Natural And Unnatural Religions

There are many different ways to classify the world’s religions. The usual way is by reference to their group origin: Dharmic, Taoic, Abrahamic etc. Others make the division into Western and Eastern religions, or esoteric and exoteric. A previous VJM Publishing essay made a distinction between spiritual and political religions. This essay will try a new approach: a distinction between natural and unnatural religions.

The central contention of this essay is that there is a natural religious tradition common to the entire human race, and that the many deviations from this are mostly unnatural. In this sense, religion is an inherent behaviour, like making music or building shelter. These natural religions follow a typical path, with some local flavour.

The natural religions start with ancestral veneration. This itself begins with the understanding that the ancestors are the reason why you yourself occupy the societal niche you do. Those who came before you battled the elements and outside enemies in order to defend the space that you now subsist in. Gratitude for this is the first spark of natural spirituality.

Ancestral veneration leads to the understanding that those who follow you will venerate you. As they enter into the niche you have saved for them, if this niche is a good place in which they can thrive, them venerating you is natural. A person who understands this will steward society into a better future instead of acting selfishly and exploiting it.

An appreciation of both those who came before and those who come after leads to an appreciation of natural cycles. In the same way that the Sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening, the human being rises in their youth and declines in later adulthood. These cycles are a fundamental part of life. Knowing this, a naturally religious person will – without needing to be prompted by an authority – celebrate the high points of the solar cycle: the solstices and equinoxes. The fact that the world will get darker (or lighter) after a certain date is imbued with a deep spiritual significance.

An appreciation of natural cycles leads to an understanding of reincarnation. If the Sun rises every morning after setting every evening, and if the Spring comes after every Winter, it’s logical to believe that a new birth occurs after every death. This is essentially The Cyclical Argument given for the immortality of the soul in Phaedo.

When Socrates made this argument, he was not stating something he came up with himself. Because Greece of the time followed a natural religious tradition, he was simply stating a widely-believed fact. The ancestral veneration of the Greeks had developed into a pantheon of gods, much as it had in India, China and other places that followed natural religious traditions. This had led to the celebration of the high points of the yearly cycle. From there, the priests among the Greeks (as those in other places) came to understand the truths of reincarnation and karma, as described in Phaedrus, Republic, Timaeus and other dialogues.

Thus it can be seen that the natural religions develop naturally. The unnatural religions, by contrast, are made up for a particular purpose.

For example, Christianity was invented by Jews to place themselves at the centre of the lives of anyone who adopted it. Much of the New Testament was written by Paul, who acted intentionally to bring this Jewish religion to Rome, knowing that Rome could serve as a springboard to spread it to the ends of the Earth. His success has centred Western life around Jews ever since Constantine.

As a result, the Crusaders were more concerned about liberating Jerusalem from Muslim rule than Spain. This is a highly unnatural state of affairs, but, being Christian, Jerusalem was at the centre of their lives, with Europe decentred. Unnatural religions devote the attention of their followers away from their ancestors and towards the creators of those religions.

The Baha’i religion is a transparent attempt to bring all world religion under an Abrahamic umbrella. The deeply unnatural quality of Baha’i is seen in its insistence, against all evidence, on the equality of all human races. Only someone with a desire to subjugate the entire world under one rule would insist on the equality of all its peoples. It’s typical for an unnatural religion to claim to be universalist, but to be arranged so that one particular group is central and thus inevitably in charge, even if informally. In the case of Baha’i, like the other Abrahamic religions, this is Semites.

Unnatural religions do not generally believe in reincarnation and karma, instead pushing a “one judgment for all eternity” narrative in order to create maximum fear, this in order to maximise control. Neither do they use spiritual sacraments, knowing them to decondition people from the brainwashing unnatural religions depend on for power.

Also characteristic of unnatural religions is a rejection of one’s natural allies. The subjugation of women was not a religious principle before Abrahamism, because it was understood that a husband and wife are on the same team. Rabbi Yeshua preached “I have come to ‘set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law’;and ‘a man’s enemies will be those of his own household.’He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me”. Yeshua, like any psychopathic cult leader, demanded that followers put him above their own families.

Natural religions, by contrast, emphasise the importance of one’s own ancestors.

Unnatural religions also hate and fear the natural world. Covering all women in burkas is exceptionally unnatural, but Abrahamist sexual prudishness considers anything related to sex to be sinful. In fact, all of biology is denied in the unnatural religions: Abrahamists today deny both evolution and racial differences, an echo of how they used to deny heliocentrism. Perhaps the most invidious aspect of this hatred of the natural world is the hatred of natural spiritual sacraments, especially cannabis and psilocybin mushrooms. This is one of the major causes of the world’s spiritual ignorance today.

Elementalism is a hybrid of natural and unnatural religions. It’s unnatural in the sense that it was deliberately created and not a development of inherent spiritual instinct. However, it is natural in its emphasis on appreciating the cycles of life, on the use of plant-based spiritual sacraments, on the importance of fighting evil and on the truths of reincarnation and karma.

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The Long Walk Out Of The Desert

Of all the trials and travails that the West has suffered over the past 120 years, one of the most arduous remains. Although the West went through a renaissance of its own greatness some centuries ago, this was mostly limited to scientific and artistic achievements. There is still a Major Renaissance to come. The first stage of this is to overcome Abrahamism in all aspects: the Long Walk out of the Desert.

The phrase ‘Long Walk out of the Desert’ was coined by an X poster known as MarbleBust. In this context, “The Desert” refers to the desert of Abrahamic religion, where white people have been wandering, lost, for many centuries.

Desert life is infamously cheap. The history of the Near and Middle East is the history of one massacre after another. Out-group antipathy has never in human history reached such extremes as in these desert cultures. And their religions reflect this: they are cruel, deceitful, treacherous, monstrous. All of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are supremacist in nature, considering outsiders somewhere between filth and cattle.

Whether owing to exaggerated and prolonged degeneracy, unfortunate chance historical events, a counter-reaction to the Roman Empire, an unusual gullibility on the part of the Europeans or perhaps that we are now in the Kali Yuga, the desert religions are predominant in Europe today. This puts us in a situation where, in order for us to return to spiritual narratives suited for us, we must abandon those that have been pushed on us for centuries. We must take that Long Walk out of the Desert. That requires a solid grounding in our history.

The desert religions conquered the West in stages.

The first stage was the decision of Constantine in 313 CE, with the Edict of Milan, to accept Christianity as a legitimate religion. Up until then, it had been recognised by the Romans for what it was: yet another Jewish slave cult based around some egomaniac’s claims to be the prophecised Messiah. They treated it as they would have done any other degeneracy. But with the Edict of Milan, Christianity started to be treated with respect by European rulers.

The second stage was the decision of Theodosius in 380 CE, with the Edict of Thessalonica, to make Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. This was the date upon which Europeans abandoned the religions of Europe for the religions of the desert. If there was a Long Walk into the Desert, this was when it began.

The third stage was when Theodosius, in 391 CE, outlawed the practice of European religion. This was mostly due to pressure from Christians obeying passages such as Exodus 22:20, which calls for the destruction of worshippers of gods other than Yahweh (Yahweh is a jealous god). From this moment onwards, the European religions were in the descendancy.

The fourth stage was the destruction of the Eleusinian Mysteries and the murder of its priests in 396 CE, under the Christian and Gothic king Alaric. The mystery school at Eleusis was one of the major reasons for the greatness of Greco-Roman culture: it was famous for liberating its participants from fear of death, which allowed them to live heroic lives from then on. With these mysteries destroyed, Europeans entered an age of fear and superstition involving subjugation to the desert religions. Thus, we have been “in the desert” for over 1,600 years already.

The fifth stage was the progressive Christianisation of Northern Europe, with events such as the Massacre of Verden (in 782 CE) and the Northern Crusades. The Albigensian Crusade could perhaps be included here. These events saw the murder of great numbers of people for refusing to abandon the European religions.

After Christians had hunted down the last remaining followers of the European religions to the remotest islands and forests, Christianity reached the apogee of its power. But because Christianity was not natural to us, and was forced on us, as soon as it weakened it began to die. European culture returned with the Renaissance, and, although Christians killed as many as they could to keep it down, it flourished.

Some 800 years after the start of the Renaissance, few Westerners are still Christian. But many Christian habits still linger, and many Christian assumptions are still taken for granted, especially moral assumptions. These lingering artefacts continue to lower the quality of life all over the West.

The Long Walk out of the Desert refers to the replacement of all Abrahamic morality and thought with a morality and thought appropriate to Westerners today.

We must stop seeing Jews as people who brought us spiritual gifts, and start seeing them as spiritual enslavers. Abrahamism did not bring us liberation from spiritual ignorance: we already had Plato. Neither did it bring us sophisticated ethics or metaphysics: we already had Aristotle. What it did bring us was a replacement of our own native culture and moral philosophy with one that put Jews, and Jewish culture, front and centre.

We must also realise that Abrahamism was forced on our ancestors through violence. The narrative that our ancestors realised European religions were for savages, and switched them out for a Jewish religion based around a dead rabbi, is nonsense. Our ancestors were murdered by Christian invaders and forced to submit, in much the same way that people in Africa, the Middle East and Asia are forced by Islamic invaders to submit to the god of Abraham today.

Perhaps most importantly, we must stop seeing Christian morality as an advance over Greco-Roman morality, and see it for what it is: a massive retrograde step. It did not end human sacrifice. It did not end slavery. It did not unite us in a vision of something higher. What it did do was deliver us into mindless superstition and a thousand-year Dark Age. It switched the master morality that had brought us so much glory for a wretched slave morality that brought us a millennium of stagnation.

Part of this moral revaluation is to no longer view passivity, tolerance and weakness as virtues. This does not, in any sense, mean that we have to swing to the exact opposite of those supposed virtues like Muslims. The correct approach is as Aristotle recommended in The Nicomachean Ethics: to find the correct balance between too much and too little. The right amount of assertiveness, instead of all or nothing like a Semite.

This will require that we get over our squeamishness about e.g. the death penalty, drugs and border enforcement. Christian “sanctity of life” must be replaced with an understanding that life, although precious, is sometimes not worth living. Christian hysteria about pharmakeia must be abolished. National borders must be enforced again, no matter what the Catholic Pope says about Rabbi Yeshua having been a refugee. We have to do all of these things to save ourselves.

The Long Walk out of the Desert, and the desert religions, will be complete when we have constructed a theological, philosophical, moral and ethical system that can guide us through this century and beyond.

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An Elementalist Interpretation Of Marilyn Manson’s ‘Wormboy’

‘Wormboy’ is one of Marilyn Manson’s creepiest songs. From the album Antichrist Superstar, it covers typical Manson subjects like death, despair and psychological destruction, possibly in the context of a person who has discovered that Christianity has driven them to ruin. There’s more to these lyrics than goth themes, though. Buried within is some deep esoteric wisdom.

One line in particular stands out, and demands explication from an Elementalist perspective: “When you get to heaven, you will wish you’re in hell.” This is an extraordinarily strange line, but from an Elementalist perspective it makes perfect sense.

The Christian heaven (Manson’s mockery is limited to Christianity; he avoids mentioning Eastern religions) is supposed to be a place of perfect and eternal bliss. For many centuries, ignorant fools have yearned for this heaven, believing it to be a place where they are liberated from all the sufferings of the Earth. But as the lyrics of ‘Wormboy’ suggest, things aren’t that simple, especially when it comes to Christianity.

From this eternal bliss in heaven narrative, one question naturally arises: why would someone wish they were in hell?

Mainstream philosophy has difficulty grappling with such a question. Because even our metaphysical thought is infused with materialist logic, it’s hard to imagine someone desiring anything for non-materialist reasons. Thus, we understand the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. But we don’t understand spiritual motivations nearly as well.

As such, we can understand what would motivate a person to want to get to heaven. The eternal bliss of heaven seems like a never-ending Oxycontin buzz to materialist cultures such as ours. We can all understand wanting pure pleasure.

Most people associate heaven with the ultimate final goal, the victory condition of life. If owning a home with a million dollars in the bank equals success in the physical plane, getting to one of the heaven realms equals success in the metaphysical plane. To get to heaven is to win at life. So why would a person who got there wish that they were in hell?

An Elementalist can readily explain: boredom.

The Fourth Tenet of Elementalism holds that the natural state of consciousness is one of perfect bliss. Following from this tenet, Elementalism teaches that this perfect bliss soon became excruciatingly boring. This boredom was what motivated God (understood in Elementalism to be the same thing as consciousness) to dream up something other than perfect bliss.

Elemental Elementalism 21.2 states: “It was in order to alleviate boredom that God forgot some of Godself, and, in so doing so, dreamed up the Great Fractal.” All of the various worlds in existence were dreamed up in order to alleviate the boredom of eternal bliss.

This includes the lowest of the hell realms.

It’s hard to realise, while on Earth, that any world must eventually become boring after enough time spent there. Earth is such a desperately miserable place that the vast majority of beings who incarnate here come to wish they were somewhere nicer. So, for the vast majority of Earthlings, the entire will is focused on getting to heaven. But when you get to heaven, you’ll get so bored that you will wish you’re in hell.

Infinite suffering is preferable to infinite boredom. At least infinite suffering has variety. Being forced to endure the infinite non-variety of the highest of the heaven realms is a form of suffering that is, in its own way, greater than the suffering of even the lowest of the hell realms.

So few of us appreciate the magnitude of the disappointment that awaits us in heaven!

Appreciating facts as esoteric as these is the preserve of a small number. Marilyn Manson may have seen aspects of reality that very few other humans have seen, and encoded references to this arcane knowledge in the lyrics of his songs.

It has long been known that Marilyn Manson is a fan of esotericism, and references to that are everywhere in his lyrics. Could it be that Manson himself has experienced, on occasion, such perfect bliss that he understands that there’s more to life than mere pleasure? If so, does it mean that Manson has cleared the Third Hurdle, transcended egotheism, and become a Luciferian?

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Growing Roots Within

All attention you spend on the interior journey is valuable, and encourages the growth of roots within. It is all too easy for this to simply become talk. The fact is, this awakening business isn’t some step by step program for self improvement or self development. This is about pointing you back to what is real, what has always been real, and then dispensing with actors such as myself. When we speak or write, there is a brief role to play in life, and then it is done. This isn’t the vector of wisdom. The vital wisdom of the response, at best, is elicited in you. Engage your own interior journey: that is the encouragement.

Now, I’m not saying leave your job, your partner, your family – this is not about the radicalisation of your outer life. This is simply about your direct discovery of what it means to really be you.

Imagine wanting to gravitate towards blame, an accident, an argument, someone else getting in trouble. To want a problem, to feel the desire for there to be drama and trouble. Have you observed this others? Yourself? It is quite prevalent, so chances are you have crossed paths with this phenomenon many times. This represents a kind of dysfunctional energetic ecosystem, a pathological twist in the psyche. It is both an inner and outer ill. People become entrained by society to actually desire and seek pain and conflict, and the false self is primed to take this programming onboard as a matter of course. As a common example, have you ever said something to someone and they ‘took it the wrong way’, almost as if on purpose?

If you examine this, it could of course be the case that you perhaps said something inflammatory, but that is by the by. What really matters is that this person had the option to minimise their upset, but they chose to become aggravated. Maybe you baited the hook, but they took it.

Why would they want to be upset, to adopt the role of the incensed victim? Psychology refers to the value perceived in this type of martyrdom as ‘secondary gain’ – which is really just a way of pointing out that when someone acts out personal drama, they do so on the basis they are getting something out of it. There is a neurochemical satiety associated with being incensed, offended, or cast into the role of the victim. This is rooted within the brain and body, and is certainly capitalised upon by the separate sense of self. The notion that secondary gain is of personal value is only viable because someone has shallow roots within – if any at all. It is all too easy to be swept up in the drama if you are not grounded.

The drama on offer, as miserable as it is, outcompetes any value in peace for one without roots within. For the one so divided, it feels fleetingly better to be in conflict, butting heads and playing out the personal drama of being a separate ‘someone’ in competition with everyone else. This can only be possible when someone is so lost, so deluded and indoctrinated by culture, that they aren’t even aware that real peace could exist. If they were, they would never abandon peace to play out these minor dramas.

This process may affect someone in scarcely noticeable ways, and yet even a small degree of seperation entertained in this way is sufficient to create vast rifts between the you and the perception of your true nature – there cannot be any actual separation, but I don’t want to go into that here. The point is that you do not have to be in the throes of being a total drama queen in order to suffer the consequences of perceived separation. Even just permitting yourself to be slightly irritated by the way someone else in your household puts something away in the fridge can be enough to hurl you out of the gates of the kingdom and lashed onto the spokes of the wheel of becoming.

There are those inclined to think this is all very abstract, out of reach, or that such minor attention to the relationship between one’s inner and outer environments is inconsequential.

It really isn’t. All of this is not only very basic, but it is also of direct and immediate consequence. You wouldn’t know unless you went inside to directly investigate the nature of this experience. It isn’t theoretical, it is phenomenological – only *you* can show up to observe this. The greatest teacher in history could only at best meet you halfway in this. You are asked to walk the final leg of the journey alone. Because that either appears intimidating or isolating, and with no clear material advantage promised, most people won’t ever bother over the course of a lifetime. In the absence of a teacher, you nevertheless have ordinary people around you who have taken up the torch and encourage you to try doing the same – not because it will make you noble, good, or morally correct, but because you haven’t yet gone outside your limited perspective. If you had, your life would unfold completely differently, even if no one else should ever notice.

Growing roots within is very simple. The more attention we give to our true nature, our deepest inner silence, the more this presence naturally takes root within us. A plant doesn’t need to be directed and micromanaged about how to take nutrients and develop, nor does your true nature. You simply give it the attention and nourishment it asks for, and just allow the entire miraculous process to unfold from within.

The remarkable thing about this is that what is undesirable in you is crowded out by the internal growth taking place. Again, not to make you holy, but to make you whole. All of this inner dysfunction is fuelled by you seeing yourself as separate, not whole. All of that is illusory, but there is no way someone can tell you that and have it blossom into full effect. It is the case that you must come to a meeting with this in your inner space so that enough soil is there for the seed that is always already there to take root.

You may be wondering if all this is simply about the time you spend in meditation. I’d like to clear this up, because meditation as an exercise can easily become misconstrued. Meditation is one avenue by which you may be involved in listening deeply to the music of your own inner world. Like anything, a practice of meditation can easily become an obstacle rather than a help. If you think you are being a good person, a hygienic entity, a spiritually well-behaved person, then you are likely to be entering meditation with an erroneous view to improvement. The notion we need fixing or betterment can be obstructive to our relationship with inner truth. The key ingredient here is listening deeply, intently, without imposing your mental interpretations upon that which you perceive. You don’t need to specifically set time aside in sitting meditation in order to listen deeply. You can do this out walking, or at work as you perform tasks.

No attention given to your inner world is ever lost or wasted. I say this, but you will not know this for yourself until you taste it directly. These roots within produce fruits of stability, connection, resilience, peace and joy that if you only tasted them once, you would be certain that never again would you trade them for the madness of diversion the conditioned world offers. You must be willing to place what you have thought, believed, concluded upon the altar of sacrifice. You must be willing to withdraw every tiny habit of revenge, resentment and personal superiority. In one shining moment, you might just see that this was all the product of a conditioned personal history, a history that doesn’t even exist except as an etheric record of what has been chosen prior. You are not bound to repeat inner or outer history. This is remarkable good news for freedom. The tragedy is, very few people are even capable of conceiving that such freedom, such a deeply beneficial inner expansion is even possible.

This is the meaning behind the myth of the Bodhisattva. There are those who have for all intents and purposes left this world behind, yet they remain among us. They return again and again into the darkness, not because they are still stuck upon the wheel of becoming, nor because they have to somehow earn nobility through some moral crusade, but because it is actually their deepest joy to extend this help to others. They completely understand that their own well-being is inseparable from the well-being of all.

Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, an astonishing and surreal collection of weird fiction stories.

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