Letting Myself Look

I guess I have not written about Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O’Neill and that surprises me. It, or maybe the just the Joe Rogan chat with Tom O’Neill, turned out to be the seed planted last April that has grown into the tree that never seems to stop branching out in one direction or another. The book is ostensibly about Manson (a person I’d never been terribly interested in), but its real subject turned out to be corruption in the law enforcement and the intelligence agencies that have kept people all over the world fed on false narratives that protect the powerful and leave the innocent, average citizen dead in the dust. What’s more, the timing of my “meeting” with O’Neill through Rogan seemed preordained in some way.

The only reason I was following Rogan on Instagram was that I had heard about his month-long trial with the carnivore diet, and I was exploring that myself. The only reason I tuned into the interview with O’Neill was the mention of MK Ultra in Rogan’s Instagram post about the interview. The only reason I was familiar with the term “MK Ultra” was that I had seen tweets about it. The only reason I had seen those tweets was that I started following on Twitter people mentioned by “Sarah Ruth Ashcraft,” a victim of Satanic Ritual Abuse. The only reason I was following Ashcraft was that something from her that had gotten retweeted by a person I follow caught my attention.

Ironically, these are all paths that I never؅—in a million years—would have thought I’d be exploring, but here I am. In fact, anything and everything related to Satan and the supernatural has long scared me nearly to death. I remember having nightmares after seeing five minutes of The Exorcist when my older cousins were visiting and were watching it on TV. I remember trying to get out of having to read Bless the Child when I worked at Barnes & Noble, but was unable to do so, because I had been assigned to interview author Cathy Cash Spellman for the store’s newsletter. What’s more, not only do I dislike Stephen King’s politics, I would get freaked out just thinking about the subjects of most of his books, even though I did manage to screw up enough courage to watch a few of the movies based on his work. Even just a few years back, I was unable to bring myself to order any collection of L.M. Montgomery’s ghost stories.

The irony, though, doesn’t end there. It turns out that getting dragged into truth about the evil (and I mean that literally) that has enslaved this world and its leaders has resulted in the naming and facing of unmapped territory that I needed so I could loosen its hold on me. That’s not to say that I am diving in with both feet to learn everything I can or to explore it at any other level. It simply means that I can deal with discussing it now.

Unprotected exposure to unexplored territory produces fear. The individual is protected from such fear as a consequence of ritual imitation of the Great Father—as a consequence of the adoption of group identity, which restricts the meaning of things, and confers predictability on social interactions. …

Rejection of the unknown is tantamount to “identification with the devil,” the mythological counterpart and eternal adversary of the world-exploratory hero. Such rejection and identification is a consequence of Luciferian pride, which states: all that I know is all that is necessary to know. This pride is totalitarian assumption of omniscience—is adoption of God’s place by “reason”—is something that inevitably generates a state of personal and social being indistinguishable from hell. The hell develops because creative exploration—impossible, without (humble) acknowledgement of the unknown—constitutes the process that constructs and maintains the protective adaptive structure that gives life much of its acceptable meaning.

—Jordan B. Peterson in the preface to Maps of Meaning

Perhaps what’s most ironic of all is that Spellman was telling me, in her work of “fiction”, all those years ago (almost 30), exactly what has been going on in the world for thousands and thousands of years. I wonder where I’d be today if I had been ready for this knowledge so long ago.