religion – Page 36

The Great Fractal

In the beginning was consciousness. This is the same as God, and it is the same as yourself. God is consciousness, and God is you, and you are consciousness. This didn’t really happen in the beginning, because there’s no such thing as time, but it’s the start of the story.

All religions and spiritual movements are inspired by gnosis about the real nature of God. It’s very simple – God is consciousness because consciousness is sufficient to create the entire physical world (and all possible worlds), and consciousness is outside of time and space and is complete even in division.

Nothing over and above consciousness is necessary to create the appearance of the entire material world and everything in it, and the appearance of every possible material world and everything in that. In fact, all of these possible material worlds can be derived through repeated iteration of a simple fractal equation – the Great Fractal.

So when people say that God is omniscient and omnipotent and everywhere and eternal they are entirely correct, because all of these things are true of consciousness.

The only disagreement arises when people try to describe the precise nature of God. These efforts are doomed to failure because consciousness is more fundamental than language, and therefore cannot be defined in language. And so all efforts to describe God or to interpret the will of God are errors, usually made through a person conflating their ego with God and therefore confusing their personal desires for the will of God.

That’s all there is to life. You, being conscious, are conscious of things. This never changes, not even on the other side of the death of your material body.

The Great Fractal is the sum total of all of the possible phenomena that God can be conscious of. It is called the Great Fractal because all possible lives are similar to all other possible lives in ways that, if represented graphically, form a fractal of infinite complexity and depth.

Every possible life is being lived by God, right now, with full consciousness – and always has been and always will be. There is a being exactly the same as you who is right now living the life you lived up until ten minutes ago – and there are an infinite number of lives being lived inbetween now and ten minutes ago.

The Great Fractal is alive. It is bursting with consciousness. Every possible life that God can imagine – from the simplest flatworm to seventh-dimensional wizards, is consciously being lived right now, and always will be, forever.

How? God just dreamed them up, and God continues to dream as an act of will. That’s all that this – what we call life – is: just a dream. You know this because it’s not any more real than the dreamworlds that you experience at night. Nothing is different at such a time – you are consciousness, and you are conscious of phenomena, and that’s all there is to it, awake or asleep.

What you consider to be your life is just one infinitely small and infinitely limited perspective of the Great Fractal, at the human-on-Earth-in-the-21st-century level. Just like a computer program that can give you the impression of an entire journey merely through zooming in on particular co-ordinates of a fractal, so is your life just a pathway through the Great Fractal and what you see along the way.

You do have free will, only you are limited by certain laws whose purpose is to make this illusion more immersive. What you consider to be free will is nothing more than navigating through the Great Fractal to the degree that you are able – you decide on a part of the Great Fractal that you would like to experience and then – if it’s possible to get there from where you are now while obeying the laws of immersion – you go there.

Why did this happen, instead of something else happening?

Being pure consciousness, God is perfection. God resides in a state of perfect bliss, complete and without desire.

Although this is perfect on one level, it’s grossly imperfect on another: it’s not very interesting.

Simply put, the most enjoyable game that God can play is to look into a limited section of the Great Fractal for long enough so that God can actually come to convince itself that this limited section is really the whole thing – and then God can feel a sense of awe and grandeur by once again awakening to an appreciation of the whole, an appreciation of itself, an awakening from the delusion that God was ever something else.

And then to do it again, and again and again, forever – an unceasing pattern of forgetting and remembering, of mistaking the illusion of the material world for transcendental reality and then realising the trick and laughing about the fact that one could ever fall for something so obvious.

What we call enlightenment is what naturally arrives as a consequence of turning the common, understandable, materialist perspective around; from looking backwards at the uncreated consciousness instead of looking forwards into the created Great Fractal.

The Great Fractal is the sum total of all the contents of consciousness and all the possible contents of consciousness. It is what the ancient Vedic culture called Maya. We mistake it for reality to the extent that we are making a game of this life.

VJMP Reads: Anders Breivik’s Manifesto V

This reading carries on from here.

This section (pages c. 286-415) is entitled “Europe Burning” and details a deliberate strategy, on the part of Breivik’s enemies, to destablise the European continent. This is achieved through a variety of political and sociological means.

Breivik appears to be an ardent believer in the Eurabia theory. This theory has it that the elites of the European and Muslim spheres have secretly agreed to come together in order to act as a counterweight to the influence of America and Israel.

The Eurabia theory sounds plausible on the face of it. But much of the rhetoric around it is misleading. A cynic might argue that the Eurabia rhetoric was deliberately dishonest.

Mass Muslim immigration to France happened not because of a conspiracy but because of economic reasons. We can surmise this because other Western nations also saw an influx of poorly educated third-worlders to work the jobs that the natives had become too highly educated to want to do.

Likewise, European prejudice against Jews and Israel did not arise as a consequence of Muslim and Arab leverage on European politicians. Anyone with so much as a passing knowledge of European history will be aware that native Europeans were more than capable of hating Jews without outside encouragement.

This document exhaustively references antisocial actions taken on behalf of certain Muslims and explains them in terms of collective Islamic anti-Western action. It’s certainly true that if a person would read a several hundred page list of crimes committed by Muslims they could come away thinking that such an agenda existed, but the document does not make an effort to determine whether such a list of crimes is unusual.

Another place in which the document makes implausible assertions is with regards to the sentiment that Judaism and Christianity are traditional European religions and Islam is not. Why Christianity and Judaism should be considered any more European than Islam, when all three Abrahamic sects come from the same place and exhibit similar characteristics, is not discussed by Breivik.

Neither does Breivik explain why he can so ardently attack Communism, Marxism, liberalism, globalism and feminism, but defend the very same Judaism that is most commonly associated with those ideologies.

This unusually benevolent stance towards Judaism is underlined by the multiple references to the work of Bat Ye’or, – who is the most energetic proponent of the Eurabia conspiracy theory – and the claim that Israel is a “cultural cousin” to Europe.

It is, true, however, that Breivik’s grasp of history is much deeper than those of the mainstream commentators whose political opinions inform the masses. He points out that the advent of the nation state, this enemy of the globalist, was itself a reaction to the religious wars that plagued Europe until the mid 17th century, and that wars predated the nation state by thousands of years.

Therefore, there is no reason to agree with the lazy consensus pushed by mainstream leftists that the end of the nation state will bring about a greater level of peace.

Ironically, Breivik “the neo-Nazi” comes across as decidedly less totalitarian than some of his enemies in certain regards. His dislike of the European Union is based in part on the phenomenon of unelected Eurocrats having more power than elected representatives of national governments.

He is correct to point out that critics of the unelected Eurocrats are often dismissed as “anti-democratic” elements – an absurdity on its face.

Although Europe has many enemies in Breivik’s analysis of the world, from the European Union to the mainstream media to mainstream academia to right-wing libertarians who deny the pull of culture, the major enemy is undoubtedly Islam: “The Islamic world always has been our enemy and always will be.”

Throughout this section, Breivik demonstrates an acute historical knowledge on the one hand, and a tendency to rapidly jump over several logic steps on the other. This leads to a number of uneasy conclusions.

VJMP Reads: Anders Breivik’s Manifesto III

This reading carries on from here.

In this section (pages c. 90-200), Breivik details the history of relations between the West and Islam. In his analysis here, there is nothing peaceful – Islam has been attempting to conquer the West since its inception, and would have succeeded already if not repelled at either Tours or Vienna, or other places.

The destruction of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War One, Breivik claims, is how the West has earned some breathing space against this relentless assault. The Caliphate was shattered after the Battle of Megido in 1917, and only because of this has Islam been unable to attack Europe in recent decades.

With sentences such as “the Islamic sources make clear that engaging in violence against non-Muslims is a central and indispensable principle to Islam,” and “Those cultures and individuals who do not submit to Islamic governance exist in an ipso facto state of rebellion with Allah and must be forcibly brought into submission,” a particular kind of Nordic bleakness shines through in this document.

It’s a kind of bleakness that has resigned itself to violence as a grim but inevitable outcome of the play of natural forces. They are attacking us is Breivik’s message. They always have been attacking us and they always will be.

Perhaps the following paragraph summarises this section of the document best:

The spectacular acts of Islamic terrorism in the late 20th and early 21st centuries are but the most recent manifestation of a global war of conquest that Islam has been waging since the days of the Prophet Muhammad in the 7th Century AD and that continues apace today. This is the simple, glaring truth that is staring the world today in the face — and which has stared it in the face numerous times in the past — but which it seems few today are willing to contemplate.

In this section Breivik continues to emphasise the point that no reformation of Islam is possible, for the reason that would-be reformers are unable to refer to any scriptural injunctions towards peace with non-believers. The example set by Muhammad himself was an example of war and of violence, so anyone with a will to reform is snookered from the beginning.

Essentially, anyone trying to move Islam away from violence has to work against the scriptures. Therefore, Islam cannot be used as a civilising force in the same way that Christianity could; no-one could discover through serendipity a message of peace and tolerance in their study of the Koran.

From reading this section there are two elements of Breivik’s reasoning that seem objectionable.

The first is that, although the list of historical atrocities by Muslims and modern apologies for these atrocities by Muslims is long, there are over a billion Muslims and Islam stretches back to the seventh century. As an inevitable consequence of existing for that long on a planet as violent as Earth, a cherry-picked list of bad things committed by or in the name of a group that large and old is going to be lengthy.

There’s no doubt, for example, that one could compile a hundred pages of grossly supremacist and chauvinistic admonitions to violence from a number of nationalities, including the Spanish, the French, the Germans, the British, the Russians, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Mongols, Huns, Persians and others, not to mention every other major Abrahamic sect.

Breivik may well have a point that most Westerners are not taught a deep general historical knowledge of Islam, but this only reveals a kind of autism on his part – after all, most people couldn’t care less about history full stop, let alone someone else’s.

The second obvious point of objection is that, although Breivik is correct in many ways when he criticises the unwillingness of Western historians, historical educators, or politicians to write or speak honestly about Islam, he doesn’t say much about an alternative.

If his contentions about the warlike nature of Muhammad and of Islam are accurate, and that they intend to subjugate the entire rest of the world, then there is a very good reason to not acknowledge this: doing so would be tantamount to an immediate declaration of war.

If Western leaders chose to go on television and say that the Prophet Muhammad was a pedophile and that the history of Islam was one of bloodshed, it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy in short order.

They appear to be gambling on the idea that, if left for long enough without provocation, Islam could reform itself. In this they stand in complete opposition to Breivik.

However, a wiser head might make the claim that if faced with an apocalyptic war today, just about any alternative is preferable, and therefore if there’s any doubt about the willingness of Islam to subjugate the world we should accommodate that doubt in our conversations with them.

VJMP Reads: Anders Breivik’s Manifesto II

This reading carries on from here.

The first part of the document proper is devoted to the “falsified history” of the West and “other Marxist propaganda”. It begins with a review of the history of Islam, in which Islam is declared responsible for the murder of over 300,000,000 non-Muslims throughout history.

It also lists, at length, the historical crimes of Islam. This exhaustive list of genocides, coupled with lines like “more than 95% of today’s Journalists, editors, publishers are pro-Eurabians” makes it easy to get the impression that Breivik has a particularly paranoid Weltanschauung.

He catalogues in detail the strategies that he considers the Islamic “theofascists” and Marxists to be using to manipulate the popular opinion of the religion in the West. Most of these strategies boil down to either lying or intimidation.

Curiously, despite that he describes himself as a Christian, he nonetheless is able to correctly point out that the vast historical crimes of Christianity are mostly inspired by religious features that are shared by all the Abrahamisms.

Without irony, Breivik describes a supposed rule of the Islamic theofascist propagandists: “If people ignore or refute your distorted version of history, accuse them of distortion and political abuse of history.”

It is taken for granted that his own understanding of history is complete and accurate.

Breivik doesn’t seem to have much time for the idea that there could be many different reasons to believe in different accounts of history. The history of Islam is one of evil, and any attempt to paint a more positive picture can only be part of a campaign of deliberate misinformation.

A noticeable pattern is that Breivik is very selective in what he cites as evidence. At one point he cites a Danish literature student who “concludes that Islamic texts encourage terror and fighting to a far greater degree than the original texts of other religions.”

There is nothing objectionable about this in isolation, but in the context of a determined attack on the legitimacy of the university system – with the attack itself centering on the degenerative effect that subjective textual analysis has had on the truth – it seems a bit contradictory.

However, the criticisms made of the content of the Koran and the Hadith cannot simply be dismissed. The plain facts are that the document calls for the killing and/or subjugation of non-believers at dozens of different points.

In fact, Breivik’s criticism of Islam raises some questions that, although deeply uncomfortable, are also unavoidable if one wishes to honestly evaluate the likely outcomes of Muslim culture expanding into the West.

If Muhammad was the perfect man who all Muslims should emulate, what do we make of the hadith that describes him as consummating his marriage to a nine-year old? Likewise, what do we make of his admonitions to kill adulterers and apostates? Or his decree to have a poet killed for mocking Islam?

“The entire Islamic moral universe devolves solely from the life and teachings of Muhammad,” Breivik contends.

So what do we do about the fact that some of these actions, believed by Muslims to have been undertaken by the perfect man in total accordance with the Will of God, are grossly incompatible with what Western culture considers to be good order?

Surrounding these very pertinent questions are long, paranoid expositions about the supposed Islamic sanctioning of lying and deceit, especially when speaking to unbelievers. Breivik certainly appears to believe that lying to non-believers is an inherent part of the Islamic religion and culture.

In some ways, the general criticisms of the unwillingness of Muslims to peacefully coexist sound entirely plausible, because we know of the history of the previous waves of Abrahamism to Europe. Christians also came to Europe professing a desire to live in peace, and they nevertheless found plenty of scriptural support for their efforts to terrorise the locals for centuries.

In other ways, things are less clear. It’s obvious that the other Abrahamisms – in particular Judaism and Christianity – are no longer as mindlessly bound in ancient tradition as they once were, but is this true of Islam? And if so, to what extent?

Breivik would evidently answer in the negative. He would have it that Islam has not changed at all since those early days of caravan raiding, and that even if it has, it’s liable to regress back into violence on account of the precedent set by Muhammad himself.

It’s certainly a very dark and dire perspective – but is it wrong?

The VJMP Reads column will continue with Part III of Anders Breivik’s manifesto.