We have
entered a period of epistemological chaos. The true condition of our
world, indeed the very nature of our phenomenal reality, including
agreement regarding the meaning of knowledge itself, is completely up
for grabs. Not only are we witnessing rapid paradigm shifts and schisms
within mainstream science, but also, and more dangerously, the
politically motivated suppression of authentic discoveries and insights
has led to epistemological blowback on every front. Every established
authority has been de-legitimized. This has led to the rise of a new
and unprecedented kind of discourse, which can be categorized as
psychotic knowledge.
To call it psychotic is not to
disparage it, but to recognize that such knowledge is produced by
ripping apart the fabric of consensual reality. What pours through that
tear in the discourse of conventional sanity may be brilliant with
lucid transcendental insight and it may equally be speckled with
nuggets of paranoid fantasy and archetypal imagery serving the
narcissistic ego. It is psychotic from the perspective of the hegemonic
paradigm that cannot permit multiple realities that elude the control
and deny the legitimacy of the materialist construct. Coping with the
accelerating explosion of psychotic knowledge, and the general
contamination of the current information deluge with every sort of
misinformation and disinformation, will become ever more challenging.
It may, therefore, be useful to establish some guidelines that will
enable us to maintain our sanity while remaining open to new horizons
of possibility.
We can trace this problem back to the
period immediately following the Second World War, when the government
of the United States created a national security establishment and a
general secrecy state. The geostrategic push to gain total hegemony
over all global political actors had to remain covert. More and more
information became classified as top secret, not only in areas of
normal politics, but also in the sciences. Some of this rush to
restrict the flow of information was a response to the intrusion of
alien spacecraft into our skies. Since the government had no adequate
response to this threat, the existence of such entities had to be
denied and ridiculed. Many careers of honest observers of such
phenomena were destroyed by that disinformation campaign.
The secret levels of government soon
overshadowed the public government and turned it into a mere front for
the actually ruling powers. This opened the field for conspiracy
theories, many with a high level of credibility. Challenges to the
secret government occurred from time to time from within Congress or
the White House. This led to limited revelations of horrifying criminal
acts on the part of the secret government against its own people as
well as on a global level. Most of the challenges to the secret
government were successfully squelched, however, leaving a wake of
assassinations, suspicious deaths, smear campaigns, vindictive
prosecutions, and other forms of intimidation.
As time went on, it became clear that
not only was the government holding out on the people, but the
scientific elites were as well. Mainstream medicine, for example, lost
its credibility when it became recognized that many treatments were
motivated by profit margins rather than curative efficacy. In an even
more general way, the entire system of information distribution,
through the major media, lost its credibility when it became recognized
that the news media serve the secrecy establishment rather than
challenge it. The public’s alienation from the actual conspiracy by
mainstream media to prevent the release of true information reached new
highs after 9/11. The capitulation of the media, in turn, has led to
the use of the internet as an information source inviting ever more
independent efforts of whistle-blowing, epitomized by the recent
wikileaks phenomenon.
But another pillar of knowledge control
that has fallen is that of religion. To understand the import of this
epochal change, we must go back in history to the establishment of
Christianity as the official state religion of the Roman Empire. We
must focus particularly on the year 325 A.D. (and keep in mind that
even the calendar and its dating of the years is an artificial
political convention that upholds a specific paradigm of knowledge, in
this case that of Christendom). In that year, the Council of Nicaea
established official orthodox doctrine. Anyone who dared to think
differently from then on was subject to being referred to the office of
the Inquisition, which had many well-known ways of changing one’s mind,
including that of terminating one’s heresy through salvation with
extreme prejudice. The current practices of official torture are simply
a continuation of the program begun long ago in the name of our God of
Love.
Not only was the canon defended by
cannon, and the sword of knowledge backed by the sword of steel, that
would now go on to convert the heathen to the same narrow line of
thought, but more significantly, the new regime of orthodox knowledge
suppressed the use of natural psychoactive substances such as
psilocybin-containing mushrooms, that had been part of the original
Gnostic psycho-technology of awakening. Much of the ideological effort
of social control from then on went to criminalizing and demonizing the
use of mind-altering substances, as well as even more natural
mind-altering processes such as meditation. Mind control efforts
invaded the deepest levels of our consciousness, by establishing the
very words of the prayers that were allowed to be offered to God in the
privacy of our own minds. In fact, the purpose of religion was to
eliminate all privacy of mind. People eventually became fearful even
of inner silence and peace!
Similar regimes of orthodoxy ruled
other religious traditions as well. Historically, only in India was
freedom of thought allowed, and that only among a single class of
people: the yogis. The teachers and practitioners of yoga remained
outside the system of vedic doctrine and the control of the Brahmin
caste. The great liberated yogis did not fear the brahminical system,
and the system recognized its need of yogic sages to maintain its own
legitimacy, and so a pax yogica was established. The yogis
could teach their own kind of knowledge, could establish their own
social forms that allowed dropping of gender and caste discrimination,
and could propagate their own lineages of teachings, so long as they
remained in their forest retreats and ashrams, and did not try to
undermine the social system. Eventually, the yogis became incorporated
into the system as its own safety valve. By allowing dissidents to
egress from the system of social control through yogic renunciation,
the society remained remarkably stable throughout the stormy
vicissitudes of history. In this way, the discipline of yoga remained
free of mind control by the clerical elites.
In other regions, however, including
China, the Middle East, and Russia, as well as Western Europe and the
colonized Americas, the effect of suppressing independent thinking led
eventually to the blowback of religious schism and turmoil that
eventually resulted in the overthrow of the dynasties that had reigned
since the ancient times. In Europe, the Protestant Reformation led to
the French Revolution and the bourgeois overthrow of the feudal system.
Capitalism had its own golden age of free thought. But that was soon
controlled by the new priesthood of scientism, applying what Lacan
referred to as “university discourse” on behalf of the class of robber
barons that had gained control of the levers of society. The older
discourse of religion now also bowed to the same masters.
The religious establishments gradually
lost their credibility and their membership dwindled. Newer religious
movements attracted the alienated adherents of the older ones. But each
new movement became co-opted by the same hegemonic forces and lost
their steam. Eventually, it became impossible to launch a successful
challenge to the dominant regime. Even such originally revolutionary
approaches to human understanding as psychoanalysis, which Freud
proudly labeled “a plague,” and later, the more transcendentally
oriented Jungian analysis, have been tamed and blunted as instruments
of change, in fact have been largely converted into instruments of
oppression, by the power of the hegemonic masters, through strict
licensing laws and the peer pressures and homogenizing edicts of
professional societies.
Whether in the political realm or in
that of grassroots media or alternative healing approaches or
theoretical science or religion, the power of surveillance and
infiltration by the secret agencies of government and corporate
machinations became so overwhelming, thanks to new technologies, that
every effort to sustain a viable new paradigm was doomed to failure. We
can look back in the U.S. at the wreckage of the black power movement,
NICAP, the socialist parties, the Green Party, Pacifica Radio,
Greenpeace, in fact the whole environmental movement, the political
insurgency of Ralph Nader, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam, and
recognize the futility of confronting the ruling masters with Truth.
This, however, does not mean that the
game has been lost. The deceivers have not gained the victory they
supposed would ensue from total control of the political realm.
Instead, their misguided and malevolent efforts have now led to the
rise of psychotic knowledge. The internet has functioned as the main
instrument of this new and hyper-revolutionary development. Much of
this was presciently foretold in the work of Jean Baudrillard. His
writings were the stimulation and simulacrum behind the film hit known
as The Matrix. And his concept of hyperreality has opened a new level
of critical understanding of the internet’s capacity to remake the
collective consciousness.
The internet is necessary as an
instrument of surveillance, but it comes at the price of unregulated
communication. And because the internet functions in the realm of the
hyperreal, of virtual reality rather than ordinary reality, it does not
need to give birth to an actual political movement in order to be
effective. In fact, its effectiveness comes in the form of birthing
anti-movements, massive fragmentations of parallel, paranormal,
paranoid subcultures, flowing lightning-like along fleeting lines of
flight, operating in a transverse Deleuzian rhizomatic underworld of
conspiratorial fantasy, requiring no verification and therefore also
free of the possibility of refutation.
These hyperreal exponents of
exponentially audacious intervention by impeccably invisible yet
omnipotent intergalactic and interdimensional powers have finally
trumped the merely real authorities of our de-legitimized demiurgic and
merely phenomenal sub-world that used to be able to claim to be our
entire reality. We have gone from Nietzsche’s axiom that God is dead,
to the postmodern claim that Man is dead, and now we can say that
reality is dead. Reality has been overcome, not by any single
alternative worldview, but by a burgeoning legion of otherworldly
messengers. And who is to say that they are false or demonic? Who has
the credibility to say anything authoritative any more? Who will
listen? By suppressing authentic information and feeding the public too
much flavorless and undigestible disinformation, the merely mortal
authorities with their clearly fallible forms of knowledge have given
birth to a disinformational universe, in which they are the first
victims of their own bad karma.
But the situation is more radical than
that. Language itself has been exposed as a primitive and ineffective
instrument of consciousness. Yet we have not crossed over to any higher
wave of coherent interconnectivity. The reign of the signifier has been
overthrown, yes. But no new monarch has been crowned in its place. We
have fallen into the gap, the abyss of an unprecedented autism of
un-communicability. Each of us floats in our own bubble of narcissistic
idiocy, a subculture of one, unable to establish common terms of
discourse with others. The solution of many is to hide within the
slightly larger bubble of biological family enmeshment, but there is no
genuine communication in that realm, either. Increasingly desperate
attempts to find a soul mate have arisen in this context. At least
there must be one other person who can understand us. But such efforts
are rarely successful in the long term. Of course, the same logic
applies to social and religious groups. The centrifugal force of
dueling signifiers fractures every field of human intercourse.
The great question is whether it is
still possible to re-establish the gold standard of all human
organization and bring about a renaissance of human unity at a higher
level than is presently manifest. The first clue to the answer lies in
understanding how the ancient yogis were able to maintain an
independent power center that sustained the original culture field of
Bharata, and later what is called the classical Indian culture. It is
essential to recognize that the same principles of yoga became the
internal power that underlay the success of all the cultures of the
world. It was through their practice of meditation that the yogis
became powerful energetic batteries that enabled cultural integrity and
propelled human achievement in every field of knowledge.
The symbolic systems that grew out of
and explained the energetic secrets of yoga were merely representations
of an achievement that had nothing to do with discourse, but was
unimpeachably Real. The power of the Supreme Real is what gave birth to
the world’s mythologies. Those myths soon were downgraded to religions
and fossilized as dogmas, and the Supreme Real was repressed in favor
of what became mere phenomenal reality. With the appearance of the
virtual reality of the internet and artificial intelligence, we can
distinguish between reality and the Real. What we refer to as reality
is conditioned by discourse and can be corrupted. It can also be
shifted by events in hyperreality. But the Supreme Real is beyond such
effects. Its power and its energies cannot be affected by events in
either reality or hyperreality. If we are to survive in reality,
however, we must return to the Supreme Real and manifest as authentic
avatars of the archetypal Real Self. We must jettison our
identifications with both reality and hyperreality, which have both
been proven to be unreal. This is what the teachers of advaita and sat
yoga have been teaching for centuries. But most of the yogis, whose
function as conduits of the energy of the Supreme Real maintained the
world, have now passed from the scene. And with them, the energy that
keeps our world alive has sputtered and is dying away. Our world cannot
long maintain itself in manifestation unless our batteries are
re-charged.
The energetic battery of yogic
Realization that once powered human history, the energy of Spirit
supplied by the masters of meditation, has indeed gone dead, all over
the world. This has been a long process, involving the suppression of
monasteries, the destruction of the world’s indigenous cultures and
their yogic/shamanic lineages, and the materialistic indoctrination of
society, turning people against their spiritual leaders, as the Chinese
are now doing in Tibet, having destroyed its monastic culture. Only a
few sparks of Real spiritual power can be felt anywhere. But those
embers of the sacred flame can still be fanned into a fire that will
renew human existence for another cycle of cosmic time, at an even
higher level of consciousness than in the past cycle, if we are willing
to perform the great work of becoming adept yogis.
The modern attempt at demythologizing
religion, which can be seen in such contemporary cultural artifacts as
the Zeitgeist films, falsely proclaims that the great avatars of the
past were mere representations of the Sun, and that the world’s
mythologies were only descriptions of astronomical events. Such a view
contains the half-truth of its recognition of the amazingly profound
astronomical knowledge of the ancient world, but fails to recognize
that astronomical data, and indeed the Sun itself, was used only as a
representation of the Supreme Real. Those who have had near-death
experiences and those who have entered higher forms of Samadhi, and
even some who have had nonordinary tryptamine experiences, can testify
that the light of our physical sun pales in comparison to the supernal
light of the Supreme Sun of Transcendent Consciousness!
Because the signifier can no longer be
trusted as expressing Truth, we must return to the gold standard of
Silence. Only the utter mental silence of authentic inner peace that
radiates the ineffable but irresistible divine energy can be effective
as an organizing principle for new communities. Knowledge of the
mechanics of the ego and its deceptive cognitive malfunctioning is
important, but that knowledge can only be trusted when it is taught by
those who have achieved genuine transcendence of the ego and freedom
from its drives and pathologies. Words are cheap, but silence is
golden. The byproducts of inner silence include humility, compassion,
virtue, detachment, and luminous fullness. These byproducts also cannot
be counterfeited. Their appearance in a community today is extremely
rare, and any community that can operate with all its members
resonating at such a frequency of conscious harmony will astound any
visitor.
The only way that the general
ideologies of cynicism, materialism, and even that of entheogenic
psychedelicism, can be cracked is through the experience of such a
communal energy field. No mushrooms or peyote or cannabis are necessary
for this transcendent attainment. In fact, those substances do not
dissolve the ego; they only offer at best brief glimpses of the
paradise of pure consciousness. Only the true heroic work of surrender
to the One Self will avail to reach the Real. This achievement will be
the new wonder of the world. It is through this passage beyond
knowledge to the Truth of Supreme Silence and Theomorphic Presence that
the current ascendancy of psychotic knowledge will be overthrown. It is
not new information, whether psychotic or shamanic, that will effect
change, but it is the infinite power of God’s Presence that will
announce the dawn of the new Sat Yuga.
Through baptism in the waters of sacred
silence, a spiritual community can restore the efficacy of language.
Once a community of yogis sits together in silence long enough to
download and establish a common carrier wave of loving
interconnectivity, the manifestation of knowledge will arrive as a
renewed expression of Truth. In this way, humanity can be reborn as a
telepathic union of the many and/as the One. From the zero point of
Supreme Silence, the One God can again be represented truthfully in
language. This renewed alignment of knowledge and Truth will bring
about an end to the eclipse of God in the world of ego consciousness.
The Sun of Truth will burn through the veil of illusion and reveal that
our GodSelf is all and everywhere!
Be prepared for the coming ascendancy
of Truth. Better yet, be a divine manifestation of the highest Truth.
The Truth, the Real, like the famous alien in the Hollywood film of
that name, will emerge from your own chest, from your own heart, and
kill your ego as it gives birth to the Great Self that will transform
our universe. You are the Alien. Let your heart be sacrificed to the
Self, so that the new world may be quickly born!
Namaste,
Shunyamurti
Image by tajai, courtesy of Creative Commons license.
