the meditating scholar
and
the Second Becoming of Christ,
in the Realm of Living Thought
~>-{[by Joel Allan Wendt]}-<~
Based upon my own spiritual research, as inspired by:
Christ Jesus, the Holy Mother–Earth Mother, the Burning Bush, …
… And … as inspired by these writers of a few of the New Gospels of the Second Becoming: Franz Bardon, Rudolf Steiner, Valentin Tomberg, Owen Barfield, George Adams, Ernst Lehrs. Rudolf Hauschka, Wolfgang Schad, Carl Stegmann, the Moody Blues, Bob Marley, Stephen Clarke, Catherine MacCoun, and especially Elizabeth Ancrum MacKenzie, aka: Barbara Gardiner, author of “a” gospel on: “Aesthetics of Economics and The Scottish Masonic Tradition: In the Light of The Folk Spirits”
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/bgae1.html
[if you put this next link in your browser, you will find a file where all the links in this little book are active.]
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To purchase a book: https://lulu.com/en/us/shop/joel-a-wendt-and-holy-mother-earth-mother-/the-meditating-scholar/paperback/product-p8p9gq.html?page=1&pageSize=4
Introduction:
These seven short essays were originally offered on Facebook, to friends who were familiar with Anthroposophy, the Cognitive Method through which Rudolf Steiner produced the Content he called: Spiritual Science.
I anticipate that many readers of this will lack that personal connection, so where possible I have added certain explanatory comments, that will be <[ bracketed]> in this form.
In the 20th Century three magi confronted the age of science. These were European initiates: Rudolf Steiner – February 27, 1861 to March 30, 1925; Franz Bardon – December 1, 1906 to July 10, 1958; and, Valentin Tomberg – February 27, 1900 to February 24, 1973.
From Steiner we get the idea that the Second Becoming would take place, not in the physical, but in the Ethereal World, the nearest to the physical spiritual realm. He also thought that this event would begin to manifest (in the sense of various personal encounters) beginning around 1933.
My own studies have concluded that this is not a question of Christ being elsewhere, but a question of the development of the evolution of consciousness, that meant that the human beings were becoming able to “see”. Many people have stories of such encounters, including myself.
In one of the later “parts”, I write that I don’t use the term Christ in the Way most folks think. To me “Christ” is simply one of the many “names” of the Maker, or Creator, who “Fathered” the Creation. Each religion seeks contact with the same Immortal Being, the local name being a function of the reality that different cultures need a perspective appropriate to them.
From a certain point of view, given that the Ethereal World is also the Thought World, the “thoughts” of scientific materialism (all matter, no spirit) amounts to a contemporary Crucifixion of Christ. Some readers will also have a sense of something called the anti-Christ spirit, a term which appears in the first two letters of John in the New Testament, and never in Revelations.
According to the writer of those letters, the anti-Christ spirit denies the existence of the Father and the Son, which is clearly what the “religion” of Unnatural Science asserts. We get the theories of a Big Bang, and random evolution, from the priests of science, but no Divine Mystery.
This Return can also be seen as a kind of “birth”, which is why I used the words “magi” above, and “disciples” below.
In the 21st Century, there were three Americans: three disciples as it were – all currently living – myself, Stephen Clarke, and Catherine MacCoun. We had the task of recognizing that a Remembering of the Holy Mother–Earth Mother (Goddess Natura) has accompanied this Second Becoming of Christ, and the words wizards, shamans, and magicians are useful in describing our style of working with and for the Mystery.
There are various names of the realm where shamans and such travel, such as Faerie and the Fae, the Underworld, and the Lost Cities. For the magi, Christ was a feature of the realms of the light and the Sun. For the disciples, the Mother was a feature of the realms of the dark and the Moon.
The latter three were, in a certain sense, aware of the works of the first three. Myself, Catherine, and Stephen, met each other in an on-line discussion group called: The Ark. It was active from around 1997, to 2003.
Steiner had predicted that at the end of the 20th Century, there would be a meeting of two Ways to the spirit, one he called the Aristotelians, and the other the Platonists. This was not a matter of philosophical views, but was due to the spiritual fact that the Aristotelians were mostly Christ oriented, and while the Platonists were also devotes of the Goddess Natura.
Steiner believed that if these two groups did not met in the right way, the fusion of these Ways would not appear, and this will be disastrous for the future of Civilization in the Third Millennium. He called this event: The Culmination, and details can be found here: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/Culmination.html
This little book is an attempt at such a much needed fusion of Ways.
An overriding quality to our present time is the arising of “technology”. Most everyone is aware of the power of these developments, and that with such power there always come great dangers. Among fans of Steiner there is a group that calls its work MysTech, meaning the “mystery” of technology. Here is a link to one of the MysTech working groups: https://cfae.us/
I disagree with some of their points of view, which is why the first “part” begins with that riddle.
“The Meditating Scholar” … part one
Introduction, as it were: A important question is what is my relationship with the MysTech folk? A superficial reader of my comments on Facebook, might fancy I am against that work. This prejudice is not true. I even wrote an article that called the MysTech work the cutting edge of spiritual scientific investigation.
At the same time, having done my own research for over three decades, on such manifestations as electricity, it should not be surprising that I find the general views on that phenomena, in the present MysTech community, to be in error.
A philosophical issue, that is quite tricky to examine, is connected to the use of the ideas of good and evil. When the terms Lucifer and Ahriman are used in the same sense – as a matter of good and evil – my view is that this is a bias that prevents Goethean observation.
<[Steiner taught that there were three primal spiritual powers, who had a deep relationship with each other. The Christ Being (the Creator) kept the two polaric powers in balance. Ahriman stood between us and the material physical world, and Lucifer stood between us and the non-material spiritual world. As we evolve over many incarnations, there arises what St. Paul called the “Not I, but Christ in me”. From a Hermetic Science point of view, the human being is the microcosm, which is a perfect analogue of the Macrocosm. This means that we, as individuals, have an analogue of the Christ, and Lucifer and Ahriman, in our own essential nature.]>
When a ready-made concept – a pre-thought thought, for example – is applied, thinking has put a kind of ghost in between our I, and the phenomenal reality.
The roots of this incomplete thinking can be found in the fact that so many students of Rudolf Steiner have never appreciated the epistemological foundation Steiner provided in GA-1 to GA-4. That foundation, as regards the real nature of human cognition, is what makes spiritual science scientific. GA-1 to GA-4 produce a science of knowing, and this then enables Steiner to speak of his spiritual research as “scientific”, for he has resolved the trend toward dualism (body and mind are separate) into a practical monism (thought and experience, or concept and percept are a unity. It is the I that appears to separate, what remains a unity, in spite of the thought habits of our technological age.
Understanding this mystery of the human being is best done through careful self-observation. When we acquire a concept through “reading”, … that is a very different result for our inner life of mind, from when we produce the concept out of direct personal experience. The read-concept enables “understanding”, while the experienced thought is actual knowledge.
Students of the idea of the evolution of consciousness might be aware of the idea of “the onlooker separation”. Owen Barfield – a student of Steiner’s – places this separation in between two unity states of being, which he calls: original participation and final participation. It is as “onlookers” that we began to investigate the phenomenal world.
I am over here, the world is over there. That is a kind of illusion, which might be called the Ahrimanic Enchantment.
Given that a lot of “technology” is classified as “ahrimanic”, I also see the MysTech conception, of when is his incarnation, to be mistaken. These issues should not be take lightly, although folk who do science frequently disagree.
A consequence of the Ahrimanic Enchantment is that we see that “over there” as lacking the same degree of spirit we find in ourselves. Our modern languages takes the view that Nature is a “thing”, not a Being. Final participation, or experienced unity, does not happen unless we choose for it to happen.
An aspect of the situation is our tendency to “think” there is no life, or consciousness, in manufactured materials. Some people feel a connection to those Fae, we call gnomes and such, who are clearly observable in a “forest”, but not so much today around a “forge”.
The Hermetic Science of the ancient Egyptians knows that elemental beings are just as much present where there is life, and also where there is no life (sort of), there yet remains consciousness and will. It is via Franz Bardon’s works on Magic, aka Hermetic Science, that knowing this communion-with the beings of the “forge” becomes possible.
Nor does one have to be interested in the MysTech work, to have a final participation – communion-with – with “things”. Certain Tesla and Keely had such instinctive relations with such beings. A car mechanic will speak to his vehicle, as if there was a there there. We yell at “tech” all the time, when we are faced with “bugs” and “cliches”.
Ultimately we need to set aside the Ahrimanic Enchantment, and have a whole new relationship with the world of “matter”: “It matters to me, for Matter to be, and that I too Matter do matter.”
Keep in mind that this is not just about Franz Bardon, yet we begin with borrowing of a bit of his language: “the Meditating Scholar”. In Bardon’s texts, that phrase is used infrequently. It refers to those readers that might notice such an idea, and have read all the texts more than once. From this overview, aspects of other material takes on a different meaning. The insights of the scholar’s works, synthesize and blend several sources into something that is beyond what studying one way, or system alone, captures.
Many people today are fascinated with the idea of magic powers, and read and practice Bardon with such a goal in mind. He gives them a lot to do, as we will see later, but the Meditating Scholar will discover that knowledge is the greatest power of all.
Reading Steiner and Tomberg and Bardon, together as a scholarly pursuit, has many virtues, including that the Mystery is more vivid when seen as a whole. In the spiritual world we have experiences that often cannot be described. Steiner, in his dissertation, written around 1892, speaks of the human act of forming “cognitions” – word-thoughts that end up on a page or in speech – in this act we link the indescribable experience of the Mystery to the world of human thought, which he also called the ethereal world.
Only the human makes this thinking-link, and as such is Itself a crucial and necessary actor in the Creation. As Steiner says, in “A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception”, the human being is Nature looking at Herself.
We should also recognize that these three seers were Europeans, and were fated to incarnate their thoughts into the dying cultural life of Western Civilization.
Tomberg disagreed with Steiner’s efforts to develop a spiritual teaching as a science, observing that Steiner left out the magical and mystical aspects of reality. I don’t think this is exactly true, but rather something not easy for Tomberg to see. Steiner didn’t talk much about the magical and mystical as a subject, although there is this: “Christianity as Mystical Fact (and the Mysteries of Antiquity)” … he most often just practiced magic right in front of us (e.g. the outdoor ceremony for laying the Foundation Stone) and modeled an example of a way of life of a spiritual artist of the Word.
Steiner did have an audience-destiny that was different than Tomberg’s. A common way to teach – any subject – back then, was to write and lecture. This Steiner did, which Tomberg naturally copied by reading Steiner and sharing his own spiritual experience in somewhat the same form, often using cognition-names that Steiner first authored.
Fate had other tasks for Tomberg. At a certain point he was no longer lecturing, but instead mostly writing. He had joined the Catholic Church, and Tomberg lore says he was asked to do this by Steiner, from across the threshold and in the afterlife.
Not just writing, but reading. In his 60’s he was able go to the British Library, daily if he wished. In his “Meditations on the Tarot – a journey into Christian Hermeticism”, each, of these Meditations/Letters on the 22 Major Symbolic Pictures of the Tarot, is filled with unimaginable scholarship. In a sense we get a scholarly education, taught by a seer, who also wrote and spoke and read the languages of many nations and ancient cultures.
The first time I read that book, I was working and living near the base of the Holy Mount Shasta, whose aboriginal name is: Waka-nunee-Tuki-wuki; Karuk: Úytaahkoo. I still wonder what manner of spirits abide even now in the depths of sleeping volcanoes.
During this first reading I had a vision one morning, in the Faerie-Gate we call the psychic world in between waking and sleeping. Christ took me with Him to show me that whenever the Mass is enacted He unites the Perfect Heavenly Church with the Fallen Earthly Church, regardless of the state of the soul of the officiating priest.
Whenever two or more are gathered … Three years later I joined the Catholic Church.
About ten years later I started a more concentrated rereading of Meditations, and each Letter took around thirty minutes to read … I also took 30 pages of notes. I believe some of his “friends” have found a means to overcome the absence of an index. My notes have been useful in that regard.
I started reading the Magician Letter on Christmas eve, and did the rest – one each night, until I had reread them all. On Epiphany, I ended that evening’s reading, by writing the follow poem: It took about half an hour.
The Gift of the Word: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/giftoftheword.html
Tomberg is in love with Ideas. It is a felt experience, and each Letter is its own symphony. A Christian mystic takes his readers along with him, on the quest, or as he puts it: “Your friend greets you, dear Unknown Friend, from beyond the grave.”
Originally done Anonymously, it wasn’t published until after he had died.
He also wrote several long essays on the law, during the WWII years. Another scholarly masterpiece, published by his students under the title: “The Art of the Good”.
Steiner endured WWI. Tomberg was a seventeen years old living in Russia as that war ended. Steiner circled around Europe for lectures, going as far West as England, and very little to the East. Tomberg was born near Moscow, and traveled West as well, ending up in England.
None of the three – Steiner, Tomberg, or Bardon – went to the Americas.
Meanwhile, during WWII, it is the lore that Bardon was in prison in Germany, could have used magical powers to escape, and did not, while a student, who was also in prison, died trying.
If we remember our rules for mystery books, the best place to hide something is in plain sight. Bardon earned a living performing as a stage magician.
Steiner had no offspring. Tomberg had one child (now deceased), although both were married. Bardon, who died in his 50’s, appears to have a living son. Steiner died at age 65, and Tomberg at age 71, … the lore is that Tomberg’s wife died almost the same day. We need to keep in mind their humanity.
Magic is the oldest science, and Bardon’s three books follow these “scientific” basic rules. First Theory, then Practice – to prove the Theory. He calls his first book: “Initiation Into Hermetics”, a version of the First Tarot Card, the Magician. The Second Card is The High Priestess, and the book: “The Practice of Ceremonial Evocation”. And, the Third Card, The Empress, was called “The Key to the True Quabbalah”.
I have a familiar spirit that hovers behind my left shoulder (I write left handed, but kick with the right foot – its call mixed dominance). I had gone to a book store to pickup a used book on astrology, and this Fae being was jumping up and down happy, urging that I buy this little one, a used cloth bound: “Practical Astrology”, attributed to St. Germain.
I still own it. It is the only book I have found that combines into a single system Tarot, Astrology, and Numerology. I still use it, poorly if you want to get a chart, but if you want to talk ancient Egyptian Tarot …
In Bardon, the idea of the Meditating Scholar is given as an alternative to undertaking a more elaborate “practice”. One sits in their meditation position/posture – the asana, which is self-chosen, and meditates/thinks about the subjects in the books the scholar wishes to consider more carefully.
All three books are available in PDF form on the Internet. On Amazon, all three in paperback form would come to $130, or about $45 if you use Kindle.
There are numerous books by others, seeking to “explain” Bardon. I see no reason to acquire such. When I visit various Internet groups sharing an interest in his works, what I am about to offer next seems to be unknown.
In magic lore there are various views about how a student magician might discover that these kinds of books hide some of their wonders, again in plain sight. The attentive reader will gain from seeing Bardon’s books as actual effects of magical operations.
For example: IIH has ten Steps, and each Step has a mental or thought aspect, a psychic or soul aspect, and a material or physical aspect. The first Step in IIH is the rules of the basic practice.
Mental training: Step I: 1. Thought control, discipline of thoughts, subordination of thoughts. Psychic training: Step I 1. Introspection or self-knowledge. 2. Making of the (black and white) mirrors of the soul. Physical training: Step I: 1. the material or physical body. 2. Mystery of Breathing. 3. Conscious reception of food. 4. the magic of water.
Organizing ones life, so as to be able to do these three first Steps each day, in a kind of personally designed Rite, does not require big changes. Most of us have routines, and these tasks can easily fit into these already existing patterns. One just adds the magical point of view, into our understanding of the Rite aspect.
Bardon states that in the beginning of the practice, finding even five minutes each day can be fruitful. Their rhythmic repetition will bear powerful fruits.
In POME (the practice of ceremonial evocation), there is an elaborate discussion of the magic circle. For some, this temple building aspect can have a lot of details, yet near the end of several pages of what-might-be-dones, he says that the magician will find that the highest circle is in his hands. That is, you sit in your asana (meditation posture) and simply make a circles of thumbs and first fingers, and all the virtues of a magic circle are present.
Having a PDF of POME, allows one the opportunity to search for terms of interest. So, if one is interested in learning to commune-with those hierarchical beings knowledgeable as to “electricity”, a search will find their names, their sigils, and their areas of expertise. Keep in mind that POME contains the names and sigils of hundreds of such invisible folk, far more than any other book claiming to teach a method of evocation … far far more.
In the asana then we can, as a meditating scholar, seek contact with various entities whose genius concerns our interests. In fact, to have this meditative contact does not require that our work on psychic and physical training keep pace with the magical mental training.
How and why will be discussed in “part two”.
“The Meditating Scholar” part two
Some years ago I wrote an article on Steiner’s “A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception”, where a main aspect of this essay was a look at the contents pages of Steiner’s GA-2, GA-3, and GA-4, which three books are in effect a gospel of the science of knowing. http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/lrsew.html Owen Barfield had called that book, “the least read most important book Steiner ever wrote”.
A contents page is an opportunity for the author to give organization to the basic riddles and mysteries they hope to illuminate. For the Meditating Scholar, such thought-forms – which an author uses – supply any number of basic conceptions, that are suitable for esoteric contemplation.
In Initiation Into Hermetics, the index serves as contents page, providing page numbers for the locations of various major Ideas, such that in Step I, for example, we get not just the leading ideas of magical mental training, but the same for the psychic and physical training, all mixed together.
During a complete rereading of IIH, done over Easter two years ago, I created separate pages for the whole of the leading ideas of each type of training. Keep in mind that the Franz Bardon practices develop the Will, thus the use of the word “training”. Steiner’s basic practices in GA-1 to GA-4 unveil a new experience of Thinking. Tomberg’s Meditations leads us to a deeper experience of Feeling.
The next is the Ten Steps of the leading ideas of magical mental training, thus providing the wonderful overview that true scholarship requires:
Vertical integration Magical Mental Training
Step I: 1. Thought control, discipline of thoughts, subordination of thoughts
Step II: 1. Autosuggestion or the secret of the unconscious 2. Concentration exercises: a) visual/optical. b) auditory. c) sensory. d) olfactory. e) taste.
Step III: 1. Concentration of thoughts with two or three senses. 2. Concentration on objects, landscapes, places. 3. Concentration on animals and human beings.
Step IV: Transplantation of consciousness: a) into objects, b) into animals, c) into human beings.
Step V: Space-Magic
Step VI: 1. Meditation on the own spirit. 2. Becoming conscious of the senses of the spirit.
Step VII: Analysis of the spirit with respect to the practice.
Step VIII: 1. Preparation to mental wandering. 2. Practice of the mental wandering. a) in the room, b) short distances, c) visits to friends, relatives etc.
Step IX: Practice of clairvoyance with the help of magic mirrors: a) seeing through space and time, b) distant effect through the magic mirrors, 3) different tasks of projection through magic mirror.
Step X: Elevation of spirit to higher levels.
Let me says a few words about Step V: “Space Magic”, which I hope will allow the attentive reader an opportunity to “play” with that idea.
Any place where your body is at rest can be an asana locus. We are in that moment, in terms of the visible sense world, enclosed by our surroundings, even if in one “direction”- the mysterious horizon – seems far away.
There is also above and below. One of the divisions of the enclosed sphere, if seen as horizontal, divides the upper and lower into two realms. Below the dark Earth, into which we can travel moon-wise, and sunless. Above, the great light of the Day, and at Night, with the moon, the star-homes for all the children of the creation, of whatever nature and kind.
This is a practical application of the principle in the Emerald Tablet: As above, so below, and as below, so above, for the miracle of the one.
Everywhichway&when, we also have the inner sunlight of thought. We name the world, and in various degrees, are today taught names that are not the true-name. Thunder, for example, names Itself with its Song. Sometimes we love the low rumble, and other times we are touched to our core, via a Majesty that almost knocks us off our feet.
I wrote a short book on “naming”: “The Father at Rest – magical and mystical dark-matter physics in the Age of Technological Chaos.”
In magical psychic training, this is Step: V …
Step V: Projection of the elements outwards: a) through the own body, accumulated through the solar plexus, b) accumulated through the hands, specially dynamically through the fingers.
Sounds complicated … yet there is a design, from the Mother. We are all the right people, in the right place, at the right time.
Most of us carry some form of the idea that we should be something more or other/different in some fashion. It is true that we ourselves, or intimate others, or worse… want us to be or do something, which we are not yet. The Mystery finds all that “work” sterile. They don’t know what we are going to do next. To Them we are the Mystery, and every unexpected aspect of our self-creation is to Them a surprise.
It is the “work” part that is a distraction. This is why the elaboration of the Emerald Tablet, in the first book: The Tarot, begins with Play (the Magician) and ends in Dance (the World).
The song of change is built into our lives. Don’t have to go looking for it. Yet, the children, being children, liked to explore and we were given a universe in which to Play, … though, … run to fast, fall down go boom.
Tomberg, in Meditations, has this wonderful way of “naming” “play”: “concentration without effort”. /// lest ye become again as little children /// Hard for a child to be bored, if left to their own devices.
Bardon teaches in Step I, physical training, that substances can be impregnated with thought. Some substances hold this influence more strongly, such as semen and blood. In getting ready for the asana thinking/perceiving, we through self-care, awaken the skin. We gently brush the body to open the pores, then wash it with cold water, after which we dry it with a rough towel, by strongly rubbing all our skin.
Obviously, for most of us, this would happen in the morning, but doesn’t have to be done, except that: When wanting to play in your mind, waking up is helpful. Although, just throwing some water on your face, and breathing in some fresh air also does wonders.
In the asana, when the skin (the largest sense organ) is freshened, we imagine light being breathed in and out of our whole organism. The key is to leave the rhythm of the breath to its own instincts. While he doesn’t say this, elsewhere I learned that some ancient Eastern Ways described us as not so much breathing, but as being breathed.
As I wrote in The Father at Rest, try to stop breathing. There may be someplace on a mountain top in Tibet, where wise men or women can, but for most of us leaving the breathing to itself is easier, so it is still play.
It is possible to think of the skin topology as capable of being laid out in the shape of a sphere. Kind of gross, until we name what you are going to feel, as did Steiner: the ethereal or life body. Our inner picture of the pore breathing play can be thought of in any geometrical form our imagination wishes, although I suspect the easiest is a ball shape, or maybe an egg.
As with breathing in&out this “light”, we can add thought to its nature. We impregnate the light with a self-chosen idea. It seems best to pick something limited in nature, in a sense. No complexity. I started out with breathing in health, and exhaling disease. It is helpful to imagine the in-breathing as coming through the skin, and the out-breathing as going through the elimination tracts.
Experience will reveal that this in-breathing and out-breathing can cause physical substance to move, since it sets up a current in the ethereal body. So if we want to out-breathe disease, we need to guide the current to where metabolic processes of elimination are already active. The bowels, obviously, and there is in the skin a metabolic process, so it is a question of what “idea” we have of where the out-breathing is to go.
As I got older and more aware of my mortality, I changed from the idea of health to the idea of life. “In It (the Word) was Life and the Life was the Light of the World”, is not just religious poetry, … it is good physics.
The Moody Blues wrote a song: “On Step Into the Light”, which has this phrase: “The river of Living Breath is flowing through the Sun. He was there before the earth began”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hprKBU9btN8&ab_channel=illuminatedEntity
From magical physical training: Step III: 1. Retaining of Step I which has to become habit. 2. Accumulation of vital power: a) by breathing through the lungs and pores in the whole body. b) in the different parts of the body. 3. Impregnation of space for reasons of health, success etc. 4. Bio-magnetism
Note item 2. “Accumulation of the vital power”. Breath is this vital power, seen from a certain direction.
When the Covid Mystery appeared, I wrote this: https://thecollectiveimagination.com/2020/03/23/the-magic-of-breathing-as-a-possible-aide-for-an-individual-with-the-flu/
Keep in mind that the Meditating Scholar is playing with ideas. Ideas that are as real, in themselves, as is our own spirit. Once we admit the “otherness”, we can find out how to “dance” with the Ideas as a partner.
Here is a list of the names of the ideas of the 22 Symbolic Pictures of the Tarot book, as appears in St. Germain’s “Practical Astrology”. It helps to recognize that we are microcosm, an exact analogue of the Macrocosm. These names then describe us, and Them as well:
I. The Magus. II. Gate of the Sanctuary. III. Iris-Urania. IV. The Cubic Stone. V. Master of Arcanes. VI. The Two Ways. VII. Chariot of Osiris. VIII. Balance and Sword. IX. The Veiled Lamp. X. The Sphinx. XI. The Tamed Lion. XII. The Sacrifice. XIII. The Reaping Skeleton. XIV. The Two Urns. XV. Typhon. XVI. The Thunder Struck Tower. XVII. The Star of the Magi. XVIII. The Twilight. XIX. The Dazzling Light. XX. The Rising of the Dead. XXI. The Crown of the Magi. XXII. The Crocodile.
In St. Germain’s book, each Arcane has a picture, and some more detailed “ideas” as to meaning. Many readers of this will perhaps have their own “deck”, that can be fun to compare. Next is Tomberg’s “names”:
I. The Magician. II. The High Priestess. III. The Empress. IV. The Emperor. V. The Pope. VI. The Lover. VII. The Chariot. VIII. Justice. IX. The Hermit. X. The Wheel of Fortune. XI. Force. XII. The Hanged Man. XIII. Death. XIV. Temperance. XV. The Devil. XVI. The Tower of Destruction. XVII. The Star. XVIII. The Moon. XIX. The Sun. XX. The Judgment. XXI. The Fool. The World. XXII.
Notice the shift of XXI and XXII. Tomberg gives a long dissertation as to why he places the Fool where he does, also giving it this name: Amor, or Love.
Steiner’s “The Philosophy of Freedom” (GA-4) concerns inner or spiritual freedom in the face of the ideas we absorb from our given cultural life. Who doesn’t want freedom? In the last sentence to the original preface, Steiner writes: “One must be able to confront an idea and experience it, otherwise one will fall into its bondage.”
Is the world in bondage to the Idea of the Pandemic?
In magical physical training: Step V: Preparation to the passive communication with the invisible ones: a) release of the own hand, b) preparation of the fingers with the help of the pendulum, the pencil, and planchette, etc. Passive communication: a) with the own guardian genius, b) with deceased people and other beings.
In magical mental training: Step VIII: 1. Preparation to mental wandering. 2. Practice of the mental wandering. a) in the room, b) short distances, c) visits to friends, relatives etc.
In magical psychic training: Step VIII: 1. The great Now. 2. No clinging to the past. 3. Concentration disturbances as a compass of magic equilibrium. 4. The astral body and the light. 5. Mastering of the electrical and magnetic fluids.
Consider that each Step, in whatever realm, displays fundamental ideas. We don’t have to master the practice, as a Meditating Scholar, but it helps to form pictures, and look for relationships … i.e. to “think”, “cognize”, and “reflect”.
A principle Idea in Bardon is the four-poled magnet, which is what consciousness (Earth) is, when Will (Fire), Intellect (Air), and Feeling (Water) are married to each other, which for all of us is the normal state. The electrical fluid is the fire-will, and the magnetic fluid is the water-feeling.
Sitting in the asana is an opportunity to self observe, and discover how to apply the magical name aspects of the totality which we constantly experience.
Next we will examine the ideas of good and evil, which in Hermetic Science are named: positive and negative. Our mental landscape is polluted by the idea of sin, for example. Or, that there are all manner of horrible and dangerous beings in our environment. Bardon makes it simple: “There is nothing unclean in the whole of the Creation”. Every Being has its rightful place, including us.
Given that we are looking at the situation, in the context of various ideas, in IIH the theoretical aspect, with which the book begins, should be read often, for while the practices prove, the Theory guides, and gives all the crucial “names”.
“The Meditating Scholar” – part three.
I wrote a book: “The Mystery of Evil in the Light of the Sermon on the Mount”.
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/mysteryofevil.html
In the sense of “ideas”, there is a type of idea I call the necessary pair. The idea of Good has no meaning without its partner: Evil. Up needs down. Positive requires negative. As regards the elements, the lore is that fire-will and water-feeling are primary, while air-intellect and earth-consciousness are secondary.
Virtues can be the opposite of uncontrolled appetites. In Hermetics there are four (according to the elements) fundamental qualities: Knowledge (air-intellect), Daring (water-feeling), Volition (fire-will), and Silence (earth-consciousness).
The idea of good and evil is, according to Bardon, a “human” conception. “In the Universe there is neither good nor evil … “
In Step I. Magical psychic training, we are encouraged to make black and white mirrors of the soul, as the essential aid to self-knowledge and introspection. Lists of personal virtues and liabilities.
Rudolf Steiner points to the idea of the “Double”, aka: the “Doppelganger”. Native Americans speak of the two wolves, one good, one bad, and the question is which do you feed. The Koran refers to the “sneaking whisperer, from among the Djinn and Mankind”.
Steiner also remarks (in “Knowledge of Higher Worlds and How to Attain It”) that one must make three steps in character development, for each step in spiritual development.
Spiritual development involves one or another kind of training, but character development only arises from our actions in our biography. In point of fact, the human biography (where fate and fortune commune) is an individualized story. No two biographies are alike. In my view, there are two books, not written except in our lives, … the story of our life, and the story of our soul.
In a certain sense the questions of good and evil, or sin and whatnot, are only dealt with in the actions we take in the personal biography. We rise or fall according to those choices.
In a future part, I will write of the Americans, who are similar actors in the 21st Century, to what Steiner, Tomberg, and Bardon were to the 20th Century. They live today. One of them, Catherine MacCoun, in her book: “On Becoming an Alchemist – a guide for the modern magician”, writes that no one sets out to do evil, and most of us believe what we are doing is for the good, in the situation.
Problems come, according to her, when we seek for absolute facts or absolute truth. In this moment of the evolution of consciousness, each individual biography is a trial-personal … not every murder or abortion is the same, for in each case the context is different, as is the individuality. We are challenged to make choices, and in this Age, the alleged moral rules in the social-surround, or in our personal religion, don’t speak to the complexities that vary from person to person.
We are meant, by the Mystery, to be free to make the choices we need to make, using our own insight. From Their point of view, the crux of the matter is having to make the choice, and how that effects us and the world … there being no right answer that applies to all.
Then there is Tomberg, and Letter XV: The Devil, or to the ancient Egyptians: Typhon. The basic symbol/picture for both, is of a large ugly figure, to which two much smaller human beings are chained.
When Tomberg was writing as a “anthroposophist”, in his little book on Inner Development, he refers to there being a Luciferic Double, and an Ahrimanic Double, and a Human Double. In Meditations, he expands this vista, writing of the Tempter, the Prosecutor, and Egregores.
The Tempter is that little voice that says, oh don’t worry, one more (whatever vice) won’t hurt. The Prosecutor is met generally in depression, when we succumb to self-loathing, which can go so far as to paralyze our will. I call the human double: self-generated wounds of soul, as a better term than the middle-ages idea of Egregores.
Addictions are of this nature. When we repeat over time a certain type of ritualized behavior – such as shooting up heroin, or munching up some oxycodone pills, we create a parasite in the soul. Steiner called them cancers of the soul, given that they have the power to keep out the ego forces, and become a kind of independent entity, which is not us, not our true spirit.
Again, for the Meditating Scholar, the matter at hand, as it were, is to meditate and reflect on the “ideas”. As we are the right person in the right place at the right time, we are in that moment exactly where fate and fortune (karma) has placed us.
We cannot escape the Now (the great moment) or our Self (the spirit). Most depression, for example, arises because we face a choice, and don’t/can’t choose. The soul becomes gridlocked – paralyzed. What the Mystery taught me was that neither choice is wrong … only the not-choosing.
In Steiner’s “The Philosophy of Freedom”, we come at the “moral” through three conscious actions: moral imagination, moral intuition, and moral technique.
In moral imagination we create a picture of the dilemma – as precise and honest as possible. We formulate this as a question, which we ask ourselves (our spirit) to resolve. The heart’s mind, in response, will generate the intuition of what to do, that satisfies our personal moral sensibilities.
We are to be the author of what is moral in the exact circumstances we face. “In self trust all virtues are comprehended”, said Emerson. An important clue, that we are on the right track for our own spirit’s actions, is the difficulty, and sometimes the danger, either physical or social or both. Waking our own capacity for moral creativity – in the beginning – will take time, and experimentation. Self trust, when all around have other views, grows with practice.
Moral technique involves the how we actually incarnate the self-created moral idea, into the situation. The classic dilemma is do we tell someone we care about that their lover is cheating on them. Again, there is no “right” answer, just a riddle to be solved by our own “I”/spirit.
Steiner published this work around 1894 or so, and around that same time (1896) a young Christian pastor in Kansas – Charles Sheldon – wrote a book of fiction: “In His Steps”. In that book he tells the tale of a pastor who asks his flock – when faced with a moral dilemma – to ask themselves: What Would Jesus Do? And, to do this practice for a year.
This question is not much different from Steiner’s idea of creating a moral imagination, and allowing our spirit to answer, via its own intuitive capacity. The book sold over 50,000,000 copies. In the l970’s, it became popular again, albeit a bit revised, giving birth to the WWJD movement.
Where Steiner was something of an idealist, Sheldon was a typical pragmatic American. It is what works that counts. My view is that both works were inspired by the same Source, each adapted to a particular cultural milieu.
Then in America, in 1933, we find the birth of Alcoholics Anonymous. Individual moral responsibility is fostered in this work. There are details here: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/TwelveSteps.html
This shift away, from externally imposed moral riddles, has been noticed by those who practice various dramatic arts. For example, Clint Eastwood’s films: “Million Dollar Baby” and “Gran Torino” both explore this mystery.
In these films Eastwood plays an older man, who was raised Catholic, yet is confronted by moral dilemmas in life with which his priests’ advice are unable to help. In Million Dollar Baby the priest is an older man, and has known the character for some time. In Gran Torino the priest is young, and immature, and equally useless. The Eastwood characters have no choice but to seek their own guidance.
In Gran Torino Eastwood is in his kitchen, leaning against a counter. At the nearby table sits a youth, who wonders why Eastwood has not acted, and is just standing there quietly. Eastwood says: “I’m thinking”, giving an artistic presentation of the inner work of “inventing” what will be his own moral response.
Modern dramatic arts, and music, are full of this sense of the right/rite of personal responsibility. This is because that need dominates all biographies, and our artists know and celebrate this in their own lives.
In Steiner’s book: “Theosophy”, he names this present stage of the evolution of consciousness for all of humanity: “the consciousness soul”, and defines it this way:
“By causing the self-existent true and good to come to life in his inner being, the human being raises himself above the mere sentient-soul. A light is kindled in her which is imperishable. In so far as the soul lives in this light, she is a participant in the eternal. With the eternal she unites her own existence. What the soul carries within herself of the true and the good is immortal in her. Let us call that which shines forth in the soul as eternal, the consciousness-soul.”
This Age has figured in prophecy. The Hopi speak of a coming “Day of Purification”. According to the Gospels, John the Baptist says that the One coming after him will Baptize us in Fire and Holy Breath.
Fire is the dire circumstances of life that force choice. Holy Breath is what happens when we choose, where whatever we choose is inwardly supported by a warm wind in the soul. Love does not judge us. Love just loves us, however we turn out to be, or choose to be.
When we look at, and accept it, the Pandemic is in part a generator of personal moral riddles. It is not an accident. Our struggles with addictions … Our problems at work and in marriages … political issues … name an aspect of life, and there exist moral dilemmas.
Again, as MacCoun points out: seeking absolute truth or absolute facts is itself a kind of imbalance. Let us look a little more closely at the Pandemic.
To trust the Official Narrative is a choice. To mistrust it, another moral choice. Neither is wrong, but rather it is the dilemma of having to choose that is the true
mystery. To jab, or not to jab. To decide the unvaccinated are a danger is another choice. To lock down or not is a choice. To go out and party anyway is a choice.
To accept the Official Narrative as the absolute truth, based on absolute facts, is a choice. To fire people who refuse to get vaccinated is a choice. To make kids in classrooms wear masks is a choice. To resist and accept the consequences is a choice.
The Moody Blues, in “One Step into the Light”, have this phrase at the end: “The Truth will set us Free, we cannot lose. We cannot lose, we just have to Choose.
In “The Meditating Scholar” part four, we will consider the social future, and the role of “Climate Change” in that “becoming”.
“The Meditating Scholar” part four.
The Mystery of “Climate Change”, and the Earth Mother’s Role.
When I was an adolescent I had a strong relationship with the Christ, as explained to me first by the Lutheran Church, and then later by Congregationalists. In my early twenties I explored Seminary. Their academic way of looking at the Mystery of the Gospels, such as that the disciples didn’t write them, broke my heart. I then tried Law School, got a degree, and spent half a year as a clerk on the Montana Supreme Court. When I saw how power and wealth and politics effected the Court’s decisions, that broke my belief in the law, as a place to be a “good” person.
I was also a scientific materialist, believing that at least in that arena doing something “right” was valued. Aspects of the “Pandemic” suggest I was mistaken to hope for truth in science. Anything can be corrupted.
I began having direct spiritual experience in my early thirties, so I knew the world was not just matter. By my early forties, I found my way to Steiner’s works, and the works of what was being called Goethean Science … a science that observed “spirit” in matter. Those works, and some other material, I today label as “gospels, because the authors clearly had met Christ in the Ethereal – the thought world, … I will discuss them in a later “part”.
What I didn’t know directly – but believed because others I was meeting thought this way – that Nature was Divine. You could say that my idea of the Earth Mother was a kind of trusted theory, yet weak given that the Christian Church certainly did not see Her that way. The Catholics had a little room off the side, where people lit candles, and prayed to Mary. The Protestants just ignored that riddle, probably because they were too busy dividing themselves into an ever increasing large variety of “faiths”, as theological disputes were settled by just making a new church/belief system.
I had faith there was a female aspect of the Divine. I started having experiences, of a sort, that were Her. These were powerful, yet I still lacked the best “idea”. Most of my studies in my 50’s and 60’s’ were phenomenological (following Goethe) observations of human social and political life.
A friend of mine, from the Ark internet conversation group, Stephen Clarke, talked of his regular experiences of Her, likening it to having tea and conversation. My Christ experiences had tended to bit more drama, or so I thought.
Stephen led me to appreciating that Steiner’s ideas about an “Evil Inner Earth” were wrong. A few years ago, he published (shared with friends etc.) an essay: “Rudolf Steiner’s “Mexican Mysteries” Re-Imagined” http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/Clarke5.html
Stephen’s riddle was: Where did Christ go on Saturday? Not our theological conceptions, but to a participant – a “seer”. Sometimes Christian understanding speaks of His Death, and that He then went to the realm of the Dead, in between the Death and Resurrection.
In the above article, well worth printing out, Stephen writes:
“In Mesoamerica, however, the other half of the story is told – and is still told. Half a world away, our unnamed shaman in the hamlet of proto-Teotihuacan, with the help of all his allies shepherded our avatar through the gates of death through all the UnderWorlds into the resurrecting arms of the World-Mother. The Weaver Goddess, Spider Woman . . . where God the Father creator has one name: “God”, God the Mother-sustainer is fractal in aspect and has many. The Intimate and Vast Loving Unity of All is respectfully hidden behind the designation of “The Great Mystery.” God is, in the end, One.”
Bardon had a peculiar relationship to the “negative beings”. None of his names and sigils are about “them”, Bardon does not even give us the names of positive beings of the Mars Sphere, as they are too dangerous.
The Emerald Tablet has much to say about the Mother, and at the same time: the Moon. Goddess religions tend to be Moon religions, and most of them existed before the arrival of the three patriarchal monotheisms.
When the Hebrews fled Egypt, for the desert and a promised home, they shed the idea of a divine feminine. Not all at once, but to give a sense of that process just keep in mind that the Hebrew creation story has a feminine being as the agent of a snake/devil. Somewhere unimportant, given its falsity, we later get the idea of “original sin”.
One day, about three or four years ago, when I read this in Stephen’s article:
“ … an alternate vocabulary for the traditional kabbalistic worlds of Emanation, Creation, Formation & Existence as depicted in shorthand in Genesis) can be seen as having their parallel “tree-rings” in the building up of successive inner-earth layers corresponding to Saturn, Sun, Moon, and, finally, the surface world of Nature, all inhabited at their core and in every particle by divinity in its immanent maternal aspect.”
“… all inhabited at their core and in every particle by divinity in its immanent maternal aspect.” blew my mind. While I had been studying the spiritual in my own way, as I said above – She had been more theory than experienced reality.”
It was as if something always seen right in front of me was now truly known as Its Idea. She is so everywhere/when, that I started to write: She has the Whole World in His Hands, He being the Son, in the sense: “I and the Father are one.” “No one gets to the Father except by me.”
Was the Divine Feminine the last part of: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? Stephen provides a remarkable table of complimentary ideas:
From Stephen Clarke’s “Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind”: Table of Compliments:
God the Mother God the Father
multifarious unitary
luminous darkness blinding light
questions answers
spontaneous playfulness fixity of purpose
fractal centripetal
below above
grief bliss
relaxation striving
immovable irresistible
forms life
mercy justice
chaos logos
“Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind” is Stephen’s story about how he first had “alien” experiences, which as most know are very full of fear, woe, and lost time.
Rather than flee from these apparitions, he tried to love them. From this act of love and acceptance, They revealed much deeper natures, and became more accessible. These are the “negative” beings for which Bardon refused to provide sigils or names. They are of the Underworld, the Lost Cities, and Faerie – pick your name, but to the extent we experience Their activity, these are the kinds of beings lurking as aspects of floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, and such. Beings of great power in the material world.
Their ruler is the Earth Mother, aka: the Holy Mother. Via this rulership, She can be said to be: Rogue Weather, The Four Horseman, and the Gate of Death. While She is Gravity, Her Son is Levity. She is point centered, while His “center” is in the periphery. These two Fields of Love are One, i.e. They are a necessary pair.
“ … all inhabited at their core and in every particle by divinity in its immanent maternal aspect.”
We do better, in grasping the necessary ideas, if we see Mother and Father as verbs, rather than nouns. To Father means to generate. To Mother means to nurture.
We also have the words/ideas: Divine Providence and Karma. Steiner sees the Son as the Lord of Karma, while I prefer: Artist of Karma. Sometimes I go for: fate and fortune, which is what “Practical Astrology” by St. Germain hopes to illuminate for individuals.
Right now the world of the religion of scientific materialism (all is matter, there is no spirit) gives us the vague gods of random chance and accident.
If the ancients all had goddess aspects to their religions, how and why did the Mother fade away into the Mists of Avalon?
By choice. She knew that the children needed to forget their true origins, in order to become free to choose the nature of “final participation” for themselves. While aboriginal religions remembered the Mother, “Western” civilization had to forget Her.
One result of Her apparent Withdrawal, was the arriving of the three patriarchal monotheisms. We tend to think of them as separate, although Islam recognized the Hebrew and Christian religions as also: “people of the book” (i.e. all have a “bible”).
Some years ago, when I was working on my “electricity” studies, I recognized a need to consciously think in wholes, even though materialistic science sought the truth in the “parts”. http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/electricityandthespiritinnature.html
For example, we can find this definition: “The general equation for photosynthesis is therefore: 2n CO2 + 2n DH2 + photons → 2(CH2O)n + 2n DO [or] Carbon dioxide + electron donor + light energy → carbohydrate + oxidized electron donor. In oxygenic photosynthesis water is the electron donor and, since its hydrolysis releases oxygen, the equation for this process is: 2n CO2+ 4n H2O + photons → 2(CH2O)n + 2n O2+ 2n H2O [or] carbon dioxide + water + light energy → carbohydrate + oxygen + water.”
This is an abstraction, rooted in the idea of Parts, yet when seen as Wholes, lets us write that the leaves of the Plant Kingdom, swim in seas of light from the Sun.
This habit of seeking wholes led me recently to experience Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as one religion, not three. As I sought their Ideas, Judaism gives us God’s Law, Christianity God’s Love, and Islam God’s Surrender.
Yet, in the over all process the Mother fades away. Maleness dominates. So we get the idea of dominion-over the Kingdoms of Nature, and lose the idea of communion-with. Nature becomes a thing, and the human being is the only being in the Earth sphere, with a sentient interior self-consciousness.
Because of these abstractions we now have about Nature, we get the idea of “Climate Change”, as a mechanical system, which obeys fixed laws, and is built up from parts rather than wholes.
If we are going to think in wholes, we need to find a way to include the Covid-Mystery.
We live today on the cusp of the Third Millennium of the Christian era. There are over seven billion souls in attendance. A world-wide plague (remember She rules the Four Horseman) is a kind of shared Rite, for everyone.
If we are honest, the world is already in decay. Politicians, drug cartels, dictators, and corporate lackeys, are addicted to wealth and power. They promise much, and deliver nothing.
From science fiction writer Frank Herbert’s novel Dune: “When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movement becomes headlong – faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thought of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until its too late.”
This is where we were headed, until She used the “plague” to give the whole world a time-out, with time to reflect on whether or not we want to jump over that precipice, or not.
One of my earliest “conversations” with the luminous darkness, involved me asking what do They do, with all the horrible and inhuman things we do to each other. I felt a lot of anguish, knowing my own role in such acts of callous indifference. Her reply: “We turn it into Love”.
It took me 14 years before I could start to see how They did that.
Recently tornadoes roared through several States, destroying buildings, and killing hundreds. She knows we are immortal, so receives all who were to die at the Gate of Death. For the living, lives are ruled for a time by chaos, yet in the middle of all that are human deeds of love. People have needs, and other people are called to care. New relationships are formed. Old life patterns are now forced to change.
One – of the stories of a helper – is about man, who hitched his big barbecue stove to his truck, loaded up a bunch of food, and came and cooked and helped.
Keep in mind that the human being is an aspect of the Mystery, not just a needy part. When She said “We” turn it into love, She included us.
Once upon a long ago, true shaman/priests communed-with the Beings of Weather. Those talents live today, and folks will do good if they start to trust the Ideas that come to them in the face of all the chaos, that goes with the Dying and Becoming of “Western” civilization.
The Mother fancies that the Law could also be put to good use. The details of those ideas here: https://thecollectiveimagination.com/shamans-law-firm/
The principle one being: If a Corporation can be a Person before the Law, then certainly a Planet can be a Person before the Law.
“The Meditating Scholar” – part five
Law and Spirits (aka: politricks) in the Light of the Moon
Rudolf Steiner offered an idea as regards human social life, in the sense of its potential ideal nature. It was called: “The Threefold Social Order” (or Organism).
The three spheres are: Cultural Life, Political-Legal Life, and Economic Life. The underling idea of the Cultural Life is Freedom … of the Political-Legal Life is Equality … and of the Economic Life is Brotherhood.
Many anthroposophists recognize these Ideas are not yet fully realized, and take the view that we can help Society to better inner balance, if these principles are understood and applied on a wider scale.
When I began my phenomenological studies of social-political life, my question was not so much in what direction should we develop our shared social existance, but rather what was this living social organism actually doing, even though yet incomplete in the sense of Steiner’s views.
In my 70th year I wrote: “The Art of God – an actual theory of Everything”.
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/artofgod.html
I am now 81. Over the course of the last three decades of my life, I have written many observational examinations of Society, and in particular the middle arena, the Political-Legal Life. https://thecollectiveimagination.com/citizenship-and-modern-politricks/
In one of Steiner’s works on Medicine (“Spiritual Science and Medicine”), he suggested to doctors that when they wanted health for the whole system, the middle realm needed to be strengthened.
The middle of living organisms is where balance is achieved between upper and lower fields of activity. Our human societies are living organisms, given the obvious fact that all the parts of any society are living human beings.
Steiner also pointed out that the living human being has three fundamental systems: the nerve-sense system, the heart-lung rhythmic system, and the metabolic-limb system. While each system has its different center, all three are also intimately inter-connected.
Our skin, for example, has three layers: 1. At the outer surface, the sense of touch. 2. At the inner layer metabolic or digestive activities arise, including elimination through the sweat glands. 3. Both systems are served by the rhythmic aspect, in the flow of blood, and if we recall Bardon, the pore-breathing of the light, which we do, even though not so consciously, in the present.
Tomberg wrote a master-work on the Law, which can be found in the book: “The Art of the Good”.
There is in most Nation States a kind of law-creation process. Each geographic area has its history in this regard. Most of us see quite clearly that politricks abuses this law-creation process for the benefit of the wealthy and the powerful.
In America, for example, there seem to be three types of laws, recognized by the Courts, who apply these laws. These are legislative, administrative (regulation), and stare decisis: or case – precedent – law made by judges.
The legislature can grant to smaller entities the power to work out details – which we call: regulations. In America, the Legislative Branch comes first in the Constitution, and has the most powers. The powers of the Executive Branch is laid out secondarily, and the powers of the Judicial Branch comes last.
Most people realize that our public life is controlled by wealth and power, and that
in today’s Way of Doing Business, the whole system is in gridlock. The political parties don’t work together, and perpetual chaos is the result. Unless, … you have enough money.
We really are midst the Dying and Becoming of “Western” Civilization. Because of this fact, expecting our public life to improve is a vain exercise in childish dreams. Rather, we face a time of coming anarchy, as things fall apart, and the center cannot hold. http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/lawspiritanarchy.html
The Rites of the Mother, via the plague and rogue weather, are transforming social life. Each human being is a ship at sea, drifting on currents we can hardly appreciate, yet many seek tea and company. The older ties of family and blood are giving way to what are essentially new kinds of tribes.
Students of social change notice that before major advancements arise, there is a period of chaos. The chaos is itself essential, the same way the organic chaos of the caterpillar – in its cocoon – has to happen before a butterfly can emerge.
Rudolf Steiner said that a near-god Ahriman would incarnate in this age. Keep in mind that we are the microcosm, as regards the Macrocosm, such that we too have such characteristic ahrimanic traits. To the extent that certain higher powers enter and form our shared existence, those thoughts and deeds come through us.
For details of his incarnation (he lives among us at the time I write this): https://thecollectiveimagination.com/2019/07/19/rovism/ and this:
https://thecollectiveimagination.com/2019/07/22/overcoming-rovism/
While much of reality is beyond our ability to change (gravity, for example), our social life is ours to heal. We are able to participate how we choose, if we even choose to do nothing. The best places to make changes are right in front of us, in the immediate day to day trials and tribulations.
Each person is in their allotted place, and the Mystery waits upon our choices. This does not exclude collective action.
An essential aspect to appreciate is that there is a Big Picture. We can have ideas and feelings about some individuals or groups, and wish they did not even exist. In this fact lies the hardest task of the meditating scholar. What exists has been approved by the Mystery. Not approved of, for karma and the afterlife are there for all, believers and non-believers alike.
The key was given to us in the Sermon on the Mount. “Judge not”.
Through us then, we get a materialistic science, rooted in numbers. Steiner spoke of the Ahrimanic deception, but I prefer to call this effect the Ahrimanic Enchantment. Under this influence we are meant not to see the world of Nature as having consciousness, but only as a soul-less thing.
The net effect, after about six centuries, is that we know more about death forces, than we do about life forces. We can take apart the world, but can’t make the world. As with atomic energy, we think of DNA, for example, as a mechanical processes, with mathematically established “laws”. We alter “genes” in our foods, and our selves, believing no other forces – such as life forces – need apply.
This is one of the reasons we are having so much trouble and confusion during this plague. Seeing the physical body as a thing, we remove the spiritual component, and fail to cure. Our “leaders”, in this trial, are epidemiologists, whose statistical arts are entirely numerical in nature, and as well are fundamentally guesses based on false and mechanical assumptions regarding the true nature of health and illness.
On a deeper spiritual level, we seem to be repeating the history of the legendary Atlantis. Our mechanistic Ways only give death, and She, who has the whole world in His Hands, is warning us via “Climate Change” that They can and might sweep the board clean, in order to reboot the new becoming civilization from the ground up.
We make atom bombs, and biological weapons, all of which are too dangerous to be allowed to continue their pointless and savage assault on the life sphere of the planet.
The Hopi Prophecy and oral history remembers Atlantis, when evil two-hearted people wrecked their way of life. “The inventive ones, clever but lacking wisdom, made many destructive things by which their lives were disrupted, and which threatened to destroy all the people.”
Details of my research are here: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/eldbr.html and here: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/twbhp.html
The leaders of the Hopi, as they fled the impending doom of Atlantis, involved two migrations. One into the Americas, where they were to travel as far West, North, East, and South, leaving behind rock writings and ruins so that they might not forget they once were a single people.
The priests of the Hopi advised that in the future a white race would appear and claim the land as their own, and as we know this has come to pass. They were also told that among these folks there would be the “true” white brother.
At one point I thought that Anthroposophy-folk might be this true white brother. Others expect this to be a single person. In the Prophecy this group is called: “Sun Clan, they are the children of the Sun”. My understanding of this as that at the time of the end of Atlantis, the Divine still lived in the Sun, a matter Steiner’s research points to as true.
In Christianity this Maker Being (or Beings) is worshiped today, having left the Spiritual Sphere of the Sun, to live as god becoming human, so as to die. In my research on this act of Christ was no so much about saving us, but rather Him having an experience of life and death, in matter, something He could not ask of us, if He didn’t do it Himself.
There are many Mysteries here, but the main one for this “part” is understanding that the Hopi expected the True White Brother, who was to be known by the Red Symbol, which was to take command of the Meha, the four forces of nature, for the benefit of the Sun.
At this moment the whole world would be in turmoil, having first lived through two world-wide wars, and then the third event (which may not happen) where the True White Brother intervenes and the last conflict is resolved in a good fashion.
We are in that Last Conflict, which the Hopi call: “The Day of Purification”. The keys riddle for me was, in what way would the True White Brother be “true”?
The answer that satisfies me the most, is that like the Hopi we would recognize – scientifically – the spirit in nature.
The Four Forces of Nature are the Ethereal Forces described by Steiner. The Red Symbol is the Rose Cross and the Sacred Heart, … that is, an amalgam of esoteric and exoteric Christianity. Given that the Anthroposophical Society has failed on so many levels, mostly due to karma, the Spirits of Inspiration influenced the ‘60’s awakening, a new age of Goddess worship, and as well the environmental movement, where Steiner and his students have provided important sources of understanding.
Goethean science, not much favored by A. Society leaders, is however the means for seeing the spirit in the processes of nature. The Bioneers annual meeting in mid-October is the much needed Michael Festival, which draws people from all over the world to share their work and understanding of the Being of Nature.
While the Hopi were also called the Younger Brother, those who went East instead of West were called the Elder Brother. In working with this idea, I came to see that the aboriginal and indigenous peoples of the Americas were at one with Nature, and their spiritual ideas also reveal them to be one with themselves.
As a consequence the Younger Brother worked at community building, rooted in ceremony. Meanwhile, according to Steiner, those who travel to the East, went to an area near the Gobi Desert, founding spiritual schools from which all the civilizations, which eventually gave birth to “Western” civilization, arose.
These developments were meant to develop the ego forces, the individuality of the human being, which is now at its apex. If we were to give a name to these different ways, to the West – from Atlantis – went the folk whose spiritual life fostered community, which can be symbolized by a circle. The ego forces, on the other hand, were cultivated by those who went East from Atlantis, leading toward the Not I, But Christ in me, symbolized by the cross.
Among the Hopi lore is the idea that for the right future, the circle and the cross must unite. They sometimes talk about the “broken stone tablets”, of which there are two pieces that can be made whole. There is a Hopi Symbol using a cross and five circles, which means: “Together with all nations we protect both land and life and hold the world in balance.”
We live in that yet to be created era. Also, among Hopi lore, is the idea we are the people for which we have been waiting.
Included in Hopi lore is the idea of the Red and Blue Kachinas. The Red spirit is Lucifer, and the Blue spirit is Ahriman. We live in a time of great ahrimanic excess, which means a luciferic counter-pull is required. For example, the Dionysian rite of the ‘60’s.
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/moon~%21~earth.html is a link to an essay: “Medicine Woman is Here”, which is about a remarkable film, and the coming future relationship with the Return of the Moon. In essence, it is about the offering of the Emerald Tablet to the Third Eye of Anthroposophia, matters which Tomberg and Bardon initiated at a very high, and deep, level.
In my research on the migrations following the Atlantean Catastrophe, there was a third group, which did not live in Atlantis. They were travelers, in both the realms of the waters, and of the air. Recent archaeological studies have established the existence of fifteen to thirty symbols that are the same in the most ancient cultures all over world.
The travelers wove the world together. They engaged in intermarriages, which explains some of the DNA riddles we discover, suggesting aboriginals came from strange places. Not knowing of Atlantis, or the migrations and traveler influences, research into DNA works from materialistic assumptions about how peoples’ DNA got from one distant place to another.
Far above, I wrote of people forming new tribes, as a means to survive the coming chaos. Some will migrate and settle, and with good fortune, they will practice ceremonies seeing the Earth as a living being. Others of the new tribes will keep traveling, again making possible the weaving together of our understanding of the spirit in the New Age. [see the movie: “Station Eleven”]
We are still in the chaos producing time, yet already we can observe travelers and re-settlers in vast movements all over the Earth. As “Climate Change” evolves, it is very likely that as many as 90% of the population will die, many grateful for the opportunity to sojourn in the After Life, not needing to return so quickly as been the case recently.
The population explosion exists because the possibilities for transformative experiences is quite special in our array of Nows.
Tomberg on the Law writes this way, which can be an important sequence of thought for meditation on any ideas:
1) there is the concept of law, a phenomenological approach …
2) the idea of law, an historical picture …
and
3) the essence of law, when the gaze of moral thought is directed at seeking the true nature of law [“The Art of the Good”].
As new communities arise, following a period of social chaos, we will still need “law” for organizing these shared trials into social order – out of Freedom (a renewed Cultural Life) we develop Equality (a renewed Political-Legal Life), which then gives birth to Brotherhood (a renewed Economic Life).
“The Meditating Scholar” part six … Merry Christmas
Wild Magic
A lot of the previous “parts” were to provide context. At this juncture it is necessary to consider the idea of personal Rites. It would be useful to the reader to make a list of the natural ritual of their day. Much of what we do day to day repeats itself. That ritual can be given various new self-chosen meanings.
The future includes an increase in what I call Wild Magic. People have different talents, and the Mother seems to intend to seed the coming transformations with such gifts. Today’s TV shows involve folk who “channel”, others who chase ghosts, some are called “mediums”, and of late there are the children who are remembering past lives. One of my Lady’s favorites involves people discovering “portals”, or “vortexes”.
Then there are the ideas of Ancient Alien Theorists, and the folk who have been abducted by beings from outer space. Included in Wild Talents are the folks like horse whisperers, and tht fellow in communion-with an octopus.
The Goddess Natura waits for us to come calling, and courting. Recently I ran into the word “manifesting”. As I understand that term, we can have/wish a causal effect on some future event. In looking back over my own life, I realized that what I “manifested” was more frequently realized if the thoughts were selfless, and other-directed.
I have for decades had an interest in films and books, especially if “magic” is an aspect of the tales. There seems to be two major types of activity, such as for example: the stories in the TV shows: Charmed, and/or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where the good “witches” fight off demons.
The other major type is horror movies, such as Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street. In these stories innocent people, especially children, get caught up in running from, and maybe turning and fighting, the most horrible troubles the film makers can imagine. We even have a name for some of this obscene bloodletting: “Slasher” movies.
In both these types, the vehicle is the fantastic imagination. The “fantastic imagination” is not rooted in actual phenomena, although many such works of “art” will say they are based on a true story. The real imagination plays a powerful role in knowledge, when we on purpose recreate in picture-thinking an experience as it unfolds over time.
We should not forget Madness.
I worked for several years on the “graveyard” shift at a for-profit behavioral (mental) hospital. There was a regular patient there, who had horrible hallucinations, which featured experiences/visions of blood and the voice of Charles Manson. One late night we were sitting in the quiet room, waiting for her meds to kick in, and talking about these apparitions, when the thought crossed my mind to suggest to her, … what if it was not Charles Manson you were meeting, but Robin Williams?
She said: “then people would think I really was crazy”, which had us both laughing for several moments.
I did have a patient for which demonic possession seemed the only explanation for his behavior. He came to us from a different hospital, who assured us he was just someone needing new meds, and given that his parents had some wealth (so they could pay the full cost), we admitted this young man. In reality it was a dump job, where the sending hospital lied us into accepting him.
The staff was gathering around him, because he would not take direction, and it looked like we might have to take him down, wrap him in a canvass and wooden restraint apparatus, and put him in the quiet room. As we approached, he grabbed at one woman staff member’s breast, and then as we got closer, he turned suddenly and struck another woman in the face. She was wearing glasses and the cuts required a trip to the ER – 12 stitches.
I sat with him in the quiet room for the rest of the night, and for several hours he struggled against the restraint, never still and mostly yelling at me what awful things he would do to me. We had the sheriffs come and take him away in shackles that morning.
I wrote a long essay on my experiences in mental health: “Healing the Insanity of Psychiatric Medicines and Practices” http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/mental.html One of the points I made in that essay was that we consider that some of the experiences of the Mad are real. How? Their fate was to have an abnormal relationship to the threshold between the material and spiritual worlds. In more ancient times, such folk were seen to be touched by the divine, and often became prophets.
A few years ago I began to think of our daily ritual/rites as a kind of Labyrinth. There is much sameness in our activities, yet each morning’s water rites, and rituals for eating, are never exactly the same in that day’s specifics.
I also thought about the thoughts that went with these rituals, and it seems workable to think of these repeating activities as united with a kind of Maze in the mind. Traps await those not paying attention.
We also make and unmake personal myths. We can be scientists of the spirit in how we look at these common experiences. Even though similar on the surface, the Labyrinth and the Maze vary each day, as well as being highly individualized.
One of the reasons the Maya counted days was that the primary cycle of life was the Day. Then there are the monthly and annual rituals. If you are a traditional anthroposophist, you recognize four seasonal periods of ritual activity: The Twelve Holy Nights at Christmas; the Seven Holy Days of Easter; St. John’s Tide (Summer Solstice); and, Michaelmas (the Autumn Equinox).
If you study a bit of Wicca, there are then eight ritual aspects to the year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel_of_the_Year As well, we have the twelve moons of the year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_moon
Rudolf Steiner produced what he called: “A Calendar of the Soul”, basically a weekly rhythm, with each week given poetic verses as to what is happening to the life of the Soul over the course of a year.
Most of the ideas connected to these weekly rhythms can be approached in two ways. One is to study them before, as if that can be a guide for our experience. I prefer to live the time periods I pick first, and then read the indications afterward. The point for me has been to feel what I actually feel, and develop that capacity without preconceptions.
Next is a sample complex Labyrinth, which I see as a kind of experimental structure, for being “scientific” is crucial, as long as we include art and religion. I don’t have to follow it, in large part because my experience is that setting goals makes more trouble than that should. A goal is something we can fail at. That fact is part of the reason we need to learn to live in the Now. What we need to do is to realize that to survive the day, the week, the month, and the year is itself a wonder:
do: (matins/2a.m.) 7 opi*
do-re: “I am the true Vine” … rhetoric … washing the feet>self-care
re: (lauds/sunrise) 7-8
re-mi: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life” … grammar … the scourging >meditation/research
mi: (prime/6a.m.) 8-11
mi-fa: “I am the Door” … logic … the crowning with thorns>writing
fa: (terce/9a.m.) 12-3
fa-sol: “I am the Bread of Life” … astronomy … the carrying the cross>THC*
sol: (sext/miday) 3-5
sol-la: “I am the Good Shepherd” … geometry … the crucifixion>hand art
la: (none/3p.m.) 5-8 opi*
la-ti: “I am the Light of the World” … arithmetic … the death>theoretic arithmetic
ti: (vespers/sunset) 8-9
ti-do: “I am the Resurrection and the Life” … music … the resurrection>singing and dancing
do: (compline/before retiring) 10
*On the seas of mortality, Intoxication is Medicine, … “opi” refers to the synthetic non-addictive opiate I take for my chronic knee pain, “THC” refers to the values of Marijuana as an antidote to the heavy foot of the threefold double complex – details here: “The Mystery of Evil in the Light of the Sermon on the Mount” http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/mysteryofevil.html
The numbers above approximate the actual time of my day, although the names come from the ritual practices of nuns and monks, usually called: The Rule, for each Order.
There are seven “I am” statements in the Gospel of John, and seven liberal arts, as well as seven stages of the Passion of Christ. The notes after the “>” are potential activities.
In an earlier “part”, I pointed out that the highest “Power” to seek is knowledge. We get fantastic uses of “powers” in film and television, whether it is Harry Potter, and the Marvel Avenger films. None of that is really possible.
In the Bardon places on Facebook, it is clear that some seek just that self important goal of powers. Should they really study his works, they would see a whole set of instructions for healing others, all of which can be done without being noticed. It is “Silence” that grants the highest “powers”. As to knowledge, that we can and ought to share.
I made a series of videos for YouTube: “On Becoming a Real Wizard”. In a sense, the word wizard is a stand-in for wise head and wise heart. A wizard seeks wisdom: aka knowledge, which is why I emphasize that the Meditating Scholar needs to learn to experience “Ideas”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBCW9MyliMM&list=PL4CAB86F6A9E5F238&ab_channel=JoelWendt
“In basic terms, Plato’s Theory of Forms asserts that the physical world is not really the ‘real’ world; instead, ultimate reality exists beyond our physical world. … The Forms are abstract, perfect, unchanging concepts or ideals that transcend time and space; they exist in the Realm of Forms.”
I have found that a good way to connect with the Goddess Natura is through communion-with so called “dead” trees. http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/GrandmotherTree.html
Nature is a whole, not parts, as even materialistic science is discovering. The root networks are thought to be a vehicle for the trees to exchange matter, and even some kind of knowing with each other. The mycelium network is huge, and gives us Mushrooms and their medicinal and spiritual effects.
“Mycelium is the vegetative part of a fungus or fungus-like bacterial colony, consisting of a mass of branching, thread-like hyphae. The mass of hyphae is sometimes called shiro, especially within the fairy ring fungi. Fungal colonies composed of mycelium are found in and on soil and many other substrates.” Wikipedia
A leader in this field is Paul Stamets. In the television show Star Trek Discovery, a new form of instantaneous stellar transportation is discovered, based on the whole universe being interconnected via Mycelium. The name of the lead scientist character on the show: Paul Stamets.
The hallucinogenic called “psilocybin” is a type of mycelium, and has been discovered to be very helpful to people needing to recover from severe trauma, and/or facing certain death through an incurable disease.
“Hemp, or industrial hemp, is a botanical class of Cannabis sativa cultivars grown specifically for industrial or medicinal use. It can be used to make a wide range of products. Along with bamboo, hemp is among the fastest growing plants on Earth.” Wikipedia
Folks who study old growth forests (never cut down, or otherwise altered), discover that in this free from human harm place, unusual organisms can be found, that do stuff like take apart the oil from oil spills, and can also transform such horrors as nerve gas.
The Goddess Natura is the original alchemist. Many of our “pollution” problems can be resolved if we open our heart’s mind to Her Magics. The curse of “dominion over”, from the Old Testament, that came to be when the wisdom of the Goddess was being abandoned, can now be healed through “communion-with”.
I had a vision one day, that the mycelium network was a physical manifestation of
the fully spiritual thought world … just as “water” is a physical manifestation of the spiritual nature of the life sphere.
In looking at the coming collapse of “civilization”, it seems highly likely that cities (huge concentrations of people) will fail, and that there will be migrations towards cultivatable open lands. For some, becoming a farmer (hemp and bamboo) will be just a way station. These latter folks will seek to return to the wild places, and become United with Them the Way aboriginal and indigenous peoples once lived.
If we were to appreciate the Mystery nature of the Covid Plague, we will see that scientific materialism (all is matter, there is no spirit) was not up to the task of dealing with this crisis. At the same time, for those who wish to work to manifest the defeat of scientific materialism, such a task should not be assumed to be impossible.
Around what Idea could ordinary humanity unite? In “part” seven, we will explore: If a Corporation can be a Person before the Law, then certainly a Planet can be a Person before the Law, a matter to be effected by a world-wide annual magical Rite: aka: Earth Day.
“The Meditating Scholar” part seven
We … are the Earth, …
… whether Scorpion or Rose, Wall-flower or High-Flier. I wrote a book about the power of “naming”: “The Father at Rest – magical and mystical dark-matter physics in the Age of Technological Chaos.”
We are not just the Earth, in a general sense, we are also an Organ of Meaning-Creation. Much that Is, cannot speak “human”, and we are to be Their Voice to each other. Tomberg writes that, while we can argue “today” that the Earth is not the material center of the Universe, it should be obvious, at a spiritual level, that the Earth is the Center of the Meaning of the Cosmos, for the Mystery Itself became “human”, followed us into matter, and then through the Gate of Death.
Where are those pesky advanced star-traveling civilizations scientific materialism insists must exist? The truth is that there is nothing for this fancied superior race to say, since we are its leading edge. When we lost the Goddess, that vast Intelligence went silent, and we erroneously felt ourselves to be the only entity – on the Earth – with an interior self-aware sentient conscientiousness.
So … if … we want Contact, like in all the wise mysteries, that answer has always been right in front of us.
It has also been obvious that the human being is wrecking the world. We can’t get along with each other, so it is no wonder that we don’t get along with the “being sentient” quality of the material world either.
Scientific materialism is the fouled soil of the current Plague. We are ignorant of Reality, and have made a religion that claims to be better than religion. When we deconstruct the ideas that came with the Covid Mystery, we will find that whole – allegedly scientific literature – is filled with theories: aka: systems of beliefs.
As a consequence, it is possible to wake up each morning filled instinctively with Rage, for all the chaos and death connected to the mistaken “idea” of this plague. As this madness continues, with no end in sight, we sense a wrongness which yet has no name. https://thecollectiveimagination.com/2021/12/27/occams-razor/
If we are parents or teachers, we know the dream life of our children is being raped by the makers of gloom and doom. At the same time we don’t have much choice – or time – but to trust authority, being too busy raising the children, and creating the wealth, to make the journey to the Emerald City, look behind the Media Curtain, and learn that the Wizard of Oz is a Fraud.
Who built the Emerald City? Who wrote the Emerald Tablet?
Dorothy is not alone. A friend, apparently without a heart, walks with her. As well, another friend, who seems to have no brain. All accompanied by a friendly appearing coward, as well as a dog, man’s best friend, who pulls the curtain aside.
The Lords of Finance ** think they rule, yet are powerless against Rogue Weather, Death, Music, and their own vanities and appetites.
** http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/Rebellion.html
Can a single Idea heal all?
If a Corporation can be a Person before the Law, then certainly a Planet can be a Person before the Law. There is Wild Magic around to aid in our quest for truth, and “The Art of the Good”. Ceremony keeps the world in balance, taught the Hopi.
America’s Shakespeare, David E. Kelley, is a great dramatist, who also does comedy. In his series “Picket Fences”, he would – in the first part of each episode – raise a deep social question; and, then frame it in such a way that its resolution involved a court of law, where opinions would be subject to cross examination, and well developed rules of evidence.
When the Covid Mystery first appeared, my original response was: Why do people trust the News, the Politicians, and Big Pharma? It is hard to imagine any other institutions with such a poor relationship with the truth.
I also knew that as this tragedy ran its course, the folks making up the faux meaning/picture of “plague”- if there is any justice – would end up in courts of law, where they were under oath to tell the truth, and had no wriggle room to assert their opinions amounted to knowledge of facts.
In “The Meditating Scholar”, part one, I told of how Divine Providence had led me to the works of Franz Bardon, and then to Rudolf Steiner, following which I made the acquaintance of Valentin Tomberg. Before that, in my early twenties, She led me to law school, where I got a Juris Doctor degree, became able to practice law in both Montana and Colorado, and spent half a year as a clerk on the Montana Supreme Court.
As I became aware of the historical dynamics, which led us to a “science” without spirit – a chief problem with the “plague” truths – there came a moment of inspiration, which was that it would be possible to take that fundamental dysfunction in “Western” Civilization, and – as in Picket Fences – into the Court of Public Opinion, via environmental lawsuits, where the “plaintiff” was the Earth Being, who needs us to advocate for Her, and ourselves, on the basis that if a Corporation can be a Person before a Court of Law, then surely a Planet can be a person before a Court of Law.
I began working out certain details here: “Shaman’s Law Firm”: https://thecollectiveimagination.com/shamans-law-firm/
The main issue is the validity of scientific materialism, which had its moment in history, and now needs to be overcome.
An essential point is that it is not necessary to seek to “win” such a suit, where the plaintiff is the Planet. It is important that people get to decide such a game-changing riddle for themselves. The lawsuits are for the purpose of waking up the general public to the Mystery – i.e. we seek to inform the Court of Public Opinion, and then trust their individual judgments.
Understanding Ritual, I also could see that Earth Day already existed, and that law suits could be filed on that day, annually. The defendants in the law suits are those institutions that place wealth before the public good. There are environmental activists all over the world, and were these to collectively begin to file such suits – first just a few, and then many – we help the world wake up to the limits of scientific materialism.
We change the conversation to the core problem of knowledge – asserting that spirit is real, and has its place in how we live together and manage (be stewards of) the life sphere of the Planet, on which all who live depend.
Some readers of this will be aware that when a suit is filed, the defendant can make a “motion to dismiss”. At this point we find ourselves with the question: What evidence does there exist that “spirit” is real?
We have to offer some, and in that offering the public will become aware of what I call: “New Gospels of the Second Becoming of Christ”. Most of these materials are rooted in Goethean Science, which while hardly known on a wide scale today, that was also the situation when Natural Philosophy first appeared five to six hundred years ago. That appearance was called the Copernican Revolution, and at the time of Galileo and others, these thinkers were at war with the dominate religion at that time – Roman Catholicism, and few knew those ideas existed.
As Natural Philosophy became unnatural science, it traveled a path of seeking the smallest bits of stuff, on the assumption that from such the world is formed. In addition, to be an acceptable “scientific” fact required something that can be counted and measured.
In philosophy of psychology corners of our shared investigations, it is recognized that most of our actual experience is “qualia”, such as the taste of a pickle, or the sigh we make as the sun sets. None of this can be counted or measured, so we get unnatural science which only trusts the quantitative, and not the qualitative. In the Pandemic this blindness led medical unnatural science to ignore these spiritual qualities: Stress, Sensitivity, Will to live, and the immune system, whose better “name” is the Wisdom of the Body.
Some thinkers resisted those tendencies, so we could say there has come to exist a Counter-Copernican Revolution, including the qualitative, beginning with the Romantic Movement in Europe, followed by the Transcendentalists in America, and then the works of Bardon, Steiner, and Tomberg, which are fully “scientific” in their nature, although currently little known.
These New Gospels can be offered into evidence, in response to a motion to dismiss. They can even be mentioned in the original pleadings, and the question of the truth in these regards is now firmly before the Court of Public Opinion, whether or not the motion is granted.
Another worthwhile tactic is to subpoena witnesses. Usually one puts on one’s own witnesses and leave to the defense to offer its knights in scientific armor. That does not preclude us from calling these witnesses ourselves, when we present our case in chief. Such as Fauci, and other dominate figures, can be subpoenaed, to appear before the defense calls them. When they are reluctant, we can ask the judge to declare them hostile witnesses, which allows us to ask leading questions.
That is, … it becomes News, and is a narrative we control, which is the goal. https://thecollectiveimagination.com/2021/10/13/new-gospels-of-the-second-becoming-of-christ/
With justice, some folks will wonder about the use of the word Christ, and the inference that somehow that “religion” is superior to the others. Keeping in mind that we decide the meaning, that comes from “naming”; and, when I use the word Christ I do not use it in the Way many religious folks mean today.
To me “Christ” is just another name for the Maker, the Creator, that which “Fathers” existence on all levels. Each ancient religion has their idea of the Maker, and when I refer to the Gospels of the Second Becoming of the Creator, I mean to include all the related historical “names”.
The prior “name” of the Maker, as it appears historically, always arises in a particular context – in a specific region of the Earth, and among certain different types of Peoples. We confuse ourselves when we think that each “religion” is an artifact, which scientific materialism considers to be various Ways of Belief.
We really only begin to grasp the Reality, when we accept that each “name” refers to the same Immortal Being. While today’s science, and its acolytes, try to dominate thinking in this regard, for the most part that science makes this grave assumption: that it – today’s “science” – is the first rational investigator of the nature of “consciousness”.
To this unnatural science, The Way of the Tao, Yoga, Sufism, ancient Egyptian Hermetic Science, Alchemy, Rosicrucianism, and so forth, are false explanations of Reality, done by people who mistook the world for a Divine Mystery, rather than a knowable and predictable mechanical system.
The main religious ideas of unnatural science, such as the Big Bang, and Neo-Darwinism, in a rather clever fashion, take the underlying perceptual issues, and ignore them by inventing (naming them) inviolate; and, what is worse, the serious questions are actually shoved off of the board of matters/riddles needing careful investigation.
Rupert Sheldrake** remarks that this incomplete science asks that if we just give them one “miracle” (the Big Bang), they can then explain all the rest. Scientists are “priests” of a religion, which is not so much wrong, as it is unfinished. Reality is Matter And Spirit. ** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKHUaNAxsTg&ab_channel=JamesDeardenBush
In the hands of humans, each “religion” tries to assert primacy of understanding. My God is more bad-ass than your god. For the scientist/priest, their gods are random chance and accident.
The long term reality is that we are ourselves meant to create our own “religion”. Bardon, in his section on Theory, writes of the God Idea as if that was personal as well.
Meditating playfully **, on our personal “idea” of God – the Divine Mystery, is an important quality for self-understanding. ** “concentration without effort”.
Besides Bardon, Tomberg, and Steiner, who were basically 20th Century sages, there exist, in the place they did not go – the Americas – three other 21st Century – personalities, who might as well be called Shamans, given their alliance with, and devotion to, the Mother.
Europe tends to be a place where the soul leans in the direction of a kind of idealism: “the best Way is the purist Way”, In the Americas, “the best Way is the Way that works.”
In the article on the New Gospels, I describe Catherine MacCoun’s work: “On Becoming an Alchemist – a guide for the modern magician”, a gospel of soul. I describe Stephen Clarke’s works as a gospel of the Mother.
Stephen, for what ever reasons, doesn’t make books, although in the New Gospels article are several links to amazing writings, for example: https://thecollectiveimagination.com/2021/04/06/bob-dylan-and-an-initiatory-tradition-in-popular-culture-by-stephen-clarke/
My book, which is a gospel of the Second Becoming – “the Way of the Fool”, goes with: “The Art of God – an actual theory of Everything” as a gospel of human social and political life.
What makes something “a” (not “the”) gospel is that those who write/share such works are having awake meetings with Christ (the Maker), in the ethereal realm, aka: the world of thought. And, She who has the whole world in His Hands, is available as well to what deserves to be called: “the heart’s mind”.
During playful meditation on Ideas, we are in this realm already. Given that this occurs in our own “soul”, every aspect is right in front of us. Only we get to give meaning to “our” life. And, when wrestling with a moral dilemma, we create the true and the good, as that works for us.
This is not easy, given that the “right thing to do” is often the hardest thing to do. All the same, the choice is ours, a private act, which is why the Maker’s advice is to pray/meditate in private.
Here is a little “trick” … when you speak to the Mystery in private, speak out loud. Even a whisper works. While you speak aloud, in the own heart’s mind the reply will be heard, such as it were. The existential nature of the “reply” occurs almost simultaneously with our whisper, which helps us recognize that a real spiritual dialogue is happening. If we need ideas, or such, there will be words. If we need nurturing, the response may be a feeling.
In Tomberg’s way of looking at this, he observes that the “office of our personal angel” serves as an intermediary with the deeper Mystery. The “wings” are a symbol of a kind of respiration between our spirit and the greater Spirit … a movement where the guardian angel takes our prayers to Him and Her, as needed by the situation, and then returns with the “answer”.
There is one last, and not least, point … regarding the question of the nature of time. We are acclimated by our cultures to see time as a linear experience. Yet, in the spiritual world time is simultaneous, not linear, for the Mystery lives outside time and space. All is Now.
Sages, such as Steiner, can meditate on the patterns of the present, and with thinking imagine that they can speak of the past and future in a scientific fashion, aka: the so-called “Akashic Chronicles”, because the pattern of the present “speaks” qualitatively of its originating roots, and its pending flowers.
William Gibson, whose artistic genius coined the term: Cyberspace, also writes of what is called “pattern recognition”, which we all posses via having the “imagination”. We use this faculty semi-consciously, and with playful self-training the practice can become a quite useful skill, keeping in mind the idea of concentration without effort.
Another brilliant writer (miss-described as a writer of science fiction) is Frank Herbert, the author of a series of novels that began with “Dune”. Many of his characters do “pattern recognition”, and these six books are a sound imaginary dissertation on a skill we all can grow into a Way of Perception.
Decisions are in the Now, and reacted to in the Now, by Beings not bound to space and time. This axis of time-qualities solves the problem of apparent conflict between destiny/fate, and free will.
They are everywhere/when, a kind of womb for our free will … we choose, the Mystery nurtures.
At the midnight hour – in between lives – we make a work of art, a kind of mandala of linear time, which as we descend into life its memory fades (like the destiny of Tibetan sand paintings), and our higher self surrenders to the mystery of the marriage of higher and lower natures = puzzle …. the light of the ideal – the Sun – and the fire of the appetites – the Moon and the Earth.
“The terms “red pill” and “blue pill” refer to a choice between the willingness to learn a potentially unsettling or life-changing truth by taking the red pill or remaining in contented ignorance with the blue pill. The terms refer to a scene in the 1999 film The Matrix.” Wikipedia.
Some readers may recall, that in an earlier “part” I referred to the Hopi image of the Red and Blue Kachinas. I wrote of the Blue Kachina as Ahriman, in whose grip – “scientific materialism” – we now live. To counter that “weight” we need Lucifer, who tempts us to intoxication, and the unearthly life in the Dreaming.
When the Mother’s mycelium network of medicinal substances are applied, this frees the soul and spirit from the dread of materialism. We find, through these magic mushrooms, that there is a light filled world, where the excessive gravitas (weight) of earthly life passes away, and we know that we too are mystery and immortal, with brothers and sisters such as animal and plant spirits, and guiding friends like Planets and Stars.
With our freedom we become then a kind of individual and unique rogue genius in action. The Meditating Scholar plays with ideas, and the Ideas play with us.
Appendixes
Group-play:
If a single person was to purchase all the books that could be bought, that are mentioned above, we are talking of costs on the range of several hundreds of dollars. If we form a “study group”, we can share the cost.
Steiner students pioneered such a way of study, although by confining themselves to Steiner all the time Steiner, they produce a one-sided religion, which could be called “Steinerism”. Steiner himself showed the Way around this, by describing what he called the “reverse cultus”.
The ordinary “cultus”, such as the ceremonial Rites of one or another religion, have the effect of drawing down/near Beings of the Ideas, with which we seek intercourse. This “contact” is largely semi-conscious. We go to church, and end up with a good “feeling”, and a renewed sense of fellowship.
In the “reverse cultus”, the circle of playful conversation rises up, together, where we become more conscious of That which also seeks contact. The idea, of this kind of shared play-with-ideas, has subtle aspects, and details can be found here: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/reversecultus.html
A principle aspect is that no one is to be seen as “knowing better” than others. As the conversation proceeds, the “spirit” moves from one to another, each encouraged to share what is on their heart’s mind. The totality of the conversation then enables the whole group to rise into “contact”, yet each in their own personal Way.
The Covid Mystery:
Most of us are aware of what might be called the Official Narrative. What is next are three statements, by different authors, regarding various questions and points of view.
It is not the point to engage in “argument”. Rather these are offered as a kind of practical work for the developing capacity to play with ideas, and do our own version of “pattern recognition”.
These papers are just ideas. At the same time, ideas can be wrong, and if the reader wants personal freedom, it will not hurt to playfully engage the thinking of others, because the next years may involve an unraveling of the Official Narrative, a difficult task for both the individuals and the communities with which we ourselves participate.
I should add, for those readers familiar with the Effects of Divine Providence on our lives, that while I was writing this book, these three papers spontaneously appeared on my Facebook feed within the last 30 days. I instinctively saved their files, but only thought to include them in this Way after I finished my last review of this book.
Professor Udi Qimron, Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University,
wrote this letter.
Ministry of Health, it’s time to admit failure
In the end, the truth will always be revealed, and the truth about the coronavirus policy is beginning to be revealed. When the destructive concepts collapse one by one, there is nothing left but to tell the experts who led the management of the pandemic – we told you so.
Two years late, you finally realize that a respiratory virus cannot be defeated and that any such attempt is doomed to fail. You do not admit it, because you have admitted almost no mistake in the last two years, but in retrospect it is clear that you have failed miserably in almost all of your actions, and even the media is already having a hard time covering your shame.
You refused to admit that the infection comes in waves that fade by themselves, despite years of observations and scientific knowledge. You insisted on attributing every decline of a wave solely to your actions, and so through false propaganda “you overcame the plague.” And again you defeated it, and again and again and again.
You refused to admit that mass testing is ineffective, despite your own contingency plans explicitly stating so (“Pandemic Influenza Health System Preparedness Plan, 2007”, p. 26).
You refused to admit that recovery is more protective than a vaccine, despite previous knowledge and observations showing that non-recovered vaccinated people are more likely to be infected than recovered people. You refused to admit that the vaccinated are contagious despite the observations. Based on this, you hoped to achieve herd immunity by vaccination — and you failed in that as well.
You insisted on ignoring the fact that the disease is dozens of times more dangerous for risk groups and older adults, than for young people who are not in risk groups, despite the knowledge that came from China as early as 2020.
You refused to adopt the “Barrington Declaration”, signed by more than 60,000 scientists and medical professionals, or other common sense programs. You chose to ridicule, slander, distort and discredit them. Instead of the right programs and people, you have chosen professionals who lack relevant training for pandemic management (physicists as chief government advisers, veterinarians, security officers, media personnel, and so on).
You have not set up an effective system for reporting side effects from the vaccines, and reports on side effects have even been deleted from your Facebook page. Doctors avoid linking side effects to the vaccine, lest you persecute them as you did with some of their colleagues. You have ignored many reports of changes in menstrual intensity and menstrual cycle times. You hid data that allows for objective and proper research (for example, you removed the data on passengers at Ben Gurion Airport). Instead, you chose to publish non-objective articles together with senior Pfizer executives on the effectiveness and safety of vaccines.
Irreversible damage to trust:
However, from the heights of your hubris, you have also ignored the fact that in the end the truth will be revealed. And it begins to be revealed. The truth is that you have brought the public’s trust in you to an unprecedented low, and you have eroded your status as a source of authority. The truth is that you have burned hundreds of billions of shekels to no avail – for publishing intimidation, for ineffective tests, for destructive lockdowns and for disrupting the routine of life in the last two years.
You have destroyed the education of our children and their future. You made children feel guilty, scared, smoke, drink, get addicted, drop out, and quarrel, as school principals around the country attest. You have harmed livelihoods, the economy, human rights, mental health and physical health.
You slandered colleagues who did not surrender to you, you turned the people against each other, divided society and polarized the discourse. You branded, without any scientific basis, people who chose not to get vaccinated as enemies of the public and as spreaders of disease. You promote, in an unprecedented way, a draconian policy of discrimination, denial of rights and selection of people, including children, for their medical choice. A selection that lacks any epidemiological justification.
When you compare the destructive policies you are pursuing with the sane policies of some other countries — you can clearly see that the destruction you have caused has only added victims beyond the vulnerable to the virus. The economy you ruined, the unemployed you caused, and the children whose education you destroyed — they are the surplus victims as a result of your own actions only.
There is currently no medical emergency, but you have been cultivating such a condition for two years now because of lust for power, budgets and control. The only emergency now is that you still set policies and hold huge budgets for propaganda and psychological engineering instead of directing them to strengthen the health care system.
This emergency must stop
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Coronavirus
The Coronavirus is the joker in the game, it’s a game changer. Virus are not alive, neither is it dead material. It’s in a state in the middle between the physical and the plant, the etheric. Outside a cell it’s potential life, inside a cell it becomes living as result of the life in the cell. When people become deadly sick by this virus the physical body and etheric body is loosened from each other, we are not bound to the physical world as much, we become less materialistic, we hear the inspirations from the spiritual world much better. The virus can be very aggressive, and for those who survive it’s aggressive form, the etheric body and physical body have been loosened as if by a scalpel. Sickness, accidents or strong shock may separate the physical and etheric body, and this makes us less materialistic, we are also less prone creating new karma, and we are more open to inspirations from the spiritual. Rudolf Steiner has described how Goethe was sick and how it changed his connection to the spiritual world.
From “The Karma of Vocation” – On Goethe
”With Goethe, this force of soul became even stronger, and yet he lived to an advanced age. What enabled him to live so long? You will recall that I reminded you yesterday of a fact that intervened significantly in Goethe’s life.. After he had spent some years in Leipzig as a student, he became seriously ill and stood face to face with death. He virtually looked death in the face. This illness is, to be sure, a natural phenomenon in the organism. However, we never learn to understand a man who creates out of the elemental forces of the world — indeed, we never learn really to understand any man — unless we take into consideration such events in the course of his karma. What really happened to Goethe when he became ill in Leipzig? We may describe it as a complete loosening of the etheric body in which the life forces of the soul had been active until then. It was loosened to such an extent that, after this illness, he no longer had that closely knit connection between the etheric and the physical bodies that he had formerly possessed. The etheric body, however, is the supersensible member in us that really makes it possible to form concepts, to think. Abstract concepts such as we have in ordinary life, the only concepts that are approved by most persons who are materialistically disposed, come about through the fact that the etheric body is, as it were, closely united with the physical by a strong magnetic union. It is also through this fact that we possess a strong impulse to project our will into the physical world, that is, provided the astral body is strongly developed. In the case of Robespierre, Mirabeau and Danton, we have an etheric body strongly united with the physical but also a powerfully developed astral body. This works, in turn, upon the etheric body, which establishes these human individualities strongly in the physical world. Goethe was also organized like this, but another force now worked in him and brought about a complication. The result was that the etheric body was loosened and remained so through the illness that had brought him to the point of death. When the etheric body is no longer so intimately united with the physical body, however, it no longer thrusts its forces into the physical but retains them. This explains the transformation Goethe passed through when he returned to Frankfurt. There, during his acquaintance with Fräulein von Klettenberg, the mystic, and with various medical friends who were devoted to studies in alchemy, and through the writings of Swedenborg, he really developed a systematic spiritual world conception. It was still somewhat chaotic, but nevertheless a systematic spiritual world conception, and he was profoundly inclined to occupy himself with supersensible things.
…
Here we see how a natural event seems to enter with immense significance into the life of a human being. Undoubtedly, it points to a deeper interrelationship than the one the biographers generally wish to reveal. The significance of an illness to a man cannot be explained on the basis of hereditary tendencies but rather points to the connection between a man and the world in such a way that this relationship must be conceived spiritually. You will note also how Goethe’s life was thus complicated; such experiences determine how we take things in and what we are ourselves.” Jordan Peterson, who have a strong presence in the physical world, have been near death, and it seems his heart have opened up, I expect much from his side. I have two friends who have gone or are going through the sickness, and there is for the one a stronger personal presence and for the other a deeper clairvoyance than before the sickness. A journalist who after the sickness wasn’t satisfied with his previous job, may also be an indication of an awakening, that their connection to the material world has lessened.
Steiner describes the epidemics of bacillus as the result of a won battle by the higher powers over the Ahrimanic beings who were thrown down on earth (Battle between Michael and Ahriman.) Is the Coronavirus the result of the returned Christ winning over the Asuras?
Source: http://work.tree-of-life.dk/astrological_living_cycle_of_earth.html
***************
Diana C. Pink
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“When we realize that in the worst epidemics only a proportion of those exposed to infection are attacked and that, as we have already seen, the real cause of disease lies in our own personality and is within our control, then have we reason to go about without dread and fearless, knowing that the remedy lies with ourselves.” – Heal Thyself ~ Dr. Edward Bach
~!~!~!~!~!~!~
China’s Fusion Super-Reactor
Green Energy Or Lethal Weapon? Or the Sun Demon forces?
Hailed as an “artificial sun” by the Chinese news media, a record-setting plasma energy experiment was a triumphant statement from the EAST (Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak) energy laboratory in Hefei, Anhui Province, in east-central China, east of Nanjing. On December 30, the national fusion-energy program accelerated particles of tritium and deuterium (heavy water sourced from the coolant water of conventional nuclear reactors) inside a toroid or ring-shaped vacuum raceway, called from its Russian origin a “tokamak”.
To prevent the gigantic apparatus from melting down, high-charged electromagnets herd the particle flow through the hollow center of the tokamak, while permitting some of the deuterium to slam into the lithium lining (called a blanket) to create added tritium for the fusion process. By quickening the pulsations along the magnetic ring, the repulsive electric energy that keeps each single-nuclear particle intact is gradually overcome by rising heat and the thrust of acceleration.
At super high speeds, electron bonds that surround the nuclei start to weaken. Think of how that snug-fitting cap is blown off your head when the bicycle gets up to full speed and your hair is tousled in the human-powered “wind”. At that critical moment, the attraction between the two nuclei enables their fusion, creating a particle of helium (a cluster of two nuclei with two electrons). The surplus material is ejected as high-energy neutron, plus various fragments of subatomic detritus. This transformation releases surplus energy, which manifests as intense heat.
As reported by the EAST team, practically unthinkable temperatures were attained, up to five times hotter than the interior of the Sun, or 158 million degrees Fahrenheit (70 million Celsius) for a record-setting 17 minutes. That’s enough raw power to light up Beijing, Shanghai, New York City and Hollywood on a cold dark evening. It’s even hotter than the heat wave of a nuclear bomb explosion.
Forget solar panels, wind turbines, geothermal, salt ponds, these being yesteryear’s green energy sources; goodbye coal, oil, gas and fireplace logs, because nearly limitless energy will soon be available once EAST in China and ITER in France tweak the bugs out of their super-duper fusion machines. That’s if slight errors in calculation don’t cause a meltdown leaving gigantic smoking holes in the ground in Hefei and Marseille. The fusion scientists assure us that accidents can never happen, in the same vein as the famous last words uttered inside Fukushima No.1.
Being a retro techno philosopher of the liberal arts and journalistic freelancer after leaving behind organic chemistry ambitions at the welcome mat of Eli Lilly, I prefer to have real sunshine tanning my back on a remote island faraway from Fukushima, Hefei and Marseille and other radioactive hot spots. (Despite “scientific” claims that fusion energy doesn’t emit radioactivity, any grade-school kid should should know by now, after the meltdowns at Chernobyl and Fukushima, that the half-life of tritium is 7 years and deuterium should not be swallowed with the fresh water from mountain streams at the risk of internal damage.)
Men or Machines
Excuse me for being a skeptic, but I smell a fried rat in the tokamak. This tendency of mine to be a techno-naysayer arose from a boyhood visit to the aircraft carrier USS Ranger in the early 1960s, the flagship at that time of the 7th Fleet parked outside Yokosuka Bay. The fleet commander, a vice admiral dressed in natty naval white, discussed the China Straits crisis and that new little conflict to the south in a remote place called Vietnam. My stepfather was a Defense Department official, who espoused carpet-bombing by B-52s, aerial dispersion of defoliants to remove forest cover over troop formations, electronic sensors for robotic guns along jungle trails, and dropping dozens of H-bombs over Hanoi, Shanghai, Beijing and Pyongyang as “the best solution to the problem”. Leave to machines to get the job done, while our troops sit back and enjoy a beer.
The admiral smiled at those ready-made pipe-dreams, replying with the question: “Are wars won by weapons or men?” His point was that all the super-technology in the world cannot defeat the resilience and creativity of human intelligence and the sheer stubborn determination, guts, of local citizens anywhere to rid one’s native soil of foreign occupation. He asked, “Remember how in the American Revolution, John Paul Jones took on the Royal Navy?”
After twenty years of grinding combat, disease and self-inflicted horrors, the admiral proved correct, as the last helicopter hastily fluttered off the roof of the American Embassy in Vietnam. Too must trust is placed on science and technology because we are too lazy to do the necessary work and too scared to make the ultimate sacrifice. Patriotism is about summoning up the personal will power whatever the risks.
The Three Kingdoms
Technology and science cannot answer the fundamental issues that determine the human condition. So how does this maxim apply to the new Chinese “artificial sun” circling mindlessly inside a magnetic racetrack?
First, let’s look back on the military-techological past of China, specifically during the Three Kingdoms era (220-280 AD), as exemplified in the genius of Zhuge Liang (Chuko Liang), whose wizardry at pyrotechnics, robotics, psychological warfare aka deception, and convoluted tactics are legendary, as depicted in the John Woo movie “Red Cliff”. The wizard of Shu devised a vast maze with fake trails and by landscape modification to the rugged terrain on the approach to the Kingdom of Shu (located in The Third Line region of southwest China, today with its research center for fusion energy in Chengdu).
As the innumerable soldiers of northern warlord Cao Cao advanced ever-closer toward Shu, after stunning defeats masterminded by Zhuge Liang, these northern invaders encountered an army of robotic puppets and then zombies who were impervious to arrows and slashing swords. (It is still debated whether these zoned-out warriors were opiate-drugged prisoners or near-dead wounded soldiers resuscitated with herbal medication. Despite those astounding innovations, the better trained and highly motivated manpower of the North won the final battle to win the contest.
Which gets to the point, that fusion power, along with most types of “green energy”, is essentially a means to fuel novel super-weapons rather than serving as a mere substitute for oil, coal or wood to warm your bathtub on cold nights. Why, after all, would the PRC, a country with low average personal income of about $12,000 and a network of energy pipelines from Central Asia and the Andaman Sea, be spending $1 trillion on fusion, a yet to be proven reliable energy source?
Myth for Military Cover
There are other examples of how myth cloaks military technology, for instance that shadowy rabbit up in the sky, visible in the glow of moonlight. Partly due to the fantastical folktale of the hare on the Moon who befriends a Chinese princess exiled on that desolate space-rock, Chinese officialdom has an obsessive fixation with setting up lunar bases connected by lunar rovers. The charming tale can be expected to sway public opinion among a rather naive Chinese populace, when the logic of realpolitik lis more calculating, specifically in terms of Earth observation and gravitational tug. The Moon serves an excellent platform for tracking the U.S. Space Command’s satellites and airships hovering over China proper, and targeting these irritating intruders for destruction with high-energy beam weapons stationed on Luna.
The “artificial Sun” meme likewise has proven effective on swaying mass psychology, given the crowd of tourists who gathered on a ridge overlooking the EAST tokamak in the chill of dawn to capture the sunrise on their phone cameras. Never mind frostbit toes or neutron bombardment of their brain cells. The weather report for that clear morning was ideal for a propaganda blitz about an “artificial sun”. It all goes to show there is no literary genre more deceptive and sinister than science fiction, for example Jedi mind-control techniques in Star Wars or Orson Wells and Ron Hubbard’s cynical exploitation of mass hysteria and paranoia over a soon-arriving alien invasion. These menacing tropes are a call to action for pilots to steer into suicide runs and taxation for improved aircraft. As stated by Wells in “The War of the Worlds”: “By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the Earth, and it is his against all comers.” Wall Street would not disagree. Space fantasies, like the tales of ancient gods, are aimed at Earth-bound populations to wage brutal wars and massacres over control of earthly resources.
Back to the Good Earth, besides the fusion reactor at EAST lab (Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak) in Anhui. Two other fusion units are operated by the Southwestern Institute of Physics (SWIP) at Chengdu, Sichuan Province, and J-TEXT located at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan. Despite the official claim that China’s independent plasma research findings will be of great benefit to the European-led ITER project (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor), now under construction in southern France, the massive budget allocated by the Beijing leadership for fusion energy indicates an unmentionable military-strategic objective of global geopolitical consequence.
Enter the Dragon
The astounding success of the EAST “artificial sun” test may imply that, with next-step development of an even more powerful electromagnetic accelerator, China could become the first great power to deploy a plasma-weapons platform with global range after engineering a linear accelerator for the front end of a plasma cannon. Given its potential to annihilate bomber fleets, naval armadas, vaporize missiles in flight, destroy spaceships, slip through tunnels to toast underground bunkers, and annihilate metropolises and even smaller nations, the “fire-breathing dragon” of plasma weaponry is the much-anticipated “super-weapon” that will ensure its operator permanent global domination over cowed rivals and fearful subject nations. That is until someone creates a super-duper fire extinguisher.
The Beast slouches toward Bethlehem in our brief allotted time. Fusion promises all the destructive power of the raging Dragon in the Book of Revelations, but unfortunately we contemporaries have long forgotten the secret code aka prayer to summon that sword-wielding alien, Michael the Angel, to come to our rescue. When faced with dragon-fire, you are absolutely on your lonesome own, which is the great realization that’s already arrived as COVID verges into Year 3.
As for the dragon’s nest in Chengdu-Sichuan, located inside The Third Line, that region has been the center of China’s defense technology research, weapons production, aircraft design and space-exploration technology since the days of Chairman Mao.
The Third Line
The propaganda value from China’s latest usurpation of world scientific leadership emerges in a global military-political context, which should not be lost on its fast-diminishing rival and clown, Joe Biden. Hefei, along with the more noteworthy Chengdu municipality in Sichuan Province, have been directly connected with research and production of military technology over the past seven decades, most of it under tight state secrecy since the early years of the Sino-Soviet split from the early 1960s through to the collapse of the Soviet Union and since.
Back in the early 1950s, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was hard pressed between the U.S. 7th Fleet prowling the Taiwan Strait and secret dispatch of military advisers to Vietnam, while a newly hostile Soviet Red Army massed along Chinia’s western and northern borders. To avert enemy capture of China’s second-rate and puny armaments industry, Chairman Mao ordered the PLA to begin construction of a military-industrial complex along “The Third Line” in the rugged mountainous terrain of Southwest China, bordered by Burma and the Tibetan autonomous region.
Laying rail for transport in and out of that remote region meant drilling and digging by hand hundreds of tunnels, a monumental achievement. Tunneling became a routine task for the Chinese military for protection against bombing runs and also concealment from U-2 spy planes and earth-observation satellites. Vast sectors of the armaments industry, along with nuclear power plants, were concealed from aerial surveillance inside underground tunnels and caverns, under the Chairman’s maxim to “dig tunnels deep.” The spy novel “Decoded” about code-breaking by author Ma Jia offers a rare look into the military-industrial complex of that era.
This inland industrial complex has more recently enjoyed a revival as a center for production and testing of military aircraft, assault vehicles, satellite communication systems, short-range rockets, ballistic missiles and manned spaceships. The region also became the center for nuclear reactors for producing H-bombs, despite a serious catastrophe in . In additional, rocket launch sites are installed further west in Gansu and Qinghai Provinces. The majority of atomic-bomb complexes were concealed under the mountains alongside the Beichuan Valley in Sichuan, but were destroyed by the powerful Richter 8.0-plus Sichuan Earthquake of 2008.
Natural Disaster as a Spoiler
In an aside, let me mention that at the time I was involved in mountain environment projects with Amdo Tibetan yak-herding families in far eastern edge Sichuan Province. On a much-delayed flight out of Chengdu, the Russian-made watch on my left wrist, which contained a tiny Geiger counter, bleeped wildly, picking up four huge radioactivity releases over the Beichuan Valley, indicating nuclear leakages free-flowing out of quake-destroyed reactors. Upon landing in the yak-herding region, the Geiger watch indicated that the small rural runway had also become contaminated from plutonium particles scooped up in the small jet engines. In the chaotic emergency response to the remote earthquake, the rescue organized had overlooked the possibility of extensive damage to the nuclear facilities.
Earlier, during the 2001 UN Year of the Mountain, I had attended an eco-conference in the Altai mountains at the juncture of the borders of China, Russia, Kazakhstan and Mongolia, and there met Kazakh Professor A. Sarsenbaev, who had been planting trees along rivers to “phyto-remediate”, that is, to remove the radioactive mine tailings left by Stalin’s secret atomic energy project, which prompted the Kremlin to occupy the Chinese Altai region to extract uranium for the first Soviet A-bomb. (This gripping tale is retold in Thomas Laird’s book about U.S. consul-general to Sichuan Douglas MacKiernan “Into Tibet: The first CIA spy killed in action”.)
The Kazakh professor and I happened to visit a local mine in Burjin, downhill from the conference, where various types of boron-rich minerals were being excavated for use as a shield against radioactive emissions at long-contaminated mining and very messy processing sites. As an unintended result, during the Sichuan nuclear horrors, I managed to inform the Science Ministry about this tried-and-proven source of boron for helicopter-drops onto the ruined reactors in Sichuan, just in time to prevent wider mass exposure during the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. While some foreign foes of Olympic events in China may curse me for trying to save human lives, as far as I’m concerned there are no political or cultural boundaries when it comes to the radioactivity threat to our frail bodies, regardless of nationality, since we are all vulnerable and naked before its lethality.
The point of this diversion is that high-risk new techologies are difficult to design and build, but can be even harder to suppress or remediate when things go badly wrong, bioengineered coronavirus being another case in point. As proven time and again, no so-called experts are going to step forward to inform you about remedial action or even the need to evacuate. The scientists and doctors simply write off their victims as dead meat. Before fantasizing over the potential applications of fusion power and its byproducts, national planners and scientist should consider the unintended consequences of technology failure, for instance, a potential meltdown of fusion reactors, despite all the calm assurances from the high priests of nuclear science. Remember Chernobyl, Fukushima and more recently that leaking Taishan reactor near Hong Kong and Guangdong. The human genome is in all probability is going extinct faster than slower, so your chances of survival are shrinking rapidly.
The Third Ozone Hole
An immediate problem related to that “green energy” fusion project along the Third Line is the inevitable escape of a host of radioactive particles, not only neutrons (remember the neutron bomb) but also irradiated metals including cobalt and molybdenum fragmenting off the tomakak walls and being released into the atmosphere. The ITER scientists in Marseille admit that more than 10 percent of the radioactive compounds are “lost” somewhere outside the tokamak. Once these super-heated metal particles reach the clouds and cycle back to the ground in rainfall, the entire Sichuan Plateau and Tibet could be at serious health risk. The same goes for the Mediterranean region, which is already contaminated with detritus from nuclear-power disasters in the Lower Rhone wine-grape region.
Nuclear Salvation
One of the temptations that arise in the perverse minds of nuclear scientists is the delusion that new untested technologies can solve vexing environmental problems. An electromagnetic particle cannon is easy enough to rig up as a means to “better utilize” surplus plasma, as is now being done routinely from an old nuclear complex on the French border with eastern Belgium and Germany, which are bombarded secretly without public disclosure, much less local municipal approval. Presumably, the purpose of plasma-cleansing is to eliminate fossil-fuel pollution from carbon-emitting vehicles, home heating and factories. This is like using a ray-gun to cauterize a pimple.
These sorts of absurd panaceas are likely to be deployed for “remedy” of the causes of ozone loss over the Tibetan Plateau (Sichuan is on the eastern rim of that “Third Ozone Hole” ). The heavily industrialized Sichuan Basin is positioned between 3,000 and 4,800 meters above sea level. The cold temperatures in the snowy mountains, therefore, cause a massive inversion layer, trapping vehicular smog and industrial emissions. Major sources of ozone can be identified, including industrial emissions of CFC-11 from a type of polyurethane used for insulation of wall panels; commercial satellite and military rocket launches from the Sichuan space port and nearby launch pads in Gansu Province; high-altitude test flights from the massive military and civilian aircraft complex based in the provincial capital Chengdu; and heat emissions from nuclear power plants. The temptation is to scrub the air with neutrons to open blue skies, however at the risk of further degradation of the ozone layer.
Green and Mean
Incredibly or perhaps ridiculously, fusion power along with nuclear reactors have been promoted by the IAEA and UN COP as the leading edge of environmentally correct “Green Energy”, as opposed to more efficient combustion of plain old “fossil fuels” such as the gasoline that powers your car or motorcycle or the gas that enables proper baking in an old kitchen stove. While conventional emissions without smokestacks lack the intensity to rise above cloud cover, super-heated nuclear thermal uplifts easily reach up to the jetstream and even higher.
There are ground-level environmental risks as well from nuclear plants and the next-generation fission reactors. Unmentioned in press articles about the EAST lab’s release is that tritium emits harmful beta rays during its half-life of 7 years, while deuterium when ingested can contribute to cancer and heart failure. Heavy water is easily absorbed into clouds, fall to the ground in raindrops, and are difficult, indeed practically impossible to remove from urban and rural storage systems or to separate from drinking water by home filtration. Many and likely most of the spectators outside the EAST release ingested potentially dangerous amounts of both types of nucleated water.
Sunny Skies over China
The false promise of beneficial effects from super-technology has huge public-relations value in China’s censored media, as expressed in the all-too clever ideological somersaults of thought-police chief Wang Deming, whose aim is to undermine the democratic traditions of China in order to elevate his party boss to parity with the founding father of the People’s Republic of China, the highest praise accorded to only the rarest of mortals.
So please sing along, Young Pioneers. “Out of the EAST rises the Sun, Long live our Leader Mao Zedong!” (The East is Red). For Americans, fortunately, this type of idol worship sounds like an absurdist parody along the lines of Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma” (nobody should sleep tonight) in homage to the homicidal princess Turandot. However for an easily impressed captive audience in China, the Imperial fusion-energy trickery has chased away the once-feared American gweilo (white ghosts) without firing an arrow or losing a single brave soldier.
What a wonderful prelude to the coming Lunar Year of the Black Tiger! (Since this mythic feline is a swimmer, watch for an amazing stunt at sea in the months ahead.) Public demonstrations of sensational but crude power are typical of weak-minded regimes, which cannot trust their public to respect democratic norms of lawful governance.. The political neoimperialism of the Kremlin a la Putinesco, now mimicked by imperial court jester Wang Deming’s conflated praise of his new emperor, are a passing phase of infantile adoration of brute power on the thrones formerly held by those benevolent demigods Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible.
As in a marriage on the rocks, a democracy-upholding Uncle Sam now has little choice other than to smile courteously and bow out during this rocky period of American separation from Moscow and Beijing. Instead remember that in certain seasons democracy blooms like tiny flowers over a meadow rather than towering trees along the peaks. In this era of smaller but more beautiful, a Cinderella hidden in the shadows demands our attention far more than her preening arrogant and ugly stepsisters. So let us remain cool-headed, wait out this hiatus in great power relations, and by all means avoid the merciless false sun that blazes over their swollen heads. When the fusion stunts blows up in their faces, I suppose that a predictably charitable and kind-hearted American public will once again open their hearts and purse strings to help lift the spirits of a downtrodden Chinese people in their moment of disappointment, sorrow and regret. History will soon repeat itself; that is the only certainty anyone can count on.
By Yoichi Shimatsu
Fake Ancient Alien Theorist Foolishly Visits the Collective Imagination 