Tear Down the Wall!
On the heels of watching the excellent film Stardust, which features a town called “Wall” due to its proximity to a stone border between our reality and an Alternative Kingdom, I stumbled across this fascinating article about an actual such wall in the Orkney Islands (totkb2 anomalist).
One of the most important finds is the remnants of a large stone wall, five or six metres wide, which is thought to have been about 100 metres long.
Mr Card said: “The site is at the tip of the Brodgar peninsula and separating it from what was happening to the north in the Ring of Brodgar is this monumental wall, beautifully faced on both sides and made of massive stone boulders.
“You wonder that with foundations of that dimension how high it was when it was built. It appears to go right across the peninsula, so the team here now calls it the Great Wall of Brodgar. It’s probably a symbolic barrier. It’s been suggested the Ring of Brodgar is the realm of the spirits, the world of the dead, and maybe this wall emphasised the difference between that and the land of the living. We had an inkling about it [the wall] last year but only this year its true extent became apparent.”
It’s interesting, this idea, that some kind of border exists between this “reality” in which we live and some other realm– the spirit world, the Kingdom of Heaven, Faery, Tir na nog, Avalon, the Realm of the Djinn, etc. One of my questions, which has driven my interest in both Gnosticism and forteana through the world, is Just How Tenuous Is This Border? Pretty danged tenuous, indeed.
UFO hoaxes have been incredibly successful and well-executed this year. For those who don’t follow the sites in question, check out the amazing Issac/Caret phenomenon, as well as this amazingly good analysis of the “hoax”, which connects it to everything from Marylin Monroe to the short fiction of Borges.
This has been followed by a very well-done UFO hoax posted on Youtube, which has ben thoroughly debunked:
Although the analysis proves that these videos were fake beyond reasonable doubt, the most fascinating thing about this hoax, to me, is that most detractors rightfully point out that the objects in question are quite simply *too clear* to be real. In other words, the videos themselves don’t behave as standard UFO artifacts behave.
I wrote that last sentence on purpose. The objects in the video behave as though we might expect “extraterrestrial aircraft” to behave. The video itself, however, does not behave (appear) the way typical UFO videos, which are typically blurry at best, behave. We can tell that the objects are fake because they don’t look unreal enough. But, if they are fake, who made them, and why?
Another very real possibility which would explain both the CARET hoax and the Haiti UFO videos is viral marketing. Many suspect that these two (possibly related) phenomena are actually part of an elaborate advertising campaign similar to Microsoft’s “I Love Bees” campiagn, an “alternative reality game” designed to hype the video game Halo 2.
Then again, perhaps these hoaxes are something more sinister. Those familiar with the literature may detect shades of Ummo, an infamous “experiment” in reality creation which is apparently still being carried out in some corners. At what point does a hoax cease being a trick and become a reality? Is it possible to hoax something into existence?
Maybe someone is trying to create tulpas…. In his most recent post, Jeff Wells suggests (via an anecdote from Jacques Vallee) that perhaps the universe as we know it isn’t organized based on measurable space/time as understood in physics. Perhaps “reality” is organized like a database best accessed via keywords, a concept long understood in the circles of religious mystics. What, after all, is the point of praying, or chanting divine names or meditating on aspects of the divine, if not ’searching’ for some kind of living information by inserting key concepts or phrases into a reality structure? So, suppose an organization exists somewhere (either here or “there”) that wants to tear down the Wall, and is doing so by feeding us keywords, or feeding them into a self-perpetuating community of individuals who want “proof” to such an extent that they’re willing to use the search terms “recommended” by said organization?
We already live in a “reality construct,” and though Law-of-Attraction-type “reality creation” stuff is categorical bullshit, we do have some limited control over how we perceive the universe around us. This is a blessing and a curse, as we are also subject to those who would alter our perception for us. The paradigm shift inherent in the nuclear age may mean that the Blessed Virgin Mary sightings which are so obviously related to the UFO phenomena, and which are so obviously aspects of a control system of some kind, have simply taken another form.
A modern extrapolation of Gnostic cosmology (vide Saying 18 in The Face of the Sky and Earth) may lead one (as it did for me) to consider the ‘universe’ as a single objective entity with a single subjective consciousness which builds upon itself in order to experience itself. This consciousness would, of necessity, exist outside of the strictions of space/time, and would be organized in fractal form. The Wall, in this case, is the inability of a fragment of the consciousness to experience itself in its entirety within space/time. The database, however, organized as a fractal, is being built cooperatively between humanity and God– the conciousness– who extends into our reality as the Logos in order to help us program the database.
(This post was designed to tear down some Walls for you! Did it work?)
tim boucher said,
semi-quasi unrelated: are you still investigating reiki, etc?
JP said,
I am, but I’ve been out of it for quite a while. I plan to get back into it this Fall. Why do you ask?
tim boucher said,
I’m not sure. Something about this piece triggered me asking that.
Thirtyseven said,
This past year has been wall demolition for sure. I find that all of of my “diverse” interests are in fact completely related, and I find myself in awe of how much vestigal “division of disciplines” is still installed in my head from school days. How is science not communication? How is math not music? …that sort of thing…
Still — startling, humbling, disturbing to be continually re-discovering how colonized the topology of my mind is. I often wonder if the very fact I bitterly fought against more or less everything during my 12 years of school actually wound up embedding all the bullshit even deeper. The phrase “what we resist persists” comes to mind, even though I seem to associate that quote with either The Secret or L. Ron Hubbard.
Jeff’s Vallee quote really touched off a brushfire in my head, though — I’ve been at work on a series of articles on time ever since. As is often the case with Big Revelations, I still have no idea what I even realized, and it will be a few months at least before I can get a sense of the new landscape.
JP said,
I hear you– I still get flak in certain circles for looking into forteana from a Gnostic perspective, but I’ve found over the past few years that all of these seemingly unrelated aspects of my reality structure fit together like peas and ham (i.e. really well), and what’s more that there are more than a few of us who are coming to this understanding of late. I’m not in the 2012 apocalypse/spiritual awakening bs camp, but I definitely think there’s some fluxes in the morphogenetic fields of late.
Emperor said,
Don’t listen to those nay sayers - people can either take the Fortean aspects are metaphors or peeps behind the curtain to what is actually going on.
The associative database analogy is a powerful one - you could even suggest that magic is really just reality hacking (with obvious Matrix-style parallels).
What concerns me is that there seem to be a lot of “black hats” out there who seem to have at least as a good a grasp on the power of this as the “white hats.” While you are trying to tear down walls they are busy building new ones. ;)
——
On the topic the post started on:
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The Haiti UFOs are clear (and now acknowledged) fakes:
www.wunderkabinett.co.uk/damndata/index.php?/archives/1022-Unidentified-Fake-Objects.html
The more curious thing is the Caret business, as parallels have been drawn with the John Titor time travel weirdness:
http://spacetimenews.com/titor_caret.html
As we’ve discussed before, quite a few people seem to be putting a lot of time and effort into creating convincing-looking memes - I’ve summarised it recently in relation to the Navy (although the more general principles apply more widely - its just that the navy seems to crop up a little too often for my comfort - then again that could just be synchronicities which would lead us back to the universe as an associative database):
www.wunderkabinett.co.uk/damndata/index.php?/archives/1017-What-the-Navy-know.html
The thing that strikes me is their relish for using the Internet to disseminate these things. Given digital technology (in the production and transmission) they could really hammer these kinds of things out. Since WWII we’ve really only had half a dozen up until a decade ago. With the spread of the Web we must have seen a similar number with the pace seeming to be increasing. I suppose it depends on what they are up to - if finding something that will “stick” if there aim they can keep at it and eventually something will fire people’s imaginations (although not sinister the fake UFO video were perhaps the biggest You Tube sensation with over 3 million views just on the original - and people were lifting and rehosting it, analysing it and posting their own interpretations, etc. so the full impact is difficult to asses - and this was accidental and easily exposed as a fake)). That might be sinister in its own right but it could be they are using the Web as am easily monitored test area - release the memes and let natural selection deal with them. Once you have a real winner set it loose in the “wild.”
–
On UMMO see this for other worrying aspects:
www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/267/ummos_children.html
What concerns me is that a lot of these attempts at memetic engineering (UMMO, Montauk Project, Ong’s Hat, etc.) all seem to have generated what some claim is cult-like following. Seen from a reality hacking point of view they could be seen as Trojans - fired out into the wild by the hackers, they take root in insecure systems where they can lurk and propagate just waiting to be activated and do their damage.
———–
Of course, they could be used as metaphors (and of course some of it isn’t relevant) but it could be addressing the same thing from different angles. Or not. That’s the beauty of it all - you can pick and chose but some really interesting things can emerge in the grey zone where the two meet which you wouldn’t get from a narrower focus (like Rigorous Intuitions combination of conspiracy and Forteana - which also raises a few eyebrows from people who like to think they know what the blog is all about).
WoodDog » Holy Moment said,
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