Chapter 7: MAYA
The Seventh concept is Venus. She is all that exists and all that will and has existed. She is also Mother Nature, our mother, and mother of the Seasonal God. Her color is green, for life. She is the real material world and she is the active force in Nature that makes Nature act in the way it does. You are part of her. Man has a place in the world. Man has evolved to be a hunter-gatherer; this is the natural niche that he is biologically made to fit. This is our natural environment. It is Man’s home, where he belongs. Only as a hunter-gatherer will Man ever be comfortable. It is the place where all natural desires are met. Only as a hunter-gatherer will Man ever function properly.
Our biological nature is full of instincts with which we are born. These appear as desires passions, and feelings. The body tells us what we need to survive. Our body takes care of itself in its natural environment. Outside of our natural environment, these desires and passions can go wrong. That is why people in civilization often see desires going wrong and start thinking that passion is evil. They reject Aphrodite.
Aphrodite is life. Aphrodite must exist freely the way she does naturally Those who want to change her are rejecting her. Civilization runs by controlling Aphrodite and changing things. I prefer to let her free. Disciplining the body will make it act abnormally. Asceticism is the act of self-perversion. You’ve just got to let go if you really want to live your life.
Aphrodite is "Maya," Ascetics think Maya is an illusion that leads to suffering. Often, people who are spiritually minded think that something other than the real world exists. They might try to see beyond the veil of matter. Maya-haters often believe that their ascetic dogma is the only truth. They believe that the knowledge of their dogma or doctrine is the only knowledge and that everything else is ignorance. Calling Maya ignorance is a way of Fooling people into believing in something else and convincing them to follow some illusion.
Different ascetic cults, with different ways and different truths, will compete with each other, each claiming to know the only truth, or the only true faith, or the only, right way. Since they don’t care about reality, they can make up any illusion they want, and make people act in all kinds of unnatural ways. Each particular cult might call anyone who is not a member of their particular cult, "ignorant."
Some people think that the world is a projection of the mind. They think that the senses do not feel from outside, but rather feel what is projected to them from inside. The Male creator creates a creative female to make forms for him. Ascetics might say that Maya is when someone becomes attached to the forms as if they were real. Hindus accept the idea of a creative female who makes the illusion of matter, but will not accept the material world. Their goddess is not Aphrodite, but rather a female Saturn. They might say that a person becomes attached to the world because of his desires. They think that these desires are something only ignorant people would let rule their lives. Some forms of Eastern religion try to turn the creative mother inside of us away from the outside world. They try to turn her back at the projection. They only want to look at the divine light inside.
The world may be an illusion, like a virtual reality computer game. It is obviously an interactive illusion, meaning that what we do in it affect the illusion, especially that part of the illusion that is our personal lives. That personal part of the illusion includes people who are close to us. Are those people real to you? My friends are real to me, and the whole illusion seems very real. It may be a game, but fell like playing. People who want out of this game called life have probably not given it a chance.
I prefer a religion that is attached to the material world, thinks matter is real, and follows its desires. My Goddess is not just the creative. She is also the creation. The truth is Maya. She is the only truth. She is the source of all true knowledge and the only right way. She is the only natural way, because she is Nature. Only reality can be touched. To reject reality is insanity. True hedonists love Aphrodite. They know she is real and wish to be part of her. They follow their passions and desires and get the pleasures of life. These pleasures are real and can lead to more pleasures.
Ascetics may tell you that these pleasures are only temporary and will eventually lead to unhappiness. This is why they call Aphrodite an illusion. What they say may be true in civilization, where the system causes the hedonist to fail. The hedonist was never meant to fit civilization. He belongs in the wild. The ascetic fails to see that it is civilization and not Maya that causes unhappiness. Aphrodite is both the will and the place where the will belongs. Nature belongs in Nature. Most of those Maya-haters fail to see that Man has a right place.
Man is naturally social. You are born because your soul has chosen to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh. We are social animals. The will to touch is our strongest instinct. Thus, we make ourselves part of a culture and teach ourselves to get along with each other. We organize into tribes and families. The family is our greatest need. Without the family we are lost. All humans naturally desire the family life. Man is full of instincts that cause people to take care of each other. Anyone denying passions is denying that which makes Man social. Changing Man will make him antisocial. Civilization, with its pressures, often breaks up the family. You have to be insane to support a system that breaks up families.
Sometimes it appears that those who fit the civilized system receive benefits. These can be economic or even social. But these benefits do not really make happiness. They are unnatural, nothing more than a gilded cage. Some people are born into civilization, appearing to have all the benefits that will one day make them fit the system. They may one-day find purpose and meaning as part of the system, but before they find a place in civilization, they must go though a long preparatory process. They go to the right schools and join the right clubs. This allows them to celebrate their success with others like themselves. These parties are not true hedonism. A true hedonistic party would be for enjoying the party itself. The prep parties are like the rest a slave gets, but the rest period is just part of the slavery. It allows the slave to adjust himself, so he can work even more. In order for the slaves to fit the system, they must really apply themselves. Sometimes, bits of pleasure are part of the asceticism, used for perverted reasons, to pervert Man’s nature. Many people in civilization think they are doing what they want to do when they are doing what the system makes them do. Civilization makes people free from themselves, like domestic animals, trained to act in a certain way. They feel what the trainer makes them feel.
Ascetics are often social rejects, who are lonely. Loneliness made them insane. Civilization made them lonely. It is those lonely victims of civilization who invent new forms of civilization. They focus their madness into a religion of hate. I am sort of like one of them. That is why I know so much about them. You might have wondered where are the ascetic cults that I talk about? Do they really exist? They are religions I almost adopted. Their doctrines and dogmas are ideas I almost agreed with. As I grew up I was trained and conditioned to adopt one of those civilized cults. I try to escape them and fight a war against those ideas everyday inside myself.
Escape from any civilized restraints. Aphrodite is the desire. She is also the act and the reward. This reward is true happiness that you receive if you live a natural life. These pleasures can be felt immediately. Do what feels good and it will lead you to a happy life. If something feels bad, it is probably bad for you, and your instincts are rejecting it. Your biological body will take care of you. The body reacts to the world and gives you signals, which tell you what you should do next. Just do what your urges tell you to do. Aphrodite drives men wild.
The world is a game called the will. Perhaps even the choices you make are what the game makes you choose. Whatever you choose is your will, even if you use Your will to deny your will. The planet, Venus, appears in two forms. One is the Evening Star in the West—the star of passion. The other is the Morning Star in the East—the star of asceticism. The lines on the five-pointed star represent the path of Venus. The five-pointed star is at the center of the eight-pointed star of Aphrodite. There is a mystery behind this symbol that is the meaning of life, and the goal we need to win the game; Man loves his fellow Man. Failure to touch will drive you insane, and perhaps even make you reject the world. What a strange game we live in.
To a human, the will to touch may seem to be the divine purpose of the universe. Perhaps it is only divine for social creatures such as humans. Other aspects of the universe may have other reasons. Those other reasons might be Outer Gods that we don’t relate to. In this book, I only deal with Gods common to humans.
Perhaps the will to touch came about by purely natural means, with no supernatural purpose. There are several social species, such as ants, bees and chimpanzees. Man’s social order most closely resembles the wolf. All of these animals survive by being part of a group, where individuals cooperate. Some people wonder how cooperation came about, if evolution involves competition. The answer is simple. In some circumstances, it is advantageous for a species to live by cooperating. Evolution is not a race where the most brutal always wins. Actually, the environmental conditions often favor a less brutal life form. Social animals like man happen because their natural niche is one where the social instincts are favored by the conditions in Nature.
The niche is the environmental conditions a life form must fit in order to survive. An environment is made of living things and non-living things, which create the conditions of that environment. Random genetic chance produces different individuals. Natural selection only allows traits that fit the environmental conditions. Those that do not fit are eliminated. There is no survival of the fittest, because there is no such thing as a hierarchy of "fitness." Either you fit or you don’t fit. A member who fits enough to breed would pass his traits down to his descendants. Generally, evolution will favor the herd over the superman.
Evolution happens when the environment changes, as it shifts about. Such changes alter the conditions in a species’ niche. Many books on evolution say that a species must adapt. This idea is misleading. It gives the image of an entire population of a species, which changes slowly as time goes on. People may think that an improved form replaces a lesser form. This is not a correct image for all forms of evolution. The life form does not adapt to a new niche. Instead, a niche adapts new members. It is the environment that molds life into its Forms.
A change in the environment can create new niches. Usually only a few members of at species are adopted by the new environmental condition. Each niche would adopt life that is most capable of filling it. All the species in an environment influence each other. The environment is changed slightly each time a new form comes about or an old form is lost. These new conditions open new niches that can adopt living things and adapt them into new forms. After a period of time, the descendants in one niche may be different than their ancestors, who were in another niche.
A new form is not necessarily better than the old one. Environmental conditions determine where each form fits. One form could become extinct if the conditions it is adapted to ever change, or if something better able to fill the niche came along and pushed them out. A new form is not necessarily going to survive. The old form could still be living long after the new form failed. Both forms could survive if the environment has two places for them. Any living form could be the parent of many other forms, if conditions made such possible.
If you have enough fossil evidence, you could place related forms in an evolutionary order. Darwin understood these evolutionary lines when he developed his theory. Many people think only of the evolutionary line when they think of evolution. They fail to realize that changes in the environment, which made this line possible, are the critical part of evolution, not the line itself. Evolution happens as the Earth’s biosphere changes itself. Life on Earth developed its complexity slowly. A balance exists in this complexity, as an intricate web of life, where all species rely on each other. Man is crazy to disturb this balance, which is such a vital part of his own nature. He will never be able to rebuild what only Nature can build.
Some moralists would have you think that social cooperation is an improvement over other animals. This is only an opinion. An evolutionary line has social traits, if the niche that it moves into makes such traits necessary. A line can lose the social traits, if ever the line moves out of a niche that demanded social traits and into one that does not require them. There is no law in Nature that always makes social cooperation an improvement.
Many people assume that evolution means improvement. They often think that Man is on top of the evolutionary line, but there is no top to it, because evolution has no up or down. Supposedly, all life evolved from bacteria, but that was billions of years ago. Since then, all kinds of genetic traits have come and gone. If all animals became extinct except sheep, billions of years later we would find complex animals and one-celled animals, all descended from sheep.
We do not rule the Earth. The Earth rules us and we are merely bags of chemicals in global soup, who needs the soup to live. The true rulers of the Earth are microbes, who made and sustain the life zones on Earth. Even the greatest technology can’t make us rule. We are drops in the soup, who need the soup to live. Our technology could destroy us, but it won’t stop the bacteria. We could blow up the Earth with our technology and pulverize it into little pieces, but, eventually, gravity will pull the particles back into a ball again. The bacteria that survived would reclaim the globe and start the soup over again. This soup is called Gaya. Gaya is life on Earth. All creatures of the Earth grow together as one biosphere.
A species will remain very much the same for many generations if there are no major changes in its environment. Mankind has been very much the same form for many thousands of years. Do not assume that an extinct form of Man was somehow less evolved than Man today. He could be a different form, which might actually have improvements over you. Do not assume that future forms of Man will be an improvement over you. They may be different but not necessarily better. The best thing a species can be is to be part of its niche. No niche or species is better than another. Civilized man is not living the way a Man should. He is less than even the simplest life form. A primitive savage can call himself a man, but a civilized man can’t.
The way a species interacts with its own kind can be a major environmental factor. This is especially, true with humans. Social instincts are genetically encoded in us. We live in a social environment that molds us like environments do. Those who fit the social norm produce normal children. Those who fit the normal social order will attract a mate and reproduce. Those who don’t are rejected. Our social nature is the kind of natural selection that keeps us socially natural. This only works in a natural society. Civilization changes things and creates conditions where things don’t work properly. Civilization has a social order, but it is not the same as a natural social order. It prevents some who should succeed from doing so and promotes the success of some who should not. In few a thousand Years, civilized man will lose his normal social instincts as more and more misfit genes enter the gene pool, without the normal natural selection to eliminate the defective genes.
Advanced medical technology enables people who would not have been able to reproduce in Nature to do so. Their defective genes are allowed to pollute the gene pool. As the generations go on, these defects will pile up in the gene pool, creating people who are not completely human. It will get worse and worse. Eventually people will no longer resemble natural humans. They will not be able to return to Nature. They will become dependent on technology to survive. Natural parts of Man will be replaced by artificial components. They will be addicted to technology and their descendants will get more addicted as time goes on. We must find a way to keep Man natural, or else people will be born artificial.
Some people might try artificial methods, like selective breeding, to keep Man strong. It is possible that selective breeding won’t work, because we can only detect certain defects. Other defects will pile up in the gene pool and we don’t know about them until it is too late. Many other solutions may be attempted, but many of these would only delay the problem, and add other problems. All creatures are connected to their outer ecology. They also have an inner ecology, which is the way their parts cooperate with each other. The outer and inner are interconnected, depending on how the species fits its niche. We are interconnected with Nature; in ways that science has not yet discovered and possibly never will.
Genetic engineering might leave permanent damage to be passed around in the gene pool. It would upset the normal internal ecology of an individual, making him inhuman. It would be a horrible life, with people who are unable to be people. We might even lose our social instincts. No man-made system can replace Nature. We were made by Nature, and only Nature can keep us natural. Once a species is removed from its natural niche traits that were sustained by that niche may deteriorate. Perhaps we should limit how much medical technology we use and allow Nature to keep us fit. A species will genetically degenerate as far as its technology allows. A form of stunted natural selection will then begin to kill just as many of them as normal natural selection would have, but they would continue to be as degenerated as their technology allowed. Any advance in technology would make things worse. It would have been better if they had stuck with natural selection. The Earth may undergo natural evolutionary changes, which we will miss if we remove ourselves from the natural order. We might lose our place on Earth.
Perhaps the most important question we must ask ourselves is, "What is Man? Do want to be ourselves, or be something different?" Some people will tell you that Man can be anything he wants to be, because Man is an existence with no essence. These people are blind. They fail to see that Man is something. Our essence is our biological nature, which is only complete in its natural environment. Today we are still biologically able to return to Nature. Some day we may become so biologically dependent on technology that we could never return to Nature. We would be like the breeds of domesticated animals, which can not live without artificial protection. Imagine what would happen if we found out that we should have returned after it was too late to return. Civilization will have won.
Something that is popular today is recycling industrial products. Industry has found a way, to get us to play hot potato with its waste. Industry has already made people dependent on it. This is just another way of making us more addicted. I don’t recycle. I throw my junk anywhere I want. I won’t let industry addict me. Industry has changed something, and now to fix its damage, it adds more changes, like recycling. It may look like a solution, but it will only make things worse, eventually, because it gives industry freedom to expand. It would be better to eliminate industry, before the problem gets worse.
If the machine consumes mankind, people will become more prostheses than human. They will be biomechanoids like the figures in paintings by Giger. Even our souls will be twisted, since the new mother will not give us happiness as the old natural mother did. A culture of perverted fashions will become the norm. I have seen it in the cities already. It is unspeakable, trapped in the spell of the Necronomicon. You don’t want to know what I mean. Blame Bill Gates.
We can still return to Nature today. A few billion people might have to die, but a few billion people is a small price to pay, compared to what might happen, if some day we won’t be able to return to Nature. I hear people worry about civilized things like jobs, and they destroy Nature to keep their jobs. These people can be eliminated. They are unimportant compared to the ecosystem.
I’m not sure what will happen in the future. I do have this feeling that man will still be here. The great universal plan still has a lot of things in store for us. We are only beginning this journey, down the path of Aphrodite. I had a vision of Man many thousands of years in the future. Different conditions had caused there to be more than one form of Man. The effects of advanced technology had affected some forms. I also saw something else, which is hard to explain. In some forms, Man’s social nature had become a dominant selective pressure. No one planned it. This causes a breed of Man that was more human than me.
Sometimes when I tell people that Man must discover what Man is, they say, "How ridiculous!" They fail to ask themselves how much they really know about Man and fail to see any importance in the question. A knowledge of what Man is may help us to realize where Man belongs. I make a lot of assumptions about Man, but I also realize that assuming that something is true is not the same as having clear evidence of a truth. I am a mystic and mystics have ridiculous ideas. These ideas may serve a useful purpose in society when they stir peoples’ imagination and make people think, but they are very unreliable.
In order to have more reliable facts, we should look to science. The quest to discover what Man is will require a great effort by the sciences that study Man. They will have to perform many long-term studies. This search may take more than few decades. It may take centuries or thousands of years. Man is extremely hard to understand. Perhaps he is too complex and dynamic to ever be fully understood. Many people jump to conclusions, which are not necessarily true. A false idea of Man allows people to think of false places for Man. My objective is to get people to start the search. I do not claim to have not found any final conclusions.