As part of Empire’s ‘special forces’ in Africa I was once caught up in a covert operation to murder a group of dissident fighters who’d defected to our side. They’d been given a clean uniform, a shiny semi-automatic G3 and a square meal… without really thinking any of it through… They must have wondered at their sudden good fortune, all freshly laundered and all.
Most were taking the opportunity to exact tribal revenges or personal vendettas. The problem was that they also had a check list of grievances which had become diplomatically, ahem, ’embarrassing’.
We were eight gunners in the belly of a Crocodile, 16 tons of armored personnel carrier, roaring to its rendezvous with death. En route, the mission is unveiled. Gooks. Lure them out. Kill them.
During the rest of the journey I sat in shock, trying to think through what I had just been ordered to do, and as more of an invitation to a party than a command..
…you are in the grip of Evil….
They are defectors, untrustworthy, here today and gone tomorrow, taking pot shots at you along the way with your own weapons..
…you are in the grip of Evil….
They’ll turn against you one day. You can’t trust them! Strike now while they are unprepared and easily beguiled by treachery….
I mean strategy…
…you are in the grip of Evil….
The innocents were teased from the bush with bully beef and cigarettes. When the trap was sprung I remained bolted to my seat, immobilized from within. A woodlouse in the debris at the bottom of the vehicle was trying to negotiate my bootlace. Would it go over or under? Which way forward? What would he do?
When the firing stopped, the officer glared at me furiously. Refusing an order could have fetched me an eon in the Dog Box but he said nothing.
And so I started to chew. If I can refuse an order and get away with it something other than the ordinary rules of war are at play. Moreover, if allies can be killed today for the inconvenience they might pose tomorrow then what about one another? What about the guy sitting next to you?
And what might motivate such hideous cupidity? The answer was in the momentary anguished screams of the dying, which is what the Crocodile ultimately fed upon, the beseeching howl of betrayal confirming them as sacrifices to the Dark Face of God.
What any of us were fighting for had nothing to do with freedom or any political ideals. The scenario I had just witnessed was the real covert endgame. It seems like gratuitous carnage or ‘collateral damage’, until you consider the awful possibility that when strategy assumes the shape of rite and sacrifice we weren’t just soldiers anymore, we were priests at the devouring altar of Mammon, disavowed dark face of Yahweh. His PR makeover into New Testament Shepherd could be swung at a pinch but He has to be fed with offerings of Humanity to do it, culminating in the current famines in Yemen and Somalia which are engineered not just by economic policies of greed or the propping up of corrupt regimes for gain…
..but to feed the maw of gods we will not name.
War proliferation and economic infrastructure dependent upon perpetual conflict is the tip of the iceberg. It’s about way more than money and greed. Its about the quasi-religious experience of being sunk into the Collective,
of being Quanteam,
and acting out the denied underbelly of Yahweh.
”The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and disorders the brains of politicians and journalists who unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world.” CG Jung
With the prospect of nuclear war greater than it has been for decades we would do well to remind ourselves, not just of the dangers of escalation but of nuclear weapons specific purpose, civilian deaths, game changing technology for gloves off diplomacy. Its the innocent people we’re ultimately after. You don’t nuke a city because you don’t like the mayor. Nor even because you are pissed at its citizens. We are through the looking glass of collateral damage. The dark god requires sacrifices. Its His thing, with a History way older than the Allied carpet bombing of Dresden, the Holocaust, or the Armenian genocide.
Acre in Judea. 1052 AD. Richard the Lionheart bravely kills every civilian in the entire city. 20,000 people. Oh and Charlegmane, he was full of convert or die. Some of the ones who were converted still had to die… only quicker. By the sword instead of the garrot. I wonder if they were grateful for that mercy?
and lets not forget Edward Longshanks beaching the Jewish citizens of London in Morecambe Bay, 1275, to be swallowed by the tide as surely as Andromeda was offered up to Poseidon….
Soon after the Crocodile’s feast, all the blokes involved got taken out by one of the only two Sam7’s fired in the Rhodesian war. I would have been aboard the Bell chopper myself that day had I not hurt my back and called in sick…
The fittest did a rather poor job of surviving. My troop had been cut down from thirty men to a mere four. We remaining Sons of Empire were treated as pariahs by the others in the Commando. They wouldn’t eat with us. Men refused transfers to our unit or pulled strings to avoid it. We were bad luck.
Strangely, when the troop was disbanded and we were individually assigned to other units we then became talismen of survival, canny warriors imbuing each host troop with new life and hope..
despite the obvious reality that we were being cut to pieces.
and despite all the ardent blood sacrifices to the Dark One..
This flick from one state to its opposite is what the ancient Greeks called Enantiodromia. It’s the kind of thing that seems terribly unlikely, yet actually describes both matter and consciousness rather well,…
”This phenomenon practically always occurs when an extreme, one-sided tendency dominates conscious life; in time an equally powerful counter position is built up, which first inhibits conscious performance and subsequently breaks through….” C G Jung.
Enantiodromias occur at a sub-atomic level as well. In fact, life as we know it seems to depend on the unlikelihood of matter being one moment a wave and the next a particle while blinking in and out of ‘reality’. Its as unlikely as going for tacos at an icecream stall and still getting lucky, or an entirely indoctrinated man refusing an order…
and getting away with it,
followed by surviving something that kills everyone else.
Enantiodromias presuppose a ‘quantum superposition’, or Self, a non-material state wherein these opposites are tolerated as paradox.
Within the quantum ‘superposition’, matter is in an unquantifiable state, you could even say it both does and does not exist. It ‘pre-exists’ in contiguity with everything else. Consciousness is like-wise an unquantifiable soup until something observes, witnesses, mirrors, even a woodlouse will do, compelling realization from the Belly of the Crocodile. That which pre-exists, knowing right from wrong, takes form as a definite state.
Being here now, the unrehearsed messiness of emerging from the wave function and becoming what you are not, is then further complicated for both consciousness and matter when time and distance come into play.
It seems there isn’t any.
Old Man Physics says that if you lie in wait for a Quantum Creature on a jungle path after you’ve seen it leave its lair, it will in fact arrive at its destination by a different route. The act of lying in wait changes the past. If quantum creatures are separated and housed in different laboratories what you do to the one affects the other. Distance is a construct.
”If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t.” Feynman.
Participation mystique, a term coined by Levy-Bruhl to describe the soup of collective identification with one another, a state of shared psychic reality like the quantum superposition, containing the components of individual identity without suffering their trials, just outside real time and space, removed from any circumstantial trouble and gloriously protected from all moral consideration.. allowing men to play dice with the Universe in a way the Gods would never dare….
similarly defies conception.
Just before my decimated troop was disbanded, I passed out one day on the parade ground. I was carried to the medic’s tent who looked me up and down and asked, ‘have you got a girlfriend?
er, yes. Jane.
Is she pregnant?
er, I don’t think so, why?
Because you have the worst case of morning sickness I have ever seen…
Many years later and out of the Blue, Jane’s younger sister called on me and told me that she had in fact been pregnant at the time and had an abortion without letting me know.
how does that happen?
You hear about fathers-to-be having sympathetic experiences with their partners, but without being told and thousands of miles away?
Distance doesn’t matter.
Like the enmeshed sub-atomic particle, individual consciousness is undivided from its superposition in a way that bypasses the constraints of time and distance like phones or first class post. This enmeshment of the wave function is what Rupert Sheldrake calls Morphic Resonance.
This most excellent Quantum Biologist refloats the Gnostic idea that matter and life pre-exist as morphic fields of possibility which are both non-material and have memory.
It turns out that even dense materials have a morphic field which ‘informs’ the process of crystalization, something which can be observed by the way in which synthetic crystals grown in laboratories become easier and quicker to create over time. Laboratories starting up on the other side of the world synthesize the crystals at the new faster rate despite using all the same old equipment. Something akin to a neural pathway, but outside three dimensional space and time, enables the crystallization process to ‘remember’ how it is done.
The simplest of creatures have morphic fields that help them ‘know’ who they are, cuttings grow roots, the lizard his tail, the segmented lugworm a whole new body, and what is learned by one member of a species becomes part of the storehouse of knowledge of all its other members wherever they are. Sheldrake taught a sample of rats to achieve complex tasks. A separate second control group then took only a fraction of the time to learn the tasks once the first group had them well mastered.
Morphic fields do more than share memories. They share information. The introduction of milk bottles in the 20’s led to the surprise discovery that once one Blue-tit had worked out how to get the top off the milk bottle, the news then traveled faster than Blue-tits can fly, let alone breed. So, no new genetic markers or mutations in the mix. When delivery was interrupted by WW11 and several generations of Blue-tits had come and gone, the new generation knew straight away what to do.
What does it mean?
When I bought myself out of the military for the princely sum of $125 I went walkabout in Central Africa for a few months to try and get my head straight. I had just left Kasama, south of the Burundi/Zambian border where I spent the night. I walked for miles along an empty road into the sprawling endless forest. All of a sudden I became panic stricken as it occurred to me, I cannot say how, not in words or images but as a visceral impression, that I was about to be arrested before the hour was up.
I rushed into the forest with my heart pounding, emptied my bag and sorted through all my stuff to see what there might be to incriminate me in any way, anything that might give anyone the slightest reason to get offended..
So, I buried everything that associated me with my past, an old bush hat, a set of para wings sewn onto a shirt. Letters with personal stuff in them.With about twenty minutes to go I got back on the road to meet my fate. Nothing and nobody. Still, strange shit will happen so I squared my shoulders and walked around the bend in the road.
Nobody, just jungle.
I began to relax and walked on. Perhaps I’m just a bit paranoid? After another ten minutes I got to the lip of a shallow escarpment that looked out over a broad valley. I could see for miles and waaay down the road.
Nobody. Not even locals, let alone horrible policemen. Just the cicadas.
Four minute warning. I began to laugh..
At that moment a young couple from Malawi drove up behind me, the first vehicle all day, perhaps taking pity on my clearly hysterical state. They kindly gave me a lift as far as the road block three miles away, where I was arrested exactly on time.
