People continually moan about how difficult the world is, about how it's so hard to understand, about how they have no sense that they have a soul, that they find it impossible to accept the existence of God. Everything seems futile and pointless, they say. They already seem dead. No light flickers in their eyes. Welcome to Zombie Land, the modern world.
We have done this to ourselves. Or, rather, evolution has. All steps forward summon a dialectical antithesis. If the dialectic isn't handled properly, disaster is possible and even probable.
The last three thousand years have been the era of human consciousness, but things haven't gone too well so far. Consciousness is exactly what evolution is seeking to accomplish, yet it has had a catastrophic impact in so many ways, particularly in that it has distanced us from the infinite power of the unconscious where our true superpowers reside, and where our spiritual aspect lives.
This is the strange tale of how consciousness has been both the marvel of evolution, and its greatest curse. Consciousness has a long way to go before it can make us happy, before it can allow us to be everything we need to be.
Moreover, we will demonstrate something astounding: two thirds of the human race can barely be considered conscious at all, and it is their lack of consciousness that underlies so many of the world's ills.
The greatest challenge facing the human race isn't global warming or over-population or financial chaos - it's consciousness, and how to get it to function properly. It's not evolution that's in charge of this process: we are. It's up to us to raise our consciousness to the next level.
Ordinary consciousness has thrown up two main types of human being:
1) Stupid and lazy people who have a childish understanding of God, the soul and the afterlife. In truth, they haven't understood the first thing about religion and they are horrifically alienated from their true selves, preferring to worship some narcissistic, egomaniacal dictator (the Abrahamic God) who demands absolute obedience. The most obvious question has passed these people by - why would God, the supreme cosmic power, have any desire to be worshipped? Is he supremely conceited? Does he love the sight of people grovelling to him, afraid to raise their eyes? Is that how he gets his kicks? Does he love it when people beg him for favours, when the masses get down on their hands and knees to him to entreat him for help? Does it fill him with pleasure when his "followers" murder people in his name and offer up their bloody slaughter to him as a "gift"? What kind of fucking monster is this? How could any sane person have such a perverse relationship with God, and such a weird idea of his true nature? Our task is not to worship God but to become God, to unite with the cosmic Mind. God's consciousness is completed through us. He is not perfect until we are. If we "worship" him then we are useless to him. Worshippers are never anything other than pathetic, clueless non-entities. The whole concept of "worship" must be abolished. We must stop worshipping the rich, the powerful, the shining celebrities. Fuck them all. WORSHIP NO ONE!!! Everyone who wants you to worship anything at all has an agenda, and that agenda is to control you by making you inferior: by creating an enormous, unbridgeable divide between you and the thing worshipped. The only voices you should ever listen to are those that seek to raise you up, not cast you down. Never grovel to another. Never bend your knee. Never bow. Never avert your eyes. Condemn anyone who says that you should do any of these things. They are trying to make you a second-class citizen. So, if you are about to encounter a monarch, pope or president and an adviser approaches you and tells you to bow, say "Kiss my ASS!!!" The idea that any human being should bow to another is ludicrous beyond words. All people who subscribe to these nauseating systems of etiquette, designed to create a power differential between two people, must be swept aside forever.
2) The second and less numerous class of people are those who have taken their primitive, feeble consciousness and reason as the supreme reality of the existence and decided that there is nothing mysterious "out there". They literally think that scientific materialism can answer everything, and that there is no place for God, souls or the afterlife. They are so deluded by this consciousness of theirs that they have turned their back entirely on the infinitely more potent unconscious where every secret of the cosmos truly resides. These people effectively deny the existence of the unconscious. When pushed, they even deny the existence of the mind and free will - because these are totally incompatible with the rigorous, deterministic paradigm of scientific materialism which reduces the whole of existence to the mere jostling of lifeless, mindless atoms. These jostlings, they say, are entirely dictated by the laws of physics, and "mind" simply doesn't have any role in the laws of physics since free will is nowhere present in the laws of physics. (Any physical law based on free will wouldn't be a law since it would be subject to whim rather than certainty.) If eternal, immutable laws are all there is then their conclusion is entirely correct. But, of course, when you ask scientists what the origins of these laws are, where the laws are stored, where they were located before the Big Bang in order to shape that event, how they came into existence in the first place, and how atoms "know" how to act in accordance with these laws, then they have no answers for you. Their position amounts to a kind of mind blindness brought on by a flawed and arrogant rationality that, ironically, is shown to be fundamentally irrational when its axioms are logically examined. The Illuminati are well qualified to say so because many of their members come from just this background of atheistic, scientific hyper-rationality. It was only when they engaged in "deep thought" that they realised the entire paradigm of contemporary science was built on sand. Although science provides brilliant answers in specific areas - those areas that have no connection with mind and free will - its understanding of the true workings of the cosmos is astoundingly close to zero.
We want to show you some true magic - the mysterious power of the unconscious human mind. We want to show you that there was a time when people were much more in tune with the cosmos than we are now, who had none of the existential fears we have today, who found life remarkably straightforward. No doubts plagued them. Why? Because they did not have consciousness as we now experience it.
Consciousness has an inevitable consequence when it first appears: alienation. It automatically alienates us from others. It is the essence of individuation. It makes us feel fundamentally alone in the world. Our consciousness is uniquely ours: our joy and our burden. Consciousness also, and equally significantly, alienates us from our unconscious, which is where all of the secrets of the cosmos have their home. Thus we become estranged from the truth of the cosmos. We are thrown onto our own, limited, finite conscious resources, which are as nothing in comparison with the unlimited, infinite nature of the cosmos. This tension between the finite and the infinite, the mortal and immortal, produces a terrible anxiety within us. It seems as though an uncrossable chasm exists between the cosmos and us. Some people fill that frightening abyss by worshipping an infinite dictator - the God of Abrahamism. Others fill it with the ineffable laws of physics. But there is only one healthy way to bridge it: by rediscovering the unconscious, by tapping into its infinite power, and, ultimately, by discovering the supreme mystery that exists at its core - God.
God is inside all of us. By venturing into our unconscious, we all have the opportunity to find God at our centre. We can all become God. We have been given a special program - the "God Program" - that allows us to accomplish this transcendent feat. It is this program that underpins all religious feelings, all intuitions about souls and the afterlife. Unfortunately, the program can be sabotaged - by consciousness! Consciousness does not understand the unconscious. It's as if consciousness is harnessed to an infinite cloud of impenetrable mystery. Naturally, the consciousness is disturbed by this and seeks to defend itself against the existential angst the unconscious generates. Consciousness goes into denial. It represses difficult ideas. It projects the contents of the unconscious onto external objects. It does everything it can to detach itself from the unconscious, to make it seem as though the unconscious isn't there at all. Everything it does is the opposite of what it should be doing. Consciousness needs to become the partner of the unconscious, not its lifelong sworn foe.
Why do people fear death? It's because they have identified themselves with their space-time consciousness which is sure to perish. However, as soon as you realise that your true self is actually connected to your unconscious, which is not in space-time, you will understand that you cannot die. You simply change. And, in fact, it's your consciousness that is the vehicle of change, that undergoes radical change from one life to another. It's your consciousness that is on a remarkable journey. But where is it going? Into the heart of the unconscious, of course, where all the answers lie. When consciousness accomplishes the supreme quest and ventures all the way to the centre of the unconscious, it achieves gnosis - God consciousness.
But there are so many obstacles. Doubt is the biggest. Scientific materialism has made billions struggle to experience God in any meaningful way. Yet, when it comes to the most fundamental questions of existence, the claims of science are simply ludicrous.
Consider the Big Bang. Some scientists claim that it was the product of a quantum fluctuation, but this is impossible. Quantum mechanics is intimately related to space and time, but scientists will eagerly tell you that space and time didn't exist before the Big Bang, hence neither did quantum mechanics, hence there was no ineffable quantum fluctuation that gave rise to the Big Bang. No scientist has ever grasped that the Big Bang cannot be explained by the laws of physics if these are fundamentally materialistic in nature - since there was no material prior to the Big Bang, hence no laws of physics. According to materialism, the materialistic laws of physics must come into being WITH the Big Bang, hence have no connection with the CAUSE of the Big Bang. Logically, from the perspective of materialism, the laws of physics are an effect of the Big Bang, not its cause. So, science, in its present form, can NEVER explain what caused the Big Bang using science. Scientists are forced to engage in metaphysical speculation i.e. they must acknowledge the supremacy of philosophy.
Physicist Stephen Hawking claimed that science had made philosophy redundant. What a fool. Science is entirely subservient to philosophy. Only philosophy can get to the truth. Why? Because philosophy is a subject that addresses the mind while science addresses matter. Science has tried to banish the mind, which is surely the most foolish undertaking in the history of the cosmos. There is only one plausible thing that can precede matter. It certainly isn't NOTHING as scientists claim. In fact, it's MIND. That is the secret of the universe. Mind is the fundamental reality. The laws of physics formed mentally and then gave rise to the material universe. Those laws didn't magically spring out of nothing, along with an entire universe, as scientists so ridiculously assert. And scientists have the arrogance to call religion stupid!!!
When we say "Mind", we are referring to an unconscious cosmic mind. What that unconsciousness is striving to do is become conscious - which is the ultimate manifestation and actualisation of mind's potential. God's is the mind that has made all that is unconscious conscious. We, the human race, are a long way behind God. We have a spark of consciousness amongst an ocean of the unconscious. Our task is to fully illuminate the unconscious, and when we have done so we become God.
The medieval tales of the quest for the Holy Grail were ingenious because they were based on a fork in the road that was sure to lure the unworthy down the wrong path, and to attract only those who understood the true nature of the test. The unworthy were obsessed with the Grail as a specific, precious object that they could find if they searched long and hard enough. And they all failed. The Holy Grail IS an object, but in order to understand what it is you must first accomplish a spiritual, not a physical journey. Only the spiritual can attain the Grail. To find the Grail, you have to use lateral thinking. You have to understand that it's necessary to find something else first, and that until you have achieved this other quest, you can never achieve the Grail Quest. You have to take a step BACK before you can go forward. So many knights failed to understand that simple requirement.
They thought that if they found the Grail they would have all the answers to their life. In fact, the reverse is true. You must find the answers to your life before you can have the Grail.
Zen Buddhists talk of attaining satori - a flash of enlightenment. They seek to build on this, to keep expanding on it until they attain full enlightenment: nirvana. In terms of the Grail, someone who has started to have regular flashes of enlightenment is on the verge of Grail consciousness. The Holy Grail is the most sacred object of the Illuminati and only those who have attained the highest mystery degree know the Grail's location. The Grail is in fact a "gnosis accelerator". The Grail transforms episodic enlightenment into full and final gnosis. It's the holiest and most sacred object of all - the supreme culmination of spirituality - because it is none other than the Heavengate: the God Portal. To use the Grail is to become God.
Thus there is no object more precious, more remarkable, more magical, more mystical, and more divine than the Holy Grail. Centuries ago, the leaders of the Illuminati went to astounding lengths to safeguard it and ensure it never fell into the wrong hands. In the event that all of the leaders were killed, they left a fabulously intricate puzzle that could be solved to ascertain its whereabouts. But they deliberately included many highways and byways that would mislead those who did not have the noblest and most spiritual of intentions. In essence, only those who have already attained the foothills of gnosis can solve the puzzle. Such people are able to make remarkable intuitive leaps that link together parts of the puzzle in a way that would never occur to those lacking the necessary intuitive qualities.
We cannot stress enough the importance of intuition, for what is intuition but an astonishing ability to derive answers from an unknown source. Yet the source IS known, but that doesn't reduce its mystery. The source of intuition is the unconscious mind. The closer you get to gnosis, the more intuitive you become. Gnosis is nothing other than intuitive thinking taken to its limit - when in a dazzling, ineffable flash of inspiration, the whole of the cosmic unconscious is illuminated and fully revealed to you. You understand EVERYTHING. You are GOD!!!!!!!!!
The Grail Quest is the journey to become God. The Grail is not indispensable for gnosis, but, unlike anything else, it makes gnosis certain. Yet even Grand Masters of the Illuminati hesitate before the Grail. If they do not yet feel worthy of it, they do not attempt to use it.
The Grail Quest is the supreme quest of the human race. The Grail is the ultimate object. In a very real sense, the Grail can be equated with God himself. The Holy Grail is thus God on Earth. The Jews believed that the Ark of the Covenant was the earthly location of God. In fact, the Grail fulfils that function. To be more precise, a worthy person (such as Sir Galahad in the legends of the Grail), who takes hold of the Grail instantly achieves full and complete gnosis and becomes God there and then. The Grail is the apotheosis, the deification, of an individual human being.
Nietzsche, in his poetic, bewilderingly brilliant masterpiece Thus Spoke Zarathustra, wrote: "But to reveal my heart entirely to you, friends: if there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god! Therefore there are no gods."
Had he been familiar with Gnostic and Hermetic thinking, he would have written instead: Therefore I will become God!
Nietzsche substituted his Übermensch - the Superman - for God. But, in truth, the Superman is but a precursor of God. The Übermensch taken to its logical conclusion IS God.
The Big Bang physical cosmos arose from the unconscious mind of the cosmos. Through the Big Bang, the unconscious mind sought to become conscious. God - Abraxas - was the first distinct consciousness. Like us, he was faced with the task of expanding his consciousness to take in all of the unknown, unconscious mind. He has taken the journey we are currently on. He has left us the means of achieving it: the God program. If we follow his program, we too can become God. Our thoughts and his merge. At that point, we are indistinguishable from God.
Consciousness should be trying to integrate, to assimilate and absorb the contents of the unconscious, to expand consciousness from the finite to the infinite, from the limited mortal mind to the unlimited divine mind.
To show how this is possible, we want to take you back to the pre-conscious age when humanity was guided by what Julian Jaynes labelled the bicameral mind. He said, "At one time human nature was split in two, an executive part called a god, and a follower part called a man."
In those days, everything was handed to people on a plate. Their unconscious spoke to them and it was perceived as the voice of the gods. And, in a very real sense, that's exactly what it was.
In order to gain more control over its destiny, humanity developed consciousness and the old bicameral mind was pushed into the background. But it's not dead. Consciousness did not replace it: rather, it was built over it. It's still there, and occasionally it erupts in unexpected ways, especially in times of stress and crisis. These can act as a trigger for our vestigial bicameral mind to reassert itself. The conscious mind panics, freezes and surrenders control to the bicameral mind. It is in such situations that a "guardian angel" can appear to us and tell us what to do, or when we hear a dominant voice advising us. Fasting can bring on the same condition, as can extreme physical exertion, and prolonged solitary confinement.
However, in our daily routines, in our drab conscious lives, the gods are voiceless. By deafening ourselves to the voices of the gods, we have lost our spiritual connection. Capitalist Westerners are practically soulless. There are plenty of fake religious types in the West, but almost no genuine ones. It's not what you do in a church that testifies to your spirituality - it's what you do with the rest of your life. Bono, lead singer of U2, can pontificate all he likes about world poverty, but the only salient fact about Bono is that he is one of the richest men on earth. It's quite something when the spokesperson for the poor is a member of the hyper-rich. You would think he would choke on his hypocrisy. Far from it. He just doesn't get it. He genuinely thinks he's a philanthropist. Our world is full of people like this. They imagine that they are one thing, but their behaviour marks them out as the opposite. If you charitably define Christianity as the expression of the Golden Rule - Do as you would be done by - Christians are frequently the least Christian people you could ever meet.
Humanity is now faced with the greatest of tasks: to get our consciousness to work in tandem with the bicameral mind without going mad. The dangers are immense - schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are the main conditions that result when the bicameral mind springs unbidden into conventional consciousness. But if humanity can neutralise these disorders it can make gods of us all. We will hear the gods once more, but we will be no mere followers - we will be partners, fellow gods and goddesses in a divine new world.
Isn't that a prize beyond all imagining? If we seize that greatest of treasures we will electrify our world. Divine energy will crackle through the atmosphere. We will be a trillion times more energised. We will build Golgonooza, the miraculous City of the Imagination, and it will shine throughout the cosmos and be its greatest wonder, like a celestial Lighthouse of Alexandria.
What is Illuminism? The first seven degrees provide the theoretical framework in which to explain all of science, mathematics, religion, philosophy, politics, society, and psychology in one Grand Unified Theory of Everything. It is to that end that this website is dedicated. The remaining three "mystery" degrees of the Illuminati are the practical application of the theory - how to achieve superconsciousness, to harness the power of the gods and, above all, to complete the long journey to ultimate gnosis via the Holy Grail itself.
The Illuminati cell that is responsible for this website consists of three seventh degree Illuminists - but we are not yet party to the mystery degrees, so even if we wanted we couldn't reveal to you the secrets of the mystery degrees. It is of course those secrets that we wish to possess and which drive us forward.
By the time this website is finished, you will have at your disposal (with a few exceptions in some specific areas that require enhanced secrecy), the same theoretical framework as any sixth degree Illuminatus, and a great deal of what is the province of seventh degree Illuminists.
Members of the Illuminati up to and including the seventh degree additionally participate in various ceremonies and tasks, and they practise a number of unique techniques to prepare them for the mystery degrees, but we shall be providing no information regarding these. However, if you have been taking on board the message of the Illuminati then you will be striving to devise your own techniques. All members of the Illuminati are expected to suggest new and better ways of honing their skills, and these proposals are tested dialectically. Anything that proves superior to what already exists immediately replaces the older versions. Thus the Illuminati are always moving forward, always getting better. The Order, though the most ancient in the world, is never stuck thousands of years in the past like the backward and absurd religions of Abrahamism. Tradition is fine as long as it does not obstruct progress. If it gets in the way then it must be jettisoned. An upwards trajectory is much more important that adhering to ancient, outmoded customs. The Illuminati use ceremonial based on ancient practices for inspirational purposes only. There is no ancient custom that has been allowed to ossify. The Illuminati are always prepared to replace anything if it moves them closer to becoming God. The Abrahamic religions that are stuck forever in the past are a guarantee of failure and backwardness. These religions offer literally nothing to the onward journey of humanity. Religions must be capable of being updated. In a skyscraper age, with large hadron colliders up and running, it's insane to slavishly follow the words of bearded desert prophets from thousands of years ago. Abrahamists are mentally retarded to cling to their pointless, sand-covered texts.
Aleister Crowley took what he had learned from the various secret societies with which he was connected and created new ways forward. You can do the same. You can show the same energy and imagination as Crowley. He said, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."
That is the statement of a man heading for divinity: no apologies, no grovelling, no bowing, no kneeling, no submissiveness, no deference to others. This is not a man who would worship others, and if everyone had Crowley's attitude there would be no Old World Order.
The Birth of Consciousness
In the film The Matrix, the resistance fighters have a socket in the back of their head used to connect them to the Matrix, and to allow knowledge to be uploaded directly into the mind.
Trinity, needing to escape via helicopter, but without any knowledge of how to fly, contacts the operator and says, "I need a pilot program for a military M-109 helicopter."
The operator locates the appropriate laser disk then uploads the program into her brain - full expertise for flying a helicopter.
Consider a model of consciousness where the unconscious mind takes the role of the loading program and supplies subroutines to the consciousness, which the conscious mind then runs to accomplish a number of key tasks.
To understand this model, it's necessary to consider six ideas: Plato's domain of perfect Forms, Aristotle's concepts of entelechy and teleology, Julian Jaynes' concept of the bicameral mind, Carl Jung's concept of the collective unconscious, Rupert Sheldrake's concept of morphic resonance and the cosmic equation of the Illuminati: r >= 0.
Imagine a domain of dialectical Platonic Forms (i.e. forms that are initially imperfect but are capable of evolving towards perfection), associated with every conceivable human activity such as flying a helicopter, driving a car, performing high level mathematics, sculpting, falling in love, composing a hip hop song, making a movie - you name it, every base is covered.
Now imagine that each of these Forms is an Aristotelian entelechy. It actively wants to perfect itself, to reach its omega point where its individual dialectical progression reaches its end. These Forms are teleological. They have a purpose, and a will to fulfil that purpose.
Each of these Universal Forms exists in the r = 0 domain outside space and time, but they are all connected to the r > 0 domain of particulars. Each Universal Form and its set of associated particulars constitute a system of Sheldrakian morphic resonance. So, for example, all helicopter pilots in the world are particulars of the Universal Form for piloting a helicopter. As a pilot learns to fly, he is in effect tapping into the Universal Form, and the better he gets the more he is a personal crystallisation of that Form. Each helicopter pilot (each "particular") feeds back to the Universal Form, and the Universal feeds back to them in a continuous, synergic feedback loop. So, any new trick learned by one pilot will be communicated back to the Universal Form and this will then update all the other pilots, who will all learn the new trick much more quickly than would otherwise have been the case (just as new generations of Sheldrake's rats get better at making their way through a maze, even if they have had absolutely no contact with any of the previous generation of rats that learned how best to negotiate the maze).
In other words, any activity you wish to undertake, no matter what (unless you are a groundbreaking genius), already exists as a dialectical Platonic Form available to your unconscious mind. You just need to tune into it like a radio station, pick up the signal and start channelling it. If you let your unconscious mind deal with it rather than your conscious mind (which always gets in the way), you will be able to master virtually any skill. Of course, getting your conscious mind "out of the way" is extraordinarily difficult.
When sporting stars are "in the zone", their unconscious minds have taken over. They don't need to think about what they are doing. However, when the pressure is cranked up to maximum, that's usually when the conscious mind assumes control once more - with disastrous results. The golfer, one shot from glory, who misses the easy putt on the last green of the Open Championship, has invariably allowed his conscious mind to interrupt his unconscious rhythm. The greatest champions are those who don't crack under pressure and who remain true to their unconscious talent.
Most great accomplishments are achieved through the unconscious, intuitive mind. As Aldous Huxley pointed out, consciousness is a "reducing valve" that filters out the enormous amounts of information potentially available to us. Consciousness gives us just enough scope to hold down a dull job and conform to a tedious, brain-dead society.
If we know how to control the unconscious mind then, like Trinity in The Matrix, we can load any program we like and be an instant expert. It's useful to think of all human activities as subprograms which are all potentially loadable into our minds. They don't load as abstract programs, sets of rules, or mathematical instructions. They load as GODS!
Human minds revolve around stories and images. What happens to the mind when it is cut off from sensory input but is still active i.e. when it dreams? Well, it shows movies to itself: it tells stories accompanied by pictures, sometimes funny, sometimes erotic, sometimes frightening, weird, embarrassing, inspiring, prophetic, enigmatic, you name it. Dreams feature symbols and, above all, they feature people, especially those involved in our lives. They don't involve hours of mathematical equations, computer code, text, or foreign languages. Dreams reveal the unconscious. They are bearers of messages from the unconscious and these come to us as mysterious little films, emotive narratives, strange symbols, perhaps even voices.
When a Universal Form interacts with a human mind it does so not as an abstraction but as a being in the unconscious - a hidden voice, a secret guide. Using the example of Trinity's helicopter program, it would be as if an expert pilot were now present in her subconscious, ready to effortlessly fly the helicopter for her on her command.
Julian Jaynes, with his revolutionary hypothesis of the bicameral mind, proposed that until as recently as the last three thousand years or so, humans were largely controlled by hallucinated voices emerging from the right hemisphere of the brain which were interpreted in the left hemisphere as the voices of gods. It was this phenomenon that made early humanity certain of the existence of gods. After all, they were literally hearing them inside their own heads. The gods in the right hemisphere gave orders, and they were obeyed to the letter by the "follower" in the left brain. The follower didn't need to think. The follower was submissive, passive, apathetic, waiting for orders.
Doesn't that sound suspiciously like modern humanity? Even though they are conscious now, many modern humans still wait to be told what to do by managers, prime ministers, presidents, popes, the rich, the powerful, celebrities etc i.e. the new cast of gods in this conscious world of ours. Little has changed in terms of underlying attitudes. Most modern humans are "followers" just like their bicameral predecessors. The only effect of consciousness has been to take the voices from inside our heads and relocate them outside. Schizophrenics are those who slide back to the old bicameral mind and once again hear voices inside their heads giving them orders. Manic depressives are those who, when in their manic phase, identify totally with the gods and think they can do anything. However, when they are in the depressed phase, they are the most abject "followers" who can barely do anything at all. They vainly wait for the gods who never come.
Jaynes argued that the advent of writing, civilisation and greater complexity in human affairs eroded and finally destroyed the bicameral mind. The gods of the right hemisphere fell silent and the "follower" in the left brain evolved into the conscious ego. Now, only its voice is heard. Any other voice would be considered a sign of mental illness. The left brain evolved into the centre of reason, logic and language skills while the right brain is emotional, intuitive and artistic.
But the right brain gods have not vanished. For one thing, they communicate with us in dreams. In emergencies, they can seize control and save our lives. When we are expert at something, we are essentially giving expression to the god within. The gods can confer their superpowers on us if we know how to listen correctly. We can load "god programs" that will allow us to accomplish anything we put our mind to. These are the treasures that await our complete mastery of the mind.
Jaynes's hypothesis can be linked to Jung's theory of the psyche. Jung proposed that all human beings are linked via what he called the collective unconscious. We can think of this as a collection of all the Platonic Forms applicable to the human condition. Jung called these Forms "Archetypes" and he said that they manifested themselves in consciousness as images of people and as potent symbols. Just as our physical bodies have adapted and evolved over many millennia, so have our psychic structures. Archetypes have evolved, and are still evolving. (In truth, physical evolution and mental evolution accompany and reflect each other.)
According to Jung, all human babies are born mentally identical: they all have empty conscious minds, but full access to the collective unconscious - to the Archetypes. All of us are guided by the collective unconscious for the earliest period of our life. As for animals, they are controlled almost exclusively by their collective unconscious for their whole lives. Could you recognise individual "personalities" in a flock of sheep or herd of cows, or do they seem largely interchangeable? Even many human beings seem like identikit people. They are so conformist that you could easily predict what they will do in any given situation.
Jung's ideas are radical. He says, in effect, that far from being left to our own devices in a frightening and alien world, we are provided with a complete program of archetypes that will help us to actualise our full potential. Every aspect of our life is already anticipated by the archetypes: the mother-child relationship, the father-child relationship, the only child situation, the brother-brother relationship, brother-sister, sister-sister, child-friend, child-stranger, child-teacher etc - all of these are governed by an appropriate archetype. Adolescence, falling in love, marriage, parenthood, middle age, seeking the Higher Self, old age, preparing for death, preparing for the afterlife: each of these is archetypally conditioned. If we just let the archetypes take their course, as humans did in the days of the bicameral mind, everything would proceed smoothly.
The truth is that we are all entelechies. Everything we need to become God is programmed into us. Just as an acorn is programmed to become an oak tree, we are programmed to reach maximum actualisation as divinities. The only thing that can go wrong is if our inbuilt program is subverted, and then things can rapidly start heading off course, leaving us bewildered, frightened, anxious, and alienated from our true selves. Welcome to Planet Earth!
It turns out that our conscious minds are our greatest enemy. They continually resist and sabotage the archetypes. They think they know best.
We try to impose rules devised by our consciousness that are utterly at odds with our authentic natures. For example, Muslims and Jews circumcise baby boys. Such a practice has absolutely nothing to do with nature or the archetypes. These little boys are then fed endless religious propaganda that warps their minds and turns them against their own natures. The inbuilt program to maximise their potential and guide them properly through childhood becomes useless. Instead, they are bombarded with garbage that does them nothing but harm.
All religious interference in children's lives is an abomination and an abuse. Religion ought to wait until the child has grown up and can think for itself before it seeks to intervene. All forms of brainwashing of children should be illegal. Children should be treated AS children, not as miniature rabbis, priests or imams. They should be protected from anything that robs them of their childhood. Why should a child have to pray five times a day and memorise the Torah or Koran?
If Nature's program for raising children is wrecked, a whole life of trouble is guaranteed. If the archetypes for childhood development are sabotaged, all the future ones are too. Every aspect of our lives is undermined. We lose contact with Nature and in fact we find ourselves in opposition to Nature. Think of the young man who wants to have as much sex as he can get, but, instead, is forced by puritanical parents to renounce all of his sexual impulses. Result? - in ten years' time you'll have a pervert or suicide bomber on your hands. We create monsters by continually attacking Nature. Rather than allowing healthy archetypes to guide us, we end up summoning the wrong archetypes that do us maximum damage. We manufacture hell for ourselves.
If society were designed correctly, we could ensure that everyone's inbuilt God program was fully activated and everyone would lead the best life of which they are capable. We could create the optimal Earth, the best of all possible worlds. So why don't we?
We know what to do. We know what's stopping us. There's just one problem. The force that stands in the way of the progress of humanity is the Old World Order. The people who rule us are our greatest enemies. Yet they too are screwed because they are leading horribly shallow and unspiritual lives. Nevertheless, they think they are doing very nicely, thank you very much, and they don't want anyone spoiling their fun. As far as they're concerned, our inner God can go fuck himself. They want us to worship them, not to make gods of ourselves. If we did, they would no longer have power over us. They are the masters and they want us to remain their slaves.
The Workings of the God Program
So, step by step, how does Jung's God program work? When we are born, the most crucial thing is for us to bond with our mother. The mother's archetype for caring for a baby kicks in, and a baby's archetype for being mothered kicks in - a perfect combination. Mother and child know exactly what's expected of them. Biologically, we say that their instincts have been activated. Archetypes are the mental representation of instincts i.e. instincts and archetypes always go together. When people say, "Follow your gut instinct," they are advising you to let nature guide you i.e. the archetypes. This is normally very good advice. Of course, religious advice is usually the precise opposite.
As we start to leave early infancy, the collective unconscious automatically confers on us a supremely important archetype: the ego. This is the entity that will grow into our individual consciousness. It will define us. Although we all partake of exactly the same archetype, it manifests itself uniquely in all of us because we all have a unique genetic and environmental inheritance.
It takes the ego several years to clearly separate itself from the collective unconscious. That's why we have no conscious awareness during our earliest years, why we remember almost nothing. Memory and consciousness go hand in hand. Consciousness is also inextricably linked to language development, which of course is a left hemisphere activity.
As the ego archetype gets more powerful, it invokes other complementary archetypes that will work in tandem with the ego. These are called the Persona, the Shadow, the Anima/Animus and the Self. The last is the most important because while the ego ends up being a great disappointment to us (being only our Lower Self) the Self can deliver all that is best in us. It can actualise our full potential and, ultimately, make us divine. It is stamped with the imago Dei - the image of God. It is God inside us, waiting to be activated. But that wondrous moment can come only if all of the other archetypes have been allowed to carry out their proper functions in their proper sequence. And that, unfortunately, never happens in a typical human life. Instead, our lives tend to be dominated by the archetypes that are most destructive to us. Our corrupt, stupid society energises them, while draining energy from the helpful archetypes. The "bad" archetypes often take on a life of their own and turn into monsters, sabotaging our progress towards our divinity.
Here are the archetypes, one by one, together with an explanation of what can go horribly wrong with them; how the good function they were intended to serve becomes corrupted and toxic. Firstly, we start with the home of the archetypes: the Collective Unconscious.
(Diagram courtesy of Eric Pettifor)
The Collective Unconscious
"How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it and why was I not informed of the rules and regulations but just thrust into the ranks as if I had been bought by a peddling shanghaier of human beings? How did I get involved in this big enterprise called actuality? Why should I be involved? Isn't it a matter of choice? And if I am compelled to be involved, where is the manager-I have something to say about this. Is there no manager? To whom shall I make my complaint?"
Kierkegaard
Although Jung never lived to hear of Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance, it is completely compatible with his own ideas. Sheldrake wrote, "The unconscious mind may also have properties that defy mechanistic explanation. For example, in Carl Jung's development of this concept, the unconscious is not confined to individual minds, but provides a common substratum shared by all human minds, the collective unconscious: 'In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix) there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.'"
The collective unconscious is the repository for the past common experiences and acquired wisdom of the human race. The collective unconscious both stores and transmits the common psychological inheritance of humanity. It is the Universal Form that feeds the particular psyches of all human beings, and which in turn feed all of their experiences back to it i.e. archetypes are not static and immutable; they evolve, and have done so ever since the dawn of the human race. The archetypes are the organising principles of the psyche; the primordial structural elements, the mental equivalents of genes.
Just as the Neoplatonist Plotinus said that all human souls have a higher and lower part, the lower part being individual and the higher collective, so Jung argued that the psyche of all humans is split in two, with one part being individual and the other collective.
Mythologist Joseph Campbell said, "The whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious." In other words, the arena of human culture in which the archetypes are most evident is mythology.
When we encounter an archetype in our daily life, it will seem to have a mythological nature, hence be overpowering and even otherworldly. Fans who meet celebrities in the flesh display this kind of reaction. The mass hysteria that greeted the likes of Elvis Presley and the Beatles is an example of people collectively recognising an archetypal phenomenon in their midst.
The collective unconscious is Jung's greatest contribution to psychology, yet it was precisely this dazzling innovation that caused the split with his mentor, Sigmund Freud, who utterly rejected this concept.
THE EGO
"It is very important in life to know when your cue comes."
Kierkegaard
The ego is the centre of our consciousness and the mediator between consciousness and the unconscious. It gives us our sense of identity and our self-image. This is who we believe ourselves to be in our day-to-day activities, but it is actually our lower self, far removed from our true potential and from who we really are. Nevertheless, it's a necessary illusion that allows us to function in the world. It's the appropriate starting point for us, but it's our task to move beyond it and journey towards our Higher Self. Sadly, most of us fail to do so. We identify with our ego and live out our lives as though there is nothing beyond it. Yet everything is beyond it: the whole cosmos and the Mind of God.
THE PERSONA
"Don't you know that a midnight hour comes when everyone has to take off his mask? Do you think life always lets itself be trifled with? Do you think you can sneak off a little before midnight to escape this?"
Kierkegaard
The ego quickly realises that what it wants isn't necessarily what it will be allowed to have. It understands that it has to fit in with others. What does it do? It can't change itself because it is what it is, but it can don a mask and thus present a version of itself that disguises what it really thinks and feels. The archetype it summons is called the Persona (Latin for "mask").
This is what we present to the outside world, our public face. It's a social construct designed to make us acceptable to others. In terms of the Freudian model of the psyche, the Superego plays a key role in the formation of the persona.
We typically put on the particular persona that we calculate will make people think highly of us. If they do indeed respond positively then this reinforces our chosen persona and binds us more tightly to it. This raises the possibility of a major problem in our psychic development: we can over-identify with our persona and become terrified of ever removing it. If this happens we are rendered fake and inauthentic - all front and no substance. Our entire life revolves around ensuring that the mask never slips, in keeping up appearances. But where is the real person, the true self? It has been buried alive.
Many public figures are Persona People. Politicians make a career out of it. Public Relations advisers exist to cultivate, nourish and protect the personas that prominent people adopt. Brand management is all about the persona. It doesn't have to be the persona of an individual - it can be that of a company, a product, a political party, an institution and so on. Everything must be done to protect it, to prevent brand damage. Thus we find ourselves in the territory of cover-ups. All the stops are pulled out to prop up the façade and to prevent us seeing the truth. Many crimes are caused by those people who are terrified of the truth about them being revealed. Actor Rock Hudson spent an entire life pretending to be heterosexual when he was in fact gay. The film studios knew the truth, but they believed it would be the end of Hudson's career if the truth came out, so they did everything to conceal it, even inventing fake romances and girlfriends, and Hudson agreed to go along with it. Our world is full of these Persona Protection schemes. How many times are politicians who espouse family values exposed as gay or having affairs? There's nothing worse than getting trapped by your persona because your whole life becomes one long lie.
The persona need not be nice, acceptable and conventional. In a group of gangsters, one of them might deliberately adopt a persona of hardness and toughness, whereas in reality he might be sensitive and vulnerable. Rebels cultivate the "rebel" persona, mavericks the "maverick" persona, "bad" boys the bad boy persona. All of these personas, whether benevolent or malevolent, are equally bad if they lead to inauthentic lives conducted in bad faith.
Think of the scandal of Catholic priests: men with a persona of holiness, otherworldliness, the utmost moral integrity, yet secretly molesting children. In a sense, their persona was the cause of their child abuse. They had become so attached to their persona that their true self had never had a chance to exist and, instead, all sorts of monsters began to grow behind the mask, and the monsters then fed on the easiest target - children.
The Catholic Church, if it had any sense, would instantly abolish the celibacy rule for priests because enforced celibacy is one of the most dangerous psychological time bombs imaginable. In fact, the issue should be taken out of the Church's hands. Society and government should order it in the name of psychological well-being. The Catholic "experiment" with celibacy has failed dismally and now others must step in to resolve the matter, whether Catholics like it or not. An ultimatum should be delivered to the Pope - either abolish the rule of celibacy or have the Catholic Church declared illegal and banned from participating in society. The same goes for whether women should be allowed to be priests. The signal sent out by prohibiting a female priesthood is unambiguously sexist and contrary to the laws of any modern country. It's time to get tough with the Catholic Church and all other religions. If they refuse to relinquish socially unacceptable positions then they should be put out of business. Why do we pussyfoot around these religions with their archaic and dangerous value systems? Whether or not their beliefs were acceptable a thousand years ago is one thing. What is certain that they are completely unacceptable now and it's about time our leaders had the guts to say so. We can't let ancient religions dictate to us just because they're ancient. Who cares about their traditions? If they're incompatible with the modern world then they have to be legally challenged and rejected. Should we have gone on tolerating slavery because all the major religions supported it?
Our leaders won't lift a finger, of course. Why not? Because of political expediency. And thus the evils of the world are never confronted.
We live in a Persona Society. Everyone is faking it. Look at Facebook, at its hundreds of millions of users spending hours cultivating their public face, constructing their social image for the consumption of others. Where is the real person with real feelings and controversial opinions, with doubts, fears and anxieties, with emotional highs and lows? All suppressed and repressed. All buried.
Facebook is about personal brand management and is every bit as obnoxious as the more expensive efforts that go into protecting the brands of the huge, faceless multinational corporations. It's the same cynical game. Facebook should be called Two-faced book, because the real face is always hidden by the self-serving propaganda. A new Facebook should be created called the True Self where no one has to wear any mask and pretend to be anything they're not.
No matter how successful our persona is, it will start to disgust us if it is inconsistent with whom we really are. An inner revulsion will grow and we will begin to cast a dangerous shadow.
The tale of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is all about the respectable public face of the doctor being removed by a secret potion to reveal the monster underneath. Mr Hyde - the opposite of Dr Jekyll - was the inevitable psychic response to Jekyll's fake persona.
Whenever you encounter anyone overly respectable, you can be certain that they are doing the vilest things in private, when they close the door behind them, when they draw the curtains. That's when Mr Hyde emerges…and he always does. It's the psychic law of balance.
The persona applies to companies, institutions and nations as much as to individuals. America presents itself as a fun-loving country of freedom, creativity and goodwill, so what's it doing tramping around in Iraq and Afghanistan where no one wants it? Why's it threatening WikiLeaks? Why is there so much poverty and squalor in America that's never commented upon? Why is it still racist to its core? (The Confederates have never gone away.) Why is it full of religious fundamentalists?
America has its own Mr Hyde that it tries to keep shut out of the way, but that just energises the dark side even more. America, to the rest of the world, looks increasingly deranged. The Tea Party seems like a bunch of madmen running around loose.
As for the Catholic religion, the Vatican presents the pious persona of the pope and the cardinals while its priests busy themselves abusing children. The Church spent decades trying to cover up the truth rather than handing over the abusers to the authorities. What kind of morality permits the cover up of child abuse? The Catholic Church's conduct ought to prove terminal. How could anyone ever trust them again?
Islam trumpets that it believes in peace and in a merciful, forgiving, compassionate God while it spews forth endless legions of homicidal maniacs. Islam looks more like the mouth of hell than the portal to heaven.
The Jews have their persona of victimhood while they relentlessly persecute the Palestinians and strive to buy the world with their gold.
Vast, corrupt corporations present glittering, golden personas via their advertising campaigns, claiming that they contribute to charity and care for the environment, even as they exploit slaves in sweatshops in South-East Asia.
Everywhere you look, you see masks of sickening hypocrisy, personas that are utterly fake and phoney.
Those who over-identify with their persona become nothing but the role they have assumed. They are like actors who can't stop playing a particular part. Their real self has vanished.
People who seek to become "perfect" in the eyes of others - to have the perfect house, job, partner, family, looks etc - often suffer nervous breakdowns. Many of the shocking episodes when seemingly loving fathers go berserk and murder their wives and children have their roots in people trying to be perfect and then falling apart if anything challenges the idyllic image.
When someone is terrified of letting the mask drop, it's because they no longer know what's underneath it, if anything at all.
Many rich people discover that their life is shallow and meaningless. The success they pursued so assiduously suddenly seems empty and worthless. When people confine themselves within overly narrow limits, they often suffer neuroses. These people can only be cured by finding a more expansive personality.
Isn't it time to get REAL? The persona has become a monster. It has practically turned into its opposite. It's time to slay the Society of the Persona, the superficial world of appearances that conceals true ugliness. It's the monstrous picture of Dorian Gray come to life.
"I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away - yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ----------- and wanted to shoot myself."
Kierkegaard
Empathy versus Sympathy
"The greatest danger, that of losing one's own self, may pass off quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, that of an arm, a leg, five dollars etc., is sure to be noticed."
Kierkegaard
The Persona is conformist. It's all about "fitting in", being "normal", being accepted by your peers. It goes hand-in-hand with other-directedness and tradition-directedness. As Kierkegaard said, "If you want to be loathsome to God, just run with the herd." The inner-directed and autonomous are those most likely to have a healthy persona not dictated by convention.
Persona usually has a strongly moralistic component (and equally usually, it's a hypocritical morality). People must be "seen" to be good rather than actually be good.
Persona is commonly about impressing the neighbours, keeping up appearances, avoiding any hint of being strange and different.
Persona is one of the central controlling levers of the world. To fit in at school, to get a job, to be respected by your community, to keep your friends, all involves playing the persona game.
Wacky weirdoes are never acceptable. You don't want to be a geek, a nerd, a dork, an outsider, uncool. You don't want to be in the out-crowd. You don't want to be Other.
What other components feed into the persona? In fact, all of Jung's components for classifying your personality type are relevant. So, your persona will be based on the relevant combination of the extravert and introvert archetypes, and the thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition archetypes. Myers-Briggs added two more categories: judging and perceiving. Several other categories could be added to the mix. For example, archetypes for dominance versus submissiveness, and for empathy versus sympathy.
People often get these last two attributes confused and they are typically treated as synonymous. If fact, they are radically different and the best way to illustrate the difference is via the provocative sentence: "The Nazis empathised with the Jews, but certainly didn't sympathise with them." This sentence would be incomprehensible to many people because they're unsure how to clearly distinguish between empathy and sympathy.
The Nazis, in order to process millions of victims through their concentration camps with the minimum fuss, had to work out how best to pacify people who were naturally in a state of high anxiety. They had to fool them into believing that they weren't about to die. So, they came up with tricks such as saying, "Oh, this is a stopping off point; a chance for you to rest and get cleaned up in a nice hot shower." This was exactly the reassuring type of thing that an anxious person wanted to hear.
Therefore, empathy is where you put yourself in someone else's shoes and work out how you would feel in their position. But, as the Nazi example shows, that doesn't mean you're on their side. You're still you. A Nazi mentally putting himself in the shoes of a Jew about to be gassed is still a Nazi. He's attempting to understand the Jew's feelings and thought processes purely so that he can kill him in the easiest way. His intent is entirely negative, thus this is negative rather than positive empathy.
Empathy is often done for benign reasons, but it can easily be for the worst possible reasons. Serial killers and conmen can be extremely skilled in terms of empathy. They know exactly what buttons to press to lure the victim into their trap.
Advertising is all about empathy - manipulating you in the most effective way to get you to buy the products the advertisers are selling.
The problem for the Nazis, the serial killers and conmen is that although they are skilled at empathy, they have zero understanding of sympathy.
Whereas empathy is about substituting yourself for someone else, sympathy is about substituting someone else for yourself. With empathy, you imagine what it's like to be in another person's situation while remaining yourself; with sympathy you create an identity with the other person so that you are no longer yourself; you have become them. If the Nazi had sympathy for his Jewish victim, he would no longer be capable of killing him because he would now be experiencing the Jew's plight as the Jew.
With empathy, you can choose to harm another person with the understanding you have gained of their situation; with sympathy you would no more harm the other person than you would yourself since you are now effectively one and the same.
Sympathy is a much stronger link with another person than empathy. The golden rule - Do unto others as you would have them do unto you - would happen automatically in a world of total sympathy between all people. Sympathy can be considered a manifestation of the magic law of contiguity - two things that have been in contact remain in contact forever. If you have interacted with someone sympathetically you are bound to them forever. But we live in a world of empathy, which reflects the magic law of similarity and imitation - that things that resemble each other are the same. If you have interacted with someone empathetically, you believe that you know how they will act in any given situation and thus that you can anticipate what they will do, hence manipulate and control them.
Empathy is like running a computer simulation of someone else, while sympathy is like actually being someone else. Empathy may or may not provide accurate information depending on how good the simulation is; sympathy is always accurate.
Many of the problems of the world come from failed empathy. The famous book Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus argues that men and women constantly misunderstand each other because it's as if they're from different planets. When men and women try to imagine how the other sex think and feel, they often get it completely wrong because they are projecting how they would act onto someone else who is wired differently. If they could be sympathetic rather than empathetic, things would suddenly make perfect sense.
In truth, we can only run accurate empathic simulations of others if they closely resemble us. For example, an intuitive introvert thinker will have an excellent idea of how another intuitive introvert thinker will think and act, but be clueless in terms of how a sensing extravert feeler will think and act. The accuracy of the simulation would disintegrate in the second case.
All misunderstandings arise from a failure to grasp where the other person is coming from. The less you resemble the other person, the more the misunderstandings will multiply. When America invaded Iraq, it actually believed its forces would be welcomed with open arms, that Iraqis would instantly embrace democracy and capitalism and that Iraq would eagerly become a satellite ally of America. How dumb can you get? The "simulation" American planners were running was that of imagining themselves in the shoes of Iraqis and, because they themselves loved America, democracy and capitalism, they thought the Iraqis would too. But the Iraqis are Muslims, not Christians; they subscribe to authoritarianism not democracy; they are not capitalists; they don't admire American culture - in fact, they regard it as godless, decadent and depraved. Thus the intervention in Iraq was guaranteed to be a disaster.
As for Afghanistan, everyone knows it is Vietnam II. As soon as the Americans leave, the corrupt regime they have been propping up will collapse, just as it did in South Vietnam, another country that America dismally failed to understand.
It's remarkable that America has been so successful given that its leaders are so stupid and clueless. They have zero understanding of other countries. They have neither empathy nor sympathy, hence always get it wrong.
THE SHADOW
This is the archetype of the personal unconscious. It gathers everything rejected and disowned by the ego and persona. It is always the same sex as the persona i.e. the persona of a man will be matched by a male shadow, and that of a woman by a female shadow. If the persona is an individual's acceptable public face then the shadow is their secret face that they never wish anyone to see. It's the picture of Dorian Gray that's kept locked away in the deepest vault. Yet the more it is hidden, the more its power grows and leaks out everywhere in all kinds of ways. It's irrepressible.
The shadow is our dark side - uncivilised, animal-like, primitive, raw, unadapted to society. In Freudian terms, it is the id: impulsive, full of desire, selfish, pleasure seeking, heedless and contemptuous of others.
If your persona is INTJ, your shadow will be ESFP, but because it is not under conscious control it will be crude, undifferentiated, volatile, wild and dangerous. It is Mr Hyde come to life, compensating for the overly controlled and fake Dr Jekyll persona. A healthy person should be striving to integrate Jekyll and Hyde to achieve a proper balance of the psyche.
The shadow can also be the repository of thwarted creativity. The boy who wants to be a ballet dancer or violinist but can't because his friends and family would find it unacceptable will bury his artistic side in his shadow.
The shadow is the dark force in nature that, if harnessed and sublimated, can give rise to incredible creativity, and, if let loose, can unleash terrible destruction.
Neurosis versus Psychosis
What is neurosis? It's when an ego is attacked by unconscious elements and can't deal with them properly but nevertheless remains intact. In psychosis, a vulnerable ego is overwhelmed by the contents of the unconscious, both personal and collective, and completely disintegrates. In a real sense, the victim of psychosis is no longer a conscious human being. His ego has broken down. He has lost the ability to be conscious and now just inhabits the twilight world of the unconscious.
THE ANIMA/ ANIMUS
Anima/animus = Latin for "soul".
While the shadow is the same sex as the persona but has the opposite psychological characteristics, the anima (for men) or animus (for women) has both the opposite psychological aspects and the opposite sex. The anima/animus is also known as the Soul-Image. It's our internal representation of our perfect soul mate. It guides our relationships with the opposite sex, and, above all, determines how and with whom we "fall in love".
Our first contact with it is through our parent of the opposite sex. This relationship invariably has a huge bearing on the subsequent development of our soul-image. We may incorporate many of the parent's qualities or, conversely, reject the qualities they exhibit.
Soul-Images are projected onto our love interests - which is why our lovers seem to have a special quality that no one else possesses.
For men, the anima represents Eros (love/sex). It can be represented by a virgin, a whore, a seductress, a femme fatale, a siren, a muse - someone who electrifies us.
For women, the animus represents Logos (reason) and reflects a woman's search for meaning and knowledge. When she's a girl, a girl's animus is her father. As she gets older, it becomes the dashing figure of a hero. Later, it's a respectable figure such as a doctor or priest.
If someone has a thinking persona, their Soul-Image is feeling oriented, and vice versa. If they are intuitive, they will have a sensation Soul-Image, and vice versa.
A thinking man wants a feeling soul mate in order to feel psychically whole.
The anima is a man's feminine side, his inner female. It's via his anima that he understands the female sex. For a woman, the animus is her masculine aspect, her inner male.
If something goes wrong with the archetypal development of the anima/animus, an individual may identify with their soul-image and thus acquire characteristics of the opposite sex. Jung regarded this as the basis of homosexuality and transvestism. If a man identifies with his anima, he becomes effeminate and his soul-image changes into that of the masculine persona he should have had i.e. his persona and his anima flip over and he falls in love with men.
In other cases, the anima (female) and the shadow (male) (or animus (male) and shadow (female) in the case of women), get mixed up since they both reflect the opposite personality type to the persona (and the anima/animus is in any case partly in the personal unconscious, the domain of the shadow i.e. it has a partial shadow nature.) This can cause the soul-image to become linked to the wrong sex or to dark and dangerous shadow impulses. This leads to such phenomena as non-effeminate homosexuality, bisexuality, bondage, sadomasochism, domination and submission, and all types of sexual "perversion". In other cases, the anima/animus can become associated with specific objects, leading to fetishism.
Anima Moods / Anima Possession
A nagging, masculine girlfriend or wife can trigger a state of so-called anima possession in a man. This means that he turns away from his real partner and into the "arms" of his anima, which offers him the idealised female he seeks and which his partner has failed to be. This has the effect of rendering him impotent in relation to his partner since his sexual needs are in a sense met internally by his union with his anima.
Such a man is said to be "unindividuated". He has not consciously addressed and developed his feminine side (his feelings and need for relatedness) and so is vulnerable to being possessed by these traits when, in particular, he is in an unsatisfactory relationship with a woman. The feminine traits express themselves in a childish and unsophisticated way because they originate in the unconscious rather than consciousness, hence are not under rational control.
Similarly, an effeminate, passive, feeble husband or boyfriend can drive a woman towards her animus and, again, destroy her sex drive. The unindividuated woman who has not consciously addressed and developed her masculine side (logic, leadership, ruthlessness, independence) can be possessed by these traits, particular if her male partner is proving deficient in these regards, and she becomes domineering opinionated, and argumentative in a childish way.
MANA PERSONALITIES
These are often ignored in discussions of Jung's theory of the psyche, yet they have a profound role to play.
"Mana" is a Polynesian word meaning a supernatural, divine life force that can choose to bestow good fortune, magical powers and great wisdom on people. In terms of Jungian psychology, it relates to higher powers hidden in the depths of our psyche that we can access and release. Intuition and inspiration originate here, as well as the spirits and guardian angels that can appear to people in times of crisis to save them.
Such is the power of the mana divinities that although they can confer godlike powers on us, they can equally well drive us to madness and destroy us, just as the practice of kundalini ("serpent power") can lead to enlightenment or insanity.
The mana personalities or divinities may seem utterly overwhelming to the ego, particularly a vulnerable ego. They have the character of an external, higher force. Such divinities can induce schizophrenia. People who become possessed by them are consumed by megalomania. Someone like Hitler - a spellbinding orator able to summon the full energy of the shadow and captivate a great nation - was a man possessed. However, if the mana divinities can be properly integrated within consciousness, they can make you a Superman.
Figures such as the Wise Old Man and the Great Mother are mana personalities. They are archetypal images of wisdom and nurturing. A woman who is possessed by the Great Mother may think that it is her responsibility to care for the whole world and she imagines herself the personification of Gaia. Possession by the Wise Old Man can convince a man that he's a global guru, a prophet of God, with superior insight and a direct link to the mind of God. He becomes the source of divine Revelation. Such people can do untold damage, as world history shows all too clearly.
If we project mana qualities onto others, such as national leaders or major religious figures, we start to think of them as the Chosen One, the Great Prophet, the Great Wise Leader, the Benign Dictator, the Messiah. Many of history's most prominent figures have been able to seduce people into projecting their mana divinities onto them. Celebrity culture is based on the same form of "magic". Celebrities tap into such unconscious forces and thereby seem to glow with magical power. "Charismatic", "incredible personal magnetism", "spellbinding", "entrancing", "bewitching", "beguiling: these are the sorts of descriptions that we apply to those on whom we have projected our own mana aspects.
However, if we tap into the mana gods properly we can gain access to the most ancient and incredible wisdom to use in our own lives.
Mana personalities are like the gods of Olympus, the ancient heroes of myth (such as Hercules) and the great adventurers of legend (such as Jason). They can be great chiefs, wonder workers, magicians, medicine men, witch doctors, prophets, saints, messiahs.
Jung, while appreciating the potential boons offered by mana personalities, believed that they often gave rise to ego inflation i.e. where the ego gets an over-inflated sense of itself through contamination by an unconscious psychic component. The self-styled "masters of the universe" who think they are financial gods who can do no wrong are people who have clearly been possessed by mana personalities, thus turning into megalomaniacs.
Why are monarchs still popular? Why do countries in the 21st century still have "royal" families? It's because simple-minded people project mana divinities onto these kings and queens, princes and princesses. Frankly, anyone who admires royalty is a moron. Similarly, "prophets" are mana projections. Again, only morons are taken in by them.
The lesson is that all the greatest treasures that the unconscious offers us come with warnings. They can seriously damage your health. All of these higher abilities to which we have potential access must be handled with extreme care and be integrated with our consciousness cautiously, skilfully and with supreme control. Just as nuclear reactors have control rods to prevent the chain reaction turning into an explosion, so we must use psychic control rods to dampen the energy of such numinous and overpowering entities as the mana personalities.
One way or another, you must master the mana personalities. Before you can make the final approach to the ultimate prize - the imago Dei - you must be armed with all of the mana powers.
Consider the popularity of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. What makes these so captivating is that they project the entire process of individuation onto the external world. Frodo and Harry Potter are archetypal heroes who do everything of which Jung wrote. They have to abandon their comfortable world of the persona, encounter their shadow (Sauron, Lord Voldemort), their anima (Harry Potter has an explicit love interest, but, for Frodo, the Ring of Power represents the soul-image), the mana personalities (all of their magic helpers, especially Gandalf in LOTR) and finally they attain their Higher Self. At this stage, Frodo is allowed to depart for the Western Havens, while Harry Potter has proved himself the Chosen One.
The Matrix is almost the perfect archetypal tale of individuation. Neo must discard not only a fake persona but also a whole fake world. Agent Smith is his Shadow, Trinity is his anima, while Morpheus, the Oracle and the Architect are his wise mana advisers. At the end of his quest, he overcomes the false world and gains the power of God.
Why are video games about quests so popular, and role-play games such as Dungeons & Dragons? As you proceed through these games and role-play fantasies, you meet enchantresses, princesses, tricksters, wizards, dragons and so on. You pick up extra power as you collect magic objects - all of which represent your progress towards individuation. Why is the Quest for the Holy Grail so enduringly fascinating? It, and all the other great stories, represent the telling of the magic tale of individuation.
If you want to write a best-selling novel or screenplay, just make sure you tell an archetypal tale of individuation.
The lesson to be learned? Don't let your own tale of individuation be consigned to the fantasy sphere of movies, games, novels and role-play.
Make it happen for real!
The Higher Archetypes
We can encounter many other archetypes as we progress towards the Self. These archetypes, like the mana personalities, are numinous - they glow with the light of the sacred. (Numinous derives from the Latin numen, meaning "presiding god".) When we meet them, they transfer a blinding burst of energy to us, enough to change our lives in the manner of an epiphany. Saul on the road to Damascus may have had such an experience.
These are the "God moments" that some people experience. However, all too often, they fail to build on them and it all slips away again, usually because they are dragged back by the petty people around them, the grim routines of their godforsaken world, their tedious jobs, the shallow values of society, the relentless pursuit of instant gratification.
THE SELF
"Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion - and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion…while truth again reverts to a new minority."
Kierkegaard
"If the unconscious can be recognised as a co-determining factor along with consciousness, and if we can live in such a way that conscious and unconscious demands are taken into account as far as possible, then the centre of gravity of the total personality shifts its position. It is then no longer in the ego, which is merely the centre of consciousness, but in the hypothetical point between conscious and unconscious. This new centre might be called the 'self'."
Jung
The Self is the archetype of unity, totality and wholeness. Through this archetype, Jung suggested, came the idea of the Monotheistic God.
The Self is God within. Jung asserted that a human being wedded only to his ego could never be happy or healthy. It was essential to recognise a higher power with deeper roots, not located in our ordinary mortal existence. The power higher than the ego to which we all have access is the Self, the image of God with which we are stamped and which, ultimately, is God himself.
Jung wrote, "2000 years of Christianity can only be replaced by something equivalent." He's absolutely right. Scientific materialism certainly can't do the job. Only one thing offers the final, definitive form of religion - the process whereby each of us becomes God. NOTHING can be higher than that. If God is the summit of existence and we ourselves can reach that summit then there is simply no further to go. We have reached the cosmic terminus. Illuminism offers that. Christianity does not. Hence Illuminism is the religion dialectically guaranteed to replace Christianity. Only a superior vision, a higher possibility can defeat Christianity. Science is not it; Illuminism is.
Illuminism has nothing to do with faith. It's solely about knowledge. It replaces "holy book" religion with textbook psychology. Prayer is abolished in favour of the pursuit of self-actualisation.
God is the master of himself. He has complete self-understanding. He is Whole, Complete. His consciousness has illuminated the entire cosmic unconscious.
And we can be all of that too.
How many great writers, artists, scientists and thinkers point to a source not located in their consciousness as their fount of inspiration? They are referring to the Higher Self, and the Higher Self taken to its logical conclusion is God.
The psyche is the totality of the consciousness and unconscious, and the Self stands at its centre. This is our Higher Self compared with the lower self of the ego. It is our True Self, and it is linked to the beating heart of the cosmos.
Jung said of the Self, "…it is not only the centre but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of this totality, just as the ego is the centre of the conscious mind."
The circumpunt, the Monad, is a perfect representation of the Self.
The Self is a new and glorious centre of personality towards which we can grow and strive.
In cosmic terms, we would label Lucifer as the moral persona, Satan as the evil shadow, Sophia as the wise and radiant anima, the Logos as the animus, and Abraxas as the Whole Self, the cosmic entelechy. Our task, as an individual ego, is to integrate all of these components. If we succeed then we have risen to the same level as Abraxas. We have literally become God.
In Goethe's tale of Faust, his respectable scholarly public face is Faust's persona (which he relinquishes when he sells his soul to the Devil), Mephistopheles is his shadow, Helen of Troy is his anima, and God is his Self.
The Self is the "whole person". To attain Selfhood is to become exalted, deified, self-enhanced: to achieve apotheosis.
Although the ego is capable of integrating the contents of the personal unconscious into consciousness, it cannot do the same for the collective unconscious. But the Self, at its ultimate level, can achieve this. Why? Because at the ultimate level it is God.
"My life is a story of the self-realization of the unconscious."
Jung
*****
In terms of the bicameral human brain, the left hemisphere acts as the home of the ego - rational consciousness. It is oriented towards everyday, mundane concerns. The right hemisphere on the other hand may be considered the home of the Self and is oriented towards the spiritual and the soulful. A whole human being is someone who has attained perfect left-right hemispheric integration, where the contents of the unconscious have been illuminated and fully brought into consciousness, where mind, spirit, soul, reason and logic are fully harmonized.
The ego needs to assimilate the persona, the shadow, the soul-image, the mana personalities and, finally, the Self i.e. as well as having a healthy persona attuned to the ego, the ego needs to integrate all unconscious elements and render them conscious. If it fails to do so, it cannot achieve gnosis. As the ego expands, is starts to take on more of the character of the Self, hence is able to expand even more.
When all the contents of the cosmic collective unconscious are brought into consciousness then that consciousness is none other than God. Why? Because it knows everything there is to know.
The Sacred Program
The archetypes constitute a sequenced program designed to lead us from maximum potential to maximum actualisation. The archetypes are teleological. It's their purpose to aid us. They can lead us all the way to God if we let the program execute correctly. If not, we go astray and we have to take a far steeper and more treacherous stairway to heaven.
If we design a society that works hand in hand with the archetypes, we can build heaven on earth. Conversely, if we have a society that uses the destructive power of archetypes, we will do immense damage to ourselves. That's exactly where we're at now.
Rather than working with the archetypes, we're working against them. We live in a Shadow World where we pour the dark and toxic contents of the Shadow all over ourselves.
Humanity has managed to do almost everything wrong. It has always chosen the wrong gods, the wrong prophets, the wrong heroes, the wrong theories, the wrong leaders. Why? Because it never understood itself. It was too susceptible to the dark side.
But all of the damage can be undone. Humanity can be repaired. We can start over. All we need to do is bury the past. All of the old ways must perish. Above all, the old gods of the mainstream religions must be forsaken. They are the agents of the Shadow. They have stood in the way of the light. Do we have the courage to free ourselves of their cold, dead grip, or will we spend eternity worshipping false gods just because our dumb ancestors did?
Get with the program!!!
Lighthouse Humanity
One way to think of a human being is in terms of a mysterious lighthouse. The persona is like a welcoming host standing at the front door, on his best behaviour for the benefit of his guests. When the guests leave, the mask may be taken off and the ego can now show itself and slob around in the lounge. Later, the ego climbs up the spiral staircase towards the light, now and again looking into some of the dark rooms on the different floors. These rooms are where the shadow exists, silent, secret, watching and waiting, ready to pounce at any time. These rooms fill the ego with anxiety. But one of the higher rooms contains a beautiful, captivating woman and the ego's heart pounds with love. He has discovered his anima, his soul mate, his true love, the member of the opposite sex who completes him.
At the top of the lighthouse, the ego encounters his Higher Self and feels enormous elation. But there is one more possibility. The ego, now transformed into the Self, can step into the light itself and become the imago Dei - the image of God - beaming the divine light across the entire cosmos.
Imagine six and a half billion human lighthouses, each capped with the blazing light of God. Imagine all of that light merging to form a single divine ray that illuminates eternity. That is what humanity can become.
Inflation
Inflation involves the ego identifying inappropriately with unconscious contents and becoming contaminated by them. When the ego identifies with the Self invalidly i.e. without going through the long and arduous journey to discover the Higher Self, it suffers from "inflation". This means that it inflates its self-image and sense of worth to such an extent that it regards itself as God.
The members of the Old World Order suffer from ego-inflation. Celebrity culture is all about ego inflation. These people think they are gods walking amongst us, and, sadly, we pander to them as if they were.
The Nazis suffered a collective episode of ego-inflation. They claimed to be the "master race", and to have the purest Aryan blood, and in doing so they cast a long, terrible and horrifically irrational shadow. Everything that was weak, despicable, shameful and impure in themselves they projected onto others, and in particular onto those who seemed most alien to Aryanism - the Jews.
The Jews were presented in Nazi propaganda as plague-ridden rats infecting Germany with deadly toxins, and as malignant growths in the German body that, as the source of impure blood and corruption, needed to be cut out to save the patient.
Of course, the supreme irony is that the Jews, as the self-proclaimed Chosen People, held similar views about all Gentiles. The Jews were more than happy to commit genocide against the Canaanites and to steal their land, and in the present day their treatment of the Palestinians is reminiscent of the way the Nazis treated the Jews in the ghettos.
What goes around comes around.
Individuation
Arising as it does from the collective unconscious, the human ego - our consciousness, our identity - must endeavour to be fully individuated or it will remain partially undifferentiated from the egos of others, leading to highly conformist behaviour. Other-directed and tradition-directed people are those who struggle to separate themselves from those around them. One's the same as another. In a sense, they never become fully human. Once you've met one you've met them all because they all share the same views and attitudes. You would never describe these people as unique, autonomous individuals. Muslims are particularly prone to this. Once you've met about ten of them you've met all one billion of them.
Jung had several mental collapses during his life. Unlike others, though, he was able to use these breakdowns to give him remarkable insights into his condition. On one occasion, he said, "My life seemed alien to me, like news from a remote world." This sums up the experience of those who have lost their way in life, who have no sense of meaning, no idea where they're going. They're so alienated from themselves that they barely know who they are. Many people in our shallow, materialistic world are on the verge of this condition. They stave it off by continually distracting themselves with all of the gadgets and diversions capitalism offers. But they're fooling no one, least of all themselves.
Jung, being a genius, was able to harness the mental crises he suffered. In fact, he pushed them further. He deliberately embarked on an exploration of his own unconscious. He spoke of plunging down into "dark depths" and reaching "the edge of a cosmic abyss." He commented, "It was like a voyage to the moon or a descent into empty space. I felt I was in the land of the dead."
Analysis is akin to lifting the lid of Pandora's Box and looking inside at all that has been rejected and neglected - at all the demons ready to fly out. Luckily, hope is in there too.
Many legendary heroes of antiquity ventured into the underworld. This can be taken as a metaphor for confronting their darkest fears and overcoming them. Those who return safely are always reinvigorated, and are enormously more powerful and spiritually enlightened.
Dante's famous work The Divine Comedy is essentially the description of a mid-life crisis. Half way though his life he finds himself in a dark place, lost, alone, and unable to find any path: "Midway through this way of life we're bound upon, I woke to find myself in a dark wood. Where the right road was wholly lost and gone." He reaches heaven only by struggling through first hell and then purgatory.
Just as Socrates had a personal daimon that lived in his mind and guided him, so Jung had his wise spiritual advisor called Philemon. This archetype of the Wise Old Man was so real to Jung that when he was strolling in the garden, he thought that Philemon was physically with him, talking to him, and saying things of which Jung had no conscious knowledge.
Many people who see ghosts, spirits, supernatural beings, aliens etc are actually reifying (objectifying) archetypes in their mind. The same brain circuits that are engaged when someone interacts with real people also get triggered when they have encounters with archetypes, thus making the archetypes seem like real beings of flesh and blood. Many "inspired" people, possessed by the muses, speak of having supernatural beings dictating to them. One could say that Mohammed's "visitation" by the Angel Gabriel, or Moses' encounter with God at the summit of Mount Sinai, or any prophet's physical contact with an "angel", falls into this category. It has been argued by some commentators that the whole of human history has been shaped by prophets mistaking internal psychic events for real, objective reality.
The archetype of the Wise Old Man may represent something astonishing - our true, eternal self. It seems old and wise because it is as old as time and has already accumulated enormous wisdom. It tries to communicate with us through our unconscious mind - through a glass darkly - and if we are sufficiently enlightened and intuitive like Jung then we can achieve something approaching direct communication. Such a person is on the verge of gnosis, and there can be little doubt that Jung believed that he himself was about to conquer the last frontier.
Death is nothing to fear if your archetypal program has worked as it should. The archetype of death - a wise and benevolent gatekeeper - guides us over the threshold and into the light of the afterlife. The gatekeeper is someone we loved who has taken the journey before us. Most accounts of Near Death Experiences are agreed on this point.
The process of individuation is about developing all the aspects of ourselves that we have neglected. It's about becoming a well-rounded, balanced person. It's about perfecting ourselves. If we are too introverted, we need to explore extraversion, and vice versa. If we think too much, we must get in touch with our feeling side. If we are too intuitive but pay little attention to the world around us, we need to spend time developing our physical, sensual awareness.
Who wouldn't want to excel in every area, to have no weaknesses, no deficiencies or defects? Individuation is about breaking down and analysing every part of our psyche, about understanding each component. Then we can put them all back together again in a true and harmonious synthesis.
Individuation is a process of self-development, self-actualisation, of making the most of oneself. It allows us to fully integrate all of the aspects of our psyche and it confers upon us a sense of psychic wholeness and true individual autonomy. It gives birth to the "inner man".
The ego needs first to integrate the persona, followed by the shadow then the anima/animus then the mana personalities and finally the Self. It needs to correct any imbalance between extraversion and introversion, and between thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. When all of that is completed, we are Whole.
The Philosopher's Stone - the Lapis - was a fabled transmuting agent that was said to allow the transformation of base metals into gold. The 16th century alchemist Gerhard Dorn said, "Transform yourself into living Philosophers' Stones!" That's what individuation at its ultimate level seeks to accomplish.
Jung argued that the more scientific knowledge humanity gained, the more it lost its soul. "Western man can no longer experience the uncanny," he said. We are becoming psychologically imbalanced, and increasingly alienated from out true selves. We need to embark on a great project of transformation that will bridge the gulf between science and religion. Illuminism is the only possible answer. Illuminism is the future of the human race.
Individuation II
"Individuation" is the centrepiece of Jung's approach to having a fulfilled, meaningful, satisfying life. It's a lifelong process of self-development and self-actualisation whereby an individual successfully analyses the separate components of their psyche via a technique called differentiation, comes to a full understanding of each aspect then re-integrates the different parts to become a complete, whole, indivisible person: a psychic totality.
Mental health is about the unity of the psyche, and mental illness about its fragmentation. Individuation enables us to attain complete mental wholeness, completeness and unity, with each component correctly integrated i.e. perfect mental well-being.
Regarding schizophrenia, Jung wrote: "Whereas in the healthy person the ego is the subject of his experience, in the schizophrenic the ego is only one of the experiencing subjects. In other words, in schizophrenia the normal subject has split into a plurality of subjects, or into a plurality of autonomous complexes."
Individuation is about making the Self rather than the ego the experiencing subject, and the Self is invulnerable to fragmentation and illness.
Human beings become ill when they are false to themselves, when they are alienated from their true nature, when they have strayed from the true path. To find your Self, the culmination of individuation, is to become an authentic human being, a TRUE person.
Jung regarded the psyche as a teleological instrument that had as an integral part of its structure the passing of messages from the unconscious to consciousness in order to guide consciousness, albeit in coded, symbolic fashion (the language of the unconscious) rather than in the explicit language of consciousness. Thus at the core of the human mind is the mystery of how to decode the cryptic messages of the unconscious. We are all psychic detectives, furiously trying to read the runes. We are story beings because stories are the best way of making sense of the emotionally charged messages of the unconscious. Abstract, unemotional logic won't help us because our unconscious can't formulate analytical statements. It's not a computer.
Individuation is about the heightening of awareness and the expansion of consciousness through the integration of unconscious elements. It's a process of psychic growth. Individuation is about the uniqueness of the individual, about becoming truly yourself, freed from the need to conform with others for social acceptability. It's about self-transformation, of giving birth inside oneself to a new, higher human with far greater power and capability. It's about drinking the Golden Elixir, of discovering what is highest and most noble in us - the Golden Flower that we truly are. Individuation is the alchemical transmutation of ourselves from base metal to gold.
The Individuation Process, the journey to psychic wholeness, to maximum self-actualisation has five stages:
1) Analysing and understanding your persona. It is what you want it to be? Does it reflect your true values and authentically carry your ego into the world, or is it fake, phoney, devious, hypocritical, shallow, narcissistic, all style and no substance, all show concealing an empty space where your ego should be?
2) Confronting your shadow. You have to face up to the things you have locked in the box of your personal unconscious. Why did you put them there? Why do you fear them? Have you failed to understand their true meaning? You must integrate these contents into consciousness so that they no longer haunt you. This is the most challenging phase of individuation when you have to activate your inner hero and slay your personal dragons, deal with your inner demons, and clear out every monster from the dark recesses of your mind.
3) The encounter with your anima/animus - the soul-image. This can also be a great personal trial. Men must confront their inner female, and women their inner male. The anima is the repository of the feminine aspects of the male psyche such as gentleness, patience, emotional accord, relatedness, sympathy, empathy, tenderness, receptiveness, patience, forgiveness, compassion, appreciation of Nature. The animus is the masculine side of the female psyche reflecting hard analysis, logic, rationality, abstraction, independence, assertiveness, aggression, competitiveness, adventure, conquest, glory, thrill-seeking, confronting danger, the will to control, to rule, to dominate, the will to power. All of your relationships with the opposite sex are defined here. A whole person must be able to understand and appreciate the qualities of the opposite sex, which are essential to collective human health and progress. We have lived in a disastrously male-dominated world for far too long, but now there are signs that we could flip and succumb to an equally disastrous feminised culture that despises masculinity. We have to be an integrated society that understands how best to optimise masculine and feminine traits. Similarly, all individuals must be able to accommodate the values of the opposite sex within themselves if they wish to be psychically whole. All of the "macho" bullshit has to perish, together with the "all men are rapists" school of feminism.
4) The encounter with the mana personalities - the gods and goddesses, our inner guides that can bestow superpowers and the wisdom of the ages. This is potentially the most uplifting phase of individuation, but also comes with many dangers if we allow ourselves to be overwhelmed.
5) Meeting the Self - the God encounter. This is the final and most inspiring and wondrous phase of individuation where you become all you have it within you to be. In strange, mysterious episodes of heightened awareness - often induced by drugs or transformative meetings with "gurus" - many people have spontaneous, but all too fleeting, encounters with their Higher Self. This glimpse of a higher life, a higher state of being, becomes the defining moment of their existence, and they spend the rest of their lives trying to understand it and recreate it. They should systematically work towards it, using all of the different stages of individuation. There are no shortcuts, no easy options, no quick fixes. People have to get away from the whole idea of instant gratification and "fast food" for the Soul. There are no spiritual McDonalds that can rustle up the answers to your life in a one-minute special with lots of mayo and ketchup. You have to earn enlightenment. You have to work hard for it, and do momentous things. You have to overcome your deepest fears. Our modern-day culture of providing everything on a plate is the worst possible preparation for achieving self-actualisation. It's the opposite of the correct formula. The modern age is the most spiritually backward in human history because it's the one most in thrall to the deceptive reality of the ego-consciousness. It may be extremely unfashionable to say, but working hard over many years remains the best way to make the most of yourself. If you're afraid of that undertaking, that effort, can you really expect to ever be successful?
Individuation - Differentiation
Individuation is a process of understanding each of the components that make up our psyche. For example, we need to understand where we stand in relation to the two attitudes of extraversion and introversion. How do these impact our lives? Are they causing us any problems? Do we need to build up our "muscles" concerning the attitude we don't typically exhibit? If we're too introverted, we should find ways to practise being extraverted. If too extraverted, we should try to explore our introverted side. Similarly, we must examine the four functions: thinking, feeling, intuition and sensation. How important is each to us? Do we go through life defiantly in one way, ignoring the others? Do we think and analyse too much, cutting ourselves off from feeling? Are we too quick to emotionally react rather than thinking something through? Are we so obsessed with letting our intuition show us future possibilities that we don't live in the present and fail to pay much attention to what's going on around us? Alternatively, do we spend so much time sucking in the detail of the present moment that we can never make plans?
We need to have a detailed understanding of our Jungian psychological type, and of the unconscious shadow that compensates for our conscious ego and persona. Gradually, we should try to build ourselves up in any area in which we are deficient and integrate our shadow into our consciousness, making us more rounded and flexible, better able to adapt to any situation in which we find ourselves.
Jung refers to this general process as "differentiation" - of separating and refining the elements just as the alchemists did. We have to reduce ourselves down to our components to see what we are dealing with, then put ourselves back together, but this time intelligently and knowingly. Thus we create our true selves. You can't begin to undertake that critical project until you know what the building blocks are and how they can be combined in the optimal way.
As babies, we are all undifferentiated expressions of the collective unconscious. If we didn't develop individual strengths and weaknesses, we would remain as part of an undifferentiated mass forever. Indeed, many of us remain so conformist throughout our lives, so determined to obey traditions, to be acceptable to others, not to be "different", that we barely become true individuals at all. Look at Islam - it appears to be a system for destroying individuality. Everyone wears modest clothes. All of the women wear hijabs. All of the men have beards. Everyone prays five times a day. Everyone goes to communal prayers on Friday. Everyone memorises the Koran. Everyone dreams of going on the Hajj pilgrimage. All Muslims talk of their "brothers and sisters", meaning all other Muslims. All Muslims dream of a united Islamic nation embracing all of the world's Muslims, and they dream especially of the whole world being Islamic, and of Sharia Law being the universal law. They are anti-free speech because that would offend the Koran. They are anti-democracy, anti-meritocracy, anti-blasphemy, anti-drugs, and anti-sex. No one is allowed to create images of Mohammed or Allah. Everyone must eat halal meat. And so it goes on, an endless list of requirements designed to make everyone Islamic robots incapable of independent free thought. And, of course, that's exactly from where Islam derives its power. It's like the Borg of Star Trek - an enormous collective lacking any thinking individuals.
Muslims are in desperate need of the individuation process, but their religion makes it impossible. Muslims are never allowed to become individuals. It's contrary to the Koran to be an individual. Only Muslims are acceptable - and Muslims are people who obey the Koran, not people who are freethinking, independent, radical, non-conformists, choosing their own path through life regardless of the beliefs of others. Mainstream religions despise individuals. Nothing could be more subversive than an individual. How could a Nietzschean Superman ever be compatible with Abrahamism?
Individuation is about claiming oneself from the social mass, from the herd, from the flock, and becoming a unique individual. How many people are true individuals? Most people simply follow the herd through their lives. That's the path of least resistance, the easy, lazy route through life. Such people have never truly lived. No Muslim has ever been an authentic human being because they have voluntarily submitted to a belief system that has no requirement for freethinking individuals. It just wants mass obedience and submission.
Individuation is first and foremost a process of differentiation and, as Jung says, differentiation is the "development of differences, separation of parts from the whole." To become who we truly are, we must show how we are different from others. We must realise how we differ from every other person and seek to build on those differences. We should be non-conformists rather than conformists, individuals rather than those who follow the herd, freethinkers not bound to any dogmatic text. We should never be afraid to be different and to cultivate difference, to be authentically unique, to be genuine characters, people who have proper lives.
Differentiation may be defined as the separation of parts from the whole, necessary for conscious access to all of our individual psychological components. If we don't perform differentiation, we remain unseparated from the whole.
To understand something better, we must disassemble it. Then, when we come to reassemble it, we will have a deeper knowledge and understanding and we'll be able to produce far more powerful results. Things we would have overlooked because we didn't see or understand them properly can now be intelligently incorporated.
An undifferentiated psyche is always inferior to a differentiated one. For consciousness to be expanded, the unconscious must be understood.
In the days of the ancients, there were thought to be four elements: earth, water, fire and air. Nowadays, we have identified the multitude of elements of the Periodic Table. Because we have properly differentiated the elements, we have the whole of advanced chemistry at our disposal. We can do things undreamt by the ancients. Thus differentiation furnished us with enormously more power. So it should be with our own psyches.
Jung wrote: "So long as a function is still so fused with one or more functions - thinking with feeling, feeling with sensation etc - then it is unable to operate on its own. It is in an archaic condition i.e. not differentiated, not separated from the whole as a special part and existing by itself. Undifferentiated thinking is incapable of thinking apart from other functions; it is continuously mixed up with sensations, feelings, intuitions, just as undifferentiated feeling is mixed up with sensations and fantasies."
Differentiation involves a) differentiating yourself from others, b) differentiating the components of your persona: your relationship to extraversion and introversion, and to the four functions of thinking, feeling, intuition and sensation, c) differentiating the contents of your personal unconscious from your consciousness, d) differentiating the contents of the personal unconscious, e) differentiating the contents of your personal unconscious from the collective unconscious, f) differentiating the contents of the collective unconscious.
Along with differentiation, we must understand integration - how best to put the differentiated components back together again.
Individuation is a never-ending process of differentiation, integration, analysis and synthesis, dialectically repeating themselves on higher and higher planes, with the result that our consciousness keeps expanding. The process can terminate only when we become God.
The Psyche at Large
It's not just individuals that have psyches. Religions do, and corporations, and institutions, and governments and nations and societies - and all of them need their heads examined. They all have a persona, an ego, a shadow, an anima/animus, mana personalities and a Self, and nearly all of them are mentally ill.
The Transcendent Function
Jung suggested that the psyche operates dialectically and makes use of an archetypal process called the transcendent function that can resolve mental conflicts. A certain idea exists in the consciousness (the thesis), counterbalanced by an idea raised by the unconscious (the antithesis, invariably presenting itself symbolically), and whose meaning is often lost on the rational, conscious mind. So, if the conscious mind is baffled how can any progress be made? Jung proposed the concept of the transcendent function operating as the synthesis phase of the dialectic. The basic idea is that the tension created by the thesis and antithesis is held by the mind for some time while it subconsciously tries to create a synthesis to bridge the opposites. It tries various keys, so to speak, and eventually finds the one that opens the door to a higher understanding. The conscious mind at last seizes hold of the mysterious message conveyed by the unconscious, understands it and integrates it into consciousness. If the consciousness keeps doing this with more and more unconscious contents, it integrates more and more of the unconscious and keeps expanding. The ultimate aim is to consciously integrate and understand everything - the whole cosmos. In other words, to become God.
The task of the transcendent function is to impose a synthesis on a conscious thesis and compensatory unconscious antithesis. It brings opposites together and then transcends them, producing something better, a higher state of expanded consciousness. The more that the transcendent function brings about the healthy conscious integration of unconscious elements, the better.
The transcendent function can reconnect us "with the gods". It can restore us to healthy contact with the archetypes of the collective unconscious. It can heal the anxiety that plagues our ego-consciousness, soothe difficult traumas and put us back on the right path.
Our ego is preoccupied with mortality. The Self, being immortal, removes that existential angst. Anyone who has made a strong connection with the Self is no longer in any doubt about having an afterlife.
Projection
Jung's view of the psyche is that it's highly structured, programmed and dynamic. Just as biology asserts that our DNA contains all of the information needed to make us what we are, so Jung argued that the archetypes manage the development of our psyche i.e. physical and mental growth happen in parallel. For Jung, DNA is responsible only for our biological progress. It's the archetypes that handle our mental development.
Jung saw the psyche as innately purposeful i.e. teleological. It actively desires to grow, to attain an equilibrium where all components are in a healthy balance, to become whole and as perfect as possible. Its specific goal is the attainment of the Self, the perfect centre of the psyche. It has inbuilt mechanisms to compensate for any imbalances.
A key part of Jung's thinking was that the unconscious stands in a compensatory role to the consciousness. Anything that becomes imbalanced in consciousness will trigger an equal and opposite reaction in the unconscious. The unconscious will communicate with the consciousness through symbols, dreams, images and finally induce mental illness if the consciousness does not heed the warning signs.
A critical dimension of Jung's scheme is that everything isn't confined within our own minds. Through the mechanism of projection, we can take some factor of ourselves that we hate and wish to disown and project it onto others.
Arguably, we live in Projection World where all of the filth inside ourselves is projected onto others, with whom we then enter into conflict. We imagine that we are struggling with an external enemy when in fact our true enemy is ourselves. If we had enough understanding of this, nations would embrace therapy rather than war.
A classic example of the phenomenon is the Islamic concept of jihad - holy struggle. You will find many Muslims who will say that jihad is about self-overcoming in order to bring oneself closer to God (i.e. it is an internal psychological matter), but then you will also find the Muslim extremists who will assert that jihad is about holy war against the infidels. What's happening in the second case is that the internal struggle is being projected onto others, thus making it external.
All of the 9/11 maniacs were Westernised, affluent Muslims. What they were struggling with psychologically was that they were extremely attracted to the free Western lifestyle, which was utterly opposed to the suffocating prison of Islamic values and rules. To become Westernised is to become a bad Muslim. So, the conflict between Islam and the temptations of the West resulted in many Muslims detesting the West (signifying their detestation of the part of them that was so strongly seduced by the West), and waging war against it.
The "clash of civilisations", as the war between the West and Islam is sometimes called, is nothing of the sort. This struggle has nothing to do with principles, values or morality. Those are simply the pretexts that "holy warriors" use to rationalize what they are doing.
The whole thing is actually about an imbalanced, unhealthy conscious life summoning an extremely dark unconscious response, which is then projected outwards, leading to murder and mayhem.
All of the mainstream religions, especially the monotheistic ones, are breeding grounds of neurosis and psychosis because they continually wage war against natural human instincts such as having fun, having sex, fooling around, playing, taking drugs.
Islam bans drugs, alcohol, recreational sex, public demonstrations of any affection, flirting. Women are deemed so sexually dangerous that they are compelled to wear burqas to hide them from the male gaze. Think of the sheer scale of the mental illness inherent in all of these prohibitions. Islam, because of its fanatical pursuit of purity, has unconsciously summoned Satan into its heart and is now nothing but Devil worship. The more it strives for purity the more Satanic it becomes. It's casting an evil shadow all across the world. Islam, a religion that sees itself as all about peace, has in fact become all about the opposite - pure violence. It was psychologically inevitable that this would happen.
It's simple to have a peaceful world. You need only identify all of the mentally disturbed belief systems and get rid of them, or introduce massive reforms. The Illuminati understood this millennia ago. The whole point of "Sin for Salvation" is to create psychological good health by allowing people to explore their shadow side and thus defuse it. The monotheistic religions, obsessed to an infinite degree with "sin" and purity, have bred monsters that have stalked the world for countless generations.
Mainstream religion is the CAUSE of war, hatred, violence, neurosis and psychosis. That's why it's Satan's greatest achievement. Can you imagine anything more devilishly clever? In the name of holiness, purity and goodness, Satan evoked the opposite: unholiness, impurity and evil. Through the pursuit of heaven, he delivered hell. Pure genius. As we have always said, Satan is a master psychologist and if we wish to put right everything that he has made wrong, we must be even smarter.
The thing is - we are. The human race, or rather the brightest amongst us, see with perfect clarity what went so badly wrong in the human journey. The essence of the error was that morality (and thus religion) was preferred over psychology.
Nietzsche waged a one-man war against morality, even calling himself the first "immoralist". He saw that conventional morality was a stinking, rancid edifice that was a breeding ground for everything truly immoral.
So, anyone who wants a better world must become an immoralist in the Nietzschean sense. Laws, rules, regulations, moral strictures, commandments and, above all, definitions of sin must be completely overhauled.
REVALUE ALL VALUES!
We must apply psychology, not morality, to all rules. Sin can play no part in the world of psychological health.
We seek nothing less than the complete abolition of conventional religion and its replacement with psychology. That will be the foundation of the New World Order. Jung's psychological theories were about creating human beings engaged in maximising their potential - in becoming God. Since that is also the aim of any healthy religion then religion and psychology should become indistinguishable.
In fact, the old religions WERE perfect systems of psychology - of NEGATIVE psychology. Their authors were geniuses at manipulating every human weakness, fear, anxiety, frailty, and, also, hope. And thus they exercised total control over them, for the worst possible reasons. The world became a prison, a torture chamber. The Gnostics who labelled it hell were entirely correct. Who are the damned? We are!
As Schopenhauer said, "For the world is Hell, and men are on the one hand the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it."
Yet the remedy is within our grasp. Now that we understand the past, we can put it right. We can start again, using all of the precious knowledge we have accumulated. We have to abolish the concept of sin, particularly that of Original Sin. There are no sinners.
"When man no longer regards himself as evil he ceases to be so."
Nietzsche
"I am entirely at a loss to know to what extent I ought to have felt 'sinful'."
Nietzsche
"If you think a thing evil, you make it evil."
Nietzsche
"There are no moral phenomena, only moral interpretations of phenomena."
Nietzsche
Instead, we should speak of the psychologically healthy and unhealthy, of positive and negative, of the life affirming and the life denying, of the vital and enervated, of health and sickness, of actualisation and obstruction. All problems are psychological, and they require psychological answers. Smart, effective psychology is the bedrock of a healthy society. We must replace priests, popes, pastors, reverends, imams, rabbis and monks with psychologists and philosophers. We must replace "holy" books with psychological texts, prayers with therapy.
Old-style religion is dead. Psychology is the way forward.
The world isn't a religious problem, it's a psychological one. The Old World Order is the monster our unconscious created through ignorance and fear. But now we have the knowledge to slay the dragon, to kill the beast. We can activate our hero program, and in turn that will trigger our God program.
Meritocracy isn't just a political or economic system. It's about the psychological well-being of everyone. Privilege is evil. It literally destroys lives and potential. Meritocracy is the antidote.
We have been ill for so long, but now we know how to cure ourselves. The problem concerns how we administer the medicine to those who have become insane - the billions of Abrahamists and karma junkies.
Our planet isn't a jail, it's an asylum. It's mental illness that afflicts us, not Original Sin nor past lives. But nature provided us with the archetypes that can cure us. All we have to do is accept them. Hasn't the time come to heal ourselves, to invoke the Doctor archetype?
The New World Order can be paradise. Only one thing is required, yet it's the hardest thing of all - the complete and utter destruction of all the things we previously held most sacred and which assuredly made us ill and mad.
The old gods must die, the old institutions, the sacrosanct family allowed to brainwash children, the privileged elites that have ruled us in their own interests. They must all be swept aside.
The hour has come for the revaluation of all values, for a Brave New World.
This time we'll get it right because this time we know what we're doing. Only now, in this time, can we say that and mean it. The twentieth century brought with it some of the greatest destruction in human history, yet it also bathed the world in the light of incredible knowledge in all fields. Humanity is groaning under the sheer volume of knowledge it possesses. There's no lack of knowledge. What is lacking is the will to apply it. The gap between the stupidity of our political leaders and the knowledge available to them is staggering. If we had smart people ruling the world, we could create paradise on earth. But we don't, and paradise remains as elusive as ever.
The idiots who run the world, the dumbocrats, are supported by billions of even more idiotic people. They would never let smart people take control. That's why they're stupid.
"We ought to fear a man who hates himself; for we are liable to become victims of his anger and revenge. Let us then try to tempt him into self-love."
Nietzsche
"The man who fights with monsters should be careful lest he becomes a monster. And if you gaze for too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you." -- Nietzsche
"The Jews are the moral genius among nations by virtue of their capacity for despising the human in themselves more than any other people." -- Nietzsche
"All suppressed truths become poisonous." -- Nietzsche
Projection II
"Projections change the world into the replica of one's unknown face."
Jung
Projection is the ego-defence mechanism that enables us to blame others for our own faults, to see in others the flaws that we refuse to see in ourselves. It's the transfer of inner psychic problems onto an outer object. It's the scapegoat mechanism. We think that if we dump our "sins" on another then destroy that other thing, we thereby destroy our own problems.
If we don't confront our shadow, we will invariably project many of its contents outside of ourselves in an attempt to deny that they are our problem. The more we try to bury the evidence of our shadow, the bigger and more dangerous it becomes.
Some psychologists say that you should think of someone you hate, write down everything you despise about them in a long list and then, finally, you should put your own name above the list because you have really described the things you hate about yourself.
The biggest problem facing the human race is the shadow. And the most dangerous people on earth are those that deny they have a shadow. Jews, Christians and Muslims are the ultimate shadow beings because their religions regard the shadow as the work of the Devil, hence all Abrahamists refuse to accept that they have any shadow since, if they did, they would be sinful, evil and destined for hell.
Abrahamists are consumed by their shadow. It has made them deranged. Muslims, in particular, have gone insane. They want to kill novelists, cartoonists, "blasphemers", immodest women, adulterers, fornicators, gays, freethinkers, atheists, apostates, infidels - well, everyone who isn't a "good" Muslim. Muslim men are so preoccupied with sexual temptation that they project their fear of where lust will lead them onto every woman. Therefore, because Muslim men are always thinking about sex, Muslim women have to go around in hijabs, niqabs and burqas to dampen men's desires. What Muslim women wear is literally the consequence of the projection of Muslim men's fear of sex. If Muslim men had a healthy attitude to sex, Muslim women would be able to wear anything they liked.
Muslim men's sexual lust is redirected towards homicidal violence. If they can die as "martyrs", Allah will grant them 72 virgins. Suicide bombers are all sexually frustrated. None of them would want to die if they had a good sex life.
Muslims detest decadent Westerners with their sexual freedom, their drugs and alcohol and music. Why? Because Muslims want those things too, but their religion forbids it, so they bury their dark desires in their shadow then project it onto Westerners as a repellent thing that must be opposed.
Islam should not be treated as a religion but as a textbook psychiatric condition. The best way to understand Muslims is as people who are consumed by their shadow contents to a pathological degree. It's pointless to attempt to reason with them. That's why the West genuinely has to be concerned about Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. Whereas a healthy nation would never contemplate using nuclear weapons, a shadow nation collectively dreaming of apocalyptic martyrdom would not hesitate to use the bomb.
The novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell could easily be about Islam: a repressive state, watching everyone all the time, expecting everyone to obey, to conform, to inform on others, to despise free thought and freedom, to worship Allah (Big Brother), to give their whole life to Allah without question, to define Allah as the meaning of life.
The character of Big Brother is the dark inversion of the Self. The ruling regime of Nineteen Eighty-Four is the shadow come to life. Instead of promoting freedom, it brings enslavement. No individuality is permitted, no inner life. Every citizen is forced into subjection. Consciousness is redundant.
Shadow contents are usually tinged with feelings of guilt and worthlessness, of rejection and abandonment, of loneliness and inadequacy, anxiety and paranoia. People are terrified they will be rejected by others should their true nature be discovered or exposed, hence they are driven ever deeper into the grip of a fake persona.
Children can often tune into and adopt their parents' shadow contents i.e. they compensate for their parents weaknesses. Sexually frustrated parents might have sexually licentious children, for example. Conservative parents might have liberal children, religious parents atheistic children, and so on.
Phobias are a form of projection. Freud said, "Phobias have the character of a projection in that they replace an internal, instinctual danger by an external perceptual one."
Libido
"I am not a man. I am dynamite."
Nietzsche
While Freud used the term "libido" to refer to sexual energy, Jung broadened its scope so that it applied to psychic energy in general i.e. it is the energy that drives the psyche. But what does that actually mean? In fact, the easiest way to think of it is as the energy that powers archetypes. Assuming we treat the ego as the "consciousness archetype" that emerges from the unconsciousness, and the persona as the ego's archetypal public mask, then if we are dealing with the psyche we are dealing with nothing but archetypes. Archetypes manifest themselves as symbols and images, especially of people, so we can think of libido as the energy that we choose to invest in these symbols and images. The amount of libido we allocate indicates how highly we value something. Libido, like all energy, can neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed or redirected. Thus, if libido is withdrawn from one archetype it must manifest itself in another archetype i.e. if it disappears in one place it must reappear in another. If a Muslim represses his sexual desires, the energy will reappear in his Shadow and he's well on his way to becoming a suicide bomber. It may sound crazy, but the best way to stop suicide bombers would be to make sure that all Muslims get a damned good fuck and stop thinking about the 72 virgins awaiting them if they blow themselves to smithereens.
Our psyche can be regarded as an intricate maze of channels connecting archetypes, with libido flowing through those channels, flowing sluggishly in some places, fast and smoothly in others, becoming blocked in some places and then redirecting itself.
Our task is to find the optimal psychic flow that provides maximum energy to all of our positive and healthy archetypes and starves the negative and unhealthy ones of their energy so that they can't damage us.
If you're feeling "down" - depressed, lacking in energy, apathetic, uninterested - it means your energy is in the wrong places. A healthy person is an energised person, buzzing, committed, focused, confident. He knows exactly where he's at, where he's going, what he's doing. He's in the zone.
Are you?
"Rare men would rather perish than work without delight in their labour."
Nietzsche
Extraversion versus Introversion
Extraverts define themselves with regard to the external world, and introverts to the internal world. Extraverts tend to focus on people and things, and introverts on ideas and images. It's impossible for an extravert to be a hermit, or an introvert to be a perpetual socialite.
Extraverts are obsessed with the object in all of its different senses - things, external accomplishments, even people. They are comfortable and successful when energetically participating in the external world, when having stimulating human relationships. Left to their own devices, with nothing to divert them, they become morose, restless and ill at ease. Being put in solitary confinement with nothing to keep them occupied but their own thoughts would be hell for them. They have no inner world to fall back on. If you want to psychologically break an extravert, you need only isolate them so that the sole object they have to occupy them is themselves. In a very real sense, extraverts hate themselves and want to spend as little time in their own company as possible. They can't relate to the interior world and they shun it. They think it's morbid, unnatural and unhealthy for people to spend too much time on their own. Extraverts are almost always other-directed or tradition-directed. They take their cues from their environment, not from their own inner values since they don't really have any.
One of the grand tasks of building a better world would involve trying to find ways to make extraverts more comfortable with themselves. In many ways, the two great evils of our world are the tendency to be other-directed or tradition-directed. Capitalism (the ideology of the consumption of objects and the objectification of the world), and fashion (i.e. looking to others to define what's "hot" and what's not) are archetypally other-directed. Abrahamic religions which deposit the ancient past in the midst of the present are archetypally tradition-directed. Other-directedness and tradition-directedness are both products of the extraverted mentality since they call on a person to allow himself to be defined by others. The extravert mentality, when combined with a submissive attitude, is the root of the appalling human inclination to accept being slaves.
The people most opposed to slavery in all of its forms are invariably dominant introverts.
Introverts define themselves with regard to the subject rather than the object. They are preoccupied with ideas, feelings, thoughts, fantasies, speculations, dreams, hopes, theories, images, intuitions - all the activity of the inner-directed mind. In terms of objects, introverts will concentrate on just a few, and only to inspire new inner activity. An introvert may stare for hours at a leaf on a tree and compose poetry, while an extravert would be rushing through the forest, sucking in as much sensory information as possible. The introvert is like a microscope, a telescope, a magnifying glass, focusing on one thing to the exclusion of others, as if trying to absorb the object into the subject. The introvert is preoccupied with detail and intensity. The extravert on the other hand can be compared with a multi-channel TV. The extravert wants as many experiences as possible to surf through. He doesn't want to linger on detail or specifics. He just wants constant sensory input.
Schopenhauer, a huge influence on Jung, wrote, "People need external activity because they have no internal activity."
Introverts have high "cortical arousal" meaning that their minds are always buzzing with activity, so they're not looking to their environment to provide them with more. Extraverts, conversely, have low cortical arousal - there's not too much going internally - and they need the environment around them to provide them with stimulation. While introverts are self-stimulating, extraverts need others to provide stimulation. While introverts are always seeking to merge subject and object, to bring the object into the inner world, extraverts are desperate to keep subject and object separate and to make themselves powerful objects in the environment. Introverts want to absorb, to subjectify, the "outer", and extraverts to objectify the "inner". Introverts are fundamentally focused on the r = 0 domain, while extraverts are preoccupied with the r > 0 domain. Extraverts rule the world because they are much more concerned with worldly things. Introverts are the spiritual ones. Materialism and extraversion go hand in hand. Introverts are naturally drawn towards idealism.
It's often said that the world is plagued by boredom. In fact, it's only extraverts that suffer severe boredom. Introverts need minimal stimulation.
A breathtaking truth of the human condition is that the eternal philosophical debate between materialism and idealism actually concerns extraverted thinking and attitudes versus their introverted counterparts. Science, being all about the outer world of objects, is fiercely and irrationally materialistic. It's the highest mode of extraverted thinking. Religion, philosophy and poetry are all quintessentially introverted activities.
Enormous problems arise when the dogmas of extraversion are imposed on introverts, and vice versa. Science has cut itself off from the mental world and cares only about objects. Religion, an introverted activity, becomes deranged when it's embraced by extraverts, most of whom have no sense of true spirituality. Extraverted religious thinking lies at the heart of the catastrophic Satanic religions of Abrahamism. Something like Buddhism is enormously more in tune with introverted religious thinking, hence is immensely more peaceful and undogmatic.
The most rapidly expanding religion in the world is Pentecostal Christianity where people imagine themselves possessed by the Holy Spirit. This religion appeals to the usual types of people: the poor, the badly educated, the desperate, the credulous, the crazy. Above all, the extraverted. Check it out:
This religion is typical irrational nonsense. You simply have to believe in Jesus Christ and you're saved. The Holy Spirit will enter you and solve all of your problems. That's it. What a sophisticated religion! Two thousand years down the line and the dummies are still lining up to swallow the greatest con in history. Will humanity never learn?
Extraverts always gravitate towards dogmatism (i.e. simplistic rules that don't require any contemplation), and introverts towards heresy (i.e. freedom of thought). Christians are extraverts, while Gnostics are introverts. It's a remarkable fact that all aspects of our world (economic systems, philosophies, religions, sciences, institutions, political systems, education systems etc.) can be analysed to the extent to which they are extravert or introvert.
The Tea Party are a classic example of unintellectual, anti-intellectual, extraverted, racist retards. They are clueless about true spirituality.
Bertrand Russell perceptively compared American Christian Fundamentalists with the first wave of childishly simplistic Christianity that arose in the aftermath of Christ's crucifixion. Russell wrote: "The Christianity of the Synoptic Gospels is almost innocent of metaphysics. The Christianity of modern America, in this respect, is like primitive Christianity; Platonism is alien in popular thought and feeling in the United States, and most American Christians are much more concerned with duties here on earth, and with social progress in the everyday world, than with the transcendental hopes that consoled men when everything terrestrial inspired despair. I am not speaking of any change of dogma, but of a difference of emphasis and interest."
America is, on the whole, an extraverted country with a shallow culture, little spirituality and a profound hostility towards thinking people. The Tea Party represent this tendency taken to its extreme. Who in their right mind would consider Sarah Palin credible? - only brainless, materialistic extraverts mired in day-to-day trivia and in the war of status that consumes extraverts while nauseating introverts.
America also has tens of millions of introverts of course, and America will only be "saved" when the introverts are able to exert far more influence than they do now.
Extraverted thinking is, sadly, usually more successful, despite (and perhaps even because of) its shallowness. Introverted thinking is deep but often impractical because it doesn't appeal to the superficial masses. No introvert would ever have thought up something like the Islamic annual Hajj - a grotesque display of extraversion that sends a shudder of revulsion through all freethinking introverts. The Hajj revolves around mass bonding between shallow extraverts. It has no connection at all with spirituality. The Hajj pilgrims look like brainwashed zombies. They are not individuals. They are not inner-directed or autonomous. They are completely defined by others and by ancient traditions. It's truly sad that these people imagine themselves spiritual. They literally don't know the meaning of the word.
Introverts hate having to fit in with the crowd. They have no problem at all with their own company and they prefer small groups of like-minded people. They are uncomfortable in large groups of strangers. Secret societies are introverted organisations. They provide the intense mental experiences that introverts thrive on, in select, uncrowded environments where the superficial are deliberately excluded.
Extraverts view introverts as self-absorbed, reserved and uptight. Introverts see extraverts as shallow, hypocritical, fake, opportunistic and lacking in "soul".
In a New World Order, extraverts need to integrate their introverted shadow, and likewise introverts their extraverted shadow. Then we can enjoy the best of both worlds rather than being trapped in one or the other.
ARCHETYPAL TALES
The tale of Theseus and the Minotaur is often taken as a metaphor for the interaction of the ego and soul-image. The maiden Ariadne (representing the soul-image) led Theseus (representing the conscious ego) into the labyrinth (representing the unconscious). Theseus would have become lost had not Ariadne given him a golden thread to take with him, which he used to retrace his path. Theseus slew the Minotaur (representing his shadow) at the centre of the labyrinth then safely returned to the embrace of his anima. He emerged stronger, wiser, and more powerful. He had dealt with his shadow, negotiated his unconscious and embraced his anima. And thus he transcended his Lower Self.
Similarly, the psychopompos - the conductor of souls - can lead you safely through the underworld (your unconscious).
Consider other archetypal figures: the damsel in distress, for example. She can trigger the "hero program" in a man, a classic example being Andromeda, to whose rescue came Perseus. Another example is Sleeping Beauty being awoken from her deathlike sleep by the handsome prince.
The damsel represents the hero's anima, which, because of neglect, repression or denial is symbolically dead or being threatened with death. When the hero rescues the damsel or administers the kiss of life, it's actually his own inner female that he's saving, thus bringing himself into a healthy balance of yin and yang.
In the case of the prince who revives Sleeping Beauty with his kiss, his act also awakens everyone else in the palace; they, like her, have been asleep for a hundred years. In other words, having resolved his anima issues, the hero now finds that all the other aspects of his psyche that were "sleeping" - i.e. to which his consciousness was oblivious, having neglected or repressed them - can now come to life, and lead him towards Wholeness.
It can't be emphasized enough that myths, legends, folktales and fairytales (and, crucially, religious tales) have such a profound effect on us and such abiding relevance because they reveal archetypes more clearly and vividly than anything else does. The Wizard of Oz is a modern fantasy that abounds with archetypes, hence its popularity. Star Wars was designed from the outset to be an archetypal tale. It's interesting to note that the original Star Wars films were much more popular than the ones that followed later. That's because the latter films were obsessed with visual effects and forgot about telling a riveting archetypal tale. The latter films look great but have no heart and were condemned on release as boring and a dreadful disappointment.
A woman's animus figure can be seen in characters such as Mr Darcy (from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice), Mr Rochester (from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre) and Heathcliff (from Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights), or the "handsome prince", the "shining knight", the "tall, dark stranger". In the tragic Arthurian tale of the Lady of Shalott, the heroine loves Sir Lancelot but is unable to get him and dies of a broken heart. She has been destroyed by her failure to come to terms with her animus. Usually, the heroine walks off into the sunset, married to her animus. All tales of romance so eagerly consumed by women revolve around the animus. In a "man's world", it becomes of supreme importance for a woman to capture the heart of a man who will provide for her and look after her in the alien world of masculinity.
Our society would have an entirely different feel to it if it reflected feminine values as strongly as masculine ones. Women would no longer be defined by their animus. The rom-com industry and Jennifer Aniston would take a huge hit - thank God!
You should go back and read classic tales and see if you can reinterpret them psychologically. Just why did they capture your imagination so strongly? Why was your favourite tale so important to you? What does it reveal about you, about the inner workings of your mind? Perhaps as a little boy you loved the tale of the Snow Queen - an icy beauty who could freeze your heart. This is a classic anima tale. It shows you that you perceive your anima as alien and dangerous, lacking human warmth, yet as incredibly seductive and beguiling. Later on in life, male fans of the Snow Queen may find themselves drawn to femme fatale figures of film noir. Such men tend to have highly masculine values and are afraid of their anima for fear that it might emasculate them. In the tale of Samson and Delilah, Samson is metaphorically castrated when he allows Delilah to cut his hair. The image of the "vagina dentata" - the vagina with teeth - is a potent symbol of male fear of an emasculating anima.
Little girls might be intrigued by the story of Little Red Riding Hood. She goes into the dark forest (the unconscious), strays off the path (i.e. is waylaid by unconscious elements) and encounters her animus (the Big Bad Wolf) that threatens to devour her (fuck her). Angela Carter in The Company of Wolves famously revealed the sexual potency of this tale. Some women have rape fantasies and these represent a desire to be violently seized by the animus, to surrender to it, to abdicate personal responsibility. No one should ever underestimate just how dark many ancient tales are, how they symbolically address our greatest fears, hopes, desires, perversions, and obsessions. Consider the tale of Oedipus - he (inadvertently) fucked his mother and killed his father. Freud made the "Oedipus Complex" a centrepiece of his psychological theories and thought that all men were somehow subject to it.
Or what about the tragic Little Mermaid who can't win the hand of her animus figure?
In the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the dwarfs are unconventional animus figures. They work underground in mines and dig out gold, diamonds, precious metals and gemstones. The message is that if a woman cultivates her animus, she will gain access to all manner of treasures and precious substances in her unconscious that will serve her well in her quest for self-actualisation.
Deep-sea divers are animus figures, plunging to the bottom of the ocean to find sunken treasures.
Sexual intercourse and magical kisses symbolize the union of the conscious ego and the unconscious soul-image. Marriage may represent the full union of the conscious and the unconscious - the final stage of individuation that allows the ego to be transformed into the Self.
Look at Michael Jackson, one of the most tragic pop stars in history, locked into the Peter Pan archetype - the boy who never grew up. Although he was a child molester, there's no question that Jackson honestly believed he wasn't. In his mind, he was just a ten-year-old boy sleeping over with other boys. In a way, it would be wrong to treat him as a paedophile. He was suffering from arrested psychic development and remained a child all of his life. While his body aged, his mind stayed stuck at age 10.
Mythologist Joseph Campbell became hugely successful by delving into the psychological meaning of ancient tales. His books are well worth reading.
You can be sure that those who seek to manipulate you will bombard you with archetypal images that they know will "push your buttons".
Many books and movies such as Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and The Matrix are full of archetypes. The most successful stories are invariably those with an archetypal emphasis. Unfortunately, the stories of Moses, Jesus Christ and Mohammed also have an archetypal nature and have beguiled and bewitched billions of human minds.
The Archetypal story will always feature a hero, a great quest, a great treasure, a journey into darkness and despair, a terrible enemy, a beguiling soul-image. There will be traitors, shape-shifters, false friends, false enemies, magic, superpowers, ordeals, temporary setbacks, temporary victories, wise advisers, evil counsellors. The hero has to negotiate his way through all of this. To be successful, he has to transform himself into his Higher Self.
The archetypal tale is really just the tale of individuation, of becoming all you can be by integrating all of the elements of your unconscious. The archetypal tale is one in which all of the unconscious elements of the psyche are projected onto the external world, where the hero wrestles with them and masters them (thus integrating them). The end of the quest is when the hero has achieved psychic wholeness and replaced the ego with the Self. He is now on a different, higher plane, ready to return to the world and offer it the benefits of the great wisdom he has acquired.
Isn't it time you activated your own hero archetype? No one says it will be easy. That's why the greatest quests are so remarkable and inspirational. Who would be intrigued by a tale where a hero woke up in the morning and found the Golden Fleece or Holy Grail right beside his bed? Yet there are people who write to us in the expectation that we will give them the Holy Grail for no other reason than that they emailed us asking us for it. That illustrates the mentality of someone who hasn't understood a single thing. You achieve nothing without overcoming the greatest resistances, without slaying monsters, without killing dragons. If you don't have the stomach for a fight, you will never become a hero nor seize the treasure at the end of the Quest. That is an inviolable law. Nothing is given to the weak, the lazy, the self-pitying, those who want things on a plate.
How many people do the daily commute to hold down a job that bores them to tears? Is that what heroes do? Why do so many people keep doing jobs they hate? Because the persona demands it - the public face, the social mask, the desire for status that a job brings. The EASY path. Have you ever seen a great, heroic movie about a bureaucrat who loves his job and whose great quest in life is to rise up one rung on the ladder of office life? It's unthinkable.
The Cosmic Unconscious
Jung proposed that we each had an unconscious with two parts: the personal (unique to us) and the collective (shared between the whole human race), but he didn't take the next even more revolutionary step - that we all have access to the cosmic unconscious: the entire r = 0 informational domain. God is God because he has brought into his consciousness the whole cosmic unconscious. He consciously knows everything there is to know. We can consider God the archetype of all archetypes, the archetype that fires up the cosmos. God's "libido" is that of the cosmos.
If you want to live the most wondrous, energised life you should throw yourself into archetypal existence. That means that you should turn away from your feeble trickle of consciousness, your "reducing valve", and attempt to plunder the infinite treasures glinting and shining in the darkness of the great cave of existence - the cosmic unconscious. Everything can be found here, including God himself.
This is the province of the soul and the afterlife. Via the cosmic unconscious you can link to every mind. This is the arena of the paranormal, of psychic powers, of telepathy, of extra-sensory perception, of "predictive precognition" (note that no one can know the future for the simple reason that it is a "non-existent" - it hasn't yet happened - but they can often predict it with incredible accuracy if they have a detailed knowledge of the present situation, and a detailed knowledge of the processes that operate on everything, just as scientists once believed that if you told them the starting positions of all particles and the starting forces acting on them, they could work out the inevitable future of the cosmos, in which case they would have had predictive knowledge of the future.)
Change your life. Summon the archetypes of Power, of Life, of Change, of Transformation, of Transfiguration.
It is consciousness - our feeble version of it - that blocks our path to enlightenment. That is the cosmic "joke". We identify ourselves with our ego, with our consciousness, and it is this fateful identification that locks us in space and time and cuts us off from the cosmic interconnectivity of the r = 0 domain.
Atheistic scientific materialists have taken our r > 0 consciousness to its logical conclusion and abolished everything but this sliver of consciousness, and they have gone even further and cast doubt on its "reality" by suggesting that it is entirely dependent on deterministic material forces which offer no scope for free will. Richard Dawkins embodies the reductive scientific mindset that relentlessly attacks the grandeur of the living, thinking cosmos and turns it into a pathetic mechanical, deterministic, programmed automaton that lurches and staggers through time like a zombie with no aims, meaning or purpose. Dawkins thinks this a wonderful cosmic vision but few agree with him. It all points to a staggering lack of imagination and soulfulness on his part. He is a man who has turned his consciousness firmly against the great cosmic unconscious, and thus cut himself off from the Truth.
To become enlightened we have to overcome the hardest thing of all - ourselves. We have to overcome our fixation on our narrow consciousness, on our obsessive identification with our consciousness. As soon as you over-identify with your consciousness you are plunged into existential angst and fear of death because you know for a fact that this consciousness of yours is mortal and will perish. If you identified instead with your Self - outside space and time - fear would be removed because then you would know you cannot die, that you are timeless, indissoluble and immortal. You are an energy that can be neither created nor destroyed, only transformed.
There are now hundreds of millions of people who, bewildered by the findings of science and its pseudo-infallibility, do not accept the existence of the soul and say, contemptuously, "So where is it then? Show it to me." However, if one were to ask them if they accepted the existence of the Big Bang they would certainly say yes. But when you ask them some secondary questions, namely: 1) Where was the universe before the Big Bang happened? 2) Show me how something comes from nothing - then they fall silent. They start blinking. They realise they don't have a clue what they're talking about. The question of what existed before the Big Bang is EXACTLY the same question as whether the soul exists or not. Unless you buy into the ludicrous notion that a universe can suddenly jump out of a state of absolute nothingness - an infinitely more ridiculous idea than anything that has ever been said about the soul - then you are in the game of accepting non-material existence. "Nothing" - as materialists call it - cannot be anything other than Mind: dimensionless existence outside space and time. The Big Bang did not come from absolute nothingness. Rather, space, time and matter - dimensional existence - came from non-space, non-time and non-matter i.e. dimensionless existence: Mind. So, unless you can explain how material "something" can come from a condition where nothing at all exists, you have no choice but to accept that souls are not just possible but probable and, let's not fool around, even certain. And when your mental journey has gone far enough, you will find yourself in contact with your own soul, and then you will be in no doubt at all.
The answers to cosmological questions are in fact staggeringly easy. The logic is infallible. If something did not come from nothing then it came from a different type of something that looks like nothing but is definitely not nothing. If "something", as we think of it, is material existence inside space and time then the "something that resembles nothing" from where it came must be immaterial existence outside space and time. And that's exactly the definition of the soul. In other words, the Big Bang universe is CAUSED by the soul. The soul - the cosmic soul, containing all other souls - gave birth to material existence. Far from being something unbelievable and crazy, the soul is the source of everything we experience, the fundamental reality. The primordial, cosmic soul is God as potential, waiting to be actualised. And we, the human race, are divine sparks, individual souls within the cosmic soul, the Soul of God. The holographic principle applies - each part is in the whole, and the whole is in each part.
So, are you still scoffing at the concept of the soul or are you now chastened to realise that you have never in your life given it proper consideration? You have let the materialistic scientific analysis blind you to the truth. Scientists themselves haven't yet understood that they haven't the vaguest idea what they're talking about when it comes to the great mysteries of life: mind, life and consciousness. As soon as you understand mind, life and consciousness, you instantly realise you have entered the domain of God, souls and the afterlife.
Souls, being outside space and time, are only glimpsed in weird and wonderful ways from the space-time perspective. Souls are encountered internally through contemplation and an inner psychic journey, not externally through scientific equipment.
We inhabit a staggeringly inspiring cosmos - a cosmos that is alive and thinking the most wondrous thoughts, the very thoughts of God.
Imagine tiny intelligent microbes living on the surface of the double helix of DNA within one of our innumerable cells. They can perceive incredible patterns and organisation but they don't have the perspective to see the double helix - they're far too small. Nor do they even begin to suspect that there are countless other cells all around them, each containing exactly the same DNA. Above all, they have absolutely no inkling that all of these cells comprise a being with a mind that can contemplate love, philosophy and eternity. In fact, the tiny microbes are like miniature scientists. They are devoted to a materialistic philosophy. How would they ever guess that they are within a thinking human being? What would ever alert them? What signs would they see? Where would they discover any signs of intelligence and mind within that single cell they inhabit? That cell seems inconceivably large to them - a cosmos - yet it's just one of the myriad that make up the human body. And within each of these cells there is not even one clue that such a thing as a human mind exists. There is no reason to suspect it.
We are living inside the cells of God's body and we are as oblivious as the microbes to the true nature of where we are. The vast majority of us do not suspect for a moment that we are inside a thinking being. We can't see or touch the thoughts that God is thinking, just as the tiny microbe in one of our cells has no mechanism for seeing or touching our thoughts. But just as the most scientific of the microbes would be completely wrong to assert that there is no such thing as mind and thought, so are the scientists amongst us who say exactly the same thing. Mind is not material. It cannot be discerned through material means, only through mental means.
We learn about the mind through thinking not through scientific experiments on matter. How could such experiments tell us anything at all about the mind? They could no more accomplish that than they could explain to a blind man what the colour red looks like.
Why are scientists so obtuse when it comes to the realm of the mind? They don't have the vaguest idea how to approach the problem. Their expertise begins and ends with lumps of "stuff".
Equally, mere human consciousness will not reveal the secrets of the cosmos to us. We are so much more than the "reducing valve" of our everyday consciousness. We have to expand that limited, restricted instrument. We have to tap into the energy of the cosmos. We have to make the pursuit of our Higher Self the focus of our life, rather than exclusively tending to our small, restricted, uninspiring consciousness.
We have to throw ourselves into the embrace of the unconscious and slay the dragons we find there as we heroically seek our personal Holy Grail - our Higher Self, our direct link to God.
Activate the archetypes. Watch archetypal movies. Go back and read ancient myths and legends, folktales and fairytales, fantasy adventures, mind-bending science fiction. Immerse yourself in their higher truths, in the energy of the unconscious in which they bathe you.
Why were the ancient Greeks so far advanced? It was because they inhabited a world of archetypes: their heroes, their gods on Mount Olympus, the adventures of the wild god Dionysus, and the beautiful music and art of the god Apollo.
As usual, Nietzsche, the intuitive genius, was able to discern just how fabulous and breathtaking ancient Greek culture was.
Read his first major book - The Birth of Tragedy - written at a time when he was a close confidant of Wagner and spellbound by Wagner's astounding archetypal power (Wagner was virtually a magician, such was his familiarity with, and control of, the archetypes). The book is steeped in hero-worship.
Later, Nietzsche rejected Wagner as an anti-Semite and Christian fanatic. His break with Wagner - an archetypal father figure for him (Nietzsche's own father died when Nietzsche was not yet five) was a great trauma for him, but he realised he could never be a hero in his own right unless he repudiated Wagner.
Nietzsche ends his autobiography (Ecce Homo - Behold the Man), with the immortal words: "Have I been understood? Dionysos against the Crucified…"
In other words, paganism and irrepressible life against Abrahamism and its life-hating obsession with sin; ancient Greek archetypes versus prophets and holy books.
Call forth the archetypes, invoke the gods, journey into the farthest reaches of the Unknown Country, the great, mysterious unconscious mind of the cosmos stretching out before you in all of its infinite glory.
God Inside or God Outside?
The history of Abrahamism is the history of an extraordinary psychological error. Abrahamists have sought God outside themselves when, in fact, all the answers lie within.
The route to the True God is by way of consciousness delving into the unconscious. At the centre of the cosmic unconscious is none other than God, the cosmic consciousness. The unconscious is simply that which is presently not conscious - but all of it can be made so. When it is then the consciousness that beholds it is the All-Mind - God.
God is at the centre of each and every one of us, separated from our consciousness by the vast tracts of the unconscious. Our sacred quest is to journey through that Unknown Country, slay every monster we meet en route, and finally encounter the universe's most precious treasure: God himself. It's a quintessentially spiritual journey, a psychological expedition into the deepest interior of our mind. The answers to our existence lie nowhere else than inside us. Why would anyone imagine they lie elsewhere? The Truth is "out there"? No, it's "in here" - inside us. Each of us carries the cosmos inside. The answer to everything lies deep within us. We are the walking, talking cosmic code. As above, so below. We are both the mystery and the detective attempting to solve it.
But some people chose to look outside themselves for the answers to their lives. They took the imago Dei - the image of God - that they carried within them and projected it onto an external fantasy being: as if he were someone they could bump into in the street.
It's true that Abraxas in his earliest incarnation had a physical body, but now he has evolved into pure mind and takes no part in the material world - which is why the ancient Gnostics identified the physical world as the domain of the Demiurge and not of the True God. The physical world is the world of alienation, where we are separated from God.
The worst possible mistake is to consider Abraxas as an external being rather than an internal one. Once you truly realise that you yourself carry God within you, your life is changed forever. All of your fear and angst vanishes. You are no longer alienated from the ineffable source of all answers and all meaning. You know you are capable of reducing the distance between God and yourself to zero.
When you do the opposite - when you look for God outside yourself - only one consequence can flow, the most catastrophic conceivable - infinite alienation from God, and an infinite, unbridgeable gap between God and you. And it is into that fateful cosmic gap that Satan steps and demands infinite worship from all of those foolish enough to fall into the deadly trap.
In his book Hegel: A Very Short Introduction, Peter Singer wrote, "At first [the Young Hegelians] seized on religion as the crucial obstacle to a society that would allow human powers to reach their full potential. Developing the hints in the section of the Phenomenology on 'the unhappy consciousness', they argued that religion is a form of alienation. Man creates God, and then imagines that God has created him. Man puts into his image of God all that is best in himself: knowledge, goodness and power. Then man bows down before this image of his own making and sees himself, by comparison, as ignorant, sinful and weak. To restore human beings to their full powers, all that is needed to make them realize that it is human beings who are truly the highest form of divinity…Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity portrayed all traditional religion as man's projection of his own attributes into another sphere. It was thus the first modern attempt to develop a psychology of religious belief."
Feuerbach was almost right. But it is not our humanity we project into another sphere, rather our perfect God Image, which is then hijacked by Satan, who calls himself that very God, our Creator no less. He proceeds to demand absolute worship, obedience and subjugation (for proof, just read the Torah, the Old Testament or the Koran) and because billions of us believe that he is indeed God and can do no wrong, we give him everything he commands and thus become inadvertent Devil worshippers. It's a mind-bogglingly clever trap that he has set for us, the work of a psychological genius with complete empathy for the human race (but no sympathy). He has a perfect understanding of what makes humans tick, how to push their buttons and make them do his bidding. And the Old World Order are created in his image and are similarly ingenious at manipulating us and controlling our minds.
When God is placed outside us and named Creator, it places an infinite gap between humanity and God. He will always be the Creator and we the created, entirely dependent on him. We are his creatures, his things, with whom he can do whatever he wants, just as parents feel they can do whatever they like with their children. If God is not Creator but is coeternal with us, if God is the "first amongst equals", the first to achieve cosmic consciousness, and we are all capable of emulating him, then our relationship with God is entirely different. We are not his creatures but his colleagues. We are not alienated from God. Rather, we can have a direct relationship with him and, at the ultimate level, actually be him. So, why would you worship God if it were in fact yourself?
The whole system of Abrahamic mind control can be smashed as soon as we restore God to his true position inside us rather than outside, where all of the alienation we feel is healed. No priest, rabbi or imam can control you if you tell him that you are the God bearer and thus you need no "holy" men nor "holy" books to tell you the ways of God. If they can't force you to obey their rules then you are finally free of them.
The old religions understand this all too well, which is why throughout history they persecuted the Illuminati relentlessly, branding any notion that we could become God as absolute blasphemy and heresy, fully deserving of death.
But we still live. We are still here and our victory is assured because we are the Religion of the Dialectic, and the dialectic can never be defeated.
Do not be alienated from God. Know that you become God. Know that no one has the authority to control you. No bearded prophet or dusty text can tell you what to do. Your life is about your choices and the first choice you should make is to be no one's slave, no one's puppet, especially no puppet of the false prophets who preach about the false gods of alienation and tyranny.
No rational person could read the Abrahamic texts and reach any conclusion other than that this "God" is a demented fascist dictator, driven by psychopathic hatred of the human race. In the future, we will write about the Trial of Jehovah where we will list his entire set of crimes against the human race and the perpetual war of aggression and genocide he has waged against us. To be one of his followers is to be evil and a Devil worshipper. Humanity cannot climb higher until Abrahamism - the religion of the Devil - perishes.
The Illuminati seek to empower all of the people of the world, to free them all of their chains, to release them from the alienation they have endured for so long.
God is WITHIN. Above all, he is within YOU. More than that - he IS you, the ultimate version of you. And it is your most sacred and holy task to become your highest conceivable self - GOD ALMIGHTY.
This is the Gospel of the Illuminati.
Homeostasis
"The psyche is a self-regulating system that maintains its equilibrium just as the body does. Every process that goes too far immediately and inevitably calls forth compensations, and without these there would be neither a normal metabolism nor a normal psyche. In this sense we can take the theory of compensation as a basic law of psychic behaviour. Too little on one side results in too much on the other. Similarly, the relation between conscious and unconscious is compensatory."
Jung
Homeostasis is the maintenance of metabolic equilibrium by means of compensating for disruptive imbalances. It's a set of self-adjusting mechanisms maintaining normal balance and correcting for any lurches or disturbances. It's how organic systems preserve a state of balance in the face of major changes in environmental conditions. It also applies to non-living systems and, in the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock, Earth itself is characterised as one vast homeostatic system. The cosmos could be considered likewise.
The very fact of homeostasis implies the working of some form of intelligence since to be able to compensate for widely divergent environmental conditions to maintain a stable state is a supremely complex task. According to Darwinists, natural selection favours systems that achieve homeostasis since these are more stable, hence they prosper at the expense of unstable systems. But the same facts can be accommodated by saying that more intelligent systems - that know how to preserve themselves - are favoured over less intelligent systems. There is considerable evidence that intelligent human beings tend to live longer than stupid ones.
Jung argued that since the human psyche evolved in the context of a homeostatic world, it too is a system governed by homeostasis. It's a self-regulating system like the living body and, just as the body is designed to maintain a constant temperature and consistent internal environment to provide stability, so the mind is configured to psychodynamically achieve balance.
Homeostatic compensation is the cornerstone of Jung's theory of the psyche and accounts for how the psyche develops, adapts and indeed why and how it goes wrong. If left to its own devices, the psyche will maintain internal harmony and balance. However, unlike the body which dies if it strays too far from homeostasis, the mind is capable of straying extremely far from its stable zone: madness, not death, results (or we might actually characterise irreversible madness as mental death).
The horrific truth is that large numbers of human beings are technically mad i.e. far from psychic homeostasis. However, if a large number of people are mad in the SAME WAY then it is not perceived as madness but as normality. This is the case in relation to the Abrahamic religions where disturbed ideas that generate mental illness are deemed perfectly acceptable and even desirable. When people are regularly contemplating homicide and suicide for absurd reasons, they are clearly far from mental homeostasis.
A healthy body or mind is a self-regulating system based on checks and balances to prevent any tendency from going too far in any one direction with disastrous outcomes. When a homeostatic system is pushed excessively in one direction, a compensating force (an equal and opposite reaction, so to speak) is triggered. Homeostasis is based on complex feedback systems that are based on a set of "normal" parameters. Anything that strays too far from the norm provides negative feedback, to which a normalising force will attempt to respond. We remain healthy while the system works. But if any major component of homeostasis fails, we are in big trouble. Physically, death can result. Mentally, we can have a breakdown.
The phenomenon of "regression to the mean" is closely linked to homeostasis. If there were no such regression, tall parents, for example, would have taller children, and they in turn would have even taller children and so on, and we would start generating freakishly tall groups of humans. Freak phenomena would be everywhere.
A healthy society, religion, political system or corporation should, like a healthy body or mind, be homeostatic. When we experience boom and bust economic cycles it means that governments have failed to establish homeostatic economic systems, hence are incompetent and unfit to rule. The super rich dynastic families that rule the world defy the law of regression to the mean - they just keep getting richer and richer, producing massive and unacceptable distortions in society. They are the financial equivalents of the freakishly tall families.
The Meritocratic compensatory mechanism of imposing 100% inheritance tax ensures that no family can ever become dynastically wealthy. Meritocracy is economically homeostatic. It complies with the regression to the mean.
Religions such as Abrahamism are inherently anti-homeostatic because of their obsession with rules, commandments, and sins. They try to exterminate desire, passion, lust, freethinking, freedom of choice, hence they create massive psychic responses in terms of the shadow. Suicide bombers are the inevitable product of the psychic response that attempts to balance the persona with the shadow. The more the persona presents an artificial degree of piety and goodness, the more the shadow becomes impious and evil as an inevitable psychological response.
No healthy society can tolerate these extreme psychic imbalances that inevitably provoke extreme psychic responses in an attempt to maintain homeostasis.
The dialectic is intrinsically homeostatic (generating an antithesis for every thesis), but it also generates higher equilibrium states via the synthesis phase.
Homeostasis that kept everything rigidly normal and permanently fixed would be a disaster. Optimal homeostasis needs to achieve the feat of maintaining balance while allowing higher forms to gradually and sensibly evolve. It must preserve balance between opposing forces operating on it, while using this stable platform to seek growth and development. That is what the Meritocratic Republic will achieve. That is the purpose of the New World Order.
In the present time, the West has become disproportionately extraverted and materialistic, absurdly shallow, narcissistic and devoted to instant gratification. A homeostatic response has been summoned - a new force that promotes the higher, spiritual values of introversion and that brings depth, community, long-term planning and deferred gratification, that prepares the platform for launching humanity to the stars. Illuminism is that force. Illuminism is a program for life, designed to follow the changing contours of human lives from birth to death, to provide the optimal environment at each stage, and, especially, to manage the difficult transition points between different phases: infancy to childhood to youth to young adulthood to career focus to parenthood to middle age to old age and, finally, death, the completion of the life cycle, and the preparation for a new cycle (or for gnosis to finally escape from the cycle). Each transition point must be acknowledged by an appropriate, archetypal rite of passage. Such rites of passage were extremely common in ancient cultures and are almost entirely absent now, leaving many people bewildered and unsure where they are in life, hence unsure of what archetypes they need to guide them and to assuage their anxieties.
Via concepts such as homeostasis, regression to the mean, the dialectic, the scientific method, teleology, entelechy, morphic resonance, the archetypes, we have a full set of tools to rationally design a perfect society. The only thing holding humanity back is the failed past where irrational forces were allowed to run riot, doing untold damage to the human race and effectively rendering it insane.
Our world is not utopia - it's a mental asylum that long ago deviated from any healthy definition of homeostasis. Instead, we inhabit a world where we stagger from one disaster, war, breakdown, bust, calamity, catastrophe to another.
Proper, healthy, homeostasis should involve a relatively narrow range of possible states. A homeostatic system that achieves balance by taking a 100% "positive" and matching it with a 100% "negative" is only homeostatic in a technical sense. Practically, it's a disaster because it allows the most extreme divergence possible. Proper homeostasis should ensure that nothing is allowed to diverge from normality by more than a few percentage points. Our ego, persona and shadow should all be relatively similar if we are to be psychically healthy. If our persona is nothing like our ego, and the shadow massively different again, we are in big trouble.
History has been nothing but the unfolding of the trajectory of a system subjected to extreme imbalances, and equally strong reactions in a futile attempt to restore balance.
We now understand all of this. With the right meritocratic people in charge, we could make all of this right and nothing would stop the progression of the human race. But to bring about a meritocracy means to wage war against the forces of the past that are content with being insane.
If an Abrahamist is so retarded that he worships a God that orders human sacrifice, how could such a moron ever be expected to see reason? "Reason is the Devil's whore," declared the Protestant psychopath Martin Luther. How could anyone get Protestants to see sense if that's their attitude? How could you ever have a rational debate with Muslims who want to slaughter cartoonists, or Jews who think that God forbids pressing an electric switch on the sabbath?
These people are insane, beyond any hope of redemption. It's only because large numbers of people have been brainwashed and terrorised into holding the same beliefs that they are not regarded as such.
THAT is the tragedy of humanity. Some of us now know the cure to our ills, but the vast majority of humans are mired in madness and stupidity and will kill you if you attempt to show them the light. They will kill, more particularly, in the name of their God, who is supposedly a God of peace, love, mercy, compassion and forgiveness. What a joke!
Is it not astonishing that the human race cannot be considered sane? The desire of humanity to believe in the most astounding nonsense is breathtaking and incompatible with sanity.
We do not regard Abrahamists as capable of rational discourse. The most fundamental question is this. Is there anything that a Jew, Christian or Muslim would accept as disproof of the existence of his God, or as proof that his God cannot in any way be defined as good? If there is no such thing, if literally nothing can persuade them that they are wrong, have we not left the world of reason far behind us? When people accept a God who orders the human sacrifice of their own children at their own hands and find nothing either disturbing or surprising or sick or perverted about such a God, how can we expect them to ever turn to the True God? When "faith" is regarded as more important than reason, has not insanity been sanctified and smothered in mind-rotting incense?
Abrahamism has pronounced madness the most sacred attribute a human being can possess. To kill your own children if God commands it is the essence of Abrahamism, the central motif that THEY CHOSE to represent their faith. No one forced them to write down the tale of Abraham, to make that their defining symbol. It was all their own doing. That was the essential message that they wanted the world to understand about the nature of their faith. They desired that all the peoples of the world should know that their faith was so strong that they would slaughter their own children for their God - so DON'T MESS WITH US.
How can any rational person fail to conclude that such people are sick, evil and stupendously dangerous? And have they not proved it a million times over? Is human history not drenched in their bloodshed and carnage? How can they mount any defence of their position, these people who support a position of human sacrifice if "God" gives the order, these savages who order the slaughter of cartoonists and anyone who dares to speak the truth, anyone who preaches freedom, anyone who chooses not to bow to Satan?
Why would any sane person want to worship God as a MONSTER, making monstrous demands and monstrous threats, a God who sends almost all human beings to hell, and who sent a genocidal flood to wipe out 99.999% of his own Creation - this supposedly loving, compassionate, merciful God who makes no mistakes and does no evil? It's INSANE!!!!!!!
COSMOLOGY
Jung was highly influenced by Schopenhauer's view that true reality consists of an irrepressible, eternally striving Will outside space and time, and that everything in space and time is a phenomenal manifestation of this noumenal Will. (Schopenhauer had a great hatred of Hegel; had this not been the case, the Illuminati would have recruited him. His philosophy has many elements in common with Illuminism. Wagner and Nietzsche also found much to admire in Schopenhauer's ideas.)
If we equate Schopenhauer's Will with Jung's collective unconscious then consciousness becomes the specific thing that imposes the categories of space and time on the noumenal reality beyond space and time i.e. consciousness is responsible for individuation - the existence of separate things - that characterises the phenomenal universe. Without consciousness, there would be no individuation, just the collective unconscious outside space and time. This, of course, is very much a Buddhist type of viewpoint and Schopenhauer was indeed heavily indebted to Eastern philosophical ideas, which he proceeded to impose on Kant's philosophy.
In the type of philosophy championed by the likes of Kant, Schopenhauer and Buddhism, space and time are the creations of the mind and do not exist otherwise i.e. the material world is an illusion generated by consciousness. Consciousness, emerging from the underlying unconscious unity, is the source of the principle of individuation. In Hegelian terms, we would say that the underlying unity chooses to alienate itself from itself by creating multiplicity (separate things), thus giving birth to consciousness which, as Hegel brilliantly recognised, is dependent on multiplicity: the collective unconscious could never become conscious if it were not capable of generating separate consciousnesses.
To reiterate, the Will, the unconscious cosmic mind, was obligated, in order to become conscious, to create a domain of multiplicity rather than unity. As far as idealistic philosophers are concerned, materialism is the construction of the mind and entirely dependent on mind: no mind, no matter. This is the opposite of the view of scientific materialists who regard mind as the construction of matter, and entirely dependent on it: no matter, no mind.
The true equation is this - no mind, no matter; no matter, no consciousness i.e. to become conscious, mind must give rise to matter, hence matter is indispensable to the expression of the fullest potential of mind.
According to Illuminism, the material and immaterial domains are, together, the manifestation of "complete mathematics". The immaterial domain is where zero and infinity reign, and the material domain is where all numbers in between zero and infinity reign. It was Pythagoras himself who assigned fundamental importance to mathematics when he said, "All is number." He made numbers the arche: the primordial, essential element of the universe. If numbers have magnitude and dimensionality then they are "things" - objects with real existence rather than just being mental constructs. If "one" is a dimensionless point then "two" is a straight line, "three" a figure in a plane and "four" a solid in three dimensions. If we define "one" as the ultimate, indivisible atom then two atoms comprise a line, three a plane and four a 3-D shape. In other words, we get something not too unlike modern atomic theory, but based purely on numerical relationships.
The Periodic Table that forms the basis of chemistry is arranged according to "atomic number" - the number of protons in the nucleus of each chemical element. Each element has the same number of electrons as protons. The number of neutrons is closely related to the number of protons. Protons and neutrons can both be decomposed into groups of three quarks. A proton is two "up" quarks and one "down" quark. A neutron, on the other hand, is two down quarks and one up quark. Isn't that astounding? Everything, at core, is just a set of mathematical relations. Without numerical relations, the physical world of atoms, and the objects with magnitude to which they give rise, could not exist. Pythagoras has been proved essentially right, although it must be acknowledged that mathematics is not the full story.
Mathematics is the enabler, the source of order, organisation, logic and language, but it is not the source of life, mind and Will. Rather, mathematics originates in mind. Mind is the true arche, the fundamental substance of existence, yet mind and mathematics are astoundingly closely related because mind cannot start doing anything useful until it applies order and organisation to itself. Mind MUST express itself first and foremost mathematically. Pure Will, without mathematics, would be ceaseless chaos and randomness - a meaningless motion and striving that leads to nothing except more motion and striving. Such a cosmos would be pointless and purposeless.
So, functionally and meaningfully, the arche is mathematical Will, with an inbuilt drive to create order and organisation and thus generate the cosmos (but Will also has an irrational, emotional element that defies logic, reason and mathematics). In his book on Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann wrote, "Nietzsche was a dialectical monist. His basic force, the will to power, is not only the Dionysian passionate striving, akin to Schopenhauer's irrational will, but is also Apollonian and possesses an inherent capacity to give itself form. The victory of the Dionysian is thus not complete, and the will to power is a synthesis of Nietzsche's earlier two dualistic principles." This is a position remarkably similar to Hegel's.
In short, reality consists of an ordering principle that we can label Apollonian (and which is fundamentally mathematical), and a chaotic, irrational, passionate and emotional striving that we can label Dionysian in honour of the Greek god of wine and intoxication. The two principles are harnessed dialectically in a process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, and their teleological objective is to maximise power in all of its forms, especially knowledge since knowledge is power. Taken to its logical conclusion, its omega point, power would be crystallised in a single consciousness - God. Thus, far from killing God, Nietzsche actually created a philosophy certain to give God life and hence his ideas are entirely consistent with Hegel's, hence with Illuminism.
But there is another truly wondrous way to think of the cosmos - musically. Music is aural mathematics. It's full of order and organisation and yet it can convey the highest emotion, enough to reduce men to tears. It is "mathematical Will": simultaneously ordered and emotional, rational and irrational, Logos and Eros.
Schopenhauer considered music a phenomenal copy of the noumenal Will. To hear music is to get as close as possible to the cosmic Will outside space and time, to the origins and essence of existence.
Consider the cosmos, existence itself, as being nothing other than the process of composing and performing the most sublime music conceivable, every note attaining absolute perfection.
Consider that the purpose of the cosmos was to give a one time only rendition of the Pythagorean Music of the Spheres, which only God can hear because perfect ears are necessary for the perfect music.
Consider that the cosmos began as the most horrendous musical discord. Every note was wrong, jarring, grating, screeching. There was no tune, harmony, or melody. Chaos reigned. But the unconscious cosmic mind started to learn mathematics, and as it did so, it started to notice that it could generate pleasant notes. It set about organising these notes, experimenting, trying all sorts of different ways of arranging the fundamental notes. After a timeless age, it had created complete mathematics - the tool necessary for complete music. But it had no instrument to play the wondrous symphony it had composed in its mind. So, it created the perfect instrument - the physical cosmos itself - for the perfect performance.
Creation did not begin with, "Let there be Light!" but, rather, "Let there be Sound!" String theory - what's that if not physics as musical notes?
With the perfect instrument ready, the divine composer played on it for many eons while he rehearsed for the performance at the End of Time.
And then came the supreme moment of existence - the Divine Performance culminating in the Divine Suicide…when the last note sounds as God perishes.
The Last Symphony begins with Wagner's Tristan Chord, the greatest musical innovation in history. The symphony is majestic, note-perfect, infinitely emotive. It bears all of the soulfulness of existence, of the whole of history. Every sadness, joy, hope, dream, desire is expressed in this music. All the tears shed in eternity are reflected here. Love, yearning, longing, hatred, destruction, good, evil…all of the contents of the dialectical unfolding of the cosmos are captured. To listen to this music is to experience every emotion imaginable, to have an infinite number of epiphanies, to achieve Absolute Gnosis - knowledge of all things. But this is the Gotterdammerung, the Twilight of the Gods. As the symphony of existence nears its end, the notes start to explode, to turn to aural fire. They set the whole cosmos ablaze.
The universe is dying in flames, in the supreme, terminal, cosmic conflagration. And, at the very last, God sings out one perfect note - the note of absolute destruction, of total cataclysm and apocalypse, the Armageddon Note. This is the unique note of The End, that brings the life of God to its perfect conclusion at the end of the perfect performance of the Music of the Spheres.
How much would you pay to hear that performance? Is that not the meaning of life? To enjoy just one instant of infinite perfection?
Music, mathematics, emotion, Will, logic, love, and the cosmic dialectic - that's the story of existence, and what a story.
Pythagoras, named in honour of Apollo, the god of reason, music, mathematics philosophy, science, astronomy, medicine and poetry, was the first human being to see the cosmic importance of mathematics and this remains the central insight of Illuminism, making it fundamentally different from all other religions. Any religion without a mathematical foundation is a joke and a waste of time - religion for dummies. What is unquestionably true of about 99% of Abrahamists is that mathematically, scientifically and philosophically they are supremely illiterate. Even their religious knowledge is close to zero. Whenever Illuminists have religious discussions with Abrahamists - including priests, pastors, rabbis and imams - they discover that these people easily fall into traps of heresy that the Illuminists set for them. We have no doubt that we could expose the Pope himself as a heretic. No Abrahamist has the vaguest idea of what they truly believe. That's no surprise since their beliefs are irrational and can be demolished with simple logic.
God's "revelation" when it comes to order and organisation is mathematical and is encoded in the fabric of the cosmos itself. It has nothing whatever to do with mad bearded prophets in the desert frothing at the mouth and waving "holy" books. Only a cretin would seek God in the ramblings of some mad, staring-eyed fanatic. Look at the stars and you will see the work of God. And also look inside yourself for your inner stars reflect the outer. As above, so below.
Plotinus, the Neoplatonist, wrote that the Psyche (Soul) had a dual nature: one part a unity and the other a plurality. In relation to humanity, the part that is the unity can be equated with Jung's collective unconscious, and the plurality with the consciousnesses of the individual members of the human race. Or we might say that the unity is Schopenhauer's noumenal Will and the plurality the phenomenal will of the human race i.e. consciousness.
What is the nature of reality? It is this. A cosmic Will, an unconscious cosmic mind, a unity that exists outside space and time, is the arche. Scientifically, we would characterise it as dimensionless energy or incorporeal matter, bearing in mind that Descartes defined any substance without extension as mind. Dimensionless energy is capable of being transformed into dimensional energy, incorporeal matter into corporeal matter. Dimensional energy is what Descartes defined as substance with extension: matter. The difference between mind and matter is simply that mind is dimensionless and matter dimensional. Matter is dimensional mind; mind is dimensionless matter. Both are expressions of energy. But energy is, ultimately, an expression of mind. Unconscious mind is the essence of existence. It is the sine qua non for everything else.
As energy flickers between dimensionlessness and dimensionality, between a domain outside space and time and a domain inside space and time, it learns mathematics. Why? Because it is mathematics that defines dimensions. Zero-dimensionality is not in space and time. The number zero is dimensionless. Zero is the origin of existence. Zero is Mind. Zero is God as he is in himself. But zero contains all numbers because zero is one divided by infinity. Whenever you see the number zero, you should not think of it as "nothing" but as the number one - the supreme Monad - divided by all numbers without limit (infinity). When you understand zero in those terms you see that the condition of absolute nothingness is impossible because "zero" is not nothing but something, namely a numerator of one and a denominator of infinity. Zero inverted is infinity i.e. one divided by zero equals infinity. Zero has an intrinsic tendency to invert itself because it is the only way it can make anything happen, and when it does so it creates infinity. The Big Bang - the creation of an entire universe from nothing - was actually the inevitable inversion of zero leading to the generation of infinity.
One dimensionless point equals a dimensionless universe, which in turn equals a cosmos of unconscious mind. To create dimensionality, at least two distinct points are required since two connected points make a one-dimensional line. Dimensionality is a consequence of plurality, of numbers greater than zero and one. Space and time are a consequence of plurality. As soon as "One" becomes "Many", dimensionality emerges from dimensionlessness.
The whole process is mathematical.
The idealists who thought that matter was an illusion, a mere fiction of the mind, were wrong. Kant was wrong to say that there was an unknowable noumenal universe and a knowable phenomenal universe. There's just a dimensionless universe and a dimensional universe, related by mathematics.
Kant's new "Copernican Revolution" was to suggest that our minds define reality. All objects we perceive must conform to the structures of our minds, he argued. Hence there is no objective reality, only subjective reality.
A new question thus arises. Are all the mathematical laws of science simply constructs of our mind? Do we see a mathematically ordered world because that's the way our minds are configured rather than the way "reality" is configured?
But objective reality - a genuine material world that truly exists - is saved if we conclude that an absolute cosmic mind gave rise to an absolute material cosmos via mathematics. All conscious minds naturally reflect mathematics because mathematics defines the cosmos. Thus it is not mathematical minds that construct subjective reality but rather an objective mathematical reality that constructs subjective mathematical minds.
Kant, despite his brilliance, was therefore 100% wrong. Nevertheless, when he said that freedom, God, souls and the afterlife were all part of noumenal reality and could not be proved in the phenomenal world, he was saying something very similar to what Illuminism teaches - that the immaterial, dimensionless domain is where freedom, God, souls and the afterlife can be found, not in the scientific, dimensional, material domain.
The material world really does exist. It's not an illusion, a mind-construct, an elaborate mental fiction, a simulation, or anything of the kind. Minds conform to external reality (as above, so below); they do not fabricate reality. Objective reality is mathematical, and everything in it is mathematical, albeit mostly at an unconscious level.
When Kant argued for the existence of a mysterious noumenal reality underpinning the phenomenal universe and beyond the reach of our minds, he was saying that reality is fundamentally unknowable. But, as Hegel then brilliantly demonstrated, nothing is unknowable. We can obtain absolute knowledge, and that's largely thanks to mathematics.
Mathematics is the core language of the universe. Numbers and the basic operations of addition, subtraction, division and multiplication define the cosmos. They are tied to the operations of logic. "Connective" logic involves words such as "and", "or", "if…then…", "both…and…", "either…or…"
Leibniz introduced a kind of algebraic logic based on four logical equations:
1) a = a (e.g. Hamlet is Hamlet).
2) If a is b and b is c then a is c e.g. All men are mortal, Hamlet is a man, therefore Hamlet is mortal.
3) a = not (not a) e.g. If Hamlet is mortal then Hamlet is not immortal.
4) a is b = not-b is not-a e.g. Hamlet is a man means that if you are not a man then you are not Hamlet.
Logic and mathematics are bound together, and they have cosmic applicability. In other words, to know logic and mathematics here on earth, is to know it for the entire universe.
Jung and Plotinus
Jung's theoretical framework is indebted to Plotinus and indeed Jung explicitly acknowledged Plotinus's influence on his thinking.
It's worth reiterating Plotinus's scheme. The Psyche is split in two. It has a collective higher part and a fragmented lower part. We simply need to equate the higher part with the collective unconscious and the lower part with the individual consciousness. If consciousness can integrate the collective unconscious then it has unified the collective with the particular. The ability of one mind to link to another mind via the collective unconscious is the basis of all psychic phenomena. It is a purely mental event hence cannot be studied by the techniques of physical science.
The collective unconscious corresponds to the r = 0 domain. Consciousness corresponds to the part of the mind that gets its sensory information from the r > 0 domain. Although consciousness is also in the r = 0 domain, it inevitably conceives of itself as being in the r > 0 domain because it is linked to the space and time information supplied by the r > 0 domain. The conscious mind is individuated and the unconscious mind is collective, and they are linked by a personal unconscious i.e. an individuated consciousness can generate an individuated unconscious, which extends into the collective unconscious. We can only approach the collective unconscious through our personal unconscious, so our first task is to master our own unconscious issues.
Plotinus's scheme actually adds a further and higher level of mind called the Nous, which is based on instantaneous, intuitive thinking and which contains all the Platonic Forms (Jung's Archetypes being the same things to all intents and purposes) and all the essential selves of all beings. This gives us an extraordinary new way of thinking about Jung's concept of the collective unconscious.
Jung's archetypes are abstract Platonic Forms that enter our consciousness as symbols and as personalised images. They are not real beings even if they present themselves to our consciousness in human form. The figure of the Wise Old Man, for example, is generic, not a specific eternal being known as the Wise Old Man who appears in the same form to all human beings. Rather, we each impose on the archetype of the Wise Old Man our version of what the Wise Old Man should look like i.e. we personalise the image of the Wise Old Man according to our own taste and make it a representation unique to us.
But Plotinus's Nous introduces an astounding new possibility. ACTUAL eternal beings from the Nous can enter our unconscious minds. These are not archetypes but authentic other minds and they can speak to us - in exactly the same way as the gods of the bicameral age. In other words, early humanity could have been directed not by archetypes alone, but also by other, higher beings. Our progress may have been explicitly shaped and guided by independent, real higher powers - the "gods" in the true sense.
And this is the mechanism that allows "mind-hopping" i.e. the ability for the mind of a higher being to relocate to another body and start controlling that new body, as in the case of Jesus Christ after his "death" when he rapidly established a new consciousness in the body of one of his followers who had been waiting by his tomb.
Those human beings who can develop sufficient mastery of the mind can likewise learn to enter the minds of others through the unconscious and start consciously controlling them. It requires remarkable ability, way beyond the skills possessed by even the best psychics. The adepts of the highest degree of the Illuminati are amongst the tiny number of people able to achieve this feat. Every ten years, on the birthday of Simon Magus, a member of the ruling council of the Illuminati provides a demonstration of the technique by taking temporary mental control of the most promising first degree Illuminatus (who is in a deep sleep at the time to prevent interference with his normal consciousness). It is considered the highest honour to be chosen.
Phosters and archons can also take control of other human beings in this "head-hopping" manner. You yourself could do it if you developed the power. But you would practically be God if you mastered the techniques involved.
So, although archetypal images can be considered inventions of the unconscious mind - Universals that are given a particular appearance by the human mind - there can be instances when entities we mistake for archetypes are actually real, independent beings authentically communicating with us. Thus the voices of the gods that Julian Jaynes described need not be mere auditory hallucinations, but could be real voices of real "gods", directly influencing human history. Phosters and archons are often said to influence human minds through such mechanisms, particularly through prophets and charismatic leaders.
It's curious that Jung never proposed a scheme along these lines. It seems improbable that such a great thinker didn't consider it since he had all of the necessary information at his disposal. Moreover, this is none other than the precise mechanism of reincarnation, although reincarnation normally applies to a newborn baby rather than a full-grown adult.
A human baby starts off as an "archetypal being" (meaning that it is guided purely by archetypes), almost like a bio-robot. It starts to develop a proper consciousness at the point at which an Immortal Self makes contact with it i.e. consciousness is connected with the Immortal self, not with the baby as a biological organism. A disturbing but fascinating corollary is that if no such contact took place then a human would be alive without having a soul. They would be guided by archetypes not by a genuine soul. It would be as if they had a simulated soul, a simulacrum of a soul rather than the real thing. It is this phenomenon that the Brotherhood of the Shadows have spent millennia studying in order to perfect their sinister science of the Golem.
The "human" programs, including the Agents, that run the Matrix on behalf of the Architect are like archetypes. The character called the Oracle is very much a Jungian archetype. The programs are not alive - they have no free will - they just do what their subroutines tell them to do. Archetypes are programs too, but we can bring them to life so to speak by giving them access to our own free will. Agent Smith becomes unplugged from the Matrix and gains free will from Neo, with whom he has developed an umbilical attachment.
The Buddhist conception of a human being is essentially that of an archetypal being. They do not consider that human beings have a soul: an essential Self. Human beings are transient entities and only their archetypal components survive death, not any such thing as an Immortal Self.
The Abrahamist idea of resurrection is absurd. There is no such phenomenon. There is only one way in which a dead body can come back to life and that is via the extremely rare practice of "reincarnational resurrection". This is when a "head hop" takes place immediately after someone has breathed their last and died. If a very powerful mind enters the corpse just then it can reanimate it for a short period - usually no more than a few minutes. Only in the most exceptional circumstances would such an event ever take place.
Only the immaterial mind, the Immortal Self, can survive death and pass from one body to another. Reincarnation is your only vehicle to immortality. Resurrection is pure fantasy that keeps only retarded Abrahamists satisfied.
Jung never committed himself to a clear stance on reincarnation, although it is fully consistent with his model of the psyche. Where he does comment on reincarnation, he is supportive of it, while remaining circumspect. That said, he was reported to have expressed the belief that he was the reincarnation of Goethe, one of the Illuminati's greatest Grand Masters. Moreover, there was a strong rumour that his grandfather was Goethe's bastard son. Like Goethe, Jung's grandfather - Professor Doctor Carl Gustav Jung (after whom Jung was named) - was an Illuminatus. Jung himself had considerable contact with the Illuminati but was never formally admitted to the society even though he was eager to join and even though no one doubted that he was a genius. He was deemed too much of a maverick, too caught up in his own issues, and too prone to mental illness.
Jung felt a much greater affinity towards his grandfather than he did towards his father, for whom he had a thinly disguised contempt, seeing him as weak, feeble and fake. Jung discussed an idea called "ancestor possession" - meaning that certain hereditary characteristics of a person's forebears could become activated under certain circumstances in the person's life, paving the way for the ancestral spirit to "take over" the person's actions.
Reincarnation is strongly implied by Jung's assertion that the psyche exists before the ego's birth and survives the ego's death. If the psyche is still there after the ego's dissolution then it must surely be capable of generating a new ego in a new life.
"Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away - an ephemeral apparition…Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom that passes. The rhizome remains." -- Jung
We might think of the Self as the rhizome and the ego-consciousness as its blossom. The unconscious Self generates the ego-consciousness, allowing the Self to assume human form and enter physical reality.
Jung believed that his mother was highly psychic and that he had inherited her abilities. Certainly, Jung does seem to have been prodigiously psychically gifted judging from many extraordinary episodes he recounted in his life, including a near-death experience. His mother had a mental breakdown, and Jung too had psychotic episodes. He had a brilliant insight into the minds of schizophrenics, believing that in effect they could not wake up from their dreams and remained in a permanent dream state. Their waking ego-consciousness had been deactivated.
Jung was fascinated by dreams and convinced that they had contents that came from somewhere beyond the conscious mind and knowledge.
"Either one does not dream at all or one dreams in an interesting manner. One must learn to be awake in the same way - either not at all or in an interesting manner."
Nietzsche
Like all great people, Jung had a horror of being average and conformist. He said, "To be normal is the ideal aim of the unsuccessful."
Jung saw his mission in life as one of making God conscious through humanity. To this extent, he had much in common with the great Illuminatus Hegel. The sacred project of "becoming God" could indeed be described as the means of making God conscious in a truly human sense. Would that not be the greatest prize of all? - to make God conscious through us by our effort to become God. We reach into ourselves and from the deepest depths we bring forth God himself. We are God and God is us. The human race has created the True God, uniquely expressed through human minds. We could never be alienated from such a God. Through him, we would create heaven on earth. We would be a Community of Gods, a Society of the Divine, and each and every one of us would know what it is to be the one, true God.
Contrast Jung's dream with that of capitalism. Capitalism is an insidious activity that resembles the global drugs trade. The objective of capitalists is to make people addicted to their products and services. To make them buy more, use more, tell more of their friends to buy them too, to spread the virus as far and wide as possible.
What do capitalist bosses tell their sales teams? "Make them buy more. Make them addicted. Make them junkies. Make them dependent. Make them crave more expensive upgrades, new versions, more deluxe models. Make them want to buy accessories. Make them want to buy more for their friends and family. Make them want different colours and textures. Keep them buying. Keep them hooked. Use any tactics. Keep seducing them, tempting them, entrapping them. Use every trick, every con, every brainwashing tactic possible."
To what end? To glorify humanity? To create a better world? To make men gods? No, simply so that the guy at the end of the line, at the top of the pyramid, can add a few more zeros to his bank account. THAT is what capitalism is all about. So, you have the latest iPod, iPhone, iPad, do you? Good little capitalist boys and girls. Keep buying. Keeping making the Man rich.
On Facebook every day? Good little capitalist boys and girls. The more you log on to Facebook, the richer you make Zuckerberg and his rich, privileged Harvard and Wall Street friends. Of course, you know that Goldman Sachs is one of Facebook's main investors and Rupert Murdoch owns MySpace. And you claim to want a new world? Dream on.
Never forget - keep buying. For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory when you keep hoovering up the junk they pile in front of you. Don't think. Not for a second. No one wants that. It stops people buying. It just gets in the way. Who wants a thinking population? Nothing could be more dangerous to the aims of capitalism.
"Yond' Cassius has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much: such men are dangerous."
Shakespeare
Are you lean and hungry? Or are you bloated on all the junk they made you gobble up?
In capitalism, if you're dumb enough to buy it, you can be sure someone will be smart enough to sell it. That's how the system works. Capitalism is about a transfer of wealth from the suckers to the exploiters.
Bicameralism
The ancient bicameral mind was able to unlock its unconscious contents much more easily and comprehensibly than the modern conscious mind. The reason for this was that the unconscious actually communicated directly: as the voice of the gods issuing explicit orders. There was no ambiguity about what message the unconscious was conveying. In the bicameral mind, the unconscious could control the language centres of the brain. This became impossible when the conscious mind took over control of language and rendered the unconscious mute.
If you struggle to imagine a world of human beings lacking modern consciousness, consider the extraordinary phenomenon of sleepwalking. A sleepwalker can carry out elaborate actions and even hold conversations without any conscious awareness. What is that if not a person under the full control of their unconscious - a person who has reverted to bicameralism? The whole of humanity once sleepwalked through the world, just as animals still do, untroubled by consciousness but still able to function in complex and marvellous ways.
When is bicameralism most likely to appear? - precisely when we "switch off" our regular consciousness i.e. when we are asleep. How can such a thing as sleepwalking be possible without the bicameral hypothesis? Sleepwalking proves conclusively that human beings have an intelligent autopilot within them that can operate without conscious control. This autopilot is engaged most of the time, even when people are seemingly conscious.
Most human beings go through life as little more than zombies, lurching through shopping malls, holding down brain-dead jobs, having low quality relationships with other members of the undead. How can the dreary nonsense we see all around us be defined as LIFE? Is it not just process - mechanical and robotic? To read someone like Nietzsche, to read of his Superman, is to glimpse an astonishing higher reality, a world as far above ours as ours is above that of cockroaches. Don't be the Abominable No Man. Be a Superman.
Schizophrenia is another type of switching off of conventional consciousness. The schizophrenic is subject to hallucinatory voices ordering him to do things, just as the voices of the bicameral age did.
And what else "switches off" our consciousness? HYPNOSIS. Hypnotised people, like sleepwalkers, are bicameral. They are passive; awaiting the voice of a god (the hypnotist) to direct them.
The Illuminati are always seeking ways to use hypnotism to activate the archetypal, bicameral mind in a safe and controlled way. However, something extraordinary has been observed: it's almost impossible to hypnotise an Illuminatus in any simple way even when they wish to be hypnotised. The reason? Most of the Illuminati are dominant introverts and have high "cortical arousal". It's very hard to switch off the consciousness of such people. The easiest people to hypnotise are submissive extraverts.
Given that most people in the world are indeed submissive extraverts, it's easy to infer that submissiveness and extraversion are strongly linked to the underlying bicameral mind of all human beings. A submissive person is someone waiting to be given orders, to have their life directed for them, just as bicameral humans awaited the voices of the gods to tell them what to do. Extraverts, with their low cortical arousal and need for stimulation from sources outside themselves, are in a sense desperately seeking the voices of the gods that were once inside them but are heard no longer.
It cannot be stressed enough that the reason why the Old World Order have been so successful at getting the whole world to dance to their tune is that they have taken the place of the ancient voices of the gods. Enormous numbers of submissive human beings - lacking any real ability to think for themselves or take responsibility for their own lives - have allowed the OWO to order them about and turn them into slaves and drones.
We live in an overwhelmingly submissive world, which is why a few dominants can wield so much power. Only about 5% of the world's population are dominant. The dominant are those who can't abide taking orders and are determined to control their lives rather than have them controlled by others. They are the "movers and shakers", the people who do things, the people who don't wait for permission. They make things happen. They are active, not reactive. They set the agenda.
If the world had been left to submissives, we would still be living in caves.
People write to us and say, "If you're so smart and powerful, why don't you destroy the OWO and save us?" And thus speak all submissives - always looking to others to do something, to save the day, to show them the way. Our message couldn't be any clearer. We're not your Messiah - YOU ARE. Only you can save yourself. It's your responsibility, not ours. If you refuse to take responsibility for your own existence, why should anyone else do it for you (except to exploit you)? The question is a simple one: do you want to take the important choices in your life or do you want someone else to take them for you (in which case they're not your choices)? If the latter is true then you are useless and contemptible, and of no possible interest. So don't come to us weeping and whining. It's YOUR LIFE. If you dislike it, change it. If you dislike it and do nothing then you are pathetic and you have no one to blame but yourself. If you are submissive then the biggest task facing you is to overcome your submissiveness.
No Saviour is coming. If you want to be saved, save yourself. The American revolutionaries did it, and so did the French and the Russian. You can do it too, but only if you are prepared to stand up to Power and say, "No more. Your rule is over."
The Unconscious History of the World
Jung thought that human beings in ancient times had spontaneously projected the contents of their unconscious onto the world and the heavens, creating a tremendous sense of spirituality and the direct presence of the gods (or the archetypes of the unconscious, to be more accurate). Later, as the conscious ego developed and became more entrenched, it withdrew many of these projections, and humanity started to lose its sense of spirituality and contact with the gods, leading to the scientific materialism and materialistic consumer culture of the present day.
The banished gods/archetypes reappeared in a new guise: as neuroses, obsessions, delusions and mental illnesses. These conditions tell us that we have badly strayed from psychic health. Jung wrote: "The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor's consulting room, or disorders the brains of politicians and journalists who unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world."
You wonder why so many people are in therapy, seeking the meaning of life. It's because they are completely alienated from the contents of their unconscious.
Why did Jung, a psychologist, take such an interest in Gnosticism and alchemy? Well, for one thing, Jung felt an instant connection with these subjects. In relation to the Gnostics, Jung said: "I felt as if I had at last found a circle of friends who understood me."
In relation to Jung's theory of the collective unconscious, Gnosticism and alchemy were invaluable because as apparently dead systems of thought, they had not been subjected to the dogmatic and pseudo-rationalistic battles that had plagued Christianity and other religions over many centuries and into the present day. Thus, as Jung saw it, they represented an authentic and untainted projection of the collective unconscious, hence he was able to study them as pure systems reflecting unconscious contents.
He interpreted the Gnostic Demiurge as a representation of the Ego archetype, obsessed, like a scientific materialist, with its own consciousness and in denial that anything more profound lay beyond it. Abraxas on the other hand was the Self - the Hidden God.
Ancient Gnostic cosmology defined two domains called pleroma (fullness) and hysterema (deficiency). The former is true reality, the perfect domain of Abraxas, the realm of light, goodness and everything in its true form, outside space and time, immutable and immortal like the Platonic world of perfect Forms. The latter is imperfect, distorted, inferior, even a kind of illusion. It's the phenomenal, scientific world of space, time, flux and mortality - the domain of the deluded Demiurge who imagines himself the True God and Creator.
Jung identified the Gnostic pleroma with the collective unconscious and the hysterema with consciousness and the world observed by consciousness.
Science explores the hysterema, while religion, philosophy and psychology are directed towards the pleroma. Those who are obsessed with their ego-consciousness are alienated from the pleroma, hence from God, the soul and the afterlife.
If you want to "find God" you're using the wrong instrument if, like a materialistic scientist, you can't see beyond your rationalistic consciousness. To reconnect with your spiritual self, you must be a fearless explorer of the unconscious.
The human race is not connected to God, the soul and the afterlife through the conscious mind but through the unconscious. That's why these issues are so mysterious and enigmatic, why they resist facile scientific examination. The language of the unconscious is not English, German, French, Spanish or Chinese. It's coded images and symbols. To find your soul, you need to be a code-breaker of the cryptic messages of your unconscious. Putting on a lab-coat and doing scientific experiments won't get you anywhere.
Those who labour under the spell of scientific materialism are deluded, and they are creating tremendous psychological problems for themselves.
Equally, "revealed religion" whereby "God" communicates with selected prophets who then put his words in holy books, which humanity must slavishly obey, are laughable and absurd. These fake religions have nothing whatever to do with real religion. They say nothing about the true nature of reality and bury everything under the ghastly concept of "faith", the last resort of those who have completely run out of ideas and reason.
So, to the many people who write to ask us how to encounter God, you must delve into your deepest unconscious recesses like the most heroic and fearless of deep-sea divers. Your task is to unlock your own unconscious.
"Hear Ye: I begin with nothing. Nothing is the same as fullness. In the endless state fullness is the same as emptiness. The Nothing is both empty and full. One may just as well state some other thing about the Nothing, namely that it is white or that it is black or that it exists or that it exists not. That which is endless and eternal has no qualities, because it has all qualities. The Nothing, or fullness, is called by us the PLEROMA. In it thinking and being cease, because the eternal is without qualities. In it there is no one, for if anyone were, he would be differentiated from the Pleroma and would possess qualities which would distinguish him from the Pleroma."
Jung
INTUITION
"Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century a distinct conception of what poets of strong ages called inspiration? If not, I will describe it now. If one had the slightest residue of superstition left in one, one would hardly be able to set aside the idea that one is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely medium of overwhelming forces."
Nietzsche
Inspiration and intuition are closely linked, almost to the extent of being synonymous. Both are concerned with gaining knowledge from an unknown source. The inspired poet imagines he is possessed. Someone or something else, an unidentified power, is writing his words that shine so bright. Similarly, those in the grip of the highest intuition make bizarre connections between things that seem totally unrelated, and their astounding intuitions are then proved correct. They have no idea how they achieved the connection. It just "came to them" out of thin air. No thinking was involved, no laborious sequence of steps proceeding from a to z. The whole answer came in a single flash, fully formed, without any scaffolding. The solution, when it arrived, was instant and total, yet the person might have been working on the problem for ten years beforehand, getting nowhere slowly. What is the force, the mechanism, that suddenly kicks in and delivers the answers so dramatically and successfully? It's as if God decided to have a look at what was causing all this mental strain and chose to provide the instant answer.
How can any scientific materialist account for intuition and inspiration? What collisions of atoms could conceivable produce breathtaking answers that seem to pop out of nothing?
If you are an intuitive person, you will have personal experience of being able to effortlessly make connections that leave others bewildered. People who have a personality type based on sensation rather than intuition are dumbfounded by how fast the minds of intuitives work. At lightning speed, the intuitives race from one connection to another to complete an enormous mental jigsaw.
Yet all of that intellectual power comes at a price. Intuitives barely notice physical details in the world around them. They are often clumsy, unobservant, distracted, far too busy with creating their gleaming cities of the imagination.
Nevertheless, the suspicion must remain that intuitives have privileged access to a transcendental source of information - to nothing other than the Mind of God.
If we set up schools for intuitives, the walls would have to be fireproofed because so much blazing mental energy would be surging through them. Think tanks full of intuitives could solve anything you threw at them.
Intuitives are the geniuses and masterminds who can bring the thoughts of the gods to humanity. The thinkers can then work out the details and implement them. Feeling types can identify the better of conflicting ideas. Sensing types can help with all the details of physical implementation.
The human race can work as an integrated whole, each psychological type fulfilling its proper function. Everyone would know what to do.
A Question
We were sent the following question: Please do not take this as me flaming on ignorantly as I have given this much thought and am in DEEP need of clarification concerning the test that we all go through. Note that I came up with this after walking around in circles for an hour and thirty minutes.
So God put us here to be tested knowing that it would take an incredibly long time to even come to terms with the fact that were being tested much more the degree to which we are being tested. Then, allows the Demiurge to swamp us with psychological brainwashing and propaganda, steadily conditioning our minds to waver from that which God views as right. Throughout this test, God barely communicates with some of us while others fall by the wayside in the respect of life, because life's circumstances, events, and scope aren't capable of furnishing the knowledge that the individual is indeed being tested to such a high degree (achieving Gnosis). With these parameters in mind, what outcome does God expect exactly? Is the test fair on some higher level? I've come to the conclusion that living multiple lives over the course of thousands of years presents opportunities to strive for higher meaning. And finally, is it the nature of the individual that is preserved over the course of the endeavour and is that how progress is made?
*****
So God put us here...
You think? What's the basis of that belief? Why not say that we chose to be here? To be tested knowing that it would take an incredibly long time to even come to terms with the fact that we were being tested much more the degree to which we are being tested.
You think? Every religion asserts that we are being tested in some way. An incredibly long time? Really? All finite times are nothing compared with eternity. Consider the alternative. God appears to us en masse and says, "Here is the test..., and here are your exam papers. You have seventy years and then I will collect your answers." You think that's how it should be done? What is the "degree" to which we are being tested? We are being tested no more and no less to the degree compatible with our nature. Then, allows the Demiurge to swamp us with psychological brain washing and propaganda, steadily conditioning our minds to waver from that which God views as right.
God allows the Demiurge to "swamp" us? You mean God allows the dialectic to unfold? He has no choice in the matter. He is part of the dialectical evolution of the cosmos, no different from us in that respect. To interfere with the dialectic is to interfere with the fundamental workings of the cosmos, and no rational being would do so because it would court complete disaster.
The Demiurge offers us his side of the dialectic. It's our choice whether we accept or not. What does it have to do with God? Can't you make your own choices? Do you need someone to hold your hand and tell you what to do? You're an adult, not a child. Throughout this test, God barely communicates with some of us while others fall by the wayside in the respect of life, because life's circumstances, events, and scope aren't capable of furnishing the knowledge that the individual is indeed being tested to such a high degree (achieving Gnosis).
What do you mean "barely communicates"? If you're listening, you can hear him all the time, just as you can hear the Demiurge. No one puts a gun to the head of the Old World Order and says, "Be evil, greedy bastards!" They choose that for themselves because they love the sound of the Demiurge's whispers in their ears. They could choose otherwise. They don't. Whose fault is that? It's theirs, no one else's.
Achieving gnosis - becoming God - is certainly hard. Why should it be easy? What good would that do? Will you become a nobler, higher, more moral person by having everything handed to you on a plate? Why are you so afraid of effort and struggle? Your message is full of the subtext: "Oh, it's all so unfair, so hard, so difficult. Poor little me." In the last resort, nothing's unfair. If we don't like something we can change it. If we don't change it, we're to blame, no one else. With these parameters in mind, what outcome does God expect exactly?
Why do you keep defining yourself with respect to God's "expectations" (whatever those are)? Your task is to become God, not to second-guess him. If you don't know what God's like then you have a real problem. But you ought to know because God is inside you and inside all of us. Your task is not to obey God - that's the creed of the Abrahamists. Your task is something entirely differently - your task is to work out what it means to be God and then to make yourself those things; at which point you will be God. Forget rules, expectations, commandments, and worrying about God. Those are all complete distractions and irrelevancies. The likelihood of God directly intervening in your life is zero. God won't be tapping you on the shoulder to tell you what to do. No Messiah is coming. No one can save you other than you. Get with the program.
Is the test fair on some higher level?
There you go with "fairness" again. So, write down what you think a fair test is for the purpose of making a human being reach their maximum cosmic potential? After long consideration, you'll realise that it's exactly the system we already have. Not one detail should be altered. It's the optimal system.
I've come to the conclusion that living multiple lives over the course of thousands of years presents opportunities to strive for higher meaning.
Exactly. This lifetime is just part of your journey. Every new life offers new tests and new opportunities to learn and understand. And finally, is it the nature of the individual that is preserved over the course of the endeavor and is that how progress is made?
Yes, precisely so. Your mortal self perishes at the end of each life, but your immortal self is never impacted by death. It absorbs the lessons learned and moves on to fresh pastures. Note that I came up with this after walking around in circles for an hour and thirty minutes.
Next time, why not spend a year and a half walking round in circles? If you think an hour and a half represents a serious commitment, no wonder the idea of a test terrifies you.
Be heroic. Think like a god. Overcome your weaknesses and fears and everything holding you back. Your task is to become strong, powerful, and self-actualised. You'll start to achieve those things only when you stop looking around for someone to come and save you. Your personal salvation is your responsibility. Why should it be anyone else's? Aren't you in charge of your own life? And if you're not, isn't it about time you did something about it?
The Architect
Many people, such as the previous questioner, express incomprehension at why the world is the way it is. By doing so, they are betraying their secret Abrahamic leanings. Their puzzlement really concerns why a perfect God, incapable of evil, created an imperfect, evil world, which is, of course, a logical impossibility. But if you remove an eternally perfect God from the equation then there is no mystery. When the cosmos is seen as the unfolding of a dialectic based on thesis, antithesis and synthesis, each phase of which summons opposites into existence, then everything makes complete sense. You cannot have light without dark, good without evil, altruism without selfishness, truth without lies, fairness without unfairness, justice without injustice. These are all dialectically inevitable.
The central problem with our world is not that it is wicked but that we allow it to be wicked. We have all of the dialectical knowledge we need to transform this world into paradise. We have endured all of the horrors and evils the dialectic has served up but, amazingly, the vast majority of people still haven't learned a single thing. Billions worship the Devil and think him God - how can they have made such a catastrophic mistake? Our planet is full of worshippers of money. They are devoid of all spirituality. Privilege rules everywhere. This is the 21st century and we still have monarchs calling people their "subjects" and being allowed to do so. We have global religions that revere a prophet - Abraham - prepared to perform human sacrifice on his own son without any questions asked.
The stupidity of the world, the delusions of the people, their adherence to mad ideas, their contempt for reason, their materialism, their worship of celebrities…these are the woes of our time that need to be overcome.
In The Matrix, Morpheus referred to businessmen, teachers, lawyers, and carpenters as part of the "system" and as the "enemy". He said to Neo, "You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it."
And that's exactly the situation we are in for real. Most people are plugged into a system that exploits them and many of them will kill to defend it. If that's not perverse, what is?
If you think the world could be better, why not consider how you would design it if you enjoyed godlike powers. In The Matrix series, the Architect said to Neo, "The first Matrix I designed was quite naturally perfect. It was a work of art, flawless, sublime. A triumph equalled only by its monumental failure. The inevitability of its doom is as apparent to me now as a consequence of the imperfection inherent in every human being, thus I redesigned it based on your history to more accurately reflect the varying grotesqueries of your nature. However, I was again frustrated by failure. I have since come to understand that the answer eluded me because it required a lesser mind, or perhaps a mind less bound by the parameters of perfection. Thus, the answer was stumbled upon by another, an intuitive program, initially created to investigate certain aspects of the human psyche. If I am the father of the matrix, she would undoubtedly be its mother [He is referring to The Oracle]…she stumbled upon a solution whereby nearly 99.9% of all test subjects accepted the program, as long as they were given a choice, even if they were only aware of the choice at a near unconscious level. While this answer functioned, it was obviously fundamentally flawed, thus creating the otherwise contradictory systemic anomaly that if left unchecked might threaten the system itself. Ergo, those that refused the program, while a minority, if unchecked, would constitute an escalating probability of disaster."
Agent Smith said to Morpheus, "Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost… Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery…Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague. And we are... the cure."
Smith's speech is chilling…because in many ways it's so true. The worst aspect is that we are responsible for plugging ourselves into the system, not some artificial intelligence, and moreover, we could pull out the plug and liberate ourselves at any time.
The Architect, the father of the Matrix, committed the childish error of making the first Matrix too perfect…so resist the idea that there is any magic wand that can be waved to make everything perfect. Is perfection, without an immense period of prior preparation, even desirable?
Consider what Schopenhauer wrote: "Work, worry, toil and trouble are indeed the lot of almost all men their whole life long. And yet if every desire were satisfied as soon as it arose how would men occupy their lives, how would they pass the time? Imagine this race transported to a Utopia where everything grows of its own accord and turkeys fly around ready-roasted, where lovers find one another without any delay and keep one another without any difficulty: in such a place some men would die of boredom or hang themselves, some would fight and kill one another, and thus they would create for themselves more suffering than nature inflicts on them as it is. Thus for a race such as this, no stage, no form of existence is suitable other than the one it already possesses."
Is that not horrifically true? All those people who bleat about the lack of a perfect world should bear in mind that certain types of perfection would destroy the human race. A heaven wrongly constructed would be nothing other than hell.
Even the Architect - the Creator - was confounded by the problem and only accidentally stumbled upon a working solution, and it was one that remained imperfect.
So, what would you choose to do differently? The thing you have to bear in mind above all else is that the system must be capable of things such as a) evolution b) choice and c) creating opposite tensions and resolving them.
When the New World Order is created, it won't be some puerile "paradise" where everyone is a goody-two-shoes or a po-faced puritan in a "sin-free" zone where the dullest people on earth have imposed their restrictions, rules and commandments on everyone else.
No, the New World Order will be psychologically sophisticated. It will give the human Shadow its due. It will let the Id be expressed as far as is sensible. Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll will be taken to a new and much higher level.
The Smart Society will be about harnessing the energy of the Shadow and the Id. It will seek to sublimate their destructive tendencies and transform them into creative forces that allow self-expression and personal fulfilment. Just as sport is a sublimation of war, turning something horrific into a great arena of human excellence and achievement that inspires rather than terrifies humanity, so all the aspects of our dark side will be channelled for positive ends.
It's an unarguable fact that mainstream religion, especially Abrahamism, has done nothing but unleash the Shadow and Id in their rawest, most brutal and destructive forms. This is not accidental or unfortunate. It's an inevitable consequence of the psychological make-up of these religions. They are nothing other than Shadowmancers - shadow generators and magnifiers. Rather than fighting the Devil, they have become the Devil's greatest work, his central instrument for plunging the human race into misery and woe. Mainstream religion is the primary cause of evil in this world.
To abolish evil means to abolish mainstream religion. Evil is indissolubly linked to dialectical psychological tensions, thus any attempt to exterminate the Shadow has the inevitable consequence of making it enormously more powerful. It is for this reason that mainstream religion has gone so badly wrong. Because the major religions subscribe to a totally false and idiotic understanding of human psychology, they produce psychological mayhem. All human beings lie so to issue a Commandment saying, "Thou shalt not lie" is sure to produce lying - especially lying to oneself - on an epic scale. Isn't that exactly what we observe? "Thou shalt not kill" has produced endless wars, slaughter and killing. "Thou shalt not commit adultery" has produced endless affairs, divorces and unhappiness. "Thou shalt not steal" has produced an endlessly greedy society where the rich are forever stealing from the poor, the poor are stealing from each other and theft is embedded in our culture. "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's assets" has created a society where people do nothing else - they measure their personal success entirely on how they match up with their neighbours. "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife" has given us celebrity culture where everyone is explicitly conditioned to lust after other men's wives if those wives are glamorous models, movie stars and pop idols. "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" has led to the worship of endless gods. "Thou shalt make no graven images," has created a whole world of fake idols - celebrities, politicians, the Elite of society, the super rich - to whom we devote our worship. "Thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain," has produced nothing but cursing and swearing, profanity and blasphemy. "Honour thy father and mother" has led to endless family disputes and rebellions against parental authority.
So, the effect of the Ten Commandments has been the precise opposite of what was intended. The Ten Commandments created and magnified everything they were supposed to prohibit, just as American Prohibition did nothing but encourage drink, drugs and gangsterism. All prohibitions invariably summon their Shadow opposite, but much more intensely than ever before. Prohibitions are Sin Intensifiers.
Therefore if you want to reduce sinfulness and wickedness you should abolish all rules, regulations, laws, commandments, taboos and prohibitions, or you should know exactly in advance what their inevitable shadow responses will be so that you can anticipate them and sublimate them.
This is not rocket science or brain surgery. This is the straightforward application of well-established psychological principles.
We can easily design a brand new shining world, fair and just to all, without war and hate, if we approach the task psychologically rather than religiously. Mainstream religion has been the crudest, most stupid approach to healthy psychology ever devised. It has, however, proved a master class in negative, diseased, warped and twisted psychology. Conventional religion has created mental illness, hatred, war, hypocrisy, intolerance, cruelty, lack of compassion, selfishness, greed, callousness and downright evil on an industrial scale. It has magnified the Shadow so much that the Devil walks amongst us almost literally. Therefore it must be concluded that mainstream religion is the work of the Devil. One need only read about the psychopathic dictator described in the Old Testament to see that the Devil is the "God" portrayed therein. The creature is full of the Shadow and brings the Shadow with him wherever he goes, as the vile, horrific tales of the Bible demonstrate all so clearly.
If you want to banish the Devil, you must banish mainstream religion.
There's just one question: is the human race smart enough to understand this simplest of truths, or is humanity irredeemably dumb and will just never get it?
A stupid person is someone who keeps doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. If Abrahamists were capable of rational thought, they would convert to Illuminism, but they're not and they won't.
To kill mainstream religion is to kill the old gods that humanity has worshipped and revered so long, in whom people have invested their identity and greatest hopes.
Nietzsche understood the significance of the event: "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderer of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives - who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed - and whoever shall be born after us, for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto."
There you have it - everything in a nutshell. We must kill the old gods and we will be able to do so only if we ourselves are gods who can step into their shoes. We must become a higher humanity to get rid of the devils who have ruled our world.
Abraxas desires that we should join him in the Community of the Divine. The True God is our friend, our ally, our secret guide, our mentor. The last thing he desires is worship. Worship is an intrinsic evil and an insult to both God and humanity. Only the Devil seeks to be worshipped and only Devil-worshippers offer it. What could be more obvious?
So, are you ready to become gods and create a New World Order based on psychology rather than morality? This is the greatest revolution of all time, the one that will take humanity to the next stage of its divine evolution.
Revalue all values!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Become part of a higher history - the divine period of human history, the true Golden Age.
Do you have the guts, the ambition, the intelligence and the merit for the task? You can be sure the deranged Abrahamists will fight to the end for the sake of the Devil in whom they have placed their complete trust, allegiance and faith.
The "death of God" to which Nietzsche referred is mistaken. He should have talked about the death of the Devil.
We have hitherto lived in the Dark Age, the Age of Satan, and now we have the prospect of entering the realm of Light. Are the Illuminati the only ones capable of taking the next step, or are there others out there of the right calibre?
The Video Nasties
"AK" alerted us to some clever and funny videos mocking well-known Bible stories and rationally deconstructing the "message" of these tales. Check them out. You will no doubt be smiling and nodding your head as you watch them. Yet these stories are so self-evidently ridiculous that they raise the profoundest question - why do billions of people believe them utterly, even some well-educated people? And it is then you realise the scale of the challenge facing the New World Order. We have to overcome a kind of insanity immune to any rational discourse. The question of how to abolish Abrahamism is the same as how to cure madness.
Yes, these are funny videos, but it's not the absurdity we're interested in so much as the horror and cruelty. We want Jehovah to be seen as a serial killer and psychopathic maniac, not as a cosmic jester and bungling buffoon.
It never fails to astonish us that billions of people believe in a God who ordered a father to make a human sacrifice of his own son - the purpose of the "test" being to demonstrate that there was no act, no matter how evil or unthinkable, that the father would not do in order to obey his God. What rational, decent person could ever subscribe to such a monstrous religion? If someone went around in the present day saying that only those prepared to commit human sacrifice were "true believers", he would be locked up as a psychopath. Yet half the world shares this insane viewpoint and the White House and Congress are full of these deranged cultists. Then people are surprised that the world is totally fucked!? How could it be anything else if billions of people think that human sacrifice is justified if "God" orders it?
The God Formula
What Jung calls the Self, and sometimes the imago Dei - the image of God - is the key to the great mystery and quest of becoming God. It's the means for ANY human being to achieve a higher level of awareness and functioning, to become their Higher Self, a Superman or Superwoman.
Forget the superheroes you see in movies and comic
strips. You can make yourself a superhero. You can create yourself.
The Self is, in truth, our immortal Self that does not exist in space and time and is not subject to mortal decay and death. It is our
guarantor of eternal life and why we have no reason to fear death. Death
provides an automatic reconnection with our Immortal Self and, just as the
Tibetan Buddhists have described in their Book of the Dead, it is always an
opportunity to achieve gnosis/enlightenment. If we have been close to gnosis at
the end of our life, death itself furnishes the Bifrost Bridge - the
transcendent bridge of rainbows - that allows us to permanently pass over into
the realm of divinity. If we fail, we again plunge into the domain of mortal
consciousness. In which case, quite simply and bluntly, our time for ultimate
enlightenment has not yet arrived.
Just as the persona is the public mask of the ego, so
is the ego the conscious, mortal mask of the Immortal Self. Just as the persona
does not truly reflect our ego, the ego does not truly reflect our Immortal
Self. Just as we can over-identify with our public face and become fake and
inauthentic, so we can over-identify with our ego and become a false agent of
our Immortal Self.
Our Immortal Self has a significant problem, one that
it is our duty and function to resolve.
Consider the split Soul of which Plotinus spoke: one
part collective, one part unique. The difficulty confronting the collective
Soul is that nothing within it is clearly defined and separated from anything
else. The collective Soul is a unity where everything is interconnected, but
that leads to an inevitable lack of differentiation. The fragmentary soul, on
the other hand, is unique, like the human fingerprint, and exists in physically
distinct and well-differentiated bodies. The mental domain is that of the
collective, and the physical domain that of the individual. A Self in the
mental domain becomes unique and differentiated precisely because of the
conscious experiences it undergoes in the physical domain. These reincarnated
lives of ours are not some bizarre accident, punishment, or illusion - they are
ESSENTIAL to turning our Immortal Self into a unique Immortal Self rather than
some vague entity so interconnected with everything else that it has no distinct
character of its own.
The type of afterlife envisaged by Buddhists is a
union with the Transcendental Oneness that overarches all things i.e. Buddhist
actively seek not to be individuals but to be absorbed into a cosmic
collective. For them, to be part of the One represents security, the end of
fear, the end of isolation, the end of all worries, desires, and all suffering.
But the price they pay for this is the complete dissolution of any sense of
self. Of course, Buddhists don't actually believe in the concept of the self.
They subscribe to the concept of anatman
- the "no self". Therefore their views are logically consistent apart from one
glaring error - why does the cosmos create this illusion of self for them if
the self does not exist? What purpose is served? Why does the ineffable Oneness
ever give rise to this strange and baffling illusion of multiplicity? It's
incomprehensible, frankly. Illuminism resolves this issue with consummate ease.
The One gives rise to the Many because it must if it wishes to attain
consciousness, if it wants to turn from a vague unity into a collection of
distinct well-defined parts that provide it with maximum self-expression,
maximum actualisation, maximum realisation of all cosmic possibilities.
It may come as a shock to you, but the
ego-consciousness you are deploying as you read these words is not the real
you. Our ego-consciousness is always locked into the mortal mentality of space
and time, but our True Self is defined by its immortal existence outside space
and time. Each lifetime we experience brings extra definition, clarity,
character and uniqueness to our Immortal Self. Our mortal life, each one of
them, is an invaluable contribution to our Immortal Self. Those people who
regard life as just some weird, accidental process, devoid of meaning and
purpose, couldn't be more wrong. Our existence here and now in the mortal world
is essential to the cosmic plan, and in particular to the development of our
Immortal Self.
While our ego is the centre of our consciousness, our
Self is the centre of our being in the fullest sense. Jung describes the Self
as the centre and totality of the entire psyche, but his definition throws up
numerous logical difficulties that never seemed to occur to him, or which he
lacked a sufficient theoretical framework to comprehensively account for.
It's crucial to examine the flaws in Jung's
understanding of the Self because by doing so we will reveal how it is possible
for us all to become God. Not a God,
but the God. But how is that
possible? How can we all be the God?
Isn't it a fundamental contradiction?
Jung asserts that the Self is the "archetype of
archetypes", the archetype which contains all the other archetypes and around
which they orbit like planets around the sun. The ego finds it hard to accept
the existence of the Self because it represents a threat to the ego's identity,
implying as it does that the ego isn't the real deal, but a mask for something
more profound.
The Self, as Jung explains, draws its power from the
collective unconscious alone i.e. not from our consciousness or personal
unconscious or anything unique to us. The Self is transpersonal - above and
beyond our personal nature - and is not influenced, according to Jung, by our
individual experiences. The Self provides the regulating centre of the psyche
and guides the process of individuation, acting in a sense as an Attractor,
drawing the ego upwards to a higher and healthier level. The Self is also the
goal - an unconscious rather than conscious one - of the individuation process,
and it provides the symbols of transcendent power and majesty that represent
the actualisation of all of our potential. These symbols are often impersonal,
geometric, symmetric designs of great beauty and significance such as the
circumpunct or the Hindu "mandala" (Sanskrit for "Magic circle"). The Self is
never symbolised by anyone or anything ordinary. To some people, it may appear
as a religious figure such as the Buddha or Jesus Christ, or a Fuehrer such as
Hitler. It can be a wise old man or woman in white robes, a seer, a priest or
priestess, the Cosmic Human, a golden child (representing a new beginning). It
could be a sacred bird of mythology such as the Phoenix that can be born anew,
or the Ouroboros, the snake of beginnings and endings flowing into one another.
It might be represented by the Golden Elixir, the Elixir of Immortality, the
Golden Flower, the Philosopher's Stone and, above all, the Holy Grail.
When the Self is projected, it is invariably onto our
conception of an external God or some prophet or charismatic, messianic leader.
Hitler wielded so much power in Germany because the nation collectively
projected the Self onto him. He became identified with the soul of the nation,
its beating heart, its very life. Germans were willing to fight to the death
for him because he was, in effect, God.
When the conscious ego is possessed by the Self, it
leads to megalomania. Hitler was possessed by the Self, and, interestingly,
this then provoked others into projecting the Self onto him as a kind of
contagion. When whole groups or nations act in a fanatical way, it is usually
because the Self is being projected. Abrahamic religions are all about the
projection of Self, which is why these religions are so psychologically potent
in relation to their followers. For the Jews, symbols such as the Wailing Wall,
the Menorah and the Ark of the Covenant can represent the Self. For Muslims,
the Prophet Mohammed is the Self, so sacred that no images are allowed to be
shown of him, leading to death threats against cartoonists. For Christians,
Jesus Christ is the symbol of Self. The personal relationship that people have
with Christ is actually with their own unconscious Self. Anyone who wants to
manipulate others just has to accomplish the task of getting them to project
the Self onto whatever system of manipulation he has devised. Once that has
happened, people show fanatical, irrational and deranged attachment to the
system that's controlling them because it's now expressing their identity. To
betray the "cause" would be to betray themselves. The only way to cure them is
to get them to redirect their projection of Self onto something much healthier,
or, even better, to get them to withdraw their projection completely.
Most of the trouble in our world comes from the
inappropriate projection of the Self. Being associated with the deepest level
of the collective unconscious, psychologically it is phenomenally powerful. It
channels the power of God. The ego tends to lose all control in the presence of
the Self and is overcome with religious feeling. Hitler deliberately turned the
Nazis into a quasi-religious cult. They used an immensely potent symbol - the
swastika - and held mass rallies, usually torchlit, invoking the special power
of the dark. People are always more religiously inclined in the dark than in
the light, which is why all the most solemn ceremonies tend to be torchlit
rather than sunlit. Hitler deliberately portrayed himself as the shaman, the
high priest, the great leader, the Messiah. He was Germany personified - Germany
transmuted into one great, living man.
The German people were possessed by him, inspired,
intoxicated, driven to do anything for him. Such a transformation of such an
intelligent people as the Germans can only be understood in terms of
quasi-religious possession. The Nazis were, in effect, a religious cult with,
it has to be acknowledged, Gnostic features. They identified the Jews as the
Chosen People of the Demiurge, responsible for the woes of the world. The world
could be saved only by destroying the Demiurge's servants, and the divine spark
of the German people would then be liberated, leading to a 1000-year paradise
(the Third Reich). The SS were modelled on the Teutonic Knights and the Knights
Templar. Himmler was obsessed with the Holy Grail. Many of the leading Nazis
believed in reincarnation. If a genius of the first order such as philosopher
Martin Heidegger could become a Nazi then Nazism unquestionably held an
incredible power over people. Jung was accused of being anti-Semitic and having
some Nazi leanings, although the evidence is hotly debated.
Nazism, if it had abandoned all of the "master race"
bullshit, if it had never gone down the catastrophic road of building and
operating death camps, if it had embraced full blown Gnosticism and campaigned
peacefully against the evils ofAbrahamism, could have been a great force for good rather than the
psychotic ideology it proved to be. If a great nation such as Germany had
become a peaceful pagan nation espousing the philosophies of Heidegger,
Nietzsche, Hegel, Weishaupt, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Fichte, Schelling, Kant,
the cultural values of Goethe, and the psychological theories of Freud, Jung,
Adler and Wilhelm Reich, it could have transformed the modern world and set an
example to everyone else. Instead, it went down the xenophobic, racist,
militaristic path. It ended up being the antithesis rather than the thesis.
If rather than identifying with the Self, the ego is
overwhelmed by the Self, this can lead to the annihilation of the ego. It
withdraws completely from the world, leading in the most extreme cases to a
state of catatonia (represented in mythology as being turned to stone or
swallowed whole by a whale or becoming invisible etc.).
Jung asserted that because of its unconscious,
transpersonal nature, the Self can never be fully integrated by the ego. The
ego pursues union with the Self, but knows it can never finally achieve it. It
must accept this and learn to defer to the Self and to its superior wisdom.
Mythologically, this is represented by a hero taking a leap of faith by placing
his complete confidence in the advice of some mystical guide, even when the
guide is suggesting something apparently crazy such as leaping over a chasm,
plunging through an invisible barrier, throwing oneself into the centre of the
flames. In The Matrix, Neo is given a
test of jumping between skyscrapers, with certain death the sure outcome of
failure. This is a classic scenario of surrendering to the higher power of the
Self. If you remain doubtful, you will certainly fail, and indeed Neo fails
until he has developed a much higher understanding of the world and of himself.
Jung suggests that the ego should always be wary of
the Self and keep a safe and sensible distance since to fly too close to the sun
always results in disaster. The story of Icarus is a symbol of what happens
when the ego makes the mistake of thinking it has become the godlike Self. The
unconscious can never be defeated or controlled, hence always carries danger.
So, how does Jung's treatment differ from that of
Illuminism? The central point of disagreement lies in Jung's definition of the
Self as entirely transpersonal. In Illuminism, the Self is supremely personal -
it is the Immortal Self that defines your entire existence. It's your unique,
immutable Form. Gnosis involves coming into full, conscious contact with your
Self. So, contrary to what Jung says, the unconscious can and must be defeated
and controlled. Indeed, that's the whole point of life.
What Jung calls the transpersonal Self, we call the
Collective Self, made up of all the individual Selves.
Jung wasn't a conventionally religious person and
effectively replaced religion with psychology and located all the mysteries of
life in the Collective Self, which, for him, was a kind of noumenal God that
could be approached but never finally comprehended. Ultimately, it is
unknowable. According to Jung, the
unconscious cannot be completely bridged and fully integrated with consciousness.
According to Illuminism, it certainly can.
Now we come to the crux of the matter. For simplicity,
let's imagine that the entire cosmos consists of just ten human beings. Each of
these is a reflection of a unique Self, but each unique Self is also a
reflection of the Collective Self as the archetype of archetypes. Each human
being has a consciousness and a personal unconscious, and they all share a
collective unconscious. Each has a unique Self and, through that, is
indissolubly linked to the Collective Self. Jung argues that everyone can integrate
their personal unconscious into consciousness and even many of the elements of
the collective unconscious, but definitely not the deepest level of the
collective unconscious that gives rise to everything else. This is the Self (or
Collective Self as we would now say), the archetype of archetypes, which we
might as well call God.
But if the unique Self and hence the Collective Self COULD
be integrated, what then?
Returning to our ten human beings, imagine that each
of them consciously integrates everything other than their unique Self and the
linked Collective Self. But then one of them takes the final step and
integrates the unique Self too, and through that the Collective Self. This
person has now integrated into his consciousness the entire collective
unconscious. This means that his psyche is whole and complete. He is conscious
of everything of which it is possible to be conscious, including the entire
psychic heritage of humanity and everything that has ever happened.
But does the story end here, or can it deliver an even
more incredible twist?
Jung's concept of the collective unconscious only
makes sense if all individual human minds feed into it and are in turn fed by
it. Before the dawn of human consciousness, this would all have been conducted
at the unconscious level, but why would the basic mechanism change once
consciousness enters the equation, particularly since consciousness is itself
an archetype of the unconscious? In fact, consciousness would take part in
exactly the same process as before. All conscious thoughts of all minds are
uploaded into the collective unconscious (which is why psychics can read the
minds of others) and are in turn downloaded into all minds in the synergic
feedback loop that Rupert Sheldrake calls morphic resonance.
But this all happens unconsciously rather than
consciously i.e. my conscious thoughts are stored in the collective unconscious
but not as universally available conscious thoughts (which is why it is a
collective unconscious rather than a collective consciousness). And no one
other than a psychic has any conscious access to my conscious thoughts with the
exception of myself. Nevertheless my conscious thoughts are fully available via
the collective unconscious, as are everyone else's i.e. my consciousness is
part of your unconscious (via the collective unconscious), and your
consciousness is part of my unconscious. If I had complete awareness of my
unconscious, including the collective unconscious, I would have complete access
to your conscious thoughts and indeed those of everyone else. And is that not
exactly what we mean when we say that God knows everyone's thoughts? It is via
the collective unconscious that he is able to achieve this.
So, one of our ten human beings has now achieved the
status of God. He has made conscious all the unconscious contents of the cosmic
mind. The cosmic mind is now identical to his mind, and at a fully conscious
level. This is the sole definition of God that makes any sense. God possesses
conscious awareness of all the information in the cosmos, and that includes all
of the thoughts of everyone in the cosmos.
But now imagine that a second person achieves the same
feat i.e. he fully integrates into his consciousness the collective
unconscious.
How does he stand in relation to the first person who
achieved this? Is he now identical? Have they become the same person? The
answer to that is yes and no. They are identical insofar as they now have
access to identical information. And yet they are not identical, because their
journey to where they now are was completely different in each case. Each has a
different sense of Self and a different actual Self, although they are linked
to the same Collective Self. Each has a different personality and character,
and places different emphasis on all of the information at their disposal. Each
places different significance on the memories available to them. Although ALL
memories in the cosmos are available to each of them, each of them has a very
different relationship to those memories. For person A, his own memories mean
the most to him, while person B's memories are of most importance to him.
Imagine that I had complete access to your memories.
My own memories would still be much more important to me precisely because they
are MY memories. Thus we have the extraordinary situation where two people have
identical mental contents, but entirely different ways of viewing,
contemplating and emotionally interacting with those contents. We all feel
things differently, uniquely. We think differently. We have different
personalities, characters and natures. So, even though our minds are linked and
share the same information, we remain different.
Do you see? Each us can be God in the fullest sense
i.e. we know all things. Yet we remain uniquely ourselves. We are both the One
True God and one God amongst Many. And there is absolutely no contradiction.
The holographic principle applies. Each part is in the
Whole, and the Whole is in each part. Those of us who succeed in becoming God
have the whole of the cosmic mind accessible to us, yet we are each part of
that cosmic mind. We are both a part and the whole at the same time.
Is it not wondrous and miraculous? We can truly become
God and yet remain uniquely ourselves and be surrounded by others who are truly
God but also uniquely themselves.
This is the gospel of the Illuminati. No other
religion reveals how you can be both God and yourself in a completely
meaningful and authentic way.
