the Judæo/Christian Bible. The absence of evidence is expected to be overcome by “faith”, e.g.
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completely unsupported belief and trust in such a proclamation. Faith is antithetical to Setian
philosophy.
While atheists and agnostics tend to be unconcerned with what others think, the same
cannot be said for faith-dependent religionists. Ostensibly because reliance upon faith is prima
facie ridiculous, the faithful cannot easily endure being the objects of such ridicule. Hence
“heretics” must be ignored, silenced, banished, or killed if not converted. In theocratic cultures
such as the Christian middle ages or modern Islamic totalitarian regimes, torture and execution
were and are not uncommon. In societies wherein conventional churches no longer have such
power, lesser prejudice an ostracism substitute.
Thus, while Setians may not regard themselves or their philosophy as actively threatening
conventional religion, that is not at all the reciprocal perception, as most recently highlighted by
the “Satanic Panic” witch-hunts of the 1980s.
E. The Subjective Universe
The Subjective Universe (SU) is each self-conscious being’s perception of the OU, blended
with personally-generated overlays, selective impressions, and creative imagination as
instinctive, indoctrinated, inspired, and/or initiated.
Thus not even the most controlled physical scientist can claim to accurately and completely
see the OU. What he sees is his filtration and distortion of it through his SU, which he has built
up both consciously and subconsciously from innumerable sources since birth.
More creative, artistic, mystical, etc. personalities may let their SUs run even more freely, to
the point where the OU is of only occasional and necessary relevance to them. If some such
persons reach a stage where their SUs have completely replaced the OU, they may be called
“insane”; in this sense “sanity” is a measure of an individual’s suppression of his SU within
socially-sanctioned boundaries.
F. Subjective/Objective Interaction
Once the simultaneous and permanent existence of the OU and SU is recognized, much of
the mystery of human history and behavior is no longer mysterious. It just requires examination
of each such individual, group, and/or event to identify the applicable OU forces and the various
individual SUs through which they are being perceived and influenced, both subconsciously and
consciously.
At the subconscious level, for instance, an individual may assume that everyone else “sees
the same reality” that he does, when in fact this is never completely the case.
At the conscious level the SU can be both easier and more problematic to handle. Easier to
the extent that the individual is making willful decisions about how much of his SU he can
successfully apply. More problematic insofar as others with their differing subconscious and
conscious SUs may be present and involved.
G. Collective Subjective Universes
When more than one SU is present and involved in any society or problem situation, it
should be obvious that no two of them will coincide, both in terms of subconscious “reality
perception” and conscious values, desires, and actions applied.
Hence both human society and human history is most accurately understood as attempts by
the involved humans to reconcile their conflicting SUs into one or more community-approved
Collective SUs (hereafter “CSU”). Sometimes this is possible through peaceful means such as
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education, reasoning, or argument. In other instances where conscious SUs are too passionate,
or when subconscious SUs are too inflexible and intolerant, the individuals/groups may resort to
coercion - aggressive and intensive indoctrination, conditioning, and reinforcement, along with
the suppression or extermination of the offending “competitors” - to achieve the desired
“reality”.
In modern society, unsurprisingly, such coercion and intolerance are invariably attributed
to “the enemy”, domestic outlaws, insurgents, revolutionaries, or other “alien” individuals or
into which its members have been conditioned since birth, is not just one among many options,
but is “reality”. Questioning it thus goes beyond acceptable curiosity to “heresy”, “treason”, or
“insanity”.
This was most famously caricatured in George Orwell’s novel 1984, in which failure to
accept the Party’s CSU not just at the conscious but at the subconscious “reality” level was
condemned as the worst of all possible sins: “thoughtcrime” - correspondingly requiring not just
punishment but “curing” by destroying the offender’s ability to see “reality” other than through
the Party’s CSU.
H. 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. 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 metaphysics, was thus something shameful,
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?
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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 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.” 55
I. The Setian Soul: MindStar
How then can each soul find and see itself, since it is a singularity which each individual
cannot “get outside of”? This harks back to philosophers such as Descartes, who sought, one
might say Quixotically, to “prove” their conscious existence. “Proof” is of necessity external, as
discussed above, so Descartes’ famous Cogito Ergo Sum (I think, therefore I am) is futile: It is
impossible to describe a “thought” which is not the composite of external sensory input.
No, conceptual thought (Kant’s “pure reason”, Plato’s nœsis, Nietzsche’s “horizon building”)
begins from the pure, unsupported apprehension of one’s conscious self as an existential reality:
the ba of ancient Egypt, the psyche of the Greeks, the Golden Flower of the Tao, the soul of
Judæo-Christianity, identifying, in the words of Dr. Raghavan Iyer, “... 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 awake and which has a translucent awareness of self-
consciousness as pure, primordial light.”
Indeed as this “pure, primordial light” is brought fully into focus, none of the above labels
seems completely adequate or accurate. Some, like Kant’s and Nietzsche’s, address expression
rather than essence. The Egyptian realization of the complete essence was multifold: not limited
55 Wilson, Robert Anton, Schrödinger’s Cat. New York: Pocket Books, 1979, page #98.
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to the ba. For this discussion, therefore, I propose a fresh term, inspired by Dr. Iyer’s sublime
description above:
... being the self-contained, self-sustaining concentration of essence which exists as the core of
the conscious mind. This new term not only frees us from the limitations and
preconceptualizations of old labels; it is a constant reminder that the present examination is a
fresh, evolutionary one in which we cannot be content to coast on inaccurate or inadequate
myths or stereotypes.
Thus emboldened, therefore, let us return to anamnesis to address the question of the
MindStar’s ability to interact with a temporary physical body while not itself containing any
element of the OU. [In conventional conversation this is often referred to as the “mind/body
problem”.] The key we bring to this lock is that of fields.
J. Fields
1. Definition
What exactly is a “field”? When something occurs somewhere in the OU because something
else happens somewhere else in the OU, by no detectible means by which the cause produces the
effect, the two events are said to be connected by a “field” [well-known examples being gravity
and magnetism].
Understandably OU scientists don’t like fields. To the extent they remain fields in defiance of
all attempts to connect their events, they are inconvenient and annoying refutations of one of the
most sacred OU cows: the law of cause and effect. Science’s fallback excuse is that the law must
apply to every field phenomenon too; the medium just hasn’t been discovered yet. Sometimes,
even more desperately, scientists hypothesize completely fantastic “missing links”, such as
“gravitons”, to emulate Robert Anton Wilson’s amusing explanation of conventional religious
jargon. Leaving both scientists and theologians thrashing about in this terminological quicksand,
let us proceed to a very special type of field: that integral with thehuman body.
2. Life-Fields
The human body is an electromagnetic machine. As such it both generates and is enveloped
by electromagnetic fields (EMF), controlling everything from heartbeat and respiration to sleep
and female menstrual cycles.
To understand the significance of EMFs to the human body, it is first necessary to appreciate
that each such body is not an inert, static clump of permanent matter. It is rather an organic
complex in a constant state of reorganization and reconstitution. For instance, human liver and
serum proteins are replaced every 10 days, and the whole of the proteins in the body about every
160 days. Moreover these protein molecules are extremely complex devices, not mere raw
material; not even a single amino acid can be out of place in the replacement.
To put it another way, there are about 60 thousand billion cells in the human body, and every
day about 500 billion of these die and are replaced and rebuilt.
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Why? One possibility is that these molecules are so complex that they are inherently unstable
and thus are continuously deteriorating. The metabolic system, including the liquid-based
transmission of food and raw material throughout the body, is a raging furnace of consumption
and regeneration.
How does the body know precisely how to recreate each cell and molecule? It cannot be
within the object itself, because an object cannot “organize itself”.
The answer lies in the existence of an entire layered network of EMFs throughout and within
the body, altogether comprising a “master plan” EMF for it. Dr. Harold Saxon Burr, Professor
Emeritus of Anatomy, Yale School of Medicine, named this the L-Field (for “Life-Field”/LF). 56
In the case of the human body, its organizing system cannot be chemical, because then that
system itself would be subject to the same entropic process. Hence there is more to a human
being than mere chemistry. It requires an organizing field, not merely an accidental
accumulation of proteins; thus the notion of “gene randomness” is invalid.
3. Telos
Organization inherently requires preconception based upon purpose. Conventional
academic doctrine is that living beings’ purpose is selectively the result of environmental survival
needs: Darwinian “natural selection”: There is no inherent purpose to life-forms beyond passive/
reactive survival, avoidance of pain, seeking of pleasure, and instinct to reproduce.
Prior to Darwin’s theory of passive natural selection, the French biologist Jean Baptiste
Lamarck (1744-1829), while not denying such passive evolution, augmented it with what he
termed “soft evolution” (in modern parlance “Lamarckism”). According to this theory,
characteristics developed or acquired by a given living being can be inherited by its progeny, thus
adding the element of intentional purpose to evolution.
If Lamarckism is allowed to operate according to human intellectual will, of course, then the
principle of purpose on the individual human scale is established. This in turn suggests that
there may be a greater element of purpose above and beyond the individual.
While heretical to the Darwinian establishment, such a master-principle of purpose was
neither unknown nor repugnant to the ancients, who by the time it had reached Greece from
Egypt referred to it as telos.
Teleology is the doctrine that final causes of phenomena exist. Further that purpose and
design are a part of or are apparent in nature. Further that phenomena are not only guided by
mechanical forces (e.g. passive natural seletion), but also move towards certain goals of self-