A System of Caucasian Yoga - Ultimate Weirdo Notebook?

Imagine if you will, a dark, dingy, corner curio store in old New York. Piles of Victorian french magic manuscripts, old canes and dusty capes, glass cases and their worn velvet lined trays covered with hoodoo powder jars, dried reptiles and silver coins for mojo bags. Across the aisles you spot dusty shelves with tomes like the Great Book by DeLaurence and The Secret Doctrine of the Rosicrucians. An old man with an incredibly thick Eastern European accent is sitting on a wood stool behind the counter. He laughs as you look around at this shop that strikes you as being a perfect replica of the studio where Dr. John recorded his first album.

The old man turns out to be royalty, Count Waleski, he calls himself and he has written his own book chronicling his involvement in a whispered about occulted priesthood. His manuscript contains the most ancient mystical teachings of the Caucasus mountain region, a land steeped in antediluvian civilization's secrets. He puts it down on the counter and motions to you to pick it up.

I was first introduced to A System For Caucasian Yoga during in the early days of my search for rare esoteric treatises. Borderland Research Group store had it in stock and claimed that the work is actually the Inner Teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff. That alone sold me, but it also claimed to be the first mention in the English speaking word of Vitic power rods.

Vitic as a term meaning life energy, came to prominence in the early part of the 20th Century belief in etheric energies lead by prominent research institutions like Northern California's Borderland Sciences Research Foundation. Continuous experiments ran from early 1945 (and evidently a bit before) until 1965 examining the use of the Rods.


 Other lithographs exist from GR Meade's collection on the cultivation of the electromagnetic life force. But the gist is that the Egyptians left for us in the archeological record evidentiary use of carbon and magnetic rods to increase the electrical output of the nervous system - charge the ganglia with such power that the latent psychic channels would open leading to kosmic consciousness. For the truly experimental out there - rods are available on that one online store everyone uses so much that all mom and pop stores in the entire US are going out of business. You know which one I'm speaking of.

There seems to be in parts of Russia a deep interest in the rods to this day http://rods.ru/en/rods/index.phphttp://rods.ru/en/rods/index.php and that is entirely in line with bio-informatics and state funded research into remote viewing, distance healing and pyramid power recently surmised in the HIGHLY RECOMMENDED report "Unconventional Research in the USSR: Short Overview" available here https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.1148.pdf

Materia is not all - the foundation is actual breathing meditation (called Arcanas), in various postures, that on a quotidian schedule are the basis of the system. James Van Gelder in his recent review of contemporary meditation masters - "Enter the Infinite" -  quickly surmises the breath practice:

• "The Egyptian methods involve four separate intervals of seven second breathing. The seven second breathing is important because this rate matches the natural rythm of the Earth. For this reason, seven second breathing is known as "Master Breath"...A total of three sets are completed each day, twice a day, with 30 seconds between each set...The Egyptian methods are referred to as the "short path"..."

combined with various visualizations of colors, and always facing the path of the sun, a complete system appears. Most methods are very surprising in their presentation versus what is common in today's new age yoga styles  - singing a Zoroastrian mantra on and off for a full day, while keeping your hands on your face and ears plugged to develop lucid dreams or using the contagion aspect of yawns to send telepathic messages - but it all seems to lend an air of some authenticity that carried a current far and wide.  How far? Well, even The KING, Elvis Presley owned a copy. Another name I would be remiss not to mention would be Murat Yagan, the founder of the Kebzeh system, who comes up in research related to the term Caucasian Yoga, but if he and the good Count actually are teaching the same thing we might never know. If you are interested truly outsider occult lit, I commend this book to your attention.

(Special thanks to the inimitable KookScience for gracious context, pointers and good cheer)

INFERNO to Reach the Fundamental Attitude

Feast your eyes on this secret notebook: handwritten notes purported to be some of infamous scoundrel Gurdjieff's awareness exercises.




Why would I bring this all up in the secret notebooks tag? Some of it was because I have been thinking about the line between the swami and the huckster that G. walked so well. The other aspect is G. played a very subtle background role in Argento's INFERNO and of course we are alllll about subtlety here.

So remember to keep yo' notes scribbled, yo' language garbled and yo' actions dangerous.

Balloon Boy and the Struggle for Weird

I'm just going to come out and say it: The problem I have with your sports, your reality shows and your wack-ass worldview comes down to you being too scared to keep BEING WEIRD. The good stuff bubbles up and we sadly file it away without remembering our true freak natures. On the freeway, in school and at work our breathing stops as we stare at  flashy, purchasable things...the kind of gunk that covers up the streetlight between your eyebrows.


I'm no different but here's how I recently hit the pause button. Take the example of the Balloon Boy. Remember that? Some hick kid steals his dad's makeshift UFO/weather balloon, flies it out of control and crashes it in a field to a media blitz across the nation. The story changes a bit when it turns out he wasn't in the balloon and his pop just wanted to get on the tele.



What got me was how cool that kid could have been if he actually did fly around INSIDE that thing. I won't wax super poetic on the need to get away from it all, you already know it. However, remember the initial feeling: remember being a little shithead who wanted to get away from your parents. The need to escape never goes away though: how about them Control Systems you deal with now?



So when I heard of Kent Couch strapping balloons to his lawn chair and flying away 200 miles to land safely in a field, I felt a deep smile well up. You can pull off the crazy even if your beer gut hangs to your knees.

Remembering what the hell kept you going as a kid is the takeaway here, boss. Kent's risk was worth it because I recalled the value of what people call "weird", "strange" and "ridiculous"... The weird jolted me back to me.

 A grimoire from the past

Weird

Weird

Moving around in a storage unit popped up this old freakout book from the Eighties. Here I plotted utility belts, boats made of cardboard that could support a human, and a fucking lawn chair with enough Estes motor rockets and helium balloons strapped to it that would allow me to fly away.

I never pulled it off, maybe it was the early signs of the Demon of Procrastination finding a soul to feast on, but the idea seemed so reasonable to this kid. A lifetime later, I found some #daug from Oregon proving it could be done. That's just how the weird rolls... and that's why it is all that matters; because it ALL matters. 

Thanks, Mr. Couch.