by Jonathan Zap

2003

from Alignment2012 Website

The Sick Rose
O rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm.
That flies in the night
In the howling storm.
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

—William Blake

from Songs of Innocence and Experience, Plate 37

"Mind Parasites” has a fanciful sound to it like the confabulation of an overwrought, paranoid imagination. The term was coined by scholar of the occult Colin Wilson in his science fiction novel of ideas entitled The Mind Parasites written in 1967. And the novel is alternately fascinating and silly, spinning out of control with overcaffinated egomania, much of the “science” in the science fiction absurd to anyone who didn’t sleep through their high school biology class.

In fairness, Colin Wilson intentionally wrote the book in a hallucinatory Lovecraftian mode, and Lovecraft is actually mentioned throughout the book as a visionary who, in the feverish depths of his imagination, tapped into secrets of the collective unconscious.

“Mind Parasites” is such an obscure topic that if you Google it you’ll find that an email I wrote about it a few years ago, and which John Jenkins archived on his website, turns up in the top three or four hits. (See Mind Parasites and Dune ---Jonathan Zap’s Pavilion)

My intuition is that this seemingly obscure subject, hard for some to take seriously, is a glimpse, through a glass darkly, into one of the powerful hidden movers behind human experience, and especially our long, tortured descent into history, the nightmare from which we are trying to awaken.

Yesterday I happened to pick up a couple of books that brought this topic, once again, to the foreground of my attention. The first book is entitled Eyewitness to History, and is edited by John Carey. It consists of eyewitness narrative accounts of historic moments ranging chronologically from a plague in Athens in 430 BC, to the fall of President Marcos in Manila, 1986. As I read some of these eyewitness accounts I noticed that most were reports of the madness of warfare and genocide, culminating in horror with accounts of Nazi concentration camps, still in living memory.

I couldn’t help but to notice how surreal, how “over the top” was the ghoulish grotesqueries of human evil. Putting down that book I picked up another I’d been meaning to get to since the Seventies----Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago---an appalling account of the Soviet forced labor camps where throughout the Twentieth Century millions upon millions upon millions of completely innocent Russian citizens were arrested, tortured and thrown into the most brutal captivity imaginable by their fellow Russian citizens. What was the reason for this?

Like the “reason” for World War One, no one can really say for sure. It may very well have been for the sheer ecstasy of inflecting terror and horrendous suffering. Law enforcement officials to this day are sometimes infected with this sadistic ecstasy. Solzhenitsyn documents the “imagination,” the fancifulness with which arrests and interrogations were often conducted on innocent citizens so as to make the surreal horror that much more weird, terrifying and bizarre. He also points out the strange, paralyzed passivity of the numerically superior victims who almost never resisted.

These readings caused me to reflect, once again, on whether there might not be an “unknown constant” in the extremity of human darkness, this surreal sadism exploding from purportedly the most intelligent species on the planet, the one apparently most capable of self awareness and a developed moral sensibility.

The possibility of “mind parasites” is not meer off the wall speculation for me, because I’ve had real life experiences with these organisms and they have been reported in all cultures and in all periods. Of course they haven’t always been called mind parasites. A better term might be “energy parasites” but this is also not quite right because it is redundant. All parasites are energy parasites. “Etheric parasites” sounds too Theosophist, has the ring of antique occultism. If anyone can suggest a better term please tell me. Meanwhile I’ll use “mind parasites” and “energy parasites” interchangeably.

The possibility of energy parasites should not take a huge willing suspension of disbelief. Parasitism is one of the three most classic types of relationship in the organic world. The other two are predation and symbiosis (my favorite). Notice that these are all relationships of energetic transaction. And notice that human begins, collectively, and individually, may be classified as all three. Certainly we have emerged as the ultimate predators and parasites on the planet as we devour the biosphere and bring on mass extinctions.

Parasitology may sound like an obscure branch of biology, but it is actually central to the evolution of life. Many biologists now believe that sexual differentiation---the existence of separate genders that mate to propagate the species----had its origin as an adaptation to parasites! Parasites themselves evolve so quickly that in order for hosts to stay enough ahead of them to survive they need the greater genetic novelty and innovation that is generated by sexual differentiation. You can read more mind-boggling information about parasites in a recent book entitled, Parasite Rex. By one of those strange twists of fate my father was a parasitologist for the U.S. Air force during much of World War II.

In Parasite Rex examples are given of how much more sophisticated, evolved and sinister parasites are than is generally known. Parasites have the ability, in some cases, to take over the will of a seemingly much more evolved animal. For example, there is a parasite that attacks a certain type of crab and eats up all nonessential soft tissue inside of it, but leaves the basics that allow locomotion---key muscles, the optic nerves, etc.

It is then able to take over this partly hollowed out crab and use it in the manner of an Imperial Lieutenant in the Star Wars fantasy operating an Imperial Walker. Rabies is caused by a parasite, and it produces a particular sort of madness that will cause an infected mammal, even a human being, to want to bite or otherwise cause bloodshed with other mammals thereby opening a vector, an avenue of transmission, for the parasite.

We know from biology that wherever we find life we find these classic relationships of parasitism, predation and symbiosis. Not too long ago, not much more than three hundred years, our species was completely clueless about the microbiological realm. Surgeons would wash their hands after surgery, but not before. Imagine if anyone had claimed that there were these incredibly tiny animals, too small to be seen, that were major players in human destiny.

Imagine that they claimed that there wasn’t just one kind, but a whole cryptozoology of millions of strange species, fantastically varied, of both plant and animal. Imagine that they further claimed that our bodies were actually made up of a cooperative colony of a trillion such animals! Anybody making such fantastical claims would have been condemned to a lunatic asylum or burned at the stake.

Presently, in the West, we have a blind spot in our awareness as huge as the blind spot we had for most of our existence as a species of the microbiological realm. Unlike Chinese medicine, Ayurveda and what would be common knowledge to any tribal Shaman, we are blind to organisms that exist on the energetic plane.

Dr. Samuel Sagan is a medical doctor who has researched this subject and written a book (I’ve only read excerpts) entitled, ENTITIES: Parasites of the Body of Energy. He’s part of a school in Australia that a friend of mine attended and spoke highly of, though I know next to nothing about it. In an excerpt available on the website clairvision.org, Dr. Sagan writes,

“ The topic is both old and new. Old, because in all traditions and folklores of the earth, one finds references to spirits and non-physical beings which can interfere with human beings. Thus Ayurveda, the traditional medicine of India, is divided into eight sections, one of which is entirely devoted to the study of bhutas, or entities, their influence on health and sanity, and the ways one can get rid of them. This places bhuta-vidya, or 'science of entities', on the same level as surgery or gynecology. If we look at traditional Chinese medicine, we find that in acupuncture, among the 361 points of the 14 main meridians, 17 have the word Kuei (disincarnate spirit) as part of their main or secondary name.”

Call them spirits, the incubus and the succubae, they have as many names as there are cultures and languages, but they have been widely recognized by everybody except us. Disincarnate organisms are far more generally recognized than the microbiological realm ever was until the invention of the microscope.

And there isn’t just one type of course, but a fantastically varied cryptozoology of parasites, predators and symbionts. Everywhere we find life we find endless variations on those classic energetic relationships----parasitism, predation and symbiosis. As the alchemists put it, “As above, so bellow.” As on the mircrobiolgical plane, so also on the energetic plane.

If there are organisms on the energetic plane, we should expect to find many highly evolved species of parasites. And what every parasite is looking for is a host with a rich deposit of energy----like the warm-blooded mammals, which attract female mosquitoes that will use them to fertilize their eggs and complete their life cycle. What is the richest deposit of organic energy that we know of? This would have to be human psychic energy/sexual chi---the energy that dominates this planet. What types of human beings have the richest deposit of this energy?

Adolescents, particularly male adolescents, have the greatest overabundance of sexual chi, and highly creative visionary types are thought to have the strongest psychic charge. Is it a coincidence that these are the types apparently most likely to be attacked by energy parasites? Another as above, so bellow phenomenon is that adolescents, particularly males, are apparently the most likely to be attacked by mosquitoes. Probably this is because they generate more infrared, have sweeter blood and less leathery skin.

From my work with dream interpretation, and as someone known to be a student of paranormal phenomenon, I have listened to dreams and strange occurrences from people of all ages. A consistent trend is that it is usually adolescents, or adults recalling an adolescent episode, who tell me of the classic nighttime parasitic attacks. These attacks tend to be highly stereotyped and to be entirely lacking, as far as I can tell, in psychological content. Should we discard all this human testimony because Western science is so far unable to satisfactorily explain it? We should always be wary when any area of human testimony is automatically discarded by a ruling collective. Think of how many generations, how many millennia, was the testimony of child abuse rejected by the collective.

Adolescents are the age segment of the population that generate the strongest excess of sexual chi and are also the group most associated with parapsychological phenomenon. Poltergeist activity, for example, is usually associated with adolescents undergoing puberty in a household in which there is strong sexual repression. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise (written when he was barely out of adolescence himself), he wrote that people were attracted to the young because they were giving off “calories of innocence.”

Calories, as I’m sure you know, are a unit of energy, of heat. When someone is attractive we say they are “hot.” An interesting correlation I’ve noticed is that those most likely to report energetic attacks also tend to be especially good looking. It is as if their dream body or energy body has an attractiveness that parallels their physical body.

(For more hidden aspects of appearance and body image disorders see the synopsis of my book The Glorified Body –Body Image Disorders and the Crisis Phase of Human Evolution which will soon be added to Jonathan Zap’s Pavilion)

One could also conjecture that these especially attractive individuals are more likely to experience attacks because of sexual attention or erotic fantasies generated by people whom they have attracted. Could autoerotic fantasies, highly energetically charged events culminating in orgasm, “get loose” and somehow be experienced by their target person during the boundary dissolution and heightened telepathy of dreaming?

In her book on projection, Jung’s brilliant colleague, Marie Louise Von Franz, points out that in traditional cultures projection, like “the curse of the evil eye,” was depicted as an arrow or missile going out from the percipient to the target person and penetrating their energetic field. Any woman who has gotten the creeps while being cruised by sexually predatory men knows that this is not merely a metaphor. The effect of these sorts of sexually charged projections may also explain some of the madness of celebrities who become the targets of colossal amounts of projection.

Although I have no way of confirming or disproving this possibility, we do know from quantum mechanics that even on the subatomic plane, to observe a thing is to change a thing, so the highly charged sexual projections and autoerotic fantasies directed toward a person can be reasonably supposed to have an effect on them. Studies conducted by British biologist Rupert Sheldrake have confirmed, for example, that the eyes on the back of your head feeling that someone is staring at you is a real effect confirmed by controlled experiments. But to take the next step and suggest that the heated attention of desire is a vector for energy parasite transmission, or even an origin of the parasites, is purely speculative at this point.

In addition to being speculative, it may also be rather dangerous, as a literal minded person who has an erotic dream involving person x may falsely assume that person x is stalking them on the etheric plane. This assumption resulted in not a few witch burnings in this country during Puritan times when a sexually repressed man could have an erotic dream about Sarah Goodwife and this would be admitted into court as “spectral evidence” that she was a witch.

Some of my fellow Jungians would also say that what I am calling “mind parasites” would be better described as “autonomous complexes of the collective unconscious.” I would have to respectfully disagree with them, at least in many cases, because if these were autonomous complexes of the collective unconscious I would expect to see them occur embedded with more psychological content and associated mythological motifs, and usually this is not the case.

At the end of this essay on mind parasites I will offer some more speculations on the origin of mind parasites and the etiology of parasitic attack, but first I would like to ground this a bit with some real life experiences. I will start with three cases I can report first hand---attacks I experienced myself.

 

Case History # 1

About seven years ago I was camping with friends, fellow Greenpeace workers, near Taos, New Mexico. We had spent the previous night in a cave, and had planned to heighten our experience of the high desert during the daylight hours with a spirit medicine of the sort associated with dampness and the subterranean. Going for the heroic dose of what turned out to be especially potent medicine, I quickly realized that hiking the high desert in a social context was not where the ally wanted to take me, which was back to my tent and what Terrance Mckenna recommends with such medicines---silent darkness. As soon as I shut my eyes I was aware of an alternate dimension that was so vivid, complex, high resolution, fully realized and alive that I can only compare it to some of my brief encounters with Dorothy Mary Taylor.

I seemed to be looking into organic chambers which intuition told me were organs of my body. One, I felt certain, was my heart, but seen on some plane of alchemical energy. The heart was a chamber with portal like valves and everything was woven of infinitely detailed filaments of living energy. Colors seemed to reveal secrets of the function of different structures. The heart was revealed as a complex nexus and alchemical transformer of cosmic energies, not merely a fluid pump.

But suddenly there was a change as definite as the click of a switch being thrown. I felt that some malign force had become aware of my forbidden seeing, a breech in the inner eye was detected, and an immunological response, a sharply aimed attack was launched at me. This attack successfully disrupted the forbidden seeing, but also provided another form of forbidden seeing, a revealed instance of mind parasites at work.

What I experienced was an attack that occurred with a definite periodicity. About every sixth heartbeat or so, a highly charged thought form projectile, like a red diamond bullet, penetrated my psyche and with explosive intensity generated expanding concentric ripples of fear and disturbance.

The languaging part of my mind registered this projectile with a contracted word phrase:

CANCERKILLER CANCERKILLER CANCERKILLER

Along with the languaged aspect would be a terrible image----a chicken lying at the bottom of cellar stairs with its throat cut illuminated by a single hanging light bulb, an emaciated concentration camp victim lying passively while being slid into an oven, etc. The horrific images over powered the forbidden alchemical view of bodily organs.

Since this attack I have often wondered if certain other anxiety attacks weren’t generated more subliminally by the stinging injections of fear energy coming from mind parasites. A constant theme of the scanty literature about energy parasites is that they live off the energy of intense negative emotions and darker sexual desires. They have also been associated with (see clairvision.org) cravings for certain foods, especially sugary or sweet foods. (Mosquitoes also prefer sweet blood, and that may partly account for their preference for the young)

It seems that they can feed off the red color temperature of hypercaloric metabolism, excess emotionality and sexual excitement. They may not be able to feed off of the bluer energy of the hypometabolic diet, what in Ayurveda would be called the satvic diet that emphasizes small portions, live foods and carbohydrates with a low glycemic index. They are especially unable to feed off the bluer color temperature of heightened consciousness in a state of emotional equanimity.


Case History # 2 - Encounter with a Vampire

I’m going to put in as much detail as I can recall (but without details that might give away the vampire’s identity) of this strange encounter. Each time I’ve reflected on it I see new connections in some of the details and I want to give the reader a chance to make their own connections, to connect the dots themselves.

I first met my young friend Nicholas (not his real name, and yes, I still consider him a friend) when he was seventeen or eighteen years old when I was doing I Ching readings for people in a public place. At the time of the encounter it was about two years later and Nicholas would have been nineteen or twenty.

In retrospect, Nicholas looks remarkably like an Ann Rice vampire. He was exceptionally good looking in an androgynous way and everyone commented on this. More than anyone I’ve ever met in person, Nicholas looked like a living Japanimation or anime character. He had enormous eyes, very high cheekbones, straight hair (dyed various colors) and a very small nose and mouth. A serious martial arts student, he trained constantly, and was thin with very high muscle definition.

His metabolism was so high that he ate enough for four people but had a body fat under 5%. This was a big problem for him because he had been abandoned by both parents, was always broke, and whatever money he did have had to go to the huge quantities of food he had to eat.

Also, much like an Ann Rice vampire, Nicholas was keenly intelligent and with an impressive array of talents. He had educated himself in a surprising number of areas for someone so young, and was well informed about the occult, Eastern philosophy and psychology. And although he apparently came out of a horrible trailer trash background, he was mannered, eloquent in speech, graceful in movement, and exotic in appearance. Some people instinctively mistrusted him, but to me he was unfailingly honest, thoughtful, and considerate.

Of course, I have no doubt that he presented me with his very best side because he valued me as a mentor. Still, I want to acknowledge that his conduct toward me was exemplary, and he was, strange as it sounds, a completely innocent participant (as far as I can tell) in the vampiric attack I experienced. This will become clearer later in the narrative.

On the evening of the encounter I hadn’t spent time with Nicholas for at least a year except for running into him and his girlfriend, Sapphire (not her real name) for five minutes in a health food store. This was because I had been traveling and hadn’t been in the part of the country where they lived for over a year.

After I returned from my travels I ran into Sapphire sitting at a table in a coffee shop. Also exotically beautiful, and racially unidentifiable, Sapphire was a couple of years younger than Nicholas. Although her appearance hadn’t changed much she seemed completely different than when I had first seen her over a year ago. A year ago she was someone I would never have expected to have a conversation with. She was extremely shy or at least so inwardly shut up inside herself that I never saw her relate to anyone, except in the most perfunctory way, besides Nicholas.

One time she complimented my artwork, but otherwise we scarcely exchanged a complete sentence even though I saw her almost every day. And it wasn’t just me, in the past there had been this powerful keep away field surrounding her like a force field. But now there was an amazing change, she made strong, friendly eye contact, greeted me like an old friend, and she seemed completely relaxed, open and eager to talk. I was astonished. I’ve almost never seen such an extraordinary change in someone in a year’s time.

We had a great heart to heart talk and there were two or three more such conversations in the next couple of weeks. Sapphire was only about seventeen, but now had the poise of a much older woman, was highly intelligent, articulate, precociously wise, and her exotic beauty turned heads wherever she went. She acknowledged the profound change in herself and credited most of it to the influence of Nicholas. Nicholas had, she told me, with painstaking effort, patience and insight helped her to work her way out of her problems.

On the evening of the encounter, as part of a revelation of his own life story, Nicholas told me that Sapphire had been brought up in a cult, and from the earliest age had been subjected to constant sexual abuse, had been raised to be a Kama Sutra trained sex slave. When I first met Sapphire I felt she was a borderline personality type, a person with fragmented center who seemed likely to remain that way. Given her horrendous past, this wasn’t surprising. But the improvement in her was little short of astounding.

Much of our conversation was about her relationship with Nicholas. They had been together for three or four years, which at their age was practically a lifetime. A traumatic aspect of the relationship, for her, was that she wanted to be monogamous, but Nicholas insisted on an open relationship, and he had affairs with other young women. He was never dishonest about this, did all he could to ease her discomfort, and always related to her as his principle lover. But, nevertheless, it was traumatic for her.

In the last conversation I had with Sapphire she mentioned that some guy she had known in the past, who had been abroad, had returned to town and was madly in love with her. She was apparently considering having an affair with him, since she had always been the monogamous partner in this open relationship.

A few days later it was a freezing cold night and I was hanging out in my RV when Nicholas called me on my cell phone. Although I had these heart to heart talks with Sapphire recently, I still hadn’t spent any time, besides five minutes in the health food store, with Nicholas. Sapphire told me several times that she wanted me to spend time with Nicholas because it had helped him so much in the past, but we had conflicting schedules, and it hadn’t happened yet. Nicholas told me on the cell phone that he desperately needed to talk to me that evening, that Sapphire was leaving him for this new guy and was going to live with him in another country. He was close by and I told him to come right over.

Soon Nicholas was sitting across from me in the back of my eighteen-foot RV, drinking yerba mate. Outside the wind was howling and it was one of the coldest nights of the year. The lighting in the RV was rather dim. It had been a gray, overcast day and my solar panel hadn’t fully charged the deep cycle batteries. With the propane furnace running, which uses an electric fan, electricity was low and I lit a couple of candles for more light.

Nicholas looked quite stressed compared to how he looked just a couple of weeks before. His complexion was what Ann Rice would have called, “preternaturally pale,” and he was thinner, his face looking drawn, his elfin japanimation features seemed ready to morph into Edward Munch’s The Scream.

Naturally, the first thing we talked about was his relationship with Sapphire. He reiterated some of the things that she had said about his successful efforts to help her, and told me about her abusive past. Although he had always insisted on an open relationship, and even though he knew it was hypocritical, now that the shoe was on the other foot he felt terrible. She was spending the night with this guy right now. He might have been able to work through that, but now that she was suddenly leaving him to live with this guy in another country…. Having been abandoned by his parents years ago, Sapphire was the closest thing to family he had ever experienced.

We talked about this for some time, I gave him the best advice I could, and we did a couple of I Ching readings on the subject. After the readings, Nicholas told me that he was ready to change the subject, that he had spent the whole day talking to his closest friends about this traumatic break up and he felt talked out about it.

Nicholas’s change of subject was rather unexpected and abrupt.

“I think I’m a vampire.” He said.

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“I feed off of other people’s energy.”

“Everybody does to some extent, can you give me an example?”

“For example, you.” Replied Nicholas. “From the first time I met you I wanted to feed off of your energy.”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked.

“I’ve always wanted to learn as much as I could from you, to absorb your ideas, and there’s always been a sexual undercurrent to it.”

This last part surprised me, seemed to come from left field, otherwise his explanation didn’t sound particularly vampiric. I assumed he had the hunger of a narcissistic personality type always wanting more attention. Very understandable and sympathetic considering how unparented he had been.

It’s always a good idea to pay attention when someone tells you they’re a vampire or evil. This had happened to me years before, someone told me they were evil, but I was young and too busy being sympathetic to realize that I was getting a very serious warning from someone who, indeed, was evil, but had a subordinate part of themselves that had enough love for me to give me a heads up. This evil “mutant” even told me about the exact moment in his life, at age sixteen, when he experienced (his description) “the death of his soul.”

Foolishly I ignored the warning and this resulted in, among an array of dark consequences, a vampiric energetic attack with lasting consequences. But this an even more bizarre story that might take hundreds of pages to unravel. And if that wasn’t enough a prior lesson, when I was ten years old I survived a still more dangerous and bizarre, nearly fatal, paraspsychological attack which resulted in a dog mauling and hundreds of stitches. The point is, I should have known better---I had been there before, been bitten before. A classic pitfall is that if you have survived weird darkness you may develop a fatal vanity that you know what you’re doing or that lightening won’t strike twice (an especially foolish notion if your last name is Zap).

It may be true that most evil entities and vampires don’t tell you what they are. They’re often too busy being deceptive and “the devil hath the power to assume a pleasing shape” and all that, and you have to be able to see through the guise, the enticing aura of glamour, beauty, power. But a surprising number of vampires and evil types will tell you what they are, often just once, like a subtly placed calling card, and you’d better pay attention. Often people make the mistake of thinking this person’s just a punk trying to show off, if they really were evil/vampiric, etc. they wouldn’t admit it. But many times they are both showing off and they are evil or vampiric.

And don’t forget that narcissistic punks can be evil or vampiric too. Another dangerous delusion is that if you are what I call a “mutant”----a self-transforming round peg off the accepted scale of normality---then other mutants must be your allies. As a mutant myself, I have had the blessing and privilege to be a magnet for other mutants, but I have sometimes forgotten that mutants are not just dangerous to the collective, they can also sometimes be dangerous to other mutants. This is especially true if you underestimate them, or are glamorized by their charisma into overlooking their shadow.

In Nicholas’s case he was not showing off, was not a punk (except sometimes in style of dress), and was not toying with me, not playing the game of leaving the calling card hidden in plain view. He was seeking help for an actual condition. Unfortunately, I was busy being sympathetic, rather than empathic, and taking what he was telling me too psychologically and not enough bioenergetically. We passed over the vampire part and I failed to notice the significance, that the life story he then narrated well into the night had begun with his stark statement,

“I think I’m a vampire.”

The revelation came and went too quickly, and I failed to recognize its continued relevance to the life story that followed. But in just a few more hours I would be taking it very seriously indeed.

Nicholas told me that he had no memory of the first four years of his life---it was a complete blank. He was pretty sure this was because he had been abused by his father who later abandoned him. There wasn’t a trace of incest survivor self pity or victim glamour, and his hunch seemed plausible.

A classic symptom of the abuse, which he noticed about himself, was that he had been extremely promiscuous with members of both genders from a very early age. There was a great deal of violence in his childhood. His mother went through a series of abusive boyfriends who were also abusive to him. As a young child he witnessed a brutal murder right inside his trailer home. His mother abandoned him at an early age, and he had to make it on his own as a street kid in a big city.

Much of this was a surprise to me, because even though I knew Nicholas was separated from his parents, he had a rather polished manner, was so intelligent and well educated and was always stylishly groomed and dressed in surreal costumes of various sorts from Gothic to futuristic punk to fantasy Renaissance fair attire. Presently he seemed more elf-like than vampiric. He was wearing some sort of elaborate, laced leather jerkin, a finely made Renaissance fair sort of item that looked like what Orlando Bloom wore as Legolas in the Tolkien films. He did not seem like someone from a violent, trailer trash background, though vaguely I remembered that he may have told me some of this a year before, but it never quite gelled in my mind because the detail was left out, and it was so incongruous with the Nicholas I knew.

Nicholas’s life story didn’t have any feeling of fabrication about it, much of it depicted him in an unflattering light. He had been a victim of violence from the earliest age, but as he got older, and learned how to fight, he had also been quite violent himself, and with shame and anxiety he admitted that he had severely maimed one or more persons. He was a street kid living in a dangerous urban environment. For a while he lived with a man who was a major dealer of a designer drug in the rave world. Apparently he was this man’s companion, protégé, object of infatuation, bodyguard and probably lover (I can’t recall if he made this last part explicit or not). There was a certain park he went to in the city to have anonymous encounters with members of the same gender.

By the time I met him, Nicholas’s looks, intelligence and charisma (my observations, not his) had obviously opened doors for him and he was able to make his way off the street and into more favorable circumstances, though he still lived close to the edge. But now, with the loss of Sapphire, who lived in more affluent circumstances, a big part of his emotional and physical support system was falling away.

We talked well into the night, freezing wind howling outside the RV. Sometimes the gusts were strong enough to cause this fiberglass coach to roll slightly on its suspension, like a ship lost at sea. At some point, much earlier in the evening, Nicholas realized that he had missed the last bus to the town where he had a place to stay. He was used to staying in this town with Sapphire, but, obviously, that wasn’t happening tonight. He asked if he could crash in my RV. Of course I said yes, my sleeping loft easily slept three, two with plenty of room to spare, and he didn’t seem to have any other option.

After recounting his life story, Nicholas said he was exhausted and looked it. I told him to take the far side of the sleeping loft, so I wouldn’t have to disturb him when I got up there, and took the near side. He lay down on the loft and seemed to instantly fall asleep. I followed sometime later. Usually I need less sleep than most people, and I am also a very, very light sleeper. This may be the result of years of training myself to wake up and recall my dreams.

Usually I have 100% recall, so I feel it’s a good trade off even though it is often a hardship for someone who travels as much as I do, often out of a backpack. I also tend to be hyper sensitive to human energies, and it is almost impossible, for example, for me to fall asleep or remain asleep in a dwelling where anyone else is awake. So I knew it would be tough for me to fall asleep so near to someone else’s energy field, and I wanted to make sure Nicholas was sound asleep before I even tried.

When I did go up on the loft I took the extreme near side of the loft to have as much personal space as possible. After I lay there for some minutes waiting for sleep, Nicholas rolled over in such a way that three different parts of his body, his forehead, knees and toes were lightly touching my body as he lay in a fetal position. I didn’t want to wake him, so I just lay there and eventually fell asleep.

Sometime, in the middle of the night, an inner survival warning system woke me wide-awake in an instant. I’m not sure how to describe what followed because so many things were apparent simultaneously, but can’t be described simultaneously. Describing one thing after another would seem to imply a chronological sequence, but the first several things were all apparent in the first heartbeat or two of awakeness, they were more like a simultaneous overlay of perceptions and realizations rather than a sequential cascade. Please keep this in mind as I relate the following.

I was awakened by one of the most shocking and intense things I have ever felt in a long life of shocking anomalous experiences. A massive, massive energy transfer was happening, primal life energy, chi, was pouring out of me and into Nicholas’s sleeping body which was still lightly touching mine. I found myself paralyzed, and this paralysis seemed a more active, energetic version of ordinary sleep paralysis.

I felt myself restrained with lashings of fiery energy, much the way Gulliver, in Gulliver’s Travels, awoke to find that the tiny Lilliputians had restrained him with lashings of rope over his whole body. There was a parasitic entity in the sleeping loft hovering just bellow the roof near our feet. It was like a dark cloud, or vortex, with a somewhat double convex lens shape similar to the way a spiral galaxy looks from a great distance. My visual perception of it was not definite; it was dark and amorphous with fractal boundaries and rotating movement.

I felt it energetically, a direct perception of it, and there may or may not have been an overlay of conventional, anatomical eyesight. I knew that this parasite was living in conjunction with Nicholas and was directing the massive, massive energy transfer while he slept. I felt that if this energy transfer were to continue for even three or four more heartbeats I couldn’t be sure if I would even be me anymore, if there would be anything left capable of resisting.

All of the above was a multilayered simultaneous realization. You may have experienced, I certainly have, that in life or death situations our psyche can step outside of slow, linear time thinking ego mode and go into an enhanced mode where profound layers of perception can unfold in a heart beat.

After this first heartbeat of recognition, there was a change in me, my will to resist emerged like a sword pulled from a sheath. And in my mind, a blue fire sparked, instead of fear there was an intense curiosity and fascination, I had been studying mind parasites for years and now I was able to see how it actually worked! With my mind fully awake, and my will activated to stop this vast, insidious suction of energy, the color temperature of my psychic energetic metabolism had switched from red to blue, an energy that is apparently unnourishing, even dangerously toxic to parasites. The dark spiral cloud entity made a distinct sound at that point, the only way I can language this sound (it’s meaning was instantly apparent) is to say that it was the sound of primal frustration of a very hungry animal that has been interrupted in the middle of feeding.

With my mind and will fully awakened, the parasitic cloud entity vanished like a puff of smoke, leaving not even a hazy residue. The energy transfer had already stopped and it was just me and Nicholas on the sleeping loft. All of this occurred in a space of less than six heartbeats, possibly as few as three or four, but it had indelibly etched itself on my memory.

Now perhaps you can make sense of my earlier statement that Nicholas was an innocent participant in the vampiric attack (as far as I can tell). Nicholas has never consciously acted to harm me in any way (unlike the person who warned me he was evil!). Even the attack did not appear to be harmful (because I had successfully resisted it). I didn’t feel drained the next day, or ill in anyway. Again, this was a dramatic contrast to the other vampiric attack, many years before, that left me ill for weeks afterwards. Months after I recovered from that illness, which much resembled giardia—a parasitic infection----the vampiric person called me on the phone from South Korea while I was in Manhattan, thousands of miles away, and within two minutes, before I hung up the phone, the illness returned!

Ultimately, the experience with Nicholas was a peak learning event revealing much about a very significant phenomenon. This does not mean that I encourage anyone to approach vampires to learn from them. “Studying the dark side” is one of the most classic ways to get sucked into the dark side, and that remains one of the most likely pitfalls for me.

Returning to my narrative, I stayed awake on the sleeping loft for some time, possibly the rest of the night, thinking about what happened and reinforcing the experience, both the conversation with Nicholas and the attack, into memory. I felt perfectly safe afterwards, though as an extra precaution I did an inner practice called “Theater of Memory,” which, among other virtues, is very effective in sealing and protecting energetic boundaries.

The following morning I told Nicholas what I had experienced and he seemed interested, but not the least surprised. He reminded me that he had told me the night before that he was a vampire, that he fed off of other people’s energy, and that he had always been attracted to mine! I could hardly accuse him of pulling the wool over my eyes. My tone was not accusatory or asking for apology, but one of fascination with what I had learned. We parted on good terms, though I have not seen Nicholas or Sapphire ever since then.

There are many interesting details in this case study to comment on. The first that comes to mind is the paradoxical complexity of Nicholas as symbiont/host to a vampiric parasite and the many positive, even exemplary, things about him. Ann Rice’s vampires have much this same uneasy mixture of the admirable and the horrific. Nicholas had clearly had an astoundingly positive effect on Sapphire, though he also suggested that his vampiric nature may have been unsatisfying to her erotically, and may be what caused her to seek fulfillment with another lover.

Nicholas was a classic candidate for parasitical attack and infection as an extremely attractive male adolescent. He may have been repeatedly raped as a small child, and was certainly highly promiscuous there after. Just as physical sex is now known as a great disease vector for microbiological parasites---as above, so bellow---it is also a likely vector for energetic parasites. Similarly, a voracious appetite for food, with an inability to put on weight, is sometimes a symptom of physical parasites, like tape worms, perhaps it is also a symptom of energy parasites that want to rev up the metabolic fires of their hosts. In the movie, The Matrix, Neo is derisively called “Coppertop,” a reference to Duracell batteries, and a reminder to him that he exists to be used as a disposable energy source for parasitic machines.

The way Nicholas’s vampirism worked had remarkable parallels to the origin of vampires that eventually unfolds in Ann Rice’s Vampire Chronicles. In her vampire cosmology, a spirit, a disembodied entity (spirits are often said to be jealous of those possessing physical bodies) that has an affinity for human blood, is able to merge with the bodies of an ancient King and Queen of Egypt through the apertures of bloody wounds opened in their bodies by the stabbing knives of assassins. The King, Queen and the disincarnate spirit become bonded, merged symbionts, and a new species is created, neither flesh nor spirit---the vampires. Nicholas, a self proclaimed vampire, seemed to be a symbiont/host of a disembodied parasitic entity.

 

Case History # 3

The third first hand case history of mind parasite attack happened just eighteen days ago. You may have already read this one as an email entitled “Mutant Danger Alert!” If so, you may still want to reread this brief account from the new perspective of mind parasites taking over the susceptible to attack a mutant. The people involved in this attack have turned out to be decent people who, apparently ashamed of their behavior that night, have gone out of their way to help me out since then, so the story had a happy ending.

The fact that they are decent people makes this an even more likely attack of mind parasites inserting their minds or thought forms into susceptible psyches. This attack came at night, and when I was already in a somewhat vulnerable state of mind. It happened on the 13^th of this month, the night of the full moon. Here’s my first person account written the day after the attack:

Last night something occurred that seemed like a Twilight Zone episode or like being inside an overwritten Stephen King story or Shirley Jackson play. I’m sending this out because I think this incident has a general meaning with some implications for many of us.

Yesterday I returned to my campsite very late in the afternoon after spending most of the day in Ione. In the two or three days proceeding, I had very pleasant experiences at this campground. I met a middle-aged couple who invited me to dinner and breakfast. I relocated to a better tent site at the edge of the campground away from where there were families with noisy small children. The couple relocated (for the same reason I did) taking the spot right across from me. Yesterday morning, shortly before I left for Ione, they packed up and left and when I returned a family with noisy kids and a boom box had replaced them. I sat quietly reading at my site.

As dark started to fall (this was the 13th, which was also the full moon) a new couple---an obese woman in her late teens/early twenties and a bean pole guy with crew cut (everybody involved very redneck) comes up to the new family across from me and I overhear bizarre sound bites of some dire warning being given, something about a “psychopathic guy…staring at all the children….writing’ weird symbols in his own excrement on the bathroom walls.” The weirdly tomboyish matriarch of the new family says, “I’ve got knives and hatchet (which she pronounced “hetchit” rhyming with khetschup) The obese/beanpole couple says, “Just give a holler if you need us.” And the matriarch says, “He better stay on his side of the road.”

Suddenly I realize, I’m the only one on the other side of the road, they must be talking about me! Inwardly I debate with myself about whether I am either being victimized by my own paranoid imagination or by some sort of actual red neck witch hunt. Some anxious minutes go by while I’m not quite able to resolve this or to think of any appropriate action. Then obese/beanpole couple returns to the family, dark has fallen now, but in the flickering light of their fire pit I see that obese/beanpole and family are all standing together and looking like a posse. The obese woman call out to me in a challenging tone,

“Where you from?”

“Colorado.” I respond.

Suddenly obese/beanpole standing in front of me. “How come you been starin’ at all the kids?” (the kids in question were fat, inbred red neck kids that probably no one, least of all me, had any interest or history of staring at)

“What?! I haven’t been staring at any kids. I’ve been gone almost all day in Ione. I’ve only been over to that side of the campground once today to fill up my water bottle!”

A six or seven year old girl, with a Salem Witch trial glint in her eyes appears from the shadows and says in an accusatory tone,

“That’s right, I saw him comin’ right at me wit’ his was water bottle an’ he was starin’ right at me.” Next, the obese woman claims that she is the host of the campground (I later found out this was a complete lie) and says,

“And somebody been making weird symbols on the bathroom walls with their own excrement!”

“That’s weird and gross,” I responded, “but it certainly wasn’t me!”

 

(Later I recalled that there were a few random streaks of mud on the bathroom walls which to the serial killer movie/ tv news ---“if it bleeds, it leads”---addled imagination of an IQ challenged amateur detective could only mean one thing: an evil serial killer making satanic symbols with his own excrement!)

I tried to apply more reason and in a reasonable tone. (In retrospect, or if I run into them again, I should have pointed out that libel is actionable offense). Violent crime in this country has gone down by about 30% in the last ten years but the reportage of in the same period has increased 600% so that kids are so frightened of strangers that a random glance feels like a potential abduction.” etc. Beanpole/obese seemed a bit swayed, but the weirdly tomboyish matriarch had a violently negative response to my reasonable approach which might have been too intellectual for her. She said, “He’s just tryin’ to use facts, I know people who are in prison for life who try to use facts.”

Beanpole/obese walked off, but the matriarch caught in some version of auto-echolalia began repeating herself, emphasizing angrily the connection between those who use facts and lifelong convicts. When this tape ran out she began saying, “If he tries to touch any of my kids I’ll put this hetchit (holding said implement in her hand) right through his heart!” this tape repeated itself at length; in fact I heard it as I was in my tent trying to fall asleep. Realizing that any more facts would just rile them up more, but also not about to pack up and leave in the middle of night ( a sure admission in their eyes that I was a serial killer) I had to spend my full moon thirteenth in a kind of horror story setting.

My tent is still at that campsite and I might come back to find them gone or a cross burning in the middle of my tent or who knows…. This morning when I asked to speak to the “host” when I found a clean up crew coming through I learned that there was no host. I also took the precaution of calling the people who supervise the campground to let them know of my experience. If they are still there I plan to confront them and remind them about libel.

There is, I believe, a more general meaning to this bizarre incident. I realized that this mind parasite attack had resemblances to my experiences at the border where this customs woman I hadn’t interacted with in over a year remembered everything about me and said that she spotted me 3 or 4 times in Nelson.

What I realized is that if you are what I call a mutant, an unusual person that doesn’t fit the mold, you are likely going to be the target of some very polarized projections. In the right social venue, like the gathering I had just been to or some place else where there is a concentration of fellow conscious mutants, I often get great recognition and positive attention from people. But over a lifetime I have found that when dealing with square peg types that their unconscious immediately registers you as a mutant even if you are (as I am now) middle aged with short hair, white skin, clean shaven, normally dressed. Then you become like “a splinter in their mind they can’t get out.”

You are a subliminal shock wave threat to their unconscious equilibrium and they have an immunological response to you, they want you out of the body politic, they want to burn the witch they sense in you. The USA has a bad history with witch-hunts and is now more fear driven then ever. So if you are a mutant, are living an alternative life that deviates from statistical norms in anyway, watch out! The lunatic majority doesn’t need a full moon to get medieval on your ass, they’re ready to do it all the time. So cloak yourself and be alert, the Babylon Matrix remains a very dangerous place.

This attack occurred during a full moon, and we all know there is a some link between lunar and lunatic. The lunatic aspect may be related to the uncanny association of parasitic beings and the moon, which has also been noted by others. Gurdjieff described the moon this way, and frequently said that unconscious people were “food for the moon.” I’d known that since studying Gurdjieff in the Eighties, but also found it turning up in, The Mind Parasites, where one character asks,

“Do you know the work of the philosopher Gurdjieff? He always said that human beings were food for the moon. He compared the human race to a flock of sheep that are being fattened for the moon…”

The moon has a certain physical analogy to parasites in that it does not have its own energy source or illumination, and only reflects the energy of the sun. That’s from our vantage, of course, since the earth is also dependent on the sun for energy. In my earliest visions of the parasites I saw what I called “moon worms.” They had a pale, unearthly, baleful luminosity. In a novel of the West, All the Pretty Horses, recently made into a major motion picture, the heroic protagonist, an adolescent male sixteen years old, in a moment glaringly incongruous with the style and content of the rest of the novel, looks up at the moon and wonders if there aren’t parasitic entities up there feeding off of human suffering.

In one of the most visionary plates in Alex Gray’s classic art book, Sacred Mirrors, we see a seated figure in the center of a kind of mandala of energy. Around the circumference we see many permutations of the act of physical coupling. At two points of the mandala are angelic Hindu beings, one as I recall looks like Ganesh, the elephant deity. The couplings near these figures seem loving. At the other two points of the mandala are parasitic deities; one of them looks like a devouring vagina. The couplings near these figures are sado-masochistic and negative.

A close friend of Alex Grey told me a story about the inspiration for this painting. Let me emphasize that this is a second hand story that I have not confirmed with Alex. But even if it were a fabricated urban legend, it would still have significance. I was told that Alex was hanging out with friends in an apartment where everyone had taken acid. Suddenly Alex noticed his friends hitting on each other in an ugly way and he became aware of parasitic deities above the earth that seemed to be promoting the ugliness and feeding off of the negative energy.

(I’m going to jump around a bit now, throw out some more dots on this nebulous map of unseen parasites, give you a chance to connect the dots as you choose.)

In the last chapter of Castaneda’s last book involving his relationship with Don Juan, a chapter entitled “The Mud Shadows,” Don Juan takes Castaneda out into the desert and helps him to shift into the second attention. From the second attention Castaneda can see what Don Juan calls “the flyers,” shadowy worm like creatures that feed off of human energy and have the ability to insert their mind into the minds of average, susceptible people.

The physical description of these “flyers” sound remarkably like the “rods,” the very high seed flying organisms that have been video taped by Jose Escamilla (see roswellrods.com). Consider the poem by William Blake at the beginning of this essay and the “The invisible worm/That flies through the night.”

Don Juan is not the only one to suggest that there might be parasites, as there are microbiologically, that have an ability to insert their mind or will into a host. In the novel, The Mind Parasites, it is suggested that certain diabolic individuals like Hitler and the Marquis De Sade (who encouraged the dark sexuality of the sort we see near the parasitic deities in Alex Gray’s vision) are puppets, zombies who have been hollowed out by the parasites and are now entirely under their control. When Jung met Hitler he described him as “a psychic scarecrow,” and some very evil figures have been described as having blank, doll’s eyes and to be on a kind of automatic pilot like mechanical puppets.

When they asked one serial killer what he was thinking about when he stalked young women in preparation for torturing and killing them he replied matter of factedly, “Takin’ care of business.” Maybe that’s the one thought rattling around in George W’s hollowed out head: “Takin’ care of business.”

I’m going to quote a long passage from The Mind Parasites to give you a feel for how Collin Wilson describes it,

“ In a few cases, the vampires have been able to completely take over a human mind and use it for their own purposes. For example, I am almost certain that De Sade was one of these ‘zombies’ whose brain was entirely in the control of the vampires. The blasphemy and stupidity of his work are not, as in many cases, evidence of demonic vitality, and the proof of it is that De Sade never matured in any way, although he lived to be 74. The sole purpose of his life work is to add to the mental confusion of the human race, deliberately to distort and pervert the truth about sex.

As soon as I understood about the mind vampires, the history of the past two hundred years became absurdly clear. Until about 1780 …most art tended to be life enhancing, like the music of Hayden and Mozart. After the invasion of the mind vampires, this sunny optimism became almost impossible to the artist. The mind vampires always chose the most intelligent men as their instruments, because it is ultimately the intelligent men who have the greatest influence on the human race. Very few artists have been powerful enough to hurl them off, and such men have gained a new strength in doing so---Beethoven is clearly an example; Goethe another.

And this explains why it is so important for the mind vampires to keep their presence unknown, to drain man’s lifeblood without his being aware of it. A man who defeats the mind vampires becomes doubly dangerous to them, for his forces of self-renewal have conquered. In such cases, the vampires probably attempt to destroy him in another way—by trying to influence other people against him.”

A couple of pages later and Wilson makes a very interesting speculation. He suggests that the parasites may seek out species that are on the brink of a quantum evolutionary leap, but still in the highly energetically charged, vulnerable position of not yet having emerged on the other side of that leap.

“Now I suspect that these mind vampires specialize in finding races who have almost reached this point of evolution, who are on the brink of achieving a new power, and then feeding on them until they have destroyed them. It is not their actual intention to destroy – because once they have done this, they are forced to seek another host. Their intention is to feed for as long as possible on the tremendous energies generated by the evolutionary struggle.

 

Their purpose, therefore, is to prevent man from discovering the worlds inside himself, to keep his attention directed outwards. I think there can be no possible doubt that the wars of the twentieth century are a deliberate contrivance of these vampires. Hitler, like De Sade, was almost certainly another of their ‘zombis’. A completely destructive world war would not serve their purposes, but continual minor skirmishes are admirable.”

A few paragraphs later Wilson states the intuition I had long before I read Mind Parasites---that the parasites, seen from a sufficiently encompassing evolutionary vantage, are revealed to be symbionts in that they challenge an evolving host to become far more conscious in order to shake off the threat. Frank Herbert, in his fourth Dune novel, God Emperor of Dune, seems to have had a similar idea.

The God Emperor who is following his “Golden Path” (apparently his personal revelation of an evolutionary Tao), makes himself into a supreme predator or parasite that dominates the human species for millennia. He does not enjoy being an oppressor, but is doing it purposefully so as to paradoxically create mutants who will be so resistant to oppression that they will able to lead their species out of bondage forever. In the I Ching it is said that some things do not fully blossom or unfold unless they are fully compressed (or oppressed).

Wilson writes,

“I have another theory, which is so absurd that I hardly dare to mention it. This is that the mind vampires are, without intending it, the instruments of some higher force. They may, of course, succeed in destroying any race that becomes their host. But if, by any chance, the race should become aware of the danger, the result is bound to be the exact opposite of what is intended.

 

One of the chief obstacles to human evolution is man’s boredom and ignorance, his tendency to drift and allow tomorrow to take care of itself. In a certain sense, this is perhaps a greater danger to evolution---or at least, a hindrance---than the vampires themselves. Once a race becomes aware of these vampires, the battle is already half won. Once man has a purpose and a belief, he is almost invincible. The vampires might serve, therefore, to inoculate man against his own indifference and laziness…”

Elsewhere, Colin Wilson compares the insidious effects of the mind parasites to “radar jamming.” This is a metaphor or analog to their apparent ability to obfuscate, to generate confusion, wild dangerous rumor (as happened to me on the 13^th) and otherwise make it hard for the host species to wake up. Mayan scholar John Jenkins and I had a dialogue very recently concerning the deceptive Dreamspell fad, and its obfuscation of authentic Mayan calendar and prophecy. (See “Zap on Dreamspell” ----Jonathan Zap’s Pavilion)

Everyone has noticed that whenever a creative cultural trend tries to get started, any time a new scene, a new bohemia tries to get going, corrupt commercializers rush in to produce a degraded, counterfeit version that sucks all the life out of it. If a new visionary band appeared on the music scene they would probably be found advertising disposable Burger King cups by the end of the month. If a mutant is discovered they can be either repressed or imprisoned (like what the feds did to Wilhelm Reich), or they can be promoted into a celebrity where they will be hollowed out by projections and parasitic temptations until they become a ‘zombis’ for the Matrix.

Potential mutants may be exactly the ones taken over by the mind parasites as Collin Wilson suggests. The school shooters, particularly the Columbine kids---Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold are all male adolescents, usually good looking. John Lee Malvo seems to be another one. Their terrifying actions seem very intelligently and precisely directed so as to create the richest harvest of fear and negative emotion in the collective.

We have said very little so far about the possible etiology or origin of the mind parasites. One intriguing theory of origin is presented by Dr. Samuel Sagan (clairvision.org). According to this theory, at the time of human death, there are denser, darker fragments of consciousness that remain behind after the spirit departs the body. Sagan believes that many traditional funeral practices, especially those involving cremation, were originally designed to destroy these fragments. These lingering incomplete fragments of consciousness do not have their own direct connection to pranic or life energy, but must parasitically attach themselves to those that do. This seems similar to the Buddhist concept of the “hungry ghost.”

There is a principle of logic known as Occham’s Razor which may support Sagan’s theory somewhat. Occham’s Razor says that hypotheses are not multiplied without necessity. In other words, we don’t adopt fancy, complex explanations where simpler ones seem to suffice. If there are energy parasites (for many this is a big if) and since they seem to both understand and be perfectly adapted to feeding off of human energy, instead of suggesting a more exotic theory of origin, say extraterrestrial or interdimenisonal parasites hunting through the multiverse, we can simplify our hypothesis by having us, human beings, whom we know exist, as the source of the parasite. At one point Colin Wilson suggests that we might be the parasites in his novel. I made a similar suggestion during the discussion of projection.

Employing Occham’s Razor to cut away the fanciful altogether, it is also possible to describe mind parasites in terms of memes, or units of cultural transmission. When people tried to explain the actions of the Columbine kids in terms of their obsessive addiction to the video game Doom, they were essentially relying on memes as the source of contagion. Although I think they were wrong, or at least wildly disproportionate, it can easily be demonstrated that memes are quite capable of functioning as mind parasites.

For example, an adolescent male watching the endless blockbuster movies in which scenes of extreme violence are dovetailed with scenes that are sexually arousing---like James Bond making out with some exotic beauty moments after a glamorous blood bath, or, even worse, both violent and arousing, like the famous erotically charged shower/stabbing scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Another example are the subliminal, and not so subliminal enticements in cigarette ads. These memes cross wires that should not be crossed---sex/violence, sex/cigarettes. Certainly in the cigarette ads it is the conscious intention of their designers to create a parasitical infection, a mind insertion meant to cause a virulent addiction that, in the shortened life of an average smoker, nets tobacco companies hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Using subliminals and sexually arousing images to sell known toxins should be outlawed to close at least one mind parasite vector. A psychologist I saw on a panel discussion wisely suggested that there be a “cooling off period” between sexually arousing scenes and violent scenes in movies so that we stop conditioning adolescent males to perceive violence as sexy. I don’t, however, advocate anything but voluntary self censorship.

To demonstrate how memes can act as functional mind parasites we can get even simpler and give an example of a single sentence (another cultural unit of transmission) acting to spread soul-consuming mind parasites.

Let’s say we have an adolescent male who has many good, compassionate qualities. He forms an attachment to an adolescent girl and there is a genuine bond, he truly cares for her. The adolescent is genuinely traumatized and extremely vulnerable when he discovers that, in typical high school fashion, the girlfriend has cheated on him. He goes to his best friend for sympathetic council and his friend utters a single definitive sentence, “That’s just the way they are, so fuck ‘em and forget ‘em!”

In the painful confusion of adolescent eros a single sentence like this, from the right person and at the right moment, could be potently influential, could seem like an empowered antidote to the pain and confusion. If the adolescent male adopts this soul-destroying mind parasite, transmitted in a single sentence meme, he may then spend a lifetime infecting others with the contagion.

Finally, in dealing with an important, but nebulous phenomenon such as energy parasites or UFOs, the strategy I follow and recommend to others is to avoid formatory thinking or premature closure. This is the lazy mental habit of thinking you’ve got the answer and letting that notion harden into a perceptual dogma making you a true believer of a pet theory. Prematurely closed ideas create an enormous apriori constraint on you observational powers, influencing you to corral the evidence to fit your theory.

I regard my thoughts about mind parasites to be speculative, and I will be thrilled to find an explanation for what I have observed that turns my thinking on its head with some new insight.

If you are experiencing trouble you believe is related to mind parasites, or otherwise have some information or ideas please feel free to contact me. If you feel under attack I recommend a 100% live foods diet (go to rawfood.com or read Conscious Eating by Gabriel Cousins) and elimination of all stimulants, intoxicants and outsize portions. Shift your metabolism and the feeding will stop. I also recommend using the techniques for dealing with negative thoughts and emotions described in Part III of my Guide to the Perplexed Interdimensional Traveler.

Check back as this document will be updated as I learn more about this phenomenon. For more discussion of mind parasites and the dynamic evolutionary context in which they are happening go to Jonathan Zap’s Pavilion. You’ll find much relevant material, especially when a document entitled “White Crows Rising…” is added, hopefully rather soon.

We’ve been working a great deal from the left side of our brains in this discussion and that may be too confining when dealing with a vast and nebulous terrain. The last thing I will leave you with is not more theory, but a vision of the mind parasites that happened to me and that can be found in Shocking Anomalous Experience parts IV and V. While these experiences are not literally true in the way the case histories presented here most definitely are, the Shocking Anomalous Experience narrative presents true events and perceptions as seen through the second attention.

A confirmation that what I envisioned was not just a quirk of my imagination is in the animated Matrix sequel, Animatrix (infinitely superior to the godawful, mind parasited, hollowed out Matrix Regurgitated or whatever it was called). In Animatrix we see an expanding parasitic lattice almost identical in form to what I envisioned. I’ll step aside to let you experience that for your self. Feed back is always welcome. Yours in symbiosis, Jonathan

"I brought you here to see life forms that coinhabit your realm, that feed in your realm, yet they are hidden and unknown to most of your kind." I knew what he was referring to, but had to ask, had to have it spelled out.

"Do you mean the mind parasites?"

"Yes, that's exactly what I mean. You have done well compared to most of your kind, in becoming aware of them, and seeking to be vigilant about them. Your will to be vigilant about them is part of what brings us together here right now. You and your kind need to see what feeds upon you, you need to behold the feeders, to bring that which manipulates you and harvests you out of the shadows and into the light of awareness."

The implications of his words were chilling, but not unknown to me. Still, he was silent for a few moment, giving me time to absorb the impact of his words which were a powerful confirmation of a dark possibility I had long been aware of…. (large passage deleted) And then Raven asked very gently, but owning the seriousness of the moment,

"Are you willing to look at the feeders?" And suddenly I wasn't so sure if I was willing. I sensed the edge of the abyss, but I knew my life only allowed for one possible answer and I willed myself to say, "Yes."

"Then look down." said Raven.

I looked down and saw that which unraveled me for several long heartbeats before I was willing to let what my eyes scanned enter my mind. Attached to my body, coming from my body, through my body, was a broken lattice of dark filaments, undulating filaments like a broken spider web spun of black spider silk moving, undulating chaotically.

And I knew that each of the filaments was a kind of nerve cell, shadowy black neurons with infinitely complex dendrites and interconnections with other threads of tissue. I must call it tissue because it was alive and intelligent and.... parasitic, virulently parasitic, a vampiric web, only the web was the vampire, and it was highly aware of me for I was its food source, its host, and it continually reconfigured itself to create networks, new interconnections to draw off more vital energy, and I felt the blackness of this shadow web, dendrites and axons of flat black spider silk moving and undulating, and also pulsating, but it was a weirdly horrifying inverse arterial pulsing, and suddenly I comprehended the horror of its pulsing rhythm, it was the antiheart beat of my heart beat.

This pulsating lattice of tissue was a capillary suction pump, it beat in perfect counter rhythm to my heart beat because when my heart pumped blood out it sucked in, not blood but vital energy and for a moment it was not clear if I was merely tissue, an organ inside of its body, or if it was a parasitic tissue that surrounded my body. Something about the light absorbing flat blackness of the filaments made them tendrils of energy suction and also rendered them invisible to ordinary human eyesight.

At certain nodes of the web, a nexus of dendrites formed a densely entangled concavity, a bulbous thicket of black nerve tissue and inside these were pale worm-like parasites, and these worms had the pale, silvery luminosity of a hungry moon, a sterile moon whose only light was reflected from a host energy source on which it drew. These moon worms were part of a delicately counterbalanced parasitic ecosystem, an ecosystem for which I was now the sole food source.

The equilibrium of this ecosystem had been shocked, even shattered by my displacement to this green realm and the web of parasitic life undulated in a highly agitated, chaotic state. It was a broken lattice, its outer edges were loose filaments, spindly neurons whose outer dendrites had been yanked off so that only loose dismembered axons, undulated in amputated torment seeking to be reconnected, reconnected to the larger web, the planetary matrix of tissue which they had been so densely interconnected to before I entered the portal. I had displaced to a green realm, a realm not infected with this vast network of parasitic tissue, so all that I saw was the broken remnant of the web that had closely surrounded my body and somehow survived crossing over.

This was but the smallest part of the mind parasite matrix that had always harvested my energy, its perpetual suction a hidden, insidious taxation of my every pulse of life energy, but now it lay before me shocked and vulnerable and I almost felt pity for it. It was torn asunder from its planetary matrix and unsure of itself, chaotically trying to reconfigure itself to cocoon around me perhaps, tightening its embrace of the host to conserve its one remaining energy source.

My mind almost unraveled as I gazed at this alien life form, for I was seeing that which it is not permitted to see, and it was a singularity, like the time when I was ten and mauled by a dog and I saw muscle tissue, purple and pink veined, the inside of my body on the outside, and perception came in time-slowing shock waves.

Then my visual perception blurred for a moment as color erupted and it took a moment to realize these were Raven's hands moving with blurred speed, and his hands projected flames or jets of multi-colored energy. So fast they moved and with surgical precision, and I knew exactly what they were doing, they were freeing me, filament by filament, from the matrix and the feeling was ecstatic, euphoric, as a billion hungry little mouths were removed from my skin, a billion points of constriction and fear that I had no idea even existed, because I had never before been freed from their insidious suction.

I felt my energy field blossoming, my awareness, my being was spinning outward, dancing and singing into the mesa, a glorious emergence as parasitic cobwebs vanished into the high desert night. My spirit celebrated, rejoiced but I felt I could not go fully into the celebration, I had to seek the forbidden knowledge because the hungry web still thrived on my earth, the predatory realm that I inhabited with six billion of my brothers and sisters.

I saw so many of them there going about their day their gaze downward, many with spirits broken, for above them was a dark coagulated sky, a planetary vampiric matrix above their heads, above them on the food chain, and their suffering spirits were like nodes of nourishing energy inside this dark brain, a network of parasitic intelligence inserting its mind into all of us, harvesting from us a rich diet of fear, pain, hatred, jealousy, addictive passions, lethargic indulgences. And we have been the deceived host of this metaparasite since at least the dawn of history.

We need to break loose from this devouring cocoon, but to do so, we need the clarity of the Vehrillion Sapphire Elemental to cast light on the vast, shadowy mind, the planetary matrix of hungry black tissue. And this was why Raven had sent the portal, he had removed me to a pure, uninfected realm so that I could see the vastness of the infection and be a witness to my kind. And now a terrible vision flickered into my mind. I saw the gleaming Twin Towers and I knew this was early on the morning of September 11.

The Twin Towers were still perfectly intact, but surrounding them, massing and swarming around them were pulsating masses of dendrites, entangled concavities of hungry nerve tissue and I knew that the matrix had sent great masses of suctioning tissue to this particular place and time because it knew what was coming, a great, exploding feast of dark energy, a feast of terror about to erupt and I saw dendrites, insidious tendrils of its will perfectly interfaced into the puppet brains of the terrorists so that the matrix actually looked out at the gleaming towers through the eyes of the terrorist pilots, but with its will and ravenous hunger, and it craved with sexual frenzy to rupture those towers, to pop them, to tear into them like a starving, rabid dog tearing into hives full of golden honey, only here the honey was fear, and blood, blood vaporizing in the fiery combustion of exploding jet fuel and as the towers collapsed there was a frenzy of feeding, an imploding vampiric orgasm suctioning blood and terror that pulsated the whole planetary matrix in waves of multiple orgasm.

My whole being trembled as I beheld the Godhead of evil, the face of the archparasitie, the Medusa whose hair of snakes was some early vision of these neurons and dendrites of pulsating evil, but mercifully, I was also seeing this event through Raven's mind and I saw that the matrix was actually being caught in its ravenous greed, in its need for vampiric orgasm, and was revealing itself, revealing the web of evil so that the host was being awakened to its peril, an awakening immunological adaptation was gaining power and the dark matrix itself was imperiled.

A deadly battle was ensuing, the hungry mind of the matrix asserting its dominance over the host, its right to draw blood, its right to feasting explosions, vampiric orgasms of mass terror, but the host was awakening, individual nodes of consciousness achieving glimpses of the shadowy network. And when I had these realizations, a matter of heartbeats, Raven pulled back the veil, the terrible visions dissolved and it was just us standing in the silent mesa.

I took in some deep breaths, feeling the stillness, the peace of the mesa, so removed from the boiling strife, the virulent, predatory infection of my home world.

"We have given you this vision and the orb of Vehrillion Sapphire Elemental so that you may share these gifts with our kind, share them through the web of thinking machines you have so recently manifested. The sleepers must awaken and see the feeding web, they must find the mind within themselves that is stronger than the web mind, the mind of freedom, of energy, of love."