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(Image by Mattijn Frannsen)
Category Archives: INSIDE THE BOOK
Inside the book, Vermeer: Portraits of A Lifetime. Analysis of all the paintings of Johannes Vermeer. The book reveals for the first time that the women featured in the paintings of Johannes Vermeer were members of his own family, his daughters, his wife and mother-in-law, Maria Thins.
GOAT FOOT GOD OF ARCADY
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“O goat-foot God of *Arcady!
This modern world is gray and old,
And what remains to us of thee ? …
Then blow some trumpet loud and free,
And give thine oaten pipe away,
Ah, leave the hills of Arcady* !
This modern world hath need of thee!”
— Oscar Wilde, (c. 1854-1900)
(*Arcady =Arcadia, the southern region ofGreece, for which Pan is the national god.)
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Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London’s most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. Today he is remembered for his epigrams, plays and the circumstances of his imprisonment, followed by his early death. (Wikipedia.org)
DISCIPLINE OF SORCERERS
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“We have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos and took over the rule of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners. The Predator is our lord and master. It has rendered us docile, helpless. If we want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it demands that we don’t do so… I have been beating around the bush all this time, insinuating to you that something is holding us prisoner. Indeed we are held prisoner!
“This was an energetic fact for the sorcerers of ancient Mexico … They took us over because we are food for them, and they squeeze us mercilessly because we are their sustenance. just as we rear chickens in chicken coops, the predators rear us in human coops, humaneros.
Therefore, their food is always available to them.” “No, no, no, no,” [Carlos replies] “This is absurd don Juan. What you’re saying is something monstrous. It simply can’t be true, for sorcerers or for average men, or for anyone.” “Why not?” don Juan asked calmly. “Why not? Because it infuriates you? … You haven’t heard all the claims yet. I want to appeal to your analytical mind. Think for a moment, and tell me how you would explain the contradictions between the intelligence of man the engineer and the stupidity of his systems of beliefs, or the stupidity of his contradictory behaviour.
Sorcerers believe that the predators have given us our systems of belief, our ideas of good and evil, our social mores. They are the ones who set up our hopes and expectations and dreams of success or failure. They have given us covetousness, greed, and cowardice. It is the predators who make us complacent, routinary, and egomaniacal.”
“‘But how can they do this, don Juan? [Carlos] asked, somehow angered further by what [don Juan] was saying. “‘Do they whisper all that in our ears while we are asleep?” “‘No, they don’t do it that way. That’s idiotic!” don Juan said, smiling. “They are infinitely more efficient and organized than that. In order to keep us obedient and meek and weak, the predators engaged themselves in a stupendous maneuver stupendous, of course, from the point of view of a fighting strategist. A horrendous maneuver from the point of view of those who suffer it. They gave us their mind! Do you hear me? The predators give us their mind, which becomes our mind. The predators’ mind is baroque, contradictory, morose, filled with the fear of being discovered any minute now.”
“I know that even though you have never suffered hunger… you have food anxiety, which is none other than the anxiety of the predator who fears that any moment now its maneuver is going to be uncovered and food is going to be denied. Through the mind, which, after all, is their mind, the predators inject into the lives of human beings whatever is convenient for them. And they ensure, in this manner, a degree of security to act as a buffer against their fear.”
“The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were quite ill at ease with the idea of when [the predator] made its appearance on Earth. They reasoned that man must have been a complete being at one point, with stupendous insights, feats of awareness that are mythological legends nowadays. And then, everything seems to disappear, and we have now a sedated man. What I’m saying is that what we have against us is not a simple predator. It is very smart, and organized. It follows a methodical system to render us useless. Man, the magical being that he is destined to be, is no longer magical. He’s an average piece of meat.”
“There are no more dreams for man but the dreams of an animal who is being raised to become a piece of meat: trite, conventional, imbecilic.
“This predator,” don Juan said, “which, of course, is an inorganic being, is not altogether invisible to us as other inorganic beings are. I think as children we do see it, but we decide it’s so horrific that we don’t want to think about it. Children, of course, could insist on focusing on the sight, but everybody else around them dissuades them from doing so.
The only alternative left for mankind is discipline.
Discipline is the only deterrent. But by discipline I don’t mean harsh routines. I don’t mean waking up every morning at five-thirty and throwing cold water on yourself until you’re blue. Sorcerers understand discipline as the capacity to face with serenity odds that are not included in our expectations.
For sorcerers, discipline is an art; the art of facing infinity without flinching; not because they are strong and tough, but because they are filled with awe.”
“Forget the self and you will fear nothing, in whatever level or awareness you find yourself to be.”
https://www.amazon.com/Active-Side-Infinity-Carlos-Castaneda/dp/006092960X
HOW DO YOU KILL AN IMMORTAL?
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WORLD AS MYTH
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The Number of The Beast, by Robert Heinlein is a series of diary entries by each of the four main characters who describe their travels through time and parallel universes to The Land of Oz, and to Barsoom, the fictional planet (Mars) created by Edgar Rice Burroughs. In the novel, the Biblical number of the beast turns out to be, not 666, but 
, or 10,314,424,798,490,535,546,171,949,056, which is the initial number of parallel universes accessible through the continua device. It is later theorized by the character Jacob that the number may be merely the instantly accessible universes from a given location, and there is a larger structure that implies an infinite number of universes. As in many of his later works, Heinlein refers to the idea of solipsism, but in this book develops it into an idea he called “World as Myth” —the idea that universes are created by the act of imagining them, so that all fictional worlds are in fact real.
Sherlock Holmes: My Life, by Lawrence R. Spencer is based on the same concept. In my book, Sherlock Holmes is a REAL person, who lived and breathed. The stories of his real-life detective investigations were published, without his knowledge or permission, in a conspiracy to defraud and deface the greatest detective who ever lived! With the very able assistance of his brother, Mycroft Holmes — the most powerful man in the British government — a conspiracy between Dr. Watson, the authors of Peter Pan, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and powerful financial interests, is discovered and foiled!
I wrote the book long before I read The Number of The Beast. However, I am pleased to discover the “great minds” a like-minded! Why can’t there be a nearly infinite number of parallel universes? If one can imagine a universe, you have created it. It exists, at least for you, subjectively. Is it possible that Sherlock Holmes and Robert Heinlein could be enjoying an adventure together right in this moment, in a parallel universe of their own design? Now, THAT would be a really interesting universe!
Another book, The Big Bleep: The Mystery of A Different Universe, by Lawrence R. Spencer explores a similar theme. It is a universe concocted from the universes of hardboiled “film noir” crime novel by Raymond Chandler, a convention of plants who decide to collectively “hold their breath” to prevent new oxygen from being created in order kill off all the evil humans on Earth, and a conglomeration of pulp comic Superheroes, fighting to help the “heroes” of the story Peter, The Potted Plant (a stand-up comic) and a “Public Dick” named Sam Shovel, owner of the Unexistential Detective Agency of America, to solve the mystery of the murder of Carmel Underwood and rescue humankind from extinction! Simply stated, The Big Bleep is sort of like a Pulp Fiction version of Columbo riding a Harley-Davidson motorcycle through the movies The Maltese Falcon, Alice In Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, with a Elvis and bunch of comic book super heroes bouncing back and forth between an X-Rated Universal Studios Botanical Garden Theme Park and a convoluted Las Vegas strip mall in a 5th Dimensional time warp!
The idea that universes are created by the act of imagining them is not new. Every history book in every library on Earth is a fictional universe filled with imagined events created by the conquerors of vanquished nations and extinct species in an imaginary time-line of undocumented fantasy!