Prophesy for Profit
One day, every child learns that Father Christmas doesn't exist, but how do you recover from discovering that he was put to work as a Coca-Cola poster boy? Hark ye! It wasn't singing angels heralding the birth of our lord but dancing Santas, festive bargains and Christmas number ones, followed by specials on weight loss plans and detox tea. I can cope with shattered dreams as well as the next man who grew up in the 80s, but what about dreams repackaged and sold back to me? Look closely, children of the nightmare. Shining lights in toy shop windows guide wide-eyed ...
Apoc-cupy London!
The End is Nigh! Occupy! “The End is Nigh!” is a delight to behold, written in bold on a sandwich board or screamed out on a street corner in the ecstasy of doom, but what does it mean? Sadly our own Christian enthusiastics at Occupy London are too busy dancing jigs, hoisting enormous crucifixes about and berating strangers to preach about the latter days, but this relentless reverend does not tire in his evangelism. Once again, oh children of perpetual resistance, let us reoccupy scripture, and rescue the good news from bad translation. “The End of the World” comes from Matthew 13, and the ...
Occupy Matthew!
Subversion on the Mount The bells, the bells, the bells which ruined my blessed sleep on the first Saturday of the occupation barely register anymore, having merged into the general background, but who ever imagined that all this Jesus-talk would become so normal? On the cathedral steps, everyone has become a theologian, taking up whips against the money-changers and rendering unto Caesar what is his. We seem to have agreed that social justice and consideration for the poor are fundamental Christian values, and, along with several important men in frocks, we are prepared to make sacrifices for them. But what kind of tactics ...
St. Pauccupied
I try to guard against optimism in general, but having spent the last three days and nights occupying central London, I must admit to feeling a little cheery. We met at the London stock exchange and, after failing to occupy Paternoster Square, we moved a few yards to the front of St. Paul's Cathedral. A constant stream of cameras filed past to snap my twins, grinning, politicised, and loving the limelight. Julian Assange said a few words, and people shouted through megaphones, but the police were better organised than us, and stormed in after a few hours to make a line ...
Ayahuascademia
Unrobed and undercover, I recently gave a talk in a secret Amsterdam basement to a group of researchers engaged in the academic study of ayahausca. My point was that clinicians, therapists and anthropologists should take note of how traditional practitioners work with ayahuasca, and pay attention to what is considered important in the Amazon. Doing that, we might avoid the mistakes of the nineteenth century medics who investigated Chinese medicine and hypnosis with their own limited tools and concepts, ignoring reports of hundreds of individuals cured of diphtheria, and hundreds of cases of amputation under hypnosis.
Riots & Revelation
"Shop looted and youths storm McDonald's and start cooking their own food" - Daily Mail (Do you want Armageddon with that, sir?) I was at a demonstration once when someone tried to climb the Downing Street fence. The police responded as you might expect, we all got squeezed a bit, and I went home, shaken by my first taste of civil unrest. Some years later I saw a football riot kick off in Manchester, from the top deck of a bus on the Oxford Road. It was so stupid that it was funny, fizzling out as quickly as it had started. Tonight, London braces ...
Radio Revelations
Straight outa Texas! On American Freedom Radio... With Casper Leitch on Time4Hemp Live! And the Reverend Chris Bennett And the Reverend Dean Becker And the Reverend Nemu - Forming a high holy trinity on one wavelength! Listen, as The Rev reveals: Pyschoactives in the ancient pages of the Bible, and wickedness in the new bills of parliament: Listen to the podcast Yee-ha! Links: American Freedom Radio Time4Hemp Live! Reverend Chris Bennett Reverend Dean Becker
Onward & Foreword!
Good Tidings, Bold Brethren! My HEART is SHOUTNG, oh Sisters of Sense and Sweetness! The author David Jay Brown has written a glowing foreword to Nemu's End He is, by way of introduction above and beyond his many honours and accolades, the guy who came up with "BS" for Belief System, as used in the books of his friend Robert Anton Wilson. Scroll down for his bio and his foreword. But first, the spirit of the Lord moves me to poetry, and to photoshop: BS swap ...
Save the experts!
People of the world! Get involved with The Global Initiative for Drug Policy Reform. Join their mailing list, and be part of the movement to rethink the UN conventions on drugs. 10 million prisoners and 38,000 dead Mexicans in four years is too high a price to pay for an unscientific and immoral convention. People of England! This is the land which invented the Scientific Method, abolished slavery, and gave women the vote - get up and let your minister know that he or she works for you! The UK Advisory Council for the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) is the body which started needle exchange programs ...
The apocalypse is where the veiled is revealed. It is how the unconscious becomes conscious, and how discoveries hiding in the shadows have their covers dissed. Nemu’s End: The History, Psychology, and Poetry of the Apocalypse considers this process as it occurs in our society, in our history, and in our brains.
In science, revelation works through dreams, visions, insights and eureka moments, and is responsible for far more groundbreaking ideas and technologies than rational thinking and tapping on calculators. An apocalypse can be a personal event, when normal linguistic and psychological limitations are temporarily broken down. When this happens, whether spontaneously or through meditation or psychedelics, people may become capable of mental feats which were previously impossible, and aware of things which are usually invisible.
On another level, an apocalypse is an event which occurs collectively during intense periods of transformation. Each time this happens, horizons expand, new scales are opened up, new frontiers are discovered, and new philosophies and technologies are developed, invariably sparking social and political unrest. In seventeenth century Europe, a new order emerged, and was accompanied with an unprecedented body count. It also happened in first century Jerusalem, and there are signs that another upheaval is underway today, which will be global in its implications.
Despite the inelegance of street preachers and the disinterest of the sensible majority, the apocalypse is relevant to our lives, and becoming more so every day. Blinkered rationalism is a bulldozer lurching down a dark cul-de-sac at the end of the world; revelation is a magick bus bouncing down the path of understanding towards the light. This book is the story of the apocalypse, how it has been experienced in the past, and how it is unfolding today. It is written in the faith that revelation is open to everyone, and in the hope that we embrace it before our bulldozer squashes the life out of us.
