This new feature (July 2007) of metahistory.org introduces an interactive dimension to the site. Below you will find two kinds of entries: comments on the site in this color (BRICK), and responses to specific articles in black, indented. John's responses appear in this color (GREEN). Most comments are linked to the specific articles to which they refer. Links in the articles return you to the relevant feedback.

Feedback includes responses to talks on futureprimitive.org, relating to specific material on this site.

We invite you to respond to these comments, or send us your own first-hand impressions for this page. Write directly to John at metahistory@earthlink.net. Please state how, or if, you want your name indicated.

[Strange Attractor, "the butterfly mask of unpredictability," after the model discovered by Edward Lorenz, a chaos theoretician. From Fractals: The Patterns of Chaos by John Briggs, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1992]

 

9 Continuing the exchange with Kevin on the Gnostic afterdeath scenario and other matters discussed in entry 7 and entry 1:

Just had a few more questions, hope you can answer them at your convenience.  

(1) The passage that talks about meeting archons after death who pose as toll collectors and having to recite their origins to bypass them and go to the Pleroma, how does this happen if, as you said, our consciousness is disassembled by the paralemptors? How does this tie in with that?  

JLL: As I understand it, and I can barely understand it, the passage through the planetary spheres where the Archons reside as tollkeepers is distinct from the passage into the Treasury of Light in the interior of the sun. Bear in mind that the sun is a star, unlike the other planets that circulate it. According to the Gnostic creation myth, the sun (called Sabaoth) plays a special role in supporting life on earth, due to its bond with Sophia. It appears that the sun may also have a special role in the afterdeath experience. I suspect that the sun is the source of the tunnel of light seen in NDEs. This is only a wild supposition, but it is based on some mythological predecents, as well as on some mystical adventures of mine.

So, the gist of it is, the encounters with the Archons who inhabit the planetary spheres appear to belong to a different scenario from the paralemptors in the sun. Make of this what you will. I do not know much about all this. What I'm telling you here is about all I have been able to infer....

(2) Are the 'unfinished parts' of us simply the state of never having been enlightened by gnosis? Are the benevolant archons forcing those parts back into the earth until they learn and accept the Sophia story? And does this get rid of the 'unfinished parts' and leave nothing over to be transferred to the sun after death, the person just ceasing to exist, his conciousness having been disassembled by the paralemptors and nothing left to continue on? What exactly is going on with that whole scenario? What is the fate of someone who has been englightened by gnosis and doesn't want to 'come back' as a person with a miserable life?  

JLL: I think the unfinished parts are, like the Buddhist samskaras, compact sets of behavioral tendencies that have not been exhausted. In the Buddhist view, unenlightened behavior is driven by trishna, craving. As long as craving is active, tendencies persist. As craving dissipates, all actions return to Nirvana, a static eternal state of pure beholding. This is just language, just one way to describe metaphysical reality. To me it is far from satisfactory, but we have to start somewhere and work from there.

Honestly, I don't know what's going on in this scenario. I only have some pieces of the puzzle, and they don't all fit together. The questions you ask will take years of reflection and experimentation to be clarified. That is quite a mission. There are various scenarios of afterdeath experience. You might research and compare them, then see if the Gnostic material fits in, or not. It may be extraneous. It may be wrong. Don't get the idea that I am a master of this knowledge.

You ask how to avoid coming back as a miserable person, or whatever. This raises the question of how to control reincarnation. The Tibetans, who appear to have a handle on this process, are not keen to let us know. If there is some form of guided, voluntary reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism - this would appear to be the case with tulkus, reincarnating lamas - is it only available to a select few? There you are: another tough question to pursue!

(3) What is Sophia involved in presently, is she trying at all to return to the Pleroma or does she just want to settle in to and stay in the archontic planetary system? And how does she experience sexual satisfaction if her consort is in the Pleroma?  

JLL: Now we're heading into what I call the planetary porno scene. I like to spend time there when I can, roaming in Gaia's Undies. There's some spectacular scenery in there, in her rippling deep purple rapture circuits. As far as I can tell, no one fucks with Gaia. She is like a gorgeous, extremely gifted 23-year-old autistic girl who gets sexual and sensual kicks from the works of art she produces - that is to say, everything in the natural world, all the wonders of the biosphere from glow-worms to thunderheads.

The sexual life of Aeons is a fascinating subject, of course. Some people would object that divine beings cannot be gendered. I don't find that to be so. I find gender ( parity, to use the equivalent term from physics) to be present all through the cosmos. Chirality, or handedness, is an expression of cosmic gendering. Most of the forms on earth are left-handed, even down to the molecular level. This is the Gaian bias, the divine feminine twist, I would say.

I have left open the explanation of Sophia's correction for two reasons: first, I am not the one to provide a definitive concept, and second, the recognition of what this is must come through the convergence of the minds and passions of numerous people. The Gnostics also left the subject open... or if they knew definitively, that information has not been preserved. (I would guess that the telestai in the Sethian-Ophite schools did know a lot about it.)

What does Gaia want? Does she long to return to the Pleroma? Is she sexually frustrated? I cannot answer any of these questions, and would not advise trying to answer them without a comprehensive mythopoetic schema in which to explore them. In other words, mythological questions require mythological answers. By participating deeply in the Sophia myth as recounted so far, you might develop a poetic understanding of these matters.

(4) What exactly is the 'correction'? Does it involve a desire by her to return to the Pleroma? And how can that happen if the 7 planets keep her bound here?  That's it for now. Thanks in advance for your time and effort in responding to these if you choose to do so.  - Kevin

JLL: As I said, I am not stating what the correction is, in part because I don't know, and in part because it is something that must emerge and not be imposed. However, consider the current buzz around the theme of "galactic alignment," closely related to the 2012 endtime. I suspect that this theme may generate some insight into Sophia's correction. But I have yet to see a clear, convincing definition of what galactic alignment means. It's all so much mumble jumble and male-mind speculation.

Gaia may feel bound by the seven planets, like a ballerina captured in a mechanical music box. But I doubt it. She is immensely powerful and, as Lynn Margulis says, she's a tough bitch. Don't forgert that Sophia produced the Archons, albeit inadvertantly. Gnostic myth continually stresses how the Goddess outwits the Archons and allows them to do what they do through her powers, without them knowing it.

I stand by my view stated early on in this site, that we, the human species, function as a memory circuit for Gaia-Sophia, the planetary entelechy. Our consciousness, and particularly our capacity for story-telling, supplies a mnemonic feedback to the planetary mind. What happening in Sophia's correction may surpass humanity in many ways, and I am sure it does. But the part of it we can comprehend must be discovered in our capacity, and our passion, to follow Her Story, and not elsewhere. That is the supreme trick of interactivity with Gaia.

8. Citing an exquisite description of the Organic Light in Chinese poetry, Darrell Koerner writes:

In addition to being inspired by Whitman, Emerson and Thoreau, I really began my "search" in the Zen / Taoist tradition. I'm intrigued by what may or may not be parallels between your writings on the Organic Light (which I experienced once upon waking from sleeping on an air flight between Phoenix and Flagstaff), and teachings and writings in the Zen / Taoist tradition of "turning the light around" and "being illuminated by the ten thousand things."

I'm currently reading some translations of Chinese and Japanese poetry, and wanted to share the following with you from the book Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China (Counterpoint 2002) by David Hinton. I find the second quote to be particularly intriguing and empathetic with your writings in Not in His Image.

"The vision of tzu-jan recognizes earth to be a boundless generative organism, and this vision gives rise to a very different experience of the world. Rather than the metaphysics of time and space, it knows the world as an all-encompassing present, a constant burgeoning forth that includes everything we think of as past and future. It also allows no fundamental distinction between subjective and objective realms, for it includes all that we call mental, all that appears in the mind. And here lies the awesome sense of the sacred in this generative world: for each of the ten thousand things, consciousness among them, seems to be a miraculously burgeoning forth from a kind of emptiness at its own heart, and at the same time it is always a burgeoning forth from the very heart of the Cosmos itself." (xvi, Introduction)

"But the importance of the rivers-and-mountains poetic tradition is not by any means limited to Chinese culture, for it is a poetry suffused in a worldview that is, however foreign, remarkably contemporary and kindred: it is secular, and yet profoundly spiritual; it is thoroughly empirical and basically accords with modern scientific understanding; it is deeply ecological, weaving the human into the 'natural word' in the most profound way; and it is radically feminist - a primal cosmology oriented around earth's mysterious generative force and probably deriving in some sense
from Paleolithic spiritual practices centered around a Great Mother who continuously gives birth to all things in the unending cycle of life,death, and rebirth." (xvii, Introduction)

Hinton goes on to translate Chinese word for poetry as "words spoken at the earth altar".. A terrific phrase and perhaps a great title for a book or article.

JLL: I am positively thrilled by these passages! As it happens, I was deeply immersed in the Cha'an / Zen / Taoist tradition for a good part of my early life. During the 1960s I could not relate to the group movement around LSD and the psychedelic experience, although I revered the experience. I took refuge in Ch'an, reading 9th-10th century masters such as Huang Po and Hui Hai, and more or less practiced a Taoist worldview. The Zen Teaching of Huang Po (translated by John Blofeld) was my guiding text:

Your true nature is something never lost to you in moments of delusion, nor is it gained at the moment of Enlightenment. It is the Nature of the Bhutatathatha. In it is neither delusion nor right understanding. It fills the Void everywhere and is intrinsically of the substance of the One mind.

I lived steeped in this view, and this view alone, for many years. I have not found anything that can surpass it. For a long time I was uncertain of the connection between the Void, the One Mind, the Bhutatathata (the Suchness of Tangible Things) and the natural world. My studies of Gnosis and the Mysteries led to a synthesis of One Mind non-attainment teachings and Gaian mysticism.

The "vision of tzu-jan" describes the Organic Light better than any attempt of mine so far. Thank you, Darrell, for this superb citation. Hinton's detailed characterization of the elements in Chinese wilderness poetry could be applied to the Sophianic vision of deep ecology that I am developing in this site. All the factors he considers are present in these pages, and, of course, his allusion to the Great Mother verifies the Gain perspective.

7 (Continued from entry 1) Thanks for your response to my questions and for taking the time. I find it all interesting. There's this woman who claims she's been to the interior of the sun in an NDE, which she believes to be the biblical 'new jerusalem,' lines up with what you said about the interior of the sun.

Could you explain what you meant by the 'unfinished' parts of us and how it is passed on to be completed by someone else?

JLL: I have not had a near death experience (NDE), but over the years I have had a number of lucid dreams in which I found myself exploring different parts of the solar system. (Take it or leave it, this is just a description of my experience, which could be totally delusional. On the other hand, it could be a veracious account of real, other-dimensional phenomena experienced in an altered state.) I was astonished to discover that the interior of the sun was cool and seems to be constructed of blue crystal, like an immense lattice of cool blue light. When I read in Gnostic texts about the "Treasury of Light" as a repository of some kind, I associated it with this amazing experience.

I take issue, however, with equating or correlating the interior of the sun with the vision of the New Jerusalem. One problem with visionary events of this kind is that the experiencer tends to sieze upon unexamined beliefs to interpret them. He or she will look often to conventional religion to explain the experience. I would be cautious of any legitimization of the New Jerusalem vision along these lines. The Book of Revelation, the source of this image, puts forward an atrocious program of genocide, divine retribution, and planetary holocaust in the name of God. Even if it were purely mystical, Saint John's vision of New Jerusalem is contaminated by annihilation theology, end-of-the-world madness. The Gnostic description of the paralemptors may be useful in developing a sane, reasoned understanding of what happens after death, the physics of post-mortem existence, if you will. The apocalyptic theology associated with the image of the New Jerusalem cannot offer anything like this.

As to your second question, consider this: Buddhism asserts that enlightenment and bliss are one. If all phenomena are of the nature of enlightenment (this is non-attainment theory), then the appropriate response to all phenomena, all events and actions, is total blissfull absorption. Most of us have felt moments of bliss in life, but imagine one unending moment when everything is felt to be infinitely blissful.

Yuganaddha by Canadian scholar Herbert V. Guenther presents an apt summary of Buddhist teachings on the unity of bliss and enlightenment. Guenther makes a remarkable statement that I have not found elsewhere in Buddhist exposition:

Any partial response to experience is unsatisfactory and, therefore, until the attainment of the goal [that is: total, blissful response. JLL] is achieved, new cycles of activity will ensue. Applied to the theory of rebirth, this means that every experience, representing a cycle of activity, is followed by another when only a partial and ineffectual response has been made. (Yuganaddha, p. 27. My emphasis.)

This quote is valuable, I believe, because it presents a proposition that can be tested in direct experience. Enlightenment cannot be had from books, but some teachings, depending on how they are stated, can orient us to the supreme experience by providing a testing frame. Just imagine any incident in your experience—say, sitting on a bench with a stranger in the park—and consider if your response to that situation has been total and blissful, or "partial and ineffectual." If you make a practice of this idea, you will find that there is always some withholding, something left unfelt and unexpressed in relation to all that happens to you, at every moment.

The Buddhist teaching says that if we have not given ourselves totally and blissfully to every moment, there remains from that moment something to be relived, and relived, and relived, until enlightenment is complete. But paradoxically, this teaching (radical Buddhist dharma, as I understand it) does not state that the same person or soul-entity persists and relives unfulfilled moments until reaching total blissful immersion. Rather, the unfulfilled moments can be relived by whoever comes along!

This is a subtle and complex teaching, obviously. Returning to your question, I would say that it is extremely difficult to define in any rational way what the "unfinished parts" of us are. This is certainly an elusive and problematic notion, a metaphysical riddle. But the experience that we do not in any given incident or event respond completely to what is happening, i.e. do not meet the moment with blissful, enlightened immersion—this experience is real, empirical, and verifiable. We can all testify to that sensation. The leap of imagination comes in supposing that any moment you have not completely realized will be replayed until it becomes the occasion for total enlightenment.

I would say, then, that the unfinished parts of ourselves—which might be stored in the blue lattice repository of the sun, following the Gnostic after-death scenario—are packets of tendencies or samskaras in Buddhist jargon. The tendencies will persist as long as they are not fully released through a totally and unconditionally blissful response (which Guenther compares to the boundary-dissolving bliss of sexual orgasm). These behavioral patterns are recycled and relived in many simultaneous worlds...

I do not pretend that this is a satisfactory explanation. I don't have an answer here, but I sense that a description based on Guenther's language could be useful, and might lead to a better understanding of something which is, quite probably, impossible for the finite human mind to conceptualize.

26 JULY 2007

6 A response to the Sophia Myth:

And to John specifically, thank you for the brilliant work you've done in uncovering this most beautiful of myths.  I found myself very touched at the deepest levels as I heard the myth unfold, and as I came to understand it more through your dialogue with Joanna.  

As I told my wife, who also listened with me, "I feel like this is the mythos I've been searching for".  I have been on a path of gnosis since I was a child, most of the time not understanding what it was I searched for.  For the past decade or more I have been seeking a mythos which harmonized with my own experience of the light of Sophia which I had when I was about 19.  Since that time I have been seeking to understand what that experience meant; what it was I experienced so clearly during this mystical encounter with Gaia.  I finally feel I'm beginning to put all of the pieces together, and the Sophia mythos seems to me to be the key.
- Jeh Cranhill

*****

5 The Terma Pattern and spontaneous "downloads":

As far as the termas are concerned, this was new information to me. I am not an astrologer, but more of a mystic, so the understanding that God's Time or one's intuitive sense of timing does not always follow conventional expectation certainly resonated with me. I have often felt that this type of information was not likely to arrive when and where other people most expected it and therefore gave it both attention and credibility...

I was in fact very pleased with your potential timeframe for the
termas. I have never felt that our normal astrological (and other) timeline projections and interpretations have ever lined up very well with some of these more mystical and internal processes and dialogues. I certainly experienced, myself, a massive expansion and acceleration of my own consciousness in the months surrounding April 2006, and was almost shocked to discover that this fitted with your own timeframe for the transmission of termas, a terminology and a timeframe that I had never heard about before. I found myself writing down hundreds, possibly thousands of pages of philosophical and spiritual concepts and ideas, many of which arrived in "chunks" of download into my consciousness.

This was unquestionably a mystical experience for me (I would consider myself a mystic) and was certainly out of the bounds of normal, purely intellectual thought. Your explanations and even your conjectures about the timeframe in some of these things made a great deal of sense to me, as I too had been seeing this as a part of an evolutionary process.

*****

4 On the difficulty of belief-change:

I have spent many hours on Metahistory, studying the material there on belief (mostly, though I have delved into much of the Sophia material as well...I'm a voracious reader).  I feel so grateful that this material is out there for the world to partake of.  Your mission is a most important one not only for you personally, but for those who are as deeply touched as I was by it.  I must admit, it does have my head spinning some, but not from a lack of understanding, for I have little problem grasping much of what you are putting out there.  

But my head does start spinning something ferocious when I begin to call all of my belief's into question; and it isn't like I haven't spent the past 15 years of my life doing just that in the best way I knew how!  So I can only imagine what this material must feel like for those who've never questioned their own belief's.
- Jeh Cranfill

*****

3 After reading Beneath the Gaze of the Goatfish, a long-time reader responded:

I am writing to tell you that I simply LOVED your latest and last posting to the MetaHistory website.
 
Of course, I read everything you write and appreciate, more than you may know, your willingness to persevere and to offer what you feel and know in your mind and in your bones.
 
I particularly loved your reference to “Gnostic arrogance.”  I am afraid that I suffer from the same disease, but, then, I do not believe that having gnosis is arrogant – it just appears “arrogant” to others, and for that, I suffer and am sorry.
 
In any event, I wanted to write to you in order to thank you for the gift of your life, you passion, your intellect, your scholarship, your willingness to journey, discover, learn, coalesce, and, then, to offer what you have learned to those who have the eyes to see, the ears to hear, and the heart to listen.
 
You mentioned in your essay that: “I gave a weekend seminar entitled "Christos and Sophia: A Gnostic Romance", which hit me particularly in my solar plexus in that this is the name that I was given some years ago.  I have no idea what this means, but I can tell you that life has become increasingly impossible and painful – not that it has ever been easy, as it is not easy for any of us, but for me, life has become almost impossible.
 
John, thank you for all that you are and all that you have become – and all that you have offered the world.  I don’t expect that the world will ever be particularly grateful – but I am.
- Martha White

*****

2 In response to the deleted Wikipedia entry came this serious inquiry:

Dear John, I have come across your article at Metahistory, as I researched about 'Gnostic dualism origins'. I have tried to research about this, etc for years now. I am confused what you claim they thought.

I had thought the Gnosticism believed matter/Nature to be evil, created by a lesser god, and that our real home was in spirit. This was also the  belief  of Orphism who had their saying 'soma sema'  translated, 'the body a tomb'. But you claim that the Gnostics dualism was a "two world system" which differed from Zoroastrianism's idea of a "split source system".

Now I understand your meaning of the latter, i.e.., that 'light' versus 'dark'. But I am not clear what you mean by 'two world system'. Did the Gnostics believe Nature to be a trap?  Did they envisage eventual release from birth on Earth? If so, as far as I am aware, this dream differs from the Goddess religion of the Earth's understanding that Earth is body of Goddess, and our home. And spirit forms in myriads of forms, all forms being sacred.

I actually view shamanism as the first step away from these insights. Where the usually male shaman becomes the myth. I.e.., he takes the myth of Goddess's 'son' literally, and then instead of understanding its meaning of living, dying, regeneration, seeks to conquer death, and gain 'immortality'.

I am just letting you know, briefly, where I am coming from. I don't expect you to tackle my views on shamanism, but would much appreciate you to help me understand what I am asking about Gnosticism.

JLL: Readers following this knotty problem of dualism and world-rejection attributed to Gnostics may also benefit from the entry on world-denial in the Lexicon, and the "planetary myth" that describes how the earth is a metamorphosis of Sophia, not the creation of the pretender god, Yahweh.

*****

1 An exchange on some troubling questions raised by Gnosticism:

Hi John
Your material is interesting. I've read a lot of metahistory and listened to
your podcasts. I just have some questions I hope you can answer for me, based in what you know of gnosticism.

(1) If Sophia is the planetary intelligence, why does she not intervene in the injustices people suffer, like someone getting thrown in jail for life for something they didn't do? Does she not care or is she not able to?

JLL: In my understanding of Sophia, it helps to consider her as a wild animal, like a tiger or a sperm whale. She is a super-organism able to communicate consciously with human beings, so my experience would indicate, but she lacks certain aspects of human concern in her cognitive syntax. The wisdom goddess is not a superintending presence who influences human affairs, conferring reward and punishment - although she was understood to do just that in ancient times, according to pagan beliefs, pagan superstitiion, if you will. Human injustice is a human creation that has to be solved by people, or not at all.

Sophia does have her own sense of justice, however. In Greek myth, the ethical aspect of the goddess was called Themis. However, this justice operates, not in the human realm, concerned with human issues, but between the human realm and the non-human world of nature. You see something of her moral sense in the predator-prey bond all through nature, so different from human predation which is selfish and without limits. Also, the meltdown of the Greenland iceshelf is an example of Gaian justice - a response of nature to human activity. As for interhuman events, the goddess does not seem to give a damn. It's just not her problem.

The belief that divine beings can can correct human injustice is endemic to our species, but it has assumed the virulent form of retributive morality in the salvationist religions. In my understanding, Sohia does not reward or punish anyone. And she appears to play the lottery quite capriciously with human beings, when it comes to distributing gifts and handicaps. In Quest for the Zodiac, I dubbed this phenomenon "the natural lottery." Not for nothing has she also been called Lady Luck, Dame Fortune.

2) The ones who 'defected' from the mystery schools, why exactly did they
defect? What was their train of thought?

JLL: The defectors, who came to be known as the Illuminati, rejected the strict educational agenda of the initiates, based in transpersonal initiative, preferring instead to get involved in behavioral modification and social engineering. In short, they succumbed to games of power, and betrayed the mission of selflessly fostering human potential to its optimal expression.

(3) What happens after death? Do we have a soul and does it live on after
death, and where?

JLL: According to the non-Nag Hammadi text called The Books of Jeu, we are met upon death by beings who aid us in the transition to other states of existence. These supernatural allies are oddly called paralemptors - a made-up word translated as "receivers" by scholars, because their role appears to be to receive the unrealized and unfinished parts of us. It is as if everything that you leave unfinished in life is absorbed by them so that it can be passed on and recycled, to be completed by someone else. As far as I know, this notion is unique to Gnosticism; although it some ways it comes close to the Buddhist notion of samskaras, perpetually recycled karmic imprints.

The paralemptors store the elements of human potential in a cosmic zone called The Treasury of Light. There is some basis to compare the Gnostic after-death scenario here with NDE descriptions of an immense tunnel of light. I believe that the timespace nexus of the Treasury is the interior of the sun.

Thus, according to this bizarre teaching, we do not survive as intact, self-conscious personalities, but our behavior does! Watch your attitude, because it will probably outlive you.

(4) You pointed out a gnostic writing that said we encounter archons after
death.. how? How does a soul encounter a cyborg in outer space?

JLL: This gets into pretty arcane territory. I have a strong hunch that the paralemptors who assist us to disassemble our consciousness after death are benevolent Archons, involved with the conversion of Sabaoth (an episode in the Sophia myth). I have encountered such benevolent Archons in lucid dreams. They are wondrously elegant inorganic creatures, like Brancusi forms. The communicate by high-pitched clicking and keening sounds. The Russian composer Scriabin appears to have encountered or intuited these beings, and tried to capture their activity in musical form in his 10th piano sonata.

Gnostic teachings on after-death also present another scenario, called "the journey through the planetary spheres" (also described in other classical sources). This appears to be some kind of otherworld rebirth passage, comparable to the Tibetan system of bardos. As the story goes, the reincarnating soul (whatever that may be!) must pass gatekeepers in each of the planetary zones, in order to show the knowledge that allows it to advance to another lifetime, as well as to absorb the benefic effects of each planet: courage from mars, esthetic sensibility from venus, etc.

There is a clear parallel between the passage through the planetary spheres and the raising of kundalini through the seven chakras in asian yoga (Tantra Vidya, Oscar Marcel Hinze). The mystical body ritual and the cosmological rite of passage are two ways of describing the same events. Tantra teaches that the human body incorporates the structure of the entire cosmos.

This arcane and complex scenario of rebirth was inherited by underground movements such as the Rosicrucians, who made a huge affair of it. You can find it elaborated by Rudolf Steiner and his disciples such as Gunther Wachsmith, author of Reincarnation as a Phenomenon of Metamorphosis, who describes the acquisition and morphological embodiment of soul-qualities in the planetary spheres in great detail. Anthroposophist Willi Sucher taught an astrological method of tracing this process in the movement of planets during the nine months of gestation. (I practiced this method for many years, then converted it to a different format when I worked out the "astral phylogenetics" described in Quest for the Zodiac.)

The Steinerite material is not Gnostic, however. There is no mention of getting past Archons with passwords and fancy mudras (hand gestures). I can testify, however, that encounters of this kind do actually occur in out-of -the-body experiences, ludic dreaming, and astral travel, which I myself have experienced. I am convinced that the after-death passage through the planetary spheres can be experienced before one dies... for what that's worth.

You ask how anyone can encounter Archontic cyborgs in outer space, but there is no outer space, strictly speaking. Outer space, where the planets of the solar system circulate, is also a zone of consciousness, a series of hyper-dimensional bardos or transition-zones. You can meet the Archons - who are indeed cyborgs but not entirely of solid physical substance, more like Tibetan tulpas, VR phantoms - and it happens on their own turf. This, I guess, is why they demand signs and passwords to let you pass.

The Gnostic after-death scenario borders on science fiction, of course. But who's to say there is not a lot of truth in science fiction?

This exchange continues in entry 7.

- JLL 27 July 2007

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