[...]
I also saw that there was a sort of balance. Many of the creatures that are most often considered prey are equipped with elaborate sensing organs that help them to stay out of harm’s way. Many of the creatures that are the predators have horrifyingly efficient organs of destruction such as teeth and claws. If predators became too numerous, they quickly devoured all but the cleverest of prey, and then turned on each other. In this way, both populations were culled. What I also was seeing was that populations that existed in herds, where there was sharing and protection of weaker members by stronger ones, had a far better chance of survival in the presence of voracious predation.
I realized with absolute horror that this was exactly the case with human beings, though it occurred at a different level – humans were an interface between the strictly material and ethereal realms, and it was through them that the energies of prey and predator manifested at the theological level. From the strictly human perspective, such a realization was monstrous. The psychological and spiritual environment in which we live is the infrastructure of the theological reality which is accurately represented in the wild world in which animals live out similar dramas. “As above, so below,” the ancient teachings have repeated for millennia, and I realized that this was part of what they intended to convey. When they tell us that the Great Secret can be learned from Nature, they weren’t kidding!
On the one hand, I was seeing a terrible vista that shattered my illusions of “God in his heaven, and all is right with the world.”
On the other hand, I could see that it wasn’t just mindless cruelty; that it was purposeful activity from another level of being.
My daughter arrived and I told her what I was observing – that the cliques were similar to Jane Goodall’s chimpanzees – and she, of course, dryly remarked, “Gee! How long did it take you to figure
that out?!”
The only thing was, she was thinking about it only in psychological terms and not in terms of literal life-force energy transfer.
Because of the many things the Cs had said, my mind immediately made associations. I also recalled a passage from James Redfield’s book
The Celestine Prophecy.
My field is conflict, looking at why humans treat each other so violently. We’ve always known that this violence comes from the urge humans feel to control and dominate one another, but only recently have we studied this phenomenon from the inside, from the point of view of the individual’s consciousness. We have asked what happens inside a human being that makes him want to control someone else. We have found that when an individual walks up to another person and engages in a conversation, which happens billions of times each day in the world, one of two things can happen. That individual can come away feeling strong or feeling weak, depending on what occurs in the interaction.
For this reason, we humans always seem to take a manipulative posture. No matter what the particulars of the situation, or the subject matter, we prepare ourselves to say whatever we must in order to prevail in the conversation. Each of us seeks to find some way to control and thus to remain on top in the encounter. If we are successful, if our viewpoint prevails, then rather than feel weak, we receive a psychological boost. In other words we humans seek to outwit and control each other not just because of some tangible goal in the outside world that we’re trying to achieve, but because of a lift we get psychologically. (Redfield 1993, 71–72)
He then describes an unpleasant encounter between a man and woman and their daughter where the parents are pointed out as dominating the girl, and she lashes out violently in order to gain some control for herself. It is then suggested that when she grows up, she will think that she has to seize control and dominate others with the same intensity.
“This same trauma no doubt happened to her parents before her. They have to dominate now because of the way their parents dominated them. That’s the means through which psychological violence is passed down from one generation to another.”
The only difference in that view and what I was seeing was that I was realizing that it was deeper than that – at the apex of the pyramid of predators, somebody was getting all the energy being passed along through something akin to etheric psychological filaments.
It suddenly made sense that the Control System had been set up millennia ago, social and religious programs instituted, to produce this psychological trauma that extended over thousands of generations, in order for somebody, or some thing, to benefit; there was an “ultimate dominator” of the global clique. And guess what? Human beings were not at the top of the food chain!
As simple as this insight may seem to the reader, having access to all of the other information that has become available about these matters over the past few years, it was a stunning revelation to me.
I then began to think about S** and the “Vital information” that could be conveyed to me. The first thing I realized was that human beings at a certain point in their development reach a crossroad where they can choose which dynamic they will develop in spiritual terms: predator or prey, and it had nothing to do with material considerations. In fact, I wasn’t even sure if it was a choice and not just simply the inherent nature of an individual.
I could see that S** was, indeed, as the Cs had described her: a simple, giving soul.
But in her dynamic interaction with her mother she was literally acting out the role of prey to her mother’s role of predator. As her mother grew older and less able to hunt on her own, she manipulated S** to engage in interactions whereby she became a sort of lure to induce other prey into her mother’s range of operation so that the feeding could continue. In a sense, it was very much like a weakened member of a herd that keeps wandering away into the realm of the predator, and when others would go after her to save her, they become prey as well; they leave the protection of the herd, or the network. In this sense, some individuals become a sort of predator by proxy – a lure to destruction; a decoy. On the other hand, I wasn’t too sure if that was exactly accurate either. Perhaps there were predators who stalked their prey in long, slow, silent exercises in patience and concealment?
I could instantly see that nearly all of humanity was in a terrible predicament by being unaware of this infrastructure of theological prey and predation. In the animal kingdom, who was who and what was what in terms of predators and prey was pretty easy to see because they look different and their behaviors are out in plain view. But in the human dynamic, it is masked from us. And it seemed to be masked for a reason: the masking is utilized to separate the herd, to divide and conquer.
Of course, that such a condition could be possible seemed to have no explanation in positivist terms until I thought about the culling factor, and the idea that spiritual vigor might be the objective. Using the animal kingdom as a template, it seemed obvious that those creatures that most correctly assessed and responded to their environment had the best chance of survival and reproduction. Those members of herds that remained in the symbiotic networked environment had strength and safety and numbers on their side. Those that strayed from the herd, those that exposed themselves to danger, were eaten. It was that simple.
It was at this moment that I saw myself as a cog in a vast global mechanism – a feeding machine – and I was nothing more than food. It literally made me sick to see it. What was more: I needed to understand where all this energy was really going. Who was getting it? Who was at the top of the food chain?
[...]
I just wanted him out of the house. I was hanging onto my resolve by a thread, and I knew I couldn’t take much more of the pity me trip because that had always been my weak point. I knew that, for the sake of the children, I had to win this battle.
I had already spent too many years teaching my children by example how to be prey and now I needed to teach them by example how not to be prey.
[...]
The moment of true initiation. It seems that, as the great masters teach us, it is not a moment of great enlightenment. It is not someone who comes to show us reality. It is not a seeing all the world as a oneness. It is seeing the self as a liar and a feeder on others. It is measuring the self with
truth. It is seeing that the Predator has been feeding on the self, that the self has been feeding on others and propagating the infection on to all those whom one claims to love and wishes to help. Initiation is not a glorious in-pouring of life and love and tears for the beauty and oneness of the world.
It is sheer terror.
It is a descent into Hell. It is the Shamanic descent into the underworld to do battle with demons. It is the dismemberment of the body, the flaying of the flesh from the bones, and the subsequent rebuilding of the self on a different foundation – a foundation of spiritual verity.
And if I could convey to you that Hell, that sensation, that solitary test in which the soul is weighed,
by the self, finally and completely and seen for what it has truly done, you would see how little truth there is because of all the beliefs of the Matrix that have been inculcated and promulgated and tended so carefully by our emotions and by the deceptions of the predator within who convinces us that we are “good” and “pure” and there is “oneness.”
Indeed, one sees that there is “oneness,” but one sees that the aspect of God that is experienced at this level is the black, sucking, feeding maw of STS. One sees how little true Love is actually manifested at this level of being. One sees that all of our illusions about goodness and truth and beauty are
lies. They are masks for more feeding.
And that is so horrifying an initiation that few survive.
That is “paying everything.”
Now, reread what Gurdjieff had to say about the matter; how he pointed out that a person has to “pay in advance,” that the key is to accept the idea that one is not what one thinks, that there is a different reality from which our own is projected, and that developing this idea in the realm of pure thought, and then using it as the platform by which one can observe and analyze, is the key to being able to see for a moment, and then again.
One must be able to see the interactions of the petty tyrants in our lives, the predators who prey on us in the theological reality. Then, one must be willing to act. It is only after action that the true nature of the Predator reveals itself just as the vampire reacts with violence to being exposed by the presence of a mirror. Because, it must be kept always in mind that there are predators who are predators by choice – even if that choice is made at some level, in some part of themselves, that is not available to even their own conscious awareness. They, too, are part of the Matrix, and they wouldn’t be able to play their roles if they were not consciously convinced that they are right, that they are good, that they are righteous and long-suffering.
