The Devil Incarnate (Part 3)
Guardian of the Veil
Those who investigate religion, mysticism and metaphysics will often come across discussion of “the veil,” indicating some form of partition in the structure of observable reality. In this chapter, I will try to explore what precisely that means, and translate it into my own model of spiritual evil.
Chapter List:
The engraving above is of unknown provenance. Its earliest appearance can be traced back to the French astronomer Camille Flammarion’s 1888 book, L'atmosphère : météorologie populaire ("The Atmosphere: Popular Meteorology"). The English translation of its accompanying text translates to: “A missionary of the middle ages says that he had found the point where the sky and the earth meet.”
It’s worth noting that Flammarion himself had an unusual cosmology and metaphysics, blending elements of the interstellar migration of souls and the existence of extraterrestrial life with staples of traditional Christianity. First and foremost, however, he saw himself as a man of science, perhaps best exemplified by the following quote:
"It is by the scientific method alone that we may make progress in the search for truth. Religious belief must not take the place of impartial analysis. We must be constantly on our guard against illusions.”
Like many people of his time, Flammarion’s mystical beliefs drew him towards psychics, mediums, auto-writing and other popular avatars of the Spiritualist movement. He maintained his skepticism towards these matters, using his methodical approach to debunk several practitioners. But in the course of other investigations, he came to believe that certain of them had met his evidentiary standards, including mental telepathy, subtle bodies and the so-called “stone tape” theory of ghost hauntings, whereupon traumatic events leave behind a kind of recording at the location they took place.
I’m not going to comment on any of these phenomena, either individually or in general. Nor will I delve into Flammarion’s elaborate theories about alien species or the reincarnation of souls on other worlds. My point is this: as a scientist in the late 19th to early 20th centuries, Flammarion found room in his mind for the existence of a spiritual reality, at a time when institutions of science throughout the world were sneering (and sometimes snarling) at the notion.
It is perhaps coincidence that he was fired from his gig at the Paris Observatory the same year he published his first book, The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds. But it was clear a certain trend was gaining strength among the theorists and practitioners of the scientific method, backed by new schools of philosophy, economics and art. Because of this trend, the traditional view of mankind as a spiritual creature was beginning to change shape. Or perhaps I should say, “disintegrate.”
In my opinion, the deconstruction of Man’s mind and spiritual body into mechanical components marks the devil’s greatest victory in living memory. The untold madness and mass murder that flowed in the wake of these “scientific” “discoveries” about Man’s inherent nature is a primary cause of our misery and abasement today.
Likewise, to corrupt the mind of a scientist is to gain a great ally in the cause of Evil Itself. When practiced ethically and in alignment with spiritual insight, the tools of science are the tools of God. But Scientism is not science, and is rooted in a fallacy so absurd that only Satan’s cunning could possibly disguise it.
In this chapter, I will investigate both the form of that disguise and the devastating effects it has on human individuals and societies. I’ll also be proposing a certain cosmological model, in order to demonstrate how a properly functioning science is the equal of art when it comes to enacting God’s will upon the universe, and how a broken science alternatively becomes the plaything of monsters.
If the thing he prays for doesn't happen, then that is one more proof that petitionary prayers don't work; if it does happen, he will, of course, be able to see some of the physical causes which led up to it, and "therefore it would have happened anyway", and thus a granted prayer becomes just as good a proof as a denied one that prayers are ineffective.
You, being a spirit, will find it difficult to understand how he gets into this confusion. But you must remember that he takes Time for an ultimate reality. He supposes that the Enemy, like himself, sees some things as present, remembers others as past, and anticipates others as future; or even if he believes that the Enemy does not see things that way, yet, in his heart of hearts, he regards this as a peculiarity of the Enemy's mode of perception — he doesn't really think (though he would say he did) that things as the Enemy sees them are things as they are!
— Uncle Screwtape to Wormwood in “The Screwtape Letters” (C.S. Lewis)
In the above quote, the demon Screwtape is advising his nephew on how to corrupt a man by exploiting a certain innate limitation of his physical being. Specifically, it is the man’s perceptual boundedness to temporality, and the ways in which this can be manipulated in their war against the Enemy (i.e. God).
A human being experiences reality as a string of ordered events, connected through causes and effects. Presumably, other living creatures equipped with brains experience reality this way as well. We can’t ask them if that’s the case, but we can strongly infer this by observing how they behave in the wild, or in the ways we train them to task.
To describe reality as a string of such linear, fully encapsulated “cause-and-effect” events is commonplace. I also suspect that it’s wrong, and perhaps paradoxically so. To suggest this is to also suggest that somehow there are “gaps” in reality that delineate one event from the next. But such gaps are strictly impossible in any conceptualization of reality that makes sense, because there logically can’t be anything that exists “outside of” or “in between” the manifold of reality, which is neither a container nor a thing which is contained.
One way it can be described is the unbroken meta-sum of all such containers and contents. From the standpoints of physics and biology, all moments that we think we are experiencing in “the present” are actually ones we are remembering from the (albeit, very, very, very recent) past. When we perceive an event as having a definitive cause and effect, what we’re really doing is looking backwards through time and telling ourselves a story about what just took place.
The same holds true no matter how we present the duality: beginnings and ends, actions and reactions, inputs and outputs, etc. In that sense, our typical experience of reality is somewhat illusory, as Uncle Screwtape knows quite well. The illusion of singular time is the result of one of our core limitations as embodied beings. But unlike other living creatures, we also possess a certain meta-organ which allows us to occasionally see past this illusion — to “pierce the veil,” so to speak.
I suspect every human being is born with this veil-piercing capacity. Like consciousness itself, it’s a component of our innate meta-anatomy, as hereditable as any material property of our species. One way to describe it is as a kind of perceptual muscle; if we train this muscle a certain way, we can not only make good choices, but can learn to tell good stories about those choices. This is important, because our stories are what help collectively write the larger story of the universe, leading to its ultimate shape.
If this perceptual muscle is left unattended, however, the deterministic illusion will eventually be confused for the actual substance of reality, which can lead us down the darkest of all paths. In this sense, the agents of Evil Itself will wield this temporal illusion as a weapon against us.
Worse, it can be weaponized in a variety of ways, and I will explore each method in detail at a later date. For now, suffice it to say that the attacks come in various formulations of God | no God and free will | fate, and that Satan has a trick up his sleeve for every combo.
In previous chapters, I proposed a certain physical model for Satan. I based this thought experiment on the assumption that it/he/she was a being of somewhat similar structure to ourselves. This model included some measure of volume, mass and density, albeit of a format so weakly-bonded that it was undetectable by instrument.
That is why artists typically illustrate demons as shadows, mists and ghostly apparitions. What they are observing is that, while the being does not completely lack substance, it is mostly intangible and invisible to our organic and mechanical sensory equipment. My implication at the chapter’s end was that despite the alien structure of his material, Satan’s mind perceived time as sequential events much the same way ours do. For this one, I’d like to explore the model from a slightly different angle.
But first, let’s explore what is meant by “the Veil.” What is it, and what is “behind” it? Moreover, why can’t we easily see through this barrier?
In one sense the Veil is conceptual, in another physical. Its conceptual and physical properties are in actuality different ways of describing an indivisible whole. But because we experience reality in the boundedness of linear time, we need language that aligns with our standard modes of perception in order to potentially push past them. Only then can we see through — and perhaps even act within — the other side of the barrier.
So for this thought experiment, I’m going to propose that the physical version of the Veil includes a “Guardian” mechanism, in the form of the brain. In addition to being the central multiplexer of sensory data, memory and muscular command, the brain is also the functional equipment via which we perceive and narrate the illusion of ultimate sequential time.
It’s also the conceptual locus of meta-organic structures like persona, because without a brain we lose the ability to express these elements of being in the material plane. It’s only through mutual expression that these aspects of Self can be properly said to “exist,” in the sense of that their function within in the material world is intrinsically interactive. In other worlds, if a body lacks the physical ability for a transmitter-persona to send information to the persona-receptors of others, then the person can’t properly be said to have a persona.
For example, we have no persona when we dream — which isn’t the same as saying we have no “person,” by the way. In fact, I suspect the selves we experience when we dream are the distillation of our actual persons (or, in other words, our souls). But even in dreams, the Veil is still at least partially obscured by the Guardian. While its functional capacity is altered in many ways, sleep does not “turn off” the brain. The Veil it guards is thinner and less opaque when it’s in that state, but it isn’t fully translucent let alone permeable. The Guard’s duty is bi-directional, and the sleeping (or otherwise altered) brain neither lets us escape nor fully drops its guard.
The idea of the physical brain as Guardian of the Veil isn’t a novel concept. I didn’t discover it. The earliest depiction that I know of is painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
The question is why? Why would God want us to have a brain that prevents us from seeing what He Himself sees, on the limitless plane of non-terminal meta-time?
To pursue a useful answer, I’d like to propose a cosmology that I think suits my language model. In order to explain this cosmology more concisely, I need to invent — or borrow from Tolkien, I suppose — a new metaphysical term. In honor of his holy artistic genius, I’m naming this new term “Eru.”
Eru can be conceptualized as a unit of both actuality and potentiality that perfectly combines love and intellect. It is through the medium of Eru that things like joy, creativity, science, connection and insight are made possible. In a certain sense, Eru is also the substance of God, like a form of meta-DNA that can be inherited and recombined in various ways.
The role of living creatures as Eru generators explains our boundedness in time, and the reason we must experience reality as a string of events that “happen.” That’s because the work that generates Eru requires the solving of problems. In the case of love, it is the spiritual problem of Self and Other, and how to pierce the boundary between the two without losing the integrity or intelligibility of either. In the case of intellect, it is the material problems of space, density and other physical forces that limit our ability to love. These properties are mutually sustaining: one cannot adequately solve its problems without the other solving its own. Love and intellect are therefore not to be mistaken for distinct components of Eru, which is an indivisible unit representing the combination of both.
I will also be using the terms “global” and “local” to describe the domain size of perception and/or action. This duality is similar in some respects to the concept of meta-simultaneity of Christopher Langan’s “Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe.” Or at least I think it is. Unlike yours truly, Mr. Langan is a staggering intellectual genius, gifted with a 200+ IQ. Therefore I can’t be sure I’ve fully grasped his theory (indeed, I’m almost certain that I haven’t).
The theory’s core observation (I think) is that there are two modes of perceiving/ interacting with reality. One mode exists for observers of the terminal domain, where events appear to happen in linear order. The other mode exists for observers in the non-terminal domain, where events can perhaps be said to be “happening all at once,” in terms of our limited perceptual model. I think the idea here is that both the terminal and non-terminal domains must exist, in order to satisfy the super-symmetrical requirements of a “thing” existing at all. In other words, in order for there to be time-boundedness, there must also be time-unboundedness. This is part and parcel to the notion that there is no such thing as “unreality”: reality is the word we use to indicate the master set, in which everything must exist in an inescapable state of duality.
Out of respect for Mr. Langan, I won’t be using these terms, because I fear I’ll use them improperly. Instead, I’ll substitute them with terms of my own that reflect my (possible mis)understanding of his work.
When I say the domain is “global,” this means the whole of reality is the observational frame of reference in which events would appear (from our perspective) to transpire all at once. When I say the domain is “local,” this means that the frame of reference is that of an individual observer with a limited view of reality, in which events appear to transpire in linear order with definitive causality.
With these terms in mind, my model can be summarized more or less as follows:
There exists a Self-Authoring Author and Creator, whom many humans refer to as “God.” God is the source and expression of the universe’s living material, and the answer to all the ways in which life seems to break fundamental, deterministic laws that govern inert matter. His perspective on reality is global, so He sees and exerts influence upon the whole instead of the parts. His goal is to infinitely expand Eru throughout the story of reality, which is the ultimate purpose of life itself. From our perspective, he is the self-propagating essence of intelligence and love. His version of the Reality Story is never-ending (and, in a certain sense, never-beginning).
Human beings are “the children of God,” in the sense that we are equipped with the greatest capacity for expanding Eru of all living species. Our perspective on reality is local, but due to our powerful brains (and perhaps to an unknowable or inexplicable property of Eru itself) we have the capacity to glimpse the global domain when operating under certain conditions (e.g. prayer, meditation, physical or psychological trauma, various psychoactive substances). Likewise, while each of us as individual agents can typically only influence the Reality Story locally, given our capacity to self-evolve through the development of language, art, science and their various egregores, we can expand our default domain of influence and perception to a certain degree.
God knows our potential for massive Eru generation, and so He will “on occasion” (again, from our local perspective) assist certain local agents in seeing through the local/global Veil, who will then help the rest of us become more effective producers and distributors of Eru. In glimpsing what’s beyond the Veil of our locality without fully crossing over (i.e. “death”), our determination to more effectively solve Eru problems (and to devise useful and reproducible proofs) is enhanced.
There exists an intelligent Adversary whom many humans refer to as Satan. God created Satan as our ultimate antagonist, to present us with the most difficult (and thereby most fruitful) Eru-generating problems to solve. Similar to our own bounded locality, Satan’s perspective on reality is mainly that of its parts, and so he exerts local influence upon the parts instead of the whole. His primary targets for influence are human brains. He sees in us the qualities of our creator, who imprisoned him here with us in bounded time. Because he cannot attack God directly, he seeks to torment, vandalize and destroy his children as revenge.
Satan’s secondary goal is to obtain material form (i.e. a “body”), as he sees physical mechanism as the entire purpose and meaning of existence. By deconstructing reality into ever smaller components (or by influencing us to do it for him) he believes that he/we will solve the mystery of creating just such a body, and one that is worthy of carrying what he sees as his perfect mind.
While Satan’s power to influence the Reality Story is by default stronger than that of any single human agent, it does not approach the power of God. To make up for this massive power discrepancy, he must employ human-based agents and egregores to help him pursue his goals of death and destruction, as well as his plan to become incarnate. To accomplish this, he attempts to seize control of the brain networks in charge of powerful institutions and authorities. He has a variety of tools and weapons at his disposal for this purpose.
Satan’s kryptonite is Eru, so he seeks to pervert and vandalize our perception of it. As per his usual method, this is done through the deconstruction of Eru into ever more component parts (for example, Love is disassembled into Eros, Phillia, Ludus, Agape, etc.) Each of these deconstructed forms of Eru can be weaponized against us, because we will be fooled into thinking our job is to generate more of those, instead of the genuine article.
That summary isn’t meant to be exhaustive. For instance, it makes no mention of angels or demons, or of saints, prophets and other spiritually gifted humans. Nor does it address the mystery of Jesus Christ as the human manifestation of God, which is something I must eventually do. My explanation has to do not only with the unboundedness of time, but that of space, in the light of which all of Christ’s miracles — up to and including the resurrection — begin to make a lot of sense.
I also must talk about death: a concept I’ve thought of in many different ways over the years. Suffice it to say for now that I think the local anguish caused by death is similar to the ordinary pain of time and distance. I recently described it to my wife this way:
“Imagine if I told you that tomorrow I was leaving on a boat, and that we wouldn’t see or speak to one another for twenty years. Imagine the pain we both would feel, as that ship was setting sail.”
But there is a certain component of loss to death in the global domain as well; it’s basically like losing the most important job in the world. In this case, the job was to help God solve the ultimate problem of telling the story of how He becomes Himself. That’s because once we’ve crossed the Veil entirely, we will no longer be able to directly generate Eru. Eru requires a body to solve problems, just as a carpenter requires tools to build houses. I suspect our best hope as spiritual agents would be to have gathered enough knowledge about the Veil’s operational functions while alive to indirectly influence or inspire those we sailed away from.
That’s all I’ll say about these subjects for now. The point of my cosmological summary (and this essay series as a whole) is mainly to narrow the focus onto the devil’s participation in the Reality Story. For us, this story is mainly unfolding as a series of ordered causes and effects. I suspect the story is unfolding for Satan and his demons in a similar — but not identical — way. Like all other angels/demons (and to a degree, humans ourselves), Satan’s consciousness isn’t strictly limited to the local domain. I even believe it’s possible that Satan thinks he can see perfectly into the global domain (i.e. the whole of The Reality Story), which is the source of his vanity and the reason he rebelled in the first place.
You won’t need to accept the cosmology above literally or in its totality to proceed with this thought experiment. The main takeaway is that Satan perceives and acts semi-locally, and that while his powers of perception and action are superior to individual human agents, they are vastly (and perhaps infinitely) inferior to God’s global version. A second takeaway would be that Satan and his demonic minions both hate and fear the presence of love and intellect, because they know Eru is both the potential and actual substance of God’s power on both sides of the Veil.
As for the Christian view of Satan’s inevitable failure, I have thoughts on this that I won’t share just yet. Suffice it to say for now that even if the story’s ending is already written, that does not in any way strip our choices of purpose. That’s primarily because our goal isn’t merely victory, but to expand Eru throughout the universe as much as humanly possible. You can think of our task as a kind of “spiritual overkill”; it's not enough that the devil lose, it’s how miserably he loses, and how great a story we can tell about it.
Back to brains.
What is your brain?
In the view of postmodern Scientism, your brain is you. Or rather, there is no such thing as a you, per se. What exists in your place is essentially a robot, or perhaps a philosophical zombie. When “you” think about yourself, what’s really happening is a complicated series of infinitely recursive meta-delusions, manifested by the brain-computer in order to keep the robot in proper working order. Or something.
I’m not going to turn this into a screed against postmodernism, or the so-called “scientists” who worship at its altars. They aren’t just wrong. They are illogical, and mystified by the newer and fancier words they keep pulling our of their own assholes. If you present them with logic grounded in first principles, they’ll just dig out another freshly baked, multisyllabic tautology. My view is they are lost. I hope they become found some day, but until then it’s useless to engage them.
But it’s worth noting the incredible damage their moronic model of the brain-as-Self has caused. It’s also worth noting that no one actually believes this model is accurate, including its major proponents. What we’re seeing is a kind of midwittery and pseudo-sophistication on parade. It’s the ego game of pretending you can somehow outsmart yourself (another illogicality, among many in the machine model). But its dire effect on those who play the game is profound, and includes tremendous splash damage to the civilization around them.
In fantasizing oneself to be a deterministic machine, with the brain as its core engine, what you are really doing is perceiving others that way. By doing so, you become a kind of erzatz facsimile of God, because your brilliant capacity to examine, comprehend and carefully label your head-machinery makes you see yourself as a kind of superior, self-programming being. But again, what the delusion is actually suggesting is that other head-machines are programmable input-output devices — and most specifically programmable by you, since you hold the secret access codes. What a genius you are!
When enough people are walking around, perceiving Self-as-Deus and Other-as-machina, what you eventually get is mass confusion, mass insanity and mass murder. In other words, you get the escalating horrors of the 20th century, and the first twenty-two of the current one. You also get multiple generations of parents and children hooked on psychotropic drugs that turn their Guardians into the bewildered and bleary-eyed slaves of major pharmaceutical companies and other fraud constructs.
Perhaps worst of all, you get the destruction of medical science as a practical engine of Eru production. This tragic casualty of the war cannot be overstated. The proponents of the mechanical brain-as-Self model definitionally do not believe in God, and therefore see religion and science as opposing forces. This is not, nor has ever been, the case. Even in examples like Galileo’s inquisition, what you see when you rotate the shape is the sadly conventional game of academics weaponizing the government, in order to protect their own cherished (and wrongheaded) theories from criticism or debate. This inclination has been supercharged in our current era of overwhelming “publish-or-perish” science, in which the perverse incentive structures and grant-writing mechanisms behind the literature guarantee that no one steps out of line with the legacy theories (and certainly not if it opposes the political and/or financial interests of those with their hands on the money spigot). The mass production model also guarantees that smaller and smaller percentages of papers will be in any way correct or of useful application. On a long enough time scale, all signal will be lost in a sea of noise.
In any case, I shouldn’t have to tick off the names of the many, many prominent religious scientists throughout history, nor the fact their contributions to science are still used as primary assumptions about reality today. I shouldn’t even have to mention that Galileo himself believed in God, a fact which strangely goes unmentioned by those who try to exploit his case for the purpose of waging spiritual warfare. It’s enough to say that they are waging it, against God and all of Creation. But they are also waging it against the scientific method itself.
The devil sees very well the danger of scientists who operate from the core assumption that both God and free will exist. When wielded as a tool of light and reason, science not only greatly expands the intellectual volume of Eru, but can alleviate human suffering on a massive scale, allowing us to love each other more freely and easily. In his capacity as the Great Deconstructor, he therefore tries to pull apart and compartmentalize the minds of those who practice science. He accomplishes this through the standard array of illusions, shined forth from behind the Veil. Their referents in material may arrive in many forms, but they end in shattered minds and darkened souls that can no longer conceive of anything but those material referents.
Sometimes the illusion presents itself as a kind of a word game. When this trick is played properly, even love itself is explained away as some sort of auto-generated dialogue between dopamine molecules and pheromones, and other ingredients floating around in the biochemical soup. It becomes a mere chemical reaction, in other words. But a reaction to what, exactly?
The top search result for dopamine reads as follows:
What is dopamine? Dopamine is a chemical released in the brain that makes you feel good.
What is this “you” you speak of, Mr. Google? And released by what?
This points to another common tactic of the devil, which is to invert the arrow of causality. He is smart enough to know the secret of linear time, which is that in seeming to experience events in the present, we are in fact narrating them in the past. It isn’t that causality is an illusion. We are making real choices, and those choices will shape how we tell our portion of the Reality Story. But what we see as a choice in the local domain is in actuality us reflecting on the choice after we’ve made it.
This can become very confusing if we think about it the wrong way. For that reason the devil inspires his human minions to author bizarre, illogical and often paradoxical statements about the flow of causes and effects, so that we’ll narrate our stories his way instead of God’s.
Here is a slightly different formulation of dopamine, that nevertheless changes its entire meaning from a diabolical falsehood to a logical truth.
What is dopamine? Dopamine is a chemical released in the brain when you feel good.
I’ve written elsewhere about the darkly comical nature of pharmaceutical advertising. You know the drill; a sundrenched, smiley-faced ad for some new SSRI pill unspools. As the actors cheerfully jog on beaches and share laughs at social gatherings, the narrator ticks off an ever more alarming list of side effects. That an ad for an antidepressant includes “depression,” “anxiety” and “suicidal thoughts” among these effects isn’t just ironic. It’s affording you a view into the absurd, boldly illogical, anti-intellectual side of spiritual evil.
This derangement of logic hasn’t escaped the attention of artists. Neither has the psycho-mechanical language model’s power to deconstruct the Self in increasingly horrifying ways. Some of us respond to this act of evil vandalism in forms that are suitably comedic and horrific.
I won’t bother with the sundry legalistic arguments involved here (indeed, lawyers may require their own special chapter in this series to address). Spare me citations of their published studies, and particularly when it comes to the never ending cascade of SSRIs and other mood-altering and psychotherapeutic drugs. The modern pharmaceutical industry is the most corrupt institution the world has ever seen. They are regularly caught massaging or outright faking their trial and safety data. Recently, four U.S. firms settled for $26 billion for their role in the opioid plague. Despite their massive body count, somehow no one ever goes to jail or files for bankruptcy. This is because their regulatory bodies are fully captured. The boldness of their capture is laughable, as their executives so often transition from the “regulated” business to the “regulatory” bureaucracy that supposedly watchdog’s them. Regardless of the quality of various individuals within their corporate and bureaucratic structures, they are as a whole an evil principality that profits from madness and harm. Who will pay for the mass misery and destruction caused by benzos? Or by “vaccine” injury? Or by the next plague after that? The likely answer is “all of us,” both physically and financially, because the devil rules that land.
But we will also pay for it spiritually. As much as I lament the “War on Drugs” for its illogical (and often extraordinarily corrupt) prosecution, at least in some sense the mistake of it was morally coherent. In its propaganda, for instance, the proverbial “drug pusher” who dealt to children was painted as a monstrous figure who profited from harming innocent parties. The real story is more complex, but at its core there was at least a kernel of moral reasoning: kids are off limits.
The monsters of Pharma have smashed this moral barrier to pieces. And terrifyingly large numbers of people aren’t just letting them get away with it. They are acting as accomplices to their crimes, even when the targeted victim is their own child.
How does this happen?
It happens because these people are confused. Not evil, mind you (or at least not most of them). They’re bewildered and mystified by the language of the Machine. In this state of confusion, the mechanical theory of mind often sounds correct to them, or at least as close to correct as they have the time or ability to comprehend. The machine language sounds almost compassionate at times, almost soothing, almost kind. It is none of these things. It is in fact the opposite of truth, gussied up in faux sophistication and games that invert causality. “The chemical designs the brain which designs the mind which designs the person, don’t you see?” To be tricked into believing in this inverted order has nothing to do with measurable intelligence. Smart people fall for it all the time, including pharmacists, doctors and philosophers of science.
By inverting the conceptual logic of action and reaction, the postmodern descriptions of many neurochemicals renders you as the object instead of the subject. In fact, in a way it functions to erase you altogether. This is spiritually dangerous. In fact, it’s about as spiritually dangerous as it comes. As I’ll explore more thoroughly in future chapters, the damage from the psycho-mechanical model isn’t limited to biomedicine and psychology. It leaks out into other fields, some of which are existentially dangerous to us as a species, and to propagation of life in general. These fields include cybernetics, genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, just to name a few.
But the initial source of damage is to your own brain. Not only does your Guardian become confused about which side of the Veil is which, it has almost nothing left to guard on your side. Your soul still exists, but it has shrunken, become withered, exhausted and frail.
That’s just the way the devil likes it, and when his minions begin to play their most devious tricks. You have, in essence, left your front door open, and made room for something else to move in.
That’s all for now. In the next chapter, I will be exploring what that “something else” might be. Call it a bestiary of sorts; these creatures visit us in many forms, and are gaining new ones all the time.
Until then: keep fighting the good fight, you spiritual commandos, you! And keep your eyes peeled this coming winter. There are big doings on both sides of the Veil. Whenever you become scared or confused — and I have feeling we all will, at various points during this particular portion of the war — remember to follow the compass of your heart, towards the True North of love.
Thanks as always for accompanying me on this expedition. I hope we all continue to give each other strength.
We will win.
P.S. If you found any of this valuable (and can spare any change), consider dropping a tip in the cup for ya boy. I’ll try to figure out something I can give you back. Thanks in advance.
"I suspect every human being is born with this veil-piercing capacity. Like consciousness itself, it’s a component of our innate meta-anatomy, as hereditable as any material property of our species. One way to describe it is as a kind of perceptual muscle; if we train this muscle a certain way, we can not only make good choices, but can learn to tell good stories about those choices."
This is so. And empirically observable if one puts the time in. (So is the existence of subtle bodies.) One of my teachers says that if he was held to one and only one practice, it would be meditation. Prayer would also suffice (but not the petitionary kind, rather ones that are more like the rosary ... I suspect, for the most part, the specific narrative in which the prayers are embedded is likely irrelevant). Regularity and discipline is key. It's like working out at the gym: the effects accrue over time. (Time!)
To fix the woes of this world, it would suffice to succeed in getting a critical mass to meditate or pray.
Another great installment! Very much enjoying this series Mark and love how you have described the Veil, call out the materialists in their folly and generally try to give us a perspective that embraces both the temporal and eternal.
Looking forward to more.