(Originally posted in the r/lawofone_philosophy community)
I’m not usually one to bring in outside philosophies into this sub, but sometimes I find that other teachers can explain things in ways that augment Ra’s words. In the same way that I’ve often held that the conscious channeling is more valuable than Ra’s channeling because it grounds the philosophy in human experience, certain teachers can shed light on our philosophy through the alternative vantage point they occupy. I’ve shared Pema Chödrön’s thoughts before (and am working through her explanations on “refraining” for a future post) because she’s so good at explicating the nature of meditation and spiritual practice in everyday language. Now I’d like to share a bit of an excerpt from a book called Reality by Peter Kingsley.
Kingsley is a scholar working on the shamanic traditions in ancient Greece that became what we know today as “philosophy”. Essentially, he argues that the perception of reality as essentially oneness is grounded in Greek philosophy from the get-go, and that later philosophers were the inheritors of this practice but stripped the wisdom of its spiritual “instructions”. For example: Parmenides, the father of logic, brought the principles of logic from the underworld via a dream (a practice in Greece called “incubation”) and the goddess who provided this wisdom also provided direction on how to use logic. It wasn’t just a set of dry calculational principles, but a deep inquiry into the illusion as an illusion – to show how inconsistent and deceptive the reality we perceive actually is.
Of course, nowadays modern science (what Robert Anton Wilson called “fundamentalist materialism”) appropriates logic to winnow down “reality” to what can be “logically” proven (and any student of philosophy is well aware of the epistemological holes in our scientific outlook). Parmenides and his student Zeno taught that, far from escaping the physical senses as false information, it was the use of the senses to the extreme that could demonstrate to the seeker how illusory they were. Obviously, this is a completely different tradition of seeing all as one, a tradition out of which the western world we inhabit was built as a distortion of a spiritual teaching. I can’t recommend the book highly enough.
In any case, another shaman-philosopher he discusses is Empedocles, who was the first to talk about the four elements as the basis of reality. However, I never knew that Empedocles incorporated the mixture and purification of these elements into a cosmic cycle of love (amalgamation and seduction) and strife (distinction and purity) that our souls are constantly going through. It’s arguably a completely different model for the octaval evolution that Ra describes: the universe and we are constantly subject to a process of the elements separating out into purity and then mixing together again, a very interesting way to think of the concept of distortion. And in discussing it, Kingsley brings up one of the best explanations I’ve ever read of the paradox of free will Ra mentions.
Possibly one little problem has been bothering you.
If, for Empedocles, each cosmic cycle comes to an end then there is no point in making the effort to do anything. Every contaminated soul will eventually be purified and returned to heaven. Trying to purify oneself, become better or wiser, seems futile: we might as well just sit back and wait. And for Empedocles himself to go to the trouble of being a teacher, acting as a prophet, tricking us so as to try and wake us up, is useless.
In other words, if everything is basically predestined this leaves us with no real free will.
The problem of choice and necessity is an ancient one. Theologians and philosophers have scratched their heads and pulled their hair out over it for ages.
And yet the solution to the problem is utterly simple. We have no free will at all; but we are predetermined to think we do.
The whole question of free will and predestination, of individual choice and necessity, that has eaten into the West for the past two thousand years is sheer vanity. Free will is an illusion. And the illusion of free will is a part of the cosmic necessity.
The only reason why we make any effort is because the effort is preordained. And our only genuine freedom is to cooperate with necessity. Of course that sounds terribly restrictive to us as humans who want to be separate, individual, different from nature: different from everything. But this is because we have already restricted ourselves by wanting to be so many things. For it’s only when we realize we are not separate at all that we start to become free.
There is no individual freedom whatsoever at the beginning of each cosmic cycle. We are forced to participate quite unconsciously, altogether against our will. But towards the end of each cycle we are under a cosmic obligation to become conscious. So Empedocles has no choice except to make every effort he can to lure us out of our confusion into some greater awareness.
And we are bound to do whatever we can to become more conscious.
As for that original fault or primordial failing of the soul before the beginning of creation in letting itself be polluted: this was nothing it could avoid. In fact ancient Greeks were very familiar with the notion, so paradoxical nowadays to us, that our faults and failings are actually caused by the gods.
But the important thing to understand is that even if the blame for what once happened or happens now is not really ours, we still have to take full responsibility for our illusory failings and suffer all their illusory consequences in this world of total deception.
All our apparent choices have been made for us. And yet we are still obliged to go through the routine, the charade, of seeming to make them. Everything is decided for us-even whether to go on reading this book or not, whether to move our arms, object or agree, get up or stay sitting, think about next week.
Even the longing to become free, to grow in awareness, be more conscious, is predetermined by our inner nature; is our own divine self drawing us to itself. And to become one at last with that inner nature is to realize everything is bound by absolute laws.
Then we are free: free from the illusion of having to choose, free simply to be ourselves.
But when every soul is dragged out of heaven once more at the beginning of a new cycle, as it most definitely will be, the illusion will start all over again.
- Peter Kingsely, Reality (2004)
He then goes on in the rest of the book (this excerpt is near the end) to talk about this “necessity” that we have the illusory choice of cooperation with or resistance to. This all sounds a lot like evolution; the progressive expression of the innate nature of things. We have a duty/fate to bring this evolution to bear not by acting but by witnessing; to wake up and be the self awareness of the universe witnessing and cooperating with the inherent order in the chaos. It’s not us as third density self-aware beings against un-self-aware nature, but us taking our role in nature as her self awareness.
Later on in the book he talks about how nature is begging us to wake up. This isn’t because we have a choice in the matter so much as it is because we bring something to bear that realizes this necessity. Evolution begins to have a conscious phase, but just like Jesus and Mohammed point out, it is through obedience and submission to divine will that we become most free. It is in transcending the fetters of our individual identity that we become most ourselves in the natural setting to come: fourth density social memory.