Oh, I Love This Song!

If you’re anything like me, you have favorite albums. You know, ones you’ve listened to so many times that you could literally recite the whole thing note for note. For me, favorite records come and go. They are indelibly tied to a particular time period in my life. I’ll typically be really into a musician for a few weeks or a month, just totally immersing myself in their work - just because it seems right for whatever’s going on. It really speaks to me.

After a while though, I’ll move onto something else. A friend will recommend something new, and I’ll suddenly listen to that to death. The cycle goes on and on. Until sometime later - months, or years even - I’ll happen upon a song or an album that just takes me back. Within seconds of hearing it, nothing more than a few notes on a guitar, or words sung in a chorus, and suddenly I’m thrown back in time. I’m flooded by the sensations and memories of the life I was leading when I was really into that record. And for a few minutes, it’s real and it’s tangible to me. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes bad, usually a bittersweet mix of the two.

I feel like this is a great image to keep in mind as we “head down the rabbit-hole” with this post. Whenever I go really far off the beaten path, I like to keep in my mind a picture of home. It can serve as a guidepost to get back, or a bridge which allows us to connect the dark regions we explore with the normal world we inhabit every day. The weirder the topic, the more important this becomes. And trauma-based mind control is one of those super freaky-deaky topics that’s so creepy and compelling that I think it’s especially important we have our heads on straight before we get started. With that in mind, maybe you’d like to put on a favorite album you haven’t listened to in ages. Something to take you back, and something to bring you back once we’re all done.

Conditioning

As far as I understand it (which admittedly is nothing close to first-hand experience), trauma-based mind control is kind of similar to the whole favorite-album phenomenon. The idea is basically that you condition the mind according to certain stimuli. When you experience a sensory trigger, a correlated interior state is achieved. The most common example of this is called Classical or Pavlovian Conditioning:

Classical Conditioning is the type of learning made famous by Pavlov’s experiments with dogs. The gist of the experiment is this: Pavlov presented dogs with food, and measured their salivary response (how much they drooled). Then he began ringing a bell just before presenting the food. At first, the dogs did not begin salivating until the food was presented. After a while, however, the dogs began to salivate when the sound of the bell was presented. They learned to associate the sound of the bell with the presentation of the food. As far as their immediate physiological responses were concerned, the sound of the bell became equivalent to the presentation of the food.

Other types of behavioral conditioning exist as well, with “operant conditioning” relating to the reinforcement or punishing of behavior. For our current purposes though, the easiest way to understand all this is through Pavlov’s dogs salivating when they hear a bell, or us being flooded by emotions when we hear a song we’ve not heard for many years.

Trauma & Dissociation

Now, listening to a record over and over may be a lot of fun, but it’s not the most significant physical stimulus available to us. Extremes of pleasure and pain may go well beyond that, triggering far greater physiological responses and long-term effects. Imagine instead of listening to a record over and over again, you are severely beaten repeatedly, or subjected to electric shocks. And at varying intervals to this, you are in turn sexually abused. Maybe this goes on for months or years. It’s not very difficult to imagine that such events would seriously contort your psyche in unimaginable ways. Especially if these things were combined and overlaid with other types of classical and operant conditioning.

For a creepy elaboration of this, check out Beth Goobie’s article, The Network of Stolen Consciousness. Goobie claims to be the survivor of a systematic process of mind control. Before we delve too deeply into that stuff though, let’s look at one very real and verifiable facet of traumatic experience which Goobie discusses:

Dissociation is commonly experienced during trauma. Rape and traffic accident survivors describe out-of-body experiences during which they float above their bodies and watch terrifying activities transpire below. This experience occurs naturally, whether the actual trauma is a fluke occurrence or a calculated torture session.

This same phenomenon can be seen in many near-death experiences. It sounds crazy when you talk about it in terms of mind-control stuff, but what about if we turn to a “legitimate” psychological source, discussing trauma and dissociation:

Technically, dissociation is a mental process which produces a lack of connection in a person’s thoughts, memories, feelings, actions, or sense of identity. When a person is dissociating, certain information is not associated with other information as it normally would be. For example, during a traumatic experience, a person may dissociate the memory of the place and circumstances of the trauma from his ongoing memory, resulting in a temporary mental escape from the fear and pain of the trauma and, in some cases, a memory gap surrounding the experience. Because this process can produce changes in memory, people who frequently dissociate often find their senses of personal history and identity are affected.

[…] Dissociative disorders develop under fairly consistent circumstances. When faced with overwhelmingly traumatic situations from which there is no physical escape, a child may resort to “going away” in his or her head. This ability is typically used by children as an extremely effective defense against acute physical and emotional pain, or anxious anticipation of that pain. By this dissociative process, thoughts, feelings, memories, and perceptions of the traumatic experiences can be separated off psychologically, allowing the child to function as if the trauma had not occurred.

Dissociation is often referred to as a highly creative survival technique because it allows individuals enduring “hopeless” circumstances to preserve some areas of healthy functioning. Over time, however, for a child who has been repeatedly physically and sexually assaulted, defensive dissociation becomes reinforced and conditioned. Because the dissociative escape is so effective, children who are very practiced at it may automatically use it whenever they feel threatened or anxious — even if the anxiety-producing situation is not abusive. Often, even after the traumatic circumstances are long past, the left-over pattern of defensive dissociation remains

Goobie describes virtually this same thing in her article. But rather than it being an accidental coping mechanism, she discusses quasi-occult techniques which systematically take advantage of this otherwise natural tendency of dissociation during trauma. She describes doctors, programmers and handlers who brutally abused her, and combined it with elaborate systems of guided imagery and other types of conditioning. As a result, her personality was fragmented into “alters” which were largely unaware of one another, and each of which had it’s own personality, training and purpose.

Autonomous Complexes & Possession

The basic idea is that triggers are set up during the traumatic programming which can later be used to initiate dissociation of the main personality, allowing one of the alters to take control. The concept, at its core, is really no different from what Jung termed “complexes”:

“Complexes are autonomous groups of associations that have a tendency to move by themselves, to live their own life apart from our intentions. I hold that our personal unconscious as well as the collective unconscious, consists of an indefinite, because unknown, number of complexes or fragment personalities.”

What we call the ego is thought to be just one of many complexes which make up the mind. Jung’s student Marie Louise Von Franz also writes:

“Even an unconscious complex can make an act of volition or decide or arrange something, as an ego can. In a way, there are as many little egos as there are autonomous complexes in a human being; like the sun among the stars, the ego complex rules […]

Not coincidentally, these other complexes may spontaneously take over during moments of extreme stress or trauma. Von Franz writes:

“That happens when you get into a state in which you are not yourself, or into an emotional upset where you lose control of yourself, but afterwards wake up completely sober and look at the stupid things you did during your possessed state and wonder what got into you: something got hold of you, you weren’t yourself, though while you were behaving like that, you thought you were - it was just as if an evil spirit or the devil had got into you.

These things one must not just take in a kind of colloquial amusing way, but quite literally, for a devil - or we would say, more neutrally, an autonomous complex - temporarily replaces the ego complex; it feels like the ego at the time, but it isn’t, for afterwards, when dissociated from it, one cannot understand how one came to do or think such things.”

[These and other related quotes and theories can be explored at these two articles I wrote - Also check out Multiple Personality and the Holographic Mind]

Mind Control, Then & Now

The point I’m trying to make with all this is that for countless millenia, humans have known about the dissociative tendency of the human mind. It’s understood by different models in different cultures of course. Nowadays we might say dissociative identity order is related to trauma. But in medieval times, they might have said that self-flagellation brings you closer to god. In another culture, a shaman might drum and dance to the point of exhaustion so that he could enter the world of the spirits. In Voodoo, practitioners too become “mounted” by gods.

Even modern day “magickians” use similar techniques. In his article Pop Magic! Grant Morrison talks about “charging” a sigil, which is a magical symbol created for fulfillment of a specific purpose.

To charge your sigil you must concentrate on its shape, and hold that form in your mind as you evacuate all other thoughts. Almost impossible, you might say, but the human body has various mechanisms for inducing brief ‘no-mind’ states. Fasting, spinning, intense exhaustion, fear, sex, the fight-or-flight response will all do the trick. I have charged sigils while bungee-jumping, lying dying in a hospital bed, experiencing a total solar eclipse and dancing to Techno.

Morrison also suggests that another critically useful moment for magical working is the ‘no-mind’ state experienced during the moment of orgasm:

At the moment of orgasm, the mind blinks. Into this blink, this abyssal crack in perception, a sigil can be launched.

What I’m trying to say with all this is that all of this has been known and actively used throughout all of human history. It’s not always been phrased the same way, but it’s pretty much never gone out of style. As a result, there’s no reason to assume that suddenly these techniques have disappeared off the face of the earth. I think it was Jacques Ellul who said that technology always expands to fill all its potential uses. And make no mistake about it, these techniques are a technology, and they have undoubtedly been put to negative uses at some conceivable point.

Brain-Change

Does that necessarily mean there is a vast Illuminati network of ritual abuse and mind control? I won’t pretend to have the answer there. But I do think we can quite readily find evidence that such techniques have been used with great effectiveness for the purposes of “mind-control” throughout human history. Although, maybe “brain-change” is a slightly more neutral term. For evidence of how this works, we need look no farther than our recent discussion of primitive rites of passage. A commenter on Rigorous Intuition also left a useful description of these events, which we can use to summarize here:

Melanesian, or Aboriginal, rites of passage begin with a separation of the boys from their mothers. They are brought to a place they have never been. They recognize nothing. They are treated strangely, perhaps dressed in women’s clothes. They are often drugged. Everything that happens to them in this liminal state is meant to completely erase whatever they knew and learned before - mother knowledge, if you will, which is considered inappropriate for an adult male.

When the initiation ceremonies reach their peak, the boys are marked in some way - some tribes burn the skin, or use tatooing. When the adult males consider the initiation to be complete, the boys are brought back to the village and use their adult names, and are accepted as adult men. The attachment to the mother (and feminine ways) is forever broken.

While the author of that comment goes on to suggest these rites have nothing to do with “mind-control” I tend to disagree. Formalized rites of passage are intentional cultural conditioning rituals. They take people whose minds are at moments of imprint vulnerability, and subject them to an ordeal which fundamentally and purposely changes their identity and relationship to society. What we call mind control - once you strip away the sci-fi Illuminati trappings - is fundamentally no different from this.

Especially noteworthy in this discussion is the importance of ritualized trauma (especially involving the sex organs). Being subjected to extreme sensory stimulus causes a point of dissociation. The mind blinks off. And in traditional cultures, this momentary gap is filled then with a new cultural mythos. The initiate undergoing the rite of passage is inculcated at this moment with the new story and correlated teachings which will allow them to take on a new functional role in society.

Trauma-based mind control would function according to this same general principle, except it would continually repeat and reinforce the conditioning for a long period of time. Whether or not the CIA/shadow government uses such techniques, you can bet your sweet bippy they are used on us routinely and ruthlessly by various other parties (intentionally or not). Spend 12 years being forced to sit still in school - a supremely unnatural and traumatic series of highly repetitive events for mammals. Then go home and watch the same commercials and television shows endlessly. Make no mistake about it, ritualized trauma-based mind control and conditioning are very real things which we all have a great deal of firsthand experience in. Most people nowadays just call it “education”, “entertainment” or “work” though - in true Orwellian fashion.

Generational Trauma

I believe there are also events which act as generational trauma-events, opening up the possibility of radical conditioning on a mass scale. Whether or not these events are committed with such purposes in mind, they seem to be invariably used by those in power for this purpose.

Jeff Wells recently posted an excellent quote by a JFK assassination researcher, which raises the possibility that these events are indeed crafted with specific purposes in mind:

Don’t you think the men who killed Kennedy had the means to do it in the most sophisticated and subtle way? They chose not to. Instead, they picked the shooting gallery that was Dealey Plaza and did it in the most barbarous and openly arrogant manner. The cover story was transparent and designed not to hold, to fall apart at the slightest scrutiny. The forces that killed Kennedy wanted the message clear: “We are in control and no one not the President, nor Congress, nor any elected official - no one can do anything about it.” It was a message to the people that their government was powerless. And the people eventually got the message

The barbarously public JFK assassination sent this message to the generation previous to us, our parents, who now have grown old. The possibility exists that this message needed to be updated for our generation - the young people moving upwards in the world today, coming into positions of power. None of us lived through the JFK, RFK or MLK assassinations, but for those who did, it left an indelible mark on their psyche. You could protest all you want, and achieve great progress, but ultimately it was fruitless. You go too far and you will be killed. Since most of us don’t even learn history in school anymore, the speculative powers-that-be might have decided to revive these tactics.

I wonder if 9/11 was actually a sort of culture-wide initiation - trauma-based mind control on a mass scale. Though for most of us it was a vicarious experience (in other words, it reached a huge audience), it was a particularly brutal one which forever transformed us as a result. Whether or not you believe that 9/11 was a “staged” event, it’s inescapable that the government well understood this was a point of “imprint vulnerability”.
Do you remember watching it all unfold on television and feeling somehow like it “wasn’t real”? That’s a crucial symptom of traumatic dissociation. Your mind splits, blinks off for a moment, creating a critical space which can be filled with a new story, a new mythos. Before that, almost none of us gave a shit about terrorism or national security. But as a result of this trauma-based rite of passage, we were suddenly conditioned to a completely new value system - one in which everything we held dear before was turned upside-down: personal freedom, the Bill of Rights, etc. It’s virtually identical to what happens to a child in a traditional culture who is re-aligned to adulthood through ritual circumcision and the supporting transformative mythos. Maybe the World Trade Center tumbling down was the ritual circumcision of the American psyche. We are now adults. We are now warriors.

Survival & Recovery

All is not lost of course. It never is. Just because somebody else either designed or exploited a moment of trauma to push their agenda on you, you’re still the one in charge of what happens as a result. Ran Prieur makes an excellent point about how 9/11 effected different people in various ways:

For me, it was liberating, like a near-death experience. That was the day I started going barefoot in the city, and started standing up to my temp agency, which got me fired two weeks later. I was surprised that it had the opposite effect on the culture at large, making people more fearful, narrow-minded, and generally emotionally contractive.

Also, in relation to the conspiracy theory wet-dream that is mind control, it’s important to look at where most of our information comes from. It comes from people like Beth Goobie, like Kathleen Sullivan, like Cathy O’Brien, people who are mind control survivors. Whether or not you “believe” their experiences, these are people who have committed themselves to a process of public healing and recovery. They are, if nothing else, a testament to the notion that no matter what trauma has happened to you in the past, you can move beyond it. It may be an intense struggle, but hell, so is life. As Derek Gilbert pointed out, the point of life is not getting your ass kicked, but in getting your ass kicked and picking yourself up and moving on.

Becoming aware of weird shit like this can either freak you out, or it can be a wake-up call about how things work. Once you understand the techniques that are being applied, there’s nothing to stop you from using them yourself. You can go back into your life and use this knowledge. Heck, you probably already do when you listen to a new album over and over again. You’re subtly conditioning yourself to forever associate it with your life at this moment. The most effective mind control agent in the world is not only on your side: it’s you. Sometimes the hardest thing in life is accepting responsibility for yourself.