Profane Exegesis: Journal Section on PKD and Brad Steiger etc.

...I’ve just realised I’m writing through Colin Blunstone, he of The

Zombies, on Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone on BBC 6. How my bro and me
loved his Say You Don’t Mind, and I Don’t Believe In Miracles. I’d picked
them up cheap in my early teens. I think it was another member of the
band, as he mentioned “Colin,” unless it was another Colin. A number of
bands have cited their importance, verifying my own discernment, though
I’ve little interest now in those bands that did; The Jam and Primal Scream.
Oh and the Stones, who are of course, excellent, though I’ve never explored
their ouvre in any consistent way. I did read a biog of Jagger though, many
years ago. Fascinating stuff this eh? I once paraphrased the biographer's
quote on him to L, that I (he) like to be 'involved' in the same way he,
Jagger, likes to have someone around, and she took me at my word. A
'fatal' thing to say to a pathological narcissist who abhors any admission of
dependency, as they hate any sign of it in themselves then project that onto
you.
All that intelligence and such negligible insight. And the 'perfect'
demonstration that even though words can be just words, you see how some
people latch onto them to never let them go because they want to keep you
on the hook forever more, in the belief it gets or keeps them off it. Never
speculate aloud with some people. They'll box try and box you in at the
first opportunity. A handy metaphor for everyday life now as the world
becomes one big control freak.
Philip K Dick was aware of this I think, as he indicated in an interview
many years ago, The ego-mind forever searching for weakness and any
scrap of sin it can cherish and keep in safety until the end of your days
while it lives forever, or so it would have us believe. Giles Wembley Hogg
goes Off.

If I die now would I really be happy? Or haver I just allowed the thought of
death to come into my mind in the guise of the same casual question? Shit-
time. It never ends. Take a Girl Like Me. That Calvin, what a guy. I tried
reading some Kingsley Amis many years ago but he didn’t keep my interest.
It would be 'interesting' to read one of hos novels now. I mention him of
course, because CW discusses him at length in his book on the Angries –
The Angry Years – along with many others, such as John Braine and John
Wain who blur into one for me, and I have a couple of the formers novels
and one day may even read them. Room At The Top might be good fun.
CW describes how his fortunes trickled out as his novels became less
popular and he moved from larger to smaller houses until he moved to a
small flat or room in Hampstead. Wilson mentions Joy as having no trouble
recalling the large kitchen in his more prosperous days, and goes on to
quote a journalist who interviewed Braine in Hampstead, describing it as
“gloom at the top,” Later he was having his Xmas dinner at a community
centre with “indigents.”
I can picture the subtext where after mentioning his wife’s apparent envy of
the Braine’s scullery amenities, he ends up in a room and divorced. But he,
Wilson is still with his wife of course, as well as having their own house in
a slightly out of the way location in Cornwall, picked up for a steal shortly
after publication of The Outsider with its no doubt more than adequate
kitchen. The whole book is about how he, CW, is a superior human being
in pretty much every sense, compared to his contemporaries, though he
leaves special praise for Doris Lessing, who, as he says, shares similar
evolutionary preoccupations to his. But this is the bloke who dismissed the
Course as nihilistic as he does in a statement on Henry Miller’s in the book,
perhaps justified in his case. but Miller was also aware that the world is
only a reflection of the mind. And CW uses it in that context so as to apply
it to Braine; (or was it Wain?) rather than for instance look at how having a
millenarian outlook and even belief needn’t be synonymous with passivity,
or as he puts it, negativity. Predictably he sees the Course as “negative.”
He has it upside down. It's the ego-mind that's negative and destructive.
These themes are also discussed in much new agey and channelled writings,
not least Ken Carey’s Third Millennium, though the Course is, as Wapnick
put it, well above anything the New Age has to offer. He doesn't discuss
Ken Carey's books.
My view, for what it's worth, is that the Carey material, channelled also, of
course, is the best of the New Age so far, and almost if not quite, on par
with ACIM itself. It certainly has its amazing and hair-raising moments;
but in a good way. Wilson’s view is fragmented and piecemeal in that he
discussed ACIM in the postscript/last chapter to his book Afterlife, along
with Shirley Maclaine and others, but he’s never made any mention of the
Carey material that I’m aware of and I see this as a pretty standard tack now
and typical of the methodically selective approach, where, because it isn’t
presented more as a whole, you would have no inkling of just how selective
and fragmentary this approach is – and the connections that are there to be
seen – if you take him and the people he does champion at his word, based
on his 'exhaustive ' research as covered in his writing.
And for example, he has a piece on Carlos Castaneda in his book, Scandal,
with Donald Seaman – who also collaborated with him on The Serial
Killers – where he uses inconsistencies in Castaneda’s books to dismiss the
whole of them as peddling fantasies. In other words, he’s picking up on
what might be relatively trivial inconsistencies to dismiss giving the ideas
the consideration they might otherwise deserve as well as influencing others
to do the same of course. In short, he;s using the one to explain away the
other; the strategy of every fundamentally inclined mediocrity under the
sun. Which isn’t to say he is, but this tends to be the level of the
mediocrities who think of themselves as his admirers and supporters and it
isn’t good enough. I mention this because some of the themes Castaneda
uses in his books, such as referring to the 'naugal,' come up in the first
volume in Carey’s series, namely The Starseed Transmissions, where it
talks about the tonal and the naugal, and the imperative to be 'willing to leap
into a new reality.' The theme, as with the later Vision, and of course, The
Third Millennium, is unmistakably and specifically evolutionary, with many
similarities and even precursive themes with CW’s own work, though his
own prescience shouldn’t be underestimated. His theme, that consciousness
leaks energy, discussed at length in A Criminal History of Mankind in 1985,
though perhaps also in his Access To Inner Worlds in ’83, comes up in The
Starseed Transmissions from ’79.
He discusses his friend and contemporary Stuart Holroyd in The Angry
Years, but I’ve yet to come across an account of Holroyd’s Alien
Intelligence anywhere at all in CW's writings; and a quite remarkable
precursor to many of the themes in Carey’s books, published later. There’s
always the possibility CW has discussed it. in his Alien Dawn back in ’98.
It’s in the chaos of my books somewhere. (He only discusses Holroyd's
Prelude to the Landing on Plant Earth – a study of 'The Nine.' He discussed
Doris Lessing’s Sirius books in The Angry Years, as I say. But Robert
Anton Wilson, he of the Cosmic Trigger (1977) and ILLUMINATUS!
trilogies and others, parallels Lessing’s The Sirius Experiments in his
Cosmic Trigger I with PKD’s Valis, and a long interview Dick gave to
Gregg Rickman called The Last Testament, and remarks on the similarities
with his his friend Timothy Leary’s own 'starseed transmissions' in a later
preface in '86, as well as his own experiences.
Nor has CW ever brought Terence McKenna into the equation, though he
would seem to me to have a central part in it. RAW finished his book with
a section on Terence and brother James’ The Invisible Landscape. UK
physicist Peter Russell discussed the book back in the early ‘90’s in The
White Hole In Time, updated and expanded as Waking Up In Time,
available in its entirety on the Internet, as is The Grand Illusion. These
centre around 2012, as does the The Invisible Landscape; then there’s also
the novels of the early SF writer Olaf Stapledon, especially Star Maker, but
also First and Last Men in London which deal with evolutionary themes. It
has to be admitted though, that PKD was preoccupied with themes,
described in Valis, such as the Dogon and dog-headed extraterrestrials he
called the Nommo. who he speculated were perhaps communicating with
him from an off-planet spaceship; an idea he explored at length in the
posthumously published Radio Free Albemuth, and as much the theme of
Robert Temple's The Sirius Mystery, a book which seems to have
influenced a whole number of people in taking the possibility seriously, and
as exposited at length in Phyllis Schlemmer’s The Only Planet of Choice, a
channelled book CW does discuss in Alien Dawn – that humanity is causing
a kind of evolutionary bottleneck – along with the ultra-weird experiences
of Uri Geller and Wilson’s friend Andrija Puharic, as described in his
biography, Uri.
But not forgetting Holroyd’s Alien Intelligence, there’s also Brad Steiger’s
Gods of Aquarius; along with a host of others in Lynn Picknett and Clive
Prince’s The Stargate Conspiracy, where it all gets very sinister. I don't
mean they discusss Holroyd's Alien Intelligence or Steiger's Gods of....
They posit a dark Aliester Crowleyian inspired religion based around
Temple’s description of the Nommo encircling the Earth in sealed capsules,
waiting to wake at some prearranged signal that will usher in a new age of
dominant leadership by 'The Nine, as in Planet of Choice as well as
Puharich’s 'Uri,' where they claim to be the souse of his powers. But
Picknett and Prince’s thesis is that all the indications are that this new
religion – stemming as much from early channelled communications with
Crowley back in the early part of the last century, from these Egyptian
'gods' is fascistic as well as just another form of fundamentalism.
And based on the fear and denial centring around reactions to ACIM and
even Ken Carey, I can well believe it. But it has to be acknowledged there
seems to be an overlap with Carey’s Starseed Transmissions and the
scenarios and events as described in Brad Steiger’s Gods of Aquarius.
There's also an interview with Jean Houston – who wrote the preface to
Carey’s Starseed Transmissions. The Egyptian theme is evident in Steiger’s
book. The main difference, to my mind, and this may be the crux of the
matter, is that the Carey channellings, unlike The Only Planet of Choice,
come in a 'Christian' context, and this seems to be anathema to CW. His
biography on Rudolph Steiner pretty much dismisses the importance of
Jesus in his metaphysics and cosmology. It’s also, as you might expect,
anathema to aficionados of Crowley, but it’s as well to point out that RAW
has/had 0 to say on Carey’s ST, though there is a preoccupation with
Crowley all through Cosmic Trigger 1 and in later books. This seems
almost juvenile to me on all their parts, not least CW and RAW, as the
Course and Carey moves the Jesus/Christ theme on to a whole other level –
turns it around completely.

RAW did write on PKD and The Black Iron Prison of the Gnostics and
Dick's belief that 'the Empire never ended,' and that these are the end times
and Jesus has chosen to make his make his move in our lifetime, and
surrounds the biosphere of this planet; a notion I'm inclined to dismiss as
dualistic. But it isn't necessarily, if one can accept the concept of the fusion
of spirit and matter rather than feeling one has to accept it as a literal
joining.

Before beginning studying ACIM, twenty years ago, I took it for granted
that anyone who concerned themselves with Jesus in any form was as good
as being an idiot. A psychological wet head. Any talk of Jesus or the Holy
spirit was synonymous the Church and churchgoers and that was for the
psychologically deluded. Or is, as CW’s protagonist Gerard Sorme put it
Ritual In The Dark, his first novel, for “the intellectually uncomplicated,”
though I see even that as being inaccurate, strictly speaking, as these people
are anything but, in the sheer complexity of their bizarre projections and
obfuscation of their denial. Not a whole world away from the
inconsistencies I’m describing here.

Brad Steiger does have a Christian approach it seems as is evident in his

updated book The Revelation – a bit too traditionally religious and new
agey for me in some ways, I'm not really into this Pentecostal stuff –
published in 1973 originally. I was still at school at the time; when I
bothered to go, that is. I ordered it in 2007 after reading about it in a review
list in Nexus Magazine. I think the above was written sometime in 2006.
I've just added this and the small extra section on RAW on PKD.
http://www.redicecreations.com/article.php?id=2186