The Enigma of Existence – The following article takes ancient Illuminati teachings and presents them in the light of modern philosophical and scientific findings. Many will find this material difficult and obscure. Those who persist may catch glimpses of a new reality. The truth is not a matter of simplistic nostrums and childish parables by preachers and prophets. The truth does not lie in “holy” texts supposedly expressing the “word of God”. If God were the true author of these allegedly holy books, the text would be a marvel of clarity; it would not be susceptible to multiple interpretations; it would not be full of contradictions; it would not lead to hatred, selfishness, greed and war. The True God does not communicate directly with this world. It is not his world. He did not create it. It is ruled by another – the Father of Lies. The truth is never simplistic. The truth is not simply “given” to us. It requires the maximum degree of effort. Truth based on faith rather than knowledge is absurd. There is no truth in faith, only delusion. Gnosticism is the path to salvation.
“What is rational is real, what is real is rational.”
Hegel
Nothing – the Greatest Mystery
Leibniz posed the question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Heidegger declared this to be the deepest and most far-reaching question of all. William James referred to it as the “darkest question in all philosophy.”
Nothing is more mysterious than “nothing”. From it, everything else follows. For a long time, the concept of infinity was as mysterious as “nothing” but Georg Cantor revolutionised the human understanding of infinity. There has been no Cantor of “nothing”. It remains the enigma it has always been.
Simplistically, “nothing”, unlike “something”, seems to need no explanation. It requires no work and no creator. As soon as “something” appears, the questions flow. Where did “something” come from, what is it made of, where is it going, what, if any, laws does it obey, who or what made it? Will other “somethings” interact with the first “something”, and so on. The gulf between nothing and something seems infinite and unbridgeable.
People who claim that the issue is irrelevant because “God” has always existed and therefore there has never been a state of “nothing” have simply begged the question, and reformulated the original question in different words. We now have to answer why there is God rather than nothing. We are no further forward. How can “God” be more likely than “nothing”? God is the most complex entity conceivable. How can infinite complexity be more probable than nothing? Nothing requires nothing. God requires everything. Existence, rather than being improbable, should be inevitable, so the mystery of nothing has to be solved before that of God can begin.
Some atheists say that the existence of “something” is a brute fact. After all, no one, no matter what they think, can deny that something exists. So, these people say, let’s ignore the problem of “nothing”. They say that time, space, matter and energy began with the Big Bang and nothing can be said about what happened before that event. (Oddly, some then claim that the Big Bang was the result of a “vacuum fluctuation”, thus demonstrating that something did in fact happen prior to the Big Bang.)
To privilege “something” over “nothing”, or vice versa, is to make it impossible to understand the true nature of the universe. The error lies in making “Being” the primary fact of the universe. The religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all guilty in this regard. Their starting point is perfect Being – God – which then creates more, but less perfect, Being – the “Creation” (most of which is perishable rather than everlasting, which is odd given that God the Creator is eternal). If this is false, and it certainly is, then every conclusion reached by these religions is also false.
The higher wisdom of Gnosticism examines Leibniz’s question more profoundly. It is implicit in the question that “something” is completely different from “nothing” and in need of explanation in a way that “nothing” isn’t. But is this seemingly infinite divide between “something” and “nothing” justified?
Illumination teaches that “nothing” and “something” are as fundamental as each other, and inextricably linked. Neither can exist without the other. In fact, in a sense they are the same thing. How can that be?
The next step in solving the problem belongs to G.W. Hegel, another towering figure in philosophy, and another secret Illuminist.
Hegel was a proponent of the “dialectic.” The dialectical process works like this:
Step 1) We discover a “thing” in need of explanation and we make some statement about it e.g. “Something exists.” We call this the thesis.
Step 2) Further discovery and consideration reveals a contradiction, something that opposes the thesis. We call this the antithesis. The antithesis of “Something exists” is “Nothing exists”.
Step 3) The third step is called the synthesis, and it attempts to reconcile the thesis and antithesis. Hegel uses the word “aufheben” to describe this melding of thesis and antithesis. It’s a difficult word to translate into English since it simultaneously contains meanings of “preserving”, “cancelling” and “lifting up”. So, the synthesis retains what is most true in the thesis and antithesis, removes what is most false, and raises up what is left into a higher truth.
Step 4) The process does not end with this synthesis, which simply becomes a new thesis, and with which we start the process all over again. With each iteration of this dialectical cycle, we move forward, reduce contradiction, refine our concepts and get closer to what might be called absolute truth i.e. the truth that contains no self-contradiction and cannot be challenged. To an extent, the dialectic resembles the scientific method upon which so much of the world’s most solid knowledge now stands. The scientific method creates provisional truths, which are rendered stronger and stronger by continual testing and refinement. Eventually, scientific hypotheses become scientific theories – which are effectively the laws of science.
A clear connection also exists between the dialectic and the medieval art of Alchemy – the secret art first introduced by the Illuminati. Alchemy is about turning lead into gold. Not in a physical sense (though some alchemists certainly thought it was possible), but in a metaphorical sense. To reach gold (perfect purity in symbolic terms) from the starting point of lead (base, impure, corruptible material symbolically) requires constant distillation, refining, removal of the impurities. This is the same as the dialectic – a continual refining to remove errors. As we reach higher and higher levels of synthesis, we ascend the scale of truth – we move from dirty, muddied, confused and confusing partial truths to incorruptible golden truths by which we can lead our lives. Truth, too, must be distilled and refined.
Hegel analysed Being and Nothing in the following way:
1) Being – the existence of things – is the thesis.
2) Non-being – the existence of nothing – is the antithesis.
Using the ancient wisdom of the Illuminati, Hegel supplied the only concept that can stand as a valid synthesis of Being and Nothing – “Becoming.”
In a stroke, Leibniz’s question is resolved. Something and nothing are just aspects of a higher truth. They do not have mutually independent reality. They are perpetual twins, locked in a dance of eternal becoming. The universe is never-ending becoming. As we will show in subsequent articles, “Becoming” answers every enigma, everything that is nonsensical about the old religions of “Being”.
The philosopher Nietzsche used a different but related word for “aufheben.” His word – “sublimieren” – comes from the Latin word sublimare: “to sublimate”. In German, sublimieren and aufheben are synonymous. Sublimation is the English word for sublimieren.
Sublimation, in human terms, involves taking a primitive urge such as violence and turning it into something nobler. The “good” aspects of violence are retained (for example, will to win, forcefulness, pride, ambition, competitiveness), while the bad aspects are removed (e.g. destruction, cruelty, injury, callousness). What emerges is something in which everyone can take pride. Sport, for example, is often regarded as the sublimation of war. Can’t we sublimate all of the ills of our society?
The dialectic is all about sublimation, refining everything to take it to a higher, nobler level – to turn lead into gold all over the universe. Can we start from a universe of unpromising lead and make it into one of sublime gold?
The True Nature of Nothing
In the 18th century, Laplace stated the Principle of Determinism: “If at one time, we knew the positions and motion of all the particles in the universe, then we could calculate their behaviour at any other time, in the past of future.” This is the basis of classical physics. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of quantum physics destroyed Laplace’s aspiration since it tells us that we cannot simultaneously know the precise position and momentum of even one particle never mind all the particles in the universe. This isn’t an experimental limitation, but a fundamental aspect of the quantum world. It accords with Max Born’s insight that in the quantum world there are no exact answers, only probabilities.
If a particle has no definite position and momentum and can be described only probabilistically then it simply doesn’t exist as “something” in the classical sense. The world we live in on a day-to-day basis may seem solid, predictable and full of “somethings”, but it is underpinned by a weird, shadowy foundation that gives way as soon as we touch it. There is simply nothing tangible there. Does that not sound like the strange synthesis of something and nothing that we have been discussing?
The Superposition Principle of quantum theory tells us that quantum particles can exist in a probabilistic cloud of different states that in classical terms would be mutually exclusive of each other. Only if and when the “wavefunction collapses” (to use the jargon) is one of the potential states definitely selected. Physicists have no idea what causes the collapse in favour of one state over the others. We will explain in a subsequent article the answer to this conundrum.
An atom consists of a nucleus surrounded by electrons. The nucleus is tiny and carries a positive charge. The domain of the negatively charged electrons is vast in comparison (about a billion times larger than that of the nucleus). In other words, between the nucleus and the surrounding electrons is an enormous space that is neither something nor nothing – but a strange probabilistic cloud, a superposition of all the different states that the electron can possess.
The reason that human beings do not get pushed into the ground by gravity is that the negatively charged electron “cloud” surrounding the nuclei of the atoms of the ground repels the negatively charged electron clouds surrounding the nuclei of human feet (or those of shoes), and this effect is much more powerful than gravity. In other words, our way of life is dependent on the strange clouds of electron probability surrounding nuclei. The solidity of atoms, of matter in general, is an illusion.
Atoms are not things – they are becomings. And humans, composed of atoms, are becomings too. The apparent solidity of our human lives would vanish if we could delve more deeply into ourselves. With every instant that passes we change. As the ancient Illuminist Heraclitus said, “There is nothing permanent except change.” He also said that we cannot step into the same river twice. With every passing second, cells in our body are dying. Some are being replaced, some are being repaired, some are vanishing for good. Our bodies are changing, our minds and memories are changing. We are continually becoming something new and different. Is the old man looking at a picture of himself as a newborn baby the same being as that baby? Or has he been on a path of becoming between those two points of his life?
In scientific terms, human beings are made of the food and drink that they consume during their lives – nothing else. As an Illuminist said ironically, “A human being is a means of getting food and drink to talk.” Every day what we take in through our mouths becomes us. We are mostly water. How can such a creature be considered a being?
Not Nothing. Not Something. Not Being. Becoming.
The Universe of Matter
Illumination denies that pure “nothing” has ever existed. It also denies that pure “being” has ever existed. Always, the universe is becoming. It is an eternal mixture of being and nothingness. It is about cycles of birth, death, rebirth: of creation, destruction, new creation. Nothing endures in the same form forever. The universe is in permanent flux; an infinite, seething ocean of activity. Quantum mechanics, with its emphasis on probability rather than determinism, is entirely consistent with what the ancient Illuminists regarded as the fundamental truth of the universe.
When physicists talk about vacuums – the closest we can get to nothingness – they refer to a turbulent quantum foam of virtual particles. “Bubbles are the seed of everything,” the great Illuminist Leibniz declared. The quantum foam underlies all things. The religions of Being – Christianity, Judaism and Islam – have no response to the discoveries of quantum physics other than silence. Only a religion of Becoming is compatible with the observed effects of quantum reality. Science and religion are not incompatible. Science should simply be discovering what religion has already declared to be true, but when religious fanatics declare a genius like Galileo to be a heretic because he observed that the earth orbited the sun rather than vice versa then it is religion that is refuted, not science. “Faith” is the refuge of those who refuse to accept science. Science has never made a single discovery that has challenged the teachings of Illumination, yet virtually all of modern scientific knowledge contradicts the sacred texts of Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
“Virtual” is an adjective favoured by the ancient Illuminists. The Sea of Becoming is virtual. Nothing, at its core, is quite real and quite solid. Only from the virtual can the real appear. Virtual existence is the inevitable precursor of actual existence. Reality is what appears when the virtual endures beyond its normal fleeting existence. As to why the virtual should have the tendency to become real, that is the essence of Becoming. Things are at all times competing to become more, to actualise, to realise everything that their potential permits. This is the Law of Becoming. Becoming might be considered as a force that acts on everything, transforming the simple into more complex forms, maximising their latent potentialities and possibilities. It is the dialectic, it is alchemy, it is evolution. The Law of Being, on the other hand, denies virtual existence. It states that Being – real, solid, and measurable – exists, has always existed and could never not exist. Otherwise Being must have spontaneously and perfectly emerged from Nothing, and that is impossible. Although simple forms always precede complex forms, never the other way around, believers in Being invariably make “God” – the most complex being conceivable – their starting point. The God of Being stands in direct opposition to the Theory of Evolution. No one can believe in both.
Illumination teaches that God is not the creator of the universe. The opposite is true. The universe is creating God. God is the telos – the object, the purpose – of the evolving, Becoming universe. All of the astonishing conclusions of Illumination flow from this single truth.
As the universal dialectic unfolds, God is becoming purer and purer, more and more refined. In alchemical terms, God is turning into the purest gold. But this revelation has the most profound consequences. The outcome of the universe is not settled. There is no predestination. We are all free and we are all contributing to the dialectic, and what each and every one of us does alters how the dialectic unfolds. We ourselves are helping to shape God…or, rather, what we do determines God’s attitude towards us. Our fate is in his hands and yet, just as truly, his is in ours.
Illumination – ultimate gnosis – reveals the true nature of the True God and explains the precise nature of the test he has set for us all. This test is not of the ridiculous type preached by the false prophets of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The last thing the True God wishes is for us to be his abject slaves. He does not wish us to “love, serve and obey him” – the mantra of all megalomaniacs and dictators – he wishes us to join him, to partake of “Godness”.
The True God is seeking those amongst us who are capable of becoming gods too. He wants allies, companions, equals. The last people of interest to the True God are those who would never look him in the eye, those who embrace slavery because some bearded “holy” man went up a mountain and came down waving a “holy” text that told them that God was a monster of egotism who wanted nothing but countless hordes to worship him.
The God of egotism, the God who wants slavish worship, the God who stands behind the grotesque, nauseating religions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam where human beings are stripped of all dignity so that the ultimate dictator can tower above them for eternity is the anti-God: Satan.
Christians, Jews and Muslims are Devil worshippers.
One of the truths of Illumination is that no God who demands worship can be God. God is not a tyrant. God is a mentor, a guide, a friend. God wants us to be the best we can be. The last thing he would wish for us is that we should spend our entire lives learning nothing but how to glorify him. Rather, he wishes us to glorify ourselves by transforming ourselves into alchemical gold.
Illumination is a religion that concerns itself only with those who seek to be the best they can be. Knowledge, not faith, is the key. If you choose to spend your life on your knees in churches, mosques and synagogues, you have estranged yourself from the True God. You are alienated from the divine spark within you. You have an unhappy consciousness.
God is Becoming. We, the seekers of ultimate knowledge, are Becoming too. We are not slaves. God is not our master, our overlord, or our dictator. He is our example, our inspiration and our greatest friend. We are part of his Becoming, and he offers us the supreme reward if we learn how to emulate him. God, already, is as close to perfection as any of us could ever imagine, but he is far from finished in terms of his own divine plan. Part of that plan involves the bestowing of the supreme gift.
We too can be gods. The possibility is open to all those who follow the path of Illumination.
(In future articles, we will reveal why the True God permitted Satan to create this world, the precise nature of the test that confronts us all, and how to find the golden thread that leads us out of the labyrinth.)
One of the strangest yet most far-reaching philosophical debates centres on whether or not absolute space exists. Newton held that space is like a container. Physical objects can be placed within it but it would still exist whether the objects were there or not. This is the theory of “absolute” space. Leibniz contended that there was no absolute space. His theory of space is relational. In his view, physical objects are not placed in any sort of container: no such container exists. Instead, physical objects exist purely in relation to one another. Some are touching while others are separated from one another by various distances, but, critically, there’s no space – no “stuff” – between them, no stuff surrounding them, no other stuff coexisting with them.
Absolute space theory says that two substances exist: material objects and space. Relational space theory says that there is only one substance: material objects. For a long time, Newton’s theory was the favoured one, and is the most intuitive. Most people think along Newtonian lines. Now, in the scientific community, Leibniz’s theory is preferred. Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity is, on the face of it, a vindication of Leibniz’s view. Absolute space and time play no part in Einstein’s theory.
Yet the reality is that Leibniz and Newton are both right. As usual, when there is insufficient evidence either way, the way out of the impasse is to create a synthesis of the thesis and antithesis. Neither one contains sufficient truth – only the synthesis can make sense of the contradictions.
Illumination teaches that time and space can come into existence only when matter-energy appears. But it also teaches that there is an infinite “void” and at any arbitrary point in that void, matter-energy can appear. Thus, as Newton argued, there is a kind of container in which all the events in the universe unfold. But space and time are not continuous. They come into existence because of quantum events and they themselves are quantized rather than continuous. This is a digital universe, so to speak, rather than an analogue one.
The contemporary science of Quantum Cosmology comes closest to the position of the ancient Illuminists. The following reference provides a good account of Quantum Cosmology (and is a useful introduction to relational versus absolute space):
This is a quotation from this article:
“Quantum cosmology aims at solving some theological questions as well. Let us remember that there are two dominant religious conceptions about the creation of the world. In keeping with the Judeo-Christian teachings, the universe had a certain beginning. That is stated in the well-known hypothesis about the Creation, according to which the universe emerged from the Cosmic Egg. On the other hand, the basis of the Hindu-Buddhist teachings is Nirvana according to which the universe is timeless and has neither a beginning nor an end. Quantum cosmology proposes an excellent synthesis of these two different viewpoints. In the beginning there was Nothing. No space, no matter and no energy. According to quantum mechanics, however, the Nothing, or quantum vacuum, is unstable. The Nothing could start boiling as well as producing a great many “bubbles” each expanding at a very fast rate and representing one universe. If that is so, our universe, or rather that part of the multiverse of parallel and timeless universes resembles Nirvana.”
In terms of contemporary physics, the Sea of Becoming – the flux that underlies all things – exists within what is as known as the Planck scale. The Planck length is considered the smallest physically meaningful size scale there is. The Planck time (the time it takes light to traverse one Planck length) is the smallest unit of time that can exist – the so-called shortest tick on the cosmic clock. The Planck mass is the mass of a hypothetical particle with a wavelength of one Planck length.
At this scale, the effects of quantum indeterminacy are so extreme that all descriptions familiar from classical physics simply break down. Size, position, momentum, mass, energy, time, space distance, locality and causality are meaningless to all intents and purposes. This is the universe in its most elemental form: the substratum of pure Becoming.
The Planck scale is unimaginably small. It may also be unimaginably energetic since any particles that exist on this scale have such small wavelengths that their frequencies are correspondingly inconceivably high. The mass-energy of such particles is so large and the particles so dense that they are often theorised to be miniature black holes, leading some physicists to claim that the domain of the Planck scale is a seething mass of virtual black holes where space and time would be completely distorted and no information would be able to escape the gravitational effects of the black holes (hence why it might seem “invisible” to us). The Planck scale represents a fundamental limit on how far we can meaningfully probe. In this domain, no measurable quantity is smooth and continuous. Instead, everything is grainy. Some physicists conceive the universe in its most fundamental form as a nexus of “pixels”, each a Planck length in diameter.
Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman showed that particles travel from one location to another along every path through spacetime. The single path seemingly taken by the object is actually just the average of the many paths actually taken.
Stephen Hawking has said: “Since we are supposed to sum over all possible histories – not just those that satisfy some equations, the sum must include spacetimes that are warped enough for travel into the past. So the question is, why isn’t time travel happening everywhere? The answer is that time travel is indeed taking place on a microscopic scale, we just don’t notice it. If one applies the Feynman sum-over-path histories approach to a particle, one has to include histories in which the particle travels faster than light, and even backward in time. In particular, there will be histories in which the particle goes around and around on a closed loop in time and space.”
This extraordinary picture provided by theoretical physicists is entirely in accord with Illumination’s Sea of Becoming, but it bears no resemblance at all to the creation myths of Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
Illumination’s cosmology is:
1) There is neither pure “Nothing” nor pure “Being”. Becoming is the fundamental reality. This is what Heraclitus meant when he said that the universe consists of eternal fire (the ever-changing fire being the symbol of Becoming). Another of Heraclitus’s teachings concerns the “unity of opposites”, meaning that opposites cannot exist without one another. This is the precursor of Hegel’s dialectical logic.
2) Time has no beginning and no end. Time always exists, but only because it is continually “created” by the matter-energy flux of Becoming. Space is continually created in exactly the same way. It has no independent existence. Nevertheless, it is in a sense everywhere at all times. At the deepest level, time, space, energy, matter, particle and wave are exactly the same thing, viewed from different perspectives. A “grand unified theory” would define a wave/particle of mass-energy that, as soon as it flickers into existence, creates time and space (or spacetime) to contain it. It is not a definite, deterministic entity. It is governed by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and exists as a shadowy, probabilistic entity – a potentiality, a possibility rather than a reality or actuality. It is the simplest unit of “Becoming”.
3) Antimatter is as likely as matter, so the flux of Becoming will contain both in equal amounts. But particles of antimatter are functionally equivalent to particles of matter with negative energy travelling backwards in time. In the Sea of Becoming, there is no arrow of time. Leibnizian relational physics, unlike Newtonian absolute physics, has no difficulty in managing concepts such as negative energy and time travelling backwards. Since there is no absolute frame of reference, there is no way to privilege either matter or antimatter. If they have opposite properties then if one seems to be going forwards in time then the other must seem to be going backwards in relation to it. A flux of equal amounts of matter and antimatter leads to a universal energy of zero, a universal time of zero, a universal space of zero. In other words, nothing and something are in precise balance and can coexist in the higher synthesis of Becoming. The universe is the perfect perpetual motion machine. The absence of Newtonian absolute time is critical in this context. If absolute time existed, there would be no perpetual motion and the universe could not exist.
4) The Universe is eternal Becoming, but it is not a pointless, aimless Becoming. Anything that is not forbidden is compulsory. Anything that can happen will happen. One of the things that is capable of happening is that asymmetries can appear in the universe. Imagine a ball at the top of a perfectly uniform hill. While it is at the top, the ball can fall with equal probability in any direction. At that stage, everything is symmetric. But when the ball does fall, it takes one direction and not any of the others. The perfect symmetry has been broken. One possibility has been realised, and the others have not. Asymmetry has appeared. It is that sort of asymmetry that ensures that, as the universe evolves, matter (or antimatter) will eventually predominate in the sort of universe we humans can directly experience.
5) Becoming has an objective. The universe is becoming the best that it can be. It is becoming the maximum degree of perfection of which it is capable. To put it more starkly: it is becoming God. If is possible for the universe to maximise its potential in a single, unique way then it unquestionably will. “God” is that maximisation. God is the perfection buried within the universe, the gold amongst the dirt. More and more of God’s perfection is being revealed as the universe evolves.
6) God already exists at a level of perfection that can be equated with Christian, Judaic and Islamic conceptions – a consciousness of surpassing intelligence and power. But God is not pure Being. He is pure Becoming. The great Illuminist Hegel said that History will end, in the sense that the dialectical process will resolve all of the great struggles and contradictions embodied by history. But although History as a grand narrative will cease, historical events themselves will not stop, but will take place within an environment of minor changes rather than great revolutions and upheavals. Becoming will continue, but not in the grand ways of old. As it gets closer and closer to the perfect synthesis of all possible theses and antitheses, it changes less and less. God is the end of universal History, but not the end of existence.
Conclusion: We have revealed the genius of Heraclitus, Leibniz and Hegel: three of the most brilliant Illuminists. We have reconciled the ancient teachings of Illumination with the findings of quantum physics. We have shown how Being and Nothing coexist in the higher synthesis of Becoming. We have revealed Becoming as a sea of turbulent activity, of matter and antimatter locked in an eternal dance. If that dance were ruled by strict symmetry, there would be no evolution. But the Sea of Becoming inevitably generates asymmetry – anything not forbidden is compulsory – and once asymmetry exists the universe can start evolving in a particular direction. Once evolution has begun, more complex forms continually replace simpler forms. There is no limit on the degree of complexity that can evolve, and the highest possible degree of complexity – the telos of the universe, its supreme objective as it seeks to realise its potential – is God.
The God of Evolution, of Becoming, is not the God of Being. He is not the Christian, Jewish or Muslim God. The God of those religions is not only false, he is Satan. Satan’s greatest deception is to pass himself off as an eternal Being, the Prime Mover, the origin of all things, the Creator of this and all other worlds. No one can achieve salvation until they have seen through Being and started to understand Becoming.
But there is one immense mystery that we have not yet touched upon: how does the physical universe that we have described relate to the universe of mind and spirit?
The Universe of Mind
Don’t Believe the False Prophets
To think that you will be saved by saying, “I believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord and Saviour”, or “I believe in Allah and his prophet Mohammed”, or “I believe in Yahweh and the Torah” is absurd. You will not. You will be damned. Faith is Satan’s greatest trick. The faithful turn away from knowledge and are thereby lost.
Whom should you believe? Christ, Mohammed, Moses, Abraham, St Paul, St Peter, Martin Luther, the Pope? All the rest? The only way to test conflicting claims is by bringing the fruits of knowledge to bear, but that is the one thing you cannot do if you have subordinated knowledge to faith. The truth could not be simpler: most Christians follow Christ because they were raised by their parents to do so. Most Muslims follow the Koran and most Jews the Torah for exactly the same reason. If they were brought up differently, in different cultures, their beliefs would be entirely different. So of what value are these beliefs? How many believers have read all the holy books of rival religions? Hence how can they say that their holy book is right and the others are wrong? Invariably, they cite their faith. They don’t need to search further, they say, because faith has been placed in their hearts. Who placed it there, and why is it different between Christians, Jews and Muslims? Religion based on faith is for people who are too stupid to understand the true nature of existence. Faith is for those who are too lazy to put in any effort. Faith goes hand in hand with brainwashing and self-delusion.
God is not concerned with saving people who are on their knees before him. God loves only with those who desire to emulate him. The ancient religion of Illumination rejects all those who cower in fear before their ludicrous gods. God wants us to join him. Those he helps, those he saves, are those who say, “I want to stand beside you,” not those who prostrate themselves before him.
Nothing is more offensive to the True God than that people should be so alienated from themselves and from him as to believe that he is seeking worship. Can you imagine God’s horror when madmen fly airplanes into buildings and then offer up this mass slaughter of themselves and of innocent men, women and children, as some “noble” sacrifice to him? Is God a psychopath? He would have to be to accept such a “gift”. Why is that so many people who have faith seem to believe that God is deranged and wants blood and death to be served up to him? Religion on earth has been nothing but the history of violence. Can there be any doubt about it? Is that the work of the True God or of Satan? Only Satan wants blood sacrifice. For all the claims of love, peace, charity, kindness, tolerance, respect trumpeted by religions of faith, they have served up nothing but the opposite. These religions are Satan’s toxic brew. The Illuminati were pacifists originally but abandoned this position after the relentless persecution they endured at the hands, especially, of the Catholic Church. Now they support violence in the limited contexts of self-defence and the overthrow of tyranny, but they would never claim that they are fighting on behalf of God. They fight on their own behalf. God has no need of soldiers and does not want bloody massacres carried out in his name. There are no “holy” warriors. It’s a contradiction in terms.
The gift God is looking for from you is that of maximising your own potential, of enhancing that precious element within you which is godlike. He wants you to offer your own divinity to him. He has no truck with priests and popes, rabbis and imams. If you seek salvation through others you are already lost. Salvation comes from within, and from deep knowledge of yourself. “Know Thyself” was inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in ancient Greece. “Know Thyself” is one of the central tenets of the Illuminati.
Illumination is the religion that dispenses with all holy men and prophets. They are all false. They are all charlatans. They are all instruments of Satan. Illumination guides the righteous on the twisting, treacherous path to the truth. If you think that all the answers will be laid on a plate for you, or in some ancient, dusty, holy text, and that you just need to say, “I believe”, then you have already failed to pass the most basic part of God’s test.
Before you can begin to understand Illumination, you must recognise that you contain a divine spark and that your mission, over many incarnations, is to burnish that divine element, to make it gleam and glint so brightly that God will recognise you from the other side of the infinite universe. The murmuring masses on their knees are invisible to him. They do not merit being seen.
Do you want to be God? To the religions of faith, such a statement is blasphemy and heresy. But bear this in mind – all great people wish to be surrounded by other great people, by equals rather than slaves. Would a man prefer the company of apes who worshipped him, or of other men who were as meritorious as he was? God is the greatest person of all, and he wants to be in the company of those who can appreciate his divinity. Only other gods can offer what he seeks. He is nothing like Yahweh, the Jewish deity who proclaimed himself a jealous God. Why would God be jealous? It is a category error. A jealous God is no God at all. God wants to admire us as much as we want to admire him. We have to prove that we are worthy of him. So, are we?
In the article below, we have provided some of the issues that inform the philosophical view of reality to which the Illuminati subscribe. This is not an account of the religious beliefs of the Illuminati. Rather, this is the worldview from which the tenets of Illumination arise. It covers a great deal of philosophical territory in a brief space, and highlights flaws in many metaphysical theories. It is not easy material, but it may point truth seekers in the right direction. Do not believe it – think about it, and decide whether it accords with your own knowledge. The Illuminati seek no one infected by the disease of faith. If you want to spend your life on your knees, go to a church, mosque or synagogue.
The Nature of the Universe
Idealism is the view that the universe is a mental construct – an arena exclusively of ideas. There’s no such thing as matter, or, rather, matter is itself just a mental construct. If no minds existed, no material world would exist.
Materialism asserts that there is nothing but matter. The mental world is a product of matter. If no matter existed, there would be no minds.
Dualism contends that matter and mind exist as independent substances. Descartes, the leading dualist, said that matter (res extensa) had the property of extension (i.e. physical dimensions) while mind (res cogitans) did not. Matter was a physical substance while mind was a substance relating to thinking, feeling, willing, perceiving and consciousness. Since they were completely different substances, it was unclear how they could interact. Descartes infamously suggested that the pineal gland in the brain acted as a mediator between mind and matter.
Idealists deny the independent existence of matter while materialists deny the independent existence of mind. Dualists assert that matter exists independently of mind, and mind independently of matter, but can’t explain their relationship to each other. All three stances have failed to solve the mind/matter problem.
Is there another possibility?
Whatever the universe is made of, one thing is undeniable – it contains the capacity for intelligent thought. Humans are composed of atoms and yet they can contemplate the nature of existence. How can atoms that obey mechanistic laws combine in such a way as to give rise to intelligence?
There are different types of intelligence. A crocodile has a limited repertoire of behaviour. A horse has a larger, more complex brain and can display more varied behaviour. A human being is capable of vastly more complicated behaviour still. Yet there’s an enormous range within human intelligence. Some humans are mired in trivial, hedonistic pursuits while others are wrestling with the profoundest questions of life.
Then there is the intelligence of colonies of ants or bees. Individuals within the colony have limited intelligence and yet the colony as a whole can demonstrate astonishingly complex behaviour. Is the intelligence of a collection of human beings also an example of the intelligence of a colony i.e. is human intelligence considered in isolation completely different from collective human intelligence? If someone pokes a stick into an ant colony, ants will scurry around in a host of different ways to repair the damage. If an airplane flies into a skyscraper, humans will scurry around in a host of different ways to repair the damage. Is there really such a difference between an ant colony and a human colony?
Can the human race be said to have some sort of Mass Mind? Could the inhabitants of other planets in the universe also exhibit Mass Minds? Could all of these Mass Minds act as individual brain cells for a Universal Mind? Think of the power of such a Mind. Would it be the Mind of God?
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin talked of the “noosphere” – the mind sphere, a kind of collective human consciousness. As humanity evolves and creates increasingly complex social networks and societies, so the noosphere evolves too, becoming ever more self aware. Eventually this would lead to a Mass Mind.
Gaia theory – the view that the earth self-regulates – attributes an intelligence of sorts to the planet. If such a theory is true of earth, it must be true of every other planet. If planets have this type of intelligence, why not solar systems or galaxies? Why not the universe itself? If all the “intelligent” planets and all the Mass Minds combined, what then? Is the universe a vast brain?
Since a range of intelligence is known to exist, is there any reason to believe that human intelligence should represent the upper limit? Is there any limit at all? Why should there not be levels of intelligence that make humans seem like insects in comparison? Why shouldn’t evolution be able to create any level of intelligence, up to the highest possible of which the universe is capable? If a maximum intelligence is not forbidden then it’s compulsory. One way or another, the universe will maximise the intelligence buried as potential within it.
What single change would revolutionise humanity? Imagine that everything that any person learned was immediately learned, effortlessly, by every other person. So, if 6.5 billion humans were each learning new things and every person was immediately accumulating all of the knowledge gained by all the others, what would happen? In a very short time, the Mass Mind of humanity would be powerful beyond imagining. Is it impossible? Or has it already happened to another species on another planet?
Long ago, the planet earth contained no life, yet it now sustains billions of intelligent humans, and countless animals and plants. Is that not the perfect example of how an apparently inanimate world has, latent within it, the potential to express incredible intelligence and abundance of life? And if that is true of earth then it must be true of the universe as a whole, yet on a breathtakingly bigger scale. If earth can evolve human intelligence, what can the universe evolve? The answer is simple – the intelligence of God.
But how can mind be generated by matter, how can intelligence emerge from atoms obeying the laws of science, how can life come from lifelessness? Any human being can be decomposed into a collection of atoms that originate from the food and drink which the person has consumed during their life. How is it that a particular arrangement of atoms can exhibit intelligence while innumerable alternative arrangements of those same atoms would show no intelligence whatever?
The number of ways of grouping atoms in the human body in ways that don’t lead to intelligent behaviour is almost infinitely larger than those that do. Yet humanity exists – six and half billion people, and rising. What are the odds? Is there an underlying factor that makes humans, and human intelligence in particular, much more likely than it might seem?
Evolutionist Richard Dawkins talks about “the selfish gene” and of humans being “gene survival machines”. He doesn’t mean that genes are literally selfish, but, rather, that if we characterise them in this way then it helps to better understand observed behaviour. For example, in moral terms, no one should be more willing to help one person rather than another, yet it’s self-evident that families (i.e. groups with high genetic commonality) almost always help each other in preference to non-family members. Although other explanations can be given, this is suggestive that genes act as if to promote their own interests over those of rival genes. But if genes – particular organisations of atoms – are “selfish” then what of individual atoms?
“Panpsychism” is a theory that claims that all matter is associated with mind. If atoms are “minded” in some way i.e. aren’t just passive objects being buffeted by physical forces but are active to some degree, albeit difficult to define, could it better explain scientific phenomena?
It is difficult to understand how life can emerge from lifelessness, how mind can emerge from non-mind, how a chemical soup on earth billions of years ago could randomly create the single living cells from which humanity eventually evolved. Some people find it so improbable that they dismiss it entirely and look for explanations involving God.
But if everything in the universe already has mind in some way, and can be said to be “alive” at some level, then several mysteries immediately become more comprehensible. If the chemical soup from which life emerged on earth was already “alive” (though at a non-conscious level) and was, in a sense, seeking to actualise itself in the optimal possible way; if the chemical soup were striving to generate higher forms of life from itself, then that would make the appearance of single cells more likely. Such a factor underlying evolutionary forces can’t be quantified and isn’t readily susceptible to scientific study, but it would radically increase the chances of complex life appearing.
Nothing is lifeless. Nothing is mindless. Life and mind are an ascending scale. The most elementary particles have little that would be recognised as life or mind, but nevertheless those qualities are there. To assert the opposite position, that there is both life and non-life, is to assume a dualistic position. How can these two entirely different “substances” interact? How can one give rise to the other? How can specific arrangements of non-life generate life? The reality is that what has been defined as non-life does contain life, albeit at a much more primitive level. A single brain cell in a human brain doesn’t appear to have either life or mind, and yet that brain cell is part of a functioning mind within a living organism. There are only two possibilities: either life and mind miraculously emerge from non-life and non-mind, or life and mind were there all along, but unexpressed in any meaningful way.
The Sea of Becoming is the source of the physical world we appear to inhabit; “appear” because, as the philosophers of Idealism realised, there is no direct way to prove the existence of the physical world. All ideas about the world are just that – ideas. The world of a dream seems solid and real while the dream is being experienced, but the dreamworld simply isn’t there. It exists as an idea in the mind, not as an independent reality. Is the “real” world similarly illusory? The movie “The Matrix” portrays the “real” world as an elaborate computer simulation. “There are no facts, only interpretations,” said Nietzsche. The physical universe conforms to this rule. It is not a fact, it’s an interpretation.
The Sea of Becoming discussed in another section of this website had the property of extension, of physical dimensions. But the Sea of Becoming could equally well have no extension, no physical dimensions. In this case, the thesis of “Being” and the antithesis of “Nothing” reach their synthesis within a dimensionless reality – the mental universe. The mental universe can contain ideas, but not physical objects.
Yet virtually no one seriously contemplates that there is not a physical world “out there”. Although its existence cannot technically be demonstrated, few would assert that it’s all just an illusion. Even in “The Matrix” there was an underlying truth, a real world, a “rabbit hole” leading to the truth.
So, it’s possible that there’s both a physical Sea of Becoming and a mental Sea of Becoming. Descartes’ dualistic universe has reappeared. The issue of mind-matter dualism is really the same one as whether a hypothetical “Nothing” can be said to have dimensions or no dimensions. A physical universe can emerge from a Nothing with dimensions, but not from one without dimensions. A mental universe can arise from zero-dimensional Nothing.
Leibniz introduced the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which states that there must be a sufficient reason why something should be thus and not otherwise. There is no sufficient reason why the physical universe should be privileged over the mental, or vice versa. There is no sufficient reason why Nothing with dimensions should be privileged over Nothing with no dimensions, and vice versa. Dialectical logic provides the solution to this impasse: the thesis and antithesis are combined in a higher truth – the synthesis.
The synthesis of mind and matter – of two supposedly separate, independent, incompatible substances – is that they are the same substance viewed from two different perspectives. Zero and non-zero dimensional nothingness are the same nothingness viewed from two different perspectives. Every deep secret of the universe flows from the truth that the material and mental worlds are not separate, and that zero dimensions can coexist with multi dimensions. All the difficulties of metaphysics arise from a false dichotomy between mind and matter.
The Complementarity Principle of Quantum Theory says :
“According to the uncertainty principle, the pair of conjugate variables such as the position and momentum of a particle is not well defined but exist only as opposing potentialities. These potentialities complement each other, since each is necessary in a complete description of the physical processes through which the particle manifests itself. This is referred as “principle of complementarity”. The more general statement reads: At the quantum level, the most general physical properties of any system must be expressed in terms of complementary pairs of variables, each of which can be better defined only at the expense of a corresponding loss in the degree of definition of the other. In particular, particle and wave can be considered as one of those complementary pairs – no experiment can reveal both at once.”
Mind and matter are also a complementary pair. No experiment can reveal both simultaneously. Mind is the inner, internalised aspect of the universe while matter is the outer, externalised aspect. If a human skull is opened up, a fleshy brain will be exposed, but no mind. Yet the mind is there. No one can deny it. In fact, the appearance of the physical brain is, ultimately, nothing but an idea in the mind.
Illumination teaches that everything that appears in the physical world – the world of dimensions – has a complementary appearance in the mental world, the non-dimensional world i.e. every physical event also registers as a mental event. All physical objects are also mental entities. The physical world is objectified mind while the mental world is subjectified matter. Mind is the inner experience of matter while matter is the outer experience of mind. The physical world is the objective, external reality experienced in a scientific way while the mental world is the subjective, internal reality experienced within the spectrum of consciousness.
Human consciousness belongs to the non-dimensional domain, yet it is tied to the physical world. It is impossible to probe it directly because it is not in the dimensional reality of science. Science has provided a vast amount of knowledge about the physical world, but it cannot say anything significant about the non-physical world. That is the province of metaphysics. Historically, science and metaphysics have clashed because metaphysics has strayed into scientific territory, and vice versa.
Illumination combines science and metaphysics, acknowledging the primacy of each in its own sphere. If the proper applicability of science and metaphysics is understood, science should never contradict metaphysics, and vice versa.
Metaphysical Reality
Immanuel Kant is recognised as one of the greatest philosophers of all time, but he has probably done more than anyone to cause confusion between science and metaphysics. Kant applied two descriptions to the universe: “noumenal” and “phenomenal”. Noumenal applies to the universe as it is in itself while phenomenal applies to how the universe appears to observers. Kant was highlighting a potential gulf between how things really are and how they seem. If it’s impossible to get beyond the universe of appearances then the world as it is in itself can never be known.
Every human presents a mask – a persona – to others, but underneath that mask lie traits, feelings and beliefs that could be shocking to others. No one can claim to absolutely know any other person, no matter how seemingly close they are, because the mask – the appearance – always stands in the way.
Kant’s revolutionary idea was that the universe doesn’t put on a mask but, rather, observers put a mask on the universe. Reality doesn’t shape the human mind, rather the human mind shapes reality i.e. “reality” is a construct of the human mind and there’s no way of knowing if there’s any correspondence between the mind-generated reality and reality itself. The world of phenomena – things as they appear to us – seem that way because our minds compel them to. In particular, Kant said, our minds create time and space, cause and effect, and everything is viewed through the prism of these categories. If our minds didn’t exist there would be no time and space, no cause and effect. Things would be how they really are: “things-in-themselves” i.e. noumena. According to Kant, knowledge of noumena is impossible. Every human, by virtue of having a human mind, is permanently excluded from seeing the underlying reality of existence.
It’s important to emphasise that, for Kant, there is a single reality, but the actions of mind create a mind-specific interpretation of reality. Every different type of mind – those of insects, mammals, dinosaurs, aliens – would produce a different interpretation of the same underlying reality. It’s not the reality that changes but the way in which it is perceived by particular minds. The universe is masked in as many ways as there are observers. The mind creates phenomena and can know nothing of noumena.
Science, in this view, is the systematic study of something that is really an illusion. The maximum possible knowledge of the phenomenal world would yield no truths at all about how things are in themselves. If the scientists in the movie “The Matrix” had discovered every conceivable scientific “truth” about their world, they would have learned nothing except the rules of the elaborate computer simulation in which they were trapped. They wouldn’t have discovered a single fact about the reality outwith that simulation. Science, in the Kantian view, does nothing but help us to make sense of our own mental simulation of how things are, but the relationship of that simulation to reality remains forever unknowable.
Illumination, on the other hand, teaches that there is a single reality that manifests itself in two ways: physical and mental. In Kant’s universe, noumena are unknowable and phenomena are illusory, but in the universe of Illumination, the mental component of existence is fully knowable, and through it the physical component of the universe. The perfect understanding of the universe in both of its aspects is the province of God.
The mental and physical aspects inherently interact with and link to each other; they always do so and can never not do so. Being part of a single reality, they are never independent of each other. But if the physical is active, the mental is passive, and if the mental is active the physical is passive. At any instant, either the physical or mental is in control. Control can switch instantly from one to another.
The physical aspect of the universe provides the platform for the mental aspect to express itself as fully as possible. Evolution is about simpler forms, under the control of the physical aspect of the universe, trying to find ways to create more complex forms where the mental aspect comes to the fore. The ultimate manifestation of the mental universe is the supreme consciousness: God. The universe is going on an extraordinary journey from an apparently blind, mechanical, unconscious physical nature to completely purposeful, intelligent self-awareness. The Law of Becoming dictates that the physical aspect of reality gradually surrenders to the mental. The physical world is the start of the journey, the mental the end.
Whereas Kant believed that the human mind creates time and space, cause and effect, Illumination teaches the opposite. Time and space, cause and effect are features of the physical world and not of the mental. The physical world gives these attributes to the mental, not the other way around. When the brain, the physical aspect of the mind, goes to sleep, the mind isn’t disengaged. It continues to function – in dreams. Dreams reveal something of the pure mental domain. Causality breaks down, time and space are distorted. Reality becomes a weird hyperreality.
If Kant were right and the mind were the active creator of time and space, of cause and effect, there would be no reason for dreams to be different from reality. Yet they are entirely different. In sleep, sensory input from the physical world is denied to the mental world, so the mental world reverts to its own way of working. Similarly, when a brain is affected by drugs, especially hallucinogens, and normal functioning is disrupted, the mind loses all sense of space and time, cause and effect. Under the influence of hallucinogens, senses often become confused. People can smell colours, taste sounds, hear sights and so on. The mind requires a properly functioning brain to operate correctly. The mental world is shaped by the physical.
There is no true noumenal/phenomenal divide. The mental is trying to harness the physical in order to understand both the physical and itself. A sufficient mind – that of God – can have complete understanding of the physical and mental worlds. Even the limited human mind can gain a far deeper understanding than Kant believed possible.
Jung said, “Psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another. Psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing.” This is exactly what Illumination teaches.
But if everything physical has a psyche, what is the nature of that psyche? It’s absurd to claim that an atom has a psyche in precisely the same way as a human being. Individual atoms are not conscious. They do not feel, do not exhibit intelligence, and do not make plans for the future. To understand their mental nature, it is necessary to turn to a concept known as “will”.
Schopenhauer, a man who hated the Illuminati because of his personal rivalry with the great Illuminist Hegel, independently produced a philosophy that, ironically, has several points of similarity to Illumination.
Schopenhauer said, “The act of will and the action of the body are not two different states objectively known, connected by the bond of causality; they do not stand in the relation of cause and effect, but are one and the same thing, though given in two entirely different ways, first quite directly, and then in perception for the understanding.”
In other words, an act of will does not cause a physical action to take place. Rather, the act of will is the same thing as the physical action, just viewed from a different perspective.
Schopenhauer’s “will” is the will-to-exist, the will-to-live, the will-to-survive. It is a blind, irrational striving, driving forward relentlessly and forever, with no object other than to exist. In a sense, it manifests itself as a cosmic yearning, an unquenchable desire. Schopenhauer, a notorious pessimist, characterised it as evil. It leads, he said, to eternal, pointless existence that fights and struggles and wreaks misery in its desperation to continue to be. It contains no meaning whatever. Happiness, if it ever appears, is never anything other than fleeting, and quickly succumbs to fresh struggles and disappointments.
Schopenhauer criticised science on the basis that it only ever gave us knowledge of one aspect of reality. We find out many things about the “outer” aspect of reality, but discover nothing about its inner character, which is why science seems so cold, clinical and sterile. It doesn’t seem to answer any of the profound questions of existence because it is always standing on the outside. Illumination is about reconciling the outer with the inner, about revealing the science of the inner realm. This is a very different science from the conventional one and yet it is really just the same thing viewed from a radically different perspective.
Atoms are too simple to manifest any behaviour that could be deemed purposeful. Although they have a mental aspect, they are not conscious. At such an elementary level, “will” cannot express itself meaningfully. It is potentiality rather than actuality. The physical aspect dominates the mental aspect. The laws of science rather than those of the mind are obeyed. At a certain point in evolution, there is a transition from dominance of the physical to that of the mental, from science to religion/philosophy, from objective to subjective, outer to inner, mechanistic laws to moral laws.
Science is easier to study than the mental arena because it is objective rather than subjective. Primitive objects can’t lie, dream, deceive, delude themselves, fantasise, choose, act irrationally: sophisticated minds can do all of those. The mental arena is unreliable in a way that the physical isn’t, yet everything that constitutes the meaning of life lies in the mental arena and not in the physical.
Nietzsche, an admirer of Schopenhauer’s philosophy in his youth, argued that the will to live was really the will to power. He pointed out that animals, including humans, often risk their lives to gain more power. They would not do so if survival were their goal. The fight to gain power, risking death, can be more alluring than long life without power. Fear, In Nietzsche’s view, is the feeling of the absence of power. Those animals, or humans, that fail to struggle for power lack will to power and hence lead fearful lives. Nietzsche, an opponent of dualism, said, “‘Will’ can of course operate only on ‘will’ – and not on ‘matter’ (not on ‘nerves’, for example – ): enough, one must venture the hypothesis that wherever ‘effects’ are recognised, will is operating upon will – and that all mechanical occurrences, in so far as a force is active in them, are force of will, effects of will.”
Nietzsche is right that one substance can operate on another only if it is a compatible substance. If “will” is radically different from “matter”, the two cannot interact. Illumination, by revealing that mind and matter are two aspects of the same substance allows will to directly influence matter, and vice versa. Mind and matter are distinct yet inseparable. Neither can be reduced to the other, nor to any other substance. They are dual aspects of a single reality, but this reality will always present itself in one way or another, never as both. This is known technically as “dual aspect monism”. It is like the Roman god Janus, normally depicted with two heads facing in opposite directions. You can look at one or other of his faces, but never both. (Janus is a prominent symbol of the Illuminati.)
Nietzsche believed that everything could be reduced to will to power, but it is not a simple monism. Rather, it is a “dialectical monism”. Walter Kaufmann said, “[Nietzsche’s] basic force, the will to power, is not only the Dionysian passionate striving, akin to Schopenhauer’s irrational will, but is also Apollonian and possesses an inherent capacity to give itself form.”
In other words, the will to power is a synthesis of a chaotic, impulsive, irrational, passionate, destructive force (which Nietzsche labelled Dionysian in honour of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and intoxication), and its antithesis: an ordered, organised, rational, cool and calculating creative force (labelled the Apollonian, in honour of Apollo, the Greek god of light and the sun, the truth, prophecy and the arts – the Illuminati have many symbols associated with Apollo).
Nietzsche’s notion of a force that strives to create order and form from chaos is an improvement over Schopenhauer’s more simple force. The seed of Freud’s Id, Ego, and Superego tripartite division of the human psyche can be glimpsed in Nietzsche’s work (the Id is akin to the Dionysian force, the Superego to the Apollonian, and the Ego to the synthesis of the two.)
Nietzsche’s dialectical will to power, with its inbuilt tendency to create order, accords more with observed reality than Schopenhauer’s blind, chaotic striving.
Hegel referred to the basic substance of the universe as “Geist”, a complex German word that expresses notions of both mind and spirit. Geist is dialectically evolving towards what Hegel called ‘the Absolute’ – God. The Absolute represents the complete control of the physical world by the mental. It is a state of Absolute Knowledge and Absolute Freedom. The Absolute understands itself perfectly. Hegel is often interpreted as an idealist, denying the existence of the physical, but in fact, like all Illuminists, he considered the physical and mental to be two aspects of a single substance. However, he certainly regarded the mental as the dominant aspect of the single mind-matter reality – the dialectical process is all about bringing mind to its highest possible expression – and to that extent can be regarded as an idealist. Hence “Geist” is carefully chosen to emphasise the mental aspect.
There is no word that perfectly captures the nature of the basic substance of the universe: the arche, the first principle. The Ancient Greek philosopher Anaximander used the word “apeiron”, which is usually translated as “a substance without definition that gives rise to all things and to which all things return, a sort of primal chaos.”
Illuminists most usually use the word “Becoming” to describe the single fundamental substance of the universe. “Becoming” is technically an adjective rather than a noun, but Illuminists prefer this word over any other because it makes clear the difference between Illumination and the false religions of Being such as Christianity, Islam and Judaism. “Becoming” emphasises the changing, dynamic nature of the universe, the evolutionary, dialectical aspect that drives the universe forwards and upwards. “Being” on the other hand is frozen, static, conservative, resistant to change.
Mathematician Roger Penrose has proposed that there are three kinds of reality: physical, mental and mathematical, all connected in an unknown and deeply mysterious way. In fact there is only one reality, which presents itself in two ways: mind and matter.
Mathematics, it is true, is more than just a language created by the mind. It might be said to be a deep expression of Nietzsche’s Apollonian ordering principle that seeks to shape the Dionysian chaos. Mind and matter, if they are to avoid an existence of meaningless chaos, must have a strong core of order and organisation, a tendency to obey natural laws. That tendency will never be precise, but it will be reliable on average, hence the statistical emphasis of modern Quantum Theory.
Mind and matter both have mathematics built into them. Mathematics can be defined as the science of pattern. Mathematicians look for patterns in numbers and space, in the physical world and abstract worlds. The mind cannot help looking for patterns. Humans look at the clouds in the sky and start to see meaningful shapes. People have reported seeing the face of Jesus Christ on slices of toast. At all times, the mind tries to shape and pattern sensory data. All of this is mathematical in nature.
Baseball players, basketball players, American football players, soccer players and most other sportspeople engage in remarkable feats of intuitive mathematics. Think of the skill involved in catching a ball while on the run: the catcher is subconsciously calculating the speed of the ball, its trajectory, wind speed, his own speed, the conditions under his feet, the interception point, the orientation of his hands etc. The person involved may know nothing about mathematics as an academic subject, he might even be hopeless at the subject, yet he can solve this complex maths problem as he’s on the move without carrying out a single conscious calculation. Autistic savants can carry out prodigious calculations in their heads faster than professors can solve them with a calculator. These examples prove how deeply embedded in the psyche mathematics is.
The Ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras – another great Illuminist (and the first to be identified with Illumination’s fundamental doctrine of the transmigration of souls) – claimed that numbers are the arche. He also said that a mathematical Law called Harmony controlled the universe.
Pythagoras is associated with the mystical idea of the Music of the Spheres (also known as Musica universalis – universal music): the most beautiful and perfect music of all, which permeates the entire universe but can be heard only by God. Music is audible mathematics. It is the sound of the Apollonian order in the universe. It has such a powerful effect on us because it resonates with the mathematical intuitions buried within us. When we hear harmonies, we are listening to orchestrated numbers; we are directly experiencing universal order in the form of musical notes. Discordant music, jarring notes are the province of Dionysian disharmony. Schopenhauer said that music was a “copy of the will itself” and there’s much truth in this.
Illumination is a religion that holds mathematics in the highest regard and assigns to it an elevated status, but it is not a separate reality as Roger Penrose believes. It is part of the fabric of mind and matter. It is the language of the fundamental ordering principle.
The Apollonian principle of order and harmony is opposed by the Dionysian principle of chaos, disharmony and entropy. “Becoming” requires the two opposing principles. It is the tension between the two that fuels the dialectic, that generates the never-ending cycle of birth, death and rebirth. “Becoming” requires destruction and creation. “Being” on the other hand is static and lifeless. Quite simply, there is no such thing as eternal Being. All teachings regarding Being are false. Becoming is the only true reality.
It is said that in order to command nature one must first learn to obey it. At the outset, the mind obeys the physical (matter over mind), but later it commands it (mind over matter).
Consciousness has five levels: non-conscious, pre-conscious, conscious (sentient), self-conscious and hyper-conscious. Rocks are non-conscious, plants pre-conscious, animals conscious, humans self-conscious and the divine hyper-conscious. The next stage of human evolution is to bridge the gap between self-consciousness and hyper-consciousness.
The theory of epiphenomenalism portrays the mind as a by-product of brain activity. The mind, in this view, has no effect on physical events. It merely interprets events after the fact and deludes itself that it caused them. This is not as absurd as it seems. In a famous experiment by Benjamin Libet, he showed that the decision to carry out certain voluntary actions is initiated prior to any conscious intention to perform them.
Illumination teaches that mind can be active and passive (engaged versus unengaged). The mind affects the world only when it is active. Otherwise, physical events occur mechanistically, and the mind makes sense of those events afterwards, but is passive in relation to them.
Consider this thought experiment. Imagine you are about to raise your arm, but don’t actually do so. Now go ahead and raise your arm. Can you identify any difference between thinking of raising your arm and actually doing it? Yet merely thinking about it has no effect in the physical world. It is passive thinking. Much of our mental activity is of that sort. To physically raise you arm, you must actively will it. Your mind must be engaged. The non-conscious and pre-conscious minds are always passive; the conscious and self-conscious minds are sometimes passive and sometimes active. The hyper-conscious mind is always active.
When the mind is passive, it exists in an epiphenomenal state, rationalising events after they’ve taken place. For example, tears appear in your eyes, and you explain to yourself that you are sad. But that is a post-rationalisation. There was no conscious decision by you to shed tears. You might not even have been sad, but you will convince yourself that you were in order to explain the tears.
It is argued that you will feel better if you smile. Why? Because your mind will automatically try to think of good, positive reasons why you’re happy, and by that very process you will become happy. So, if you smile for non-conscious reasons, you will quickly find conscious reasons to account for your happiness, whether or not they’re correct.
Conclusion
Illumination teaches that the basic substance of the universe, the arche, is “Becoming”, the synthesis of Being and Nothing. It is the ever-changing “fire” of Heraclitus. Becoming has two aspects: the physical and the mental. At the earliest stages of Becoming, the physical is dominant. During this phase, the mental is non-conscious but has an inherent Apollonian tendency to create form and order, to promote growth, interaction and change.
As Becoming unfolds and evolves, the physical grows increasingly organised, giving the mental ever-greater expression until eventually consciousness has appeared in the mental arena. (Consciousness is mind that has been given a direct window into the physical world via the senses. Consciousness cannot exist without senses. Senses are the connecting channels between the physical and the mental.)
Consciousness in turn evolves into self-consciousness: a higher form of consciousness where a being can reflect on its own existence. Becoming follows a dialectical process to achieve an ascending scale of consciousness, and of truth, knowledge and freedom. As Becoming advances, the mental aspect becomes entirely dominant and able to control the physical at will.
The culmination of Becoming is the Absolute. God. Becoming is a process that never ends, but it does reach a so-called End of History where all major changes possible have taken place. Events still take place after the End of History, but in a context of peace, freedom and self-understanding. The End of History is the age of Heaven.
The God of Becoming is the True God. He is the perfect potential that existed within the universe from its beginning. The purpose of the universe, of Becoming, is to release its maximum potential. That maximum is God. God is the perfection of Becoming. God is ultimate Becoming. Nothing can become greater than God.
Here is the highest wisdom. God himself is evolving. He is not pure Being but pure Becoming. That means that the universe is not in any final state. Indeed, it can never reach any final state. There is no Last Judgement, no Day of Resurrection. The gospel – the good news – is that there is no predestination. We are free and our future is not locked and sealed. We can become the most that we have it within ourselves to be, the most that our merits deserve.
Later, we will explain the religious rather than philosophical aspects of Becoming. We will reveal why the God of Becoming created good and evil, why Satan was permitted to become a new creator – a creator of a particular type of matter – why we are reincarnated beings that are confronted by an incredible challenge – to maximise ourselves, to self-actualise, to become as perfect as we can be.
We can become our best selves only by overcoming the hardest challenges, hence Satan, the great Adversary, the great Tester, the ultimate Tempter. It is Satan who stands between God and us. The Old World Order are those who have succumbed to Satan and accepted every temptation he has to offer.
Satan creates false religions such as Christianity, Islam and Judaism that masquerade as the truth, as good and noble messages for humanity, but are lies and poison from beginning to end. These religions corrupt humanity and are designed to lure the souls of the believers to Hell. Only knowledge – Gnosis – can save us. Illumination lights the path for us all, the road through the Satanic darkness.
We will show how we ourselves can become gods. The vast majority will fail, but the select few, the most meritocratic, those who have worked hardest and followed the path of Illumination across many reincarnations will be provided with the ultimate reward.
Personal divinity.
Paradise Regained
There is a final truth.
Ultimate becoming is God. But there is one stage beyond.
A community of Gods.
And we can become part of that divine community.
