Cont.
4. Hyper-Dimensional Entities: Shaytan / Satan (Islam)
The Shaytan (plural Shayatin) belongs to pre-Islamic Arabian mythology, however there is a story that Muhammad was tricked by one (although there are debates by scholars over the historicity of this incident), realized it, and came out publicly the next day to correct what he said. In the Quran, there is the story of Iblis, the first Shaytan, who was apparently made by Allah (God) from a fire so pure that not even smoke could mar its beauty. This is interesting, because reference to the Archons as made from smokeless fire crops up repeatedly across different traditions. Iblis refused to bow to Adam (who was after all a mere man made of clay), so Allah banished him from heaven. Iblis swore to take revenge on Adam and all clay-men like him.
Iblis is considered the lord of all Shayatin and is said to have gathered an army of Shayatin and Jinn to persecute mankind. A Shaytan is described as a sweeping force and a whispering voice, visible only to donkeys, who bray desperate warnings when they see it approaching. This again is noteworthy, since this highlights the theme that these hyper-dimensional entities are outside the normal range of normal human perception – but not outside the perceptions of other creatures such as animals like donkeys (or cats), and not outside the range of human perception when a person (through will, intent or even psychedelics) expands his or her perception range.
5. Hyper-Dimensional Entities: Hostile Forces (Sri Aurobindo, the Mother, Rudolf Steiner)
Sri Aurobindo was an Indian sage who founded Integral Yoga. He wrote about the Archons using the term hostile forces:
“It [the adverse force] is the Power that keeps up ignorance and darkness in the world —it can only be destroyed when mankind is no longer in love with ignorance and darkness. Each sadhak has to push it out of contact with his being. When it has gone from him, then there will be no longer any serious difficulties in his sadhana [practise] … The hostile Forces are Powers of Darkness who are in revolt against the Light and the Truth and want to keep this world under their rule in darkness and ignorance. Whenever anyone wants to reach the Truth, to realise the Divine, they stand in the way as much as possible … Sometimes they possess men in order to act through them, sometimes they take birth in a human body. When their use in the play is over, they will either change or disappear or no longer seek to intervene in the earth-play.”
The Mother, a woman closely associated with Sri Aurobindo and his work, talks about it here as she elucidates upon spirit possession or demonic possession:
“Question: When a being is possessed by a hostile force, what becomes of his psychic?
Mother: It depends on the degree of the possession. Usually it is something progressive. First there is an influence under which one comes … The second: the influence becomes permanent and there is one part of the being which deteriorates, which is constantly under this influence and expresses it. After this, the being which has cast this influence tries to enter that part. Then, usually, this produces a conflict, a kind of inner battle … if one doesn’t know how to resist and doesn’t succeed in shaking off the hold, then gradually the being that has seized upon a part of the person acts like an octopus and spreads its tentacles like that, slowly and everywhere; and finally it is a total possession. At the moment of the total possession, either the possessed person becomes completely unbalanced or he becomes a kind of monster …”
Rudolf Steiner is known for many things including his revolutionary ideas about education. He too was aware of the Archons:
“There are beings in the spiritual realms for whom anxiety and fear emanating from human beings offer welcome food. When humans have no anxiety and fear, then these creatures starve … If fear and anxiety radiates from people and they break out in panic, then these creatures find welcome nutrition and they become more and more powerful. These beings are hostile towards humanity. Everything that feeds on negative feelings, on anxiety, fear and superstition, despair or doubt, are in reality hostile forces in supersensible worlds, launching cruel attacks on human beings, while they are being fed. Therefore, it is above all necessary to begin with that the person who enters the spiritual world overcomes fear, feelings of helplessness, despair and anxiety. But these are exactly the feelings that belong to contemporary culture and materialism; because it estranges people from the spiritual world, it is especially suited to evoke hopelessness and fear of the unknown in people, thereby calling up the above mentioned hostile forces against them.”
6. Hyper-Dimensional Entities: Cosmic Predator / Mud Shadow (Shamanic a la Castaneda)
Out of all the descriptions of hyper-dimensional entities thus far presented, the descriptions given by Carlos Castaneda in his 12th and final book, The Active Side of Infinity, are the most disturbing for me personally. I still remember reading it in my early 20s and being shocked to my core. Some part of me knew it was deeply true, and it rendered anything else I had learnt in my life up until that point as irrelevant and meaningless, because this was, without doubt, where the real battle lay. Castaneda relates what his mentor Don Juan taught him about the Archons, which he called the Cosmic Predator and the Mud Shadow:
“We have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos and took over the rule of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners. The Predator is our lord and master. It has rendered us docile, helpless. If we want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it demands that we don’t do so … this was an energetic fact for the sorcerers of ancient Mexico … They took us over because we are food for them, and they squeeze us mercilessly because we are their sustenance. Just as we rear chickens in chicken coops, the predators rear us in human coops, humaneros. Therefore, their food is always available to them.”
“Sorcerers believe that the predators have given us our systems of belief, our ideas of good and evil, our social mores. They are the ones who set up our hopes and expectations and dreams of success or failure. They have given us covetousness, greed, and cowardice. It is the predators who make us complacent, routinary, and egomaniacal … In order to keep us obedient and meek and weak, the predators engaged themselves in a stupendous manoeuvre stupendous, of course, from the point of view of a fighting strategist. A horrendous manoeuvre from the point of view of those who suffer it. They gave us their mind! Do you hear me? The predators give us their mind, which becomes our mind. The predators’ mind is baroque, contradictory, morose, filled with the fear of being discovered any minute now … through the mind, which, after all, is their mind, the predators inject into the lives of human beings whatever is convenient for them. And they ensure, in this manner, a degree of security to act as a buffer against their fear.”
“The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were quite ill at ease with the idea of when [the predator] made its appearance on Earth. They reasoned that man must have been a complete being at one point, with stupendous insights, feats of awareness that are mythological legends nowadays. And then, everything seems to disappear, and we have now a sedated man. What I’m saying is that what we have against us is not a simple predator. It is very smart, and organized. It follows a methodical system to render us useless. Man, the magical being that he is destined to be, is no longer magical. He’s an average piece of meat.”
The Mud Shadow explains the seemingly irreconcilable difference between man the genius engineer and man the stupid idiot. The Cosmic Predator uses man as food, but in order to get the most loosh he can, he has to whip man up into a negative frenzy, much as farmers fatten their chickens and cattle before killing them. Don Juan specifically explains that every human has a glowing coat of awareness upon which the Predator feeds; it “milks” man by provoking emotional drama so as to generate flashes of awareness that it then eats. In other places in the Castaneda book series, Don Juan describes the Mud Shadow as a foreign installation, and even hints that certain shamans (sorcerers) have seen the creature/creatures.