THE MASTERY
OF YOUR ATTENTION WILL COME
WHEN YOU WILL START SEEING the truth..
Working our way
From virus to Buddha
Through this cosmic kilo of atoms,
We seek the Ptolemaic Deity
(Of whom we are the smallest part),
As he pedals His epicycle
(A humongous monkey-motion machine)
Along Eternity’s wire.
Now that we are this far along,
We may as well worry
About the net,
And what happens when
He reaches the pole
At the far end of the tent.
by Jim DeKorne
.........
ARCHONS ARE ARCHETYPES, ARE US
In Kabbalistic teaching the transition of Ein-Sof to “manifestation,” or to what might be called “God the Creator,” is connected with the question of the first emanation and its definition. Although there were widely differing views on the nature of the first step from concealment to manifestation, all stressed that no account of this process could be an objective description of a process in Ein-Sof; it was no more than could be conjectured from the perspective of created beings and was expressed through their ideas, which in reality cannot be applied to God at all.
Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah [i]
Solipsism tells us that nothing can exist outside of the observer’s awareness. Pragmatically, this doesn’t work very well for subjective observers, but by definition it has to apply to the only observer capable of objective perception: the Cosmic Mind itself. In the above quotation, Gershom Scholem evokes the philosophical problem of Ein-Sof‘s first emanation. After emanation commences, Consciousness-Without-An-Object suddenly morphs into Consciousness-With-An Object. Since all versions of the Perennial Philosophy assert that Consciousness-Without-An-Object exists separately and eternally above and beyond any manifestation, how do we imagine our way around this seeming contradiction? The Vedic account doesn’t help much, though it does assert that the answer lies within:
Before creation came into existence, Brahman existed as the Unmanifest. From the Unmanifest he created the manifest. From himself he brought forth himself. Hence he is known as the Self-Existent ... He who knows that Brahman dwells within the lotus of the heart becomes one with him and enjoys all blessings.[ii]
Let’s try not to get bogged down in semantics about mysteries – if everything is Mind, then I imagine the Big Bang as Consciousness-Without-An-Object’s choice to imagine a Cosmos. Notice that you cannot even regard this idea without using your imagination – that’s exactly what we’re talking about here, except on a scale beyond human imagining. (By the way, the astrophysicist’s concept of the Big Bang is an equally fantastic depiction of creatio ex nihilo.) Thus we do the best we can with the imagination we possess.[iii]
At any rate, the cosmology of Gnosticism resolves the koan by describing “God the Creator” as the Demiurge, a lesser god who created the spacetime universe. We can imagine this entity as a relatively early fractal of Consciousness-Without-An-Object’s imagination. The gnostic mythos goes on to describe the Demiurge (named Ialdabaoth in some systems) as ignorant of his origins – he doesn’t know any more than we do about the Cosmic Mind which emanated him. Like all monotheistic deities however, his pompous ignorance of Reality is definitive:
Ialdabaoth, becoming arrogant in spirit, boasted himself over all those who were below him, and explained, “I am the father, and God, and above me there is no one…”[iv]
The Demiurge in gnostic thought is usually equated with Jehovah, the God of Judaism and Christianity, and presumably all monotheistic deities proffering detailed instruction manuals for their worship. Objective evaluation of their books reveals that all Supreme Beings with personalities are insane. Out of innumerable proofs, here’s one of my favorites:
If ye will not hear, and if ye will not lay it to heart, to give glory unto my name, saith the Lord of hosts, I will even send a curse upon you, and I will curse your blessings: yea, I have cursed them already, because ye do not lay it to heart. Behold, I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces, even the dung of your solemn feasts; and one shall take you away with it.[v]
In other words, Jehovah is that schoolyard bully in hyperspace who trashes our DNA and smears our faces with shit if we don’t provide sufficient “glory unto his name.” Whether it’s via the Bible, the Koran or Windows-98, these dreadful deities damn their Truest Believers to lives of hellish confrontation with any person, place or thing that doesn’t agree with the Holy Writ as promulgated by their prophets. (By the way, if you object to any of this, God has commanded me to kill you, so watch what you say about me on your blog!)
According to any standard of mental health, fear-based religions (always arrayed in military hierarchy) are as insane as their Commanding Deities and hosts of subordinate flunkies. Hosts (armies) derive their power solely from their ability to coerce obedience through fear of death or extreme bodily harm. Fear, as the partisans of terrorism (and the war against it) know well, is a mighty Daimon, indeed.
Gnostic cosmology, presumably based upon a shamanic penetration into hyperspace no different than Lilly’s isolation tank journeys, describes an infinite host of entities dwelling therein. These beings are the Archons[vi] (Greek for “ruler”), and in gnostic thought they exist to enforce the Demiurge’s authority in hyperspace. In most gnostic systems, the Archons are equivalent to Gestapo-like prison guards: their sole function is to keep us trapped in their/our insane belief systems. Indeed, at some level they are the personifications of these belief systems. The Tibetan Book of the Dead clearly recognizes them as creatures of consciousness:
The chief deities themselves are the embodiments of universal divine forces, with which the deceased is inseparably related, for through him, as being the microcosm of the macrocosm, penetrate all impulses and forces, good and bad alike … And the minor deities, heroes, Dakinis (or “fairies”), goddesses, lords of death, Rakshasas, demons, spirits, and all others, correspond to definite human thoughts, passions, and impulses, high and low, human and subhuman and super-human, in karmic form, as they take shape from the seeds of thought forming the percipient's consciousness-content.[vii]
If ultimate reality is Mind itself, then by definition the Big Bang describes a Cosmic schizophrenic explosion. The Kabbalah portrays this unfortunate event as the “shattering of the vessels.” Since their number is virtually infinite, we can assume that the Archons represent the Cosmic Mind’s detonated ideation in all of its endless detail. (All solve and no coagula – as good a definition of “crazy” as can be imagined.) What is most crazy-making is that each of these fragments of the Divine Consciousness is a creative spark capable of imagining its own separately insane version of reality.
All the Gods, all the deities of the Veda are powers and personalities, emanations put forth from the supreme Creator for purposes of manifestation out of his own Being whose nature is Consciousness…[viii]
Analytical (Jungian) psychology uses a special terminology to describe these “powers and personalities” within the human psyche. Jung’s terms are in general agreement with analogous concepts in the Perennial Philosophy, hence are very useful in describing the entities encountered in hyperspace. I assume anyone reading this book is moderately familiar with Jungian theory, so I won’t bog down the narrative in a long recapitulation. Suffice it to say that we are primarily interested in four concepts: ego, Self, archetypes and complexes.
An archetype in Jungian parlance is a concentrated gestalt of psychic energy expressing an idea, theme or point of view. Archetypes appear to shamanic sight as beings or entities in the objective psyche, usually from the mythical pantheon of the observer’s culture. For example: the god, the king, the father; the goddess, the queen, the mother, are all archetypal core-roles played out in myth and in life. Note that I have organized these examples as fractal sequences. That is, the archetype of the father is based on the king archetype, which in turn is based upon the god archetype, and the same for the female half of the sequence. Male and Female (or Positive and Negative), are the core archetypes in this example. Thus we perceive a chain of command, an authoritarian hierarchy. This is to show how archetypal themes can express themselves in fractal extension from their focal point.
In Jungian theory, a complex is defined as a series of individual associations modifying an archetypal nucleus. (If archetypes were nouns, complexes would be like adjectives evoking and expressing all the possible nuances of meaning latent within that noun-archetype.) For example, someone with a “mother complex,” obsessed with her children, their health, their welfare, etc., is an individual who has identified with the mother archetype. She isn’t the archetype itself, but her mother complex draws from that role within the objective psyche and expresses it as only she can: she might be a good mother or an incompetent mother (or any other kind of mother) depending on the structure of the complex she’s channeling. We say that she has a mother complex, though it would be more accurate to say that the mother complex has her. Really powerful complexes are virtually uncontrollable by the ego – ever observe a woman turn into “Mama Bear” if she thinks her child is being threatened? The archetype at the core of the mother complex is one of the most powerful Daimons in Nature, even transcending human awareness since all higher animals express it.
Everyone manifests an indeterminate number of complexes – they are the vehicles through which the archetypes express themselves in spacetime. Humans are infested with complexes and for the most part, they rule our lives. Jung emphasized that the Self is an archetype, and that the ego is a complex constellated around it. We might say that the ego is a fractal of the Self emanated into spacetime, or that the ego is the Self’s object. Notice how the correlations go backward and forward – all the links are probably impossible to untangle at our level of awareness. We are interpenetrating, holographic energy-systems extended in eleven dimensions.
Many writers in talking about the [psyche] treat it as a unity. In the formulation presented here, it is viewed as an extremely complex pattern of energy interactions, differentiated into many separate states that vary greatly in size, content, and relative strength. These entities can be consonant or dissonant with each other, and they are continually changing in their relationships to each other and to the outer world. The [psyche] thus becomes a dynamic system of equilibrium that cannot be treated as one but must be considered as a group of interacting forces. By attention to its different facets, many problems in psychotherapeutic treatment that seem incomprehensible become more readily subject to rational understanding and handling.[ix]
Thus, the archetypal contents of the objective psyche are the forming templates for how we perceive and process reality. If an ego is ultimately just one of a given Self’s many complexes, then each ego-incarnation reveals that Self’s stage of the Work by the way that particular ego handles the complexes it inherits and creates. (The concepts of karma and complex are probably synonymous at some level.) Although Jung acknowledged that the Self is the center of the psyche, his therapy concentrates on how the ego can adapt to that fact in spacetime. Viewed from the Self’s point of view, however, the ego is only its current complex to be integrated within a long continuum of incarnations.
If we accept that the ego is a complex of the Self, and that the Self is an archetype within the objective psyche, the concept of fractal emanation suggests that the totality of the archetypes in the objective psyche could be regarded as “God’s complexes.” (It also suggests that the objective psyche and Cosmic Mind are synonymous.) This fits perfectly with the Kabbalistic concept of “raising the sparks.” Ego works as Self’s representative to organize the disparate contents of its share of the objective psyche from multiplicity to unity – solve et coagula. By making ourselves sane, we make God sane. It’s a long, involved process.
Therefore, dealing with the entity problem is a very important part of the Work. Complexes are like sub-personalities operating within the psyche. At some level, they represent unintegrated conflicts, either from this or former lives. If a complex is strong enough, it can behave like a demon or Archon within us. Multiple Personality Disorder[x] is an example of how one or more complexes can assume lives of their own outside the control of the ego-personality. The energy at the archetypal core of the given complex manages to assert itself and overthrow the ego under certain conditions. Since we are microcosms of the macrocosm, all the devils and angels in creation dwell within us and, in theory, could manifest under the proper circumstances.
Psychologists working with Multiple Personality Disorder corroborate the Tibetan insight that complexes (subpersonalities, thought-beings, whatever), behave exactly like discrete, separate entities living their own lives within the psyche, unconscious to ego-awareness. John O. Beahrs, M.D., a psychiatrist specializing in MPD, formulated the concept of “co-consciousness” to explain this phenomenon. He defines it as follows:
Co-Consciousness: The existence within a single human organism of more than one consciously experiencing psychological entity, each with some sense of its own identity or selfhood relatively separate and discrete from other similar entities, and with separate conscious experiences occurring simultaneously with one another within this human organism ... The theory of co-consciousness assumes that each part of any human individual has some sense of selfhood of its own, discrete from that of other parts and the Self proper ... Co-consciousness assumes that each part of [the unconscious psyche] must have its own ongoing conscious experience. There can then be no such thing as an unconscious, in any absolute sense. “Unconscious” can only be relative to one particular part.[xi]
Swedenborg’s 18th century descriptions of hyperspace tally with this modern conception. The objective psyche is a multiverse containing personifications of every possible belief and idea imaginable. Whether you call them spirits or archetypes or angels or archons or complexes, they’re all a part of who we are:
I have been informed that the spirits and angels with other men see nothing at all that is in the world, but only perceive the thoughts and affections of those with whom they are. From these facts it must appear that man was so created that while he is living among men on earth he might also at the same time live among angels in heaven, and vice versa; so that heaven and earth might be associated together and act as one, and men might know what is in heaven, and the angels what is in the world. And when men depart, they would thus pass from the Lord’s kingdom on earth into the Lord’s kingdom in the heavens not as into another, but as into the same in which they have been while they were living in the body. But because man has become so corporeal he has closed heaven against himself.[xii]
As we have seen, when a shaman (or any out-of-body traveler) penetrates the objective psyche with full waking consciousness, he immediately encounters these entities. The Perennial Philosophy assigns them many labels: devils, angels, Jinns, Devas, Asuras, spirits, ghosts, archons, fairies, gods, goddesses, heroes, archetypes, whatever. What soon becomes apparent to anyone able to observe these beings clearly enough and often enough (i.e. in full consciousness over time), is that they generally arrange themselves into two contending groups: the good guys and the bad guys:
Two groups of forces have always been involved in this cosmic charade. Early man quickly learned to separate them into the good (prohuman) and evil (antihuman) and gave each new god and demon a name. In the interests of clarity, we shall label the good guys the Alpha Group and the bad guys the Omega Group. The Alpha Group gave man a set of ethics and moral principles, while the Omega Group fostered racism, greed, and violence. As time passed, the two groups began imitating each other’s tactics, and the task of discriminating between them became impossibly difficult.[xiii]
This is the origin of the military template shaping so many world religions. In Christianity it’s the war in heaven between the demons and angels; in Hinduism it’s the endless battles between Devas and Asuras. On Edgar Cayce’s shamanic forays into hyperspace, he distinguished the “Sons of Belial” and the “Sons of the law of One” – contending groups with whom every human being maintains reincarnational allegiances throughout eternity.
Thus, stress-polarity is the central archetypal theme in the objective psyche, emanating continuous conflict into spacetime: World Wars I and II, the war on drugs, the war on terrorism, the battles between Crusaders and Jihadists – whatever current war over whatever current controversy the Archons evoke for our allegiance will suffice. Taking sides is how we nourish them through commitment and belief. For them, our endorsement is a continuous smorgasbord of energy they need to exist.
Note that it doesn’t matter at all what the issues are: any kind of contention: from our former war between Capitalism and Communism to our current war between Judeo-Christianity and Islam will suffice. It isn’t the issue; it’s the polarity that provides the juice which keeps the Play in motion. And if you decide to stop feeding the Archon-rulers with your beliefs, you can anticipate that someone or something will try to smear shit in your face, either literally or figuratively. Jealous Gods and their followers are just like that. This is not a new idea; it has been around since the dawn of history:
In both Sumerian and Mesopotamian cosmogonic texts the view is set forth that mankind was created to serve the gods, by building temples for them and offering sacrifices for their sustenance. With this view of the purpose of man’s being went a corresponding estimate of human destiny. So long as the gods wanted his services, the individual lived, and, if he were zealous and careful in their service, his divine masters would reward him with prosperity. This was his destiny, namely, to participate in the divine ordering of things in the world. Once the gods ceased to need him, his raison d'être ended, and he died.[xiv]
John Keel, a journalist investigating such mysteries as UFO contactees, alien abductions, bizarre belief systems and other anomalous phenomena, arrived at this same conclusion after many years of research.
The human race would supply the pawns. The mode of control was complicated as usual. Human beings were largely free of direct control. Each individual had to consciously commit himself to one of the opposing forces. After that commitment was made voluntarily, the chosen force could possess the individual to some degree ... The main battle was for what was to become known as the human soul. Once an individual had committed himself, he opened a door so that an indefinable something (probably an undetectable mass of intelligent energy) could actually enter his body and exercise some control over his subconscious mind.[xv]
For a contemporary shamanic image of what this eternal warfare looks like out in hyperspace, here is how John Lilly perceived the situation from his isolation tank in the 1970s. Note that he couches his observations in the form of a third-person belief system to assert some degree of scientific objectivity over his empirical observations:
Those beings which were close to the subject in complexity-size-time were dichotomized into the evil ones and the good ones. The evil ones … were busy with purposes so foreign to his own that he had many near misses and almost fatal accidents in encounters with them; they were almost totally unaware of his existence and hence almost wiped him out, apparently without knowing it. The subject says that the good ones thought good thoughts to him, through him, and to one another. They were at least conceivably human and humane. He interpreted them as alien yet friendly. They were not so alien as to be completely removed from human beings in regard to their purposes and activities.
Some of these beings … are programming us in the long term. They nurture us. They experiment on us. They control the probability of our discovering and exploiting new science … Discoveries such as nuclear energy, LSD-25, RNA, DNA, etc., are under probability control by these beings. Further, humans are tested by some of these beings and cared for by others. Some of them have programs which include our survival and progress. Others have programs which include oppositions to these good programs and include our ultimate demise as a species. Thus the subject interpreted the evil ones as willing to sacrifice us in their experiments; hence they are alien and removed from us. The subject reported with this set of beliefs that only limited choices are still available to us as a species. We are an ant colony in their laboratory.[xvi]
So we’re right back where we started, with the multi-dimensional Psyche and a final slant on who the Archons are. These entities have independent existences in the objective psyche. They represent personal, familial, tribal, national and religious allegiances in addition to any other fantasies they can coerce us into adopting. As established beliefs or belief-complexes, they assume separate autonomous authority demanding continuous energy (food) from their hosts.
