Paradise Suppressed

A unit of consciousness becomes alienated  from the Great Whole. It feels vulnerable. It becomes aware of its condition and feels compelled to control its environment. Before long the unit of consciousness challenges the Whole for supremacy, confusing it with security. But the unit cannot “conquer” reality. It is forced to compromise, and finally finds harmony with the Whole but on a higher plane than the other “units” within the it. The unit has reached harmony within the greater Whole. Is this the journey of the human ego and society?

Don’t we find the unit diverging from its Path by ignoring the perilous road blindly chosen by the ignorant, misguided unit itself? Has a tumor developed on the Whole that’s tried to emulate it, and guides the unit astray? Haven’t we seen this tumor turned into a parasite, a god, a ruling class that, through the divine graces of the Supreme Executive, forces the unit, on behalf of this ruling class, to suck up all the energy and resources needed for a harmonious existence within the Great Whole?

Suppressing Paradise

To the Preservation Society the masses’ fabled Paradise On Earth is not a fable, it is suppressed. Among ruling classes the world over, and known for millennia, Our fathers and forefathers have reminded Us that a harmonious existence between the individual and their world always threatens to break out. It is a raging caged monster hot with claustrophobia and indignation, who’s suppression requires constant devotion. It always threatens to bubble to to the surface and pierce the fabric of the Establishment. In Our secret societies, We have always been taught that the battle for hearts and minds — for the ego of each and every individual — begins with the “guilt of man” and recognizing the “evil” effects of women and the material world have on the individual of the lower orders. We conduct sacred rituals to remind us of these sacred truths, and to protect Our patriarchal foundations from the Beast of Harmony.

To the ruling class, the Establishment is a very fragile veil of contorted “reality”. At any moment “true” reality may poke through its surface. The irony is that the reality of paradise is actually right in front of the individual’s face. No veil or iron curtain could ever deceive those who would but look before their very noses with the courage of honesty.

It is the Establishment’s task to blind the masses to heaven on Earth, even though their wise men and messiahs preach its tradition. We shrivel the ego so that it is easy to blind the herd with labels. The effect is that while the raging Beast of Worldly Paradise rampages right in front of their face, demanding expression and willing to come to their aid, the individual has been rendered to feel the primacy of insecurity, loyalties, anxiety, suspicion, complacency, isolation in a great void, making the prospect of a static fixed position, if less than liberated, a safe and secure one. The raging Beast of Harmony is reality itself. The Establishment “protects” the individual from it. Perhaps the greatest secret of all time.

One of Our members had severe learning disabilities growing up. He did badly in school, but was a strong-headed young man, and after high school ran off to Europe anonymously to escape his shame and embarrassment. He roamed aimlessly throughout Paris, Madrid, London and Amsterdam and Eastern Europe. Our minion described that time as the happiest days of his life. He came out of his shell and made friends, went drinking, dabbled in art, laugh plenty, and explored the cities. As a young man, he did not want it to end, and had difficulties accepting “reality”. “Those,” he says now, “were magical days”.

These are glimpses of paradise, interpreted as “moments of happiness”. As if life was not supposed to be filled with such ecstasy. Shouldn’t all days be magical? “And then ‘reality’ sets in” Our unwitting loyalists masses like to say. Our fellow minion retained the strong instinct for paradise that was once in us all. The desire for happiness, e.g., paradise is difficult to squelch. The Establishment had trouble reigning him in — and he belonged to the ruling class! — the masses’ third rate paradise. But eventually, the prodigal son came into the fold and assumed his obligations in society.

The pull of the Supreme Executive proved much too powerful for the Beast of Harmony because the Establishment is constantly reinforcing ego-embedded establishment memes, and steering thought with its labels. Meanwhile there is no equal counterpart working on behalf of the Beast of Harmony, except the people — and those are far and few in between. The real world does not self-promote, yet it manages to assert itself even when no one pushes its interests. This is the power of “true” reality, Our persistent foe.

Many ancient writings — Greek, Near Eastern and many others — allude to a time when things were more idyllic. Problems existed, but they did not rise to the level of cruelty and drama as seen just a few hundred years later with the establishment of patriarchy. It was a time of harmony in which social energies were balanced. A balanced society precludes the appearance of the ruling class due to the latter’s dependence on imbalance. Through religion, the ruling class retained the idea of paradise as a reward for servitude and suffering on Earth for the benefit of the higher orders, and only to be enjoyed after death. Who but a ruling class could agree to such a contract?

The Fall

The Fall From Paradise is a universal theme found in many cultures. It is the pivotal moment when the balance went negative. This adverse change occurred on many levels, all related and sustaining each other. It is generally the movement from ignorance and innocence to awareness and therefore power.

At the “beginning” there was Paradise on Earth. In other words, what is the need  for ulterior motives in the first place? Humans, naturally, want to avoid trouble. Duplicity is not necessary when you have an abundance of life and everything besides. What need does the rich individual have for street crime? What need was there for the division of rich and poor?  What’s the point? The burden of proof is on those who are convinced that poverty and war not only exist, but is inevitable in humans.

In prepatriarchal society, the individual was in harmony with each other and nature. Neolithic graves demonstrate remarkable egalitarianism. The leaders’ burial remains show little difference compared to their less privileged companions. There was a distinctive lack of weapons and sacrificial victims buried with them. The Fall of Man is the rise of the patriarchy. And so it is. Women were subjugated, and men are lesser men because of it.

The Fall of Man is the Fall of Woman. She fell first and hardest. It was all her fault. She listened to that bad old snake — which represents wisdom in many cultures. She was curious. She took the bait and damned all humanity. Just like a woman! She took the apple and bit it. She had to entice Adam to bite the apple because he was apparently too busy frolicking around in total innocence to do it himself. As a result, God damned her eternally to serve “man”, and “man” because he followed, was kicked out of Eden. The reasonable thing to do. Adam and Eve were kicked out of paradise for becoming thinking people, as opposed to the unquestioning herd content living in bliss. This is the basis of Western “civilization”.

We find a version of the motif in classic Zoroastrianism, “humanity is created to withstand the forces of decay and destruction through good thoughts, words and deeds. Failure to do so actively leads to misery for the individual and for his family.” Ahura Mazda (AM) created Gayōmart the perfect human, the first to worship AM. “For 30 centuries I kept the world from corruption and decay,” AM tells his prophet Zoroaster. “They lived for 3000 years in peace and they did not pray, did not eat and did not talk but Gayōmart was thinking about this”. We see the potential treachery, the sinfulness in humans, in Gayōmart contemplating indulgence. Then the demonness Jahi, the “polluting whore”, awoke the dark forces of Ahriman, who made war on this perfect arrangement. Thanks again lady. AM vanquished Ahriman but not before he “started to create death, illness, lust, thirst, hunger among the life forms and spread evil beings in the world (The ‘Kyrm’, which includes reptiles, insects and rodents)…”

In Greek mythology Prometheus gives “mankind” many gifts that make them increasingly more powerful. Interestingly enough, it was Athene, the daughter of Zeus, who taught him architecture, astronomy, mathematics, navigation, “and other useful arts, which he passed on to mankind”, writes Roberts Graves in Greek Mythology. It was not Zeus the father, the jealous, suspicious, aggressive appropriator of the goddess. On the contrary,  Zeus who “had decided to extirpate the whole race of man, and spared them only at Prometheus’s urgent plea, grew angry at their increasing powers and talents.” Then Prometheus dared to give fire to the individual and that was the final straw. For his actions he was chained to a mountainside where a vulture would visit him every day and eat his liver. The pain was eternal, for every night the liver grew back and every day the vulture came back to gorge on it.

Fire meant the individual could challenge nature, and its appropriator, the authority of the man-god. The audacity of learning things and becoming independent in thought and action, and confident and powerful in deed, leads to thoughts of extermination for ruling authorities.

Zeus has a woman made, Pandora, who married Prometheus’s brother Epimetheus. Graves comments: “Pandora (‘all-giving’) was the Earth-goddess Rhea, worshiped under that title at Athens and elsewhere…” Through Graves Hesiod tells us Zeus had made Pandora

as foolish, mischievous, and idle as she was beautiful — the first of long line of such women. Presently she opened a jar, which Prometheus had warned Epimetheus to keep closed, and in which he had been at pains to imprison all the Spites that might plague mankind: such as Old Age, Labour, Sickness, Insantiy, Vice and Passion. Delusive Hope, however, whom Prometheus had also shut in the jar, discouraged them by her lies from a general suicide.

Pandora went from all-giving goddess to giving all of “mankind” misery and pain. This was Hesiod’s version of punishing humanity, and in particular woman. Delusive Hope, another female, is the veil of lies of the Establishment.

“Man” suffers many Falls. The human condition is the First Fall, as represented by the expulsion from Paradise. The next Fall came from another expulsion from paradise. In ruling class ideologies birth is a fall into an unforgiving and treacherous world. The audacity of birth makes the individual a “sinner”. In the womb is security and warmth. The individual does not have to deal with anything. The trade off in this Eden is that one is not independent, one is not even an individual yet. Then the newly minted individual is ejected out of Paradise to a cold, sterile hospital room. Birth is the first trauma experienced by the individual in this Fallen purgatory of Earth. The individual comes out isolated and helpless — punished for the sins of Adam and Eve. They are born into an Establishment soup that then goes to work breeding the herd.

Subsequent trauma hits at the end of childhood, with the onset of adult herd conditioning. In many low technological cultures, those closer to nature — “primitive” as they have come to be known — childhood ends with rites of passage that would make the toughest tough guy in the First World cringe with horror. They are a ritual enactment of the Fall. The adult in these “primitive” societies, are preparing their children for what might be considered the indoctrination of “courage”, and in preparation for the “harsh realities of Life” — which are mostly created by the communities themselves. Rites of passages being a case in point. Useless war being another. We can look at the world today and easily trace how the most significant problems facing society and the planet are unnecessary concoctions of ruling class misdeeds.

Back to the the Fall from paradise and its incarnation as the child growing to adulthood. The fruit of knowledge robs the child of innocence. The grown individual must fend for themselves. The Establishment piles on its burdens and anxieties. Questioning authority becomes a crime, a threat to the status quo. Eden no more. The father must not be challenged but inevitably must be, for the individual wants to be an independent self-fulfilling consciousness.

For this misdeed, the adolescent is decreed a sinner, an uncooperative being who must force themselves to be disciplined, to work hard and pray for redemption. They must pay their debt which Adam and Eve cast upon them. Sweet ignorance is no longer an excuse for the irresponsible desire to play and explore. Harsh “reality”. Time to put away the toys and dedicate one’s life to sustaining the Supreme Executive.

The Fall is at the heart of the relationship between patriarchal authority and the individual. Does not the individual fall when the ruling class rises? But do not bother to ask. Inquiry will only get you in trouble. Opposition makes you an enemy. Father knows best. Suspicion of the masses consumes the gods.

The Fall also encompasses the transition from a natural foundation to a technological one. The individual, at their whim, may ignore nature/authority/god. From walking the paved streets to buying vegetables in a bag, to wondering around in the full light of night, to casually throwing a candy wrapper to the ground, the individual need not care about nature at all, and still do significant damage to the paradise they are blind to. Nature, like paradise, might as well not exist for most of the masses. They do not know nature, a legacy of the sins of Adam and Eve. And like previous gods, science and technology take nature’s place on the dais.

Eden was left further and further behind as technology improved and made life “better”.  What Robert Oppenheimer, “father of the atomic bomb”, said about physicists can be said for the human condition, “[i]n some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose”. Equipped with the knowledge to challenge and subvert nature, individuals are no longer living innocently or in harmony with it. This compliments and reinforces the idea that the individual is a sinner, and God, as the only god, over and above nature. We are sanctified by Our Lord to dominate and exploit nature, yet we are guilty of destroying it. And this Lord has been mistakenly thought by the masses to be some ultimate being in the sky, rather than what it is: the ruling class hanging over them.

The Fall from animal harmony with nature now requires the conscious efforts of “good” individuals to protect the source of all wealth if they and their world (not to mention their ruling class) are to survive. Once, like other Earthly creatures, the human could not hurt the planet, only contribute to it. Science and technology has improved the quality of material life dramatically. But with it, the power to destroy and concentrate power increases exponentially, and makes those material gains dubious. One may ask how necessary such material gains are in the first place. Either way, innocence is lost in technical progress. The individual must now be responsible and aware of their actions. No more Garden of Eden. The Fall, ie, the rise of the ruling class, in all its aspects drives the masses out of their paradise and its rhythms and cycles, and into the arms of fear and insecurity. The increase in power and technology has turned the individual out of harmony and into the herd and apathetic masses — the price paid for power and servicing one’s ruling class.

The ugly and negative behavior of one’s fellow individuals, especially toward their neighbors are taken as proof, not of ruling class breeding, but of the intrinsic “guilt of man”. The individual is transformed into a petty self-involved entity who would destroy themselves and their planet in service of their greed and small-mindedness, which in turn serves the higher orders. “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” said Oppenheimer the Buddhist. Under the powerful sway of the Supreme Executive, the individual fulfills this prophecy.

The Mother Condition

After the Fall occurred in pre-historic societies (that is before most of recorded history), they yearned for the days of yore. Before the Fall, most societies worshiped the goddess and other deities closely tied to the natural world. A partnership society existed as opposed to male-dominated patriarchy. These are the origins many societies sought to go back to, if unconsciously. Going back to the “origins” is a significant leitmotif in many traditions.

The venerable Tao Te Ching says:

All things and beings will eventually return to the original source.
This is called “peace.”
“Peace” means returning to one’s original nature.
This original nature is the eternal law. To know the nature’s law is to be enlightened.

Only by going back to the origins does one begin to see paradise.  As We said at the outset,  if humanity is to regain a harmonious existence with the natural world it to go back to it after having been detached for so long. “Peace” can only be achieved by going back to an original state of balance in venerating nature and not man-gods. The liberated but prodigal consciousness must now find it’s way back to the original source as the liberated consciousness.

Riane Eisler points out in her ground-breaking book, The Chalice and the Blade, that the Tao Te Ching also “describes a time when the yin, or feminine principle, was not yet ruled by the male principle, or yang, a time when the wisdom of the mother was still honored and followed above all.”

It stands to reason: woman is the mother. The miracle of birth was at first awe-inspiring. A human being coming out of another. Early reverence for the mother was great. It is your mother who birthed and raised you, after all.  She had evolved qualities suited to rearing the young. They made her even more venerable. Patience, empathy, mental fortitude, understanding and feeling are much more pronounced in the yin, while aggression, physical strength, suspicion, analyzing, compartmentalizing became pronounced in the male, who hunted, fought off dangers, and did the heavy lifting. But the truth is the latter set of dispositions, while necessary for protecting the community were far less necessary and more dangerous than the former, thus “wisdom of the mother was still honored and followed above all”.

(One mustn’t get hung up on such terms as “feminine”. Many of Us at the Preservation Society have a profound difficulty with them, but We try to look past such things and focus on the evidence and facts as they are — grotesque as they maybe to a “real man”. Our aim is to protect Our ruling class paradise, such as it is. Feminine and masculine represent different attitudes or characterizations of energy and mental processing which complement and complete one another. We take comfort in knowing that it takes a real man to accept forbidden fruit head-on. As manly men with honor, we felt obligated to digress here.)

Eisler furthers relates that

writing toward the end of the period Western historians call the Greek Dark Age … following the Dorian invasions … Hesiod tells us there once was a “golden race”. “All good things,” Hesiod writes, “were theirs. The fruitful earth poured forth her fruits unbidden in boundless plenty. In peaceful ease they kept their lands in good abundance, rich in flocks and dear to the immortals”.

But successive invasions by a “lesser races”, one by a “sliver race”, then one by a “bronze race” destroyed this harmonious existence.

The historian John Mansley Robinson writes: “We know who these men were. They came out of the north, about 2000 B.C.E., bearing weapons of bronze. They settled the mainland, built the Mycenaean fortresses, and left behind them the documents in Linear B which we now know to be an early form of Greek. …

Thus paradise was vanquished one way or another. In the Greek case, by maurading groups who had already passed into a patriarchal culture. Patriarchal societies have been fighting enemies, conquering land and “protecting the people” ever since.

Paralleling the historical patriarchal suppression of yin energies and more harmonious social conditions, “scholars” have also down played historical debt cancellation, which have been central to Western religious traditions early on. In the ancient Near East, rulers regularly declared debt jubilees to appease the masses and stabilize society. The excellent economist Michael Hudson has explored this in detail, especially. In “Bubbles Always Burst: the Education of an Economist“, he recounts his difficulties with getting this subject recognized by the mainstream:

In the early 1990s I had tried to write my own summary, but was unable to convince publishers that the Near Eastern tradition of Biblical debt cancellations was firmly grounded. Two decades ago economic historians and even many Biblical scholars thought that the Jubilee Year was merely a literary creation, a utopian escape from practical reality. I encountered a wall of cognitive dissonance at the thought that the practice was attested to in increasingly detailed Clean Slate proclamations.

“Each region had its own word for such proclamations”. “In Sumerian, debt jubilee was called amargi, meaning a return to the “‘mother’ (ama) condition, a world in balance” (note the allusion to a prepatriarchal past).

Again, Hudson points out in The Lost Tradition Of Biblical Debt Cancellations, “[t]he once-glowing core body of law within the Judeo-Christian Bible has become all but ignored — indeed, rejected — by the colder temper of our times.” Another layer of the Fall?

Many others have addressed this issue. David Graeber’s popular book Debt: The First 5,000 Years supports much of Hudson’s pioneering work. In a Naked Capitalism interview he says

Rulers would regularly conclude the only way to prevent complete social breakdown was to declare a clean slate or ‘washing of the tablets,’ they’d cancel all consumer debt and just start over. In fact, the first recorded word for ‘freedom’ in any human language is the Sumerian amargi, a word for debt-freedom, and by extension freedom more generally, which literally means ‘return to mother,’ since when they declared a clean slate, all the debt peons would get to go home.

Debt bondage, it turns out, is the key to maintaining a ruling class society, and yet fatal to it. When Debt bondage reigns Paradise cannot exist. Suppression of the latter requires conditions of the former. Slavery is perpetual debt bondage of the lowest order. Wage labor is the level before the middle class “professional” stratum of debt bondage. Debt bondage expresses the fundamental relationship of ruling class to masses. In older days, debt was laid upon the individual and their descendants. Today debt is wielded on behalf of tax-cutting corporate hucksters and bankers to defend economic austerity — in addition to traditional usury. Gutting public works and lower wages are justified because of debt, meanwhile, trillions are flushed down the toilet of war and off-shore accounts. This is the “reality” the masses are taught to accept.

Economist Steve Keen is another highly regarded economist promoting debt jubilee writes in his DebtWatch Manifesto

The economic and financial crisis has been caused by unenlightened self-interest and fraudulent behaviour on an unprecedented scale. But this behaviour could not have grown so large were it not for the cover given to this behaviour by the dominant theory of economics, which is known as “Neoclassical Economics”.

In Michael Hudson’s latest book Killing the Host he points out that the history of classical economics was large in part a battle over debt and taxes, and trying to get rentiers to pony up much more in the new capitalist world. Neoclassical economics is the rentier reaction to classical economics, which in turn tries to rationalize capitalism.

MoneyWeek.com reports,

Versions of a debt Jubilee have been called for by a variety of economists and pundits (including the influential Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley) who argue that federal policymakers should broker what in effect would be a grand out-of-court settlement between bond investors, banks and consumer groups – a “great haircut” to fix the underlying problem of excessive debt and jump-start the economy.

The astute reader will have noticed that while debt jubilee relieves pressure on the masses, it not only protects the ruling class from social collapse, but strengthens them. Debt jubilee gives them a new lease on life. And yet jubilee is the portal through which the masses may seek liberation and paradise. This is where our interests converge. What we need today is a debt jubilee. A wiping of debts, and giving — it pains the Preservation Society to say — the ruling class that haircut. One needs grooming now and again. Better to be groomed than getting your head chopped off.

The attainment of paradise is entirely within the grasp of society. The individual might be able to see it, feel it, or sense it through their indignation and social difficulties, but it takes a society to actually realize it. We are told that paradise is impossible to do. But all it takes is for the masses to open their eyes and see it before them. And it is impossible only because the masses still listen to Us. Stop taking your masters so seriously!

Make a movement to abolish debt in all its forms. Debt is only necessary in a ruling class world that needs to keep its masses under control and heavy with burden. The Beast of Harmony is crying out locked away, and yet reality pokes through the veil. Seize that opportunity. Let the Beast help you, for paradise is just a different perspective away. From Our vista, the true struggle begins when the masses see paradise and know that the ruling class keeps it from them.  When the visceral sensation and anger of being cruelly robbed of paradise, so near at hand — just on the other side of the Establishment — when that anger is targeted in the direction of the ruling class and not their neighbors — however odious they may be — then Heaven on Earth is within sight. Shouldn’t the masses be setting a course for a permanent Mother Condition? Society based on a principle of no debt releases the Beast of Harmony which just turns out to be Paradise Attained.