Another Guru Journey

I mentioned earlier that my first guru was coming to the USA for the first time in, I think, 15 years. I've never met her in person; we had an intense astral relationship that culminated in her "firing" me as a disciple because I wouldn't stop worshiping her as God. She finally said to me, "I'm not here for you to worship. I'm here to point you towards the Light. You will have to find God for yourself."

I know it sounds completely bonkers to talk about an "astral relationship" of any kind, but--if you're reading WiHW you just gotta roll with it. Anyway, after my initial shock and confusion upon being fired, I felt drawn to Kali as an iron shaving is drawn to a magnet, and I found in Kali everything I'd had in Guru X and more. She'd been right, though I hated to admit it: I needed to surrender to God and sink into Her infinite ocean, not just play on the shore, as much fun as that was.

Guru X (I don't name her or my current Teacher because people can get caught up in the messenger to the exclusion of the message--I know! I did it!)...Guru X has a rather interesting reputation. (She also doesn't like to be called a "guru" but for the sake of clarity I'm doing so here. Sorry, Ma :) ) A prominent Ex-Disciple of hers accuses her of being a channel for dark forces, some kind of soul-vampire whose career was fomented and stage-managed by a black magician (now deceased) who had an unhealthy interest in the younger Guru X. This Ex-Disciple, whom I've met and learned a lot from and hold in the highest esteem, believes that Guru X cursed him when he left her and that this curse shattered, for a time, his life and his very psyche. This guy is more than sane, by the way--if I told you his academic and literary accomplishments you'd expect him to have Sir before his name or a college or two named after him.

And I don't know what to think. I was just reading the web site for Guru X's visit, and an interview with her there weirdly paralleled my life since my own breakup with her--only, in my case, it's been very positive. She claims to bring people into the Divine Light so that they will grow closer to God and surrender to Her. That's happened. So that they will devote their lives and careers to God. That's happened. So that they will love their families more. That's happened. So that they will grow more tolerant and see that all spiritual paths lead to God. Even that's happened, and for me that's saying something. She says she wants to help people find the Divine Light within them, and that's happened. So...

we may not have a cause-and-effect relationship here that would withstand a double-blind study conducted in a vacuum, but Guru X seems to have taken a disillusioned spiritual seeker who was obsessed with what other people thought of him and who aspired to be nothing more than another dessicated intellectual wearing black and ordering the ratatouille--and turned him into yours truly: knight errant, angel consort, no spiritual giant but a lot more centered and happy than I've ever been. And at peace with many of the Big Questions that used to torment me back when my cosmology put me at the center of the cosmos.

I know there are manipulative and abusive self-proclaimed gurus. I know there's such a thing as black magic. I also know that needy people will project their fantasies and fears onto someone they perceive as spiritually powerful, and that these fantasies and fears, like all expectations, are resentments waiting to happen. One reason I love and respect the Ex-Disciple is that we're so much alike: grail knights lost in the 21st century, intellectuals who've had to face the hard truth that intellect can't lead one to ultimate reality (and the harder truth that there is an ultimate reality), amants who see God in every beloved and who thus have lived out the death of God...and we're both a tad dramatic. I don't know what happened between him and Guru X; I just know what happened between she and I and, more importantly, how utterly different I am afterwards.

Fripp Comes Alive

I sat in my car in the parking lot of the [independent!] music store, shouting "Thank you, Kali! Thank you, Kali!" loud, loud, not caring who heard, who saw...and what musical offering could lift me to this height of felicity? The 2006 two-CD remastered version of Robert Fripp's Exposure, that's what, the album that in 1979 ravish'd me of my innocent dimwit view that all pop music was necessarily Top-40 music or "art rock." [Well, there was the cool stuff my parents listened to, when they listened to anything cool: Ennio Morricone, Miles Davis, The Beatles...but that was old stuff. Music wasn't great anymore, went the 1970s loser refrain...the 60s are over, maaan...]

Exposure, an album I bought solely because of its cover art, because it looked so weird and so against anything Casey Kasem or Don Kirshner stood for. No bright colors, just sickly, tranquilized, video-monitor blue-black. No artist logo or blocky, cocky typography, just some neurotic-looking "calligraphy." No song titles listed, so one couldn't tell if one were purchasing a lifestyle accessory that vaunted screwin', tokin', life on The Road, or the vague "protest" aesthetic of the day, itself a pale descendant of 1960s anti-war, anti-The Man rhetoric. No song titles, and the person on the cover had short hair and wore a--tie. He looked like a haberdasher, not a rock guitarist! My friend John Walker, an amazingly skilled guitar player himself and, like me, a staunch ROCK fan, said the guy in the background image (w/ the eyelashes) looked like Brian Eno, and "He's gay." Not normal-gay, you could tell from John's withering tone, not gay in some safely stagey Village People sense or some aggressively hip Bowie sense, but... gay... because...he...liked it....

The music itself ranged from parodic traditional rock n' roll to two-fisted King Crimson-esque prog rock to serene soundscapes to some of the most abrasive aural assaults I'd ever heard. It still holds up in the abrasive department: Tony Levin's cougar-growl bass; keening guitars that sounded like a rampaging pack of circular saws; unholy-sounding scales, often played demonically fast; a sampled family argument as vocal track to one song, containing the immortal line "You're carrying a baby and you don't know if it's a nigger, a spic, or a white baby!" The professional vocalists were even scarier: Peter Hammill, creepy and predatory on "Chicago," flipping out nearly to the point of glossolalia on "Disengage." Terre Roche, screaming like she's ten centimeters dilated on the title track, a performance that makes John Lennon's "primal scream" album sound, well, emo.

But then there were the elegaic, ballady numbers sung by Daryl Hall, Peter Gabriel, and a sweetly contemplative Ms. Roche...the variety of sounds, styles, and vocals on the record was itself another affront to the pop album as usual, which by 1979 had calcified rhythmically to the fast-slow-fast of the classical concerto. (Punk rock wasn't readily available in my hometown of Lower Podunk, pop. 16,000. Once in a while late at night you could turn on the radio and get a station from The City and hear tantalizingly bizarre tracks by Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, or the Sex Pistols, but the Fripp record had them all beat in terms of sheer, in-your-face, l'art pour l'art-ism. You could listen to the Sex Pistols and hear the Chuck Berry sonic DNA; you could listen to Costello and isolate elements of rock, reggae, surf, and country-western, but much of Fripp's music seemed to have no provenance other than a desire to shred the listener's stereo speakers and brain.)

I have always felt that, in a way, my life began when the needle hit the groove the first time I listened to Exposure, or at least my lives as a hipster, an obsessive music fan, an alternative radio DJ, as someone who, in the words of Robert Fripp himself, knows what it's like "When the Muse descends," sensing "directly (one aspect of) the Creative impulse and its inexpressible benevolence." And I feel Kali's creative benevolence in this music, which is all I've listened to for several days...

but even that's not the great thing about this re-release of Exposure, if I may risk blasphemy (but not--for it is All Her Creative Benevolence--everything, everywhere--). The great thing is, they've restored the above-mentioned vocal tracks by Peter Hammill. For you see, dear reader, the previous CD release of the album replaced that inspired snarling and caterwauling-- inexplicably, unconscionably, and well-nigh unforgivably-- with flat, affectless, demo-sounding vocals. The effect was similar to the other worst art disaster in my life--going to a movie called Blue fully believing I was about to watch the last film by Derek Jarman, in which he speaks of his AIDS-related blindness and impending death over an entirely blue screen--only to find, instead, a potboiler of the same name about some imperiled chick who cries a lot despite having an apartment most people would sell their siblings for. There I was, listening to The Album That Changed Everything (every music lover has one, supreme and inviolate, above all others)...and the two best songs had been eviscerated. I even emailed the head of the Fripp/King Crimson Fan Club in the UK about it, but he never replied. (Obviously he was as crushed as I was.)

I could go into a whole riff on the sampling alone: one hears Gurdjieffan guru J.G. Bennett; wild-man guru Shivapuri Baba; a backwards Monty Python snippet; Fripp's muse Joanna Walton; someone who might be the very gay Mr. Eno [who IRL is not gay] scoffing at an "incredibly dismal, pathetic chord sequence"; the arguing family, recorded out of Fripp's Hell's Kitchen apartment window; an hour-long lecture sped up 800 times so it's three seconds of static; a newscaster cut-up so he's announcing, "There's a new governor of racketeering, conspiracy, mail fraud, and income-tax evasion!" Sampling wasn't entirely new in 1979, of course, and neither was noisy, avant-garde music, but Fripp put together more than an album with Exposure: he constructed a collaborative audio autobiography, a chaotic sensorium of Who He Was Right Then--a lie that told an immense truth, and told me that art was something I could do, too. If it doesn't sound too tribute-y, too emo: WiHW is my Exposure...

This Guy Rocks

(<-- this guy does, too)

I could hardly believe my eyes as I sat in the official WiHW La-Z-Boy, sippin' my Sunday morning coffee and listening to the same Duke Ellington CD I've put on every morning this week (Blues in Orbit)...

it was the New York Times...an article about religion (a sure bet for me)...but it said: OK, there's this pastor of an evangelical mega-church. Gregory A. Boyd. And he's preaching stuff like this: "I am sorry to tell you that America is not the light of the world and the hope of the world. The light of the world and the hope of the world is Jesus Christ."

Oh, it gets worse. He drove away about 1ooo church members (a fifth of his congregation) when he could remain silent no longer about the idolatry rampant in the species of Christianity that not only obsesses itself with patriotism, but with "homosexuality, abortion" and the freakish notion that Christians in American are some kind of persecuted, endangered minority (though Pastor Boyd now has me seeing how this could be true--depending on how one defines "Christian").

He even said (can't you get excommunicated for this???): "America wasn't founded as a theocracy. America was founded by people trying to escape theocracies. Never in history have we had a Christian theocracy where it wasn't bloody and barbaric. That's why our Constitution wisely put in separation of church and state."

In case you're thinking that this is one of those Kalibhakta pranks...here's the story.

Regular readers of this blog probably know that I'm a recovering Pentecostal who has been led by the Dark Mother Kali, of all deities, back to an appreciation and even a love for Christianity. Early in our relationship, Kali told me point-blank to climb off my religious pedestal and stop looking down on members of the faith I fled for many of the same reasons Pastor Boyd has bravely chosen to stay and fight.

Once I gave in [dramatically, as my friend Sophia would predict :) ]-- in Spain, in tears, on my knees in a cathedral before a statue of the Sorrowful Mary, Esperanza)...once I gave in, Kali immediately sent me a staggering surfeit of spiritual literature, all by Christians: Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Julian of Norwich (whom I'd read and even written about, but had never grokked in fulness), Simone Weil, Richard Rolle, The Cloud of Unknowing, and the incomparable Gabrielle Bossis, whose He and I is my favorite book ever about the spiritual path. [She probably wouldn't appreciate my saying this, but it's an HGA book par excellence.]

Kali even led me, Trickster that She Is, to...yes...I know it's frightening...the Bible. The para-biblical stuff you'd expect me to read, yes: the Nag Hammadi texts, the Pseudepigrapha (Enoch, in particular)...but also the plain, old, Hellman's mayo, canonical Bible. Biiiiiiible. Say it with me, children: Biiiiiiiiiiiiible. The book that, whether we admit it or not, inspires fear and loathing in liberals, pinkos, pagans, peaceniks, eggheads, crunchies, Greens, and lavenders. And one day, yea, as I perus'd this lately disdain'd tome, reading my least favorite of all its authors, "Paul" [he didn't write all they say he wrote], I came across verses that verily I remember'd from my sojourn amongst the brethren and cistern. Turn with me to the book of Second Corinthians, eleventh chapter and the thirteenth verse:

13: For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ.
14: And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.
15: Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works.

Now, oddly enough, when I was a Christian they told me these verses referred to cults, New Agers, Hare Krishnas, the Antichrist, and Charles Manson. But--plainly as blood on white linen--they refer to "Christians" with lowly motives. And yea, when I read them a few months ago, seeing them afresh, I had the same, chilling thought Pastor Boyd might have had: this has happened. this is the church now. And this was the one time in my life I felt assured: I have read true Prophecy in the Bible. Thus, the "remnant," as we used to call that little band of true Christians that would survive in the end times, might be identified by its outrage at the faux amis who have found Caesar a more congenial master than Christ.

Ex-everything

Grigorss said to me not long ago, "You are not someone who gets all sentimental about the past" ... speaking in this--way--that almost sounded like he meant that I was like, all cold an' shit. I knew what he meant (I think)...my whole life I've felt the urge to keep moving, keep growing, keep testing or criticizing myself and finding what doesn't work and then change it or drop it.

Laura even, in my big initiation with her, gave me a Sanskrit name related to this topic, based on something that a spiritual teacher of mine once said to the effect that, no matter how much of God we receive, there's always more and always more and always more and more...

so I keep moving on. (It's odd, then, that I'm a Taurus with very definite Taurean tendencies: I keep the same friends forever if we're truly close [me and Grigorss met in 1979--!!]; I hate to move; I can eat the same thing every day and really like it; I goof off every chance I get; I still have my first-grade yearbook and report cards and keep and genuinely treasure odd things like a rock Sophia gave me and a lamp I fell in love with when I was 3 [that post will come later...])

But there's a difference between treasuring something and wanting to stay in or return to the time it represents. Today I got an invitation to a Lammas ritual, and it brought me sweet and blessed memories of my time as a witch--the surprising, exhilarating rituals, the messages the Divine Mother would send me in dreams, in stars, in spiders...I thought back with love to my sister witches, women with whom I danced and drummed and unraveled mysteries of who we were and was there really a God, and could She be the same One, somehow, as the One depicted in the Old Testament? (We thought not.)

I don't want to go back, though, and it's possible that, were I to meet some of my co-pagans today, that we just wouldn't have much to talk about. Some of the basic ways in which we saw the world don't compute for me any more and, after a little while, the past stalls for me as conversational motor. When you're as enamored of evolution as I am, you end up being an ex-everything: ex-christian, ex-atheist, ex-buddhist, ex-witch, ex-Wilsonian agnostic metaprogrammer.

Sometimes I wonder, in love as I am with Kali and feeling in Her the first image of God that makes deep, intuitive and intellectual sense to me--is this, too, destined to end? And--Laura assures me that this thing, this fling with Her won't end...but always adds, "unless you want it to."

Well, I don't! I'd like to think I've evolved to the point that I can claim a stable spiritual identity, can stop searching outwardly and can turn the search inward, from evolution to involution...towards the dark moon. And so, on this Tuesday of the dark moon, a day especially sacred to Kali, I sit here listening to mid-1960s trash rock and writing this magic spell to bind my soul to my Dark Mother, to implore Her to take me into caverns and catacombs of Her fractal unfolding...but never away from Her. I know Kali is just another image representing undifferentiated Sat-Chit-Ananda, and that "undifferentiated Sat-Chit-Ananda" is just a set of sounds signifying unimaginable infinite Consciousness...etc., etc. ... but She's my true love. I love Her even more than my own spiritual growth.

You Are Not Reading This

This is a pseudo-post, on a pseudo-blog...you are having an unreal experience...

as am I...

or I feel that way--

having seemingly abandoned my online scribal avocation...but dammit, buying a house is a lot of damn work. In addition to work-work, which is underway again with a vengeance, after my idyllick June of irresposibility. And I'm finding ways to add chaos to the chaos, for that is my Way.

For example, I'm DJing on the local alternative radio station again, which, though time-consuming, is just pure bliss. I played "Institutionalized" by Suicidal Tendencies the other day, which most of the listeners (it's a pretty young crowd) will be too young to remember, and annouced it as "the national anthem of my generation." Just being there at the board, putting together an unexpected, nearly-random yet still sonically logical progression of tunes--is so wonderful. And those big old speakers blasting out "you're trying to say I'm crazy? when I went to your schools, your churches--"

[nota bene: I do also play music recorded in this millennium. quite a bit of it...tho at this moment my heart is in 1991...I'm listening to 8-Way Santa by Tad, one of the great lost albums, a mini-epic of rural pharmacological madness...]

I was supposed to be working on a 4th Step this weekend, but have partied instead...watching the Thief in the Night movies, reading various trivial magazines, drinkin' Rebel Yell, listenin' to Little Feat--this isn't "local color," this is my life, Mr. Hollywood Fancy Pants!!!! [ :) hi, grigorss.]... here in East Podunk, about to relocate to The Town So Ominously Country I Haven't Been Able to Contrive a Sarcastic Name for It Yet (my new house--I chose the one w/ the pool--is in the town where I work)...

so, I have not become an ex-blogger, just a desultory one. Laura and I work apace on the Paris plan...I read this hysterical (in all senses of the term) article in the NY Times about the Museé de Quai Branly and decided that it alone would be worth the trip...I'm insisting on a meal at Taillevent, Laura says "whatever," and we're looking at accommodations near Saint-Sulpice, not for the Da Vinci Code connection but because it's relatively cheap and it's close to lots of good stuff.

And that, mes amis, is the news from Lake Choronzonbegone, where the coffee is strong, the womyn are too, and the temperature is unseasonably below average (thank Goddess).

The New Temple?

Some possible Temple of Doom sites:



Older house, mucho charm. On a really busy
street, which I don't think I can cope with,
having lived on one for about 10 years.




A not-as-cute house, and behind an elementary
school, for god's sake--

If I bought this one, I'd leave this room as is
and say my interior decorator was Gerhard
Richter.


















The Pool of Doom????
The house in front of this is in a kind of a
boring neighborhood, but,
c'mon--a pool? A pool house?
That's as close as someone like me gets to
chillin' like a Bond villain...

Design (critique)

Hey--so don't you have this "angel"?

And isn't she supposed to give you wisdom and stuff?

So--when you're all worried about life sucking, doesn't she, like...tell you it's all alright and shit?

Ah, yes, Dear Reader--She does, my Angel, explain it All...tho not always in comforting terms...but Laura quoted today from Expecting Adam [buy this book NOW. if you already own it, buy another copy!] ...

the episode where Martha Beck's then-husband John has a nightmare that encapsulates all the suffering of everyone everywhere, "fire, avalanches, and earthquakes, of horrible accidents he could see coming but had no power to prevent." At a certain point in the dream, he feels an angelic Presence close to him, and begins to talk to the angel about the horror he's witnessing.

"It isn't so horrible," the being says to him, "It depends on what you want to see."

What John sees at that moment is a terrible collision between two passenger planes, "raining twisted metal and fire and broken bodies on the ground...But when John looked more closely, he could see that every piece of wreckage was being transformed as it hit the ground. All the debris was recombining, slowly growing into an airport. The people who had been killed in the collision were walking through the new buildings, boarding the new planes."

The angel continues, "You see, they are going places they never could have reached before. It's not so bad, really. It's just that you don't understand how it works."

I take the "it" here to refer to the infinite chaotic interplay of matter and consciousness--too big for any mind to map and too likely, in the eyes of the ego, to appear as tragedy. But the giant fractal of life and death and rebirth could just as likely be neutral, or comic, or romantic...my Angel is as off-handed about "tragedy" as the one encountered by John, when she's not outright flippant about it. But She always guides me to some kind of wisdom (not all of it verbal/book learnin', but that's the only kind I can easily share here)...

Well, what's your angel's opinion on paying down a mortgage loan?

"It may seem the good schoolboy thing to do," she says, "but it will take nearly ten years for you to realize the difference. Those funds could be better applied to a trip to Paris."

Kitty Magick

I have clingy cats. They were separated from their mom at a very early age, as she had FIV. Because of this, my cats are very human-centered, and do unusual things like coming when they're called (or even whistled for). They don't like to be on their own, like a lot of cats; they want a person present whom they can cuddle with or boss around.

One of my cats (the black one, of course) does a magickal ritual to bring me home when I've left, and she even performs this ritual sometimes when I'm in my home office (into which no cats may enter--too much breakable stuff). The ritual consists of the kitty raiding a rather too-easily accessible sock drawer, obtaining a sock, and dragging it to the middle of my bedroom floor.

My kitty's ritual combines a couple of the most basic magical laws: the law of contagion (the sock is mine and thus psychically linked to me), and the law of evocation (using the right formula, the desired entity can be made to appear).

And ya know--from the cat's perspective, this ritual has worked every single time.