An Introduction from the author of KIN Notes, a favorite Son --- a spudly Boddhi --- our "Common 'Tater:"                                              Meet the Retards Wake up, sleepyheads, See the light! See your Daddy in a pole-cat fight! With that (despised!) ditty, my Dad would stand at the door and awaken my brother and I each schoolday morning. Catfight indeed . . .  poles of the opposites! Wake up, sleepyheads! Here I am these many decades later, my father decades dead, the days gone down in the West, night settling like pneumonia on the American dream.  Culture wars ravage the land, especially the Ur-war of gender, and Daddy long ago lost the pole-cat fight. The lawyers clean up all details since Daddy had to fly        “End of the Innocence” (D. Henley) The nation changed radically in the intervening years, very little for the better. Some things persist, though.  When I was a kid, about the worst thing another kid could say to you was “You’re a retard!” Remember that? Oh, how the floppy does flip!  Pretty quick here, the “retards” are gonna grab us by our Nikes, turn us downside up, and SHAKE the Sleepy SHIT out of us. As Jesus cleansed the temple and shoved the swine off the cliff. . . . Those “retards” might bring Daddy back to ever-loving life.  Watch them and see.  It’ll be carried on Cable, but not teevee.  Heee-heeee! That quintessential outsider, Jesus, was a Bullgoose Retardo hisself -- a holy nerd in the first degree.  Then he cracked his autistic egg, ventured into the Zoo, and ministered to the shell-bound Sleeple. Right to the scrambled end, the Nazarene never wearied of loving losers:  he was always playing the dogs. As he trudged the blighted roads of the Empire-That-Still-Is, gazing upon the crucified, the broken, the betrayed and the lost, he was heard to bark: I will overturn it! He just didn’t say when. Well, according to the “retards,” NOW is real close to when. QIM Tunes, Tom Smith’s “facilitated communication” (FC) metalogue with five institutionalized autistic men, will turn your ontology outside-in, rattle the change in  your frontal lobes, and put the Spirit back in spirituality -- where it has long languished beneath pseudo-religious “leaders,” market-forcing merchants, power-besotted organizations, and demagogues hawking “faith-based initiatives.” Within five minutes of engaging Qim Tunes, I was the stunned recipient of not one, but TWO, “impossible” synchronicities. And no, it was not Mushroom-Tea-Evening. Deny this, said Qim Tunes, checking its collective package and chuckling. (Are documents allowed to do that?!  I’m sure there’s a law prohibiting it -- we’ve got laws against everything else.) The Tunes is no comfy ride in the pews.  There is no conventioneer-gladhanding.  It doesn’t tell us exactly what we want to hear, then pass the plate and pat our backs on the way out the door. Oh no, baybee!  It is raw, savage mojo, a caustic elixir for our poisoned world and souls.   The faint of heart, the epistemologically smug, the haters, the Sleeple, the Professionally Oppressed need not apply within.  Let them crank up the volume on Oprah and Rush, on Junior Bush and Slik Willy, and return to Mammon’s Hibernatorium. These Tunes peg out the Weirdometer.  If you don’t resonate with them, hey, you never even saw the rabbit hole.  You took Morpheus’ Blue Pill, and went back to believing . . . well, whatever you need to believe, a satisfied slave of the Ma-tricks. The Tunes self-validate, not merely through narrative authenticity, but through the nimbus of mysterioso attending contact.  They are an uncanny five-way mirror.  Time and space are no barrier.  To look into them is to be ogled by a face both alien and human, both impish and divine. Qim Tunes synthesizes the codings of kabbalah, the poli-spiritual mission of the Koran and Bible, the trans-dimensional questing of shamanism, the messianic authority of Qumran, and the psycho-mythic range of Mysterium Coniunctionis.  They are Tunes for our times, an eschatological blast on the archangelic winsock trump, a pilgrimage to the Father’s pure and purgative black-hole. They’ll whack yer noggin with the jooled jujustick.  But good. The five participating “Boys” are a wrecking-crew of consensus assumptions and religious certainties, demolishing cultural wisdom about the “mentally challenged” and mucho – muy mucho -- mas. The Prophecy Dire of Director Baldo For example, a May 7, 2002, article in the Contra Costa Times entitled “Increase in Autism Alarming” documents the skyrocketing numbers of autistic children showing up in California schools, and in the culture at large. In the hysteric fashion of our times, one Bob Baldo, Director of the Association of Regional Center Agencies, bleats: We are extremely concerned about what these numbers mean . . .  this has the potential to financially almost break the system . . . the human costs are absolutely profound. This state can hardly afford to have this continue to go on . . . if there's a way to prevent this from occurring, we need to find out awful fast. Dear Director Baldo:  it’s a bit late in the Game to be freeking about “human costs,” hmm?  Checked the homeless and prison stats recently? But rest easy, O Baldo, you are going to “find out awful fast.” The Director’s threat of  “prevention” means bringing the full brunt of American Zero Tolerance and genetic markering-out to bear on the little retardo slackers . . . just WHO ARE these useless Drains on the System, who is this Fearsome Plague the Director warns will carry a “profound human cost.” (Oh well, at least he got the “profound human” part right!) But perhaps this surge of “autistics” is expressly designed to “break the System,” afflict the State, and discomfit the collective Directors Baldo?  Perhaps no law or “cure” – short of genetic genocide -- will “prevent autism from occurring”?  Perhaps the explosion in autism, or the explosion in awareness of autism, IS the cure for Director Baldo and his increasingly god-like State? Autism, like its cousin schizophrenia, manifests individually but is a collective response to a collective crisis -- in particular, to spiritual sickness and planetary malady (Mal Lady).   Ultimately, autism will not be “managed,” by the State or anyone else.  Despite Director Baldo’s pronouncement of doom, the autism “boom” isn’t a step toward the precipice; it’s a step away from collective suicide.     Autism is generally defined as a “disconnection” from conditioned social agendas, social cuing, speech, and motor-sensory capacity.  But in the psychotic and predatory culture of America, children and adults who “disconnect” from collective madness are NOT suffering pathology -- rather, they are cleansing themselves from the pathological environment in which they exist, and simultaneously offering healing to that environment. One seven-year-old, nonverbal autistic boy uses milk-baths for these purposes: apparently, it’s an old technique! His mom patiently waits for him to stop splattering and splashing.  She’s not sure why he does it, but trusts that his actions are neither random nor pointless. Like a white blood cell, autism is an agent designed to attack and cure disease, at both individual and collective levels.  And like WBCs, autistics are often considered yucky, smelly, messy and funny-looking. Are autistics savants?  Are they “God” or “just retards”?  Are they God’s agents or foes?   Demons?  Angels?  All of the above? Don’t ask me. Like you, I just work on this funny farm.  Listen to their Tunes and decide for yourself. The authors of Qim Tunes are purposely fuzzy about theology, especially the “organizational” role of these tuned fraternities.  But they self-identify as “Yahweh” and, absurd though it sounds, there is evidence in Qim Tunes  to speculate a special – and probably instructive – relationship to non-autistic folks extending to the Paleolithic. At least to the Paleolithic. So no more snickering about being “M.R.”  Author William Henry -- although, sadly, a neo- gynarchist -- offers this helpful hint: The Cathars of Southern France, who swapped secrets with the Templars and the Irish, called EA’s pillar of light AMOR or love, from the root MR, meaning ‘bright light’. Fascinatingly, Meru (the root of Moriah and Mero-vingian) is the name for the central pillar of Atlantis. The Greeks called the Atlanteans Meropes in honor of this pillar. MR is the name of the oil/substance secreted by the Ark-Pillar. The Qim Tunes Boys are the gnowing cloud, and eventually they will turn everybody’s cards face-up.  First we will hate them, like we do anyone communicating unpopular information.  Then we’ll laugh at them and their advocates.  But eventually, as the inevitability of their messages are grasped, as they level the playing field of our hearts, we will . . . well, we will hate them a little less. LOL!! Progress! For starters, they’re gonna take our scapegoats away from us, and we’re gonna whine and bawl like the self-absorbed infants we are.  They’re gonna resurrect western masculinity from the pit of cultural Hades.  Boy: we’ll really hate them for that!  No more worshipping Mommy! (Oh no! Waaaaah!) Many folks – especially vested organizations -- won’t appreciate their expose of the unholy alliance between neo-matriarchy and the self-appointed, transgenerational “elite.”   But autistics will reconcile the warring genders, thereby healing divided, suffering Creation in a jubilee of wholeness. Not perfection.  Wholeness.  Very, very different things. Not bad for societal “millstones” and “idiots” that sometimes flop around in wheelchairs, drool, and poop their pants, eh Director Baldo?! In ancient Jewish tradition, codified in the Torah (Leviticus 25), every seventh year was a Shemita, or fallow, year.  Shemita is an extension of the Sabbath concept, which is the “seventh day of rest” designed for physical, psychological, and spiritual regeneration.   The Sabbath is the day of atonement because it unites, and contains, everything within itself – including the ur-duality of the sexes. Similarly, every 50th year was a Yovel Year, set aside for Jubilee, a period expressly mandated by God for overturning -- and thereby balancing -- secular and religious society, and its attendant precepts.  During Yovel the land itself was allowed to rest; all financial, legal, social, and spiritual debts were annulled and forgiven; prisoners and slaves were freed, and each person was permitted to return -- and was welcomed back -- to his or her “ancestral heritage.” The concept and practice of Jubilee is merciful and wise, for it breaks cultural, psychological, terran and spiritual inertia, and ensures that the wealth of the nations -- and of the Earth itself -- does not fall under domination of any particular person or group.   A hidden aspect of “Yahweh’s” insistence upon Sabbath, Shemita and Jubilee was (and is) compassion for the suffering of the Earth itself, which -- despite the efforts of modern humans to whip it into hyper-production -- needs rest, like any other entity.  All the organisms that “support man” need also their hours of calm, joy, and contentment, lest the world be only an endless machine, a mathematized, Manufactured Hell. Under Jubilee, the powerful cannot forever oppress the powerless.  Fresh energy is injected into stagnant systems, and hope rises, renewed. Jewish Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement.  Tellingly, the priests of the “Millennial Temple” described in Ezekiel and Isaiah all wear linen on this day -- indicating that they are in a perpetual state of Yom Kippur. Rudolph the Read-Nosed Rain Dear Meets VALIS Overmindus Through Qim Tunes, our anti-heroes document the self-outing of an ancient brotherhood of extraordinary power and understanding, shrouded for eons safely behind “autism,” growing and learning beside us, tweaking and shepherding the human project. The Tunes consist largely of questions from facilitator Tom Smith, and cryptic answers from the five Doods.  In part, “Qim” stands for “quotes I am” or “source.”  These Boys may be “leaders” of a hidden autistic network, communicating in various ways, including telepathically. Rudolf Steiner notes: Brotherhood-Lodges evolve into Dhyanic Beings. These Beings are, as it were, a collection of cells, forming one Spiritual Being. The brotherhood-Lodge of the Adepts will guide as one Dhyanic Being. Here again is an enrichment of evolution. In the middle of the Fourth Round lies a very important point. Human Spirits begin to unite into a Brotherhood and to form a Dhyanic Being.   Rudy was a sharp dood.  Philip K. Dick and Terence McKenna also were secret sharers, kin to the hidden brotherhood.  Dick’s mystical correspondence with the “alien” VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System) chimes with the cosmo-planetary sentience of certain autistics.  In his novel of the same name, Dick called VALIS a “spontaneous self- monitoring neogentropic vortex” functioning as partial antidote for what Phil called “the Empire that never ended,” whose most recent reincarnation he recognized in the Nixon Administration -- and we likewise recognize in the transgenerational monarchies of Reagan, Clinton, the burning Bushes, ad nauseum. Like many Gnostic sectarians, ancient and modern, P.K. Dick saw the Earth as an enormous “Black Iron Prison” ruled by archonic planetary Powers whose despotism was exercised through systematic traumatization, propagandistic conditioning, and tyrannical social management -- all secreted within the illusion of political self-determination, “democracy,” and “progressivism.” “Homeoplasmates” was the word Dick used to describe the liberative and semi-divine “agents” of VALIS.  He suggested that when Rome razed Jerusalem’s Second Temple in 70 B.C.E., time itself ceased.  The “homeoplasmates” escaping execution dove underground, resurfacing in 1945 (a rescencion of the Fallen-Host theme in Judeo- Christian and apocryphal thought, with Ur-War between the genders recapitulated as apocalyptic Endtime War.) Through Qumran and other sources, Dick claimed that the “homeoplasmates” kickstarted time again, as living water fell from the scroll-jars of Nag Hammadi.    P.K. Dick’s “God” -- like America’s throwaway “psychos” and autistic “retards” -- hides amongst the detritus and banalities of life, and, as Dick writes, mimics “sticks and trees and beer cans in gutters,” presuming “to be trash discarded, debris no longer needed.”   Not surprisingly, the wisest alchemists also called the Philosopher’s Stone “the commonest of things, available in every street and marketplace.” Autistic Jeffrey Powell, Jr., begins his superb prophetic poem “In Jupiter’s Realm Waiting,” thus: In light of hopeless voices changes can't be avoided, I'm staying in the likeness of molten calm. It's hot in the crater, but like stopped stone on the surfaces, I'm hoping to master my knoll of Jupiter soon. It is like the oldest godlike firths in the deepest recesses. Great thunder rolling after the firestorm, warning that the dragons still wait and watch. But giving the dreamer hope that they will not find the opening as long as the stony surface remains still. Still with us, Director Baldo?  :O) P.K. Dick’s “deity” is not encountered by neocortical forays into celestial rarification, nor in tour-de-forces of cosmic power, but in humble descent to everyday living, the hour-to-hour struggle to remain a feeling, empathetic being, in touch and love with Creation. Bowmaster Erik Davis, writing on VALIS, updates the Gnostic cosmology and splits the planetary tree: The world is a prison not because of its materiality—which was the opinion of the ancient Gnostics—but because of the hidden orders of power and control it houses: the various corporate, political, and ideological archons herding us into increasingly compelling synthetic worlds.   Not coincidentally, the late Terence McKenna – a Walking Novelty who was actually early -- was the West’s chief explicator of synchronic teleology, the notion that not all events are “determined” by replicable cause and effect -- as the scientific method demands -- but rather are pulled, or attracted, by a numinous Cause located in the future, magnetizing the past to its ultimate Source. In the afterword to Philip Dick’s neo-gnostic compilation, In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis, McKenna relates how one fateful day in 1971, the yammering wound of the Logos passed from himself to Philip Dick -- even as McKenna’s natal brother, Dennis, was facing down the void in Amazonia: Unknown to me, a struggling, overweight SF writer, an idol of mine since my teens, discovered the next day that his house had been broken into, his privacy violated by the Other . . . the torch had been passed, in a weird way the most intense phase of my episode of illumination/delusion ended right where Phil’s began. This raises some questions: Can we refer to a delusional system as a folie a' deux, if the deux participants have never met and are practically speaking, unaware of each others’ existence? Does the delusion of one visionary ecstatic validate the delusion of another? How many deluded, or illuminated ecstatics does it take to make a reality? PKD proved that it only takes one. But two is better. Indeed, two is better -- it spreads out the paranoia!  And the blame! And as various groups of “adepts” have long known -- and these autistic Boys prove -- a bunch is better than two! Egoic, individuated consciousness is a necessary evil, an effective illusion of recent vintage, originating in the Paleolithic via shamanic (i.e., autistic) spiritual brotherhoods, as a defense and tactic of individuation against hive-mind female hegemony (matriarchy).  Human consciousness is not an isolate, nor a stranded singularity.  We are composite beings, at the microbiological and macro-spiritual levels. Troops: eets crowded out there, and in here. McKenna raves on: Phil wasn’t nuts. Phil was a vortex victim. Schizophrenia is not a psychological disorder peculiar to human beings. Schizophrenia is not a disease at all but rather a localized traveling discontinuity of the space-time matrix itself. . . [T]here is an idea that wants to be born, it has wanted to be born for a very long time. And sometimes that longing to be born settles on a person. For no damn good reason. Then you’re "it," you become the cheese, and the cheese stands alone. You are illuminated and maddened and lifted up by something great beyond all telling. It wants to be told. It’s just that this idea is so damn big that it can’t be told, or rather the whole of history is the telling of this idea, the stuttering rambling effort of the sons and daughters of poor old Noah to tell this blinding, reality-shattering, bowel- loosening truth. And Phil had a piece of the action, a major piece of the action. He shore did – and man, do I relate. But these autistic Boys are the action.  They make Phil and Terence look like newbies, plebes, virgins upon the wild, wide, waving Kosmik See. Autistics and schizophrenics share a continuum, with the former acutely aware of shadow/unconscious processes, and the latter largely unaware, in denial, or out-of- control.  Schizophrenia is a nigredo, a blackening process of individuation -- the fast track preceding the cure, ashes work in the soul’s basement.  Deep-autism (what diagnosticians usually call “Kanner’s Syndrome”) is insanity’s end-result, what Jung called the realized Self, what Jesus called the White Stone. As McKenna put it: “Being is a solid state matrix and psychosis is the redemptive process ne plus ultra.”  Jesus sang harmony: Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed. When they are disturbed, they will marvel, and will reign over all. (2, Gospel of Thomas, Scholars’ Translation) This isn’t to suggest that the Qim Tunes Boys are crazy.  It is to suggest, however, that the rest of us, in varying degrees, are.  Take a walk around the neighborhood.  Wanna argue the point? [B]ooks will be given to the righteous and the wise to become a cause of joy and uprightness and much wisdom. And to them shall the books be given, and they shall believe in them and rejoice over them, and then shall all the righteous who have learnt therefrom all the paths of uprightness be recompensed . . . [I]n those days the Lord bade (them) to summon and testify to the children of earth concerning their wisdom: Show (it) unto them; for ye are their guides, and a recompense over the whole earth.                (1 Enoch 104, 12-13; 105, 1) Hanging at the Crossroads Evolving humanity, and evolving Earth, have arrived at quadrivium, our crossroads, our four-way street.  Spiritual revival, with concomitant physical transformation, is necessary to pass the thresholds now before us.  Tweaking the old System won’t feed the bulldog.  Monsters lead the masses.  Earth is exhausted and begs for Sabath, its final child. Creation holds its breath, steps into the crucible. In the Roman Empire -- where we languish still -- the quadrivium was the site of many crucifixions, the better to instruct passing travelers in the subtleties of “law.”  Our nation, and our planet, is also being crucified within what Joyce called “the nightmare of history.” At present, we are plummeting full-tilt through the spirals of Hell, and the West -- with America whipping the black-mare team -- is leading the freefall.  Babylon revisited. Therefore the initiators of spirituality -- and of masculinity itself -- are summoned back, to remind us where manhood began, and even more importantly, why.  When the life of the Spirit is abandoned, when Brotherhood is outlawed, when maleness is vilified and disenfranchised, when fathers are divided from children, cultures plummet, regressing to gynarchic roots.  The olde dragon Tiamat resurrects, and rules again from the Sea of Chaos. Over the past four decades, the West has fallen to waste, descending into mass psychosis and recapitulating the ancient psycho-social conditions of matriarchy -- alternating ecstasy and horror.  Like the unevolved primates they are, transgenerational (non)elites have funded and abetted the oppression of American men, using neo-matriarchy to crush opposition and dialogue.  The imprisonment, degradation, and neutering of masculinity ensures that American men will not -- cannot -- regain their spiritual heritage and bearings, and rise up in cultural revolt. Therefore, the ancient initiators and conservators of spirituality have voluntarily abandoned their hidey-holes, emerging to offer us their hands. Like all authentic prophecy, Qim Tunes is a living document, in the full, chilling sense of that phrase.  It not only bends time and space, it makes a monkey of them.   As Tom Smith correctly notes, the “validation” is built-in, a quality shared with all genuine spiritual texts from The Epic of Gilgamesh onward. And to make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God, who created all things by Jesus Christ: To the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known by the church the manifold wisdom of God                (Ephesians 3) On my first few readings, I was amazed at the ability of the Boys to predict events seven or eight years into the future, including my own involvement with the Tunes and arcane aspects of my personal history. But that’s tater-tots.  The revelations contained in Qim Tunes stretch backward into prehistory, and forward into the coming Kingdom of God.  It’s concordances extend from Qumran to The Urantia Book, from the verse of contemporary autistic prophets like Jeffrey Powell, Jr., to the Venus of Lascaux, right down to the nub, the genesis of religion and egoic consciousness in the Stone Age. In many respects, Qim Tunes parallels the Dead Sea Scrolls.  Both are chiefly eschatological documents addressing not the ancient world, but modern times.   Both document sets concern the inclusion of outcasts/scapegoats, both were transcribed within “Michaeline communities,” and both involve the destiny of the Host/Primal Horde. Perhaps the Tunes are part of the ur-tongue of Creation, the fabled Green Language. Author and comparative mythologist William Henry notes: The Incas called the Bird Language the Court (Core) Language, because diplomats used it.  The Bird Language was used to conceal the hidden (core) meaning of diplomatic communications from all but those initiates in the inner circle . . . ancient alchemical texts and mystery teachings, like the diplomatic communications of the Incas, are sealed to all but those who understand the Bird Language.  To outsiders these texts appear incomprehensible.    Most occult and magical texts (including sculpture, engravings, and petroglyphs), although employing the Language of Nature, are coded to keep the “zoo animals” out.  Because words and knowledge are power, care is taken to keep the “uninitiated,” well . . . uninitiated.  This is less for the benefit of the “insiders” than for the protection of the untrained.  If that sounds “elitist,” well, it is. Yet these five autistic men have specifically requested that their esoterica be diced and fed to the Zoo (us).  Elsewise, dear reader, rest assured: I wouldn’t have offered these speculations, nor recommended the text to another soul.   The bulk of communication between and amongst autistic networks seems to occur through “tunes” and “tones” -- from “below” and “above,” respectively.  These are hybrid musical and telepathic processes, possibly developed and individuated as humanity’s first language arose from the collective soup of shared (maternal/undifferentiated/edenic) consciousness.  Male “shamans” (autistics) were instrumental in advancing humanity from its initial Collective Mind, indivisible from Nature, to group individuation, and later to egoic personalities.  Modern deep-otties sometimes remain more functional in the archaic Collective Mind mode of (un) consciousness; the most advanced autistics shift amongst individual, group, and collective states -- typically sacrificing many sensory/motor/normal functions in the process. Modern self-consciousness is so claustrophobic, leadership so corrupt, and civilization so fractured and toxic, that only the outsiders, the throw-away Kleenex Men, the “retards,” now know who we were, are,  and can be.  Their harrowing of our little corner of Hell is a draught of cruel kindness to bring us around, like Elrond calling Frodo back to light and life as Sauron’s war-machine hems Rivendell on every side.  Over our chests these Boys kneel, cup their hands, and breathe into humanity new life, a second innocence. . . . . And yet Director Baldo figgers they’re dead weight.  Tax gobblers!  Plagues! Genetic pathologies! The evidence I’ve seen suggests instead that “normal folks” are the geno-typical blunders.  Or maybe, as the Boys hint, we’re all somewhat “autistic,” and don’t know it. Yet. But the Qim Tunes Boys didn’t surface for any sympathy concertos.  They’re not interested in patronizing attaboys. They’re here to call out the Tyrants, and to usher in, Monty Pythonesque, Something Completely Different.