35 thoughts on “Jeffrey Epstein, Edge Foundation, MIT Media Lab, TED Talks, & the Biology Wizards Rewriting Global Culture”

1. Very interesting piece, Jasun.

   I have long been disturbed by the association of certain Edge.org thinkers with Jeffrey Epstein via John Brockman. The vast majority have always struck me as toxic to the spiritual needs of human beings – examples are Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker – but someone like Lee Smolin, who I’m a big fan of, unfortunately contributes articles to this website. I imagine the temptation for the latter has to do with the way edge.org has become a platform or venue for some of the leading thinkers in the sciences to share their ideas with one another. Also, its perfectly possible for someone’s views to be useful to someone else without the former person being at all morally aware of what the latter person intends to do with it.

   As to that last statement of Epstein. Clearly, the man is very educated, and his description here seems very sophisticated. He is right on the mark when he says that humans are the result of their environments; that the mental states we experience are emergent properties of the invisible configurations of thermodynamically-controlled matter (brain-body) moving within us. But how is this any different from the conventional gnostic position which argues exactly the same thing – except by reference to things like the “demiurge”? The demiurge satisfies exactly the same conditions that Epstein ascribes to the environment. Epstein could more or less be saying: “I am what God made me. I can’t change. I am God doing what God wants to do”.

   The issue is the same; it doesn’t matter how much glitter and gloss modern science has contributed to the picture Epstein describes, its still Judaism vs. Gnosticism, with Judaism understood as the unification of semiosis with dynamical structure in determining what humans take to be the real; and Gnosticism basically all the arbitrary metaphysics that derives from the split between the way we know and the way we live. You could say Gnosticism – meaning an arbitrary metaphysics – is as ancient as the human civilization itself. The only thing which corrects this error in understanding is the cultural process of learning i.e. through wisdom traditions. Since this learning has already occurred in ancient human history – indeed, to create humanity this attractor had to have already been discovered – albeit, obscured by the veil of biblical allegory, humans now only need to represent this metaphor in more literal language, so that we aren’t confused about how we work and the nature of our relationship to the real.

   This is what I mean when I say that elitist culture poisons people’s experience of reality. There is a metaphysic which percolates through everything – the languages we use, the things we become attached to – which determines what we regard as the ‘ideal’ way of being in the world. Our ideal is literally the attractor which organizes us. The ideal can be compatible with the real, and so express the “will of God”, or it can be incompatible, and so express the will of some arbitrary, fanciful creation of human meaning-making. Evidently, the vast, vast majority of human cultures have not landed on the real, but instead, are arrested in a ‘strange attractor’ which keeps them fixated on the unreal. This strange attractor can plausibly be maintained by sheer human stupidity; but more often than not, it is maintained by a conscious dedication of human social elites to the unreal.

   More or less, all these people (and people in general) to varying degrees are regulated by an ideal that derives from their structural relations with their environments. Symmetry is a ‘sink’, and so ‘convergence’ refers to the fact that each physical system converges to make itself symmetrical with the embodied representations in body, voice and face that other people enact. Once narratives proceed, higher level convergences flow through.

   Epstein likes to believe, or pretends – being the confused buffoon he is – that social convention is synonymous with reality. If we never grew through time, or weren’t once babies, this would be true; but all babies need the same things, and hence, the attractor human functionality is fundamentally the processes which optimize human wellbeing i.e. sensitivity towards the needs of the other. Social convention is diseased; it is the ‘false gods’ that exists through the will of the true God, in biblical parlance. But since we don’t subscribe to dualism, the ‘true God’ refers to your true, essential, dynamical basis in recognition processes with others. Since this always exists, even as people dissociate this implicit reality, the issue is – vis-à-vis his sexual exploitation of minors – that his refusal to acknowledge what sort of misery and deprivation he puts mind controlled sex-slaves through derives from his sick addiction to sex, and hence, to the motivated reasoning which prevents him from accurately seeing the world through an others eyes.

   I can easily see most of these people having similar addictions to Epstein. Human males in particular are prone to the disease of pedophilia

   Reply

   • Sorry; our bodies are only partially thermodynamically controlled. As the biophysicist and philosopher Mae Wan Ho puts it, our bodily system converges towards an ideal, and given enough time, will spontaneously reach that ideal – which is, as Peirce put it, “perfect symmetry” with our environments.

     Since the idea of perfect symmetry is, as Blake put it, very fearful, the elites are more or less all about preventing that symmetry from emerging.

     Reply

     • which is what early life sexual abuse accomplishes.

       Reply

   • I feel the need to qualify the ‘Judaism’ vs. Gnosticism claim, which could come off as weird. Obviously, I am not advocating orthodox Judaism. What I am advocating, or meaning, is that how we name things plays a fundamental role in structuring how we act i.e. what we take to be meaningful. In brain terms, the left hemisphere can organize the right if it fails to properly recognize through logic the structure of the right i.e. in ecological relations. The left, in short, can take over the right and cause the right to misperceive the nature of the real.

     The Bible expresses this idea through the metaphor of Noah and his three sons. Noah (meaning ‘rest’ in Hebrew) is the state of rest which is attained after trauma. The state of rest has three possible attractors: Japheth (meaning ‘beauty’), Ham (meaning ‘heat’) , and Shem (meaning name). These archetypal end points for humans when they are in a state of rest: they can pursue things superficially and be attracted by appearances (Yapheth); they can be obsessed with power and becoming fearsome to others (Ham); or they can be motivated to see things truly – to name things properly (Shem). The Bibles allegories thus describe a psychological genealogy of states – which states which to lead which states. It almost seems as if the concept of natural selection is being described in its genealogies; and indeed, even with Ham, who is said to have raped Noah, we may see something of the secret society network and its strong association with Africa, Egypt, and Canaan. Noah says “cursed be Canaan”, and Canaan of course refers to the Phoenicians, who worshiped and spread both the cult of Melqart (Herakles/Hercules) which strikes one as the proto-capitalist, as well as Baal-Hamon, where child sacrifice was practiced. In other words, Ham (intensity) rapes the rested, both figuratively and literally: those who self-organize from this attractor literally sexualize abuse other human beings; and the whole point is to manipulate, or ‘rape’, the minds of others: to exploit their restedness or need for rest. It should be pointed out that the Phoenicians are considered to be the originators of this cult of the entrepreneurial self; and that both the Greeks and Romans have been heavily influenced by the Phoenicians activity in the Mediterranean – in Sicily, western Italy, Corsica. It may also be why Freemasons celebrate Hiram Abiff, with Hiram being “Hiram of Tyre”, a Phoenician city-state.

     If you don’t read Hebrew, these ‘mysteries’ are closed off to you. The same thing can be claimed for any language that uses myth and metaphor and where the meaning has to do with the play-on-words.

     Reply

     • In other words, I know of no other tradition which emphasizes structure and language the way the Hebrew Bible does. You either find language at the expense of structure (most myths); or structure at the expense of language (as in Taoism or Buddhism). But the complementarity of both is a rare thing. The understanding that language expresses the same sort of ecology as everything else is not the easiest thing to perceive, and my own penchant for it is a mixture of my exposure to Judaism, as well as the more formal study known as biosemiotics. The latter seems to trace itself – even its proponents don’t acknowledge it – to the kabbalah.

       Reply

2. I’m feeling sleepy..

   Reply

3. Thanks for this Jasun, I’m looking forward to your follow up on Brockman. After reading your collection of research here I thought of Robert Maxwell, then went to investigate something and discovered that your article has already been crossposted to r/Maxwells.

   Reply

4. Hi Jasun,a great piece by yourself and your good lady! None of this surprises me with these genocidal degenerate perverted maniac’s,who are consumed with wealth,power and trying to make the world in there image,what could possibly go wrong with that, (vomit).
   A point i want to make is,i have a deep gut feeling that Epstein is not dead,and there are a couple of reason’s why i believe this, first the official narrative of most things if not all simply cannot be trusted,and the complicit tightly controlled msm pushes so much propaganda/disinformation/psychological Warfare etc against the general public no one really know’s what the hell is real or fake anymore,all thanks to those wonderful folk at the “Tavistock Institute” and many other think tanks too numerous to mention!
   The guy that supposedly carried out the second autopsy on Epstein was none other than Dr Michael Baden,this man was the head of the pathology department enquiry of JFKs assassination…he even has his own tv show for crying out loud,he’s the go to pathologist when you want some serious BS put to the public, just like Dr Thomas noguchi the Medical Examiner of just about every celebrity who died in the 60s and 70s including JFK!
   Anyway Jasun, i have just stumbled upon your website recently and i’m very impressed with your writing’s and work,hopefully i will get through most of it over the next few month’s?
   I’m a fellow Brit from Coventry,but now live in Southern Ireland. Take care,Mike.

   Reply

   • You know, some of the people most vocal about the existence of ritual abuse are a part of the Tavistock clinic.

     My gut reaction is, he’s dead. What is there to gain by his living? The only arguable detail, then, is whether he killed himself or whether he was killed, and either situation is plausible, though I’d give a slight advantage to the former, given that death and believing in death, or being dead already while still alive i.e. not caring or thinking about others and holding to that position as a matter of principle, rules everything about the way these sorts of people operate.

     Epstein, then, is where we will end up: with our selves. The trouble for him is that the self is an emergent property of socializing; and that means he is with all the people who etched themselves into him, as well as the others (alive and dead) whom he himself etched his being into. Depending on the accuracy of your living, this is either heaven or hell.

     Life is hard.

     Reply

     • The wag Voltaire once responded to the statement “Life is hard,” with “Compared to what?” Once you get past the initial amusement, it may dawn that the question need not be only a rhetorical bon mot, and that the answer is (something like) “compared to what it could be.” Related perhaps would be the question, “For who or what is life ‘hard’?”

       There seems to be no better guarantee of human misery than seeking the easy life.

       Reply

       • It would be nice to grow into a world that taught us lovingly the importance of disciplining ourselves. But alas, in this world, you either discover it through suffering or you discover it when its too late.

         In the philosophy of the kabbalah, there’s a beautifully enchanting idea for this called “Tzimtzum”: God ‘restricted’ his infinite in order to create a world, so too, then, human beings must constrict their own selves in order to ‘make room for others’ [within yourself].

         It also reminds me of the psychoanalyst Donnel B. Sterns book ‘The Infinite of the Unsaid’, in which there is a potentially infinite number of ways we can represent ourselves or a situation, but which speech requires us to constrain into a particular, finite point.

         “Easy” can also be interpreted in a purely relational sense. Relative to what? Hard and Easy are emergent from physics, so, when I eat a big meal before bed, it is ‘hard on my stomach’ because a human beings metabolism necessarily slows down at nighttime, meaning it takes more work to break down the food. People have a crappy sleep because of that; and sometimes it leads to a cold – because the body saps too much energy for digestion, leaving the immune defenseless against an invader.

         This is what CS Peirce was implying in his very profound metaphysical musings on what a future of “perfect satisfaction” would be like. He believed deeply in logic, and thought that perfect symmetry was perfect semiotic representation of the real – but this first entail that truth be valued, which he noted that the powers that be have nothing but contempt for: “The words justice and truth, amid a world that habitually neglects these things and utterly derides the words, are nevertheless among the very greatest powers the world contains. They create defenders and animate them with their strength. This is not rhetoric or metaphor: it is a great and solid fact of which it behooves a logician to take account.” – Charles Sanders Peirce, The Logic of Signs, in Essential Readings in Biosemiotics, pg. 138, Springer, 2010; In Peirces marvelous mind, this symmetry would lead to a more and more relaxed – or satisfying – experience of being-in-the-world-with-others.

         Peirce was hated by the administration at Harvard, and anywhere else where he tried to get a teaching job; and yet he impressed intellectuals like Oliver Wendall Holmes, and especially William James, who supported him emotionally and financially until the day he died.

         I cannot justice to this mans writings. I don’t think its an exaggeration to say that he is the most impressive thinker I have ever read. He deserves the reputation he has for being Americas ‘greatest philosophers’. I would go so far as to say that he may be the greatest philosopher in human history. I cannot think of anyone else who was as original and trailblazing in human thinking as he – and he achieved all of it, it seems, by refusing to allow himself to be lulled by a system that rewarded mediocrity.

         Reply

     • Hi Till, i agree with you on the heaven or hell,and that life is hard,bloody hard,i had to retire from work in 1990 due to chronic fatigue syndrome(CFS) and live on benefits since then, and i can tell you living in Ireland (Carlingford) is not cheap!
       As for Epstein,yes he could well be dead,i can’t prove he’s alive and you can’t prove he’s dead either. Let’s face it, deep state or whatever you want to call them? Are always pulling pys-ops on the public,and they take great pleasure in doing so, i could give you example after example of the msm mocking us and being gate keepers..Check out the Parsons green London underground bomb attack on 15th Sep 2017. If you are familiar with Aleister Crowley,L Ron Hubbard,Jack Parsons,his wife Marjorie Cameron and Samuel Liddell Mathers who were all members of the OTO/Golden dawn, you will get the joke,If you do a little digging on the event,and the people involved in it. This was a full on operation by MI5 as most of these events are! It’s all about keeping us in a constant state of fear so they can bring more draconian laws on us!
       Do you know what the names of the doctors who treated the injured were at the gay Pulse nightclub shootings in Orlando June 12th 2016? Dr Lube and Dr Cheetham,and Dr Lube treated a Mr Angel Colon one of the injured, so Lube treats colon…..Take care! Mike.

       Reply

       • Hey Mike.

         I looked up your claim, and surprisingly enough, a Dr. Matthew Lube is a real Orlando area general surgeon, and in Spanish, colon means “dove” – a fairly popular last name especially amongst Puerto Ricans. Also, I think you’re referring to a New York Times article where all three of these names appear? If so, Dr. Lube isn’t described as treating Mr. Colon. They simply appear in the same article but without having any relationship between them.

         https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/15/health/orlando-shooting-medical-center.html

         Occamz razor asks us not to make unnecessary assumptions. If Florida has a lot of Puerto Ricans, and Dr. Lube is a real person who works in the Orlando area, and the two are not described as having anything to do with one another, and yes, this event is related to gayness, and lube and colons are associated with homosexuality, I still think this should be chalked up as a coincidence. Dr. Lube is a real surgeon with articles in reputable medical journals that predate the nightclub shooting; and Colon, as said, is a very well known Spanish last name.

         https://www.orlandohealth.com/physician-finder/matthew-w-lube-md

         https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colón_(surname)

         This isn’t to deny that false flag events don’t occur. Its largely accepted that the Spanish American war, WWI (Lusitania), WW2 (Pearl Harbor), Vietnam (gulf of Tonkin), the first Iraq War (baiting Saddam into invading Kuwait), the Kosovo war (Operation Gladio) and the second war in Iraq (lies about WMD’s) all were carried out for the purpose of justifying financial and geopolitical agendas. Conspiracies are the rule – but that doesn’t mean every tragedy or shooting or terrorist event is explicitly connected to secret intelligence operations. Humans can be made to do things simply through the stress and trauma of living.

         In this case, there were real victims – just as the Sandy Hook shooting had real victims.

         Reply

         • Hi Till,thanks for the reply. I take your point on Dr Lube. Apparently Angel Colon one of the injured has become a Christian since the event,which i suppose is something good..Though i will never trust the msm on anything even when they throw some truth our way!
           operation Mockingbird is one of the reasons, and as you rightly said all the false flags over the decades! Take care! Mike.

   • thanks Mike – good to meet you, glad you stopped by; to Till’s point about Tavistock bringing attention to ritual abuse, I am not sure but this may be restricted to Valerie Sinason, who I have approached about speaking on the podcast, but who replied that she no longer feels the atmosphere is congenial for her to speak about it. She also retired from Tavistock. It stands to reason there are decent and intelligent people working there, as at Edge or (even) the CIA, tho that would also require a degree of amorality or naivete to justify.

     Reply

     • Graham Music is another guy who is interested in the subject. I’ve shared some of my views on the four stages of its development (intersubjectivity -> phenomenology -> epistemology -> ontology) and he was very nice, and encouraged me to publish these views in a neuroscientifically sympathetic psychoanalytic journal. He recommended a few but I would rather wait till my project is finished.

       The Bowlby center seems to show a more consistent focus on this matter.

       That said, the general tendency to demonize the Tavistock centre doesn’t jibe with what I’ve read – for instance, from Music in his own writings – with some psychotherapists who work there and whose work I’ve found to be genuinely sincere. Making people aware of themselves or their unconscious, or seeking to promote compassionate awareness of the other and ones own self, is what I find in their writings. At most, they maybe play too much into the LGBTQ+ etc audience, but I even sense that they only do so – like Dan Siegel, for instance – because they feel the dragon (the political correctness police) breathing down their necks.

       You know which institution always seems to be implicated in ritual abuse related topics, both denying its existence, promoting pedophilia, and encouraging cultural anomie? The London School of Economics. I’ve found some of the most perverse thinking comes out of this institution. There are probably way more, spread out across the world – scarcely a country has been spared the wrath of postmodern relativism.

       Reply

       • Both LSE and Tavistock came up a lot in my Occult Yorkshire trails, esp LSE; that was a surprise as they had never really got my attention before. Tavistock of course had, & I was surprised in this case because there never seemed to be much to the claims, research wise, yet it turned out that many, if not all, roads viz a viz social engineering and mind control, did indeed lead back to Tavistock.

         Regarding Charles Sanders Peirce I found an affordable volume of his works, recently published via Amazon, suggesting possibly a renewed interest: https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?isbn=9781973922995&cm_sp=mbc-_-ISBN-_-all

         Reply

         • Maybe Tavistock’s like the Kinsey center at Indiana state University (a sketchy place – just like MIT – yet some of the most interesting thought comes out of it), where I believe just a few years ago Sue Carter (a biologist married to the neuroscientist and trauma researcher extraordinaire Stephen Porges) took over, changed its logo and changed its mission from studying sexuality to studying human relationships – with ‘social bonding’ and ‘monogamy’ as the evolutionary norm that human nervous systems are adapted to. It has seriously pissed off people within the religious end of the LGBTQ movement like Dan Savage, who thinks that sexual freedom i.e. promiscuity, is just as healthy a lifeway as monogamy.

           There are many Peirce books. For the optimal value, my recommendation is you should buy Indiana Press’s ‘The Essential Peirce’. It has all his writings (he never wrote a book in his life). The first edition covers the early part of his life, the second edition the later part. There are so many interesting articles to read.

           I haven’t yet got completely through the first edition – but I got through the second one. After finishing it, I had this feeling of, “I want to savor this man’s thinking”, so I have since let myself read countless other books while I take him once in a while and read a chapter. When lackluster thought bores you, and you want something to inspire you, Peirce is the place to turn. Nobody combines strictness in logic with metaphysical and spiritual depth the way he does:

           “Nor must any synechist say, “I am all together myself, and not at all you”. If you embrace synechism, you must abjure this metaphysics of wickedness. In the first place, your neighbors are, in a measure, yourself, and in far greater measure than, without deep studies in psychology, you would believe. Really, the selfhood you like to attribute to yourself is, for the most part, the vulgarest delusion of vanity.” – C.S. Peirce, The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Vol 2 (1893-1913), pg. 2, Indiana, 1998

           “There is, in the second place, the social consciousness, by which a man’s spirit is embodied in others, and which continues to live and breathe and have its being very much longer than superficial observers think.” – C.S. Peirce, The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Vol 2 (1893-1913), pg. 3, Indiana, 1998

           https://www.amazon.ca/Essential-Peirce-Selected-Philosophical-1867-1893/dp/0253207215/ref=pd_bxgy_img_2/147-3548084-7110658?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0253207215&pd_rd_r=6474971a-1a7c-48b9-9216-21f5ddba1e8c&pd_rd_w=CRXMF&pd_rd_wg=ofKdZ&pf_rd_p=31075106-99ea-4a31-a463-1494a4b8bd5d&pf_rd_r=TP88P3DS8VWSFVFB34YZ&psc=1&refRID=TP88P3DS8VWSFVFB34YZ

           https://www.amazon.ca/Essential-Peirce-Selected-Philosophical-1893-1913/dp/0253211905/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1579484916&sr=8-5. You get all his writings from the years 1893-1913

           Another book which covers the whole backstory of Peirce and gives it an interestingly contextual lens is Louis Menands “The Metaphysical Club”, which describes the lifes and relationships of CS Peirce, William James, Oliver Wendall Holmes, and John Dewey.

     • Thanks for the reply Jasun,yes no doubt there are decent people working in these institutions and who would desire to speak out but can’t.
       I sent a reply to Till that you might find interesting? Take care.Mike.

       Reply

5. Started reading an online pdf of Brockman’s early-‘70s aphoristic text ‘By the Late John Brockman’. It seems to prophesy the “death of Man” as traditionally conceived. Human beings are henceforth to be understood as mere confluences of impersonal processes in a world of pure cybernetic immanence — an eerie foreshadowing of Nick Land’s output.

   Reply

   • This clearly expresses the influence of Marvin Minsky’s thought, though I think Norbert Weiner was concerned about the way people like him thought about cybernetics.

     Cybernetics is a fairly useful heuristic to describe how organisms link up within the more general complexity of the biosphere and the other three geospheres, and ultimately the solar system and galaxy. But there is this school who uses it, or thinks about humans, as mere empty automatons expressing nothing more than the sum of the influences acting upon them. This is where you get a B.F. Skinner type of behaviorism which uses conceptual advances like cybernetics for evil thinks like perception management and motivation creation – a business nowadays within the so-called “surveillance capitalism” which now pries into everything humans do with the goal of directing their attention and intentional states – a wet dream if there ever was one for totalitarians.

     This fixation on imminence also seems to be popular leitmotif with people like this – a position which I’m most acquainted with through Nietzsche. Jiddu Krishnamurti, also – probably dissociating his own early life sexual abuse by CW Leadbeater – once told David Bohm in their joint lecture on the “end of the time”, that he wanted, to quote him “You see, I want to [laughing] abolish time, psychologically. You understand?…To me, that is the enemy.” Continuous imminence and eliminating the psychological experience of time – the “enemy” – go hand in hand, as it is memory and reflection from a temporal vantage point which causes us to step outside of imminence within the world. Combine this imminence and hatred of time with the surveillance capitalism economy and you have a fabulous apparatus for keeping people forever chained within imminence.

     I assume that this is the goal: drown people with sensuousness and superficiality – nonstop entertainment; teach them through popular culture and TV shows about the “power of now” as well as the “unreality of time”; and to keep it working in the right way: expand the powers of facebook, google, amazon, and the other tech companies.

     My own little pet theory for how game of thrones ended refers to just this picture: daenerys represents the impulse for equality and democracy; john snow represents the mythologically minded “hero”; and Bran is Plato’s ideal ‘philosopher king’. The seven kingdoms are the seven sephiroth, and by the time the show ends, seven becomes six, which in kabbalistic thought means “malkuth” (time) goes out the window. John Snow (the hero) then goes beyond the now “six kingdoms” (the feeling domain) into the traumatic and depressive realm beyond the wall, into the intellectual sephiroth where only they – the hero (elite secret society members; mostly men) know what the truth of things is. It is here that they do battle with “white walkers” and the ancient “children of the forest”.

     Reply

     • Thanks for taking the time to reply, Till.

       “Continuous imminence and eliminating the psychological experience of time – the “enemy” – go hand in hand, as it is memory and reflection from a temporal vantage point which causes us to step outside of imminence within the world. Combine this imminence and hatred of time with the surveillance capitalism economy and you have a fabulous apparatus for keeping people forever chained within imminence.”

       Yes. Cultural engineers in thrall to control fantasies need to eliminate both individual and social memory. Everyone must live in the present and Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.

       At the same time, it seems they are manufacturing a hypertrophied sense of temporal succession — time as whirling centreless flux, a process without directional meaning albeit cloaked in the temporal rhetoric of ‘progress’. This requires memory, without which there would be no sense of ceaseless change. What must be occluded is any awareness that memory as such reveals something that persists through time.

       Reply

6. Wow! on the research.

   Looking forward to what you’ve found on Brockman.

   Some of the photos that illustrate this post look a little ‘shopped to me. 😉

   Reply

7. Till-
   you do realize that Kabbalah is not Jewish? It is gnostic. I can’t quite tell from your comments which way you land on that. But you probably read Scholem so you are probably aware of this misconception that kabbalah originates in Judaism. Small point and not germane to Epstein per se sorry if I’m off in the weeds. But weeds make the best medicine!

   peace b

   Reply

   • And Scholem expressed a gnostic spirituality, so perhaps it’s a bias he has?

     But in any case, if the Hebrew bible is a book of allegory, it wouldn’t be any more correct to call it ‘gnostic’, since kabbalah officially dates to Moses de Leon, even though the orthodox tradition traces it back to Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. Gnosticism is dated to around the end of the 1st century BCE, usually to Philo of Alexandria. I see more influence from Neoplatonism in kabbalah than Gnosticism, though frankly with Rabbi Luria, there is genuine innovation with the diagram of the sephiroth, which as far as I know originates with him. Hegel in turn is supposed to have derived his own emphasis on dialectic i.e. thesis/antithesis/synthesis from the structural emphasis placed upon it in the kabbalah, even if the idea of dialectics can be found in Plato.

     Overall, we can call kabbalah “obvious” natural philosophy. I think the presence of this doctrine in the Hebrew bible (encoded in allegory) implies that this way of thinking was very prevalent in the Near East long before Gnosticism or kabbalah appeared. I think, also, that the term kabbalah, which means “received”, speaks also to the fact that most esoteric traditions have been handed down orally from teacher to student throughout the world – whether the text is literary-poetic, as in Near East, Greece, and India, or hieroglyphic, as in Egypt, or just a bunch of memorized tales, as in most tribal societies. There’s always – though I don’t think its necessarily the greatest thing – an ‘elite’ group of people who sophisticated enough to understand the psychological-metaphysical and sometimes social-engineering ideas behind it.

     I think I noted that Judaism simply inherited this tradition of interpretation; just as Gnosticism and Christianity and any other group who felt a special connection to the Hebrew bible did as well (minus the elitist karaites and earlier, the sadducees, who like modern day obscurantists demonize the mystical oral part in order to keep literal-minded).

     There are differing relationships, and by no means is it always clear what a text may mean; but since reality is fairly stable, and a humans functioning within reality law-like, the texts – from my understanding of Hebrew and my knowledge of human experience in light of systems analysis – refer to archetypal human realities which appear again and again and for that reason, the text is treated as holy truth. Maybe one day we may all be surprised to learn what kind of truths our ancestors learned about our condition and encoded in this book?

     Reply

8. To make the above conversation more topical: I’ve often found the disproportionate (relative to total population) presence of Jews within the elite as existing squarely for creating the impression (given elites are so focused on perception creation) that Jews “control things”.

   The history is usually well known – why and how Jews became money lenders – but it is interesting to point out a statement from the Talmud which goes, to paraphrase, “no one hates Judaism more than Jews”, which I took to mean that no one hates truth as much as a person most intimately aware of it, and aware of what it demands from them.

   Thales is said to have come from the Lebanon region – a region which would have been under the influence of semitic culture; Pythagoras in turn is said to have visited the near east (Babylon) and Egypt and came back from there with their wisdom. Pythagoras of course emphasized geometry, and believed all of reality could be reduced to numbers.

   Whether or not the latter statement is legitimate (I don’t think it is), the didactic value of shape and configuration, or geometry, is certainly valid and can be seen throughout the metaphorical logic of the Hebrew bible.

   One may also say that the concept of “keep your enemies closer” present in the way conservatives and liberals befriend ‘Judaism’; I find it very odd, though intriguing, for instance, that ‘education day’ in the United States was named after Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson by none other than George HW Bush. When the renegade and iconoclast Rabbi Meir Kahane tried to get the attention of western intellectuals, who was the only person willing to respond to him? Allan Dershowitz. The Ukranian financer and moneypot for the Temple Institute in Jerusalem – the organization trying to rebuild the third temple on the spot where the dome of the rock presently stands – Eduard Shifrin – is unusually close with some of the worse sorts of people – Trumps, Putins, oligarchs, etc.

   What does one make of this? In Jason Louv’s recent book ‘John Dee and the Empire of Angels’, the author notes the opinion of the British war general J.F.C Fuller, who wrote this rather cryptic piece:

   “The Chosen People are the light of the world, a light which at present is mixed with darkness (the Gentiles or children of Esau). This darkness will vanish little by little; first Israel will “look forth as the dawn,” next she will “become fair as the moon”, then “as clear as the sun,” and lastly “terrible as an army with banners.” Such is the reformulation of YHVH. When this is accomplished, not a Gentile will be left to pollute the earth; for Israel will have become its Messianic Shin which will untie the tongue of God, and on the utterance of his name will the entire universe vanish into absolute light”

   Weird, right? This book is useful reading for anyone who wants some deeper insight into the psychology of people who subscribe to the value of ritual abuse, without necessarily saying they do, but alluding to it by more or less describing the western esoteric tradition as “very hard” – but a very “quick” way to become enlightened. That is, trauma-as-road-to-enlightenment, or as one book I own puts it: “hurting the body for the sake of the soul”.

   It’s insanely deluded of course, but this is what the plan seems to be. The author Jason Louv basically says that there is a cabal within the western world who WANTS to engineer the apocalypse so that the events of the Bible will unfold (according to their own engineering work, perhaps?):

   Louv writes, “Not only is decay necessary as a prelude to redemption (just as death creates fertile conditions for new growth), it may also be necessary to accelerate that Saturnian decay in order to speed the arrival of the redemption to follow. The apocalyptic magic of the angel’s hinges on this principle.”

   The author is all over the place in this book in his commitments to Crowley’s creed and then describing it as evil and degenerate, and I am very skeptical that JFC Fuller cares one lick about the “chosen people”, or that his description of them in this light does anything more than promote certain conspiratorial ideas about Jews and Judaism.

   But if at any rate he means what I could mean, the “chosen people” is an archetypal concept for a “way of being” that YHVH (reality) will choose from human behavior; a way of being which is necessarily synonymous with the allegorical narratives encoded within the Torah. If he means this, then perhaps his statement isn’t all together whacky – not that I endorse the latter part of the universe “vanishing into absolute light”, unless he means it metaphorically, as in “all will seem to be full of life and light”, in which I would agree.

   Anyways, the elite and Judaism – there is something complicated going on here. It almost reads like the relationship between Jacob and Esau – the latter pulling at the formers heels (Jacob literally means “heels”). This means that Esau (meaning ‘rough’), in being the first born, is the older archetypal mode of human being-in-the-world. It is the mode of being that Hayden notes in his studies, of aggrandizers and the sorts of societies they create in their images. Jacob – the conscious, moral, self – fights with this dimension of itself in order to transform it (pulling at its heels) which eventually does happen when “Israel” emerges following a wrestling match with an angel; the name is is often interpreted as “Ish Ra El” – “man sees God”, or as “he will have power over” – as in power over the self, body, conditionality, and reality itself i.e. matter.

   I for one will stick to the ethics of science, although I do think taking seriously the allegorical dimension of the Hebrew bible yields some profound correlations.

   Reply

   • Jacob the conscious moral self who cheats, lies, and steals his brother’s blessing?

     Reply

     • If you read the verse literally, and believe it is simply a literal story, and you ignore the role of context, and language and such things, that is exactly the impression that can be created.

       If I were to write something about you or this site, I would have to reference you, this site, what you’ve written about, etc, and for anyone to make heads or tales of what I’ve written, they’d need to know the context – to know what my references are.

       Same thing with the Hebrew bible. Its theology, or metaphysics, only makes sense with reference to the systems – myths – that preceded it. It’s a conversation between intellectuals about the nature of reality.

       You’re a very intelligent guy Jasun. Do you think the narrative is really that banal? You don’t think the notion of an earlier mode of being (Esau), interacting with a later developing mode of being (Jacob) is what’s being talked about here? You think its really a story about a guy named Jacob stealing the birthright and blessing of his brother? This is what uneducated simple-minded people are taught (not that I agree with that) to believe. Yet Jung was very right in emphasizing the importance of archetypes; and if archetypes are, as I would put it, “attractors” underlying the ideal-modes of being in particular situations-of-living, then archetypes are the appropriate objects of religious metaphysics. Since stories are very useful mnemonics, humans have encoded important knowledge about living in the world within these mnemonics.

       I think I mentioned earlier that the story of Noah is the story of the traumatized self. Noah means “rest”; his three sons are the three possible modes of being that come from feeling rested: Japheth, Shem, and Ham. Japheth means beauty and refers to superficial attachments; Ham means “hot” and refers to hot-headed intensity. When I feel rested, sometimes I can be Japheth, playful, superficial, mindless; attracted to meaningless things; other times I can be Ham – argumentative, aggressive, and critical. But it is Shem who is the stable attractor, or archetype, which ‘rest’ can evolve towards. Shem means ‘name’, and refers to naming something properly. It refers to seeing the essence of a situation and capturing it with the right words – something I know you probably experience all the time when you slowly select the ‘right words’ to navigate the conversation with the other in the right direction – towards the right feelings.

       I think it is extremely naïve to think the Hebrew bible is simply a story book as this depressingly shallow culture of ours presents it as. Wouldn’t that, btw, be exactly what it want to do, given Japheth’s son Yavan is associated with Greece – as Josephus notes. If todays world is the product of Greek culture and its ideas – and the Greek fraternity system would be a big indicator of it – then its only natural that the Hebrew Bible would be presented as stupidly and foolishly as possible, given its metaphysics is anathema to its idea of the good.

       The Greeks are sober-enough to know that their worldview is committed to a system which oscillates between two poles: comedy (as now and has been for the last 70 or so years) and tragedy, as it will be a decade or so from now. Its excessive and extreme lustfulness for living, its addictiveness, its shallowness, and its need to re-represent human experience in a thousand different ways again and again, is attractive, granted, but it is inherently unstable – so much so that it leads time and again to social crises. If one of them (Fuller, for instance) then says something like, the “chosen people are the light of the world”, it must come from acquaintance with these differing metaphysical viewpoints as captured in the different myths and writings of the Greeks and Hebrews; perhaps after having experimented with the worldview that leads inevitably to suffering, it might be a sobering claim to say that the chosen people are an ‘inevitability’ – in the sense that the structure of the real, as natural selection, only selects those systems which are compatible with the relata making it up. If living ecologically means learning how to control your appetites, and therefore learning to live with accepting limitations, Fuller may be saying nothing more than what another culture might attribute to the eightfold path in Buddhism or the eternality of the Tao, but perhaps without the sort of drama that exists between the Jews and the western world where the former have been, in their language, in “exile”.

       Reply

       • sure to all of that but then are you saying the stories are entirely made up and if so, at what point does history enter in, if at all?

         and is this sort of “elitist” reading of the Bible so different from Thelemites who scorn anyone who suggests that Crowley might have literally be prescribing child sacrifice, etc?

         and what of Blake, whose words you choose to take more literally than others who admire his work would do?

         more and more my sense is that you have a model of reality and you rearrange the data to fit your model, but it all starts to seem a bit arbitrary in the end, saying more about the model-creator than the reality it purports to represent.

         Reply

         • As to your first paragraph: I have no way to answer that question. It could be that its all allegory, or, as the Rabbis would insist, it is to be interpreted both literally and allegorically. If literal, that would imply that they see reality as fundamentally metaphorical, which is to say, that we are God experiencing himself in terms of something else; or we are God experiencing himself in a self-repeating way that ultimately reaches up towards ultimate knowing. So, for instance, Self and Other in human relationships maps or becomes the template for body and reflection processes, which becomes the template for thinking processes ABOUT the world, which ultimately evolves after enough deduction work has occurred, into the ultimate stage of God (transcendental) experiencing himself within reality.

           So what is self at one stage becomes reflection at another, and then ‘thinking about’ at another, and ultimately witnessing your own eternal nature at a final stage; the other, the body, the structure of the world, and the world as it is as a beloved object (as in the song of songs) are the counter poles.

           I see the above perspective as very plausible, and very likely, as the ultimate truth of things. To think of ‘ultimate meaning’ is devastating for some people – for instance, people within this culture dedicated to whimsicalness and arbitrariness and do-what-thou’ness; so much so that you can explain much hatred of Jews in this light – the holocaust, even the Star Wars movies, with Yoda being Hebrew for ‘he who knows’, and Jedi for “Knower”, and the Siths obsession with murdering all the Jedis being the obsession of left hand path initiates being obsessed with killing all Jews, which also means, if Mike Hockney is a guide, killing all ‘dharma believers’ i.e. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc, leaving only postmodernists and the radical anarchists left to do what they wish with the earth – maybe mad max? In short, deep symmetry IS fearful. I wouldn’t be able to posit this unless I knew it first hand from my experience of it. My “Greek parts” don’t get along well with my “Jewish” parts. They fight with one another. Perhaps Christianity was an effort to reconcile those differences so that eventually a higher level truth can be established at some later evolutionary date – at some future period where people are coherent enough not to be overwhelmed by the deepest truths? I theorize in this direction sometimes.

           But Thelema and the Bible are very different narratives. The Bible from its beginning is about a fall from a higher level of being; its a genealogy of states that humans have gone through, using metaphor. It even describes the very groups that Thelamites and Satanists refer to: Cain. Cain comes from Qana, which literally means “to acquire”. It is the acquisitive attitude which leads the self to wander in confusion (Nod, the place where Cain went to, means “wander”); then Cain had Enoch (meaning “dedicated”) who then built a city. That is, the acquisitive attitude becomes dedicated to building; and interestingly enough, Haydens own thesis has aggrandizers (Cainites) being the source of social complexity (cities). Seems the ancient Hebrews came to a similar deduction. Irad, Cains son, Irad, in turn means to “flee witnessing”; once we commit ourselves to a certain agenda, or a certain object, we begin to flee anything that gainsaids it.

           As to Blake, I am basing my attitude towards him, as I mentioned earlier, on Northrop Fryes interpretation of him. In general, I think Blake was a part of a world and culture that is consistent with the picture described by Frye; and Frye essentially describes him as a person who muddies the difference between right and wrong, truth and falsehood, into a situation where criticism becomes evil, and letting people be becomes good. In other words, the whole negative-feedback structure of human relationships becomes inverted to serve elite regulatory fantasies where no one criticizes them for their harmful behavior.

           As to the Hebrew bible, recall Samuels advice to the Hebrews NOT to put in place a King, that is, not to pursue hierarchical forms of organization “like the other nations do”. That is a very egalitarian and democratic way of thinking about human relationships. Certainly elites are present throughout the human bible, especially the book of Ezra. Elitism pollutes every society; but not all equally. For instance, as we progress through history we find more and more exemplars of equality, but I think, for instance, that Lloyd de Mausse doesn’t do a good enough job representing the good and decent hunter-gatherer societies WHO DO NOT sexually exploit their children – a position he gives the false impression of not existing in the anthropological record (a position I’m sure Hayden would strongly dispute). There are indeed a great many more who do it, but its not homogenous.

           My theory is, the Hebrew bible – Hebrew (Ivrim) means “to cross over”, while Jew (Yehudim) means “He who Knows” – represents the same sort of process that we ourselves are going through today. In other words, I think Lloyd picture is patronizing and naïve – belittling ancient humans as if their reasoning faculties weren’t as capable as ours – and naïve because he doesn’t know enough about the modern cognitive sciences, physics or semiotics to realize how plausible it is to treat them as just as mentally sophisticated as we are. The trick to the success of modernity is misrepresenting the past as stupid, that what we are is inevitably “progressive” relative to them. No. I think the truth is that stupid and smart people exist in probably similar proportions today as they did in the past; that propaganda was a problem and recognized as such in the past just as it was today. The only difference is the modality of communication and representation: they used myth, we use literal language. They interpreted their myths; buy and read books. It may ultimately amount to an economic and technological difference related to efficiency.

           As to your latter paragraph, it can definitely seem that way from your outside perspective. What have I said so far I hope suffices to make you see Thelema as wildly different from the Bible – with the latter taken no explicit or thematic opposition to reality as Thelema does. Is it possible that your experience with the latter has traumatized you such that you think the bible is an exact replica of it? Isn’t it odd, though, that the Jews have been victims again and again throughout history – to the Egyptians, Persians, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Christians, Nazis? Are the Thelemites also victims? Or does the whole comparison sound ludicrous?

9. I wrote this at another website correcting someone elses understanding of the meaning of Adam and Eve:

   For someone who likes Buddhism perhaps this interpretation will appeal to you.

   Eve – Chawah – means ‘living one”, not breathe (which is ruach). Adam on the other hand means “blood” (dam means blood) with an aleph in front of it. Aleph is the grammatical prefix for the personal pronoun “I”; so ‘Adam’ can be interpreted as “I [am] blood”. Eve on the other hand is completely a verb. Living one. The living one is our human body, living, breathing, feeling the fluxes of living-in-the-world. Taken together, Adam is the eternal static point of the eternal witness; Eve is the living body that the witness is experiencing, hence “I” “am the blood” expresses an identification between the eternal witness and its feeling body. It is an identification that is at the root of a healthy and truthful and non-dualistic way of being in the world: I am the blood means that Eve, Chawah, is, contrary to the traditional belief, is actually the template that Adam needs to follow in order to know what is true and what isn’t. So, when my body feels tired, there’s a regulatory homeostasis process at work which is dictating to the conscious reflect mind what is required; but since the mind can be “eccentric”, or partly outside, of the processes of the body, the reflective, language based mind can if it wants to completely ignore this command of the body and do something else.

   Hence, the narrative of Adam, Eve and the snake is really a narrative of how traumatic experience affects human phenomenology, of how the lower, more ancient, reptilian (metabolically conservative) brain misleads feeling states (Eve) by misrepresenting how the world works (if you read the verse in the Hebrew, the snake in fact misrepresents Gods commands to Adam). Adam is the knowing, reflective dimension of the mind, the mind that is eccentric to the body. The mind only knows the real, however, by reading the signs of its body – the living one, or Eve – in the right way. Eve tells Adam, or the reflective mind interfaces with its feeling body – and the effect is that the reflective mind believes what its body is saying. The origin of projection begins here – or is described here within the archetypal narrative.

   Since human beings are in fact God, or the Universe, experiencing itself, Human beings are understood within the Torah’s narratives as the transcendental dimension of God – the reflective part (Adam) – interfacing with its embodied, ecologically diffuse dimension – Eve. The Torah is really about the blueprint of where we came from, how we got there, and what we can do to get back there.

   As for sensory experience; the issue is not the sensory world since that’s the way we learn what is and isn’t real – remember Eve, the feeling body, and the fact that we refer to its states to know the real? Sensation is the truest part of what we are – indeed, the REAL, the nature of God, is symbolically encoded in the world we perceive with our senses. Denying the sensory world is the beginning of the root of evil, and hence, the snake has Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil i.e. the misrepresentation of the real becomes a “tree”, which is a metaphor for a system (trees are the metaphor used in many sciences for organizing and classifying things); when we misname things, we become committed to our representation through attachment processes; we misname reality and begin to see things in ‘black and white’, without the complexity and non-linearity of the ‘tree of life’ – the ecological way of knowing.

   The sin of Adam and Eve is the sin of the reflective mind not reading the feeling body so that it properly understands the ecological nature of why it feels the way it does. By misreading the body, a false reality is set up – the tree of the knowledge of good and evil – which is what sets up the whole delusion of being separate from God to begin with i.e. “you can be as God” as the snake utters deludedly imagines that the ideal can be anything other than what the REAL is. The only lasting, stable truth, as climate change is very well showing us, is a truth that acknowledges the relational nature of things.

   Reply

   • making God and the Universe synonymous, as you have done here & elsewhere, in my view is one of the central conceits, and lies, of new age scientism and occultism.

     Reply

10. Overall, Jasun, you need to better appreciate the mnemonic nature of myth as containing the core spiritual ideas of a culture; and you need to appreciate that the Jews have been enemies wherever they’ve lived: you can add Muslims to the list as well (they even decided to build their third most important holy site on the temple mount; with eight walls, which, since eight refers to eternity, is in opposition to the septenary structure of the real – according to ancient thought; i.e. the Kabbah, the black cube, is the infinite in time; its about eliminating distinctions in the real; hence, building an eight sided octagon over the Jewish temple mount was a metaphysical slap in their face that says “there will be no God in the world except man”. Time is real; the infinite is an abstraction that doesn’t add any value to how we live in the world of the real; so people who say time isn’t real have no concern at all for conditionality or reality and more or less deny being affected by reality or conditions or situations that occur in reality; hence, eight > seven is more meaningful than it might first appear.

    Just to make a point: I don’t follow any religion. I am not Jewish; or follow Judaism; I am merely a person who at one point was very fascinated with Judaism, learned a lot about it, and whose subsequent studies have found a lot of correlation between the archetypal meanings encoded in its myths and my own education in fundamental sciences. These positions say nothing about my political views about Israel, for instance.

    Reply

    • I too am fascinated with the black cube
      https://youtu.be/CwMy5NtuizU

      Reply

    • Ah the Jews.

      And on another thread, meanwhile, someone is telling me, not for the first time, that I am avoiding mentioning the ethnic element to the shadowy manipulations of culture; there’s really no way to win when talking about the Jews, it’s been set up that way by Jews & Gentiles both, so I prefer to ignore the whole question. On one side, it’s all about how the Jews are the victims of a conspiracy, on the other, that they are the directors of one. Both are presumably true, and so neither is really true when it excludes the other. They are complementary conspiracies that prop each other up, like one of those weighted beans that keeps rolling.

      At least since WW2 & the creation of Israel, the Jews’ status as victims has become primary to their disproportionate degree of social influence and control. I doubt if I, or anyone, needs to be MORE aware of how victimized they have been, only perhaps of what the reasons for this victimization might have been (i.e., that “anti-Semitism” isn’t an explanation, only a label), and what uses it has been put to, as in, how it has been exploited by the victims as a means to gain more power—a trick that all the other minority groups have now learned or are in the process of learning. It’s easy to see how this keeps the vicious circle spinning: the more victimized a people are—provided they can draw widespread attention to the fact, which itself indicates power—the more power and leverage they gain, the more they abuse that leverage, the more resentment and potential victimization they attract. The real victims meanwhile are the ones we never hear from or about.

      So again, I say, the wisest course seems to be to ignore the whole Jew question as much as possible and focus on individuals, not group-identities.

      Reply