Conflict and Convergence Are Not Two

As we all know, we’re living in a time of maximum disjunction, a coming apart, a time of conflicts—omnipresent conflicts at every level of the fractalized cosmos. Yet it’s punctuated by moments of very paradoxical conjunctions and superpositions. And this day is one of those very profound conjunctions in which three holy days are juxtaposed, coming together within traditions that are not in rapport, and yet the meaning of which in all of them is identical. It’s that strange paradox of identity and alienation that is the hallmark of ego-consciousness.

So we have three holidays, the Hindu holiday of Hanuman Jayanti, which is the mythical birth of the mythical hero Hanuman from the famous epic the Ramayana, which we have studied here. And Hanuman, of course, symbolizes–well, there are many levels of the symbol, but primarily the divinization of our animal nature, the transformation of the monkey mind into the mind of—if not God—then such a total devotee of God, that in that adoration there is union and no longer any alienation or separation.

So we could say that, in the paradigm of the Ramayana, you have Rama signifying God-consciousness and Sita as the soul. The soul becomes captured by the lower animal nature that has not been divinized but still has its bestial, if you wish, attributes or traits of jouissance, of gratification, of the sensory level of the bodily vehicle that is out of touch with the true nature of its being as pure consciousness that is infinite and not localizable in a bodily form. And it happens because, if you remember the story, Sita is giving alms—a coin to a brahmin priest who comes as a beggar—and she’s not allowed to leave the magic circle. But out of a misplaced moment of empathy, she gives the coin and her fingernail traverses the edge of the circle and she’s captured and taken to the island outpost of that demonic ten-headed entity named Ravana. She becomes enslaved, we could say, or at least captivated, by the lower nature of ego-consciousness and its intensities that have not been divinized.

We could say that Hanuman represents the soul, the divinized aspect of consciousness that saves the part of the soul that is represented by Sita who has fallen—the nature of the soul that has identified with the body ego and has become split. That split nature then is healed as Hanuman is able to bring the divinization of consciousness into effect, as the warrior who defeats the lower drives and raises the consciousness of the soul back to God and who also brings those famous healing herbs for those wounded in the battle. In other words, our traumas that we have suffered in the fall into body-consciousness are healed by the same power that defeats the identification with the ego mind. And thus, the battle being won, Sita and Ram are reunited and the Ram Rajya is able to then take place. The Kingdom of God can be restored.

At the same time, we’re celebrating the Israelite holiday of Pesach, the Passover, in which the enslaved Israelites rise up against their masters with divine help, namely the angel of death that passes over. We need to understand this, of course, internally (as we do every myth) that the angel of death brings about the ego death of those who had been enslaved to the ego, which enables the Red Sea to part—enables the opening of consciousness to break through its enslaved condition and be able to enter into the journey to the holy mountain where the Light of God, the burning Tree of Life, is able to be encountered fully and God-consciousness and its dharma—its mitzvot, its commandments, its way of expressing life in a divine manner—are given. At least that’s the mythological interpretation.

And then we have, of course, in the Islamic tradition, the beginning of the season of the Hajj, the pilgrimage to the holy Kaaba stone in Mecca, which I suggest signifies the Zero Point of consciousness. Of course, the Zero Point of consciousness is not located in Saudi Arabia or anywhere else, just as the holy mountain is not located in the Sinai desert, nor is the kingdom of heaven located in a city in India. The kingdom is laid out before us all if our third eye is open and we are able to see, as Christ has said in the Gospel of Thomas. And of course, the Passover meal is also the Last Supper, signifying the passion of Christ to come and the rising of consciousness—the return of consciousness to the Father, to the Godhead, to the Absolute Self—and the divinization of the human consciousness that can now abide, no longer split, but unified with the one Infinite Consciousness that encompasses, pervades, and acts through every node of its manifest forms. So each of these three holidays is signifying the same internal journey to the Source, from the unreal to the Real, from darkness to Light, from the world of death to that of Eternity.

The problem, I would suggest, of Kali Yuga is that, in the first place, the Real that is God became confused with the religious belief in God; the God that one believes in cannot be the same as the real God, because no belief system can actually grasp the infinite, incomprehensible, inconceivable nature of the intelligence, the beauty, the power of God. No belief system, therefore, can have a monopoly on truth. But once we have fallen into ego-consciousness and we mistake religion for God and substitute the former for the latter, we become loyal to an institution of signifiers and a particular tradition that is now in opposition to other traditions with different signifiers, different holy scriptures, different mythologies. Even though they are all congruent and all signify the same Truth, because that Truth is beyond the symbolic, for those who are identified with language, with thought, with the mental activity in the mind that is no longer under their control but which turns the ego itself into an artifact of the mental stream of consciousness, there is no longer any power to discern the difference between the belief in God and God or in the righteousness of the teachings of a religion from the Truth of the presence of the intelligence of God that can transcend–and must transcend–any list of commandments or dharmic values.

And because of that, the limited mind in a contracted state has then become an instrument of the misuse of faith and the misuse of self-righteousness to foment religious wars and conflicts between empires whose organizing principle is the faith that one lives for and dies for. That limited mind must be willing to kill for that belief system and the orders given by those who represent that system, rather than returning to the Real of God-consciousness, which is beyond any limited frame of reference or motivation of conquest or defense or justification or belief in one’s chosenness or the chosenness of a particular piece of land or the chosenness of a scripture or of a particular way of life.

And so, once the particular wins out over the universal and the surrender to a particular group overcomes the loyalty to that Infinite Presence that contains all as equal manifestations of the same Absolute Self, then the world comes apart. And at every fractal level, that coming apart replicates itself.

Then we have a further historical development in the West, which attempts to overcome this problem by repressing religion and the values—the traditional values—of religion and to replace them with secularism based on a pseudo-religion of scientism. And this Western heresy then becomes a new orthodoxy for Western Europe, the U.S., Canada, and all of those contained within the empire of the globalized capitalist system, who become necessarily indoctrinated into the belief in scientism. And its teachings include the replacement of God as Creator with Darwinism—with evolution, but evolution of a kind that is based on random mutations. Therefore, the whole development of life loses its meaning.

In that frame of reference and that paradigm of reality, literally, the world becomes meaningless. And at the same time, the physicists say, we don’t need God anymore; we have a Big Bang, and we have our belief that everything can be explained in terms of mathematics; no God is necessary. And even though there are clearly inadequacies to such a paradigm, it is taught and mandated in such a way that it is irresistible to those brought up in a Western cultural framework. Moreover, scientism offers, via technology, a force that they can claim is more powerful than prayer. They have modern medicine; they have the ability to communicate globally; they have weapons of mass destruction that can conquer everyone; they have proved that the scientistic belief system is superior to religion.

But the problem, of course, is that technology—being meaningless—leads to a very oppressive and tyrannical transhumanism in which a eugenicist program of depopulation becomes inevitable, because there is no longer a need—once the development of artificial intelligence and robotics develops to a certain point—of having the masses of bodies that are now inconvenient to the holders of power and threaten their rule. So you have a situation where an empire becomes illegitimate through its own turning against its population, which then creates a backlash of a return to religion. But now religion is in a much more primitivized form that is extremely defensive and reactive rather than focused on the elevation of consciousness to the level of the God-Self–a religion now of trying to hold on to a disappearing value system to prevent the complete neutering of the population and the perversion of all the traditional ideals and values.

Audio File Conflict and Convergence Are Not Two.mp3