Alan Watts on How to Fake Your Way as a Spiritual Teacher
via James Ford
Patheos
May 30, 2009
The Trickster Guru
by Alan Watts
I have often thought of writing a novel, similar to Thomas Mann’s “Confessions of Felix Krull,” which would be the life story of a charlatan making out as a master guru – either initiated in Tibet or appearing as the reincarnation of Nagarjuna, Padmasambhava, or some other great historical sage of the Orient. It would be a romantic and glamorous tale, flavored with the scent of pines in Himalayan valleys, with garden courtyards in obscure parts of Alexandria, with mountain temples in Japan, and with secretive meetings and initiations in country houses adjoining Paris, New York, and Los Angeles. It would also raise some rather unexpected philosophical questions as to the relations between genuine mysticism and stage magic. But I have neither the patience nor the skill to be a novelist, and thus can do no more than sketch the idea for some more gifted author.
The attractions of being a trickster guru are many. There is power and there is wealth, and still more the satisfactions of being an actor without need for a stage, who turns “real life” into a drama. It is not, furthermore, an illegal undertaking such as selling shares in non-existent corporations, impersonating a doctor, or falsifying checks. There are no recognized and official qualifications for being a guru, though now that some universities are offering courses in meditation and Kundalini Yoga it may soon be necessary to be a member of the U.S. Fraternity of Gurus. But a really fine trickster would get around all that by the one-upmanship of inventing an entirely new discipline outside and beyond all known forms of esoteric teaching.
It must be understood from the start that the trickster guru fills a real need and performs a genuine public service. Millions of people are searching desperately for a true father-Magician, especially at a time when the clergy and the psychiatrists are making rather a poor show, and do not seem to have the courage of their convictions or of their fantasies. Perhaps they have lost nerve through too high a valuation of the virtue of honesty – as if a painter felt bound to give his landscapes the fidelity of photographs. To fulfil his compassionate vocation, the trickster guru must above all have nerve. He must also be quite well-read in mystical and occult literature, both that which is historically authentic and sound in scholarship, and that which is somewhat questionable – such as the writings of H.P. Blavatsky, P.D. Ouspensky, and Aleister Crowley. It doesn’t do to be caught out on details now known to a wide public.
After such preparatory studies, the first step is to frequent those circles where gurus are especially sought, such as the various cult groups which pursue oriental religions or peculiar forms of psychotherapy, or simply the intellectual and artistic milieux of any great city. Be somewhat quiet and solitary. Never ask questions, but occasionally add a point – quite briefly – to what some speaker has said. Volunteer no information about your personal life, but occasionally indulge in a little absent-minded name-dropping to suggest that you have travelled widely and spent time in Turkestan. Evade close questioning by giving the impression that mere travel is a small matter hardly worth discussing, and that your real interests lie on much deeper levels.
Such behavior will soon provoke people into asking your advice. Don’t come right out with it, but suggest that the question is rather deep and ought to be discussed at length in some quiet place. Make an appointment at a congenial restaurant or cafe – not at your home, unless you have an impressive library and no evidence of being tied down with a family. At first, answer nothing, but without direct questioning, draw the person out to enlarge on his problem and listen with your eyes closed – not as if sleeping, but as if attending to the deep inner vibrations of his thoughts. Conclude the interview with a slightly veiled command to perform some rather odd exercise, such as humming a sound and then suddenly stopping. Carefully instruct the person to be aware of the slightest decision to stop before actually stopping, and indicate that the point is to be able to stop without any prior decision. Make a further appointment for a report on progress.
Facebook: Colonialism 2.0
by Tony Cartalucci
New Eastern Outlook
24.12.2014
The Western media has attempted to portray Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitious plan to get every human being online as altruistic at first, but later revealed as simply what could be called “profitable empathy.” In reality however, the truth is much more sinister, with Facebook already revealed to be much more than a mere corporation run by Zuckerberg and his “ideas”.
Facebook is the pinnacle of social engineering, an online operant conditioning chamber – also known as a Skinner box – that is being used to track, trace, document, and manipulate half of the entire online population. Despite users attempting to utilize Facebook to connect and communicate with individuals and organizations of interest, Facebook has turned its features against users, insidiously manipulating their timelines to show selected posts and updates while “soft censoring” others to manage public perception.
“Studies” have even been published proving the effectiveness of Facebook’s unethical social engineering. In one study, the emotions of users were successfully manipulated by selectively posting only negative or only positive posts from individuals or organizations on users’ contact lists.
A report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) titled, “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks,” stated in its abstract that (emphasis added):
We show, via a massive (N = 689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. We provide experimental evidence that emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people (exposure to a friend expressing an emotion is sufficient), and in the complete absence of nonverbal cues. Not only are the findings troubling – illustrating that Facebook possesses the ability to influence the emotions of its users unwittingly through careful manipulation of their news feeds – but the invasive, unethical methods by which Facebook conducted the experiment are troubling as well.
In another experiment Facebook manipulated the news feed of some 2 million Americans in 2012 in order to increase public participation during that year’s US presidential election.
Facebook was also an official sponsor of the US State Department’s training program preparing political subversion across North Africa and the Middle East years before the so-called “Arab Spring” unfolded. The very activists audiences around the world were told “spontaneously” sprung up across North Africa and the Middle East were in fact trained, funded, and equipped by the US State Department and various corporations including tech giants Google and Facebook years beforehand.
From Internet Troll to Psychopathy Expert: The Con-Artistry of Thomas Sheridan
by Joe Quinn and Niall Bradley
Sott.net
Sun, 19 Aug 2012 00:20 CEST
Compared to, say, ten years ago, a lot of people today are aware of and talking about psychopaths. On the one hand this is encouraging, but on the other, it’s a little troubling. It is heartening to see awareness of psychopathy breach the mainstream frequency fence here and there, but the signal-to-noise ratio, as with all knowledge relevant to the growth and survival of decent human beings, remains high on the ‘noise’ side. We see ridiculous studies in the news portraying psychopaths as curable and articles making the rounds about how not having a Facebook account may indicate that someone is a psychopath. We’ve also seen Twitter being touted as a tool for ‘spotting psychopaths’ and, just today, news that the US justice system is considering acceptance of biological evidence that someone is a genetic psychopath in court with a view to using it to mitigate the sentences of criminal offenders. The reasoning being that psychopaths can’t help being psychopaths, that they lack free will and therefore they bear diminished responsibility for their crimes.
Well, yeah, that’s exactly why they need to be held under lock and key permanently.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised that the burgeoning awareness of psychopathy has been vectored away from the truth of the matter in this way. This is an information war after all, so if the psychopaths in positions of power gauge that the ‘psychopath awareness train’ has left the station, they would naturally be working around the clock to load it with nuclear capabilities in the hope of derailing it, or at least sending it down the wrong track. The name of their game is to misinform people about what psychopaths are really like by trivialising and obscuring the issue: hence the proliferation of junk science that claims psychopaths can be cured, that psychopathology is a harmless evolutionary adaptation, or that psychopaths can be spotted based on analyses of their Twitter feed and Facebook page (or the lack thereof).
A case in point is an author who has written a couple of books of the issue. When Irish artist Thomas Sheridan published Puzzling People: The Labyrinth of the Psychopath in 2011, we initially felt that, overall, Sheridan had done a decent job of synthesizing the available information on psychopathy, which is largely walled in by academic jargon, and putting it together for a wider audience. Four of his five core characteristics of a psychopath were sound (except for ‘high testosterone’ – there’s no correlation between psychopathy and baseline testosterone), but we had reservations about some of the ‘secondary characteristics’ he listed as markers for psychopathy, and worried that they tended towards ‘spotting the psychopath’ based on visual cues, such as being able to read the condition in someone’s eyes.
Those of you who have read Dr. Robert Hare’s Without Conscience will remember that the best psychotherapists are fooled from time to time, even when they practically have a clipboard in front of them with a patient’s history that is stamped ‘Probable Psychopath’! Yet here was, Thomas Sheridan – a new author on psychopathology – stating with absolute certainty, in a book that provided no citations, that “when one becomes skilled in recognising these traits and pathologies, psychopath-spotting becomes relatively straight-forward.” [p.10]
Really? That certainly hasn’t been our experience. Sheridan also claimed in Puzzling People that “all psychopaths get it in the end.” [p.108] Not only is this not true, it must run counter to reality given that the vast majority of people are totally unaware of their existence – at least, they are limited to an awareness of psychopaths as mass-murdering sadists, whose numbers are tiny relative to the psychopathic population as a whole. Our research actually puts their number at around 6% of the global population (and that may even be conservative), so the overwhelming majority of the planet’s 420,000,000 psychopaths live from cradle to grave undetected, leaving a swathe of emotional, social and financial destruction in their paths. And this is to say nothing of the massive destruction wrought by the actions of psychopaths in positions of power in governments and corporations who almost invariable get away with mass murder.
Much of Sheridan’s Puzzling People read like it would not have been out of place on the Cassiopaea forum, so despite our reservations about some of Sheridan’s claims, we nevertheless endorsed his book and encouraged SOTT readers, family members and friends to pick up a copy. From correspondence with the author, we learned that he had been a big fan of our work for several years. He has also been a member of our forum since 2009, when he introduced himself as “Transsociopathica, Demonic Sociopath Entity Destroyer”.
Where Puzzling People was a compilation of the research and insights of others, Sheridan’s second book, Defeated Demons, Freedom from Consciousness Parasites in Psychopathic Society, is enriched with his own ‘original’ material. The long and short of it is that Defeated Demons is ‘not even wrong’.
In a section called ‘The Self-Raised Predator’ (p.24), Sheridan proclaims that the fact that psychopaths are born into this world is “propaganda by the pathologically-driven, genetics-obsessed elitist faction that psychopathy is ‘all in the genes’… a myth peddled by prescription-happy psychiatrists… and creating enormous anxiety among ordinary people.” Raising the issue of psychopaths in power abusing research into genetic psychopathy is one thing; throwing the baby out with the bathwater by stating that there is no genetic component to psychopathy is something else altogether. Whether or not Sheridan realised it, by doing so he discarded the core problem of psychopathy altogether. By definition, psychopaths are born, not made. According to all of the psychiatrists and psychologists that have spent years researching the topic, and psychopaths themselves, psychopathy is not an acquired mental illness that can be fixed.
VIDEO — Stonewalled by Family
mfromcanada1
Mar 6, 2015
dysfunctional family communication, triangulation, stonewalling, ostracism, narcissism, borderline, sociopath, codependent, passive, psychopath, anti-social, personality
VIDEO — How They See You
Larken Rose
Sep 16, 2013
If you’ve ever called your congressman or protested at some capitol building, maybe you need to take a moment to know your enemy.
Starbucks Logo Secrets Revealed
by Anonymous
Blog Globs
May 12, 2010
When you see that Starbucks logo, you probably think the same thing as me: “There’s that ‘smiling mermaid’ logo, there must be some good, but overpriced, coffee nearby”, or perhaps “There’s that evil Starbucks corporation that’s helping to destroy the world”.
Well, today for the first time I decided to look at the Starbucks logo with the mindset that there may be some hidden symbolism there, designed for the subconscious mind but not the conscious mind.
(Does the subconscious mind actually exist? Absolutely. When you dream, those are all the thoughts of your subconscious id surfacing, without the usual censorship of your conscious ego, as Sigmund Freud would phrase it).
As I looked for the Starbucks symbolism, I believe I found it. Others would charge that I had a predetermined goal so I merely saw what I wanted to see.
When I tell you what I found, their message will go from your subconscious mind, where you have no danger filters whatsoever, to your conscious mind, where you can judge for yourself how appropriate or inappropriate their manipulation of your senses is.
Or you can disagree with me, but nevertheless the logo’s alleged hidden meaning can never again be sublimated from your conscious memory back to your unguarded subconscious level.
Incidentally, the original masters of subconscious thought and manipulation, prior to the MK-Ultra brainwashers of Manchurian Candidates and their ilk, are Sigmund Freud (who had more hang-ups than Woody Allen’s closet, incidentally) and Hitler’s favourite, Edward Bernays.
When I say “breakfast”, do you think “bacon and eggs”? That’s Edward Bernays.
Why have bananas always been cheap (until now) and why is Guatemala still ruined? Because of the Chiquita banana company, US secret agents, and Edward Bernays, according to Wikipedia.
Why did cigarettes, once “forbidden” for women, become popular with women, seemingly overnight, in the 1940s, addicting and killing millions of innocent female victims over the years? Once again, the subconscious advertising campaigns of Edward Bernays. But I’m getting off-topic here.
Question: Have you ever seen a mermaid with two tails?
Answer: Yes, but you may not have noticed. Look at the Starbucks logo:
It features a mermaid with two “tails”. How could a mermaid swim with two tails? She couldn’t.
But are they really “tails”? Or is it an image of a woman spreading her serpentine “legs” apart for the sex act?
Sounds about par for the course for perverted sex-obsessed corporate leaders, doesn’t it?
And are the black-and-white stripes on her “tails” perhaps striped leggings symbolizing the balance of good and evil, as featured in the Alice in Wonderland movies?
(I haven’t seen the Johnny Depp version, but I’m sure it is filled with mirrors, Saturnalian reversals of logic, black-and-white checkered floors, chess games, twins, hookahs, magic mushrooms, pills, and other assorted hallucinogenic drugs, to name only a few of their symbols).
Also notice that the mermaid’s wavy hair forms a sort of mirrored 333/333, or “666”. Her hair also resembles the waves of the ocean (Pisces, Aquarius, Atlantis). The mermaid forms a fancy “peace sign” as well. The peace sign, of course, doesn’t really symbolize peace at all, it is an ancient rune symbolizing death, also known as the Broken Cross, the Crow’s Foot, and the Witch’s Foot, and used on Nazi graves.
Here is the logo from the Order of Baphomet (satan).
Note the double circle with two stars.
Mermaids are said to drown humans by dragging them underwater, sometimes purposely, sometimes by accident. In British folklore, mermaids are unlucky omens.
The “Voodoo Child” Jimi Hendrix wrote a song called “1983 (A Merman I Shall Be)”, about his desire to be a male mermaid in Atlantis, or possibly a reincarnation of Ethel Merman.
Speaking of voodoo (aka “vodou”), Canada’s Governor-General Michaelle Jean’s coat-of-arms has two “Simbi”, mermaid spirits from Haitian vodou, as supporters. Why was a practitioner of voodoo chosen to represent the Queen in Canada? Her coat-of-arms has been mysteriously removed from the “Public Register of Arms, Flags, and Badges of Canada”, where it was once available for viewing. Here it is from another source:
Does the “double mermaid” logo of Starbucks also represent the twin mermaid spirits of voodoo witchcraft?
Are voodoo “Simbi” (singular: “Simba”) related to Disney’s “Lion King”, who was also called “Simba”? Yes, “Simba” is Swahili for “lion”, but why is their “hero’s” name also a voodoo term? Is the “magic” guiding Disney’s immoral movies these days really the spirit of voodoo?
Modern references to “Atlantis” refer to the desire for an ancient occult-based “master race” to be re-established on Earth. The implication is that the inhabitants were half-alien and half-human, like the Nephilim (fallen angels) in the Bible or the demonic Navi in Avatar.
The Atlantis space shuttle is a good example of the occultists’ love of Atlantis (notice that NASA rockets and space shuttles always have occult-based names). Also recall the lame tv show “The Man from Atlantis”, starring Patrick Duffy as an “Aquaman” type character.
The Nazis were enthusiasts of the Atlantean “master race” concept, for obvious reasons, as are new age occultists. The Starbucks logo is very “Atlantean”, since its inhabitants are said to be half-fish and half-human.
The circle within a circle often symbolizes a secret society. The outer circle is unaware of what the “inner circle” does. How many circles do you see in the Starbucks logo (not counting the letter “o” or the Register mark)? I see six.
Circles also symbolize the sun, the egg (fertility), and the female anatomy.
Does the Starbucks mermaid really have two sets of “tailfins” in the logo? Or are those demonic cloven hooves, similar to those that Pan and the devil are usually depicted with?
And are those perhaps two Papal “Fish God” mitres below the occult/communist pentacle on the mermaid’s tiara? The Papal mitres were also chosen for their resemblance to the female anatomy. I’m referring to this:
The image to the left is a follower of the Philistine luciferian fish-god Dagon.
And so is the image to the right.
What exactly does “Starbucks” mean, anyway? I guess that’s what they worship: “Stars” (occult astrology) and “Bucks” (Mammon, the god of money), with two communist pentacles between “Starbucks” and “Coffee”, the same communist pentacles, by the way, that Wal-Mart and many other corporations now use.
Here is the original 1971 Starbucks logo:
The cloven hooves and the mitre analogies are missing, but she now has bare breasts, and the parted legs analogy is now pretty obvious, no?
PN 