The Voice of God
The human brain consists of two hemispheres linked by a thick band of connective tissue called the corpus callosum. The two hemispheres are not identical. In right-handed people, the left hemisphere is dominant and controls the right side of the body, while the right hemisphere controls the generally weaker left side of the body. Bicameral means "two chambered" and provides a good way of describing the human brain with its two distinct but connected hemispheres.
The left hemisphere is normally considered the seat of language and logic while the right hemisphere is the province of art, mathematics and music. Autistic savants can show bewildering technical expertise in art, mathematics and music while often being regarded as backward in relation to language, logic and empathy. It has been speculated that these individuals suffered left-brain trauma in the womb due to an abnormal response to testosterone, leading to right-brain dominance. People who have suffered strokes in the left brain have been known to undergo remarkable transformations and discover high-level artistic, musical or mathematical skills that were not in any way evident previously.
The left-brain is characterised as selective, focused, methodical. It filters information to allow the "big picture" to be seen. The right brain, on the other hand, deals with all of the detail ignored and filtered by the left brain. Ours is a left-brain "big picture" society, but that doesn't mean it was always so. Julian Jaynes's radical hypothesis is that what we regard as modern consciousness is intimately connected to the evolving dominance of the left brain and, particularly, to the development of language and writing. Before that, the right brain was in charge and what we regard as consciousness simply didn't exist. In fact, Jaynes speculates that human consciousness as we now understand it has existed for only about 3,000 years.
What existed before consciousness was the "bicameral mind". Jaynes argues that human beings, as they started to learn rudimentary language, began to undergo a form of auditory hallucination when they were stressed. They would hear a voice in their head commanding them what to do: "fight", "run", "drink", "rest", "hunt", "shelter" etc. The hallucinated voice was that of the tribal chief or some authority figure. The person carried out the command unquestioningly. No consciousness existed to allow the command to be pondered, challenged or contemplated. It was simply executed robotically. Even when the tribal chief died, his hallucinated voice would still be heard for a long time after. In this way, it would seem that he wasn't actually dead. Was the tribal chief promoted to the status of "god" at this time? (This was the origin, Jaynes suggests, of the belief in life-after-death and therefore the human religious sensibility.) As society grew more complex, additional voices arose to reflect additional chiefs and gods.
The bicameral human mind had an inbuilt master-slave structure: one part of the brain barked orders, and another part carried them out immediately. This permitted a rapid and decisive response in crisis situations. It is a more sophisticated form of animal behaviour, most of which is pre-programmed and instinctual. Animals don't reflect on their behaviour and don't take time to decide what to do, and nor did the bicameral mind.
According to Jaynes, the hallucinated voice(s) arose in the right hemisphere of the brain and was heard in the left hemisphere. The right brain was the master that issued executive commands and the left brain was the slave that dutifully followed them. From this originated the human propensity for master-slave relationships.
Jaynes thought his model provided an insight into hypnosis. The authoritative voice of the hypnotist becomes that of the right-brain master that once spoke to human beings. The left brain reverts to its old slavish instinct and mindlessly obeys the master's commands.
In a TV show featuring British illusionist Derren Brown, he rang a public call box and waited for someone to answer. As soon as a person picked up, he shouted, "Go to sleep!" Amazingly, many of those who answered the phone were filmed immediately slumping to the ground in a deep sleep. Brown's explanation was that these people were extremely suggestible. He pointed out that most people would ignore a ringing phone in a public call box, assuming it was a wrong number and knowing it definitely wasn't for them. Those who do answer are almost Pavlovian in their behaviour - they feel compelled to pick up a phone if it rings, no matter what the situation is, as if they have been conditioned since birth to do so and have no conscious choice. Is "suggestibility" a vestige of the old bicameral mind?
(In the 1960s, it was rumoured that the CIA carried out research on "voice control" as part of their top secret MK-Ultra project. The idea was to use a form of auditory hypnosis via the telephone to gain control over the person at the other end of the line. An agent would use subtle vocal commands and specific acoustic tones to bring the listener under his influence and then manipulate him for the desired purpose. It was hypothesised that the right hemisphere of the brain was more impressionable than the left and could be targetted.Once it had been brought under control, it could be used to direct the left brain. Afterwards, the subject would be made to forget what had happened. This procedure is entirely consistent with Jaynes's theory. Prohibition A, freely downloadable from this site, is about brainwashing and mind control techniques used by the American Intelligence services and relates a hypothetical plot to install a fully brainwashed person as President.)
Is schizophrenia, where people hear voices ordering them to do things, a reversion to the old bicameral mind? Are the "imaginary friends" that some children create also a product of the ancient bicameral mind?
Are young children conscious? How many of us can remember even one detail of our earliest years? Yet we clearly did things, despite not being conscious in any way that we can recall. Perhaps we were guided by a bicameral mind in our childhoods, with our parents' voices the ones we hallucinated in our heads to tell us what to do when our parents weren't physically around. We can't remember this phase of our lives because we had no consciousness to organise memories for us. Children in infancy exhibit similar traits to autistics; they don't understand concepts such as deceit and empathy. Nor would people with bicameral minds have understood these concepts. Are autistics operating according to a form of bicameral mentality?
Is a charismatic leader with hypnotic language skills - someone like Hitler, Mussolini, Martin Luther King, Billy Graham - taking the role of the hallucinated voice of the tribal leader or god of bicameral times? Is that why they inspire such devotion and can command vast crowds? At huge election rallies, are human beings reverting to their vestigial bicameral selves? Is that why they love strong leaders, why they love authority, why they love celebrities and the super-rich? Have they placed these people on a par with the old bicameral gods? Is a lynch mob a manifestation of a collective bicameral mentality kicking in? - a leader commands and the mob mindlessly obeys. Is the office hierarchy where people feel compelled to obey their inept managers a throwback to bicameral thinking? People say they're scared to lose their job if they disobey. They're obviously much less scared of losing their self-respect.
When Moses went up to the summit of Mount Sinai and encountered Yahweh, when Mohammed went into a mountain cave and encountered the Angel Gabriel, when Jesus spoke with his heavenly Father, were they all exhibiting "bicameral episodes"? Such episodes are thought to be more frequent if people have been fasting, meditating, isolating themselves from others. In short, if you go into the wilderness for forty days, you markedly raise the chances of having a bicameral episode. Are such episodes the basis of the "divine revelations" of Judaism, Christianity and Islam? Is the "Word of God" the same as the "Voice of God"?
In a famous experiment by Benjamin Libet, strong evidence was provided that consciousness may often consist of retrospective rationalisations of events that have already been decided by the brain i.e. free will might be illusory. But another explanation is possible. Perhaps the older bicameral mind acts before the conscious mind, except the hallucinated voice is silent. The conscious mind then rationalises the event as its own work.
Did empathy - our ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes and imagine what they would feel and think - evolve from the old bicameral mind and the new conscious mind trying to understand each other and seek some mode of cooperation and mutual understanding? In other words, empathy was, according to this view, originally internal before being extended to others, and may derive from our twin-chambered brain. We can run a simulation of the person with whom we are empathising in our right brain, while comparing and contrasting with our "selves", located in the left brain. This is a capacity that evolved from the older bicameral mind. Whereas in the past, the right brain issued the "voice of god", and the left brain obeyed, the left brain can now create any voice in the right brain and treat it as if it were a separate individual. The simulation can become so powerful and vivid that the created voice might eventually seem real. Some novelists have claimed that their fictional characters take them over and write the book on their own, without the author's conscious involvement. These novelists say they could imagine placing the character in any situation outwith the context of the novel, and know exactly how the character would behave. This is consistent with a bicameral mentality, with a created character taking on a voice and life of its own.
Is our love of acting and role play, of story-telling and fantasy, of impersonating others, of assuming an identity for computer games, of having an avatar in a virtual reality world like Second Life, related to the inbuilt existence of a twin nature arising from the left and right brain, and from the modern conscious mind and the old bicameral mind? Studies have shown differences between how men and women use their right and left brains. Are women more prone to submissive and compliant behaviour because they are more bicameral then men? Is the human obsession with opposites, with binary logic, related to bicameralism? Is the "double", the doppelganger, the shadow, the "other" all intimately connected with bicamerlaism? Does the ultimate root of good and evil lie in bicameralism? There is virtually no arena of the human condition which couldn't be considered as some kind of bicameral phenomenon.
Is the human race as a species prone to individual and mass hallucinations because of bicameralism? Can humans create such powerful simulations of other "voices" that they effectively conjure gods, ghosts, spirits, vampires, werewolves and a whole gallery of supernatural beings out of their imaginations and then believe they are real? Are mediums (those ones who aren't outright charlatans), so skilled at simulating the thoughts of a dead person about whom they have collected a few details that they can accurately describe how that person might have behaved when he was alive? Is that why they seem so convincing? Are people who have uncannily accurate intuitions about other people running incredibly powerful simulations of those others in their mind? Or is something else going on?
Some patients suffering from a hallucinated personality claim that the hallucination knows more than they do. What does that imply? It could be argued that the right brain, with access to all of the detail that the left brain filters out, may well seem to have greater knowledge. It retains all of the facts that the left brain has long forgotten.
Some people have had "split brain" operations involving the severing of the corpus callosum. Could that result in a person developing two "selves"? Not nearly enough scientific research has been conducted on split brain patients. They could hold the key to persuading the world about the reality of the bicameral mind.
The word "paranoia" literally means having another mind alongside one's own. That is exactly what the bicameralism is.
Does multiple personality syndrome (MPD) - when one personality seemingly divides into two or more - derive from bicameralism? (Prohibition A shows how MPD could be used to manufacture "Manchurian Candidates" - perfect mind-controlled assassins.) Regarding those people who can provide vivid details of past lives when they are under hypnosis, are memory traces of buried "voices" being accessed? (If someone living in America who had never left the country were able, under hypnosis, to successfully reveal the location of an ancient artefact that had been buried in France for hundreds of years and state that he himself had hidden this object in a previous life, how could any mainstream hypothesis account for this?) Is "speaking in tongues" a bicameral phenomenon? (If someone were to speak fluently in an ancient and "dead" language which they had never previously encountered and of which they could have no possible knowledge in conventional terms, how could any mainstream hypothesis possibly account for this?)
The Muses who are said to guide poets, writers and artists - are they actually bicameral voices? Tourette's Syndrome - is that an inner bicameral voice suddenly erupting uncontrollably? Being "possessed" - is that really a description of an old bicameral voice coming to the surface? In an exorcism, is a bicameral "demon" being expelled? The famous ancient Greek Oracle at Delphi - was the priestess vocalising the thoughts of a hallucinated god?
In ancient Rome, an individual's "genius" was his guardian and guiding spirit. This "genius" could easily be interpreted as an echo of the bicameral voice of old. Socrates, when he was on trial for his life, spoke of a daemon that helped him in difficult times. He described it as, "…a sort of voice which comes to me and has done so since my childhood; and when it comes it always dissuades me from what I am proposing to do, and never urges me on." John Milton referred to a "Celestial Patroness" who guided his poetry. William Blake seemed to live his life amongst a plethora of visions and auditory hallucinations. Wagner reached his creative peak when he searched inside himself for his musical ideas rather than looking to the outside world. Mathematician Françoise Chatelin heard a voice which, he claimed, instructed him in a new way of understanding numbers.
Is the condition of bipolar disorder (manic depression), from which many artists suffer, connected with bicameralism? During the manic phase, the person is consumed with activity, passion and creativity. Is that when he is being guided by an inner voice, silent but still directing his actions, reminiscent of the bicameral voice? The depressive phase would kick in when the "voice" or inner conviction vanished and the person was left to his own devices once more. He would feel bereft without the certainty and direction provided by the inner voice.
Some people might speculate that the vestigial bicameral "voice" could be equated with the Jungian "Shadow" aspect of the personality, or with the Freudian "Id". What is referred to as the "unconscious" may actually be the interplay between the modern conscious mind and the ancient bicameral mind. In certain situations, particularly stressful ones, the bicameral mind may come to the fore since it is far more decisive and quick-acting than the conscious mind.
When intoxicated people find that they can get home from a bar yet not have any conscious recollection of a single part of their homeward journey, they sometimes say they were on "autopilot", but perhaps it was their old bicameral mind that took over and guided them safely home. What about sleepwalkers? Have they been taken over by their old bicameral voice and then remember nothing about it when they wake up? As for dreams, human beings really have no idea what takes place in the dreamscape. People are woken up in order to report what they have been dreaming about. However, that involves their normal conscious mind kicking in and then trying to rationalise the few fragmentary images it can remember. It is possible that the dreamscape is where the old bicameral mind has much more say than normal, and tries to communicate messages to our consciousness, most of which are promptly forgotten unless they are particularly vivid? Jaynes thought that bicameral humans didn't really dream at all. Since they had no sense of "self", they could never imagine themselves in other times, places and situations, as modern, conscious humans do when they're dreaming. Rather, a bicameral person continued to experience the same sort of hallucinations in sleep as when awake i.e. voices speaking to them, accompanied, perhaps, by images of dead tribal chiefs, gods, heroes etc. Jaynes also speculated that the sexual encounters of bicameral people were boring and infrequent since they had no fantasy space to go to in their minds to spice things up. In many ways, bicameral humans are as far from modern human beings as Neanderthal Man.
There is a group called the "Hearing Voices Movement" which claims that between 2% and 4% of the population regularly hear voices, but only about one third become mental patients. In other words, there are people who hear voices and yet manage to cope with them and function normally. John Nash, the Nobel Prize winning economist, eventually managed to control the voices that had tormented him all his life.
There is a phenomenon known as the "Third Man", derived from T.S. Eliot's poem Waste Land:
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together.
But when I look up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you.
The idea is that in times of extreme stress, a presence can manifest itself and guide a person out of danger. Many people in life-threatening situations have described such a presence giving them direct instructions. Frequently, they attribute it to divine intervention. Many mountaineers, marathon runners and people doing extreme endurance sports have reported Third Man encounters. Scientists typically assert that oxygen deprivation is leading to deterioration in brain function, leading to hallucinations. However, the people undergoing these experiences seem not to be going into a chaotic, unfocused, disconnected state that will lead to their death, but the precise opposite. Why would a hallucination be so helpful and so specific in its advice? According to Jaynes's theory, what is happening is that the left brain is surrendering control to the right brain and the old bicameral mode is being restored during the crisis.
Jaynes's theory is massively speculative but it seems to convincingly address many issues that are inexplicable within the parameters of alternative and more conventional hypotheses.
There is no mystical element in Jaynes's thinking. He is rationalising a wide range of phenomena according to specific differences between the left and right hemispheres of the human brain, leading, he thinks, to hallucinated voices (and perhaps hallucinated bodies too). These hallucinations are, he proposes, the basis of humanity's religious beliefs.
Jaynes's hypothesis, as it stands, is one that should speak loudly and persuasively to atheists. Even though they reject the concept of God, they may see the possibility of "expanding their consciousness" via getting in touch with the strange landscape of the right brain, full of creativity, mathematical, artistic and musical potential, and vast resources of unfiltered data that, if it could all be accessed under certain conditions, might provide amazing insights and extra capabilities. Wouldn't we all want access to an inner voice that could help us in times of danger, or that could revolutionise our perception of reality? Just as humanity underwent a remarkable transformation when it evolved from the bicameral mind to modern consciousness (in Jaynes's theory), so it could take another radical leap if modern consciousness could selectively tap the old bicameral mind.
But there's another possibility that Jaynes never considers. What if the bicameral hallucinated voices aren't hallucinations? What if they're real? What if the voice is that of the divine spark? What if it was the divine spark that guided humanity from its ape ancestry to modern consciousness? That would be one way of accounting for the staggering difference between humans and all other animals.
What if the divine spark has full memory of all of its previous incarnations, and these memories can be accessed under hypnosis? (Plato, an advocate of reincarnation, argued that all true knowledge involves recollection. We are not discovering anything new…we are simply remembering what our soul knew when it was part of the divine order.) What if glossolalia - speaking in tongues - is actually a manifestation of the native tongues of previous incarnations? What if some incarnations go back to the very dawn of humanity and know exactly what happened back then? What if they know the truth of the "Garden of Eden" and all the other Biblical events? What if they know the identities of the archons? What if they deliberately became silent, as part of a greater plan, once they had brought humanity to consciousness? The combination of reincarnation and a hidden voice that can be accessed in certain circumstances is nothing short of a way to bring the whole of human history alive, to reveal all of the moments once thought lost in time. And what if the divine spark also offered glimpses of the divine order, and the uttermost secrets of the universe?
Jaynes's proposal could be treated as a mystical theory providing direct evidence of the divine spark located, in effect, as a separate personality in the right hemisphere of the human brain - divinity inside man - or as a rationalist's account of how we might think the divine exists even though it is only a sophisticated hallucination produced by brain wiring.
Jaynes's theory permits the religious to glimpse the divine spark, and atheists a higher self. In that way, it can unite both factions in the pursuit of a higher humanity with massively expanded possibilities.
Those who might speculate that the Illuminati's path to enlightenment is concerned with gaining reliable and consistent access to just the sort of inner voice of wisdom, command and revelation that features in Jaynes's theory would be on the right track. But on that subject we can say no more.
"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time is come."
Victor Hugo
"All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed; third, it is accepted as being self-evident."
Schopenhauer
THE SUPERMAN
"We are the new, the unique, the incomparable, those who impose on themselves their own law, those who create themselves."
Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche, a radical atheist, is an unlikely person to invoke in the search for gnosis and God, yet his concept of the übermensch - the overman/the superman/the hyperanthropos - can be harnessed by anyone searching for his higher self.
To comprehend the Superman, it is necessary to understand Nietzsche's infamous statement: "God is dead."
The Divine Vacuum
'Where has God gone?' he cried. 'I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. We are all his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is more and more night not coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition? - gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers 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 not 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.'
Nietzsche
Nietzsche didn't believe that God ever existed, so it seems curious that he could pronounce God dead when, as far as he was concerned, God was never alive in the first place. What he's highlighting is the fact that much, if not most, of the culture of the world was created under the assumption of God's existence. God, or the illusion of God, is built into practically everything. But, year by year, under the bombardment of science in particular, God seems to recede ever further into the distance. Yet the old institutions, with God at their centre, still exist, even though their foundations are rotten and collapsing.
God doesn't have to be real to have a decisive impact on human culture and society. Virtual existence can be as influential as real existence. Jean Baudrillard characterised the modern world as "hyperreal", where fact and fiction, real and virtual, truth and fantasy are now so inextricably intermingled that it is not possible, even in theory, to separate them. Nietzsche's assertion is that God, real or virtual, fact or fantasy, is no longer viable. In whatever context you care to choose, he is "dead".
For Nietzsche, everyone is running away from the realisation that belief in God can no longer be sustained. He says (writing in 1882), "The greatest recent event - that 'God is dead', that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable - is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe." Christians know Nietzsche is right, but they are living in denial, refusing to face up to the "fact" of their absent God. They are too scared to face the consequences of such a conclusion. The religious beliefs of most people in the last couple of centuries have been tepid and unconvincing. People go through the motions, but there's no real sense that they genuinely believe what they claim to believe. God is dead in their hearts, but they lack the courage to admit it. But, worst of all, Nietzsche thought, are the atheists who, unlike the believers, "know" that God doesn't exist, yet haven't acknowledged the earth shattering nature of this reality. Nietzsche's incendiary speech is directed at them, not at believers. Nietzsche's central point is that atheists have killed all trace of God in their hearts and minds yet they have no idea of the significance of what they have done. To "kill" God is not merely to reject superstition and myth, as atheists would claim, but to destroy the entire moral edifice upon which the world is built. As Nietzsche saw it, those killers are then obliged to confront what they have done, and they have refused.God, when defined as the omnipotent, omniscient, all-seeing, morally perfect and infallible creator, is the guarantor of the moral order. No matter the limitations of human beings, who often make terrible blunders and condemn the innocent, persecute the worthy and praise the criminal and wicked, God will always know exactly who the good are and who the bad. The truth will always triumph. Every wrong will be righted. The wicked will receive their dues. No one can hide from divine justice.This is the moral "myth". It underlies all human thinking about morality. But Nietzsche was the first to see that if God didn't exist then nothing was more bogus than the morality that flowed from the assumption of his existence. If the Ten Commandments aren't written by God then they are man-made and deliberately deceitful, masquerading as something that they are not. Within their own parameters, they are immoral. They tell us not to lie even though they themselves are lies. Why should anyone treat them with anything but contempt?If there is no God then the wrongdoers will never receive their proper punishment and those who are unjustly treated will never receive their proper reward in the afterlife for their sufferings. For example, everyone who died in the Holocaust simply died. That was it. There was nothing else. They became smoke and dust. Some of their killers escaped and lived long and prosperous lives.Someone like atheist biologist Richard Dawkins is exactly the sort of person Nietzsche loathed. Dawkins is a bland liberal whose personal moral code is indistinguishable from that of the average Christian, Jew or Muslim. He has killed God, so to speak, yet behaves exactly as though God still exists since he has made no attempt to proclaim a new moral order. He continues, in effect, to obey the old moral order. But in the absence of God, absolutely anything becomes possible morally: humans can choose to do whatever they like, knowing they will be neither punished nor rewarded in an afterlife that will never come. Without God, every human has absolute freedom of action. No divine eye in the sky is watching. There is no infallible log of sins committed or good deeds done. There is no book of life to be consulted on Judgment Day. No such day will ever come.Nothing, Nietzsche realised, could be more significant than removing the foundation stone of morality from the universe, than killing the universe's guarantor of justice, than stripping the universe of its infallible standard of good and evil. In the Godless universe, good and evil are mere matters of opinion and quickly serve no function at all since there is no conceivable standard with which everyone could agree. None of the so-called most evil people in history have ever considered themselves anything but good. When Hitler set out to exterminate the Jews, he was acting, in his opinion, for the good of Germany and humanity. When he put a pistol to his temple to commit suicide, he hadn't changed his mind one iota.Even concepts such as "human rights" and "crimes against humanity" are derived from the idea that there is some guarantor of absolute standards, but without God it's all a sham. A legal opinion is invariably a political opinion, not a moral one. As Goering said at the Nuremberg Trials, "The victor will always be the judge and the vanquished will always be the accused." Had the Nazis won WWII, different people would have been in the dock at Nuremberg, facing the executioner's noose. Churchill, Truman and Stalin would have gone to the gallows. Ultimately, force is all that matters in the Godless universe. And force has no moral component at all.Imagine earth after one million years of atheism, where every concept of God has vanished, where all traces of the God mentality have been erased, where every vestige of religion has been consigned to oblivion. The word "evil" would no longer appear in the human vocabulary. As Nietzsche said, "When man no longer regards himself as evil he ceases to be so!" That, in fact, is how easy it is to escape from evil. The whole concept is an illusion in an atheistic world. A man who has committed mass slaughter should feel no more evil and guilty than a lion after it has killed a thousand antelopes: nature - evolution - is simply taking its amoral course. There is no concept of "murder" in the animal world; why should such a concept exist for humans in a Godless universe? There are no holy commandments to be transgressed. Man-made laws are not divine laws. They promote a certain agenda, usually that of the powerful. They are mostly concerned with the protection of property.Nietzsche regarded the removal of the moral order of the universe as the biggest revolution conceivable. Nothing could escape the consequences. He referred to himself as the first immoralist to emphasise his utter rejection of Christian values. Only as an immoralist or amoralist can an atheist be taken seriously. If atheists are Christians without Christ, as most of them are in moral terms, then they are a joke.Contemporary atheists like Dawkins, despite all of their bluster, are still firmly rooted in a Judeo-Christian mindset and culture, and haven't even begun to explore what true atheism means. Nietzsche viewed such people with scorn because he knew exactly what it meant to kill God. To assassinate the holiest of holies, the centrepiece of human existence, the keystone of the universe, is to take the boldest step of all. And you can't then continue as though nothing has changed.For Nietzsche, the assassins of God must be people of the highest possible calibre. They must be nothing less than Supermen. Nature abhors a vacuum and, above all, it abhors a divine vacuum. What can fill such an infinite, transcendent vacuum? It is Nietzsche's Supermen who step into the cosmic void. Once you said 'God' when you gazed upon distant seas; but now I have taught you to say 'Superman'.
The Supermen must be creators, those who establish and enforce values, those with the strength and courage to act and judge. The Supermen should "revalue all values" since all of the old values are as dead as the God who underwrote them.Nietzsche didn't think a true Superman has ever appeared on earth. Individuals he thought had some of the qualities of the Superman were Alcibiades (a friend of Socrates, and a controversial Athenian general, thinker and leader of men), Caesar (a controversial Roman general, thinker and leader of men), Friedrich II (a controversial Holy Roman Emperor, thinker and leader of men), Leonardo da Vinci (artistic genius and polymath) and Napoleon (a controversial general, emperor, thinker and leader of men). He described Bonaparte as: "that synthesis of monster and Superman." The man who came closest to the Superman, in Nietzsche's opinion, was Goethe, a literary genius and polymath. (As we have revealed earlier on this site, Goethe was a Grand Master of the Illuminati.)The Superman is the next stage in human evolution. The Superman is not a biologically higher evolutionary form - he will still be very much part of the human species - but he will attain an infinitely higher level of consciousness. He represents human consciousness reaching its zenith, expanding to bursting point, becoming everything noble, magnificent and wondrous that is currently latent in the human condition and which has been held back for so long by false prophets and Satanic religions that seek to have humanity on its knees, bowing before golden idols.Nietzsche characterised man as a bridge from ape to Superman. We characterise the Superman as a bridge from man to God.Supermen are the supreme advocates of life-affirmation. They crave more life, a higher quality of life, an intensification of life, life expressed to its fullest extent. They say "Yes" to life. They say "Thou shalt" rather than "Thou shalt not". They are liberators, not controllers. They seek a community of free, creative, open-minded individuals of the highest calibre, not herds of slavish believers whose highest aspiration is to fly a hijacked plane into a skyscraper in the name of "God". How could the "God" of such people ever be confused with anyone other than Satan? What "God" other than Satan would ever accept a blood sacrifice of innocent passengers on a plane? If that's how believers conceive of their God then these believers are Satanic. They are agents of hell, and hell is precisely what they bring to this world. Imagine a world free of such people. Would that not be paradise? The "original sin" is to believe in Satan yet name him "God". Christians, Jews and Muslims are all Satan worshippers.On this website, we have often emphasised that the True God neither craves nor demands any form of worship. Only tyrants wish to see the masses prostrate before them. All religions involving acts of mass worship are Satanic.As Nietzsche said of the Superman: "The creator seeks companions, not corpses or herds of believers. The creator seeks fellow creators, those who inscribe new values on new tables."And what Nietzsche says of the Superman is exactly what can be said of the True God. He seeks those who are like him, not those on their bellies, wailing in fear. No Christian, Jew or Muslim could ever find himself in the company of God. They are an abomination, an insult to divinity. They are not "companions of God." As Nietzsche says, they are "herds of believers", practically corpses. The life force could scarcely be weaker in these people. It would never occur to them to write "new values on new tables"; they are slaves of ancient, words of crumbling stone. They cling to dead texts to steer their feeble, misguided lives. They have no creative instinct, no desire to look inside themselves and find a higher being. The Superman's greatest creation is himself. The Christian wouldn't know where to begin. The Christian whines that he needs Jesus Christ. In truth, the only person he needs is himself. We are the vehicles of our own salvation. No one needs some Jewish man called Yehoshua ben Yosef who allegedly died on a Roman Cross 2,000 years ago. The very idea is laughable.Nietzsche, although an atheist, was seeking a spiritual renewal of humanity. Richard Dawkins, with his sterile, desiccated atheism, could never inspire anyone, but Nietzsche's Supermen could lead us to a new, glorious world, free of the shackles of the past, liberated from our Satanic inheritance of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The Superman has no desire to be a tyrant over others, though he is certainly capable of it. Those who cannot be tyrants cannot be praised for not being something they could never be. But those who have the power to be tyrants but deliberately choose not to - who restrain that aspect of their character - then they have demonstrated their virtue.The Old World Order are precisely those people who never restrain themselves; who indulge every whim, every base desire. The greedy pigs of Wall Street could all choose not to take their vast, obscene and absurd bonuses, but none of them does. It wouldn't enter their heads. Even in the midst of a financial crisis, with the whole world condemning the bonus culture, they stick their snouts into the money trough more vigorously than ever. They know that no one will ever stop them. They are the masters, and we are the cowardly slaves who never fight back.The Superman, on the other hand, is the passionate man who controls his passions; the tyrant who controls his tyranny; the master who masters himself rather than others. In Nietzsche's language, he "sublimates his will to power" i.e. he turns his primitive desires into positive forces of creativity. (Schopenhauer said that the fundamental drive in all creatures is the will to live. Nietzsche pointed out that creatures often risk their lives to gain higher status, thus showing that there is an even more fundamental drive, which he named the will to power. Nietzsche considered fear as the feeling of the absence of power. The Wall Street gang are unafraid, while all the rest of us cower like frightened children. Why are we so scared simply to sweep Wall Street aside? No one needs these people.) Nietzsche regarded the notorious Cesare Borgia, the model for Machiavelli's The Prince, as an example of someone with an unsublimated will to power. Borgia wanted power in the crudest sense - direct control over others. He wanted to be master, with everyone else his slaves. Such a man could never be any sort of Superman until he learned to master himself, to transform brute force into a creative higher state of consciousness. The Wall Street gang are very much of his ilk, but without any of his style.The Old World have no concept of self-mastery. They are exactly those sad people ruled by an unsublimated will to power. They are primitives, near savages. Greed is the most obvious manifestation of unsublimated will to power in our contemporary world. The greed of the super-rich simply beggars belief. It is astounding that a) they are so greedy and b) we allow them to get away with it.Nietzsche said that the ideal Superman would be Caesar with the soul of Christ. He should have replaced "Christ" with a much nobler person: St Francis of Assisi, a man who turned his back on wealth and comfort to live a live of austerity, poverty and helping others. Francis was one of the few Christians who transcended the dark gravity of Christ's Satanic religion. Who is the Superman? It is he who sublimates his will to power and turns it to higher ends; he who has understood and mastered himself; he who has practised self-overcoming and raised himself to a higher, nobler state. He needs no other to create him; he creates himself. He is tolerant, forgiving, kind and compassionate not from weakness but from the very greatest strength.The Superman is someone who affirms every moment of his life. He is ashamed of nothing. Nietzsche constructed an existential test to provoke people into considering the sort of life they are leading:'What if a demon crept after you one day or night in your loneliest solitude and said to you: "This life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live again and again, times without number; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and all the unspeakably small and great in your life must return to you, and everything in the same series and sequence - and in the same way this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and in the same way this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence will be turned again and again - and you with it, you dust of dust!" - Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who thus spoke? Or have you experienced a tremendous moment in which you would have answered him: "You are a god and never did I hear anything more divine!" If this thought gained power over you it would, as you are now, transform and perhaps crush you; the question in all and everything: "do you want this again and again, times without number?" would lie as the heaviest burden upon all of your actions. Or how well disposed towards yourself and towards life would you have to become to have no greater desire than this for the ultimate eternal sanction and seal?'This is Nietzsche's famous "eternal recurrence", the idea that this life you lead will be repeated infinitely many times in every exact detail. The Superman who has lived every moment to the maximum is he would celebrate eternal recurrence.Nietzsche said, "If in all you will to do, you begin by asking yourself: Is it certain that I will to do it an infinite number of times? - this would be your most solid centre of gravity."This is the question the Superman poses to himself, and he does nothing that he would not wish to have echo endlessly in eternity.Nietzsche was a philosopher of "becoming". The Superman is a perpetual becoming, forever transcending base human nature, forever trying to become alchemical gold. The opposite of the Superman is the "Last Man". This is the inevitable product of where our current cultural values are leading us. Arguably, we have already reached that state. We are surrounded by last men. The rise of industrialisation, capitalism and consumerism, has created "mass man" - a lifeless husk with no great passions, no genuine beliefs, mired in materialism and lacking all sense of the spiritual. Mass man - the man who follows the crowd and is dead to the human spirit - and Organisation Man - the man who does his daily job like a zombie, never challenging his idiotic managers in his ludicrous world of bureaucracy - are synonyms for the Last Man. They are everywhere, killing all of the potential of humanity. They are trivial, cowardly, obsessed with petty comforts and vanity.The Superman is the antidote, but time is running short. If we embark on Nietzsche's project to become Supermen, to be creators and value makers, to rise to the highest heights, then we are donning the mantle of God. It is by walking in God's shoes that we enormously increase our chances of contacting our divine spark.The beauty of Nietzsche's Superman is that it can appeal to both spiritual atheists and those who seek their divine spark; it is both a non-religious and religious concept. In that sense, it can unify atheists, agnostics, deists and gnostics. The only ones who are excluded are the theists - to them the Superman would be the purest heresy and blasphemy, the falsest God. Of course, it is they who worship a false God. The mind control exerted over them by Satan is total. They will never escape.As for us, are we "preparatory" human beings, about to welcome a great new age, a wondrous spiritual renaissance that will transform humanity? Nietzsche said: Preparatory human beings - I welcome all signs that a more virile, warlike age is about to begin, which will restore honour to courage above all. For this age shall prepare the way for one yet higher, and it shall gather the strength that this higher age will require some day-the age that will carry heroism into the search for knowledge and that will wage wars for the sake of ideas and their consequences. To this end we now need many preparatory courageous human beings who cannot very well leap out of nothing, any more than out of the sand and slime of present-day civilization and metropolitanism-human beings who know how to be silent, lonely, resolute, and content and constant in invisible activities; human beings who are bent on seeking in all things for what in them must be overcome; human beings distinguished as much by cheerfulness, patience, unpretentiousness, and contempt for all great vanities as by magnanimity in victory and forbearance regarding the small vanities of the vanquished; human beings whose judgement concerning all victors and the share of chance in every victory and fame is sharp and free; human beings with their own festivals, their own working days, and their own periods of mourning, accustomed to command with assurance but instantly ready to obey when that is called for-equally proud, equally serving their own cause in both cases; more endangered human beings, more fruitful human beings, happier human beings! For believe me: the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is-to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer. At long last the search for knowledge will reach out for its due; it will want to rule and possess, and you with it!
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche assumes the role of the second coming of the ancient Persian prophet Zarathustra, returning to correct the errors pronounced by his first incarnation. Nietzsche's Zarathustra says, in the following quotation, what every true prophet ought to say. The fact that none of Abraham, Moses, Buddha, Jesus or Mohammed did so proves that they were false prophets and deceivers.Go away from me and guard yourselves against Zarathustra! And better still: be ashamed of him! Perhaps he has deceived you.
The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.
One repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil. And why, then, should you pluck at my laurels?
You respect me; but how if one day your respect should tumble? Take care that a falling statue does not strike you dead!
You say you believe in Zarathustra? But of what importance is Zarathustra? You are my believers: but of what importance are all believers?
You had not yet sought yourselves when you found me. Thus do all believers; therefore all belief is of so little account.
Now I bid you to lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you…
THE SHOWCASE
There are many ways to fight back against the Power Elite. Music is high on the list. Good music can transform us. A solo artist and two bands have contacted us and we've had the chance to listen to some of their material. They are all talented, have completely different styles, and they have something different and meaningful to say.
They are an antidote to Simon Cowell's American Idol and X-Factor junk machine that takes music, feeds it through a "trivia filter", and out at the end pops bland, sterile, synthetic, plastic, manufactured muzak for people who hate real music - the zombie masses who listen to anything so long as the singer looks pretty and is wearing the latest fashions. The music industry is now about the brand. The music itself is a secondary consideration. A singer with a great "brand" and average voice will always massively outsell a singer with a great voice and average brand. So much for musical talent.
Music from 1950 - 2000 was about rebellion and rejecting the establishment. In the last decade, it has become just another arm of the consumption machine, a capitalist activity like any other, shorn of all its power and meaning. Bands are banal. They have nothing to say. The music industry exists just as a means to make Simon Cowell and his ilk absurdly rich, and to let advertisers expensively demonstrate their wares at "music" festivals (actually just merchandising and brand promotion opportunities). Pop has finally eaten itself.
Music is too important to permit it to be corrupted and trivialised. The musicians showcased here are all fighting back. The music industry is one of the toughest on earth to crack, especially for those who aren't interested in pandering to Simon Cowell, but these guys all have the talent to make it. Now they just need the right wind. Have a listen. If you like what you hear, spread the good word. Make music a weapon to change the world. Let the people hear the mystical and transcendent Music of the Spheres.
First up is Pho' (Photon), a hip hop artist. And this is Sleight of Mouth:
"I repeat, this is not a test."
"We are five individuals from Ft. Worth, Texas, all with diverse musical backgrounds. We hate commercialism. We don't seek riches. We are searchers, not slaves. We are talented, but have humility. We are not materialistic or greedy. We believe that when people stop wanting and just focus on what's really needed, they will become better people. Our image is that we don't have one. Images are materialistic. We are just ordinary people fed up with the way the world operates, and through music we want to encourage others to join in with changing the world for the better. Our audience is anyone who is tired of today's plastic pop and wants to hear music that provokes thought and action. Too many people blindly follow any new fad. They don't even like the music they buy. We want people to believe that the world can change and then act on that belief. We don't need designer clothes or leather pants; we're happy with T-shirts and jeans. Rock 'n' Roll used to be anti-establishment, now look at it. Recycled, inauthentic, fake. It's time to change it back. It's time for real music for real people."
This is our song Who'd Wanna Save Us?
DISÖRDER are a German metal/thrash metal/black metal band, with guitar and voice supplied by Adam W.Eishaupt (!)
Their debut album WOLVENSTEIN...is a concept album about someone who seeks the Illuminati, finds them and finally becomes one of them.
"We, the Brotherhood Of The Serpent, have nothing much to say ... about your World, your mindless Dreams, your unsatisfying Deaths. We support, we ARE the Lucifer Rebellion. To bring Light to The Darkest, Blackest, Unseen and Unknown Spaces and Places. The very hurting Light of change. Chaos. End of the World as you know it. Millions are waiting to be enlightened by the Brotherhood of the Serpent. Dumb and Blind they crawl upon the Planet's surface. Unaware. Harmless. We are going to change these established conditions. In the most Holy Tradition of our ancient Ancestors Adam Weishaupt, Leibniz, Jaques de Molay and such ... You are not the Masters of Thyselves. As we crawl like cattle over the earth, we are searching, hungry, and willing to find those of you who will support the Brotherhood. All the Wars and Tortures of the centuries will be nothing. Beware the Sun of Man. Will you be a companion of the Lucifer Rebellion? Will you support The Brotherhood Of The Serpent? We offer you nothing and everything ... Contact us!"
Listen to their concept album here: http://www.myspace.com/disordergermany
It's illuminating!