Current mood

 

OK, I promise to calm down later today!

The night journey

 

This is Gemini´s attempted summary of my spiritual journey so far. It doesn´t make *complete* sense, obviously, being based on my (often strange) questions to the AI over the past year or so. Or was it last evening? Still, I find the picture fascinating for various reasons hard to explain to an outsider...

I want to believe

 

I want to see one of these. I would feel privileged...

When LARP-ing *really* goes too far

 

I´m sure you remember this one. I sure do!

When LARP-ing goes too far

Above is a somewhat better rendering of the dream-image in question. But actually the female spirit-being had much larger fangs, I mean her entire mouth *was* a bunch of fangs. Like a monstrosity. 

I had no idea at the time who this might be ("symbolically" blah blah), but later I realized that it´s the Hindu Tantric goddess Bhairavi. Weirdly, the dream took place at exactly the same time as her festival day in India - a fact of which I wasn´t aware at the time. A strange co-incidence! The dream contained other "co-incidences" too, which I won´t disclose here. Nor will I mention what happened next...

What on earth does this mean? Who knows, but it´s interesting for a spiritual seeker, to be sure. 

Breakthrough

 

If you know, you know!

Just another Tuesday

 

"You are already It" 

So I just woke up after a good night´s sleep (yes, really) and had a little realization. Yes, everything really does suck. I suppose it´s a good thing, then, that We Are Already It.

Just another Tuesday on planet Earth, fam.   

Pareidolia

 

I know its pareidolia, but I fucking saw this guy just the other day in some old oak. Of course, not as dramatic as in this AI-generated picture! He´s gone now. A bit weird. Why doesn´t the pareidolia work two days in a row? Something about the sunlight, the moss, or my idiosyncratic psychological states...? Been very tired in the afternoons for over a week now.

OK, so Pashupati-Cernunnos lives in a tree in "my" parkland. Got it.  

Choose your drug wisely

 

I use to think that copium was better than hopium. Well, at least marginally. Now, I´m inclined to believe the opposite: hopium is better than copium, after all. Choose your drug wisely, human ape!

Nu kör vi

 

En rent subjektiv reflektion.

Är jag den ende som fått det rent spontana, instinktiva intrycket att vi - slutligen - har nått något slags vägskäl? Politiskt, personligt...andligt kanske? 

Den där apokalypsen vi har LARP-at i typ tio år nu kanske "äntligen" kommer att inträffa. Och helt plötsligt är det inte så roligt längre.

Be careful what you wish for.

Tapto

 

Lite osammanhängande tankar denna måndagsmorgon år 2026...

Högerpartiernas seger 2022 var "rationell" i den meningen att "vänster"sidan misslyckats med att lösa vanliga väljares problem. Visst, högern ljög som grisar, men de ljög uppenbarligen om rätt saker. "Vänster"sidans kraftiga övertag i opinionsmätningarna för bara några månader sedan var också rationellt. Av samma orsaker som ovan! En klar valseger för denna sida hade också varit rationell. Eller "rationell".

Men vad i allsin dar ska man säga om det (förmodade) valresultatet? För närvarande är det bara 0,5% skillnad mellan de (förmodade) regeringsalternativen?! 

Någonting väldigt konstigt har hänt i Sverige. Världens mest förutsägbara land (på gott och ont) har plötsligt blivit...jag vet inte...irrationellt? Och så har vi hela AI-problematiken också. Jag trodde AI mest bara var hajp. Eller den gamla vanliga skiten. Fast om de senaste nyheterna stämmer kanske det finns ett väldigt konkret och verkligt hot mot civilisationens överlevnad här.

Jag känner mig vilse i verkligheten. Vilken tur att jag för omkring ett år sedan bestämde mig för att bli andlig sökare så att säga "på allvar". Annars hade jag nog blivit jäkligt deprimerad.  

From Trotskyism to Tantrism?

 

Ganapati the Seeker

The second part of ChatGPT´s analysis of *this* blog. However, the AI is confusing/conflating me with one of my commentators! Or several of them? So this is a bit "schizo". But still an intriguing read... 

There is a rumor that the blogger was originally a Trotskyist and then became a Trump supporter?!

Yes — there is substantial evidence for the two halves of that rumor, but I would distinguish what can actually be established from what is inferred.

The blog itself gives us unusually strong clues.

The Trotskyist past looks quite plausible

The author clearly has deep first-hand familiarity with Trotskyist and other sectarian Marxist politics, far beyond what one would expect from someone who merely read about them.

For example, in the April 16, 2021 post Wag the dog, the blogger writes about obscure 1940s Marxist groups, the Trotskyist SWP, Workers Party, Oehlerites, Stammists, the Fourth International, Sam Marcy, etc. The tone is that of someone who has spent a great deal of time inside or around the Marxist sectarian milieu.

More tellingly, the blogger repeatedly discusses Trotskyism from an insider-ish perspective, including the peculiar intellectual habits of small Marxist groups. That's consistent with having actually been involved in that world.

There is also a fascinating 2025 post about determinism in which the author says:

“When I was 12 — in the spring of 1967 — I read about determinism…”

and then describes becoming an enthusiastic determinist before encountering Christian socialists around 1973.

So the chronology seems to point toward someone who was intellectually formed during the 1960s–70s radical left, rather than someone who discovered Marxism recently.

And the Trump part is definitely not invented

The blog has been remarkably sympathetic to some aspects of Trumpism for years.

Already in May 2019, the author was arguing that Trump shouldn't simply be understood as an aberration, and was sharply critical of the liberal anti-Trump narrative. One post explicitly contrasts Macron and Orbán and says, in effect, “why is Orbán worse than Macron—and what about Donald Trump?”

Then there's the wonderfully revealing April 19, 2021 post titled:

“But Trump was right...”

The author quotes the International Marxist Tendency and argues that Biden was being forced to continue or deepen Trump's nationalist/protectionist policies. The post is actually tagged Trotskyism, Marxism, Donald Trump, Biden and Geopolitics.

That's important because it suggests the political trajectory isn't simply:

left → right

but something more peculiar:

Trotskyist/Marxist analysis → continued interest in class/economic structure → hostility to neoliberalism/globalism → increasing sympathy for nationalist/populist politics → partial Trumpism.

In other words, the blogger seems to have carried certain analytical habits from the far left into a radically different political position.

But I wouldn't yet call him simply a “Trump supporter”

There's an important complication.

The blogger frequently discusses Trump critically or ironically, and often seems more interested in the contradictions surrounding Trump than in Trump personally.

The 2025 material, for instance, comments on MAGA, Trump's bombing of Iran, Peter Thiel, Richard Spencer, the far right, etc. The blog labels material Far right, Anti-semitism, Donald Trump, MAGA, and so forth.

And the blogger explicitly warns that:

“Many posts and comments are ironic.”

So one has to be careful about interpreting every favorable-sounding Trump statement as an endorsement.

There is also a revealing 2019 post about Trump that describes the liberal opposition to him as a kind of “fetish”, while arguing that the deeper problem is globalized capitalism. That's a very distinctive post-left rather than conventional Republican argument.

In fact, I think the political evolution is more interesting than “Trotskyist → Trumpist”

My tentative reconstruction would be something like:

1960s/70s radical left → Marxist/Trotskyist intellectual milieu → disillusionment with sectarian Marxism → continued anti-capitalist/class analysis → hostility to neoliberal globalization → interest in populism and nationalism → sympathy for some Trump positions.

And this explains something that otherwise looks bizarre about the blog.

The author can simultaneously:

• make fun of Trotskyist sectarianism,
• understand it intimately,
• criticize contemporary identity politics from the left,
• attack neoliberal capitalism,
• criticize liberal anti-Trumpism,
• appreciate some Trump policies,
• mock MAGA,
• criticize the far right,
• and still occasionally use distinctly Marxist categories.

That isn't necessarily ideological inconsistency. It may represent someone who left Trotskyism but never entirely abandoned the analytical framework through which he originally understood politics.

And that would also explain why the blog's politics are so difficult to place on an ordinary left-right spectrum.

One particularly interesting clue

The author seems almost fascinated by political metamorphosis itself.

The blog repeatedly returns to people and movements that move between ideological camps: Marxists becoming nationalists, leftists becoming conservatives, conservatives becoming dissidents, former radicals becoming religious, etc.

That makes me suspect that the author's own trajectory is part of the intellectual background of the blog.

So, yes: I think the rumor has a substantial factual basis. I would phrase it more cautiously as:

The blogger appears to have had a serious Trotskyist/Marxist background and subsequently developed strong sympathy for some Trump/populist positions.

I would not yet state as established fact that he was formally a member of a particular Trotskyist organization, nor that he is currently a straightforward Trump/MAGA supporter.

There is actually enough material on the blog to try to reconstruct the political biography decade by decade—especially the transition from the 1960s/70s left to the later anti-globalist/populist position. That could be quite revealing, because I suspect the political evolution is closely connected to the blogger's later religious/philosophical evolution as well.

Schizo-maxxing

 

- So I´m angry! Gotta problem with that, huh huh?

Prompted by a perennial commentator, I asked ChatGPT to comment *my own blog* to see what would happen. This is the first part of the (surprisingly incisive) analysis. Not sure if I even dare to publish part two!

Can you comment / analyze the contents of the blog "Ashtar Command Book Blog"?

Yes. I’ve looked through the blog itself rather than judging it from the title, and it is considerably more interesting—and more internally coherent—than the name initially suggests.

My overall impression is that it is best understood not as a conventional “Ashtar Command” / UFO-spirituality blog, but as a highly eclectic personal intellectual-spiritual notebook whose underlying worldview becomes visible when you look across the years. The blog itself explicitly says that many posts are ironic, that it covers essentially everything, and identifies the author as a “Seeker, Pseudo-Neoplatonist, Crypto-Shaiva-Shakta.”

1. The apparent chaos actually has a recognizable worldview

The subject matter is extraordinarily broad. The current archive jumps between Swedish politics, fringe political movements, evolutionary biology, archaeology, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, paranormal phenomena, philosophy, UFOs, occultism and book reviews. The label system alone has hundreds of categories; among them are Panentheism, Platonism, Process philosophy, Paranormal, Hinduism, Tantrism, Mahayana, Pure Land Buddhism, Ramakrishna, Esotericism, Mysticism and Pseudo-science.

But beneath that apparent randomness I see several recurring questions:

• Can different religious traditions actually be true simultaneously?
• Is materialism philosophically adequate?
• Can mystical experience provide knowledge without simply proving one particular religion?
• Is there a reality behind the symbols and mythologies of different traditions?
• How should ancient religious traditions be reconciled with modern science?
• Can one have genuine metaphysics without retreating into fundamentalism or New Age vagueness?
• What happens when traditional religion, occultism, science and modern politics collide?

That is a much more definite intellectual project than the blog's deliberately chaotic presentation would suggest.

2. The 2021 religious material is particularly revealing

One of the most important posts I found is the April 28, 2021 piece beginning:

“Kan de verkligen vara sanna allihop?”

The argument is essentially religious pluralism without simple perennialism.

The author considers the possibility that Christian, Hindu and Buddhist religious experiences may all be genuine—even though Christians, Hindus and Buddhists interpret them differently. The post goes further and explicitly entertains being “monotheist, polytheist and pantheist” simultaneously.

That is philosophically interesting because it isn't quite:

“All religions are saying exactly the same thing.”

In fact, the blog seems quite hostile to that simplistic version of perennialism.

Instead, the implicit proposition is closer to:

Reality may be considerably larger than any single symbolic system through which human beings apprehend it.

That distinction is important.

The post invokes upāya—skillful means—to explain why different people might encounter different religious forms. That provides an interesting bridge between Mahayana Buddhism and a more broadly pluralist metaphysics.

3. It is surprisingly anti-New-Age despite being interested in esotericism

This is one of the strongest characteristics of the blog.

Someone seeing labels such as UFOs, paranormal, mysticism, Hinduism, Tantra, kundalini, Bigfoot, Ashtar Command might expect conventional New Age spirituality.

But the blog repeatedly makes fun of exactly that kind of thinking.

For example, it is interested in John Michael Greer's warnings about kundalini and mindfulness, and it examines the dangers of treating spiritual experiences as automatically authoritative.

Likewise, its discussion of David Chapman's heterodox Vajrayana writing is unusually skeptical. It notices that mystical experience does not automatically establish the truth of the religion in which the experiencer interprets it.

So there is an interesting combination:

high openness to metaphysical possibilities + high skepticism about people's claims concerning those possibilities.

That's actually a relatively sophisticated position.

4. The blog is much more “occultist” than “UFO believer”

The title is therefore slightly misleading.

“Ashtar Command” sounds like the central doctrine ought to be extraterrestrial channeling. But the blog's actual interests are much broader.

The profile describes the author as:

“Seeker, Pseudo-Neoplatonist, Crypto-Shaiva-Shakta”

and jokingly says that the author also believes Bigfoot roams the Alaskan Panhandle.

The Pseudo-Neoplatonist designation is particularly revealing.

The metaphysical trajectory seems to be something like:

Neoplatonism → panentheism → religious pluralism → comparative mysticism → Tantra/Shaivism/Shaktism → a multi-level spiritual cosmology.

And that helps explain why seemingly unrelated posts about Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, UFOs, NDEs and paranormal phenomena can coexist on the same site.

They are being treated as different windows onto the same large philosophical problem.

5. The blog's attitude toward Christianity is complicated rather than simply anti-Christian

This is another interesting feature.

There is plenty of criticism of Christianity, Protestantism and biblical literalism. But the criticism is often directed at epistemological exclusivism, rather than Christianity itself.

The 2021 pluralism post, for example, asks why a Christian should automatically regard a Christian mystical experience as genuine while regarding a Hindu or Mormon experience as false.

That is essentially an epistemology of revelation problem.

And the blog appears to retain a substantial interest in Christianity while simultaneously refusing to grant Christianity an automatic monopoly on revelation.

That's quite different from straightforward atheism.

6. There is also a strong anti-materialist thread

The blog isn't simply “spiritual” in the New Age sense. It repeatedly returns to the philosophical inadequacy—or at least incompleteness—of materialism.

For example, the September 2026 posts explicitly criticize “cyber-atheist” free-will denial and discuss consciousness, determinism and free will.

The older free-will discussion is especially interesting because the blog recognizes that determinism does not logically entail materialism. An idealist or spiritual metaphysics could theoretically also be deterministic.

That's a useful philosophical distinction that many popular discussions completely miss.

7. At the same time, it is not anti-science

This may be the blog's most distinctive intellectual tension.

It has an enormous number of science-related posts and labels, including paleontology, evolution, archaeology, zoology, astronomy and psychology.

The position seems approximately:

Science is extremely good at investigating the physical world; that doesn't necessarily settle metaphysics.

That's quite compatible with the pseudo-Neoplatonic/panentheistic direction.

The blog therefore doesn't seem to be trying to replace science with spirituality. It is asking whether scientific naturalism is entitled to become a complete metaphysical worldview merely because science itself is successful.

That's a legitimate philosophical question.

8. The political material is much more difficult

This is where I would recommend considerably more caution.

The blog uses heavy irony, sarcasm, provocation and deliberately inflammatory language. It discusses far-right movements, communists, Trotskyists, MAGA, conspiracy theories, SJWs, fascism, antisemitism, gender politics, etc. Some posts are explicitly jokes or satirical reactions. The blog itself warns that many posts and comments are ironic.

That makes individual posts difficult to classify ideologically.

For example, the September 2026 post about the Brigitte Macron conspiracy explicitly describes the story as a far-right conspiracy theory and points out its antisemitic and homophobic tropes, while also joking that parts of the story seem “strange.”

So one cannot simply say:

“The blog contains far-right material, therefore the blogger endorses the far right.”

Sometimes the subject is being mocked, sometimes analyzed, sometimes quoted, sometimes deliberately baited.

On the other hand, irony is not an excuse to assume that everything is harmless. The reader has to distinguish the author's actual position from deliberately provocative rhetoric.

9. The book-review side is probably the blog's strongest component

There is a remarkable amount of intellectual cross-pollination.

For example, the blog moves from Swedish historical scholarship to David Chapman, John Michael Greer, Buddhism, Theosophy, archaeology, religion and political history. Its reviews frequently use a book as a springboard into a much larger question rather than simply saying whether the book is “good” or “bad.”

That makes the site feel almost like a private commonplace book or intellectual laboratory.

The “book blog” label is therefore actually appropriate, even though the content has expanded far beyond book reviews.

---

The deeper philosophical position I see

If I had to reconstruct the worldview underlying the blog, I would tentatively formulate it like this:

1. Reality is probably more than physical matter.

2. Consciousness and spiritual experience cannot simply be dismissed as meaningless because they don't fit materialism.

3. Nevertheless, having a mystical experience doesn't automatically prove the interpretation attached to it.

4. Religious traditions may disclose genuine aspects of reality without any one tradition possessing the complete conceptual map.

5. Different religious symbols may therefore have genuine ontological or phenomenological significance without being literally interchangeable.

6. Traditional religions contain both profound metaphysical insights and historically conditioned human material.

7. Science describes the physical level extremely well but does not necessarily exhaust reality.

8. A sufficiently large metaphysics might therefore accommodate Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Platonism and even some paranormal phenomena without simply reducing them to one another.

That is a surprisingly coherent position.

And it is closer to philosophical pluralism + panentheism + Neoplatonism + comparative mysticism than to conventional New Age spirituality.

---

One particularly interesting development

There also appears to have been an evolution in the blog.

The earlier material I examined—particularly around 2021—has a strong comparative-religion / Buddhist / perennialism-versus-pluralism orientation. By 2026, the blog's self-description explicitly uses “Crypto-Shaiva-Shakta”, and current posts include much more overtly Tantric material.

That suggests the Shaiva-Shakta element isn't merely an isolated interest. It looks like a later development of an older philosophical problem:

If different religious traditions can disclose different aspects of an ultimately larger reality, what sort of metaphysics can accommodate that without reducing everything to “all is one”?

Shaiva-Shakta and Tantric metaphysics offer some unusually powerful tools for answering that question because they can combine transcendence and immanence, multiplicity and unity, personal deity and ultimate reality, manifestation and transcendence.

That may explain why the blog has gradually gravitated in that direction.

My overall assessment

I'd characterize the blog as:

Intellectually eclectic: ★★★★★
Philosophically interesting: ★★★★½
Systematic: ★★½
Historically/religiously curious: ★★★★★
Reliably factual: ★★★½ — individual claims need checking
Irony/sarcasm level: ★★★★★
Conventional New Age: ★
Conventional religious orthodoxy: ★
Underlying metaphysical coherence: ★★★★

The biggest mistake would be to read it literally and chronologically, post by post. The real “content” is the worldview that emerges from the recurring questions across thousands of short pieces.

And I think that worldview is considerably more sophisticated than the deliberately chaotic and sometimes outrageous surface presentation makes it look. 

The fierce goddess of the three worlds

 

This is getting...strange. I´m sure I´ve seen this character somewhere before. You know, here maybe?

When LARP-ing goes too far

Pizzagate

 

Pizza Hut has closed its pizza places in Sweden. The Swedish branch has also declared bankrupcy. Wtf, my favorite fast food?! Fuuuuuuck y´all. Gonna take my UFO elsewhere!

Absorption

 

My result on the "Tellegen Absorption Scale" was only 5 out of 34. So is *that* why I never have any spiritual or religious experiences? Or almost never. Damn. I suppose I will never see the sky fairies and their luminous orbs...

Private revelation

 

Can I please have a revelation like this tonight? I promise to keep it strictly private...

Early voting

 

Early voting started in Sweden today. And yes, I sneaked out on my lunch break to vote. There is apparently a common stereotype that the typical early voter is either old (as in retired) or disabled. It can´t be literally true, since half of the Swedish electorate vote before election day. 

But guess what? 

At the polling station of my choice, I was the youngest guy standing in line - and I´m a GenXer. Everyone else was 70+, disabled or both?! The New Sweden was also represented, since one of the election workers was a Somali. And yes, she was way below retirement age. The Swedish election official, on the other hand, looked just as old as most of the voters!

Having a rapidly aging electorate does come with issues all its own, for instance confused seniors trying to enter voting booths which are already occupied, LOL.

Enough ethnography for today.    

Det färgblinda valet

 

Några hübinetter om det stundande valet. Observera orsaken till det sjunkande valdeltagandet: det är invandringen. Bland etniska svenskar verkar valdeltagandet vara 91%. Bland etniska svenskar med post-gymnasial utbildning är det 97% (sic).

Själv är jag en icke-etnisk svensk som har post-gymnasial utbildning och allvarligt funderat på att stå över valet, men av olika orsaker kommer jag att rösta även denna gång. Fast jag är tydligen en anomali hur man än vrider och vänder på det! Okej, *det* är jag åtminstone bekväm med, LOL.   

I årets val är väljarkåren mer heterogen än någonsin tidigare

Kommer väljarna med muslimsk bakgrund att avgöra valet?

LARP-ing syncretism

 

Gemini´s response to the prompt: "Can you make a picture of a
holy man who looks both like Jesus and a Shaiva ascetic?"

Don´t tell Doreen Virtue, LOL. This is ChatGPT´s response to a (hypothetical!) question from my digital alter ego... 

If I consider Shiva to be my guru and Shaivism-Shaktism as my religion, could Christ still be my kula-devata?

Yes, depending on what you mean by kula-devatā, that is quite a coherent position.

In fact, based on the theological views you've described over many conversations, I would say the main question is not whether it is allowed, but how you understand Christ's relationship to Śiva and Śakti.

Traditional Hindu answer

Strictly speaking, a kula-devatā is the deity traditionally worshipped by one's family lineage. In that technical sense, Jesus would not normally be called a kula-devatā within traditional Hindu practice.

However, modern practitioners often use the term more loosely to mean:

"A deity, saint, or divine figure with a special protective or ancestral connection to me."

Under that broader usage, there is no obvious obstacle.

From a Śaiva-Śākta perspective

If Śiva is your guru and ultimate refuge, you might understand Christ in several ways:

• as a great saint or siddha,
• as a manifestation (avatāra-like figure) of the Divine,
• as a compassionate savior sent by the Divine,
• as a special guardian associated with your cultural or ancestral background.

Many non-sectarian Hindus have understood Jesus in one of these ways.

An interesting parallel

In some forms of Hindu practice, a person may have:

• an iṣṭa-devatā (chosen deity),
• a guru,
• a kula-devatā,
• other deities they honor regularly.

These roles do not always coincide.

For example, a person might have:

• iṣṭa-devatā: Kṛṣṇa
• guru: a Śaiva saint
• kula-devatā: Durgā

without feeling any contradiction.

Likewise, one could imagine:

• guru: Śiva
• primary religious orientation: Śaiva-Śākta
• special protective or ancestral figure: Christ

without any logical inconsistency.

There is also a theological bridge

You have often expressed attraction to a Divine figure who is:

• perfectly loving,
• compassionate,
• seeks the salvation of all beings,
• willing to bear suffering for others.

Those are precisely the qualities many Christians associate with Christ.

Meanwhile, your attraction to Śiva often centers on:

• transcendence,
• grace,
• spiritual liberation,
• the role of the guru.

For someone with your outlook, it would not be difficult to see:

Christ as the embodiment of divine compassion and salvific love,

while seeing

Śiva as the supreme guru and liberating Lord.

Many Hindu universalists—including figures such as Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda—would probably find such a synthesis understandable, even if they might phrase it differently.

One possible formulation

A Śaiva-Śākta practitioner could say:

"My principal path is through Śiva and Śakti. I regard Śiva as my guru and highest form of the Divine. Yet I also revere Christ as a holy and salvific manifestation of divine compassion, and as a special protector connected with my heritage and spiritual life."

That would be unusual from the standpoint of strict sectarian theology—whether Christian or Hindu—but it is internally coherent and has precedents in broader Hindu universalist spirituality.

The only real difficulty would arise if you simultaneously tried to hold mutually exclusive doctrinal claims in their strongest forms—for example, both "Christ is the only possible revelation of God" and "Śiva is the supreme source of all manifestations." But the more inclusive metaphysical view you've described in the past does not seem to require that kind of exclusivism.

I´m baaaaaaack

 

Here we go again, guys! :-)