The ship that saved the world from itself

Never try to build on a rotting foundation. My father, a carpenter, told me that.

1st October 2009

No longer shall we be guided by a cynically fabricated past from compulsively flawed sources with misleading agendas. Instead, we will build a common, universal vehicle — a sensible place of safety for each of us and all of us — by which to gather empirical wisdom from the future and live happy lives, with a decided emphasis on home rather than state.

Salvaging what stark lessons can be learned from our pathological history, we must create the Garden of Eden we have always dreamed of, a place where peace, freedom and hospitality will reign forever in recognition of the most important truth of all — that without friendship and understanding there can be no life at all, only the needless death that is brought by perpetual war, which in fact exists because we refuse to admit that we actually die, and instead invent all these fantasylands to make believe that we don’t. These fantasies have materialized into an ugly reality that now threatens to destroy us all, at any moment.

The most important fact we don’t realize is that each of us has only one chance to make this world right, so we’d best not muff it, because extinction will be the result if we do. If you believe anything else, then you’re not only deluding yourself, but seriously harming everyone else.


The metaphrand is the ship that saved the world from itself.

Call it a boatload of possibilities, if you like.

And the best thing is, you don’t have to buy one, because you already own one. But you will have to learn to make it work, or else you will lose everything.

Let’s briefly take a guided tour of the metaphrand so you may determine what ingredients and contents you will wish to install in your own ship of safety.

Lexically, the word metaphrand means “the thing to be described.” Which means you may give it any definition you like.

The metaphrand is your mind space. After you’ve detoxed it for misleading God poisons, put your best stuff in it. One handy aspect of this new conceptual device is that it can be used both before death and after death.

I like to think of my personal metaphrand as something as big as an airplane hangar. (Don’t worry about size: when you learn materialization, miniaturization comes with it.) It is a vehicle of thought that I conceive of as a triangular solar sailing ship, kinda looks like a sleek Sunshine Skyway (the beautiful bridge over Tampa Bay), with golden strands connecting my assemblage point (ten inches behind the center of my spine), my reticular activating system (in the back of my neck) and my amygdala (the brain’s fear screener). This is the organic control panel for the engines of metaphorical possibility, which determine the degree of expansion of consciousness. In combination with the 200-channel, 360-degree array of perception I created while studying Silva’s astral projection techniques, I envision it as a metaphorical template for understanding, if not everything, as much as I can.

I always wondered why the ancient religions were all set up on a trinity — Father/Son/Holy Ghost, Brahma/Vishnu/Shiva (creator/preserver/destroyer) etc. — yet . . . our society has evolved on the basis of dualism. Good and evil. The balance, and knowledge of the balance, has been lost in the shuffle.

As the poet T.S. Eliot once famously asked: “Who is the third who walks beside you?”


This character has definitely been identified as the shadow of death. We must learn to deal with it, rather than deny it. Rather than let it rule us in the rancid rituals of xenophobic jealousy called religion, let’s make the shadow work for us in helping to honestly identify both our deepest fears and our most sensible future.

The third alternative. Yes, no and . . . what is the third? Who is the third? Creator, preserver and destroyer/regenerator?

The shadow. That famous radio show was right. The shadow knows. If you can hear it, it will tell you things — rational conclusions, actually.

Thus we begin to understand the new template for perceiving what parades before our eyes. When we fully integrate “the third who walks beside us” into the operating perceptual faculties of the metaphrand, a new world opens up. It is one we are familiar with, since this is the way we make most of our non-compulsive decisions anyway. But the new clarity comes from the perspective of the third, which is better called triangularity, one of two essential ingredients to powering the metaphrand. The other is Plato’s concept of quintessence, which we shall discuss fully at a later date.

The coming expansion of human consciousness (which is already here, BTW) requires us to find a way to more efficiently deal with double-meaning facts, which will enable us to better see behind the scams that now afflict us.

This method is triangulation, a simple matter, really. Get a third opinion. I do it the simple way. I just bring my mom.

This new faculty of perception (actually used by billions of people) is a pathway to:

1. Seeing how the metaphrand is both ourselves and a detachable representation of our ourselves, which we may, operating on the principle of nonlocality, deploy instantly to any other space anywhere.

2. Seeing how both sides in wars are actually fighting for the same thing, and that the actual cause of wars is third-parties who fund both sides of the same struggle through deception, media manipulation, subterfuge, and sock puppets like Barack Obama, George Bush and any other U.S. president you would care to name.

Such is the texture of the shadow.

Metaphrand engine specifications

The years I spent examining so-called New Age material were mostly useless distractions except for a few neat tricks I learned along the way.

At once both one of the silliest and yet effective techniques for creating new rooms in your mindspace — excuse me, metaphrand — was one espoused by one of the leiadian princesses prowling the sprout-and-tofu circuit in one exotic locale or another. It was the concept of spinning.

I don’t remember the exact details, but the deal was that if you spun around in place 33 times and then suddenly stopped, you would see the world as you perceive it continuing to spin. But as it slowed down, if you looked carefully, you could see almost like frozen film frames in the interstices between the images of what your dizzy eyes seemed to see that suddenly became portals to what she said was the universe, but what we know is the shadow. Legitimate avenues to both new dimensions and the shadow, both of which along with other things comprise our new faculty of perception, perceiving the shadow for what it actually is.

And nowhere is this better perceived than in the realm of the inorganic beings, as explained by Carlos Castaneda and his conversations with don Juan.

“Awareness is the only avenue that human beings have for evolution,” he said to me once, “and something extraneous to us, something that has to do with the predatorial nature of the universe, has interrupted our possibility of evolving by taking possession of our awareness. Human beings have fallen prey to a predatorial force, which has imposed on them, for its own convenience, the passivity which is characteristic of the right body.

“Don Juan described our evolutionary possibility as a journey that our awareness takes across something the shamans of ancient Mexico called the dark sea of awareness: something which they considered to be an actual feature of the universe, an incommensurable element that permeates the universe, like clouds of matter, or light.

“Don Juan was convinced that the predominance of the right body in this unbalanced merging of the right and left bodies marks the interruption of our journey of awareness. What seems to us to be the natural dominance of one side over the other was, for the sorcerers of his lineage, an aberration which they strove to correct.

“Those shamans believed that in order to establish a harmonious division between the left and the right bodies, practitioners needed to enhance their awareness. Any enhancement of human awareness, however, had to be buttressed by the most exigent discipline. Otherwise, this enhancement, painfully accomplished, would turn into an obsession, resulting in anything from psychological aberration to energetic injury.”
— Castaneda, Magical Passes, p. 142

This is valuable information toward the creation of a balanced, functional metaphrand.

According to don Juan, those who can master the disciplines of travel in the inorganic sphere are called naguals, and there are only two kinds of them: dreamers and stalkers. With the creation of the metaphrand, a third kind of nagual appears upon the sorcerers’ scene.

They are the shadowmasters, all of whom are either designing or already driving metaphrands, and constantly honing their ability to analyze shadows.

Packing your ship

What I put in my metaphrand mostly consists of pieces of good advice which I keep handy so I can orient my life toward these avenues. My life is much better that way.

You should choose your own favorite sayings to install in your metaphrand (being ever vigilant for God poisons), but these are just some examples I chose because, being an adventurous chap, I seek endless elevation and expansion.

First, the prescient knowledge of the Chinese sage of sages that resonates across time with the forgotten wisdom of the ages.

“Seek not to save your soul or you will lose it.”

“We hide our old people, not wanting to see the inevitable, not wanting to feel our own inevitable death, not wanting to feel the possibility of dying at any moment . . .”

“The longer a man lives, the more stupid he becomes, because his anxiety to avoid unavoidable death becomes more and more acute.”

“What bitterness! He lives for what is always out of reach. His thirst for survival in the future makes him incapable of living in the present.”
— Chuang Tzu, c.250 BC

And then, of course, about the only lines of classical poetry I can actually recite reflexively are . . .

“Only when Love and Need are One
And the Work is Play for Mortal Stakes
Is the Deed ever really done
For Heaven and the Future’s Sakes.”
— Robert Frost, 1926

And maybe a little dash of Heidegger . . .

“Being’s poem, just begun, is Man. To create a thought that will hang like a star in the world’s sky. To head toward a star, this only.”

More on how to operate the metaphrand, and some of the different kinds of metaphrands that we must nourish to benefit our own lives coming soon.

back to previous page