Infected by archons?: Scottish Energy Minister Jim Mather (top), and Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond
How did we get to be this way? How come the human species, with a potential to be so fabulous, so fantastic, to dream such wonderful dreams, often turns out petty, nasty, and downright rubbish? It's the question of questions, yet barely anyone bothers to look for an answer.
The human condition itself is described reasonably well by the various Buddhist traditions. Greed, aversion, and ignorance are the forces driving its less savoury aspects. The repeated habit of looking for fulfilment in impossible places, in what is essentially unsatisfactory, impermanent, and without substance, continues our frustration. All this in turn is a reflection of our mistaken assumptions of fixedness and separatehood.
So far, so good. But while it serves as a decent preliminary description, it leaves well alone the 'why' and 'how' that form the vital core of this piece. Generally, Buddhist traditions show scant interest in such explanations. If my memory serves me well, the Tibetan Gelugpa school says that samsara (conditioned existence) has existed from beginningless time, but frankly this does not help all that much. Maybe a story from the Pali Canon exemplifies the Buddha's approach. Imagine, he said, somebody coming to you with an arrow stuck in his eye. He wouldn't be interested in the 'why' and 'how': who the archer was; why he shot the arrow in the first place; how the arrow was made; what the archer ate for breakfast. No, the person would just want you to pull the arrow out. Similarly, explained the Buddha, my teachings are an exercise in spiritual arrow-yanking. The rest is superfluous.
I suppose that the Buddha has a point: in modern times, it's a warning against wasting too many years in psychotherapy digging up yet another occasion when daddy misbehaved. But the Buddha seems to ignore the times when knowing a bit about 'how' and 'why' might come in useful. It could be, for example, that Mr. Arrow-in-the-Eye's way to work passes, unbeknownst to him, the hideout of a bunch of crossbow-wielding bandits. He should know this, and change his route if he wants to avoid a recurrence of the incident. The Buddha's story, I suggest, appears a little simplistic for our modern troubled times.
Changing tack, the story of the transition of western civilisation from partnership to dominator cultures (see Pale Green Vortex entry 'Dominators Everywhere', May 2010) is highly relevant for a proper understanding of our descent into the delusion of alienated separatehood with its consequent nastiness. Yet this, too, is at root descriptive rather than explanatory, and can only get us so far.
We are left with the prevalent notions of mainstream western science, where life and the universe are chance happenings, with our current predicament a natural reflection of Darwinian 'survival of the fittest' theory (which, taken simply, translates as 'it's good to be nasty: you gotta look after yourself.'). Alongside one-eyed Darwinism runs the notion of 'the selfish gene', a most convenient idea for justifying the pursuit of personal interest at the expense of others, along with the social, political, and economic systems that reflect this dismal picture of human nature.
These theories of science, however, have nothing of interest to say about our main theme, the yawning abyss between the fantastic potential and oft-mediocre reality of the human lot. Rather, they deal with it simply by removing one side of the equation altogether, dismissing the fabulous and the fantastic as mere delusions, generated by chemical reactions in the brain, perhaps. Such a dismissal says more about the people creating the theories than it does about the human condition itself. It belies the bias in most mainstream scientists and academics, showing them to be scientistic in belief rather than truly scientific in approach. Scientific materialism is in fact a continual process of self-validation within which, by definition, it cannot accord significance to higher, deeper, archetypal, and holotropic ('tending towards wholeness') dimensions of experience.
With the Buddha viewing the question as irrelevant, social systems analysis only going so far, and Darwin and the selfish gene not up to the job, what remains to account for the paradox of the human condition? Nothing within our normal terms of reference comes to mind at all......
When the well-worn paths lead nowhere
The oft-repeated formulae sound old and tired
radiating dull-grey their mean fabrications
What remains is the fabulous, the fantastic, the impossible -
We are left with....... the archons
The archons crop up time and again in the ancient Gnostic texts, and John Lash, who has worked tirelessly on the Gnostic writings, discusses them at great length on his website, metahistory.org. In brief, archons are alien intruders, inorganic beings, whose aim is to invade and confuse human minds. Their prime motivation is envy - of the paradisical biosphere that we inhabit, while they are consigned to live outside the Earth's atmosphere - and they get their kicks from leading us astray from our true nature. The archon's main tactics are twofold. Sowing error in our minds is one, principally mistaken ideas and beliefs, such as that in an off-planet creator god. Their other major ploy is simulation, meaning the inability of the human to distinguish a real pearl from a plastic copy, as John Lash vividly describes it. Or, in modern times, to tell the difference between directly experienced and virtual realities.
The theory of archon intrusion does seem a bit wacky at first sight, granted. But then notions of 'normal' and 'wacky' are very much culturally-defined, and whatever our modern western systems of thought have produced on the theme of human nature is shown to be severely wanting. The Gnostics' pedigree is impeccable, if John Lash's suppositions are correct: they were the inheritors of shamanic wisdom in the west, gleaned from millenia of practice and experience of the many spheres of human consciousness.
And when you thought the story could not get any stranger: John Lash comes up with remarkable parallels to the Gnostic theory of archon intrusion in a source far more modern, yet no less enigmatic. He points us in the direction of master raconteur Carlos Castaneda, specifically the chapter entitled 'Mud Shadows' in the final book he wrote before his death, 'The Active Side of Infinity'. "Think for a moment" the incorrigible sorceror Don Juan Matus urges his student (Carlos) at one point "and tell me how you would explain the contradiction between the intelligence of man the engineer and the stupidity of his system of beliefs, or the stupidity of his contradictory behaviour. Sorcerors believe that the predators have given us our systems of beliefs, our ideas of good and evil, our social mores..... they have given us covetousness, greed, and cowardice. It is the predators who make us complacent, routinary,and egomaniacal." And again, "The predators give us their mind, which becomes our mind." "Man, the magical being that he is destined to be, is no longer magical. He's an average piece of meat. There are no more dreams for man but the dreams of an animal who is being raised to become a piece of meat: trite, conventional, imbecilic." The name given to these mind predators is 'flyers'.
My mind goes back to what I wrote in my last post, about the narrow horizons of so many people's lives nowadays. And, to spell out more from what I wrote then: a little experience of the innately pure, habit-free nature of our mind, through whatever means, leads to an altogether different take on the 'civilisation' going on around us, with its typical thought-patterns and forms of behaviour. None of it - complacent, routinary, conventional, imbecilic, to borrow a few choice adjectives from Juan Matus - is inevitable, none of it a predetermined parade in a fixed direction, whether it be decided by genetic predisposition or fantasies of the apocalypse. There is something else going on..... something.
Fortunately, the archons/flyers can be repelled. The Gnostics speak of what we may vaguely call 'spiritual life' as effective, in particular those practices of energy aimed at what, in other traditions, is known as awakening and raising the kundalini. Inner stillness, silence, frightens them away, according to Don Juan Matus; they have no concentration whatsoever. Looking at much modern technology from this perspective, it seems purpose-designed to make human beings into ideal archon fodder. Folk rushing to work texting with one hand, grasping a Starbucks in the other, oblivious to the natural world around them. It is the archon dream come true. Attention deficit on a grand scale as the norm; simulation and virtual reality totally replacing the real world. Inner stillness? What's that?
Inner stillness. Profound knowing of our own mind in its vajra-like strength and infinite radiance. "The flyers are an essential part of the universe" concludes Don Juan Matus....."They are the means by which the universe tests us.......we are the means by which the universe becomes aware of itself. The flyers are the implacable challengers." Can we pass the test?
