Morrison also suggests that another critically useful moment for magical working is the 'no-mind' state experienced during the moment of orgasm: At the moment of orgasm, the mind blinks. Into this blink, this abyssal crack in perception, a sigil can be launched. What I'm trying to say with all this is that all of this has been known and actively used throughout all of human history. It's not always been phrased the same way, but it's pretty much never gone out of style. As a result, there's no reason to assume that suddenly these techniques have disappeared off the face of the earth. I think it was Jacques Ellul who said that technology always expands to fill all its potential uses. And make no mistake about it, these techniques are a technology, and they have undoubtedly been put to negative uses at some conceivable point.
Brain-ChangeDoes that necessarily mean there is a vast Illuminati network of ritual abuse and mind control? I won't pretend to have the answer there. But I do think we can quite readily find evidence that such techniques have been used with great effectiveness for the purposes of "mind-control" throughout human history. Although, maybe "brain-change" is a slightly more neutral term. For evidence of how this works, we need look no farther than our recent discussion of primitive rites of passage. A commenter on Rigorous Intuition also left a useful description of these events, which we can use to summarize here:
Melanesian, or Aboriginal, rites of passage begin with a separation of the boys from their mothers. They are brought to a place they have never been. They recognize nothing. They are treated strangely, perhaps dressed in women's clothes. They are often drugged. Everything that happens to them in this liminal state is meant to completely erase whatever they knew and learned before - mother knowledge, if you will, which is considered inappropriate for an adult male.
When the initiation ceremonies reach their peak, the boys are marked in some way - some tribes burn the skin, or use tatooing. When the adult males consider the initiation to be complete, the boys are brought back to the village and use their adult names, and are accepted as adult men. The attachment to the mother (and feminine ways) is forever broken. While the author of that comment goes on to suggest these rites have nothing to do with "mind-control" I tend to disagree. Formalized rites of passage are intentional cultural conditioning rituals. They take people whose minds are at moments of imprint vulnerability, and subject them to an ordeal which fundamentally and purposely changes their identity and relationship to society. What we call mind control - once you strip away the sci-fi Illuminati trappings - is fundamentally no different from this. Especially noteworthy in this discussion is the importance of ritualized trauma (especially involving the sex organs). Being subjected to extreme sensory stimulus causes a point of dissociation. The mind blinks off. And in traditional cultures, this momentary gap is filled then with a new cultural mythos. The initiate undergoing the rite of passage is inculcated at this moment with the new story and correlated teachings which will allow them to take on a new functional role in society.
Trauma-based mind control would function according to this same general principle, except it would continually repeat and reinforce the conditioning for a long period of time. Whether or not the CIA/shadow government uses such techniques, you can bet your sweet bippy they are used on us routinely and ruthlessly by various other parties (intentionally or not). Spend 12 years being forced to sit still in school - a supremely unnatural and traumatic series of highly repetitive events for mammals. Then go home and watch the same commercials and television shows endlessly. Make no mistake about it, ritualized trauma-based mind control and conditioning are very real things which we all have a great deal of firsthand experience in. Most people nowadays just call it "education," "entertainment" or "work" though - in true Orwellian fashion.
Generational TraumaI believe there are also events which act as generational trauma-events, opening up the possibility of radical conditioning on a mass scale. Whether or not these events are committed with such purposes in mind, they seem to be invariably used by those in power for this purpose. Jeff Wells recently posted an excellent quote by a JFK assassination researcher, which raises the possibility that these events are indeed crafted with specific purposes in mind:
Don't you think the men who killed Kennedy had the means to do it in the most sophisticated and subtle way? They chose not to. Instead, they picked the shooting gallery that was Dealey Plaza and did it in the most barbarous and openly arrogant manner. The cover story was transparent and designed not to hold, to fall apart at the slightest scrutiny. The forces that killed Kennedy wanted the message clear: "We are in control and no one not the President, nor Congress, nor any elected official - no one can do anything about it." It was a message to the people that their government was powerless. And the people eventually got the message
The barbarously public JFK assassination sent this message to the generation previous to us, our parents, who now have grown old. The possibility exists that this message needed to be updated for our generation - the young people moving upwards in the world today, coming into positions of power. None of us lived through the JFK, RFK or MLK assassinations, but for those who did, it left an indelible mark on their psyche. You could protest all you want, and achieve great progress, but ultimately it was fruitless. You go too far and you will be killed. Since most of us don't even learn history in school anymore, the speculative powers-that-be might have decided to revive these tactics. I wonder if 9/11 was actually a sort of culture-wide initiation - trauma-based mind control on a mass scale. Though for most of us it was a vicarious experience (in other words, it reached a huge audience), it was a particularly brutal one which forever transformed us as a result. Whether or not you believe that 9/11 was a "staged" event, it's inescapable that the government well understood this was a point of "imprint vulnerability." Do you remember watching it all unfold on television and feeling somehow like it "wasn't real"? That's a crucial symptom of traumatic dissociation. Your mind splits, blinks off for a moment, creating a critical space which can be filled with a new story, a new mythos. Before that, almost none of us gave a *&^% about terrorism or national security. But as a result of this trauma-based rite of passage, we were suddenly conditioned to a completely new value system - one in which everything we held dear before was turned upside-down: personal freedom, the Bill of Rights, etc. It's virtually identical to what happens to a child in a traditional culture who is re-aligned to adulthood through ritual circumcision and the supporting transformative mythos. Maybe the WTC tumbling down was the ritual circumcision of the American psyche. We are now adults. We are now warriors.
Survival & RecoveryAll is not lost of course. It never is. Just because somebody else either designed or exploited a moment of trauma to push their agenda on you, you're still the one in charge of what happens as a result. Ran Prieur makes an excellent point about how 9/11 effected different people in various ways:
For me, it was liberating, like a near-death experience. That was the day I started going barefoot in the city, and started standing up to my temp agency, which got me fired two weeks later. I was surprised that it had the opposite effect on the culture at large, making people more fearful, narrow-minded, and generally emotionally contractive.
Also, in relation to the conspiracy theory wet-dream that is mind control, it's important to look at where most of our information comes from. It comes from people like Beth Goobie, like Kathleen Sullivan, like Cathy O'Brien, people who are mind control survivors. Whether or not you "believe" their experiences, these are people who have committed themselves to a process of public healing and recovery. They are, if nothing else, a testament to the notion that no matter what trauma has happened to you in the past, you can move beyond it. It may be an intense struggle, but hell, so is life. As Derek Gilbert pointed out, the point of life is not getting your ass kicked, but in getting your ass kicked and picking yourself up and moving on. Becoming aware of weird *&^% like this can either freak you out, or it can be a wake-up call about how things work. Once you understand the techniques that are being applied, there's nothing to stop you from using them yourself. You can go back into your life and use this knowledge. Heck, you probably already do when you listen to a new album over and over again. You're subtly conditioning yourself to forever associate it with your life at this moment. The most effective mind control agent in the world is not only on your side: it's you. Sometimes the hardest thing in life is accepting responsibility for yourself.