Divide & Conquer vs. Unite & Empower
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Science and spirituality ultimately CAN’T be in conflict, because their subject is the same: the nature of being and existence. The true Singularity will occur when science proves spirituality, the smallest scope of distinction and identity yielding to the largest scope of indistinct non-identity, the small picture realizing that it’s OF the big picture.
People speak of the body and the mind as though they’re separate, distinct entities. But the mind is of the body. The mind is no more distinct from the body than the leaves are distinct from the tree from which they sprouted. If the whole of the tree may be likened to the body, the leaves may be likened to thoughts, and the fruit, or produce, what the tree produces and offers Nature’s kingdom in the heeding of its innate, mutualistic mandate, may be likened to our creations. The Root manifests Its own fruit.
The root is as the spiritual Source, the basis of what’s conducted from the Base of Being up into the tree. Pagans were condemned by the Church for knowing the sanctity of Nature, as had been known for millennia. Paganism was decreed as evil for the same reason that natural healers were declared to be witches: for knowing that the roots of all of life penetrate into Mother Matter, the Earth, and receive their energy from Father Energy, the Sun. We’re all forms of the foundational forces bequeathing being. Father and Mother are the symbols of the literal Holy Union that transmutes energy into matter; the unified accumulation and condensing of matter, or being, within the spacetime Body of Being, or God. This is how One became Infinite of One.
Today, the people are blinded by the infinite, having lost sight of and denying The One from which infinity was derived, half the world’s population asserting that the Source doesn’t exist at all. We’ve forgotten our roots, our grounded Base of Being, wandering lost through the desert, misled by every belief system dividing us from the Truth. Egotism, the absolute, separated, standalone identity, is the work of the Devil, the reigning symbol of D-for-Division feeding the Ego, the reigning symbol of E-for-Evil. And everything that stems from this diseased tree overshadows and hides our divine nature. The false divide between body and mind is but one of the cuts which, when believed, is paid for with life, our greatest potential bleeding from every wound.
Not only is it near to impossible to separate good health from good thoughts, and good thoughts from good outcomes, but no separation occurs ANYWHERE. All absolute separation is an illusion. The saving Truth includes the fact that we’re all within God, as exponents of God. So why do we think this way, in terms of separating body from mind, and in terms of enforcing separations in general? Conditioning. TRAINING.
That is, we’re trained by the prevailing scientific and ‘realist’ paradigms of narrow ‘knowing’ to think in terms of differentiation and identity; in terms of isolation and classification; in terms of effects instead of causes; in terms of the appearance of independence rather than the truth of interdependence. Part of everyone’s awakening is the philosophical fact, the gnosis, that these falsely absolute separations are only ever relative. For, again, absolute separations is the root of evil. The false divide is the symbolic ‘work of the Devil.’ As with the false divides between God, the life-giving Energy, and being, the endlessly-evolving embodiments of that Energy. As I often write, the true Original Sin was convincing humanity that it’s divided from God.
That’s what the snake was really whispering about in The Garden: the mentally-corrupting, slanderous lie that Adam and Eve stood apart from God. Once that false, disempowering ‘truth’ wasn’t just tasted, but began being gobbled-down with relish, the original divide from The One was set in our collective minds. We’ve been victims ever since. For what the snake was hissing about was the snake oil of EGO. All false division branches from that Original Sin, as does every subsequent illusion.
In truth, what leaving The Garden of Eden really means is losing the purest state of gnosis, of knowing you’re undivided from God, instead, with the lie of separation and otherness setting in, being open to believing the lie that we’re something ‘other than’ the divine. Leaving Eden means losing the Christ Consciousness to which humanity must return, having wandered away from The Garden and gotten lost in the vainglorious quests of ego, meandering past every mirage of idolatry. Some even worship themselves as though they’re the Source, all ‘other lives’ being entirely other, and meant to serve their vainglory. Returning to The Garden is the reawakening; the enlightenment offered to every being who remembers what they most truly are, in the innermost cloisters of the sanctum buried within the Base of Being, shared by all.
Ironically, our evolution as a race depends, in effect, upon going backward. It depends upon returning, in mind, to what our hearts have always known. For, through religion and every prevailing modern means of thinking and knowing and labeling and dividing,we’ve gone in mind from what we most truly, essentially are, ones of the One, to accidents; to products of random mutations (if you believe the scientists), or to being divided from God and ‘born into sin,’ destined to go to heaven or hell (if you believe the Christians). Religion convinces you of a sickness so that they can sell you a cure, controlling you by tricking you into believing that they’re the only ones who have access to that cure. But the saving truth is that the sickness is religion, for no cure is needed, because the sickness was invented. Because you don’t have a separate soul, you’re of and from and forever inseparable from the Single Soul, God. Your essence IS God.
You’re a unique expression of eternal energy, Being into being. You’re only as separated from God as any form of flora is separate from its roots. The false ‘truths’ conflicting with such saving Truth is, again, representative of the Original Sin seeded by Caesars’ predecessors, beginning the process of dividing humanity from its roots. From there the illusion of absolute separation took root, displacing the true, pagan, non-dualist Root in the now-seemingly-separated minds that, in reality, conduct Mind.
The list of false divides producing evil effect are almost too numerable to count, and include the false boundary that the so-called ‘rationalists’ erected between what’s condescended to as ‘feeling’ or ‘sensing’ and ‘thinking’ or ‘knowing.’ The implicit, and sometimes explicit, false truth sold by so many amongst ‘the educated’ is that consciousness is limited to the brain, and, as a consequence, that all direct intuiting knowledge, all mystical and theosophical insights, all ‘knowing without knowing how I know’ is nonsense, and somehow kept perfectly apart from the way in which anything may be ‘known.’ So it was that the Age of Religion was supposedly supplanted by the Age of Enlightenment, even as, ironically, the truest enlightenment belongs to those who best channel and most directly experience the spiritual truths that are the secret Root of religion, before spirituality was corrupted by Empire.
The number of times that I’ve been rebuked, censored and even condemned by so-called sharp-minded rationalists working within the constraining realms of popularly-accepted ‘truth’ and their limiting definitions, or for seeing God beyond the myopic lens of religion, is beyond counting; and all for knowing the inviolable Root Truth: all things are unique forms of the universal One thing. The stones have been ruthlessly, self-righteously cast at me both by the ‘religious right,’ for saying that we’re all divine embodiments of God and thereby denying their falsely separating division from the divine and all the religious hierarchies that are actually antithetical to spiritual truth, and by the ‘scientific left’ for seeing the same Root Truth buried beneath Huxley’s assertion that “all science is a reduction of multiplicity into identity.” For, you see, both religion and science are based upon control, upon power, and the basis of control has been essentially the same since the days of Caesar: DIVIDE AND CONQUER.
If you believe that you’re a separate being below God (religion) or independent of spirituality altogether, and that everything of the Spirit is a myth (the scientific atheist), and that you exist in a cold, careless universe of evolution-by-accident (materialism), you’ve bought into your own mental enslavement. Divide and Conquer is the foremost strategy for exploiting and oppressing all human weakness, especially the weakening effect of convincing us that absolute otherness, all tribalism, is reality. Successfully sown into the social fabric by a long line of emperors, aristocrats, oligarchs and their ilk, the aim of D&C is to deny the poor the united strength to fight against the princely parasites at the top of the financial food chain. The strategy of the systemic evil of D&C, from Caesar to Trump, is propagandist design. It’s simplyfor the sake of facilitating ever-amassing greed and ego, the one, hidden aim at the heart of conservatism, guaranteed by conserving the status quo stratagem of keeping us as divided, perpetually-warring tribes. It’s like the bundle of sticks analogy: separated, the sticks are easy to crack into pieces, but bundle them together and they won’t break.
Your narrow identity is a design to keep you in a weakened state of conflict with your holy brothers and sisters, you see, all so that you, WE, lack the strength to overthrow the emperor, who became the landed aristocracy, then the incorporated oligarchy of today. And, frankly, the purpose of the rare people like me who’ve divined the underlying truths buried in the Base of Being is to deprogram you from your brainwashed state, thereby offering you the means to liberate yourself. And that liberation shall reach its heights as more and more people come together in this shared enlightenment. For a human race unified in underlying identity and its impassioned community and solidarity CANNOT BE CONQUERED.
This, then, is the battlefield involving every belief: the war against otherness.
And if you think that ‘individualism’ became a core guiding principle of America by accident, or because it’s morally correct, you’re missing my point: the foremost means that power is relinquished by the people is through their inability to recognize the power that they already possess, especially when they come together. Nor is it an accident that true community is so rare in America as to be practically non-existent; that we’re all walled-off behind our private little family fences and enclosed within classist enclaves, in cookie-cutter suburbs and rural properties plastered with “keep out” signs. This one aspect of American Life alone accounts for so much of our sense of ‘otherness,’ of alienation and isolation and social division and innumerable connected stresses and the incidence of all physical and mental health ills. Whereas any naturally-led society is BUILT around community and its mutual support, symbiotic endeavor and sustaining solidarity. That’s the crux of naturally-evolved native communities, in fact: it’s all one big family, with all of the connection and love and mutual concern and activity built in. Even the substances that encourage feelings of unity, like marijuana and the entheogens prized by the medicine men of native communities (now experiencing a global revival), are villainized and criminalized.
Anything to keep you from coming together with others and eradicating the sense of otherness, for that’s what the dividers and conquerors truly fear, and that’s why the civil rights movement and the beatniks, hippies and all counter-cultural communities and movements are targeted for attack, and why communes are immediately associated with cults in the conditioned conservative mind. All of which is to suggest that American Life epitomizes Divide and Conquer. Surely this is why such a blatant demagogue, such an obvious magnifier of prejudice and tribalism, such a fracturing false leader attained the presidency. He’s like the clown at the carnival that distracts everyone whilst the corporate-funded carnival operators, the oligarchs and tycoons, steal from passing patrons at will. If you’re an individual, or part of a tribe, or a zealot for a particular religion, or a ‘patriot’ of a single nation, or in any of the countless other ways identify with the part over the whole, you’re a part of the popular disempowerment, you see. You’re participating in a parade that was built to swaddle you in false comforts whilst keeping you divided from every vilified ‘other,’ dependent upon narrow identities, conditioned to idolize those taking from people and planet.
Watch any conservative channel and its programming and you’re sure to see that its basis is fomenting anger at the liberals and progressives that are actually trying to support the people and planet, including the conservatives preyed upon by those they’re duped into voting for,but whom the frenzied faction of conservative viewers have been conditioned to equate with the enemy, even as the true enemy of most conservatives, especially impoverished conservatives, are those financing the propaganda on the screens keeping them locked into their false reality, their enmity misdirected. Not that liberal shows are kind to the conservative viewpoint, but it’s quite clear that far more money is invested in misdirecting misinformation and stoked hatred for ‘the other’ on the right, and you know what they say: if you want to understand something, if you want to understand the motive behind any action, simply follow the money. Clearly there’s more misunderstanding ‘on the right’ if such funds are considered viable investments. Yes, you can argue that I, myself, am reinforcing the divisive line between ‘right and left’ with these words, but I’m attempting to draw attention to it in a manner wherein it needn’t remain so defiantly absolute, so common ground may be found in the crossing.
In direct connection to this primary principle, any movement that doesn’t make as much room for the inclusion of ‘the enemy’ as for ‘the friend’ is itself the enemy of God and progress. I understand the rage of a Malcolm X, the pure, indignant fury of it, but that’s the catalyst, not the cause. For the philosophy and understanding and strategy of MLK far exceeds the former in its capacity for progress for every afore-alluded-to reason: it’s holistic. It invites shared identity rather than perpetuating the lie of absolute distinction and thereby empowering the dividers and conquerors whom feed off of our weakness. Yes, you’re a unique individual entitled to self-determination and the pursuit of your own passions and loves, but that uniqueness doesn’t negate God, it is God: endless forms of the formless for the sake of the uniqueness of Itself. This is why I use the term ‘individualization’ instead of ‘individual,’ because it reflects the greater, deeper truth of what any incarnation of God actually is: one of The One.
Of course, in my painful quest to assist in the liberation of minds, it’s become imperative for me to realize why people cling so tightly to such narrow self-perceptions and their narrational definitions: FEAR. For it is, of course, fear that keeps people divided and conquered. And, again, the root fear stems from the aforementioned Original Sin: the perception of being standalone; of being a body and mind and a distinct ‘self.’ When you believe you’re essentially isolated, you’re vulnerable and afraid, regardless of your relative ability to admit this fact to yourself and others. And so you reach for any certainty of self and belonging that you can, as a means of mitigating and securing yourself against that fear. And anger stems from fear; from fear of ‘the other,’ of what we don’t understand, of every type of threat, including everything perceived to be a threat to both bodily life and our ego identity.
But here’s The Good News (the meaning of the word ‘gospel’), where the liberation offered by the most sagacious writers and speakers and entheogenic medicines and their direct experience of the divinity extant in all people, places and moments comes into play: when you know you’re an impermanent form formed around your own permanent formlessness, that you’re a leaf blowing on your own tree… when you don’t just think this but KNOW IT through long-walking the Path of Gnosis, when the most illuminating of experiences and gateways into pure knowing are paired with the following of the guiding signposts left by sages such as Huxley, Thoreau, Emerson, Rumi, Plato and, dare I say it, Gnostic Nick, illuminating the path leading you into your centermost self, THEN you can release, or at least ease off of, your divided and conquered, caging identities and definitions and lose the fearful self-defenses. And it all starts with how well unified, i.e. aligned, we are within, in the Trinity of Self.
Healing division is the heart of spiritual practice in general, starting with the internal divides, or self-conflictions, that pull us out of self-alignment, making us imbalanced and invariably leading to the internal distress inviting disease. In my first book, Infinite of One, I posit that there’s actually a Trinity of Self, not a singular self, not a simple ‘I,’ and that this Trinity is comprised of: (1) the heart (the gateway to Spirit), (2) the body (the vessel of Spirit) and (3) the mind (the translator of, or bridge between, the Spirit and Its vessel). Of course, one can make further divides if one wishes, such as between the psyche, ego, intellect and creator, all existing within the mind. But the point is that balance and imbalance are between the wills of the relatively-differentiated components of the composite ‘self.’ And when the heart wants something other than the head that fails to heed it, and the body wants something else entirely, imbalance and internal warfare eventually manifest physical disease through the path of least resistance. In its fashion of classification science names it a distinct disease and says that it’s in one isolated area or system of the body, but it’s all imbalance invites disease.
The examples that this imbalance-is-self-division-is-disease, balance-is-self-alignment-is-healing paradigm of being are almost endless. Any addict whose head recognizes that their addiction isn’t in their best interest (which they all do instinctively, even when they deny it) and constantly thinks of quitting, and whose heart wants them to quit, but whose body and/or psyche is so dependent upon what they’re addicted to that it convinces their mind to capitulate, is obviously imbalanced (self-divided). Most people are addicted to some sort of physically-comforting habit that costs them more than it’s worth, and know this is true deep inside (in heart), but, again, are overpowered by the physical sense of need. Examples are near endless, applying to everything from the most common, carbohydrate, caffeine and nicotine dependencies and being dependent upon over-eating and comfort feeding in general, to sex addiction, to hard drugs… to, in essence, any inability to follow our hearts. For only when heart (Spirit) is aligned with body (vessel) and the head (mind) agrees are we truly balanced, i.e. self-unified, and, thus, our happiest, most capable selves best able to use our innate gifts to serve the totality of life (God) in return for the spiritual reward we call LOVE.
And so I beseech you: Step out of the mental cages that the Caesars have always built and reinforced, remedy your internal self-divides, and the path will reveal itself. Look for the light and follow it out of Plato’s Cave, and bask in the splendor of saving Truth.
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[Please visit me on Substack, and order Why God Chose THIS, for much more by Gnostic Nick]
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