For most consciousness is like “housekeeping in a dream.”
Delirious with fever, one does not recognize the fever.

Paltrul Rinpoche

Climbing barefoot-worn circular stone steps in Varanasi, India, reaching the lighthouse-like temple on top, worshipers ring a brass bell before entering the small sanctuary. “Why do they ring the bell?” I asked. “Is it to wake God up so he or she will listen?” “No,” said my companion. “It is to wake you up so you will listen.” This spin of subject-object is nearly universal. “The crisis is really inward and we are unwilling to face this.” Krishnamurti.

We might call “goodness” any expression of our authentic nature. That nature being defined by the way our species-specific capacities are nurtured by the environment, or not. “Badness”, or “evil,” is similarly defined as expressions that are not coherent with our authentic nature. From this view, the essence of evil is self-deception.

Gazing out a Pepper tree grows, and next to it an Alder. Both trees but each expressing different morphogenetic templates, organizing patterns. In his new book, “The Myth of Normal,” Gabor Maté redefines illness or disease as a process, not a thing. Each of us, the trees, the sky, grass, flowers, everything we call nature are process, not things. The movement of our unique energies, flowing like water, creates the form we call river, or me. River is a concept. What is actually happening is energy flowing. We are processes, not things. To misperceive this basic fact is self-deception, and upon this false organizing template the ego, culture, and civilization grow.

Mother-deprived juvenile rogue elephants rampage violently like inner-city gang members. Bad or evil we might say. Their perception of self and world was twisted by early maternal sensory deprivation resulting in an inability to express fully their authentic nature, a form of self-deception. Trees may express “bad” tree process, but are far less susceptible to self-deception than mammals, and infinitely less so than human beings with their astonishing capacity to imagine. The evolutionary gift of extended memory and image making, compounded by symbolic language and now technology, dramatically increases the capacity and potential for self-deception, and with that evil.

Upon entering a new room or residence the sage, J. Krishnamurti would purge the space of any lingering evil shadow energy, something I propose is similar to ringing the temple bell, waking us up, and strengthening our immunity to self-deception. Native traditions use sage to purge or purify, creating sacred spaces, outwardly and inwardly.

These examples reveal two essentials; there are such things as shadow-energy fields, unseen and lingering, that can and do influence. These latent fields can impregnate and influence our subjective mind, like breathing subtle perfume or poison in the air, inducing self-deception, or not, depending on our awake mindfulness. We can include technology as counterfeits of awake, awake meaning not daydreaming attention and therefore, its immunity.

That nonlocal fields of meaning exist is of little doubt. Joseph Chilton Pearce devoted the opening chapter of “Evolution’s End,” to the savant phenomena, supporting the oracular tradition, aboriginal dreamtime, and other indigenous and shamanic practices. Imagine that thoughts and strong emotions, the anger, sorrow, judgments, accusations, and endless wars, hover in the air like psychic smog. DNA remembers our ancestors. Is it not conceivable that self-deceptions, theirs and ours have accumulated for the past 10,000 years, lingering as an energetic shadow that penetrate and influence? Might these unseen shadows slip into our unconscious like other dreams when we are less present, less aware and less awake?

Smudging, ringing the bell and what Krishnamurti did to purify reaffirms the ever-present need for mindful immunity. Does this smudging sweep away the bad vibes, or simply negate their potential to infect? Who cares? We each have thousands of cancer cells floating in us daily. What ‘allows’ these scoundrels to join forces is a chronic imbalance of coherent action, feeling, and thought, a lack of wholeness. It is not the lingering shadow energy rather, our daydreaming openness to self-deception that injures.

Here we set the stage for varying ways the ancients imagined. Pagans worshiped nature and her spirits. The Greeks built temples to Aphrodite, Zeus, Apollo, Cronos, Athens, Gaia, Dionysus, Eros, Hygeia, and more.

In the Gnostic Creation Myth, originating from indigenous roots early in the first century AD, Sophia, the feminine personification of wisdom, lives happily with spirits created by the twin powers of Depth and Silence. Dizzy with love for the Creative Source, she sees a brilliant shimmering light below, and flings herself into the darkness, mistakenly following what she believes is her Father’s radiance, but fooled by a mere reflection [a false image]. There, she is trapped [by the image] – separated from the light, the spiritual realization of Gnosis – the knowledge of transcendent unity.

There, the powers of the underworld [like our rogue juvenile elephants] have their way with her, using, abusing, and exploiting her, until all she knows is sadness in the struggle to return to the light she has lost, but not forgotten [just like us]. She gives birth to a bunch of bad boys, demigods called archons, [shadow energies, mental parasites], including the worst of them, the demiurge who becomes the creator of this world, infecting humanity with pride, ignorance, fear, and his lust for power and pleasure, [what he Buddhist’s call ignorance, not just a lack of knowledge about how people and things actually exist but an active mistaking of their fundamental nature].

Witnessing the irresponsible creation of the world by her errant offspring, Sophia “conceals” Consciousness in the body of the demiurge’s first man, “Adam,” and then brings that consciousness into the world, “Eve.” Finally, Sophia breaks free and ascends back up to the true light of life, raising humanity with her ever so slightly. But she refuses to abandon the sad world of humans, so she divides herself, keeping a part below, ever-present and available for the enlightenment of all.
Robert Kopecky Abridged

An interesting characteristic, being mechanical, void of true creative intelligence, the bad boys, archons, feed on human essence, what we generally call soul. Unaware, sleepwalking, the normal state of semiconscious human awareness, renders most of us, according to G.I. Gurdjieff, “food for the moon.” One writer describes how humans are farmed by the archon for just this purpose, using their mental infections to intentionally keep humanity in perpetual conflict, anger, and sorrow, these strong emotions fattening up the psychic energy being served for dinner.* A nice business model, to be sure.

The Gnostics, grounded in nature, understood that the infectious claim of the archons and demiurge, that humanity was “created in the image of an alien God,” was pure abstraction, grounded in imagination and nothing more, lunacy. Once that seed was planted in the ripe and fertile soil of reified imagination however, the snowball gathered, evolving into an avalanche of self-deception that just kept growing, today mechanically and exponentially inflated by global propaganda and technology, an archon's dream come true.

As with the Pagans and Greeks, we still paint wings on angelic, celestial, nonmaterial fields. Pure nonlocal energy doesn’t need wings. Nor does Poseidon need a human form or psyche to guide the seas, storms and earthquakes. We reify the flowing river of entangled energy that defines ‘us,’ so the mental images we conjure fit into our subject-object, “thinging” language and metaphors, then forget that this is what we are doing. And upon this pervasive “ignorance of our true nature,” our world spins into increasing chaos.

Krishnamurti observed evil was not the opposite of goodness, rather a different and independent force. The mental parasites the Gnostics described are real in terms of our near-infinite capacity for self-deception, which is, in this thesis, the root and essence of evil. Once a false reality becomes reality, that template cannot self-correct. Inventing war strategies to battle invisible mental phantoms only deepen the deception. Not unlike the layers and layers of deception we face with weaponized public health and weaponized government. A completely different approach is needed.

Imagine not comparing yourself or identifying with anything our toxic culture and screens encourage. What if you experience yourself, “Not in His Image,”* or any of the varied images culture spawns, rather as a flowing process in an infinite swirl of other interdependent and altruistic fluid processes, without a name or border to define or limit. From this ground, when the need arises, we use words and concepts to relate, act and represent this endless flowing essence in ways that benefit wholeness for all. Who or what are we then? And how will this new boundless identity change the outer world we share?

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* The book “Not In His Image,” by John Lamb Lash
* “Exit the Cave,” by H. Mickoski