Sunday, April 29, 2018

Power and Transhumanism

There are two basic magic perspectives on the nature of power. According to one, power originates from man. These are the hidden strengths in a man that reveal and develop through yogic and mystical practice. According to the other standpoint, the source of power is not in a man but in good or bad spirits, or the Holy Spirit, God’s will, that is, in factors outside a human being with whom a man communicates and makes agreements in magical, religious, or shamanistic way. Hence the haunted diabolists do not have their own, but borrowed power of diabolic forces while different saints and mystics acquire their power from the Holy Spirit, or God. The standpoint according to which a human being is the source of power I will call solar perspective on the source of power, that is, the result of solar spirituality, while the standpoint according to which a human being acquires their power from some outward deity or demon - the expression of lunar spirituality. The perspective which combines both principles, let it be solar-lunar, is the one according to which somebody can have the power but that power is an act of their susceptibility and ability to transmit a certain amount of positive or negative energy from the Universe, yin and yang, and alike, through themselves. Thus we defined three types of manifesting the power from which every type has its positive and negative variant.

From hermetistic perspective, the power is represented by the so-called magic weapons, and these are sword, wand, cup, and pentacle. The sword and wand are the tools of active, and the cup and pentacle of passive power. Magic weapons are actually body extensions of the magician himself. They are filled with energy which can be directed and projected through space and time. The sword and wand are conforming to knowledge and power; the wand as the expression of creative power and the sword as the weapon of annihilation but of understanding, too. The pentacle moves time, matter, events, money, and population; the pentacle creates; the sword annihilates. The pentacle and sword are thus symbols and tools of knowledge and power, the power of fire and air in esoteric sense. At the same time, the wand, especially the sword, more than cup and pentacle, are present in different heraldic symbols all around us. Time we live in, time of the rule of quantity, reaches for wand and sword more and more. That reach is not the act of creative will but in first place spiritual, moral, and ontological perversion, that is, black magic.

Basic humanistic and anthropocentric perspective (esoteric or profane) is the one according to which man is the measure of all things. The statement: You shall be as gods is the expression of the doctrine of anthropocentrism and belief that the hidden forces within a man can be activated by methods of spiritual growth. Postillumination doctrine, that is, transhumanism doctrine, precisely aims at overcoming this principlein sense of separation with anthropocentrism. I think that a contemporary man is characterized by materialism, skepticism, and atheism. Hence it is easier for a modern-day mentality to accept hidden forces in a man than objectively existing gods and demons, etc. Therefore, according to the understanding of nature of power, people have solarized in a pathological way, which is the consequence of egocentricity strengthening. From that reason, they will rather dehumanize themselves in order to gain power instead of rehumanization, that is, becoming human again, or coming back to original principles of humanity by becoming aware of the self, attributed in microcosm. That kind of solarization is pathological because it separates people from their microcosmic essence. Leaving anthropocentric attitude is not the same as turning a man into a being of higher order but in non-being. Man as the being of higher order in relation to human beings is nothing more than microcosm actualized. People cannot be as gods just as monkeys cannot be as people because, in order to become human they have to stop being human, that is, monkeys. In order to stop being people, they have to overcome the degenerated and limited man in themselves and discover the true genuine man whose symbol is pentagram. If they did so, they would not be desirable members of the society any more. The non-human in society is an outcast, free and unruly, even dangerous. Therefore, transhumanism offers an artificial solution in a futile attempt to negate or avoid death (or suffering at least), which is a situation that resembles the description of old seers in Carlos Castaneda books - who turned into monsters because of fear of death (the so-called death defiers). Castaneda emphasizes the loss of human form as one of the sorcerer’s tasks but that refers to typically degenerated human form and acquiring a more adequate form while facing the eternity (this resembles the Egyptian notion sah, sahu, a celebrated body of eternal life which is given to the worthy deceased by Osiris. A modern man of pervert solarity will rather become a monster, a cyborg, sinking deeper into darkness, klipotic shells, and materialism, than reject egocentric and limited notion of power and self (the illness which Crowley called the condition of Black brother).

In addition to this theme, I will present a standpoint on the development of human element through a series of incarnations of an individual being, that is, the collective development of humankind through eon shift, as presented by Rudolf Steiner. If we interpreted what he said at the beginning of his lecture written as a book „The Mission of the Individual Folk-Souls”, we could draw the following conclusions. Saturn (Binah) is in the base of nature of the socalled the spirit of the times, that is, epoch. Sun (Tipharet) is the reference of the so-called spirit of the people, that is, the collective national entity and identity. Moon (Yesod) is an equivalent of angelic nature of each individual, something like an angel guardian or an angel in charge of each individual member of a national community. Saturn, that is, eon influence pervades the solar ones making a change on the collective plane in conscience and destiny of a people. Solar influences are sending the impulse to the lunar hierarchies which then influence conscience and destiny of certain people. That is trans-historical and super-historical mechanism of the course of time, cycle, eon, and the whole metaphysical apparatus on the humankind. The aim of that mechanism is development and improvement of a man. Today’s people are tomorrow’s angels (Moon). Yesterday’s angels are tomorrow’s archangels (Sun). Former archangels are today’s archetypes, that is, carriers of time cycles (Saturn). It is a nice and graphic description but we have to bear in mind that there are the so-called fallen angels. While rising, some souls simply fall. According to Steiner, historical people are preparing for tomorrow’s role of angel they will play in the following stadium of evolution. Therefore, Steiner and Swedenborg propose continuous growth. Similar, but not that technically elaborated as Steiner did, is the doctrine of Mormonism. By this I wanted to illustrate some kind of spiritual approach to transhmanism on esoteric grounds, which actually aims for overcoming human form in a natural and evolutional way. Here, I make a difference between spiritual evolution and evolution in Darwinian, that is, materialistic sense.

Aleister Crowley mentions that the purpose of the eon of Aquarius is that the collective consciousness of the humankind rises to the state whose equivalent is Sun/Tipharet (the central sphere of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life). In that way the modern humankind would reach archangelic level at the end of the upcoming time cycle of over two thousand years. That would mean the unity of mankind, that is, the unity of all separate folk spirits into one, that is,reaching synergy as the reflection of the unifying principle of the spirit of time which characterizes the Age of Aquarius. Then the mankind would politically and ideologically unify which means forming of a unique world political, religious, and ideological system in the frame of global sovereignty. That is the world order conspiracy theorists talk about which is the operative aim of Illuminati doctrine on the plane of action in the world. We can follow the same thread which connects seemingly different people whose basic projection of the purpose of time and the aim of action of Intelligence in time is the collective development of human consciousness. This is the sense (or it should be, at least) of the so-called Freemasonry, that is, the very process of masonry on the overall plane of humankind which would be composed of spiritually developed people. That is building a new Solomon’s temple, spiritual building, spiritual temple for the spiritual man, because the “temple is in man”, as R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz said. Of course, such world unity is utopian from the present perspec tive since the current representatives of the world power have perverted psyche, not enlightened or genius personalities. Therefore, I would leave such scenarios to some distant future under the condition that the humankind survives these dark ages which guide the conscience towards transhumanistic solutions of improving a man via technology.
Also, Christianity is the expression of such utopia in a bit different way since there are no eon cycles and development throughout the history in Christianity, but decline of the original perfection of heavenly state of human beings. According to Christianity there is no development, but decline. The history is not improvement but decline and decay. The representatives of the so-called school of traditionalism (Julius Evola and Rene Guenon) agree with that. Following the logic of permanent decadence, non-being tears one part of being apart and sets a hierarchy on a lower level. Then nonbeing forms an alternative to the reduced order of being and violently tears another part. And so, over the time, non-being reduces the quality of being, while it increases quantity on the other hand. However, the final denouement is, according to the Christian scenario, eschatological, super-historical, and it happens on a different plane but it is still collective. The only individual act is activity and sacrifice of Jesus Christ as the pivotal personality of the cult, as the Son of God. In that sense, he is similar to avatar. The aim of avatar, or adept, is not to become a liberated soul that will enter some kind of unity with the divine. His aim is to renounce bliss and freedom for a certain period of time in order to keep working for the humankind. He becomes the master of wisdom, liberated from all limits imposed on him by the process of spiritual evolution. He is free to help people as a materialized spirit of time or the soul of a people on altruistic-patriotic mission of providing evolution for those in the dark of ignorance and stupidity.

Actual civilization and its technology make the number of people unbearable. The way of life and the system of world’ money distribution must be changed because it already becomes unsustainable and it endangers the very ideological abstraction thanks to which it had been set. By recalling ideological “humankind”, the nullifying and destructive force of the world capital and its transhumanistic obsessions recalls. The result in future is some kind of petrification of human beings, not literally but perceptively. Human consciousness will be completely immersed into material modus. Therefore, as time passes by, people will be more and more “material” and materialistic. I am convinced that some kind of rupture will happen in humankind, that is, division which will result in forming new humankinds between who there will be a great gap and who will become genetically incompatible with one another, but that is distant future. Some will lose the human form falling down in complete materialism, while the others will return to the original role models on higher frequency of existence cyborgizaton is that crystallization, or petrification I have in mind. With the help of technology human element will become one with still life and it will be called evolution. On the other hand, individuals turned to different perspectives will not accept and they will turn to more subtle levels. They will be called conservative and backward.

Translated by Sandra Šabotić