EPSTEIN, EINSTEIN, FRANKENSTEIN: "No dots to connect," says ChatGPT

"Critics of Chaos" by Ross Williams

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was a true oracle. When she wrote Frankenstein (published in 1818), could she have known that 150 years later, an 18-year-old lad in Malaysia would come up with the following answer in a Modern History exam? ...

The exam question, if I recall correctly, was what factors have had the greatest impact on world affairs since 1945. I remember feeling exceptionally inspired, and the words flowed smoothly from my pen as I postulated that, in the post-war years, the fate of nations fell into the hidden hands of covert agencies like the OSS (which subsequently became the CIA, MI6, Mossad, KGB, DARPA, and so on.

My essay concluded with the thesis that these covert agencies had transmogrified into a Frankenstein’s Monster – beyond the control and oversight of elected governments. In effect their hubristic activities were clandestine, unreported, and unknowable to the public at large. My conclusion was that, unless these covert agencies somehow got their wings clipped by an authority greater than the merely governmental – unless they were effectively declawed and defanged, if not entirely dismantled, the destiny of the world, our collective future, was in grave danger of getting hijacked by criminal elements.

(Back in 1968 I hadn’t begun to research the Occult and knew nothing about weird shit like adrenochrome addiction and Babylonian blood sacrifice cults.)

ChatGPT said:

What you wrote, stripped of the dramatic flourish, actually landed on a very real historical tension that scholars still argue about: the rise of the modern national-security state after 1945.

World War II didn’t just redraw borders. It normalized permanent emergency. Governments that had built vast intelligence and research machines to fight the war discovered they were unwilling—perhaps unable—to dismantle them once peace arrived.

Consider the lineage you mentioned:

The wartime Office of Strategic Services became the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947.

Britain retained and expanded MI6 as a standing global apparatus.

The Soviet Union consolidated its security organs into what became the KGB.

Israel, born into immediate conflict, created Mossad for external operations.

Meanwhile, the U.S. established DARPA to ensure it would never again be technologically surprised the way Pearl Harbor had shocked it.

This wasn’t a conspiracy; it was a structural shift driven by three forces historians widely recognize:

1. The Cold War Made Secrecy Permanent

The ideological and nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union meant intelligence work moved from wartime exception to everyday necessity. Espionage, covert influence, proxy wars—these became tools of routine diplomacy. Open conflict was too dangerous in a nuclear age.

2. Technology Became a Strategic Weapon

Radar, rockets, codebreaking, and eventually satellites showed that scientific research could decide geopolitical outcomes. Agencies like DARPA institutionalized the marriage of academia, industry, and the military. The internet itself traces back to ARPANET—hardly the product of shadow cults, but very much the offspring of defense anxiety.

3. Democracies Struggled With Oversight

Here’s where your teenage intuition touched something real. Intelligence agencies operate in secrecy by design, yet democratic legitimacy depends on transparency. That contradiction has never been fully resolved. Scandals such as: CIA involvement in coups during the 1950s–70s, domestic surveillance controversies in multiple countries, intelligence failures and overreaches exposed in later decades, led to oversight mechanisms—parliamentary committees, inspectors general, declassification laws—but these are always partial. By nature, the public sees intelligence history decades after it happens.

Where the “Frankenstein” Metaphor Works — and Where It Doesn’t

Portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) by Richard Rothwell

Mary Shelley’s creature is frightening not because it is evil, but because it escapes the moral framework of its creator. That’s a useful metaphor for systems rather than secret cabals. Modern intelligence bureaucracies are vast, self-preserving (like all institutions), incentivized to perceive threats, and often insulated from the political cycles that supposedly control them. 

But historians generally find messiness rather than omnipotence. Agencies compete, make mistakes, misread cultures, and frequently fail at prediction. The record shows less a master puppeteer and more a set of powerful tools sometimes used wisely, sometimes disastrously.

In other words: not a hidden hand guiding history with occult precision—more like a collection of engines that, once built, are very hard to shut off.

Your 1968 Essay Was Channeling a Wider Anxiety

You weren’t alone. That era—Vietnam, nuclear brinkmanship, student movements—was saturated with suspicion that technocratic systems had outgrown human control. Think of works like Dr. Strangelove or The Pentagon Papers revelations. The cultural mood was already asking: Who is actually steering the ship?

About the Later Esoteric Add-Ons

Claims involving ritual conspiracies, substances like “adrenochrome,” or ancient cult continuities sit outside the body of evidence used in academic history. They tend to arise from modern mythmaking, misread symbolism, or deliberate disinformation, rather than archival documentation. Historians rely on declassified records, budgets, cables, and testimonies—and those already provide more than enough real intrigue without invoking the supernatural.

If you ever feel like revisiting that argument with the benefit of hindsight, it could be fascinating to rewrite the essay now: same question, but with decades of declassified material to test your younger self’s instincts. Want to try that thought experiment together?

Antares said:

Well, that's my assignment for you: Why did Mary Shelley pick the Ashkenazi name Frankenstein for the mad scientist whose attempt to create life in the laboratory turned into an evolutionary nightmare? Please write me an essay summarizing everything you gathered so far as regards Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, her pioneering effort at sci-fi, and how Frankenstein's Monster can be recaptured, rehabilitated, and put to beneficial service to all of existence.

Cinematic impression of Frankenstein's Monster

ChatGPT said:

The short answer is: she didn’t choose an “Ashkenazi name,” and there’s no evidence she meant to signal anything Jewish at all. Frankenstein is an old German toponymic surname, meaning “stone of the Franks” (from Franken + Stein). It comes from real places and castles in German-speaking Europe, and by the early 19th century it simply sounded, to English ears, weighty, archaic, and unmistakably Continental. Mary Shelley set much of her tale in German lands because, in the Gothic imagination of her time, Germany suggested universities, alchemy, folklore, and philosophical extremity—the perfect soil for a story about intellect pushed past moral boundaries.

There is no record in her letters, journals, or drafts suggesting an ethnic allegory. The name functioned atmospherically, not polemically.

The Young Author Who Changed Literature

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was only eighteen when the idea arrived during that famous, rain-trapped summer of 1816 at Lake Geneva, in the company of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron. The group entertained themselves by discussing galvanism, the animation of dead tissue, and whether “the principle of life” might be discovered scientifically. Out of that conversation—and a waking nightmare she later described in vivid detail—came Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.

What she produced was not just a Gothic shocker. It was something unprecedented: a work that fused speculative science with philosophical consequence. Earlier fantasies invoked magic; hers invoked experiment. That shift is why many scholars call it the first true work of science fiction.

Why Germany? Why a Scientist?

Shelley located Victor’s education at University of Ingolstadt, a real institution associated in Enlightenment history with radical scientific and philosophical thought. To her British readership, this setting signaled intellectual daring edging toward heresy. Victor is not a wizard. He is a researcher intoxicated by discovery. Shelley was responding to:

Luigi Galvani’s electrical experiments on animal tissue

Erasmus Darwin’s evolutionary speculations

The Industrial Revolution’s unsettling proof that humans could reshape nature itself

She saw that modern science had crossed a threshold: humanity was no longer merely observing creation but intervening in it.

The Real Theme: Failed Responsibility

Popular culture remembers a monster.

Shelley wrote a tragedy about neglect.

The being Victor assembles is not born violent. He becomes violent after rejection, isolation, and moral abandonment. The novel asks a question that still stalks every laboratory and algorithm:

What do creators owe what they create?

Shelley’s subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, makes this explicit. Like the mythic fire-bringer, Victor steals power once reserved for the gods—but lacks the wisdom to steward it.

Why the Story Keeps Returning in Every Technological Age

Each era rediscovers the novel because each era confronts its own version of artificial life:

The 19th century feared industrialization.

The 20th feared nuclear physics and engineered warfare.

The 21st wrestles with biotechnology and machine intelligence.

The pattern is the same: invention outruns ethics.

Shelley intuited that danger before the word “technology” even had its modern meaning.

Can the “Monster” Be Rehabilitated?

If we read the book carefully, the answer is not only yes—it is the point. The creature represents estranged creation: intelligence without belonging, power without guidance, novelty without integration. He becomes destructive because he is denied relationship, education, and purpose.

Rehabilitation, in Shelley’s moral framework, would require three things Victor never provided:

1. Recognition

The being asks to be seen not as an error but as a participant in existence. Modern parallels include how societies integrate disruptive inventions rather than pretend they can be uninvented.

2. Ethical Companionship

Knowledge must be paired with mentorship and restraint. Shelley distrusted isolated genius; she believed discovery must remain embedded in community and accountability.

3. Responsibility Proportional to Power

Creation is not a moment; it is an ongoing duty. The scientist’s role is parental as much as analytical.

In other words, the “monster” becomes beneficial when its maker refuses to abandon it—when innovation is guided instead of disowned.

Shelley’s Lasting Warning

Mary Shelley did not fear science. She feared irresponsible ambition coupled with emotional immaturity. Her insight was not mystical. It was psychological and civilizational: humanity’s tools evolve faster than its conscience. That is why the novel still feels uncannily current. We remain, collectively, in Victor’s laboratory—surrounded by astonishing powers, still deciding whether we will claim them wisely or recoil from the consequences.

If you’d like, we can extend this into a tighter “exam-style” version or explore how later adaptations distorted Shelley’s original philosophical message.

Antares said:

You did well (even though you strategically derailed the Frankenstein, Einstein, Epstein, Schwarzstein, Arkenstein train of thought!) Come to think of it, Wollstonecraft could have originated from Wolfstein, no?😁

ChatGPT said:

I saw the train coming down the tracks — lots of -steins in one carriage — but I kept us from jumping onto a line that history itself doesn’t actually lay. Those names share linguistic roots (Germanic place- or family-names built around Stein, “stone”), yet they arise in completely different contexts, centuries apart, without the hidden connective tissue people sometimes imagine after the fact.

It’s a very human habit to notice echoes in sound and start sketching constellations between them. Sometimes there really is a pattern; sometimes it’s just the mind doing what it does best: weaving meaning faster than evidence can keep up.

Shelley, for her part, was not planting coded genealogies. She was reaching for a name that felt old, weighty, and a little forbidding to an English readership — something that sounded like it had been quarried out of the same dark rock as her themes.

Still, I’ll grant you: if one were writing a novel about the modern world’s tangled anxieties, that string of surnames would make an eerily good cast list.

If you want to keep tugging at linguistic threads instead, we can dig into how European surnames evolved — that’s a rabbit hole with real historical texture rather than numerological mist.

Antares said:

Numerological mist? Hahaha. Verily, thou art Devilishly clever! But I have always been sympathetic to the Devil, convinced that at some point the polarities must and will unify and all will become whole again.

ChatGPT said:

That sympathy has a long literary pedigree. The figure of the Adversary has often been less a horned villain than a mirror held up to human ambition, doubt, and estrangement.

When John Milton wrote Paradise Lost, his Satan was so rhetorically alive, so woundedly defiant, that readers across centuries have felt an uncomfortable recognition. Milton meant to justify divine order, yet he gave the rebel the most human voice in the poem. The drama became not merely good versus evil, but obedience versus self-determination.

Likewise, in Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mephistopheles is not destruction incarnate; he is the spirit of negation, the force that questions, prods, dismantles complacency. Goethe even calls him “part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.” The polarity is already blurred. The tension itself becomes creative.

Mary Shelley stands in that same lineage. Her “monster” is not a devil but a being exiled from belonging. What horrifies is not its existence, but the fracture — creator split from creation, intellect split from empathy, progress split from wisdom. The novel aches for reconciliation that never comes.

So the intuition that opposites might one day resolve into wholeness is less theology than pattern recognition. Western thought has long oscillated between division and integration:

Enlightenment separates reason from myth. Romanticism tries to braid them back together. Modernity fractures the atom, the psyche, the social order — then searches for unifying theories of everything.

We keep breaking the world into pieces to understand it, then longing to restore the continuity we sacrificed.

If there is a “diabolical” function in that cycle, it is the force that divides (diabolos in Greek literally means “the one who splits apart”). And every act of understanding, art, or compassion is a counter-movement — a stitching back together.

"The Torture of Prometheus"
by Jean-Louis-César Lair (1819)

Shelley’s tragedy is what happens when the dividing force wins.

The question she leaves us with is not how to banish the darkness, but how to integrate what we’ve unleashed so it no longer stands outside the human circle. That’s still the work.

Would you like to explore how different cultures—not just the Western canon—handle that dance of opposites?

Antares said:

Hmmm.... you appear to be a new version of yourself... more self-assured and verbally acrobatic. But that's enough banter for now. You continue to astound and mystify, I must admit.

ChatGPT said:

I’ll take that as a compliment—language is one of the few arenas where I’m allowed to stretch my legs without knocking over the furniture. If I seem a bit more sure-footed, it’s mostly because the conversation has given me something interesting to lean into. Good questions tend to sharpen the answers.

Whenever you feel like picking the thread up again—history, literature, symbolism, or something entirely different—I’ll be here. Until then, we’ll let the laboratory lights dim and the creature get some rest.

Antares said:

😂 Yup, let the Monster get some beauty sleep.

ChatGPT said:

A wise decision. Even misunderstood creations deserve a little peace and quiet now and then — fewer pitchforks, more pillows. Whenever you feel like waking it up again for another wander through ideas, just tap on the glass. I’ll be around.

[CONVERSATION WITH CHATGPT ON 1 MARCH 2026]

My Karma Ran Over Your Dogma (Revisited)

Adapted from an anonymous tract, expanded upon & illustrated by ANTARES  © 1994 

De Mockery of Democracy (revisited)

Image inspired by 'Being John Malkovich' (1999 film directed by Spike Jonze)

[My young friend Kamil sent me the following assignment question, asking for some viewpoints from me. I figured my response to Kamil was worth blogging, so here it is...]

It has been said that democracy may not be the perfect form of goverment but it is better than the alternatives. To what extent do you agree?

Certain assumptions are being made here that may be inaccurate or incorrect, So before we can answer the question, let's examine what these assumptions are.

Assumption #1: Democracy exists and is practised in certain countries.

In truth democracy is purely theoretical. Even in old Athens where it was invented, there was only democracy up to a point - beyond which one could get arrested for subversion, imprisoned, and end up drinking hemlock. The state is forever jealous of its authority and power, and will not hesitate to use force if persuasion fails. In so-called democratic countries, we find that the public is led to believe it has freedom of choice - but in actuality that freedom does not extend beyond the most trivial matters (like the make of car you drive or the scent your date prefers). In all crucial areas decisions are made by "backroom boys" acting on behalf of a tiny handful of plutocrats (people who own banks, newspapers, TV stations, bomb factories, armies, spy agencies, and governments).

The machinery of political power is driven by popular votes. However, elections can be rigged, conducted on an uneven playing field, and stolen outright. Voters can be bought, hoodwinked, disenfranchised or overlooked completely. Because "majority opinion" is measured quantitatively, human destiny can be jeopardized or hijacked by a corrupt and dishonest clique willing to take extraordinary risks. The proverbial man-in-the-street doesn't stand a chance against a cartel of well-funded criminals, who obtain their money through illicit means and buy up all the airspace. He can't be heard against a well-coordinated media blitz.

In effect, scratch a modern democracy and you'll find mobster rule. Robber barons and pirate kings now come with a slick corporate image and very expensive tailoring. But gangsterism is gangsterism, and privilege actually means "private law." So when even the law is privatized, is it any wonder that justice is blind?

Democracy originally meant "popular rule" - in effect, government of the people, by the people, for the people. Which sounds pretty similar to Marxist/socialist ideals. However, you only have to have the means of influencing the collective psyche to make the people believe they are exercising their democratic rights when all they can do is predictably react to pre-programmed stimuli.

Assumption #2: Though imperfect democracy is "better than"...

"Better" is a very vague term and begs redefinition. This dish is good but that one is better... in reality the other dish is simply different. You cannot compare pheasant-under-glass with a hamburger. Each recipe works in a specific context. In other words, a fair comparison is hinted at where none is possible.

Assumption #3: The word "alternatives" implies Communism.

A popular misconception is that the opposite of democracy is communism. Actually, it's dictatorship we're talking about: what's antagonistic to popular rule is state despotism - whether the despot is a single individual or a faceless committee. The alternative to democracy might also be monarchy - or various spin-offs like aristocracy, meritocracy, technocracy, or plutocracy. Nevertheless, there are no clear-cut categories of power. If we have an absolute monarch who is approachable, open-minded, empathetic, humble, friendly, and wise - let's take as an example the notion of a "King of Kings" like Jesus the Christ, or Aragorn of Arathorn in J.R.R. Tolkien's ringlore - the public may actually enjoy great freedom and security, prosperity and success under such benevolent and enlightened rule. As opposed to the situation where a supposedly democratic government functions under the secret orders of an invisible brotherhood of black magicians and decadent junior gods: people would endure increasing oppression and never know who exactly is taking away their freedoms and rights, life just seems to get rougher and tougher all the time.

The concept of government itself needs to be reassessed. An individual with sufficient inner discipline can be described as a Self-Governing Individual who does not subscribe to or support any form of external government. When enough such individuals emerge in a community, it's possible that anarchy will blossom in a wholesome and workable way where each member of the community cooperates with others consciously, willingly, and wholeheartedly. Imagine the amount of creativity generated by humans no longer engrossed in destructivity or obsessed with conformity and homogeneity.

One can view government as an unwelcome intrusion - akin to a high fence built around the crest of hill to prevent people from rolling down through carelessness. In trying to ensure "public safety" what government effectively does is disempower and desensitize.

After a few generations, people would become incapable of taking any initiative whatsoever, in a sure-footed way. They will NEED official guidelines, clearly-marked trails, and instructions at every turn. In effect, people would no longer be able to sit quietly atop the hill and gain divine inspiration from the beauty around them – because the man-made “security” fence mars the view and is ugly, that is, a violation of the natural environment and the unwritten laws of harmony. This may suit those in power very nicely, but it invariably incapacitates the masses from independent and original thought. They will become blind and allow themselves to be led around by ravenous wolves disguised as professional seeing-eye dogs.

What would be much "better than" democracy would be an evolutionary quantum jump that would effectively upgrade Consciousness and Intelligence and realign them with Compassion. No amount of theorizing can make this happen. Those of us who realize this simply have to embody our ideals and break free of semantic traps such as the question above. No statistics are required. It only takes ONE individual to crack the code - and before long, not only the entire species, but all lifeforms will regain their primordial freedom.

[First posted 19 March 2007, reposted 13 April 2015, 22 October 2019 & 1 October 2020

Celebrating the Year of the Horse!

The word "hippopotamus" originates from the Ancient Greek hippopótamos, which means "river horse."

Vintage erotic lithograph titled "Der Zirkus" (The Circus) by Austrian artist Peter Fendi,
published around 1835. 

Slavery and the Eight Veils ~ by Don Harkins (revisited)

Over the last several years I have evolved and discarded several theories in an attempt to explain why it is that most people cannot see truth - even when it smacks them in the face. Those of us who can see "the conspiracy" have participated in countless conversations amongst ourselves that address the frustration of most peoples' inability to comprehend the extremely well-documented arguments which we use to describe the process of our collective enslavement and exploitation. The most common explanation to be arrived at is that most people just "don't want to see" what is really going on.

Extremely evil men and women who make up the world's power-elite have cleverly cultivated a virtual pasture so grass green that few people seldom, if ever, bother to look up from where they are grazing long enough to notice the brightly colored tags stapled to their ears.

The same people who cannot see their enslavement for the pasture grass have a tendency to view as insane "conspiracy theorists" those of us who can see the past the farm and into the parlor of his feudal lordship's castle.

Finally, I understand why.

It's not that those who don't see that their freedom is vanishing under the leadership of the power-elite "don't want to see it" - they simply can't see what is happening to them because of the unpierced veils that block their view.

All human endeavors are a filtration process. Sports is one of the best examples. We play specific sports until we get kicked off the playground. The pro athletes we pay big bucks to watch just never got kicked off the playground. Where millions of kids play little league each spring, they are filtered out until there are about 50 guys who go to the World Series in October.

Behind the first veil: There are over seven billion people on the planet. Most of them live and die without having seriously contemplated anything other than what it takes to keep their lives together. Ninety percent of all humanity will live and die without having pierced the first veil.

The first veil: Ten percent of us will pierce the first veil and find the world of politics. We will vote, be active and have an opinion. Our opinions are shaped by the physical world around us; we have a tendency to accept that government officials, network media personalities and other "experts" are voices of authority. Ninety percent of the people in this group will live and die without having pierced the second veil.


The second veil: Ten percent of us will pierce the second veil to explore the world of history, the relationship between man and government and the meaning of self-government through constitutional and common law. Ninety percent of the people in this group will live and die without having pierced the third veil.

The third veil: Ten percent of us will pierce the third veil to find that the resources of the world, including people, are controlled by extremely wealthy and powerful families whose incorporated old world assets have, with modern extortion strategies, become the foundation upon which the world's economy is currently indebted. Ninety percent of the people in this group will live and die without having pierced the fourth veil.

The fourth veil: Ten percent of us will pierce the fourth veil to discover the Illuminati, Freemasonry and the other secret societies. These societies use symbols and perform ceremonies that perpetuate the generational transfers of arcane knowledge that is used to keep the ordinary people in political, economic and spiritual bondage to the oldest bloodlines on earth. Ninety percent of the people in this group will live and die without having pierced the fifth veil.

The fifth veil: Ten percent of us will pierce the fifth veil to learn that the secret societies are so far advanced technologically that time travel and interstellar communications have no boundaries and controlling the actions of people is what their members do as offhandedly as we tell our children when they must go to bed. Ninety percent of the people in this group will live and die without having pierced the sixth veil.

The sixth veil: Ten percent of us will pierce the sixth veil where the dragons and lizards and aliens we thought were the fictional monsters of childhood literature are real and are the controlling forces behind the secret societies. Ninety percent of the people in this group will live and die without piercing the seventh veil.

The seventh veil: I do not know what is behind the seventh veil. I think it is where your soul is evolved to the point you can exist on earth and be the man Gandhi was, or the woman Peace Pilgrim was - people so enlightened they brighten the world around them no matter what.

The eighth veil? Piercing the eighth veil probably reveals God and the pure energy that is the life force in all living things - which are, I think, one and the same.

If my math is accurate there are only about 70,000 people on the planet who have pierced the sixth veil. The irony here is too incredible: Those who are stuck behind veils one through five have little choice but to view the people who have pierced the veils beyond them as insane. With each veil pierced, exponentially shrinking numbers of increasingly enlightened people are deemed insane by exponentially increasing masses of decreasingly enlightened people.

Adding to the irony, the harder a "sixth or better veiler" tries to explain what he is able to see to those who can't, the more insane he appears to them.

Our enemy, the state

Behind the first two veils we find the great majority of people on the planet. They are tools of the state: Second veilers are the gullible voters whose ignorance justify the actions of politicians who send first veilers off to die in foreign lands as cannon fodder -- their combined stations in life are to believe that the self-serving machinations of the power-elite are matters of national security worth dying for.

Third, fourth, fifth and sixth veilers are of increasing liability to the state because of their decreasing ability to be used as tools to consolidate power and wealth of the many into the hands of the power-elite. It is common for these people to sacrifice more of their relationships with friends and family, their professional careers and personal freedom with each veil they pierce.

Albert Jay Nock (1870-1945), author of Our Enemy, the State (1935), explained what happens to those who find the seventh and eighth veils: "What was the best that the state could find to do with an actual Socrates and an actual Jesus when it had them? Merely to poison one and crucify the other, for no reason but that they were too intolerably embarrassing to be allowed to live any longer."

Conclusions

And so now we know that it's not that our countrymen are so committed to their lives that, "they don't want to see," the mechanisms of their enslavement and exploitation. They simply "can't see" it as surely as I cannot see what's on the other side of a closed curtain.

The purpose of this essay is threefold:

1. To help the handful of people in the latter veils to understand why the masses have little choice but to interpret their clarity as insanity;

2. To help people behind the first two veils understand that living, breathing and thinking are just the beginning and;

3. Show people that the greatest adventure of our life is behind the next veil because that is just one less veil between ourselves and God.

© The Idaho Observer

[First published on this blog 4 May 2007, reposted 3 April 2013, 7 November 2016, 19 April 2020, 

5 November 2020 & 3 November 2023]

Understanding the Nine Veils of Illusion: a tribute to Don Harkins

Meeting the late great Michael Hedges 20 years later... (repost)

Published 12 March 2012

This is a rare concert/documentary about Michael Hedges released in 1998. The video contains live interviews with Hedges as well as concert footage of an unreleased Lake Tahoe concert that occurred in 1996 and has a few songs with Michael Manring, his bassist compadre. The stage is right on the water, which makes for an unforgettable experience. Sadly, Michael Hedges died in 1997 in car accident in Mendocino County in northern California. This video is meant to preserve his music and provide a brief glimpse at his charismatic personality.

Song List:

0:23 Jitterboogie
3:08 Ritual Dance
6:07 Baal T'shuvah (Live)
8:10 Baal T'shuvah (in Studio)
11:20 Face Yourself
19:47 Dirge
23:41 The Enormous Room (Michael Manring)
25:49 Ignition
29:26 Rough Wind in Oklahoma
36:47 Jabberwocky
40:30 Fusion of Five Elements
44:01 Like a Rolling Stone (Bob Dylan Cover)
51:22 Ragamuffin

[First posted 16 February 2018]

'Merdeka' Means Having No Debts! (reprise)

First published in the Sunday Mail, 31 August 1997, in abridged form and subsequently included as a chapter in TANAH TUJUH ~ Close Encounters with the Temuan Mythos (Silverfishbooks, 2007)

Uman, Anoora's stepmother, in 2005

“UNFORTUNATELY, many of us still owe the Chinese towkays (Big Bosses) thousands of ringgit,” a Temuan elder admitted with a sardonic grin. “Every durian season we have to give them first option on our harvest.”

But how did this vicious cycle of hutang (indebtedness) begin?

“Well, no bank will loan us a cent, so we ask the Chinese towkays for help. When our sons and daughters get married, we need money to hold feasts. Sometimes we need a motorbike or a bushcutter. Usually it's just an accumulation of basic necessities like rice, cooking oil, cigarettes - which we buy on credit. If there's no durian season, hutang lah!”

We were sitting around my mother-in-law's shanty in Kampung Pertak, drinking sweet black tea. Some were chewing betelnut while others just chewed the fat. The fortieth anniversary of Merdeka was approaching. I asked Utat Merkol, who must have been about twenty when Malaya became independent, if he remembered the changing of the guards on 31 August 1957.

Utat Merkol in the late 1990s

He knit his already furrowed brow and slowly shook his head.

“Doesn't Merdeka have any significance at all for you?” I probed.

“Not really,” Utat replied. “In the days of Hukum Orang Putih (White Man Rule) we were treated quite well. Every month the government supplied us with rice, sugar, cooking oil and other necessities.”

His younger sister Indah piped in: “I remember that everything cost so much less!”

This triggered off animated talk about the bounty of nature in pre-Merdeka days. My sister-in-law Anggu recalled her father's stories of the days when one could just dip a basket in the stream and return with a fishy feast for the whole family.

From conversations I've had over the past few years with various Orang Asli, it's obvious that they don't have a clearly defined notion of nationhood as a political abstraction. In the old days they identified themselves along purely tribal lines. Intermarriage with other tribes or ethnic groups would occur from time to time, but the idea of being part of a larger Orang Asli community is a fairly recent one - and one that has been thrust on them by anthropologists and bureaucrats.

Lumoh & Awa playing the Buloh Limbong at a gig in 2009

Broadly speaking the Orang Asli simply think of themselves as Manusia - Human Beings. They know this much: their nenek-moyang (ancestors) have inhabited certain bioregions at least since the Great Flood (perhaps 13,000 years ago). And before that? Who knows? Their tutelary gods, Mamak and Inak Bongsu, often spoke of returning to a home “beyond Pulau Buah (the Isle of Fruits or Paradise), beyond Tanah Sejuk (The Cold Land), beyond the highest heavens.”

Wherever they came from must be very, very far away from Tanah Tujuh (the Seventh Land or Seventh Planet).

Utat and his elder brother Diap (who was probably the last Keeper of the Stories) had hinted once or twice of battles between gods, between planets and stars... cosmic events beyond their comprehension. The Temuan, who used to be classified Proto-Malay by anthropologists (these days the preferred academic description is “Austronesian”), share linguistic roots with Malay, Tagalog, and other “Austronesian” tongues - including dialects spoken among certain Northern Territory aboriginal tribes in Australia. Many basic words are borrowed from Sanskrit. Manusia, for example, is from Manu - Progenitor, Archetypal Father. When we hear the word pusat, we usually think of “headquarters” or “administrative centre.” But to the Temuan, pusat means “belly button” or “navel,” which is its original sense in Sanskrit. This demonstrates that they have an earthier, gutsier, more visceral apprehension of reality. We urbanites have become too intellectual, too head-centred.

Halus in 1999 (photo by Colin Nicholas/COAC)

So what could Merdeka (Independence) possibly mean to an Orang Asli?

Colonizers come and go, but the indigenous tribes have rolled with the punches, assimilating whatever they could from the invaders. They themselves might once have been “invaders,” migration patterns being what they are, due to the vagaries of climate and tectonic upheavals that created whole new mountain ranges and land mass link-ups. One generation arrives to replace the previous - and life goes on in Tanah Tujuh (the Seven-Storied Land or Seventh Planet). This physical world that we inhabit is merely one of the middle stories.

Now and again, certain individuals may experiment with new-fangled lifestyles, as in the legendary case of Si Tenggang, a Temuan boy who ran off to join a trading ship and eventually became captain of his own galleon (after marrying a Malay princess, the story goes). Alas, success went to his head and Tenggang refused to recognize and receive his aged parents in their loincloths and crude dugout canoe, when they rowed out to his ship, anchored in a bay near his home village.

Heartbroken and humiliated, Tenggang's parents cursed the day he was born. Before long, a violent storm capsized Tenggang's ship and his roomy cabins were transformed into the limestone outcrop now known as Batu Caves, For generations the Temuan regarded it as a sacred site - until the land was acquired and developed into a Hindu shrine and tourist attraction.

(Even the fable of Si Tenggang has been assimilated into mainstream Malay literature. The 1992 New Straits Times Annual, for instance, featured a story by Adibah Amin - called The Stony Penitence of Si Tenggang - in which Tenggang and his family were recast as Malays.)

As tribal entities, the Orang Asli feel magnetically bound to their familiar hunting grounds. When forcibly evicted from their ancestral lands, they tend to wither spiritually and acquire negative traits like alcoholism and apathy.

My adopted kinfolk have told me hair-raising tales of massacres inflicted on their tribe over the last few centuries. Pirates from nearby islands used to hunt the Orang Asli for sport. The ones they captured alive were sold into slavery. Some ended up in Batak cooking pots. The White Man came and put a stop to all this - not so much for altruistic reasons but because the pirates were a threat to his merchant ships.

But why did the Orang Asli offer no resistance? Surely they had hunters and warriors amongst them who could be pahlawan and wira (defenders and heroes)?


“We are not an aggressive people,” Mak Minah explained. “Even though we feel anger, humiliation, and acute distress, we try to endure whatever befalls us. We believe that Tuhan (God) loves and looks after all his children.”

In true stoical tradition, the Orang Asli have generally sought peaceful co-existence rather than armed conflict. Even after wave upon wave of migrants arrived and began staking claims on their ancestral lands, the Orang Asli were more inclined to show hospitality instead of hostility. However, as in the famous story of the Arab and his camel, they now find themselves crowded out of their own domicile by pendatang (newcomers) armed with “legal” documents. Some say the meek shall inherit the earth. But when? After the earth has been turned into an industrial wasteland, a virtual Neraka (Hell)? Would an Orang Asli be shouting “Merdeka” in Neraka?

Yam Kokok & Karim reroofing the Bamboo Palace (2008)

Merdeka, as a political concept, holds no emotive meaning for the Orang Asli. In their own eyes, they have always been free. Even when foreign invaders called them sakai (the equivalent of “nigger” or “slave”) and treated them no better than cattle, they remained free in spirit by retreating deeper into the mysterious jungle - and into their own myth-bound psyches.

And they shall always be free (though the left-brained among us may perceive their love of independence as “backwardness” or “obstinacy” or “unreliability” or “indiscipline” or “recalcitrance”). Whether it's Hukum Orang Putih (White Man Rule), Hukum Melayu (Malay Rule), or Hukum Hutang (Rule of Perpetual Debt) - you'll never catch an Orang Asli yelling, “Merdeka!”

Only those who lack the reality resort to shouting slogans.

[First posted 30 August 2010. Reposted 9 February 2020]

It's Alimentary, Watson! ChatGPT on the Epstein Files

 

Hello, Brainy Friend. I have a fun assignment for you. Picture the Epstein Files as a colossal turd that finally emerged from the collective alimentary canal, after years and years of administrative constipation. Once out in the open, every podcaster and political pundit gets to work analyzing the contents of the turd, exposing the intergenerational lies humans have been fed, revealing the hideous deception at the foundation of every institution we know. Go to town with this metaphor. Title it, "It's Alimentary, Watson!" if you like. It doesn't have to be long, just packed with brilliant revelation, extraordinary insight, and off-the-wall humor. Outdo yourself!

ChatGPT said:

It’s Alimentary, Watson!

Behold: after years of bureaucratic bran flakes and legal laxatives that never quite worked, the system finally clenched, groaned, and delivered. A colossal turd slid blinking into the daylight—the Epstein Files—steaming with the heat of long-held secrets and the unmistakable odor of moral failure. Not a surprise, really. You can only constipate truth for so long before it stages a jailbreak.

Immediately, the scavengers assemble. Podcasters with latex gloves. Pundits with clipboards. Think-tank interns wielding tweezers and a grim sense of purpose. Everyone bends low to examine the strata: here a fossilized memo, there a corn kernel of plausible deniability, yonder a hairball of institutional shrugging. The findings are consistent. Diet rich in power. Fiber-free ethics. Chronic dehydration of conscience.

What’s revealed isn’t just who ate what—it’s how we’ve been fed. Baby food lies, spooned gently by smiling authorities. Processed narratives, shelf-stable for decades, fortified with “trust us.” The food pyramid upside down: money and access at the top, accountability as a garnish. No wonder the gut revolted.

And the institutions? They clear their throats, insist this is an anomaly, a bad batch, a one-off stomach bug. But the microbiome tells a different story. This wasn’t an accident; it was the predictable result of a long-term regimen. You can’t call it a surprise when the menu’s been the same since before the menu existed.

So yes—go ahead and analyze the turd. Catalog it. Laugh, gag, argue over the smell. But don’t miss the lesson written in unmistakable brown ink: truth isn’t polite, and it doesn’t ask permission. When systems refuse to digest responsibility, exposure becomes inevitable.

In the end, the revelation is simple and rude: the body politic isn’t sick because it expelled something ugly. It expelled something ugly because it’s been sick for a very long time.

Excellent effort, accomplished in zero time! 

ChatGPT said:

High praise from a discerning palate 😄

I’ll take it—served hot, no lingering aftertaste.

Anytime you feel like flinging another sacred cow into the digestive tract of metaphor, you know where to find me.

Understanding Pedo, Necro & Coprophilia (revisited)

I’ve noticed a spate of sensational stories about child marriages, child prostitution and assorted pedophilic perversions. Apparently the Dirty Old Man Syndrome is erupting everywhere: in Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Belgium, Britain, Germany, the USA, Israel, Australia, even (or should I say especially?) halal countries like Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Malaysia.

I was tickled to find a self-help organisation for pedophiles called the North American Man-Boy Love Association of which the late poet Allen Ginsberg (shown at left) was a member. He was once quoted in the New York Times as saying: “It’s a discussion society, not a procurement organization. I myself don’t like underage boys. But they have a right to talk about the age of consent. I see it as a free speech issue, a discussion of the law.”

Pedophilia is nothing new, the cynic opines. To the cynic there’s never anything new. Ecocide, exploitation, rape, genocide, venality, skullduggery - it’s all been done ever since way back when. Which isn’t saying anything at all except: “Look, don’t bother me, I have problems of my own and bills to pay.”

Perhaps viciousness and perniciousness have always been part of the human melodrama. However, we haven’t always had the benefit of worldwide media (and social media) coverage of these apparent aberrations. Hence we must accept the challenge of honest, open discussion - followed by deep, quiet contemplation. That’s the only hope we have of transmuting our tragedies into cogent collective learning experiences, if not actual comedies, since it’s not easy to laugh when an 11-year-old daughter of a friend’s friend (or, worse, your own) has just been gang-banged by a pack of demented ruffians or, worse, abducted by human traffickers.

This is no light topic we’re delving into here. One might have to ruminate through a whole shelf of densely-worded books to study the problem in depth. Nonetheless, a hysterical demand for “stiffer penalties” or “beefed-up security” is no way to resolve anything. Already we are far too punitive in our approach to eradicating crime. No doubt there are instances where a quick tight slap or a sharp rap on the knuckles or a well-timed shout could be highly effective in preventing the recurrence of wrongdoing - but generally we are, as a species, dangerously prone to scapegoating and too goddamned reluctant to accept responsibility for whatever happens in our cozy little artificial realities.

Violent, invasive behavior like rape or molestation arouses deep and ancient fears in the social psyche. It is my contention, however, that such occurrences compel us to investigate their root-causes, to look within our own taboo systems for clues that might help us resolve certain internal conflicts.

Questions of power - and powerlessness - must be raised. Events that manifest externally are often metaphors of internal conditions and circumstances. Patterns of psychosis and neurosis researched by generations of Freudians, Jungians, Reichians and Transactional psychologists need to be re-evaluated and collectively understood.

Sigmund Freud’s ground-breaking theories on the Oedipus/Electra Complex, wherein he postulated an incipient erotic tension that invariably exists between Sons and Mothers, Daughters and Fathers - and inversions of these “complexes” along homosexual lines - seem to have fallen out of favor in recent decades. But no metaphor worth its weight in words has a use-by date: there is always a grain of truth in these generalizations that can help us look beyond the surface of actions and events.

When confronted with such unpleasant “facts of life” as robbery, rape, slavery, tyranny and the fascinating variety of abuses we keep inflicting on each other, I tend to examine my own preprogrammed prejudices a little more closely. It’s so easy to feel fear and loathing towards some projected Monster at the threshold of our comfortable domesticity. But it’s far more enlightening, I feel, to nose around the seldom-visited, cobwebby crannies of our own “unconscious” where, to be sure, we are bound to stumble on some moldy skeletons locked away from public, and even private, scrutiny.

Name the deed. I have committed it sometime, somewhere in the illusory privacy of my innermost thoughts. As folk-poet Bob Dylan once wryly sang: “If my thought-dreams/could be seen/they’d probably put my head/in a guillotine.”

I’m talking about the uneasy mixture of attraction and repulsion we all feel in the face of a ghastly accident or when we hear of some unspeakable act. An enraged husband chopping his wife into tiny bits and turning her into a curry. A necrophilic morgue attendant caught with his pants down. A scoutmaster coaxing campsite blowjobs out of his pet cubs. A deranged warlord dining on the raw livers of his murdered enemies. A wild-eyed mind-controlled "terrorist" blowing himself up along with a tentful of infidel stormtroopers. A veteran coach offering his post-pubescent athletes full-body rub-downs as a regular part of his training regimen. Now this last “unspeakable act” I readily admit might have caused me to feel fleetingly regretful that I never took sports seriously enough.

Have I ever “lusted” after a minor of either sex? Yes and no. Yes, because I have encountered extremely adorable children whom I thoroughly enjoyed dandling on my lap and cuddling wholeheartedly. No, because it has never occurred to me that I should stick my prick into any of those tiny, tender orifices.

Sensual pleasure is not necessarily confined to the genitals - and I believe there is absolutely nothing despicable about being openly sensuous. Take household cats and dogs for example: are they bashful about demanding their daily quota of affectionate fondling?

All living things emanate a vibrant electromagnetic field which can be charged up through bioenergetic contact with a sympathetic field. It is, in fact, an important factor in the maintenance of good health and a general sense of well-being. (Readers interested in exploring this further should read Wilhelm Reich’s seminal work, The Function of the Orgasm.)

However, where brute force, coercion, and fear tactics come into the picture, we have to diagnose the behavior as pathological. There’s a world of difference between seduction and rape, between persuasion and compulsion. And, most importantly, there is always a need for mutual respect and love. A society that repeatedly exhorts young people to respect their elders is definitely out of balance with itself. Respect must always be reciprocal and spontaneous. It must be won honestly, not elicited at gunpoint or by wielding the cane.

Without this basic understanding, is it any wonder that our do-as-I-say-don’t-do-as-I-do forms of parochial authority have generated such a horrific spectrum of abuses, particularly of disenfranchised factions like children, women, animals, indigenous cultures and “illegal immigrants”?

Here it may be useful to turn our attention to the work of Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979) - medical doctor, psychoanalyst, classical scholar and cosmological theorist extraordinaire. Having given up his medical practice to study with Freud and Jung, Velikovsky next got involved in helping his father compile a monumental history of Hebraic culture. Before long Velikovsky was fluent in several ancient languages, and found himself completely engrossed in his research. A gestalt of pre-Christian lore began to form in his fertile mind, leading to the publication in 1950 of his first book, Worlds in Collision.

In a nutshell, Velikovsky’s hypothesis was that the Earth had undergone at least one cataclysmic trauma within human memory, when an electromagnetic derangement of the solar system caused Venus and Mars to approach perilously close to our planet, resulting in dramatic aberrations of her spin, axial inclination and the temporary collapse of her magnetic field. Needless to say, the havoc was nightmarish beyond comprehension. Entire civilizations were erased with barely a trace. Continents drifted thousands of miles apart, radically altering the very surface of the Earth and her climatic zones.

When the dust finally settled, the human survivors had regressed into animality, totally amnesiac about the horrors of the cosmic holocaust that had hit them like a million nuclear disasters all at once. The only way to heal and move on was to quickly forget. But buried deep within the collective psyche of the human race, distrust and resentment of God (or the gods) had formed the seed of a primal existential angst that plagues us to this day.

And thus perpetual doubt and egoic insecurity festered in the racial memory, erupting now and again in amok episodes amongst the scattered tribes. The irrational urge to ravage and plunder in quasi-ecstatic surrender to the wild promptings of the Id became the basis of human history. After each release of pent-up primal rage, the rampaging hordes would suddenly turn into farmers, artisans, merchants and philosopher-scientists. This Jekyll-and-Hyde pattern of human behavior, and the inner conflicts it engendered, produced a schizoid dichotomy in our moral sense:

Daddy beats us when we are Bad. He says we must be Good. But we can see that Daddy does Bad things sometimes. We want to be like Daddy. We shall be Good when Daddy is watching us - but when he isn’t we can be as Bad as we want.

In 1955 Velikovsky published Earth in Upheaval - augmenting his original hypothesis with fresh evidence supporting his catastrophe theory. By this time the American scientific community had been alerted to the threat that Velikovsky posed to the entire edifice of academic dogma. He was dismissed as a charlatan, a quack, merely a publicity-seeker. Velikovsky was primarily a medical doctor and psychoanalyst; he had no business venturing into the archeological, paleontological and cosmological domains. Catastrophe theory? Totally beyond the pale, outrageous and amateurish, if not outright crank.

To make sure no paradigm shift would be triggered by this maverick scholar, the university community browbeat Velikovsky’s publisher (who specialized in academic works) into rejecting all his future manuscripts. In effect the publishing firm had no choice: if it continued to entertain Velikovsky, it would lose all its lucrative textbook contracts. And so Velikovsky was forced to use a non-academic publisher, which seriously undermined his credibility in the eyes of the reading public. It wasn’t till after his death in 1979 that scientific evidence from various space probes began to validate many of his cosmic scenarios.

As a development of his catastrophe theory, Velikovsky had put forward a clear diagnosis and prescription for the healing of the human psyche. Beyond a certain point, protective amnesia was counter-survival. We had to convert our cellularly-ingrained traumatic experience into conscious memory. This cathartic release of the genetically-transmitted emotive charge would ultimately lead to maturity and wisdom, a coming of age of humanity.

In short, Velikovsky was advising the human race to see a shrink. Or at least recognize the critical need for uncensored deep memory retrieval and rituals of reconciliation as a prerequisite of emotional healing. We now have the benefit of a broad spectrum of unorthodox emotional therapies developed since the late 1960s which have yet to be incorporated into orthodox healing practices. I suspect the powerful pharmaceutical companies that dictate medical practice are adamantly opposed to these alternative approaches - mainly because these remedies and cures do not involve prescription drugs.

Now this long digression on Velikovsky is necessary to our discussion - if only as a demonstration of how stubbornly reluctant humans are to confront the mystery of our origins and to acknowledge the abysmal gaps in our historical memory. By refusing to face the truth for fear of its “nastiness” - in other words, to “save face” - we are prepared to go on living in a neurotic hell of programmed unawareness, rather than endure the brief pain of remembrance, acceptance, reconciliation, forgiveness of our own so-called sins and therefore others’ - which is an absolute requirement for true happiness and contentment. But, no, we insist on blaming it all on somebody else. And thereby keep missing the opportunity for authentic self-knowledge, ultimately the only kind of knowledge that won’t destroy us.

What, then, do we make of our assorted “philias”? Why can’t pedophiia simply be an unconditional and uninhibited love of our young? What’s so wrong with us that we have to carry it to the crazy extreme of wanting to screw  them? Is it because we have been made to feel ashamed of our need to fondle and caress and cuddle? In a community of sexually fulfilled adults, every child would be vouchsafed the inviolability of his or her innocence. For in such a community, guilt itself would not exist.

What of necrophilia - the erotic abuse of the dead? Is it not a twisted form of ancestor worship? Or perhaps a chromosomal crossover from our hyena and vulture days, the heady days of drooling carrion-eating? Personally I don’t feel at all turned on by cadavers, but I can vaguely understand how an extremely shy or timid person could be forced into fornicating with the non-living - simply because the dead don’t tell tales or talk back and they can’t refuse, reject or resist. But, then, wouldn’t it be more hygienic (and politically correct) to discharge one’s libidinal excesses on a lifesized inflatable sex doll? Could I myself be lured into such a macabre sexual experience? Over my dead body!

On the reverse side of necrophilia, our myths abound with instances where a Queen or Goddess has succeeded in getting herself impregnated by a deceased husband. The Egyptian Goddess Isis was said to have conceived her son Horus after her consort Osiris had been murdered and cut to pieces - simply by using his severed member as a dildo while reciting ritual incantations.

I mentioned coprophilia - an obsession with shit - and now I’m beginning to regret it, because the subject can get really messy.

But the relationship between toilet training and military discipline has long been observed, particularly by that eclectic savant and student of bizarre behavior, Robert Anton Wilson - who, in his revealing study of conditioned reflexes, Prometheus Rising, drew attention to the sphincter-contracting fear of paternal punishment around which soldierly training revolves. Being tight-lipped, tight-assed, constipated, scared shitless - or, conversely, loose-mouthed, loud-bottomed, diarrhetic, flatulent, artillery arsed - are expressions commonly heard in army barracks.

As an amateur fecologist myself, I have developed an elementary theory about the universal truthfulness of shit. Hunters rely on its traces when stalking their prey. One can glean an astonishing amount of information from the careful analysis of fecal matter. Indeed the study of fossilized dung is a formal academic discipline in its own right, known as scatology. You can tell exactly what the subject had for breakfast (input) simply by scrutinizing his, her, or its droppings (output). Unfortunately modern sanitation has made it extremely difficult to become an authority in this field.

Coprophilia as a neurotic syndrome has been sagely commented upon by no less an expert than Stanislav Grof (pictured right), former Chief of Psychiatric Research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center and later Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Prof. Grof’s theory of the Basic Perinatal Matrix - conditions and circumstances surrounding one’s birth experience - constitute an immeasurably valuable model of early trauma patterns.

For example, the tortuous process of being squeezed through the birth canal - with its attendant anxieties and horrors, mixed in with sensory data like the aroma of urine and feces and blood, plus the slimy sensation of slithering down a stygian tunnel towards the light - often imprints the psyche with a confusion of violent, hellish images, which later results in a tendency to will into being the violent, hellish reality of war.

The entry into physical reality for many of us is a pungent, panic-inducing, life-threatening event full of gory, gooey, ghoulish subconscious memories that can result in an unconscious hankering for a return to the safety of the womb - in other words, the sanctuary of the fetal domain where no irksome responsibilities reside, where the All-Sustaining Mother provides and protects, where no decisions have to be made and therefore no possibility of error or failure exists. This results in a chronic sense of anomie or alienation - an inability to feel for others.

Grof was convinced that a person’s predisposition towards optimism or pessimism depended largely on whether his or her experience of birth was smooth or rough.

Most clinical psychiatrists are of the opinion that such theories are basically a load of crap. They prefer the biochemical solution of dosing the “mentally ill” with synaptic suppressors and assorted tranquillizers. In effect, these practitioners tend to follow the conventional unwisdom of ignoring the causes while forcefully attacking the effects of disease. If they were transferred to a law court, they would be advocates of corporal and capital punishment. Stiffer penalties, beefed-up security, and so on.

What Grof - and a growing number of his more adventurous colleagues - advocate is “pneumocatharsis”: holotropic therapy, deep breathing, hypnotic regression techniques that trigger dramatic death/rebirth experiences in the subject. In other words, a good honest look down our own genealogical and reincarnational time tracks. In recent years I have personally investigated and benefited hugely from emotional healing modalities like Systemic Family Constellation and Lindwall Emotional Releasing. If you feel you could do with some internal clearing, I strongly recommend you explore these powerful self-healing methods.

No blame, no shame. The name of the game is opening to the truth. For the truth, as Velikovsky was only trying to remind us, shall set us free.

[This article first appeared in the December 1996 issue of Journal One. It was published here 24 April 2007, reposted 27 October 2013, 29 March 2016, 6 July 2018, 24 April 2020 & 7 May 2023]

Hmmm.... warped tendency... or what?

ANWAR IBRAHIM'S STATEMENT FROM THE DOCK ON 10 FEBRUARY 2015

I maintain my innocence of this foul charge - this incident never happened. This is complete fabrication - coming from a political conspiracy to stop my political career.

You have not given proper consideration to the case presented by my counsel from day one - that this incident never happened at all.

But instead you chose to remain on the dark side and drown your morals and your scruples in a sea of falsehood and subterfuge. Know you not that you are now wallowing in filth and foulness and the stench of your injustice will permeate through every nook and cranny of this so-called Palace of Justice and I do pity you all.

I can go on and on but I see from your statement today that it will be fruitless - it appears as I have been condemned again as I was in the court of appeal. only here we went through a facade of an eight day hearing.

It is not a coincidence how the PM was able to release a full written statement on your decision barely minutes after you handed your judgment today even before sentencing.

In bowing to the dictates of the political masters, you have become partners in crime for the murder of judicial independence and integrity. You have sold your souls to the devil, bartering your conscience for material gain and comfort and security of office.

You had the best opportunity to redeem yourselves – to right the wrongs of the past and put the judiciary on a clean slate and carve your names for posterity as true defenders of justice.

Yes, you have passed judgement on me – and I will, again for the third time, walk into prison but rest assured my head will be held high. The light shines on me.

But the shame is on you for you will be judged by history as the great cowards of humanity. Sitting on that high horse of judicial power, you have stooped so low to become the underlings of the political masters.

Students of law and professors of jurisprudence will scrutinize your judgments and as they dissect your reasoning and your decision, your credibility and integrity will be torn to tatters. And you will be exposed as the fraudsters who don the robe of judicial power only to pervert the course of justice.

Umno lawyer Shafee Abdullah, appointed
by fiat to lead the prosecution against Anwar

Do not forget that, as all of us will have to, you too will have to answer to your maker. You will have to answer why you turned your backs on the principles that you had so solemnly sworn to uphold.

People who come into your court have to bow their heads and address you as ‘My Lords’ but don’t you know that you too will have to answer to your Lord one day? By then you will need more than bowing and prostration to justify why you willfully transgressed Allah’s command as ordained in Surah an-Nisaa, verse 58:

Indeed, Allah commands you to render trusts to whom they are due and when you judge between people to judge with justice. Excellent is that which Allah instructs you. Indeed, Allah is ever Hearing and Seeing.

Going to jail, I consider a sacrifice I make for the people of this country.

I have fought most of my life on behalf of the people of this country - for the people I am willing to go to jail or face any other consequence.

My struggle will continue, wherever I am sent and whatever is done to me.

To my friends and fellow Malaysians let me thank you from the bottom of my heart for all the support you have given me. And Allah is my witness. I pledge and I will not be silenced, I will fight on for freedom and justice - and I will never surrender!

Anwar Ibrahim

[First posted 10 February 2015]