MindStar

by Michael A Aquino

  4357 Wilshire Boulevard

  Los Angeles, California, December 1992

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  Chapter 4: Anamnesis from “Soul”

  to MindStar

  Hollywood is a place where they’ll pay you a

  thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your

  soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer

  often enough and held out for the fifty cents.

  - Marilyn Monroe

  A. Anamnesis

  Plato devotes his Dialogue Meno to an exposition and

  demonstration of anamnesis: the faculty that, as sentient

  beings have lived previously/eternally, their knowledge of

  the Forms ( neteru) - creative, organizing, and preserving

  Principles of the OU - is also permanent, recallable

  through the exercise of dialectic. Through this mental

  discipline, the conscious mind is inspired through

  progressively more precise questioning to discard later,

  coarser, inaccurate concepts in favor of their pure,

  original substance and clarity.

  The key of anamnesis came down to Plato from Egypt

  through Pythagoras. As Dr. Raghavan Iyer summarizes:

  Thus the soul, since it is immortal and has

  been born many times, and has seen all things

  both here and in the other world, has learned

  everything that is. So we need not be surprised

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  if it can recall the knowledge of virtue or

  anything else which, as we see, it once

  possessed. All nature is akin, and the soul has

  learned everything, so that when a man has

  recalled a single piece of knowledge--learned

  it, in ordinary language--there is no reason

  why he should not find out all the rest, if he

  keeps a stout heart and does not grow weary of

  the search, for seeking and learning are in fact

  nothing but recollection.

  - Plato, Meno

  Anamnesis is the true soul-memory, intermittent

  access to the divine wisdom within every human being

  as an immortal spectator. All self-conscious monads

  have known over immemorial time a vast host of

  subjects and objects, modes and forms, an ever-

  changing universe. Assuming a complex series of roles

  as an essential part of the endless process of learning,

  the soul becomes captive recurrently to myriad forms

  of maya and moha, illusion and delusion. At the same

  time the soul has the innate and inward capacity to

  cognize that is is more than any and all of these masks.

  As every incarnated being manifests a poor, pale

  caricature of himself - a small, self-limiting, and

  inverted reflection of one’s nœtic and creative potential

  - the ancient doctrine of anamnesis is vital to

  comprehend human nature and its hidden possibilities.

  Given the fundamental truth that all human beings

  have played many parts, initiating diverse actions in

  intertwined chains of causation, it necessarily follows

  that everyone has the moral and material environment

  from birth to death which is needed for self-correction

  and self-education. But who is it that has this need?

  Not the shadowy self or false egoity which merely

  reacts to external stimuli. Rather there is that Eye of

  Wisdom in every person which in deep sleep is fully

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  awake and which has a translucent awareness of self-

  consciousness as pure, primordial light. 27

  For the reader to apprehend the original Egyptian

  nœsis of what modernity only dimly and vaguely calls the

  “soul”, we will now highlight this corruption and

  degeneration preliminary to jettisoning them.

  B. Western Religious CSU

  Recall from Chapter #1 that human societies are

  generally not comfortable with free and independent SUs.

  At the conscious level, humans dislike disagreement and

  wish for consensus. But far less apparent and more

  deadly are SU conflicts at the subconscious level, which

  threaten the prevalent and acceptable view of “reality”.

  Until recent centuries, control of Western

  civilization’s subconscious CSU was by institutions of the

  dominant religion: Judaism and its Christian and Muslim

  variants. They defined “reality” and of course punished or

  killed “heretics” who could or would not see this “reality”.

  [Anticipating Orwell’s 1984, evangelists and inquisitors

  saw themselves as “saving” or “curing” unbelievers, even

  if the “cure” was individual execution or “heathen”

  culture extermination.]

  27 Iyer, Raghavan, The Society of the Future. London: Concord Grove

  Press, 1984, pages #13-14.

  Raghavan (D.Phil. Oxford) was Professor of Political Science at

  the University of California, Santa Barbara [and revered mentor and

  friend during my M.A. & Ph.D. studies there]. He was also a member

  of the Club of Rome and a Mahatma of the Theosophical Society & its

  Krotona Institute in Ojai, as well as founder of the Institute of World

  Culture, Santa Barbara. His writings may be studied at:

  http://theosophy.org/

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  C. The Judæo-Christian Soul

  Judaism is most significant from a CSU standpoint

  for its introduction of the concept of “original sin”,

  according to which every human begins, lives, and ends

  his or her life under a curse and condemnation from

  Judaism’s God. This “greatest of all sins” resulted from

  Adam and Eve innocently and ignorantly eating a fruit in

  the Garden of Eden which gave them individual SUs:

  awareness of their freedom to assign meaning and

  evaluations of goodness and evilness according to their

  own intelligence and experience, not God’s. In effect they

  had ceased to be non-conscious components of the OU,

  and this separation was the “greatest sin”. Implicitly their

  OU-separation from their eating of the fruit was also

  passed along to all of their descendants, who similarly

  inherited the same inescapable sin.

  Consider the effect this CSU has had upon all of the

  civilizations in its grip: the entire Jewish, Christian, and

  Muslim world down through the centuries. Humanity is

  taught that it is inherently and inescapably evil, so much

  so that even the most strenuous of purging and punitive

  lifestyles, such as monasticism, nunnery, celibacy, etc.,

  are futile. Only through the intercession of divine saviors

  such as Jesus Christ and Mohammed can a fortunate few

  humans hope for even posthumous relief. For everyone

  else this life is a journey of misery followed by an eternity

  of torture. In its original, pre-Christian “Hell” concept,

  ancientMesopotamians [including the Hebrews]

  considered the underworld ( Kur-nu-gi-a or Sheol) as a

  dim, dismal place in which the once-incarnate soul

  disintegrated. Hence their approach to life was fatalistic

  and pessimistic, with ethics considered in terms of

  Earthly consequences only.

  Contrast this with the culture of ancient Egypt, in

  which there was neither “original” nor �
�inherited” sin.

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  Each individual was born a blank slate, so to speak, and

  had full discretion to pursue an incarnation of virtue or

  vice, after which, at the entrance to the Afterlife, the

  deceased’s heart would be “weighed against a feather” to

  fairly ascertain whether pleasure or penance had been

  earned.

  The Judaic soul, unlike anything in Egyptian

  m e t a p h y s i c s , w a s t h u s s o m e t h i n g s h a m e f u l ,

  reprehensible, and evil. What could families,

  communities, or nations composed of such flawed and

  doomed creatures hope to accomplish? If they could not

  save themselves in the greater sense, of what value were

  efforts towards morality, virtue, and other behaviors

  supposed to please if not placate God?

  It wasn’t until the late-17th/early-18th century CE

  “Enlightenment” that Judæo-Christianity ceased to be

  regarded as literal truth and became merely a

  propaganda tool for controlling the ignorant and

  superstitious. Thereafter, and to this day, it receives

  extensive lip service and ceremony, but without the

  intelligentsia or even its own cadre regarding it as

  anything more than a fairytale. Neither God nor Jesus

  nor Satan is regarded as anything more than a convenient

  symbolic myth.

  It therefore takes some effort to cast oneself back to

  pre-Enlightenment times when all such influences were

  held to be quite real indeed, and so the determinants of

  human actions. Once this is appreciated, the Crusades,

  religious wars, sect-persecutions, and “heathen”

  civilization exterminations are coldly understandable not

  as aberrations but as the God-sanctioned norm of human

  conduct.

  The Enlightenment relegation of Judæo-Christianity

  from truth to fiction was echoed in its concept of the soul.

  Previously the soul had been a real, tangible object of fear

  and self-hatred within each human. Now that it was

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  eliminated, society had to develop new devices to entice

  or coerce the dominant CSU. We shall survey these

  devices as they were introduced and are still used today,

  but before doing so, we need to clear away the remaining

  wreckage from the popular notion of the soul, and return

  again to Egypt for completeness and clarity.

  From Webster’s International Dictionary:

  soul: (1) The immaterial essence or substance,

  animating principle, or actuating cause of life or of the

  individual life. (2a) The psychical or spiritual principle

  in general shared by or embodied in individual human

  beings or all beings having a rational and spiritual

  nature. (2b) The psychical or spiritual nature of the

  universe related to the physical world as the human

  soul to the human body ...

  While a superficially-impressive attempt, this

  definition finally falls back on empty circularity. What is

  an “animating principle”, and would the soul not exist if it

  did not animate externalities? What is meant by

  “psychical” and “spiritual”? As Robert Anton Wilson

  quipped in Schrödinger’s Cat: “Theology was a system for

  explaining things by coining words which nobody could

  understand and pretending that the words meant

  something.” 28

  D. Jewish and Christian Afterlifes

  Within the Western cultural tradition it is rarely

  realized that its two major religions - Christianity and

  Judaism - are actually at extremes apart on this issue.

  Christianity in all of its many forms upholds life-after-

  death as reason for abstinence in “this life”. Judaism, on

  the other hand, insists upon “this life only” and absolutely

  28 Wilson, Robert Anton, Schrödinger’s Cat. New York: Pocket

  Books, 1979, page #98.

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  rejects justification for human behavior on any grounds

  other than YHVH’s direct instructions to living humans.

  Comments Arthur Schopenhauer in Parega #I, 13:

  The Jewish religion proper, as described and taught

  in Genesis and all the historic books until the end of

  Chronicles, is the crudest of all religions because it is

  the only one which has no theory of immortality - not

  even a trace of it. Every king and every hero or prophet

  is buried, when he dies, with his fathers, and there is an

  end of the matter; no trace of any existence after death;

  indeed, as if intentionally, every thought of this sort

  seems to have been removed.

  Schopenhauer is only partially correct. The ancient

  Hebrews drew no distinction between human souls and

  the animating force common to all animals ( nephesh).

  Although some part of this animating force was thought

  to survive the destruction of the body, it was regarded

  with superstitious terror and referred to ambiguously by

  the terms elohim and rephaim. By the 2nd century BCE

  Hebrew doctrine had changed to include the

  revivification of the material body, but Hebrew

  theologians never extended this principle to the

  Pythagorean/Platonic concept of an independently-

  surviving psyche.

  Not surprisingly the original Christians continued this

  Jewish tradition of corporeal revivification, using the

  Greek term psyche to mean much the same thing as the

  Hebrew nephesh. In Matthew 10:28, where the soul is

  mentioned as distinct from the body, their posthumous

  reunion is promptly suggested. The most conclusive

  example of this doctrine, of course, is that of Jesus’ own

  material resurrection [as in Luke 24:36-43], but by the

  time of Paul the distaste with which sophisticated Greeks

  regarded this “animation of corpses” ( anastasis nekron)

  induced that apostle to modify Christian teachings in the

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  direction of Pythagoreanism. Paul was further aware of -

  and presumably sought to overcome - the challenge of

  Gnostic and Hermetic Christianity, being a blend of basic

  Christianity with various Egyptian and Hellenic

  mysteries. 29

  In I Cor. 15:35 and II Cor. 5:1-2 Paul offers a mixture

  of Pythagorean and Hebrew ideas, whereby the

  posthumous soul is given a “spiritual body” ( soma

  pneumatikon) which nevertheless requires a bodily form.

  Despite Paul’s efforts, Christianity has never succeeded in

  breaking free from the notion of reanimation of the

  original corpse, which at least has been grist for the mill

  of horror-film producers.

  While there have been many explanations for

  Christian antipathy towards Judaism, one of the most

  crucial had todo with Jews’ failure to be posthumously

  accountable in any way for their incarnate conduct,

  implying that they are self-serving and indifferent to

  ethics. Observed Dietrich Eckart, initiate of the Thule

  Gesellschaft and mentor to Adolf Hitler and Alfred

  Rosenberg, in 1919 ( Auf gut deutsch):

  It is now evident that a people which completely
/>   denies the existence of life after death must limit all of

  its thoughts and endeavors to the present world, to

  earthly existence; it has no other choice. But a people

  can only grow up with such an emphasis on worldly

  matters if it fundamentally lacks any need for

  immortality, which in turn is possible only if there is no

  trace of feeling in its basic character for the eternal in

  mankind. Wherever the soul manifests itself, no matter

  how faintly, a sense of immortality necessarily follows.

  The individual is not always consciously aware of this;

  indeed there are many who refuse to understand it -

  29 The 1945 discovery of thirteen original Gnostic codices at Nag

  Hammadi in Upper Egypt has shed much light on the ideas with

  which Paul had to compete. The codices themselves date to 350-400

  CE but are probably copies of 2nd century CE originals.

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  who are so ignorant concerning the concept of

  immortality that they habitually denounce it, even

  while their unselfish actions clearly reveal that each

  one of them senses the soul and therefore eternity

  within himself.

  Although Pauline Christianity attempted to

  appropriate the Pythagorean/Platonic concept of the

  “soul distinct within and ultimately freed from the body”,

  it was unable to sustain this concept without the vehicle

  of the body. Christian artistic representations of

  posthumous Paradise are invariably sterile and dull. It

  will be recalled that Christ’s ultimate promise upon his

  Second Coming was to reunite all souls with their ex-

  bodies, so that they would once again enjoy their original

  corporeal shells.

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  Chapter 5: Anamnesis MindStar

  You have left your body; be aware if you care.

  Your mind has left your body, and for this one moment

  You are under the polar ice cap in a place we call home.

  How is it there, white bear, like that where you grow?

  Now all of you come back to here, and now elsewhen to

  there.

  Move on out the other way where...

  Do you find yourself floating, growing there?

  You can exercise your mind on where you want to go,

  And you can see the city lights flashing two thousand miles

  below you.

  You can feel the sands of Zanzibar or pierce the nearest sun;

  Find out what and who you are and if you need to run.