Beat the Infernal Internal System
Excerpt: So, I want to share with you a science fiction novel I’ve been writing, and I need a little help with the plot. It’s about this esoteric school up in a remote mountain somewhere, and they are studying the Orphic mystery tradition of ancient Greece. And they learn about Tartarus, which is of course, the lowest level of hell—this level, by the way, exists in every tradition—in the Vedic tradition, it’s called Raurav Narak—there’s Narak and there’s Rau Narak and there’s Raurav Narak. You don’t want to go to Raurav Narak—no one ever returns from that inferno.
Well anyway, they start studying what it means to be in Tartarus and the symbolic implications, and suddenly they all realize in a split second: we are in Tartarus! We’ve been sent to Tartarus and this is our hell realm in which we have to face the hell of our ego—what could be worse?
So, the name of the novel, of course, is Escape from Tartarus, but I have to figure out how we escape. I’m working on it. So, the first rule is if you find yourself in hell, if God offers you a job, take it. In the hell realm, there are double agents. God sends people in, or recruits them, in order to do surveillance on the devils and to get more information for the realm of light, for the angels, to help keep things in balance. So, a certain number of double agents get recruited every so many eons in order to retrieve a few people to do some great escapes of a few of the darkest demons that actually God thinks might be turned and might be useful for the light. But they are really tough customers in Tartarus, and they tend to be too skeptical about the existence of God to even believe that if they’re offered such a job that it could be real. So, we have to deal with a lot of cynicism. So, most of the “Tartarians” don’t actually get out even though they’re offered a passport.
So, we have to figure out then, what is it that would hold someone in a hell realm when they actually have the freedom to leave? And I actually think this was figured out in the early 1800s. It was figured out by a German theologian named Friedrich Schleiermacher. I’m sure you all know his writings. He lived from 1768 to 1834—he was a German Protestant theologian, and he maintained that there were two reasons why people were attracted to religion. Religion, which of course, postulates the existence of God—and he said that one was a taste for (but I think more a yearning for) infinity. And the other slope was the ego’s feeling of absolute dependency. And so, it wanted to know that there was some force somewhere it could depend on.
Now, in the more postmodern periods, people tend to assuage their yearning for infinity by having certain glimpses of a pseudo-infinity by altered states of consciousness, or others will do it through studies of science that in some way will give them a sense of the infinite or a study of mathematics. In fact, most mathematicians, I think, study it in order to get a sense of infinity in the form of numbers—and you get a lot of very mad mathematicians, often clinically diagnosed as psychotic, but who create mathematical theories of infinity. Georg Cantor is one and there are a number of others and mathematics has really led the way in the development of the understanding of the transfinite for example.