Permission granted!

July 7, 2005 | Share/Save

I’ve been following Tim Boucher’s blog lately with great interest lately - I mean really, I’m hooked. It’s like a train wreck. It’s painful to watch and yet I can’t look away.

I’ve only really been blogging for - what now - like two weeks? And I’m getting things out of it I never would expected. Not only have I met all of these really fantastic, amazing people with all of these different perspectives (Laura Jane, Alistair, Zach, Fell, Hearesis) but…

Tim’s blog interests me because he seems to be having what amounts to a public identity crisis. He’s questioning his own purpose, his writing, in front of an audience, and getting all sort so f feedback to these agonizing questions he’s throwing right out there in front of everyone. A lot of the questions he’s asking are questions I had always been afraid to publicly ask myself. Which is not to say they haven’t tortured me - they have and they do. But I never wanted to admit to them - I always figured it would destroy my credibility as a Gnostic, or at the very least as someone who publicly writes about gnosticism and does art about it as well.

Well, I only started reading Tim’s blog a few weeks ago anyway, so I don’t really know where he has been. I can tell you where he has been in the last two weeks though. Now this is a guy who puts himself out there as an “Occult Investigator.” That’s kind of neat hook to hang your hat on, for obvious reasons - it gives you the set-up for some kind of voice, authority, a platform to speak from even if you’re only asking questions.

Now, extrapolating from context I can see that lately he has been questioning EVERYTHING - even questioning. It began (or at least my perception of it began, what passed before I cannot say) with a post where Tim was discussing, and other posters were giving feedback on, the phenomenon whereby certain ideas that individuals invest a lot of time and energy in take on a life of their own. The person who originated the ideas, or brought them to life, has a choice after a while - they can subsume their own identity and become secondary to these ideas - which Tim likens to Tulpas - or they can set them free, kill them, send them on their way.

This observation, this insight, was really fascinating to me on a number of different levels. I of course have had a similar struggle - when I first discovered the Gnostic mythology I was so taken with it really just boggled my scrotum and rocked my socks. I didn’t question it at all, I just sort of ran with it and set about trying to figure out how to promote it.

That was a blast for a couple of years but eventually I started to feel almost trapped by the site I had created (i.e., this one). I felt like I didn’t have any more room to maneuver - as though I had become the spokesman for an idea and everything I said or did would be judged in that light. So, if I had questions about it, I really had to keep them to myself or risk betraying something I actually had begun to take quite seriously.

The ironic thing is, that in itself - the point that I eventually reached - represented a betrayal of my original inspiration. Or inspirations, really -because before I discovered gnosticism back in 1996 or so I had blasted my mind open reading these books and a few others:

Hakim Bey - TAZ
William S. Burroughs - The Job
Georges Bataille - Visions of the Extreme
Robert Anton Wilson - Prometheus Rising

Around the time I was reading these books, I was attending art school in NYC for the summer (SVA). That summer - the summer of 1994 - I got in touch with my subconscious for, I think, the first time. I began creating visual art (many of the postcards on this site were created that summer) and having powerful dreams.

Anyway, One of the most influential books I read was Peter Carroll’s Liber Null & Psychonaut. This is considered to be a seminal text of chaos magic, and in it Carroll discusses gnosticism in a really intriguing way - he describes the ancient gnosticis as chaos magicians and memetic engineers and semiotic saboteurs who were creating reality at the seams and making fun of everyone who couldn’t keep up with them. Wow! That vision really inspired me too. It seemed like a great way to give yourself permission to write or do art about anything you wanted while keeping a light-hearted attitude towards it.

That book really inspired me, and I set about building enemies.com. I had a lot of fun with it for a few years. Basically I felt like the mythology was a blank slate I could illustrate in any way I wanted, and I did. I also felt like the words the Gnostics used - the ancient myths - were a great springboard to explore any number of paradoxical issues - and they were. I didn’t particularly worry about having any kind of responsibility - I just went for it.

So, in my writing, I use Burrough’s cut-up method a lot. The reason I did this was because I was continually exposed to these astounding concepts in my research - control systems, superstrings, parallel universes, the triune brain, etc, etc. These ideas were new to me, and I was continually shocked and astounded by the amazing similarities many of these concepts bore to the ancient Gnostic myths. I came up with a phrase which I thought described it neatly - mythology and science are both stories about reality that use different metaphor-sets (I disovered, years later, that Tim had stumbled across or developed a similar concept).

Now, I felt like I couldn’t prove this directly - the original site was actually supposed to be more of a parody of a research paper - I wanted to show how the mind connects certain ideas and projects patterns on them. So what I did instead of writing in my own words was cut up and juxtaposition certain passages to show their relation in time and space - a conversation across the centuries between scientists and the ancient Gnostics discussing the origins of the universe or the fate of the soul.

My idea was that the reader would have to make the cognitive leap themselves and draw their own connections, come up for their own explanation as to why ancient stories and modern ones seemed to draw such eerie parallels, even using (in many cases) similar metaphors, turns of phrase, story arcs, etc. I didn’t know either but I wanted people to think about it - I really wanted to rattle people’s cages and make them question reality strongly.

I think another reason I wrote this way was because I didn’t want to take responsibility for my own words - I wanted to have the authority of these various scientific references to fall back on. In a way, the concept was sort of a parody of “The Tao of Physics” and books like that too.

Anyway, eventually I began to take my project too seriously. I became very caught up in ego-games, arguing with people on the internet, and on Usenet. Can you imagine that? Arguing like a fundamentalist about something that had begun as a light-hearted art experiment.

I began to think that I really would be able to definitively answer certain questions if I could only find the right book or the authoritative source. Is the universe open or closed? Is language learned or part of a deep structure? Nowadays I realize of course that certain questions point to a paradox - when you try to get beyond them through logic and language you hit a wall, and if you can blow past that what you find on the other side is inner experience, silence and unreason. (This also explains my deep love for Geroges Bataille)

But at the time I was on fire, and my brain was on fire, and I was too goddamned stubborn for my own good, so I kept going. I should add that at the time (this was almost a decade ago now) I was doing a lot of speed too.

I actually had prayed to the pink light as a 21 year old and didn’t even find out who Philip K. Dick was until I was 28, but that’s a different story. Suffice it to say I had been making many of the same mistakes as PDK, was following his template for a couple of years there and didn’t realize it.

Permission granted! gnostic

Anyway, I eventually did hit that wall. A wall where I had exhausted language, exhausted reason, my mind had begun to turn back on itself and devour itself. What I learned : you can’t force inspiration. You can’t get blood from a stone. Depriving yourself of sleep to write and do art won’t improve the quality of your work it will cause it to suffer, because you are turning over and mulling and processing everything you learn and see and experience a lot faster than you can digest it. In some ways, the mind really is not all that different from the body.

Another thing I realized was that aspects of Gnostic myths I had always sort of dismissed had caught up with me. For example, I never really took seriously the idea that the body is a trap or that matter is evil. But over time I had in fact become more and more ascetic and self-abnegating - I was celibate from 1991-1999 or so, I didn’t eat or sleep much, I rarely left my apartment, etc.

Something that had begun as a wonderful form of enlightenment for me had become a trap.

So I didn’t know what I had done wrong, ultimately. I knew I had taken a wrong turn but I didn’t know what it was. Was it my artwork - had I somehow perverted my own mind? Was it too many drugs (a distinct possibility)? Or had I simply become trapped in my own hardened structure, unable to see a way out?

I took a break from the site for a year or so - that’s why in the art gallery there is no art at all for the year 2000. And I decided that, in addition to my responsibilities as a Gnostic webmaster, I had some responsibilities to myself that were important too. For example, I needed a job so I could feed myself. I needed to get back in the habit of showering, of shaving, of brushing my teeth. I probably needed to get over my creeping Puritanism and get laid. In short I needed to get back in the swing of life.

So, I had started a new job (I wrote about in a post about my friend Kevin) and met a guy named Lothar. His girlfriend was this shamaness-type - a student of Michael Harner’s. I asked her to do a soul retrieval for me, and so I made an appointment, and she played the drums, and went into a trance, and checked me out.

Her report - I was firing off light-beams from all over the top of my head, but from my heart to my knees my system was completely black - absent - there was nothing, no energy there.

I wanted her permission to check out a different system, to learn about other things? I had it! Whatever I had to do to get myself back in shape as a whole being, I could.

Now it may seem odd that I felt like I needed permission to do anything but what can I say? I went to Catholic school as a kid. Anyway, this shamaness had the same name as my mom and was also middle-aged so that probably gave her thoughts more weight than I would have otherwise given them too.

So, the next thing I did was go out and find a tantra teacher. And I met a wonderful Hawaiian woman who initiated me into some very basic energy work and got my heart turned back on and my dick back in gear. And for that she will always have my eternal gratitude. A wonderful lady - I respect sex workers more than politicians for sure, they actually HELP people - they aren’t parasites, they are GIVERS - something there are too few of in the world nowadays.

Permission granted! gnostic

SO, a big tip o’ the hat to the ladies of the eveming! I love you all, as Ozzy would say.

Anyway, with that taken care of (all these projects!) I started doing a martial art. I had seen a capoeira troupe once at the Carnival parade in the mission so I got into that. Wow! Within a month or two I was in the shape of my life! Gettin laid, gettin paid and blowin up like a live grenade!

I realized that the world was not actually this horrible prison I had started to see it as. But also, I didn’t really know how I felt about this whole project - enemies.com - now that I was living again. In a way it had become like a relationship that goes flat or sour but you don’t want to end it - you remember so many good times and so many benefits you had derived that the fact that it is now a millstone around your neck is something you just kind of shove to the back of your mind.

Anyway, I then took the additional step of taking down most of the written material here too. I didn’t want to run the risk of misleading anyone else like I now felt I might have been mislead. Or not. I didn’t know. It was still all too close to digest I really wasn’t sure of anything. My secret fear was that I had gone too far, experimented too radically with certain symbols and ideas, given myself too much freedom of speech, and maybe even pissed off God himself.

So, I got into the groove of just being a normal person again. Gnosticism was no longer consuming my every waking thought. My apartment no longer had weird collage fodder plastered over every square inch of every wall. Have you ever seen that movie a Beautiful Mind? That’s what it was like.

So, I decided that since I wasn’t doing speed anymore and was ambivalent about gnosticism and about my own artwork, I needed something else to keep my life magical and interesting and mysterious. I got into magic, specifically a form of tribal witchcraft. I discovered - in short order - that my ancestors were awake and aware and helping me, that the spirits of nature were (or at least, could be) my allies, and the devil too!

Permission granted! gnostic

Wow! Now, I’ve had some amazing experiences with that stuff. Since I got into it, I’ve gotten married, been promoted at work, bought a house (not an easy thing to do in the bay area!) and risen a couple of belt ranks in krav maga (the martial art I do now). It has changed my life for the better in a million little ways - just feeling and knowing that the universe is not only not against me but is actually on my side makes a much bigger difference than I could have predicted. And I have seen and experienced some amazing things too.

Now the downside is, I can’t talk about it. I have taken certain vows that makes it a serious thing to keep silent about certain things. For example, I can’t say what the tradition is.

For another thing - well, shit - talk about a conflict! Talk about it, really. When I put together the first iteration of enemies.com I had quite a glib attitude. I would dismiss out of hand - or even laugh in the faces of - anyone who suggested that I was a satanist or an evil wizard. That’s a common tactic actually - Christian fundamentalists LOVE accusing Gnostics of being secret Satanists. But since I wasn’t, I would just laugh at them.

Permission granted! gnostic

From my POV, all of this Gnostic mythological stuff about archons and demons and the ouroboros - these were metaphors, baby! Allegorical descriptions of different states of consciousness, cognitive, biological and cosmological processes and structures. The Gnostics were seers who had intuited and anticipated the discoveries of modern science!

Permission granted! gnostic

Or had they? My explorations of gnosticism had brought me to a place where it all seemed like a giant intellectual game, a labyrinth of paradox, an elaborate joke (not unlike reality itself! I cannot emphasize this enough)….

But for all that, I had no strength, no warmth, no security in my life. Explorations of paradox are great but do they really give you what you need to survive? I’m not so sure.

Where was I? Oh yeah, anyway, once I got involved in magic and witchcraft, all of these things were no longer theoretical - they were real. And I discovered that spirits are real, the dead are real, trees talk, people can have good energy or bad energy, and….

things don’t always work the way you would expect - sometimes there are rules and structures to follow. Disincarnate entities actually do take offense at being made fun of. Sounds weird, right? I don’t expect that anyone except for a handful of people involved in certain very heavy and primal styles of sorcery would know what I’m talking or what I mean. But its true.

Anyway, that created for me a huge conflict. My life is great now on the material plane - health, wealth, love - but I miss my artistic outlet of working on enemies.com. Fuck I invested so much fucking energy into that thing - can I really just abandon it? And shit, there is all this research that I did, and insights I came up with - should those just slip into silence now because I discovered something else as well?

WHAT IS THE VALUE OF GNOSTICISM TO ME NOW?

I came back on the internet and wrote an article or two for New Dawn, which has been great to me. I had an art show which was cool too.

Blah blah… so why is the title of this post Boucher-mania anyway? Well, I’m getting to that.

I had a great astrological reading a couple of weeks back. It said that I had all of the fuel supplies, maps, storage space and mission I needed to launch my rocket. The only thing I needed was a good platform.

SO I threw the bones and asked. Will New Dawn be a good platform for me? Yes. Will my blog be a good platform for me? YES!

This was confusing to me. I mean, jeez, I’m not as articulate as a lot of these people like Jeff Wells. I’m not all that interested in government conspiracy as a topic. I mean I know, its real, its there, it sucks, I put this together and that is sort of my final statement on the matter, its obvious and I don’t care to explore it further except as an archetype.

So what do I have to write about? I do have a fairly deep understanding now of certain things, really just based on my own experience (I will come to the topic of permission now in a second, note to self), such as:

- light energy and black energy, how they stick to people, and what this has to do with the archons
- the limits of knowledge which finds obliteration in paradox
- the reality of radical monism which finds its expression in visions of mermaids and satyrs and fairies and spiders (assisted by a good squeegee-ing of the third eye, as bill hicks put it, I still do that once a year)

So, like I started this off with, it seems like Tim Boucher has been questioning his own purpose as a writer and an occult investigator lately. And by asking these questions in such a strong way he has this audience hanging on his every word giving him feedback. And then he’ll make a decision and announce “OK! For the next 24 hours - at least - this is the direction I’m going in! Keep up if you can!”

Tim has given me permission by example. I have read posts by him and Jeremy Puma discussing how neither take seriously or literally the idea that matter and the body are a trap, or evil - they see these concepts as metaphors for something else, and so neither subscribe to this particular fundamentalist Xian caricature of Gnostic theology.

Really? Well jeez. I always saw things that way too but was afraid to say so. And in feeling like I had to “represent” gnostcism in a “mature” way I actually allowed that caricature to affect me until I did become life-denying myself. Jeez, I didn’t realize I had permission to be that flexible in my reinterpretations of this stuff!

If I had known I could have saved myself a lot of pain. Ah, I mourn my lost 20s… all the beautiful ladies I woulda, coulda, shoulda slept with… oh well!

Tim talks elsewhere about something he calls Episco-pagelian gnosticism, contrasting it with his own interest in the more lurid aspects (I might be projecting here a bit). Long story short, what he has always loved about gnosticism is all of the crazy sci-fi cosmological conspiracy scenarios, and barbarous names, etc - as opposed to philosophical wanking about the mother goddess and reclaiming theological community, etc.

And I mean, again - really? Well, shit. When I first started enemies.com that’s what was motivating ME anyway - monsters, magic and mysticism. But after a while it all started to get so… sincere. SO serious. So deadly, deadly, serious….

Well, puke. Fuck that. If that’s what I wanted to get out of it I would have gotten into something else. Thanks for reminding me Tim. Thanks for helping me to reclaim my monsters.

Permission granted! gnostic

In a lot of ways actually, I haven’t changed since I was 5. I am STILL obsessed with monsters. I wonder why?

So that brings me to something else. I am not an initiate of gnosticism. I am in fact an initiate of something else I can’t discuss.

Well, fuck, that tears me apart sometimes. I have questioned, wondered, agonized. My understanding reality departs from classical gnosticism on many, many points nowadays:

- I am a monist
- I practice magic
- I don’t think about Jesus much (although I DO know he is there!)

So… can I should I write about gnosticism? What do I have to say. What would be the purpose of continuing this project. Does the world need a kooky cartoonist and Left hand path type like me giving commentary on something that is , for a lot of people - a very serious and dedicated sincere path to Christian charity and meditative oneness and whatnot.

I’m not an initiate of any Gnostic system, though I’ve certainly had the opportunity to get involved. Honestly, I don’t know how some of these people do it, how they can resolve these things that still seem to me like irreconcilable contradictions. Michael Bertiaux for example claims apostolic succession - he was initiated by someone who was initiated by someone and so on and so forth all the way back to Jesus himself. And yet, on another site M. Bertiaux is talking about astral tarantula lycanthropy and working with low spirits and being down for sucking and fucking and destroying anyone who gets too close to his secrets - and yet on some occult art site he also has all these pictures he did of Christ being crucified. I don’t get it.

Well, how can someone who see things one way speak with any authority about another? Is there really a conflict? I agonized about this on my own site, here on this blog - I wondered whether or not I could or should continue to write about gnosticism, if I had the right and the permission or whether that was dishonest. Could I trust myself? How much of my own agenda would I bring to it?

Tim Boucher gave me this great feedback and compared my writing about gnosticism and also about magic to two panes of stained glass in the same piece of art, and drew the analogy of my life as the connecting thread, the implication being that I was seeing or drawing a distinction and a difference that wasn’t really necessary. Permission granted right?

Well, shit, this stuff is tough. And here is (hopefully) where I will wrap up this rather long-winded essay and goofy personal revelation in a way that make sit obvious why I titled this post the way I did.

I saw Tim have almost the exact same conflict I was and I could tell it was driving him nuts. He gave a bad review to some book about pop culture magic and all of these soi-disant chaos mages turned out in force to bash him with (basically) this criticism: if you don’t practice magic, if you aren’t a practicing occultist, then you have no ground to stand on criticizing this book. Yer just a voyeur.

So, Tim agonized about this, and asked everyone what they thought, and decided (or seemed to, we are all universes unto ourselves after all, no one person can ever really know the truth of another) that he DIDN’T need to get involved in ceremonial magic in order to write about it, that writing and questioning itself was his path, so thanks for playing, damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead.

As should be obvious I have faced a very similar conflict. I am fascinated, obsessed with the Gnostic mythology and the possibilities it offers, but I am only a Gnostic in the broadest most generic sense nowadays. I have chosen instead a path which while not necessarily incompatible with gnosticism isn’t exactly just a more meditative form of Christianity either (to put it mildly!)

Why am I still so interested in gnosticism and what do I have to say about it? In many ways I’m actually ambivalent about it - I kind of feel like it put me through the wringer. So why would I want to continue trying to breathe life into the Frankenstein corpse of some defunct syncretic mythological system from 17 centuries ago? Shit, I’m not even initiated myself!

Well, the answer is right there. I like the questions gnosticism asks. They’re fascinating, mind-blowing questions, that point to all sorts of paradoxical possibilities. It may not be a system of magic, it may not have everything I need to be happy and healthy and whole AS AN INTELLECTUAL CONSTRUCT but fuck! It has taken me on some wild rides, turned my life upside down, acted as springboard for all sorts of terrifying and bizarre other paradigms I NEVER would have dreamed I would EVER get involved with, rattled my cage, shook my tree, turned my mind inside out and back again, gave me not only a paradigm but a metaparadigm for examining science and myth alike, validated my skepticism as well as my natural mystical tendencies, made me cry with joy over my own spirit and soul…

I don’t give a shit if anyone else thinks I have permission to opine on gnosticism or not. If I don’t, who does?

So thanks Tim, the best kind of leadership is always leadership by example, Yer doing an outstanding job.