Archons Everywhere

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?

The Dangers of Psychedelic Substances

Photo: Hofmann LSD blotter (Erowid library)

I recently finished rereading 'Acid Dreams' by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain. Along with 'Storming Heaven' by Jay Stevens, and Andy Roberts's 'Albion Dreaming', this forms part of a trio of books relating tales of consciousness, counterculture, and larger-than-life characters, all connected in one way or another with the history of that classic psychedelic LSD. Fact may or may not be stranger than fiction, but in this case it is certainly every bit as compelling - if you're into that kind of thing, at least.

'Acid Dreams' sheds light on the CIA's involvement with LSD in the 1950s, both in their search for a wonder 'truth drug' and as an agent of incapacitation. The book's particular strength, though, lies in its exploration of the counterculture of 1960s U.S.A., and the relationship psychedelic experience had to its birth, growth, and eventual disintegration.

Media and consumerism have successfully reduced the more significant aspects of this side of 1960s American life (which spilled over into the early 1970s in the U.K.) into a predictable set of cliches, caricatures, and fashion features. 'If you remember the '60s you weren't there' is a typically dumb and trite soundbyte, a translation from alcohol-based assumptions on the effects of drugs into foreign territory. It you were really there, you might just as likely recall it as if it were only last week. Then there are those television rockumentaries of the period, making occasional reference to 'drugs', and daring to show a couple of clips of long-haired dopers taking a toke at a music festival; yet with LSD, the bete noire, getting no more than a passing reference, as if it were an incidental add-on to the main story. All this amounts to a massaging of history, removing its more problematic and threatening aspects: typical Control System tactics.

Most critically, 'Acid Dreams' resurrects the genuine psychic ambience of the mid- and late 1960s in the U.S.A. 'Nearly everything was being questioned and most things tried in an orgy of experimentation that shook the nation at its roots.' (chapter 5, 'Acid and the New Left' section). And central to this upheaval was the growing popularity of LSD, which opened doorways in the mind that the initiate had hitherto not suspected even existed. Even those counterculture affiliates who did not directly partake of the new sacrament, viewing it with fear, suspicion, or distaste - I knew plenty of people like this in the mid-1970s - were nevertheless caught up in a maelstrom that had acid at its centre.

LSD was capable of facilitating many things, among them personal and social change. On mid-60s Dylan: 'The vastly accelerated personal changes Dylan underwent as he moved from protest to transcendence were archetypical of a rite of passage experienced by thousands of turned-on youth.' Carl Oglesby, former president of Students for a Democratic Society: ' It (acid) draws a line right across your life - before and after LSD - in the same way you felt that your step into radical politics drew a sharp division.' (all quotes from chapter 5).

While the precise phenomenology of different psychedelics at reasonably high doses tends to differ, it is not exceptional for the subject - certainly with the help of the classic psychedelics LSD and mescaline - to enter a dimension of complete existential open-ness; infinite potential, unbounded possibility reveal themselves within and without. All the games, as Timothy Leary termed them, which go to make up our repeated patterns of behaviour, our unconsciously acted roles - in short, who we think we are - temporarily vanish. For the moment, all conditioning seems in abeyance, all habit unravelled, and the human being bathes in fullness, a transpersonal luminosity that is strange yet familiar. This moment correlates roughly with the aim of Castaneda's Don Juan, when he speaks of 'erasing personal history'. It also resounds with Buddhist scholar Herbert Guenther's translation of 'sunyata' as 'the open dimension of being'. There is additionally an echo of the esoteric meaning of the 'drop out' section of Timothy Leary's frequently ridiculed clarion call to 'turn on, tune in, drop out'. It is not the literal leaving of society so much as the dropping out of the games and habits which bind us to a blind and limited existence.

This is all very bad news for the Control System, to use Neil Kramer's most apt term. For its functioning, the Control System relies on its subjects following games and habits seriously and unthinkingly. Intimations of infinite possibilities in our life are definitely not part of the game plan. They pose a dire threat to the entire set up; when Richard Nixon declared Timothy Leary to be the most dangerous man in America, he wasn't joking.

How close the whole shithouse came to collapsing in the late 1960s will never be known for sure; not very close, I suspect. All the same, the Control System was given a severe jolt, and realised the potential threat to its own game of total domination that psychedelics posed. Enough people get hold of this stuff, and who knows what will happen? The Control System was determined that no such situation should be permitted to arise again. Once the CIA and other agencies of domination decided that LSD was no good as a truth drug for interrogation purposes, Operation Psychedelic Crackdown was instigated. Spearheaded by the U.S.A., and ushered into the global arena by the U.N., it classified psychedelics alongside heroin and cocaine as the most dangerous of drugs (in truth, the Control System prefers heroin to LSD: it enslaves people to the system, reducing their autonomy, and offers up huge profits, a proportion of which can be seamlessly sequestered). All nations must follow the line: step outside, and there will be serious trouble, chiefly in the form of bullying and threats from the U.S.A. and U.N. Control System emissaries. And so the story continues until today. With few exceptions, politicians and the media play the 'psychedelics mean death' game, either without a clue as to what they are talking about, or as a cynical publicity ploy. Practical examples can be found littered throughout the posts in Pale Green Vortex and across the web.

Looked at from one perspective, the history of western 'civilisation' over the past 45 years can be read simply as the slow but inexorable clampdown on the hearts, minds, and bodies of the populace by a system intent on extending its influence and preventing a repeat performance of the goings-on of the past. To spend any amount of time in a shopping mall today, and compare what goes on with the dreams of hope and infinite possibility illuminated by the acid-fuelled visions of the 1960s and early 1970s is a salutary experience. Most people's horizons are very narrow. The Control System's strategies have been extremely successful. A new pair of trousers (the right cut and colour, of course), a McDonalds, and sweeties for the kids. That'll do nicely (speaking of children, it is noticeable how many of them are out there in the shops. 'Get them early' has been another successful Control System ploy: kids who can't spell their own name, but can shout 'Buy one, get one free' with gusto. That's the kind of citizen we want....).

Fear and a perverted sense of normality created by media saturation characterise our Brave New World. Yet any extreme position inevitably throws up its opposite. And a system based upon the suppression of the many by the few is built upon inherently shaky foundations. Personal observation suggests that humans are an extremely flexible species ( I use 'flexible' deliberately rather than 'adaptable', with its Darwinian connotations). Just as so many have been duped and suckered into a life that falls far short of its amazing potential, so they could equally rise into fullness and an awareness of the possibilities latent in every breath they take. We dream mad dreams regardless, and live from the innate purity that resides deep within our hearts, minds, and bodies.....