THE PANTHEIST MANIFESTO (Revisited Yet Again)

Annunciation - Mati Klarwein - 1961 - 128 x 88 cm

I CLEARLY REMEMBER that life was a great deal simpler a few decades ago... especially in the 1960s when I was a curious-minded adolescent interested in just about everything, especially the Mysteries. In those days, it was so exciting to read about Egyptian, Andean and Trans-Himalayan Mystery Schools, ascended masters, alchemists, wizards, spiritual hierarchies, Sufi networks, Templar secrets, and whatnot!

Names like St. Germain, Djwhal Khul, Koot Hoomi, Rakoczi, and Morya fired my imagination. When I was 15 or 16 I hungrily devoured books by Lobsang Rampa, Dion Fortune and Dennis Wheatley. Pauwels & Bergier's Morning of the Magicians was a sort of bible to me. Richard Kieninger, writing as Eklal Kueshana, described his stellar initiations in The Ultimate Frontier and invited readers to join his Stelle Community based outside Chicago. I actually wrote to them and they sent me a membership form (which I never filled).

Jane Roberts came out with her Seth books and corroborated many private notions. I longed to be tapped on the shoulder by a beggar on the street who, with a merry twinkle in his eye, would reveal that he was an emissary of some Invisible Brotherhood that had been in existence for thousands of years as Keepers of the Sacred Flame... you know, the sort of Dr Strange comicbook stuff that folks like Drunvalo Melchizedek and Jimmy Twyman report. In short, the 'New Age' was NEVER all that "new" to me - esoteric knowledge was something I grew up on.

Hollywood celebrities like Shirley Maclaine came out of the closet with mystical books (Out on a Limb); box-office stars like John Travolta declared their faith in Scientology; and even country-&-western singers like John Denver got involved with dadfangled new therapies like EST, just as John & Yoko had popularized Arthur Janov's Primal Scream.

And we mustn't forget how the Beatles (and Mia Farrow) had promoted Transcendental Meditation with their visits to the Maharishi's ashram. More recently, author-teachers like James Redfield (The Celestine Prophecy) and Neale Donald Walsch (Conversations With God) broke into the mainstream with their best-selling books and infected millions with a newfound optimism and holographic perception.

Many of us will recall the excitement of discovering that there may be a great deal more to existence than meets the egocentric "I" - that angels, cherubim and seraphim, space brothers and sisters, Venusian bombshells and Arcturian crystal healers might ACTUALLY exist.

And when did I first come across that evocative word, "Pleiades"? I never felt 100% comfortable with the idea of "Sirius" - for some strange reason.

Then there was the widespread buzz over the Zeta Reticulan Greys and John A. Keel's famous Mothmen. In 1991 a muse goddess loaned me a book by Solara and I was introduced to the mysterious Og-Min (which spawned a small collection of Og-Min jokes, e.g., Bog-Minster Fuller of the Intergalactic Og-Ministration :-)... Nibiru and the Anunnaki was a fairly new discovery... perhaps within the last 10 years, after I got plugged in on the WorldWideWeb and had access to more information in a week than I used to have in years.

My point is this: were all my "peak experiences" - times when I felt fully reconnected to Source and at-one with All That Is - simply the synergetic result of my years of reading, thinking, and arcane research?

Do Catholic girls have visions of Jesus and the Blessed Virgin Mary simply because they were raised on this specific pantheon? Does a Hindu carrying the kavadi at Thaipusam inevitably receive messages of healing and succor from Lord Murugan - or might Kwan Yin, Kryon, or Amaterasu come to him instead? Did Mother Teresa model herself after Amaterasu?

And how do Obama, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Blair, Queen E, MJ-12, MI6, Mossad, MK-Ultra, Najib Razak, the Mafia and the Reptilians fit into this dense and elaborate scenario? Are we still playing Cozmik Cowboys 'n' Injuns? Where is Inspector John Lee of the Nova Police when we need him? Has anyone heard from Uranium Willy and the Heavy Metal Kid of late?

Believe me, I've had FAR-OUT experiences since the age of 19. Once, in 1972, Jimi Hendrix materialized briefly in my garden looking like a Mayan galactic navigator (or was it just a side-effect of the psilocybin mushrooms?) I used to have extended telepathic conversations with Frank Zappa, whom I perceived as Intelligence Incarnate. Lest anyone think I only traffic with the Rich 'n' Famous, I occasionally hobnob with garbage bins and lampposts, even toilet brushes - not to mention trees, grasshoppers, and garden shrubs. Does this make me a candidate for the Cuckoo's Nest? Or am I simply way too eclectic in my scientific pantheism?

I've explored tantric yoga and vegetarianism, Rosicrucianism, Enochian magick, Crowley, Gurdjieff, Wilhelm Reich, Tim Leary, John Lilly, Terence McKenna, the Kabbala, sacred geometry, and the Flower of Life.

And now Asha Deane is saying that the Alpha-Omega Melchizedek Order (of which Drunvalo claims membership) is behind a nasty plot to get people to activate their Merkabas in reverse, so that Fallen Angelic Hierarchies can take over their souls! Jim Hurtak is really an Illuminati agent channeling the naughty Jehovian Elohim via his Keys of Enoch. However, Enoch himself is cool and doing his darndest to remain neutral in the Final Conflict between Light and Dark.... Hmmmm.

In truth, I am utterly bewildered by all this metaphysical shit flying around. Some say we must transcend to ascend. Others insist we must get involved on the social and political levels - or lose our genetic inheritance to evil extradimensional parasites. However, I do have a mathematical constant to which I can refer when feeling disoriented: my innermost core is none other than Source Itself!

All that peripheral detail is just an entertaining spin-off from allowing a random factor into the permutation process that makes manifestation possible. No matter what belief system I take a temporary fancy to - or to use a more organic analogy, no matter which philosophical Playboy Playmate I pick as my flavor-of-the-month - I know that what I'm all about is LOVE. Even in my grouchiest state on the worst bad-hair day, I am centered in Universal Love, Compassion, and the Unending Quest for Pure Meaning and Perfect Harmony.

And that is ultimately all anyone needs to be. The rest is just subscription TV with an infinite choice of channels (pun fully intended).

Written 10 May 2003 & published in Magick River's lunatic fringe e-zine, The Moon. First posted 7 January 2009, reposted 16 May 2014 & 15 August 2015.

In Celebration of Love’s Labors Lost (Part 1)

Radha Krishna and the Gopis

As I lean back now and look back on the life path I have taken since I first stepped out into the world, two recurring motifs dominate the pattern of events.

The first is a hardwired impulse to be free – free of all external compulsions (which is well nigh impossible when you happen to be part of a family, and all of us are). But as one whose birthdate adds up to a 5, numerologists say I’m “one of those people who is always striving to find answers to the many questions that life poses; [that I] want to be totally unrestrained, as this is the sign of freedom and independence.” So I’m only being true to my core nature in cherishing my freedom.

Freedom from debt, for a start. I don’t have a credit card, no overdraft, and I have never once applied for a bank loan. The house I’m living in is in my wife’s name and it was given to her when her entire village was relocated several hundred yards upstream on account of the Selangor Dam. So, no mortgage either - although the fine print says the land the house stands on is on a 99-year lease. We have until the year 2106 to worry about having to move.

The second motif happens to be my susceptibility to love. Some live to work, some to eat, some to make money – I live for love.

My first love was at the tender age of 4, when I shared a bathtub with a neighbor’s daughter, who arrived on earth 11 days ahead of me, and later found myself sitting beside her at kindergarten. I remember how we shared little secrets in class. She was curious to know if boys and girls had similar genitals, and neither of us had a clue – so I drew a simple diagram to show her what mine looked like, and she reciprocated, very demurely, by handing me a piece of paper on which she had written the letter V. I wasn’t satisfied with her response, suspecting there had to be more to it, that she was holding back. Then we got separated in primary school – there were no co-ed schools when I was a kid – and didn’t meet again until we were in our early teens, and I was smitten by her luminous beauty which I noticed for the first time.

When I learnt she was in the habit of roller-skating along the corridors of a school opposite my house most afternoons, I decided to take up roller-skating too – and soon became quite adept at it. But we were both too shy to go beyond smiling at each other and I felt totally tongue-tied when face-to-face with her.

So nothing at all transpired until fate brought us together again when we reached fourth form. I was appointed to the editorial board of a science magazine jointly published by my all-boys school and a nearby girls’ school. At our first informal meeting to discuss the magazine, I was astounded by how mature the girls were compared to me at 15. She and her best buddy, my co-editor, were smoking real cigarettes (not the chocolate ones I was familiar with as a kid) and even driving around without a license.

That’s how I began smoking, and soon I was borrowing my dad’s car to drive – at first up and down the compound, then increasingly further around the neighborhood. Working together on the science magazine project gave me a good excuse to start visiting her in the afternoons after classes. She lived conveniently around the corner from my house, within a 3-minute walk, even less on my bicycle.

Several times a week, I’d perch my cockatoo on the handle bar and ride over to her place. She was usually home. We would sit around her airy front porch and chat till twilight. Each time I saw her she grew more beautiful in my eyes. But I just didn’t know how to shift gears from being her childhood playmate to being her beau. 

So things drifted along for a while sweetly enough, but neither of us wanted to make the first move into adulthood, although I occasionally detected a flirtatious or teasing tone in her glances. I just wanted everything to be perfect between us. The thought of doing something clumsy or saying something inappropriate paralyzed me. Much later in life I realized that the abstract notion of “perfection” itself could be the #1 Killjoy Factor in the human universe…

Anyway, many other events intruded that weren’t part of the pattern of “perfect love” and I took them all in my stride as part of love’s learning curve. As my mind drifts slowly backwards in time, scanning for precious memory fragments to rescue from analog oblivion, I become acutely aware of the many-layered nature of experience: in so many instances, I can’t draw a linear timeline marking one event without then wondering when some other event occurred.

For instance, during the years I didn’t see my first love, I enjoyed quite a few other romantic fantasies. I vaguely recall an alphabetic crush I had for a pig-tailed cutie who played the letter M in some kiddie concert I witnessed around 10. I remember a couple of stiffy-inducing dreams with me playing the letter K and somehow showing up the loutish low-class L who stood between us. I never found out her name, but I bet it began with the letter M...

Then there was WW, baby sister of one of my best buddies in whose home I used to hang out all day after school. My own siblings were much older than I, so I never felt the same sort of intense kinship with them. In this household there was a great deal of family interaction. It was an ideal atmosphere for innocent fun and puppy love to flourish: the stirrings of juicy adolescence, the brief but intense thrill of her foot brushing against mine during a game of Monopoly. I was present when her first period arrived, her face flushed as she hurried towards the bathroom.

I knew nothing about hormones and pheromones then. But I enjoyed the undercurrent of irrational desires and the heady sensation of erotic impulses. These weren’t exactly romantic – primal, more likely. Electromagnetic and biochemical, at least. No guilt was attached to these prurient fantasies; nor were they focused on any specific person. Non-specific lust is what I call this syndrome.

Girls were lovely to dream about, but my everyday reality was populated with boys. Since girls were sexually unavailable, we resorted to making lewd jokes about them; but among ourselves, we were comfortable showing off our erections and competing to see who could shoot his load the furthest. There was ample opportunity for experimentation. Staying over at male friends’ houses presented no problems with parents and it seemed natural for us to have temporary crushes on each other without their becoming full-blown affairs.

Being single-minded about anything has never been a habit of mine - which may explain why I never became a virtuoso in any specific endeavor. Looking back, if I had kept my focus on winning the heart of my first love, ignoring other distractions and settling for nobody else, perhaps we would have ended up as a couple. I can’t imagine what married life would have been like for us – but I’m fairly certain she would have compelled me to become a high flyer in the upper income bracket, since it’s clear she had set her sights on a comfortable lifestyle, being what people would consider a trophy wife. As it turned out, she subsequently dated and married a fellow who became an accountant – while I drifted in the opposite direction, devoting my energies to the arts, after a short-lived stint in the glossy advertising game.

Clark Kent look @ 1968

But I’m getting ahead of my narrative. While all this was going on, I began to visit a couple of pretty sisters – one shy and demure, the other outgoing and vivacious – both of whom eventually became integral parts of my life.

When you’re a teenager it’s very important to appear cool – and to visit a young lady on a rickety bicycle is fairly uncool (especially with a cockatoo perched on the handlebar). Since I had convinced my father that I could drive competently, he rarely protested whenever I asked to borrow his car. I had a schoolmate named Johnny who was always on the lookout for hot chicks. He didn’t have access to a car, so he would sometimes tell me about some nice girl he knew who happened to have good-looking sisters – and we’d go visit them in my dad’s car.

That’s how I got to meet Annie, my French kiss instructor only a year younger than I but slightly more experienced. It was because of Annie I decided to quit wearing glasses (which, prior to my first kissing lesson, I had believed to be a requisite accessory since they made one look smarter and older). We were both wearing glasses when the serious smooching began one sultry afternoon – and the collision of our spectacles almost turned the experience into an episode out of some Woody Allen movie.  Anyway, thank you, Annie – for your wonderful coaching which has served me well through the decades.

(In 2011 Annie tracked me down on facebook. Imagine the great joy I felt to be reconnected with her after 46 years. She's moved on from kissing coach to tai-chi instructor.)

[To be continued...]

Originally posted 1 April 2012, reposted 6 May 2016