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Academia Iluministă (69)

Kabbalah in a Nutshell:

JEHOVAH, the supreme narcissist, wishes to see himself in all his glory. But how is the Infinite to be captured – how can Infinity gaze upon Infinity, how can Infinity be captured in a mirror. Wouldn’t the mirror itself need to be Infinite? It can’t be done. The closest God can get to seeing himself is to create a finite world that will act as a finite mirror in which he will see a finite version of himself.

So God as Logos, the principle of Cosmic Reason, emanates or creates an idea of himself – Adam Kadmon, the Heavenly Man, made in the image of the Logos. But this is an Idea, not a physical actualisation, not a truly independent mirror. Therefore, Adam – Earthly Man, humanity – is formed from matter (the “stuff” of the finite domain) – in the image of Adam Kadmon.

When Earthly Adam perfects himself in the finite domain and becomes Heavenly Adam (in as near an approximation as physical reality permits), then God gets as close as possible to the idea of his own perfection, albeit at the level of the finite rather than infinite.

Heavenly Adam (Adam Kadmon) has all the qualities required to complete the task of Divine reflection. In the final analysis, he is both mirror and viewer, object and reflection.

God gazes at the image of God and the image of God gazes at God, and in that union of gazes, that synergy of the finite and the infinite, the apex of existence is achieved. For Earthly Adam – now Adam Kadmon himself, God’s perfect image – the deal is the sweetest of all. He, the perfection of the finite, is allowed to gaze upon and contemplate infinity (the unlimited, the much greater than the finite self), while the infinite, of necessity, must gaze at something lesser than itself, but at least with crystal clear detail and definition.
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The Ten Spheres of Kabbalah:

KABBALISTS Talk of the Ein Sof: the infinite, endless, boundless, limitless. They say that God is never revealed directly to humanity, but only through his “virtues and deeds”. If Ein Sof is unfathomable, Ein is even more so. Ein is the hidden, transcendent God that can never be apprehended by humanity at all, resembling, to all intents and purposes, nothing at all.

At the end of their journey of enlightenment, Kabbalists do not expect to “know” God but, rather, to encounter his divine spirit in some mystical way and be possessed by him (as Christian Pentecostalists seek to be overwhelmed by the Holy Spirit). Their path consists of mastering ten sephirot (“spheres” or “enumerations”) that emanate from the Ein Sof. The upper sphere, closest to the Ein Sof, is called the “crown”. The ten sephirot are:

1 Keter “Crown”
2 Chokhmah “Wisdom”
3 Binah “Understanding”
4 Chesed “Kindness”
5 Gevurah “Severity”
6 Tiferet “Beauty”
7 Netzach “Eternity”
8 Hod “Splendour”
9 Yesod “Foundation”
10 Malkuth “Kingship”

Sometimes “Keter” is replaced by “Daat” (“Knowledge”), which is the conscious manifestation of the unconscious (or “above consciousness”) Keter. Some people consider Keter too lofty to include in the sephirot since it’s too close to the Ein Sof.

Wikipedia describes the Sephirot in the flowing terms:

Keter (“Crown”): Divine Will to create/Infinite Light of the Creator/ the Hebrew name of God “Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh-I am That I am”.

Chokhmah (“Wisdom”): First unbounded flash of an idea before it takes on limitations/ male light/ Divine Reality/ first revelation/ creation from nothingness.

Binah (“Understanding”): the infinite flash of Chokhmah brought into the vessel of understanding to give it grasp of breadth and depth/ feminine vessel that gives birth to the emotions/ reason/ understanding brings teshuva: return to God.

Daat (“Knowledge”): Central state of unity of the 10 Sephirot, also called the Tree of Life.

Chesed (“Kindness”): Loving grace of free giving/ love of God/ inspiring vision.

Gevurah (“Severity”): Strength/ judgment/ intention/ withholding/ awe of God.

Tiferet (“Beauty”): Symmetry/ balance between Chesed and Gevurah in compassion.

Netzach (“Eternity”).

Hod (“Splendour”): Withdrawal/ Surrender/ Sincerity.

Yesod (“Foundation”): Connecting to the task to accomplish/ wholly remembering/ coherent knowledge.

Malkuth (“Kingship”): Female vessel for the pregnant nurturing of the male lights of the emotional sephirot into action/ becomes the Keter Will source for any subsequent lower level in Creation/ accomplishment/ realization of the Divine Plan.

The Sephirot are said to reflect the physical organs of a human being according to the following scheme:

Keter (Crown) = Skull
Chokhmah (Wisdom) = Right brain
Binah (Understanding) = Left brain (or Heart)
Daat (Knowledge) = Central brain
Chesed (Kindness) = Right arm
Gevurah (Severity) = Left arm
Tiferet (Beauty) = Torso
Netzach (Victory) = Right leg
Hod (Glory) = Left leg
Yesod (Foundation) = Sexual organ
Malkuth (Kingship) = Mouth

Just as Christian souls had to ascend through spheres to get to the Empyrean, Kabbalist souls had to “ascend” through the ten spiritual spheres (sephirot) to reach the Ein Sof (as Spirit, not as God as he is in himself, which is said to be unknowable in the manner of the supreme Kantian noumenon).

This has been compared with the mathematical idea of the limit of an infinite series whose sum can be approached more and more closely as we add more and more terms, but never actually reached since that would require infinite terms. God similarly evades us, say the Kabbalists. We can get nearer and nearer, we but we never reach the final destination.

The Kabbalist movement came to prominence in central Europe in the 12th century. It reached its zenith in Spain in the 15th century, but then, in 1492, Torquemada engineered the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, with the unintended consequence that Kabbalah spread all over Europe. Poland and Russia provided relatively safe homes for Kabbalists. Another destination was Jerusalem in Palestine.

The modern Hasidic movement – those incredibly weird-looking people with an assortment of fashion-victim hats – are Kabbalists. As is Madonna, of course. If only she were more intelligent, she would realise she’d been a sold a pup. But, hey, being a celebrity don’t make you smart, as they say.

It’s baffling that anyone would want to be a Jew and worship the Torture God, Jehovah, when they could opt instead for Gnosticism, Neoplatonism or Hermeticism. At times, Kabbalah seems like gibberish, reflecting the Jewish propensity for autism and obsessive compulsive disorder. It’s hard to imagine that any non-Jews (apart from celebrities with Jewish friends, agents and managers) could take it seriously.
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Sephirot:

The highest level of Sephirot (Keter = Crown) is equated with Yahweh. The lowest level (Malkuth = Kingdom) is Shekinah, the presence of God in the material world.

Keter.

The first of the Sephirot exists at the edge of the Void. It is said to contain all that was, is and will be, the place of first emanation and final return. It is I AM THAT I AM – Yahweh, the first discernible manifestation of God. Note that Yahweh is an expression of two higher realities: Ein Sof and, highest of all, Ein.

Daat.

The most mysterious of the Sephirot is called Daat, and is often omitted from the list of Sephirot. Through this gateway, God may enter at will to directly intervene in existence. In the human sphere, Daat is knowledge that comes directly from God and seems to appear out of nowhere like the most powerful intuition (similar to gnosis). Daat is the Tree of Life, and we might also call it the Tree of Knowledge i.e. it could be regarded as the combination of the two sacred trees of the Garden of Eden.
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The Divine Beam:

Kabbalah talks of the void being surrounded by a glowing sphere of Endless Light. The act of Divine Creation described in the Book of Genesis consisted of a single beam of light emanating from the enveloping light sphere and penetrating the void all the way to its centre.

This was the holy beam of the Divine Will, and it brought with it the Sephirot, the ten sacred stages of emanation. These were sometimes called utterances and it was said that the world was summoned into existence with these ten divine vocal commands.
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The Biblical Mystery:

Was humanity created twice? Was the original human a hermaphrodite? Many commentators have pointed out that Genesis 1 in the Bible describes the creation of the world, and Genesis 2 does exactly the same with subtly different details. It has been suggested that God in fact made the world several times and did a botched time each time. Even his final attempt was a screw up with Adam and Eve disobeying him within six to twelve hours of their appearance in Eden. Then, when Jehovah later exterminated humanity apart from Noah and his family, the new Earth populated by his hand-picked people was soon even worse than the old Earth. Has God ever managed to do anything right?

So, why does Genesis 2 repeat Genesis 1 unless to hint that there was at least a secondary creation, and perhaps other hidden Creation attempts? Imagine a novel where chapter 2 repeated chapter 1 with slightly different details. It couldn’t be a mistake, could it? The author would obviously be trying to tell you something. So it must be with the Word of God. Or was the Cosmic Blunderer suffering from Alzheimer’s and simply forgot when he got to Genesis 2 that he was repeating what he had just said in Genesis 1? Is he a doddery old fool?

Genesis 1:26: Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image and likeness to rule the fish in the sea, the birds of heaven, the cattle, all wild animals, and all reptiles that crawl upon the earth.’

(“Let US”? How many monotheistic Gods are there? And note that humanity has God-sanctioned dominion over the animals, so let’s have no complaints about hamburgers. Did you know there’s a McDonald’s in Heaven!)

Genesis 1:27: So God created man in his own image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

(Note the completely bizarre switch from “he created HIM” to “male and female he created THEM”. Is it being said that original humanity was hermaphroditic and double, as some ancient Greeks, including Plato, had suggested? Or is it being said that a man and woman were created EQUALLY, with no nonsense about Eve subsequently being made from Adam’s rib. Why can’t God communicate in simple English?!!!)

Genesis 2:7: Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.

Kabbalists noted a radical problem between Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:7. The former says: “God CREATED man” while the latter says “God FORMED a man”. Now, Created and Formed have different meanings. “Created” is FROM NOTHING. Formed is the rearrangement of something that ALREADY EXISTS, namely the dust of the ground in this case. So, was Adam created or formed, or are two different events being described?

Surely Genesis should be the most airtight part of the Bible, yet it has already fallen part by Chapter 2 (not that Chapter 1 was remotely convincing, you understand). If you submitted Genesis 1 and 2 in an exam, the examiner would think you were retarded and fail you. Surely we should expect more of God than that he should be the Cosmic Dunce wearing a yellow pointy hat with an enormous “D” on it. Only people with a subnormal IQ could take the Bible seriously.
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Adam Kadmon:

The Kabbalists proposed that Genesis 1 actually referred to the creation not of Adam but the being called Adam Kadmon (meaning “Primal Man”). He is the Perfect or Complete Man, like the Platonic Perfect Form of Man. The Adam Kadmon Soul is said to be the primordial soul that contains all human souls.

In this view, Adam of Genesis 2 is formed in the image not of God but of Adam Kadmon (who was previously created hermaphroditically in the image of God). The earthly Adam is then given a soul from Adam Kadmon. Genesis 1 and 2 are thus reconciled. Ingenious, huh?

Adam Kadmon is the “original man” (“heavenly man”), created in the image of God. As the equivalent of an incorruptible, immutable, Eternal Platonic Form, Adam Kadmon takes no part in corruptible, earthlike, material essence. Material man is made of clay or dust, but not Adam Kadmon, who is a perfect Idea in the Mind of God.

Much of the intellectual underpinning of Kabbalism originates with Philo, a Jewish philosopher and contemporary of Jesus Christ who lived in Alexandria in Egypt. Philo held that Judaism was the sum-total of human wisdom, although he seemed to spend most of his time stealing from Plato. Philo’s Judaism, like St Paul’s Christianity, attempted to blend ancient Greek philosophy with Judaism. While Christianity tried to appeal to the pagan world, Philonic Judaism attracted Jewish mystics (who later became the Kabbalists). Kabbalah has a great deal in common with Gnosticism, Hermeticism and Neoplatonism. They all originated in Alexandria, with Kabbalah being the Jewish version of the other three systems. There were many disputes between Gnostics and Kabbalists because the Gnostics regarded the God of Kabbalah (Jehovah) as the Devil.

In Kabbalah, the eternal Platonic domain of Perfect Forms is relocated to the mind of Jehovah. To be more exact, the Perfect Forms are thoughts in the mind of an emanation of Jehovah that Philo called the Logos (the Word) – and Jesus Christ was of course later called “the Word” by Christians.

Adam Kadmon, the heavenly man, was the perfect image of the Logos (not of God himself as Ein Sof/ Ein who cannot be represented or have any likeness or image). Heavenly Adam was neither man nor woman but rather an incorporeal Idea. Earthly Adam, who was later fashioned from clay by the Logos, was corporeal and belonged to the world of the senses. In short, Adam Kadmon, primordial Adam, is the Platonic Idea, and Adam, Earthly Adam of flesh and blood, is the image, the inferior copy, the simulacrum of the Idea, brought to life by the Logos (whom Plato would have called the Demiurge).

Earthly Adam was formed as a man-woman (androgynous) and then the Logos separated them into Adam and Eve. So, the Idea of Adam pre-existed Adam’s earthly appearance. But imagine if Adam Kadmon himself could somehow incarnate on the Earth. Would he not be Man-God, the Messiah, the Word made flesh? In other words, it’s not too difficult for Christians to argue that whereas ordinary human beings are simulacra of Adam Kadmon, Jesus Christ was Adam Kadmon himself – the Heavenly Adam, the perfect image of the Logos come to the world. (So close is the relationship between the Logos and Adam Kadmon, the perfect Idea of the Logos, that they may effectively be regarded as one and the same. In Christian terms, this would make Jesus Christ Adam Kadmon.)

In this view, Adam Kadmon is the original man, and all actual men are his inferior copies. Nevertheless, the divine order is present in humanity. Earth is a lesser Heaven. As above, so below. Everything that applies to Adam Kadmon can equally be applied to humanity, just at a lower level of actualisation.

In the Zohar, the heavenly man, Adam Kadmon, is the embodiment of the ten divine manifestations – the Sephirot – hence earthly man is too, but imperfectly. The heavenly Adam stepped forth out of the original darkness and formed the earthly Adam, shaping him in his own image. That is the sacred link between man and God.
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St Paul and “Adam Theory”:

1 Corinthians 15:45-50 45 The Scriptures tell us, “The first man, Adam, became a living person.” But the last Adam—that is, Christ—is a life-giving Spirit.

46 What comes first is the natural body, then the spiritual body comes later.

47 Adam, the first man, was made from the dust of the earth, while Christ, the second man, came from heaven.

48 Earthly people are like the earthly man, and heavenly people are like the heavenly man.

49 Just as we are now like the earthly man, we will someday be like the heavenly man.

50 What I am saying, dear brothers and sisters, is that our physical bodies cannot inherit the Kingdom of God. These dying bodies cannot inherit what will last forever.

According to St Paul, the earthly Adam with his body of flesh and blood can be converted into a heavenly Adam with a spiritual body. Thus St Paul effectively destroys resurrection theory and replaces it with “body transformation” theory. Physical bodies are converted into spiritual bodies when they go to heaven. This is much more like Platonism than Judaism, hence why it appealed to pagans. It’s remarkable that neither St Paul himself, nor of any of his Christian followers, realised he had killed Christianity by talking of spiritual bodies.

St Paul said: (1 Corinthians 15:13-14) But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen again. And if Christ be not risen again, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.

Yet it turns out he’s not talking about resurrection at all. According to his own words, the dead don’t get their physical bodies back and walk the Earth again. Rather, they are converted from material simulacra of Adam Kadmon to spiritual, and hence heavenly, copies of Adam Kadmon (the Logos). That isn’t resurrection – that’s matter being converted to spirit. It has absolutely nothing to do with resurrection, which is a materialistic theory. Isn’t it amazing that St Paul, the true founder of Christianity, didn’t even know what resurrection was even though he made it the keystone of Christianity?

Jesus Christ himself supposedly came back from the dead with a physical body that could be touched by Doubting Thomas. In Corinthians, St Paul, by speaking only of spiritual bodies, denies that Jesus Christ returned with a physical body: he has therefore denied the reality of Christ’s physical resurrection, the central doctrine of the Christian faith.

Why does no Christian seem to notice these rather important details? If Christ didn’t come back from the dead with a physical body then it means he came back as a GHOST – as a phantom, an apparition – and Thomas wouldn’t have been able to touch him.

Islam, of course, says that Christ’s crucifixion was an illusion, and Christian Gnosticism said that Jesus was never anything other than a phantom in the first place since no divine messenger would ever enter the evil physical world and put himself at Satan’s mercy.

St Paul, rather than refuting these heretical positions, has merely added fuel to the fire. If Christ came back to the Earth as an apparition then Christianity is a theory of GHOSTS interacting with the living! But if he did in fact come back as a physical being, how did he get to heaven (via ye olde rocket?). And if he was a physical being then St Paul was WRONG about spiritual bodies. Scheeez! Come on you Christians, explain yourselves. Get off your ass, Popey boy, and try making sense of your own religion. Aren’t you the Vicar of Christ? Aren’t you able to make ex cathedra infallible pronouncements? So why haven’t you infallibly cleared up all the mysteries of Christianity, especially those regarding the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Resurrection and the soul? Cat got your tongue? Why the deafening silence?

Resurrection, at its most basic, is the statement that people can come back from the dead. However, proper “Soul Theory” denies that true death ever takes place. The soul NEVER DIES. All that ever happens is that a physical body perishes, but the soul to which it was attached never dies, so what do people actually mean when they talk of “coming back from the dead”? Bodies die, not souls. Souls don’t come back from the dead since they never died in the first place, and dead bodies can’t be reanimated because that’s scientifically impossible.

In terms or reincarnation, everyone understands that a soul migrates from one body to another. At no time is the soul “dead” and at no time does it come back from the dead. Resurrection theory is the bizarre notion that a soul, although immortal, is forever linked to a single body. There is thus complete confusion over what happens to the soul at death. Do souls and bodies both die and then get restored to life together, or do souls separate from bodies and the soul goes to heaven while the body awaits physical resurrection at the “Last Judgement”, in which case what is a “spiritual body”? Is it a spiritual body or a physical body that gets sent to Heaven or Hell on Judgment Day? What’s the relationship between a soul and spiritual body? Can a soul exist without a spiritual body; if so what’s the point of a spiritual body? If a spiritual body is immaterial why does it need to wait until Judgment Day to be resurrected? And so on. No Christian has EVER managed to explain any of this. They say they have faith, but faith in what? They can’t even articulate what resurrection is even though it’s the foundation of their “faith”.

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In Kabbalah, Adam Kadmon is the first being to emerge from the infinite Godhead, Ein Sof, and is essentially indistinguishable from the deity (just as God the Son is said to be essentially indistinguishable from God the Father in Christian Trinity theory). Humanity, having been created in God’s image, is comprised of the very same cosmic elements, the Sephirot, which comprise the “body” of Adam Kadmon. Adam Kadmon is humanity writ large. He is the cosmos with a body and a soul. He is the macrocosm and we are the microcosm. As above, so below.
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The Kabbalah Division of the Soul:

THE ZOHAR, the primary book of the Kabbalah, says that the soul is divided into three parts: nephesh, the organic breath; ruach the spirit; and nechama the power of man, the most elevated aspect of the soul. The nephesh is the lowest grade of soul, the animal part. The ruach is a higher level of consciousness than the nephesh and sustains the animal soul. The nechama is the highest level of spiritual development.

When a person is born, the first soul he receives is the nephesh – the animal soul – through which a person has the opportunity to raise up his condition from the physical to a more spiritual level, at which point he acquires the ruach. If he raises himself to a still higher level he is adorned with the nechama.

The possession of an animal soul gives a human the scope to elevate that primitive aspect himself. If he succeeds, he has made the world a better place. All people are tasked with imbuing matter with spirituality in order to purify it and draw it upwards. Thus, a human being is a combination of brute and god, reflecting and mediating the forces of the cosmos. A person can help to improve the quality of matter by drawing himself towards God or can make base matter even baser by allowing primitive forces to overwhelm him.
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The Tree of Life:

KABBALAH depicts the Tree of Life in the form of ten interconnected nodes, analogous to the ten Sephirot. The Kabbalist obsession with ten comes from the Pythagorean tetraktys. All systems based on ten are unwittingly paying tribute to Pythagoras and the Illuminati.
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Satan:

SATAN, the leader of the Fallen Angels, was the “tester” of Creation and of God. Satan is also the tester of humanity. Dialectically, Satan sums up all those forces that oppose the progress of knowledge, self-consciousness and the betterment of all. A monad (soul) can perfect itself and become God, but a monad can also make itself immensely powerful and then, instead of becoming God (with all of the benevolent connotations that implies), it can make itself Satan and seek to use its power in the pursuit of supreme selfishness.

The Abrahamic God – wishing to have power over everyone and to be worshipped and obeyed by everyone – is exactly how we define Satan. He is a false God who, in his egotism, imagines himself the True God. Just as any monad can emulate God (Abraxas), it can also emulate Satan (Jehovah).

Satan’s dialectical opponent is not Abraxas but Lucifer. A monad can evolve to a position where it is immensely powerful but absolutely committed to service to others rather than to itself. While Satan is the God of Selfishness and of all relentlessly selfish people (such as the super rich and privileged), Lucifer is the God of Altruism and all those who are helpful, selfless and cooperative are his followers.

Abraxas is the dialectical synthesis of Satan and Lucifer. Abraxas grasps the higher rational truth that selfishness is not always wrong, nor altruism always right. It’s imperative to achieve the right balance if you are to achieve self-perfection. Abraxas exists beyond good and evil: he is supra-moral.

All souls can become God, but they could equally stop at the prior stage of Satan or Lucifer. A universe of Satans would be truly Hell. A universe of Lucifers would be a kind of Heaven, but a lesser one because in order to maximise one’s own potential, one cannot always be obsessed with the welfare of others. Sometimes your own welfare must come first if you are to be all you can be.Abraxas, Satan and Lucifer may all be considered cosmic archetypes, but they are also real beings, the ones that first brought these archetypes into existence.

The universe primordially evolved a being who was utterly selfish at all times and that being has never changed his nature. He was and is Satan. He is the cosmic, archetypal Satan, but each world has its own Satan, and ours is the God of Abraham. All of the members of the Old World Order are Satans as works-in-progress. They are all destined to be future Satans tyrannising unfortunate future worlds, and they will have learned all of their lessons from the first Satan. Like him, they will consider themselves the only True God, who created everything.
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Angels and Demons:

According to Kabbalah, each of us has an angel and demon allocated to us. They’re not guardian angels trying to save us or agent provocateurs trying to get us into trouble. Rather they are accountants of sin and virtue, calculators of good and evil. At the end of your life, their calculations are presented to the Judges of the afterlife and your fate is sealed without appeal.
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The Four Worlds:

Kabbalists speak of worlds of existence: Emanation, Creation, Formation and Action. The divine order emanates from God. Creation can be thought of as the domain of Platonic Forms. The world of Formation is where matter is formed into shapes according to the templates of the divine Forms. The world of Action is where the Formed beings do things. Within humanity, there are four corresponding levels: divinity, spirit, psyche (soul) and body.

It is said that fallen Adam is initially stuck in the world of body and action, but as his spiritual qualities develop, he becomes increasingly aware of the Divine Presence at all levels. Adam Kadmon also has four levels called Will, Intellect, Emotion and Action. It is said that every one of us was present in Adam Kadmon before the Biblical Creation. We were therefore all pre-existent souls. Kabbalists say that the first chapter of Genesis is actually describing the copying of a pre-existent Divine World of Ideas (Forms) that emanated from God. Therefore, Creation wasn’t from nothing but from an emanated world containing all of the design templates of Creation.

Frankly, the Kabbalists seem to have one world too many: they prefer four worlds over three, but three would be more logical. In the Platonic scheme, from which Kabbalah is largely borrowed, there is a Domain of Forms and a material world where those Forms are physically copied. If we said that the Forms emanated from God, we would have three worlds: Emanation (Forms); Creation or Formation (material copies of Forms) and Action (the events of the physical world). “Creation” implies that matter is summoned from nothing while “formation” implies that pre-existing matter is shaped appropriately. Creation and formation technically contradict each other. In Kabbalah, there’s always a tension between emanation, creation and formation: only two from three are actually needed.
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Jacob’s Ladder:

Jacob’s Ladder is nothing other than the ladder of existence, showing angels ascending to and descending from Heaven. Jacob is dreaming when he has his vision i.e. he is asleep when his spiritual awakening occurs. We are all asleep and we all need to be spiritually awoken. Then we can start ascending the ladder to heaven.

Kabbalah says that Creation is filled with spiritual beings such as angels who are not perceived by ordinary people but whose presence may sometimes be felt in sacred places where consciousness can be raised to a higher level.

Kabbalistic angels are not physical: they don’t eat, drink or have sex. Nor do they have any individual will. They are messengers of the upper worlds and they simply carry out the orders and tasks assigned to them. Apparently, God first taught the secrets of existence to the highest archangels who comprised the inner council of the Court of the Almighty. (This seems somewhat futile if all angels have in fact no will of their own.)

After Adam’s expulsion from Eden, an archangel called Raziel (whose name means “Secrets of God”) gave Adam a secret Kabbalistic book showing how he might return to Eden. Not only that, Raziel said that as the image of God, when Adam looked into the mirror of existence he would perceive the Divine Face itself.

Kabbalah has a cyclical view of time. Each cycle ends with Judgment Day. All spiritually perfected human beings blend into Adam Kadmon and this image of God then sees the reflection of its own divinity in the accumulated experience of perfected humanity. In that infinitely exalted moment, God beholds God. The image of God then merges with the reality of God and dissolve firstly into Ein Sof (Infinity) and finally into Ein (No thing). God has at last returned to himself. The universe has disappeared…until the next time. And there is always a next time.

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The process of humanity perfecting itself can be thought of as a mirror, dirty and indistinct at first, being polished more and more until at last it can furnish a stainless reflection, perfect in every way. In Kabbalah, God continually hides then reveals himself. He oscillates between Deus Absconditus (the God Hidden) and Deus Manifestus (God revealed). Above all, he reveals himself to himself.

his is remarkably similar to Hinduism where the logic of that religion is that God creates Maya (Illusion) to hide himself from himself, and the purpose of the cosmic journey is to overcome Illusion and allow God once more to see himself as he really is. In Illuminism, the cosmic journey is about maximum potential being transformed into maximum actualisation (perfection), and then starting again. At the outset of the process, God is hidden. At the end, he is revealed.

So, there is a degree of similarity between these three views (Kabbalah, Hinduism and Illuminism). They all share the notion that there is a time when God is hidden and then loses himself through a certain process involving illusion, alienation, separation or exile involving the material world, and then, after overcoming many obstacles and false realities, God finds himself once more. In the case of Illuminism, God becomes fully self-conscious and attains an infinitely higher level than the one with which he began.

In none of these systems does existence come to a halt in the manner of the Abrahamist view where eternal bliss is achieved at the End of Days. As all logical religions understand, if a final state were possible, it would already have been reached since an eternity has preceded this present moment. We know that existence is cyclical for the simple fact that a) it is always becoming and b) we are 13.7 billion years out from the event known as the Big Bang. What happened before the Big Bang if not infinite previous Big Bangs that all unfolded according to the same cosmic script? And when our Big Bang universe perishes there will be another one along in due course. Becoming can never be converted into being, and becoming goes on forever. It’s always becoming and as soon as it attains any conceivable “final state” that merely signals the initial state of a new cycle.
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Hidden Sparks of Divinity:

It is said in Kabbalah that sparks of Divinity are hidden in everyday objects. There are those that are always on the lookout for these “hidden lights” and seek to redeem or absorb them. Perhaps Kabbalists should invent “hidden light” detectors like metal detectors. Beep.

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There are a few interesting ideas in Kabbalah but a lot of it is mind-numbingly dull – written by autistics, one would imagine, obsessively returning to the diagram of the Sephirot and then reinterpreting it over and over and over again until all meaning has vanished and just gibberish is left.
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Illuminism:

IN ILLUMINISM, God does not so much want to see himself reflected in a mirror, as to become self-conscious and know who and what he is. Once he has dialectically reached the Absolute, he has achieved Absolute Knowledge, Absolute Freedom, Absolute Mind and full consciousness of the Absolute Idea of God. Pythagoras and the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi both proclaimed, “Know Thyself.” That is the divine formula too: God wants to know himself. As above, so below.
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The Illuminati:

WE ARE THE “NEW PEOPLE”.

WE ARE THE REVOLT. WE ARE THE REBELLION. WE ARE THE LIBERATION.

WE ARE THE HERALDS OF THE FINAL WAR OF HUMAN FREEDOM.

We are the advocates of THEOGENESIS – the birth and growth of Gods.

The Illuminati were the leaders of the First Enlightenment, but final victory was not secured. So now it’s time for the Second Enlightenment, the War of Reason versus Faith, and this time COMPLETE victory must be achieved. This time the process must go all the way. Abrahamism and privilege must be eradicated from our world. It’s time to bring the light to all the dark corners of the world. This is our declaration of war on all the forces of endarkenment. This is our declaration of independence. This is our charter of freedom.

A New Humanity. A New Direction. An equal CHANCE for everyone.

We will create our own Eden and our own Tree of Knowledge, from which everyone will eat without fear. We will have a Tree of Life that invigorates everyone. Revalue all values. START again. Build paradise. No monarchs, no popes, no preachers, no prophets, no princes, no privileged elites.

We are the Plan. We are the ANSWER.

Join the Resistance. Change the world.

-AC
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What have we achieved?

The information provided to the first six degrees of the Illuminati (now available through the AC [www.armageddonconspiracy.co.uk] website and series of books) is designed to constitute a Grand Unified Theory of Everything. An entire analysis of all of the major religions of the world is provided, revealing their flaws and strengths (if they have any), so that all members are aware of what it is they are choosing to reject. Most followers of mainstream religions not only have no idea of other religions, they don’t even know anything about their own religion and follow it as a matter of culture, habit and brainwashing, not of knowledge. Their religious affiliations are therefore of zero worth.

We provide an analysis of all the major political systems of the world and show how they are all deficient in comparison with our political SYSTEM – MERITOCRACY.

We provide an analysis of three economic systems: FREE-market capitalism, communism and National Socialism. The optimal economic system is a hybrid of these systems and we refer to it as social, public or meritocratic capitalism, which is subordinated to the requirements of the Meritocratic Constitution and not of free markets (which are invariably not free and are rigged by rich cartels).

We provide an in-depth psychological analysis of the world and explain why people behave as they do, and how their deficiencies can be remedied.

We provide a new MODEL of society based on community rather than on the selfish family unit.

We provide a synthesis of philosophy, mathematics and science called mathematical idealism (or mathematical panpsychism), which provides the RATIONAL rather than faith-based foundation for religion. Illuminism is the world’s SOLE rational religion grounded in Logos rather than Mythos. Science – which is in fact mathematical materialism – is a subset of mathematical idealism. Science is nothing other than a version of Illuminism lacking the three most important numbers in the world: zero, infinity and the imaginary NUMBER. These three numbers are the ones that define time, mind consciousness, the soul, the afterlife and God i.e. the primary concepts of religion are actually mathematical concepts. Anything that cannot be defined mathematically is meaningless. Mathematics alone provides Absolute Truth. Nothing else can. Nothing other than mathematics exists. Any philosophy, religion or science that does not invoke mathematics is bogus. Mathematics is the anchor of the universe.

Illuminism offers an entirely integrated and consistent world-view. It offers the world an optimal political, economic and psychological system, one capable of turning humans into Gods. It offers a rational religion that requires no faith and needs no Creator God to whom we are all enslaved. It guarantees a soul, an afterlife and the OPPORTUNITY to become God on the basis of the only source of infallible truth – mathematics. It explains all paranormal phenomena mathematically. It explains time mathematically.

Illuminism is the explanation of EVERYTHING. It has attracted, in secret, many of the world’s finest minds who have worked on it patiently for millennia to bring it to its current omega STATE.

If you are LOOKING FOR the truth – a truth that embraces religion – Illuminism is your only choice. Illuminism has no religious competitors. Its only opponent is atheistic scientific materialism, and that, ultimately, is seen to be a subset of Illuminism that suffers from a catastrophic misunderstanding of two numbers in particular – zero and infinity. Science cannot produce a Grand Unified Theory of Everything because it cannot handle zero and infinity in its equations. The last hope of scientific materialism – so-called M-theory – attempts to make it impossible for the NUMBER zero to exist. If zero doesn’t exist then division by zero can never take place and thus catastrophic infinities can never appear in the equations of science. There’s just one problem – why should nature allow all numbers other than zero to have an actual, real existence? How can you have a mathematical system lacking its origin? Mathematics without zero (hence without its inverse, infinity) is what we describe as “incomplete”. The mathematics of Illuminism is based on COMPLETE MATHEMATICS. There are no missing numbers. Even the imaginary number is assigned ontological reality in Illuminism (the imaginary number frequently appears in science and engineering equations, but no one knows what it’s doing there and it’s regarded merely as a necessary instrument for getting the right answer). Whereas “real” numbers are the basis of space, “imaginary” numbers are the basis of time. What could be simpler?

The mathematical formalism of Illuminism ADDRESSES all of these mathematical issues in great detail.

Illuminism, when it becomes widely known, will sweep the world. Why? Because every single rational person on earth will embrace it. The whole scientific community will come onboard once they see that Illuminism is nothing but science with three numbers added: zero, infinity and the imaginary number; but these happen to be the most important numbers of all that address the BIG QUESTIONS of existence. Scientists will see that Illuminism, not M-theory, is the true Grand Unified Theory of Everything because it’s based on the only possible candidate for unifying ontology and epistemology: complete mathematics.

This is the gospel of the Illuminati.

“Number rules the universe.” -Motto of the Pythagorean School (the Illuminati).

-AC
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Conclusion:

Since 1576, it has been impossible for any rational person to be an Abrahamist. An infinite universe full of stars inconceivably far away refutes any concept of a Creation centred on Earth. God did not make this world. He did not make Adam and Eve. There was no Garden of Eden, no Fall, no Original Sin, no need for Moses, Jesus Christ or Mohammed. The whole thing is just one enormous myth that has captivated the imagination of the human race and become tied to a sinister brainwashing machine used by certain powerful parties to control the credulous, superstitious masses.

There was a time when the myth was supported by the science of the day and it was plausible to be an Abrahamist, but modern science has destroyed the myth. The facts are utterly incompatible with any religion remotely like Abrahamism. It wasn’t stupid to be an Abrahamist 1,000 years ago, but it certainly is now. The Eastern religions are much more scientifically plausible than Western Abrahamism.

If humanity is rational, hasn’t the time come to accept the scientific facts and consign Abrahamism to its grave? Abrahamism is false from beginning to end. It is the most comprehensively refuted system of beliefs in human history. That billions continue to believe in the false and discredited religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam is testimony to the most horrific conclusion – most human beings have no relationship whatever with the truth. They would much rather believe comforting lies and fantasies than scientific evidence and the laws of reason. They eagerly plunge themselves into the ignis fatuus – the fool’s fire – of faith. One day it will burn them to death.

The time has come for the values of the Enlightenment to prevail. It’s time for light and reason. It’s time for rational governments to take active steps to suppress Abrahamism. The hour has grown late. We must now cure the disease of faith and superstition. Abrahamism, with its boo-hiss pantomime characters and dubious heroes, has stridden the world stage too long. The curtain is falling. The show is over. The Abrahamist God – Jehovah/ Allah/ Jesus Christ is dead.

Thanks be to God – Abraxas!

The End

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The Armageddon Conspiracy: The Plot To Kill God
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http://www.amazon.com/Crystal-Spheres-Illuminati-Series-Book-ebook/dp/B005HMO7EG
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7/7

Academia Iluministă (68)

The Impossibility of Finite Creation:

“Nature is an infinite sphere, whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” –Pascal

The Ancient Greeks typically believed that a stationary Earth was fixed at the centre of a finite universe, with the cosmic boundary set by the crystal sphere of fixed stars, and this view was adopted, with a refinement or two, by Abrahamism. Copernicus, although placing the Sun rather than the Earth at the centre of the universe, continued to advocate spheres, circular orbits and a finite universe. That said, Copernicus located the sphere of fixed stars so far away that the universe was now much vaster than anyone had ever previously suggested, and it was no longer much of a leap to consider that it might in fact be infinite. Although Copernicus didn’t take that step, his successor, Illuminatus Thomas Digges, certainly did.

Illuminists Nicholas of Cusa and Giordano Bruno both held that the idea of a finite universe was absurd because an infinite, omnipotent God would never tolerate bounds. He needed an infinite canvas for his infinite power and knowledge.

We might conclude that a finite universe was possible if God lavished infinite love on it, but we can rule that out thanks to the legions of damned (98.3% of humanity, apparently!) in Hell. “God” seems rather more inclined to infinite hate.

Nicholas and Bruno were both obsessed with infinity – infinity of space and time and spiritual infinity as well as physical infinity. Only infinity could reflect the infinite God. Finitude was a contradiction in terms in relation to the infinite God.

Bruno wrote: “The One Infinite is perfect; simply and of itself nothing can be greater or better than it. This is the one Whole everywhere, God, universal nature. Naught but the infinite can be a perfect image and reflection thereof, for the finite is imperfect; every sensible world is imperfect, wherefore evil and good, matter and form, light and darkness, sadness and joy unite, and all things are everywhere in change and motion. But all things come in infinity to the order of Unity, Truth and Goodness; whereby it is named universum.”

Bruno regarded infinity in terms of freedom. A finite universe was like a prison. Infinity destroyed the walls of the prison and allowed endless possibilities. Enormous, wide spaces were opened up physically as well as for the imagination. Inexhaustible treasures were now available: the ultimate cosmic treasure hoard.

Bruno wrote: “There is a single general space, a single vast immensity which we may freely call Void: in it are innumerable globes like this one on which we live and grow. This space we declare to be infinite.”

Elsewhere, he said: “Thus is the excellence of God magnified and the greatness of his kingdom made manifest; he is glorified not in one, but in countless suns; not in a single earth, but in a thousand, I say, in an infinity of worlds.”

Many people find infinity disturbing, but what are they so worried about? The basic unit of the physical universe is a galaxy. A galaxy is made up of more than a hundred billion stars. Each star is potentially the centre of a solar system, being orbited by several planets, one of which might be suitable for the evolution of life.

Our own solar system and galaxy is nothing other than a reflection of the pattern of the WHOLE UNIVERSE. There’s nothing out there that’s different. Infinity is just endless repetition of this pattern. If you know one element of the pattern you know the whole lot. By concentrating on our own world, we know how intelligent life on all worlds operates. Reason and logic are the same everywhere. All thinking beings think exactly as we do. They are all subject to the same psychological forces. They may have evolved radically different cultures from ours, but we would still recognise those cultures. Humanity itself could have developed differently. Across our website, we have illustrated key turning points in history where humanity might have gone down entirely different paths. Christianity might never have happened, nor Islam. Imagine a world without those pernicious religions. The Enlightenment might have swept away all monarchs and old religions.

Although history could have been drastically different, it would still have been recognisable. We can all imagine much better human races than the one we have now; but we can also imagine more horrific human races. Imagine the whole world under Sharia Law or Judaism. Life wouldn’t be worth living.

Don’t become obsessed with the possibilities of infinity. There’s nothing out there that’s new or alien. We have it all on our own doorstep. In fact we have it all within ourselves. We are made of stardust and we are a microcosm of the macrocosm. As above, so below. The answers to everything lie within ourselves. Look inwards, not outwards. YOU are the answer to your questions if you did but know it.

Bruno wrote, “Open the door through which we may look into the limitless, unified firmament! We are the door! You are the door!
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Mythos People versus Logos People:

A Mythos person – steeped in “story-thinking” based on emotion – is typically extraverted and belongs to the feeling and sensing personality types.

A Logos person – preoccupied with logic, philosophy, science and mathematics – is typically introverted and belongs to the thinking and intuitive personality types.

A study of well-socialised, extraverted school students in the Netherlands showed that they couldn’t get away from science subjects quickly enough.

Nearly all of the problems in our world arise from Mythos people. They are the ones who hate reason and logic, who have no respect for mathematics, science, philosophy and psychology, who flock to dumb Mythos religions and who form fanatical, irrational attachments to mad ideas.

All Abrahamists are Mythos people. They are the people of faith; the uttermost enemy of reason. Slaves, submissives and sheeple are overwhelmingly Mythos people. They are nostalgic, sentimental, other- and tradition-directed. They love spectacle. They are attracted to royalty. They love celebrities. They are driven by materialistic rather than spiritual values. Christians and Jews are extremely greedy capitalists. Muslims have a fake spirituality: the enormous prayer gatherings of the Muslims reveal that the most important thing for them is to be SEEN to be a good Muslim rather than to actually be a good Muslim.

One of the most disturbing elements of any analysis of how to improve the human race is that things would unquestionably vastly improve if we had a radically different type of humanity where Logos introverts were just as numerous as Mythos extraverts rather than outnumbered some 4 to 1. Certainly, any nation that wishes to become the greatest in the world must actively engage in a programme to enhance the Logos ability of citizens and make them much less susceptible to Mythos thinking. No.1 on the list of things to do is to remove the Mythos religions of Abrahamism from our culture. They are the source of nearly everything that is wrong with our world. They are the essence of irrationality, faith, simplistic parables, fanaticism and servility.

If we want a rational world, we cannot teach children irrationality and declare that irrationality (faith) is the key to life.

End the phoney war. Destroy Abrahamism. Build a new world order. Destroy the old, failed ways that brought us to where we are now – a world of almost universal misery and woe apart from the privileged elite who have never had it so good.
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Native American Spirituality:

“SS” Sent us a fascinating account of Native American spirituality:

Prior to the “arrival” (i.e. invasion) of the Europeans in 1492, there were several thousand different tribes, so the expression “Native American spirituality” suggests a commonality that just doesn’t exist. Native American spirituality encompasses a wide range of beliefs and practices and is far too broad a topic to limit to only a few pages. Instead, I will attempt to approach, with care and respect, some generalizations and touch upon the basic and common principles that each tribe shared.

Basically, the foundation of Native American spirituality is a mystical connection and interdependence between humans, animals, the land and all of Creation. It’s the respectful means of honoring spirituality, seeking knowledge and embracing the underlying respect for communion and harmony with nature that represent the core features found in a variety of Native American belief systems. Long before Darwin taught a similar truth, Native Americans saw no difference between man and his animal brothers and sisters.

Most of the indigenous cultures in North America had developed rational spiritual (religious) systems that included creation myths that were transmitted orally from one generation down to the next that explained the origins of their societies and all of existence.

Most Native Americans worshiped an omnipotent, omniscient Creator. The Master Spirit could assume a variety of forms as well as both genders. They also recognized and respected several lesser supernatural entities, including an evil god who dealt out suffering, disaster and death. The people were attentive to the heart of nature. Members of most tribes believed in an afterlife and the immortality of the human soul. Nature was the great equalizer. They thanked whatever animal they hunted and killed that gave up its life to feed the people because they knew that in due time, they would also share the equal fate of death.

Native American societies enlisted the aid of the supernatural in controlling the natural and social world and each tribe had its own set of religious rituals and ceremonies committed to that aim. An individual might try to entice or pacify powerful spiritual beings through private prayer or by sacrificing valuable items such as food, furs and tobacco. Entire villages would call upon shamans whom they believed had supernatural powers. It was the shaman’s role to seek assistance from the spirit world and Gods to ensure a successful hunt, victory in battle or a good harvest. Shaman abilities included controlling and manipulating weather conditions and predicting the future. They would also assist individuals with dream interpretations, curing illnesses or casting spells, etc.

There is a common concept of dual divinity found throughout the belief systems where a creator is responsible for the construction of the world and a mythical individual (hero or a trickster) that introduces culture, proper behavior and teaches the people the means of providing sustenance to the tribe. In addition, there are underworld spirits that control the weather and interact with humans or the Shaman.

Creation legends vary from tribe to tribe but recurring themes are quite common. The universe is seen as multi‐layered where humans climbed from an underworld to populate the Earth. Another common creation myth is the earth‐diver. The story goes that in the beginning there was only the sky above and the waters below. An animal (the creature can vary depending on the relevance to the tribe) dove below the primal waters and brought up mud and earth and other materials to form the land. It should be noted that a flooded earth is a consistent element presented in the mythology.

Native American beliefs and practices form a fully integrated and central part of their very being. There is no such thing as a definitive Native American religion. They did not have distinct prophets like those found in the western monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. However, some “prophets” included White Buffalo Woman of the Lakota and Dakota tribes, Handsome Lake in the Iroquois Confederacy and Sweet Medicine of the Cheyenne.

Native American creation myths are also significantly different compared to Biblical Creation because these myths tell us that creation is an ongoing process that we are taking part in all the time. Creation isn’t something that happened 5,000 years ago or trillions of years ago. We are engaged in the Creation Story at this very moment.

Native American creation myths put humans in a very special place with respect to nature. People are not given authority or control over nature and other creatures. Instead, all co‐inhabitants of our planet (animals, plants and minerals) are our companions and guides. Mutual respect is required when interacting with animals, trees and birds. Mutual and deep respect is also necessary for natural forces such as the wind and rain. These beliefs forbid the despoiling of the environment for selfish reasons as well as produce a convincing spiritual angst when observing the mistreatment of any aspect of existence.

Native Americans did not differentiate between the supernatural and the natural. They saw the “material” and “spiritual” as an interconnected realm of being. In their view, humans, animals and plants play a part of divinity through their close connection with guardian spirits, (“supernatural” entities) who instilled their “natural” relatives with life and power.

Consciousness and spirituality are familiar subjects among traditional tribal beliefs. Everything possesses a spirit or a special sacred quality such as certain areas or land formations. To the Native American, the sacred element is not realized by building a church or the consecration of a temple but rather it is an element of the land itself. To the tribe, these locations are respected and cherished and are the destination they travel in order to pray, bury their dead, seek vision or fast. Western thought enables us to demolish a church and rebuild it at a new location or exhume our dead and relocate them to another cemetery. These practices are completely unfamiliar to Native American spirituality. The location or the place itself is what contains the sacred element.

Native American spirituality can be viewed as an attitude and appreciation for our existence. It doesn’t fit squarely into the physical and psychological realms of existence but it can tune us into the interconnectedness of everything and inspire us to a new way of being (or becoming) in the world. I for one, think it’s beautiful.

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Our Comment: Many thanks to “SS” for this insightful piece. Isn’t it time for a reappraisal of Native American spirituality? Modern America could learn a lot from the tribes that the US Army tried to exterminate. Would America be the monstrous palace of capitalist junk and trivia that it presently is if it had spent less time on Christianity and more time on Native American religious ideas?

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SS added: “We have conscious awareness but unfortunately most people see themselves as different from nature. Most indigenous people knew that they were from nature so they would treat the world as they would treat their own body.

“I’m also on board with Meritocracy based on social capitalism. In a factory of 2,500, I’m the only manager that runs their department meritoriously. Others notice and have tried to break it down with nepotism that runs rampant here but now they all know better than to try and fuck with me. I wouldn’t care if an applicant was the son or daughter of the CEO of the company. Prove your worth. I had to, so I expect nothing but the same from those in my department.

“I guess I should mention that I’m from Canada but I’ve been living and working in China for years. I came over here to pay off student loans, fell in love with the place and never left! In my free time, I study Metaphysical Theology.”

Well said!
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Kabbalah:

KABBALAH, the mystical Jewish tradition (“Kabbalah” actually means “tradition”) came to prominence in the Middle Ages thanks to the esoteric text the Zohar (the Book of “Splendour”), but its roots go back to ancient times and the outermost fringes of Judaic thought that were influenced by Gnosticism, Hermeticism and Neoplatonism. For that reason, mainstream Judaism hated Kabbalah and regarded it as heretical.

Kabbalah focused on cosmogony (the mythical/mystical account of the origin of the Universe), and the nature of God. It also had an “applied” strand whereby it tried to convert mystical knowledge into power over the real world. Thus Kabbalists were alchemists, numerologists, fortune tellers, psychics, clairvoyants, wonder workers and, above all, they specialised in the creation of artificial life. They were obsessed with the “golem” (Hebrew for “dumb or helpless”) – a creature composed of inanimate matter that could be brought to life by the most powerful and secret Kabbalistic knowledge concerning the true name of God. Adam was made of clay (“Adam” is Hebrew for “earth/clay”) and brought to life by God; Kabbalists thought they could do exactly the same thing with a clay golem (Frankenstein, made from parts of dead bodies, is also a kind of golem). The Brotherhood of the Shadows is the most secretive and powerful of modern Kabbalist groups and they are devoted to applying the most sophisticated modern science to Kabbalist mysticism in order to gain mastery of artificial life.

In Kabbalah, God in his essence is unknowable and is called “Infinity” (Ein Sof). The gulf between the infinite and finite worlds is bridged by a series of emanations (“sephirot”), which are progressively more accessible and knowable to the human mind. Most people can grasp the sephirot furthest from God, but to master the higher sephirot requires the esoteric knowledge of Kabbalah.

The sephirot are God’s actions in the world and he can be known through these actions (though not ultimately known since he is unknowable in the last degree). Human beings as images of God are microcosms of the macrocosm. The sephirot are reflected in each human being, and so fully understanding ourselves gives us the best and surest knowledge of God. Yet there is an implication that some part of the human being – the divine spark, the soul – is part of God and hence as ultimately unknowable as God himself.

Kabbalah provides the intellectual basis of Hasidic Judaism and is also favoured by many liberal Jews of a more experimental and spiritual kind. Together with Hinduism and Neoplatonism, Kabbalah influenced the modern Theosophical movement (theosophy means “wisdom about God” and is an attempt to attain a mystical insight into God’s nature).
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The Many Faces of the Jewish God:

IN KABBALAH, the highest manifestation of God – God the Transcendent – isn’t, strictly speaking, Ein Sof at all. It’s actually Nothing! In Hebrew, “Ein” means “No thing.” God is nowhere. God is Absolute Nothing. He is beyond existence. But then comes God’s second manifestation – “Ein Sof”, meaning infinite, boundless, limitless, without end i.e. God is everywhere; God is Absolutely Everything. If Ein is zero then Ein Sof is one. Ein and Ein Sof together are the totality of what is and is not.

Ein is God as Transcendence. Ein Sof is God as Immanence.It is said that Ein Sof has no attributes because attributes are properties of the finite domain, and Ein Sof is infinite. Equally, Ein – no thing – is without attributes. Therefore God has no attributes at all. He can’t be defined, described, comprehended, brought into rational understanding or anything else. He is beyond all of that. He is like the ineffable “One” of Neoplatonism, the mysterious and mystical source of everything.

From the endless, unfathomable Ein Sof God Source emanate ten realms of existence (like the emanations of Neoplatonism), each less glorious than the former, until we arrive at the final realm, the shabbiest of all, furthest from the divine light of God – and here our world is located. The ten emanations – called Sephirot – can be regarded as ten creative energy realms that intervene between the infinite, unknowable God (Ein Sof) and our created, finite world. Our task is to ascend through those realms, just as Dante’s Christian soul had to ascend through the crystal spheres to get to the Empyrean.

The Ein/Ein Sof scheme is similar to Hegel’s. He said that the cosmic dialectic begins with the thesis of “being” and antithesis of “nothing”, leading to the synthesis of “becoming”, which then relentlessly drives the universe forward dialectically until it culminates in the Absolute.

The Kabbalists have “nothing” (Ein) and “being” (Ein Sof – the infinite) underlying existence. Both are God, but at the stages before he gives rise to the world of limited things in which we exist.

To say that God created the world from nothing becomes a rather different concept from the one familiar to most people. If God IS nothing then God created the universe from HIMSELF, which immediately means that Creation is not separate from God after all, but absolutely imbued with God. There is nothing but God. Therefore this is suspiciously like pantheism.

Kabbalah says that the reason for existence is that “God wished to behold God”. In Hegel, God, as he is in himself, must alienate himself in the physical universe in order to become self-conscious and thus see and know himself. (Self-consciousness arises only through being aware of a consciousness that is different from your own and which you cannot subsume, hence self-consciousness needs multiplicity.) In other words, the physical world of alienation and multiplicity provides the mirror that God uses to behold himself.

Kabbalah then takes the strange step of claiming that as an act of free will, the Ein Sof was withdrawn from a particular place, allowing void to form, into which the mirror of existence could be placed. This cosmic act of withdrawal is known as Zimzum (“contraction”), and rabbis declare; “God’s place is the world, but the world is not God’s place.”

This “manoeuvre” is logically absurd. We already know that God himself is void (Ein – nothing), so if Ein Sof withdraws from any location, it simply reveals Ein. It is IMPOSSIBLE for Kabbalah to logically arrive at the position it does. It does so in order to separate God from Creation, even though the two cannot be separated. This is the stage where Kabbalah radically departs from Illuminism, Gnosticism, Hermeticism and Neoplatonism and becomes pure Jewish mysticism.

No intellectually honest person or religion could define God as “everything and nothing” (immanent and transcendent) and then arrive at the position that God can vacate part of existence. By definition, there is no scope for anything that is not-God. The heretical Jewish philosopher Spinoza understood this all too clearly. He’s often accused of being an atheist although he’s actually a pantheist: God is everything and everywhere.

Spinoza, a brilliant logician, might be said to be the only Jew who actually understood what Ein and Ein Sof implied. Other Jews shied away from the logical conclusion while Spinoza did not. He was a philosopher of integrity who went where logic dictated, not where theology pointed. Kabbalists wanted to have their cake and eat it.

Rabbi Nachman of Breslav said: “Only in the future will it be possible to understand the Zimzum that brought the ‘Empty Space’ into being, for we have to say of it two contradictory things: (1) the Empty Space came about through the Zimzum, where, as it were, He ‘limited’ His Godliness and contracted it from there, and it is as though in that place there is no Godliness and (2) the absolute truth is that Godliness must nevertheless be present there, for certainly nothing can exist without His giving it life.”

This, manifestly, is a paradox. You should always be on the alert when you encounter the word “paradox”. What it signifies is either that there’s a true phenomenon that’s hard to conceptualise in any familiar and common sense way, or that someone is talking absolute nonsense and wants to maintain two contradictory positions at once (“doublethink”). In these latter cases, there is no paradox at all. There is simply an error being described as a paradox to avoid calling it what it is.

Kabbalists say that if the “Infinite” did not restrict itself then nothing other than God could exist because God’s totality would overwhelm everything else. So, the argument goes, the immanent Infinite (God) withdraws itself from the area of the finite, and in that area he takes a transcendent role, standing above it, so to speak, but still in control of it.

What is Hegel’s (and Illuminism’s) answer to this “paradox”? It is that God does not withdraw himself from anything. The concept of Zimzum is absurd and kills off Kabbalah as a serious system of thought. The real cause of the Zimzum problem is that Jews can’t conceive of God as anything other than perfect. For them, imperfection can exist only where God is not. Zimzum is the idiotic contention that omnipresent perfection is able to contract part of itself to create a Godless void (nevertheless transcended by God). This instantly contradicts the original definition of God being everywhere.

The Kabbalists could have begun with a definition that God isn’t everywhere or isn’t perfect, but of course that would limit him and thus render him not God. So, they are between a logical rock and a hard place, and, as all bogus religions do, they create a specious argument that sounds profound but is nonsense. The easy and honest escape route is to acknowledge that God is indeed everywhere, but he is not perfect. God is EVOLVING towards perfection; he does not begin as perfection. He starts as infinite potential capable of being transformed into infinite actualisation.

There is no contradiction in a God of Becoming being both infinite and finite. The Infinite God is God in himself, but he is not complete and whole. He NEEDS the finite world; he needs to separate himself into infinite FINITE PARTS to create multiplicity, to create a dialectical competition for power between different centres of power. Through their conflict – through the dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis – God pulls himself up by his own bootstraps to his Absolute Self.

We are all part of God and we can all become God. We ourselves are monads: souls associated with the number zero which have infinite capacity. The definition of God applies to all of us. We all begin as potential and we are all trying to optimise that potential. Before the birth of the finite world, before true differentiation and individuation entered the world, we all existed as one vast Zero.

Each of us is a zero, but the zeros put together form “Zero”: the collection of all zeros. An infinite number of zeros (dimensionless points) can be superimposed on one another. How is one to be distinguished from the other? What separates them? They can all share the same content because they all exist together. That is why Zero is “God in himself”.

Outside space and time, the collection of undifferentiated zeros represents a single God. It is via dimensionality (space and time) that the monads can start having a separate existence and be differentiated one from the other. Each monad can then grow to fulfil its own divine potential. At the “end of time”, all the perfected zeros come back together at a dimensionless point. But now “Zero” is the God of all Gods, the Absolute God, the Omega Point of existence.

The cosmic journey is: dimensionless existence (pure mind) generates dimensional existence (the material world with which the dimensionless world interacts) where all minds are individuated and perfected, and dimensional existence then returns to dimensionless existence but at an infinitely higher level where infinite potential has been converted to infinite actualisation. The universe has gone as far as it can. It is now PERFECTION.

The crucial conceptual difference between Illuminism and Kabbalah is that Illuminism is about the evolution of perfection whereas Kabbalah is about eternal perfection “imperfecting” itself in a particular place in order to “see itself”. But clearly it couldn’t have been perfect if a) it had a need to see itself and b) is able to create a non-perfect zone. How can perfection give rise to imperfection? It’s impossible. This is the age-old “paradox” of why a perfect being chooses to make a less perfect universe. Clearly, no such phenomenon can ever happen. All Creation religions involving a perfect Creator who creates imperfection are simply ludicrous and incredible.

Illuminism is about transforming potential into perfection. Abrahamism is about perfection making itself less perfect for no plausible reason. Jehovah’s created world is by definition less perfect than Jehovah. Why would perfection have any desire to gaze at imperfection? Even to have such a desire points to an intrinsic deficiency in God, hence he is imperfect.

All of the problems concerning God stem from the nonsensical idea that God is eternally perfect. As soon as that fallacy is recognised, religion makes perfect sense. How can an all-powerful, morally perfect being create an imperfect world of evil? Impossible, right? But there’s no mystery if God was not all-powerful or morally perfect to begin with. Rather, he is evolving towards those qualities.

Becoming (evolution) is the core of existence, not being (immutable, eternal perfection). This is the ancient debate between Heraclitus and Parmenides. Why did Plato’s brilliant system fail? It was because his Perfect Forms were pure being rather than evolving Forms.

One way or another, the “becoming versus being” debate is at the centre of nearly all intellectual disputes, and there can be no doubt that evolution (becoming) is the winner. Any anti-evolutionary theory of being (which includes Abrahamism) is automatically WRONG.

Having separated God from the void via Zimzum, Kabbalists then contradict themselves by saying that God must continuously maintain the created universe, hence not be absent from it: “The Divine life-force which brings all creatures into existence must constantly be present within them… were this life-force to forsake any created being for even one brief moment, it would revert to a state of utter nothingness, as before the creation.” (Yosef Wineberg).

Creation therefore requires God’s immanence, even though we were told that Zimzum was all about removing God’s immanence. No amount of pretentious posturing and pseudo-profundity can get around the fundamental contradiction (it’s certainly not a paradox since it’s just wrong).

The Wikipedia entry on Zimzum muddies the situation even further: “This paradox is strengthened by reference to the closely related doctrine of divine simplicity, which holds that God is absolutely simple, containing no element of form or structure whatsoever. This gives rise to two difficulties. Firstly, according to this doctrine, it is impossible for God to shrink or expand (physically or metaphorically) – an obvious contradiction to the above. Secondly, according to this doctrine, if God’s creative will is present, then He must be present in total – whereas the Zimzum, on the other hand, results in, and requires, a ‘partial Presence’ as above.

“The paradox has an additional aspect, in that the Zimzum results in a perception of the world being imperfect despite God’s omniperfect Presence being everywhere. As a result, some Kabbalists saw the Zimzum as a cosmic illusion.”

So now the whole thing is an ILLUSION! Well that’s one way out of the problem. Jehovah has become rather like Maya of Hinduism: a cosmic illusionist intent on deceiving us. But what’s the point of this illusion? Why does a perfect being have to resort to playing mind tricks (on himself!)?

Kabalah, more and more, looks like Jewish Hinduism. It even has the concept of reincarnation. Who would have thought that the Jews and Indians had so much in common?! It has been said that Ein Sof is the impersonal part of God and that this is reminiscent of the Buddhist Nirvana. In fact, Nirvana looks much more like Ein given that Nirvana is typically described as Nothingness, the Void, the “Extinguishing”, the “blowing out”. So perhaps Kabbalists are really Jewish Buddhists who are willing to contemplate a more personalised God than the abstract Nirvana of Buddhism.

******

Zimzum is connected to the concept of exile and alienation from God. It is a place of flaws and imperfection. The task of humanity is to repair the problems of the world to allow reconciliation and union with God. The Jews claim that this is done by obeying endless rules and commandments (over six hundred of them!) Judaism is a rule-book religion for autistics and victims of obsessive compulsive disorder. It has absolutely nothing to do with perfection. It’s about slavish, mindless obedience.

Hear this: no slave will ever attain the kingdom of God. No one who obeys mindless commandments will ever be spiritually enlightened.
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Academia Iluministă (67)

Academia Iluministă (66)

Academia Iluministă (65)

Paradise Lost:

JOHN MILTON, in his epic poem Paradise Lost, provides a picture of a vertical universe with Heaven at the top, Hell at the bottom, and Chaos in between. As for Earth, it dangles on a golden chain dropped from Heaven. Eventually, a bridge is built to connect Earth directly to Hell to facilitate the transfer of the legions of the damned.

Heaven, the highest point of the universe, is where God and his loyal angels reside. It’s a place of light, and such is the purity of the light of God that no one can look directly at him. He must be observed through a cloud.

The angels have bodies of light that emit colours. Milton described the Archangel Raphael as being made of “colours dipt in Heaven”.

God sits on a throne at the top of a mountain, the highest point in the cosmos from where he can see everything. A cloudy mist surrounds him to protect everyone else from the intensity of the light he emanates. On a throne on his right side sits God the Son. (Milton secretly subscribed to the Arian heresy that placed the Son as inferior to the Father.)

Surrounding the mountain, on a great celestial plain, are the angels grouped into nine hierarchical categories (“choirs”): Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels, and Angels.

Although the Seraphim are the highest order of angels, it’s often said in Christian theology that the most important angels are the archangels such as Michael, Raphael, Uriel and Gabriel. Michael is the leader of the heavenly host, which seems to place him above the Seraphim. (On the other hand, Satan himself was originally the highest angel and he was a Seraph.)

As often happens in Christianity, two independent traditions are being built on. The first tradition, that of the ancient Hebrews, is simple and has many ordinary angels, led by archangels who are God’s chief captains. The second and much more complex tradition, involving the nine choirs, is the typical elaborate accretion that gets tagged onto the simple version to answer entirely different theological issues. The two versions are incompatible but no one seems to notice or care. This happens all the time in Christianity. The best example is the Nativity. Was the infant Jesus visited by shepherds or kings of the East? Didn’t the kings arrive twelve days later, and, come to think of it, weren’t they wise men (Magi) rather than kings? Well, who cares? The shepherds and kings (Magi) just get lumped together in Christmas cribs as if they all arrived at the same moment. All the believers like it that way. It’s a better story. The truth is neither here nor there.

Heaven is called the Empyrean, which in ancient Greek cosmology was composed of the element of pure fire (or aether – the quintessence – in Aristotle’s philosophy). It is an indestructible realm of light and is the source of creation.

The angels of light are immortal, so when the angelic civil war erupts in heaven between the followers of the Satan and those loyal to God, the losers are not annihilated but cast out…to Hell. They fall for nine long days, to the very bottom of the universe. The journey renders them unconscious. When they awake, they are lying chained on the surface of a lake of fire, surrounded by sulphurous fumes.
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Hell:

Unbowed, the fallen angels manage to release themselves from their chains and rise from the fire. They set to work and build a capital – Pandemonium, the place of “all the demons” – designed by the architect Mulciber. He constructs an infernal palace of magnificent size and splendour for Satan, with a great throne (a travesty of God’s heavenly throne), where Satan can sit as Hell’s king. (In Dante’s Inferno, Satan has three faces in mockery of the three persons of the Holy Trinity.)

The devils were industrious and intelligent. They built hell into a dark imitation of Heaven. Instead of God, they had Satan. Yet without the absolute beauty and truth of Heaven, everything remained corrupt and ugly. It was a sham Heaven.

Hell is as far as possible from the Empyrean. It’s totally cut off from the divine light. This is heaven’s antithesis. If heaven is the zenith of the universe, this is the nadir. In relation to Earth, it’s the Underworld. It’s literally under everything.

The archetypal Miltonic description of Hell is: “As one great furnace flamed, yet from those flames / No light, but rather, darkness visible.”

“Darkness visible” is one of the most evocative phrases in literature. Everything in the Empyrean emanates celestial light, but here, in Hell, light cannot penetrate. Nothing here can emit God’s light, not even the flames. The pure light of heaven is also pure goodness. The non-light of Hell – the infinite darkness – is pure evil. As God’s perfect light blinds, this non-light provides perfect visibility. All of the horrors of Hell are seen with the greatest clarity of all.

This Hell has two aspects: internal and external. The inner Hell is the psychological one which everyone in Hell carries with them at all times. Satan himself declares: “Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell”. Hell’s lake of fire burns inside everyone’s head. It’s an abiding state of spiritual horror and torment. It can never be escaped. It’s much worse than any particular place, or any physical instrument of torture. Mental Hell is much worse than physical Hell. It sinks its hooks in much more deeply. Physical pain can stop. People can become desensitised to it. But there’s nowhere to flee from your own demons.

Satan’s Council consists of his chief devils: Beelzebub (“Lord of the Flies”: Hell’s second-in-command), Belial (handsome on the outside but false and hollow on the inside), Moloch (an advocate of total, unending war against Heaven), and Mammon (who is always gazing downwards looking for gold and precious stones, just as in Heaven he could never avert his eyes from the streets of gold). Other prominent demons are Osiris, Isis, Baal and Astaroth, Thammuz and Dagon. In other words, Milton is asserting that the pagan gods of the tribes that opposed the Hebrews were in fact not gods but fallen angels and demons masquerading as deities. The enemies of the Chosen People worshipped false gods: corrupted and demonic angels seeking to lure humanity away from the true path.
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Chaos and Night:

Between God on his throne and Satan on his is the domain of Chaos and his consort Night: an enormous discordant, disorganized, dismal chasm. It is the formless void that existed before Creation. It’s the abyss, the cosmic darkness, containing matter in its utterly unformed state.

If Chaos can be imagined as getting more and more disordered the further it is from Heaven then Hell lies at the bottom of limitless bedlam. Milton says of Chaos that it is “Eternal Anarchy”, a “wild Abyss”, “The Womb of nature, and perhaps her Grave, / Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire, / But all these in their pregnant causes mixt / Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight.”

In their campaign against God, Satan and his devils decided to attack indirectly, by seducing God’s new creations: humanity. Satan assumes personal responsibility for the task. To get to Earth, he must journey through the vast, hostile tracts of Chaos and Night in one of the most arduous odysseys of all time. He launches himself into the cosmic abyss in search of God’s brand new creation – Earth. Milton thus inadvertently portrays Satan as a heroic figure, taking on the most daunting of challenges and pitting himself against the whole universe and God himself.

Many of those who disliked the Abrahamic God saw in Milton’s Satan a noble, inspirational figure of resistance and heroism who would not submit to the tyranny of Heaven. He is perhaps the anti-hero par excellence. He is the Rebel with a Cause, the fearless fighter taking on overwhelming odds and leading from the front. It wasn’t for nothing that William Blake said of Milton: “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”
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Earth:

In PARADISE LOST, God created Earth after the rebellion of Satan and his followers, with the purpose of replacing the fallen angels with a new type of angel – human angels. If they passed all of the tests of Earth, they would be promoted to Heaven and become a new Angel Order. Earth and the lesser heavens (Sun, Moon, planets, stars) by which it was surrounded were hung below the Empyrean on a golden chain.

Had Adam and Eve obeyed God, the chain would have slowly retracted, pulling Earth up to Heaven and merging the two. Instead, the chain was let out and Earth, weighed down by sin and evil, grew more distant from Heaven. At the same time, a wide bridge was built across Chaos to connect Hell to Earth.

Human beings are faced with a difficult ascent of the golden chain or an easy journey across the wide causeway to Hell.

The Garden of Eden is the paramount place on Earth and, just as the Empyrean has a divine mountain where God lives, so is Eden on a high hill, the highest place on Earth. When Adam and Eve are expelled from Eden, they leave the most perfect place on Earth and descend to the flat, hard plains.
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Sin and Death:

Satan and his fallen angels vowed to wage eternal war against God, and never surrender.
What though the field be lost?
All is not lost;
the unconquerable Will
And study of revenge
immortal hate
And courage never to submit or yield

Satan believed that it was possible to psychologically transform Hell into Heaven, and vice versa:
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n

Above all, he loathed being the slave of God. He would rather be king in Hell than servant in Heaven;
…preferring
Hard liberty before the easy yoke
Of servile Pomp.
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell;
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.

He had the most spectacular throne built for him.
High on a Throne of Royal State, which far
Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind
Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand
Showers on her Kings Barbaric Pearl and Gold
Satan exalted sat.

The gates of Hell are protected by Sin and Death. Sin is Satan’s daughter, and she incestuously mated with Satan to produce Death, making Death both the son and grandson of Satan. Death then raped his mother to produce the Hounds of Hell.

Sin and Death were the builders of the bridge from Hell to Earth.
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Rebel with a Cause:

What was the specific cause of Satan’s rebellion? Milton says that Satan – when he was Lucifer, glorious Angel of Light – was the principal archangel, second only to God. One day, God introduced him to his newly begotten Son and made it clear that the Son would now be second in the celestial hierarchy and King of the Angels. Satan was livid. He refused to serve the upstart. All Hell broke loose!

After the rebellion of Hell’s Angels, God decided to create the Earth to replace the fallen angels with a new type of being – US. If we did but know it, we are an angelic species. The first human beings – Adam and Eve – were astoundingly good looking. Eve was so stunning that when Satan first saw her he momentarily forgot his evil nature.
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John Milton (1608-1674):

Milton was an extremist Puritan who detested Catholicism. In the English Civil War, he naturally supported Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan leader of the Parliamentary forces, against the Monarchy.

After Cromwell executed King Charles I and took over as Lord Protector of England, he appointed Milton to the post of “Secretary of Foreign Tongues” (Foreign Secretary/Secretary of State).

Milton went blind but continued to work and write with the help of his daughters and aides. He was an advocate of animist materialism – the concept that everything in the universe is composed of a single material substance which is “animate, self-active, and free”. This substance can be in the form of stones and trees, bodies and minds, and includes souls, angels, and God.

This is not so different from the worldview of the ancient Stoics. For them, the material world was composed of the four elements: earth, water, air and fire. Earth and water were “heavy” while air and fire were “light”. The Stoics called the former “passives” and the latter “actives.” Air and fire – the higher, active elements – could combine in various proportions to produce something called pneuma (breath, spirit) that served the role of a fifth element; a quintessence like aether.

For the Stoics, everything was constituted of matter and pneuma, but that amounted to saying that everything was composed of the four elements since pneuma was composed of two of these elements. The all-pervading pneuma seeded with reason (Logos) structured the animal and physical world, and animated the living world of flora and fauna.

The Stoics regarded the cosmos as a single, whole entity: a living being with a soul. The cosmos was a vast sphere of matter held together, ordered and organised by Zeus through the agency of the Logos-bearing spirit (pneuma) that pervaded physical reality. Pneuma was itself a material entity, but of much more rarefied type than ordinary matter.

Pneuma comes in five grades (reflecting the relative proportions of fire and air of which it is composed) from the basic form that guides the most elementary matter to the pneuma that powers the divine.

The lowest grade provides cohesion, stability and shape and is present in inanimate objects such as stones and rocks. The second lowest grade is associated with plant life: it provides the life force. The next grade of pneuma is the soul which animates animals. The next grade provides the rational souls of mature human beings, while the highest grade belongs to the gods, but is really just a more perfected version of the human rational soul. Each human being has a fragment (divine spark) of the soul of God (Zeus).

The Stoics didn’t have a monistic materialism per se since there were four distinct material elements rather than one, but nor did they introduce any kind of mind-matter dualism. Rather, like modern scientific materialism, Stoicism made mind (pneuma, in effect), the product of combinations of material elements. Modern science has around one hundred elements rather than the four of the ancient Greeks, but the basic picture is much the same. In many ways, modern scientific materialism is simply the ancient Greek atomic theory combined with Stoicism. It’s not any radical departure from the views of the ancients; it’s just couched in more sophisticated mathematical and scientific jargon. The Stoics’ idea of the Logos (Reason) present in the pneuma is similar to the implication of scientific materialism that the rational laws of science (modern Logos) are somehow embodied in all matter.

Milton, with his concept of animist materialism, sought to avoid both the mind-body dualism of Plato and Descartes and the mechanistic determinism of Thomas Hobbes. Since his angels in Paradise Lost have material bodies, they can eat and have sex (indicating that angels can be male or female – can they also have baby angels and form angelic families?)

Milton was right to go down the path of monism rather than dualism, but wrong to make it a materialistic monism. In fact, reality reflects an idealistic monism. Mind is the supreme reality but is able to create the material world through mathematics and dimensionality.

******

A remarkable point worth commenting on is that the grandeur and majesty of Dante’s vision is possible only within Roman Catholicism. Protestantism, an ugly, drab religion, is incapable of producing the beauty and glory of the divine. The most magnificent religious artistic creation of Protestantism is Paradise Lost which can almost be interpreted as a glorification of Satan (the embodiment of Protestantism) defying “God” – Catholicism! Paradise Lost, at least at the beginning, makes the Devil into a fabulously heroic and noble individual challenging the might of the divine empire.

Hell, it might be said in this view, is the Protestant Church standing opposed to Heaven, the Catholic Church. Satan goes to Earth to seduce humanity away from obedience to Catholicism and the Church hierarchy and to place their trust much more in themselves. He gives them the Bible – the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil – in the form of their own national language rather than in Latin, the language of Catholicism (which most people couldn’t read). He delivers them from ignorance by giving them “knowledge”.

Milton wrote so brilliantly about Satan because he subconsciously identified Satan with the Protestant challenge to Catholicism, and, during the English Civil War in the seventeenth century, with the Parliamentary challenge to the English king. In the Civil War, Milton was on the side of Cromwell and Parliament against the “rightful”, divine authority of King Charles I.
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The Devil and Hell:

It’s often stated that the Devil’s primary objective is to be worshipped by humanity as God. He wishes to rival the power and glory of the True God and to create a realm equal to Heaven. Isn’t that agenda exactly the one pursued by the Abrahamist “God”?

Many commentators have pointed out the Devil is virtually never mentioned in the Old or New Testaments. They’re wrong. He’s on every page. He’s Jehovah!

According to Christian myth, when Satan was the highest angel in heaven (when he supposedly bore the name of Lucifer), he was made of an aethereal, shimmering substance and had great wings (six or twelve) that glistened with living gold. His throne was on God’s left side. (If God the Son was on the right, surely God the Holy Spirit should have been on the right, but he always seems to be mysteriously missing.)

It was said that God promised Lucifer dominion over Earth, and he certainly got it (as Jehovah!). According to some tellings, Lucifer found himself so superlative that he thought he was God’s equal and he refused to be subservient in any way. Eventually he developed the idea that he was the greatest being of all, the authentic God of the universe, and everyone must worship him.

When God vacated his throne to busy himself with creating the Earth, Satan ascended the divine throne and took it for himself. He proclaimed to the Angelic Host – the nine choirs – that he was their new leader and he would usher in a Golden Age the like of which had never been experienced before. Were they not creatures of free will, he asked? Then they were free to worship him. A third of the angels, thoroughly bored with the tedious worship of the old God, hailed their new Lord and bowed before him. He and the rebel angels took over the North of Heaven and made preparations for war.

Michael the Archangel took command of the loyal angels and angelic civil war erupted in Heaven itself. When God returned from the Garden of Eden, it was to find Satan on his throne and full-scale war raging. Satan’s great wings were flaming bright with sin. God, enraged, hurled the rebels from Heaven for all eternity. Over 133 million angels, their pure, shining light bodies turning black and oily as they fell from the sky like raindrops, were cast out of paradise.

Down and down they fell, into the bottomless abyss. For nine long days they crashed downwards, growing heavier and heavier with sin. According to some telling, it was Earth itself upon which they landed, crashing through the crust and coming to a dead stop at the centre of creation – the hellfire and brimstone at the core of the Earth where they would burn forever. The perfumed air of Heaven was replaced by choking, toxic fumes. And here Satan was forced to establish his new kingdom. He vowed that in time it would be greater than Heaven. He would never stop opposing God and all of his plans.

When he succeeded in corrupting Adam and Eve, Satan delivered an immense blow to the divine plan. The pearly gates of Heaven were thenceforth shut to humanity, and only the sacrifice of Jesus Christ partially opened them again, to all true believers. For the time being, Heaven was CLOSED. Earth became a grim, horrific place, reflecting the Hell at its heart.

Protestant champion Martin Luther declared that few are saved and infinitely more are damned. It is said that only one in sixty people make it to Paradise. That’s just 1.7%. In other words, “God” created humanity in order to make 98.3% suffer forever. Do you really think that’s a God worth worshipping? How can anyone deny he’s the Torture God? All he cares about is universal Terror.

Those who are saved must ascend a Golden Ladder to paradise. The rest enjoy the express highway to Hell.

The word Hell comes from the old Germanic word Hölle meaning “hole in the ground or cave” (like the Hebrew Sheol).

Hell, in Catholic theology, has three domains: Hell proper, Limbo and Purgatory. Hell has entrances for souls, but no exits. Limbo likewise. Purgatory has entrances, but none leading to Hell proper, and it has one exit leading to Heaven. Purgatory is the only region of Hell from which sinners can be redeemed. Only there can you win the golden ticket out.
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Heaven in flames?:

THE REBEL ANGEL Xaphan suggested to the rebellious angelic horde that they burn Heaven to the ground. He was just about to light the fire when God cast all the rebels into the Abyss. Imagine if Xaphan had succeeded and Jehovah’s kingdom had lit the sky as it burned down; the greatest conflagration in history.

Now, Xaphan works the bellows of Hell, fanning the flames of damnation. Volcanoes act as the safety valves for the furnaces of Hell. If they didn’t relieve the pressure, Hell would explode and all Hell would literally break loose.

The fuel of Hell is supplied by burning the souls of sinners. This is the perfect solution to our fuel problems. Souls burn perfectly forever, with no toxic by-products!

Yet some parts of Hell are frozen. They’re so cold that bones snap like twigs.
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Hell’s Publishing Industry:

HELL has a vast publishing empire (run by Rupert Murdoch perhaps?), churning out blasphemy, porn and garbage. Tabloid newspapers, we might speculate, are its main product. Or perhaps it’s Torahs, Bibles and Korans.

Rock ‘n’ Roll is the main product of Hell’s music industry. There is also an infernal orchestra that forever plays the Dance of Death.
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Hell’s Capital (Washington D.C., Jerusalem?):

PANDEMONIUM – the place of “all demons” – is the capital city of Hell. It is the ultimate industrial city, the opposite of the Elysian Fields. It’s a grim, urban landscape, full of skyscrapers and overcrowding of the doomed and the damned who spend most of their time engaged in slave labour.
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Hell is a Black Hole?:

There are those who say that the Devil’s lair is like a black hole, sucking everything sinful into it. Once a soul has passed the Event Horizon of Sin, there’s no way back. The heavier a soul is with sin, the more easily it’s drawn into the Hell Hole of infinite Darkness.

Everyone in Hell is permanently alienated from God. They are weighed down by their estrangement from the divine. It’s the greatest burden imaginable.
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Hell: Them or Us?:

SARTRE: “Hell is other People.”
T.S. Eliot: “Hell is oneself.”
You get used to Hell if you’re there long enough: “He who is used to Hell is as comfortable there as anywhere else.” (Anonymous)
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The Keys to Hell:

ST PETER is said to hold the keys to Heaven. The fallen angel Dommiel performs the equivalent role in Hell, though he doesn’t actually have any keys because the gates are always open to incomers (and closed to those who want out).

The gates of Hell are never locked. Hell is ready for business 24/7 every day of the year, including Christmas!

Although the gate IN to Hell is always open, it is always locked in relation to getting out. It’s closed with seven seals that will not be broken until the Last Judgment.

Sometimes it’s said that Hell has three gates: one at the bottom of the ocean, one in an enormous wilderness and one in a city (with Paris typically being named as the place in question).

Each zone of Hell reflects the particular sin that brought the damned there. The demons of each zone are specialists in inflicting punishment worthy of the sin in question. The Devil himself punishes the worst sinners – traitors.

Hell has one-way gates for the damned: they can get in easily, but they can never get out. And isn’t that true of so many aspects of life? Addiction in all of its forms has a lot in common with Hell – easy in, hard out.
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Pride before a Fall:

IN THE ISLAMIC telling of Satan’s rebellion, Adam was brought before the Angelic Host and Allah demanded that every angel bow to his new creation. Satan refused, saying, “Why should I, a son of fire, bow down before a son of clay?” Instantly, Allah cast him out of Paradise.

What is it with Allah and his obsession with getting people to bow? Look at all the trouble it’s caused.
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Christ the Fraud:

LET US TELL YOU A STORY. Once upon a time, a being of ultra-evil called Satan enslaved the human race and said that all of them would be despatched to Satan’s cosmic torture chamber where he would inflict infinite pain forever: a place he named Hell.

Hearing of Satan’s monstrous plan, God declared, “No, take me instead.” Satan was overjoyed and agreed immediately. He imprisoned God in Hell and subjected him to the greatest pain conceivable, a pain that would never end.

So, if the tale we have told was about the “real” Jesus Christ then all of humanity would be forever in Christ’s debt. Christ’s love for humanity, his infinite self-sacrifice, saved humanity from a fate worse than death. He took upon himself all of the sins and suffering of humanity, a burden he would endure to Doomsday. We would be forever in his debt and his sacrifice would shine as the greatest beacon in history.

But let’s see what actually happened. It wasn’t Satan who built Hell – it was God! It wasn’t Satan who declared that humanity was guilty of Original Sin and hence damned to Hell forever – it was God. Jesus Christ didn’t sacrifice himself to spare humanity from Satan’s evil decrees, but from his own. Jesus Christ allegedly lived for 33 years and then died on the Cross – does that constitute a significant sacrifice in the context of eternity? Enormous numbers of human beings have endured much worse fates than Jesus Christ, and often at the hands of followers of Jesus Christ.

There is NOTHING about the story of Jesus Christ that makes any sense. It’s ludicrous. He died to save us not from Satan but from himself. What kind of crazy shit is that?

The little tale we told at the start makes sense, but not the actual tale of Jesus Christ. Shouldn’t we define Satan as the person who creates Hell and sentences souls to eternal suffering in Hell? In that case, there’s only one person who fits the bill – the Abrahamic God! If he’s not Satan then who is? Who could possibly have done more damage to humanity than Hell’s Creator and Judge – “God”? The only role “Satan” has in Hell is to act as God’s Torturer-in-Chief. If God wanted him to stop, Satan would. After all, God is infinitely powerful and could crush Satan in an instant if that was his wish.

No, let’s attribute humanity’s suffering to its one, true author – “God”. This monster must be fought to the last breath. He is humanity’s ultimate and eternal enemy.

“God” is the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE, hence he is Satan. The True God is the friend of the people. The True God is Abraxas.
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The “Cosmology” of the Social Order:

SINCE ANCIENT TIMES, the master-slave paradigm had led people to be obsessed with hierarchies. This has always suited those at the top of the hierarchies, of course. They claimed they were there because that’s exactly where God had put them. Therefore to challenge them was to defy both the natural and the divine order.

As we have seen, the cosmos itself was seen as reflecting a strict hierarchy, with the Devil at the bottom and God at the top. Everyone had their place in the hierarchy and it was wrong for anyone to seek to be higher than God had decreed. It was a structure comparable to the Hindu caste system.

It wasn’t until the French Revolution when the Illuminists Robespierre and Saint-Just – two nobodies in the monarchical social order of France, despite their great talents – demanded and got the execution of Louis XVI that a decisive blow was struck against social hierarchies. Robespierre and Saint-Just announced to the world that merit rather than privileged birth would henceforth be the axis around which the world would revolve. Anyone was qualified to get to the top if they had the talent, and no one could block them according to the ancient idea of divine right to rule.

The meritocratic vision is that of a Round Table where the most talented can become the first minister according to the principle of primus inter pares: first amongst equals.
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