“Protect this powerful woman, she is your child, take these fears away from her in the name of your son Jesus”
The trip to Nevada started with a session of praying with the Congolese painter Fransix Tenda Lomba. This ritual took place in the city of Amsterdam and we tackled panic attacks, professional insecurities, and the permanent pressure of neo-imperialist global structures. Fransix Tenda Lomba told me to pray before working because he says it is when you work when you wait for your prayers to cristalise. The trip to Nevada was going to be about waiting.
But how can you wait in a city like Las Vegas? Praying, waiting, both actions that seem so difficult in such an overwhelming place: the abundance of lightning, the multiple sounds of machines and terrible pop songs, and of course the pervasive presence of money. Stimuli was impossible to process until, just as with psychedelics, everything made sense all of a sudden:
“A sense of profound one-ness, a feeling of the unity of all energy. Superficial differences of role, cast, status, sex, species, form, power, size, beauty, even the distinctions between inorganic and living energy, disappear before the ecstatic union of all in one”.
-Timothy Leary, The Psychedelic Experience
A sensation of unity emerges, it becomes clear that the noise, the crowds, the clothes with the trashy messages, the industries of consumption have an important purpose in this union because they are containing the shadow of an entire empire.
A glorious nation needs their territories of spiritual misery. The overflowing city of Las Vegas needs the desert to face together these hellish temperatures of the end of times. And at the hacker conference that we were invited to, I could only long for jocks, for their simplistic desires, their allegiance to superficial beauty and the innocence of those who have never been disappointed by life. The shadow of nerds.
The Jungian psychotherapist Robert A. Johnson proposes that there is gold in the shadow. He also affirms that what is on the other side of the mirror is not a reflection but something darker. This idea motivated me to act like a hacker and exploit a vulnerability within this spiritual choreography.
WHAT’S A SACRIFICE?
“Are your actions being predicted by someone you never met?
Someone you would not want to meet or invite into your home?”
-Phillip K. Dick, Ubik
“Humans are distinguished from other species by our ability to work miracles. We call these miracles technology.”
-Peter Thiel
When we’re drunk at night in the Bellagio casino all my surroundings feel like church. We are part of a community of people who gather to perform acts of faith, in this heterotopia we no longer behave as we would in the normal world with their constraints and taboos. We become intoxicated with this unnatural state of mind and we are capable of seeing how the veils are lifted. We sit next to each other at the roulette and I feel ecstatic like Sharon Stone in Casino. The miracle takes place when we stop being mesmerized by the hypnotic nature of the game and we realize that losing money is not important at all, when we solve the problem of chance through a crystal clear method that we decide to trust no matter what.
“The key to enlightenment and serenity during this period of ten thousand visions is simply this: Relax.
Merge yourself with them. Blissfully accept the wonders of your own creativity. Become neither attached nor afraid, neither be attracted or repulsed. Above all, do nothing about the visions. They exist only with you”.
-The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Second Bardo
Merge yourself with them. Blissfully accept the wonders of your own creativity. Become neither attached nor afraid, neither be attracted or repulsed. Above all, do nothing about the visions. They exist only with you”.
-The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Second Bardo
The world then emerges as this assemblage of perfect balance where darkness is the counterpart of light and pain is the counterpart of joy. This is an absolute truth. Therefore, what is crucial is to understand that it is possible to act consciously within this balance. The Chilean filmmaker and tarot master Alejandro Jodorowsky named this practice psychomagic, Robert A. Johnson referred to this as the psychological negotiations we can perform in our daily lives where our unconscious tends to equilibrium using “real” and symbolic acts as its primary materials, being a key element to consider the fact that the unconscious cannot differentiate between these two types of act. Just as fire craves for water, fortune demands a sacrifice. And to make good money at the casino something important has to be compromised beforehand. It has to be a difficult act, like having a first kiss with someone when sober, a true effort, an outburst of life force that will lead you to the miracle:
“Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. if you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return – that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a beloved one, then your love is impotent – a misfortune”.
-Karl Marx, The Power of Money
-Karl Marx, The Power of Money
EQUILIBRIUM
David Foster Wallace wrote that Las Vegas was the least pretentious city in the United States. “Unapologetic” was a term we constantly used during our trip across Nevada. Back at home I noticed that panic attacks were gone, the wisdom of Fransix Tenda Lomba resonates now that I know that there is nothing to fear because the Kingdom is with me, daunting ceremonies will be my shelter and after the death of my father I will become more beautiful each day.
The problem of hedonism is its impotency, it involves a paradoxical absence of life force. Today I’m on a mission to become fertile justice, to be the woman who takes you to sacred places. Like the Justice arcana, to sex I give creativity. You give me movement, you give me devotion, you take beautiful photos of me, I’m eternally grateful. It feels so good to be back home.
“Experience the ancient cosmic myths of creation and manifestation.
Do not try to understand; there is plenty of time for that later.
Let your heart burst in love for all life”.
-The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Second Bardo
Do not try to understand; there is plenty of time for that later.
Let your heart burst in love for all life”.
-The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Second Bardo
This is the miracle.
It is being offered to you.
Now you just have to believe.
It is being offered to you.
Now you just have to believe.
