Nine Elven, Budding Seven, Pentadragon

I was a seventeen year old high school senior. I was getting out of bed and preparing to go to school as my parents were watching the planes crashing and the towers burning. The second tower collapsed as I walked out the door. By the time I got to my first class, everyone had heard the official story, and everyone believed it.

You remember how 9-11 made everyone come together, how there was a real sense of unity after the attacks? I don't. I remember me and the punk rocker James Rivard, when asked by our homeroom teacher what we thought we should do next, being the only two kids in class to say, "nothing." As opposed to rushing off to carpet bomb Afghanistan. Everyone else in the class, except maybe the teacher, seemed to want more people to die.

I knew I wouldn't like the direction things would take in the country after that day, how the attacks would be used as a motivator, how the fear would be spread. I had read 1984 the year before, and I watched as the world got more and more Orwellian, or sometimes Huxley-ian. This, combined with the die hard atheism and reductionist materialist world view that I was stuck in, led to me being a rather melancholic individual throughout the remainder of high school and the entirety of college.

Then, sometime near the end of college, a good friend of mine gave me a copy of an early version of Loose Change, and everything changed.

It seems that there are two main groups of people who appear to have benefited from September 11th. One group is the fascist zionist military industrial globalist psychopath network, or whatever you want to call them - the ones who actually engineered the attacks. I appear to belong to the other group. Allow me to explain...

The official story of 9-11 is a sacred myth that binds the believers of that myth together. It's a narrative around which a shared view of reality is constructed. Its a narrative that instills fear, fear encourages herd behavior (ask a sheep dog), and herd behavior allows for greater control. That's what all this talk of national unity is about.

For me and unknown millions of people across the world, the shattering of that sacred myth meant the shattering of an entire world view, a paradigm shift. If 9-11 was a lie, what other myths had our media, our schools, and our politicians perpetuated down through the years? Everything I had known became suspect, and I embarked on the beginning of what I might call my real education, as opposed to the schooling I'd received for the previous 16 years of my life.

In my search for truth, I developed a taste, a craving in fact, for what I call 'secret knowledge,' the things that few people know, that are in most cases intentionally hidden from us. Paradigm shifting things, things that would flip a person's world view upside down, things that are utterly mind blowing. I learned things terrible, horrifying, nightmarish, and I learned things beautiful, awe-inspiring, and divine.

I found a hidden ocean of knowledge, a whole universe of things, all the things that exist outside the box of consensus reality - conspiracies, secret societies, the occult, the paranormal, symbolism, parapsychology, quantum physics, the great mysteries of antiquity, ancient technology, truths hidden in "myth," and myths passed off as "truths," and most importantly, the ancient and timeless wisdom, the perennial philosophy, the "Law of One."

I dove right in and at times was guilty of believing just about every new thing that came along, suddenly everything seemed possible and things which previously seemed too crazy to believe now seemed almost too crazy not to believe. I eventually learned there are a lot of lies hidden in with the truth and nobody has all the answers. I learned to view the world with "open minded skepticism," and to trust my feelings when something seemed to resonate with truth, to not fall into belief traps or get mired in the details and minutiae.

I relearned how to learn. I use the bootstrapping method, I pick up a thing here, a thing there, I learn a little bit about it, consider it for a while, and see how it fits into or changes my steadily evolving paradigm. I have taken my mind on wandering journeys through things like Gnosticism, Freemasonry, Theosophy, Hinduism, Bhuddism, Shamanism, even Satanism. I learned a bit about the Kabballah, the Tarot, Astrology and the I Ching. I learned a bit about the mysterious, monolithic cultures of the past, the Mayans, Olmecs, the Sumerians, the Druids, the Egyptians. I gleamed a few things from Carl Jung, Alan Watts, Phillip K. Dick, Robert Anton Wilson, Aleister Crowley, Gurdjieff, Blavatsky, Many P. Hall, David Boehm, Charles Fort and John Keel... but I find even more inspiration in the living - the countless people out there who don't claim to have any of the answers but are lifelong seekers of truth. The people who blog and make their own documentaries and produce their own radio shows and write their own books, or who are just content to learn what they can and share it with other seekers.

And I feel a special affinity for the people like me, for whom 9-11 was the catalyst. It lit a fire under our asses, so to speak, a fire that rekindled the love of knowledge, our goddess Sophia, that characterized all true philosophers throughout the ages, but that schooling, and religion, and politics, and the media had all but extinguished completely. If anyone benefited from 9-11 more than the monsters who caused it, it was this world-wide, loose knit network of newly awakened individuals of whom I feel a certain kinship.

Along this path, I have had to abandon out of necessity the search for the absolute truth about certain things, such as "just whose fucking eye is that, on top of the pyramid on the back of the one dollar bill?" There are some things we will just never know.

But I have discovered many truths, and many things that point at truths. One idea I've become increasingly attracted to is the idea that I call, "The Greatest Conspiracy of all." It is basically this: there is but one source of all the lies, the wars, the terror and horror. And it is the same source that is behind all the good things that happen, behind falling in love and curing disease and all happiness and joy and music and beauty. And it's all there for our benefit, even 9-11 happened for our benefit, for our growth and evolution, individually and collectively. It is the force that pushes us forward, toward the life giving light. It presents us with problems so that we can overcome them, and in overcoming them we become greater. It shows us beauty, so that we may be inspired. It is the universe engaging in the simultaneous act of self analysis and synthesis, of looking into itself and realizing itself. It is the spirit that moves in all things. We are it and it is us.

So thank you, you vicious, lying, murdering, fascist oligarchs. You've taught me so much. You have helped make the world a better and more interesting place, by helping to bring out the best in me and many others, and for that I'm eternally grateful.