Take the Red Pill Exegesis

This article is a more serious follow up to Take the Red Pill—Trumpocalypse Reveals that you Live in a Simulated Matrix The red vs. black font is a faulty html artifact of some sort we’re trying to fix.

This article is a follow up to Take the Red Pill and will discuss who or what the Archons or matrix masters might actually be and also my methods of inquiry.

  I grew up in a highly intellectual family with both parents trained in scientific methodology and critical thinking.  Sometime during adolescence, I realized that probing into the world with such left-hemisphere weighted tools was not going to be sufficient for me.

To paraphrase the famous quote (attributed variously to Haldane or Eddington) I knew that the cosmos was not only stranger than people thought, but stranger than anyone could think. For my vision not to keep hitting walls I knew I had to blend intuition, imagination and critical thinking. Although the terms “skeptic” and “skeptical” have been co-opted by debunkers who are true believers in negative absolutisms, the skeptics were originally a school of Greek philosophers who believed that their powers of observation and thinking were enhanced by not arriving at conclusions.

The true skeptical approach is probably the wisest approach if you want to go down rabbit holes and not get tricked. If you already think you know the answer, confirmation bias and the trickster aspect of the unconscious will help you to be a naive true believer. As Terence McKenna pointed out, those who say the most usually know the least. In Ufology, for example, the people who have the deepest insight have not come to fixed conclusions about who the visitors really are, while those who know the least can tell you the names of everyone on the Pleiadian High Council.  In paranormal research, for example, if something paranormal occurs—I predict keys will fall off a table in 5 seconds and they do—it is almost impossible to say what paranormal thing occurred. Did I do it with telekinesis? Was it clairvoyant foreseeing that in the near future some other force would cause the keys to fall off? Did I use mind pressure to cause someone else with telekinetic power to cause the keys to fall off? (and we can keep populating the list) Similarly, the Trumpocalypse has weird patterning suggestive of something paranormal at work, but there are multiple explanations and we can’t fully falsify or exclusively credit any of them. But we also can’t deny the weirdness, and that the weirdness indicates another level than conventional causality.  For example, bracketing the Orlando shooting were two other bizarre, dark occurrences in Orlando, each of them leading national news and all occurring within a few days. (I wrote about that here: The Orlando Shooting—Part of a Window Zone of Evil )Bizarre and often fatal constellations of events often surround movies that powerfully evoke occult darkness  (wrote about that here—note this and most of the “articles” I link here are also in  Youtube and podcast form so you can listen as well as read— The Batman Shootings and Crossover Effects).

There are different ways one can go down rabbit holes. Jung felt that if you sought to explore the unconscious without having a strong moral stance you would likely be destroyed. Tribal shamans don’t travel into the hidden realms to have a psychedelic thrill ride. They know they are entering dangerous domains and usually do so for the purpose of healing an ailing person. They generally try to get in and out as quickly and safely as they can. One can try to plunge into a rabbit hole in a space suit bristling with sensors, trying to remain objective while your mind is getting blown. One can plunge in with a tie-dye shirt and a hundred tabs of acid in your gut and get perma-fried. One can plunge in for narcissistic or thrill-seeking purposes and get possessed and inflated by the highly energetic and trickster nature of the unconscious so that you emerge as a demented prophet, charlatan or abusive guru on a self-serving messianic mission to spread your psychic contagion.

I employ different balances of thinking and intuition during different rabbit hole excursions, and also use different blends of right and left hemisphere tools when I report back on what I have encountered. Sometimes I will emphasize critical thinking and the scholarly voice such as in my book Crossing the Event Horizon—Human Metamorphosis and the Singularity Archetype, while other times I may use a more surreal approach. Sometimes I’ve found myself switching midstream. For example, I wanted to look behind the curtain into the nature of money and started out in analytical mode for a few paragraphs and then got pulled by the muse into an increasing surreal vision/rant: Green Energy Vortex .

If you check my section on Reality Sandwich you’ll see I’ve written seventeen articles so far on the 2016 election—a few are soberly analytical and journalistic, but more of them involve sarcasm and surreality. I think they’ve been weighted toward the surreal because even before Trump won the nomination I sensed weirdness erupting from the collective unconscious.

Sometimes it is better to enter rabbit holes unencumbered by facts, scientific methodology, journalistic responsibility and other such tools or affectations of objectivity. When it is not morally hazardous, I sometimes employ a chaos magic method I call interpretive magic. I use mythologizing interpretive latitude to creating meaning and motivation out of things and events a materialist would explain via randomness and mechanical causality. (see Interpretive Magic ) In other cases, such an approach would be morally unacceptable. For example, if I were a juror on a murder trial then facts, rigorous reality testing, rules of evidence, chains of custody and other such grounded and concrete tools must take precedence, while right hemispheric tools like free-associative thinking, interpretative latitude and mythologizing would be irresponsible methods.

Where it is does not appear to be morally hazardous, however, I like to sometimes blur the line between the factual and the imaginal. This line is a permeable membrane anyway, and when we are looking into weirdness, and there is a lot of weirdness in human affairs, we are looking at phenomena where various lines— especially the line between the inner psychic world and the outer world of physical events is blurred in the phenomena itself. The Trumpocalypse is a zone of heightened weirdness and I’ve tried to probe into it with both my astronaut suit and my festival clothes. So, in Take the Red Pill, I was letting the muse pull me into a rabbit hole, and I used humor and other means to blur the line between rational assertion and surrealized associations.

The paranormal, as my friend George Hansen discusses in his seminal book, The Trickster and the Paranormal, is governed by the trickster archetype, and so often the paranormal tricks and possesses people who seek to investigate it, turning seekers into rubes and charlatans. Pretensions of high objectivity seem to bait trickster forces while I find that by consciously engaging a bit of trickster methodology myself can sometimes allow me to proceed further down a particular rabbit hole.

To read more about my approach to reality testing and paranormal/occult research see: Reality Testing is Politically Incorrect and Carnival 2012—the 2012 Phenomenon and the 22 Pitfalls and Blindspots of Esoteric Research.

So, now that I’ve given a thumbnail explanation of my highly variable methods, I will put on a very informal scholarly outfit for a little bit, playa dust carefully vacuumed from the tweed jacket with elbow patches, to talk as sensibly as I can for a few paragraphs about who the archons or matrix masters might be.

First, we should discard what I call the single-correct-diagnosis fallacy where we assume that there is only one objectively true  explanation of every phenomenon.  We live in a novelty creating, incredibly varied and complex cosmos. Look at the fantastic variety of forms just in the micro and marcro biological realm of carbon-based life. When we remove the need for organic chemistry and consider life based on zeros and ones and various other subtler, more etherealized and plastic substrates—the thought-responsive, ideoplastic realms of the imaginal, the spirit world, the dream time, etc.—then the cryptozoology of lifeforms inhabiting such realms should be expected to be exponentially more varied and weird than carbon-based organisms.  Consider how large would be the encyclopedia of all dream creatures for example. So, when we look at the hidden causes of Trumpocalypse, we are more like to find a multitude of agents and agencies than say an individual ADD archon boy behind a control panel.

One general possibility, close to the perspective I adopted in Take the Red Pill, is that there are hidden species above us on the food chain that are using us as harvest/experiment/entertainment.  Visionaries and experiencers from many cultures and periods give testimony to there being hidden species interpenetrating the human domain and much of the testimony points toward parasitic species.

You can find my full collection of writings about what I call “mind parasites” in the mind parasite category of zaporacle.com.

There are two articles that relate closely to gnostic texts about the Archons: Alex Grey and the Mind Parasites and A Gnostic View of Mind Parasites .

I’ll just make a few quick points to put the idea of hidden species in a rational perspective.

1.   Wherever we find life we find parasites, predators and symbionts. These are classic relationships of energetic transaction.

2.  It is possible for people who regard themselves as well-informed to fail to notice an entire dimension of life.

3.  When a culture, such as that of scientific materialism, ignores a vast body of human testimony, that culture is in danger. For example, Western culture ignored or denied testimony about child abuse until recently. You should neither accept all testimony at face value, nor dismiss or superficially explain it away. The job of science, and other methods of inquiry, is to investigate the unexplained, not explain the uninvestigated.

Here is an excerpt from introductory essay on this subject, Mind Parasites, Energy Parasites and Vampires :

Not too long ago, not much more than three hundred years, our species was completely clueless about the microbiological realm. It was not until 1674 that a Danish shopkeeper developed the first microscope capable of resolving protozoa. Surgeons would wash their hands after surgery, but not before. Imagine if anyone had claimed that there were these incredibly tiny animals, too small to be seen, that were major players in human destiny. Imagine if they claimed that there wasn’t just one kind, but a whole cryptozoology of millions of strange species, fantastically varied, of both plant and animal. Imagine if they further claimed that our bodies were actually made up of a cooperative colony of a sixty trillion such animals! Anybody making such fantastical claims would have been condemned to a lunatic asylum or burned at the stake.

Presently, in the West, we have a blind spot in our awareness as huge as the species-wide blind spot we had for most of our existence about the microbiological realm. Unlike Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, and what would be common knowledge to any tribal Shaman, we are blind to organisms that exist on the energetic plane. Dr. Samuel Sagan is a medical doctor who has researched this subject and written a book entitled, ENTITIES: Parasites of the Body of Energy (Read my review of this book: Energy Parasites—the Sagan View ) He’s part of a school in Australia that a friend of mine attended and spoke highly of, though I know next to nothing about it. In an excerpt available on the website clairvision.org, Dr. Sagan writes:

The topic is both old and new. Old, because in all traditions and folklores of the earth, one finds references to spirits and non-physical beings which can interfere with human beings. Thus Ayurveda, the traditional medicine of India, is divided into eight sections, one of which is entirely devoted to the study of bhutas, or entities, their influence on health and sanity, and the ways one can get rid of them. This places bhuta-vidya, or ‘science of entities’, on the same level as surgery or gynecology. If we look at traditional Chinese medicine, we find that in acupuncture, among the 361 points of the 14 main meridians, 17 have the word Kuei (disincarnate spirit) as part of their main or secondary name.

Call them spirits, incubi and the succubi, they have as many names as there are cultures and languages, but they have been widely recognized by everybody except us. Disincarnate organisms are far more generally recognized than the microbiological realm ever was until the invention of the microscope. And there isn’t just one type of course, but a fantastically varied cryptozoology of parasites, predators, and symbionts. Everywhere that we find life, we find endless variations on those classic energetic relationships—parasitism, predation, and symbiosis. As the alchemists put it, “As above, so below.” As it is on the mircrobiological plane, so it also is on the energetic plane.

If there are organisms on the energetic plane, we should expect to find many highly evolved species of parasites. And what every parasite is looking for is a host with a rich deposit of energy—like the warm-blooded mammals, which attract female mosquitoes that will use them to fertilize their eggs and complete their life cycle. What is the richest deposit of organic energy that we know of? This would have to be human psychic energy/sexual chi—the energy that dominates this planet.

So, yes I do believe it is possible that there are “Archons” of some sort or of many sorts who may be manipulating the human domain for various purposes.

An overlapping possibility is that we may be living in a simulated reality created by hidden entities or forces. Read the wiki: Simulated Reality. The movie, The Matrix, which so greatly amplified the simulated reality possibility in collective consciousness, was inspired by Gnosticism.

Since I’m not a materialist, I don’t find the possibility that we are living in a simulated reality to be particularly disconcerting. In a deleted scene from the fantasy epic I am writing, Parallel Journeys, one character asks another what does anything matter if we are living in a simulation. The other responds:

I think it matters. Even if it is a simulation. There are physicists publishing papers about the possibility that we are living in a quantum computer simulation. But I don’t think it matters that much what we’re made of—probability waves, superstrings, quantum-computer -generated matrix source code. It’s all just the stuff that dreams are made of. And dreams are as real as anything else. Anything that exists is real. Any dream you have ever had, any thought, or image or fantasy that flits through your mind has a factual existence. You thought of that particular thing and no other. The history of the unfolding of the multiverse has to include the fact that you had that particular thought at that moment. If we are composed of zeros and ones generated by alien quantum computers, then the pattern of zeros and ones is real. A simulation is as real as anything else because it exists . . . What also feels real to me is that things we do have moral consequences. Hair-splitting logic can’t prove anything, but I feel that we are both self-aware entities and how we act toward each other is more meaningful than what sort of stuff we are made of.”

Finally, I want to briefly discuss a matrix creating force that I am not skeptical about because I know it exists. It is not, however,  mutually exclusive of the other possibilities mentioned.

A more potent force in generating human realities than the Archons (even if they do exist) are the archetypes. What Jung called the “collective unconscious” and the archetypes are an empirically proven reality.

Excerpted from Crossing the Event Horizon—the Singularity Archetype and Human Metamorphosis:

Jung and his colleagues have provided us with definitive evidence of a collective unconscious. From this collective layer of the unconscious emerge the great, primordial images Jung referred to as the “archetypes.” Archetypes are “innate universal psychic dispositions that form the substrate from which the basic themes of human life emerge.”  Across cultures and periods we find endless variations of these archetypes, such as the Self, Persona, Shadow, Hero, Great Mother, Trickster, Devil, etc. The archetypes may manifest in anyone but often show up most vividly in the fertile psyches of artists, poets, mystics, writers, shamans and prophets. Through such individuals the archetypes become myths and diffuse throughout a culture. Edward Edinger, a Jungian analyst who wrote eloquently about the nature of archetypes, points out that although we can study archetypes as patterns, they are also living, dynamic agencies.

Donald Trump is a classic personification of the trickster archetype. The trickster is transgressive and violates expected boundaries and hierarchies. Tricksters are great at getting attention and are not bound by facts or logic. Archetypes possess enormous primordial energy, so someone possessed by an archetype may be imbued with uncanny charisma and messianic zeal. They often experience enormous ego inflation. They may also be surrounded by a “reality distortion field” with heightened synchronicities including synchronistic names (see Jung’s name synchronicity theory ).

The archetypes and the collective unconscious are a super-potent reality generating force shaping human personalities and culture. Jung in his book, Flying Saucers a Modern Myth of Things seen in the Sky wondered if the UFOs might not be “physical exteriorizations of the collective unconscious” (see the ufology chapter in my book).

In the classic 1956 science fiction film, Forbidden Planet, an advanced alien species called the Krell were destroyed by a technology they created to enhance their minds. The device also amplified their unconscious minds and unleashed monsters from the Id. If you substitute the collective unconscious for the Krell hardware you can easily explain the 2016 election and ensuing Trumpocalypse. You don’t need Krell technology, Archons or simulated realities to explain eruptions of weirdness into the phenomenal world, but that does not discount them either.

The conventional view of the Archons, or other matrix masters, does tend to be rather anthropomorphizing (egos with manipulative agendas).  It is quite similar to the conspiracy view of human affairs (a view that Terrence McKenna referred to as “epistemological cartoons” see my Youtube Problems with the Conspiratist World View). Obviously, there are conspiracies, but what Terence and I are criticizing is the idea that any group of human conspirators can control the world, which Terence describes as “like trying to control a dream.” Any informed person with intact reality testing ought to able to observe that we live in a world of competing spheres of power, not one run by a single power center. The Archon variation merely locates the main conspirators off-stage and allows them to be non-human. This does not mean it is wrong, just that we need to be extra wary about projection when our explanatory model looks anthropomorphic.

The collective unconscious is a matrix, and its ability to manifest itself in the human domain is massively evidenced and empirically proven. While other exotic forces, entities and levels of reality are likely also in play, we should begin by recognizing the highly permeable membrane between psyche and the realm of outer phenomena. Everything economic, war, manmade environmental destruction and Trumpocalypse are products of psyche.

As Jung put it,

“There is no hydrogen bomb in nature. That is all man’s doing. We are the great danger. Psyche is the great danger.”

As a charcter in the movie Dazed and Confused put it,

“We’re the aliens man, we’re the savages.”

When we gaze into the nuclear depths of the Trumpocalypse we may find that psyche is the matrix master and that the Archons exist, and are to be found in our own hidden depths.

For the most sophisticated and comprehensive view of the paranormal I’ve encountered in a single volume I highly recommend Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained by my friend Jeffrey Kripal and Whitley Streiber.

Supplement: