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Conspiracy Reflections

The Tool of Predictive Purification

A look into the symbolism of rock band Tool and how their latest record Fear Inoculum inspired my spiritual revolution.

In the conspiracy community there is a term called “predictive programming.” It refers to anomalous occurrences in media that would suggest foreknowledge of historic events by at least some of the creators of the media content.

Digital archiving and its quickness of reference material is the full evolution of print technology. Only the electric medium had the transcendent quality to extend print beyond its original paper formats. One technology leads to the next and transcends it.

Marshall McLuhan understood media like nobody else. He observed what was happening with humanity under the conditioning of electric technology and its incredible branches of media, ultimately predicting the era of globally networked computer technology that we call the internet.

In his book Understanding Media, he discusses the way that artists document the future by channeling it into the present in a creative process.

The percussed victims of the new technology have invariably muttered clichés about the impracticality of artists and their fanciful preferences. But in the past century it has come to be generally acknowledged that, in the words of Wyndham Lewis, “The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.”

-Marshal McLuhan, Understanding Media

Foresight may be an illusion of the creative process, but it might also be the leaking of information into the vessel that is the artist. The mysteries of synchronicity, of prophecy, are always compelling to look at, but it is only possible in hindsight, a lens that is magnified by the introduction of digital technology.

Perhaps nothing has more correlation to predictive programming than the events of September 11, 2001. There are dozens of examples of corporate media like the Back to the Future series, The Matrix, an X-Files spinoff show The Lone Rangers, and many more that somehow reference the ill-fated day without much stretching of the imagination.

The least famous example of artists and 9-11 should also be regarded as the most striking. There was a group of Israeli art students that occupied the Twin Towers called E-Team. Incredibly, just six months prior to the infamous day, they spelled their name out in lights precisely where the first plane would strike.

Then there is the better known case of artist Michael Richards. Eerily, this man produced a work of sculpture called “Tuskegee Airmen” that involved a cast of his own body which was then impaled with WWII fighter planes. This piece refers to the African-American pilots of the non-white U.S. Air Force. They were top performing pilots compared to the average white pilot, yet treated like second-class citizens.

It just so happened however that he would die in his art studio in the World Trade Center in that terror attack. To me it is further amazing that this black artist that spoke on the topic of racism shared a name with Seinfeld’s Kramer whose career went down like a kamikaze plane at The Laugh Factory screaming, “He’s a [n-word]!”

“Tuskegee Airmen” by Michael Richards

Richards somehow processed his destined death through his art, purifying himself before his untimely departure from this world, channeling advance information that — if I were his friend or family member — would haunt me for life.

He wasn’t famous except that he was in the New York art community and that itself makes him an elite artist. However, he is not elite in the way that conspiracy theorists would call illuminati. This sculpture was not exposed to the masses in advance through mass media. This does not fit the bill of predictive programming.

The E-Team also does not fit the bill for predictive programming, as they were even more obscure than Richards, and remain so. Conspiracy theorists have picked apart these cases and I leave it up to the reader to dig into that rabbit hole.

Corporate media programs its audience with the content it publishes be it magazines, video, film, music, radio, or podcasts. This is where people tend to look for predictive programming. Any recording artist reaching a mass audience is a candidate for the illuminati.

Artists and honest investigators are trying to get to the truth using the same mediums, the same media, and technology, as the dark side, the people that want to influence and control us through media technology. This is one of the biggest features of the media: Propaganda.

This world is situated between forces of light and dark. It is the yin and the yang. The best artists try to get out of their own way so that the message can channel itself through the medium. They want to transcend light and dark, but the best ones want ultimately for their light to shine into the darkness, to be a positive force in the world.

Truth reveals what darkness conceals. Forces of darkness try to contain the light. There will always be the battle between control and freedom, truth and deception, and so on. This battle goes on internally, within ourselves, and this is the only arena that we can truly exercise our will and self-determination.

My Year of Fear

In October of 2019, the progressive metal band Tool dropped their first new recordings in thirteen years. Apparently unbeknownst to them, as their tour kicked off to coincide the new record release, a worldwide calamity known as the Covid-19 pandemic was already underway.

That month would also become a marker for me as to when I began a process that would revolutionize my spiritual constitution.

About two weeks following the release of Tool’s new album Fear Inoculum, just ahead of Halloween, I was unceremoniously fired from my job over the phone, and bitch slapped by my neighbor.

That was a bad day. Here is how it happened.

I had the police order my neighbor to move his vehicle off of my property. That pissed him off, so he picked a fight with me over my own parking spot. These are prison rules! 

I stood up to him, but he didn’t keep swinging. He stood down. That one strike didn’t hurt or leave a mark, so I didn’t have a claim for assault.

This shook me up pretty well. I was stunned.

Toward the end of the day, I got a call from my employer, and I was terminated.

Behind the numbness, that innate sense of insecurity was stinging.

The neighbor didn’t leave it at that. He gathered his crew, showed intimidation. I was living alone in North Philly without a crew to protect me. That’s not how people live around here.

I began carrying my knife. I was ready to go ape shit and unleash a lifetime of cowardice and repressed rage on any motherfucker that got too close.

Two days later, I was bicycling home after seeing a music show with a coworker from the job that I had just lost. I used a shortcut through the unlit graveyard. Just ahead of the exit, I tripped over an invisible cable. My bike wheel got caught up and my bike flipped forward throwing my feet behind my head, my head pushed against the ground with my knuckles being jammed under the weight of my collapsing body as they gripped the handle bars. This is why I wear a helmet.

I clearly survived. I had a bruised face, a black eye, fucked up knuckles, some degree of fracturing in my hands, and a sore back. I looked and felt like someone that had just fought and survived a bad fight.

Post Ghost Fight

When people asked what happened I would say that I got in a fight with a ghost in the graveyard.

On top of the insecurity of losing a job, of being in a cold war with my neighbor, my hands were actually fractured and in pain and I was a sitting duck.

That one day was like a personal 9-11, two major towers of your life are your income or job, and your home. The aftermath plus new challenges continued to frustrate and cause issues, challenging me every day. It seems like an influx of karma coming to haunt me.

Throughout all of this, I became fixated on the new Tool album. Sometimes the soundtrack of our lives demands a certain thing. I needed some fear inoculant. The band in general has this unique balance of aggression and compassion, spirituality and dank heavy metal.

My ego was being checked by life. It was the culmination of a long pattern of mine. The ego gets involved with situations normal to life in a way that causes all kinds of unnecessary conflict. 

Sure, my employer couldn’t fire me based on my job performance, which was without complaint, but they didn’t like working with me — not because I did a bad job — but because I was always making little fires for the management. I never meant to be a devil. But the top expertise of the management class is how to cover their own ass, and I don’t play their politics.

Sure, the neighbor was being a total jerk assuming my hospitality, illegally occupying my property, but I took it very personally, my ego was offended and I refused to engage with the man to find common ground.

The ways that I’ve been belligerent, the ways that I have taken advantage of other peoples’ hospitality in my life, the ways I’ve manipulated people, and more, all this stuff has confronted me over the last year. It goes far beyond these two events. I’ve been forced to realize it, to step through my shadow, the fear behind the egotism.

I have gratitude now for the opportunity to burn off the karma, to take it like a man.

I built a fence, yet my neighbor still takes up sections of my driveway without my permission. I still hate it. But now, my ego is not involved. We have restored neighborliness.

It’s funny in retrospect, because I see now that he isn’t up for war either. But I had good reason to be afraid.

My employer did not simply let me have unemployment, and that was a brief battle. I easily proved there was no negligence on my part, it was a political termination. The unemployment award became a huge boon in 2020 as the pandemic stimulus gave me a raise.

Regardless of my preparedness for a physical or legal fight, I realized that I was provoking shit in my life due to a lack of mindfulness. The real answers to my problems would be revealed from the weakening of the ego.

Tool’s latest record set the tone for my handling of all these situations, believe it or not. They are just regular people, but they use their will to focus the creative energy toward a spiritual purpose. From my personal experience, their work is predictive purification. It predicted my existential dilemma and purified my path through the challenges. On the macro level, I believe I have spotted a pattern of predictive lyrics and rituals that align to major world events.

Encoding Fear Inoculum

As fear itself is the first challenge to face in the process of liberation, their title track “Fear Inoculum” really helps dissolve the sense of division of self from other. We all share the same breath, the same light, in this world. It is truly a universal consciousness and experience, but we divide ourselves from it.

The deceiver says / he says you belong to me / you don’t want to breath the light of the others / fear the light, fear the breath / fear the others for eternity

The karma of my egoistic behavior haunts me. It is the root of disorder, of fragmentation. Present circumstances are always the result of previous choices. 

Going through it, confronting the karma, the inner and outer experience become one by observing the internal cause to an external behavior and its return effect.

Enumerate all that I’m to do / calculating steps away from you / my own mitosis / growing through division from mania

It was clear one year ago that my life had ended up in this place because I had some kind of mania. My ego was off the rails and all of my accomplishments were spoiled because of it. I burned almost every bridge that I built, out of an egoistic, “Fuck them,” attitude.

My life has been a series of revolving doors because I was afraid to accept my life and the people in it. That also attracts people who are not committed to you. It takes extraordinary will to overcome things like this.

Exhale, expel / recast my tale / weave my allegorical elegy

This is what I am doing now. I am digging deep into my shadow and I’m making amends and approaching people without the fear.

I feel like it is almost a form of time travel. You do not have to be who you have always been. I never really believed the notion that people don’t change. It always sounded like an excuse to me like, “I’m doing the best I can.” Maybe you are, maybe you are not.

By changing yourself, by pushing yourself to really be the best you can be every day, I feel truly like it’s some kind of time travel, purifying our past mistakes, dissolving our past selves.

“Pneuma” is the next track on Fear Inoculum. The song builds on a single riff extending into complex territories, breathing between oddly timed, disjointed chord progressions and hard hitting, straight forward grooves.

We are will and wonder / bound to recall, remember / we are born of one breath, one word / we are all one spark, sun becoming

The same message that we’re a composite living organism, that our separations are an illusion in comparison to the grander commonality, is what this song is about.

Bound to this flesh / this guise, this mask, this dream / wake up, remember

This song comes off like a plea. The singer badly wants his audience to snap out of the illusion of separateness to realize we share everything in this world, that we are disparate only on the surface.

The ego is an illusion, you are not really hurt by words and misdeeds that cause no physical injury. Our integrity is the only thing worth defending, aside from our safety.

One must be liberated from the ego to become fearless. Fearlessness reveals love. A soldier will fight with fear, but not with love. A warrior fights with love, but not with fear. When the ego dominates a person that has attained super powers, they become a supervillain.

The story of the warrior follows the logic of awakening with “Invincible.”

Beating chest and drums / beating tired bones again / age-old battle, mine / weapon out and belly in

Maybe the singer is lamenting, and it is self-referencing. All good lyrics have double-meaning. The artist is telling a story. He may be thinking of someone else entirely, it’s interpretive.

A warrior struggling to remain relevant / a warrior struggling to remain consequential

One notable distinction about the lyrics on this record compared to all previous Tool records, he doesn’t wish anyone harm. 

Tales told / of battles won / of things we’ve done / Caligula would grin

It is a common concern among spiritual people that we live in a world, in a species, that is self-destructive, and this sense of impending doom has long been a theme in Tool’s music. Only this time, unlike previous work, there is a call to mend the problem before it unravels. In their landmark song “Ænima” the singer says, “Mom’s gonna fix it all soon / Mom please flush it all away,” referring to mother nature. Perhaps Caligula would grin at the singer’s past lyrics because he disregarded human life out of hatred for the world.

On Tool’s first EP Opiate the song “Jerk-Off” seemed to refer directly to my situation. “Punishment was cure for those / Who dare to cross the line / But it must not be true / For jerk-offs just like you” and then suggests that he should take matters into his own hands and kill a bitch.

Belligerence is fear, that is what I’ve learned this year. That is what the singer is telling his audience today, drawing back from the kind of vitriol that dominated his persona before.

Cry aloud / bold and proud / of where I’ve been / but here I am / where I am

I am getting older now, but I have lots of energy yet to burn. My bones are bruised. The path has been long and winding. But here I am, experienced. I may have gotten lost, but I know where I have been. I don’t give up.

False hope, perhaps / but the truth never got in my way before now / feel the sting, feeling time, bearing down

The next story on the album isn’t so personal. The song “Descending” depicts a time when the world is collapsing under the weight of itself.

Heedless in our slumber / floating nescient we free fall through this boundlessness / this madness of our own making

Falling isn’t flying / floating isn’t infinite

He wants people to have a fighting chance, maybe he believes it is redeemable, after all. The warrior has softened his armor, yet he is calling on everyone to the fight.

Sound our dire reveille / rouse all from our apathy / lest we cease to be / stir us from our wanton slumber / mitigate our ruin / call us all to arms and order

The only way to fight the impending calamity brought about by the oligarchs is to take a stand for your own integrity. I believe the good fight invites you onto a good path.

The next song, “Culling Voices” deals with that sense of paranoia that every ego struggles with. We have this unfortunate common psychopathy that makes us believe people are against us.

Heated altercations we’ve never had / so I’m told / yet guided by them all 

It’s about the way that our mind, our brain, our ego — not really sure what — escapes the moment and invents frightful scenarios. I was going through scenarios in my head of killing this dude. Crazy.

Judge, condemn, and banish any and everyone / without evidence only the whispers from within

Psychopathy, misleading me over and over

It is maddening. It is important to bring oneself back to the moment. I have had this paranoia going with many people in my life. It is important to be able to distinguish a real threat from an imagined one. He seems to be directly talking to the psychopathy.

The final lyrical track on the album is “7empest.” I’d say it is the best song on the album. It rocks, it is brilliantly constructed, spaced out but never short of energy. 

This song makes me think about the response to the pandemic. Those first weeks of lock down were refreshing, but it was the lighting of a fuse.

Trying to lull us in before the havoc begins / into a dubious state of serenity

I would suggest you read the whole set of lyrics and listen to the song. To me, it is eerily saying that the powers that be have some shit in store and we’re all just kind of taking it.

Disputing intentions invites devastation / a tempest must be true to its nature / a tempest must be just that

This song, I believe, is the context for the rest of the album and those lyrics. To confront the tempest, we are going to have to recognize our fear, we have to see the controlled demolition taking place, we have to insert ourselves like warriors to prevent substantial calamity.

What I see from Tool is an ongoing ritual magic event, and this album is the latest point in the continuum of that.

Listening to them is a process of encoding yourself with the sum of information provided through the music. They are not just churning out records to satisfy contracts. They are not just writing about their girlfriends, or their drug habits, nor are they using satanic and hellish imagery like traditional metal bands do.

Tool is just that: A tool. They are utilizing their own spectacle as a vessel to set an intention as an inspiration to self-actualization, spiritual purpose, and creativity. They evoke the strongest of all principles to fight darkness, and that is clarity.

Whatever is fucked up in the world, do something creative about it. Don’t let it stifle. Don’t ignore it. Don’t become it. See the darkness. Shine a light into it.

That doesn’t mean you have to be in a rock band. 

Start a business. Invent something. Be of service. Do anything but comply with the bullshit that you are discontent with.

Tool is not trying to condition the listener toward an ideology or anything like that. They use symbolism in their record packaging, music videos, and in their live shows, toward a ritual that I would say is purifying for themselves and increasingly designed toward the benefit of the audience.

To me, it is this simple. They like the aesthetic of heavy metal, the fullness of its sound, but they are really nice guys, they like nerdy progressive rock, and that genre has always lent itself to spirituality, and psychedelic imagery.

When the explosiveness, the masculine principle of metal comes into contact with the feminine principle of their symbols and spiritual focus, it is a powerful artistic statement that reaches some of the most lunkheaded men in the world.

Decoding Tool is not meant to be all that tricky. They want us to explore it, you don’t have to look too deep to see the truth and good nature of their offering. 

They will troll us with it and remind us that they’re just a rock band. It’s not a big deal.

Yet, for those of us who listen to it over and over, it does become ritual. Music is a tool to get through the day. Some songs, some records, some bands become a part of our relationship with the world. They are embedded in our heart. They encode our worldview. That is why it is important to embrace loving, principled artists.

Loose Correlations Will Tie Up

After my personal experience with Fear Inoculum cast a personal shade of meaning to it, several months into the Covid-19 pandemic, an eery parallel was unfolding in the world. The lyrical content of the album, combined with some of their live show concepts, packed into a band that fills stadiums and wins Grammys, this has a lot of the hallmarks of predictive programming.

People staying indoors and wearing masks, the protracted mandate of these masks and the psychological effect of it, that is what I think of when I hear, “Fear the light, fear the breath, fear the others for eternity.”

When folks are constantly worried about keeping six feet away from others, I hear “calculating steps away from you,” and this has double meaning regarding the ways that we divide ourselves from other, the illusion of those steps, as we always share the breath, mask or not.

The inverse of the fear, the facts opposed to the deceiver are that, “We are born of one breath.” While we live in this world as individuals, we are “bound to this flesh, this guise, this mask.” Obviously the word mask triggers something.

Then all the songs after these tunes point in the direction of sure destruction, authoritarian rule, and a sure fight coming.

Tool’s singer Maynard James Keenan appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience in October 2019 and hardly discussed music or the new album at all. Maynard did casually express a sense of urgency that it was time to get another record out.

They also talked about how to snap out of our sense of division, of making a video series that brings disparate people together. 

They talked about Maynard’s Arizona vineyards, and the value of land. Joe asked him, “Do you see some shit coming?” Maynard responded, “Oh yeah.”

A year later, Maynard was back on Rogan’s show, discussing how he had contracted Covid-19 before it was well known or widely tested for. He described the same kind of symptoms people discuss. However, he never advocated for global lock downs and he specifically talked about how it didn’t stop his operations. The tour had to conclude early in Portland, Oregon.

He conceded to wearing masks, sadly, despite the clear fear-generation it creates. But he essentially said that he got it, fought it, he’s okay, take it seriously but go on with your lives.

It was exciting to see them again, I last saw them twice for their extensive Lateralus tour. First at the Wiltern Theater with progressive rock pioneers King Crimson, in 2001, and again in Irvine, the next year.

Their whole stage production was state-of-the-art 19 years ago, but it has advanced incredibly since then. Their lighting and animation is even more omnipresent, and the effects they create with all the moveable lighting components are brilliant.

The stage was first quarantined with a transparent curtain. It gradually opened up until the stage was fully exposed. The curtain closed at intermission for a period that is clocked, then opened back for the encore.

High definition video projections overlaid most of the stage throughout the show. The default this year was the computer animation of a mechanical skeleton created specifically for the tour. Fractal patterns and eyeballs are usually somewhere to be seen.

Maynard’s costume is a nod to The Joker, the hit 2019 drama featuring Joaquin Phoenix, depicting the making of a supervillain, in a failed state wrought with protest, economic strife, and class warfare. This film could be an example of predictive programming, as 2020 kind of looks like the world depicted in Gotham City.

The choice of red and black and the goat horned alien icon gives the costume ritual meaning. The black represents the dark information, the lies, the concealment of truth and the dark agenda. Red and the joker character is what happens when you let that agenda rule you, and get inside you. It’s unchecked passion. That is how I look at it.

Maybe by referencing predictive programming using their own ritual magic as a reflection spell, it is purified. At least that is what I want to believe about Tool. Not that they have an all-seeing eye, but that they do things from the heart and it has a way of going deeper than they even know.

The morning after the show, I was thinking about “Stinkfist” as the finale. It is one of their most popular songs, but this was also the only moment in which they allowed people to use their phones. This was a troll on the audience.

Look at the album cover for Ænima, where the song appears. That is a screen. Watch the music video for it. See how the television screen is the album cover. Notice how the character in the video integrates to a new technology and is transformed by the end of the video.

Official music video for “Stinkfist” (1996)

Boredom’s not a burden anyone should bear… Constant over-stimulation numbs me / but I would not want you any other way… But it’s not enough / I need more / Nothing seems to satisfy / I said / I don’t want it / I just need it / To breathe, to feel, to know I’m alive.

When they allow everyone to use their phones during that song, they are pointing to exactly the screen that dominates our lives and how we justify our existence, how we feel connected, according to our lives depicted in these devices. Tool’s social media presence is almost nothing. They don’t indulge in the manipulative aspects of it.

Production for Ænima began in 1995 and the album was released on September 17, 1996. Possibly the biggest event of 1996 was the passage of the Telecommunications Act, because it was a deregulation overhaul that opened the floodgates for the rapid advancement of home internet. Most households did fine without a PC until the internet broke around 1997, when this album was reaching peak exposure, when my household got a Windows system.

Radio history was made on September 11, 1997, by a phone caller made to Art Bell’s Coast to Coast radio program. The caller claimed to be an Area 51 employee on medical discharge and that he was on the run. The caller was in a nervous breakdown and began to explain that aliens are actually inter-dimensional beings, that they have infiltrated the highest levels of government, that they were herding us into urban centers to make us easier to control. Suddenly, his phone call terminated, followed by the radio signal.

More than ten minutes later, the radio signal returned on a back up system. Art Bell was notably shook. He exclaimed that in all his years, they have never lost a signal.

Tool’s next album, Lateralus, featured a clip from this radio moment without any context about the radio show, and it was released in January of 2001. I never understood the context until this year.

It just struck me as statistically improbable that this audio clip which happened on September 11, 1997, would show up on Tool’s secret track “Faaip De Oiad” — translating to “Voice of God” — for their 2001 release of Lateralus just before the fated world-changing events of September 11, 2001, in which this country’s greatest urban center was attacked, and subsequently exposed to the rollout of mass surveillance, a key factor of the control the caller warned about.

Not only were we attacked, but it was a hypermedia event. We all watched hours of television, we saw those attacks on loop endlessly. This is what “Stinkfist” was dealing with, how we are tied into electric media, especially television and internet.

One of the most studied parts of the brain today is the pineal gland. We are learning how it is affected by contemporary conditions versus the environment humans adapted to, and the ubiquitous digital screen is a huge source of discussion.

The pineal gland receives incoming spatial information including sound and light, and it helps unite the environment into one image. A widely accepted lay term for this is “the third eye,” coined by the scientist philosopher Descarte. The term has been widely adopted by spiritual people to refer to a higher consciousness.

The pineal gland is an aspect of the Lateralus album artwork by Alex Grey. It reveals GOD in the folds of the center of the brain, where the pineal gland does its work.

Throughout the tour, Maynard would ask the audience to take whatever response, whatever feeling had been generated from the concert and put it toward something creative, “The mediocre are winning,” he would say. After the final song, the band would all hug and walk off stage together.

It was a foreboding warning and a constructive message. It was August 13, 2001, at the Wiltern Theatre, when he said this to me and several thousand fans. It stayed with me. I took it to heart.

One month later, on September 11, the mediocre had indeed won and locked this nation into an unstoppable trajectory for twenty more years. People lacking love and true creativity, just as Maynard warned, had set the table.

Coming back to the “Voice of God” song with the historic radio moment that triggered this tangent, there is more to that story.

I believe comic book writer Bryan J.L. Glass when he says that he placed that call, from his apartment in the Fishtown district of Philadelphia, just miles from where I presently live.

Bryan called the show seven months later. He explained what happened, but didn’t want to give his name. To a conspiracy audience, that is insufficient. 

I believe him because he has answering machine tapes from his friends’ machine that demonstrate how and when he committed to the ruse. He archived the tapes, he says, but they were not inspected and published until his appearance on Fade to Black, with Jimmy Church. 

Back then we didn’t tweet everything we did to the world. We called our one buddy whenever we had a good story for the day.

He wrote the script, rehearsed it, and he was doing what lots of people did with Art Bell. Blending uncertainty with truth, Art Bell kept his show safe, compelling, and great entertainment.

Nonetheless, Glass believes that his call was traced, that the signal was cut, and that he might have stumbled upon the truth using his own imagination.

Glass himself is an artist. He is a published comic book writer. His most popular work is The Mice Templar, which is a positive story concept of defeating global domination. 

He made it eventually to Marvel Comics, but not until 2010, and not since 2010. I don’t believe he is illuminati. I believe he used his old appearance on Coast to Coast as a means to self-promote. Possibly his upward trajectory has leveled out. I am going to try and interview him, since we’re on the same side of town.

Tool’s “voice of god” audio clip goes to show how artists open their minds to the truth and they set it free in their creative work. It has nothing to do with control.

Ideas simply come to the artist. Tom Waits actually talks to his songs. He talks to his songs. That means they have a life of their own. Artists are the vessel and when they are totally vulnerable, then they can channel information belonging to another time. This is how I see it.

The album Lateralus opens with a song called “The Grudge.”

Wear the grudge like a crown of negativity / Calculate what we will or will not tolerate / Desperate to control all and everything / Unable to forgive your scarlet lettermen

The events of September 11, 2001, were blamed on a character, Osama Bin Laden, who was created by covert CIA funding, behind the backs of American taxpayers, to challenge communism in Afghanistan, and Iran at once. Afghanistan fell to the Taliban while Bin Laden and his terror network found new opportunities in life. Everything about 9/11 is built on a grudge. This is geopolitically obvious if you do your research.

Clutch it like a cornerstone / Otherwise it all comes down / Justify denials and grip ’em to the lonesome end / Saturn ascends, comes round again / Saturn ascends, the one, the ten / Ignorant to the damage done

Take American foreign policy, if you eliminate every grudge and make lasting peace with our enemies and engage in fruitful free trade and cultural exchange, then the whole apparatus of the military industrial complex comes crashing down. On the other hand, if we don’t, then the weight of that complex will crash in on us.

It is a stretch but I feel weird about the reference to one and ten. It is interesting. Earlier, he says, “Choose one or ten.” It is just weird that 1+10 = 11, 10-1 = 9, and the inverse 1-10 = -9, so by choosing one or the other you don’t make the mistake of making a combination resulting in 9 and 11.

There is a lot of investigation into Saturn worship as the base belief system behind the elite class. There is this fascinating correlation to what they call the dark cube of Saturn in all kinds of religious iconography. I’m not an expert. The idea however is that they try to use the power of Saturn to pursue their dark agendas.

The hexagon is a 2D cube, and the six pointed star contains a hexagon
The actual hexagon phenomenon at the north pole of Saturn.

Saturn comes back around / Lifts you up like a child / Or drags you down like a stone / To consume you till you choose to let this go / Choose to let this go

The singer is pleading with these Saturn worshippers (maybe) to drop their shit because they don’t really even understand the forces they are working with. It will consume not just them but the whole world with them.

Give away the stone / Let the waters kiss and / Transmutate these leaden grudges into gold / Let go

The song ends in one of the heaviest climaxes Tool has ever produced with Maynard repeating, “Let go!”

Who Fuckin’ Knows?

From all of this, I feel like they had this gut instinct about what was coming in our world and did their part to ritually purify the collective consciousness. 

Who knows the truth about anything, they could just as well be a tool of the illuminati. Only thing is that their whole career doesn’t support that. Just looking at their symbolism shows that they are putting out a totally different set of ideas than typical illuminati crap.

Their album cover for Opiate demonstrates how they were resisting the hierarchical religious power structure and indicated that the people at the top of that are aliens anyway. That thread ties across all their albums, including the “Voice of God” in Lateralus.

What starts as more of a punk rock attitude about Christianity evolved into a sophisticated spiritual code that embeds itself as the band’s aesthetic. Ænima was the album that Maynard has discussed as being the first in a new intention to balance feminine and masculine principle. They only add to that intention over time.

Maynard James Keenan in costume to symbolize the marriage of masculine and feminine principles. August 16th, 1997. Image by Tim Mosenfelder/ImageDirect

There are several repeated symbols used throughout their career. Front and center at their concerts is their use of the heptagram. This seven-sided shape contains more feminine and humanistic pagan principles than, say, the pentagram or the hexagram, which are more closely associated with dark occult and illuminati ritual.

Seven is the number of unique steps in the western music scale, which they practice. Seven days to the week to build our calendar. Seven chakras to build our bodies. There is more to it. The heptagram according to guitarist Adam Jones is, “Very positive in sacred geometry.” 

No symbol in itself is evil, but some have more significance to evil people than others.

The pentagram is common in the very same heavy metal that Tool members are influenced by. They love that shit. I do too. Most of those bands were just rebelling against the status quo. I can listen to bands like Slayer and Deicide and appreciate the musicianship of that, their existential position, without becoming it.

Eyeballs are huge with Tool. They use them all the time.

I recall in my early Twenties going on a road trip with my father to Santa Fe. We visited an art museum. I saw real examples of ritual artwork known as the talisman. They say that by staring into these paintings that are densely populated with eyeballs, your demons are drawn out and exorcised. Often, sigils built on sacred geometry will accompany the eyeballs.

The music video for “Parabola” brings together all of their symbolism and creepiness into one very spiritual and empowering poetic story.

The coda of this song is total sludge rock, but in the music video, there is total transcendence and self-realization. This is their aesthetic in a nutshell.

Being in the audience for a live Tool concert is the exact same ritual magic of the talisman. Their message of self-awakening is lyrically transmitted so loud and bright that this composite visual-auditory experience has you entranced, and your demons may be exorcised, if your heart is open to it.

Many people feel that a Tool concert is transformative, or at least, “Amazing.” Even if you didn’t understand what was happening and just rocked out, then it still can have a positive effect.

They use spirals. They use carnal imagery. They use lots more, but this article is long enough already, so I am closing this one out.

I’ve shed my tears for you in this post. I stand naked and fearless in the truth of my life. Those who choose to weaponize my transparency can just go ahead and move on.

We all perhaps have the power to see what is coming, we should not wait for a rock band to do that for us. 

I see the tempest coming and everyone is busy arguing about its nature. The only thing to do is brace yourself, be the warrior, and do your part to wake up. Tool has a big platform meant to inspire individuals, and they are more powerful together than apart. That is how life is. It becomes our task to make a positive difference in our lives to reinforce a positive culture, to defeat the darkness.

By slaying your mediocrity, you make your own life stronger, you purify yourself, you make it easier to predict what might go wrong in your life, and what may go wrong in the world.

Nobody will tell you it is easy. But many will tell you it’s worth it.

References

E-Team: https://www.ifar.org/nineeleven/911_residency1.htm

E-Team: https://www.salon.com/2002/05/07/students/

E-Team: https://rense.com/general87/14_1.htm

Michael Richards: https://blogs.mprnews.org/state-of-the-arts/2012/09/on-911-franconia-remembers-micahel-richards/

Ænima: https://www.revolvermag.com/music/tools-aenima-10-things-you-didnt-know-about-bands-watershed-second-album

Meaning of Red and Black: https://runelore.it/en/satanic-magic/meaning-of-colors.html

https://deprogramwiki.com/other-illuminati/illuminati-colour-coding-for-knowledge/

Maynard Joker Photo: https://metalheadzone.com/maynard-james-keenan-says-hes-going-to-abduct-his-fans-in-a-short-time/

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