The New Religion is all-encompassing. There are so many ways into an exploration that thoughts must be reined in repeatedly. The New Religion is green and sustainable. It is positive and full of optimism and possibilities. The New Religion is scientific and authoritative (more like authoritarian). It is free from restraints. It is unhinged, unmoored. The occultic no longer hidden. Neopaganism celebrated.
In part one, I mentioned Stephen Dinan of Esalen and The Shift Network. In his book Sacred America, Sacred World, Dinan writes about how we are at a “transformational” stage and the need we have to balance male and female energy. He said,
“I’m a big advocate of electing more women into office and also of bringing more of the feminine to the male side, appreciating men for things like vulnerability rather than strength and dominance . . . Men and women, too, need more fluidity and less rigidity. The advance of gay marriage and gay rights is already helping create a culture in that there’s not as much binary polarization. This allows men to have a more fully developed feminine side, women to feel more balanced, and the culture to be more in flow”.
He must be celebrating Rhode Island’s Democrat state senator Tiara Mack, the first openly LGBTQ black person ever elected to the Rhode Island state senate. On the 4th of July, Ms. Mack twerked upside down for the people and worked it all into a TikTok campaign ad. She responded to her critics by saying that she had an Ivy League education and her constituents liked her because she was fun.
Speaking of women notably lacking modesty and good judgment, here’s a sampling of the headlines beside the Daily Mail’s “twerking senator” story:
Madonna praises Kim Kardashian after she channels the Queen of Pop's iconic 1992 Jean Paul Gaultier breast-baring dress.
Gwyneth Paltrow's ultimate guide to sex toys! Actress's company, Goop, releases VERY lengthy list of tips and tricks for choosing and using vibrators - after debuting her own new $98 design
Cardi B displays her bare derriere in a VERY racy black mesh catsuit as she hits the stage in Norway
Helena Blavatsky set out to bring the New Age to women. With her Theosophical Society she pushed the esoteric, Eastern mysticism, Hinduism, and Spiritualism. Blavatsky claimed to be in contact with an ancient brotherhood of spiritual adepts known as the Masters (or Mahatmas).
Mahatma Gandhi famously said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” He also said, “Theosophy is the teaching of Madame Blavatsky. It is Hinduism at its best. Theosophy is the Brotherhood of Man.” Gandhi met Blavatsky in 1889 and though he did not become a Theosophist at that time, in 1891 he became an associate member of the Blavatsky Lodge.
Mahatma Gandhi echoed the words of Blavatsky and her "Ancient Brotherhood" when he said:
“The soul of religions is one, but it is encased in a multitude of forms. The latter will endure to the end of time. Wise men will ignore the outward crust and see the same soul living under a variety of crusts. … Truth is the exclusive property of no single scripture. We may call ourselves Christians, Hindus or Mohammedans. Whatever we may be, beneath that diversity there is a oneness which is unmistakable and underneath many religions there is also one religion.”
The motto of the Theosophical Movement is “There is no religion higher than Truth.” In another striking parallel, Gandhi said, “There is no God higher than Truth.”
Why was Gandhi a Mahatma or “master”: he was an inductee into both Freemasonry and the Theosophical Society and therefore was a “master”.
Blavatsky’s sometime sidekick Annie Besant was a leading spokesperson for the Fabian Society, a group advocating for slow-motion communism in Great Britain. This isn’t the place to really dig into the history of 20th century India, British rule or the partition, but what was useful to this research was seeing Gandhi as a Blavatsky fan-boy, learning how his initiation into Theosophy led to him adopting a more “Hindu” way of dress, bringing ancient customs onto the popular landscape. The journal Foreign Affairs noted that Gandhi’s Hindu holy man costume caused Muslims to be suspicious of him, even while his stated aim was to smooth divisions between the two religions.
Mark Bevir is a British professor of political science and the Director of the Center for British Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He wrote that in India, Theosophy "became an integral part of a wider movement of neo-Hinduism", which gave Indian nationalists a "legitimating ideology, a new-found confidence, and experience of organisation." He stated Blavatsky "eulogised the Hindu from the vestiges of the past. The Theosophical advocacy of Hinduism contributed to an "idealisation of a golden age in Indian history."
Gandhi attributed much of his inspiration to his time spent with the Theosophical society. He spoke of Blavatsky as being a major catalyst for his ideas, and while he was living in South Africa, Gandhi kept a picture of Annie Besant on his office wall. What I see is a direct link between the Freemasonic Blavatsky and Fabian Besant and the shaping of modern India for its specific role in the 20th and 21st centuries.
But Theosophy was an afterthought for this article. What first popped into my head was the Burning Man Festival. Even though it has been a yearly “happening” for over thirty years now, it most embodies the convergence of the various tenets of the New Religion. My suspicion is that “Burning Man” is a top-down event, i.e., the creation of some intelligence agency such as the CIA. Now, obviously that would never be admitted publicly, but let me show you the connections I made.
The first connection I made was the festival’s reputation for heavy drug use, in particular, the psychedelic type. Think Woodstock, the Summer of Love, CIA mind control experiments and the Manson murders or the “Merry Pranksters” who distributed LSD like bottled water during the 1960s. As I was thinking along those lines, the excellent documentary film from 2003 popped into my head, The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet. This is easily one of the most remarkable films of the last several decades. The connections that it makes are unparalleled. Here's a line from it about the 1960s and the thinking that was shaping that era:
“Everything is possible. Reality can be altered at will. You are what you want to be.”
The film pulls together players such as Stewart Brand, John Brockman, Ted Kaczynski with pivotal events in the “evolution” of science and technology such as Norbert Weiner’s Cybernetics and the creation of the internet. (Weiner studied with Bertrand Russell, an early proponent of what we might now call Scientific Socialism.)
Besides LSD as something that was distributed and promoted in a kind of laboratory/observational approach, the film talked about the early experimentation with and use of strobe lighting to create a more suggestible state, a highly sexualized condition. Stewart Brand was one of the early pioneers of that work.
If you would like to do a deep dive on this, read Tom O’Neill’s book, “Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties.” The assertion I am making is that these events (along with the more general shaping of society) are intelligence operations, or if not directly planned and instigated by the Intelligence Community, at the very least thoroughly infiltrated and guided by IC people.
My question is, if you do some homework and you see that mind-altering drugs have been promoted (clearly marijuana is the Soma of our day), why use them? If promiscuity and deviance are celebrated there – and they are – why do you trust that those behaviors are harmless in your own personal life? If a certain ideology is being promoted heavily at these events and is the daily fare on television and the internet, e.g. sustainability, greening, the Feminine Principle, why are you not on guard against every iteration of these toxic ideas?
The 10 Principles of Burning Man
Burning Man co-founder Larry Harvey wrote the Ten Principles in 2004 as guidelines for the newly-formed Regional Network. They were crafted not as a dictate of how people should be and act, but as a reflection of the community’s ethos and culture as it had organically developed since the event’s inception.
Radical Inclusion
Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.
Gifting
Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.
Decommodification
In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.
Radical Self-reliance
Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources.
Radical Self-expression
Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient.
Communal Effort
Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration. We strive to produce, promote and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction.
Civic Responsibility
We value civil society. Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants. They must also assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with local, state and federal laws.
Leaving No Trace
Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them.
Participation
Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart.
Immediacy
Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience.
In looking at video of past years of Burning Man events, and still images, I was struck by the disconnect between the stated principle of radical self-expression and the fact that most of the attendees wear a very similar costume. I’ve named it Victoria’s Secret Meets Mad Max. Festival goers are mostly nearly naked, wearing masks and goggles to protect them from the desert sand. I stumbled upon a pornographic article about the event in the young women’s rather mainstream magazine, Cosmopolitan. It described an adventure in the festival’s Orgy Dome. A little more research showed me that the sexual promiscuity of the event was being heavily marketed in the mainstream press. Orgy Dome. Logan’s Run meets Brave New World.
I found it humorous and pathetic that for all the self-expression that the attire or lack thereof was supposed to represent, these costumes (elaborate LED wings and headdresses, S&M collars and cuffs, thongs and jewelled bras) were in proliferation across the internet for a rather steep price. One set of wings will set you back $12,000. So much for “decommodification”.
Were there any other signs I could point to for my own satisfaction that this event (and those like them) were intelligence operations? Yes. Scholarly studies done on the event. There are studies to be found published by Yale University, PubMed and universities across the world on various psycho-social aspects of the festival.
According to a study in the May 2022 issue of Nature Communications, ‘transformative’ effects of mass gatherings like Burning Man are lasting. “63.2% of participants reported having transformative experiences so profound that they left the events feeling radically changed, including a substantial number of people who did not expect or desire to be transformed. (And yes, transformative experiences were more intense among the 28% of subjects who reported taking psychedelic substances.)”
There are scientific studies. From PubMed, Welcome to Wonderland? A Population Study of Intimate Experiences and Safe Sex at a Transformational Mass Gathering (Burning Man):
“Transformational festivals are socially immersive artistic mass gatherings that are said to promote a strong feeling of belonging and experiences of personal transformation. The purposes of the present study were (1) to investigate the social and intimate experiences of Burning Man participants and (2) to study the factors safe sex practices in the context of that transformational festival. The study was based on data from two consecutive cycles (2013 and 2014) of the yearly post-event online survey done in collaboration with the Burning Man Project. Participants consisted of people who attended the event (N = 19,512). The results were weighted based on the sociodemographic characteristics of the population”.
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s an intelligence operation.
One paper I found was a master’s thesis that was entitled Utopian Visions in Radical Communities: Burning Man. The paper is a collection of utopian visions gathered from the Radical Community of
Burning Man. These are some of the “utopian visions” in no particular order:
Unity-tolerance-peace
More love
Gaia Spirit - people who want revolutionary change split from society
Permaculture, harmony with plants - intergalactic garden of green love.
The destruction of democracy, Christianity, and the other filth we've grown accustomed to
The US government should be overthrown
Using our Full biological potential for Metamorphosis and Transmutation "Homolumen."
Peace
Human self awareness
People living for themselves
Neurological evolution
Loss of male privilege, with women truly having an equally important role in society and are treated accordingly.
***
A couple of random observations came to mind in thinking about the Burning Man Festival and the immolation of their very tall man: the Bohemian Club that meets annually at the Bohemian Grove, their 2,700 acre Redwood grove near Monte Rio, California, and cremates their cares of conscience in front of a giant owl alter.
It also made me think of the 1973 British horror film, The Wicker Man. Sergeant Howie, a devout Christian goes to a remote Scottish island in search of a missing girl. There he encounters the inhabitants who have abandoned Christianity for an ancient Celtic form of fertility worship. They copulate openly in the fields. May Day is celebrated complete with a maypole, the phallic symbol. He stays at the Green Inn. The island’s leader is an agronomist. Howie finally realizes that he is to be a sacrifice to their pagan god. He fits their gods' four requirements: he came of his own free will, has "the power of a king" (by representing the Law), is a virgin, and is a "fool."
When we dance naked in the dust of the festival, and copulate in the open, our minds aided in “liberation” from the restraints of the old male-dominated Christian culture, we have become the willing fools. When we burn, who can we blame?
***
The Theosophical Society is still on the go. Here is a long quote from an article I found on their website entitled The Feminine Principle: An Evolving Idea.
“Our culture has had a long heritage of associating the feminine principle with what it means to be female and the masculine principle with what it means to be male. As a result, both men and women have traditionally been locked into rigid culturally-defined gender roles that have not been helpful for anyone who wishes to live a more meaningful, creative, and soul-making life.
“However, this situation is changing. Today, we are more aware of the physical and spiritual harm that this perspective has caused to both the individual and to society. Thanks to Carl Jung and H. P. Blavatsky, we are beginning to learn that a fully integrated individual is a unique and balanced expression of both masculine and feminine traits…It all started long ago, at the dawn of human consciousness, when some said, ‘In the beginning was Mother Earth, the primal vessel that contains all things.’ The Great Mother was inclusive. From her womb emanated all life, and from her body all of her family received the gifts of nourishment, shelter, and transformation. When her children died, she enfolded them back into herself to be reborn anew. This early concept of what was later to become the feminine principle was that of a nature-based, interconnected existence for all creation, both in life and in death”.
I might point out to this writer that in ancient times people have believed all sorts of things and explained nature and cosmology and human anatomy in remarkable ways that now make us laugh. In Celtic mythology the father god's skull is the dome of heaven. Some ancients believe we came from water and others believed that fire was the source of all life. It makes sense to me that Theosophists believe we spring from the “inclusive” womb of Mother Earth.
It isn’t funny though, when all of our explanations, everything we have used to define ourselves and our experiences has been turned upside down. Perhaps all of our definitions of reality have always been given to us. We are simply living through a particularly massive upheaval of what we’ve held onto as “normal”.
The stars are put out for us to follow. “Follow the stars.” That could mean that when the star twerks, so do we. Angelina Jolie (a member of the Council on Foreign Relations) tells us she has fed her children crickets, so now it doesn’t seem odd that we can buy a bag from a vending machine. But most interestingly is how this technique has been applied to elevating scientists to star level. The ground has been tilled for decades, so now when a series of mainstream articles tell us that microdosing psylocibin can help with depression, it doesn’t seem too revolutionary an idea. Surely there are many agents working behind the scenes to turn their scientists and thinkers into stars, but none has come to the fore in quite the same way as John Brockman.
John Brockman runs an online salon called Edge - “To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.” To mark the 25th anniversary of Edge, they are presenting original lectures from “eminent scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who are changing the way we think about science and our place in the world.”
Who are some of the scientists and thinkers affiliated with Edge? Here are some of the “complex and sophisticated minds”:
Marina Abramovic – performance and visual artist, Spirit Cooking
Paul Allen – (deceased) co-founder of Microsoft
Tim Berners-Lee – MIT professor, inventor of the World Wide Web
Jeff Bezos - Founder & CEO, Amazon, Owner, Washington Post
Stewart Brand – Founder of the Whole Earth Catalog
Sergey Brin – Google
Steve Case – AOL
Noam Chomsky – Linguist, MIT
David Dalrymple – MIT
Kate Darling – MIT
Richard Dawkins – Evolutionary biologist
Esther Duflo – MIT
Ari Emanuel – Talent Agent, brother of Rahm
Brian Eno – Talking Heads
Steve Fuller - The Proactionary Imperative: A Foundation for Transhumanism
Peter Gabriel – Musician
Bill Gates – Lucifer (kidding)
Neil Gershenfeld - MIT
Terry Gilliam – Screenwriter
Steven Jay Gould – (Deceased) Evolutionary biologist
Jonathan Haidt – Social psychologist
Kiley Hamlin - Canada Research Chair in Developmental Psychology, University of British Columbia
Yuval Noah Harari – Lecturer, Dept. of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, close advisor to Klaus Schwab, long-time director of the World Economic Forum (WEF) “There are no gods, no nations, no money and no human rights, except in our collective imagination.”
Arianna Huffington – The Huffington Post Media Group
Walter Isaacson – Aspen Institute
Joichi Ito – Godson of Timothy Leary, resigned from MIT Media Lab when his personal and professional financial ties to Jeffrey Epstein were discovered
Bill Joy – Sun Microsystems
David Kaiser – MIT
Ken Kesey – Deceased, countercultural figure, “Merry Pranksters”, participated in government studies on hallucinogens, distributor of LSD, friend of Stewart Brand
Ray Kurzweil – Google, Transhumanism
Eric Lander – MIT
Steven Levy – Newsweek
David Lykken – Behavioral geneticist
Sir John Maddox – Deceased, Royal Commissions on environmental pollution and genetic manipulation
Terence McKenna – Deceased, ethnobotanist, “mystic”, psychedelics, shamanism, environmentalism, alchemy, the “Timothy Leary” of the 90s.
Kate Mills – UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience
Kary Mullis – Deceased, Nobel prize winner, PCR test
Elon Musk – Tesla, SpaceX
Nicholas Negroponte – Founder MIT’s Media Lab
Larry Page – Google
Ryan Phelan – Wife of Stewart Brand, Co-founder of Revive and Restore, “enhance biodiversity through the genetic rescue of endangered and extinct species”
David Reich – Geneticist, Harvard Medical School
John Rennie – Editor-in-Chief, Scientific American
Larry Sanger – Co-founder Wikipedia
Cass Sunstein – Law professor, advisor to Obama, author of “Nudged”
Sherry Turkle – MIT
Anne Wojcicki – Co-founder of 23andMe, genetic mapping
Steve Wozniak – Apple
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky – Co-founder Machine Intelligence Research Institute
Philip Zimbardo – “Stanford Prison Experiment”
In 2019, BBC reporter Emily Maitlis mentioned that both Prince Andrew and John Brockman attended an intimate dinner at Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion to celebrate Epstein’s release from prison for charges stemming from at least one decade of child sex trafficking. Per an October 2019 New Republic report, Brockman's emails confirmed Prince Andrew's presence at Epstein's pad. The story suggested that Brockman was the “intellectual enabler” of Jeffrey Epstein.
Brockman's famous literary dinners (held during the TED Conferences) were, for a number of years after Epstein’s conviction, almost entirely funded by Epstein as documented in his annual tax filings. This allowed Epstein to mingle with scientists, start-up icons and other tech billionaires. Online you can find a few creepy photos of Brockman surrounded by a couple of Epstein’s girls.
By the way, no one has ever adequately explained where Jeffrey Epstein got his fortune (that he earned such a vast fortune from managing Victoria’s Secret owner Leslie Wexner’s wealth strikes me as a cover story). It is widely believed that Epstein’s pandering of underage girls was an intelligence community operation funded by the Mossad or the CIA, or both, designed to create kompromat to leverage some of the most wealthy and influential figures in the world, the type of people Epstein made it his business to get close to.
One of the reasons Melinda Gates cited for leaving Bill was that she was “deeply troubled” by his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. The mainstream media has carefully avoided drawing attention to the connection between Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Silicon Valley, but many of the tech lords have ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Whitney Webb has gripped this story like a terrier, researching and telling of Epstein’s ties to Leslie Wexner, the billionaire who hired Epstein to be his financial manager. Wexner is the owner of Victoria’s Secret, the lingerie retailer.
Is the New Religion science? Technology? Self-empowerment? Sustainability? Naval-gazing hedonism? All of that and more. It’s here. We worship in the cathedral of the New Religion every time we Tweet or twerk, when we apologize for our “privilege”, when we visualize ourselves manifesting our fullest potential, when we breathe deeply and meditate on merging with the Great All.
Willing fools.
Additional reading/viewing:
The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet
https://www.bitchute.com/video/Ss3jZKXMfxgQ/
Agent Provocateur - Literary agent John Brockman flouts the boundaries between art and science.
https://www.surfacemag.com/articles/know-now-john-brockman-literary-agent-edge
Edge Foundation President May Have Been Jeffrey Epstein’s Connection to Intellectual Elite
https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/news-opinion/edge-foundation-president-may-have-been-jeffrey-epsteins-connection-to-intellectual-elite
John Brockman knew. (Jeffrey Epstein)
https://mobile.twitter.com/xeni/status/1165266579560521728
Massive cricket-processing facility comes online in London, Ont.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/cricket-farm-london-ontario-1.6506606
In Japan, edible insects are sold in vending machines to help the environment
https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/06/19/in-japan-you-can-get-your-supply-of-edible-insects-from-vending-machines
Queer Rhode Island state senator twerks and campaigns for votes
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10986061/She-twerks-people-Queer-Rhode-Island-state-senator-raises-eyebrows-raunchy-video.html
Here's What Happens in the Orgy Dome, Burning Man's Wildest Sex Party
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/a63532/stories-couples-burning-man-orgy-dome/
Our wildest Burning Man festival tales – from naked shower parties to ‘Orgy Dome’
https://www.the-sun.com/news/3599934/burning-man-festival-confessions-sex-drugs/
Context-Dependent Emotion Regulation: Suppression and Reappraisal at the Burning Man Festival
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01973533.2011.614170
Swiss scientists think we can learn something from Burning Man
https://www.rgj.com/story/life/arts/burning-man/2018/12/26/burning-man-swiss-study-groups-burners/2303629002/
‘Transformative’ effects of mass gatherings like Burning Man are lasting
https://news.yale.edu/2022/05/27/transformative-effects-mass-gatherings-burning-man-are-lasting
Burning Man: An Ideal Lab for Microclimate Research and Climate Modeling
https://www.esri.com/about/newsroom/blog/burning-man-climate-research/
Gifts in the desert: the psychology of Burning Man
https://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2014/sep/26/gifts-in-the-desert-psychology-burning-man-altruism
Silicon Valley tech culture has roots in Burning Man, Stanford scholar says
https://news.stanford.edu/2018/08/29/burning-mans-influence-silicon-valley/
Science at Burning Man: Say What?
https://iqim.caltech.edu/2014/10/15/science-at-burning-man-say-what/#
Utopian Visions in Radical Communities: Burning Man
https://digitalcollections.sit.edu/capstones/2739/
Welcome to Wonderland? A Population Study of Intimate Experiences and Safe Sex at a Transformational Mass Gathering (Burning Man)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31325119/
An ad executive explains how Burning Man is really a massive marketing festival
https://www.businessinsider.com/an-ad-exec-explains-how-burning-man-is-really-a-marketing-festival-2017-9
The Feminine Principle An Evolving Idea - Theosophical Society in America
https://www.theosophical.org/publications/quest-magazine/1532-the-feminine-principle-an-evolving-idea