The War on Consciousness - Graham Hancock

After Skool

"What is death? Our materialist science reduces everything to matter, materialist science in the West says that we are just meat, we’re just our bodies. So when the brain is dead, that’s the end of consciousness, there is no life after death, there is no soul; we just rot and are gone. Actually, many honest scientists should admit that consciousness is the greatest mystery of science and that we don’t know exactly how it works. The brain is involved in it some way but we’re not sure how. It could be that the brain generates consciousness the way a generator makes electricity, if you hold to that paradigm, then of course you can’t believe in life after death, when the generator’s broken, consciousness is gone. But it’s equally possible that the relationship — and nothing in neuroscience rules it out – that the relationship is more like the relationship of the TV signal to the TV set, and in that case, when the TV set is broken, of course the TV signal continues. 

And this is the paradigm of all spiritual traditions, that we are immortal souls temporarily incarnated in these physical forms. If we want to understand consciousness, the last people we should ask are materialist scientists. Instead, we should look at ancient cultures, like the Egyptians, who highly valued dream states. Many ancient cultures around the world used hallucinogenic plants to understand consciousness and expand their minds. However in today's society, visionary plants are highly illegal because they promote a state of consciousness that does not agree with the agenda of profit.

Substances, like coffee, alcohol, sugar and pharmaceuticals, are forced upon the population, but possession of even small quantities of cannabis, Ayahuasca or psilocybin will land you in jail. If we do not recognize the right of adult sovereignty over consciousness, then we can NOT claim to be free. Look at what our moderns state of consciousness has done. We have destroyed the natural gifts of earth in pursuit of short-term, selfish gain. We must reconnect with spirit immediately or else we will encounter disaster. Visionary plants could be the remedy for our current sickness."

Kindling the divine spark within you

Tim Boucher
New Dawn

Blessed is he who has a soul, blessed is he who has none, but woe and grief to him who has it in embryo.¹ - G.I. Gurdjieff 

The United States Declaration of Independence proudly proclaims the mystical truth that "all men are created equal." What happens after that, though, is anybody's guess. Once we've been created equally, does that mean all our lives are the same? Do the essential differences between us come from genetics, environment, free will, the soul? Do we all end up in the same place again when we die? These questions have excited the myth-making faculties of humankind from antiquity down through to the present day.

Working for a Soul

The esoteric teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff, in many ways, fly in the face of traditional Western religious thought. Whereas it is accepted as a given within Judeo-Christian tradition that each human is born with a soul, Gurdjieff does not let us off so easy. Active in the early part of the 20th century, this Greek-Armenian mystic travelled the world, synthesising spiritual disciplines into a unique path called The Fourth Way. He taught that human existence is a kind of waking sleep, in which we live more or less automatically, unconscious and unaware of ourselves. He even went to the extreme of suggesting that humans are not born with souls at all, and that we can only create one while alive through intense personal suffering and what he called "work." If we are not successful in this venture, he taught that our identities would not survive the shock of death, that we would "die like dogs" and that the ever-hungry Moon would gobble up our energy as part of its own evolution of consciousness.

It's a teaching which sounds strange to most people today, but which was perhaps more common to the ancient world. Consider the words of the Gospel of Philip, an ancient Gnostic codex recovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945:

Those who say they will die first and then rise are in error. If they do not first receive the resurrection while they live, when they die they will receive nothing.²

Like the other Gnostic texts recovered at Nag Hammadi, this type of information was declared heretical, banned and except for in a few lucky cases, completely destroyed by the early Catholic Church in an effort to consolidate both its teachings and its power structure. The Catholic story-system pivots around the idea that we will be resurrected at the end of time, not transmuted to higher levels of understanding and awareness here in our lifetimes. The Gnostic texts, on the other hand, seem to teach that humans are born with a spark of divinity which can either be left undeveloped or guarded and fanned into a full-on blaze.

With the popularity of books like the Da Vinci Code, and a renewed interest in Gnosticism, many people today are left wondering why these alternative esoteric Christian teachings were so viciously eradicated. Who benefits by suppressing this ancient gnosis, and what happens to those of us left in the dark as a result?

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Sufism and the Way of Blame

 
Reality Sandwich

The following is excerpted from Sufism and the Way of Blame: The Hidden Sources of a Sacred Psychology, available from Quest Books.


J. G. Bennett was convinced that Gurdjieff's greatest influence came from a group of proto-Naqshbandis in Central Asia, a brotherhood later verified by HasanŞuşud as the Khwajagan, or Masters. Idries Shah implied that his own perspective was influenced by the Khwajagan-Naqshbandiyya. Moreover, the father of Idries, Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, was also known to have contacts among Afghan Sufis, some of whom (according to Robert Darr) were still active members of the Khwajagan.

HasanŞuşud, a rather enigmatic Sufi in Istanbul, had disguised his former affiliation with the Naqshbandiyya and with another group that referred to itself as the Nuriyya-Malamatiyya (in Turkish, Nuriyye-Melamiyye). He had revealed that he had a rather low opinion of Gurdjieff as a "thief of the tradition." It is hard to tell which tradition Şuşud was referring to, although he probably meant the Khwajagan or the malamatiyya, or both of them comingled together.

A common element that tied together Gurdjieff, the Shah family, Bennett, and Şuşud was that all of them referred to the Masters of Central Asia. All of them also posited that the Khwajagan had functioned as a rather elite group within greater Sufism; yet all of them, with the exception of Şuşud, seem to have deviated from the central teachings of Sufism, which emphasized the nothingness of human beings next to God. Instead, the followers of Gurdjieff, Bennett, and Idries Shah would all continue to promote a form of occult elitism that emphasized a hidden hierarchy in Sufism composed of superhumans who operated beyond, behind, or outside of normative Sufism and Islam. And this idea was inimical to the original teachings of the Khwajagan.

Ibn al-Arabi had also referred to a hierarchy among saints, at the pinnacle of which were the blameworthy (malamiyya, or malamatis). But rather than promoting a form of elitism, he and other classical Sufis claimed that malamatis hid themselves among the common people. A question that remains is whether or not the Khwajagan and the people of blame were somehow associated with each other, and if so whether or not they shared common characteristics. To attempt to answer this question requires a less fantastical examination of the early malamatis and the Khwajagan, who appear to be separate. So, to begin with, what was the original "path of blame"? [...]