Beef Tree

           

Merry Christmas 1819 mad George the 3rd,

Jabbering nonsense for 58 hours

Thick foam gathering on his lips like eggnog

Then from the King a new noise was heard,

something like the whining and howling of a dog.

 

No your highness, that tree you are shaking hands with

is not the King of Prussia.

“No?” said the baffled king squinting, “Who is it then?”

 

The poetic steward started hinting, and said:

Your highness, put your hand down, let go of the tree,

For it is not a king, just a part of nature's beauty

But it was lost on the King, who greeted a rose bush instead.

 

And he spoke to his daughter, despite her being dead

And with paternal pride and joy at something wonderful,

He told her all about her own funeral.

 

He then buried a steak in the grounds of the castle,

An ingenious plan to feed the poor

Waiting for it to grow into a beef tree; 

He was surprised no one else had thought of it before.

It took the mind of a King to see things clearly.

 

KABBALAH PSYCHOSIS!

 Audio version of this article:

 

The Kabbalistic Tree of life seems as much as anything else to be a framework of different aspects of the psyche and the conditions therein. There is perhaps a reason why psychiatry is such an eminently Jewish science and also perhaps again an example of the practitioner imposing his view on a phenomenon for reasons known only to himself. Just as the psychiatrist imposes his own definitions so too, the Kabbalist impose his own definitions on God.

The Zohar is the central and most important book of the Kabbalah. Much of its discourse is based on secret interpretations of the Torah in such a way to bend, change or even contradict the original meaning. It does this by creating a whole secondary study on the meaning of the words used in the Torah by interpreting and ascribing some kind of mystical interpretation to the Hebrew letters themselves.

I have previously written on the fascinating origin of the alphabet as pictographic symbols, a fact many people are completely unaware of today except for students of linguistics; this fascinating study opens up vistas into our most remote past and confronts us with some intriguing mysteries. For instance, learning that the letter C represent a ‘Gamal’ or ‘throwing stick’ we might wonder how this ancient Egyptian hunting tool found its way to the Australian Aborigines. The word ‘Gamal’ is the Arabic word for camel and it is possibly the distinctive bent, or arched shape of the throwing stick and also the word for ‘bridge’ in Aramaic is ‘Gamla’, no doubt the distinctive ‘arched’ shape of the camel back being the inspiration but all of these words have their origins with the Ancient Egyptian word for a ‘throwing stick’ and the verb QMR or ‘qamar’ which meant ‘to throw’. We can see how with the passage of years consonantal shift may slightly obscure the origins. So ‘q’ and ‘g’ and ‘r’ and ‘l’ are largely equivalent and phonetically very close when it comes to the movements of the tongue and the mouth for their articulation.

The Study of the letters of our own alphabet also betray the Middle-Eastern, ancient Semitic origins of our letters. The alphabet we may consider to be Greek since the letters of ‘Alpha’ and ‘Beta’ are known, but the ‘Aleph’ and ‘Beet’ of the Hebrews may be less widely known. The Semitic ‘Beet’ represents the floor plan of a house and our letter B still shows us the two rooms of this house. Every letter in fact is a picture of something and often correlates with words which use that letter to convey that meaning.

Over the years the letters may have transformed somewhat by flipping either to the left or right or upside down. So the letter A, known in Greek as ‘Alpha’ and in Hebrew as ‘Aleph’, was originally a pictogram of an ox’s head. If you turn the letter upside-down and return it to its original orientation as an Egyptian hieroglyph and the two horns and face of an ox appear. In the Hebrew alphabet ‘Aleph’, like all of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, is supposed to have mystical significance. ‘Aleph’ is composed of two yods with a diagonal letter waw (or f) connecting the upper, hidden qualities of God and the lower visible presence of God in the visible world. 

In some instances, some of these symbolic interpretations may actually contain something genuinely insightful or even revelatory. The letter ‘Yod’ for instance or ‘Iota’ in Greek, as in ‘not one iota’ or ‘not one jot’ as the smallest letter represents the immense power of God and the single, smallest point of the microcosm from which all creation emanates; it is also significantly, the first letter of the ‘tetragrammaton’ YHWH or ‘Jahweh’.

In his book The Palm Tree of Deborah, Shelomo Alfassa describes the attainment of the highest level of the tree of life, Kether or Crown, though like so much of the Kabbalah this in itself is an inconsistent claim since it was said that in the Zohar that Moses himself had only perceived as high as Tiferet and the Patriarchs Malchut, so from this we are to assume that the higher Sefirot are probably off limits to humanity, yet Shelomo apparently is able to explain the attainment of Kether, the highest emanation closest to the infinite and unknowable Ain Soph.

“It does not raise nor exalt itself upwards; on the contrary, it descends to look downwards at all times. For this there are two reasons. The first is that it ashamed to gaze at its Source, but the Cause of its emanation looks continually into it to give goodness to it while it looks down to those beneath.”

The suggestion of being ‘ashamed’ to look at the source which is Ain Soph or the unknowable God suggests estrangement from God and evokes the fall of man in the Garden of Eden being where the first sign to God that Adam had disobeyed his commandment not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge was his shame and the fact that he hid himself when God came to look for him.  It can be no coincidence that the serpent is a stylistic representation of the journey up the Kabbalistic tree of life, and we may recall that the word snake in the Hebrew Old Testament is Nachash which also means occult.

Hearing voices, demonic entities and gang-stalking.

 

HELLO OPERATOR

Opening chapter from Demons of Eleusis.

 

It was the recommendation of an extraordinary book called Operators and Things which started me on the path of putting this work together. A strangely unrevelatory title at first glance which one might think was some kind of glossary of telephone switchboard terminology but it was anything but mundane. It is one of those books which reading forces you to reconsider your whole perception of reality itself and the events of the story, which are in fact autobiographical and the kind of story that you could probably only make-up after a 3 day LSD and Domestos bender at Disneyland.

The book was written by Barbara O’Brien, a lady who apparently developed schizophrenia in the 1950’s as a result of a long and stressful period at work during which she was forced to observe the behaviour of various psychopathic personality types using underhanded means to displace good people from their jobs, and step into shoes they were wholly unfit and unable to fill. She then observes how the psychopaths turn on each other and even manage to undermine the whole foundation of the company with their self-serving pursuit of power and their employment of malicious lies and deceptions to reach their power goals. 

The author at her place of work seems to be one of the few people to notice these nefarious shenanigans and she, knowing the true nature of some of the people around her starts to live every moment in fear of them, what they can do, what they represent and perhaps how utterly unsuspecting and defenceless the company and other employees are when it comes up against such malign intelligence. But this is not a story about psychopaths, it is a story about a schizophrenic, and one morning after the mounting fear and terror of the psychopaths at work comes to some kind of head, Barbara awakes to find three ghostly forms at her bedside telling her that she is now part of a special secret experiment. The nature of the experiment is to reveal the secret ‘world of the Operators’ to one of the ‘Things’ and to see what happens.

A ‘Thing’ is the operator’s term for a human being and the Operators themselves are an organized non corporeal collective intelligence which apparently ‘buy’ operating rights or charters for human beings, and then they control them by directly dictating their thoughts and supposedly guide them through life. The aim of this is apparently to feed themselves as they seem to gain energy by causing reactions and emotional feelings in the ‘Things’ or humans they control and possibly they benefit human development in general, indeed one of the discarnate voices of the Operators speaking to Barbara makes the claim:

“If it weren’t for Operators, Things would still be wandering in and out of caves.”

A similar line of thought appears referenced in a Masonic compendium book from 1847 entitled The Golden Remains of Early Masonic Writers compiled by George Oliver:

“In the history of man, there is nothing more remarkable than that Masonry and civilisation, like twin sisters, have gone hand in hand. The Orders of Architecture mark their growth and progress. Dark, dreary, and comfortless were those days when Masonry had not laid her line, or extended her compass. The race of mankind, in full possession of wild and savage liberty, mutually afraid of, and offending each other, hid themselves in thickets of the wood, or in dens and caverns of the earth. In those poor recesses and gloomy solitudes, Masonry found them, and the Grand Geometrician of the Universe, pitying their forlorn situation, instructed them to build houses for their case, defence, and comfort. It is easy to conceive that in the early state of society, genius had expanded but little. The first efforts were small, and the structure simple and rude; no more than a number of trees leaning together at the top, in the form of a cone, interwoven with twigs, and plastered with mud to exclude the air and complete the work."

For much of the story this is what Barbara believes and is told, and she is repeatedly told that a rival gang of Operators are trying to drain her energy, or otherwise involve her in detailed and ultimately pointless delusions about her own imminent death; or that her life is under threat by members of the Operators guild who are apparently not happy that she has been made aware of the existence of the Operators and that the information she has learned could endanger all their operations. This leads her to travel apparently pointlessly across the country, while some kind of convoluted astral legal drama plays out in the background, with the voices telling her of court hearings, legal writs being sought on her behalf and various motions filed in order to protect her while her mind remains in the realm of the Operators.

She travels the country on Greyhound buses which are apparently full of ‘Flies’ or Operators who do not belong to the committee and apparently spend their time playing a game where the winner is the one who can put a thought into the head of the person and elicit the strongest emotional reaction.

At one point she rents a cabin in the mountains thinking it will put her out of reach of the Operators who have told her they are actually humans who were born with psychic ability who can project their consciousness into the minds of others, and that they have a limited field of operation, and that travelling beyond that range would leave them powerless to act. So she finds herself a cabin in the mountains but finds that the voices have followed her there, but when she spots other cabins nearby she rationalizes that they must also have rented out one of the cabins in order to maintain psychic contact with her. She falls ill with various maladies as one might expect in her nervous and distressed condition and ends up finally seeing an analyst in California where miraculously the voices finally disappear.

One thing that is eye-opening about the book is how after reading about the inner world of the schizophrenic, the term ‘hearing voices’ which we have always been told is the classic symptom of schizo-affective disorder doesn’t fully explain how convincing in their way the delusions can be. It is not merely hearing voices, but it is the insinuation and the ‘reasoned’ if that is the correct word to use here, acquiescence to the ‘logic’ of the voices. They are telling you things no-one else knows, but they are real, they are trying to help you; the Greyhound bus-driver secretly works as an Operator cop which means he has the power to protect a Thing from other Operators as long as the owner Operator of the ‘Thing’ posts their charter with him.

And as Barbara says herself:

“It forces me to live in a double world. It’s like having a magic mirror through which I’m observing what’s happening on the moon while I’m going about the business of living on the earth.”

One of the strange things about schizophrenics is that they are extremely sensitive to human emotions: at the beginning of part one Barbara tells the reader how she ‘read’ psychoanalyst, Dr Donner, “Uneasiness hung around the room like a thick mist. He’s walking up and down, I thought, spraying worry around. The room is filled with worry.”

Throughout the interview with her analyst she seems perfectly able, despite her apparent mental illness, to be fully able to read the emotions and even the thoughts of her analyst whom it seems has personal moral scruples about referring his patient Barbara to the hospital for shock treatment, and the personal wrestling with his own feelings on the matter conflicting with the then perceived medical wisdom of the efficacy of shock therapy.

In this first chapter Barbara is able to perceive that something is troubling the analysist and she writes that she ‘leaned forwards to study his face’ however this action was not entirely her own as we are then told that one of the Operators, Hinton, was apparently studying the analyst through her eyes. Hinton, as a classic ‘voice in her head’ then gives her instructions on what she should say to best get out of being forced to undergo shock treatment.

This theme of the schizophrenic seeming to be extra-sensitive to emotions and people’s thoughts is something which is later revealed to even more interesting and thought-provoking degrees as it is suggested that the schizophrenic, through whatever new sub-conscious faculties are brought to light as a result of their illness, apparently develop the ability to read people’s deepest thoughts and motivations. Barbara states:

“Many psychiatrists had noted, among the patients who did talk, an odd ability to throw the doctor off balance by a feat which might have been called mind reading except that the psychiatrists described it as ‘the schizophrenics uncanny sensitivity to unverbalized and only partially conscious feelings in the psychiatrist.’”

Barbara’s belief is that some innate power of the unconscious mind which she calls ‘Something’ and this faculty, which during the early phases of her recovery from schizophrenia, performs astounding feats which defy reason and logic. One time the ‘Something’ urges her to go to Las Vegas; she only has five dollars but the ‘Something’ urges her to go to a specific roulette wheel and then that ‘Something’ tells her which numbers to put her money on:

“Something kept me rooted at one wheel and Something urged me violently to play a certain number at a certain time. I played a dollar chip and won. I waited, rooted, got another strong urge, played, won again. I played six times, won six times, and found myself with a purse full of money. Something stopped giving me numbers. I stopped playing and came home.”

Another time the Something helped her to find a job, specifically directing her to be in the right place at the right time:

“As my money was running low, I decided that I would try to find a job whose chores were not too demanding. As I started out, Something urged me to walk in the opposite direction from the bus line, toward a large building a few blocks away. Something urged me so violently to enter the building that it would have been impossible, almost, not to have gone in. I went to the building’s personnel department and found the employment manager not at all surprised to see me. She had phoned an agency that morning for a receptionist. She hired me.”

According to Barbara, the ‘mind reading’ ability which some psychiatrists have apparently observed in schizophrenics is part of the Something of the unconscious mind.

“Something can extend into the unconscious minds of others. Nevertheless, it was nice to know that other schizophrenics had demonstrated a similar talent. It made the business more normal, at least for us schizophrenics. Anyway, it wasn’t witchcraft.”

This is something for which I have long sought an explanation as during my travels around the world and the continued attempts to recruit me into what, for convenience’ sake I will call ‘the Illuminati’ despite that name evoking an automatic response of derision. The people I had contact with were Freemasons, but to say they attempted to recruit me into Freemasonry seems to fall short of the truth, since these people were of an elite branch of Freemasonry, it might therefore be more accurate to describe them as Illuminated Freemasonry. My personal conception of what these people represent is something I would call ‘The Family’ since there seems to be a genetic component connecting all of these people and this is what has been generally referred to by such researchers as Fritz Springmeier as The Illuminati Bloodline.

Flat Earth beliefs and schizoid psychosis in the 'Truth Community'.

 

Just thinking out loud.......

I cannot grasp what is driving the current sub-current of belief in flat-Earthism.

It defies not only any rational or logical cognitive framework but even defies the concept even of a conceptual framework.

Flat-Earth belief is almost purposefully and maliciously irrational and the fact that it requires a completely implausible and impossible set of circumstances in order for it to be true doesn't seem to  bother Flat-Earth people who are happy to 'invent' the universe as they go along in order to create a weird fantasy backdrop for their Flat-Earth reality.

Then I tried to think like a schizophrenic.

When I looked at Flat-Earth from the viewpoint of the schizophrenic it fit and made a kind of sense.

The only cognitive framework within which Flat-Earth makes any sense is within the concept of extreme mental illness.

I say this because for the schizophrenic personality, the whole of reality has become both unreal and threatening.

A schizophrenic will look at the horizon and the sun set and will 'see' or 'perceive' an unreal cardboard sky like a movie backdrop and a sun watching him or her, as if it were a spotlight, placed there, to peer at him, as he goes about his business.

They will know, either rightly or wrongly, but partially rightly, that this is all an illusion, and that there is something 'behind' and 'beyond' the cardboard sky and the sun staring at them, like a bright burning eye, watching them moving to-and-fro on the surface of the unreal stage which has been set for them.

The sense of total unreality is absolutely central to understanding why people believe in Flat-Earthism, because despite their protestations and claims, logic and scientific measurements can never carry the argument.

The sense of a mechanistic, Newtonian rational universe, entirely dissolves as a plausible reality to the shizoid mind, who knows, that there is something MUCH BIGGER going on. Again, they are partially right, but in a sense, are being exposed to too much information, which their human mind and senses cannot handle. 

So..... in order to circumvent this, the schizophrenic Flat Earther has to externalise or project their sense of unreality to the Earth and everyone living here as a whole, in order to feel 'normal' with their unreality.

This way the Flat-Earther is the one who 'knows' that the Earth is flat, and everyone else is conveniently wrong.

The larger the Flat-Earth group gets, the more comfort, solace and security these schizophrenics feel about their own delusions which by sheer force of cultural resonance and repetition actually gain reality in the real world and as we have seen, become a cultural current in their own right.

Therefore, it is no use arguing with a Flat-Earther because you are probably dealing with someone who is medically insane and at the same time, has their whole reality invested in this belief. A man will fight to their last brain-cell to defend their sense of reality.

I write this both as a personal investigation, and I am glad to have been able to solve a minor riddle in my own mind, but also at exasperation at how far this self-serving cult of mental-illness has infiltrated the Truth Movement and succeeded in largely discrediting the conspiracy movement as a whole. 

I also believe that there are non mentally ill agents and perps involved in promulgating the Flat-Earth information, but what is surprising is the sheer level of up-take amongst people in conspiracy circles. The Flat-Earth schizophrenia hypothesis explains this riddle.

Flat-Earth beliefs allows the schizophrenic to be the sane-one at last, and the rest of humanity to be the ones in error. One can understand why this might be appealing to such people.

So the prevalence of Flat Earth beliefs, although apparently laughable and ridiculous, signals a disturbingly wide distribution of psychotic and shizoid cognitive patterns, in our online communities.

UPDATE a rather awful but pertinent example which underlines this point was published on April 5th, in the Daily Mail.

Just be careful out there....not everything you read in the Truth Community is going to be true, or even useful to you. I have always said...use discernment.... Where attention goes....energy flows...and sometimes this can be dangerous.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10688793/QAnon-obsessed-dad-murdered-two-children-radicalized-David-Icke.html

QAnon-obsessed dad who murdered his two children with a spear gun in Mexico because he thought they had 'serpent DNA' told cops he was radicalized by British conspiracy theorist David Icke

• Matthew Coleman killed his two-year-old son Kaleo and 10-month-old daughter Roxy in Mexico in August 2021 
• He believed they were shapeshifters with serpent DNA and had to be killed
• He shot them through the heart with a spear gun then dumped their bodies in a ditch before fleeing for the border
• Once in custody, he told the FBI he had been convinced of shapeshifters by 'that British guy with white hair' 
• The FBI agent said he believed he was talking about David Icke, the British conspiracy theorist  

Latest Excerpt from Latest Book.

 

The ROAD TO ELEUSIS

                                                           The journey into mystery.

THE BEST PLACE TO HIDE

                                 

It’s quite possible and perhaps even likely that we are all at home to these spirits one way or another, but they are so well integrated into our consciousness that we think they are us. This reminds me of the powerful scene from the Guy Ritchie movie Revolver where Jake is seemingly enrolled on a path of self-discovery by two mysterious men who want him to break free from his greatest enemy and they do this by repeatedly robbing him and manipulating him to the extent that he is forced to abandon everything he holds dear including his ego, after which he discovers that this is not his authentic self but a parasite which only has its own protection and nourishment in mind, pun not intended. This is what is known throughout the story as Sam Gold: a mysterious enemy which is feared by everyone but has never been seen and in the words of one of the mysterious men from the film who seem able to read Jake’s mind:

“You’ve heard that voice for so long you believe it to be you; you believe it to be your best friend.”

He then asks:

“Where’s the best place an opponent should hide?”

“In the very last place you would ever look.”

“He’s all up here pretending to be you, you’re in a game Jake: you’re in THE game; everyone’s in his game and nobody knows it. And all of this, this is his world. He owns it. He controls it. He tells you what to and when to do it.”

“He’s behind all the pain there ever was, behind every crime ever committed. And right now, he’s telling you he doesn’t even exist.”

“We just put you to war with the only enemy that ever existed and you think he’s your best friend.”

More ominously, if we remember the fate of Joe Fisher “No one lives and displeases Gold.” Many have interpreted the character of Sam Gold to represent the ego, and within the context of the story this explanation fits, but could it not also be that Sam Gold represents one of the Operators, or one of the Tempters surreptitiously influencing us? The movie shows us that Sam Gold is not the authentic self so then what is the ego? Could it not be a convenient place for the discarnate entities to hide? As Avi, one of the two mysterious men from the film says:

“Where’s the best place an opponent should hide? In the very last place you’ve ever look, he’s hiding behind your pain Jake, you’re protecting him with your pain embrace your pain and you will win this game.”

“If you change the rules of what controls you, you will change the rules on what you can control.”

This is why the voices harassed Evelyn Waugh, playing on his insecurities: in his youth Waugh had homosexual experiences and much of his novel Brideshead Revisited seems based on the life he had at Oxford and frequenting a circle of members of the elite and aristocracy and this is one of the things the voices taunt him with. Once he seems to have ostensibly defeated the voices by failing to be cowed by them and not even being afraid of the bizarre prospect of being captured by the Spanish and drawing a virtue of noble self-sacrifice from the prospect and finally by abandoning the nonsense of Margaret’s phantasmagorical teasing and going to sleep, he emerges from his cabin to find that the voices have left the confines of his cabin and now appear to be amongst his fellow passengers:

“That’s Gilbert Pinfold, the writer.”

“That common little man? It can’t be.”

“Have you read his books? He has a very peculiar sense of humour, you know.”

“He is very peculiar altogether. His hair is very long.”

“He’s wearing lipstick.”

“He’s painted up to the eyes.”

“But he’s so shabby. I thought people like that were always smart.”

“There are different types of homosexual, you know. What are called “poufs” and “nancies”—that is the dressy kind. Then there are the others they call “butch”. I read a book about it. Pinfold is a “butch”.”

“Oh, Pinfold lives in great style I can tell you. Footmen in livery.”

“I can guess what he does with the footmen.”

“Not any more. He’s been impotent for years, you know. That’s why he’s always thinking of death.”

“Is he always thinking of death?”

“Yes. He’ll commit suicide one of these days, you’ll see.”

“I thought he was a Catholic. They aren’t allowed to commit suicide, are they?”

“That wouldn’t stop Pinfold. He doesn’t really believe in his religion, you know. He just pretends

to because he thinks it aristocratic. It goes with being Lord of the Manor.”

“…There he is, drunk again.”

“He looks ghastly.”

“A dying man, if ever I saw one.”

“Why doesn’t he kill himself?”

“Give him time. He’s doing his best. Drink and drugs. He daren’t go to a doctor, of course, for fear he’d be put in a home.”

“Best place for him, I should have thought.”

Once the experience is over and he is safely returned to England he consults with Dr. Drake who tells him:

“Lots of people hear voices from time to time—nearly always offensive.”

If such a thing were the construction of one’s own consciousness, why would they generally be offensive? From a psychological perspective such a thing would make no sense. It would seem much more logical that these voices are NOT part of the psyche and are inimical to it and somehow, they benefit from attacking the person in question.

People as diverse as Philip K Dick, Mahatma Ghandi, Winston Churchill, Anthony Hopkins and Brian Wilson had all reportedly heard voices. Some relentlessly critical and offensive and some, ostensibly seeming to be helpful, but in the case of Ghandi before the end of his life a voice apparently told him:

“You are on the right track, move neither to your left, nor right, but keep to the straight and narrow.”

It might have been more useful if the voice had told him some crackpot was going to assassinate him. Ghandi also said, of the voice which he attributed to God itself:

“Charitable critics impute no fraud to me, but suggest that I am highly likely to be acting under some hallucination. The result for me, even then, will not be far different from what it would be if I was laying a false claim. A humble seeker that I claim to be has need to be most cautious and, to preserve the balance of mind, he has to reduce himself to zero before God will guide him. Let me not labour this point.”

“The hearing of the Voice was preceded by a terrific struggle within me. Suddenly the Voice came upon me. I listened, made certain it was the Voice, and the struggle ceased. I was calm. The determination was made accordingly, the date and the hour of the fast were fixed…”

There are two things which ought to stand out in Ghandi’s account, the fact that the hearing of the voice was ‘preceded by a terrific struggle within’ which we can perhaps assume was a kind of hormonal crisis, the kind we have seen with the story of Barbara O’Brien, we can therefore assume that Ghandi may have experienced a similar condition to Barbara O’Brien, namely Adrenochrome toxicity but also this seems to be a factor not only of secret occult groups but also UFO groups as is referenced in Jacques Vallee’s book Messengers of Deception:

“For every individual who is openly identified as a contactee, how many more have received what they regard as a ‘secret illumination’? It is apparent that the transformation they undergo can strike at any place and at any age. Is it purely random, then, or do the UFOs select their ‘victims’? Does it spread like an epidemic, or does it develop like a psychosis?”

Anthony Hopkins went on record in a 1993 News of the World interview:

“I’ve always had a little voice in my head, particularly when I was younger and less assured…While onstage, during classical theatre the voice would suddenly say, ‘Oh, you think you can do Shakespeare, do you?’ Recently, I was being interviewed on television and the voice inside my head said to me, ‘Who the hell do you think you are. You’re just an actor, what the hell do you know about anything’”.

Brian Wilson is one of the most high-profile people to go on record about hearing voices, his voice was typically threatening:

“Well, a voice is saying: ‘I’m going to hurt you, I’m going to kill you.’ And I’d say: ‘Please don’t kill me.’”

Like the Evelyn Waugh voices but seemingly more menacing, I wonder if the tenor of the voice changes depending on how you react to them; as we saw with Evelyn Waugh, he refused to be intimidated by the voices, even though he was under the delusion they were actual physical agents, it was only when he thought he was going mad that his defences seemed to crumble, but Waugh despite his somewhat dissolute student life and obese drugged form in later life, served in the Royal Marines and was given a position of command; he was prepared to fight or even if all odds were against him surrender, but on his own, noble terms. I suspect the voices see what they can get away with and if their victim proves to be made of stronger stuff then they adapt their tactics, though it would still appear that their final goal is either the destruction or complete possession of their victim. Furthermore, in his conversation with the doctor who has told him that they were part of his own subconscious Pinfold/Waugh is puzzled:

“What I can’t understand is this…if I wanted to draw up an indictment of myself, I could make a far blacker and more plausible case than they did. I can’t understand.”

Mr. Pinfold/Evelyn Waugh never understood this; nor has anyone been able to suggest a satisfactory explanation. I have an explanation. What Pinfold means is that although the voices were insulting to him, if the attacks were from his own mind, then he would have been able to draw up a far stronger line of personal attack on himself. The attacks were very general: attacking his excessive use of drugs and alcohol and his previous homosexuality, but nothing very specific or damning about him as a person and his decisions, just somewhat general comments about his lifestyle choices. The reason might be that possibly the ‘voices’ can only hear your thoughts in the present moment but do not have a deeper access to your memories and your past deeds. Since they do not have that level of access to information one might assume that they do not come from the self but are interlopers and opportunists which exist in a kind of mental astral realm and can pick up on people’s thoughts and in exceptional circumstances such as Waugh’s experiences with his unique combination of drugs and personal stress, can in turn be heard themselves, at which point presumably, knowing that they can be heard, they start to mentally abuse and torture that person for their own demonic pleasure.

While shaving he hears the family of voices conversing about him which develops from the lines that he drinks too much and to his own suicide. The voices make no pretence at this stage that he is not a party to their dialogue and they directly address him

“‘I know you can hear me Gilbert, why don’t you kill yourself’ Then Goneril’s steely voice cut in: ‘I can tell you what he was doing on deck. He was screwing up his courage to jump overboard. He longs to kill himself, don’t you, Gilbert. All right, I know you’re listening down there. You can hear me, can’t you, Gilbert? You wish you were dead, don’t you, Gilbert? And a very good idea, too. Why don’t you do it, Gilbert? Why not? Perfectly easy. It would save us all—you too, Gilbert—a great deal of trouble.’”

He emerges from his cabin, believing the voices are a product of some old war-time inter-ship communication system which hasn’t been decommissioned properly, and emerges onto the boat deck to find everyone talking about him in an incessant dialogue.

They encouraged him to commit suicide but Waugh being a Catholic and a fairly successful man, wealthy and probably in his own way, quite pleased with himself, such an effort wouldn’t lead to their desired results so instead they settle for continual abuse, except one of them, a character called Margaret.

It seems that what the voices want from Gilbert is his attention and when the threat of violence fails to cow him and he reveals that he is prepared to physically fight, even in his infirm and bloated condition, then the voices try a different approach.

This leads to the development of the character: Margaret who reveals that she is impressed by how Gilbert bravely confronted the prospect of hooligans which he faced down outside his door and how he nobly chooses to offer himself as a sacrifice to preserve the security and safety of the secret agent which the Spanish authorities were trying to capture. She declares herself in love with him and ready to yield herself to him. This story becomes increasingly bizarre until at one point Margaret is all ready to enter Pinfold’s nocturnal bed chamber and yield herself to him utterly. Naturally she never materialises.

The voices of Margaret’s family are overheard coaching her and preparing her for her nuptials and things take a grossly comic turn:

 “That’s my beauty. Go and take what’s coming to you. Listen, my Peg, you know what you’re in for, don’t you?”

“Yes, Father, I think so.”

“It’s always a surprise. You may think you know it all on paper, but like everything else in life it’s never quite what you expect when it comes to action. There’s no going back now. Come and see me when it’s all over. I’ll be waiting up to hear the report. In you go, bless you.”

Pinfold then awaits her in the darkness, in his delirium, expecting a girl he’d never met before whom he can hear speaking with her family in her cabin and who can read his mind which is all somehow connected to some kind of radio technology left over from the war, to come into his cabin and have sex with him. There is some hesitancy however on her part in showing herself and her father the General is surprised that things have not developed to their natural conclusion.

“What the hell’s going on? You ought to be in position by now. Haven’t had a Sitrep. Isn’t the girl over the Start Line?”

It would seem that although Margaret and the hooligans’ approach is radically different, the hooligans attempt to instil fear in Pinfold while Margaret tries to instil love, in a manner of speaking they are both doing the same thing, that is getting ‘attention’ and in that way drawing a kind of energy from Pinfold.

Although Pinfold is unwell and heavily drugged it seems something in his mind is able to perfectly well articulate a highly complicated and serpentine plot, almost Dickensian in its colourful cast of characters and their high levels of melodrama, but the one common thread which runs through the whole experience is that of abuse, abuse and denigration of himself. Since the experience and the organisation and colourful characterisation of the voices are so similar to the voices which haunted Barbara O’Brien then we can collate these experiences within the same category.

So, we might therefore draw the conclusion that Barbara O’Brien’s analysis that the voices were from her own consciousness and were there to help her become sane again, was incorrect since nothing of this nature can be drawn from Evelyn Waugh’s similar experience.

So, if we can allow ourselves the belief that such a thing as God exists, then logically there must be an invisible world of the spirit which accommodates a varied flora and fauna of disembodied entities. Not all of these entities have our best interests at heart and perhaps for some unknown reason, they are directly opposed to us.