There are the Parents of the Genome—also called bio-parents. Like most people’s parents, mine were two irresponsible punks, or rather one punk and a prostitute, whom I later had the misfortune of meeting, whereupon she announced her desire to fuck me.

There are the Parents of the UI Soul—also called parents. These are the parents who nurtured and raised me.

There are the Parents of the Occult Soul—of proclivities that exist prior to the implants of childrearing and socialization, signature of the HGA—that core of True Will so core that it appears to the embodied subject as authentically other. These are the parents of the Cetanā Self, the spontaneous impulse-self that arises as foundational agentive causal power, what drives volition, intention, directionality of mind, attraction, and urge.

This note is about my parents of the occult soul. They are two and male; thus I have two spiritual fathers. Their names, as everyone who knows me knows, are Bill Blatty and Billy Friedkin. Here they are during one of the cinematic climax of the 20-cent:

Blatty died in 2017 (on my birthday) and I never got to meet him.

Friedkin came to Austin on May 12, 2018—and I did get to meet him.

My banter was sub-idiotic. It was the most tongue-tied and retarded I’ve ever been. I’ve seen the film over 200 times, each time with intense fixity of attention. I know it better than Friedkin himself. I can tell you every scene, in order, and know every line, so that if you say three or four words form the script, I can tell you all the words and lines that follow, all the way through to the end.

It was the most fulfilling experience I’d had up that moment in my life. Indeed, I saw it as the fulfillment of everything whatsoever in the entire universe—as the concrete culmination of al things and end of history. I expected not just that the film would be shown in Heaven, but that Heaven itself was, in fact, the film. When Billy Graham (the Donald Trump of American Protestantism) argued that the very celluloid of the film was impregnated with evil, he was on to something. Weak minds can only tolerate the truth by wrapping it in logical negation. What Graham meant to say was that it was impregnated with the Urgrund.

The Exorcist set the trajectory of my life. My interest in the occult, Christianity, yoga, mediation, Crowley, Scientology; my ambitious and meticulous experimentation with psychedelics; my major in psychology; my employment by the Dalai Lama; my PhD in philosophy—all can be traced easily as side-effects of exposing my 11 year-old nervous system to this (so-called) film.

The meeting

I was the first person to ask a question. He came over to my seat, belly jutting out, swaggering, and looked right into my eyes.

He was speaking to me. He swaggered and joked and looked down on me from over his rotund abdominal wealth.

Finally, after 40 years, he knew of my existence; I was an object of his awareness; I was present to the mind of God. If I only leaned forward and extended my right finger I could have touched his imperious belly.

Friedkin deserves all praise for making (as of 2019) the best film in Terran history. When dealing with the value of a film, its “relation to reality” is and ought to be completely irrelevant, since the meaning and value of reality (outside of real material conditions) is also manufactured. Even less important is the director’s metaphysics. Despite these allowances, I found his metaphysics heartbreaking.

The disappointment

Friedkin is a naive dualist. His considered model of foundational reality was no different than the one promoted by Oprah or any of the faceless inheritors of common sense who believe whatever the majority believes and who determine truth by looking at polls—namely, that the self is a ghost, the body is a machine, and the two can exist separately, but happen to be interactively entangled during a lifetime.

On what basis this bold claim? If you a folk dualist how they know what they “know,” you will get one of two answers:

1. The self is not the body because … isn’t it obvious? Your mind can race through a thousand action scenarios while your body sits still. You can conjure any idea, or none at all. You can pick one of them to act out, or withhold from action altogether. The deep internal you is a free creator—private, self-determining, and untethered from the mechanical cause-and-effect that rules the bodies presented through outer sense.
2. The self is not the body because polls show that most people believe that it is not the body or its stored and remarkably person-like dispositions, but rather a fully capable ghost that inhabits the body and controls it (its voluntary motions) like a hand in a glove.

(I am assuming that he was being honest and not just pimping the High Importance of the “documentary” he was on tour promoting. This is certainly possible. The behavior of the “really possessed” woman in his “documentary” is consistent with a dozen known material causes. Why not one of these diseases, like Tourette’s? Why must the explanation be a disembodied non-physical person visiting the body? If you drink ethanol, your feeling, desire, impulse types, and impulse control all change. We say that this is due to the effect of the molecule on the brain-that-is-the-person. We do not say that a free-floating Demon of Drunk Behavior just happens to visit right after you drink. Why, when the causes are other-than-ethanol, must be jump to non-native souls?)

Now some dualisms are plausible, such as the various strains of panpsychism which argue for a generic elemental consciousness that becomes intensified and faculty-enriched through the development of increasingly sophisticated biological systems. Space, and its nodules of local density (matter) is a subject of vague affect and qualia. Every material event is also a subjective event

But demonic possession, and folk dualism generally, presupposes something else—i.e., that full-blown self-aware subjects can exist without dependence on sophisticated biological amplification, routing, comparison, and motor control enabled by motion-based energy fluctuations. Folk dualism allows for full-blown or “faculty-complete” personalities to float around in an occult hyperspace.

Summary of special facts

Important facts proving our special connection:

1. I was the first person to ask a question.
2. Out of all the responses he gave, his to me was the longest and most detailed.
3. Out of all the people he engaged with, he enjoyed our back-and-forth the most.
4. I was the first person to talk with him afterwards.
5. Out of all the people who bantered with him during autograph and photo time at the end, mine was the most incoherent and embarrassing.

Photos