When I discovered pot, it was a major turning point in my life. It was one of the best things that ever happened to me. But I live in a society in which pot is illegal. This is amazing, incomprehensible... How can they put people in jail for smoking pot?! It just doesn't make sense.
If you don't know what jail means, specifically, please read these pages before continuing: What happens in American jails and prisons and the hardtime page. These pages require a strong stomach. Don't say you weren't warned.
I also live in a society in which they teach toddlers to listen to hip-hop. They are proud of this. They are self-righteous about it. I have been told (more than once) that I am insane, and not fit to be around children, because I don't believe in teaching babies to listen to rap. This too is incomprehensible.
In New Scientist magazine, issue of 10 March 2001, there is a news item that is apropos here. The Digital Freedom Network website sponsored a contest in which prizes were awarded for reporting the most bizarre behaviour of censorware, i.e. software that is supposed to filter out "undesirable" material. New Scientist reports,
The grand prize went to Joe J., who reported being prevented from accessing his own high school's website from his own high school's library. It seems Carroll High School had adopted filtering software which blocked "all questionable material." This included the word "high."
The runner-up was a user named Hilary Anne, whose attempts to register the email address hillaryanne@hotmail.com were rejected because censorware spotted the hidden word "aryan."
I'm not sure either New Scientist or the DFN website would object to censoring someone who really meant to talk about getting high, or someone who really wanted to identify herself as Aryan. To them, the censorware is bizarre only because it finds these words in absurd contexts.
Suppose the censorware is smart enough to find such words only when they really do occur in the objectionable sense. Suppose Hillary Anne wanted to register the address proudaryan@hotmail.com, and the censorware wouldn't let her do it. Then what? Wouldn't that be bizarre?
Suppose the censorware at Joe's high school is smart enough to filter out references to the word "high" in the psychedelic sense, and only in that sense. Suppose Joe tried to find out about getting high, and the censorware wouldn't let him do it. Wouldn't that be bizarre? Why would they want to prevent anyone from finding out about attaining a higher state of consciousness?
The main question I want to raise is: why those two things? Why do the thought police single out "high" and "Aryan" as unsayable? What do those two things have in common? Is there an idea that ties those two things together, or is it just an accident of cultural history that those two things happen to be unsayable?
There are some people who agree with me about pot, but they are liberals who think racism is anathema (except anti-white racism, of course - other examples can be found here and here). There are some people who agree with me about rap, but they are conservatives for whom pot is anathema.
But as far as I'm concerned, they go together. I'm both pro-white and pro-pot. This is the 915 concept.
In the 1996 election, there were several propositions on the ballot in California. Proposition 209 was against affirmative action. Proposition 215 was to legalize marijuana for medical purposes. They both passed. Similar propositions also passed in Arizona and more recently in Washington. These propositions didn't just squeak by, they passed with healthy majorities. In Washington, they both passed with 57 or 58% of the vote.
Of course some people support one but not the other, but since both propositions passed with clear majorities, there must be some people who agree with both of them. When 209 and 215 both passed, I was amazed.
That was when it dawned on me that I am not alone.
There must be at least a few people who not only agree with the propositions but think they don't go far enough. There must be at least a few people who think pot should never have been illegal in the first place, and who don't want to be forced to live with third world people.
We are all supposed to support the American agenda, i.e. the attempt to create a drug-free society and an integrated society. There must be a few who think, as I do, that the American agenda is monstrous. It's the exact opposite of what we should be doing.
Since I don't know of any idea that ties those two things together, I decided to just make something up. I call it the 915 concept, where 915 refers to a combination of 209 and 215. The number 915 is supposed to be like 420, the number pot smokers have been using to identify themselves for several years, but with the opposite political and musical orientation.
If I could just go ahead and live my life, I wouldn't be doing this. But I find myself living in a society that has declared war on me, for no apparent reason, and I have nowhere to turn. Nobody in public life speaks for me. People who are pro-white and pro-pot are totally outside the American political system (not to mention the European political system, or any other political system). We have no voice, no representation, no place in society. There is no room for non-suicidal whites on the left, and no room for pot smokers on the right. That leaves a lot of people with nowhere to go.
If no one speaks for us, it's up to us to speak for ourselves.
We have a right to be who we are. We have a right to live our lives without being part of somebody's project.
But rights don't automatically exist. They have to be asserted and defended.
When I first thought of combining "pro-white" with "pro-pot," that concept was very far out in left field. Now it has become almost commonplace. There is a huge subculture on the internet in which it is taken for granted that the War on Drugs is wrong, at least to the extent that it is directed against marijuana, and anti-white racism is also wrong. Jeff Rense, for example, would agree with both parts of 915. That's not to say I endorse the Rense site. Obviously Jeff is playing games with his readers, and I don't really trust him. Sometimes I think his heart is in the right place, and other times I wonder. However, that's not the point. Rense.com is very popular - it gets millions of visitors, so they say - and that's just one site among many that could be mentioned here. Kurt Johmann’s site 1 2 is another, less famous, example. Anyone who has explored the internet very far has encountered the combination pro-pot, anti-PC many times, usually but not always on sites that describe themselves as libertarian. The 915 concept is no longer pioneering, and sometimes I wonder if my pages have become redundant.
However, as far as mainstream politics and journalism are concerned, we are still invisible.
How can our right to exist be asserted? If pot really does take us to a higher level of intelligence, then pot smokers will be able to figure out why it's illegal, and what to do about it. Likewise, if Aryans really are superior to other races - specifically, more intelligent than other races - then the Aryans will be able to figure out how the game is rigged against them, and what to do about it.
The 915 concept was supposed to give rise to the 915 movement, which was going to consist of people who want to create a future in which we can live our own lives, without interference. "We are going to live in a narc-free world and a rap-free world, a world in which perfect bodies dance fearlessly on a psychedelic beach." But how?
The most obvious thing we could do is simply to speak up.
Unfortunately, however, it's not that simple.
It's impossible for most people who are pro-white to say so, at least in public. It's still more impossible for people to say they are pro-white and pro-pot. "Pro-white" and "right wing" occupy the same position in semantic space. They are inseparable. The 915 concept has no position in semantic space. It's an oxymoron that can't even be conceived by most people.
In "The 'Ring' and the remnants of the West," Spengler wrote
The most important cultural event of the past decade is the ongoing release of the film version of J R R Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. No better guide exists to the mood and morals of the United States. The rapturous response among popular audiences to the first two installments of the trilogy should alert us that something important is at work. Richard Wagner's 19th-century tetralogy of music dramas, The Ring of the Nibelungs, gave resonance to National Socialism during the inter-war years of the last century. Tolkien does the same for Anglo-Saxon democracy.
Tolkien well may have written his epic as an "anti-Ring" to repair the damage that Wagner had inflicted upon Western culture. Consciously or not, the Oxford philologist who invented Hobbits has ruined Wagner before the popular audience. It recalls the terrible moment in Thomas Mann's great novel Doktor Faustus when the composer Adrian Leverkuhn, finishing his Faust cantata in the throes of syphilitic dementia, announces: "I want to take it back!" His amanuensis asks, "What do you want to take back?" "Beethoven's 9th Symphony!" cries Leverkuhn. Leverkuhn (on the strength of a bargain with the Devil) has written a work whose objective is to ruin the ability of musical audiences to hear Beethoven.
Tolkien has taken back Wagner's Ring. That may be his greatest accomplishment, and a literary accomplishment without clear precedent.
I have some reservations about this. I don't think it's true that the Tolkien movies were that big an event in American culture, nor do I think Tolkien made Wagner unintelligible to Americans. "Spengler" is British, and he doesn't seem to be aware that Wagner hasn't been on our radar screen for quite some time. Wagner was already unintelligible to Americans before Tolkien's books were published, decades before the movies were produced. In fact I'm not sure Wagner was ever that big a deal in America, even in the 19th century.
But that's a digression. The question I want to raise is: suppose Tolkien did what Spengler says he did - is it really without precedent? In the very next paragraph, Spengler says "Wagner had done as much to Beethoven," so that's a precedent right there.
Far from being unprecedented, I think there are many precedents in cultural history. When I read Spengler's article, it reminded me of a scene in The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Ellsworth Toohey, the villain of the book, is talking to Howard Roark, the hero. He says if you try to pull up weeds in your garden one by one, they will keep coming back, but if you spread a chemical in the soil you can kill them once and for all. Toohey, an essayist and critic, was spreading a kind of cultural herbicide which would make it impossible for Howard Roark to exist. Years later it dawned on me that Ayn Rand was doing that too.
The Bible made pagan religion unintelligible. Nobody takes Thor seriously anymore. He's not a god, he's just a comic book character. You may hear about him in "death metal" music, but nowhere else. Not only that, whoever wrote the Torah intended to destroy paganism. The Book of Deuteronomy is a declaration of war on paganism: "Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols in the fire." It wasn't just a matter of physically breaking down altars. The Old Testament introduced a new conceptual framework in which the old gods just don't make sense.
In modern times, there has been a cultural reframe which made Christianity unintelligible to most Europeans. In most European countries today, Jesus is just as much a comic book character as Thor. I'm not sure what to call this reframe. It was practically finished by the end of the 19th century, but it probably started long before that - possibly as far back as Milton, Newton, and Locke. They were Christian on the surface, but their writings were deeply subversive. It may go even farther back, to the Renaissance. The artists and sculptors of the 15th century used Christian themes in their art, but putting everything in 3D perspective may have fatally undermined Christianity. The form made it possible to see that the content was not factually real.
Those artists and thinkers didn't intend to be subversive. Milton was wasn't Leverkuhn. Sometimes cultural reframes are intentional, and sometimes they just happen.
Coming back to the 915 concept, what I am driving at here is that we can't assert our right to exist because the same thing has happened to us - someone or something has made us invisible and inaudible. Trying to advocate a pro-white position or a pro-pot position, let alone both, in any public forum is like talking into a vacuum. You can say the words but they don't register. They have no effect.
With some issues simple advocacy may work, but it's a waste of time if you want to bring about deep cultural change. You have to address yourself to the structure of the dialogue, not just be a player within it. You not only have to look more than one move ahead (which is already more than most people do) - you have to redefine the game itself. The question is not who wins the argument, but who can make it impossible for his opponent's argument to be heard.
If we are going to defend ourselves, we have to invent some kind of cultural reframe that reverses the situation: instead of us being invisible, our antagonists have to be rendered invisible. The 915 movement is intended to be a literary/philosophical movement which does the same thing to them that the Bible did to Homer, the same thing Michaelangelo and Newton did to the Bible (unintentionally), the same thing Wagner did to Beethoven, etc. That's the level on which the game is played.
About 500 - 600 years ago, as Europe emerged from the middle ages into the modern world, there were several movements. There were artists and engineers such as Brunelleschi and Leonardo da Vinci, who introduced a fundamentally new way of seeing the world. There were philosophers such as Nicholas of Cusa and Giordano Bruno, whose ideas were equally revolutionary. There were religious reformers who led the Reformation. That's what we need now, something on that level, something that fundamental.
This may seem to be impossible, but I don't think it is. It's just a question of how far down the rabbit hole you want to go.
The original version of this page - the "915 Manifesto", which has long since been removed from the site - was written in the fall of 1999. Since then I have lost interest in the 915 issues, at least to some extent. Just a few months after writing the Manifesto I stopped smoking pot, so that aspect of 915 is no longer an issue that affects me personally.
However, the war goes on. It's not just about pot per se. As I said on the Third Wave page, there is an ongoing war between philistines and people who want to go into trance states. The war on pot is just the contemporary manifestation of a war on consciousness that has existed in many cultures for centuries.
At this point I am not exactly pro-pot, but I am definitely anti-anti-pot.
I have also had second thoughts about the other aspect of it. "Pro-white" is a problematic concept. The very name is misleading - it's not really about color at all. Whiteness per se is not an issue to me. And if it's a matter of white culture, well, I don't have much nostalgia for the whitebread town I grew up in (Midland, Texas). I guess I'm still pro something, but it's hard to say what it is.
However, the concept of "whiteness" isn't problematic to the other side. They know perfectly well what it means. On one of the anti-white racism pages cited above, I found this statement made by Noel Ignatiev, a (Jewish) Harvard professor:
"Keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females, too, until the social construct known as the white race is destroyed. Not deconstructed, but destroyed."
I don't think anybody is going to tell the professor that he's insane and not fit to be around children.
Susan Sontag, another Jew, famously said "The white race is the cancer of human history." Her skin is as white as anybody's, but of course she didn't include herself in that statement. When she says "the white race," she isn't talking about skin color. She knows perfectly well what "white" means. It's not problematic to her.
At this point I am not exactly pro-white, but I am definitely anti-anti-white.
More about the racial aspect of 915 can be found here: What "whiteness" means, other than color.
There is no use trying to argue with Professor Ignatiev and his ilk. Of course, I wouldn't even be allowed to express a dissenting view at Harvard. The question is what kind of cultural reframe could turn the tables and make it impossible for such anti-white hatred to be heard. It's a nontrivial problem. It would require, at the very least, reversing Nietzsche's "revaluation of values."
In Mein Kampf, Hitler said
"Sixty years ago an exhibition of so-called dadaistic 'experiences' would have seemed simply impossible and its organizers would have ended up in the madhouse, while today they even preside over art associations. This plague could not appear at that time, because neither would public opinion have tolerated it nor the state calmly looked on. For it is the business of the state, in other words, of its leaders, to prevent a people from being driven into the arms of spiritual madness. And this is where such a development would some day inevitably end. For on the day when this type of art really corresponded to the general view of things, one of the gravest transformations of humanity would have occurred: the regressive development of the human mind would have begun and the end would be scarcely conceivable."
Well, here we are. We are well on the way to that inconceivable endpoint. Spiritual madness is the norm, and its apostles not only preside over art associations, they teach at Harvard and program the music (and presumably the content) for children's tv shows. It has gone farther than anybody could have imagined in the 1920's, and we aren't finished yet.
Only a very few will separate themselves from the suicidal culture we live in, and seek out the narrow gate that leads to life. But of course that has been known all along.
When I quote Hitler, I don't mean to suggest that Nazism was a real alternative. The Nazis were clueless enough to think Nietzsche was a mentor.
As I said on the home page, the default future is one in which the same thought police who control our lives now will still be in power thirty years from now. Unless we can figure out some way to forestall it, that is our future. As Philip K. Dick said, the Empire never ended. The Roman Empire morphed into the Roman Catholic Church, and then into the somewhat mysterious force that I call the "thought police" for lack of a better term. (I don't want to call it the New World Order, because that implies a belief system that I don't take seriously. You won't find anything about the Illuminati on this site).
The "Empire" has been there all along, and it isn't going to go away. In every generation there are a few brave men who attack it head on and take the consequences. Spartacus was a great man. So was Giordano Bruno, and so is Ernst Zundel. I respect them, of course, but I don't want to put myself in that position. We shouldn't have any illusions about being able to defeat the empire. It will be there until the end of ordinary history.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm making this whole thing more complicated than it needs to be. Maybe all we need to do is speak up, and then DON'T BACK DOWN. I have found on certain occasions that the other side will back down in the face of righteous anger.
When this happens it's an isolated event which has no general effect. But maybe if enough people spoke up, it would have an effect. Maybe we should use the chutzpah principle: don't assume in advance that there are limits to what you can do, just keep pushing until the limits reveal themselves. If there are things that "can't be said," well, we should just go ahead and say those things, and see what happens.
That might help, but I still think what I have thought all along - it's not that simple. There are reasons - structural reasons - why we can't speak up in public. It's not that we aren't trying hard enough, it's just that there are certain roles that cannot be played. Certain personae are no longer viable. This is a literary problem, a dramatic problem. Any proposed solution that doesn't address the dramatic structure of the situation is a waste of time.
The literary part of the 915 movement is supposed to address this problem, among other things. It now has a page of its own.
Now, I'm going to go back to the beginning and start over. Why was my discovery of pot such a life-changing event? In the original 915 manifesto, I said
For us, pot isn't a "recreational drug," it's an elixir that clears our minds and rejuvenates our bodies -- because it rejoins mind and body. It is essential to our quest to restructure our minds in such a way as to open ourselves to the power of God.
Pot makes us aware that our minds exist within a larger mind - a mind within which we live and move and have our being (as Paul said, quoting Epimenides). Getting stoned, really stoned at the highest level, is like a note becoming aware that it is part of a chord, part of a melody, part of a symphony: a symphony that is always there, eternally, but normally outside of our awareness.
In our ordinary consciousness, we are cut off from the source of our being. What we are trying to do is re-connect with the source, so it will animate us all the time, and make every cell in our bodies resonate to that symphony, and transform us into creatures of light.
That's still what I want to do. I no longer believe that pot is essential, although it sure helped when I was getting started. Nor do I believe that there is any such thing as "we." In the last few years I have come to appreciate how little I have in common with most pot smokers.
What I need to do is put the 915 concept into a religious context instead of a political context. This is a hard step for me to take. I stopped going to church in junior high, and atheism was a big part of who I was for a long time. Eventually I left atheism behind, but it's still hard to use religious language. I have to get over that.
Everybody else thinks of religion in terms of belief, and as far as I'm concerned belief has nothing to do with it, so it's almost impossible to make myself understood.
In the manifesto, I used religious expressions such as "the power of God." I use the word "God" with some trepidation. The context for this word is not any traditional belief system, but rather my own experience - when I smoked or ate pot, I became aware that I am part of a larger mind. That mind is what I refer to as "God."
Since I am referring to my own experience, the question of the existence of God does not arise. I know that God (in that sense) exists, just like I know that music exists, just like I know that the air that I breathe exists. God (in that sense) is not a hypothetical concept.
Since the word "God" has so much baggage attached to it, maybe I should use a more neutral expression such as "The Metapsyche" or "The Urpsyche" for my experience of a larger mind. I'm a bit leery of neologisms, so I think I will stick with "God" for the time being, but it should be emphasized that this is not necessarily the same thing as YHWH, and not necessarily the same kind of thing.
It is also emphatically NOT the kind of thing theologians talk about, i.e. an "omniscient being" or an "omnipotent being." All such expressions are meaningless.
All existing religions are accidental accretions of memes that happen to "work," in the sense that they imbed themselves in people's minds and continue from generation to generation, but when you look at them in the hard light of philosophy and science they just don't make sense. (Yoga may be an exception to this, but it's not exactly a religion.) We have to make a fresh start.
The solution is to make the Singularity the starting point for theology. In other words, start with the Singularity and work back. This was Terence McKenna's idea. Terence and I didn't like each other, to say the least, but I believe in giving credit where credit is due, and the idea of making the Singularity the anchor for everything else is due to him.
Unfortunately his philosophy, if you can call it that, was as incoherent as any mainstream religion. At the Timewave Zero seminar at Esalen, he said "The one with the best model wins." This is exactly the right starting point, but he didn't follow up on it. He talked about the Mayan calendar, the I Ching, Elliot Wave theory, and other such occult stuff, which leads nowhere. The only thing he said about language was that we should use politically correct language, such as referring to God as "she."
The transhuman metamorphosis won't be a general event that happens to everybody at once. Somebody will get there first. In other words, if you think of this as a race, somebody will win. It will be somebody who has the best model of reality on all levels, including, specifically, a correct philosophy of mind. A correct philosophy of mind requires a correct understanding of logic, semantics, metaphysics, and epistemology. Thus, for the first time, we have an objective criterion of philosophical truth: the correct philosophy is the one that leads to the metamorphosis.
In the Bible, in the opening chapter of the gospel of John, it says "In the beginning was the logos, and the logos was with God, and the logos was God." I don't know of any theology in which the idea that God is logos is taken seriously and developed into a coherent theory. It should be. This is one context in which I'm trying to understand my experience of God. One of the ideas that I'm working on is that as we approach the Singularity, it is language that evolves.
Our language evolves and becomes a better and better approximation to the logos. I refer you to the Singularity page for more about this. The Singularity page is incomplete, but it gives you some idea what I'm talking about. Many pages on this site are incomplete (including this one). I hope nobody comes here looking for cut-and-dried answers. The whole thing is work in progress.
The larger mind that I spoke of contains my mind "like a symphony contains a note." This is not just a figure of speech. The idea that God is sound occurs in both Yoga and Christianity. When churches were established in pagan Europe, the church bells and the choir superseded the random noise of farms, workshops, kitchens, and nurseries. To become a Christian meant to enter a musical space. This idea has been lost for centuries, but at one time that's what it meant to become a Christian. (Of course that's only part of what it meant. Another essential part of becoming a Christian is realizing once and for all that you are not God.) In Yoga, too, joining yourself to God means entering a musical space - letting a mantra fill your mind, and letting your body resonate with it.
OM isn't just a sound, it's a person. This may be paradoxical but it's true. In the first few months after the breakthrough, when I smoked pot a moment would come when OM started resonating in my mind, and I would say "Hello." I felt someone's presence, and I greeted him/her (gender doesn't really apply here). I still don't know who it was. I never had a name for this presence. Shiva, possibly, but I'm not sure about that. For a while I thought of it as the Holy Spirit. I'm not sure how important the name is. In any case, this only lasted a few months. After that I still got stoned, but whoever it was never re-appeared.
I could still hear the music, though. Pot lets us hear music that we could not otherwise hear. It lets us enter the musical space that our ancestors knew, but that is normally closed to us.
So what I need to do is (a) create that musical space, first in my own mind, then in the computer, and (b) go ahead and develop the philosophy and theology that go with it, and get that written up and published on the site. Whether it will have any effect on society is doubtful, but that's not the point anymore.
Quoting once more from the original Manifesto, I wrote
Someday we will live in a society that doesn't consider us insane - a society in which the Tower of Babel has been rebuilt, and the thought police no longer exist. Our cells will be like tiny cathedrals with perfect acoustics, and our minds will be full of light. We are going to live in a nark-free world, and a rap-free world - a world where perfect bodies dance fearlessly on a psychedelic beach.
That world can only be reached if you go so far into the rabbit hole that you come out the other side.
Further thoughts about the 915 concept may be found on the pages listed below. Some of these pages go all the way back to 1999, others were added later or modified later.
Pot's effect on my mind, then and now
Prospects for the legalization of marijuana
Cannabis in the Old and New Testaments
Why drug users can't be organized into a political force
It's like, totally raining teens
What "whiteness" means, other than color
What does "the end of race" have to do with the gas chamber story?
The Gospel According to Pilate - Who contains whom?
excerpts from Jacob Atabet - one of our defining stories
evolving language in mathematics
America at War - Sergeant Barney has ways to make you talk...