substance?
In truth it is impossible for us either to apprehend
or define it, or even to say where it dwells. When we try
to go back to its last source, we find little more than a
succession of memories, a mass of ideas, confused, for
that matter, and unsettled, all connected with the same
instinct, the instinct of living: a mass of habits of our
sensibility and of conscious or unconscious reactions
against the surrounding phenomena.
When all is said, the most steadfast point of that
nebula is our memory, which seems, on the other hand,
to be a somewhat external, a somewhat accessory
faculty and, in any case, one of the frailest faculties of
our brain, one of those which disappear the most
promptly at the least disturbance of our health. As an
English poet has very truly said, “That which cries
aloud for eternity is the very part of me that will
perish.” 100
Maeterlinck was, however, falling into - or, rather,
setting for himself - the same logical trap that imprisons
99 Maeterlinck, Maurice, Our Eternity. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1914,
pages #50-51.
100 Ibid., pages #48-49.
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contemporary Mechanists: that memory is completely a
product and construct of OU interactions through the
physical senses. Eliminating them eliminates it.
Implicit in this limitation is the assumption that OU-
based, and presumably buttressed, memory is the only
“real” memory. Anything else is merely imaginative, and
as such must be kept carefully and strictly segregated
from the “real”. If the two are confused, or worse yet
deliberately dignified with the same reality, the individual
is “insane”.
The same holds true for time-assignments of memory
events. If one remembers an event, it may or may not be
consciously or subconsciously dated. Remembering your
date from your high school prom associates that OU date
with the memory creation. But remembering something
not so inherently fixed in time, such as a favorite location
visited repeatedly over years, does not carry a specific
date. You may store enough short-term memory to be
certain you haven’t seen it within the last year or so, but
that is merely external-exclusionary.
Also there is no reliable division in terms of precision
between short-term and long-term memory. It’s effortless
to remember the multiplication table you learned in the
third grade. Yesterday’s credit-card charge at the
supermarket? Not unless you gave it special “retentive”
attention at the time.
All of which is to say that memory is neither objective
nor reliable, and that there is no certain mechanism to
ensure or correct either problem.
With Maeterlinck’s trust in memory-as-self undercut,
the individual is reduced to instantaneous sensation of
separateness to establish conscious identity. This is René
Descartes’ cogito ergo sum at its most fundamental. It is
not thinking “of something”, whether real or imaginary,
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that establishes individual consciousness; it is the
exercise of thinking itself. 101
But confirming that one exists is only the smile of the
Cheshire Cat. What distinguishes and differentiates you
from innumerable other separate consciousnesses? Again
the Mechanist’s habit is to default to his OU body. “I am
what exists within and uses this machine.” Nevertheless,
as we have already seen, this is not at all a unitary
relationship. Parts of the body can be inactivated or
r e m o v e d w i t h o u t a f f e c t i n g t h e w h o l e n e s s o f
consciousness, and during sleep or anesthesia the
consciousness disconnects from all of the body’s physical-
sense interfaces.
We are left with an “essential self” which we thought
we knew through a mixture of reliable memories and
constantly-reinforcing body sensations. We now realize
that both are fragmentary, imperfect, unreliable illusions.
B. Sensory Deprivation
During the mid-20th century John Lilly, M.D. devised
and conducted numerous experiments with sensory
deprivation tanks to determine whether any
consciousness remained, and if so in what form, once
bodily sensory im/expression had been eliminated. Lilly
pursued this with several students and colleagues over
the years, and discussed the results and his conclusions
in his 1977 book The Deep Self. Which in turn inspired
his playful caricature in the novel/film Altered States:
101 Rejecting the “disincarnate origin” of thinking as establishment of
personal existence and identity, Martin Heidegger proposed that self-
perception requires external displacement: “being there” ( Dasein) in
order to subsequently conceive itself through a composite of “what it
isn’t” reflections. This may console those unnerved by Descartes, but
ultimately does not refute him. Something with the innate capacity to
perceive must preexist any external input.
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I’m a man in search of his true self. How
archetypically American can you get? Everybody’s
looking for his true self. We’re all trying to fulfill
ourselves, understand ourselves, get in touch with
ourselves, get ahold of ourselves, face the reality of
ourselves, explore ourselves, expand ourselves. Ever
since we dispensed with God, we’ve got nothing but
ourselves to explain this meaningless horror of life.
We’re all weekending at est or meditating for forty
minutes a day or squatting on floors in a communal
OM or locking arms in quasi-Sufi dances or stripping
off the deceptions of civilized life and jumping naked
into a swimming pool filled with other naked searchers
for self. Well, I think that true self, that original self,
that first self, is a real, mensurate, quantifiable thing,
tangible and incarnate. And I’m going to find the
fucker! - Edward Jessup, Ph.D. (after several glasses of
wine)102
Lilly associated his quest for the self with the problem
of “reality”. Assuming, per Descartes, that the
consciousness is a constant, active phenomenon, prior to
and independent of what it perceives and constructs
through the physical senses, the task is then to pare the
irrelevant and unnecessary clutter away, resulting in that
true, raw reality. In The Deep Self he sums up the
conclusions of his investigations [and earlier writings]
thus:
In the province of the mind, what one believes to be
true either is true or becomes true within certain limits.
These limits are to be found experientially and
experimentally. When the limits are determined, it is
found that they are further beliefs to be transcended. In
102 Chayefsky, Paddy, Altered States (New York: Harper & Row,
1978), page #44.
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&n
bsp; the province of he mind there are no limits. The body
imposes definite limits. 103
Previously Lilly had written:
Today reality may be said (in its less involved
meanings) to possess the same attributes as the
original meaning of the [Latin word] res (“a lawcourt”).
First it expresses that which is completely objective as
opposed to anything subjective. By “objective” we mean
“existing without the mind, outside it, and wholly
independent of it”. “Subjective”, on the other hand,
takes the meaning of that which is in the mind ...
How can the mind render itself sufficiently
objective to study itself? In other words, how are we
able to use the mind to ponder on the mind? It is
perfectly feasible for the intellect to grasp the fact that
the physiological changes of the brain occur
simultaneously with thought, but it cannot conceive of
the connection between its own thoughts and these
changes. The difficulties of the precise relation between
the two have caused many controversies as to which is
the more real, the objective or the subjective reality. 104
Lilly had indeed succeeded in “finding the fucker”,
showing scientifically that “reality” is a composite of OU
and SU interpretations and constructs. His research was
of course purely on an individual level. Having verified it,
he found himself at a bit of a loss as to what to do with his
discovery. At the culmination of Altered States, the
hapless Dr. Jessup is reduced to a protoplasmic “primal
self” so unconstrained that it is like a mental atomic
critical mass. He is just barely rescued from this state by
his wife, who then collapses in hysteria:
103 Lilly, John C. M.D., The Deep Self. New York: Warner Books,
1977, page #63.
104 Ibid., pages #67-8.
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He’s a truth-lover, a God fucker. I was never real to
him. Nothing in the human condition was ever real to
him. Reality to Eddie is only that which is changeless,
immutably constant. What happened to him tonight -
that was Eddie’s idea of love. That was consummation.
He finally got it off with God. He finally embraced the
Absolute, was finally ravished by Truth. And it fucking
near destroyed him. 105
C. MindStar Visions
The Setian initiate, bypassing all conditioned OU-
dependencies, is challenged to first recognize, then
differentiate, then identify his immortal consciousness
with those parts of the eightfold emanations which are
never connected to the physical body’s functions, hence
are not affected by its death or disintegration.
This is accomplished through reflective, non-
reactive thinking. Thus the individual becomes aware
of his authentic self (MS); and upon activating this as the
locus of his consciousness, looks outward at phenomena
at the same depth.
In other words, the superficial “self” looks out at its
level and sees OU events - like bodily pleasure/pain, blue
sky, ringing telephones, time defined by clocks and
calendars, and so forth.
The core or true self, however, exists as a neter and,
when looking outward, sees a SU not of the works of
other neteru, but of those neteru themselves.
One “machine” sees other “machinery”; one “creator/
operator” sees other “creator/operators”.
The Egyptians might describe such inward, reflective
thinking as the accessing of the ba or core-MS by the khat
or body-soul: the Platonic phenomenon of anamnesis as
the khat, which normally exists and defines itself in an
105 Chayefsky, op. cit. , page #167.
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environment of bodily dimensions and sensations, not
only reaches beyond that environment but in some
situations depends upon the ba for a more accurate
source of truth.
To “deny one’s senses” is a familiar experience for
most people in certain situations, though they may not
realize what such a gesture actually entails in terms of
mental coherence. When done, it is almost always brief
and minimal, because the khat’s reliance upon bodily
senses for its information and both definition and
continuous reinforcement of “reality” is so strong and
ingrained.
Unless the khat-ba connection is both a conscious and
a strong one, the individual may interpret such an
experience as mere loss of coherence, or “insanity”.
Immortality of the self is. Your ability to align your
consciousness with your neter, rather than your
superficial, animal, illusion of “self” is Xeper, the
apprehension and affirmation of your telos.
We have seen how these ancient initiatory keys to
immortality were energetically attacked and suppressed
by institutional Christianity, as that religion correctly
perceived that fear of death was one of the most powerful
weapons it could use to enslave adherents and converts.
It was crucial that death be taught as something fearsome
and final, from which the only salvation was surrender to
Christ - by which, of course, Christian churches really
meant their institutions.
Those areas of non-Christian Europe which had
escaped, at least for a time, domination by this terrifying
propaganda, continued to preserve the truth. In For
Freedom Destined Dr. Franz Winkler observes:
In ancient times the secrets of man’s true nature,
and of the forces that determine his fate, were
contemplated in the great temple universities of
paganism all over the civilized world.
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Though men were fully aware of the important role
that heredity plays in the shaping of the physiological
and psychological organism of a human being, they did
not think that the innermost core of the human being
was the product of purely biological forces. This
innermost core, called by the Greeks the entelechy or
dæmon of man, was credited with qualities unique to
the individual, apart from the characteristics of the
body he inhabited. The concept of entelechy
corresponded roughly with the Judæo-Christian
concept of an immortal soul.
Most pagan creeds held that the human entelechy
neither begins nor ends with life on Earth. Man’s
“mortality” referred merely to the fact that his self-
awareness ceased with the death of his body.
The immortal gods differed from mortal man by the
continuation of their consciousness.
Since ancient ideas on the mystery of birth cannot
be separated from pagan philosophies about the soul’s
supersensible existence, certain concepts generally
accepted in the pre-Christian era should be mentioned.
According to pagan theology, consciousness after
death could reach one of three levels.
The first level was the one allotted to the average
man: dreamlike, with almost complet
e absence of
memory and self-identification, called Hades in Greek,
Hel in Germanic mythology.
The second was accessible to the true hero, the man
whose deeds of courage and creativeness distinguished
him from ordinary mortals. The Greeks called this state
of consciousness the Elysian Fields, the Germans
Walhalla.
The third level was reached by those who could soar
b e y o n d t h e n a r r o w l i m i t s o f E a r t h - b o u n d
consciousness and thus bring new impulses into the
world. Already while they still lived in a mortal body,
their awareness had assumed divine status. Their souls
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after death, in the language of mythology, were lifted to
the stars. 106
Is attainment of the immortality of the ba or psyche a
technique which the individual has to “learn”? Must one
hurry to do so, lest one’s body expire before the transition
is mastered? Quite the contrary, as the Sage in Her-Bak
emphasized: This immortality is innate in all
conscious beings. You possess it already, by evidence
of that same consciousness which enables you to read and
comprehend these words. It is nothing which initiation,
either Setian or natural, “confers” on you; rather it is
something to which conventional churches have resolved
to blind you, and which materialistic science has denied
simply because it is an aspect of existence which
transcends that science. Further from Winkler:
Life’s appearance as “meaningless” stems basically
from man’s materialistic concept of himself. If his
innermost nature were merely biological, complete
fulfillment of his appetites and the acquiring of wealth
would satisfy his longing for happiness. Since they do
not, an atmosphere of hopelessness is enveloping our
generation, especially our youth. In an affluent society
where all material ways out of such frustration have
been found wanting, drugs, perversions, and the thrills
of crime are now being used as desperate means of
escape from the intolerable boredom. Well-meaning
efforts on the part of the authorities to stem the tidal
wave of juvenile delinquency and drug-addiction will
therefore bring scant results, until the following simple
truth has been fully accepted by parents and teachers:
Happiness, love, and compassion are spiritual
faculties that during centuries of neglect and
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