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So Dark the Con of Man…
Towards A Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory - Part 1
The Da Vinci Code is a hoax which purports to uncover a hoax while simultaneously replacing it with another hoax, which meanwhile draws attention away from far more insidious and much less obvious hoax.
The hoax which it purports to uncover is the ridiculous idea of Apostolic Succession, that church leaders claim authority because Jesus laid his hands upon an Apostle who laid his hands upon his own disciples, who in turn laid their hands on their followers, who laid their hands on their own, and so on - down to the present age. Basically nothing more than the whisper of an echo of a fleeting touch by a man two thousand years ago in linear time.
The hoax which it replaces Apostolic Succession with is one with a little more meat to it - literally. Or maybe not meat so much as blood. The notion that spiritual or other authority can simply be passed on to others through the transmission of semen and its successful fertilization of a willing womb - rather than through intense personal transformation and turmoil. Royal blood poured through vessel after vessel over the years. The physical artifact of power without any of the understanding which originally created it or utilized it.
And here’s where the theory that I’m operating under gets fun. This line from the Apostle’s Creed:
[…] who suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into hell. On the third day He arose again from the dead.
This doctrinal statement of belief describes the Descensus Ad Inferos, the Descent Into Hell. In the Middle Ages, this tremendously popular mythology was referred to as the Harrowing of Hell.
The official Bible pays surprisingly little attention to this interesting event, this shamanic descent into the underworld. We have 1 Peter 3:19-20 which says that Jesus “went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey…” and 1 Peter 4:6 which says that the gospel was “proclaimed even to the dead…” And yet an enormous folk apocryphal tradition fleshed out the details, depicting Jesus as a “conquering general,” throwing down the gates of Hell and freeing the “righteous pagans” there.
I’m not sure when it started exactly, but in more recent times, the Church has downplayed this event - the Harrowing of Hell, the preaching to the spirits in prison - so much so that few people have even heard of it or ever pondered it’s importance. Well, why? What could be it’s importance? Here we come to the “far more insidious and much less obvious hoax” that I was talking about at the beginning. The one that the questions of touching versus blood relation totally sweeps from your mind, because both relate to physical rather than spiritual realities.
And the possibility exists that the spiritual reality is something far darker and more disturbing than we could have ever imagined. I will allow Philip K. Dick to introduce you to this possibility, since he’s the one who introduced me to it:
[…] I have synthesized all these high sources and derived a single sensationally revolutionary occult doctrine out of them; the distillate expressed theoretically is, We are dead but don’t know it, reliving our former lives but on tape (programmed), in a simulated world controlled by Valis the master entity or reality generator (like Brahman), where we relive in a virtually closed cycle again and again until we manage to add enough new good karma to trigger off divine intervention, which wakes us up and causes us to simultaneously both remember and forget, so that we can begin our reascent back up to our real home. This, then, is purgatorio, the afterlife, and we are under constant scrutiny and judgment, but don’t know it, in a perfect simulation of the world we knew and remember — v. Ubik and Lem’s paradigm. We have for a long time been dying brains/souls slipping lower and lower through the realms, but the punishment of reliving this bottom-realm life is also an opportunity to add new good karma and break the vicious cycle of otherwise endless reliving of a portion of our former life. This, then, is the sophia summa of the six esoteric systems — seven if you count alchemy — of the entire world. Eight if you count hermeticism. We are dead, don’t know it, and mechanically relive our life in a fake world until we get it right. Ma’at [an Egyptian goddess who weighed the souls of the dead in the balance to determine their virtue] has judged us; we are punished, but we can change the balance. . . but we don’t know we are here to do this, let alone know where we are. We must change the “groove” for the better or just keep coming back, not remembering, not reascending.
Whether we call it Purgatory or Hell or the Black Iron Prison or the World of Forms or Maya or the Matrix or Linear Time is a moot point. We are caught in it. Caught in an illusory prison of some sort - quite possibly of our own construction - which effectively limits our access to the Original Source, the Divine Signal. If our prison is called Linear Time, we could refer to this other land as Real or Mythic Time, eternity, the Palm Tree Garden.
The hoax that has been perpetrated upon us has to do with confusing the realms in which the Gospel stories took place. Both the Da Vinci Code and the Church of Rome would have you believe that the events described in the Gospel took place in Linear Time, in history. They have the artifacts and the documents to “prove” it. When in actuality, the events described in the Gospel take place in Real or Mythic Time, a time from which we are separated for some inexplicable reason.
The “spirits in prison” to whom Jesus spoke are us. We are dead, re-living simulations of our lives in endless self-defeating loops. The power, strength and beauty of Christ is that he tears down the walls of the simulations and invites you into Real/Mythic Time, the time in which the Gospels not only did occur, but still are occurring, and will forever occur. It is an ageless timeless mythic drama that cuts across all races and social classes and geographic regions. It just so happens that those who most forcefully tapped into this particular version of it happened to live some 2,000 years ago in a small desert region. When they look at the Eternal, they saw themselves, and introjected the Mysteries into their own lives - thereby uniting for (some of) them partially or fully the Upper Realm with the Lower Realm.
Jesus didn’t incarnate into our world as an infant. He perpetually exists in Real/Mythic time as the child-king, as the baby Horus. Jesus descended into our world, into the Linear Black Iron Prison of Hell as a fully-fledged conquering military hero. He threw down the linearity of our world, the “gates” of Hell, and within the chaos that ensued opened a door-way into Real Time through which the “righteous dead” could slip.
Even a divine in-breaking could not exist infinitely within the world of decay and entropy that is the World of Forms. As such, Jesus had to ascend back to Heaven, to Real/Mythic time. What we were left with was the linearity of the Black Iron Prison seeking to repair itself through the only means it knows possible: through institutionalization and physical processes. Thus we see the church develop around the idea that “Jesus touched me! Jesus touched me!” And, if the re-writers of history would have us believe, we see these people threatened by those who take it a step farther and say “Jesus knocked up my grandma!”
Meanwhile, the Bible is written by people who supposedly knew Jesus, and by people who knew people who knew people who knew Him. The dilution of word and concept through vessel after vessel. The Bible then is an artifact of the World of Forms, an attempt to sort the boundary-busting break-in of the Christ consciousness into a discernible order which can be then filed away, institutionalized and used to manipulate groups throughout all of subsequent linear time, among those whose nostalgia for Heaven is surreptitiously replaced by a longing for a non-existant event that never happened the way the Bible describes it in our own Linear time-frame. Thus people are hoaxed into forgetting that there is even such a thing as Real/Mythic time to begin with, because if we can’t touch it and it doesn’t flow through our blood, then we don’t have any way of understanding it…
Coming Soon: Towards A Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory - Part 2
June 1st, 2006 at 9:57 am
Your reasoning seems backwards to me, Tim. You observe people’s supposed disconnection from the ‘Original Source’, and use a speculative (Biblical) and anthropomorphic (’prison’) story to explain the lack of spiritual awareness in the world.
But just because people seem disconnected from the Original Source (I prefer calling it the Self) doesn’t mean they are. The Self is always here, and anyone can ‘tune in’ to it at anytime. It still directs our lives, whether we are conscious of it or not.
Your notion that we are stuck in a terrible time loop, suggested by those ‘uncanny’ temporal sensations we all have, could have a less emotionally-laden explanation: perhaps it is because confusion sets in when the mind attempts to grasp the experience of Self consciousness in what you call Mythic Time. A singular finite cycle is the closest temporal mode to eternity (infinitely large cycle).
June 1st, 2006 at 10:01 am
Sorry, let me change that last sentence:
An infinite cycle is the closest our mind can get to simulating/emulating timelessness.
June 1st, 2006 at 10:36 am
fuj: that’s the kind of talk I like!
Anyone read Corbin?
I’ve thought a lot about “the final conspiracy”, it seems it must ultimately be utterly impersonal and amount to no less than Nature in the hermetic sense.
Bilderbergers, alien invasions: these are “standard” causal explanations for the otherwise inexplicable correspondances observed by the conspiracy enthusiast. I cannot accept these explanations as final, but feel they are manifestations or instantiations of symbolic realities. (Sorry if that makes no sense, this is the area where the language I have really fails me.)
Impersonal causal theories fall under the category of “archetypal” cosmogonies, such as Ibn Arabi’s conception of the Divine Names calling out to be realized, or the reciprocal dialectic between unity and multiplicity in neoplatonism.
June 1st, 2006 at 10:50 am
Don’t listen to the player-haters, Tim– this post is awesome, best one I’ve seen in a long time. It really gets the ol’ brain juice sizzlin’.
June 1st, 2006 at 10:57 am
[…] Tim’s posted his best item in ages: So Dark the Con of Man… Towards A Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory - Part 1. I don’t have time at the moment for a bunch of commentary, but it’s absolutely worth a read. […]
June 1st, 2006 at 11:36 am
Haven’t been on here for a spell, but felt great joy to read this–a real, solid piece, Tim.
Also, with regards to P.K. Dick’s theory and your framing of it, you might look into Nietzsche and his concept of the Eternal Recurrence; and also, P.D. Ouspenksy, Gurdjieff’s old disciple, who likewise held a view of the the Eternal Recurrence very similar to both NIetzsche’s and P.K. Dick’s–not sure if he received it from G. or if it represents a conclusion he came to through his own experiences and insights.
Nice work again, Tim. Looking forward to part 2.
June 1st, 2006 at 11:51 am
Yep, that’s where I’m going. Never fear! And in the meantime, don’t get caught in the words. Just enjoy the ride!
June 1st, 2006 at 12:31 pm
And so I bring in my life-frame of reference to Tim’s excellent post, which is Gurdjieff’s practice of self-observation, self-sensing, and self-remembering–the Work.
Early on when I began it, I realized that part of its necessity is to realize A SELF–which is now only an embryonic entity.
I relate it to one of Gurdjieff’s many excellent aphorisms (his second-to-last):
“#37: Man is given a definite number of experiences—economizing them, he prolongs his life.”
If we seek “freedom” and possibly even “immortality”–although this takes many different possible meanings–how better to do it than to make room in ourselves for the truly new, by letting go, and by properly contextualizing the old by real self-knowledge?
We infrequently do experience timelessness and even formlessness by grace, seemingly by some planetary alignment, but can it happen at any moment? Can it happen permanently in a universe of impemanence?
Each person has a Jesus and each a Pilate within. Each a Heaven and each a Hades. I think there is no need to look for it outside.
June 1st, 2006 at 2:28 pm
Tim, great post. I actually had thought about something similar to this before, in relation to Plato’s Cave, but the PKD passage really knocked it through for me. You got my attention, now you better deliver the goods with Part2
.
BTW, if this is supposed be working towards a “grand unified conspiracy theory”, shouldn’t it be done in more of a group setting? As in, taking a boatload of ideas from everyone and combining them into one massive theory?
Eh?
June 1st, 2006 at 2:39 pm
Erm, that’s what I did to come up with this part…
June 1st, 2006 at 3:50 pm
Tim,
Read Ouspensky’s Strange Life of Ivan Osokin!
IMHO a deja vu moment is remembering the fact that you ARE in a endlessly replaying simulation-but there may be hope as these moments of awakening add up-at the moment of death we may get to choose a better script fot the next time if found worthy in how we play this one:)
June 1st, 2006 at 4:15 pm
Wow that was an amazing post, it put gnosticism in a new context for me. Thank you!
June 1st, 2006 at 5:43 pm
[…] In the previous installment of this series, we talked about two realms of existence: the prison world of Linear Time in which we exist bodily, and the world of Mythic, Eternal, Spiritual or “Real” Time that exists over and above this one. We talked too about Jesus, who in this story broke down the walls and categories of Linear Time, from a Mythic realm above. While his story is important and powerful, he has not been the only one to walk between the worlds. […]
June 1st, 2006 at 6:16 pm
I meant from a collaborative perspective, instead of a singual entity. Sorry if i wasn’t clear about that.
June 1st, 2006 at 6:21 pm
Well you’re more than welcome to write one yourself, if thats what you mean… In any event, I’ve had numerous other posts where people collaborated on constructing conspiracy theories in the past though. I thought this was a good opportunity to synthesize from that and from recent conversations I had had.
June 2nd, 2006 at 2:02 pm
recent conversations I had had
Gawd, I miss being out there.
The other side of this coin - breaking through to mythic time, or having mythic time break into your life - is re-learning how to navigate ordinary time.
The title of your post seems to be an anagram - would you mind sharing what of?
June 2nd, 2006 at 2:13 pm
[…] When I was in highschool, I absolutely hated the band Rush. Like, passionately hated. I just thought the whole thing was so ridiculous and over the top. But now I’m starting to get it. Because that’s the point. Their absurd musicianship and complex song structures aren’t (just) arrogant, they are supposed to invoke this super-human realm of existence. Maybe we could even call it Mythic or Real Time, if we wanted to be esoteric about it. […]
June 2nd, 2006 at 2:21 pm
Oh the title of the post is from the Da Vinci Code, if I’m not mistaken. It’s one of the clues Sauniere leaves…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Da_Vinci_Code
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virgin_of_the_Rocks
June 3rd, 2006 at 9:55 am
You know, it should disturb me that I find a lot of this occult/Gnostic stuff making sense to me more and more.
The more I read of Christian mystics, the more this general idea seems to come through. I’m not sure that the exact details are correct or that they need to be, but the sense of the Divine Realm - Heaven, the Kingdom, etc - existing in a sort of parallel - no, not exactly parallel, more like tangential - continuum seems to be there. This universe as a kind of subspace within a wider realm in which things are more real than here.
It’s interesting to me that Plato described a similar sort of setup in his Republic as Dick’s VALIS, or even L Ron Hubbard (may he have attained some kind of peace with the beyond, the old charlatan) and his ‘imprinting stations’. Similar to near-death type experiences.
It seems to me that just about all the occult systems derive from some actual glimpse of reality, and of this world as being merely a way-station to points beyond. But it also seems that some of them catch a look at reality and go ‘aieeee we’re all just hypno-programmed drones aieee this world is a sham God is an evil machine’ and spiral down into paranoia and some go ‘well, if this is just an illusion then it’s all actually okay and the point is to listen to what the Invisible Lover is trying to teach us at every moment’. Same reality, same glimpse, totally different reactions. And it also seems that even true glimpses of Reality can go really rancid if they’re taken the wrong way. Also that things There seem to work so much differently, or bigger, than here - like a hyperdimensional elephant - that it seems very hard for returning mystics to be able to map concepts onto anything approaching intelligibility. “Words not lawful for a man to utter” was how the Apostle Paul put it in the King James version, which seems to sum up the sheer frustration of not even having a shared physical model to correlate with.
The idea of Mythical Time having more than the one linear dimension also rings true. Similar to Heim Theory with its multiple timeline dimensions. Or Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime. Things in There seem to travel quite without respect to our physical laws. What Is, is, both forward and backward in our kind of time. More like sideways.
June 3rd, 2006 at 3:14 pm
Why is that?
June 18th, 2006 at 4:40 pm
[…] Making Chutney has posted a summary with some questions for further discussion regarding my recent three part posts (I, II, III) on a grand unified conspiracy theory. Chutney focuses on hammering my thoughts into a neo-gnostic framework, which is interesting, but not strictly what I had in mind when I wrote it. […]
August 17th, 2006 at 7:42 pm
[…] The events of September 11, 2001 created a close time loop. The end point of the time loop I am not sure of, but I would speculate that its length is nine months and eleven days, which would place the far end of the loop at the juncture of June 22, 2002. Not coincidentally, this was the date on which a massive earthquake struck Iran. (It is also Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown’s birthday, which should tell you something in itself!) […]