4357 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, California, December 1992
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Chapter 4: Anamnesis from “Soul”
to MindStar
Hollywood is a place where they’ll pay you a
thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your
soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer
often enough and held out for the fifty cents.
- Marilyn Monroe
A. Anamnesis
Plato devotes his Dialogue Meno to an exposition and
demonstration of anamnesis: the faculty that, as sentient
beings have lived previously/eternally, their knowledge of
the Forms ( neteru) - creative, organizing, and preserving
Principles of the OU - is also permanent, recallable
through the exercise of dialectic. Through this mental
discipline, the conscious mind is inspired through
progressively more precise questioning to discard later,
coarser, inaccurate concepts in favor of their pure,
original substance and clarity.
The key of anamnesis came down to Plato from Egypt
through Pythagoras. As Dr. Raghavan Iyer summarizes:
Thus the soul, since it is immortal and has
been born many times, and has seen all things
both here and in the other world, has learned
everything that is. So we need not be surprised
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if it can recall the knowledge of virtue or
anything else which, as we see, it once
possessed. All nature is akin, and the soul has
learned everything, so that when a man has
recalled a single piece of knowledge--learned
it, in ordinary language--there is no reason
why he should not find out all the rest, if he
keeps a stout heart and does not grow weary of
the search, for seeking and learning are in fact
nothing but recollection.
- Plato, Meno
Anamnesis is the true soul-memory, intermittent
access to the divine wisdom within every human being
as an immortal spectator. All self-conscious monads
have known over immemorial time a vast host of
subjects and objects, modes and forms, an ever-
changing universe. Assuming a complex series of roles
as an essential part of the endless process of learning,
the soul becomes captive recurrently to myriad forms
of maya and moha, illusion and delusion. At the same
time the soul has the innate and inward capacity to
cognize that is is more than any and all of these masks.
As every incarnated being manifests a poor, pale
caricature of himself - a small, self-limiting, and
inverted reflection of one’s nœtic and creative potential
- the ancient doctrine of anamnesis is vital to
comprehend human nature and its hidden possibilities.
Given the fundamental truth that all human beings
have played many parts, initiating diverse actions in
intertwined chains of causation, it necessarily follows
that everyone has the moral and material environment
from birth to death which is needed for self-correction
and self-education. But who is it that has this need?
Not the shadowy self or false egoity which merely
reacts to external stimuli. Rather there is that Eye of
Wisdom in every person which in deep sleep is fully
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awake and which has a translucent awareness of self-
consciousness as pure, primordial light. 27
For the reader to apprehend the original Egyptian
nœsis of what modernity only dimly and vaguely calls the
“soul”, we will now highlight this corruption and
degeneration preliminary to jettisoning them.
B. Western Religious CSU
Recall from Chapter #1 that human societies are
generally not comfortable with free and independent SUs.
At the conscious level, humans dislike disagreement and
wish for consensus. But far less apparent and more
deadly are SU conflicts at the subconscious level, which
threaten the prevalent and acceptable view of “reality”.
civilization’s subconscious CSU was by institutions of the
dominant religion: Judaism and its Christian and Muslim
variants. They defined “reality” and of course punished or
killed “heretics” who could or would not see this “reality”.
[Anticipating Orwell’s 1984, evangelists and inquisitors
saw themselves as “saving” or “curing” unbelievers, even
if the “cure” was individual execution or “heathen”
culture extermination.]
27 Iyer, Raghavan, The Society of the Future. London: Concord Grove
Press, 1984, pages #13-14.
Raghavan (D.Phil. Oxford) was Professor of Political Science at
the University of California, Santa Barbara [and revered mentor and
friend during my M.A. & Ph.D. studies there]. He was also a member
of the Club of Rome and a Mahatma of the Theosophical Society & its
Krotona Institute in Ojai, as well as founder of the Institute of World
Culture, Santa Barbara. His writings may be studied at:
http://theosophy.org/
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C. The Judæo-Christian Soul
Judaism is most significant from a CSU standpoint
for its introduction of the concept of “original sin”,
according to which every human begins, lives, and ends
his or her life under a curse and condemnation from
Judaism’s God. This “greatest of all sins” resulted from
Adam and Eve innocently and ignorantly eating a fruit in
the Garden of Eden which gave them individual SUs:
awareness of their freedom to assign meaning and
evaluations of goodness and evilness according to their
own intelligence and experience, not God’s. In effect they
had ceased to be non-conscious components of the OU,
and this separation was the “greatest sin”. Implicitly their
OU-separation from their eating of the fruit was also
passed along to all of their descendants, who similarly
inherited the same inescapable sin.
Consider the effect this CSU has had upon all of the
civilizations in its grip: the entire Jewish, Christian, and
Muslim world down through the centuries. Humanity is
taught that it is inherently and inescapably evil, so much
so that even the most strenuous of purging and punitive
lifestyles, such as monasticism, nunnery, celibacy, etc.,
are futile. Only through the intercession of divine saviors
such as Jesus Christ and Mohammed can a fortunate few
humans hope for even posthumous relief. For everyone
else this life is a journey of misery followed by an eternity
of torture. In its original, pre-Christian “Hell” concept,
ancientMesopotamians [including the Hebrews]
considered the underworld ( Kur-nu-gi-a or Sheol) as a
dim, dismal place in which the once-incarnate soul
disintegrated. Hence their approach to life was fatalistic
and pessimistic, with ethics considered in terms of
Earthly consequences only.
Contrast this with the culture of ancient Egypt, in
which there was neither “original” nor �
�inherited” sin.
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Each individual was born a blank slate, so to speak, and
had full discretion to pursue an incarnation of virtue or
vice, after which, at the entrance to the Afterlife, the
deceased’s heart would be “weighed against a feather” to
fairly ascertain whether pleasure or penance had been
earned.
The Judaic soul, unlike anything in Egyptian
m e t a p h y s i c s , w a s t h u s s o m e t h i n g s h a m e f u l ,
reprehensible, and evil. What could families,
communities, or nations composed of such flawed and
doomed creatures hope to accomplish? If they could not
save themselves in the greater sense, of what value were
efforts towards morality, virtue, and other behaviors
supposed to please if not placate God?
It wasn’t until the late-17th/early-18th century CE
“Enlightenment” that Judæo-Christianity ceased to be
regarded as literal truth and became merely a
propaganda tool for controlling the ignorant and
superstitious. Thereafter, and to this day, it receives
extensive lip service and ceremony, but without the
intelligentsia or even its own cadre regarding it as
anything more than a fairytale. Neither God nor Jesus
nor Satan is regarded as anything more than a convenient
symbolic myth.
It therefore takes some effort to cast oneself back to
pre-Enlightenment times when all such influences were
held to be quite real indeed, and so the determinants of
human actions. Once this is appreciated, the Crusades,
religious wars, sect-persecutions, and “heathen”
civilization exterminations are coldly understandable not
as aberrations but as the God-sanctioned norm of human
conduct.
The Enlightenment relegation of Judæo-Christianity
from truth to fiction was echoed in its concept of the soul.
Previously the soul had been a real, tangible object of fear
and self-hatred within each human. Now that it was
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eliminated, society had to develop new devices to entice
or coerce the dominant CSU. We shall survey these
devices as they were introduced and are still used today,
but before doing so, we need to clear away the remaining
wreckage from the popular notion of the soul, and return
again to Egypt for completeness and clarity.
From Webster’s International Dictionary:
soul: (1) The immaterial essence or substance,
animating principle, or actuating cause of life or of the
individual life. (2a) The psychical or spiritual principle
in general shared by or embodied in individual human
beings or all beings having a rational and spiritual
nature. (2b) The psychical or spiritual nature of the
universe related to the physical world as the human
soul to the human body ...
While a superficially-impressive attempt, this
definition finally falls back on empty circularity. What is
an “animating principle”, and would the soul not exist if it
did not animate externalities? What is meant by
“psychical” and “spiritual”? As Robert Anton Wilson
quipped in Schrödinger’s Cat: “Theology was a system for
explaining things by coining words which nobody could
understand and pretending that the words meant
something.” 28
D. Jewish and Christian Afterlifes
Within the Western cultural tradition it is rarely
realized that its two major religions - Christianity and
Judaism - are actually at extremes apart on this issue.
Christianity in all of its many forms upholds life-after-
death as reason for abstinence in “this life”. Judaism, on
the other hand, insists upon “this life only” and absolutely
28 Wilson, Robert Anton, Schrödinger’s Cat. New York: Pocket
Books, 1979, page #98.
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rejects justification for human behavior on any grounds
other than YHVH’s direct instructions to living humans.
Comments Arthur Schopenhauer in Parega #I, 13:
The Jewish religion proper, as described and taught
in Genesis and all the historic books until the end of
Chronicles, is the crudest of all religions because it is
the only one which has no theory of immortality - not
even a trace of it. Every king and every hero or prophet
is buried, when he dies, with his fathers, and there is an
end of the matter; no trace of any existence after death;
indeed, as if intentionally, every thought of this sort
seems to have been removed.
Schopenhauer is only partially correct. The ancient
Hebrews drew no distinction between human souls and
the animating force common to all animals ( nephesh).
Although some part of this animating force was thought
to survive the destruction of the body, it was regarded
with superstitious terror and referred to ambiguously by
the terms elohim and rephaim. By the 2nd century BCE
Hebrew doctrine had changed to include the
revivification of the material body, but Hebrew
theologians never extended this principle to the
Pythagorean/Platonic concept of an independently-
surviving psyche.
Not surprisingly the original Christians continued this
Jewish tradition of corporeal revivification, using the
Greek term psyche to mean much the same thing as the
Hebrew nephesh. In Matthew 10:28, where the soul is
mentioned as distinct from the body, their posthumous
reunion is promptly suggested. The most conclusive
example of this doctrine, of course, is that of Jesus’ own
material resurrection [as in Luke 24:36-43], but by the
time of Paul the distaste with which sophisticated Greeks
regarded this “animation of corpses” ( anastasis nekron)
induced that apostle to modify Christian teachings in the
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direction of Pythagoreanism. Paul was further aware of -
and presumably sought to overcome - the challenge of
Gnostic and Hermetic Christianity, being a blend of basic
Christianity with various Egyptian and Hellenic
mysteries. 29
In I Cor. 15:35 and II Cor. 5:1-2 Paul offers a mixture
of Pythagorean and Hebrew ideas, whereby the
posthumous soul is given a “spiritual body” ( soma
pneumatikon) which nevertheless requires a bodily form.
Despite Paul’s efforts, Christianity has never succeeded in
breaking free from the notion of reanimation of the
original corpse, which at least has been grist for the mill
of horror-film producers.
While there have been many explanations for
Christian antipathy towards Judaism, one of the most
crucial had todo with Jews’ failure to be posthumously
accountable in any way for their incarnate conduct,
implying that they are self-serving and indifferent to
ethics. Observed Dietrich Eckart, initiate of the Thule
Gesellschaft and mentor to Adolf Hitler and Alfred
Rosenberg, in 1919 ( Auf gut deutsch):
It is now evident that a people which completely
denies the existence of life after death must limit all of
its thoughts and endeavors to the present world, to
earthly existence; it has no other choice. But a people
can only grow up with such an emphasis on worldly
matters if it fundamentally lacks any need for
immortality, which in turn is possible only if there is no
trace of feeling in its basic character for the eternal in
mankind. Wherever the soul manifests itself, no matter
how faintly, a sense of immortality necessarily follows.
The individual is not always consciously aware of this;
indeed there are many who refuse to understand it -
29 The 1945 discovery of thirteen original Gnostic codices at Nag
Hammadi in Upper Egypt has shed much light on the ideas with
which Paul had to compete. The codices themselves date to 350-400
CE but are probably copies of 2nd century CE originals.
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who are so ignorant concerning the concept of
immortality that they habitually denounce it, even
while their unselfish actions clearly reveal that each
one of them senses the soul and therefore eternity
within himself.
Although Pauline Christianity attempted to
appropriate the Pythagorean/Platonic concept of the
“soul distinct within and ultimately freed from the body”,
it was unable to sustain this concept without the vehicle
of the body. Christian artistic representations of
posthumous Paradise are invariably sterile and dull. It
will be recalled that Christ’s ultimate promise upon his
Second Coming was to reunite all souls with their ex-
bodies, so that they would once again enjoy their original
corporeal shells.
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Chapter 5: Anamnesis MindStar
You have left your body; be aware if you care.
Your mind has left your body, and for this one moment
You are under the polar ice cap in a place we call home.
How is it there, white bear, like that where you grow?
Now all of you come back to here, and now elsewhen to
there.
Move on out the other way where...
Do you find yourself floating, growing there?
You can exercise your mind on where you want to go,
And you can see the city lights flashing two thousand miles
below you.
You can feel the sands of Zanzibar or pierce the nearest sun;
Find out what and who you are and if you need to run.