I am, frankly, at a loss for what more to say about The Ascension Mysteries. Each new chapter of David Wilcock’s autobiography offers a myopic list of the slights and wrongs he accrued over the decades, usually listed day-by-day, contrasted with his growing certainty that science fiction and horror movies, books, and TV shows were communicating to him cosmic secrets. (He believes Fallen Angels finance genre fiction to indoctrinate believers.) At one point we listen to Wilcock rage against a “jock kid” who humiliated him (hatred of “jocks” is an ongoing theme), and at another point he recounts his friendship with a young sadist whose parents he suspected were government UFO disinformation agents. He contrasts events like these with the music teacher who failed to recognize what he claims is his savant-like musical talent and the Cognitive Abilities Test scores that belied his low grades. “I just couldn’t take the dullness of practicing,” he writes, and that same ethos carries over into the other areas where he believes himself a genius: research, insight, and writing, all of which are decidedly lacking in the professional polish that would make this tome less of a slog. As I wrote yesterday: Please note that nothing here is intended to diagnose Wilcock with a psychological condition. The diagnoses mentioned in my review are those Wilcock disclosed himself. He did not provide a discussion of whether he sought professional treatment in the past, or whether any treatment is ongoing. Wilcock credits martial arts with helping him to overcome severe depression, and he praises himself for getting into physical altercations with his bullies and “fighting back.” By the time the seventh chapter ends, almost one-third of the book has been devoted to Wilcock’s horrific youth before high school. Then came the high school years. Wilcock talks about his ongoing battle with depression, various traumas he experienced, and his growing realization that his best chance at happiness was to be “on stage” in some capacity, because if one is famous, he said, one could land girls and command respect regardless of looks. He is still trying to live out that fantasy today, but he considers his failure to achieve universal fame a virtue, claiming that recognizing the drawbacks of celebrity is “part of the ascension process.” Then he discovers marijuana, a drug his mother (but of course) used, and receives even more bullying for becoming a pothead. His mother encouraged his pot use but only allowed it on weekends. He crash-diets and uses hyperventilation to achieve an oxygen-deprivation high that he claims produced a past-life regression (or, really, a hallucination). At times he found himself dressing and heading for school in the middle of the night only to realize that he had hallucinated his alarm going off and never checked the clock. He took LSD and experienced horrific visions, and he did mushrooms with his father while attending a Grateful Dead concert here in Albany. All of this, he says, was traumatic for him. Long before reading to this point I couldn’t take reading about any more traumas. The laundry list of misery—and even neutral or normal events mythologized into misery—was simply too great. For Pete’s sake, having an old woman mistake you for a girl because you had long hair and fair features is not the kind of event that deserves pride of place in the annals of human misery. “It only caused me to feel even more traumatized,” he writes. I had sympathy for Wilcock for a while, but the endless recounting of every slight, no matter how small, is painful to push through and unpleasant to read because Wilcock’s clunky writing ensures this is less a Bildungsroman than an invitation to Schadenfreude. Ideally, an author would be selective in details to build toward catharsis; Wilcock throws in everything that ever upset him, no matter how tangential to the alleged purpose of The Ascension Mysteries (remember those?), thereby blunting the impact of his eventual discovery of the ancient astronaut theory and its supposedly cathartic power of transformation. “More and more, I was becoming deeply introverted, paralyzingly shy, paranoid, and fearful,” he says of himself at age 17. He started having lucid dreams where he reenacted movie scenes and engaged in wish-fulfillment displays of magic powers. He said he only knew he was dreaming because no one was making fun of him. Skipping ahead to the end of his high school years (if you will allow me the jump—I don’t think you need to hear about his hundred pages of high school angst), Wilcock became a chronic drug user and chronically insecure about being “cool” as a druggie. He began to think that the TV and VCR were communicating secretly with him through high pitched squeals most people cannot hear. (This used to bother me, too, but I know that in reality some electronics give off a high pitch that adults can’t hear but children and adolescents can. Tuning in to WTVH in Syracuse on my parents’ old 1980s TV used to drive me mad because of it. I never considered it a secret message, and as I got older, like all kids, I stopped being able to hear it.) MTV, he thought, was trying to humiliate him with commercials that made fun of drugged out kids sitting and watching MTV. Wilcock claims that when he fled his school on the last day because he was high on drugs, leaving behind two pieces of jewelry that he had made, that moment of losing the jewelry caused so much trauma for him that it haunted his dreams for two decades. “If I’d had any idea at the time how much that trauma would repeat in nightmares, I would have risked everything to save my art.” The man needs help. This book reads like a cry for it. And, dear God, it just keeps getting worse. In college at SUNY New Paltz, the drugged-out Wilcock said that his dominant roommates turned him into their submissive cleaning slave. He said that they poured so many humiliations onto him in one semester that he would need another book to detail them all. Even through Wilcock’s self-pitying description I could see that his real issue seems to be difficulty with social relationships, which led to him entering into bad or even abusive relationships. Some of the actions he describes as bullying read more like his misunderstanding of adolescent attempts at male bonding, combined with his ineptitude at forging friendships. Don’t get me started about his dating woes. He describes having his mind blown by a freshman sociology class in which the professor accused oil companies of destroying the streetcar industry to benefit automobiles (Illuminati conspiracy!), and he wistfully recalls his freshman bull sessions with roommates about how corporations really run the world. Instead of recognizing these for what they were, he believes he accidentally discovered hidden truths that the public is blind to, mistaking corporate greed for Illuminati action. He quit drugs, but he came to believe that his dreams were portals to other dimensions and that the short science fiction stories he wrote were actually prophecies. He decided that his band’s song lyrics—“metal to metal, soul to soul, meshing to fusion”—were a prophecy of the 9/11 terror attacks. Around this time, he decided to start reading about ancient mysteries in the college library’s fringe history books. He claims a professor admitted to participating in the Roswell cover-up and then refused to ever speak of it again, so he didn’t bother to try to confirm the claim. At this point, halfway through Chapter 14 and still in Wilcock’s freshman year, the book abruptly stops being Wilcock’s autobiography and on a dime switches to rewriting standard conspiracy theory claims about space aliens, NASA, and government cover-ups. He says he formed his view of ancient history, aliens, and government conspiracies from ancient astronaut theorist Maurice Chatelain, whose claims he accepts wholesale from the book he picked up in the college library, and later he added those of Graham Hancock, whose Fingerprints of the Gods (1995) helped him to understand Chatelain’s references to catastrophist ideas going back to Ignatius Donnelly. The remainder of the book—its back half—is a steaming pile of warmed over internet conspiracy theories and recycled content from other conspiracy theorists (specifically Richard Hoagland), interlaced with comparisons to science fiction films that Wilcock seems to think are intentionally created to pave the way for the public to accept the coming alien/Illuminati paradigm shift and power grab in the name of the good aliens, the Alliance. This includes ancient astronaut theories, anti-government conspiracy theories, hollow Earth theories, hollow Moon theories, and so much more. He refers repeatedly to having “insider knowledge,” but offers no proof beyond attributing famous internet conspiracy theories (like George W. Bush’s supposed “ear piece”) to pseudonymous ex-government officials who sound delusional. One claimed to have led combat missions on Mars like John Carter and another to have battled insect-people at Ice Station Zebra—yes, the one from the movie! But, no, supposedly it’s all real and the movies are secret documentaries. No conspiracy is too stupid not to be confirmed by an ex-government agent. I think this line about sums up the quality of this section of the book, and why there is little point in analyzing his claims line by line: “The two most prominent movies that reveal the Alliance’s agenda and prepare us for disclosure are Iron Man 3 and Captain America: The Winter Soldier.” Wilcock can see that science fiction and fringe history are connected, but he reverses the order of operations and assumes that a real conspiracy stands behind the similarity. “Comics and other pop-culture media sources are routinely used to provide us with disclosure disguised as fiction,” he writes. Wilcock believes that the Cabal of evil aliens tried to threaten him into silence by causing a plumbing problem at his house. Big deal. These must be some awfully inept aliens. I’ve had so many household disasters that surely the aliens must be behind it all. Does that qualify for home owner’s insurance coverage? Or do aliens run the insurance companies, too, for extra cash? Oh, and the evil aliens are also secretly black magicians who can open portals with magic spells, and they are anti-gun. According to Wilcock, the evil Cabal have a plan to seize all our guns and get rid of the Second Amendment (that somehow they allowed to be enacted), and indeed the Cabal use liberalism, science, secularism, and atheism to make America weak, and only by enacting conservative policies can we guarantee the good aliens will keep the bad aliens in check. Wilcock believes that evil aliens plant damaging info-packets in one’s soul, sort of like engrams and thetans in Scientology, and only by acting according to traditional Christian morality can one avoid having them activated in a “damaging” way. The good aliens, incidentally, are cat-people, which is why Egyptians worshiped cats, I guess. These cat-people built the pyramids and the Face on Mars and gave their secrets to Mithras and Solomon. He adds that the skeletons of giants were not, as many have argued, the bones of Ice Age mammals (actually, he misunderstands Adrienne Mayor as referring to dinosaurs), but those of space aliens, who came back to remove the bones so no one can find proof of their existence. As you must have guessed, because no fringe theory is complete without them, these aliens are the Watchers or Fallen Angels of Genesis 6:4 and the Book of Enoch. He redefines God to be the plural Elohim, who are the “good ETs,” and assigns the Watchers to be the “bad ETs.” Citing Jim Vieira, he argues that the Watchers’ children, the Giants, were the residents of Atlantis and that Noah’s Flood sank the lost continent: Just as the Book of Enoch indicated, giants from this civilization did survive all over the Earth after the epic Atlantean flood. They were often reduced to a primitive level, such as in the Americas. They continued to build mounds, even if only out of dirt, to commemorate their ancient legacy. This is, of course, warmed-over Ignatius Donnelly, who wasn’t even being original when he made that claim back in 1882.
The giants had elongated skulls and were, according to Wilcock, the ancestors of European nobility and key members of the Vatican’s secret circles. U.S. presidents are descendants of the giants through European aristocrats. These giants are, of course, also “international bankers.” There is so much more, but it’s all recycled crap from other fringe writers—Peter Lemesurier on Christian “codes” in the Great Pyramid (from 1977’s The Great Pyramid Decoded), Helena Blavatsky on Pyramid mysticism, various internet memes—that there is no purpose in reviewing material that was debunked decades or even a century or more ago. Instead, I will skip ahead to the final claim of the book, the actual “secret” of the Ascension Mysteries. I don’t feel bad about giving it away because this misshapen mess of a book is a classic bait-and-switch. According to Wilcock, he planned to teach the reader how to reach the extraterrestrials, but his “dreams” told him at the last minute to junk that and write about his traumatic youth for two-thirds of the book and conspiracy theories for the other third instead. So, bottom line, here is how you “ascend” to superpowers in the heaven-dimension, in toto: “All you have to do is be slightly above 50 percent ‘service to others’ as opposed to ‘service to self’ and you are cleared for ascension.” Yup, that’s it. There is none of complex argument between salvation through faith or works as in Christianity, or abnegation of the self as in Buddhism. There is only a mechanical calculation in which you can be 49.999% selfish dick and still be a superhuman. I guess that explains why Wilcock praises himself as a global force for good: “Now I am glad to be a force for good by starring in Ancient Aliens on the History Channel, and sharing information that can help wake people up from the lies and myths of mainstream reality.” That’s about 49% selfish humblebrag, wouldn’t you say?
51 Comments
Kal
9/26/2016 10:47:29 am
First.
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Time Machine
9/26/2016 12:34:49 pm
It's all very similar to banal religiosity
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Time Machine
9/26/2016 12:36:56 pm
Witness how Leary, Arguelles, Terence K. McKenna and others all regarded psychoactive plants to be divine.
Liz
9/30/2017 01:05:34 pm
Mr. David Wilcox is handsome & entertaining.
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Tom
9/26/2016 01:02:19 pm
Judging by your review, Mr Wilcock is so self centered it verges on solipsism.
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Shane Sullivan
9/26/2016 01:04:18 pm
"All you have to do is be slightly above 50 percent ‘service to others’ as opposed to ‘service to self’ and you are cleared for ascension."
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Bob Jase
9/26/2016 01:11:21 pm
Wilcock would have saved himself the trouble of his unhappy life if only he had clicked his heels three time while saying, "There's no place like home."
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Ken
9/26/2016 01:21:06 pm
I would agree with DW in his assertion; “... I am glad to be a force for good by starring in Ancient Aliens..." since, despite all its nonsense, it offers so-called "reasons" for the existence of god(s).
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TheBigMike
9/26/2016 02:04:47 pm
Oh... my... wow. Okay, so my first comment is about all this "trauma" that Wilcock experienced. I am in no way trying to diminish the psychological impact of his expereinces but "trauma" is not the word for like any of that. Witnessing a hippie overdose not withstanding (mentioned in previous blog post about Wilcock's early years) the things Jason says this man describes are not trauma, at least not when talking in technical and clinical terms. Trauma, in the DSM-5, is defined as "actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence."
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Shane Sullivan
9/26/2016 03:17:34 pm
If he thinks being mistaken for a girl by an old woman is traumatic, then it's a good thing he wasn't mistaken for a girl by Santa Claus.
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Time Machine
9/26/2016 08:34:23 pm
@TheBigMike
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Gunn
9/26/2016 02:11:05 pm
I think Wilcock would have carried a much lighter load in his youth had he garnered a better degree of forgiveness in his heart for people...somehow.
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Time Machine
9/26/2016 08:36:18 pm
You mean to say that you are over 15 ??!!!
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Only Me
9/26/2016 03:02:15 pm
Wilcock has basically admitted he's socially awkward and emotionally stunted. Normal, everyday life is a continuous chain of events that are "traumatizing" because no one recognizes his genius. As a result, we have "mainstream reality" and his reality.
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9/26/2016 03:08:19 pm
That's the 49% "service to self" talking. His public service on Ancient Aliens puts him at 51% "service to others" to clear him for ascension.
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Only Me
9/26/2016 03:55:52 pm
You should use that in response to your critics.
David Bradbury
9/26/2016 04:59:43 pm
I'm pretty sure it's Jason's "service to others" which makes the fringe community uncomfortable !
Time Machine
9/26/2016 08:37:38 pm
>>socially awkward and emotionally stunted<<
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Only Me
9/26/2016 09:19:30 pm
I would ask if you could prove that, but I already know the answer is no. Just like all your other sweeping generalizations.
Time Machine
9/27/2016 12:07:52 am
It's only mind-expansion that makes Homo Sapiens different from all other species on Planet Earth - mind-expansion created by psychedelic drugs,
Time Machine
9/27/2016 12:18:33 am
Still looking for those translations found with Mesopotamian reliefs. Probably not translated because the origins of Homo Sapiens Law and Civilization was developed from mind expansion and it would be too terrible for that to be translated.
Time Machine
9/27/2016 12:26:54 am
It would be great to have the raw and original version of the myth of Oannes and not to rely on a late version of the myth by Berossus.
Only Me
9/27/2016 12:49:03 am
And none of those replies answered the original claim.
Time Machine
9/27/2016 01:11:54 am
LOL
Only Me
9/27/2016 01:45:46 am
>>>Drugs are the only explanation for the origin of religion and the origin of civilization developed from mind expansion of Homo Sapiens<<<
Time Machine
9/27/2016 06:14:13 am
Spam from a religious fundamentalist.
Gunn
9/27/2016 10:01:58 am
No Longer Any Templar Secrets (Time Machine, Broken), there is a point at which doubt denies and deprives the doubters.
Only Me
9/27/2016 01:56:47 pm
>>>Spam from a religious fundamentalist.<<<
Chris Lovegrove
9/26/2016 05:26:04 pm
Didn't David Wilcock claim he was the reincarnation of someone a while back? Jason, any ideas?
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9/26/2016 05:33:50 pm
Many people claim he is the reincarnation of Edgar Cayce, but my understanding is that he doesn't specifically claim this himself but encourages his fans to discuss it.
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Jim
9/26/2016 06:45:30 pm
Maybe a cross between Edgar Cayce and Edgar Rice Burroughs ?
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Clint Knapp
9/27/2016 07:26:06 am
Specifically, that would be Wynn Free's bailiwick. He wrote a book called "The Reincarnation of Edgar Cayce?: Interdimensional Communication and Global Transformation" revolving around the belief and based largely on parallels between what Cayce promoted himself as, what Wilcock promotes himself as, and the time-honored reincarnation studies method of side by side photographs showing even the vaguest similarities.
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9/26/2016 07:57:37 pm
The question mark is what makes it legit. After all, it's just something everyone is saying. He totally can't help it if his fans and coauthor think that!
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Brian
9/26/2016 07:55:25 pm
Good grief. He makes David Icke look almost coherent. Next to this self-absorbed guy, my childhood was a Lovecraftian horror story of cosmic proportions. And there are people who follow him, pay attention to him, look up to him?? I think my despair over the human species just hit a new low.
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Time Machine
9/26/2016 08:53:03 pm
Here's a good one
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David Bradbury
9/27/2016 03:16:51 am
Marcus Aurelius did not speak or write English, so that is not a quotation from Marcus Aurelius.
Time Machine
9/27/2016 06:13:20 am
Do you want the source?
Time Machine
9/27/2016 06:37:58 am
It's actually a paraphrase taken from here
David Bradbury
9/27/2016 03:33:59 pm
It's not even exactly a paraphrase; more an over-simplification of a poor translation. The word rendered as "opinion" is "ὑπόληψις" which literally means "taking up"- so we receive a sensory impression, and once it has entered us, our brain/soul takes it up and processes it.
Shane Sullivan
9/27/2016 06:38:12 pm
Furthermore, considering that this was Marcus Aurelius, I'm pretty sure he was talking about not allowing himself to be bothered by things external to himself, not about the absolute nature of truth. He was a Stoic, not a Pyrrhonian.
Dale Martin
9/26/2016 08:32:23 pm
Did anyone here ever read Mein Kampf ? This sounds a lot like little Dolfi Schicklegueber and his childhood angst...At least Hitler had the good sense not to go hog wild on the childhood thing...This guy is just painful to read, like Adolf..
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Kal
9/27/2016 04:57:18 pm
"Anyone will be made to believe a lie if you repeat it enough."
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Kal
9/27/2016 04:59:01 pm
Mr. Wilcox is a shining example of self actualized schadenfreude, taking pleasure from his own alleged pain.
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TheBigMike
9/27/2016 11:16:59 pm
Actually Kal, I think you are misunderstanding what self-actualization is. Nothing about Mr. Wilcock is an example of any type of self-actualization. The term is used differently in several different psychological theories but they all revolve around the idea of people realizing their full potential. According to Maslow and his Hierarchy of Needs (probably one of the most popular theories among undergrad psych majors, after Freud and his psychosexual stages of development...) people gravitate towards a state of self-actualization as they fulfill needs. The basic levels of the Heirarchy of needs goes Physiological, Safety, Love/Belonging, Esteem, and finally Self-Actualization. If you examine Mr. Wilcock and place him on the spectrum of these needs, he is clearly still trying to fulfill his need for love and belonging, meaning he is a far cry from self-actualized.
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nomuse
9/28/2016 12:45:43 am
I have GOT to read this earlier in the day. I misinterpreted above as Edgar Cayce doesn't claim to be a reincarnation of Edgar Cayce. (Which sounds like something Dali would say.)
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Chris Aitken
10/2/2016 10:06:47 am
In the old days you could have simply said Wilcock was a 'woosie', and that would have been the end of it. How carefully we have to guard our words these days...
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Daniel Djadan
10/2/2016 01:55:08 pm
Troubled kids like David Wilcock either bring a gun to school and open fire at the "jocks" and "bullies" who oppressed them, or escape into fantasy and find solace in imagining that the physical world will soon be destroyed in some cataclysmic event such as a solar flare.
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Ursa*Major
3/3/2017 03:25:04 pm
I've read the review and all the comments, and notice that none of the heavy intellectuals on this site has come up with an explanation for the causes of seemingly endless war on planet Earth, which Wilcock at least has a theory about, and is willing to go public with. Is no one else interested? . . . That would be a real 'service to other', wouldn't it? To help create peace on earth? That's not a pointless exercise, no matter how flawed in the attempt, surely. . . . (And, yes, I agree, Penguin does seem to have fired its fact-checkers [and perhaps its structural editors as well].)
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Damo from Dubbo
3/27/2018 09:22:13 am
Fuck me,
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Joris Vander Cammen
3/28/2019 07:48:14 am
I have to agree with "URSA*MAJOR" on the fact that this 'review' and comments seem like a venting session for people with no real grasp on their ego.
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AuthorI am an author and researcher focusing on pop culture, science, and history. Bylines: New Republic, Esquire, Slate, etc. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. Newsletters
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