ENDING THE COSMIC WAR

IS THE WORLD REAL? AND DOES IT MATTER?

Yes. End of episode. Thank you for reading.

No? The world isn’t real? We are not real? We are just spirits having a human experience, stuffed into this meat suit, confined to these few paltry dimensions? All the world around us is in our heads, subjective, and we can manipulate it as we please? All we need to do is wake up, become aware of the prison of physicality, and we will become fully ourselves? We can manifest our desires, because the physical world is malleable to our wills? Ok. Let’s have a look at this, because it is an old and large idea, and it feeds itself nicely into the Cosmic War.

Kia Ora Tatou and welcome to Ending the Cosmic War, with me, Karen Effie.

The idea that the world isn’t real, and we are not real, has been around since that amazing confluence of thought, the Hellenic/Judaic/Southwest Asian world of about two thousand years ago. There is also a strong stand of this idea in Vedic and Buddhist thought, but for my purposes I will focus on the “Western” strand, because it feeds itself into Christianity, and Christianity itself is soaked in the Cosmic War right from the start. At this point, it comes down to Gnosticism.

The universe was not created by the great Creator, the True God. In the beginning, this Being subsisted along with other intermediary beings called Aeons, and together they made up the Pleroma, or Fullness. One of these Aeons, Sophia (Wisdom) broke away from the Pleroma, desiring to actualize herself, and in her hubris, she manifested a lesser being. This lesser being in turn, manifested the universe, but in his ignorance, he thought he was the only God. He now rules the universe, along with his Archons, who are lesser than he is. He is the Demiurge, the “half-maker”, also called Yaldabaoth. Thus, humans are born into a world that is many emanations removed from the perfect Pleroma. Because it was created in error, it is a place of error. It is our prison, and the Archons are our prison guards. Yaldabaoth remains ignorant of his limitations, and desires to keep his creation ignorant as well.

We instinctively know this, because we suffer. We know the world is imperfect. We may even have a sense of separation, or homelessness, or being somehow suppressed and deprived of the knowledge of our true selves. We may have a longing for home, for divine connection, or we may sense that we are much greater than we are told we are, or the world makes us. The situation is as dire as we sense it is. But there is hope. Within us is a divine spark, that remained pure all the way down from the Pleroma. Once we become awake to this, we can find our way back. We do this by processes of meditation, devotion, and ritual, leading to gnosis, a personal revelation or awakening into godhead. Most humans are not capable of this. Gnosticism as practiced two thousand years ago was a way of the elite. What we think of as consciousness is just our material minds at work. True gnosis is beyond logical thought: it breaks us out of thought prison.

Gnosticism developed over time. Many early Christians were Gnostics, but not all Gnostics were Christian, or at least wholly Christian: they owed their ideas to Hellenic philosophy and Paganism as well as the Old and New Testament. Unfortunately, we know about them mostly through their Christian detractors, and we don’t know much about their actual practices. What we think of as Christian theology only became so over time, and as a process of argument and political and theological struggle. What is written up as heresy was in fact widely practiced and deeply considered. The ideas that won out, did not do so in any natural process. Christianity could have taken a very different turn.

The ideas I have hinted above are still very influential today. Doesn’t it sound like the move “The Matrix?” We live in unreality, taking the red pill enables us to see the world around us as the prison it truly is, and only then are we able to escape it and attain our true destiny. Modern magic also adopts Gnostic ideas, most particularly the idea of each of us having a divine spark within us, and gnosis enabling us to attain apotheosis, to become gods or godlike. Magical powers enable us to kick our way out of the whole sorry shebang, to become anti-cosmic, uncreated, all-powerful. Gnostic ideas crop up in Kabbalah (medieval Jewish mysticism, roughly). Gnosticism appeals to many who are interested in the esoteric. I think about the song by Tool on their Fear Inoculum album, “Pneuma”:

We are spirit bound to this flesh

We go ‘round, one foot nailed down

But bound to reach out and beyond the flesh

Become Pneuma

We are will and wonder, bound to recall

Remember

We are born of one breath, one word

We are all one spark, sun becoming

Child, wake up

Child, release the light

Wake up now child

Wake up

Child, release the light

Wake up now, child

Spirit…..

I have listened to this over and over, mostly because Danny Carey’s drumming is just transcendent, like what the hell time signature is that? I could digress. A lot. If humans could become gods they would be Danny Carey behind a drum kit.

Anyway, the lyrics give a great sense of the Gnostic impulse.

One of the great Christian criticisms of Gnosticism is that it makes gods of us. Today’s Christians (and Muslims, for that matter) are equally wary of this same problem: we must never think we are gods. There is only one God. Thinking we could become gods was the original sin. Magicians have thought the opposite: that it makes gods of us. Gnosticism also explained However, Christian and Gnostic thinkers alike grappled with the same problem: how to explain suffering, how come the world is like this. The second century CE Gnostic thinker Marcion had a very clear idea, gleaned from a careful reading of the Old Testament: God just had to be evil. Look at the Old Testament God: legalistic, capricious, occasionally genocidal. God was Yaldabaoth, the creator of this flawed and cruel world. Yes, as Paul said, we could understand God through his creation – and his creation sucked. The father of Jesus Christ, the good God, came from outside to save us. More “orthodox” Christians were working on the idea of the Devil as the cause of sin and suffering because of sin. Both groups saw creation as flawed. Both acknowledged human suffering as a kind of ground of theology. Psychologically, it is pertinent too. We want to make sense of this shit.

Greek philosophers also paid attention to the issue of what exists, and what is coming into existence. What is eternal and what changes. Or order and chaos. Plato and his Platonic successors emphasized the commonality between the two. Plato saw the World Soul divided into two, a perfect, ordered, rational part, and an irrational part that has the capacity to err. It is our job to govern this irrational part of ourselves. Later Platonic thinkers were interested in in the Demiurge as a bridge between these two parts of the World Soul. They did not see a fall into darkness in the way the Gnostic thinkers did. However, Platonism and Gnosticism had common ground, especially when you consider both systems to be attempts to answer the question of being and becoming, order and chaos, and why the world is the way it is.

The true inheritors of Gnostic thought are those in the spiritual community. I call it the spiritual community after the anthropologist Suzannah Crockford. In her book “Ripples of the Universe: Spirituality in Sedona, Arizona”, she explains the anthropologist’s practice of referring to communities and peoples by the names they themselves use. The term “New Age” is now seen as pejorative. It refers more specifically to the particular time of the 1960s to the 1980s, when the belief that the Age of Aquarius would kick in and widespread consciousness raising would occur. Today’s spiritual community is more diffuse, more of a bricolage of many different ideas and tropes, some of which are contradictory. They include, but are not limited to: alternative healing methods, “extreme” health and wellbeing, divination, ancient wisdom traditions, Buddhism, Hindu traditions, psychedelics, Theosophy, Anthroposophy, traditionalism, perennialism, individual sovereignty, privileging the intuition over intellect, aliens ancient and modern, angelology, Kabbalah, Arthurian legend, astrology, privileging the natural over the human-made, and psychic powers. The spiritual community is adjacent to Paganism, shamanism and indigenous tradition, in that each influences the other. There is no logical connection between some of these ideas, but they are ideas that hunt together. They vibe. The spiritual community is influenced by Gnosticism in two ways.

The first is New Thought. New Thought is massive. When you try to think positive thoughts or “good vibes” you are engaging with New Thought. I recently watched a comedy game show called “The Hundred”. One of the contestants said she had “manifested” her success in being chosen for the show, and manifested herself winning it. Manifesting, the New Thought practice of strongly imagining success in order to bring it about, is mainstream now. New Thought has a definite history. Early scientists were interested in how everything worked, and they did not confine their investigations to the material. In the eighteenth-century Franz Mesmer postulated that energy could act like a substance, that it flowed around the body could be transferred between people and influence them. He attempted to cure people by manipulating this energy force, similar to the way we use chi or ki today. In the early nineteenth century, the gorgeously named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, of Lebanon, New Hampshire, experimented with the mind’s ability to cure the body. He claimed to have cured his consumption with positive thought. He was an ethical chap: he distinguished himself from faith healers and from the snake oil salespeople of the day. So, we see here developing the idea that we can change our reality with our thought. Thought is the primary reality and its effects are in our health and our life chances. New Thought developed over time: thinking can make us rich, thinking gives us illnesses (and cures them), thinking created our whole world and better thinking can change the whole world. There is a Gnostic tinge to this. The world is less real than our thoughts about it. We can transcend the world and our own problems through our thoughts.

The other Gnostic-influenced strand of spirituality is that the world is not real. There is coarse matter, the stuff of this material world and the astral plane, and further up and out, through multiple dimensions, there is finer and finer matter and eventually true spirit, which is the true reality. While we are confined to this material world, we are subject to its laws of suffering and ignorance only if we don’t realize there is so much more going on. Some of us, who are primed in this way over many lifetimes, or brought in by higher beings to help others in this life, are light workers or special beings. It is the job of such souls to teach others and to raise the vibration of the world, so that it may ascend through the dimensions. Some people are among this spiritual elite and don’t know it. It can take a crisis to awaken this knowledge. Awakening is inevitable, but it will take a cataclysm to do it. Meanwhile, evil is ever-present. Bad spirits are as real as angels. A secret cabal of Luciferians runs the world, forcing us into being vaccinated, or sending our children to be brainwashed in school, or making us sick with big pharma or the big food industry. This cabal may or may not be linked to ancient aliens such as reptilians, but there are good aliens as well who are waiting for us to evolve so they can help us.

I was in a shopping mall, when I saw two people I knew slightly. They offer regular events of a spiritual nature. One of them told me he had been told (presumably by his spirit guides or higher powers) to get out of the mall, and they were leaving quickly. An earthquake was about to happen, and everybody would be killed. Fortunately, this did not matter, because all the people who were killed would be reincarnated immediately. He told me this joyfully. Everything was unfolding as it should. The deaths of hundreds were insignificant in relation to the higher purpose being served, whatever that might be.

There was no earthquake. The shopping mall remains standing. I imagine that the earthquake happened in the spiritual realm. When prophecy fails, “spiritualizing” the failure is a common way forward. The material is subject to the spiritual. It is not real. It is a simulacrum governed by evil. Once we unplug from the Matrix, we receive gnosis. We see it for what it is. It is insignificant. Our true home is elsewhere, in the stars, with the Divine.

The spiritual community has some of this in common with some Christians, although such Christians would not be that happy about it. For Christian millennialists, all of the world’s history has been a vale of tears since the fall of humans in the garden of Eden. The Devil and his demons are in charge. Soon, any day now, Christ will return and the world as it is now will end, Satan will be struck down and all non-believers will perish. I want to quote Tad DeLay’s book “Future of Denial”:

“…remember when Reagan’s secretary of the interior, the late James G. Watt, was asked in a congressional hearing if he would defend the land for future generations and he famously replied, ‘I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns’”.

There is not much point in taking care of the world. The world is subordinate to metaphysical reality. While this is not a Gnostic view, we find ourselves in similar territory.

I have a critique of the idea that the world is not real. It starts with, well what about all this, then? I guess you would say that I am deeply fooled by it. I can meditate by a waterfall in a glade and be in wonder at the natural world. I can meditate by a waterfall in a glade and praise God for God’s creation and its beauty. Or I can meditate by a waterfall in a glade and know that it is just a very beguiling part of the simulacra.

I am house sitting as I write this, for a little old dog I know well. When the house humans left, they explained to me that he was suddenly seeming much older, and not well. He was spending his days under the bed, and was not eating, and getting him to take his meds was a struggle. I didn’t need to walk him, just make sure he has a pee outside every day. We had one of Those Discussions, about what I would do if he died while they were away. Yesterday I sat on the floor with the little dog, and he was clearly uncomfortable and stressed. I scritched his head when he let me. I was like, please don’t die while I’m looking after you, I would never forgive myself. This morning, he woke me up early, with a shake of his dog tags and his tail up high. He dragged me to the park, stopping to pee at his usual spots. I came out of the shower to find him sitting waiting for me on the bathmat. He has annoyed me half the day and I love him.

Seems real to me.

Two days ago, it rained. The weather had been building up to it for days. The weather forecast kept predicting it. Great and noble cumulus clouds, shining white like God in the Book of Daniel, built up over the hills, waiting as if for war. Finally it began. The sky darkened and the earth with it. The clouds were on the march, ridden by enormous golden many-armed beings, as if they were elephants ridden into battle. And then the rain came, like a barrage of watery arrows, piercing the ground, telling it, nurturing it.

Seems real to me.

Now, if I lost you with that paragraph about the rain, yup, that’s ok. Please understand I am using a language that is not literal and yet not metaphor either. It is a way of describing something that is in my head and heart that can see two things at the same time. I am in ordinary reality and in non-ordinary reality at the same time. In the words of William Blake: “When the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea? O no, no, I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.” The point is: both are true. Both are true, and both are descriptions of a real world.

I find myself committed to living in a real world, and wanting to increase my connection to the world. Experiences of transcendence occur within the world itself; they open me up to more of it. This approach is part of the animist world view, that experiences the world as peopled with an infinite number of spirits. My commitment to the world means I get to live here. I want to love the world more, and to be a part of it.

We live in a time of climate catastrophe and climate denial. We can’t do right by the world we live in if we believe it’s not real, or insignificant, or base matter, or evil or fallen. We can’t do right by it if we believe it’s going to end tomorrow at the behest of God. I want to look behind these ideas that support the Cosmic War. Because, for the sake of the clouds and the rain and the little old dog at my feet, we need it to end.

Thank you, if you read this far, and I hope you will read some more. Ma te wa!

Further exploration:

Dr Justin Sledge has some excellent videos on his YouTube channel Esoterica, on Gnosticism.

Mitch Horowitz’s book “One Simple Idea” is a useful introduction to New Thought.

Your life will be instantly improved if you watch this drum cam video of Danny Carey “Pneuma”. And he’s nearly my age! God damn! Oh, and listen to the lyrics.