Demons inside the Safe Room
A Few Thoughts on the 2nd Matrix & the Pitfalls of Belief
(A free post, inspired by/extracted from the recent Jobcast with Derek T.)
I haven’t tried to live Castaneda’s teachings for 20 years, but I did recently try to apply some of them in my next book (Crucial Fictions). One thing led to another, and since then I have felt compelled to look more closely at how I have internalized some of these ideas.
When ideas get inside us, which they invariably do, it is not enough to adopt some sort of external structure of belief to protect us from them. That’s like putting on a hazmat suit when you’re already infected.
What makes ideas bad is as much, or more, to do with how they are applied than their essential nature. Truth is a matter of active embodiment, not mere cognitive apprehension. Occultism promises personal power, and so its adherents commit to it. Christianity promises salvation, so, in a similar way, its adherents commit to it.
The underlying impulse may be the same.
Noticing (“the JQ”)
The Judaic system of thought control—to give it a loaded term—may be the operating system of the western world. Insofar as this is the case, it is precisely for this reason that it’s very, very difficult to fathom the depth of “the JQ.”
What many people haven’t noticed about “noticing” is how much the landscape has changed around “the JQ.” When I was writing my series “Stories We Tell Ourselves,” 2.5 years ago, it was about the Holocaust™ as the defining myth of the 20th century, and the Jews as the chosen people, again, chosen now as the ultimate victims and granted complete protection and power in the new geopolitical landscape (with Israel as the new instrument of Anglo-American power in the Middle East).
Part of the evidence of such a geopolitical hegemony was the idea of Holocaust Denial™—i.e., if you question the defining myth, you get thrown in jail.
I was interested in “the JQ” just as the JQ: what are we not allowed to say about “the Jews” and why? But now we are allowed to say pretty much anything. It’s becoming viral, and the scales have tipped.
At a simple, surface level, when Israel was created, the ultimate victims became the victimizers. They scapegoated the Palestinians, and eventually (i.e, in te months are October 7th, 2023) they began to take it too far. Now it’s open season on Israel (and, by less-than-logical extension, “the Jews”). Now they’re fair game for scapegoating again.
This means that, potentially, they can get re-empowered for being scapegoated! Back and forth it goes.
What really interests me around “the JQ,” however, is the religious question: in what way, or for what reasons, were the Judaists complicit with, or instrumental in, Jesus being crucified? And how does that relate to Jesus himself being opposed to Judaism?
The Candace Owens thing
Conspiratainment is like a Saturday morning cartoon adaptation of an ancient philosophical text. It may include some of the main facts, and make them user-friendly, but it does so at a high price. What is multidimensional becomes 2D. Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson’s 2nd Matrix version of “the JQ” is a Saturday morning cartoon. Good for laughs, but not much else.
Yet many people feel they’re being empowered by this pseudo-knowledge. They think they’ve got the keys, or that Candice Owens has got them anyway: the missing pieces. She even gets people to believe she’s Catholic. Who knows, maybe she even believes it herself?
There’s true religious understanding, which is extremely rare, and then there’s superstition, which is everywhere. Most people that are Christian now are really just superstitious. Contemporary Christianity may be a useful way of further confounding people and making them confused about subtler realities. What Derek T. called “an institution of confusion.”
Tucker Carson has been talking about demons a lot later, and Rod Dreher was trying to convince him to get exorcised. Carlson said thanks, I’ll do it my way; now Rod Dreher thinks Carlson is possessed by demons.
Belief in Miracles
Many Catholics and regular Christians believe in the virgin birth as a biological event. They believe in the miracles of Jesus, water into wine, feeding of the 5000, etc, as physical events. Yet at the temptation, Christ said No to turning stones into bread; so why would he do the equivalent for others? It seems inconsistent. (The miraculous healings and exorcisms are a different sort of “miracle”; even the resurrections are ambiguous.)
For the more and more materialistic modern mindset to retain faith, Christians have to literalize those teachings and update them into a modern context. Those stories could be literally true, but not in the way we think of as literal now.
There was a subtler sense of things back then, where today we’re more and more confined to material reduction viewpoint. Our consciousness has evolved, and central to that evolution is a deepening immersion in materialism that feeds the need for material miracles (i.e., superstition).
Christianity becomes more and more superstitious within a modern framework—both from the point of view of material reductionism and (ironically) from the perspective of a subtler spiritual awareness.
Rudolf Steiner spoke about how the Catholic Church established itself as a form of defense against Gnostic ideas, which were recognized as dangerous because most people weren’t ready for that level of knowledge, or for exposure to these realities. In this context, Christianity has always been a kind of protective buffer, a prophylactic against “the occult.” It serves to prevent most people from encountering things they’re not ready for—including, or especially, certain realities.
Demons “Я” Us
Jesus was an exorcist. He was handling demonic beings. Since even the apostles in the gospels couldn’t do it, it seems safe to assume that most Christians are not ready for handling demons. Yet today, all of these alt-media Christians are “paranoid-aware” or “conspiracy-conscious.” “Red-pilled.” They are talking more and more about demons and conspiracies as if they knew what they were talking about. (Watch the clip above of Rod Dreher claiming “I do have a demonology,” and tell me you would want Rod cleansing your temple.)
It is as if they believe being inside the “orthodox” church is going to keep them safe from demons, and so they’re letting the demons into the cognitive space that’s supposed to keep them safe from demons. They are huddling down inside the safe room—the beliefs, institutions, and superstitions—which they’ve let the demons take over. It is a form of double-think.
A broader term for superstition is gullibility.
Empty Mimetics
To give a more visceral example, imagine a small child who witnesses its parents having sex, then goes and re-enacts what they’ve seen. They think they’re reproducing it, but how can they when they don’t understand what it was they saw?
People are engaged in all manner of weird rituals today in the hopelessly naive attempt to replicate an actual technology which they’ve only ever seen the effects of.
It was hard enough for me to build a goat barn and get it right. Why would I ever think I could somehow apply profound occult principles, or spiritual ideas, and not come a cropper? Why would Christians trust church authorities to show them how to do it, when it’s evident the church is a captured institution?
Now apply this to the technology of the internet. We have been given something we haven’t designed, and that we don’t understand how it works. We think we can play around with it because we can see others doing it. But all we see are the effects.
So it becomes increasingly more likely that the technology is playing with us.
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