Amen to the funk. I don’t believe in Obamas, just like John Lennon didn’t believe in Beatles. Nevertheless, I find a whole lot I can agree with in the latest post over at Hoodoo Encoding.

From “How the Funk Can Help You (while you’re taking out the trash)”:

And here’s some news for ya’ll: unfortunately, Bruva Obama is not the garbage man. He can’t take out your garbage for you, nor should he be expected to, because getting rid of your own garbage is your own responsibility.

Sorry to be the one to say this to you but in a democracy, you are responsible for taking out the garbage you make. Xenophobia and racist attitudes. Sexism and homophobia. Status anxiety and social ostracism as a method of systemic social control. Corruption. Cronyism. Collusion. Caste. Blind aggression in place of reason and debate. All that trash. Its yours and the longer you keep it in your house the more it will stink up where you live.

In other words, civic engagement means much more than seeing who can holler the loudest at the mic in a crowded room. Sometimes it means volunteering to work in your community to create a cleaner, safer, welcoming place for everybody to live in – not just you. Sometimes it means working for free and expecting nothing in return when helping a neighbor who can’t help themselves - or do anything for you. And of course it can mean picking up that piece of trash on the ground in front of your door and throwing it in the garbage can, even if you didn’t drop it, because you live there.

Yes! Civics and common decency, taking initiative and responsibility: these things will become increasingly important the further into the shit storm of these Spectacular Times we travel. Rather, it will just become blindingly clear, for those with eyes to see, that these things have been of the utmost importance from the very start.

Check out more of the Hoodoo here. And tell ‘em Cadeveo sent ya.

The Masonic Lodge in my hometown stood on a corner, at the end of a street that let out onto one of the main thoroughfares. It was “downtown” (back before downtown got re-branded) across and up the street from the post office and not too far from the public library. Right next to a shoe repair shop that has since disappeared, the Masonic meeting place was an old square building like a lot of other old, square buildings in middle America. Fairly easy to miss if one didn’t know it was where the Mason’s hung out. It was no Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania, that’s for sure.

All throughout my childhood, I never saw anybody go in or out of that building. I knew it had some funny symbols in the windows, windows that always had the blinds drawn, which just added to its mysterious character. The few times I’d tried to go in, the front door was always locked. It was just a mysterious building that I thought about now and again, but mostly not at all. After all, there was the candy store housed inside an old train station that sold dozens of penny and nickel candies, plus chocolate covered bananas and salty, sweet caramel corn (long since gone). There was also the independent record store down the block where I gave my sister the whole of my allowance so she could buy me those two tapes with the parental warning stickers on them, thus beginning my initiation into the mysteries of hip hop: Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet and Ice Cube’s AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted. (This place, also, has ceased to exist.) And of course, there was the big dormitory tower on the nearby college campus and all those pretty girls with funny letters on their t-shirts.

When I became a high school senior my interest in that old, lonely, seemingly never open Masonic building became reawakened by two events. The first event was the discovery of an ornately designed book with what looked like Renaissance-era artwork on its cover on one of the shelves way in that back of the school library. I’d wandered back there on my free period out of boredom and the desire to find something, anything, that might cure that most typical of teenage ailments. From the moment I saw the artwork, the book had me captivated; reading the title only made me more so: The Secret Teachings of All Ages: An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy. I looked at the stamps on the inside cover and noticed that it hadn’t been checked out of the library in nearly twenty years. I didn’t check it out either, but I did walk out of the school library with it and took it home, where I read and re-read it and poured over all its esoteric artwork over and over again. The book, of course, had quite a lot to say about the lofty teachings of Masonry, its connection to the legendary Rosicrucians and hints of a lofty, secret purpose behind the founding of the United States, among many other things.

Just what went on at that Masonic building downtown?

When I’d finished reading The Secret Teachings for the third time, the second event happened, the discovery of another book. This time I was downtown, just a three minute walk away from the Masonic Lodge, in a locally-owned comic book store. On a rack in the center of the store, between a book on Chaos Theory and a copy of William Cooper’s Behold a Pale Horse, sat the Big Book of Conspiracies, a comic book treatment of the most profound, paranoid and plain deranged conspiracy theories that had been established up to that point. Fittingly enough, it was published by Paradox Press. And yes, there was plenty of stuff about the Masons in there.

Just what really went on at the Masonic building downtown?

I set out to find out.

I started with the phone book. While in my friend’s basement, I looked up the number and, just in case something magical, mysterious or frightening happened, while I dialed the number, my friend listened in on another phone.

One ring. Oh man.

Two rings. Ho, baby.

Three rings. What the? Do you think they know that we’re calling and who we are?

After a few more rings, we got the answering machine of the Lodge, informing us of the days and times of meetings and the kind of folks eligible for membership in the Lodge.

Spooky! My friend and I hung up.

But I got a bit of luck. At the time, I was also making the rounds of different religious houses of worship in town (shades of other activities to come in my life), out of curiosity, a sincere hope of something genuine and real, and oh, yes, also out of boredom and the desire to find something, anything, that might cure that most typical of teenage ailments. In this endeavor, I once again received assistance from the local telephone book. From calling the local representative of the Greek Orthodox congregation, I learned that, due to the tiny size of their community (we were, after all, in a very non-Greek Midwestern town), they were holding services in the basement of…the Masonic Lodge.

Spooky! But also convenient and cool, two missions rolled up into one.

I asked my friend with the basement if he wanted to come along with me that Sunday to the Greek Orthodox service and to, you know, also see if we could sneak around the super secret Masonic other floors. He dutifully agreed to embark on the journey with me.

Sunday came and I got dressed. My friend picked me up and drove us downtown. We parked in a spot right in front of the shoe repair shop and walked on up to the corner. This time, when I pulled on the front door, it opened.

Spooky!

There were folks already ahead of us heading downstairs and so we followed them.

What followed was a very beautiful service, officiating by a young Greek-American priest with nearly black hair. Some of it felt familiar because I had been raised Roman Catholic, but it struck me as much more meaningful and spiritual, partially because of the sheer quantity of smoking incense used during the service (a detail virtually absent from the local Catholic churches), the greater frequency of kneeling, standing and sitting, and the fact that it was conducted entirely in Greek and I didn’t understand a word of it.

Right then I had an insight about the importance of ritual and mystery in human life and the need to seek out and experience those things, even if one had to create them for oneself. I suddenly understood why certain elderly Catholics bemoaned Vatican II so much and how it had gotten rid of the traditional, Latin mass. I also understood one reason why the blinds were always closed and the front door was frequently locked at the Masonic Lodge whose basement I was sitting in.

When the mass ended, my friend and I spoke with the Father for a few minutes. I complimented the mass, let him know how beautiful it had felt, how spiritual. And we asked him about the use of incense in the service and received a two-fold answer.

“Well, it’s meant to symbolize the prayers of the people going up to heaven, as well as reminding us of the Holy Spirit.”

He then smiled.

“It’s also used because, well, in the Middle Ages they didn’t have deodorant or air conditioning and people smelled really bad, especially in the summer.”

Now we smiled.

After a few more minutes of pleasant conversation, we thanked him for the experience and said goodbye. There were still plenty of people mingling in the basement as we ascended the steps up to the entry way and kept on climbing to the very next floor. We hadn’t forgotten our other reason for being here. To seek out some clues as to what the heck those Masons did when the Greeks weren’t using their basement.

We walked through a bare room with a portrait of George Washington on the wall and came upon a locked door. No dice there, so we continued on to the next room. Here, we found a framed diagram outlining various degrees of Freemasonry. The one that stuck out for me was “The Order of the Knights Templar.” I remembered them mentioned both in the Big Book of Conspiracies and in The Secret Teachings, each making a connection to the Masons, but painted in very different lights. The first book conjured something wild, sinister and disturbing; the latter, painted something wild, wise and profound. Standing there I knew I was in no position to know whether either view was entirely, partially or not at all correct.

“Interesting,” I said.

“Yup,” my friend agreed. “Looks like that’s gonna be it for today.”

“Yup,” I said.

So ended my first trip inside one of Hiram’s Houses. Not a single spooky thing came of it either. I did, however, enjoy smelling like incense for the rest of the day.

It finally happened. Not that I thought it would, but it has. Awhile back, I wrote about visiting a lifelong friend back in my hometown and being shown a chain-letter Jesus in his basement. One was supposed to look at the face of this chain-letter Jesus picture in a spirit of prayer, then (so it was implied) the chain-letter Jesus would (not so) miraculously open its eyes. You were then to pass on Chain-Letter Jesus to someone else who really needed him. The trick to Jesus’ opening his eyes, though, was simply that the artist had very lightly outlined a circle on each eyelid. If your eyes got tired or you bugged them out and let them go unfocused a little, you would then see Jesus “open his eyes.” Just tricks.

About a month ago, I received some Christian junk mail whose envelope read the following:

This very old church loans this to you, to bless someone connected with this home. Then, it must go to another family that desires God’s blessings. See letter inside…YOUR HOME FIRST!

The envelope also promised me that, honest to God, the senders wanted to give me “this free piece of jewelry, a Cross, Blessed for you.” Now, the envelope seemed thick enough, but didn’t seem to have any jewelry in it that I could tell from feeling it up thoroughly. (Sorry for that, envelope.)

My first inclination was to throw the thing out since it came unbidden and because, aside from plugging in some Christian-sounding specifics here and there, nothing much distinguished this letter from a piece of postal service-sent junk from Publisher’s Clearing House or a credit card company. I mean, seriously: who but a marketer would pre-print multiple red underlinings under key words on an envelope, plus go crazy with the bold face and the all-caps? Only old school marketers or schizophrenic, self-published manifesto-writing geniuses like the late Francis E. Dec. Unfortunately, it wasn’t from a schizophrenic genius. For whatever reason, though, I didn’t throw it out. I just let it hang out on a counter for a month.

Finally, this morning, in preparation for finally throwing the thing out, I decided to open it. I turned the envelope over, quickly read the pre-printed, supposed-to-look-like-handwriting-fonted words on the back–

DEAR JESUS,

WE PRAY THAT YOU WILL BLESS SOMEONE IN THIS HOME SPIRITUALLY, PHYSICALLY & FINANCIALLY. AND PLEASE DEAR LORD, BLESS THE ONE WHO’S HANDS OPEN THIS LETTER. MAKE GOOD CHANGES IN THIS ONE’S LIFE AND GIVE THEM THE DESIRES OF THEIR HEART. WE PRAY OVER AND BLESS THIS LETTER IN YOUR HOLY NAME. AMEN.

–and opened the envelope. And guess (because I’m sure you already have) what I found inside that envelope? That’s right. Not jewelry, not a cross: the Chain-Letter Jesus.

It’s slightly different than I remember seeing it in my friend’s basement awhile back, but it’s him alright. A picture of a Shroud of Turin-esque, purple, floating Jesus face surrounded by a arabesque border that has a design in various shades of brown, purple and gold. Below the floating Jesus face, it says: Church Prayer Rug.

And at the bottom of this Church Prayer Rug, which isn’t really a prayer rug unless we’ve started considering poster-sized pieces of paper or napkins, for that matter, to be rugs simply because they’ve got a design printed on it, is a set of instructions:

Look into Jesus’ Eyes you will see they are closed. But as you continue to look you will see His eyes opening and looking back into your eyes. Then go and be alone and kneel on this Rug of Faith [piece of paper] or touch it to both knees. Then please check your needs on our letter to you. Please return this Prayer Rug. Do not keep it.

The chain-letter Jesus paper–er, Prayer Rug–comes with a standard, marketing letter filled with further excessive use of underlining, all caps and bold print, telling you that, in old school chain-letter fashion, you’re only supposed to keep the Jesus Prayer Rug for 24 hours and then send it back to them. “Use this unusual, important, Church Prayer Rug for tonight only,” it says. Of course, there’s nothing unusual about the Prayer Rug except the misuse of the word “rug” to describe it. As for important, that’s in the eyes of the perceiver, not in the eyes of the Chain Letter Jesus.

On the backside of this holy marketing letter there is a checklist of needs you can have the church of the holy junk mail pray for on your behalf. These includes prayer “for my family and me for” the following:

“My Soul,” “A Closer Walk With Jesus,” “My Health,” “A Family Member’s Health,” “Confusion in My Home,” “A Money Blessing,” etc. You can even have the church “Pray for God to bless me with this amount of money:$________.” I’m thinking of filling in twenty million dollars. It really couldn’t hurt.

The second to last item, in case you’ve forgotten the promise they made to me on the envelope, is this:

“Yes, I want the free Deuteronomy 8:18 Prosperity Cross, blessed by the church!” I know what that sentence is supposed to mean, but for some reason, when I read it, I keep hearing “Yes! Send me my free NFL cordless football phone with my subscription to Sports Illustrated, plus the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition!” It’s funny what bits of childhood marketing hypnosis bubble up when you least expect it.

Also embedded in the prayer request list is the item “I Want to Be Saved.” Who doesn’t? But from what? I know what the Christian meaning of that phrase is meant to be, but again, the answer is in the eyes of the perceiver. You’re to assume the answer is saved by Jesus or heaven from sin, the devil, death. I could be reading this totally wrong, but I think the answer basically boils down to wanting to be saved from bad luck, from hard times, from feeling like a loser. Who hasn’t wanted that at some point in their life? Just remember that everything’s gotta be paid for; so it’s no surprise that the final item on the checklist isn’t a prayer request from you to the church but a request from the church to you: “Enclosed is my seed gift to God’s work of $________.”

Twenty million dollars? Oh, wait…I don’t have that yet.

In case you’re curious as to who is sending around the Chain Letter Jesus letters, it’s a Tulsa-based franchise of “Ecumenical, Evangelic” churches named St. Matthew’s. They have a website where you can get daily prayers and find out more about the Prayer piece of paper that wants to be a rug. The franchise was founded in 1951, according to their story, by fifteen born-again families that used to baptize folks in a local river. From river baptisms to Christian junk mail: my, my they’ve come a long way. But I’m not going to be too hard on them. After all, their website does include this piece of honesty by way of disclaimer:

The power is in the faith. There is no power in the free prayer rugs or the Acts 19:11,12 handkerchiefs; they are symbols of faith, just as holy anointing oil was used in the Bible, at James 5:14. That James 5:14 oil had no power. The power is in prayer and faith…Baptism water is symbolic of our following Jesus in His baptism (St. Matthew 3:16,17). That is all that Saint Matthew’s Churches’ free prayer rugs are. They are simple symbols of dedicated holy places in a home, reminding us to set aside prayer and meditation times for our Lord and Savior.

Okay. Then, so why embed a cheesy optical illusion in the Chain Letter Jesus Prayer “Rug,” then? Here’s their answer:

Saint Matthew’s Church believes that in faith the Apostle Paul sent forth handkerchiefs, “and the evil spirits went out of them [the sick]” (Acts 19:11,12). Sometimes Saint Matthew’s Church gives away free biblical, prayer, faith handkerchiefs to represent the Apostle Paul’s act of faith.

There was no holy, magic power in the Apostle Paul’s handkerchiefs or aprons. Those pieces of cloth simply triggered faith in the believers’ lives…

“Trigger faith”? No holy, magic power in Saint Paul’s handkerchiefs? Boy, Saint Matthew’s is giving the whole game away while still playing the game. Hypnosis is alive and well at St. Matthew’s Churches. If they went far enough to actually use the term, though, I wonder what that would do to their sales…I mean ministry. The power is in you and I, not in St. Matthew’s Churches and they’re admitting as much. So how exactly would I be doing God’s work by sending seed money to them? And how would I not be doing God’s work by keeping their prayer “rug”?

What do you think, should I send away for a non-magical, non-holy Saint Paul handkerchief for use against demons?

***

Here’s a picture of the “rug” from someone who has also received it “on loan” in the mail from St. Matthew’s Church.

***

MORE FROM THIS RABBIT HOLE:

Bless the Jesus of the Basement and the Backyard:

http://cadeveo.wordpress.com/2008/01/16/bless-the-jesus-of-the-basement-and-the-backyard/

Chapter Four of Jeff Warren’s illuminating Head Trip, he pays a visit to Dr. Herbert Spiegel, a clinical psychiatrist and contemporary of the late, Milton Erickson, in order to experience a hypnotic trance. Part of what brings Warren to Spiegel’s office is the search for a desire to find and understand a reliable standard by which to measure an individual’s relative ability to enter into a hypnotic trance state. What Spiegel tells him is worth quoting at length:

Although the complete HIP [Hypnotic Induction Profile--a measure of an individual's hypnotic susceptibility] is needed to determine a subject’s exact hypnotic capacity, the Eye-Roll Sign is a quick and reliable signpost. The key measurement is how much white (sclera) the subject shows under the iris as she rolls her eyes up and begins to flutter her lids closed. No white is scored at zero, and is a strong indicator that the subject will be unable to enter a hypnotic trance. A small sliver is scored at one, mild ability; when the amount of white approaches the mid-line of the eye it’s a two, mid-range; and more than midline is three, which means the subject has a solid hypnotic capacity. When the iris disappears almost entirely and the person facing the subject gets the full white-eyeball zombie glare, that’s a four, and you may as well command her to assassinate that public figure right then and there because this chick is going to be putty in your Svengali hands.

Of course, Warren is joking about the assassination stuff (so he thinks!), but what interests me is to compare the eye roll phenomenon with countless religious paintings where we see the saint or the worshipper sitting with eyes raised–or rolled up–toward heaven. Are these depictions of saints literally looking up to heaven or is it a clue to some knowledge that was known at some point–that you connected with heaven through an eye roll, the gateway to trance?

Another note to consider here. According to Spiegel, who arrived at the Eye Roll diagnostic over the course of years of observation, not everyone has the capacity to roll their eyes up to the same degree and some folks, who he terms Appollonians, can barely do the eye roll at all, certainly not to a degree to obscure any more than the slightest sliver of iris. These Appollonian folks don’t seem capable of hypnotic trance at all and one wouldn’t be surprised to see your Amazin’ Randy-type skeptic among their ranks:

‘”Spiegel noticed…personality tendencies early on, nad with his data he eventually identified three clusters of personality styles that most subjects–excepting those with “severe psychopathology”–fall into. Each corresponds to a different hypnotic capacity. At the low end are “Appollonians”…:controlled, organized, observant, methodical. Like th eGreek god of light for whom they are named, Appollonians cultivate reason over passion and survey the world with aclear and steady gaze. Their opposites are “Dionysians.” Trusting, imaginative, empathetic, Dionysians like Chris live fantasy-rich lives, and are able to lose themselves in pleasures of the moment.

…The eye roll is just an indicator. But it’s based on decades of clinical observation as well as experimental validation. It indicates that personlaity style has certain predictable pathological outcomes”…that is, if they get pathological. If they don’t, then Apollonians typically become executives or lawyers–organized, controlled thinkers–while Dionysians become artists and actors, professions that emphasize feeling and intuition. These are the two extremes–most people are in the middle.”‘

What does Spiegel call that large swath of folks in the middle? Odysseans.

And here I invite you, dear readers, to post links and pictures of folks in various religious traditions, who are displaying the eye roll–whether they be shamans, Christian saints and lay-people, “horses” of the lwa and orisha, etc., as food for thought–and sight.

First time I saw a gray, “for real,” I was in the middle of a deep meditation, at a moment in my life when I also found myself to be, willingly, though perhaps less than consciously, a gypsy’s mark.

The second (and third and fourth…) time I saw a gray happened like this.

Riding to the Japanese Boonies

The Son of the Widow’s Son and I merge and become one with the human salmon stream rushing into Shibuya Station. In our inside coat pockets we carry newly bought shrooms, legal non-consumption purposes only. The Mickey-Mouse-gloved station agents smash us, along with the other thousands of other man-and-woman fish, into the red-line train. The Son towers like some proud farmer’s prize cornstalk above the Japanese standing around him. Me, I’m left spooning a salary man. Against my will. Just like everyone else whose crotch is pressed against a stranger’s ass in the crammed Japanese subway, and also like those whose asses must accommodate this imposition, I am avoiding any and all eye contact.

The Son, towering, oblivious to the Japanese crotches up against the back of his calves, says, “Is there a Konbini near you? We’ll have to get some Acerola juice.”

“Ass-a-rola juice?”

Does he see where me and my poor crotch are situated right now?

“Very high in vitamin C. Vitamin C makes them [the shrooms] more potent.”

“Oh. Sure, there’s one in town. It’s a walk.”

I’m glad that I won’t be stuck in unwanted-spoon forever. Once we get on my train line, there are considerably fewer people. I live in the country, see. “The Japanese boonies” as my college friend-cum-roommate/landlord calls it. He’s fully aware that The Son of the Widow’s Son and I will be coming and he knows what we’re up to. Tonight he’ll be our guide and I can’t think of anyone better suited for the duty. Among the college sets he’d hung with were the rich kids, mostly from either U.S. coastal metropolis, who idolized the Beats and the Romantics, and indulged in psycho-pharmacological experimentation, bullshit sessions and bad poetry readings in equal measure. He had experience as a guide for folks doing the tripping thing, though, even if they were pretentious phonies getting their rocks off and not earnest explorers of the soul like me, right guys? Guys?

We get off at Yokohama station to make the transfer and on my train line, we can sit comfortably on the upholstered seats, spread our legs out. The closest person to us is a Japanese woman wearing a face mask, sitting all the way on the other end of the train car.

The Son makes one of those snorty, under-the-breath nose laughs and shakes his head.

“What?”

“You remember the sarin gas attacks in the subways?”

I remember the story, sure. The Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo had procured sarin gas and then pumped it into the subways in an attempt to immanentize the eschaton or something.

“I wasn’t here for it, obviously. What about it?”

The Son nods over at the Japanese woman.

“Oh,” I say.

“That,” he says, pointing, “has nothing to do with the sarin gas attacks. It’s cold season. The Japanese were wearing those before the Aum thing.”

I put it together pretty quick right then.

“Holy shit. I remember Time and Newsweek had all these pictures of Japanese people wearing those little white face masks and some caption about how the Japanese were living in fear and terror. You mean?”

“They just took some pictures of regular people in the winter here and then tacked on the caption they wanted to freak out the folks back home. But they do the same shit here, too, just in reverse.”

Well, I don’t really want to think about sarin gas or media manipulation just now. I want to have my set and setting all free and clear of cynicism, paranoia and other inconvenient states of mind when I go on my first spiritual journey on the ol’ mushies. So I change the subject.

“Your gonna meet T– and his cat. They’re both cool.”

“Great. You vibe with cats in a whole different way when you’re taking a trip,” the Son said.

I found that to be truer than words, but that comes later.

We arrive at my station and exit the train.

Juice and Voices

Whereas most stations in Yokohama and Tokyo face out upon either a Pachinko parlor or one of a several cookie-cutter corporate English language schools, this isn’t the case where I live. We walk out of the station, across the gravel, pass the phone booths and have only an old noodle shop to greet us. We pass it by as I lead The Son a half mile away to the Konbini, with it’s blue and white lettering. We enter the artificial light to a cacaphony of “Irishimashe!”s that signals we have entered the alternate reality of Japanese convenience stores.

The Son goes to the coolers in the back while an unseen, preternaturally cute, female whose voice comes from nowhere and everywhere at once, has preternaturally cute orgasm after rolling-near orgasm, while selling something in Japanese. Her commercial revelries are accompanied by the kind of music that would embarrass the host of an American informercial. Hyper-happy synth-horns gleefully blast away, synth-piano flits about, punctuating every squeal of the disincarnate girl-woman. I go straight to eyeing the Meiji chocolate bars, the Pocky. Then I move to deliberating about whether or not to buy one of those over-priced “Genki drinks” that the Japanese were concocting years before anyone Stateside other than certain messianic, horny-for-apocalypse, Christians and Jews had anything at all to associate with a Red Bull.

“Hey.” I look up to see The Son walk by with the Acerola juice, a big, squarish bottle of light red liquid and head straight to the cash register.

An Entheogenic Memory Lane Prelude

A minute later, we’re back out on the street and begin the long, winding walk uphill to the house. It’s a walk that I got wrong quite often in the first few weeks I lived out here, and still get wrong, if I’m sufficiently tired. If you walk up the hill and turn at the wrong spot, you end up back down the hill. If you don’t know where to look for the narrow staircase on the right side of the road—and it’s damn easy to miss—you spend an extra six minutes walking. You can navigate the path by landmarks, but since it can start to all look the same, its better to go by your feet’s sense memory.

T— immediately stumbles out into the foyer as we enter the house. He’s been napping.

He squints, rubbing his head and holding out his other hand for The Son.

“J—?”

“Hey,” says the Son of the Widow’s Son, “you’re T—.”

T— makes some coffee and starts up the rice cooker and quickly reached a full, waking state. T— brings us some big, fat Japanese toast, upon which some of that amazing, egg-flavored, Japanese mayo has already melted, soaking deep into the bread’s pores. T—lights a cigarette. The Son lights a cigarette. And we three shoot the shit. Two of us smoking, one of us not. Two of us chewing up bitter, improbably powdery, dry gray mushrooms while swigging Acerola juice, and one of us not.

“So, J—, C— told you about the ghosts.”

“Yeah. My wife’s friend’s a Buddhist monk, so that’s how I knew about the mounds of salt.”

“I told him about that, too. I didn’t think to tell him to put the mounds in all the corners, just in front of his door.”

I’d had a few trying months dealing with some unpleasant spectral visitations in that house. Once I’d put salt mounds both in front of my door and in the corners of my room, the phenomena had stopped.

“There used to be a lot of wars around here a long time ago, so there’s a lot of stuff out here,” T— says.

But I don’t really wanna dredge up ghosts. Set and setting, right? I want mine to be conducive to one of William James more positive and powerful varieties of religious experience. So I suggest some music.

The Son of the Widow’s Son has some music in his bag, some ambient meets shamanic drumming-type stuff. T— has a fairly new, very pretty Bjork album. So we alternate between listening to those two things as the conversation moves on at an easy and relaxed pace. T—‘s cat comes by and he grabs him up, strokes him, and lets him go. The cat sits and half closes its eyes content. The Son and I close our eyes half-way and it’s like I can almost feel the cat’s purring inside my own throat. Then T—, and all of us, go silent for a long moment, and right on cue, I feel the body buzzing-humming of the mushroom’s magic begin.

“Come on. Let’s go,” T— says, and we put on our shoes and head out of the house. We turn down a side street I don’t ever notice.

Fog and All Fours

A cat passes us in the dark, its every muscle movement and breath taking on the quality of ocean tide, fluid, rolling in and out over a shore of thin, fine, skin and fur.

And just like that, we follow T— and soon find ourselves descending old steps surrounded by trees. We pass by a kami shrine in a clearing and keep going, everything beginning to sparkle, my own breathing and movements feeling like ocean tide.

And it’s a foggy night, a misty night, mystic: and the whole night breathes as do we. The Son of the Widow’s Son and I follow T— without question, finding ourselves now upon a very old, stone staircase, rising up into the hills. Somewhere here, Buddhist monks sleep and meditate in their temples while we climb. And back into the woods and out onto another, narrow, stone staircase, overlooking a bed of mist. And I’ve heard a dog howl somewhere and now the dog is me, as I pull off my shoes and throw them into the waiting mist below. I don’t hear them land for quite some time and when I do, I’ve no clue where they will be, nor do I care.

“Hey, man. Those are your shoes,” T says.

They descend the stairs, submerged in fog. I follow. On all fours. I can’t imagine anything more natural to do right now. Down the stairs without missing a step, just like rogue mutt or a wild dog making its rounds unselfconsciously. It’s like I’ve been doing this forever. I know that I can go back to standing upright when it feels right again and that, again, will feel as natural as anything. Likewise, I know, that if I choose to go about on all-fours again years on down the line, it will feel just like this, but less intensely. More subtle.

And like that, we’re out on flat ground, a wide and empty stone road, walking, all of us like journeymen (the journey dog has gone). I still don’t know where we’re going. And I’m not sure what, if anything, this all has to do with God or varieties of religious experience, though I know it feels alive. After all, we, and everything is still breathing. But also more silent. Peaceful. As if it is all nothing and simply so: clear.

A Gray Surprise

My feet are warm and my arms cold as we keep on. I don’t even think to ask where we’re going. I’d rather let that knowledge unfold as we go.

Now we’re down some cement steps and walking through dirty-white sand and there it is: the ocean, big and expansive: breathing.

And it makes sense that we should end here.

T— sits down and The Son and I follow suit. We all sit and stretch out and stare out at the ocean and the calm of the deep, long night.

Across the beach we hear someone strumming a Beatles song, Let it Be, in broken English.

And it’s as I stare out at the ocean that I see, flitting up from the swirling air way out above the sea, a familiar face, then two of them, three, four.

And I just smile.

“Of course,” I say.

The Son smiles back at me. And in the way that a person on shrooms does, I feel like he knows what I’m thinking, maybe even sees what I’m seeing. But who knows. I didn’t ask then and I didn’t ask later.

And here’s where we meet the grays again, out by the ocean in the Japanese boonies, buzzing symbiotically with the mushrooms humming through our system, briefly piggy-backing on our human body’s perceptions.

Expressionless, cat-like cipher faces with their thin, thin bodies that flow like that ocean breathed, the grays looked back at us.

Not exactly God, but something.

What do the grays have to do with God? Or the Kami? Or me? You? Anybody?

Months later, I’ll see the grays manifest themselves from out of the walls in a Japanese karaoke room while on another, less high-minded shroom journey in Ikebukuro. After that, I’ll see them show up at a meat-bowl and rice joint somewhere else.

That we first saw a gray while meditating, and next saw them on several mushroom journeys says something. I’ll let the reductionists of all stripes tell you what exactly.

***

Similar Rabbit Holes:

Remembering the Hauntings in Japan:

http://cadeveo.wordpress.com/2007/03/07/remembering-the-hauntings-in-japan/

Summer of Lam: Traveling Blind in the Gray Realms

http://cadeveo.wordpress.com/2007/06/09/101/

Wolves and Dogs and Things:

http://cadeveo.wordpress.com/2008/05/31/wolves-and-dogs-and-things/

Here’s Where We Meet the Grays Again, Pt. 1:

http://cadeveo.wordpress.com/2008/05/18/heres-where-we-meet-the-grays-again/

From Zora Neale Hurston’s impressive autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road:

“There is no diffused light on anything international so that a comparatively whole scene may be observed. Light is sharply directed on one spot, leaving not only the greater part in darkness but also denying by implication that the great unlighted field exists. It is no longer profitable, with few exceptions, to ask people what they think, for you will be told what they wish, instead. Perhaps at no other period in the history of the world have people lived in such a dreamy state. People even waste time denouncing their enemies in open warfare for shooting back too hard, or too accurately. There is no attempt to be accurate as to truth, however. The whole isea is to be complimentary to one’s self and keep alive the dream. The other man’s side commits gross butcheries. One’s own side wins smashing victories.

Being human and a part of humanity, I like to think that my own nation is more just than any other in spite of the facts on hand. It makes me feel prouder and bigger to think that way. But now and then the embroidered hangings blow aside, and I am less exalted. I see that the high principles enunciated so throatedly are like the flowers in spring–they have nothing o do with the case. If my conclusions are in error, then the orators and copy-books were wrong to start off with. I should have been told in the very beginning that those were words to copy, but not to go by. But they didn’t tell me that. They swore by jeppers and by joe that there were certain unshakable truths that no man nor nation could make out without.

There was the dignity of man. His inalienable rights were sacred. Man, noble man, had risen in his might and glory and had stamped out the vile institution of slavery. That is just what they said. But I know that the principle of human bondage has not yet vanished from the earth. I know that great nations are standing on it. I would not go so far as to deny that there has been no progress toward the cocept of liberty. Already it has been agreed that the name of slavery is very bad. No civilized nation will use such a term anymore. Neither will they keep the business around the home. Life will be on a loftier level by operating at a distance and calling it acquiring sources of raw material, and keeping the market open. It has been decided also, that it is not cricket to enslave one’s own kind. That is unspeakable tyranny.

But must a nation suffer from lack of prosperity and expansion by lofty concepts? Not at all! If a ruler can find a place way off where the people do not look like him, kill enough of them to convince the rest that they ought to support with their lives and labor, that ruler is hailed as a great conqueror, and people build monuments to him. The very weapons he used are also honored. They picture him in unforgetting stone with the sacred tool of his conquest in his hand. Democracy, like religion, never was designed to make our profits less. (258-259)

Ol’ Zora came to these conclusions back in 1942. Perhaps she’s right about we here human folk, since her words still remain so relevant and the picture she paints still looks all too familiar…

***

We’ll be back to the original content soon, kids. I’ve been reading a lot of Ol’ Zora lately. A complicated woman and born story teller, she speaks to me in a way I need right now. As for us, the story teller’s vocation seems saner and more fruitful than unadorned rabbit hole diving at the moment. Not that we won’t be rabbit hole diving, just doing it in a way that speaks to the parts of us that can sing–and what’s more, hold a more uplifting tune, despite the occasional gravel in the throat.

Even with my great absence over the last few months, I still manage between 150 and 200 hits a day.  Not blog rockstar numbers, but pretty good for an underground cat.  Now we’ve hit the 100,000 visits mark, which is an interesting milestone, though I feel ambivalent about it.  I suppose it means there are enough things I’ve written on here that have sustained attention and some sort of word of mouth on the electronic ocean’s floor.  I’m increasingly uncertain as to what to do with myself and this site, though. 

I’m at a crossroads. 

There are quite a few loose threads I still want to tie up, articles and writings I’ve promised to finish and put up on this site, but I find myself a bit out of steam.  And I just wonder sometimes if I’m simply wasting my time when I write about certain topics. 

I’m being pretty oblique, but that’s how it goes.

Not looking for a pity party or anything, just trying to evaluate how or if to proceed.  I think I’ve grown weary of staring at the void and having it stare back at me.  Diminishing returns.  Eventually ya just gotta turn around and face away from the cave wall ; remember how to get yourself out into the sun…

Sunlight’s vital for good mental health, after all.

We worked together for one year in Japan at the same school. He lived in Hiyoshi, same as the tiny groupuscule from the Fellowship of Friends that I ran into during that year. He taught English, went to Temple University, and lived with a Japanese wife with whom he seemed to have a pretty happy, still-fresh marriage. I also thought he fit the bill as the doppelganger to a college friend I’d called The Captain. Difference was, The Captain was the son of a minister. The Son was the progeny of a Southern police chief and Freemason.

The Son of the Widow’s Son read tons of Graham Hancock, smoked cigarettes like he needed to personally deplete the world’s supply, enjoyed Kirin beer, and scoured the internet for all sorts of alternative news, which he’d dutifully print out and share with his Japanese students when he saw an opportunity. He also refused to use e-mail.

“It’s not secure. All of it is monitored,” he said.

At that point, I already had been introduced to the early Disinfo.com (helmed by Richard Metzger) and knew about Project Echelon, Carnivore and the like. Yet, I felt that somehow, if you weren’t writing certain key words in your e-mails, you had nothing to worry about. Of course, now that it’s obvious that things have advanced far beyond Carnivore, what with several recent publications letting Main Core, out of the bag, there’s still nothing to worry about. If they know about you, they know about you. It’s a waste of energy to worry or get paranoid about; that way leads to inaction and a crack-up that only the most skillful and the most lucky come out of for the better.

Still, I lost track of The Son of the Widow’s Son precisely because he did not use e-mail. At some point, after I left Japan, I either lost his number or it changed, I forget which. A letter I sent apparently was not addressed right and so, The Son of the Widow’s Son ceased to be anything more than a memory to me.

There are several things worth remembering about him, which informed quite a bit of what I got up to after I left that Japan year, filled with so many synchronicities, so many RAW’ish 23s, so many changes.

See, it was The Son of the Widow’s Son who told me about putting the salts in all the corners of my room when those ghosts were terrifying me something fierce in my room in rural Japan, a room that had been unoccupied since the death of my friend-landlord’s very beloved grandmother. For that I thank him greatly.

The Son of the Widow’s Son was also there, smoking and smiling fiercely, on my first journey through the reality of Terrence McKenna’s fungal friends, as we both were guided through thick woods, run-down walkways, past hidden kami shrines, and finally to the ocean on one foggy night seven years ago.

And The Son of the Widow’s Son is who told me about Lyndon LaRouche, that ol’ dark intelligence trickster and dictator of his own insular kingdom, what he’d been saying on the radio while the 9-11 went down. I’d just sat down in the sauna room of a remote onsen, flanked by two wrinkly Japanese men in towels. This is the moment when the surreality of the attacks appeared through the hot fog of the room on the Japanese TV, Japanese reporter screaming and running, never once letting go of her microphone as she barrelled down a lower Manhattan street with swarm of gaijin, attempting to escape from the gray clouds of Christine Todd-Whitman approved, non-toxic smoke, dust, gas and debris.

“This guy was saying it had to be an inside job, an element of the government involved because the military jets were not scrambled, they were told to stand down. He said it was an attempted coup.”

It’s interesting how that suspicion was first sowed by such a suspicious person as LaRouche so quickly. But a man no less suspicious, though considerably less powerful (thankfully) than the folks he has wished to be for the past forty plus years–the presidents, the presidential advisors, the movers and shakers of Washington. But being a spook, a shadow has its perks, too, I suppose.

I knew LaRouche as the crazy old codger who ran for president from prison one year, the guy whose followers plastered telephone polls with run-on-sentence-heavy leaflets praising and pleading for the ear of President Bill Clinton while decrying the evil villainy of…Al Gore. I knew him as the guy whose local representative, out of misplaced curiousity, I had called back in college, only to be talked at for the next two hours before the compulsion to take a nap got me off the phone. I also knew LaRouche as a former Trotskyist who’d done a Mussolini turn, moving from the extreme margins of the Left in the 60’s to the extreme margins of the Right by the 1970’s. And I had read that he had a private intelligence organization.

Hmmm…what does it mean when a sketchy guy with a private intelligence organization says that a nationally traumatic event is “an inside job” and a “coup” while its still happening? What might a guy like that know and what might he just be pretending to know? And how different is the stuff he really knows from what he’s saying?

Curiousity killed the cat and all that. Hearing The Son of the Widow’s Son tell me about this LaRouche guy’s proclamation about 9/11, most certainly affected my reaction upon seeing a bunch of LaRouchers with a table out in my New York neighborhood a month later when I returned to the States. I handed them a dollar, wrote down my number and name and waited to get invited to a meeting.

I wanted to know if I could separate the wheat from the chaff. If I could figure out what the LaRouche people were really up to; but if that was the only reason I dove into the world of the LaRouchers, I could have simply cut to the chase and read a few books. The other truth (and I’m sure it’s not the only one), though, is that more than anything, I wanted to see if I could put myself in a trap and then get out of it.

I learned quite a bit, I think, in the bargain, but I’m just as certain that I wasted a good many months distracted from more worthwhile pursuits, attracting crazy energies to me. I could have been Jeremy Duggan.

I hope one day to meet The Son of the Widow’s Son again. I’ve got so much to tell him. Just in case that never happens, maybe he’ll stumble across Waking the Midnight Sun and read this.

Ball Bearings and Appearances

Ms. Vlado is behind me. So are the Lams. I think.

I’ve been hearing for, like months now, how you can get shrooms in Japan. They’re legal, see. To purchase. As “botanical specimens.” They’re not legal to eat, just to buy. They’re for the looking only.

It’s sort of like how gambling is officially illegal in Japan, but then there’s all these Pachinko parlors sprawled all over Tokyo and Yokohama where all these salary men and college students and your random cluster of housewives will go and spend hours playing at the flashing, clanging machines in order to win (drum-roll): ball bearings.

I guess they’re just really into ball bearings.

Strangely, there always happens to be some crazy old guy around the corner from the Pachinko parlor. And this crazy old guy loves ball bearings even more than all those salary men, college students and housewives. He loves ball bearings so much that he’s willing to trade money, and jewels and whatever other valuable shit he has laying around in exchange for the damned things. He just can’t get enough of ball bearings! That’s all it is! And he’s got an equally old and crazy cousin living around the corner from all the other Pachinko parlors; and all those cousins are just as obsessed with ball bearings! They probably get together for family reunions and rent out an onsen for the express purpose of filling every pool with the things. They probably spend hours just diving in, swimming around in those cool metal balls, feeling them rubbing against their own sweaty, fleshy ones.

Everybody wins!

And gambling is illegal in Japan!

And no one buys shrooms for the purpose of eating them because that’s illegal.

But you can buy shrooms just to look at any time you want.

You just have to know where to go.

And, says the Son of the Widow’s Son, who works with me teaching English, shrooms are much, much easier to find than pot.

“Pot, he says, “good luck with that. But shrooms? Just go on down to Shibuya. I’ll go with you and show you where.”

Superior Airs of Shroomspirituality

Why am I interested, you ask?

For spiritual reasons, you see.

My interest in mushrooms isn’t like how men are interested in Playboy for the interviews.

Or maybe it is.

There’s certainly nothing in Playboy worth masturbating to: air-brushed beer ad girls, sans the beer and sans the clothes, but still working the beer ad game. Playboy Bunnies exist merely to give the suggestion of carefree fun and sex–and only that, because neither Playboy nor beer can deliver more. The interviews, though–in Playboy, not beer ads–are really worth the time.

So my interest in the fairy fungus is like that exactly.

If I only wanted to get high, I could make an effort to breathe deeper or drink more. Both options are easier, cheaper, and less potentially frightening to me, not to mention that neither of those things are illegal. Yet.

See, this is a spiritual thing, people.

I’ve read Cosmic Trigger and I’ve convinced myself that if I’m going to do shrooms, I’m going to get something out of it. And mere fun isn’t something. No, I’m gonna get something meaningful out of this, not just some frivolous, escapist bullshit. Escapist bullshit is the provenance of T.V., not this sacred fungus, so says I.

If I’m gonna do shrooms, I’m gonna see God.

Or Something.

Or I’m gonna at least break up a few of the clogs in my mental sink, the ones that keep the deep, pure waters of living experience from flowing through the spiritual and bodily pipes unhindered.

Or something.

“Let’s go to Shibuya,” I say.

“Great. You’re off on Saturday, right? We’ll go on Friday after work.”

“Okay, I don’t wanna be out in the city for it. So come with me out to K—. Lots of trees, mountains. I’m guessing that’s better.”

“Sure. I’ll tell my wife I’m staying out with you,” says the Son of the Widow’s Son.

“Great.”

Finding the Spiral Tunnel in Blade Runner Town

That Friday night we leave the school together and get on the train to Shibuya. We arrive there and join the mass of people streaming, like salmon to ancestral mating grounds, out of the cars and down the steps and out into the night. We pass Hachiko, ever faithful stone dog of Tokyo, and wait at the Blade Runner intersection for the lights to change, entranced by giant TV screens and flashy commercials on the sides of buildings, spectacle that make Times Square seem small, cheap and tacky as a K-Mart, but also less inscrutable.

The lights change and we stream out again and the Son of the Widow’s Son, looks over his bony, tall shoulders with a smile.

“Alright, this is a fun walk.”

We travel past the Shibuya girls with their moon-boots and silver eye-liner, turn down one side street and then another; and as the ratio of dread-locked Japanese youths increases, I realize that we’re getting close.

And then like that, there we are.

I don’t notice it at first, this place. We’re at an intersection where foot-traffic is sparse, yet much greater than that from the tiny Japanese scooters and cars. Three streets cross here and all I see is a bunch of boutiques with lights and a tiny entry way that stands in profile to all the storefronts around it. Next to the entry way is a speaker that blares reggae and hip-hop, and across from that, there is a small wooden bench and a hand-shaped couch chair where several people are sitting and waiting.

Ahhh. That’s it. That’s the place.

“You gotta go down one at a time,” the Son of the Widow’s Son tells me. “And only two people can fit down there at once.”

“Is that a rule?” I ask.

“A necessity,” he says,” it’s small down there and the staircase is very, very narrow.”

I notice then the metal chains dangling down from the entry way.

“That’s a nice touch.” I nod my head toward the entry way.

“Yeah.” The Son smiles, pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket, and starts doing that palm-pounding thing smokers do.

It’s getting a little cold, so I’m hoping this won’t take too long. It takes about fifteen minutes for the two Japanese college kids to emerge from the chain-draped entry way and for the two people occupying the bench and the hand-chair to take their place, going through the chains, one after the other, and disappearing as I hear the banging of their feet. It sounds like a furnace in an old New York apartment clanging to life.

“Metal staircase?” I ask.

“Yeah,” says The Son, smoking his second cigarette.

I’ve got a choice between bench and hand-chair now. I choose the bench because I don’t like the idea of being in anyone’s palm.

I sit and watch pretty Japanese girls in moon-boots walk by as The Son smiles wide and turns his back to me, watching those girls go by, too.

“Nice,” he says, exhaling.

As I sit, the sound of Dr. Dre’s “Next Episode” begins to thump out of the speaker across from me. This is my first time hearing the song, which is brand new at the time, and I’m pretty excited. It has an amazing, chunky beat and seems to portend, obliquely, an impending NWA reunion. This is back in the days when such a thing seemed likely, not just a possibility as remote as Axel Rose ever releasing Chinese Democracy, much less being worth the wait. I bob my head and smile and, for a few minutes, feel a little warmer.

“You ever read Graham Hancock?” The Son asks me, still facing the street.

“No.”

“He’s got a pretty good book about the Egyptian pyramids, how they’re older than mainline historians think. They great pyramids were probably used for religious initiations. I’ve got it at home.”

“Maybe I can borrow it sometime.”

“Sure. You still have those salt mounds in the corners of your room?”

“Yep. So far, so good. No more ghosts.”

“Cool. Those Buddhist monks know a thing or two.”

I hear the clanging of feet on metal as it rises up from beyond the metal chains hanging from the entry way to the head shop. The Son turns around and inhales deeply on his cigarette as the Japanese couple emerge from behind the parting chains. The Son smiles, walks over to the hand-chair and puts out his cigarette in its palm before tossing the butt in a trash receptacle.

“Alright, C–. Here we go. Down the hole!”

None Too Subtle Greetings

I follow the Son as he parts the metal chains and begins the descent. A few inches into the entrance and I barely see any light. In front of me The Son, all six and a half feet of him, was hunched over so he wouldn’t bang into the ceiling. I stepped cautiously down the very narrow, spiral staircase, my feet clanging on the metal. It reminds me of the stairs inside a slide in a park in the town where I grew up. The slide was made to look like a light house and, at seven years old, it looked like the tallest thing in the world. The stairs were all inside of the light house and you were completely in the dark until you reached the top. That’s where the sun hit you straight in the eyes and the slide began. You had better have long pants on when you got there, too, because the whole structure was metal and in the summer, it was hot enough to burn a kid foolish enough to wear shorts. That metal staircase clanged like this one, though it went up, and this one went down.

Right now, slowly spiraling down, down, down those stairs I felt like I was going down into Plato’s Cave. It would not have surprised me to see people chained up, watching shadows reflected on a wall. That’s one part of the parable that never got explained, how those people ended up down in that cave. Maybe they were born there. Or maybe they banged their way down a spiral staircase to get there, in search of something. Whether that something was supposed to be a deep experience, some light-hearted kicks or a good scare, would be anyone’s guess. Maybe some people were born there while others came by way of exploration. They all ended up down in that cave, entranced by the shadows flickering on the wall, so I suppose in the end it didn’t really matter how or why they got there. It only mattered whether they noticed the chain on their feet and thought to turn around.

As we reached the bottom of the stairs, some low, red light seeped through another entrance way. No chains on this one, though. Just beads. We walked through. The Son of the Widow’s Son went through and got to assume his full height again. I got to look up and around him.

We were in a very small room, lit by some crimson light, the source of which I couldn’t quite make out. In front of us was a small wooden counter, behind which were a bunch of mirrors and a stoned-looking Japanese man with an unkempt whisker-patch on his chin and long dread-locks sprouting from his head. In front of him on the counter, were several foam dildoes and some ceramic mushrooms. The room had various fractal posters. Trance music thumped through the air all around us.

“How much do you want?” The Son asked me. “We could get an ounce each or, if you want, two ounces.”

We opted for the latter choice and I handed my share of yen notes to The Son who slid them over to our dread-locked attendant. He took the money and then walked back a few feet and crouched down, coming back up with a large, clear trash bag full of dried mushrooms. He brought the bag up to the counter, behind which lay a measuring scale, obscured by a peach-colored foam dick. He plopped shrivelled shroom after shriveled shroom onto the scale until satisfied. He then placed the amounts in tiny, plastic zip-lock baggies. He then placed the baggies inside only slightly larger white paper bags. He folded the tops of the paper bags over and sealed them with a red-ribbon sticker that read “Enjoyable Thank You.”

He then smiled a twisted-tooth smile and coughed, setting the bags before us. The Son handed me my bag and we each placed our purchases inside our coats. As we turned to leave, I noticed, just above the beaded entry way, a picture of a gray, a Lam, peaking out from behind some rainbow colored mushrooms, smiling and holding a joint.

Do with that what you will.

[To Be Continued...]