The Unreal Machine (6) – The Unveiling of Spirit-Consciousness

‘Humanity urgently needs to become aware that a spiritual world is working down into every detail of existence in the physical world.’

Rudolf Steiner

As the last few essays in this series have indicated, there is the growing presence of entropic, or counter-evolutionary, forces within humanity. And these forces have been gaining dominance in our reality, which is the nature of the Inversion. It is, I suggest, a responsible move on our part to recognize these forces, to attempt to comprehend them, and to transform them into impulses that can work for humankind’s evolvement. In this, we need to come to grips with the presence and activity of those aspects deemed as ‘evil.’ Negative, or entropic, forces are a feature of existence as much as positive, developmental forces. They all act within the playground of attraction, repulsion, and the expression of energy. The Rosicrucians recognized these forces when they referred to the Deus Inversus – or the ‘Reversed God.’ This Reversed God works on humanity through the spheres of evil, or negation, to counter its development. The Austrian mystic Rudolf Steiner was very aware of the future impact of such forces. He stated that: ‘It is essential that the forces which manifest as evil if they appear at the wrong place must be taken in hand…in such a way that humanity can achieve something with these forces of evil that will be beneficial for the future of the whole of world evolution.’¹ In this regard, it is important that individuals become aware of the metaphysical realm that lies beyond the threshold of normal, or everyday consciousness. If we remain unawares to our own forces of spirit-consciousness, then we are more susceptible to the manipulations of such counter-developmental forces. As readers familiar with my previous writings will know, I have attempted to draw attention to certain aspects of our consensus reality in order to gain greater clarity about how we may respond to the situation in a constructive way. I stand by what was written in the Gnostic Gospel of Philip: ‘For so long as the root of wickedness is hidden, it is strong. But when it is recognized, it is dissolved. When it is revealed, it perishes.’ Recognition, through heightened awareness and perception, allows each individual more choices. In the context of the machinic impulse and the intrigues of the Inversion, we need to be conscious of certain facts before we can manifest the correct intention and focus of will. What is needed is a culture of revelation – of ‘uncovering’ – rather than of cover up.

            Our conscious life experience within the Inversion is partly dependent on the fact that the world around us is a delusion. This delusion, or mode of separation from the Greater Reality, has functioned so that the human being can develop their inner world and sense of being – ego consciousness – through free will and action, rather than being a ‘plaything of the gods,’ void of individual vital force or destiny. This phase, it seems, has now served its purpose and it is time to uncover (reveal) spirit-consciousness as a participant in the physical life experience of humankind. In order to transform the entropic forces, humanity needs to return to contact with a metaphysical reality. In this respect, the developmental path of humankind has reached a threshold. And to begin crossing that threshold we have to re-experience the spirit world. Humanity needs to be prepared for its next step, which includes the unfolding of new, or hitherto unused, organs of perception. New psychic abilities are likely to emerge as the ‘thinning of the veils’ progresses, the consensus reality increasingly dissolves, and energetic realms begin to cross over. As is already the case now, more and more people are having psychic experiences, such as non-human communications – and this will increase and become more common, unless the entropic forces can drag people further into deepened materialism, which causes amnesia in spirit-consciousness. The important threshold for humanity now is to be receptive to developmental impulses and to consciously open up to correspondence with these transcendental forces towards a spiritualized culture.

            Referring to what sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick had written as his gnostic cosmology, he considered that the individual already possessed fragments of the Absolute/Source within them, and that the ultimate goal of a human life was to accomplish this human-Source merger. In Dick’s perspective, the Absolute, or Source of All (the Urgrund), was all the time penetrating into this false reality construct, and attempting either to trigger/activate people, or waiting for them to arrive at the moment when a merger could be accomplished. If enough people were to integrate with Source, then the artificial reality construct (the Inversion) would be annihilated. In its place would be a sentient reality-awareness that was simultaneously all within the Urgrund/Source. Dick also believed that the false god (or ‘artifact’) is not evil, and neither is the false projected world of the Demiurge (the Inversion). Rather, the Demiurge is deterministic and mechanical and, as such, cannot be appealed to through human values. The Demiurge is itself an artifact that cannot fathom any greater truth beyond itself or purpose for being. Dick’s cosmology also recognizes the struggle of polarities by saying that the Urgrund/Source, from time to time, gives a revelation to human beings in order to further the positive evolutionary process towards enlightened or perceptual knowing. And to counteract this impulse, the Demiurgic ‘false god’ entity would induce blindness, forgetfulness, or subterfuge, to further maintain the perceptual darkness. This, argues Dick, is the perpetual struggle that is operative within the lesser reality – what I refer to as the Inversion.  In this context, the Source-of-All and humanity is moving toward fusion whereby the artificial construct is moving toward final elimination. It is a feature of Dick’s unusual cosmology (which seems a form of neo-gnosticism) that lesser reality is the medium through which the process of the merger between Source and the human being can be actualized. True Gnostics have felt, in a similar way to Dick, that humanity is ‘from elsewhere’ and this suggests that we are estranged from our true reality (the Greater Reality) – on many levels. It has been said that:

Man, we say we know, originates from far away; so far, indeed, that in speaking of his origin, such phrases as “beyond the stars” are frequently employed. Man is estranged from his origins. Some of his feelings (but not all of them) are slight indicators of this…Man has the opportunity of returning to his origins. He has forgotten this. He is, in fact, “asleep” to the reality.²

To assist us in finding ‘our way back home’ we have the tool of our own creative imagination, as well as the mystery wisdom traditions. The wisdom schools, with their initiates, have also taken on the role of creating conduits for the transmission of real knowledge (i.e., knowledge from outside of the false Inversion construct). Through their work, of which only parts are publicly known, they continue to maintain the lifeline – the umbilical cord – that connects the phenomenal physical world with the realm of Greater Reality. And through this bridge, vital forces can enter this ‘lesser realm’ and fuse with materiality; that is, to work through physicality. The Initiate Path is a difficult one as the person has to deal with the ego-self in order to prepare the physical body as a vessel for the streaming of transcendental energies. This preparation is sometimes referred to as the ‘ego death’ – of dying before you die – that creates the conduit in allowance for the merger. This is not a channelling but a far more advanced state. The Indian sage Sri Aurobindo put forth a similar notion when he described the supramental consciousness as needing to descend into the physical-material realm through the human being. It is said that the ‘Great Work’ is to develop individuals to be then sent back out into their society to help facilitate development, such as through the cultural sphere. It is important to produce well-balanced individuals who have developed a degree of immunity against the entropic forces. The more conscious and aware people there are in a community, the less susceptible is that community to external forms of social management and control – i.e., less vulnerable to the Ahrimanic forces of stagnation and decay. The Initiate, in this context, is a person who although carries and/or transmits great power and responsibility, does not wield this power over people in any negative form. This ‘Great Work’ is ongoing for the contestation between evolvement and de-evolvement is continuous, and this is the situation current in these times.

Humankind has moved through various stages necessary to its evolvement; and within this path has been the transition from a condition of spirit-being into earthly, material form. This established a physical separation from spirit-consciousness that activated the human being’s growth of ego-self so that it could then return to the state of spirit-being with an individualized awareness. In this, the human being has evolved through the loss of some faculties and the development of others. This has involved a ‘descent’ from a state of direct consciousness of the metaphysical realms and an ignorance and innocence of the material domain, to a mastery of material forces and a loss of spirit-awareness. The next threshold will likely involve gaining the correct correspondence and use of material forces alongside a re-spiritualization of human life within the physical domain. This is the fusion or merger that now stands at humanity’s door – and must be taken in hand in an appropriate manner. Otherwise, the momentum of the ascending arc may be missed.

We can no longer deny the subverted nature of our reality and the anti-human impulses that are rife in the present earthly life experience. Generally speaking, the human being has become far too numbed and desensitized to the atrocities that plague human civilization. Each day in our news and media channels we hear of terrible human-led crimes, sufferings, and violence; not to mention the absurd behaviour of our political, financial, and corporate systems. So much human action across the planet sounds as if people are asleep within their own nightmares. It is as if human life has slipped within a realm of sub-nature. Humankind is not acting from a correct or balanced place. The madness of the modern world has become normalized as the upside-down Inversion. Even in these so-called ‘advanced times’ our modern societies are predicated upon the energies extracted from the subterranean darkness: oil, gas, coal, etc. The continued proliferation of these denser energies are holding back humanity’s development into the sphere of finer forces. As mentioned previously, even electricity was regarded by Rudolf Steiner as representing sub-natural forces; that is, Ahrimanic forces using the medium of electricity as a vessel. Our electrified world is being utilized to cause a stagnation upon the path of humankind’s necessary evolution. It is as if the human being is between both worlds – between the supra-sensible world (the metaphysical realm) and the sub-sensible world (the denser mechanical realm). In this context, humanity may need to act as a bridge between these polarized forces…

            To be continued in Pt.7 …

[The above essay was taken from Kingsley Dennis’ new book The Inversion: How We Have Been Tricked into Perceiving a False Reality (Aeon Books, September 2023)]

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References

¹ Steiner, R. (2006) Secret Brotherhoods and the Mystery of the Human Double. Forest Row: Rudolf Steiner Press, p163

² Ustad Hilmi, cited in Shah, Idries (1974) Thinkers of the East. London: Penguin Books, p196