Oh this is a crazy episode! We go from 0-60 mph today! We talk invasion of the body snatchers, Magick vs Magic, Rudolph Steiner and Secret Brotherhoods, Thomas Kuhn and paradigms, Tony Wright's left brain right brain paradox, Rupert Sheldrake's take on materialism, and the fact that there really is no history! And I give you some great films to watch to better understand our dilemma, while I "diss" a a guest on Joe Rogan who happens to be an American theoretical physicist, mathematician, and string theorist. Yes I do! I and I do not apologise!
Rudolph Steiner
https://www.bookdepository.com/Secret-Brotherhoods-Rudolf-Steiner/9781855841628?redirected=true&selectCurrency=AUD&w=AF45AU963KVN5XA8V9R0&gclid=Cj0KCQiA8ICOBhDmARIsAEGI6o2Jw1Rj3WJjXOSjokUAfhHzLOBpgKFYa26-yBBXnRGb18zP_S6OnIsaAhJSEALw_wcB
Tony Wright
https://www.booktopia.com.au/return-to-the-brain-of-eden-tony-wright/book/9781620552513.html?source=pla&gclid=Cj0KCQiA8ICOBhDmARIsAEGI6o3NSXBUqEHL-3Xl6oSIeFsiY-o-mDxocHEqL15r7fFzazXCMLnSHCQaAohcEALw_wcB
Jeremy Nadler
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071XJSZWV/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
Ruper Sheldrake
https://www.amazon.com/Science-Spiritual-Practices-Transformative-Experiences-ebook/dp/B079NXTHRB/ref=sr_1_3?crid=2BSY3A0FV2KHZ&keywords=Rupert+Sheldrake+science&qid=1640070319&s=digital-text&sprefix=rupert+sheldrake+scienc%2Cdigital-text%2C460&sr=1-3
Transcription:
Hello, Lovelies. Today, we will go from zero to sixty because a brother from another mother is also feeling up the metaphorical elephant, and I have a piece of the puzzle that I want to give him. So if I have to explain it to him, I may as well explain it to you. But, you know, I can't help but think that elephant will get lucky one day, hahaha! Oh my!
Let me paint you a little word picture if you would be kind enough to indulge me. In so doing, I hope to make a point. I'm doing it for demonstration purposes only, and it doesn't mean that I think it's true, but I certainly think it's interesting. So here goes.
Imagine for a moment that humanity had a parasite, a parasite that is Arahmanic and Mephistophelian in nature. Now I'm going to stop right there as I had to look up both of those words. They are kind of big words, right? Mephistophelian is wicked and fiendish, and Arahmanic is the antagonist, a spirit of darkness and evil in Zoroastrianism. So now, let's imagine that the human soul does not entirely fill up the human meat suit. So there's a little bit of extra room in there. And before birth, this parasite sneaks into the human body and resides there alongside the human soul for human life. Interestingly, this parasite operates in the non-physical realm at a subconscious level, and it's very, very smart.
If you were a non-material, subconscious, brilliant creature and did not want to be discovered, how would you do that? How would you hide or guarantee at least that humans would have a hard time finding you? Is there a way you could stop humans from looking for you in the place where you hide? Could you put restrictions on your human hosts, for example, where they're allowed or not allowed to look or not look, if your host ever became suspicious that something might be going on? Perhaps you would create a prison, not a physical prison of cement and steel, still, a metaphorical prison of ideas, concepts, society, and culture that would prevent your host from looking over there. "Nothing to see here, folks!"
When I tell people that I'm interested in magic, I always get the, "Oh, can you do a trick for me?", and I'm like, no, no, no, not that kind of magic, the other kind of magic? But consider this for a moment, the other type of magic, stage magic that I do not do, relies on powerful psychological illusion. The magician creates their tricks by exploiting gaps and errors in our conscious experience. So, for example, magicians use misdirection to manipulate what you attend to, allowing them to control what you see and what you miss. Doesn't that sound like something you might do if you're a brilliant, Ahrimanic, Mephistopheles, and clever parasite? Isn't that precisely what you might do? I know this sounds all very invasion of the Body Snatchers, but I bought it up for two reasons.
The first reason is that Rudolf Steiner, the person that introduced me to this concept, made it very clear that this information has been suppressed from humanity for the straightforward reason that the secret brotherhoods do not believe that humanity is mature enough to handle the truth. He also believes that now is the time, well, one hundred years ago, was the time when this information needed to filter into humanity. So there you go. Rudolph, I did my part.
But more than that, I brought it up because it paints a fascinating picture. If these beings did exist, did they, in fact, create a paradigm prison for humanity, or did humans make it for themselves. For example, Tony Wright, a great researcher, looks at the development of the left and right hemispheres of the brain as we left the tropical rainforest and how, as a result of this migration, our brain evolved pathologically. You have to check him out on Youtube.
Or, as Tobias Turton points out, it could have started with the Enlightenment. He says it's more appropriate to call it the great blackout, but The Enlightenment could have been the beginning of this materialistic prison paradigm as well. But regardless of how it started, it is also the precise requirements of a paradigm prison that prevents humanity from seeing, understanding, or accessing their magic.
So let me get into what a paradigm is. I went to see Rupert Sheldrake in London just before COVID, and I was very blessed to spend some time with him. He elaborated on the way science works within paradigms. He explained that Thomas Kuhn famously put forward in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that science is centered on the idea of a paradigm, which is a set of theories and methods that the scientific community accepts as unproblematic. The paradigm determines the way that scientific discipline views the world. It sets the standard for good and bad science, and it isn't criticized except during phases of crisis that may lead to a scientific revolution and a paradigm shift.
The paradigm is basically a shared model of reality, at any given time, sets limits on what fits in it. Rupert further explained that science is dominated by the materialistic theory of nature and consciousness, which says that the only reality is material matter. That means the very existence of consciousness is problematic, and that's why it's called the hard problem in the Philosophy of Mind. "The very fact that we're conscious is a problem because we ought not to be according to materialism. For example, the materialist theory says that minds are nothing but the activity of brains; therefore, phenomena like telepathy and precognition ought not to happen. Yet they do. So within our paradigm, the evidence for these things is embarrassing and would overthrow the paradigm if true. So the way most scientists react to this is to pretend that something like this doesn't exist. The evidence is pushed under the carpet. It's all discredited and classified as pseudoscience and so on. "
But it's not just our science that paradigms affect. It affects our faith. It affects our belief in what we can do and what we can't do to heal ourselves. It affects so many things! Later, I will show you how paradigms influence history by looking specifically at the history of ancient Egypt.
But hey, since we've already gone down the body snatcher rabbit hole, let's go down another, and let's bend our minds even further. I want to go out on a limb and make the statement that history doesn't exist. Now, I know that that sounds like a radical claim, but I'm not alone in it.
R.G Collingwood, a British historian, and philosopher thinks it's only common sense. What we perceive as the past is simply an illusion formed in our brains. The past used to exist, but it no longer does. Akhenaten doesn't exist anymore, and neither does your childhood. The only thing that is real is the present. But if only the present is real, then what are historians studying, or for that matter, what the hell am I making documentaries about?
Historians study the only thing they could be looking at: the present right, the archives, the archaeological objects or ancient texts, or even books by other historians. So the historian is always investigating things in the present, in the now, and from these present things, Collingwood tells us the historian constructs history. He studies the texts, artifacts, ruins, and so on. And in that way, he creates an idea of what, say, ancient Egypt looked like. So it follows then that history is just an idea that the historian constructs. The historian's job is to create a narrative that makes maximal sense of all the historical traces he finds in the present. History, then, is a story that the historian tells to understand what he sees in the present. History is just a story.
Now, that's interesting to me because on our Magical Egypt Facebook Page, there are, on occasion, pretty angry people. They're mad that we are not telling the history the way they would like it to be told. And in the beginning, before I realized that history is just a story, I used to get defensive about it because I liked John Anthony West's story. I liked it a lot. And it made a lot of sense to me. But that doesn't mean that John's story makes sense to everybody. And so now I say if you don't like that story, make up your own story because history is just a story.
So how does that work, exactly? How does one create a narrative that explains historical events? What does the historian have to add to the bare facts to generate his story? Well, this is where it gets interesting.
The most influential philosopher of history in the early 19th century, and maybe ever, was George William Frederick Hegel. Hegel believed that nobody could escape from their present time to take a position outside of history. So our point in time shapes how we think and how we are in history, time, society, and culture.
So history sits within the paradigm. The same thing with science, so then, if that is the case, we should be able to look at ancient Egypt throughout time, throughout paradigms, and see how the history of ancient Egypt was written under different paradigms, thereby revealing the different paradigms, breaking us free from the restrictions of believing in only one paradigm. To demonstrate this, I am going to walk us through a little bit of history and show you how that works.
When the Rosetta stone was found during the Napoleonic era, ancient Egypt was held in the highest regard. According to Jeremy Nadler in Shamanic Wisdom in the Pyramid Texts: The Mystical Tradition of Ancient Egypt, Ancient Egypt was seen as harboring a tradition of deep wisdom that was the inspirational fount of Greek religion, mythology and philosophy - particularly Platonism and Hermeticism. In 1799 this knowledge of Egypt depended on ancient commentators such as Plutarch, Diodorus, Iamblichus, and Aristotle. According to Aristotle, Egypt was "the cradle of mathematics," and the priests of Egypt invented geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy. Other ancient sources testified that prominent Greek thinkers like Thales, Pythagoras, and Plato learned their philosophy and science from the Egyptians.
It was 20 years, however, before Jean-François Champollion announced the transliteration of the Egyptian scripts in Paris in 1822, and with that Egyptology was born with early Egyptologists like Champollion, de Rougé, and Brugsch holding a great reverence for Egypt as the source of a sublime metaphysics and theology, but this view was not to last. On the contrary, the opinions held of the ancient Egyptians by the Egyptological establishment were about to embark on a steady decline.
By the turn of the century, earlier views of Egypt were displaced by a far more critical approach as Egyptology established itself as a professional academic discipline. Egyptologists like Maspero and Erman's views differed markedly from the earlier "romantics" describing the Ancients as "semi barbarians, and 'compilers of spells ." To many of the first generation of scholars, the sacred literature of ancient Egypt seemed so muddled, haphazard, and obscure that any residual hopes of rediscovering some "forgotten wisdom" or "secret knowledge" came to seem a foolish endeavor. Thus it was concluded that the ancient Egyptian mind was "pre-philosophical", incapable of coherent or systematic thought and given to expressing itself in rather crude imagery.
For much of the twentieth century, this view of the ancient Egyptian mind largely remained the dominant one among Egyptologists. That Egyptians, far from being the guardians of secret wisdom, were an ignorant lot who had not yet discovered philosophy of science.
As Egyptologist B. L. Goff wrote in the late 1970's, "In ancient Egypt, as also elsewhere in the ancient world, there was no knowledge of consistent laws governing the operation of everything around us".
In the second part of the twentieth century, however, the view of the ancient Egyptian mind as "pre-philosophical" and incapable of accessing worthwhile knowledge became less and less sustainable.
A growing rift thus emerged between "mainstream" Egyptology and "outsiders" who usually did not have a formal qualification in Egyptology and could easily be dismissed as cranks. Foremost among the latter was R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz. Despite his detailed study of ancient Egyptian mathematics's theoretical principles and practical applications in The Temple Of Man, he remained virtually ignored by the Egyptological establishment. When The Temple in Man ( Le Temple de l'Homme) first appeared in French in 1957, the eminent Egyptologist Etienne Drioton counseled his colleagues to "build a common wall of silence" around it lest it find its way out into public view. With just a few notable exceptions, that injunction was obeyed within Egyptology itself.
Schwaller's observations and esteem for the ancient Egyptians might have been lost to obscurity had not John Anthony West published Serpent in the Sky in 1979. As Peter Tompkins writes in the forward to this book, "In the current joust between materialist and metaphysician, with admirers of the former screaming for blood from the latter, John Anthony West has taken up the banner in support of the Alsatian philosopher R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz. The thesis of de Lubicz, lucidly developed by West that the builders of ancient Egypt had a far more sophisticated understanding of metaphysics and the laws that govern man and this universe than most Egyptologists have been willing to admit. It is a striking thesis, but unpopular with orthodox scholars who have deliberately ignored it for twenty years, though they proffer no argument against it other than that it contravenes accepted dogma."
Serpent in the Sky presented a now revolutionary, exhaustively documented reinterpretation of the civilization of ancient Egypt. West showed that Egyptian science, medicine, mathematics, and astronomy were of an exponentially higher order of refinement and sophistication than modern scholars will acknowledge. Ultimately, West's book inspired and comprised a significant portion of the Magical Egypt documentary series that would spread this knowledge about ancient Egypt even further into the modern world. And I think we can say that he was a massive success in shifting the paradigm about the wisdom of ancient Egypt.
Now I'm hoping that through that little history lesson, courtesy of Jeremy Nadler, you can see clearly how the history written about ancient Egypt depended upon the paradigm within which it was written. Paradigms can be incredibly dangerous things and also incredibly funny. As an example, I am a big fan of Joe Rogan, and he recently had an eminent materialistic scientist who is a leader within our current paradigm. Joe asked the scientist how long human beings had been pondering the scope of the universe? The scientist answered that it was really pretty recently? "If you think about the beginnings of modern physics, you know, you can start with Galileo and start with Newton. But in any event, we're talking on the order of hundreds of years. And the amazing thing is that in hundreds of years, we've gone from a complete lack of understanding about how anything in the world works to the development of Newton's equations......" and he goes on and on.
Way to go Brian! I want to see him build a pyramid. Hmm. I mean, is that seriously the most ignorant thing that you've ever heard? I don't know. I'm speechless. But this is why paradigms are dangerous.
And to bring this all back to magick, magick "doesn't exist" within the material realm. Or, more accurately, magick cannot be apprehended within the rules of the materialistic paradigm. And so, there is no wonder why it is such an alien concept to people that people don't believe in it.
I love Gordon White, an author of fabulous books and the host of the Rune Soup podcast. When I interviewed him about the subject of magick, he made a very adroit observation that magick has been with humanity as long as there has been humanity, except for the last two hundred years or so. He further explained that our materialistic culture trying to understand the least materialistic culture of all time, ancient Egypt is nothing but a fool's game. And so it's no surprise at all that we look at the ancient Egyptians and miss an essential part of their culture.
Now, I would like to suggest two movies as homework for you to look at because they do a fantastic job painting a picture of the effects of paradigm on a culture. The first one is Lobster, and I love the Lobster because, in the Lobster, you have a story about an everyday human civilization with a different paradigm than ours. And so things that we would take as absolutely usual would be completely strange to them. And the things that they take are entirely normal are definitely strange to us. So it just paints a beautiful juxtaposition that is very demonstrative about how much a paradigm can affect your culture.
The other one that I saw last night was great as well, and it is called The Giver, and The Giver is a story about a culture in the future that, a culture with amnesia, as collectively they have had their memories stolen from them. So the movie starts in black and white as they have this perfect, dystopian, authoritarian, totalitarian, happy, happy joy, joy, existence. But, at the same time, there exists one man, The Keeper of the memories, and it's his job to hold all the memories, for good and for ill, within the community, and then pass on the memories to the recruit that will eventually take his position. So as this young recruit gains access to memories of humanity, his paradigm changes, and he becomes initiated into a whole new meaning of what it is to be human. This idea speaks very deeply to me because we are also a civilization with amnesia, and we have had so much of what it means to be human stripped from us. And just like in the movie, when we have access once again to the full range of what it means to be human, our lives become so much richer.
So what have we learned? What have we learned in this exciting episode of Magic Works? The first thing is that we may or may not be victims of Body Snatchers. And honestly, I don't know if that's true or not. But, unfortunately, I have not been able to find theosophists that I've been able to engage in a meaningful manner about that material.
Next, we learned that we as shaped by our paradigm, our history is shaped by our paradigm, our science, our health care, the way we relate to each other, the way we relate to the planet are all shaped by our paradigm and paradigms. Things that do not fit within a particular paradigm are made fun of and stuffed under the carpet, for better or for worse. And in our case, I contend that the things that have been stuffed under the carpet do not serve us to be stuffed under the carpet. These include our interconnectedness with each other, the planet, and nature and can only be improved by expanding our paradigm to include non-physical forces of all kinds, which will get into in another episode.
So I hope you enjoyed this episode of Magick Works, and I hope you don't think I'm crazy. But hey, it is what it is. More to come if you can stand it.
Thank you so much.
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