So, What Am I Doing Here?

I ask that you use your own personal discrimination when reading this article, and set aside any words, aspects or concepts that do not resonate with you. For I recognise your freedom to choose what is right for you, and would not wish to violate your freewill, but rather, I would act only as a resource for your seeking.

So here I am, age 62, starting this website, in the hope of elucidating to you the world, my latest understandings about the so called 'spiritual or awakening' journey. To say that 'I've been traveling towards this point for my whole life,' seems like an understatement. So, what am I doing here?

However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.” – Stanley Kubrick

This site is about the search for the elusive answer to the great conundrum of life, which I hope promotes an answer to the question posed above. My own pursuit began at the age of eight, sitting in a gigantic cinema in Dublin, Ireland in 1968, watching the stunningly beautiful and enigmatic masterpiece by Stanley Kubrick: 2001 - A space Odyssey. This film blew my young mind, initiating me on a lifelong quest, to understand who I really was and what was the nature of reality I seemed to be in. This magnificent near silent visual poetry, opened something up in me, awakening me to a pursuit that would be present in all my subsequent activities. It prompted me to start paying attention, to question everything, again and again, to reach higher and further, groping in the meme fields of common and not so common culture, for a clearer understanding of what this reality truly is. Through my subsequent life I studied with passionate intent cosmology, quantum mechanics, philosophy comparative religion, chaos theory, math, the arcane and the exoteric … I read profusely, searching for the song which would light up my life and guide me forward in my search for the truth of myself.

The surface narrative of the film seems to propose that an advanced

alien civilisation gave Early Man a lift up the evolutionary ladder, by upgrading their intelligence, by touching a black monolith planted in their midst. This provided them with the capacity to use simple tools, not only to kill animals, which increased their access to higher calorific diets, thus providing them with more spare time to build civilisation - But also the drive and need to kill members of competing tribes, for resources, in pursuit of that objective.

In one scene transition, which to me represents the greatest human developmental jump in cinematic history, we see a now enhanced ape throwing a bone into the air, which magically morphs into a satellite orbiting the Earth - a leap of some four million years in one 24th of a second. Through this presentation, Kubrick was telling us that once the ability to use tools had been obtained, the rest of human civilisational history was an evitability, which he promptly dispenses with as not being germane to the story and of little consequence. The film then takes us on an epic journey, first to the moon, where the monolith has been dug up, then to onto Jupiter where an even larger version lurks in the darkness, through which a Stargate opens up, taking us to the infinite and beyond. With each of the four stages or parts of the film, Kubrick is expanding our perception, enlarging our capacity for wonder and initiating the audience into higher and higher levels of knowledge.

The premise of the film bypasses the standard Darwinian evolutionary path, by denying mankind the accidental self-evolving path, and proposing that without the external intervention, mankind would not have evolved to its current level. The deeper suggestion is that higher more advanced forms of life are always guiding lower lesser evolved forms. The ultimate inference is that there is always a supreme numinous power at work behind the scenes, holding, directing and supervising our personal and collective development.

Interestingly, it has been pointed out, there is no mention of Aliens per se in the film. Besides the black monolith (which in some alchemical circles is code for Prima Materia – the prime substance out of which the Universe is constructed), no advanced technology is encountered. The opening of the movie has a dark screen for some 3 minutes, where we are actually looking at the monolith (without initially knowing it), turned through 90 degrees (I only found this out after watching the 50th anniversary screening), whilst listening to the World Riddle theme from Strauss’ ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The monolith image is an arc symbol that pervades the film. Perhaps we are being told that we also, like the apes, are being upgraded, as we touch the movie through the portal of the monolithic screen, this time with our minds, instead of hands.

Many of the scenes are accompanied by celestial alignments. The first visual of the film opens with a mystical sun-earth-moon alignment - A lunar eclipse has just taken place. The sun is moving away from this configuration. There are also a plethora of continuity errors, which given Kubrick’s renowned fanatical diligence and attention to detail, can only be interpreted as deliberate. If so, then we are determinedly being ‘messed with,’ disturbed with pattern interrupts, presumably engineered to break our attachment to the surface detail of the film's presentation. In other words, the film has multiple layers designed to confuse, misdirect and confound. There are strange juxtapositions of significance, which cause paradoxical interference patterns. This all amounts to the supposition that nothing in the film is to be accepted as real at any level – the true reality is the personal journey of the viewer itself, as an experience of transformation and transcendence. Intriguingly, when we ignore the banal surface interpretation of our own lives and begin deconstructing it, deeper truths and meaning begin to emerge, only to be subordinated again and again, as we travel further into the mystery of the self. Since the blank dark screen at the beginning of the movie is our first encounter with the Monolith, upon which the film is projected, we are led to the conclusion that the film itself is the modern monolith of our Age – it is a film within a film, or a level of reality within a higher level of reality, a teaching machine with a higher purpose!

The monolith can be seen as the representational means by which we perceive our own reality. It is our own personal screen that conveys and projects upon, our story, our interpretation of events, our sensuous connection to the external physical world. Could Kubrick be attempting to illustrate that our own minds are the monolithic locus of awareness, the lens of localised subjective perception, through which consciousness observes but also constructs the world at large? These are big questions that will be addressed in due course on this website.

Now the question of ‘are we alone’ or are we one of many lifeforms distributed, not just through our own galaxy the Milky Way, but the Universe, has absorbed many a mind since time immemorial. And so, it gripped my nascent imagination! In my young burgeoning mind, some switch had been flicked on. It is as if some universal symbolism in the film working at some unconscious level, had instigated some deep programming [activation] in me. I began searching for answers. This exploration has carried me through my whole life and serves as the inspiration for creating this website. This quest has defined me, sustained me, kept me going through my darkest moments. It has built a pathway right through the centre of my neural net, impressing the need upon me to keep going no matter what (the disregard of the apparent solidity of presented evidence to the contrary). At times, I have felt like the protagonist of the film, Dave Bowman (or his earlier counterparts, Homer’s hero, Odysseus or Arjuna just before the great battle at Kurukshetra), on an incredible journey of exploration, not into the depths of outer space, but into my own inner landscape, which as I am discovering is infinite. This journey is not just my own, but yours too, if you did but know it.

This journey has surpassed every film that I’ve seen, every book that I have read. At one stage I believed my life to be average, that I was born in a boring age, with no hope of proving my mettle. Now I see that this is the most exciting age that our race has ever lived through. What I didn’t know until the last 5 years, was that I was really searching for freedom, not from society and its impositions, but from my own suffocating conditioning. This life has been tougher than any war, or expedition to the poles, more tortuous than any existence of persecution and enslavement. This life has opened up the gates to my own personal Hades, where I have confronted my own demon shadows. The scariest journey is the one where we are asked to dissolve the very foundation upon which one stands. Where all beliefs are surrendered in faith as illusory deceptions, in pursuit of the ultimate truth. Where there is no guide but oneself. The greatest ask has been to open my heart to a world that has trampled it apparently again and again. The supreme sacrifice (to make holy, to become divine) is to love, not just oneself but the entire world, unconditionally, without the need for anything in return.

And so, this blog will be my personal journal which accompanies the articles that I will bring forth, which I feel will be of interest to the world. The blog will inform the reader why I have chosen to approach the subject of the Archetypal Mind in the way I do, based upon my own intuitive and often inspired insights into the process of Individuation. I invite you to accompany me on this journey.