And while I’m at it, some more stuff about Manson’s philosophy of fear. “Manson claimed that children were more aware than adults, because they were naturally afraid. But animals were ven more aware than people, he said, because they always lived at Now… Charlie was always ’selling fear’, Watkins continued. He wanted people to be afraid, and the more afraid the better. Using this same logic, ‘Charlie said that death was beautiful, because people feared death.’

Supposedly Charlie was a big fan of the sci-fi author Robert Heinlein, and especially his work Stranger in a Strange Land. Heinlein later claimed to have been sent a prison letter from Charlie, and according to the book “Turn off your mind” by Gary Valentine Lachman Heinlein even turned down an interview with Playboy becaue Hefner wanted to ask quiestion about his books influence on the Manson family. More about Charlie from the same book: “In the mix-sixties, while in McNeil Island Prison in Washington State, Charlie picked the brains of a Scientologist inmate, at the same time he studied Masonic ritual and absorbed an indiscriminate amount of occult lore; it may have been then that he read Stranger in a Strange Land, and it was certainly then that he developed a kind of persuasive charisma based on Hubbard’s auditing. … Manson later contributed a semi-coherent rant for the Process ‘Death’ issue, calling death ‘total awareness, closing the circle, bringing the soul to now.’”

Fear was apparently one of Manson’s pet methods of expanding the consciousness. In the summer of 1969 Brian Wilson told the English pop magazine Rave, that “Fear is nothing but awareness” and mentioned someone he called “The Wizard”. Guess who that was? In 1970 Manson expanded his version of proverbial “the fear [of the lord] is the beginning of wisdom”: “Have you ever seen the coyote in the desert? Watching, tuned in, completely aware. Christ on the cross, the coyote in the desert — it’s the same thing, man. The coyote is beautiful. He moves through the desert delicately, aware of everything, looking around. He hears every sound, smells every smell, sees everything that moves. He’s in a state of total paranoia, and total paranoia is total awareness.”

Fear is something he apparently spoke about a lot, and believed was a key to expanded consciousness. Could this be another angle to the Apocalypse? Most people who are into the apocalyptic theories usually kind of look forward to “the end”, but still.. hear me out.. By being in fear of the end of the world, we open our eyes and ears and become hyper-sensitive. Everywhere we scan for signs of the coming events, and we of course find them everywhere, exactly as Manson did on the Beetles White Album. Which is of course what Jesus and Muhammad also spoke about. The Signs are everywhere, but people refuse to see them. The Whole of Creation is a Book for us to read.

I’ll finish this disorganized rant with an interesting remark by Neil Young, who even bought Charlie a motor cycle at one point. “A lot of pretty well known musicians around LA knew him, though they’d probably deny it now.. He was great. He was unreal. He was really really good. Scary…”

A reader named Kabir left what I thought was a really excellent thought on my post about Manson: There’s a lot of BS told about Manson’s i [...]

“For Zimbardo, the prison experiment also has led to research on a range of social situations that generate pathological conditions. He has studied the social psychology of madness and cults, shyness as a kind of self-imposed prison, and time perspective ­ the way people come to be controlled by their overuse of past, present or future timeframes.”

I wonder what this means? I was just thinking today that time as we experience it (linearly) is the prison.

It`s a small world and they surely bumped into each other in the night.

The question is why did this culture thrive (or recieved its` biggest attention) at that time in history?

Anyhow, regarding Manson’s powers, the story goes that he met a scientologist (is that what you call the adherents of Scientology?) who taught him all the techniques of that church. Manson later claimed he was a “clear”. Dont know if that explains anything, but perhaps it’s one piece of the puzzle.

he literally convinced people that they’d dine on rivers of chocolate while the race war was going on.

The Process Church and Manson are also linked to The Son of Sam killings in the book ‘The Ultimate Evil’ by Maury Terry. There are also some threads relating the Mansons and Bruce Davies to San Francisco’s Zodiac Killer on zodiackiller.com

A google search on the Process Church and Robert De Grimston (it’s founder) should bring up some interesting apocalyptic information.

Love the site Tim, keep up the good work!