[QQ editor's note: this is posted for informational purposes, not as an endorsement of any opnions it contains]

9/11 Convergence: a Report and Commentary

by Joseph Kerrick GriffinUR@aol.com

On September 11, 2004, I attended an event called the 9/11 Truth Convergence here in Marin County, California. The morning session featured films and live presentations about the 9/11 cover-up and power boondoggle, highlighted by investigative journalist Jim Marrs talking about his new book *Inside Job: Unmasking the 9/11 Conspiracies*. Most of this vital information is already very familiar to afficianados of the alternative media, including myself; so I attended only the second half of the conference, featuring what I felt would be a more interesting agenda: the large-scale social-political implications of the 9/11-fueled war of imperial aggression and related developments, including ideas for positive alternatives and solutions. I was not disappointed, even though I didn't see eye-to-eye with the speakers on all the issues.

It began with an artist named Colette who recited a poem which, in my subjective interpretation, was about her anguish at the 9/11 attack and how she learned to transmute it into healing. Then came a woman & man called Entera & Omeran, who were introduced as teachers and healers held in high regard by the local spiritually-oriented community. They sang a song about "creating the Divine Plan" and "bringing in a Golden Age" in which "our vision becomes reality".

The first speaker was Byron Belitsos, whose Origin Press published *Inside Job*. His vision is "planetary democracy", also referred to as World Federalism. He would like to replace the United Nations with a World Parliament, which would "rule the world democratically". He emphasized that this is in opposition to "the cabal that appears to be running the world" now, which has perpetrated "the New World Order". He described the UN as "a relic of World War II", a loose confederacy of nations historically similar to the condition of the thirteen American states before the Constitution was ratified and the federal government was thereby established as the supreme power in the USA. So now, said Byron, it's time to do the same thing on a world scale.

The World Federal Government would have a World Executive, but lest anyone compare such a person to Emperor Bush, Byron assured the audience that the Executive's powers would be strictly limited by a global constitution and Bill of Rights, and would be balanced by the powers of the houses of the World Parliament and courts. In this open, democratic global forum, all the people of the human community could tap into our "common divine Source from which our sovereignty flows".

Byron said that terrorism is a symptom of an underlying cause: "global anarchy in a legal sense"; so the true solution is "enforceable global law". This would bring a permanent end to war -- "not just containing it, but abolishing it". He said that the best hope under the present power structure is "world peace via imperial dominion", but that this is "futile". Instead we must "build something that's never existed: planetary democracy".

At this point Byron was interrupted by a man who stood up in the audience and challenged him in a loud, aggressive way, in favor of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This cause was described by its proponent as "progressive", just like Byron's, so evidently we were witnessing an intercine debate. In refutation of Byron, the challenger said that "if nations don't abide by human rights, there's nothing to make them do it"; therefore the only viable solution to the world's problems is "education in human rights, from preschool all the way up". After another brief volley, the man sat down in deference to audience reaction against his interruption.

Byron then affirmed that his own cause is indeed "controversial". He said that "there's a huge dialogue in visionary-progressive circles" about its "feasibility", and magnanimously closed his talk by inviting his challenger and everyone else "to enter into the inquiry".

The next speaker was Robert Rabbin, founder of TruthforPresident.org. He offered commentary from what has evidently been a life of contemplative asceticism, and his spiritual insights often cut to the core of the pragmatic issues under discussion.

Then came Jim Garrison, who is president of the State of the World Forum, an organization that was founded by Mikhail Gorbachev and holds yearly conferences in furtherance of the aim of progressive globalism. Jim's new book is titled *America as Empire -- Global Leader or Rogue Power?*. He talked about the emergence of the USA as not only the most powerful nation in the world, but in all of recorded history. Then he asked: "Why is it us who have become the greatest power?" His answer was that it was a result of the genius of the Founding Fathers in establishing a "consciously constitutional" government, which became a light unto the world. He quoted a statement made by Benjamin Franklin as a warning to future generations of Americans: "The greater your light, the longer your shadow." This drew some gasps of recognition and other appreciative sounds from the audience, no doubt because it spoke directly to the stated theme of the conference, which was: "Birthing a new world through facing America's shadow".

Jim framed the current international situation in a context of the rise and fall of civilizations and empires in the cycles of history. He said that three things happen to a great nation at its apex: (1) it exercises more power both externally and internally, dominating other nations and tightening control over its own people; this was the point at which ancient Rome formally became an empire. (2) "A complicated social structure arises, which morphs into an aristocracy"; wealth and privilege become polarized, the middle class evaporates. (3) Power becomes increasingly concentrated and corrupt, until a stage is reached where "democracy becomes an impediment to effective government". One of the strategems of this corrupt aristocracy is to create incidents that appear to justify the rule of brute force -- like 9/11.

Earlier Jim had evoked the idea of "a Spirit that guides the affairs of humankind" through "the courses of history". Now he spoke of "natural movements of power" which operate "independently of who's in office". He said that in the world today, "we wield absolute power", meaning the USA; and under the shadowy auspices of the Bush administration, this power is being misused by intentionally "creating anarchy abroad" as a pretext for "setting up a series of national security states". Ultimately this will be done at home -- in fact it's already begun.

Though Byron and Jim were collaborating on this conference and other projects, they said that they have a gentleman's disagreement: Jim is not a World Federalist. When it came time to present his own positive alternative, Jim was perhaps more inspiring but less precise about what is to be done. He said that the ability to hold light and dark together is a sign of spiritual maturity; and while it's true that progressives are outnumbered, "a small minority always makes the historical decision, by the power of conviction".

The tenor of the conference was totally, overtly anti-Bush and implicitly but strongly pro-Kerry. When Jim Garrison mentioned John Kerry in this manner, a woman at the back of the auditorium shouted out: "So are you going to vote for Kerry?" He answered that yes, he is. With the disclaimer that of course Kerry isn't perfect, Jim echoed the sentiment of other speakers and attendees that "this is the most important election in history", and if it goes the wrong way we could "lose democracy". This statement evoked a standing ovation.

There followed a session in which members of the audience posed questions to a panel of the three speakers. A woman criticized them for not acknowledging that "the male proclivity for settling things by force and violence" lay at the root of the whole problem they were addressing. She did not say this in an abrasive way but rather with gentleness, and she added that this tendency should be "recognized and forgiven". Byron said in reply that a chapel/meditation space had been set up in an adjoining room, in which the Goddess/Holy Mother was the central figure. Jim copped to the point, but retorted that the shadow has as much to do with women and even children as with men. The organizer of the conference, Steve Dinan, asserted that the presentations of the men had embodied the "healthy male warrior impulse".

But then came the ultimate refutation of the criticism of unbalanced male energy, as a fourth speaker made a climactic entrance: Medea Benjamin, the leader of *Code Pink*, a women's group which has made an international splash in actions protesting the wars of the Empire against Afghanistan, Iraq, and its own dissident citizens. She was introduced by a fellow "Pinko" who described in admiring terms how at a recent event Medea had foiled the efforts of riot police to pull her down from a fence before she had chanted a mantra for the TV cameras over & over: "Bush lied, people died! Bush lied, people died!"

Today, 9-11-04, Medea said that she had "masochistically" tuned into Fox News in order "to see what millions of Americans are seeing". She saw the pop network transmitting images of people's grief at the deaths of so many Americans three years ago -- "so that they could turn that grief into fear, and then turn the fear into votes". Again the audience gasped in awe at this psychohistorical insight.

Medea went on at length about "the war for oil and for control of the Middle East", always emphasizing the personal suffering of the victims, especially women and children. The audience was totally rapt in the verbal emotional cocoon, but I chose to leave the auditorium at that point. Before departing I paid a quick but respectful visit to the Chapel of the Holy Goddess, where for a small offering I obtained a piece of Colette's artwork: a Tarot-like postcard featuring an image of a "Madwoman" in a clingy white gown with an evil, deranged expression on her face, collaged against a background of exotic towers and with a pointed phallic icon superimposed in front of her. Just as I suspected, the Goddess was Kali.

The common ground I find with the people at the 9/11 Convergence is that I'm a compassionate person striving for enlightenment and an understanding of the larger historical/spiritual framework of the world situation. I completely identified with the lyrics of the song sung by the New Age couple at the beginning of the session -- I, too, have been trying to turn my vision into reality for many years, creating the Divine Plan to bring in a Golden Age. However, I know from past experience with that community that my vision differs radically from theirs.

The basic difference is that I don't like the present global civilization as a whole, regardless of whether the visible reins of power are held by bellicose buffoons like Bush, or by kinder, gentler globalists like Clinton or Kerry -- or for that matter, like Belitsos or Garrison. When the latter two gentlemen said that their own visions were in harmony with that song, I knew that we didn't agree on the details of the Divine Plan. My own studies show that the mythological conception of a past Golden Age corresponds to what historians call the Stone Age. I think that's correct -- contrary to modern prejudices, primitive peoples experience their natural lifestyle as vibrantly positive. And so in order to get to a future Golden Age, we first have to clear the planet of the technostructure that's strangling it and turning humanity into a race of robotic zombies.

Some of my sentiments are shared by radical ecologists, neo-primitivists, and ideological anarchists. I also have disagreements with those camps, however, and in fact I feel that my vision is progressive in the literal sense in that it entails the human species taking the next step in its evolution -- in a social, spiritual, and even a Darwinian modality.

At one point in the 9/11 Convergence, Robert Rabbin resolved a dispute amongst speakers and questioners from the audience by taking the dialogue to a higher level: he pointed out the limits of conceptual thought, and evoked the formless realm which is the Source of ALL conditioned life, belief, and power. He said that the desideratum is to strive for "Truth unconditioned by belief". This insight matches my own understanding, and I've been striving in this vein for a long time. I've found that there is a marvelous interface between thought and no-thought where the infinite formless potential of the Absolute can pour like nectar into the relative conditioned world of manifest life and conceptualization. I call it THINKING WITH THE MIND OF GOD. All creative expression is of this nature, and perhaps the crisis facing humanity today is the direct result of the lack of it on the world stage, or even behind the scenes.

My creative breakthrough came in the planetary alignment of May 2000. I felt that it was a potential turning-point in human destiny, and predicted that a radically different Weltanschauung (worldview) would begin welling up from the collective unconscious. Such things have happened in the past, and even *Sky & Telescope*, an astronomy magazine, featured an article about how past changes of epoch had been signalled by planetary alignments -- or at least how this was the belief of the people in the subject civilizations. I was inspired to carry the whole thing a step further, in line with the idea that humans can start taking an acive hand in our own evolution. I initiated a project wherein I, and any other enlightened indivduals who may care to join in the work, can actively call into being a new manifestation of God on Earth.

I feel that knowledgeable and adept individuals can learn how to intentionally reproduce the seemingly mysterious activity of Spirit, just as mundane scientists learned to reproduce the processes of the natural world. I personally am educated and experienced in the art and science of theurgy (high magic), and so I know that it CAN be done, at least theoretically. Whether or not it WILL be done may depend on the number and quality of coworkers who join in the Magnum Opus.

The progress of the work to date can be found on this website:

http://www.ramofgod.com/

There are several documents headed by the title text, *The Ram of God* in two parts. The premise is that a physical incarnation of Godhead was born during the planetary alignment, a manchild who will grow up to be an Avatar, defined as an individual who has developed his inner Godpower to the maximum degree, such that he can bend objective reality to his will, or rather to the Divine Will that operates through him. Though this individual is still a little child, I attempted to speak with his voice and/or in his name in scribing the text of *Ram*. This is similar to what some call "channeling", but I prefer a German term used by Carl Jung: Ergriffenheit, which means getting *siezed* by a God. Yes, the Avatar is male, but he has a twin sister/lover (in fulfillment of basic esoteric principles), who also speaks in some sections of Part II.

I'll close this post with a quote from *Ram* Part II, chapter 11 which relates cogently to the above report on the 9/11 Convergence, and attempts to speak directly to the people in attendance:

"The massive default and failure on the part of the Elect to take responsibility for the rest of humanity lies at the heart of the malaise of the human species. Now the day of reckoning has arrived, and to all those who have been graced with the gift of Supernal Truth, I say: arise from your private lotuses and ACT! Your little candle is not bright enough to illuminate the Abyss that is swallowing the people -- for the Truth is without form and void, and must ever coalesce into an Avatar to be known by the people in their teeming millions."