Copyright E. A. Benjamins aka Jaņdžs
NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
24 A Function of Awe

The civil war that began round about the year 1117, when Alexius I threw Basil (according to my theses also known as Jesus or John) into the pit of fire continues to this day.

After killing Basil (and the subsequent destruction of the empire of Alexius I by the French in a “Crusade”), Basil-John’s Holy Office was removed (1305) from Constantinople to Avignon. Seventy-three years later, in order to make the priesthood in Avignon look less French, the office was moved once more, this time to Rome. The Byzantine people were not happy, but perhaps this spiritual violence was mitigated by a promise that Basil-John would sit in Rome, where western princes would surely protect him from oriental despots like Alexius I. The protection, if such was offered, proved a lie. No Pope has ever sacrificed his life as John-Basil and his retinue of Johns routinely did before secular kings put them to death. Instead, the early popes—the brothers or in-laws of kings—called (actually renamed) John Jesus and wrote a new myth about his divinity.

While today neo-Christianity is a show that entertains a dead God, western thinkers stubbornly cling to western (Scaligarian and Petavian) chronology of history. Even atheists cannot shake off this lighter than air God and remain bound to a God, they claim not to believe in.

From the very beginning of this religious civil war, which essentially polarizes people in two economic camps, the allies of Jesus have had the upper hand. It is thus that they are able to impose on the world their version of the story-history of John. Indeed, the princes invented the story about Jesus we know. At the same time, this invention is the reason why the fire pit death of Basil is practically unknown.

The civil war is at its bloodiest today, even though to one of the economic poles it may appear to be bloodless. No matter how many thousands of images of dismembered and dead men, women, and children are shown on the internet and television they are as if not seen. This is because such scenes take place far away from the viewers living inside the protected zones of the powers-that-be.

Being the apparent winner of the civil war, the successors of Alexius I (symbols of state power and righteousness) claim to speak in the name of love and peace, and let the bloodguilt fall on unnamed secularist armies (their own and that of their enemies) as though these appeared outside the bounds of western foreign policies. Worse, the oligarchs (or their like) have not only killed Basil-John and changed his name to Jesus, but have installed Jesus-Basil as the ruler of heaven, where all his energies are consumed trying to sit on air.

Perhaps the “victory” of the successors of Alexius I will be carried forward yet another thousand years. However, there are reasons to doubt this. The torn social bonds that are the price of appearing to be victor of this war have turned the populace into an army of the dumb. This is not without its corrosive effects. Unable to resist the oligarchs, the poor play a waiting game. That is, they wait for the rich and their own to exhaust the resources of our planet, because it is only after the resources are exhausted will everyone be able to let the Earth go fallow and gradually resume a normal life again.

Poets, often true, but physically weak seers, have watched—real time and their mind’s eye—ignorant armies http://tinyurl.com/qk7mqr rush to be devoured by chaos http://tinyurl.com/2lhyc4 . Brazen men with brazen promises are in leadership positions http://tinyurl.com/pdujkd . Mountaintops (bald for loss of snow and forest cover) and deserts (jumping from Africa to Europe) have replaced the ancient Johns with Apocalypse sans Jesus in real time.

Waiting still, the poets see no sacrifice charismatic enough (whether by John, Jesus, or anonymous soldiers blowing their heads off in the field) to save humankind. Governments with high decibel sugars glaze all protests.

But wait! Is it not curious that the present winners of the civil war appear to hate most “suicide terrorists”? Is it not a “suicide terrorist” one who takes not only his-her own life, but the lives of everyone around, the lives of the innocent as well as the guilty? Does not such self-sacrifice speak of utter moral depravity, which gives the ruling elite moral authority by default? Most likely this is because the powers-that-be presume such moral authority as much as the terrorists do.

At this time, the losing side, the poverty stricken and superfluous, use tactics that they have learned from the winning elite, who camouflage their violence from the eyes of the ordinary citizens by controlling the communications media. We hear of remote controlled drones killing the opposition leader, but it takes a long time for the news to reach us that along with the leader, the dead include the bride, the groom, and most of the wedding guests. http://tinyurl.com/ncgx2m . While the tactics of both sides of the civil war are roughly the same and equally brutal, it nevertheless appears that only the side of the poverty-stricken and superfluous ones, has the option to practice true self-sacrifice. At a time when the internet is replacing newspapers, radio, and television as primary media as the disseminator of news and other information, the tools are available that will record and broadcast the self-sacrificial deed and censure it and keep it anonymous. The failure to express protest by using self-sacrificial death as a tool (what John-Basil-Jesus taught), may be seeing the end of its days.

Slavoy Žižek, a Slovenian philosopher and at this time the director of the Birbeck Institute in London, approvingly cites Brecht, the German playwright. Writes Brecht (in “Baden Learning Play on Consent”): “To encourage a man for his death, the interveningly thinking one (der eingreifend Denkende) asks him to give away his goods. When the man gives away everything, what is left over is only life. Give away more, says the thinking one.” The ‘interveningly thinking one’, one assumes, is one’s own inner voice. [No doubt, the language is a bit heavy.]

Žižek then writes (“The Monstrosity of Christ”, pp 300): “This ‘give more’ is a true ethical answer to the false spirit of sacrifice: it hits the narcissistic satisfaction provided by sacrifice in the eye. Brecht’s real target here is the pathetic gesture of sacrifice….”

Nevertheless, one may object: What if sacrifice is essential, a kind of mirror of the Big Other mentioned in a previous blog, so that human kind will be reminded of itself by reminding itself to mind, which reminder is essential to the formation of a larger-than-life or virtual society?

What if with the mirror, which reflects back to one one’s true terror of death, puts the same one in awe of the (“pathetic”) sacrifice and breaks down the refusal of one’s otherwise ungovernable ego to submit to the compromise that is necessary to create a society larger than one’s immediate family and intimates?

If you copy this or otherwise mention the content of this blog, please credit the author and http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/

Copyright E. A. Benjamins aka Jaņdžs
NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
23 Death Has No Bite?

Death is no more—so goes the message. Jesus, the Santa Claus of neo-Christians, has taken the sting out of death by taking himself up to heaven. Heretofore, this has been a sure-fire method to resurrection—by way of rhetoric. Today, the last day of days (spacecraft hovering over slums to make us note them http://tinyurl.com/ldxfyp ), is the result of believing in nonsense.

Incredibly, we make-believe we believe in the truth of priestly fiction. It is as when a child sees Santa Claus come through the door and is convinced that he is real and crawls under a chair. Still, we continue to tell our children the story. Why propagate such an obvious untruth?

The answer is that such practices set precedent for belief in similar, but more important fictions. For example, many make-believe—perhaps they are not 100% sure, but are sure nonetheless—that after Jesus died on the cross death was no more.

Each one of us persuades him-herself about our deathlessness in his-her own way. If truth is told, I see myself walking not on water, but on air. Though this seems incredible, there is logic to it. There was a time when I used to live in an apartment on the fifth floor. Then there came airplanes, dropped bombs, and the building collapsed. The spot where the building stood remains empty to this day. Every time when I walk past my former address, I see myself sitting on the floor there and playing with my electric train set.

It is also easy to walk on water. All we need is the ice on a pond with no snow cover. If I then skate a pebble across it, my cat will chase after it and appear to be walking on water (see photo at start of blog).

It is easy to walk over fire as well. You scatter over a path several sacks of charcoal and grind the charcoal down so it looks like dust. Then you stretch along one side of the path a hemp rope soaked in oil. You put a match to the rope. You have a friend take a photograph as you walk along the charcoal path, and then you send the photograph by mobile telephone to your friends. Rather than disbelieve their eyes or think you are a graduate student at the college of secret arts, your friends are gullible enough to believe that you have learned to hypnotize yourself and feel no pain. If you feel no pain, the logic goes you are fireproof.

By making of death a joke at the home and leaving the dying to far away wars—no matter how many photographs of that war you see—death will remain unreal. This is one reason why we succumb to soothsayers, aromatherapy, crystal therapy, and—most assuredly—money therapy. Money and gold can talk us out of believing death is real most convincingly.

If we believe anyone of the above rabbits to be real, we discount consciousness and believe that death comes to us as it does in nature, suddenly and unexpectedly. Our consciousness—its ability to make deductions and to reason—has little place in the lives of those who believe in miracles. Indeed, we then call consciously effected death of ourselves unnatural and unethical. Like monkeys in the trees, we prefer to think that we fall off the branch and disappear http://tinyurl.com/pc68uf . As consumers of the “survivor of the fittest” theory, we continue to dip our potato chips in dill sauce, and the market economy keeps functioning as before—robbing the “unfit”.

Nevertheless, there are other ways of looking at life. If Jesus is John (one of the Johns certainly), then there are many Johns and Joans, even as each is a singular being and after their death never appears again. This singularity is why the Johns make an effort to die because of a decision to die. Such free will decisions makes Johns and Joans an inconvenience to the capitalist economy. By dying of their own choice, we become the opposition to supernaturalist permissiveness and the relativity of thought.

A conventional answer to the subjective fears that conscious death brings goes something like this: I did not ask to be born and, therefore, I am not responsible for the time of my death. Is it not enough that I have lived my life and obeyed my country’s laws? If the country asked me to defend it against its enemies (whether I am president http://tinyurl.com/ppdjmo or simple soldier), and I did so. I am sorry if the drones that I guided from a van in Texas http://tinyurl.com/q4a86a killed and maimed the groom, the bride, and all the wedding guests of that Afghan village. If my finger on the remote button http://tinyurl.com/p7njyl is the one that released the rocket, I am sorry that my enthusiasm as a child http://tinyurl.com/qgn6z7 for airplanes led to my enlistment in the air force. It was my duty to push the button. My priest confirms that I did right when he tells me that God forgives me.

Even so, there are other ways of thinking about how one in possession of consciousness should live one’s life. Whatever the injunction of any moral law, the interpretation of what one does is up to the individual and no one else. If that individual accepts a priest or president as the interpreter of the moral law, he-she gives his-her singularity over to another human being. We become drones under the thumb of individuals who are more equal than we are to consume the Earth for their profit. Until the authorities save us by sending us to be consumed in a war (or retire us as no longer useful, or we all fall altogether caught up in a “natural” disaster), we keep our consciousness unencumbered by responsibilities.

There are strong indications that capricious individualism (all talk and no action) spawned by capitalism brings upon itself and the world a catastrophe. It is the responsibility of consciousness to avert the catastrophe. Only by living one’s life as a conscious singularity, one that permits no intermediary between it and its death, are we creating for our community a perpetual future.

If you copy this or otherwise mention the content of this blog, please credit the author and http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/

Copyright E. A. Benjamins aka Jaņdžs
NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
22 Terror and Awe

Every child is born expecting love and a breast full of milk. As we grow up, we discover that we do not cease expecting easy access to the breast, because it has come to represent—love. We also learn that love does not come easy, especially after we grow old enough to have to look out for our food and shelter. Some call it “scratching out a living”. We meet others, some of whom may look on us as of another species. If our teachers are without breadth and depth, we may learn to become the same. What started with a positive outlook may turn into a life with a minus (­– 1).

In spite of the fact that we grow old and know that we have given back to the world little of what we expect from it, we do not cease to expect it—love. We wish to leave love behind us (as per Jesus’-John’s famous “love one another”), and have love to welcome us back to whence we came, through the door of the Big Zero into the world of -1.

The quantum jump or leap http://tinyurl.com/d3l7jo that we make when we make the transit from +1 and go through the Big Zero to –1 may seem like a mystery, but in approximate terms, it involves but

· – 1 + sexual contact between a man and a woman = passage
0 (a seesaw) through the hole of the Big Zero to possible conception;
· + 1 = conception, living as a fish within the womb of the mother;
· + 2 = emerging from the womb into the world of air;
· + 3 = discovering the mirror, memory;
· + 4 = beginning to walk and talk;
· + 5 = learning to live with others through reflecting;
· + 6 = learning to live our own story;
· + 7 = helping to maintain a community;
· + 8 = preparing for death and survival of death through cloning;
· + 9 = a return to – 1 (perhaps to what the Tibetans call Bardo http://tinyurl.com/c26upc ), and reconstruct from Nothing-Something (–) a Something-Nothing (+).
· +10 = it is probable that reconstructions from out of Nothing-Something differ from each other, because the ultimate goal of Isness is to reach self-awareness, not a different hairdo.

However, mothers experience their child’s “quantum jump” into life rather differently. Whatever the pleasures of the sexual act, many mothers have died in childbirth or experienced terrifying traumas because of the risks involved in giving birth. Of course, for those who survived giving birth to a child, it was a joyful and awesome experience. http://tinyurl.com/cfqegk Few women even today face childbirth without fear or terror. [For near-death birth experience http://tinyurl.com/c2qdr7 For near death experience (scroll to p. 217ff) http://tinyurl.com/c3gk7t ] These examples prove that terror is not necessarily the result of overt violent attacks, but comes with consciousness and begs us to accept the limits of the act of creation. John [Brown] moldering in his grave can only take us to the entry point; the rest has to come from our contribution in carrying the ball of creation forward.

How demoralized the consciousness that allows one to wrap one’s self in dynamite sticks and annihilate everyone around one. How demoralized the moral environment of those who fight such terrorists by vying among themselves over who kills more of them http://tinyurl.com/d9mr8s . This is what a Something-Nothing on the plus (+) side looks like. The moral degradation of the haves who hire such soldiers-terrorists makes it easier for us to see the polarization that military acts create. We begin to understand how violent terror delays the development of humankind from negation to Something, which accepts self-sacrifice as essential.

Self-sacrifice is essential if a community wishes to remain self-aware in body and spirit. If one sacrifices one’s self in the world of Nothing-Something or Bardo, one gives birth to awe, i.e., life. This is how Genesis 2:2 tells its “…and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.” One may say, without contradicting Genesis, that after “he” had done creating, God died. Such was the assumption of ancient myths. http://tinyurl.com/de7avc We, the created, are in awe of Creation, whether by God or by evolution.

In whichever direction we pass through the 0, whether to – 1 or + 1, it involves sacrifice. From + 1 to – 1 means to die, like it or not. The body must succumb to the limits of matter. From – 1 to + 1 also means to take on the risk of death, but this time less by the time-traveler than the bearer of the traveler, the mother. The birth canal is the only tunnel with a light at the end of it.

When sacred kings died, they were like a mother giving birth. They were full of anxiety before the experience that they had committed themselves to, especially when the hour of delivery drew near. Unlike the common man, the king died conscious. This was leadership by deed (example). A slow death before a public eye, say, by not taking food http://tinyurl.com/c3yu72 , allows the witnesses (embodied by people coming to say good bye) to wonder over man’s (actually their own) will.

Unlike the common man, the sacred kings (Johns) stood before the altar in terror, but also in intellectual awe that their sacrifice—self-sacrifice under ideal conditions—maintains and at the same time repeats the act of creation of society. After they died with no one to witness whether they actually made it through the 0, the people, nevertheless, could only speak of the act with awe. As witnesses, they stand bonded to what they have seen. Strangely (to us, but perhaps not to the sacred kings), the witnesses went away certain that if their community ever needed their lives, they would take strength from the sacred king and join him in a like deeds.

If you copy this or otherwise mention the content of this blog, please credit the author and http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/

Copyright E. A. Benjamins aka Jaņdžs

NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
21 No Mirror, No Terror, No Consciousness

The second half of the 20th century saw newspaper articles and discussions on television about “leisure society” on almost a daily basis. The economist Maynard Keynes coined the idea of a leisure society in the early 1930s. From about the mid 1960s, the phrase seemed to be on everyone’s tongue. In the 1980s the talk stopped.

While the rich and well to do continued to enjoy their leisure, it was apparent that the mirror that mirrored the future—a mirror that reflected back to ordinary Americans the fantasies they projected forward—knew that leisure society was not to be after all. Rather, the future arrived as a gradual but steady economic decline loaded with ever-increasing anxiety and stress.

It is very possible that the mirror of the future reflects onto the mirror of the past, which then returns what it knows or sees of the past onto the future again. The innocent and unlearned are the ones trapped in the middle of this play of mirrors, while the not so innocent (the ones who have the power to manipulate) manipulate the mirrors in such a way that the theatre of Truth, the act of life, becomes a circus. While Daliesque distortions of images are possible under any circumstances, malicious distortions that benefit a small clique will, if practiced for a generation or more, cause the forgetting of the real and result in a catastrophe for all. Like it or not, the manipulators cannot influence the real (written with a small r rather than a large one), because it has its own agenda.

The real is limited by what it is. For the real nothing else is real but it. For example, the real accepts (lets happen) that a cat in realizing itself a real cat will hunt and catch mice. My cat obviously delights in catching mice. I can tell this by watching her in an excess of joy playing with the mouse she has caught, even when it is already dead. However, how can I really tell this is so? Actually, I cannot tell, but in the process of being a witness to what I am describing, I try to imagine being my cat. I try to mimic her feelings by a kind of inward dream process. Outwardly, I am horrified by what appears to be sadistic behavior. On the other hand, by imagining myself in my cat’s place (in dreaming myself to have become a cat), I stop myself from calling her a “bad cat”.

Something similar appears to be happening, when I dream of the hieros gamos ritual in a city and bar which I have never before visited. While my public self hesitates from acknowledging the dream as my own because of the moral laws of our civilization, my dreams protect me from humiliation by substituting for me another figure—a stranger. Only then does the dream proceed: the Goddess with the pearly breast and a man’s genitals comes to me to enact our union. Strangely, I become a curious bystander and a witness to someone else sucking the milk of kindness unhesitatingly offered by the Goddess. Thus, the cat hunts and kills, and I let nature take her course in spite of the censorship my conscious mind imposes on my cat’s kill.

Does perhaps death happen in the same manner? After I have done pleasuring my mother (as much as I may refuse to acknowledge any pleasure from living a life which ends in capital punishment), do we continue to embrace as lovers? My subconsciously created dream and my conscious projection of it through acknowledging its existence onto the mirror (the big Other), answers yes. This is why the real needs the big Other—even as we know the big Other is a mirror and an illusion.

To suggest as psychologists and philosophers Žižek and Lacan do, that full consciousness of the real does not need a mediator (heretofore known as God or “the big Other”) is like saying the body has no need of sleep. One common method of torture is sleep depravation, just as the easiest method of making a person look an idiot is to deprive him-her of a mirror.

The need for a big Other may be explained by a feature of the real that has heretofore gone unrecognized, but which we may call “the real of the undead”. That is, when we die, we enter a zone of activity that runs parallel to quantum mechanics: when because of dying a human being becomes a zero (0), he-she simultaneously crosses over, to a greater or lesser degree, to the minus (-) side, meaning that his-her activities take place in a negative environment. It means that the dead (0) become undead (-) and begin to reconstruct reality from scratch.

When after billions of light years of activity in minus territory, consciousness again arrives at zero (inevitable chance happening as understood by dandelion seeds flying over a large forest), he-she may cross over into plus territory. In effect, he-she eventually arrives at the limits of knowledge possible to arrive at by the minus side and which then self-instructs that time has come to try a quantum jump to the Other side. Once on the plus side, he-she again begins to figure out how the real fits together, then tries to advance the interests of consciousness with no less exertion of patience and not-violence than the undead.

Therefore, it is on the Other side (which ever side) that the real enters the evolutionary process, through which we arrive at an understanding of All, the Being that in the interim many knew only as God.

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NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
20 Prisoners of the Law

It is not difficult to get a perspective of what smoke and nicotine does to one’s body and to begin doing right by it. This is why telling a smoker to “break the habit” often works. However, sometimes a habit is difficult to get a perspective on. Two habits difficult to deal with are neo-Christianity and death. Both for their own reasons so saturate our consciousness that try as we may, some of us cannot look at them with a fresh eye.

Following of the imposition of Christianity and peace through violence and terror (“just war”?), the populace found it expedient to submit to Truth as it was told it from Above. The “Truth” of course is nothing more than the Word (edict, law, order) under the control of a bureaucracy that interprets the Word according to the wishes of the powerful princes and their courts. After being taught for several hundred years running that Christianity is love and to associate this love with Jesus Christ in Heaven, the populace is now unbelieving if told that Jesus in Heaven cancels out love. Likewise, after being told for centuries that death is for God and the secular authorities alone to decide upon, people are shocked if told that life as well as death is their own, and that a voluntary and a self-willed death is the goal of consciousness.

However, as my Blog 18 explains, before incest was tabooed and the taboo became engraved in stone as “law”, the laws of the mind prevailed. In the dream, the counter of the bar is made do as the altar, and the barmaid becomes “mother” with male genitals. The dream denies the values of our society, which are not only neo-Christian, but essentially fascistic, that is, they are superficial, positivist, and directed from Above at the public as advertisements (propaganda in an earlier day).

What hides behind the conflict between “natural” law and man-created law? The Greek playwright Sophocles in his play “Oedipus the King” explains this. http://tinyurl.com/c2lr8d The story tells of how a prince marries his mother (as if he did not know who the Queen of Thebes was), how the citizens of Thebes discover the lie, and why as a result Thebes faces social collapse. Unless the king resigns or is cast out, Thebans believe that their city will suffer a fatal demise.

Nevertheless, there is another possible interpretation of the story. It appears in my rewrite of the Oedipus story. See “Tiresias’ Revenge”. [February, 2009 http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/ ]

My interpretation argues that in order for Oedipus to earn the right to become King of Thebes, he has to suffer the risk of exposure on a mountaintop. If he (as an infant) survives one night on the mountain, it will mean that the Gods look at him with favor. However, Oedipus’ mother does not want her son exposed to such a risk. The queen offers to sleep with the goatherd who is standing watch if he will let her steal away her son. Another baby, quite dead, is to be put in Oedipus’ place.

The problem this “saving” of Oedipus from the risk of death creates is that by gaining a life not risked, he loses a kingdom. He loses the kingship in two ways: a) the other infant’s corpse (drama demands that this baby is murdered) tells everyone that the Gods did not favor him; and 2) Oedipus did not face the test demanded by the society of Thebes through its sacred by-laws.

The mother of Oedipus, Iocaste, however has a solution. When her son becomes old enough to become king, she will have her husband and Oedipus’ father, the king, killed. Following Laius’ murder, she will marry Oedipus, who through her will become king.

The story told by Sophocles follows this latter line, which shifts the guilt of what plagues Thebes onto the incest taboo. The taboo serves the as a sacred by-law as much as the test of the King’s son over his suitability to become king.

If the drama escapes the notice of modern critics and lends itself to the Freudian interpretation, i.e., son desires to sleep with his mother, it is because we desire to escape the kind of maturity that asks us to accept death and go into that good night with understanding. This neo-Christian doctrine, introduced by priests serving secular princes on the make, had its critics, but—as the erasure by Oedipus’ mother of the need for sacrifice and the violent way that neo-Christianity came to power shows—the critics were killed and the incest taboo was accepted as the very truth of God and Nature.

The denial of the need for self-sacrifice and its substitution with state murder (only the state has the right to kill) is the dogma of our day. The dogma that tells us that the individual has no right to take charge of his-her own life-death, penetrates even the circle of so-called revolutionaries. While not averse to war, they have a nihilistic concept regarding self-sacrifice, i.e., one kills one’s self (a better word is one “explodes” as a “suicide terrorist”) to kill as many bystanders as possible. In effect, the resistance of intelligence to neo-Christian dogma and its violence wrought modern state has been cleansed of the arch-Christian concept of death as a responsibility of a mature mind.

The absence of death from the lives of modern individuals has resulted in unsustainable numbers of people populating our planet. Because of habits long preached and enforced by the modern state in alliance (a charade) with state-created neo-Christian religion, one unexpected result is a exponential increase of human births.

The 6.8 billion people on Earth today are far beyond the 2 billion that our planet can support and sustain indefinitely. The established mindset believes that war and pestilence will eventually take care of the surplus billions. At the same time, death of 4.8 or more billion people begs the mind to perform murder on such a scale, that it cannot face it. Nor can it think of a solution. After all, it has condemned the acts of Hitler and Stalin as atrocities. What is to be done?

At the present (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlgtbEdqVsk ), we imagine the problem as an invasion of aliens. Since we cannot think of killing them as Hitler would have, we imagine death as a kind of perpetual concentration camp. Still, as the film illustrates, our mindset is not free of fascist solutions.

P.S. A philosopher from the left, Slavoj Žižek, opposes self-sacrifice and taking charge of one’s own death. Žižek, a Slovenian Marxist philosopher, who is now international director of the Birbeck Institute for the Humanities at London University (Financial Times, 3/6/2009) is against individual sacrifice. While in one sense Žižek fresh air in a rancid political environment, the air is so much under the control of inertia that it keeps even Žizak from breaking away from the neo-Christian shadow.

In his book called “Interrogating the real” (2005), Žižek discusses a film called “The Life of David Gale” (2003). According to Žižek, the film supports “[sacrifice] right up to suicidal sacrifice, as the only proper ethical virtue.” Writes Žižek “…the film fails: it endorses an ethics of radical self-sacrifice for the good of others; it is for this reason that the hero sends the full version of the tape [the evidence]… because he ultimately needs the symbolic recognition of his act. No matter how radical the hero’s self-sacrifice, the big Other is still there.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzp_b8qvTRo&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4cb1MS9q7Q For Žižek the big Other continues to be big enough to check the will to self-sacrifice.

On the other hand, what if the big Other auto-projects through an act of mimesis? The question that arises is what are we to do with it then, when it is, thus, real?

NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
19 The Mother of Terror

NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
19 The Mother of Terror

As I wrote in the preceding blog, synthetic or man-made law may conflict with natural law, the latter also known as “the state of nature”. The question this poses is why do human beings create laws that conflict with nature?

The answer lies in the nature of human consciousness.

It is beyond the scope of these blogs to discuss reasons of how human consciousness developed, but the dream and story mentioned in the preceding entry indicate to us that our unconscious is aware of manipulation of consciousness that contradict laws of nature and reacts to it with critical intelligence. Assuming this to be true, what is it that causes us to want to manipulate consciousness contra naturam?

The short answer is death. Human consciousness enables us to be aware of death every waking hour. While animals, such as elephants, are aware of death (they sometimes fondle the bones of their forebears if they happen to pass them), human consciousness comes endowed with a capacity for memory of such degree that once it encounters death, it is remembered for the rest of the individual’s life.

The presence of death in our memory results in two sub-branches of emotive consciousness: anxiety and a desire to mitigate it. Because anxiety and the desire to mitigate it become a movement, a state of inertia if you will, of consciousness, consciousness next moves to a forked crossroad. The road to the left goes in search of immortality; the one to the right leads to >1) a natural community, i.e., a family of a mother with her children; >2) an attempt to form a greater-than-life community; >3) said community recognizing that its ties are sourced in death.

The first greater-than-life community was a temple community.

The temple community is the result of those most conscious and troubled by death banding together as if for mutual protection. In the process, the community discovers mitigating relief not only for what troubles its individual members, but other benefits. One such benefit is greater protection for the group’s members such as the very existence of a group offers; another is an increased ability to accomplish a common task, said task best expressing itself in the building a community temple. This is the path by which in due course humankind arrived at the city, from whence society.

Sometime during its development, the temple community experienced a coup d’etad. The coup brought to power a group willing to substitute death as a phenomenon of nature with death as caused by man. The oversimplification of Darwin’s evolutionary theory into a statement such as “survival of the fittest” is a consequence of a community created by and maintained through violence. Most people who cite the cliché give little thought that they are justifying death caused by fellow man. Such response to violent activity indicates that violence has become an internalized part of social structure, and an exponential quickening of death will be no surprise to such a society.

Of course, the temple community fought back.

While there are no records of how the temple community resisted violence, one may surmise it involved heightening the public’s awareness of the significance of death. If, in the first instance, a not-violent community came together because of anxiety over death, hence this becomes reason for arguing that the conscious mind is fully mature only when it comes to accept death as a conscious act. One may think of this as the first theological argument.

In a community that perceives a mature consciousness as being able to meet death consciously, the community’s elders may make a conscious rendezvous with death when their body has come to a stage that the elder believes to be the approximate time for natural death. The medieval arch-Christian Cathars of Languedoc, France—probably reflecting a wide spread practice of their day—then called for “consolamentum” (consolation) and thereafter stopped eating. Fasts, common in the Middle Ages and still sometimes practiced during Lent by neo-Christians today, are remains of a practice by the entire community of how to prepare for and meet death.

The violent princes in power reacted to such resistance to their violence with increased violence. If the Russian mathematician-topologist-historian Anatoly Fomenko is correct in dating the death of Jesus (before his renaming Basil and/or John) to 1084 or 1184, this is about the time when the practice of killing the opposition as a solution to all problems settles into habit. At the same time, the rights of the individual to his-her own death (these rights given by nature) are forbidden in the name of a God removed from Earth. These are the years when the bogomil leader Basil was burnt in Constantinople. To eventuate his forgetting, the violent ones took certain features from the story of Basil and used them in their newly created story of Jesus. The year 1204 saw the Crusade against Constantinople (under the pretense of revenging the killing of Basil-John-Jesus by the Byzantine emperor Alexis I) and its sacking. The sacking of Constantinople by the neo-Christians removed the city from the map as a geopolitical power, at the same time as it effectively dismissed arch-Christianity as a story that never happened.

The ambiguous theology that justified violence (re: “just war”), took the next two hundred years or so to create. The violent princes understood that naked violence alone could not be justified. They needed the support of a theology that differed from that of the arch-Christians by being ambiguous. The new theology had to pay lip service to love, peace and community, at the same time as it prevented a reawakening of the arch-Christian theology, the theology that enabled love and peace to prevail.

Sometime during the next two hundred years [the ones that followed 1084 (or 1184)], the violent princes decided to rename John as Jesus and removed him from Earth to Heaven. They did so by redirecting theological thought to the left (the direction mentioned at the beginning of this blog), the direction that goes in search of immortality.

If up to then the search for immortality had proven futile (the Sumerian king Gilgamesh, for example, is said to have discovered the plant of immortality, only to have a snake steal it from him), the neo-Christians gave the story a new twist. In the neo-Christian version, Gilgamesh (Jesus) rises miraculously out of the grave, right past our eyes as it were, into heaven. Once in heaven, Jesus-John is beyond our reach, and he cannot reach us. To make sure this version of the story prevails, the arch-Christian Johns are replaced with priests who know no other version of history than the one taught to them in seminaries supported by the princes. Doubters of the new story are tortured, but stubborn doubters are killed in a fashion similar the way Basil was.

Looking back, we must—shocked as we may be—admire the minds that created such a violence-bolstered variant of the story of immortality. Indeed, the story has been so successful that humankind has not only brought itself to the edge of the abyss, but has stepped over its edge with expectations of recovery.

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NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
18 A Sacred Marriage That Breaks No Law

When sexuality began to be hyped (paradoxically through repression) and then was used as a money substitute for poorly paid workers, it involved everyone in a culture of amorality or, if you will, the corruption of nature’s morals. A kind of surreptitious state of the jungle became the social norm. Thus, just beneath the naïve newspaper advice columns on sexual matters, there lurked the drool of pornography.

The orgasm, sometimes known as “little death”, lost its powers as a source of spiritual revelation. In short, it no longer caused one to experience a little death. The “fern blossom” of midsummer’s eve (the fern has no blossoms) became—as SPAM e-mail tells it—“a great time in bed”. The sexual act lost its connection to sacred marriage or hieros gamos. http://www.angelfire.com/ct3/ascension/ros5.jpg

Still, hieros gamos is not lost to the unconscious and sometimes shocks someone’s repressed consciousness with a dream that terrifies one’s awake or conscious morals. Here is how the morals of nature once reminded themselves to this author.

It is night. I am walking the streets of a large city. The streets are dimly lit. I have no idea where I am going, but I soon find myself at a street corner and a door leading to a bar. I enter.

The barroom is crowded with men. In front of me is a large crowd of men standing with a mug of beer in their hand. As if having waited for my arrival, the bartender announces that there will be a strip tease, followed by “sex”. Even as he speaks a woman in a black cocktail dress climbs on top of the bar. The men around me fall silent.

I discover that on the counter of the bar stands also a man. The woman goes up to him, pulls down the right side of her dress, and exposes her breast. The man says but one word: “Mother!”

The woman then pulls up her dress, and (surprise of surprises!) she presents herself to the audience with an erect cock. The cock grows from her crotch and presents upward in an unmistakable demand of a caress.

The dream apparently does not wish me to see what comes next, because the audience partially blocks my view. Nevertheless, the attentiveness of the men transmits to me the notion that the man is “sucking her”. After a moment, the woman screams and the act is over. The audience remains silent, but everyone appears to be satisfied in their expectations. The barroom resumes normal activity.

I remain standing near the entrance to the bar. Then I see the woman in the crowd. She is coming toward me. She has a warm smile of recognition for me. She has blonde hair with an orange tint to it. I do not know her, but she comes up to me, and we embrace with great affection. End of dream. I awaken.

What was the dream about? Was the woman a man dressed up as a woman? Or was the woman born with a man’s genitals? Did the sight of her breast, an object made for sucking, translate into an act of fellatio, moreover, by the son of his mother become his lover and father?

The dream clearly features a hermaphrodite, but with an emphasis on the feminine. The male of the hermaphrodite projects as the “son”. Like it or not, this means that the man owes his sex and sexuality to his mother. Thus, the man’s desire is to have sex with his mother even if she comes to him with a male’s genitals.

How does one unravel such a dream and make sense of it? Then I came to read a book, which mentioned the 614th and 615th episode of the Arab “One Thousand and One Nights”. The story reminded me of the terror of breaking the “law” that I experienced after dreaming the dream. It set me free of my guilt. Here I combine the episode with the experiences of Iananna and Ian or John, her son (see Blog 12):

When John had gone through the seven doors, he came before a woman whom he did not recognize. John asked, “Who are you?” “Oh, dear son, I am your mother,” said the woman. John, separated from his mother since childhood, ignored what the woman said and told her: “Take off your clothes.”

The woman refuses to do so, but because John continues to insist, she eventually relents and little by little removes her clothes until she is but her panties.

John insists: “Take off your panties as well.”

The mother protests and tells John that to do so is against the law. At this point John recognizes the woman to be his mother. “Indeed, mother, you are right. Leave your panties on.”

However, no sooner has John spoken that his mother screams: “You have gone back on your demands that so humiliated me! Guards, seize him and give him a whipping.”

John gets a whipping and is let go, but not before his mother tells him that she expects him to come back and see her the next day.

The next day, when John enters his mother’s chamber, she greets him: “Oh, welcome, my son”. To which John replies, “Would a mother so whip her son as you had me whipped yesterday?” He then demands that his mother again take off her clothing.

The mother obliges. When she has removed everything, but her panties, John does not hesitate to order her to take them off too. “Strip for me, completely,” he tells his mother. She does.

John gets an erection. His mother takes his cock in her hands and pulls herself close to him.

This is how John gets to enter through the eighth gate. Once he enters through the gate, he finds a land of rubies and gold without end.

John still has not come back. No doubt, John got all the sex he desired. To put it crudely, he fucks himself to death. The story makes clear that John broke no sacred laws, but a temporal one.

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NOT-VIOLENT TERROR
17 Beyond Orgasm

Claiming to be in possession of one of the “great religions”, i.e., Christianity, the politicians of our civilization opened the gates to impermissible freedom (the state of nature) in sexual matters. Not surprisingly, drugs enhanced the sexual “drive”, raised the blood pressure, and sensitized the erectile tissue of sexual organs above normal. Christianity which ought to have checked the drugs and the behavior that resulted from their use, failed to do this, because the servants of the elites, the politicians, had made sure that the inspirational leaders of Christianity, the Johns, were renamed as one name, Jesus, long before all the consequences were obvious. Once the colleges of Johns were sufficiently repressed with burnings and drownings, Jesus was dismissed to Heaven, a non-existent space, whence he could not affect social behavior on Earth.

One of the catastrophes to result from the dismissal of arch-Christianity under John was an increased number of babies, most of who came into the world of our civilization unplanned and unwanted. Neo-Christianity claimed that these births were the result of “an act of God”, and therefore objected to the mother’s (and perhaps the father’s) crude effort to reverse the effects of hyper-sexualization through abortion. The neo-Christian efforts to stop abortion did not (and could not) work, because Jesus, neutralized as a force on Earth by his removal to heaven, could not intervene in the direct ways that the Johns would have.

How would the Johns have intervened? While this is a hypothetical question and, therefore, does not have a sure answer, the search for ways of preventing conception suggest contraceptives, alternate ways of sexual discharge such as hand stroking, and castration and penis removal in extreme cases.

The people endured the catastrophe brought about by hyper-sexualization, because hyper-sexualization (once the sport of princes and princeses) served as a reward for enduring social hypertension. The impermissible freedom, originally secured by the elites for themselves, allowed the elites to act without a conscience when their presumptions to such freedoms was threatened by social upheavals. While reserving for themselves a statistical niche of 5% of the population, they let the rest of the 95% of hyper-energized people to exploit (rape) the Earth without any sense of guilt. This is how in less than a millennium (according to the historian Anatoly Fomenko, the arch-Christian John was burnt and the neo-Christian Jesus sent to heaven in 1184) our planet was turned into a refuse pile and a desert. In other words, the elites—the oligarchs—satisfied their servants less with money, more with hyper-sexualizing their sexual life. Sex as a spiritual experience became something like a sweet potato http://tinyurl.com/clvsna . Paying off the middle and working classes with a payment “hidden” within sex (as permissiveness and by overlooking the damage caused by conception), has resulted in the collapse of our civilization. What was supposed to become a field of wheat, a cornucopia of the good life achieved through intelligence, has turned into a field of tares.

One of the first victims of the catastrophe of our civilization are the small nations, the reservoirs of cultural variety, the seed banks for when hybrid plants fail to adapt to disease that they are not programmed to resist. One such victim is the small nation is Latvia.

Latvia, one of the three Baltic nations, escaped some of the brutal consequences of the rule of elitist theology because of being held in a state of “backwardness” by fifty years of Soviet occupation. However, this backwardness was not the result of self-conscious holding back, but because the Soviet Union—whose aim was to emulate the “developed West”—had to struggle against the West to reach equivalence. The West understood all too well that the planet could not two hyper-populated civilizations and fought the Soviets with a “cold war”. When the Soviet Union failed to reach its economic goals and imploded, the people of “backward” Latvia were on their own.

Predictably, the newly liberated Latvia began to copy the ways of the West. Its political parties became fronts for business groups (led by oligarchs or alliances of oligarchs), and the Latvian people, a people who through their forebears were heirs to an ancient culture, were deprived by their political parties (led by their elites of course) of education, specifically knowledge of their history. Instead of renewing and adapting relevant religious elements from their forebears, the Latvian government subsidized—sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly—neo-Christianity and its theology of Jesus, at the same time as it dispossessed John, the native Latvian “god” and/or symbol of unity, and tried to forget him.

The direct support of neo-Christianity may be seen in the act of the president of Latvia attending neo-Christian prayer meetings and state support for annual catholic pilgrimages to Aglona, a site claimed to be especially blessed for catholics. No such favors or visits are ever made to native Latvian religious groups or Johns Eve celebrations. The indirect methods of facilitating the forgetting of arch-Christianity include the dropping the name of John from the festival altogether. Thus, increasingly the festival is being called by the public media a “summer festival”, a “solstice festival”, “ligo festival” (“ligo” is an ancient refrain to Johns Eve songs, similar to neo-Christian “halleluyah”), “fernleaf blossom festival” (once a reference to the revelation of a spiritual mystery, now become a sexual orgasm), and other.

The Latvian president’s attendance of neo-Christian prayer meetings has now reached the stage of permitting neo-Christians to burn the books of Latvian authors. One neo-Christian priest encouraged his congregation to burn Latvian books in a Johns Eve bonfire and called John and religious folk traditions of Latvians as “an ideology that does it [the congregation?] physical and spiritual evil” (my translation of a citation in Diena, 4.8.09).

Be that as it may, the remnant of John or Johns—once an arch-Christian symbol of communal bonds throughout Europe and beyond—is a phenomenon worthy of the attention of spiritual communities throughout the world. John identifies Christianity (what I call arch-Christianity) not with worship of the supernatural, but as a theology inherent in human nature before it is turned into a theology that serves the oligarchs.

Nearly twenty years after Latvia has regained its independence, the oligarchs and their supporters have turned Latvia into a failed state—both, in terms of confusing Latvians as to their past cultural and spiritual legacy and in terms of bankrupting and pauperizing their country. The de facto bankruptcy of Latvia (it is kept from de jure bankruptcy by accepting a spirit-bankrupting loan from the IMF) is not a result of careful and thrifty planning of how to renew Latvia and its traditions. It is the result of overspending, creating irresponsible debt,and in the words coined by one of Latvia’s oligarchs—“flooring the gas pedal”, no doubt, to drive the nation into a tree or a ditch.

Today the Latvian population (1.4 million), its numbers long held in check through various repressions (war dead, suicides, prostitution, deportations, emigration for political as well as economic reasons), finds itself in a death-spiral. The situation report on Latvia is, as some forebear of the Latvian people might have said it, “Oh John!”

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