new illuminati: collective consciousness

Showing posts with label collective consciousness. Show all posts

Friday, 30 December 2016

Omnipresent Virtualities: Virtual reality releases solitary dreamers into the collective dream

Omnipresent Virtualities

Virtual reality releases solitary dreamers into the collective dream

by Star Larvae

As waking and sleeping converge in the enriched brains of our extraterrestrial descendants, the conscious and unconscious experience of those descendants should fuse into an undifferentiated mode of subjectivity.

Immersive media look like they're just about ready to facilitate the colonizing of the dream state. Already, digital wizardry approaches in style and content the surrealistic hyper-reality of the dream. Hollywood movies, with increasing fidelity, capture the unearthly fly-around perspectives and temporal elasticity of dreams. In its advertising, television, notably when promoting sugar to children, evokes the zany, weightless world of dreams.

Jump Start comic strip from http://comics.com/jump_start/2010-09-23/

For its part, the dream world acknowledges new technologies as they come on line. Cars, airplanes, telephones, radios, and now computers insinuate their ways into the dream milieu. Surrealist fantasies of a culture of the unconscious look today like a premonition of the computer age, in which any scene or sound can morph into any other.

But the extroverted among humankind’s extraterrestrial descendants might cringe at the prospect of terminal, albeit spectacular, introversion in the dream, even the lucid dream. For the extroverts, the networked dream might provide relief. Space brains will have at their cortex tips access to uncharted frontiers of expression, gregariousness, and interpersonal fusion.

Through virtual reality (VR) technologies, weightless dreaming becomes a social medium. VR systems are sensorimotor-feedback setups that link users and computers in information-exchange loops. The motions of the users are fed into the computers, which respond by sending appropriate signals back through visors and headphones and potentially other interfaces. The signals—translated by the visors and headphones into synthetic sights and sounds—give users the impression that they are interacting with a physical environment. But the environment exists only as a computer program and a sequence of perceptions. Nevertheless, the virtual world can be shared by as many inhabitants or visitors as the available computing power and bandwidth can support. Pokémon Go is a baby step along the path. (Variations on the VR concept are sometimes called telepresence or tele-immersion.)

The Communal Lucid Dream

The phenomenology of dreams segues naturally into that of virtual reality. Dreams and virtual realities are interactive and immaterial, though phenomenologically habitable, spaces. The literature on therapeutic and recreational VR applications seems modeled after that of dreams, especially that of lucid dreams. Themes of conflict resolution and wish fulfillment are prominent in descriptions of the virtues of both worlds. If Marshall McLuhan’s technological prostheticism struck near the mark, and electronic media extend into the physical world the collective patterns of human subjectivity, then VR technology extends specifically the capacity for lucid dreaming, not particularly into the physical world, but into the collective experience of the networked community.

"A biotechnical, and not merely biochemical, straitjacket, whereby the psychophysiology of an individual's behavior would be permanently relayed to instantaneous information capabilities, his/her body wired with electronic pathways that would extend the nervous system. [. . . . ] Once this happens, adoption of a sedentary life tends to become final, absolute, since the functions traditionally distributed within the real space of the town are now exclusively taken over by the real time of the wiring of the human body."

— Paul Virilio
Open Sky

"The real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models—and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal of negative instance. It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It is a hyperreal, the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere."

— Jean Baudrillard
Simulations

Virtual realities can only become increasingly engaging as they gain resolution and responsiveness. The prospect of VR technology accessorized with brain sensors, such as those used in EEG monitoring, let alone brain implants, suggests the potential for a new level of intimacy of shared experience. Mythic forms from the unconscious will be available as blueprints for a cosmic arcade in which experiences are manufactured from such stuff as dreams are made of.

The Brains-in-Vats Scenario

One potential of VR has been thrown under a sobering light by writers of cyberpunk science fiction. The Gothic-styled genre of high-tech low-life takes its dystopian inspiration from the familiar scene of glazed-over couch potatoes. Cyberpunk writers have seen the implications of tomorrow’s tech: bodiless brains suspended in nutrient vats, networked and synchronized with other vatted brains. The cyberpunk genre’s Gothic stylizations can obscure the astuteness of the vision, namely the insight that urbankind already consists of networked brains in vats on wheels. One need only notice one's co-motorists fumbling with their phones to recognize it.

Nineteen ninety nine’s popular action film, "The Matrix" presented the brains-in-vats scenario to a large audience. The movie's premise involves the subjugation of humankind by a race of malignant machines. The premise is taken to an extreme in which the ruling machinery cultivates human beings as an energy crop. Each head of human livestock is raised in a life-support pod, fed artificially, and tapped like a battery for excess metabolic energy. But the citizen slaves believe themselves to be living normal lives, thanks to a shared virtual reality piped into their brains. Little imagination is needed to recognize in this arrangement today's corporate cubicle farm, in which networked human livestock productively ruminate, their energies drained to feed the demands of their various masters. And the growing number of debt slaves who occupy today’s protoMatrix do so largely in a state of pharmacologically induced complacency, thanks to a pharmaceutical industry eager to lavish antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs on a spiritually eviscerated workforce.

But the machines of the developing matrix need not exert their control coercively, as they do in the films of the Matrix series. Human beings eager to enter the pods, whether on Earth or in space, will be easy to find. Many minds conditioned by an entertainment industry to despise the humdrum and by an advertising industry to crave novelty find synthetic realities to be as appealing as anything that exists outside of cyberspace.

An eagerness to transcend the meatbot by plunging into a comprehensive environment of synthetic inputs expresses itself through the ambitions of transhumanism, a movement that advocates plunging headlong into as technologically mediated a reality as can be engineered. Transhumanism's selling points revolve around technological enhancement of human faculties and experiences, the enhancements intensifying until reaching a breaking point: the vaunted "Singularity," a secular rendition of Heaven/Nirvana.

That oligarchs would encourage their subjects to embrace a programmable digital infrastructure, thereby further empowering the oligarchs, seems not to occur to transhumanist enthusiasts.

Transhumanism or Exohumanism?

The dystopian "brains-in-vats" scenario of the cyberpunk future approaches the star larvae scenario. But essential differences distinguish the two storylines. The cyberpunk future is dystopian because it ignores foundational elements of the extraterrestrial program:

· The geographical separation of space colonists from terrestrial control

· The solar economy of abundance

· The neurological enrichments of weightlessness

It might be only in the unwieldy vastness of space, in a prosperous solar economy, that communities will be able to pursue destinies independently of the evolving global power elite. Once again, self-directed freedom-seekers might need to tackle a frontier to secure their autonomy.

On the optimistic side, and with noetic prescience, Marshall McLuhan glimpsed the light at the end of the postmodern tunnel. In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man he summons an epiphanous image:

"If the ultimate reality and therefore our own deepest nature is creativity, then to 'obey' it means not to give complete allegiance to any of creativity's past products, be they scientific ideas, religious dogmas, political institutions, or economic systems. Likewise, to 'obey' the will of God for our lives is to become more rather than less creative. True obedience is therefore manifested in a life of maximal creativity."

— David Ray Griffin
God and Religion in the Postmodern World

"Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language. The computer, in short, promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity. The next logical step would seem to be, not to translate, but to by-pass languages in favor of a general cosmic consciousness which might be very like the collective unconscious dreamt of by Bergson. The condition of 'weightlessness,' that biologists say promises a physical immortality, may be paralleled by the condition of speechlessness that could confer a perpetuity of collective harmony and peace."

McLuhan’s early grasp of what later would be called cyberspace may have been a reaching for the phenomenology of outer space. In the passage above, he proposes that technology has as its covert aim the engineering of a kind of rapture. Humanity's collective calling may be to fabricate the communion of angels by evolving into it. Evolving into angels—or whatever label best suits our extraterrestrial descendants—will require letting brain circuits express themselves fully by letting them take shape weightlessly.

"The new media are not bridges between man and nature:

they are nature."

— Marshall McLuhan

Counterblast

Humanity's complex of devices and programs and the extensions of that technological complex yet to come can be seen as humankind’s attempt to engineer around itself an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent parent. This Freudian ambition has as its goal the preserving of humankind's posthuman descendants in a state of retarded, neotenous, development. On Earth, this program threatens to impose the nightmare scenario of a global technocracy perpetually exploiting it pharmacologically anesthetized drone-citizens. In space the program plays out as a metamorphosis of humans into the angels of the religious imagination.

The Star Larvae Hypothesis:

Stars constitute a genus of organism. The stellar life cycle includes a larval phase. Biological life constitutes the larval phase of the stellar life cycle.

Elaboration: The hypothesis presents a teleological model of nature, in which

Stellar nebulae manufacture bacteria and viruses in their interiors as they cool.
Biology evolves within an ontogenetic program that in its entirety, on- and off-planet, constitutes a generational life cycle of the stellar organism.
Technology plays a necessary role in evolution. It enables biological life to emigrate from planets to weightless space.
Postplanetary life manufactures the protons needed to create, then metamorphoses into, new stars.
A prescient complex of celestial religious motifs expresses humankind’s stellar calling. The star is the human imago.
Nature's metabolism encompasses the organic and the inorganic in a continuum of anabolic and catabolic exchanges.

From Star Larvae @ http://www.starlarvae.org/Space_Brains_The_Synergy_of_the_Network.html

For more information about floppy socks see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/free%20energy

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Saturday, 24 December 2016

Archons, Dominions and Thoughts that Run Wild

By Julian Websdale

There is a simple premise in esoteric literature: thoughts have power. Even modern science accepts that behind the structure we know as the material world is a web of energy, and the interactions between different types of energy create the semblance of solidity we call matter. Thought, then, as a form of energy, has the same power. This is why in so many traditions there are admonitions about controlling the thought process, while thinking and doing are still different things, thinking does have its effects.

Clairvoyants of many persuasions have seen and documented the shapes and forms produced by various types of thought; witness the work of Charles Leadbeater. While many of these forms are fleeting, when empowered by the emotions and by memory they become more than just thoughts, they become thought forms.

These thoughtforms exist beyond simply when they are thought – they take on an independent existence within the mind of the thinker. They then influence memory and condition our perceptions of everyday life. We may want to see these thoughtforms as only existing within the psyche of the neurotic or unstable, and yet all of us have our lives conditioned by the thoughtforms we have created in the past. For most people they never see the present unfiltered, all experience is sieved through thoughtforms created from childhood, and even beyond through past lives.

“Meme: (pron. ‘meem’) A contagious idea that replicates like a virus, passed on from mind to mind. Memes function the same way genes and viruses do, propagating through communication networks and face-to-face contact between people.”

– David S. Bennahum.

Thoughts however go much further. As documented in much modern research on Memes, thoughtforms can become like viruses of the mind. They can spread throughout groups, families, nations and indeed the world and are passed through the deeper levels of the unconscious we all experience. Rumours, tales and urban myths are all memes or thoughtforms. While they may be primarily passed by the printed word, internet, media, etc., there is a time when they reach a certain “saturation point” and then become part of the collective unconscious. This is exceptionally dangerous as negative and violent forms can control groups and crowds creating mob violence and aggression. These group-minds are really thoughtforms out of control, and are known in the Gnostic Tradition as Archons. There are multitudes of Archons dwelling both within our minds and within the collective unconscious.

Not only can Archons exist in the unconscious collective mind, they can create a breach into the astral worlds through which fallen spiritual entities can then move into the earthly spheres and control the thoughtforms created. The Archons are the products of mankind enlivened by fallen spirits and fed by our own emotions. They can control and influence individuals, collectives, even nations and governments.

In Gnostic literature these Archons can so increase in power that they become Dominions, forces which control whole groups of people; even races and countries. People of many religions think that they are worshipping the I-AM; however they are actually feeding a false god, an Archon they have created from their own ignorance. This happens all too often and is why the esoteric tradition is imperative.

Without the guidance of esotericism, many will be caught within the web of exoteric (outer) religion. Fundamentalism, cults, literalism, extremism are all products of incorrect readings of the spiritual tradition. When these groups develop, their thoughtforms take on a life of their own and, not being connected to the “real” energies of the Great Chain of Being, they soon sour and become a nexus for the manifestation of fallen entities from the astral worlds.

These fallen spirits work out of step with the universe and invigorate these forms so that they become independent, discrete fields of energy within the astral world (Archons). They grow from Archons to Dominions and rule from their astral kingdoms. Their poor and unfortunate worshippers think they are following the “true god” but are actually feeding monsters created from mans suffering and ignorance. Many of these forms feed on suffering, while others feed on pleasure, and they amplify the emotions of their members to gain more and more sustenance. In some sense they are truly “spiritual vampires”, and without esotericism, all religions and traditions succumb.

“(They took…) The name of those that are good and gave it to those that are not good, so that through the names they might deceive him (mankind) and bind those to those that are not good.”

– Nag Hammadi Gospel of Phillip 54:18-25.

The imagery of Archons is very strong in Gnostic literature, and because it has become mixed with tales of cosmological dualism, many have come to believe that the Archons are the result of a cosmic error or fall. The reality is that there was no cosmic error, just a misinterpretation caused by ignorance. Yet at the same time this ignorance has created a doorway through which fallen forms can enter and it is these Archons, or whatever we call them, which keep us from appreciating our own misperceptions. Indeed, it is through our own permission that they enter the earth sphere. This is the idea which gave birth to the “fall of man” tradition. Since man in his ignorance created fallen thought forms and allowed fallen entities to enter into the earth stream, then ultimately man is responsible for the present condition of his planet, his culture and his soul.

The issue of Archons is complex for there is an interaction between our own thoughtforms and real fallen astral entities. The thoughtforms allow these entities to interface with our own unconscious. They can change form according to the language of the culture through which they communicate and, being a mixture of our own thoughtforms and “fallen” spirits, can mimic our own hidden desires and needs. While in Medieval periods we may have had demons, incubus and succubus, in the present we have aliens, UFO abductions and medical experiments by creatures we cannot see. In the modern mode, these Archons are sometimes called “ultraterrestrials”. However we must realize that these forms are spiritual in origin. Although there are many other races within our universe, it does seem that a percentage of UFO sightings and experiences reflect our own fears, terrors, needs and desires and hence have an Archontic origin.

“The world is the work of lowly powers which, though they may mediately be descended from Him, do not know the true God and obstruct the knowledge of Him in the cosmos over which they rule. The genesis of these lower powers, the Archons, and in general that of all the Orders of being outside God, including the world itself, is the main theme of Gnostic speculation … The universe, the domain of the Archons, is like a vast prison whose innermost dungeon is the earth, the scene of man’s life. Around and above it the cosmic spheres are arranged like concentric enclosing shells. Most frequently there are seven spheres of the planets surrounded by the eighth and of the fixed stars…

The religious significance of this cosmic architecture lies in the idea that everything which intervenes between here and the beyond serves to separate from God, not merely by spatial distance but by active demonic force. Thus the vastness and multiplicity of the cosmic system express the degree to which man is removed from God…

The Archons collectively rule over the world and each individually in his sphere is a warder of the cosmic prison. Their tyrannical world-rule is called Hiemarmene, universal Fate … [This universal fate] aims at the enslavement of man. As guardians of his sphere each Archon bars the passage to the souls that seek to ascend after death, in order to prevent their escape from the world and their return to God.” – The Gnostic Religion, Hans Jonas.

So when we read a description of Gnosticism such as that found in the classic text The Gnostic Religion by Hans Jonas, we must appreciate that the seeming cosmic dualism is actually a dualism between the real and the unreal, between the light of the higher worlds and forces which have been created through ignorance. They are like “monsters from the Id”, they seem real enough and since the physical world is shaped and formed by our perceptions, they are for all intents and purposes real. The only way for us to escape Hiemarmene (universal fate) is to realize that we have created the prison bars ourselves.

“What a tragic world this is, he reflected. Those down here are prisoners, and the ultimate tragedy is that they don’t know it; they think they are free because they never have been free, and do not understand what it means. This is a prison, and few men have guessed. But I know, he said to himself. Because that is why I am here. To burn the walls, to tear down the metal gates, to break each chain. Thou shalt not muzzle the Ox as he treadeth out the corn, he thought, remembering the Torah.”

– The Divine Invasion, Phillip K. Dick. HarperCollins 1981.

“For we contend not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness.”

– Ephesians 6:12.

While the Archons and the Demiurge are creations of man’s ignorance, they are used by the fallen spirits as a source of power. This is one of the major problems with the Archons we create – they attract forms and spirits which are themselves in ignorance and hence follow them.

Reference:

The Institute for Gnostic Studies. (1997-2000). The Gnostic Handbook. [e-book].

From Julian Websdale @ http://julianwebsdale.tumblr.com/post/91483272614/archons-dominions-and-thoughts-that-run-wild

For more information about archons see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/archons