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Archive for Maggio, 2019:
Academia Iluministă (66)
In his treatise On the Heavens, Aristotle divided the cosmos into two. Everything below the moon is mortal and subject to decay, change and procreation (generation). Everything above the moon is immortal, immutable, indestructible and ungenerated i.e. this is the divine realm. Everything in the sublunary sphere is composed of the four elements: earth, water, air and fire. Everything above is made of aether, the quintessence. The four earthly elements move linearly; aether naturally moves in perfect circles (hence the motion of the spheres).
The heavens are perfectly spherical and move around the centre of the universe (Earth) in orbits of perfect circles. The upper heavens are more divine than the lower heavens. According to Aristotle, stars and planets are not made of fire (as many people thought because they shone), but of the quintessence. Thus, the aether manifests itself in several ways. It can form stars, planets, “crystal spheres”, and it becomes more rarefied, perfect and divine the further it is from Earth. It’s truly a miracle substance.
This view meant that many Greek philosophers did not regard the Earth as a planet. Planets, in their view, were made of aether that had no material density and therefore could float. (It was held that the elements of fire and air had “positive” density, counteracting the “negative” density of Earth and Water: fire and air strive to go up, and earth and water to pull things down. We might call this an early version of gravitational theory: it has nothing to do with the modern scientific concept of density which is graded from high to low rather than positive to negative.) Since the Earth was made of the dense elements of earth and water, it plainly wasn’t a planet but rather a unique Creation (implying the existence of God).
The stars and planets are fixed in their particular spheres of operation, and move according to the circular motion of their spheres. Note that it’s not the planets and stars that are moving but the crystal spheres in which they are set. The crystal spheres move at different speeds, and their overall motion creates the divine Music of the Spheres. As for the four elements of the sublunary sphere, they are not eternal but they come together in various combinations to create all the perishable things of the world. Fire is the element closest to aether and rises highest, followed by air. The element of earth is heavy and sinks downwards. Water is less heavy and sits on top of earth as the oceans.
Although this vision of reality is almost total nonsense in modern scientific terms, it dominated scientific thinking, such as it was, until the time of Copernicus and Galileo, the latter being many people’s candidate for the first true scientist of the modern age. Despite the flaws of Aristotle’s thinking, it is aesthetically beautiful and compatible with a “divine” view of reality. At a simplistic level, it appears to offer neat explanations of all manner of phenomena and is in accord with “common sense”. Christians eagerly seized on it and gave it an interpretation that Aristotle himself never intended.
The Aristotelian universe seems to be built with gods and men in mind. The sublunary universe is like a special laboratory deliberately created by the gods for the purpose of making new gods through an elaborate test of mortal men. Aristotle himself was not someone who believed in the soul in any conventional way, but his ideas were harnessed by advocates of the soul. Reincarnational Gnostics made as good use of his ideas as Christians.
Some Gnostics hypothesised that the soul was a divine spark of the holy substance aether, trapped in the mortal, material world of the four perishable elements. Its natural tendency was to rise up and enter the divine domain above the moon, but it was weighed down by heavy earth (the physical body) and couldn’t escape. Its task was to work out how to free itself of the earthly elements and soar into the heavens.
All of the different spheres of the heavens were associated with various gods and angels, who possessed secret passwords. In order to pass through each sphere and rise higher, a soul had to know the relevant passwords. The finest souls knew all of the passwords to get to the highest heaven itself. Others could find their natural level.
This is a materialistic account of the soul – aether is typically regarded as a material substance – but it makes a lot of sense on a superficial level, and its appeal is apparent. All souls were on a great star journey through the heavens to reach God. They had to acquire the special knowledge (gnosis) that furnished them with all the keys, passwords and maps to navigate the celestial spheres to the highest heaven.
And if the aether is deemed so fine and subtle that it becomes immaterial and can be identified with “mind substance” then we have a soul theory based on mind rather than matter and the celestial spheres become spiritual rather than physical spheres. Much esoteric thinking simply converted materialistic thinking into spiritual thinking. Spirit bodies replaced matter bodies; a spiritual universe replaced the physical universe. Often, material and spiritual elements were mixed together. Much of Theosophy and Anthroposophy is based on a hopeless confusion of materialism and spiritualism.
In order to understand religious thinking, it is necessary to understand the type of science and cosmology to which ancient peoples subscribed. If you were born into a world where science was taught in the Aristotelian manner, religious ideas would make much more sense to you.
The truly astonishing thing about modern religious thinking is that all of its “scientific” underpinnings have been destroyed by modern science. Everything that makes sense in terms of the ancient view of science makes no sense at all in the modern view. Logically, religion should have died when modern science killed ancient science since the model that supported conventional religious thinking has been removed. It’s a testament to how irrational modern religion is and how dangerous faith is that people can continue to believe in concepts and a worldview that has been definitively refuted.
In terms of known science, it made some sort of sense to believe in the Abrahamic God 1,000 years ago (leaving aside the immorality of the Abrahamic God), but it makes no sense now. Modern religion has made no credible attempt to compete scientifically, withdrawing into a fanatical mind-set of faith and mystery. It has divorced science and religion and claimed that they address separate questions. They absolutely do not. As the ancients understood, religion and science must relate to the SAME reality. There are not two different worlds: one of science and of religion. There are not two different truths. Scientific truths CANNOT contradict religious truths or vice versa.
When, historically, science and religion collided, it was invariably science that was the winner by revealing a truth about the world that entirely disproved the mainstream religious thinking. When Galileo was put on trial for his life by the Inquisition for supporting the Copernican heliocentric theory rather than the Abrahamist/Ptolemaic geocentric theory it represented the absolute collision of scientific and religious truth. The Catholic Church knew instinctively how critical this moment was. If science were allowed to refute revelation, it was the end of revelation. The Church had long understood that many matters of faith stood at total odds with matters of reason. If revelation fell to reason, Abrahamism – a religion of revelation – was certain to die. Thus everything was at stake in Galileo’s trial.
Galileo was found guilty of heresy, of course, and he recanted to save his life. His life was spared but he lived out his days under house arrest: a dismal fate for the world’s first modern scientist. This was the Trial of the Ages. Although the Catholic Church seemed to win (by completely ignoring science and citing only theology), it was in fact science that proved the victor in the long run. In terms of the intellectual debate, mainstream religion is now a sad, marginal activity that keeps out of the way of science for the most part, though Creationists sometimes fight desperate rearguard actions.
The “Intelligent Design” movement is Creationism in disguise, but this movement would in fact be entirely respectable and admirable if instead of covertly supporting Abrahamism it focused on a different angle: promoting the primacy of mind over matter. Illuminism is a species of intelligent design, asserting that living mind is the underlying reality of existence rather than mindless, dead matter.
According to scientific materialism, everything happens because of inexorable mechanistic laws, sprinkled with randomness. Matter collides and some of these collisions have miraculously managed to produce life. More collisions have managed to add mind to matter. Human consciousness is just a product of atomic interactions and, because atoms and their interactions are scientifically determined, so is human consciousness. In this view, free will is an illusion and we are all automata. That is the essence of mainstream Darwinism advocated by the likes of Richard Dawkins. In truth, mind is the basis of existence and mind drives all processes. Mind, not matter, originated the laws of science. Laws are inherently mental and not material.
It’s time for a new Trial of the Ages, and this time the boot will be on the other foot. It’s time for science to prosecute Abrahamism according to the findings of modern science. Let the whole world see this trial. Let’s call all of the star witnesses for both sides. Let’s get it all out in the open once and for all.
When Abrahamism has been found guilty and sentenced to oblivion, let’s have part two of the trial: Idealism versus Materialism. Now it will be scientific materialism in the dock, and the Illuminati will be more than happy to lead the prosecution on behalf of panpsychism, dialectical monism and mind as the origin of matter rather than the other way around.
Isn’t it time the world was allowed to see all of the main systems of thought put to the test in the Court of Reason? Isn’t that the least our “leaders” can do for us? Of course, they never will because they are Abrahamists who hate the truth, and are doing very nicely with the world as it currently is, thank you very much. People must be motivated to change, and the super rich controllers of our world have no incentive to change anything at all. Quite the reverse.
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Parmenides and the “One”:
PARMENIDES, one of the pre-Socratic philosophers, has been called the first Western metaphysician, he who looked beyond natural science to apprehend reality. Parmenides’ has an abiding place in the philosophical pantheon for arguing that all change and becoming are illusory. Pure being is all there is. Our senses deceive us. The multitude of things revealed by the senses are not truly there.
Parmenides believed in an infinitely large and indivisible cosmic sphere called The One. It seems that he intended it as a material, extended entity but it’s also possible to conceive of it as a cosmic mind. The One was the Truth. It was God. It was the Logos. It was pure Being. It was complete, whole, uncreated, indivisible, unmovable and eternal. It was the sole reality. There could be no other.
Parmenides held that there was no such thing as empty space, so the One could not be divided into parts (which would have involved spaces between the parts). Since there is no empty space, the One cannot move because to do so it would have to occupy a space previously empty, and no such thing is possible. The One must always have existed because something which IS cannot come from something which is NOT. And that which is NOT does not exist by definition. In short, you can’t get something from nothing.
This remains a supremely important doctrine. Many scientific materialists believe that you CAN get something from nothing. They talk of a free-lunch universe, all the properties of which cancel out, leaving a total of zero i.e. if you can generate +X of something and cancel it with –X then you can have something that is, overall, nothing. Nothing and something are therefore potentially compatible.
The enormous question for Big Bang theorists is what did the universe consist of prior to the Big Bang? How did “nothing” explode into something, even if the something cancelled out over all? If such a thing can happen once, what is the sufficient reason preventing it from happening all the time? Why isn’t something continually appearing from nothing and exploding into entire universes (destroying any existing universes in the process)?
It is perhaps the case that Parmenides was the first philosopher of pure idealism. One way to remove motion from the world would be to deny that the physical world actually exists. Although things seem to move, they are going nowhere because there is nowhere to go – except in the imagination. In a world of nothing but mind, it is certainly true that there is no physical motion and no physical change. These are indeed illusions. This seems to be the most probable interpretation of his work given that he said that thought and being are one and the same: what cannot be thought cannot be and what cannot be cannot be thought. This is a classic statement of idealism. Mind is everywhere and mind is the cause of everything. Matter, to the extent it exists at all, is caused and created by mind.
The idea of a perfect realm of immutable, eternal things was highly influential since it inspired Plato’s domain of Perfect Forms beyond the reach of the perishable material world of becoming. Parmenides was taught by Pythagoreans, but he was not recruited by the Illuminati because he opposed the dialectical doctrine of becoming of Grand Master Heraclitus. Nevertheless, he was held in high esteem as a subtle and ingenious thinker who was certainly no slave of common sense thinking.
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Spheres, Circles and Ellipses:
To the Ancient Greeks, the sphere was a supremely perfect shape, as indeed was its junior partner, the circle. Had they not been such devotees of spheres and circles, the Greeks might have discovered much earlier that planets actually trace elliptical rather than circular orbits. Sometimes, the Greeks were simply too entranced by aesthetic considerations of perfection. They couldn’t conceive that the divine order would produce anything ugly or imperfect.
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Emanationism:
NEOPLATONISM asserts that the source and structure of reality is a spontaneous and ongoing outflowing (emanation) from a transcendent principle called the “One” (God “in himself”). The task of humanity is to “turn back” and contemplate their divine origin, and, ultimately, to become one with that origin. It is often said that evolutionary theories have completely discredited emanationism, but in fact the two fit together perfectly. There is no contradiction and it’s time that science started appreciating the qualities of emanationism. It’s none other than the source of the “dark energy” that drives the expansion of the universe.
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Pythagoras:
PYTHAGORAS has been dubbed “the speculative forefather of modern natural science”. The tetraktys was the sacred symbol of the Pythagorean Illuminati and all binding oaths of the ancient Illuminati began with the words: “By him that gave to our generation the tetraktys which contains the fount and root of eternal nature…” The tetraktys is an equilateral triangle comprised of dots representing the first four integers: one, two three and four, which add up to the decad (ten), the most sacred number of the Illuminati. To modern Illuminists, 10 is 1 and 0 – the binary system that underlies computing. It is also 1 “something” and 0 “nothing”: existence is all about the interaction of “something” (matter) and “nothing” (mind).
The word “cosmos” was coined by Pythagoras and refers to the notion of the universe as a rational, ordered whole. The word also has connotations of fitness, beauty and harmony. Plato held the view that the goodness of anything was dependent on its being properly constituted, with all of its parts properly ordered. This is a classic teaching of Illuminism, applying in particular to the meritocratic State.
Copernicus made his revolutionary breakthrough after discovering the ancient Pythagorean view that the Earth was spherical and travelled around a central fire. Unlike many ancient Greeks who held the view that Earth wasn’t a planet and was fixed at the centre of the universe, the Pythagoreans, by putting Earth in motion around the centre, were easily able to start conceiving of the Earth as just another planet.
Pythagoras was the first to say that the Earth was a sphere. He was the first to say that Earth wasn’t fixed but moved through space. He was the first to say that Earth wasn’t the centre of the universe. He was thus the first to break out of anthropomorphic thinking. In other words, Pythagoras had taken all the decisive steps of the revolutionary Copernican model some 2,000 years earlier!
While the rest of the world was slipping into the madness of superstitious religions, Illuminism was striding ahead in the proper direction. It put those 2,000 years to the best of use.
“I do not know of any other man who has been as influential as [Pythagoras] was in the sphere of thought. I say this because what appears as Platonism is, when analysed, found to be in essence Pythagoreanism. The whole conception of an eternal world, revealed to the intellect but not to the senses, is derived from him. But for him, Christians would not have thought of Christ as the Word; but for him, theologians would not have sought logical proofs of God and immortality.” –Bertrand Russell
One day, it will be acknowledged that Pythagoras and the Illuminati were the guardians of human reason against endless attacks by irrational forces. In the sign of truth, we shall conquer. We will prove victorious in the end because we represent the highest aspirations of humanity. The barbarian hordes, the slaves of the Abrahamism and Mammon have offered the world nothing but misery and bondage. It’s time to be free. We are the culmination of the dialectic of freedom, and, ultimately, freedom sweeps aside all opponents.
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The Primum Mobile:
The outermost physical shpere of the cosmos is the Primum Mobile (“first mover”) where all physical motion in the cosmos originates. The reason given for the physical motion of the universe is an extraordinarily beautiful, if completely unscientific, one. Beyond the Primum Mobile, is the immaterial Empyrean outside space and time where God resides. The Empyrean is perfectly still. The Primum Mobile loves God. It’s a love so great that every fibre of its being strives to touch the Godhead, and to touch it in all possible places, so the Primum Mobile sphere whirls around endlessly, and its motion sets in motion all of the other spheres below it.
It was an Aristotelian doctrine that there was an unmoved mover, a first cause that set everything else in motion. God is this unmoved mover, and he produces motion by being LOVED.
The Primum Mobile is the swiftest sphere and all the inner spheres get progressively slower. All the spheres are of course in direct contact with each other and “rub together” so to speak. The spheres act as a huge interlocked mechanism. If one part’s in motion, all parts are.
The Primum Mobile is the highest heaven, encased in the Will of God. The largest and swiftest sphere, it is the physical origin of life, motion, and time (a function of motion) in the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic universe. It’s the supreme physical heaven in the universe, wrapped in the Mind of God. From God, creativity cascades into the other spheres via the Primum Mobile. It shapes and directs the natural operations of the universe. Through it, God’s will is transmitted to Creation.
Earth is fixed and motionless at the centre of the nine concentric, revolving heavens. The last visible heaven is that of the Fixed Stars (the eighth sphere). Identifiable only through the motion it imparts to the cosmos, the Primum Mobile is also called the Crystalline heaven because it is totally transparent.
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The Crystalline Heaven:
Strictly speaking, none of the planetary were ever technically described as “crystalline” although this became their popular and poetic name. The expression came from coelum crystallinum (crystalline heaven, the Primum Mobile) a sphere said to exist beyond the fixed stars. It was called “crystalline” in the sense of being clear, like water, and one of its purposes was to try to reconcile cosmology with the Biblical assertions that there were waters above the heavens (Genesis 1.7): “And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.”
Where were these waters above the firmament? Clearly, they MUST exist because the Bible said so (and we all know the Bible is never wrong) ergo they were in a special sphere beyond the fixed stars of the firmament. Or so goes Abrahamic logic, which is infallible because it comes from God himself, as they never tire of telling us.
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The Earth: the Centre of the Universe:
The Earth, of course, stands at the centre of existence. Why? Because the Bible says so, so it must be true. It is completely stationary and unmovable:
Psalm 104:5: He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.
Psalm 96:10: Say among the heathen that the LORD reigneth: the world also shall be established that it shall not be moved: he shall judge the people righteously.
1 Chronicles 16:30: Fear before him, all the earth: the world also shall be stable, that it be not moved.
Ecclesiastes 1:5: The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.
So, there you have it: the Sun moves around the static Earth. And if you disagree, you’ll burn in hell forever!! In Abrahamism, if you disagree with the revealed truth of God you get killed. That’s how to encourage the open-minded, fearless pursuit of knowledge, isn’t it?
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The Cosmology of the Jews, Christians and Muslims:
Just in case you’ve forgotten, it goes like this:
Genesis 1
The Beginning
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.
5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
6 And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.”
7 So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so.
8 God called the vault “sky.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.
9 And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so.
10 God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” And God saw that it was good.
11 Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so.
12 The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.
13 And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day.
14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years,
15 and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so.
16 God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.
17 God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth,
18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good.
19 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.
20 And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.”
21 So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.
22 God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.”
23 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day.
24 And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so.
25 God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.
26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
27 So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
29 Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.
30 And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so.
31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.
So, are you convinced? Has the Book of Genesis nailed it? Has it dispelled all doubt? It’s the infallible Word of God, you know – and if you don’t believe it, you’re GOING TO HELL FOREVER. So either you’d better start believing or you should tell this moronic Abrahamist God to fuck right off! Only stupid people believe the Bible. No intelligent person could ever take this ludicrous book seriously.
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Creation:
Let’s recap the ancient view of religion. The sun, stars and planets were, the ancients thought, essentially the same thing, made of aether and located in transparent, aether “crystal” spheres. The aether became more refined in the higher heavens, and was most refined, to the extent of being immaterial, in the highest heaven of “God”. Earth wasn’t a planet but a kind of laboratory where, uniquely, it had four perishable elements of earth, water, air and fire. Imperishable aether, if it existed in this sphere at all, was associated with mind/nous/psyche/soul. Earth was a unique environment (Creation) beneath the divine order.
In the Abrahamic view, God created the universe – heaven and earth – from nothing. The ancient Greeks didn’t have a Creator God per se – and absolutely denied the Creationist principle of something coming from nothing – but they did have divinities, divine forces and intelligences that could shape and organise the world.
We can conclude that the “divine order” prepared a special space with unique properties for the “mortal order”. Either way, whether you accepted the Abrahamist Creationist view or the pagan view of divine teleology, Earth was a place like no other. Human souls could join the divine order if they did the right things and lived the right way.
Crucially, the ancient religious paradigm was also a scientific paradigm based on the most advanced scientific thinking of the day then available to a mainstream audience (rather than the much more sophisticated scientific knowledge of secret societies such as the Illuminati).
The radical difference between the old religious paradigm and that of the present day is that religion was scientifically respectable and credible back then. That’s one of the reasons why there were so few atheists. Religion and science were in apparent harmony. To be religious was to be scientific, and vice versa (and indeed the Illuminati hold that exact position even now: religion and science CANNOT be in conflict!)
However, the old scientific paradigm of Aristotle was destroyed by modern science. Earth became a humdrum planet orbiting the Sun, which was in a humdrum solar system, part of a humdrum galaxy in a universe so vast we don’t know where, or if, it ends.
In the old religious paradigm, Heaven and Hell were specific locations in the known universe. God lived in a precise place and so did Satan. The soul could travel towards God or Satan (up or down) in a physical sense.
Modern science made the old religious paradigm untenable, so mainstream religion had three options: to give up now that it no longer had any scientific underpinning, to find a new religious model that was scientifically underpinned (e.g. Illuminism) or to declare war on science and inhabit a separate dimension of “faith” (i.e. total, anti-scientific irrationality). We all know what it chose to do.
Modern religious people are much more stupid than the religious believers of yesteryear. Dante had a whole vision of reality, religiously and scientifically compatible, that he could plausibly believe in. No such vision exists today with the SOLE exception of Illuminism.
It’s a form of madness to be a mainstream believer in the present age. Science has not left that as a rational option. You are proclaiming yourself an outright enemy of science and knowledge in the present day if you proclaim religious faith. That was not the case 1,000 year ago. All of the excuses have run out for modern believers. They are dumb, dumber, and dumberer!!
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Astrology:
The medieval mind was sure that “above” (the Heavens) was full of intelligences and angels. All of the shining stars and planets were deemed to be the visible signs and manifestations of divine and angelic minds.
If you think of the planets as active celestial intelligences rather than inert lumps of matter, it becomes much easier to understand astrology. It seems bizarre to suggest that the alignment of Mars with Saturn would cause any effect on a human baby, but if all the planets are angels and celestial intelligences with specific qualities it’s possible to imagine that their mental qualities could be transmitted to newborn babies via the aether, and could mentally influence their lives afterwards.
The ancient belief in astrology is much more rational than the modern belief in the subject. Astrology in ancient times was to do with the mental influence of the planets (celestial intelligences) on human personality. In modern astrology, the physical location of lumps of rock in space is said to influence human personality and fate: a much more bizarre claim.
In the Platonic view, the Earth had a soul and intelligence, as did all planets and stars. Matter was infused with soul and intelligence. This lends itself quiet naturally to an astrological view of reality: minds influencing minds; minds shaping future events; higher minds controlling destinies of lower minds.
In short, the ancient and medieval conception of the universe was that the universe was suffused with soul, and each cosmic sphere was guided by an intelligence. In the light of modern scientific materialism, these ideas seem absurd. In fact, the old view is largely correct. The universe is panpsychic: mind is everywhere. The universe is indeed suffused with “soul”. There are no conscious intelligences guiding stars and planets, but there are certainly unconscious intelligences (as in Gaia Theory). Black holes are cosmic interfaces between mind and matter. They are present in the physical universe and yet the black hole singularities have zero size and are outside space and time. It’s thought that supermassive black holes are at the centre of every galaxy and were vital in the formation of those galaxies. We might regard these supermassive black holes as the “guiding intelligences” of the galaxies.
The central problem with old and new views of the cosmos is that they employ radically different vocabularies. The mode of “speech” of science is inherently materialistic and anti-mind. Therefore the paradigm of modern science simply doesn’t cater for the possibility of mind. Mental phenomena cannot be described in terms of scientific equations, and scientists automatically take the next step of asserting that mental phenomena do not actually exist.
There is only one way to resolve the problem: to find a vocabulary of mind that science can understand. Illuminism has the right vocabulary: mathematics, the queen of the sciences. Once the true mathematical architecture of the cosmos is understood, all of the problems surrounding mind and matter dissolve. Mathematics provides the Logos foundation of Illuminism. Using nothing but mathematics, Illuminism bridges the gap between scientific materialism and the older panpsychic view of the universe.
It’s impossible for the modern mind to tune into the religious ways of thinking of the past. One thing we have sought to achieve is to resurrect the often ingenious context in which religion once flourished. Religion once made much more sense to people than it does now. It was part of a coherent worldview linking all of the knowledge of the world then available. Religion nowadays seems rather ridiculous because the paradigm of scientific materialism has destroyed the link between humanity and the divine order.
Illuminism has the vital task of sealing that catastrophic rift and it can be done only through knowledge, not through the anti-science mantras of “faith”. No one can truly understand religion unless they are familiar with the history of ideas, the history of philosophy, of science and mathematics, myths and legend, and the history of religion itself.
Is the Jewish Bible good religion or incredibly bad history? The Jews were the first people to convert their own history into a religious discourse. Actions that would otherwise have been regarded as political and social were turned into religious events. The incredible tale of 70,000 Hebrews being killed by God because King David carried out a census (!) is plainly a preposterous distortion of some political feud. David almost certainly wanted to impose his authority (symbolised by the census) over a group that rejected his rule, and violence subsequently erupted. The bloodletting was then transformed into the sign of God’s disfavour and punishment.
Similarly, the Jewish enslavement by the Babylonians was, in reality, simply a much stronger power destroying a weaker one – but the Jews decided it was caused by their failure to worship Yahweh properly. A completely mad conclusion, but that’s the Jews for you. (Their way of thinking would have turned 9/11 into a sign of divine displeasure at gay marriages, teenage sex before marriage, shopping on the Sabbath, or something equally ridiculous.)
In order to escape from captivity, the Jews needed a divinely appointed Messiah, so they became obsessed with that concept. Christianity came along and transformed the idea of a terrestrial messiah into a celestial one. Then, hundreds of years later, Mohammed appeared on the scene and couldn’t make any sense of the Christian Trinity, so he returned to Jewish monotheism, but because he was an Arab and not a Jew, he changed the emphasis of the Bible from Abraham, Isaac and the Jews to Abraham, Ishmael and the Arabs. The whole thing is history, politics and identity. Religion comes into it only as camouflage.
Abrahamism made sense cosmologically while science and astronomy located Earth at the centre of the universe. When that was no longer the case, Abraham should have been a dead duck, but instead it simply went into denial and the believers redoubled their faith – a classic psychological defence mechanism. It’s nothing but an example of cognitive dissonance. Everyone is driven to minimise cognitive dissonance. If you can’t do it rationally, you do it irrationally. The more that modern science contradicts Abrahamism, the more irrational the latter becomes, and the more extremist: look at the Muslims!
The intellectual, historical, mythological and psychological underpinnings of the main religious traditions are brought about by the evolution of ideas – by the dialectic – not by “revelation”. The revelations of Abrahamism have been 100% refuted by science and philosophy. There’s nothing real left, just a ghost called “faith” that people refuse to abandon.
An enormous amount is revealed about the human psyche by the failure of Abrahamists to reject their failed religious system. What is clear is that truth and reason don’t matter at all to most human beings. Comforting delusions are always preferred. People want to be lied to. They beg for the truth to leave them alone. Nothing is more frightening to the ordinary person than the truth. Yet isn’t the truth what it’s all about?
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4/7
Tags: Academia Iluministă
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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3/7
Tags: Academia Iluministă
Academia Iluministă (64)
THIS IS ONE OF A SERIES OF BOOKS outlining the religion, politics and philosophy of the ancient and controversial secret society known as the Illuminati, of which the Greek polymath Pythagoras was the first official Grand Master. The society exists to this day and the author is a member, working under the pseudonym of “Adam Weishaupt” – the name of the Illuminati’s most notorious Grand Master.
The Illuminati’s religion is the most highly developed expression of Gnosticism and is called Illumination (alternatively, Illuminism). Dedicated to the pursuit of enlightenment, it has many parallels with the Eastern religions of Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism. It rejects the Abrahamic religions of faith: Judaism, Christianity and Islam, considering these the work of the “Demiurge”; an inferior, cruel and wicked deity who deludes himself that he is the True God, and who has inflicted endless horrors on humanity.
If you wish to judge for yourself how deranged the Demiurge is, you need only read the Old Testament, the story of the Demiurge’s involvement with his “Chosen People”, the Hebrews. You may wonder why the “God of All” entered into an exclusive and partisan Covenant with a tribe in the Middle East several thousand years ago, why he promised them a land (Canaan) that belonged to others, and why he then actively participated with them in a genocidal war against the Canaanites. Even more bizarrely, according to Christian theology, he then despatched all of those Hebrews, whom he had supported so fanatically, to Limbo – the edge of Hell – when they died. They couldn’t go to Heaven because they were indelibly marked by the “Original Sin” of Adam and Eve. Only the atonement provided by the agonising death of God’s “son”, Jesus Christ, could wipe the slate clean and allow the Hebrews to be released from Limbo. But there was a catch. Only those who accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour were eligible for Paradise.
Of course, the Chosen People of “God” have almost entirely rejected Jesus Christ. Therefore, from the Christian perspective, nearly all of the Chosen People are now in hell proper. Don’t you find God’s behaviour distinctly odd? Indeed, unbelievable? Don’t alarm bells start ringing? Doesn’t the behaviour of this God sound rather more like what would be expected of Satan?
Remember that this same “God” ordered Abraham to perform human sacrifice on his own son, Isaac. Abraham, rather than rejecting this monstrous command, rather than denouncing the creature that gave it as evil incarnate, agreed to butcher his own flesh and blood to demonstrate how slavishly and mindlessly obedient he was – the prototype of all psychopathic, fanatical “believers”.
Does God’s command to Abraham sound like something that would ever pass the lips of the True God? We pity you if you think it does because you are surely a creature of the Demiurge and one of the legions of the damned. If, however, you doubt the credentials of the Abrahamic God, you may be receptive to the message of the Illuminati and our future-oriented, rational, scientific, mathematical and dialectical religion of light – Illumination.
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Quotations:
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. –Einstein
“The universe is not bounded in any direction. If it were, it would necessarily have a limit somewhere. But clearly a thing cannot have a limit unless there is something outside to limit it…In all dimensions alike, on this side or that, upward or downward through the universe, there is no end.” –Lucretius
“All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.” –Alexander pope
“It is, I say, impossible that I can with any true meaning assert that there existeth such a surface, boundary or limit, beyond which is neither body, nor empty space, even though God be there.” –Giordano Bruno
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The Divine Comedy:
Probably the greatest defence ever presented for the existence of a Creator God is the artistic one furnished by Dante, the brilliant Italian poet, in the first quarter of the 14th century.
Dante’s masterwork – The Divine Comedy – takes the reader on an amazing journey through the soul’s three possible destinations according to Roman Catholicism: Hell, Purgatory or Heaven.
In the Inferno, Dante provides the greatest-ever depiction of Hell. In the Purgatoria, he provides the definitive version of the uniquely Catholic theological concept of Purgatory where the sinners not wicked enough to be damned to Hell nor good enough to be admitted straight to Heaven go to be purged of their sins in preparation for Paradise. Finally, in Paradiso, Dante ventures to Paradise itself, finally seeing the Triune Christian God with his own eyes.
The centrepiece of the poem is a wondrous cosmology based on ancient Aristotelian and Ptolemaic teachings, integrated with Christian myths.
At the centre of Dante’s universe is Earth, and at the centre of Earth is none other than Satan himself, at the point furthest from God.
Earth is divided into a Northern Hemisphere of land and a Southern Hemisphere of water. At the centre of the Northern Hemisphere is the holy city of Jerusalem and its polar opposite in the Southern Hemisphere is the island of Mount Purgatory, surrounded by a vast ocean with no other land anywhere near.
Mount Purgatory was created by the soil and rock displaced when Satan and his Fallen Angels crashed into the Earth and smashed through into the core. Satan struck the Earth feet first, creating a huge crater (later crusted over by land) in the Northern Hemisphere. All the crater debris had to go somewhere and its effect was to push up a huge mountain (Mount Purgatory) at the centre of the Southern Hemisphere.
Hell is positioned underneath the Northern Hemisphere (beneath Jerusalem) and is composed of nine circles in a great cone-shaped structure, narrowing as it descends to Satan at the lowest point of the cone (the centre of the Earth). Dante’s vision provides an early version of the Hollow Earth theory, with Hell taking the place of the underground cities and communities that feature in the writings of the proponents of the Hollow Earth.
Like Hell, Mount Purgatory (the mount of salvation) has nine circles, and at the top is the earthly paradise of the Garden of Eden: next stop Heaven!
So, what exists between Eden at the top of Mount Purgatory and God? First of all, the four elements of the ancient Greeks – earth, water, air and fire – come into play. The Earth itself is the element of earth. It is covered by the second element, water, and it has a third element of air as its atmosphere. Between the air atmosphere and the Moon, is a sphere of the fourth element: pure fire – a kind of invisible spiritual fire.
Dante thus accounts for the four classical elements, and they are all located in the sublunary domain i.e. the mortal realm below the Moon. The superlunary domain above the Moon is immortal, and is made of different grades of the mystical fifth element – the famous quintessence (aether). The aether is as pure and transparent as clear glass.
The quintessence was poetically said to form crystal spheres (or spherical shells to be more exact, one within another like Russian dolls), and each sphere contained one of the components of our familiar solar system. In a series of concentric spheres (usually called “Heavens”) surrounding the Earth are: the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Fixed Stars, the Primum Mobile and finally, the Empyrean, the abode of God.
The soul, leaving Eden, goes on the ultimate journey, ascending through the crystal spheres one by one. As it travels ever upwards, it starts to hear the wondrous Music of the Spheres of which Pythagoras spoke. By the time the soul reaches the Empyrean, the music has become simply divine: it is the music of Creation itself, of Eternity, of God.
Every stage of the ascent takes the soul further and further from Satan and his irredeemable evil. The soul reaches levels of ever-increasing purity, and the quality of light it experiences becomes more and more perfect.
The ascent takes the soul through the “seven heavens” of our solar system (as it was known and understood in ancient and medieval times): the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Beyond these seven heavens is the crystal sphere of the fixed stars (the “firmament”).
In this cosmological view, there’s a finite number of stars and they are all located within one shell of the overall vast sphere of Creation. All of the stars are fixed perfectly in position. None of them move: only the shell in which they are located moves, thus explaining the apparent movement of the stars and constellations in the night sky seen from a supposedly stationary Earth.
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Dante:
DANTE (1265-1321) is one of the greatest artists of all time. He was on the fringes of the Illuminati, being a zealous advocate of the Knights Templar and despising those who destroyed the Templar Order. He was equally enraptured by the Illuminati’s tales of King Arthur and the Holy Grail.
Although his Divine Comedy seems like impeccable Catholic orthodoxy, it is studded with potential heresies and denunciations of popes and ecclesiastical corruption. He explicitly placed the controversial Joachim of Fiore (a secret Grand Master of the Illuminati) in Paradise even though Joachim’s writings were condemned as heretical.
Dante met many Templars and they were keen to recruit him to Illuminism. Dante, however, was genuinely attracted to Catholic doctrine and although he had many doubts in specific areas, he found the whole package wondrous and inspiring. He cherished the idea that Catholicism could be reformed rather than destroyed. He was intrigued by the possible union of Illuminism and Catholicism, and this in fact has been a recurring theme in the history of Illuminism. The simplest way to effect a religious transformation of the world would be for the Illuminati to assume the leadership of the Catholic Church and start ditching all of the junk ideas like faith, original sin, grace, baptism, transubstantiation, Papal infallibility etc.
Both the Knights Templar and the Jesuits were intended to be Illuminist Fifth Columns that would take over Catholicism from the inside. Adam Weishaupt was raised as a Bavarian Catholic, and also harboured an aspiration to take over Catholicism and turn it to the truth. Even today, a cell of the Illuminati is working on a new, sane version of Christianity. Dante would have approved.
In many ways, his dazzling depiction of the journey of the soul through Hell and Purgatory and its subsequent ascent through the heavens to Paradise is an allegory of the trials and tribulations of a soul as it undergoes many reincarnations in the world before achieving gnosis and escaping.
******
Isn’t it time the Catholic Church admitted its myriad errors and submitted to the truth of Illumination? We offer to run the Catholic (“Universal”) Church, and we will restore it to the unity of science and religion that it enjoyed in the era of Dante.
If the Catholic Church is remotely interested in the truth it must accept our offer. The Catholic Church was our most ancient and deadly enemy, but now its power is gone and it’s a sham edifice, a hollow Church, a walking zombie that doesn’t realise its dead. Only Illumination can resurrect it. Like Catholicism, Illumination is rooted in ancient Greek philosophy, in Orphism, Mithraism and Neoplatonism.
The Illuminati have absolute contempt for Judaism, Islam and Protestantism, but Catholicism is different. It can be intellectually salvaged thanks to its underpinnings of Greek philosophy. We say to all Catholics: see the light! See the truth. Join the Illuminati. The Illuminati have solved all of the mathematical problems that prevented ancient Greek science, mathematics and philosophy from becoming the cornerstone of human knowledge. The ancient Greeks had more or less solved every problem, but without assembling the pieces of jigsaw correctly. We have succeeded where they failed.
It was not until the advent of German Enlightenment Idealism, starting with Leibniz, that ancient Greek ideas could be perfected. The answer lay in the only place it was ever likely to be found – mathematics, the language of the divine, the foundation of the cosmos.
Mathematics is the sole guarantor of rational truth. Even modern science bows to mathematics and it is precisely for that reason that religion and science can once again be brought back together. Mathematics is the glue that binds religion and science. It is the only religious language that science understands. All other religious statements are ridiculous nonsense. All declarations of faith and revelation are preposterous and laughable. They are the essence of anti-mathematics, hence they are utterly false.
What is the central feature of Illuminism? – its Logos substructure is purely mathematical, based on zero and infinity. What is the central feature of Abrahamism? – it’s pure Mythos without a single reference to mathematics. As Galileo declared: “The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.”
AMEN to that!
It’s time for the truth. It’s time for mathematics. It’s time for Illuminism. The Pope must bow to the Illuminati and vacate the Vatican for those who actually stand for the truth. Let holy books be written in mathematics from now on and damn the illiterate, innumerate prophets!
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The Ultimate Mid-life Crisis:
DANTE’S INFERNO BEGINS…
“Midway along the journey of our life
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
for I had wandered off from the straight path.”
A middle-aged man, Dante had lost sight of where he was going in life. He no longer knew his path and found himself in a dark wood (depression, doubt, fear, anxiety). Things were about to get a lot worse: he would soon be descending into Hell! Yet that would be his launchpad to spiritual enlightenment and, by the end of his journey, he would see God in the Empyrean.
If we want to see God, we may have to see the Devil first. Hell precedes Heaven. There are no easy paths, no straight roads to Paradise. We have to wander along crooked tracks in dark woods and fall into bottomless abysses. Yet, in the end, our struggle makes us fit for Paradise. As Nietzsche said, “What does not kill me makes me stronger.”
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The Inscription over the gate of Hell:
THROUGH ME IS THE WAY TO THE CITY OF WOE,
THROUGH ME IS THE WAY TO ETERNAL PAIN,
THROUGH ME IS THE WAY TO THE LOST.
JUSTICE MOVED MY HEAVENLY ARCHITECT;
DIVINE POWER MADE ME,
AND SUPREME WISDOM JOINED WITH ETERNAL LOVE.
BEFORE ME WERE CREATED ONLY ENDLESS THINGS,
AND I ENDURE ENDLESSLY.
ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE.
The final words of Dante’s inscription are amongst the most famous in literature. Has there ever been a more chilling statement? When you pass through this gate, hope is gone forever. You will never be coming out and the only thing that lies in front of you is suffering that never ends. You can’t even kill yourself. You can’t be annihilated. There’s simply no escape.
Take careful note. Hell was not created by the Devil but by God. God, not Satan, is Hell’s true Gaoler and Torturer. The Devil is merely his agent, his unpaid help. Hell is the creation of the three persons of the Trinity: God the Father (Divine Power), Son (Supreme Wisdom), and Holy Spirit (Eternal Love). Jesus Christ is the Lord of Hell. He doesn’t love you. He hates you.
We are told that the Christian God was motivated not by love, forgiveness, mercy, compassion or kindness but by JUSTICE. Yet what is just about Hell where finite crimes are met with infinite punishment? This is the last place where justice is found.
We are told that God created only eternal things before creating Hell, and that Hell will endure eternally. God’s FINAL ACT of eternal creation was to build Hell! Hell was ready for business BEFORE God declared, “Let there be light!” In other words, God, before he embarked on the Biblical Creation, had intended to populate Hell with endless souls. If that does not make him the Cosmic Torturer and Sadist, what does? If that doesn’t mean that he’s Satan, King of Hell, what could?
What loving God declares to his creations that he will strip from them hope itself, thereby sentencing them to a fate literally worse than death? What sane person would ever worship this deranged monster?
Nietzsche, as usual, provided a deadly analysis of the toxic psychology of Christianity: “In my view, Dante was grossly in error when, with an ingenuity inspiring terror, he set that inscription over the gateway into his hell: ‘Eternal love also created me.’ Over the gateway into the Christian paradise and its ‘eternal blessedness’ it would, in any event, be more fitting to let the inscription stand ‘Eternal hate also created me’ – provided it’s all right to set a truth over the gateway to a lie!”
Saint Thomas Aquinas declared that punishment, when deserved, is LOVE. Did he therefore mean that infinite and eternal punishment is infinite and eternal love? In that case, it would definitely be better to be hated by God, wouldn’t it?!
******
The Inscription over the Gate of the Abrahamist Heaven:
INJUSTICE MOVED MY HEAVENLY MAKER;
DIVINE POWER MADE ME,
AND SUPREME STUPIDITY JOINED WITH ETERNAL HATE.
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Dante and Numerology:
The Devine Comedy is divided into exactly 100 cantos (a canto is to an epic poem what a chapter is to a novel). The number 100, according to the laws of numerological mystical addition is 1 + 0 + 0 = 1 = God.
The Divine Comedy is divided into 3 books (Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso), and each book has 33 cantos (with the Inferno having an extra canto to serve as an introduction.
Throughout the epic poem, overwhelming attention is paid to the numbers 3, 6, 9 and 10. They are embedded everywhere.
10 (the number of the Pythagorean tetraktys) is the number of perfection, which is why the Empyrean, the abode of God, comes after the nine celestial spheres.
Important names in Dante’s poem are delivered according to exact numerical formulae. A significant character’s name appears 63 times (6 + 3 = 9). The same name is used as a rhyming word 9 times. Every appearance of the name is related to 3 or 9 in some way or another.
The whole poem is saturated with numerical relations. It could almost be understood mathematically rather than verbally.
******
Inferno.
Hell has 1 + 9 levels (1 + 9 = 10 = 1 + 0 = 1).
The first level is the vestibule of Hell where the Ignavi – the lukewarm, the neutrals who followed no cause in life – are placed. No one wants them, not even Hell. They have no hope of death, and their lives are so contemptible that they envy all fates other than their own. The world rubs out all mention of their names. No one wants to discuss them. It is said that they were never really alive. The world passes by them in silence.
Ironically, Dante recognises one of the anonymous masses and accuses him of making the Great Refusal out of cowardice (it was believed he was referring to Pope Celestine V who abdicated in 1294, five months after his Papal election, thus refusing to do the job God assigned him). It must have been disconcerting for the Vatican to note that the very first person in Hell to whom attention was drawn was a Pope!
The vestibule of Hell is separated from Hell proper by the first river of Hell – Acheron (Greek for “flowing pain”).
Then come the nine circles of Hell:
First Circle (Limbo)
Second Circle (Lust)
Third Circle (Gluttony)
Fourth Circle (Greed)
Fifth Circle (Anger)
Sixth Circle (Heresy)
Seventh Circle (Violence)
Eighth Circle (Fraud)
Ninth Circle (Treachery)
If you want to know the number of different types of torture available in Hell, it’s 144,000.
******
Purgatory.
Purgatory has 2 + 7 = 9 levels + 1 special level at the top (1 + 9 = 10 = 1 + 0 = 1).
A hole from Hell emerges on the Island of Purgatory. Cato the Younger, a famous Roman pagan and zealous defender of the Roman Republic, guards the Island and fiercely sends back any souls from Hell that have miraculously managed to escape. (Cato committed suicide rather than submit to Caesar with his anti-Republican kingly and imperial designs.)
The island is dominated by a single, towering mountain divided into nine terraces. Purgatory has two ante-levels for: 1) The Excommunicate and 2) The Late Repentant. Souls hang around here awaiting an opportunity to enter Purgatory proper (they are admitted only as new spaces become available when souls completing their penitential journey through Purgatory are promoted to Heaven). They can be helped on their way by the prayers of the living, so get on your knees and start praying for your dead loved ones.
The entrance gate to Purgatory is at the foot of the third terrace. It, and the following six terraces, are dedicated to the seven deadly sins. The terraces are:
Terrace 3 (for the proud)
Terrace 4 (for the envious)
Terrace 5 (for the wrathful)
Terrace 6 (for the slothful)
Terrace 7 (for the covetous)
Terrace 8 (for the gluttonous)
Terrace 9 (for the lustful)
The summit of Mount Purgatory, completely different in character from the lower terraces, is the Earthly Paradise (Garden of Eden) from which the purified souls ascend to the Celestial Paradise.
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Paradise.
Paradise, like Purgatory, has 9 + 1 levels (9 + 1 = 10 = 1 + 0 = 1). Where you end up in Paradise is determined by the type of life you led. The nine Spheres of Heaven are:
First Sphere (The Moon: The Inconstant)
Second Sphere (Mercury: The Ambitious)
Third Sphere (Venus: The Lovers)
Fourth Sphere (The Sun: The Wise)
Fifth Sphere (Mars: The Warriors of the Faith)
Sixth Sphere (Jupiter: The Just Rulers)
Seventh Sphere (Saturn: The Contemplatives)
Eighth Sphere (The Fixed Stars: Faith, Hope, and Love)
Ninth Sphere (The Primum Mobile: The Angels)
The special, final level of Paradise, completely different from all the others is the Empyrean, the abode of God himself. (And in fact all the souls of the Saved are allowed to reside here in a breathtaking amphitheatre shaped like a perfect rose, with a depthless lake of light at its centre. This light is the divine illumination of God himself, bathing the holy rose of the Community of God in infinite love and goodness. This is the Beatific Vision proclaimed by the Catholic Church, and which it alone claims to be able to deliver: “There is no salvation outside the Church.”)
Note that Purgatory and Paradise have a (9 + 1) structure whereas Hell has the reverse (1 + 9), showing that it is the inverse of the divine order.
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Cato the Younger and Cato the Elder:
The Younger.
Cato the Younger is one of those remarkable figures from history about whom there is little popular knowledge. He was an ardent supporter of the Roman Republic and an advocate of Stoicism. He was tenacious and stubborn to a fault, refusing to give in or bow to the prevailing political winds. He was a superb orator thanks to his authenticity and fierce convictions that always shone through. In an age of endemic corruption, he was renowned for his moral integrity, his refusal to take bribes and his loathing for the sleaze and venality all around him. Obviously, he wasn’t much of a politician – no one with principles ever succeeds in the political cesspool.
It’s remarkable how similar ancient Rome seems to modern Washington D.C. The American political class is as corrupt and power-craving as their ancient Roman equivalent, and equally obsessed with the popularism and control afforded by “bread and circuses”.
Cato chose to live exceptionally modestly, and even subjected himself to a harsh physical regime of strenuous exercise, extreme cold and rain (wearing nothing but a tunic) and a meagre, inexpensive diet. He ate just enough to live on, and drank only the cheapest wine. This was despite the fact that he was from a privileged background and could afford to live in luxury. This attitude to life was instilled in him by his devotion to Stoicism and also the stern, ascetic record of public service of his family.
An enemy of Caesar in the Civil War, Cato took his own life rather than surrender to the man he regarded as a tyrant. Due to an injured hand, his initial suicide attempt was bungled, and Plutarch relates the hideous aftermath: “Cato did not immediately die of the wound; but struggling, fell off the bed, and throwing down a little table that stood by, made such a noise that the servants, hearing it, cried out. And immediately his son and all his friends came into the chamber, where, seeing him lie weltering in his own blood, great part of his bowels out of his body, but himself still alive and able to look at them, they all stood in horror. The physician went to him, and would have put in his bowels, which were not pierced, and sewed up the wound; but Cato, recovering himself, and understanding the intention, thrust away the physician, plucked out his own bowels, and tearing open the wound, immediately expired.”
They don’t make them like that anymore!
According to Plutarch, Caesar, who had great admiration for his foe (matched by contempt), remarked: “Cato, I grudge you your death, as you would have grudged me the preservation of your life.”
Dante appointed Cato the guardian of the approach to Mount Purgatory (and thence to spiritual freedom in Paradise) because of his devotion to political freedom.
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The Elder.
Cato’s great-grandfather was another famous Roman, known to history as Cato the Elder (or Cato the Censor).
His personal motto was “delenda est Carthago” (“Carthage must be Destroyed), with which he concluded all of his speeches, no matter what subject he was speaking on.
The Roman expression “He is a Cato” signified that a person lived a simple life, had self-denying rather than self-indulgent habits, was zealously committed to strict justice, was blunt of speech, brusque of manners and didn’t suffer fools gladly – all of these being characteristics of Cato the Censor. A byword for austerity and Puritanism, Cato constantly advocated a return to simpler, purer, nobler and more honourable times. In his role of Censor, he was always on the lookout for moral laxity and blamed the increasing Greek influence over Roman culture for many of the Republic’s problems. He was disgusted by the dissolute, pampered ways of the rich and fearlessly condemned anyone, no matter their status and power.
His great-grandson, Cato the Younger, was in the same mould, being famous for his obstinacy and rectitude which earned him the epithet of “conscience of Rome.”
The two Catos might be characterised as miserable kill-joys, but every healthy nation needs such people to uphold standards and resist the inevitable degeneration, corruption, decadence and “race to the bottom” that we see all too often in the lax nations of the capitalist West.
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The Celestial Hierarchy:
Dante equated the nine crystal spheres with the nine orders of angels that were said to exist according to the study of medieval angelology:
First, Innermost Sphere = Moon = ordinary Angels
Second Sphere = Mercury = Archangels
Third Sphere = Venus = Princedoms
Fourth Sphere = Sun = Powers
Fifth Sphere = Mars = Virtues
Sixth Sphere = Jupiter = Dominions
Seventh Sphere = Saturn = Thrones
Eighth Sphere = Fixed Stars = Cherubim
Ninth, Outermost Sphere = Primum Mobile = Seraphim
The Empyrean beyond the Ninth Sphere = utter stillness and perfect peace.
This is the abode of God. In the Empyrean, virtue replaces space and time as the organising principle.
By linking physical heavens and angelic orders, Dante brought together material and spiritual existence in one perfect correspondence.
Note that the physical spheres count outwards from the Moon, while the angelic spheres count inwards from the Primum Mobile. There is therefore an inverse relationship. The highest angels – the Seraphim – are closest to God but furthest from humanity.
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Angels:
“The lower intelligences have their effect as it were from a radiating body, and, after the fashion of mirrors, reflect the rays of the higher to the one below them.” –Dante
Angels are like celestial mirrors that reflect divine light. The highest created beings, they are above humans on the ladder of being and they are associated with pure reason and contemplation. For Dante, they are perfect actualisation, being free of both matter and potentiality. This was a heretical idea since Thomas Aquinas asserted that only God is “actus purus” (pure actualisation).
Angels are said to enjoy an uninterrupted vision of God and this led Dante to believe that angels have no memory. Their concentration is always on God and they are therefore in an eternal blissful now, hence have no need of memory.
Abrahamism promotes the view that God created two types of intelligence, represented in two different kinds of beings: angels and humans. Angels receive the revelation of God directly, while humans have to work towards it laboriously, step by step.
Using the vocabulary of Neoplatonism, we might say that angels have minds based on intuitive Nous where thinking takes places at once in many parallel tracks. Humans, on the other hand, are guided by single-track, linear thinking based on the Psyche.
Angels and humans therefore differ according to the degree of their intuition. The more intuitive you are, the more angelic you are, and the closer to gnosis. The degree of your intuition might be said to be a measure of the state of your soul. People who are lacking in intuition are much nearer to animals than angels. Sensing types are highly materialistic. They are mired in the sensations of the world and their minds make no contact with the supra-sensual domain of the divine. So, are you a sensing or intuitive type? How close are you to the angels?
In Dante’s scheme, angels represent pure being. These angels don’t have free will or memory (which rather begs the question of how any of them managed to rebel against God as an act of free will – did God contrive the rebellion himself – you wouldn’t put it past him, would you?). Rather, the angels eternally contemplate God and reflect his will, and not their own, at all times.
We might say that the angels belong to the imperishable domain of pure being described by the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides, while humanity belongs to the mortal domain of becoming described by Heraclitus. Here we see a typical ancient theme: being = perfection; becoming = imperfection. The formula of the Illuminati is that there is no such thing as pure being and everything is becoming perfect.
The Angelic Fall produced three classes of angels:
1) The angels that actively rebelled against God went to Hell.
Fallen angels are called “devils” whereas “demons” are malignant spirits that were always evil; they never fell from grace, they never knew God or lived in Heaven. Strictly speaking, devils cannot leave Hell (though Satan and several others seemed to manage it without too much trouble), but demons are free to come and go to Earth and Hell at will since they are not bound by the sacred laws of Hell that apply to the fallen angels. In this view, demons are the force of evil we experience in this world, though they may be carrying out the instructions of the devils in Hell. It is sometimes said that demons, unlike devils, were not directly created by God. But didn’t God create all things, and all souls in particular? If God didn’t create demons, who did? Doesn’t that point to a source of creation independent of God and which can create evil directly as an active force in its own right? Theologians are silent on such matters.
2) The lukewarm angels who neither supported nor opposed Satan’s rebellion but waited to see which way the wind was blowing.
These are angels without a cause who act only out of self-interest. They are “neutrals” who don’t take sides until the matter is already decided. These are the Ignavi and they are condemned to be in neither in Hell nor Heaven. They don’t make it to Hell proper but instead hang around Hell’s vestibule. They are separated from Limbo, the first circle of Hell, by the infernal river Acheron and its ghostly ferryman Charon. Since all angels are directly created by God, one must conclude that he’s rather a fuck-up when it comes to creating his own servants, never mind humanity. No wonder things turned out so badly on Earth since they were already shit in Heaven.
3) The good angels who stayed loyal to God.
These are as perfect as the day they were first created. Unlike humanity, they don’t have to become perfect in order to join God: they already are. The purpose of the material world is to support, reform and educate the souls of men and bring them to the light of perfection. The rather boring good angels on the other hand devote nearly all of their time to the work of eternal praise. Doesn’t God ever get fed up with being praised all the time? Isn’t there more to life? The angels are sometimes allowed to desist from praise for a while and help to educate humanity. They have three basic functions: pandering to God’s ego via endless praise, transmitting his spiritual intelligence to humanity, and executing his will in the physical sphere. To that extent, they duplicate many of the functions of the Holy Spirit. Dante was one of those who subscribed to the view that human beings were planned by God as a replacement for the fallen angels. We will be the risen angels!
The Aristotelian-Ptolemaic universe was eagerly embraced by Abrahamism not only because it was a compatible with a Creationist perspective but also that it seemed to support the existence of angels. Given that angels are frequently mentioned in Abrahamic texts, it was essential to have a cosmological model that gave them a plausible place.
Before the Fall of Man (following the Fall of Angels!), human beings were rather like a new species of angel. Their bodies were perfect, incorruptible and deathless. In fact, if Adam and Eve had never sinned and always dutifully obeyed and praised God, it’s hard to see how they could have been distinguished from angels. It’s equally hard to understand what the function of humanity is. Why weren’t angels enough for God? Why did he need to create humanity too, especially since, in the first hours of the Garden of Eden, there seemed to be no measurable difference between Adam and Eve and the angels?
Dante, in the Paradiso, describes nine fiery rings whirling around a central point of intense, ineffable light: these are the nine orders of angels, eternally circling God.
God, for Dante, is of course the Christian Trinity. At the end of his epic journey, Dante finally sees three circles of light in one. He describes the second divine circle as a reflected rainbow cast by the first, and the third as a fire breathed by the first two.
“Within Its depthless clarity of substance
I saw the Great Light shine into three circles
in three colours bound in one same space;
the first seemed to reflect the next like rainbow
on rainbow, and the third was like a flame
equally breathed forth by the other two.”
–Dante
Dante’s masterpiece ends with the words:
“I felt my will and my desire impelled
By the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”
Dante places love at the centre of all, as the source of movement and life itself. Dante’s work is a supreme triumph of the human imagination and one of the greatest feats ever accomplished by the human mind.
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2/7
Tags: Academia Iluministă
Academia Iluministă (63)
Jiren Gray a adăugat 7 fotografii în albumul The Crystal Spheres of the Illuminati.
by Adam Weishaupt – Book 4/6
The Illuminati Series – Book 4/6:
Blurb:
“The days that are still to come are the wisest witnesses.” –Pindar
700 years ago, religion made much more sense to people than it does now. It was part of a coherent worldview linking all of the knowledge of the world then available, including the science and cosmology of the time. Religion nowadays seems rather ridiculous because the modern paradigm of scientific materialism has destroyed the link between humanity and the divine order.
To be religious in the past wasn’t stupid; now it is. The religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam have been comprehensively refuted.
This book explores the ancient Greek and medieval cosmology that supported the view that Earth was specially created by God. The “crystal spheres” of the heavens, with Earth at the centre, were beautiful, wondrous and inspiring. They fitted in perfectly with ideas of spirituality, angels and astrology.
Dante’s “Divine Comedy” of the early 14th century cannot be bettered in terms of its astonishing portrayal of Creation. No one in Dante’s time could seriously have doubted that the universe was designed this way. It was a state-of-the-art, integrated religious, scientific, cosmological and artistic vision which he presented.
Only with Copernicus and then Thomas Digges did the old religious worldview collapse. Yet humanity goes on believing in religions that are now demonstrably false. Even though humanity has never known more than it does now, and most people have a basic education, yet legions of people still believe in formally refuted ideas. In Dante’s time, it would have been mad for the ordinary person not to believe in a Creator. Now it would be mad to believe in one. Why are so many human beings so mad?
This book is an exploration of why mainstream religion made perfect sense seven hundred years ago but not now. You can’t go on believing ideas that have been categorically refuted. The book examines Dante’s “Divine Comedy”, John Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, Islamic cosmology, ancient Greek cosmology, Kabbalah, and myths about Heaven and Hell.
This is one of a series of books by the Pythagorean Illuminati, designed to reveal the absurdity and untenability of the Abrahamic religions in the modern scientific era.
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A Book Review:
“This is a book from a series of books by the Pythagorean Illuminati. The books in this series are excellent and life changing. The Pythagorean Illuminati are an ancient secret society of rational free thinkers. The great polymath Pythagoras was the first official grand master of the order.
The goal of the Illuminati is and always has been to change this world from the insane, miserable, hell hole it is for so many humans and non-humans into a just, altruistic, rational world where humanity can finally actualize its full potential.
The Illuminati are not scary boogeymen as the crazy, right wing conspiracy theorists would have you believe.
The Illuminati are philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, artists, musicians, technologists, futurologists, filmmakers, and radicals. Some of the greatest, most creative geniuses in history have been members of the Illuminati, these people include: Hegel, Weishaupt, Leibniz, Plato, Goethe, Hypatia, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and many others. These books are for serious people who want, more than anything, to rescue ourselves and change this world into what we know it has the potential to be. If this isn’t your goal, then you shouldn’t waste your time on these books. If, on the other had, this goal is on your mind everyday then these are the books for you and you should read them all asap. You should also check out the Illuminati’s websitewww.armageddonconspiracy.c
Every book in this series is very well written and filled with unique, thought-provoking information. The Illuminati have integrated philosophy, mathematics, science, politics, history, sociology, psychology, religion and the paranormal into what scientists have been searching for but have been unable to discover: A Grand Unified Theory of Everything. These books flow in and out of all of these subjects in a very readable way that reflects the intrinsic connections of the subjects. The writers have a writing style that keeps you on your toes. This style of writing makes some of the more challenging information much easier to grasp. These books do not read like academic text books but are written with passion and that passion rubs off on the reader. You will constantly find yourself wanting to read just one more page.
“The Crystal Spheres of the Illuminati” will take you on a journey through the history and cosmology of many different religions and philosophies. You will learn about Dante Alighieri’s and John Milton’s epic poems “Divine Comedy” and “Paradise Lost”. The Illuminati will give you information on both Dante and Milton that you won’t find anywhere else. You will learn about the cosmologies of various philosophers and religions including the bizarre and backwards cosmologies of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that billions of people, to this day, still believe in.
This book along with the rest of this series sets the stage for the Illuminati’s new series of books called “The God Series”. “The God Series” is releasing, for the first time into the public domain, the Illuminati’s Grand Unified Theory of Everything. I feel that having an understanding of all of the Illuminati’s previous material will make “The God Series” much more enjoyable and easier to understand. Always remember though, these books are not just to be read, their purpose is to change the world. Read them all but more importantly figure out what skills you have to help make this change happen, then go out and get active!” –BG
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The Profound Mystery of Time:
If time is grounded in imaginary space and there are three dimensions of imaginary space then doesn’t that mean that time is three dimensional rather than the single dimensional arrow of time that we experience? We can never travel backwards or sideways or up and down in time…we just go forward.
But is that true? Physicists say that superluminal particles would be perceived by us to go backwards in time, so, in theory at least, it’s possible for time to have a reverse direction. But Einstein’s equations of special relativity actually indicate that superluminal particles would experience “imaginary” time, but no scientist knows what that is. There’s actually a huge problem with defining what time is in scientific equations, and what its negative might be. Is “negative” time simply -t compared with it? But what about imaginary time and negative imaginary time: it and -it? Where do they fit in? And what if time is actually complex and has a real part and an imaginary part? What then? Science doesn’t have a clue about any of this. Time is always handled as an ill-defined “bodge”; it seems to work (more by accident than design), but there’s no firm theoretical foundation for it.
Why does it work at all? Time is regarded as a one-dimensional scalar quantity. It has a magnitude and, in our experience, it goes one way only – forward. But consider distance. A straight line between two points is a one-dimensional scalar. But if we have drawn a straight line in a 3D space then its two ends may have x, y and z coordinates such as (3, 4, 7) and (10, 2, 8) i.e. it is now actually a vector (a directional line) in 3D space and not just any old line. But, in real life, its magnitude may be all that really matters to us. If we have to walk ten kilometres over flat land from one place to another, it is the distance travelled that will matter to us. We won’t be aware of how the x, y and z coordinates constantly change as we move; the vector elements are almost irrelevant. Obviously, we need to be walking in the right direction to reach our desired destination, but once that is established, it is the magnitude that preoccupies us. Time is treated as a scalar but is actually a vector, exactly like distance. We just don’t notice its vector aspects.
In 6D(3r3i), it is possible to go forwards/backwards, left/right, up/down. Exactly the same is true of imaginary space, hence of time. In 6D(3r3i) space, positive and negative space, and imaginary and negative imaginary space, can all be defined. By the same token, positive and negative time, and imaginary and negative imaginary time can all be defined. A proper scientific theory of everything needs to be able to clearly distinguish between all of these different cases. Many scientific equations involve taking the square root, but a square root always has a positive and negative solution for both real and imaginary numbers. Often, science only accepts one solution as real: the positive root of a real number. Everything else is discarded as unreal. Yet Einstein’s special theory of relativity and the quantum mechanical treatment of “antimatter” show how wrong this approach is. The world is enormously more complex. It’s no wonder that scientists haven’t got a clue what dark matter and dark energy are since, on the whole, they have rejected all of the “unreal” solutions where these mysterious entities are unquestionably lurking. The cosmos is not ruled by real and imaginary numbers (the extreme cases), but by the numbers in-between: the complex numbers that have both a real and imaginary component. Science, again by accident more than design, has found equations that actually deal effectively with complex numbers, but scientists are unaware of why their equations actually work. After all, they have no idea what the core dimensionality of the cosmos is. According to relativists, the cosmos is a 4D spacetime continuum. According to M theorists, it is an 11D spacetime with 10 spatial dimensions (seven of which are “folded” into practically nothing, hence why we can’t see them!) and one of time. Is it any wonder quantum mechanics can’t be reconciled with the general theory of relativity (concerning gravity)? How can the two theories be blended if they can’t define something as basic as dimensionality? We have no doubt at all that if relativists and M-theorists both start using 6D(3r3i), many of the difficulties in merging the two theories will vanish.
Another point worth mentioning is what we mean by “going back in time”. If I truly travel back in time by, say, ten years then it means that I go back to who I was and where I was ten years ago, and everything that happened to me in the interim is erased. However, most people think that time travel means going back to the past but in their present condition and state of knowledge. The two situations are entirely different.
In the former case, time has truly been reversed. In the second case, it hasn’t been reversed at all because the time traveller’s consciousness is still GOING FORWARD in time.
Going forward in time actually means that INFORMATION always increases. To go back in time would imply the erasure of INFORMATION and that can never happen. This is why we experience time as always going forward even though it is actually three dimensional like space. It is INFORMATION FLOW that has only one direction in time. Our consciousness, hence our experience of time, is linked to this information flow, not to time itself. We can’t go back in time in terms of reversing time (erasing information). If we could experience the time of ten years ago, but with our present knowledge, then we would still be going forward in time in terms of information. Such is the mystery of time.
Time needs to be completely re-examined in philosophical, religious and scientific terms. The 6D(3r3i) paradigm provides the only mathematically, scientifically and philosophically coherent framework in which to define and analyze time.
It’s time for a scientific revaluation of all values!
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The Profound Mystery of Schrödinger’s Quantum Mechanical Wave Equation:
Schrodinger’s wave equation is one of the most important in physics. If you look it up, you will discover that it has the imaginary number right at its heart. What’s that there for? How does it make any sense in the “real” world (of real numbers)?
No physicist actually knows why it’s there. They simply know that it works. But we know the reason – it’s precisely because of 6D(3r3i) space. The imaginary dimensions are every bit as “real” and important as the real dimensions. Quantum mechanical particles need to be handled with 6D complex numbers (with real and imaginary parts). Schrodinger’s equation achieves this by incorporating the imaginary number along with real components, but Schrodinger, and every other scientist, has never been able to account for why the imaginary number is essential to quantum particles. We have now given the reason: 6D(3r3i) complete mathematics requires it.
All quantum “weirdness” stems from the fact that these tiny, almost massless particles are whizzing around in 6D(3r3i) space rather than 3D real space, and are fluttering in and out of the null zone that exists outside space and time (hence these particles can seem to be in two or more places at once). This is the “physical” model of what is actually taking place at the quantum level, a subject that has hitherto baffled all scientists, who have never been able to form any kind of picture of what is taking place. Once again, 6D(3r3i) provides the decisive breakthrough.
The famous Einstein Podolsky Rosen paradox concerning instantaneous communication between correlated particles separated by enormous distances is explained with consummate ease: the particles are linked outside space and time via the null zone which links all points in the cosmos. Simple stuff! Yet it has defied the greatest scientific minds for decades.
M-theory will never work because scientists are groping their way forward without actually knowing what they’re doing and without having any logical conceptual framework in which to work. They are continually changing their ideas to suit the latest experimental data, rather than logically working out what NEEDS to be true. Over and over again, scientists manage to find good equations, but they never really know why they work, just that they do. That’s why there are so many rival interpretations of what quantum mechanics means in terms of reality. That debate should end thanks to the 6D(3r3i) space of complete mathematics.
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The complete mathematical space 6D(3r3i) provides the framework for the Grand Unified Theory of Everything. Everything that can happen, happens within this space. One way of thinking about the cosmos is to consider a single point and its relationship with the infinite number of other points in the cosmos. The point we choose will be separated by a certain distance from each of these infinite other points. There are only three possible types of distance it can experience: a “real” separation, an “imaginary” separation” or a null (zero) separation. That’s it. Nothing else can happen. The same is true for every point in the cosmos. If we want the simplest possible way of thinking about the cosmos it is this: energy moves from point to point and as it does so it crosses a real distance, an imaginary distance or no distance at all. This staggeringly simple model describes everything that can ever happen in the cosmos from a scientific standpoint. All the complexity we see around us is simply the manifestation of what happens when energy, spread across an infinity of points, moves around from one point to another within that infinite matrix – the ultimate cosmic game of Musical Chairs except no chairs are ever removed and the music never stops.
The null zone – where distinct points are separated by no distance – is the key to the whole edifice. Here, and here alone, time and space do not exist. Dimensionality disappears. Movement occurs, and yet no distance is ever traversed. Everything here is interconnected, interpenetrating, flowing over and into each other endlessly. This is the extraordinary domain of the mind, the soul, the afterlife, God. It is the dazzling domain of light.
It is this null zone that underlies the Buddhist conception of nirvana – the underlying Oneness where everything is interconnected and where the individual is “extinguished”. He enters into union with Zero, with nullity, so to speak. And also with infinity since the null zone is as strongly associated with infinity as its twin zero. So, Buddhists must be congratulated. Nirvana is certainly an enlightened concept that expresses much of the essence of the null zone. Equally, the Hindu concept of Brahman, the universal soul, the eternal, infinite, immanent, transcendent reality and ground of all being can be equated with the null zone, so Hindus too must be congratulated. Nirvana and Brahman both lie beyond the “veil of illusion”, which we can equate with the r > 0 physical cosmos, the cosmos where distances between points are real or imaginary, but not zero. As for Taoism, the Tao is the ultimate creative principle of the universe in which all things are unified and connected: again, this is strikingly like the null zone.
Buddhism and Hinduism, if they dropped their allegiance to the idiotic concept of karma, would be truly enlightened, and close to the fundamental truth of existence. Taoism is arguably one step closer already to Illumination since it avoids karmic thinking.
Only Abrahamism, with its laughable idea of God being external to the universe rather than at the centre of it, is truly deluded and ignorant. Abrahamists – Jews, Christians and Muslims – could not be further from the truth. Their holy books are a philosophical, religious, scientific and mathematical joke. Their holy prophets are liars, madmen, idiots, clowns, frauds, fools, fakers, charlatans, warmongers, fanatics and deceivers. The Abrahamists are the forces of darkness, utterly estranged from the light.
It’s time for an end to all the mumbo jumbo, hocus pocus and mysticism. We have provided, as we promised we would, the framework in which all the issues of religion, philosophy, science and mathematics can be treated in a comprehensive, unified, integrated manner. Science and religion do not describe two separate universes, and “never the twain shall meet” (so to speak). Rather, there is only one universe. Science and religion come at the same problem from two different angles, but they are dealing with exactly the same problem, not completely separate ones. If religion does not or cannot specify the mathematical and scientific framework in which it is said to manifest itself then it’s not worth a cent. It’s literally nothing but madness and delusion into which human fantasy will flow unopposed, completely disconnected from reality and truth. That is the essence of the Abrahamic religions of faith. If your starting premises have no basis in fact then you can literally believe anything. None of it will make any contact with the truth.
Only the framework we have provided allows a proper consideration of religion. Only this framework links it indissolubly with science, philosophy and mathematics. Religion has nothing whatsoever to do with faith. Religion is a special type of science that operates fully within the scientific framework. We have shown that religion is the province of the null zone where time and space do not apply – where everything endures forever. The part of us that exists in the null zone cannot die; we have a guaranteed afterlife.
Descartes described the mind as being without “extension”. In the null zone, we have exactly that extensionless domain of mind. Panpsychism asserts that mind is everywhere. We have seen that every point in existence is indeed connected to the null zone, so mind is omni-present. Enlightened religions talk of everything being interconnected. We have demonstrated that this is true within the null zone. Enlightened religions say that we can enter into union with God. Again, the null zone provides this precise possibility. All psychic and paranormal phenomena are mediated through this “magic” zone of cosmic interconnectivity. We haven’t even begun to tap into the extraordinary powers that reside within this zone, the zone that can convert us into gods.
Have we not provided the entry point to all the mysteries of the cosmos? Have we not provided the Solomon Key?
Illumination is the only truly valid religion. It is the only religion based on science, mathematics, philosophy, logic, and reason. It is a religion of knowledge, not faith. The Eastern religions are pale imitations. The Abrahamic religions are preposterous. Atheism is the quasi-religious worship of scientific materialism. Agnosticism is for people who are paralysed by doubt, indecision and lack of knowledge. To access the truth, you don’t have to take any “leap of faith”. You simply have to think.
The adherents of Illumination are incredibly loyal. Why? Because they have at last found what they were always looking for – the one, true religion that avoided all the ridiculous bullshit of all the rest. It is not a “finished” religion. It’s a dialectical religion, always making itself more perfect, always embracing new knowledge and new insights. It is never out of date. It is not frozen in time like Abrahamism which gets less and less relevant with every passing day. All the followers of Illumination can contribute to its development. There are no prophets and no holy texts. Ideas are adopted according to their merit. Illuminism is all about meritocracy. The smartest, most meritorious make the biggest contributions.
Ten Grand Masters are singled out by the Illuminati because they are the ones who made the most meritorious contributions. One of them – Simon Magus – is accorded special status because he achieved gnosis before his death and become a man-God. His is the example that all Illuminists seek to emulate. But Simon Magus was not the intellectual driving force of Illuminism. That honour falls to the likes of Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Leibniz and Hegel. Nor was he the most revolutionary and political – that honour falls to Adam Weishaupt. The most creative and artistic was Goethe. The greatest showmen were Pythagoras and Empedocles.
Solomon, Pythagoras and Empedocles had almost the same extraordinary powers as Simon the Magician. Hypatia, the only woman in the list, was extraordinarily intelligent, beautiful, charismatic, dignified, and courageous. Her philosophical, mathematical and scientific knowledge were profound, and she sought to overcome the opposition of Christian fanatics with peace, love, logic and reason – only to be brutally and horrifically martyred by the diabolical, evil Christians.
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We, the Illuminati have glimpsed the Mind of God. Now we want to become God. Our sign is the truth, and in that sign we shall surely conquer. Ours is the religion for the past, the present and the future. For then, now and forever. Ours is the religion dialectically perfecting itself. It is “complete” only when it attains its Omega Point…when every Illuminatus has become God.
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The notorious medieval theological question – “How many angels can dance on the point of a needle?” – can actually be regarded as the precursor of modern discussions of quantum physics and Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Thomas Aquinas said that angels and human souls are without matter (incorporeal) i.e. they are rather like massless photons. He also said that angels, being pure spirits, are not, strictly speaking, in any place – they have no specific location, which again is like photons that exist in the null zone, which are everywhere at once. He declared that they are in the place, or places, where they exercise their activity, which is a rather clever definition that could equally be said of photons. An angel, according to Aquinas, does not pass from place to place. It could exercise its activity first in Italy and then in Germany in two instants (of angelic time), without travelling through the intervening space. This sounds like a quantum particle entering the null zone at one instant and exiting somewhere else completely different in the universe at the next quantum instant. Aquinas contends that many angels cannot be said to be in the same place at the same time for this would suggest that they could be producing the same effect at the same time. There can only be one angel in one place at one time. However quantum physics argues otherwise. Certain types of particles can indeed produce the same effect at the same time, leading to a massive intensification of an effect at a specific point. This is the case with laser technology, for example.
Nevertheless, Aquinas and other medieval thinkers engaged in a fascinating way with issues that are now frequently debated by top physicists, albeit using different terminology. But isn’t the idea that photons are none other than angels an inspiring one? When the noonday sun blazes down on us, are we being immersed in guardian angels coming from heaven to protect us?
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Putting It All Together:
Illuminism has no connection whatsoever with faith. We don’t expect anyone to “believe” a single word of what we have said. Our religion has no time for those who cling to Holy Scripture and the words of dead prophets. All faith-based religious statements are intrinsically absurd and quintessentially UNBELIEVABLE. That’s the supreme irony of the Abrahamic religions. They are all about belief, yet no one with a brain and power of rational thought could ever believe them.
We have presented Illuminism as a set of philosophical, religious, mathematical and scientific statements. Slowly but surely we have constructed the edifice that everyone can now see for themselves. We have quoted no holy books of Illuminism that you must accept without question; we have quoted no prophets of Illuminism whom you must believe utterly or suffer eternal hellfire.
Every statement we have made is capable of being analysed and challenged. If you think you can improve Illuminism, go for it! Illuminism is a dialectical religion; it is perfecting itself, just as the cosmos itself is. That is the fundamental nature of the dialectic.
The following are the essential points of Illuminism, the logical premises by which it stands or falls:
1) Q. What is the arche, the fundamental substance of existence?
A. It is “minded”, formless, striving, dimensionless energy – Pure Will. Since it is dimensionless, it does not experience the “mortal” dimensions of space and time, hence is immortal. It has always existed and it will always exist. It is existence itself. It can never not exist. It accords with the First law of Thermodynamics which declares that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It cannot be brought into existence and nor can it be removed from existence; it has simply always existed. But, crucially, it can be transformed. Its quality can be improved until it’s perfect.
2) Q. How does the formless arche attain form?
A. Through the only thing that can provide absolute order, organization, system, stability, pattern, logic – mathematics, the queen of the sciences, the sacred science. Nothing else exists that can accomplish what mathematics can. It is the ONLY candidate for providing cosmic form, law and organized behaviour.
3) Q. In that case, where does mathematics come from? How is the cosmos able to understand mathematics?
A. Mathematics is in fact the surest proof of cosmic mind and intelligence. It is absurd to propose as materialistic science does, that mindless matter is miraculously able to organize itself in a host of complex ways according to the “laws of physics”. No scientist has ever explained where the laws of physics come from and how they are possible. Why those laws and not others? Why any laws at all? Why not eternal randomness and chaos? Why should matter be subject to law at all? Why should matter have any connection with mathematics? In fact, the cosmos “learned” mathematics over many eons by nothing more sophisticated than trial and error, evolutionary natural selection and dialectical progression: the principles that have guided all existence since time immemorial. The cosmos in itself – dimensionless energy – continually “spilled” out of itself into dimensionality. It is the nature of Will never to be “contained”. It will always try to reach beyond itself. This was a haphazard process since dimensionality is mathematical and mathematics did not yet exist in any coherent way. Each time Will entered the domain of partial, incomplete dimensionality, it learned some new item of mathematical information. After countless “experiments”, the Will had learned to count and understand geometrical shapes. Not in any conscious sense – more like the ultimate autistic savant. Its grasp of mathematics was strictly intuitive.
Mathematics was the first language ever learned by the cosmos; it is thereby the fundamental language of existence. It is the basis of all order and thought, of logic and reason, of mind, of consciousness. It is the essential framework providing the categories of understanding. It is the sine qua non. Mathematics can be considered as the true version of the Platonic Forms: eternal, perfect, unchanging, existing in a permanent ideal state to which the whole cosmos has access. They were not given to the cosmos as perfect Forms; rather they dialectically evolved and when they reached their Omega Point they were subject to no further change; they had achieved perfection and completion. Plato’s domain of perfect Forms is the domain of mathematics and it is now hard-wired into the cosmos (we might say that this domain is stored in the core memory of the cosmic mind, the Read-Only memory, to use a computing term.) The Will learned through its endless experimentation that only “complete” mathematics is stable and provides a proper framework for organization and order: all of Plato’s mathematical Forms must be used, not an incomplete subset. And so came the miraculous moment when the r = 0 dimensionless cosmos of mind deliberately poured itself out into the r > 0 dimensional cosmos, according to a perfect intuitive understanding of complete mathematics as eternal Platonic Forms. Formlessness flowed through the domain of mathematical Forms and emerged in the myriad forms we observe in Nature. Plato’s mathematical Forms are the origins of the laws of physics that shape the world we observe around us. They dictated the creation of the material world. This supreme, defining event was none other than the Big Bang itself.
4) It is essential for the cosmos to externalise itself, to physicalize itself, to alienate itself, in order to dialectically overcome that alienation and reach self consciousness. The teleological purpose of the cosmos is precisely that: to attain self-consciousness, to actualise all of the latent powers, potential and possibilities of raw mind. No scientist has ever explained how mind originates in dead, mindless matter. The truth is that the arche is alive and minded and always has been. There is no dualism between life and death, between mind and non-mind, between consciousness and non-consciousness. Everything exists on a continuum of actualisation of life, mind and consciousness. Humans have more of it (more actualisation) than plants which have more of more of it than rocks which have more of it than interstellar dust. The cosmos is based on monism, not dualism. To be precise, it is a dialectical monism. All dualistic systems – those based on two radically different concepts such as mind/matter, death/life, consciousness/
5) Mathematical dialectical monism based on complete mathematics provides the answer to Leibniz’s requirement that the best account of the world is the one that is “simplest in hypotheses and the richest in phenomena.” Complete mathematics achieves precisely this. Nothing else could accomplish this with the same simplicity, consistency, efficiency and elegance. In fact nothing else is even conceivable.
6) Complete mathematics also addresses Leibniz’s fundamental question of why there is something rather than nothing. “Nothing” – zero – is something. It is a mathematical number, one of the complete set; in fact it’s at the very origin of the complete set. Complete mathematics asserts that all numbers have equal “reality”, hence zero is as real, has as much existence, as any other number. Zero can be defined as 1/∞. So, already, we can see that it is something and not nothing. In fact, any finite number divided by infinity equals zero. Zero is the twin of infinity – the other side of the coin, the flip side, the inverse – and contains all numbers. The question why is there something rather than nothing is really an implicit acknowledgement of the stance of scientific materialism that dimensionless existence is impossible.
To an idealist who rejects materialism, the question should be reformulated as: is it possible for mind/thinking not to exist? Could there ever have been a time when there was no thought? If so, what caused the first thought and indeed what was the first thought? And if something caused the first thought then the precursor of thought must always have existed since how could thought or its essential precursor have sprung out of absolute nothingness? But if thought or its precursor has always existed then “something” has always existed. Pure nothingness is quite simply impossible. And when we understand the indissoluble relationship between nothing and infinity, we see why. Everything is implicit in nothing. Infinity can pour forth from nothing. “Nothing” is defined with regard to the finite divided by the infinite i.e. it is finite “something” divided by infinite “something”. It is not defined with regard to nothing. No definition of nothing can ever be formulated. It is an impossible state. It cannot exist. Pure nothingness is outside the scope of complete mathematics, hence cannot have “reality”. Scientists who talk of a “free lunch” universe assert that the overall energy of the universe is zero because the positive mass-energy of the cosmos is exactly balanced by the negative gravitational energy i.e. something came from nothing but only because something is always implicit in nothing, and because somethings can have opposite signs and cancel each other out, leaving zero on the one hand and an infinity of balanced energy on the other.
The cosmos at the “scientific” level may be considered as energy moving through a complete mathematical space where the distance between any two points can be zero, real (positive or negative) or imaginary (positive or negative). The zero zone, the “null” zone, is outside space and time. The imaginary zone is what relativity describes as “timelike”, and the real zone as “spacelike”. We exist in the timelike zone where no speed ever exceeds light speed. In the spacelike zone, no speed can ever fall below light speed. But note the fundamental asymmetry: subluminal speeds go from zero to the finite speed of light (as measured in space-time reference frames), while superluminal speeds go from the finite speed of light all the way to infinity. All symmetry-breaking phenomena deserve the most careful study because it is they that make the cosmos what it is and not just some eternal cancelling out of symmetrical properties where nothing significant would ever evolve. Asymmetry is essential to evolution and teleology.
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One of our correspondents – “Zero One” – suggested that the cosmos is eight dimensional: “So, I think, in order for ‘time-space’ to be complete again, we give each one of our four dimensions both real and imaginary parts. Once time-space is completed this way, there is no way going at any speed, faster or slower than light would allow you to ‘break out’ of the space. The answer should be 4 complex dimensions, 3 spatial and 1 temporal. This could also be seen as 8 dimensions if we take the real and imaginary parts as separate dimensions. I hypothesize 8 dimensions, or actually 4 ‘pairs’ of dimensions, in the same way a complex number is a pair of real and imaginary. These 4 pairs are grouped into 3 space-like pairs, and 1 time-like pair, the time-one being not quite like the others, the timepair is ‘flipped’ in a sense. The reason why I proposed 8 is that with the 4Di model, once you attempt to pass ‘light speed’, make it to ‘the other side of the wall’, you break out of 4Di entirely. 8 does not have this problem. It’s ‘complete’ in a sense.”
“Zero One” has correctly seen that the error we committed was to include only one imaginary dimension in our 4Di model, rather than have an imaginary counterpart for each of the three real dimensions. So, congratulations to “Zero One” for perceiving the right way to extend our model. However, he has gone further than he needed to by including time and imaginary time as separate dimensions.
Einstein’s special theory of relativity demonstrates that time and space are different aspects of the same thing. That’s why it’s possible to fuse space and time together into four-dimensional Minkowski space-time. As we saw earlier, time is in fact derived from imaginary space. It’s not a primary dimension, but, rather, a derived, secondary dimension, entirely dependent on imaginary space for its existence. So, despite its importance, it is not one of the core dimensions of the cosmos, and nor is its pair (imaginary time). So-called space-time is, at root, space-imaginary space. The connection between space and time in 4D space-time results from the natural relationship between space and imaginary space. Space and imaginary space are the “same but different”, hence why they are able to interact so smoothly.
In Newtonian physics, space and time were treated as a dualism of two separate, absolute substances: space and time. So, how did they interact? In fact, they didn’t. In Illuminism, space and imaginary space are fused together as two complementary aspects of a mathematical space. There is no mystery at all about their close relationship and how they interact.
The combination of space and imaginary space creates a null zone where light resides. Light flows through this null zone. It can be said to do so at infinite speed since it is everywhere at once. This infinite speed of light in ITS frame of reference outside space and time must be interpreted as a FINITE speed in any space and time frame of reference since space and time automatically impose finitude – which is why a black hole singularity does not tear the cosmos to pieces despite being associated with zero and infinity. The singularity remains safely “contained” within finite space and time. Nothing at all is capable of tearing apart the fabric of space and time. If anything could, the cosmos would certainly self-destruct. That’s the whole point of complete mathematics: it contains everything and it is completely stable (in the cosmic sense) no matter what happens. The cosmos won’t blink out of existence because of the presence of zero and infinity in scientific equations.
The finite speed that light assumes is exactly the same in all spacetime frames of reference. Hence it is the invariant, “natural speed” of the cosmos. Since speed is defined as distance over time, we have found a means of introducing “time” into the 6D(3r3i) mathematical space. Distance divided by speed equals time, just as time multiplied by speed equals distance.
As soon as it is possible to define an invariant cosmic speed, time is conjured into existence. Time is the outcome of movement within a mathematical space. The arche is in eternal motion (otherwise it would be permanently static and nothing would ever happen). If there is motion, hence change, then there must be some kind of time. But time can be defined only if an invariant cosmic speed is defined first. Only via the null zone of 6D(3r3i) space where the motion of light never changes because it is everywhere at once (even though it is moving) can we derive a speed that will manifest in space-time as an invariant speed in any frame; it is thus an absolute, invariant frame of reference in all circumstances, the only one capable of performing this role.
In other words, a consistent interpretation of time is possible only because of 6D(3r3i) null space and the way that light moves in that zone. Without 6D(3r3i) mathematical space, time as we experience it could never exist. Time is a derivation of 6D(3r3i) mathematical space. It is secondary, not primary. It is not a true core dimension.
Since a real number axis and an imaginary number axis can be drawn in a plane to produce the set of so-called “complex” numbers, it occurred to Irish mathematician William Hamilton that perhaps he could define 3-dimensional complex numbers by simply adding another suitably oriented imaginary dimension. However, complex numbers with one real part and two imaginary parts proved resistant to a successful mathematical treatment. The addition of yet another imaginary dimension to create “hypercomplex” 4D complex numbers with one real part and three imaginary parts resolved the problems. These new numbers were called “quaternions”, meaning “a set of four” (its Greek equivalent is the tetraktys!)
A quaternion has one scalar component (w) and three vector components (ix +jy + kz): q = w + ix + jy + kz
The three components of the vector portion are imaginary numbers, just as “ib” is the imaginary number portion of a complex number (c = a + ib, where a is a real number). While complex numbers can be used to algebraically describe rotations in the two-dimensional complex plane, quaternions achieve the same thing for rotations in three-dimensional space defined by the three imaginary axes, i, j, and k.
However, quaternions and various other exotic numbers have thus far only ever found very specialized applications and have not proved the wonder numbers that Hamilton thought they would be. They are actually just a 4D(1r3i) subset of 6D(3r3i) numbers. The fundamental numbers of the cosmos are 6D(3r3i).
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The sharp-eyed might object to our entire scheme on the basis of one glaring potential problem. How does Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem fit in? Doesn’t that kill off all schemes that have pretences to completeness? In fact, it is the Completeness Theorem (thesis) harnessed to the Incompleteness Theorem (antithesis) that creates the cosmic synthesis that forms the Grand Unified Theory of Everything. But that is for another day.
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Finally, returning to Pythagoras’s Law of Harmony, we discover that he has been triumphantly vindicated by quantum physics, some two and half thousand years after his death. The domain of quantum physics is very different from the world of our everyday experience because it is based on discontinuous, grainy, discrete changes.
Imagine that you were driving a new car and that in order to increase your speed from 10 kilometres per hour to 20 kilometres per hour, you put your foot on the accelerator in the usual way. To your amazement, nothing happened for a second or two and your speedometer still stubbornly showed 10. Then, an instant later, it showed 20, without ever having gone through any of the intermediate speeds. Each time you wanted to increase your speed, you could do it only via 10 km per hr increments, and you always had to wait a second or two until the car had enough capacity to make the “jump”. This is how the quantum world functions – through quantum leaps from one state to another, bypassing any of the intermediate states. (But in the quantum world, jumps are instantaneous; they either happen or they don’t – they don’t “build up” to it.)
In other words, in the quantum world, we return to Pythagoras’s beautiful domain of rational numbers, of correct notes, of harmonies. Anything irrational – all the notes of discordance – is excluded, just as Pythagoras would have wished. Why is this? Because of the wave-particle duality of quantum particles. Particles seem to travel as waves and arrive as particles. Waves are of course based on undulations, on peaks and troughs.
When two similar waves come together then if they are in phase with each other the peaks and troughs will be reinforced. But if they are out of phase and the peaks from one wave meet the troughs of another, they will cancel out. Thus only harmonic notes are permitted, and everything else – all the intermediate forms – will be erased. (One might even suggest that the lack of intermediate forms in the fossil record that is used to criticise Darwinian evolutionary theory – i.e. why can’t we see a smooth gradation of fossils clearly showing us how one species morphs into another through genetic mutation? – is also a consequence of harmony: only certain notes are allowed.)
So, if you put your ear to the microscopic world of the invisible and strain ever so slightly, you may start to hear something truly beautiful and inspiring, that lifts your mind and soul to the heavens: Pythagoras’s transcendent Music of the Spheres. The music composed by God!
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We have given you Solomon’s key to the secrets of the cosmos. Use it wisely. Use it well. Use it to become all that you have it in you to be. Maximise your potential. Be great. Be divine… become God!
The End
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The Armageddon Conspiracy: The Plot To Kill God
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http://www.amazon.com/
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8/8
Tags: Academia Iluministă
