Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (55 page)

But I don’t think so….

While it’s kind of fun to imagine shape-shifting iguana-demons from just south of our
Bardo
feeding on the depressed feelings and bad sex of humankind, the real story is a bit more complicated.

Have you ever heard of the Anima Mundi–the Soul of the World? Just as every person has a soul–which can be further divided into a higher soul that seeks union with the divine spirit, and a lower soul that identifies with the False Self and its attachments to the material realm–the world also has a soul. Sometimes we refer to this world-soul as the collective unconscious, but there’s more to it than just that. Again, like the human soul, the Anima Mundi can be divided into a higher world-soul that seeks union with the True God, and a lower world-soul that identifies with this False World created by the Demiurge.

“As Above, so Below,” as Hermes Trismegistus said. Or “As Within, so Without” as Carl Jung might have put it.

Also, just as every one of us has a personal Shadow (as in Jung’s definition of the shadow archetype), the world also has its Shadow: the Dark Brotherhood. So in that sense, the Dark Brotherhood isn’t really evil. It’s just all the negative crap that the world is projecting. A shadow sphere controlled by shadow beings. Darkness that needs to be integrated by bringing it into the Light. Actually, in a way–since we haven’t completely integrated our own shadows–it’s us.

What keeps the Dark Brotherhood alive is human fear and negativity. They feed off our thoughts and deeds of murder, violence, rape, brutality, and psychopathic rage. They actively encourage and even inspire our creepy moral failings and wounded pride, our shame and grotesque self-pity, and the assorted debaucheries that result from our addictions to pleasuring the False Self. Those desperate acts give off a corrupt spiritual essence that energizes the Dark Brotherhood. It’s what makes them strong. “Food for the Moon,” as Lloyd puts it. He picked up that phrase from G. I. Gurdjieff, who hinted at all of the above when he said:

"Man contains within him the possibility of evolution. But the evolution of humanity as a whole… is not necessary for the purposes of the Earth or of the planetary world in general, and it might, in fact, be injurious or fatal. There exist, therefore, special forces (of a planetary character) which oppose the evolution of large masses of humanity and keep it at the level it ought to be. For instance, the evolution of humanity beyond a certain point, or, to speak more correctly, above a certain percentage, would be fatal for the Moon. The Moon at present feeds on organic life, on humanity. Humanity is part of organic life; this means that humanity is food for the Moon. If all men were to become too intelligent they would not want to be eaten by the Moon.”

Yeah, getting eaten by the Moon is a big bummer…. The whole idea kind of puts a new spin on the Reverend Sun Myung Moon and his cult of Moonies, doesn’t it? What better way to stir up a shitstorm of negativity, over the long haul, than to get thousands of perfect strangers to marry each other in a mass ceremony at Madison Square Garden? (Where on May 18th, 1982, Reverend Moon married over 2,200 couples in one day alone.)

It was Gurdjieff’s belief that if people refused to do the inner work that served the purposes of “Great Nature,” then their excess energy would be extracted from them in the form of “useless suffering.” Sometimes this extraction would proceed on a massive scale by means of wars, famines, floods, and epidemics. But Gurdjieff didn’t see our situation as hopeless. He said there was a way out for individual men and women. Maybe the masses were screwed, but an individual could outwit the forces that oppose human evolution. “The liberation that comes with the growth of mental powers and faculties is liberation from the Moon.”

Like resonates with like, and if you don’t resonate with the Dark Brotherhood’s lower astral frequency, then they won’t be able to feed off you. If you don’t identify too strongly with your reptilian brain functions, then you won’t see shape-shifting reptilians. Of course, shit will still happen…. You’re in a human body, after all–and bodies have a tendency to age, sicken, and die. But if you’re sincere in your efforts not to become food for the Moon, then the Brotherhood of Light will be there to help you.

What, you didn’t think you were on your own, did you?

All daimons belong to the Brotherhood of Light, of course. They’re the liberators of humanity, the diametric opposite of the Archons. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that, because daimons, as a rule, don’t make life easy on their human charges. They toss up obstacles left and right. But learning how to overcome those obstacles is exactly how we achieve liberation and enlightenment. Consider what W.B. Yeats had to say on the subject:

“It was Heraclitus who said: the Daimon is our destiny. When I think of life as a struggle with the Daimon who would ever set us to the hardest work among those not impossible, I understand why there is a deep enmity between a man and his destiny, and why a man loves nothing but his destiny.”

In addition to daimons, the Brotherhood of Light is also comprised of guardian angels and all those people, past and present, who’ve made a conscious decision to align themselves with the Light of the spirit and the True God. That latter category would include historical figures like Buddha and Jesus and so on (along with less obvious names like Nikola Tesla, Edgar Cayce, Buckminster Fuller, and Wilhelm Reich), and also ordinary souls like that nice guy who gave you a job when you were down on your luck. Many of the people you meet in this lifetime from the Brotherhood of Light will be members of your karass–spirit friends you’ve met in previous lifetimes–but they’ll be having worldly problems of their own and you won’t always be able to count on them. For more consistent spiritual help in this world, your best bet is to get in touch with one of the transcended enlightened masters, like Buddha or Jesus–or your own daimon, if you have one.

All daimons and transcended enlightened masters are working from the Other Side to transmit liberating ideas (or “infused knowledge”) into receptive individuals in our physical realm. It happens whenever human culture seems ready for it. Shakespeare couldn’t have written two plays a year for twenty years without a little help from the Brotherhood of Light, to cite just one example. Bob Dylan made the connection explicit when he said of his own songwriting: “The songs are there. They exist all by themselves just waiting for someone to write them down. I just put them down on paper. If I didn’t do it, somebody else would.”

Great advances in science and technology often come about in the same way. Descartes invented calculus while he was relaxing in bed one morning. Francis Crick first visualized the double-helix structure of DNA while he was tripping on LSD. Friedrich August Kekulé spent twenty years trying to figure out the structure of the benzene ring, then one night he went to sleep and had a dream about a snake swallowing its own tail–the Uroboros–and everything clicked for him. “Visions come to prepared spirits,” he said later, sounding a little less than humble. He should have just thanked his daimon. (Then again, maybe the benzene ring was one for the Archons.)

Daimons aren’t much talked about these days, but there was a time when people were on far better terms with them. The Neoplatonists certainly didn’t have any problems with their daimons. They actually hoped and prayed for a daimonic guide to help them navigate the perils of this world. It was only after Christianity came along that daimons were demonized as (what else?) demons. Archons should be regarded as the true demons, in the Christian sense of the word; daimons shouldn’t be tarred with the same brush. But the church didn’t want anyone to know that, because it was making a big power-grab in the third- and fourth-centuries. It wanted to be the only intermediary between the realm of spirit and the realm of man–a role that properly belongs to a daimon.

So how can you tell the difference between a daimon and a demon, you might ask? It’s all in what they want you to do. For instance, if you’re asked to sacrifice your children, you can be pretty sure you’re dealing with a demon–unless, of course, your name is Abraham. No, wait… I take that back. Even Abraham should have known better. Human sacrifice is never okay–I don’t care what anyone says. When Isaac was laid out on that rock with his father’s knife poised above his chest, I’m sure he wasn’t thinking the God of Abraham was all that great.

Hermes is the quintessential daimon personified. You have to love Hermes: relaying messages from the gods, conducting souls through the underworld, assisting in the creation of poetry and literature, parceling out dreams and prophetic visions. The guy’s busier than Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. If you’re looking for a more recent example, Napoleon had a daimon (or demon) to guide him during the French Revolution. Sometimes it showed up as a shining sphere, which he called his star. At other times it popped in to warn him as a dwarf dressed up like Little Red Riding Hood.

Napoleon managed to knock the Catholic Church down a few well-deserved notches. He wiped out a lot of the monasteries that had participated in the Inquisition and he turned St. Bernard’s Clairvaux abbey into a prison. Then he forced Pope Pius XII to watch helplessly as he crowned himself Emperor in the cathedral of Notre-Dame.

Daimon or demon? You be the judge.

See, it’s not such a black-and-white world…. If you think an all-powerful Church that tortures and burns anyone who doesn’t share its beliefs is an okay thing, then there’s no reason to change. The modern nation state that Napoleon ushered in seemed like a big improvement, but it’s had its own share of problems, like bigger and more destructive wars, gulags, corporate malfeasance, and the ever-increasing concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a few, to the detriment of everyone else.

It’s like Yeats said in 1896 after seeing the premiere of Alfred Jarry’s
Ubu Roi
: “What more is possible? After us the Savage God.”

Actually, the Savage God has been here all along. The Archons never left us.

The latest incarnation of the Dark Brotherhood seems to have us heading toward a microchip-controlled, totalitarian New World Order with plans to reduce the bulk of humanity to the level of wage slavery and herd-like intellectual conformity. If that’s the case, then maybe the Apocalypse isn’t such a bad thing–provided no one gets hurt.

I’m sorry all this sounds so fucking bleak, but as our moon-mad pal Gurdjieff was so fond of saying: If a man in prison has any chance of escaping, the first thing he has to do is
realize he’s in prison.
So long as he thinks he’s free, he’s screwed. And the Dark Brotherhood is really, really good at turning people into slaves while at the same time making them think that they’re in control of their own destinies.

Think about how advertising works. All those shiny new cars and nubile young women, the expensive Swiss watches and sparkling diamonds, the cigarettes and bottles of liquor that promise to make you look cool. They’re all glamour traps. They’re selling you an impossible dream of luxury and fame and hassle-free sex–a James Bond sort of lifestyle that no one can really live up to, except maybe Hugh Hefner. Mal bought into that dream and it kept him emotionally stunted and dissatisfied throughout his entire life, in a permanent state of pissed-off longing. It also made him work harder to buy things that he really didn’t need. A new Corvette or a liquor store extracts a price in physical, mental, and emotional toil–all of which goes to feed the Dark Brotherhood.

(Women are just as susceptible–just ask any
Architectural Digest
-reading mom who’s blown half her kid’s college fund on a new bathroom with English tub fixtures and handcrafted Italian tiles. Or talk to the housewife with ten different kinds of mascara and a closet full of Harlequin romance novels who’s given up on making love to her husband because he doesn’t live up to her fantasies–nevermind that with her stretchmarks and stomach flab, she’s nobody’s ideal fantasy material, either.)

Movies and television are the same as advertising, only worse. Your brain shuts down after watching about half-an-hour of a movie or television show; it goes into a hypnoidal twilight state and stops distinguishing between Self and Other. You start to live what’s on the screen–which puts you in the ideal state to feed the Dark Brotherhood.

Think about all the emotional turmoil you put yourself through while watching a movie: You’re at once the cop and the serial killer, the doctor with three wives and the chipper farm girl with leukemia. You gladly participate in car crashes, cocaine binges, machine gun shoot-outs, battlefield skirmishes, doomed love affairs, skyscraper fires, oceanliner disasters, contagion by monkey virus, race riots, blood feuds, witch trials, voodoo rites, emasculation by Egyptian scarabs, and bloody, gushing stomach eruptions triggered by fanged, penis-shaped little space-aliens. You think you’re having a great time as all that emotional crap boils through you. But now imagine a giant astral vacuum-funnel above every movie theater sucking up all that negativity, making the Dark Brotherhood grow stronger. They’ve got you resonating on the lower levels of the
Bardo–
just where they want you–and you’ve paid the price of a movie ticket to do it.

You’ve colluded in your own doom, as Philip K. Dick would have put it. How fucked up is that?

I’m not saying you should stop going to movies, or stop watching television. You should just try to be more aware of the effects that entertainment has on you. If a movie is making you feel anxious or depressed, don’t buy into it. Remember that it’s only a movie. Later on you can graduate to saying, “It’s only life…” when something in life is making you feel intense negative emotions–because really, each lifetime is like a movie when viewed from the perspective of your immortal spirit.

Heraclitus summed it up with another saying that was one of Yeats’ favorites: “Mortals are immortals and immortals are mortals, the one living the other’s death and dying the other’s life.”