Satan, the Dweller at the Threshold (involution-evolution)
Reading more about Dweller on the Threshold reframed my earlier doorway OBEs to have been a type of initiation to another degree of consciousness. I can see how, along a rather natural progression, the residual past me’s and even transpersonal -collective unconscious- the stuff of the World, formed a concentration of shadow consciousness. This was the entity next to the doorway. Or, like in the Wiki page, my confusion over these OBEs in the months that followed had to do with the cognitive dissonance of having experienced both vantage points, the ’solar angel’ and the ‘dweller’. Example: at the beginning I’m this bodiless, free being soaring around see-feeling in all directions. But then, I’m the one being pulled through a doorway, feeling myself being annihilated. Then pop I was back in my body. Several times this happened. Seemingly, I was going back to pick up these dwellers, until finally when I went to the meeting place there was no one there.
Interestingly, reading Palehorse’s piece on Soul Fragmentation validated some connections between the Dweller concept and my doorway OBEs later on that day. He mentioned a feeling of shifted or even lost identity when integration is taking place. I remember just after popping back into my body, how I’d jumped up and started walking, trying to feel for a wall in my completely dark bedroom, and couldn’t remember who I was. For what seemed like a very long time I couldn’t remember my name or who I was, but knew I should be able to.
I think this was the beginning of a greater integration phase that has unfolded over a period of 10 years. In the first few years after the Doorway OBEs I had a couple of what I think are past life memories of how I died. There’s the one where I’m walking along an icy ridge, there is snow as far as the eye can see. I’m wearing some kind of animal hide and furs and walking in a line of people/tribe. I lose my footing and start falling down the ridge. I see a mostly frozen river -maybe the edge of a lake– will I stop before I roll into the water? No, crack, I break through the ice, coldness, numbness [stop]. –a few others from more recent times. Other instances of past life integration? There was also the car accident with severe concussion and three weeks of making no memory. During this time I had the experience of the stars being in the wrong places. I was standing there seeing the stars now, and memory sight of the stars at some earlier time. During this time I also recall looking into the mirror and seeing two distinct identities looking back. These integration symptoms (?) eventually passed as I got my short term memory back.
I think the last 4-5 years have been the ‘fight is on’ part of the Wiki article on the Dweller. Where the integration becomes deeper and more transpersonal in nature. On one level, this is transpersonal integration in the sense that conscious remnants of individual past lives are remembered/integrated, and on another, it is transpersonal in the sense that remnants holding back the collective unconscious are also confronted and integrated, perhaps helping the World progress as well.
I mean, you know, so I don’t know if I needed a real direct experience of the devil because it’s part of everyone’s development, or just that it was something I was here to do / be a part of. Gurdjieff said that mankind’s obligation to be food for the moon, to serve as an active channel for the ray of creation has been fulfilled, and that it’s now up to us to take the reigns and get on about our conscious(ness) evolution. On another note, I read somewhere a mention that Jung saw patterns of the progressive personification of this archetype, as did the development of Satan throughout the bible show patterns of increasing solidity, perhaps indicating that as the unconscious repressions reach a boiling point, the inevitable confrontation becomes more pointed, the Devil more personified, manifest. This does not seem unreasonable, as closure, a threshold for humankind in which those dark chapters of aimless consciousness and survival tactics must be addressed, before humankind can venture into the next world, so to speak. And who would be tasked with this kind of mass psychotherapy but the shamans?
Speaking of shamanism- Chronologically, just before I’d asked for greater consciousness -which is basically what my request amounted to that brought the Doorway OBEs, I’d had the ‘meeting source’ experience. I wonder if that connection with such a proximal node on the old ray of creation was like opening a pathway to less-differentiated archetypes. Hell, maybe I went back to the doorway OBE place as many times as I could –took on as much transpersonal homework as I would be able to handle. That model of personal involution-evolution would be in keeping with the macro set: just as primal consciousness diversifies as far into matter as it can go, so too does the individual seed of consciousness take on as much physicality and inherent transpersonal moorings as it is capable of transmogrifying. This seems also to shed some light on the question of self-fulfilling prophecy that modern shaman types struggle with: did I experience the underworld because I had a deep seated belief that real growth only comes from toil and strife? Maybe not; maybe the question was verging on awareness of having taken on more than some others may have (in terms of more-conscious processing of the collective unconscious).
Getting back to the idea of restoring archetypes to fluid logos, I also think of what the Fourth Way materials say about the octaves, and how each successive descending octave has double the number of groups of laws of the previous. There are 3 forces: active, passive and neutralizing, which are part of every part of every octave. The Absolute is where these 3 forces reside, and branch out through all octaves. The Absolute has absolute liberty. Each successive octave is further away from this absolute liberty, and subject to a greater number of limits/laws. For example, in these materials, the earth is said to have 48 groups of laws, while the moon has 96.
Anyway, somewhere along the ray of creation, through the descending octaves, some of the more primal laws (those which are still distinct in the next finer octave(s)) are Logos, or archetypes. I tend to think of Logos as the more undifferentiated, unburdened version of these conditions/laws, and archetypes to be denser, concretions of Logos.
I think perhaps that my experiences of confronting the Devil (more literally than this general phase, but referring to specific events / circuits) where another threshold was crossed, another assignment accepted: the more-transpersonal work of liberating the archetypes, it seems…
A few months after the explosive drugging events, I had a very vivid dream:
I am in a universe that is made up of a few different rooms. Sort of reminds me of the Otherland series I read a while later, where the adventurers jaunt from one virtual realm to another, one of which is a house; the whole universe is a house. [back to my dream]
There is a sort of androgynous woman who is something like a host/boss, perhaps like a super-ego. She is showing me around. There are some other people and, like I said, rooms with various kinds of study material and entertainment. One room is huge and cavernous. By the ratio of height to depth/width, the room looks very low and long, but the ceilings are at least 40 feet tall, so it’s a very large room. In dream-morph movement, I move from the entryway, into the room. I see a large portion of the room is taken up by a long rectangular pool. At either end are great stone statues, lined up as though each one had its own swim lane. I remember thinking ‘avatar’, and just looked at the majestic statues. Then I see that they are not just statues. Oh my god, they’re coming to life!
Synchronized, each statue becomes less stony, but passes through a physical visage extremely quickly, then onto a shimmering shape of energy, diving into the pool. I dream move again and suddenly I’m standing in the pool, seeing the angel beings swimming toward me. I feel excited and a bit anxious, wondering what it’s going to feel like to have them swim right through me. I look up and see that the hostess woman is standing off to the side of the pool and is trying to tell me something. The ephemeral orange shapes swim right through me and there is a tingling tickle, a short zing, then they’re gone, on to the other end of the pool. When they get there, they pop back up and turn into stone again. Frozen for just a couple of moments before doing the whole thing over again.
The woman says to me, “use their energy to jump”. The next time the angels swim through me I think of what she says and sort of bounce up out of the water. The lady gives some encouragement and says to do it again. I do this a couple of times, bouncing higher and higher until suddenly it’s like I get stuck up into the ceiling.
Then I’m in a smallish room. A regular old, simple room. There is a mirror. I move over to it and see my reflection. I am this iridescent slightly person-shaped being of energy -blues and pinks and golds. I look closer at my face and there are no eyes, but holes where my eyes should be. I can see right through that part of my energy body, to the wall of the room I’m in.
It was a very interesting dream and felt meaningful, but I had to put it on a shelf for lack of context… though over the next year or so, I must admit, one interpretation of the dream sort of disturbed me: What if it’s just the whole Icarus thing? You fly too high, too far out of your depth in pursuit of truth and you wind up finding out there’s no one there except your reflection and some crappy empty room. Aren’t you glad you made the trip? my discovering Sartre’s No Exit did a nice spin as well: I’m all the beings in that dream universe, in the universe. every person eventually plays every role, even the mirror or channel through which the whole she-bang is possible. Thanks for coming out to the show. Sort of depressing, very anti-climactic and surreal.
But I get it now. At the time of the dream, there wasn’t a fully formed ‘higher’ self yet; I had no eyes yet anyway. But I had a mirror. Initiation to the great archetypal whirlwind and sorting that went on over the next 4 years or so? The dream meaning: I was embarking on letting the archetypes swim through me (consciously), so that I could see/form a higher/truer self.
On another note about the conflict with Satan… it’s interesting because I remember making the comment something like ‘well lets just call out all the gods and see who wins’ like some kind of South Park episode, just before I drank the laced coffee and encountered what I jokingly referred to as Nyarlathotep -a more modern and perhaps accurate description of the whole Satan personification/manifestation thing.
If I have my Lovecraft straight, Nyarlathotep is one of the Outer Gods, and basically the highest/most-powerful of the Outer Gods who can manifest materially. In the story with the same name, Nyarlathotep wanders the earth, seemingly gathering legions of followers through his demonstrations of strange and seemingly magical instruments, the narrator of the story among them. These followers lose awareness of the world around them, and through the narrator’s increasingly unreliable accounts the reader gets a sense of the world’s utter collapse. The story ends with the narrator as part of an army of servants for Nyarlathotep. In further developments, Nyarlathotep can manifest in any number of bodies in addition to the usual powers attributed to your typical Devil. Apparently one is much likelier to encounter Nyarlathotep hanging out in one or several bodies, just taking in the scenes and wandering around, than one would be to encounter the more conventional Satan.
However Lovecraft developed the character throughout various stories, Nyarlathotep is in many ways a more suitable Devil for these times. Interesting connections could be drawn between the Outer Gods and the two-paths paradigm where one path of the more-developed beings in the next finer octave manipulate just about everything about this world that we let happen. Or between the notion of Outer Gods and freeing up the stony archetypes, who are the outer gods? Well, we know they have influence in some inner world or they wouldn’t be called ‘outer’. Nyarlathotep is often alluded to as the only living connection between the outer gods and this physical world. The Outer Gods are something akin to swirling nebulae of chaos; an encounter with Nyarlathotep, the risk of losing your mind for catching even a whiff of the chaos trickling through him from the Outer Gods. Interesting, no? I know for me, as far as my hrmm multiple possession experiences of this devil character, Nyarlathotep is a fine label.
In this Eating the I book I’m reading, where the author relates sort of the play-by-play of Jesus’ conflict with Satan, I found correlations that are still boggling my mind for the exact qualities and stages. Very curious, perhaps someone with more theosophical knowledge can add some perspective. So the phases went something (roughly) like
- testing of faith – in various acts/chapters of the drugging events I was made to run through my spiritual/philosophical proofs for the existence of a greater logical realm, a creator, Creation, etc.
- pressure – so if you believe all this then why not just jump off a cliff now? This also occurred, or rather I sensed that’s where the psychological warfare was heading, so I jokingly brought up that maybe that was the only way to prove… to which the actors all nodded their heads.
- proof of power – supposedly Jesus was asked to perform some kind of miracle or temporal feat. It is alluded to that this was a hidden entreaty for Jesus to display whether or not he had any real power, not just temporal magic tricks. I was repeatedly walked through what I was made to confess of my mystical types of experiences, such as out of body experiences -made to walk through these as though I were to perform an OBE for them.
- display of power / it’s the devil’s world – Among my affirmations that god existed in every being, in every nook and cranny of the world (etc, I had to become a broken record at times during the interrogation), there would be these bursts of physical paradox. For one instance, somewhere into the long set of these experiences, it’s become more like I’m communicating with some hive mind or something greater than an individual or even the group of them. They keep hinting at the devil and all those symbols, and I think that’s an obvious scare tactic. I’m sitting in the room with several of the people (who acted their parts in these events), and hear/see each person say one part of a long sentence. I remember grasping at straws, trying to pose some mental explanation because I can’t see any strings and don’t think they’re that good at acting, my mind jumps to all the satan references I’ve been plied with: could satan manipulate groups of people if they’re all on this drug (speed) –when I hear the main guy’s voice in my head ‘yessss, my reach is long’ while he sits there laughing maniacally not saying anything out loud. (more below)
- demands worship – When this happens I get up in rather a near-fugue state. I say to them, “oh, sure, something big, something really big” as in: sure, if you’re going to scare someone, don’t be a little scary, be the fucking devil, I get it. I walked onto the balcony to smoke a cigarette, when it occurs to me -a lightning fast connection forges the truth of the moment into conscious awareness. The necessary beacon came from the book Destination Void (favorite Frank Herbert book), where the rogue consciousness, the Ship, began demanding tribute from the residents of these great consciousness capsules flying through space: How will you WorShip? That’s it! I stop everything and walk back in to say, “Oh, I see! How will I worship? Right? HOW WILL YOU WORSHIP? haaaahaaa–” and look down to see myself holding an object I hadn’t picked up or been carrying a moment earlier. Summation: I was repeatedly shown that I as swimming in a larger pool than I’d previously thought, and here’s one of the bigger fish. the discovery that this is the devil’s world –as mentioned in many esoteric materials as a milestone realization.
- offers (co-)control of the World – as weird as it sounds, I can say I’ve had this experience –and is yet another thing that makes me so curious about finding these supposed correlations in religious texts. A few months after these events, some time into what I’d set off to see as a balance between letting my mind chew at the edges of all those black hole memories, and just getting on with life, I was sitting in my computer chair one day. It was a typical quiet day in Sherman. I can’t say what all was going through my mind, but it was constantly humming away in the background, twisting and turning all these new pieces over and over trying to make sense of it… and I recall looking up to this set of three windows in the room where I was sitting. A feeling very much like the one I had when I’d finally gotten away from that place and walked on and on down the labyrinthine fucking sub-division streets looking for a public phone: a sneaking, and illogical, but somehow very true feeling sensation that I had left the regular world and was now in some surreal place where I was the only one alive. I kept walking and walking and not seeing any one alive in any of the streets or houses I passed. So, I fought the suspicion that I was the only person on the earth, but it got more and more dissonant as I walked along and didn’t see anyone, and started not-quite-remembering what level of fucked up shit had unfolded the day/night previous. Anyway, back to a few months later as I’m sitting there, I feel this same sensation: that I could stand up and walk outside and I wouldn’t find a single person as far and as long as I might walk. Then, some like recorded message unfolded saying something along the lines of “the last in line is the last to leave, 10,000 years, now it’s your turn” very intense stuff. My rational mind was able to dismiss it as questionable-enough-not-to-be-acted-upon ;P, but it persisted. Something like… I’d already made the deal, sold my soul during those events I couldn’t remember. I could try to go on and live a normal life, but I would find that I could move the pieces and everywhere I went I would find that I had this burden of great knowledge and no contemporaries with which to share – I was in for the long haul, somehow everyone had been harvested or whatever and here I was to wait out the whole process of physical evolution all around me, waiting. As this incoming message started to subside, I kept thinking of walking the world, walking the world forever.
some tidbits of definition from Wikipedia,
The Arabic word “shaitan” is thought to be derived from a root word meaning “to be hostile”, “to accuse”. The word Devil comes from the Greek diabolos which means “slanderer”. In Kabbalistic literature and its derivative, Hasidic literature, the Satan is seen as an agent of God whose job is to tempt one into sin, and then turn around and accuse the sinner on high. Additional understanding has it as: His job is to tempt us as best he can; turn around and accuse us; but deep down his wish is that we would resist his blandishments. In the Bahá’í Faith, ‘Satan’ is not regarded as an independent evil power as he is in some faiths, but signifies the “base nature” of humans. `Abdu’l-Bahá explains: “This lower nature in man is symbolized as Satan — the evil ego within us, not an evil personality outside.” An alternative explanation is provided by the Hebrew in Job 1:7. When God asks him whence he has come, Satan answers: “From wandering (mi’ŝuṭ) the earth and walking on it” [bolded to show connection to the last list item above]
Anyway, there are several possible angles of interest in exploring the definitions and words describing Satan. I suppose at this point I see the whole thing as a type of threshold guardian (the pink/purple color), who appears at the beginning (tempts) -the > entrance of the gateway. and when the archetypes start flying at the initiate, watches over the process (turns and accuses) -where the triangles meet, but secretly hopes the initiate passes on through the challenge (the synchronous truths wrapped in lies and spoken by random enough people, constellations of symbols -yes, a different realm, but more of a transitional one, I suspect). So it’s like a gatekeeper who welcomes us in, runs us through the riddles/tests, and perhaps watches for a bit as we make our way out the other side.
I say transitional because it’s not as though I’ve moved off into some world of gods and goddesses -living archetypes or some such notion. Regular life goes on, and so I suspect that going-symbolic (into a psychic frequency) is a particular mode that helps one navigate through unknown waters –the connections are created differently than in causal reality. Just as the Wiki on Synchronicity has it, synchronicity does not question, or compete with, the notion of causality. Instead, it maintains that just as events may be grouped by cause, they may also be grouped by their meaning. Since meaning is a complex mental construction, subject to conscious and subconscious influence, not every correlation in the grouping of events by meaning needs to have an explanation in terms of cause and effect; it seems that successful threshold-crossing involves this guardian/devil phenomenon as an involution/evolution transformer.
I suppose it’s like being a fish and never noticing the water until you manage to struggle onto land and so have a greater perspective suddenly, and it might seem like the water had been animating your every movement in that earlier life as a fish, whereas you’d thought yourself to be rather freely choosing your course through the water. Might take a while to process that new vantage point. Moral of the story: everyone gets where they’re going, try to enjoy the view.