by Johnny Satan
Meister Eckhart, the medieval German mystic, and others have called this the ‘eternal Now’. Charlie knew all about this too. ‘No past-time burnt-books burnt-past burnt. All bridges melted with dope and fervor. All time factors in the now. The now of Charlie’, as Mr Sanders puts it in his rather biased way. The man who, like Charlie, has achieved cosmic consciousness, lives in and from the level of the Now, but the average mortal, who lives in, for, and from ego consciousness only, can only find the Now in death. Hence it was only logical that Charlie should deal in death (‘Death is Charlie’s trip’, as Tex Watson, the most devoted and savage of his murder squad, laconically and truly observed). And so, if we are to believe an account attributed to local residents, when one of his minor associates, Shorty Shea, showed signs of ‘snitching’, ‘they got Shorty in his car ... They hit him in the head with a big wrench. They took him with them. They let him sweat. When he would come to, they would cut him some more. He was begging for his life. They finally had to cut his head off. He got to NOW, and they killed him.’
Logical enough, you will say, but Charlie was himself perfectly capable of making distinctions and could concede that there were occasions on which people were not ready physically to undergo the supreme experience: ‘Her ego wasn’t ready to die,’ he said of Linda Kasabian on one occasion, an imperfection on her part which was to prove fatal to him.
Once you have reached the stage of the eternal Now, all is One, as Parmenides taught in ancient Greece. ‘After all,’ Manson said, ‘we are all one.’ Killing someone therefore is just like breaking off a piece of cooky. And did not the Manson adage say, ‘If you’re willing to be killed you should be willing to kill’? He was perfectly sincere in this and sometimes would hand his knife to an adversary, bidding him kill him. The offer was never accepted for the Family regarded Charlie as almost divine. This was his third level of awareness: the crucified ego merges into the Infinite, transcends Time and descends again, transfigured into a ‘superego’ or ‘superman’.
‘We are all one’; this is the obverse of the eternal Now. This whole philosophy was long ago summed up in an ancient Hindu scripture: ‘Whoso thus knows that he is the Absolute, becomes this whole universe. Even the gods have not the power to cause him to un be, for he becomes their own self.’ Or, as country Sue, a member of the Family, puts it in her more rustic way: ‘And like, I’m willing to die for anyone, anyone who’s me, ‘cause it’s like one soul.’
The ‘Soul’ plays an important part in the Manson ideology. As in Hinduism it is the Absolute both with and without attributes.
Without attributes it is the Now of which nothing can be positively predicated: with attributes it is incarnate in Charlie Manson: ‘I am Charlie and Charlie is me’ is a correct statement of the faith. More elaborately formulated, it could be put in this way: ‘Charlie is above wants and desires – he is dead. It isn’t Charlie any more. It is the Soul. They are Charlie and Charlie is they.’ And, of course, this total cohesion implies love: ‘There were men there who were great lovers, lots of them, ready for love that was total.’ Not all, however, could reach this exalted state: they had to be brought there, so far as this is possible, by either LSD or ultrasex, or both.
Manson acted on his beliefs, and many a ‘rich pig’ was to meet a gruesome and untimely end because Charlie, so far from being mad, had a lucidly logical mind. When acting on the purely relative plain, Charlie had developed his own techniques for destroying that wicked little ego with its absurd pretensions to independence. The sufficient formula on which these techniques were based was simply ‘ultra sex’, performed either with or without the help of LSD. There was nothing half hearted about Charlie’s ‘sexual magic’: ‘It could be called an exhaustion grope ... [He] felt that it was only after the first three or four hours that the sex really got good-when the woman “gave up”, lost her ego entirely, then the act was of the Soul. And it was true.’
Take the case of Linda Kasabian.
‘That night Linda Kasabian encountered her first mystic experience at the ranch. She and Tex Watson made love in a dark shed and it was, as she later testified, unlike anything she’d ever experienced. It was total, but eerie, as if she were being possessed by some force from without. Her hands were clenched at her side at the culmination of the sex and her arms were paralysed.
‘Later she asked Gypsy about the meaning of such paralysis. Gypsy reportedly told her that such things occurred when you don’t give in completely to a man: her ego was dying.’ Alas, it was not quite dead, and Linda ‘snitched’. But even after she had become the principal witness for the prosecution, and had decided that perhaps Charlie was not really Jesus Christ but the Devil, she continued to love him as she loved everyone. Whatever Charlie’s defects may have been, he certainly inspired love and absolute devotion. As ‘God’ he could be both the Christ of St John who is love and the Christ of the Book of Revelation who wreaks terrible vengeance on the unrepentant wicked or, in Charlie’s peculiar mythology, ‘rich pigs’.
There is no need to go into Charlie Manson’s eschatology, which was extremely bizarre. It must, however, be said that his power over women was based on a masochism that seems to be innate though usually dormant in the female sex. To be violently raped can result in a real dissolution of the ego, and Charlie knew it. Being sexually totally possessed was, he thought, what every woman really wanted: ergo woman is naturally a slave and a whore. Once this truth is brought home to her she must rejoice in her own annihilation and degradation. Hence she must be prostituted to real one hundred per cent he men-the bikers (Satan Slaves and the Straight Satans whose device was ‘love hate’), who ‘loved it’. This was the role of women in the bringing about of the new era.
And then there were the negroes. Charlie had little respect for their intelligence, but they were much nearer to the One ness of the Soul. He used to say, we are told, that blackie was much more aware than whitey and super together, and whitey was just totally untogether, just would not get together; they were off on these side trips, and blackie was really together. This was his strength, as it was that of Charlie’s Family. Hence ‘blackie’, through his sense of togetherness and Oneness, would be God’s instrument in destroying the fragmented mechanical rot that was whitey. Meanwhile, the Family would retire to a strange underground paradise biding their time. When all was over, blackie, realizing his total incompetence to organize himself, could appeal to the hidden Messiah who would emerge to take charge of the New Jerusalem which would also be Aristotle’s orderly army in which the general and his ordered ranks were in some sense one. His vision of the new era may have been slightly mad, but it was certainly no madder than Teilhard de Chardin’s vision of a world converging on itself in joy. This vision apart, which did not derive from his own enlightenment but from the mystico occult sects that proliferated in the Los Angeles of his time, Charles Manson was absolutely sane: he had been there, where there is neither good nor evil, and he had read and reread the Book of Revelation. These two facts explain his crimes.
‘This is not I: this is not mine: this is not the self: this has nothing to do with a self.’ This refrain runs throughout the whole Buddhist tradition in all its multifarious forms. Your ego does not exist in any shape or form that you could possibly identify with yourself.
This is indeed the essence of the gospel according to Charles Manson too. But he did not know that the Buddha, like the God of the Old Testament, had, though perhaps for less obvious reasons, commanded his disciples not to kill, not to fornicate, and not to steal.
For Charlie, who, after that forty five mile walk, had surmounted death and tasted of ‘enlightenment’, no such commands and prohibitions had any relevance. He was not mean. Generous to a fault, he stole, since he believed that all private property was stolen goods anyhow, and in his Family all things were held in common: but what he stole he was always happy to give away again. ‘This is not mine.’
‘This is not I.’ This dawned on him with marvellous clarity as he c
ollapsed as if dead in the desert. It was no longer he that was alive but the Soul that lived in him. He was the Soul, and the Soul is all things, present in all things, just as Christ, according to Catholic belief, is wholly present in every single consecrated Host throughout the world. In eternity – the eternal Now – there was no Charles Manson, only the Soul. And yet, as in the case of his precursor, Crowley, once he emerged from the Now, he emerged not as himself nor yet as the Great Beast whose number is 666, as did Crowley, but as the avenging Christ of the Apocalypse himself. This, he seems to have thought, was his role on earth, just as it had been the role of Jesus to suffer and die at his first coming. The two roles are the two faces of the same coin. In the Now and the One Soul all the opposites are united:
Should the killer think: ‘I kill,’
Or the killed: ‘I have been killed,’
Both of these have no [right] knowledge:
He does not kill nor is he killed.
So spake the ancient Hindu text; and it spoke rightly, for in eternity there can be no action, but in time each man seems to have his own particular part to play: everyone has his own karma, as Charlie knew, and, for better or for worse, ‘death was Charlie’s trip’.
This is a great mystery – and the eternal paradox with which the Eastern religions perpetually wrestle. If the ultimate truth, or the ‘perennial philosophy’ as Aldous Huxley called it, is that ‘All is One’ and ‘One is All’, and that in this One all the opposites, including good and evil, are eternally reconciled, then have we any right to blame Charles Manson? For seen from the point of view of the eternal Now, he did nothing at all.
PART TWO : HELTER SKELTER
Sick city, yeah, restless people From the sick city burnt their houses down To make the sky look pretty. What can I do, I’m just a person, This is the line we always seem to hear, You just sit, things get worse And watch TV and drink your beer. Walking all alone Not going anywhere, Nobody seemed to care, Restless as the wind. This town is killing me, Got to put an end to this restless misery, I’m just one of those restless people Can never seem to be satisfied with living in this sick old Sick city. It may be too late for me to say goodbye, And I might be too late To watch this sick old city die. Going on the road, Yeah I’m gonna try To say sick city so long farewell And die.
(“Sick City”)
Pretty girl, pretty girl, Cease to exist, Just come and say you love me, Give up your world C’mon you can see I’m your kind, I’m your kind You can see. Walk on, walk on, I love you pretty girl, My life is yours and You can have my world. Never had a lesson I ever learned, But I know we all get our turn, I love you. Submission is a gift, Go on, give it to your brother, Love and understanding is for one another. I’m your kind, I’m your kind, I’m your mind I’m your brother. I never had a lesson I ever learned But I know we all get our turn, And I love you. I never learned not to love you, I never learned.
(“Cease To Exist”)
THE TRIAL TESTIMONY OF CHARLES MANSON
JUDGE OLDER: Do you have anything to say?
CHARLES MANSON: Yes, I do. There has been a lot of charges and a lot of things said about me and brought against me and brought against the co defendants in this case, of which a lot could be cleared up and clarified to where everyone could understand exactly what the Family was supposed to have been, what the philosophies in regards to the Family were, and whether or not there was any conspiracy to commit murder, to commit crimes, and to explain to you who think with your minds. It is hard for you to conceive of a philosophy of someone that may not think.
I have spent my life in jail, and without parents. I have looked up to the strongest father figure, and I have always looked to the people in the free world as being the good people, and the people in the inside of jail as being the bad people. I never went to school, so I never growed up in the respect to learn to read and write so good, so I have stayed in jail and I have stayed stupid, I have stayed a child while I have watched your world grow up, and then I look at the things that you do and I don’t understand. I don’t understand the courts, and I don’t understand a lot of things that are brought against me.
You write things about my mother in the newspaper that hasn’t got anything to do with anything in particular. You invent stories, and everybody thinks what they do, and then they project it from the witness stand on the defendant as if that is what he did. For example, Danny DeCarlo’s testimony. He said that I hate black men, and he said that we thought alike, that him and I was a lot alike in our thinking. But actually all I ever did with DeCarlo or any other human being was reflect himself back at himself. If he said he did not like the black man, I would say: “Okay.” I had better sense than tell him I did not dislike the black man. I just listened to him and I would react to his statement. So consequently he would drink another beer and walk off and pat me on the back and he would say to himself: “Charlie thinks like I do.” But actually he does not know how Charlie thinks because Charlie has never projected himself.
But maybe the girls and women in your world outside... Being by yourself for such a long time when you do get out you appreciate things that people don’t even see, you walk over them every day.
Like in jail you have a whole new attitude or a whole different way of thinking. I don’t think like you people. You people put importance on your lives. Well, my life has never been important to anyone, not even in the understanding of the way you fear the things that you fear, and the things you do.
I know that the only person I can judge is me. I judge what I have done and I judge what I do and I look and I live with myself every day.
I am content with myself. If you put me in the penitentiary, that means nothing because you kicked me out of the last one. I didn’t ask to get released. I liked it in there because I like myself. But in your world it’s hard because your understanding and your values are different.
These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn’t teach them. I just tried to help them stand up. Most of the people at the ranch that you call The Family were just people that you did not want, people that were alongside the road, people that their parents had kicked them out or they did not want to go to Juvenile Hall, so I did the best the best I could and I took them up on my garbage dump and I told them this: that in love there is no wrong.
I don’t care. I have one law and I learned it while I was a kid in reform school. It’s: don’t snitch. And I have never snitched. And I told them that anything they do for their brothers and sisters is good, if they do it with a good thought. It is not my responsibility. It is your responsibility. It is the responsibility you have towards your own children who you are neglecting, and then you want to put the blame on me again and again and again. Over and over you put me in your penitentiary. I did not build the penitentiary. I would not lock one of you up. I could not see locking another human being up.
You eat meat with your teeth and you kill things that are better than you are, and in the same respect you say how bad, and even killers, that your children are. You make your children what they are.
I am just a reflection of every one of you. I have never learned anything wrong. In the penitentiary, I have never found a bad man.
Every man in the penitentiary has always showed me his good side, and circumstances put him where he was. He would not be there, he is good, human, just like the policeman that arrested him is a good human.
I have nothing against none of you. I can’t judge any of you. But I think it is high time that you all started looking at yourselves, and judging the lie that you live in. I sit and watch you from nowhere, and I have nothing in my mind, no malice against you and no ribbons for you. But you stand and you play the game of money. As long as you can sell a newspaper, some sensationalism, and you can laugh at someone and look down at someone, you know. You just sell those newspapers for public opinion, just like you are all hung on public opinion, and none of you have any idea what you are doing. You are just doin
g what you are doing for the money, for a little bit of attention from somebody.
I can’t dislike you, but I will say this to you: You haven’t got long before you are all going to kill yourselves because you are all crazy.
And you can project it back onto me, and you can say that it’s me that cannot communicate, and you can say that it’s me that don’t have any understanding, and you can say that when I am dead your world will be better, and you can lock me up in your penitentiary and you can forget about me. But I’m only what lives inside you, each and every one of you.
These children, they take a lot of narcotics because you tell them not to. Any child you put in a room and you tell them: “Don’t go through that door,” he never thought of going through that door until you told him to go through the door. You go to the high schools and you show them pills and you show them not what to take, how else would they know what it was unless you tell them? And then you tell them what you don’t want them to do in the hopes they will go out and do it and then you can play your game with them and then you can give attention to them, because you don’t give them any of your love. You only give them frustration, you only give them your anger, you only give them the bad part of you rather than give them the good part of you. You should all turn around and face your children and start following them and listening to them.
The music speaks to you every day but you are too deaf, dumb and blind to stop what you are doing. You point and you ridicule. But it’s okay, it’s all okay. It doesn’t really make any difference because we are all going to the same place anyway. It’s all perfect. There is a God. He sits right over here beside me. That is your God. This is your God. But let me tell you something: There is another Father and he has much more might than you imagine.