Phil's Blog

Sinister Forces

With Peter Levenda

Part Four

Jay Weidner: and I want to remind you that my new film Infinity:The Ultimate Trip is now out. Please go to www.sacredmysteries.com and look it up as well as my other new films Sophia Returning with John Lash and The Alchemy of Qi Gong with pedram Shojai. Also we have The Alchemical Dream with Terence McKenna and our two 2012 films: 2012: The Odyssey and Timewave 2013. Also go to www.jayweidner.com and read all of my free articles that are up there.

Jay:  We're back. I don't want to waste any time here. I don't always have Peter Levenda on the line, so let's get right to it. So, Peter, now where were we? This was very interesting. So, this occult, the CIA is dabbling in the occult, and they are using techniques and things. And they really don't know what they are doing, causing a lot of damage. I don't think people really even understand the amount of damage that was caused. I wonder now about all those people in the late '70s, wandering around the streets of America, speaking to themselves, if they weren't some kind of casualty of some of these experiments, actually.

Peter:  Well, that was one of the points I was trying to make in "Sinister Forces" that what we did is we created an army of zombies, really, of people that were prisoners in some cases, violent offenders in prison, that we gave massive doses of LSD to, for instance, that we submitted to all sorts of bizarre experimentations. People took acid in the '60s for spiritual reasons. I mean, they were taking hallucinogens. They were taking like peyote, psilocybin, mescaline. They were trying to obtain altered states of consciousness, and the idea was to open their minds and to become spiritually aware but not everybody was. Sometimes, a lot of people were taking it for recreational purposes, if you can imagine taking LSD for recreational purposes. But anyway, so that was the intent, right?

Turn on, tune in, drop out. This was the intention of it, and yet these same chemicals, or the natural version such as the mushrooms and the peyote, were used in these experimentations on prisoners, on prostitutes without their knowledge, on children in some cases, in mental institutions for children.

So, this is all documented and none of the stuff we're discussing here is speculation. It's all based on primary sources, on real documents, declassified stuff from the Army and from CIA and from the FBI.

So, what you have is a massive government program that used the same tool as Shamans have been using for centuries, if not millennia, to open the doorways of the mind to enable a human being to contact supernatural forces or have spiritual experiences.

These same substances and these same techniques and the same methods are being used to create the perfect assassin??the so?called Manchurian Candidate kind of assassin. We're weaponizing spirituality, and we did this in the years right after the end of World War II. And this to me is what is so astonishing, that no one really picks up on this. [laughs]

The government programs were looked down upon, of course. And they said, "Well, that's just too bad. It was an abuse of power" and all of this. But there was much more to it than that. People who are involved in spiritual quests should realize that the government itself was involved without even knowing it in a spiritual quest, and they bungled it because there were no safeguards in place.

There was no context for the experiences. So this to me is frightening. So what did we create? Who's out there? [laughs] I sometimes wonder if some of the far more famous serial killers were products of this process.

Charles Manson. Not really a serial killer, but Charles Manson does come to mind as one of these characters. Maybe Henry Lee Lucas and a few others??people who had spent time in the military or at the prisons where these experiments were taking place. And they then came out and started committing horrible crimes. I'm wondering what the connections might be.

Jay:  Oh, I think it makes good sense to wonder about those connections. May Russell used to say back in the late seventies that the Son of Sam murders was a final test for an assassin school. Could you calmly kill two people in the front seat of their car police?style firing six times from your 44 magnum? And we thought, "Oh, you're crazy, May. That's the craziest thing we ever heard." But then you started looking at her evidence. One guy was blond, and another guy had black hair and another assassin had red hair. And it's like hmm. You know? Maybe.

Peter:  Well, I devoted a whole chapter in "Sinister Forces, " or actually a number of chapters spread out, on the Son of Sam case because I lived at New York during the time. I was connected to some of the events peripherally. And we all knew back in the late '70s in New York that this was not the work of one person. We knew it was the work of a group. And then later, of course, Berkowitz confessed to this. Even after he confessed to all of the crimes, et cetera, et cetera, he's in jail for life. He's never getting out. He knows that. So now he's coming clean. And he has talked about the people he was involved with. He has identified the murders he did commit because he did commit some of the murders, and he identified the murders he did not commit.

And as we were going through it??the Son of Sam killings in New York??I was painstakingly trying to figure out the calendar they were using. And I noticed, as I mentioned in "Sinister Forces," there was a kind of an occult calendar in effect. Murders being committed during certain periods of waning and waxing moons, et cetera, near pagan holidays, so on and so forth.

There was a cult?like connection to what was taking place. Now the Son of Sam case was reopened. It was reopened some years ago because all the new evidence came out and suggested very strongly that more than one person was involved.

So yeah. [laughs] The connection between serial murder, our intelligence, our bungled attempts at creating assassins, spiritual initiations, this abuse of shaman technology, if you will. All of this is all together in one very messy cauldron??one very messy witch's brew here??of evil things, evil intentions, and unforeseen consequences, which turned out to be just as evil.

Jay:  And it's like it's almost contagious. It's now gone beyond the seed, and it's a contagion. And it's spreading into the bowels of culture. It's astonishing to see kids today really think vampires are cool. I find it stunning because when I was young, I loved vampire movies but I never thought they were cool.

Peter:  [laughs] Exactly.

Jay:  They scared the living daylights out of me. [laughs] Go ahead.

Peter:  No, I was going to say exactly. As I mentioned, you were deconstructing "The Shining." We should start deconstructing all the movies that have come out in the last 30 years or so on the occult and how it's been re?engineered in a sense??re?imagined??in so many different ways. We pooh?pooh the occult from a scientific point of view, many people, but at the same time they're embracing it on the other hand. They're seeing it as cool. They're seeing it as sophisticated in some cases. Or they're...

Jay:  They have no idea what they're messing with.

Peter:  Right.

Jay:  They really don't, and this is what worries me. And you're right. I actually do deconstruct movies. It's like my hobby. I don't usually write it down. But I can pretty much tell you who's made the film, what their agenda was, what they're into. You know what I mean? It's getting to that point now where I can pretty much tell. And I'll tell you something. Kubrick is onto the same thing that you're onto. I haven't figured how to break this one yet, but Kubrick has films within films. And in "The Shining," the film within the film that no one has ever seen is about these sinister forces. And he literally builds them into the set and into the scenery, and it's quite astonishing actually.

He's basically saying that these forces have taken over this family??these unknown forces that are all around us. And if you allow them in, then they'll take you over and it's incredible. I don't know how to get it down on paper yet, but I'm working on it. Anyway.

Peter:  Well, the point I make in the last volume of "Sinister Forces" is that America itself is a kind of haunted house.

Jay:  It is.

Peter:  We're living with ghosts.

Jay:  Yes.

Peter:  We don't know it, but we're surrounded by them. We're just as ancient a civilization here as you would find in Egypt or anywhere in Europe or in Asia. There were people living here for thousands of years before. We don't know who they were or what they were doing. We built our cities on top of them, and that's just the beginning. Then there's the other ghosts we've created along the way. So, there are sinister forces. We are surrounded by them. We've been blind to them because of our materialism and our materialist approach to things, which we're now paying for, [laughs] you know?

Jay:  I agree. I'm obsessed with that subject. I was just talking to my wife today about where we live. Only 170 years have white people lived here in Southern Oregon, and we have no idea what was going on here before or what was sacred and what isn't sacred. And this is all over the country, too.

Peter:  Absolutely. [Indistinct]

Jay:  We have no idea. There's no connection to the land. There's no soil?to?soul relationship in America.

Peter:  No, we don't as Americans. We don't have that. We're probably unique among countries with that total disconnection from [laughs] our physical environment.

Jay:  And if you're spiritually literate, you know how important it is to have these places that were imbued with centuries of worship and sacred activity. I think you pointed out we might be building our prisons on sacred ground and building our churches on places that maybe where the evil was. We don't know what we're doing. We're just floundering around in the dark here.

Peter:  Well, exactly. And we have built our prisons on sacred ground. Moundsville, West Virginia comes to mind right away. We built a prison there where we famously kept Squeaky Fromme, one of the Manson followers??the one who tried to kill Gerald Ford. So we built a prison there. We build prisons in Ohio on top of Indian burial mounds. I find it interesting that in "The Shining" the hotel was supposedly built on an Indian burial site.

Jay:  Yup.

Peter:  That was part of the Stephen King story. So you have this idea there was an Indian burial ground there underneath the Overlook Hotel. In the film "Poltergeist" they built their home??their suburban tracts??on Indian burial ground. I mean there's this idea that's there. It's in the back of our minds, where we know there's something wrong. We know it. We just don't know how to deal with it. [Music begins]

Jay:  That's right, and we're haunted by the ghosts of an ancient civilization. We're standing on their bones. Quite incredible. Hey, Peter! I'd like to really have you back. We've really just scratched the surface of this. And I'd also want to talk to you next time about your book, "Stairway to Heaven." I'm really a big fan of Chinese alchemy and Daoism and just love that stuff.

 

Sinister Forces

With Peter Levenda

Part Three

Jay Weidner: and I want to remind you that my new film Infinity:The Ultimate Trip is now out. Please go to www.sacredmysteries.com and look it up as well as my other new films Sophia Returning with John Lash and The Alchemy of Qi Gong with pedram Shojai. Also we have The Alchemical Dream with terence McKenna and our two 2012 films: 2012: The Odyssey and Timewave 2013. Also go to www.jayweidner.com and read all of my free articles that are up there.

 

Jay:  We're back, talking to Peter Levenda, and boy Peter, I've got to tell you, when I was writing my book on alchemy, the number of synchronicities, it was almost ludicrous after awhile. It felt like I was in a Salvatore Dali painting and everything had just turned into rubber watches that were melting on cliffs and, quite unbelievable actually, really to this day don't know what to make of it at all, honestly.

Peter:  Well, to me it's always an indication that you're on the right track. When these coincidences start to pile up, you've obviously tapped into the mother load of whatever it is you're working on. On some level, when the universe starts to organize itself around you that way and to present you with the tools that you need. Obviously, as I say, you're on the right track, whatever that track may happen to be. You may not realize it for awhile, but the coincidences, the synchronicities themselves, that's the evidenceJay to me. I view them as the evidence of darker??not darker, necessarily??but deeper forces that are at work, and they manifest as these synchronicities.

Jay:  You know, John Lash is a friend of mine. He wrote a book called "Not in His Image" which is a very good book. He talks about the Gnostic beliefs of these creatures that they call the Archons. When I read his book, I was recalling your work and realizing that, maybe, that was the best succinct explanation for what you're finding. Do you know this concept of the Archons at all?

Peter:  Of course, yes. I've been doing a lot of research in Gnosticism in the last five or six years for other work that I've been involved with. One of my other books went into that a little bit, "Stairway to Heaven", for instance.

Jay:  I saw that. I want to get that book. It looks like a great book. I just saw it. I haven't read it yet.

Peter:  It's not political [laughs] . It veers right off the politics into the??not necessarily the occult??but the esoteric anyway. So, to me all of this is all of the same book. I mean, "Unholy Alliance", "Sinister Forces", "Stairway to Heaven", all of it. They're all just chapters in one big book, in a sense what's in my head that I'm trying to write. I don't see any difference between the purely spiritual esoteric aspect and the gross or mundane political things that I write about in "Sinister Forces".

Jay:  I don't either.

Peter:  What I tried to show is that there was a spiritual force at work, and the Archons are a good way of describing what these spiritual forces might be.

Jay:  So, what are these Archons? What are they here for? Why are they screwing with us?

Peter:  Well, you may recall that the original Gnostic idea of Genesis, if we are to believe the Gnostic version of it, is that the creator of the world was not God. The creator of the world was what they called the demiurge, the demiourgos, which was a creature of its own; I think, kind of a monstrous entity that created the world. So, the Gnostics God in the story of Genesis is represented by the serpent. They do a complete twist on this. To the Gnostics, the earth itself, the materialism was evil, and only pure spirituality was good. So, it's this kind of Manichean idea of the forces of light versus darkness. So, the Archons might be what Jesus said in the gospel, referring to Satan as the king of this world. Maybe, that's a Gnostic reference. Maybe, the Archons are the rulers of this world in a sense, and that's why we come across them as, what I call, sinister forces because they can't be manipulated.

I believe that our own intelligence agencies, as an example, at one point in the 1950s, the 1960s when they tried to experiment on the human mind and they tried to use drugs, hypnosis, behavior modification, all of these various things, they were in our field. They were in our business, in a sense. They were in our house.

What they were doing was committing a kind of spiritual initiation on innocent victims, people who had no idea what was going on which meant that they had no spiritual training. They had no spiritual protection against what was taking place.

If we do believe in initiation, then when we take our beliefs about initiation, how it works, the technology of it and apply it towards what the CIA was doing, for instance, with MK?Ultra, with Artichoke and Bluebird and all the other programs they were running, Operation Ofmun and all the others, we can see that they had the necessary elements of spiritual initiation in place. They were using these things, but they were using them to weaponize them, and that's what, to me, caused all the problems.

I think that right at the end of World War II we had a chance to go in one direction or the other. And when we started importing the Nazi scientists and we started saying the ends justifies the means I think at that point we kind of lost our way, and we're still struggling to get back. We were abusing a spiritual process in my point of view.

Jay:  I completely agree. Is it possible that we through those spiritual crimes, so to speak; is it possible they let something in accidentally?

Peter:  Well, they did it on a localized level, for sure. They did it on the level of the hundreds and thousands of people that they worked this "magic" on.

Jay:  That might be enough, actually.

Peter:  Well, right, you know. And who knows? We could look at an analog with the atomic explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for instance, as being magical experiments, at least, having a spiritual analog, an occult analog, perhaps. I remember years ago someone had shown me a copy of the Catholic Missal, the Catholic prayer book that you use for the services during the week and on Sunday. There was a diagram on one page that blew me away. This missal had been published in the 1950s, and there was a picture of a mushroom cloud. This is in a Catholic prayer book, and underneath it in Latin was "ecce qui tollis peccata mundi" which translated means the whole key who takes away the sins of the world.

Jay:  Wow.

Peter:  And that juxtaposition of that mushroom cloud with that famous prayer that is said in Catholic churches daily was stunning, this idea that the atomic bomb was taking away the sins of the world. So, there was a belief at some point among some people that this was, not just a scientific thing, not just a military weapon that existed in its own world but that there were ramifications. There were connections to spiritual processes that were involved. So, it's possible that we did commit some sins. It's possible that we did let something in and that we have to deal with this now in a constructive way. I think the popularity of films that are coming out now??I know you do a lot of work on film, and I read your deconstruction of "The Shining." I thought it just blew me away. It was terrific.

Jay:  Thank you.

Peter:  There's a film coming out now, "Men Who Stare At Goats" based on a true story, based on the controlled remote viewing that was taking place in the military, and it's become a comedy. They turned it into what appears to be a comedy.

Jay:  That's hilarious.

Peter:  Well, it's the only way to deal with it, I guess, so that's what we have to figure out. There has to be a more constructive way of dealing with this.

Jay:  Well, I'm looking forward to seeing that film, actually. I read the original thing it was based on. We're going to be right back. We're talking to Peter Levenda. I'm Jay Weidner and you're listening to the Smoke and Mirrors Radio Hour. You can see my deconstruction of "The Shining" at JayWeidner.com and, believe me, that thing is causing some controversy.

 

Sinister Forces

With Peter Levenda

Part Two

Jay Weidner: and I want to remind you that my new film Infinity:The Ultimate Trip is now out. Please go to www.sacredmysteries.com and look it up as well as my other new films Sophia Returning with John Lash and The Alchemy of Qi Gong with pedram Shojai. Also we have The Alchemical Dream with terence McKenna and our two 2012 films: 2012: The Odyssey and Timewave 2013. Also go to www.jayweidner.com and read all of my free articles that are up there.

And we're back, talking to Peter Levenda, I don't want to waste much time here. OK Peter, let's get back to the raid and I've known for a long time that they've bought up both sides of the Andes, Argentina and Chile, just from my travels. Which I always thought was a very clever little plan, and so what happened? He escaped through some system or underground or what?

Peter:  Well right, they had built underground tunnels in the first place when they developed the colony. What they did was they had torture and interrogation centers built there to interrogate political prisoners when Pinochet took over which was on September 11th, 1973. So they brought hard?core prisoners up there, political prisoners, people they really wanted to break. And they had developed a series of underground interrogation cells. And these cells could be monitored remotely. Which means that the person committing the interrogation and the torture could be in a separate room and electronically was able to torture prisoners at a distance using an electrical system.

Jay:  Wow.

Peter:  So he could actually torture several people at once using the electrical systems that were developed, by the way, by a man called Michael Vernon Townley, who was the son of the Ford Motor Company executive in Chile at the time. He was very pro?Nazi, the son was, very pro?fascist, pro?Nazi, very anti Salvador Allende who was their democratically elected president. So Townley invented this whole system, he had a flare for electronics and developed this and it was all done underground. When the raid took place, they found not only these torture cells, they also found the fact that the Germans at the estate were burying everything underground, including automobiles, including files and dossiers on people, including weapons. They had this fascination for building these underground tunnels and for putting everything under ground.

So when the raid actually took place at the colony, as I said, it was a massive military incursion, the leader of the group, used the underground tunnels as a way to get out. Got out on the other side of the Argentine border, because the colony is up in the mountains right close enough to the Argentine border to make that accessible, jumped over the border and was there for years in Argentina before he was finally located and brought back to stand trial in Chile. Which happened about, I think, about three years ago.

So he's been in Chile, he's still alive, Pinochet died, but Schaeffer is still alive. He was indicted for all sorts of human rights abuses. There are a lot of other possible charges that can be brought against him. They're still going through the documents they found at the colony, which probably includes a photocopy of my passport, by the way, because they took that away from me when I was there.

So I'm very eager to find out what's in the documents, but the Supreme Court has sealed, the Supreme Court of Chile has sealed all those documents and they say they're not going to let anybody see what's in there. So we're all very frustrated by this because I believe there's going to be evidence there of the involvement of other countries, in Colonia Dignidad, in torture interrogation cells, in the creation of this underground apparatus and everything else, so, we all want to know what's in those documents...

Jay:  Yeah.

Peter:  And unfortunately right now, we can't get at them.

Jay:  I have a sneaking suspicion we may never get them. Anyway, that's really interesting and that should segue right into the next thing which I want to talk about which is your "Magnum Opus, Sinister Forces, " but the thing about "Sinister Forces" that I think drives everybody crazy is the thing that drives me crazy about this kind of research which is that you can never really grab the monkey, I mean he's like...

Peter:  That's right.

Jay:  He's like slipping away all the time, right when you think you've got it, that's when you don't have it. And that's what you're dealing with in this. And there's this strange set of synchronicities that happen, and they happen to me, in this stuff, even though I'm not involved. I know that sounds strange. But there are actually synchronicities that lead me into weird things that happened in the "Sinister Forces," without me even being involved in it and it's very strange. One of the ones that just drives me crazy is the, maybe you know this, I don't know if it's in your book or not, but the right wing preacher who picked up Sirhan Sirhan hitchhiking and took him to the Ambassador Hotel? The night that he killed...

Peter:  Right, yes.

Jay:  And then a year later he picked up the, I'm trying to think, I think it was the housemate of, no it was the guy watching the house for Roman Polanski and picked him up and left him off at that house. And this guy is the only guy, besides the Manson family that was ever suspected of anything. He was in the other room listening to music, or something, while the murders were going on. And those kind of coincidences and synchronicities just drive me crazy. And your book was just a litany of them. It was a great work. Underrated I think, it's going to have a long life, I think.

Peter:  Well thank you, it's, the problem with "Sinister Forces," was the problem I had writing it. It lasted since through the Watergate period in the mid?seventies and I only finished it a couple of years ago. The research for it went on and on. And every time they de?classified more documents I had more to work with and to put in with the other pieces. Synchronicities, yes, they abounded. I wrote a lot of that book while I was overseas, so I was living in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. A place which is not known for having vast libraries of U.S. political documents and that sort of thing so, although I'm there, because I was there for other reasons, I'm doing the research for "Sinister Forces."

And every time I started a new chapter, whether it was on Charles Manson or whether it was on remote viewing or whatever it happened to be, I would be wandering around some weird little secondhand book stall in the tropics there in some small town or in Kuala Lumpur itself and I would find precisely the books that I needed.

Which is virtually impossible, you can't even imagine. These were not popular books; these were not books you could get in any regular bookstore. These were sometimes academic texts; these were hard to find works. They would be hard to find in this country. And then there they were..