December 4th, 1999 - I get to talk about the concert. Whoowhee. So the trip went off without a hitch; we did not get lost, made all our buses and stops, which was in large part due to my sister’s guidance and infallible memory. It was just my sister and me. We stayed overnight at a friend of my roommate’s. This ended up constituting a sleep of three hours, as we got a car ride for the 7 a.m. ferry. Good, as it turned out, since there were at least two ferry cancellations due to winds the next day. When we went it was stormy; it was neat to see the wave crests and caps being blown away and the clouds in the sky were a luminous blue as the light rose.
We traveled cheap and brought all of our own food. This included two bottles of white, one for our hosts and one for us (which we shared with them as well). This went over really well.
I did a double hit of E and Sheba did acid. Having done acid at the previous Depeche Mode concert, she did not want to break with tradition. (I did it too, but I’ve wanted to check out E for a while and was just supplied with a source for the first time. E is not worth the expense, considering my trip cost $50.00 and my sister’s cost $1.80, but I simply wasn’t sure I wanted to cope with acid in a concert setting again, especially Depeche Mode’s. Conclusion: E makes for more of a hangover, (it made my head throb), and the experience differs so little from cid that what’s the point, though it somehow seemed easier, which is what I wanted. The E hit like a freight train on the bus ride to the stadium, much faster than the first time I tried it, and not gradual at all. Sheba’s hit on the bus too, but not all at once. We came just before the introducing band and were well on our way already; I peaked and had the whole trip framed before the guest act finished, whereas Sheba peaked through the same process somewhere during DM’s first four songs. The guest band was Stabbing Westward, who have never created a suitable impression. Their lyrics are completely depressing, and I would have happily skipped their set. On a side note I will say that E and acid do not operate well with each other. E makes you comparatively contact oriented, simply meaning there was a period of about half an hour that I spent intermittently resting my head on my sister’s shoulder or holding her hand, and she found this uncomfortable to the point of almost unbearable. Acid is quite removed and not intimate. The key difference is that acid tends to make you step back and not want to touch the set-up (you’re much too afraid about what effects you might have), whereas E is participatory, and makes you want to do something about it (you think you must).
Personal Jesus (1990) I Feel You (1993) Higher Love (1993)
It is for songs like these that to me Martin is absolutely beautiful. No one else has the courage to lay it out so purely with such simplicity. The crowd lines were, of course, Reach out and touch faith, at which everyone reaches out, and This is the dawning of our love. That one took some initiative. But really with the last concert the audience was singing songs in their entirety, without Dave having to say anything. He barely had to put his mike out. This time, I had an expectation that it was going to be good, that it would work. What happened in October makes a big difference, and then there was the mail. That single is a good indication.
A word about the stage setting: It looked like it took considerably less expense than the last one, but was appreciably better. The backdrop was a giant velvet scarlet stage drapery. Before opening, during the guest set, there were three large rectangles, about 20 ft. tall, covered by rich blue velveteen drapery. There was a mirror ball at the very top of the scarlet frame. (A-ha. Of course. It’s even the same as last week, at the rave. You realize I’ve been hit with a mirror ball three times within the span of a month. That was Bono’s last symbolic metaphor, incorporating the moon as a reflective light source.) There were also two of the giant UV lights, also the same as last week’s. The first band, Stabbing Westward, had two elegant sculptured rotating female torsos that had small white spotlights shining on them, the effect of which was to cause them to flare all over at random like they flickered with stars. Oooooh.
The blue draperies fell for Depeche Mode’s set, revealing, simply, a giant D and a giant M that were edged with little white lights that did sequences and stuff. In the middle there was a three-sided screen trimmed with sculptured draperies designed to look like a small stage. It was lit from behind with various light colours at different times and later the three screened sections doubled as video screens. I had to think, Gee, that set-up is absolutely perfect for silhouette dancing. (My job description.) I wonder if they use it for that? It was such a curious concept, having a hollow, back-lit, empty “stage” at the middle of their set. It just seemed to make sense to put something in it. It was exactly the sort of concept art Martin would have appreciated. I was so hopeful on the idea that I went up front to check out whether it was designed as such, but no such luck. It was simply concept art; the “stage” is empty, there’s nothing behind it. Then why the heck is it there? Here. Take a boo. It’s a little too intimate for comfort, which is why I used to assert that all Ultra was good for was bedtime music. You listened to it in the dark by yourself. I almost never put it on in public.
Because I was never willing to enter “the stage”, a prospect I have been hit with several times both tangibly and in the music, (I’ve never thought there would be a point), and there was no way out that I could see, this song was really no help at all. (That has all changed now, of course.) It does explain the concept art rather well.
So that was the set. -Now onto the music. Like I said, I was peaking rather heavily before I even got into the stadium, and really Stabbing Westward was the last thing I would be looking forward to in such a state, and by three songs in I was getting exactly what I expected. Stabbing Westward basically is one depressing drivel of perpetual break-up, isolation and depression. (My roommate has them, so I know, I checked.) But I’ve barely heard them so I have no expectations or preconception of their effects. Soon enough they are taking the whole thing down and fast. The comfort zone shrivels into nothing, and I am very high. I can’t remember it well enough but the attitude was this is down, this is where we are, and this is where you’re going. The context was of course, added to by my own. The stakes were facing reality and the consequences on high, basically, yes, you’re in a new consciousness, see if you can define it safely from here. -The usual. Only try doing it the context of Stabbing Westward. Good Luck. Stabbing Westward’s thoughts on the whole notion are not what you call friendly. I’m sorry this is so hard to write without lyrics and without looking absurd. With the lyrics I can at least deduce the process and the space, and hence where my mind went with it, because in that state every word applies, and this was uncanny. I can say that from the associations I knew that the stakes were this: I was being induced into a damned state and I had to conceptually save myself. It wasn’t looking good at first. The debate went something like this: try doing it without redefining your reality in terms of a delusion, and I was at a pause. You cannot just pretend you are not where you are. There are people in this room right now who cannot define where they are in terms of reality. The dichotomy has reared its head. They’re endorsing what the band is saying as comfortable and elevating, and it’s not. Then things took a decided dip based on the lyrics. Something very strange happened to my body; it suddenly felt like I was burning up perpetually, on the inside. -Holy Shit. Seeing as I had no idea how it started, I really wasn’t sure how to stop it, but I knew what was required. I had to save myself. I wondered if this was one way of inducing hell on earth, to induce a perpetual internal burning. (Gee, you never knew there was a switch, did you?!?) I know it had been self-induced, in the sense that I knew the dangers inherent in what was being induced, and was afraid enough of my own state of existence. If you don’t think the band was on this tact, take into consideration that after I had defined this as the dilemma, or the stakes, the next song they performed revolved around this chorus: I cannot save you, I cannot even save myself. So Save Yourself. Yup, that wuz up they were up to. I knew the game.
So I adopted my way of functioning in such states. I saw it was making a segment of the audience uncomfortable, what the band was playing with, because suddenly people were getting out of their seats in large numbers. I’m going hold on, you can get through this, but I was terrified. I did not know, at that point, if I could “turn it off”, meaning the burning. I couldn’t let it do me. At that point, I can’t totally remember, but I began thinking in terms of my past and what I had been brought up in. First there is acceptance of state. This means accepting full knowledge of oneself, and the awareness of sin and retribution. I did not remember then, but I’m sure it helped, my father describing going passively through the state of final judgment, how to accept and escape through giving up your self-absorption, and transcending your fear within the belief of Christ. (Can I really be angry with my father for sentencing me to this consciousness when he has given me the tools along with it? -If the suffering is worth so much?) I remembered the heights in my past and everything I walked away from, and then the singer was saying, that was all we wanted, that was all we needed, a repetition that was the chorus. Oh no, did I really abandon that? Did I have it all, and let it go? If this is true, the repercussions are such as I perceive them. But at the same time I refused to define such limits . . . (Capture the paradox, survive the dichotomy.) Then I began thinking in terms of what the state is meant for, what being on high means. Then the dichotomy reared its head again in the thought that you risked invoking our own divinity, because I know damn well the function I am playing with and who did it, and I also know where I am. Remember what you were taught. (I did not actually think this. I enter those parameters automatically. I did not recall them. I am them. I put them here for you.) My father spoke of the highest state you can reach. He spoke of where that state changed, where you went from the total experience of God into the belief that you too were Divine. God with Gods. He said that was the division between Christ and Anti-christ. He spoke of acceptance and belief in that state as the distinction between the saved and the damned, and that belief in the God-state would become consuming and destroy them. And yet we are to become as God, fully defined with some of His attributes, elohim, in fulfilling our purpose in creation. I’m not even sure I can describe how I saved myself, but I know I did. I know that is what the process was all about. I know it was induced. In redefining on high, one has to be very, very careful. I remember being asked in the song what we were meant for. I answered in my thought, immediately, in the manner I was taught, We are meant to enter into Divine communion with God in perfect love. I meant forever but I don’t think I stated it in thought, but my heart was in it. That is what we are meant for. Forever. The chorus immediately responded, That was all we needed, that was all we wanted, over and over again until the song concluded. That was the need. To define it properly within the right bounds, and yet open it to ultimate potential at the same time, safely. The band was jumping all over. The communion will be a Divine state, (so I think I passed), but the line is so fine. I cannot point to where the burning stopped. I don’t actually remember it stopping. I thought to myself, that was so simple . . .
Reduce the definition to its pure state, and open it. Love. When that is done I put it out. I don’t even have to consciously attempt it because my mind is already in that frame of perception. I remember thinking, I haven’t felt this in such a long time, because in safely defining the space for them they are my children. I could embrace them, nurture them, and in my mind I was saying, Oh child, Oh child Oh child . . . It’s alright and it’s safe to be here. You are safe here. You are safe here now. You are in my arms now, and I can hold you. I remember Bono asking for this in 1997. I have embraced them again. I haven’t been capable of doing that for so long.
The next song was one of two I had heard on the radio before, (the other being I can’t even save myself), so I have some idea how it goes. He was actually jubilant in singing this. It’s about as cheerful as he gets. What can I do, to make you happy? What can I do, to make you understand? What can I do, to make you love me? And if I can’t make you want me, then tell me, what do I have to do, to forget about you? Well, that hurdle is already down, in a sense. The verse was interesting in context: I not the same way as I used to be, and I promise that I’ll never let you down. I’m not as selfish as I used to be, that was a part of me that never made me proud. What can I do . . . You don’t have do anything because we’re already here. (And I am happy.) He’s made his own personal acknowledgement in turn. Really, I had no comprehension of what Stabbing Westward was made of. -Should have guessed. I’m willing to lay a bet that the next album will be markedly different.
That was the end of the set. They said Thanx for coming out early and then they left. During the intermission I paid for water for my sister and me and went and sat down again. There were two guys behind us on the right who were pretty nice. I listened to their comments during the show. At one point one was going, they’re just musicians, that’s all. It’s no big deal, and of course I am laughing at that cuz it’s true. He also said that Jesus was very cool, so I turned around and shook his hand. He responded Alright. Are you a Christian? I automatically hedged this in a way I have been doing for a number of years now, I was raised one. -That’s great. I turned back in my seat and realized I’d hedged. I thought to myself, If you cannot define yourself as one now, just when will you be able to? I mean, I haven’t been able to for years now, and I never testify to anyone, but having gone through this, well, what are you? So I turned back to one of them and said, I am a Christian because I am one here, now. (Consider too, that without the confidence that what DM was going to render would not be impure, this would have been hard for me to say.)
Then DM was on. They opened with an old song from 1986, called It’s A Question of Time. I’d never heard this whole song through before; I didn’t have an appreciable context for it until now. The song ends with Martin singing back-up in his archangel voice, It should be better, it should be better than you . . . and that is the final step in the process, because then there is the realization that what you have experienced is not the highest, it is just the minimum perception of what can be, and the acceptance that where you are is in fact the bottom to so much more. The last shall be first, and the first shall be . . . last. That’s the paradox. And so the equation is set. Ah-ha, we made it. It’s been so long. It’s so nice to be back.
So it was nice to get that over with before DM made use of their grill. After that the sailing was pretty smooth. Even Barrel of a Gun would not phase me out, besides, I’ve realized that it’s his method of ducking out. Basically the key line is Whatever I’ve done, I feel I’ve been staring down the barrel of a gun . . . Yeah, no shit. Especially ten minutes ago. That’s the frame of perception he’s referring to in the song, perceiving damnation. If I showed you the whole thing it would be obvious. Other than that they pretty well refrained from beating the audience over a head with a stick, though they wouldn’t leave you without a few twists. They messed with iconography something fierce and in some of the songs he just can’t leave his shadow alone. Then it was It’s No Good, which is the reverse of the title impression. I think Martin sang it, which was an important switch. It was around then that we lit our spliff. I prayed over it (just like we always do), and then I prayed for the concert. I invoked God’s blessing and asked that the audience would become as one.
What made me extremely pleased, very, very happy, was that when the new single was up, It’s Only When I Lose Myself, and the old line came up (the lights immediately go red), Did I have to lose my soul, for pleasure like this, Sheba and I of course, immediately responded No! in our heads, and then David immediately shouted No! into the mike. You can feel the crowd heave a sigh of relief. Everyone goes YES! And that, in a nutshell, is it right there. -Because it brings me to a new awareness of DM’s whole process. This time, they are giving the audience full autonomy. The audience is responding how they want to. Even Personal Jesus is defining your own autonomy. It’s finding Jesus within yourself. They made people find it within them to elevate themselves. Then they made them consider what it meant for themselves. Then they let them off the hook. The audience sang with them through Personal Jesus, Enjoy the Silence, I Feel You, Everything Counts, I Just Can’t Get Enough. They were ecstatic. They all stood, danced with palms in the air. Sheba said to me after, you know how you said, let [the audience] become as one? That is exactly what they did.
You have no idea how much it means to me that David said No. (I have spent years defining when to say No. That is my belief in finding Nick. I can make it No if I have to.) I have waited years for Martin to reach that conjunction within himself. If David is saying it, it means that Martin is becoming it. For Dave really has stepped into his position, he has abnegated his ego and is truly speaking for Martin. Martin only comes out in front of the mike for some of the most direct and personal addresses, or when he’s describing himself. He sings Sister of Night, Home and Someone. David has committed himself to voicing Martin’s beliefs. It’s amazing to me that he can find it within himself to do this. It’s because he’s now secure in himself enough that he’s doing it for himself.
It’s so nice to be back. The first time out it was marriage. This time it was redemption. Lover, Mother.
PPS: I have remembered it. I may not be capable of articulating and describing how the experience occurred, but I know the process.
IT WENT LIKE THIS: CHAOS, DELUSION, DIVINITY, EVIL.
(I knew there were four levels, and that I had only remembered two.)
Those are the four levels to the dichotomy. Four traps.
190) I had approached all four of these dichotomies in my letter. They were all present as issues I had to avoid in one form or another.
These are the things you must avoid upon entering the heavenly state, or your own divine state of awareness. With psycho-actives, this is a state which in relative terms may be induced. The way you react, or the choices you make in these dichotomies, essentially revolve around whether or not you believe there is a God.
So the first dichotomy I encounter is the choice of limitations, or chaos. It is very appealing, at face value, especially to people of this mind set, to immediately invoke no limits. We’re supposed to have total freedom. -Anarchists, and all those whatever. That’s their end-goal. They don’t see any problems with that. Then there’s us law and order freaks. We respond, well, there has to be limits, because otherwise, there would be Chaos. I’m not talking about the Chaos that is being defined by mathematicians as having its own system of order as in fractal geometry, that to me is the Divine, in a sense. I’m talking about the nasty kind. The one that says, for example, there’s no limits on human behavior. Even saying humans can do anything that doesn’t harm anyone else but themselves is the acceptance of a limit, and it’s not that simple, because fuckers of various denominations breed population capping diseases and self-mutilation is the denigration of a temple you yourself did not create, etc., etc., etc. So, me, I accept the basis of limitations to one’s behavior in the heavenly state. Do I trust that we have yet evolved to a form of self-regulating discretion? Do I hear anyone howling in fits of laughter? But I bet you lots and lots of individuals were reveling in the prospect of no limits. This scares the shit out of me. I sense this and understand the first entrance into evil, its acceptance into the divine consciousness. Do you think that is tolerable to God? Or would God, purely in essence to protect His own essence, be forced to act against this irrevocably?
So if you have glibly gone along with this one you are already in trouble, you have entered a delusive state as to what is possible, and as to what is acceptable, and as to whether or not evil is permitted within the divine order. Now knowing that there is already trouble afoot in the divine order, are you going to decide that it is not really happening, it is not really trouble? Do that, and you have just assumed a delusive state, you inadvertently are attempting to redefine reality. Are you safe there, or have you just achieved becoming permanently lost? Now, if you believe that just by believing, you can change the state you’re in, or that just by deciding that chaos isn’t afoot, it won’t be, you have committed what I consider to be a crime against reality. You actually believe you can define it on your own terms. I think that in doing this you are infringing upon the Divine. Now obviously if there isn’t a God, then you’re perfectly OK to go about defining your own reality, aren’t you? I mean, that’s sort of what everyone is doing here on earth. (Need any more proof that this is a destructive, cycle leading to apathy and a lemming type of paralysis?) Think about it this way, everyone’s free to define their own reality and the dominating, or most successful reality, will probably eventually win. Survival of the fittest. That may not require quality. (I have always been highly concerned about the quality, or true nature of human experience.) It may also involve a war fought at the closest quarters imaginable. The prospects to this are about as pretty, say, as the ones involving Chaos. Note that you have, once again, included prospects of allowing evil, because there are tons of evil realities. And I’m not through yet.
Trap #3, or, the Big Doozy, being the difference that likely defined Lucifer vs. Christ. They had an argument a ways back as to who was really Divine. Christ, of course, asserted that it was just him. Lucifer thought this was a crime against creation, because all creation should be defined as such. Christ had just permanently limited the potential of creation for eternity. Gee, what a bastard. Lucifer, however, said we were all the same. We were all Divine. My, that was nice of him. I mean, Divine is higher that divine, right? So the highest consciousness you can hit, is that you’re Divine, right? Lots of people go there, believe that. They have incorporated their flawed essence into the eternal order. They have accorded it, that wretched little reflection, Divine attributes. It’s about as rude as worshipping the waste on your toilet paper. Yet they believe they can do this. They believe the can incorporate their own evil as Divine. That has to be the steepest crime. So when you begin to enter that perceived state of consciousness, will you have the discretion to refuse it, and understand there is ONE beyond yourself of infinite capacities? There is so much more too it, beyond your imagination.
New Agers think we’re all God. They think that the universal unconscious is God in itself. (You know, from my theory, that I do not believe that.) I want to know, if we ourselves are the end all and be all to existence, than whereby will we discover a comparative by which to excel? And whereby springs the existence, even the concept, of total and unconditional love? Consider that the dynamic that exists, between God and ourselves, is what gives us the capacity to conceive true Love, and to evolve into something divine. Without this existence beyond ourselves, how could we conceive of what we could become?
You really think Love is limited to the altruism in survival of the species? How limiting is your existence. I would go so far as to say that it defines you in terms of total, albeit holistic, self-absorption. I do not even think we can exist eternally on that basis, as it may be self-confining. Consider that if you assume you are ultimately the limit to the Divine consciousness, you have just eliminated the conscious capacity to go beyond that. A self-limiting vortex cannot, I think, be eternal.
This is the crux of debate that defines the difference between Christ and Anti-christ. It is why Anti-christ comes off smelling like a rose, and Christ will look very inferior. It will unleash new contortions in self-fulfilling righteousness and the crimes people inflict in their own certainty, because they are going to be way more confident they are right, and we are wrong, than they ever have before. I mean, the Anti-christ will by all apparencies be a complete fulfillment of the Divine. He has become it, and you can be too since he can show you, especially if you know how to save yourself. Anti-christ used to frighten me very very much. There’s nothing that says the Anti-christ will necessarily make a debut on earth. That’s up to humanity’s choices.
I think that by defining oneself as Divine, you may enter the portal to becoming essentially evil. This is where the burning begins.
The last test, perhaps, comes in your own simple choice of definition. Do you regard the universe as operating in a yin-yang balance? Do you incorporate Evil in that perspective as the balance, or illuminating contrast, the only way in which we can see Good? To this I would respond, has earthly history taught you nothing, if not that evil is inherently a consuming entity and by that basis alone will eventually overwhelm all good? It does not exist in a balance. It can’t, and survive. Consider the earth as a giant test tube that was created, because the bulk of creation could not resolve these questions successfully. So evil was set loose in a limited fashion, in a closed system, to demonstrate how even the incorporation of one sin would lead to total destruction. (If you eat the apple, you will surely die. It just takes several thousand years. Not a whole lot on the Divine calendar.) Let’s consider it this way, do you really want to bother having it around, or does it hurt too much? I mean, you will have earth’s wreckage to observe as a full demonstration. What is jeopardized here is life itself.
What if we can have the full strength of opposites, all that contrast of opposites, without evil at all? Why do you think the dichotomy of two sexes exists anyway? I mean it sure is a pain in the ass. I call it a substitution of opposites. It does a heck of a lot more than that too, but that’s another topic.
So that is test #4 in my books. No, No, No, and No. Now see if you can stop the burning. (Gee, where did it come from?) After all, you know you’re a part of the club. You’re here, aren’t you? And this whole gig has involved you arriving at the acceptance of what you truly are. So did you understand that in being born on this earth you had no choice but to be born into sin, and that you are sinful? And are you aware that it is inherently in conflict with the divine order? Feeling combustible yet?
If you have not successfully defined yourself in this process, the next step will become utterly meaningless; any one of these bogeys may then rear up inside your own post definition and render it completely useless.
Enter SAVING GRACE – THEN THE ELEVATION OF POTENTIAL, which could only happen subsequently to the enactment of Grace, or it would potentially adopt those impurities. This is what I mean by capturing the paradox. The trick is to go through without saying “there are no limits” and thereby invoking Chaos, or total confusion. And yet you must not define it within limits that exclude its full potential, meaning your own. What a trick, eh? No wonder I used to get a little confused? So first you enact salvation.
To enact salvation you have to quit thinking of one’s self, because self-awareness of your own flaws makes your position untenable in the heavenly order, and the more you look at yourself, the worse it gets. Amalgamation of both the awareness of saving grace and devotion to others is release from the self-absorptive state. You simultaneously put out what you must truly become, within the confines of holiness, and in that act forget what you are now, by devoting yourself exclusively to this fulfillment, in terms of those around you at that moment. You are thinking in terms of everyone, not yourself. We are in love with everyone. By devoting yourself exclusively to this potential in the moment, you instantly pass. By putting it out in terms of everyone, you are not acting exclusively on your own terms, the playing field is no longer yourself, hence you are not self-absorbed. You are also not open to individual condemnation. Better yet, you are acting in selfless altruism, which gets you out of trouble. Better yet, if somehow this consciousness is released and becomes awareness in other people, you are in fact saving them.
The elevation of potential is the other paradox, which comes after, a device in order to capture unlimited potential. It is what Christ meant as an active dynamic when he said, the first shall be last, and the last shall be first. Even, say, if you arrived there first, you have just arrived at the merest perception of your potentiality, the maximum limit of what you can perceive. You have arrived, in fact, in the position, of being the very last, as you have only accepted the merest possibility. In this acceptance of our condition, we will elevate our potential over and over without limits.
The third active paradox within these words I find almost unmentionable and can barely comprehend. It is what creates the bubble of consciousness that contains every soul, no matter where their place may be, and frees them from placement and hierarchy. -Because there is an active paradox between first and last.