

                       Breaking  Cultural  Trance

                              1991 - 95:

                When  the  Collective  Dreambody  Awakens


                        by Antero Alli (c) 1990



Mezlim Editor Comment:

        As I was rereading this article in preparation for this issue, I
        found myself thinking how well it described our current cultural
        transformation.  Then I looked back at the cpyright date and
        noticed that it was written before the Gulf War, before the re-
        unification of Germany, and before the revolution in the U.S.S.R.
        Good call, Antero.


     Perhaps the most difficult thing to believe is the very thing that is
the very thing that is happening to oneself.  Maybe the second most diffi-
cult thing for me to believe is what the mass media says is happening out
there in the world.

     There seems to be three dissident epochs occurring simultanewusly,
with most people living in various parts of each.  There's the past-
oriented Industrial/military complex now giving way to the recently emerged
Information Age which, in turn, is rapidly reaching its hyper-saturation
point, globally - with orbiting satellite networks - and mutating into a
"virtual" reality of consciousness itself.  We can watch any situation on
earth, as it occurs, on a big screen monitor hooked up to a satellite dish.
Yet, as television has demonstrated, acvanced communications systems have
never guaranteed a higher truth quotient in the quality of information
transmitted.  Programs, as we know, are predetermined by the individual,
corporate and/or government programmer.  As the minority who can still think
for themselves have discovered:  We are not the program.

     As diverse sources of information combine and concentrate inside the
psyche, a shift in consciousness occurs.  At its saturation point, infor-
mation turns into consciousness.  We perceive through the filters of what our
mind has consumed.  On the mass collective level, a widespread cultural
awakening is on the verge of occurring.  This will most likely be catalyzed
by global shock waves emanating from an epicenter in the Persian Gulf area.
Its longterm effects may jumpstart collective consciousness, propelling
humanity out of the Information Age and into "an era of invisibility"  I will
call The Age of Consciousness.

     What does this mean?  What you read, hear or see will never again be as
critical as how your consciousness has been prepared to interpret the infor-
mation.  When does this happen?  From an astrological vantage, this era of
invisibility pervades our lives during the conjunction of two outer planets
- Uranus and Npetune - from March 1991 through 1995.  (The last and only
time this century two outer plnaets were in a conjunction aspect commenced
when Pluto conjunct Uranus from 1964 to 1968.)  What will happen?  The
awakening of the collective(Uranus) dreambody(Neptune) - collective con-
sciousness separates from its collective body and enters a phase of symbolic
disassociation.  The human species has an out-of-body experience!  If you
think that's a wild idea, wait until it actually happens.

     As you read these words, the Information Age explodes - inside and
around you - with the Misinformation Missiles and Propaganda Bombs of
outright Information Warfare.  Traditionally, war has been fought for ter-
ritory and economic gain.  Information Wars are fought for the acquisition
of territory indigenous to the Information Age, i.e., the human mind itself.
In particular, it is the faculty of imagination that is under a direct threat
of extinction from the onslaughts of multimedia overload.  What the vast
plethora of media outlets would have us believe is anything but the inner
truths of our own intuition and the creative workings of our own imaginations.
IMAGINATION ALERT: Multi-media conglomerate Imagination Killers are now flood-
ing collective consciousness with a non-stop assault of THEIR images, icons
and concepts (via magazines, books, film, radio, and television).  DANGER!
Your imagination may not be your own.

THE CULTURE THAT DREAMS ITSELF INTO HISTORY

     As a symbol, Neptune represents (among may things) the transpersonal for-
ces of the collective imagionation and dreambody.  Imagination, as defined
here, is isomorphic to the internal workings of dreams and dreaming in general.
They all generate images.  At the onset of biological sleep, electro-chemical
reactions in the human brain(specifically, the release of a psychoactive,
neuro-transmitter called seratonin) trigger in consciousness a spontaneous
stream of mental imaging-imagining-while the physical body slumbers.  Raised
to a lager scale:  When the collective body sleeps, the collective psyche
dreams.  The effects of the collective dreambody can be seen by observing the
mutating phenomena of "cultural trance", wherein a culture dreams itself into
existence.

     The function of imagionation, in general, seems to include an ability to
bond together-in the psyche-those images forming a basis for the inner world
and life of the soul.  In other words, without nurturing the faculty of
imagination there may be no soul.  "Species imagination", if you will, seems
to operate as if it were the collective psyche's own cohesive agent-formed
out of the strongest resonances with those images resembling the zeitgeist or
spirit of the times.  The entertainment industry, in particular cinema and
popular music, act as "Neptunian" mediums for catalyzing collective imagin-
ation and its process of dreaming its newly emerged culture into existance.

     The seventies film, SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, induced a collective "disco
trance" in a large sector of the populace, just as the SEX PISTOLS, the
premire punk rock group, broke this trance and replenished it with its own
brand of "anarchy trance."  Both trances were "real" to their respective
dreamers.  The current wave of Hip Hop Rap music feels and looks like
"reality" to millions of xommitted listeners and so, they dream themselves
into the political history of its occurrence.

     David Lynch's suprise dream hits, TWIN PEAKS and WILD AT HEART, have
lured a large sector of the collective imagination into a trance of "humorous
decay" where we learn to laugh as things fall apart while touched by thier
strange beauty.  Already, other films have started to mimic Lynch's "dreaming
style" in hopes of dreaming themselves into motion picture history.  Like all
film-makers, David Lynch did not "create" culture insomuch as he presented
his dream... how he imagined it.  The collective, through its various degrees
of resonances with certain images over others, determines cultural valididty.
THe audience always has the final say in the realm of collective culture.
By these examples, it's easier to see how collective consciousness floats
from one being. In the realm of the soul, dreams and trances are the commerce
circulating as local currency.

     Another example of making and breaking cultural trance can be seen at
work in our observations of the history and psychological effects of the
atomic bomb.  Since its inception and execution, the atomic bomb has made a
home in our idividual and collective psyches as a highly potent, and highly
repressed, symbol-representing the greatest manmade force ever unleashed on
this planet.  Since most people alive today were born after 1945, the Bomb's
status as a modern-day symbolic phenomena can no longer be denied.  We've
either learned to "live with the bomb" and the threat of our imminent
extinction, and/or we've done our best to repress it-garnering untold degrees
of latent psychic power as the bomb within.  There it is, within our sub-
conscious depths, a lock-up account of monumental psychic force pulsating
inside a turbo-charged atomic image.

     Consider.  In the collective psyche, this awesome internal force remains
ON HOLD until activated by the detonation of an out-there, external nuclear
incident.  Is this the "quantum leap" collective consciousness needs for
species survival now?  As much as the author abhors, and is naive to, the
horrific realities of nuclear devastation, he must also confess his urge to
awaken from his part in the collective slumber or, at least, know his life
may somehow contribute to the awakening of others.  The shrouded yet volatile
politics of the Persian Gulf feels pregnant with unleashed destruction at the
time of this writing.  Despite the information from media smoke screens, we now
know the United States is preparing for war.

THE BOMB AS COSMIC TRIGGER

     Will this war be the catalyst that pulls the cosmic trigger, unshackling
concentric global shock waves from a nuclear explosion?  Is this to be how the
USA defines its, until now hidden from public view, role in this world of na-
tions?  Will the Arab states ignite a sequence of terrorist attacks on Amer-
ican soil while American troops are thousands of miles away?  The political
revolution of the late Sixties emerged, in part, from a global response to
American intervention in Viet Nam.  Remember, 1964-1968 was the last and only
time this century where global activities were marked by the conjunction aspect
of two outer planets (astroloty refers to Uranus, Neptune and Pluto as the
"outer" planets which, when in conjunction aspect, have been know to herald
widewpread political, economic and socio-religious shifts).

     A highly idealistic and nearly impossible alternative to nuclear warfare
is the prospect of engaging in the kind of meditation which serves to ignite
the Bomb Within.  Miracles do happen, though... so why not atomic miracles?
As individual psyches, each of us can participate as a more creative force
right now by OWNING THE BOMB WITHIN.  LOVE THE BOMB WITHIN.  Dare to embrace
your charged atomic symbol and detonate it before the Arabs do it or before the
USA does it for you.  Before anybody else does it for you, DO IT YOURSELF.  Set
off your own internal atomic time bomb and enter the radical transformation of
your won mind and, do it on purpose.  Set youself on fire!  Use your imagin-
ation.  If you are a casualty of the Information Wars you have lost your
dreams, your mind, your imagination-find someone whose vision you feel strongly
enough to fire up your passios to the higher levels of spiritual awakening.

IMAGE IS KING IN THE LAND OF THE BLIND

     When the mind fixates on an image of reality to the exclusion of the very
reality that image refers to, consciousness fragments and begins to split
(schiz) the psyche (phrenia).  The "diseases of the future" will tend to be
schizophrenically based in the erroneous identification with images (a.k.a.,
the "eating the menu instead of the meal" syndrome), especially as the greater
collective continues living out symbolic lives instead of real ones...without
realizing the difference.  The distinction between "the symbolic" and "the
real" is as basic as night and day yet, as a result of being inundated with
culturally-conditiond images from birth, may of us still don't know the differ-
ance today.

   "it's the real thing, in the back of you mind, what your hoping to find...
    it's the real thing.  Coke is!"

  - A post-hypnotic suggestion from the Imagination Killers Handbook.


     As suggested earlier, the territory being fought for and conquered during
the Information Wars is nothing less than the human mind itself.  The list of
mental casualties include those who have never learned to think and process
information through their own imaginations.  These are the victims of Imagin-
ation Death, whose own imaginations have been sucked out and replaced by
designer replicas supplied by the Corporate Imagination Killers referred to
earlier.  (For more symptoms and remedies of this dilemma, please see my book,
ASTROLOGIK, pages 205-212.) Advertising geniuses worldwide know the economic
value of upstaging public imagination with images promising more security, more
status and more sex appeal.  For those left with their imaginations intact,
congratulations: You are surviving the World Entertainment Wars.  ("World
Entertainment War" is also the name of a rock'n'roll group led by California
astrologer/poet, Rob "Pope Artaud" Brenzsny).

     As a culture sophisticates, it deepens its reliance on its images, icons
and symbols as a way of defining itself and communicating with other cultures.
As the accumulating mix of a culture's images float around in its collective
psyche certain isomorphic icons coalesce to produce and project and "illusion
of reality."  That is to say, when enough images agree with each otehr they
almost seem to conspire and form a more convincing "fact".  Examples of these
including passing fads, fashion statements, artistic trends and the slower
moving socio-political and economical shifts, as well as the slowest turning
wheels of established religio-moral doctrines.  Whosoever controls the
metaphor, governs the mind-personally and collectively.

BABES IN THE ABYSS

     I'm referring to thes period (March 1991-95) as an era of invisibility
for several reasons, the first of which includes a more widespread need for
accepting things unknown and unknowable.  For example:  As soon as we relize
how network television and other multi-media outlets are controlled by those
who pay them for advertising, the sooner it grows obvious how narrow and
distored the spectrum of available information is.  For the most part nobody
knows what is happening.  The Persian Gulf is proof enough of how much front-
page, headline newspaper can be printed to say so little.  Ham-radio operators
pointing their antennas at Iraq pick up more reliable data in three minutes
than mass media can in three weeks.  The information, how are we interperting
it and putting it though our own imaginations?

     IF there is a nuclear incident poised to send shock waves around the world
and IF this does release tremendous forces from within our charged psyches, what
kind of effects can we anticipate?  That depends upon each individual mind-of
how one has chosen to conceptualize the psychic realm and/or build defenses
against recognizing its existence.  IF the tragic occurrence of a nuclear were
to occur, I believe there would be a deep spectrum of reactions running the
psychological gamut of people completely flipping out on one end on the other
end, people flipping even deeper into their bodies... with all the graduations
in between.  Theoretically, psychic survival is now more paramount than
physical.

     One's psychic survival may depend on the degree of uncertanty one is will-
ing to permit, alongside a faith in the capacity for intuitive resonance with
unknowns.  This amounts to keeping our antennas clean and the mobility of
pinting them wherever we need the impressions of incomming signals.  For those
of us still immobilized by the paralysis of analysis or whos antennas are
warped in self-preoccupation, a rude awakening awaits.  With all the usual
information sources either exposed as fraudulent or, at best distorted, we may
only be able to depend on our instincts, innate sinsibilities and our best
shot at interpreting them.

     What is meant here by "psychic" is simply perception direct enough to be
relatively free of culturally-conditioned concepts and beliefs.  Using the
term "psychic", we can already recognize certain conditioned responses: New
age, flaky, occult, hidden, forboding, evil, witchcraft, the devil's work,
and so on.  The actual state "psychic" refers to, however, is altogether
different.  The psychic, or perceptive, state is a product of a mind cleaned
of its identification with thoughts, concepts and images...a mind that includes
no-mind.  This is a mind in a dynamic relationship with the potential state of
being...void, or nothingness, corresponding roughly with our comfort in being
nothing...and, in our conscious choice to be nobody-but-ourselves.

     In this predominantly void-ignorant culture, there is little or no
external support for being nothing.  To your average culture vulture, being a
"nobody" is akin to death.  Mass media wizards know better than to appeal too
directly to this void within us and do a good job barely dressing it up.  They
know how the less something exists, the more people want it.  Imagination
Killers stay in business by implementing formula-tested images with the great-
est public appeal to an individual's security, status, ideological and sexual
positions in life.  The more imaginative the concept, the greater the intrigue
and entertainment for the consuming mind.

     Ironically, this professional "avoidance of void" inadvertently creates
an invisible cultural oasis for psyches perceptive enough to see through the
sham.  These minds belong to the psychic survivors.  They refresh thier psyches
through a kind of "identification bypass" by choosing not to be anything or
anybody but themselves.  Inside the heart of the Void, awakening minds find
nourishment in a concept-free zone, as well as refuge from the non-stop imp-
ressions of pre-conditioned iconography-now parading as the next new car or
lipstick color or smash dance or dishwater detergent.  This is why and how
image is kind in the land of the blind.

     Being nothing implies a certian willingness to see through yourself and
through the world around you and, posits the values of transparency and
invisibility.  Here, our emptiness is neither a "good' nothing or a "bad"
nothing; it is simply a beyond image, alive inside the heart of silence.  The
mind that learns to live with the truth is a mind wearing images like a war-
drobe, disrobing at the drop of a hat in the presence of the beloved.  The
spiritual autonomy afforded by this intimacy-with-void does not come easily;
like anything else, it is hard earned if it is to be of lasting value.

     "almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a
      single human being can be tought to be.  Why?  Because whenever
      you think or you believe or you know, you are a lot of other
      people; but the moment you are being, you're nobody-but-yourself.
      To be nobody-but-yourself in a world whis is doing its best night
      and day to make you everyone else - means to fight the hardest
      battle any human being can fight, and never stop fighting...
      Does this sound dismal?  It Isn't.  It's the most wonderful life
      on earth."         - e.e. cummings



     Antero Alli is the author of ASTROLOGIK plus four other rebellious
     manifestos on mystical realism.  For his free katalog of books, tapes,
     & services, write him at PO Box 45758, Seattle, WA USA 98145.


Transferred to the Electronical Realm by:


                      B r i a n    O b l i v i o n

           Black Crawling Systems  @  V0iD Information Archives




