blogosphere is to blog, and “blog” is like it sounds, it’s unformed, it’s wet, sloppy and rubbery. It’s like the way a pirate’s brain feels when he drinks too much grog, it’s blog, like the way an amoeba is blog. The only implicit rule of blogging is to be massively self indulgent and self referential and go on at agonizing and irrelevant length like a garrulous drunk reciting Vogon poetry.

But actually I am still hoping to break that rule, I am still hoping to be relevant , I still plan to keep my commitment to blog about 2012 Now - Empowering the Transformation.


And so I ask the Blogosphere how to deal with my perplexity, the problem of how to write about this since the muse does not want me to laboriously recount events or appreciate all the many people involved. And the Blogosphere replies instantly:

“Links, links, links. It’s all about using links.”

And now I understand, I don’t have to describe these people because I can just keep throwing up the link: 2012 Now - Empowering the Transformation. And if people follow the link they will find biographies and the biographies have links to everybody’s websites, and those sites describe these amazing, brilliant people so much better than I ever could, and so there is no need for me to describe them at all, no need for me to say that Stanislav Grof, for example, seems like a wizened, psychonaut lion approaching the winter season of a long and fulfilled life. No, I don’t have to embarrass myself with stuff like that because of links, the endless availability of links, the endless convenience of links, links that I can get to do almost all my work for me, links that could take me anywhere and everywhere.

And using links isn’t even lazy, it is actually even weirdly appropriate because this is a case of form following function, because this is what the conference was, a massive nexus of links, links between participants, links between many minds, and hearts and spirits. And this massive link nexus has made all sorts of new links in my mind, and refurbished and excited old links, and my mind got to link with other minds, and to propagate its own nexus of links, and to be part of a greater abundance of links, a massive redistribution of link wealth.

And now that I think about it I realize that we are actually made of links, that’s what DNA is, that’s what a brain is, that’s what a molecule is, what a multiverse is, its links, it’s not turtles all the way down, it’s links all the way down. And not just down, but up, and in every direction, the multilinkverse. And the multilinkverse is like a fractal, like a hologram, the small part recapitulates the whole, and whether you look microscopically, or macroscopically, all you see are links, links extending to the vanishing point of human comprehension.

So now I know what I’m going to write about. I’m going to write about the links that lit up in my mind while I was at the conference. This inner link approach seems self referential enough to satisfy the implicit rule of the Blogosphere that I be both amorphous and egocentric. But it also seems possible that the inner links will find links in others’ minds, and what was numinous to me, might be numinous to others, or at least relevant.


Or maybe I won’t do that, maybe I’ll let people reflect on the links that lit up in their own minds, and people who weren’t there can get the DVDs and experience their own ecstasies of heightened linkage. So maybe I’m done, I’ve already written over 1,500 words after all, and am two days under deadline. This is a blog, so its boundaries are rubbery and amorphous, I could add more, or make changes at any time, every time I read through it I make changes, to observe a blog is to change a blog.

And so perhaps a blog is an artifact of galactic alignment. It is a medium that arose during the zone of alignment, and it is somewhat indeterminate, it is able to mutate in infinite ways that confound patriarchal systems, it is a portal aligned with the galactic center, a changeling object metamorphosing within a massive nexus of links. And so the medium of the blog is the message, and the analogue of the conference, a massive and metamorphic nexus of links shimmering and scintillating in an indeterminate space of possibilities.

STANISLAV GROF ~ THE HOLOTROPIC MIND