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Monday 26 February 2018

Two Sides to the Monster of Life

It is as if there are two different programmes running simultaneously in my brain. They treat information differently.

One I can call the Zen Programme. It runs on 'This Is It' software. Everything is simply the way it is, the way it is, and that's pretty much it. Wishing anything different is stupid, because things are the way they are, and that's all we've got. A bird is a bird is a bird, and it does birdie things. The person living next door does what he or she does because it's what he or she does. In the Zen programme, furthermore, not only are things the way they are, but there is a kind of perfection attached to all this. Everything 'is' in precise reflection of its own nature. Taken seriously, the Zen programme gives rise to a certain kind of contentment, a deep acceptance, and possibly feelings of unconditional love.


But there is also running in my brain a second programme. It hasn't got a name. I could call it the Alchemy Programme, but alchemy is all a bit mysterious. I could name it the Jung programme, but I have discovered that there are lots of people who don't like Jung.

It is this second programme which gives rise to sentences such as these in my recent post 'The Bliss'. Speaking of mainstream 'news and current affairs' programmes, I wrote: "Should I stumble into a thirty-second exposure to such programmes, it is like looking at another world on the other side of a pane of glass. And it is a hell world, composed of pure evil." These sentences actually provoked a couple of remarks from readers; and they speak volumes about the nature of this second programme.

Light and dark; good and bad; masculine, feminine; up and down; night, day; sun, moon: these are the stuff of the second programme. It runs on opposites, dualities, couplings, pairs. Polarities. Syzygy, to go Jung and Hillman. Differences, distinctions, discriminations. Even if everything is One, that One is composed of the Two, and of the manifold. The One splits into Two, the Two unite as One. But without due cognisance of the Two, any experience of the One is wan, partial, one-sided, superficial. And, er, delusional and possibly dangerous....

So it is within this context of polarity that I wrote of the hell world on the other side of the pane of glass, composed of pure evil. 'Evil' is one of those words, isn't it? For many people it is a very loaded and emotive word. Philosophers, theologians, and metaphysicians have debated for centuries - nay, millennia - the nature of evil: what it is, or indeed if it exists at all. It goes without saying that we are no closer to knowing the answer now than were folk in Plato's time.

My own use of the word 'evil' comes divested of these big philosophical, ontological speculations. It is actually quite practical and pragmatic. 'What is the greatest good?' I ask myself. The greatest good is human beings fulfilling their potential, their most magnificent possibilities. Contact with Higher Self, with God; growing towards the Absolute; Enlightenment, saturated with Wisdom and unfettered Compassion. Individuality, Authenticity. The variants are many, and I'm not bothered with their differences at the moment. The main point about 'good' is the thing. It has this impulse, this motive, this direction.

If this is the greatest good, then evil is the opposite, the biggest bad. Evil is therefore whatever leads human beings away from achieving their miraculous birthright of 'awakening'. In particular, blinds that are tied before peoples' eyes, so they are unable to see what they could become. Deliberate confusing, deluding. Or denying that such higher potential exists. This, in my book, is evil.

So when I look through that pane of glass, I see the public being presented with a particular version of reality. It is a version in which misery reigns supreme. Fear, insecurity, anxiety, are created by what is spewed forth as 'news' and 'the issues of the day' for the unwitting consumption of the unknowing. It is a manipulation of people into hopelessness and powerlessness; away from their own authenticity into a strange fabricated world. A manipulation into ideology, especially the ideology of political correctness, and away from ones unique and direct personal experience of life. At best it is very partial, at worst completely false. It points away from that most dangerous truth for any powers-that-be: from the knowledge that god lives within, if you like, can be realised, and that everything else just pales in comparison.

This is why 'news' is full of reports of rapes, abuses, murders. Of abject apologies from celebrities and politicians for supposedly sexist or racist tweets or facebook posts. Keep people afraid to speak, afraid to speak. And why 'news' is not full of alchemy, kundalini, seeing God through the assistance of meditation or psychedelic substances; telepathy, advances in energetic treatments for disease, or efforts to produce cheap or free energy, all of which would liberate people from the shackles of the construct which 'news' exists to perpetuate.

There is a thing in human existence, a special evil, we could call it. Light and dark exist in the animal world. A crocodile tearing its prey to pieces, a cat playing with a pain-wracked dying mouse; the horror of a volcano, an earthquake, a tsunami. Death through starvation on the desert plains. It all seems pretty harsh and dark to me. But I submit that human existence comes overlaid with an extra layer. It is a layer which appears deliberately intended to keep human beings in ignorance, blind to what they could become, if only somebody showed them. This is what I term 'evil'.

So it is outside the natural cycle of Creation, Preservation, and Destruction, as elucidated by Hinduism, for example. It is another, new, factor fed into that system of nature. Deliberate, synthetic, pulling people away. And this is where, for me, the demiurge and the archons come in.

It is some of the Gnostics who insist upon the reality of the demiurge and his minions, the archons. We can take them literally, or we can take them metaphorically. Whichever, as a story, and as a description of what goes on in human affairs, it speaks to me in a way that nothing else quite does.

The demiurge is a false god. He is an impostor on the godly scene. He stands up and rants about how he is the creator of all, the one and only. It's a bit of a bad joke, until the tragic happens and the mass of humanity actually believes his story. He ends up creating most of the world that gullible people inhabit as a result. His job, his purpose, is to keep people believing this nonsense, and to keep them away from the truth. In order to assist in his subterfuge, he has his hordes of inorganic helpers, the archons.  They are his foot soldiers, engaged in deceiving and deluding  people. They lead humans astray through ideas and ideologies. To continue the computer analogy (a ridiculous thing for me to do, given my own parlous knowledge of things virtual), they are like a virus which infects the workings of the brain.

It's been going on for a long time: our early Gnostics are contemporaries of the first Christians. Mind manipulation, warping humanity's view of reality, is nothing recent. But it is this which, I submit, is the foundation of the really really bad: of evil.    

To look through that pane of glass is to peer from a place of relative authenticity into a synthetic creation, a manufactured bubble, a nightmare induced by the god of falseness. Which is not to say that everything which turns up on the BBC Six o' Clock news is 'untrue' or designed to scare and manipulate. Of course not. But that is the overall context, the general worldview which issues from such a dark place.

It is possible to develop out of, to become free from, the clutches of the demiurge and his nasty minions. Courage to be sovereign, authentic, is the key. This may or may not come with recognised spiritual practice. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. There are plenty of people who may spend a lifetime sitting on a meditation cushion and go to the grave with their archon-derived notions intact.

No. The key seems to be awaking to the innate power within ones individual life, free of any organisations, systems, gurus, leaders, religious or non-religious traditions, ideologies. The spiritual anarchist stands the best chance. That is not to say that the demiurge will not impact upon ones life. His henchmen may turn up on the doorstep one day and drag you away because you've been a naughty boy or girl. Nothing much to do about that. But emotionally, psychologically, energetically, the person is free. Which is plenty to aim for.