Writer, DJ, Photographer, Performer, Freemason, Psychonaut, Muckraker

My experiments with “pyramid power” in the 70s and early 80s were seriously mind-blowing. I don’t know how, to this day, to explain how an open, pyramid-shaped frame (built to the precise angles of the Great Pyramid in Egypt) kept bits of food (bacon, an orange slice, a glass of milk, among others) from putrefying, while the same food — placed a few inches away outside of the pyramid — completely molded and rotted.

I documented my experiments in a 7th-grade science fair project titled “Do Pyramids Affect Decomposition?” After winning my junior high school fair, I took the project to the Maryland State Science Fair. I’ll never forget the back-and-forth as several perplexed organizers tried to put my project in the appropriate section — was it biology? Physics? Chemistry? I can’t remember where the eventually stuck me, but I’m proud to say I’ve stayed in that weird little ghetto of the scientifically unclassifiable ever since.

Click for the PDF of a vintage pyramid power pamphlet.

Here’s the honor award for Outstanding Accomplishment.

What's on his mind?

When I first read Wilson Bryan Key’s controversial Subliminal Seduction, I couldn’t wait to start finding examples of subliminal ads on my own—and I quickly did. I’ll never forget turning to this ad for De Niro’s “Raging Bull” in an issue of Rolling Stone and spotting something that, after seeing it once, is impossible to un-see.

Be sure to click on the image to enlarge it to its full size. Let me know if you see it, too.

Just the two of us
Not yet looking up. Waiting
for totality.

Lunar or Solar
Never can quite remember
What kind of eclipse.

Now, she says. Look now.
And we look. Pupils enlarge.
No words. Just seeing.

A hole. A halo
of fire surrounding a void
Impenetrable.

The Sun is the same
size as the Moon in the sky
she says. Why is that?

(Above and below
said Hermes Trismegistus
are one and the same)

Exactly the same
How in the world could that be?
What are the chances?

I don’t know, I say.
Just chance. Randomness. Blind luck.
Like everything else.

Do you wonder why
we are here, she says, right now?
watching this unfold?

Sun, Moon, you, me, us?
Each one aligned perfectly
In time and in space?

Just because we are
I want to say. But I don’t.
Because it’s ending.

The light of the Sun
will blind us, so we look down
Quietly. Alone.

The Earth-destroying planet from Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. . . .
—Revelation 21:1

I’ve been struck by some unusual symbolism manifesting in the collective imagination recently, with two notable (but unconnected) films sharing eerily similar imagery: that of a new Earth-like planet, blue, cloud-streaked, and reflective—essentially a mirror-image of our own—appearing in the sky. There’s something deeply resonant and iconic about the image that appears in both Lars von Trier’s haunting, nihilistic Melancholia and in Mike Cahill’s provocative first dramatic film, Another Earth. I was going to write about the cinematic synchronicity, and what it means viewed through several prisms (Jungian, Hermetic, alchemical, Gnostic, comparative mythology, shamanism, etc.), but I haven’t been able to settle on a single overriding interpretation—does a new Earth represent our hopes for a new beginning or our darkest apocalyptic fears? In von Trier’s film, the new Earth-like planet is a cosmic joker, snuffing out our world and all its life, history, and dreams in a bleak, meaningless collision of mindless matter. In Another Earth, however, the new planet is an exact mirror of our own, including all of us, only changing its identical chronology when its humans (our other selves) become aware of our world (and we, theirs). Cahill immerses us in quantum paradoxes, particularly the “many worlds” or multiverse theory in which each and every interaction alters the course of reality.

Publicity still from Another Earth.

Neither of these films attempts to be “realistic,” even as lightweight science fiction, but are instead heavily symbolic fantasies. Von Trier doesn’t even try to explain the presence of the new planet, except perfunctorily, while Cahill uses real-life scientist and SETI proponent Richard E. Berendzen to wax philosophically while invoking the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (a theory, by the way, embraced by Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, among many other mainstream physicists):

In the grand history of the cosmos, more than thirteen thousand million years old, our Earth is replicated elsewhere. But maybe there is another way of seeing this world. If any small variation arises—they look this way, you look that way—suddenly maybe everything changes and now you begin to wonder, what else is different? Well, one might say that you have an exact mirror image that is suddenly shattered and there’s a new reality. And therein lies the opportunity and the mystery. What else? What new? What now?

But what intrigues me more is not the similarities or differences in the filmmakers’s symbolism, but the appearance of such a big, iconic symbol in two unrelated films arriving at the same time. This collective synchronicity affected me in a way that defied my attempts to wrestle it into a rational compare-and-contrast exercise, and I couldn’t deny that the image of a new Earth in our sky, when divorced of all intended meaning, was inherently archetypal. Like a woodcut diagram from an old Hermetic alchemy text, the Kabbalistic Sephirot, or a trump card from the Rider-Waite deck, it contains a wealth of possible interpretations, but it’s also just an image that just hits us way beneath the conscious, chattering monkey brain in the atavistic darkness where the life-giving Mother, the Wise Old Man, and the Devouring Demon lurk.

So I put this blog post on hold. I can’t explain why the image struck such a chord, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It’s been a few weeks since I watched Melancholia, and over a week since I watched Another Earth, but the vision of a mirror planet appearing in the sky kept creeping up on me and refusing to go away. Despite several avenues of promising research, it resisted easy interpretation.

Then yesterday, NASA held a press conference about a discovery made by the Kepler space telescope team of an Earth-like planet—Kepler-22b—in the “Goldilocks” habitable zone circling a star roughly 600 light years away. The temperature of its surface has been calculated to be a balmy 72 degrees Fahrenheit, though the composition of the planet is completely unknown. NASA released an admittedly creative artist’s conception of what the planet could look like, and, well, I’ll just let you see for yourself.

NASA artist’s rendering of the potentially Earth-like planet Kepler-22b (note similarity to von Trier’s planet Melancholia)

Coincidences happen, of course, but so do the type of meaningful, acausal coincidences Carl Jung and physicist Wolfgang Pauli termed examples of synchronicity. Maybe the coincidence of a new earth-like planet appearing in two disparate films is just that—purely coincidental (though I must admit I have a conceptual bias against anything being termed purely coincidental or random—but that’s a post for another time). But now that the powerful image is mirrored in the real world, inspiring headlines proclaiming a “new Earth” (Telegraph, UK) “Earth’s Twin” (MSNBC), and “Earth 2.0″ (from, it must be noted, Mirror.co.uk), it feels much bigger—like the extrusion of a potent, deeply buried image into the collective imagination in a time when it truly does seem like we face the potential of human extinction if we fail to rethink our roles as occupants and stewards of this beautiful, white, brown, green and blue—but maybe not so unique—home planet of ours.

In short, what this all seems to be saying is: We need to create Earth 2.0. Right now, because this is the point when the mirror shatters. We have to look at our reflection in the shards and decide if we have what it takes—the will, the intellect, and the compassion—to bring it to manifestation.

I still have no idea when the video from the Mysteries of Space and Sky conference will be available, but I’ve uploaded my slides for the few people who have asked for them. You can get a feel for the presentation through viewing the slides, though I hope to get the complete video as soon as possible.

UFOs_and_Paranormal_Hughes

In the meantime, my friend SMiles Lewis just sent me a video his recent presentation, Exploring UFOs and Consciousness, which covers a lot of similar territory (and we both use a famous Terence McKenna quote).

Perhaps it’s time for the Occupy Wall Street/99% movement to adopt some new tactics. From the brilliant poet/philosopher Hakim Bey, originator of the “Temporary Autonomous Zone” (TAZ):

In short, we’re not touting the TAZ as an exclusive end in itself, replacing all other forms of organization, tactics, and goals. We recommend it because it can provide the quality of enhancement associated with the uprising without necessarily leading to violence and martyrdom. The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it. Because the State is concerned primarily with Simulation rather than substance, the TAZ can “occupy” these areas clandestinely and carry on its festal purposes for quite a while in relative peace. Perhaps certain small TAZs have lasted whole lifetimes because they went unnoticed, like hillbilly enclaves–because they never intersected with the Spectacle, never appeared outside that real life which is invisible to the agents of Simulation.

(edit)

The TAZ is an encampment of guerilla ontologists: strike and run away. Keep moving the entire tribe, even if it’s only data in the Web. The TAZ must be capable of defense; but both the “strike” and the “defense” should, if possible, evade the violence of the State, which is no longer a meaningful violence. The strike is made at structures of control, essentially at ideas; the defense is “invisibility,” a martial art, and “invulnerability”–an “occult” art within the martial arts. The “nomadic war machine” conquers without being noticed and moves on before the map can be adjusted. As to the future–Only the autonomous can plan autonomy, organize for it, create it. It’s a bootstrap operation. The first step is somewhat akin to satori–the realization that the TAZ begins with a simple act of realization.

Nomadic occupations? I like the idea. Appearing and existing just long enough to catch the attention of the state, then slipping back into the shadows. Appearing like a cluster of potent psychedelic mushrooms, only to return to the underground mycelial network before bursting through the soil on the other side of the forest. Finally, perhaps, a proper use of the often maligned “flashmobs” for something other than simple amusement.

One of my favorite quotes about the UFO phenomenon (slide from my talk: UFOs and the Paranormal: Beyond the ETH).

Got inspired to ‘shop this little memester after witnessing more hoards fleeing Facebook for G+.

Frictionless Poo!

Not that I think G+ won’t do the same crap in due time.

What do Amazonian shamans, sleep paralysis, the pineal gland, 19th century spiritualists, ritual magic, and Tibetan monks have to do with UFOs? Is the extraterrestrial hypothesis the most compelling explanation of the UFO phenomenon, or might it be something deeper—a mystery intimately tied to human consciousness and the imaginal realm? I’ll be discussing this and more at the 8th annual Mysteries of Space and Sky UFO Conference in Hanover, Maryland on October 29th. The event is dedicated to the late (and dearly missed) Budd Hopkins, and the headliner is George Knapp, award-winning journalist and author of Hunt for the Skinwalker.