Swimming with
a friend the other day in the clean, crisp chlorinated water of her condo
complex’s pool, I was inspired to share my unexpected “journey into the blue”
from the day before.
I was checking
headlines on a favorite news site and clicked on a pop-up blurb about “the accidental
discovery of a new shade of blue.”
“So what makes
this new blue pigment so special?” read the Forbes
Magazine article. “To find out we need to once again consult the spectral
profile of the pigment, and also at the crystal structure of the compound. The
intense blue color of the pigment is a result of the strong reflection of
blue light, and blue light alone. It absorbs green and blue light, making the blue color incredibly
vibrant.”
I was working on my computer inside a Starbucks at
the time and long after I’d returned to concentrating on a deadline project, I
was distracted by the sound of a young woman giggling loudly as she waited with
a friend for their drink orders. When
I glanced up she was flipping her long
hair, even twirling her body around to make the hair fly. She could not have
been more delighted with her brunette tresses, dyed a very unnatural blue!
Later that same day, waiting in the checkout line
at my neighborhood grocery store, I suddenly noticed that a cashier who I
sometimes encounter there had dyed the front section of his curly brown locks with
an alien-shade blue similar to a Blue Man Group performer!
I then thought about how U.S. Olympic swimmer Ryan
Lochte had just dyed his hair an “ice blue,” as it was reported, to greet the Rio
Summer Games.
This all led me to go home and type into Google
something like “blue hair craze.” Among the articles was one from the London Daily Mail about--get this-- mermaid and
“merman” hair!
“Men are joining in with a bold new trend of their own which
is seeing more than a few fellas adding bright blue hues to their locks in a
new trend being dubbed 'merman hair,' ” revealed the lifestyle piece. “The
half human creatures of the sea may be more commonly associated with women in
bikini tops and long, flowing, brightly-colored locks, but that hasn't stopped
hundreds of men from hopping on board with the trend. From turquoise
mohawks to teal-hued pompadours, there is plenty of inspiration for this
vibrant look all over Instagram and Twitter.”
Of course, this fits right in with the information from my blog post yesterday! Possibly dying the hair bright unnatural colors is
just another outward manifestation of that inner appetite driven by bondage, just as with tattoos, piercings, etc.
I thought about how people used to say things like, ‘I’m
going to beat the blue blazes out of you,’ or, ‘It’s hotter than blue blazes,’
to avoid using the word ‘hell’ and thereby swearing. It’s the electric blue
flame that appears when a fire is at its hottest.
*****
*****
Predictably,
blue is a very important color to the secret societies. Just look at this entry from Masondictionary.com:
“Blue is the supreme color of Masonry. First, because it is that
color which . . . among all those used in Masonry, is acknowledged by every
Mason to belong to us all and no Mason, whatever his degree, questions the
Master Mason's ownership of blue. Second, blue is the supreme color because it
has, coupled with its universality, a place in symbolism which, both as regards
importance of lessons taught and as regards legitimacy as a symbol, is second
to that of no Masonic color.
“The use of blue in religious ceremonials, and as a symbol, comes
to Masonry from many of the different peoples of antiquity. Among the Hebrews
various articles of the high priest's clothing were blue. one of the veils of
the tabernacle was blue. In his initiation into the Druidical Mysteries the
candidate was invested with a robe one of whose colors was blue. The Babylonians clothed their idols in
blue. The Hindoo god Vishnu was represented as blue. And among the medieval
Christians blue was considered a peculiarly important color."
From the website
Masonicworld.com is this definition of blue:
“Blue, then, is the Craft colour par excellence, used in aprons,
collars, and elsewhere. Let us quote Bro. Chetwode Crawley. 'The ordinary
prosaic enquirer will see in the selection of blue as the distinctive colour of
Freemasonry only the natural sequence of the legend of King Solomon's Temple.
For the Jews had been Divinely commanded to wear...a 'riband of blue'
(Numbers 15:38).' A modern translation of that verse in Numbers is: 'You are to
take tassels on the comers of your garments with a blue cord on each tassel.'
The biblical text, then, refers to blue cords to be incorporated in the tassels
worn by pious Jews, while Bro. Chetwode Crawley is speaking of blue ribbons
which somehow became the embellishments of aprons, sashes and collars.”
******
As any well-read person from the occult
world knows, novelist-poet philosopher Aldous Huxley was a tremendously
influential figure in the 1960s-drug-culture-rock-and-roll hippie scene. He was
among the Beatles’ heroes splashed across the cover of their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
In his ever-popular book, “The Doors
of Perception and Heaven and Hell,” which inspired the name of the rock band The Doors, Huxley gives a personal account on what he experienced taking
the psychedelic drug mescaline, famously regarded as a "chemical means of
inducing a state akin to religious enlightenment."
Huxley writes, “From the French window I walked out under a kind of pergola covered
in part by a climbing rose tree, in part by laths, one inch wide with half an
inch of space between them. The sun was shining and the shadows of the laths
made a zebra-like pattern on the ground and across the seat and back of a
garden chair, which was standing at this end of the pergola.
“That chair--shall I ever forget it? Where the
shadows fell on the canvas upholstery, stripes of a deep but glowing indigo alternated with stripes
of an incandescence so intensely bright that it was hard to believe that they
could be made of anything but blue fire.
For what seemed an immensely long time I gazed without knowing, even without
wishing to know, what it was that confronted me. At any other
time I would have seen a chair barred with alternate light and shade.
“Today the percept had swallowed up the concept.
I was so completely absorbed in looking, so thunderstruck by what I actually
saw, that I could not be aware of anything else. Garden furniture, laths,
sunlight, shadow--these were no more than names and notions, mere
verbalizations, for utilitarian or scientific purposes, after the event.
“The event was this succession of azure furnace doors separated by gulfs
of unfathomable gentian. It was inexpressibly wonderful, wonderful to the
point, almost, of being terrifying. And suddenly I had an inkling of what it
must feel like to be mad.
“ . . . Confronted by a chair which looked like
the Last Judgment--or, to be more accurate, by a Last Judgment which, after a
long time and with considerable difficulty, I recognized as a chair--I found
myself all at once on the brink of panic. This, I suddenly felt, was going too
far. Too far, even though the going was into intenser beauty, deeper
significance.
“The fear, as I analyze it in retrospect, was of
being overwhelmed, of disintegrat- ing under a pressure of reality greater than
a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could
possibly bear.
“The literature of religious experience abounds
in references to the pains and terrors
overwhelming those who have come, too suddenly, face to face with some
manifestation of the Mysterium tremendum. In theological language, this
fear is due to the in- compatibility between man's egotism and the divine
purity, between man's self-aggravated separateness and the infinity of God.
“Following Boehme and William Law, we may say
that, by unregenerate souls, the divine Light at its full blaze can be
apprehended only as a burning, purgatorial fire. An almost identical doctrine
is to be found in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, where the departed soul is
described as shrinking in agony from the 'Pure Light of the Void,' and even from
the lesser, tempered Lights, in order to rush headlong into the comforting
darkness of selfhood as a reborn human being, or even as a beast, an unhappy
ghost, a denizen of hell. Anything rather than the burning brightness of un-
mitigated Reality--anything!
“None too soon, I was steered away from the
disquiet- ing splendors of my garden chair. Drooping in green parabolas from
the hedge, the ivy fronds shone with a kind of glassy, jade-like radiance.
“A moment later a clump of Red Hot Pokers, in
full bloom, had exploded into my field of vision. So passionately alive that
they seemed to be standing on the very brink of utterance, the flowers strained upwards into the blue. Like
the chair under the laths, they
protected too much. I looked down at the leaves and discovered a cavernous
intricacy of the most delicate green lights and shadows, pulsing with un-
decipherable mystery.”
*****
Huxley relates that earlier in this same
mescaline trip--an hour and a half after first taking the pill--he sat in his
study looking at a small glass vase.
He writes, “The vase contained only
three flowers—a full-blown Belle of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at
every petal’s base of a hotter flamier
hue; a large magenta and cream-coloured carnation; and, pale purple at the
end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris. The little
nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste.
“At breakfast that morning I had been
struck by the lively dissonance of its colours.
But that was no longer the
point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the
morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence .
. . a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering
under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged.
“I continued to look at the flowers, and
in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of
breathing--but of a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no
recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from
deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words like ‘grace’ and ‘transfiguration’ came to
my mind, and this, of course, was what, among other things, they stood
for.
*****
In a BBC documentary about Huxley appearing
on You Tube, his wife is interviewed saying that in this same mescaline trip
outlined in ‘Doors of Perception,’ “He went into a beautiful place . . . he said,
‘Finally, you have to say those almost embarrassing words—God is love.’ ”
A friend and peer of Huxley’s reports in
the documentary, “When Aldous thought that he made the breakthrough through
mescaline, LSD, to some kind of ultimate reality, well, for one thing, what was
it like? He said in an interview that
when you reach the ultimate mystical breakthrough, you discover that in some
way, despite everything, the universe is all light.
“ . . . His encouragement in a way of
the use of drugs, relatively innocent in those days, was part of this desire to feed an appetite that wanted to
understand phenomenon. I wouldn’t go so far as to say he was experimenting
with that but he was just himself, so often transported into a world
illuminated by the greater understanding of the phenomena of nature and he
wanted everybody to share in that.”
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