Savonarola Lives

Part One

You may or may not know of Girolamo Savonarola. Back in the 1980s, when I was a great devotee of the art of the Italian Renaissance, Savonarola was the big bogey man, the good guy turned bad. Very bad. A priest in Florence with a high opinion of himself. Considering many of the wonders of the Renaissance to be pagan and classically inspired, and therefore decadent, damaging, and far from God, he organised for great burnings in public places. Irreplaceable manuscripts, books on evil subjects such as divination and astrology; sculptures, paintings by folk as prominent as Botticelli: all went up in smoke - or, if not easily burnt, were just smashed to pieces. And in this way Savonarola helped God create his kingdom on Earth.

Neil Kramer has recently written about how friends and colleagues of his are having their Savonarola moment, in the shape of seeing their accounts closed by the giants of social media: Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, and the rest. The reason is that their views, though often backed up by independent research, do not conform to the political models preferred by those aforementioned social media providers. In particular, he noted, true libertarians and neo-conservatives are victims of the new Savonarolas.

Rather than rant and rave about modern totalitarianism, as plenty of folk may be inclined to do (including Pale G.V. when it's in a strop), Neil remains sanguine. It is their prerogative, he points out. But we need to be aware that Twitter is no better source of unbiased and impartial information than are the mainstream newspapers and television channels. In the meantime, there are companies emerging with truth and integrity at their core. But there may be 'blips and outings' of info in the short term.

It raises the question of whether this blog should move ground. This would entail convening a meeting of the Board of Directors, however, and we all know what a bunch of lazy good-for-nothings they are....

Part Two

The Savonarola syndrome comes round from time to time. Sometimes it manifests in really dramatic fashion, such as the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria by early Christians, thus wiping out centuries of knowledge-based literature accumulated by the Wise Ones of the pre-Christian world. European persecutions of witches, burning of heretics - oops, it's the Christians again - were similar attempts to remove knowledge of deeper realities from the public realm.

In one respect it is a good sign, that the perpetrators of the great artifice, the forces of synthetic darkness, feel sufficiently under threat to act in ways that any decent human can see as, well, indecent. In order to maintain its apparent dominance and control, the Great Lie has to continually martial enormous amounts of resources, fuelled by gigantic quantities of finance and humanpower.

To sustain Great Global Falsehood is a mammoth task: lies are not easy to keep going, especially when the eyes of the Shark of Truth are out there examining your every move. Though it may appear strong, unbeatable, even, the Mainstream Monster walks on shifting sands. One of its main tricks is to try and persuade you that it is indispensable and omnipotent, whereas the reality is rather different. Its foundations are in truth weak, non-existent. It is a Monster of increasing desperation, and despair requires extreme measures for its continuation.

Why is Mainstream Monster not as all-powerful as people like to believe? And what is the Great Lie? The two questions are interconnected.....

The Great Lie is that we need this crappy system of control in the first place. That we need big power politics and big power politicians; that we need crappy scientists, philosophers, academics, and commentators to tell us how the world works and how our world should work; that we need popes, priests, gurus, in order to experience anything of spiritual worth, and to become anything decent in this life.

A major function of the Great Lie is to keep everybody down, in place - to turn everyone into blobs, as Neil Kramer once succinctly put it. Independence, individuality, are bad news, creating troublesome people who question the status quo, the received view of the world. Mediocrity, robot behaviour, are the favoured styles, and ones which are encouraged from an early age.

Once the nature of the Great Lie is understood and absorbed, everything falls into place. We see how current acceptable attitudes and ways of thinking and behaving are not just accidents, but have a purpose. 'Victim culture', political correctness, multiculturalism as an article of faith and ideology, as opposed to a genuine appreciation of other cultures. Corporate living, corporate mentality. All have the effect of discouraging independent thought, independent living, discovering personal uniqueness. They are focal parts of the big business of creating mediocre hive blobs.

Part Three

A lie inevitable hides a truth. And a Great Lie has to hide a Great Truth. It is a truth most marvellous, most miraculous indeed. It is the Great Truth that, to put it in the terms that Timothy Leary once used : You are God! Or Buddha. Or the Divine. Or a manifestation of Universal Mind. As you wish. But you are it. Your sovereignty is, by definition, yours and yours alone. You don't need priests, politicians, news analysts, to push you around, tell you who you are, tell you about your own tiny little place in the world. Once realised, your sovereignty can be taken away by no one.

The Great Lie exists as an instrument of disempowerment. It appears real and necessary only while enough people bow to its synthetic, self-created reality. While enough people believe the propaganda, that it is indispensable. Anything or anybody who points out the truth about the Great Lie - whether mentally, through 'alternative history, news' etc or through direct experience, as in alchemy, mysticism, and psychedelic exploration - is inevitably in for a hard time. A desperate system will resort to desperate measures.

Savonarola better eat his spinach; he sure needs it.

 

Return of the Archons

Part One

Yes indeed, they're back! Their cameo reappearance in a recent blog post met with a mixed response. Such is the way of the archons.....

The reason they reappear the way they do is that there are times when the behaviour of certain sections of humanity strikes me as so odd, so bizarre, so out of kilter, that only an equally bizarre scenario can be called forth to account for the current state of affairs.

The Gnostics and their archon theory are not the only ones to propose non-human elements as crucial in the moulding of human affairs. Castaneda astonishes in his final book with his chapter on the flyers, which bear close resemblance to archons. And there is the material on the annunaki, whatever we may make of that.....

I know people who have seen archons, but I have as yet failed to spot them, engaged in their pernicious activities.

So, for me, the theory of the archons is just that: a theory. Mind you, many things which people take as unquestionable truth are theory. Darwinian evolution is a theory. Cholesterol as a cause of heart disease is theory. And there is one of the most insidious of all, one which the archons wear as a badge of personal pride: the theory of human-induced cataclysmic global warming. For my part, while walking around town, I see more evidence to support archon theory than I do of Darwinian evolution.

Part Two

Having resurrected the archons on this site, I feel inclined to say a little more about how they are purported to work. So I hereby present, in my own words, some of the Gnostic theory of the archons, in particular as I have learnt it from the works of John Lamb Lash.

The human being in its natural state is, according to the Gnostics, a mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly. Some more good, some more bad, but that's the picture. In our fallible state, we can easily make mistakes; fall into error, as it is said. Such error can be quite vicious, serious, nasty, but it is error. In truth, it plays a vital part in the destiny of human beings: it is through error that we learn. We correct ourselves as a result of bitter experience, and in this way 'evolve'.

There is, however, in human life, another layer; another degree of waywardness. The mind virus implanted by the archons permits error to run riot, continue unchecked and unabated, to perpetuate itself without correction. This takes place to such a degree that we eventually arrive at a different level of wrongness: where error tips over into evil.

In this way we arrive at the unusual notion of two-source duality. Much orthodox theological speculation is based on the idea of a single-source duality, in which good and evil issue from the same place, a God of some description or another. Such is Christianity, in which God is the All, the source of everything, and theologians spend millennia getting their braincells in a twist about the loving god who also created evil etc etc etc. The two-source duality of the Gnostics proposes that good and evil come from different places, that evil is the result of the perceptual distortion artificially imposed by the archons.

The archons are inorganic; they have no soul. They cannot be creative. So what they do is copy, replicate, simulate. They are very good at this. They introduce into the human mind notions that appear to be full of all manner of positivity, whereas in truth they demonstrate the opposite. The tragedy is how the majority of humanity remains well and truly suckered by the counterfeit realities conjured by the archons.

Part Three

Here, as tentative suggestions resulting from first-hand observation, are a few areas where the archons have successfully implanted their virus into the collective brain of sleeping humanity.

The archontic nature of much modern-day so-called environmental thought and action is well documented on Pale Green Vortex. It is the old archon trick of providing a simulation which appears to be the genuine article, while really effecting the opposite. In this case, how to save the planet by destroying it.

The modern cult of political correctness provides a veritable feeding frenzy for voracious archons. It is their same prime tactic: under the umbrella of mimicry or simulation, to take something healthy, distort it, and sneakily present the result as the same, while in truth it is the opposite.

Political correctness takes the truths of our essential unity and interconnectedness, and perverts them into the apparently similar (to the unwary) but in reality contrary notion of 'sameness'. This translates, as Neil Kramer once put it, into the aim of political correctness being to turn us all into blobs. Our magnificent uniqueness within the great web of interconnectedness is the foundation for self-realisation, spiritual gnosis, and so on. 'Sameness', on the other hand, renounces difference and uniqueness, viewing them as enemies. In this way, political correctness aims to sever us from our own paths of self-discovery, reducing us to identi-fit robots. In the definition given recently on this blog, political correctness is therefore, ahem, evil.

And then there's Europe. Here's what the archons want. They want you to think 'Europe' and immediately think Brexit, May, Juncker, Lagarde, Merkel, Tusk, parasitical French farmers, Brussels, and badly shaped bananas. From its inception way back when, what is now the EU was an archontic construct. Anybody thinking it is a salvatory instrument conceived by a bunch of loving, visionary Bodhisattvas intent on achieving lasting world peace should think again.

No. Authentic Europe is not the deadly perils of Brexit. Authentic Europe is magnificent. It is a rich and varied tapestry of cultures which mix, merge, and run into conflict in an infinite variety of ways. Art, music, cuisine, temperaments, ways of driving, dressing, and being. Just considering the richness of this resource makes you feel giddy. Europe has saved my life more than once, but the EU certainly hasn't.

Part Four

It is possible to escape the slimy clutches of the archons, but not through a mass movement or by 'attack the enemy' strategies. Developing authenticity, deep personal integrity, sovereignty, is the key to freedom. An authentic human being is, by definition, beyond the grasp of the archons, who can feed solely upon minds that are vulnerable to deceit through artifice. As transmitters of synthetic falsehoods, they cannot get inside the brains of the truly self-determined.

Developing sovereignty is no easy matter. It requires the courage to look deeply at the world created by the archons - which is most of the world that the majority of us believe to be 'real' - and to see it for what it is: an artificial construct overlaid on wonderful direct reality. No amount of meditation etc will do the trick if it is not accompanied by this looking into the heart (or lack-of-heart) of the world as presented conventionally through mainstream channels. In this respect, I wonder about some Buddhists I know and know of, who have spent decades 'looking into reality', while remaining staunch and sometimes aggressive defenders of the world-as-presented-through-the-mainstream version of reality. Anyhow......

One necessity for self-liberation from the archons: turn off the bloody television! And another: give a wide berth to mainstream 'newspapers' and internet sources of 'news'. Even brief exposure is sufficient to invite the archons in. Thinking you can move beyond the archontic sphere while watching BBC 'news' twice a day is like trying to heal a wound by scratching it constantly. Can't be done.

And that is about it for today, folks......

Wot! No pictures.....

  

Brain Programmes: the Postscripts

Here is a quotation from Jana Dixon's encyclopedic 'Biology of Kundalini'. It has relevance to the error of living from the Zen programme, as I called it in my previous blog post, without due regard for the Other programme, the one that acknowledges and affirms the value of dualities.

"Theorems of  Nondualism, No-self, and EST, propose the idea that the central core self is just another limitation on freedom. However, a more advanced way of looking at it is not the negation of self, but the acknowledgement that the self is plastic. Saying that the habitual self is 'non-existent' when all selves and organisms consist of morphogenic habit is silly. But we can proceed if we acknowledge that indeed new habits can be made along with a perpetually 'new' self-concept."

And, even more to the point: "The no-self thought virus is part of the feudal extortion system of religions and cults. Rather than emphasizing that we are a 'vehicle' of spirit, they emphasize that we are no-self and so can be enslaved to an external regime. Evolution is always in the direction of autonomy not slavery, and self-sacrifice is a control device of  exploitive power structures that rule by fiat." (Biology of Kundalini, Part Two, Section 'Existential Escapism'. Actually, the contents of quite a lot of Jana's book have been made generously available online).

I also like this quotation, because I was delighted to find another person who agreed with me about the delusory nature of identifying non-duality as the  truth. Jana's book is truly astonishing, and has been an invaluable guide in recent times.

Also invaluable at times in my life has been 'Not in His Image', the book by John Lamb Lash. Like me, you may not go a bundle on absolutely everything that John has written or said over the years. But his grasp of what the Gnostics were on about is unique. And for an understanding of what the archons and the demiurge are about, he is the best source, in my view. 'Not in His Image' remains one of the most important works on my bookshelf.

To all the authors of instruction and inspiration, I give thanks.