The New Aeon, Immanentizing the Eschaton, and Slouching Toward Liberation of Consciousness in Two Parts (Part II)

No one likes being told what to do, but civil anarchy also sucks and has proved itself untenable. Liber Oz, referenced in Part 1 of this essay, is not talking about anarchy; it is challenging Piscean-era Judeo-Christian moral relativisms that double as straightjackets. Even the post-modern occultist slogan “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” is not an anarchistic war cry; nor was it ever uttered by an 11^th century ascetic Islamic fundamentalist mystic/jihadist named Hassan ibn Sabbah. The slogan was penned by William S. Burroughs. Sabbah only became noteworthy because the Discordian authors of The Illuminatus! Trilogy worked fanciful conspiratorial ideas about him into their novels. It is a tip of the hat to how malleable and provisional ideas and systems are. The New Aeon is expected to be an era when this is acknowledged and done so in power-conferring freedom rather than fear. And anarchy is not to be conflated with Chaos, which is what post-modern occultists propose is at the root of the New Aeon:

Etymology: Middle English (15^th century), formless primordial space, from Latin, from Greek khaos.

Chaos is defined, by standard American dictionaries as “the disordered state of unformed matter and infinite space that existed before the ordered universe [the Cosmos].”

The Concise Encyclopedia of Science and Technology (5^th edition, McGraw Hill Publishers) defines Chaos (Chaos theory) as a “system behavior that depends so sensitively on the system’s precise initial conditions that it is, in effect, unpredictable and cannot be distinguished from a random process, even though it is deterministic in a mathematical sense.” The theory observes that Chaos only seems chaotic but is rather elegant design, and besides all the esoteric mathematical jargon, it is tied in with concepts about environmental adaptation and interdependent arising.

        

Chaos is the hypostasis—that is, the Divine Ground—of Cosmos. It can be said that Cosmos is continually reasserting itself by drawing from its matrix. Chaos and Cosmos are two sides of the same coin: numinous and immanent Existence. The Boundless and the Measurable. Thus, Cosmos is a place where everything that can happen does happen whether or not it is someone’s idea of permissible. It is not a new concept by any means, it’s just not cool to glorify Chaos in a World where the overwhelming majority of people need structures, blinders, and neat answers to tranquilize them while being herded through cattle stalls and gauntlets toward a meat grinder.
           

Literary dystopias aside, the Age to come is often thought of as a “Golden” one. And that proverbial Golden Age is a revisiting of a time when everything was everyone’s idea of perfect. The kicker is that the Golden Age redux is an era in which everyone is perfectly conscious, willful, and complicated, instead of automatons like they were when things were perfect and simple.  Underlying the concept is the kvetch that consciousness got us into this mess, and consciousness will get us out—once consciousness evolves beyond the limitations of the human-animal nervous system. How to imminentize it into immanence is the question and is in the realm of mysticism and occultism, not social politics.

        

The truth of the matter is that the Golden Age of a past or future doesn’t occur in Time or culture. It is the phenomenon of self-actualization. It occurs in select persons and has done so since hominids became self-conscious and thus were evicted from Golden Age National Park and cast adrift in the Sea of Samsara. Being a potential and a continuum, it is always now or never. There is no place to go to retrieve the Golden Age either in memory or expectation.

        

The New Aeon, thus, is not a time but an idiom that promotes the aspiration of self-actualization. In the context of occultism and mysticism, it is the glorification of Personal Gnosis, which is a recurring and subversive act in the annals of history.  It is an ideal, which is the liberation of consciousness.

        

It is not necessary to deny anything. It is only necessary to know ourselves. Then we will naturally seek that which is needful to our being. Our significance does not lie in the extent to which we resemble others or in the extent to which we differ from them. It lies within our ability to be ourselves. This may well be the entire object of life; to discover ourselves, our meaning. This does not come in a sudden burst of illumination; it is a constant process which continues so long as we are truly alive. The process cannot continue unobstructed unless we are free to undergo all experience and willing to participate in all existence. Then the significant questions are not “is it right” or “is it good” but rather “how does it feel” and “what does it mean.” Ultimately these are the only questions that can approach truth but they cannot be asked in the absence of freedom.

—Jack Parsons,  Freedom is a Two-Edged Sword:

Selected bibliography

Peter Carroll. Liber Null & Psychonaut. San Francisco: Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. 1987.

Aleister Crowley. Liber Oz. http://www.hermetic.com/crowley/libers/lib77.html. Accessed June 17, 2013.

Jack W. Parsons. Freedom is a Two Edged Sword.  Reno, Nevada: New Falcon Publications, 2001.

The Principia Discordia. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tilt/principia/body.html#greyface. Accessed June17, 2013.

Wikipedia entry on Eric Voegelin. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Voegelin.  Accessed June 17, 2013.

Excerpt from Chapter 20 A Snake in the Grass from The Savior at the End of Time Book 3 in the Sorcerers and Magi Series

About 42 days after his confrontation with Lord Consul Tau-Bridge, Zosi began to be spotted in flamboyantly full ceremonial regalia within the Mercury Gardens. He would wear a tunic of thick raw silk and tightly fitted, black leggings that were made of tanned leather and full of straps and whips of lacings. Over this, he would wear high boots that matched a mottled, purple-black tanned leather cope embossed with images of ourobori, moondragons, and griffins. His hair was meticulously plaited and decorated with pins and ribbons. His head was topped with a black double-cone hat that was rakishly crimped and folded over so that the tips of the horn-like cones, embellished with opalescent jingle bells, menacingly flounced and jangled in front of his face. He wielded a rather large and tall staff, the core of which was made of slender poles of cedar and fennel stalks. It was wrapped in embossed leather that matched his ensemble. Like a sinister maypole, the staff’s leather sheath was itself wrapped in a filigreed design of cords and leather straps on which gadgets and flotsam were affixed and that dangled, flail- and cat-o-nine-tails-like, from the staff’s finial, which was a gold spearhead in the shape of a fish with an acorn protruding from its mouth.

Like that, he would stroll about the Gardens and then stop here or there to deliver a sermon that attracted larger and larger crowds as word of the spectacle grew.

He would begin the rant in a gentle voice with the words, “See the illumination at the center of being,” and materialize some small sparkly object that would fascinate and mesmerize onlookers.

“The body and all phenomena arise causally and provisionally within absolute being,” he would continue, yet still in a very meek and quiet voice. It would be trembling and barely audible despite his ferocious appearance. “There is no time and no dimension to space, both being mere adaptive projections of mind. The personality is an interdependently arising construction of circumstances and experiences, driven by reactivity bred by conditioning devoid of awareness or true will. What is it to wake up from the idea of yourself? Heaven, hell, God, the Adversary, pleasure, pain, and all the pairs of opposites are projections of your own consciousness. You project ideas out of yourself. Treating them as independent entities, you go into them, fear them, and allow them to have power over you although they are your own creations. No one is there to deliver you; you must deliver yourself. Glimpse self-effacement and the root of your existence. Reality is silent, blissful, self-composed Being. This is the Redemptive Principle, the Christos, the Ground, and the Life beneath the mechanism.”

Then he would walk off to another part of the Gardens and say it again even though people weren’t really listening and hardly understood him; they were just grooving on being part of the show and the very groovy euphoric feeling Zosimo’s magical words incited in them.

But finally, one day, in a rather ballsy display, Zosimo materialized several wheel barrels of fried cod fish and sugar-dusted zeppoli, which his Inchaote acolytes distributed throughout the Gardens.

The spectacle drew a multitude of gawkers, most of whom very festively reveled in being part of the scene. Few in authority were much concerned with Zosi’s banter—quasi-Buddhist transcendent drivel that would awe the needy masses and teach them to be resigned and endure circumstance, but philosophically so. The fried fish and dough balls catering endeavor was a weird Discordian metaphor.

Toward the latter part of the day, however, an outbreak of explosive diarrhea hit every Senate member who had not earlier partaken of fried fish and dough. And it was no silly prank but a violent attack, lethal in nature, leaving several magistrates—including Tau-Bridge—with shit extruding from every orifice: blind, deaf, choked, tortured, and incapacitated in stink and waste.

At the same moment, every locked-in person across five sovereignties within Terra Novit woke up. Both meek and menacing, novice and adept, innocent and fiend, without judge or judgment, merit or demerit, without any distinction or categorization, they woke up and were tasked with helping each other break out of the places in which they had been confined.

                       

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