We have

entered a period of epistemological chaos. The true condition of our

world, indeed the very nature of our phenomenal reality, including

agreement regarding the meaning of knowledge itself, is completely up

for grabs. Not only are we witnessing rapid paradigm shifts and schisms

within mainstream science, but also, and more dangerously, the

politically motivated suppression of authentic discoveries and insights

has led to epistemological blowback on every front. Every established

authority has been de-legitimized. This has led to the rise of a new

and unprecedented kind of discourse, which can be categorized as

psychotic knowledge.

To call it psychotic is not to

disparage it, but to recognize that such knowledge is produced by

ripping apart the fabric of consensual reality. What pours through that

tear in the discourse of conventional sanity may be brilliant with

lucid transcendental insight and it may equally be speckled with

nuggets of paranoid fantasy and archetypal imagery serving the

narcissistic ego. It is psychotic from the perspective of the hegemonic

paradigm that cannot permit multiple realities that elude the control

and deny the legitimacy of the materialist construct. Coping with the

accelerating explosion of psychotic knowledge, and the general

contamination of the current information deluge with every sort of

misinformation and disinformation, will become ever more challenging.

It may, therefore, be useful to establish some guidelines that will

enable us to maintain our sanity while remaining open to new horizons

of possibility.

We can trace this problem back to the

period immediately following the Second World War, when the government

of the United States created a national security establishment and a

general secrecy state. The geostrategic push to gain total hegemony

over all global political actors had to remain covert. More and more

information became classified as top secret, not only in areas of

normal politics, but also in the sciences. Some of this rush to

restrict the flow of information was a response to the intrusion of

alien spacecraft into our skies. Since the government had no adequate

response to this threat, the existence of such entities had to be

denied and ridiculed. Many careers of honest observers of such

phenomena were destroyed by that disinformation campaign.

The secret levels of government soon

overshadowed the public government and turned it into a mere front for

the actually ruling powers. This opened the field for conspiracy

theories, many with a high level of credibility. Challenges to the

secret government occurred from time to time from within Congress or

the White House. This led to limited revelations of horrifying criminal

acts on the part of the secret government against its own people as

well as on a global level. Most of the challenges to the secret

government were successfully squelched, however, leaving a wake of

assassinations, suspicious deaths, smear campaigns, vindictive

prosecutions, and other forms of intimidation.

As time went on, it became clear that

not only was the government holding out on the people, but the

scientific elites were as well. Mainstream medicine, for example, lost

its credibility when it became recognized that many treatments were

motivated by profit margins rather than curative efficacy. In an even

more general way, the entire system of information distribution,

through the major media, lost its credibility when it became recognized

that the news media serve the secrecy establishment rather than

challenge it. The public's alienation from the actual conspiracy by

mainstream media to prevent the release of true information reached new

highs after 9/11. The capitulation of the media, in turn, has led to

the use of the internet as an information source inviting ever more

independent efforts of whistle-blowing, epitomized by the recent

wikileaks phenomenon.

But another pillar of knowledge control

that has fallen is that of religion. To understand the import of this

epochal change, we must go back in history to the establishment of

Christianity as the official state religion of the Roman Empire. We

must focus particularly on the year 325 A.D. (and keep in mind that

even the calendar and its dating of the years is an artificial

political convention that upholds a specific paradigm of knowledge, in

this case that of Christendom). In that year, the Council of Nicaea

established official orthodox doctrine. Anyone who dared to think

differently from then on was subject to being referred to the office of

the Inquisition, which had many well-known ways of changing one's mind,

including that of terminating one's heresy through salvation with

extreme prejudice. The current practices of official torture are simply

a continuation of the program begun long ago in the name of our God of

Love.

Not only was the canon defended by

cannon, and the sword of knowledge backed by the sword of steel, that

would now go on to convert the heathen to the same narrow line of

thought, but more significantly, the new regime of orthodox knowledge

suppressed the use of natural psychoactive substances such as

psilocybin-containing mushrooms, that had been part of the original

Gnostic psycho-technology of awakening. Much of the ideological effort

of social control from then on went to criminalizing and demonizing the

use of mind-altering substances, as well as even more natural

mind-altering processes such as meditation. Mind control efforts

invaded the deepest levels of our consciousness, by establishing the

very words of the prayers that were allowed to be offered to God in the

privacy of our own minds. In fact, the purpose of religion was to

eliminate all privacy of mind. People eventually became fearful even

of inner silence and peace!

Similar regimes of orthodoxy ruled

other religious traditions as well. Historically, only in India was

freedom of thought allowed, and that only among a single class of

people: the yogis. The teachers and practitioners of yoga remained

outside the system of vedic doctrine and the control of the Brahmin

caste. The great liberated yogis did not fear the brahminical system,

and the system recognized its need of yogic sages to maintain its own

legitimacy, and so a pax yogica was established. The yogis

could teach their own kind of knowledge, could establish their own

social forms that allowed dropping of gender and caste discrimination,

and could propagate their own lineages of teachings, so long as they

remained in their forest retreats and ashrams, and did not try to

undermine the social system. Eventually, the yogis became incorporated

into the system as its own safety valve. By allowing dissidents to

egress from the system of social control through yogic renunciation,

the society remained remarkably stable throughout the stormy

vicissitudes of history. In this way, the discipline of yoga remained

free of mind control by the clerical elites.

In other regions, however, including

China, the Middle East, and Russia, as well as Western Europe and the

colonized Americas, the effect of suppressing independent thinking led

eventually to the blowback of religious schism and turmoil that

eventually resulted in the overthrow of the dynasties that had reigned

since the ancient times. In Europe, the Protestant Reformation led to

the French Revolution and the bourgeois overthrow of the feudal system.

Capitalism had its own golden age of free thought. But that was soon

controlled by the new priesthood of scientism, applying what Lacan

referred to as "university discourse" on behalf of the class of robber

barons that had gained control of the levers of society. The older

discourse of religion now also bowed to the same masters.

The religious establishments gradually

lost their credibility and their membership dwindled. Newer religious

movements attracted the alienated adherents of the older ones. But each

new movement became co-opted by the same hegemonic forces and lost

their steam. Eventually, it became impossible to launch a successful

challenge to the dominant regime. Even such originally revolutionary

approaches to human understanding as psychoanalysis, which Freud

proudly labeled "a plague," and later, the more transcendentally

oriented Jungian analysis, have been tamed and blunted as instruments

of change, in fact have been largely converted into instruments of

oppression, by the power of the hegemonic masters, through strict

licensing laws and the peer pressures and homogenizing edicts of

professional societies.

Whether in the political realm or in

that of grassroots media or alternative healing approaches or

theoretical science or religion, the power of surveillance and

infiltration by the secret agencies of government and corporate

machinations became so overwhelming, thanks to new technologies, that

every effort to sustain a viable new paradigm was doomed to failure. We

can look back in the U.S. at the wreckage of the black power movement,

NICAP, the socialist parties, the Green Party, Pacifica Radio,

Greenpeace, in fact the whole environmental movement, the political

insurgency of Ralph Nader, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam, and

recognize the futility of confronting the ruling masters with Truth.

This, however, does not mean that the

game has been lost. The deceivers have not gained the victory they

supposed would ensue from total control of the political realm.

Instead, their misguided and malevolent efforts have now led to the

rise of psychotic knowledge. The internet has functioned as the main

instrument of this new and hyper-revolutionary development. Much of

this was presciently foretold in the work of Jean Baudrillard. His

writings were the stimulation and simulacrum behind the film hit known

as The Matrix. And his concept of hyperreality has opened a new level

of critical understanding of the internet's capacity to remake the

collective consciousness.

The internet is necessary as an

instrument of surveillance, but it comes at the price of unregulated

communication. And because the internet functions in the realm of the

hyperreal, of virtual reality rather than ordinary reality, it does not

need to give birth to an actual political movement in order to be

effective. In fact, its effectiveness comes in the form of birthing

anti-movements, massive fragmentations of parallel, paranormal,

paranoid subcultures, flowing lightning-like along fleeting lines of

flight, operating in a transverse Deleuzian rhizomatic underworld of

conspiratorial fantasy, requiring no verification and therefore also

free of the possibility of refutation.

These hyperreal exponents of

exponentially audacious intervention by impeccably invisible yet

omnipotent intergalactic and interdimensional powers have finally

trumped the merely real authorities of our de-legitimized demiurgic and

merely phenomenal sub-world that used to be able to claim to be our

entire reality. We have gone from Nietzsche's axiom that God is dead,

to the postmodern claim that Man is dead, and now we can say that

reality is dead. Reality has been overcome, not by any single

alternative worldview, but by a burgeoning legion of otherworldly

messengers. And who is to say that they are false or demonic? Who has

the credibility to say anything authoritative any more? Who will

listen? By suppressing authentic information and feeding the public too

much flavorless and undigestible disinformation, the merely mortal

authorities with their clearly fallible forms of knowledge have given

birth to a disinformational universe, in which they are the first

victims of their own bad karma.

But the situation is more radical than

that. Language itself has been exposed as a primitive and ineffective

instrument of consciousness. Yet we have not crossed over to any higher

wave of coherent interconnectivity. The reign of the signifier has been

overthrown, yes. But no new monarch has been crowned in its place. We

have fallen into the gap, the abyss of an unprecedented autism of

un-communicability. Each of us floats in our own bubble of narcissistic

idiocy, a subculture of one, unable to establish common terms of

discourse with others. The solution of many is to hide within the

slightly larger bubble of biological family enmeshment, but there is no

genuine communication in that realm, either. Increasingly desperate

attempts to find a soul mate have arisen in this context. At least

there must be one other person who can understand us. But such efforts

are rarely successful in the long term. Of course, the same logic

applies to social and religious groups. The centrifugal force of

dueling signifiers fractures every field of human intercourse.

The great question is whether it is

still possible to re-establish the gold standard of all human

organization and bring about a renaissance of human unity at a higher

level than is presently manifest. The first clue to the answer lies in

understanding how the ancient yogis were able to maintain an

independent power center that sustained the original culture field of

Bharata, and later what is called the classical Indian culture. It is

essential to recognize that the same principles of yoga became the

internal power that underlay the success of all the cultures of the

world. It was through their practice of meditation that the yogis

became powerful energetic batteries that enabled cultural integrity and

propelled human achievement in every field of knowledge.

The symbolic systems that grew out of

and explained the energetic secrets of yoga were merely representations

of an achievement that had nothing to do with discourse, but was

unimpeachably Real. The power of the Supreme Real is what gave birth to

the world's mythologies. Those myths soon were downgraded to religions

and fossilized as dogmas, and the Supreme Real was repressed in favor

of what became mere phenomenal reality. With the appearance of the

virtual reality of the internet and artificial intelligence, we can

distinguish between reality and the Real. What we refer to as reality

is conditioned by discourse and can be corrupted. It can also be

shifted by events in hyperreality. But the Supreme Real is beyond such

effects. Its power and its energies cannot be affected by events in

either reality or hyperreality. If we are to survive in reality,

however, we must return to the Supreme Real and manifest as authentic

avatars of the archetypal Real Self. We must jettison our

identifications with both reality and hyperreality, which have both

been proven to be unreal. This is what the teachers of advaita and sat

yoga have been teaching for centuries. But most of the yogis, whose

function as conduits of the energy of the Supreme Real maintained the

world, have now passed from the scene. And with them, the energy that

keeps our world alive has sputtered and is dying away. Our world cannot

long maintain itself in manifestation unless our batteries are

re-charged.

The energetic battery of yogic

Realization that once powered human history, the energy of Spirit

supplied by the masters of meditation, has indeed gone dead, all over

the world. This has been a long process, involving the suppression of

monasteries, the destruction of the world's indigenous cultures and

their yogic/shamanic lineages, and the materialistic indoctrination of

society, turning people against their spiritual leaders, as the Chinese

are now doing in Tibet, having destroyed its monastic culture. Only a

few sparks of Real spiritual power can be felt anywhere. But those

embers of the sacred flame can still be fanned into a fire that will

renew human existence for another cycle of cosmic time, at an even

higher level of consciousness than in the past cycle, if we are willing

to perform the great work of becoming adept yogis.

The modern attempt at demythologizing

religion, which can be seen in such contemporary cultural artifacts as

the Zeitgeist films, falsely proclaims that the great avatars of the

past were mere representations of the Sun, and that the world's

mythologies were only descriptions of astronomical events. Such a view

contains the half-truth of its recognition of the amazingly profound

astronomical knowledge of the ancient world, but fails to recognize

that astronomical data, and indeed the Sun itself, was used only as a

representation of the Supreme Real. Those who have had near-death

experiences and those who have entered higher forms of Samadhi, and

even some who have had nonordinary tryptamine experiences, can testify

that the light of our physical sun pales in comparison to the supernal

light of the Supreme Sun of Transcendent Consciousness!

Because the signifier can no longer be

trusted as expressing Truth, we must return to the gold standard of

Silence. Only the utter mental silence of authentic inner peace that

radiates the ineffable but irresistible divine energy can be effective

as an organizing principle for new communities. Knowledge of the

mechanics of the ego and its deceptive cognitive malfunctioning is

important, but that knowledge can only be trusted when it is taught by

those who have achieved genuine transcendence of the ego and freedom

from its drives and pathologies. Words are cheap, but silence is

golden. The byproducts of inner silence include humility, compassion,

virtue, detachment, and luminous fullness. These byproducts also cannot

be counterfeited. Their appearance in a community today is extremely

rare, and any community that can operate with all its members

resonating at such a frequency of conscious harmony will astound any

visitor.

The only way that the general

ideologies of cynicism, materialism, and even that of entheogenic

psychedelicism, can be cracked is through the experience of such a

communal energy field. No mushrooms or peyote or cannabis are necessary

for this transcendent attainment. In fact, those substances do not

dissolve the ego; they only offer at best brief glimpses of the

paradise of pure consciousness. Only the true heroic work of surrender

to the One Self will avail to reach the Real. This achievement will be

the new wonder of the world. It is through this passage beyond

knowledge to the Truth of Supreme Silence and Theomorphic Presence that

the current ascendancy of psychotic knowledge will be overthrown. It is

not new information, whether psychotic or shamanic, that will effect

change, but it is the infinite power of God's Presence that will

announce the dawn of the new Sat Yuga.

Through baptism in the waters of sacred

silence, a spiritual community can restore the efficacy of language.

Once a community of yogis sits together in silence long enough to

download and establish a common carrier wave of loving

interconnectivity, the manifestation of knowledge will arrive as a

renewed expression of Truth. In this way, humanity can be reborn as a

telepathic union of the many and/as the One. From the zero point of

Supreme Silence, the One God can again be represented truthfully in

language. This renewed alignment of knowledge and Truth will bring

about an end to the eclipse of God in the world of ego consciousness.

The Sun of Truth will burn through the veil of illusion and reveal that

our GodSelf is all and everywhere!

Be prepared for the coming ascendancy

of Truth. Better yet, be a divine manifestation of the highest Truth.

The Truth, the Real, like the famous alien in the Hollywood film of

that name, will emerge from your own chest, from your own heart, and

kill your ego as it gives birth to the Great Self that will transform

our universe. You are the Alien. Let your heart be sacrificed to the

Self, so that the new world may be quickly born!

Namaste,

Shunyamurti

Image by tajai, courtesy of Creative Commons license.