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Borrowed from the Division Theory
website
D I V I S I O N T H E O R Y
THE SECRET AFTERLIVES OF THE HUMAN PSYCHE
Whenever a true theory appears,
it will be its own evidence.
Its test is that it will explain all phenomena.
- - - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Can such a
dreadful legend, forgotten for nearly 2,000 years, be the true
Secret of Death? Although this ancient vision is completely
alien to our modern assumptions about what lies beyond, it
nonetheless makes a powerful case for itself. Simultaneously
based in modern science and ancient scripture, this answer
quickly shows itself to be simple, logical, and compelling,
providing neat solutions for many long-standing riddles and
enigmas. Horrific as it is, this DivisionTheory behaves
exactly the way correct answers are supposed to behave - it
generates sensible, cogent, intellectually honest explanations
for humanity's most prevalent and mysterious afterlife
reports, including:
* PAST-LIFE MEMORIES *
* NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES *
* REPORTS of DEMONIC POSSESSION *
* REPORTS of GHOSTS & APPARITIONS *
* WORLD RELIGION AFTERLIFE BELIEFS *
and also, amazingly,
* CREATION MYTHS & JUDGMENT DAY
PROPHECIES *
* THE ORIGIN of the HUMAN UNCONSCIOUS *
* THE ORIGIN of the DEVIL *
* THE RESURRECTION of CHRIST *
It appears, in short, to do exactly what one would expect the
Secret of Death to be able to do - solve the mysteries of the
ages themselves.
WHAT IS DIVISION OF
CONSCIOUSNESS?
"Nothing else in the world ...
not all the armies...
is so powerful as an idea whose time has come."
- Victor Hugo
The
Division Theory website
describes a revolutionary theory about what happens to us
after death. Hundreds of such theories exist, of course – most
of them mutually contradictory.
The Binary
Soul Doctrine is different, in three respects:
1. It
accounts for virtually all the reports emerging from modern
research into afterlife phenomena.
2. It
accounts for the vast majority of humanity’s religious
teachings about death and the afterlife, explaining why people
would have arrived at those conclusions.
3. It is
based on modern scientific knowledge about how the mind
functions.
But the
oddest thing is that this theory, though newly rediscovered,
is among the oldest of explanations – perhaps the oldest
explanation – ever devised by the human mind for a series of
puzzles about life, death, and the afterlife.
The simple
premise of DivisionTheory is that we DO survive death - our
psyches do continue to exist and function after the demise of
the physical body, but at the tragic cost of being ripped
apart into two separate pieces, each of which goes on without
the other into a different, crippled afterlife experience. The
conscious mind, known for eons in the East as the Spirit,
loses its memory and goes on to reincarnate. The unconscious
mind, known for eons in the West as the Soul, becomes trapped
in a heavenly or hellish afterlife dreamworld of its own
unwitting creation. Both scientific and scriptural evidence
exists to support this startling conclusion, which not only
explains the differences between many of the world's great
religions, but also shows that humanity's intuitions about the
soul's survival has a reality separate and distinct from the
mind's philosophical conflicts.
Ancient
religious beliefs from all over the globe contain elements of
DivisionTheory, suggesting that this was once a world-wide
religion. And now our modern science is again pointing in that
same ancient direction.
Has modern
science finally arrived at the underlying mechanics of Life
After Death? It now seems possible, perhaps even likely, that
humanity's many various reports of heaven & hell,
reincarnation, and ghosts are all the common effects of a
single, scientifically definable "Life After Death" condition.
A great wealth of scriptural evidence, compiled from the
sacred texts of religions all across the world, also seems to
constitute substantiating evidence for a radical new,
scientifically-based vision of Life After Death. And yet more
evidence for this has been added to our cultural storehouse by
recent sociological research into Past-Life Regression,
Near-Death Experiences, and ghost reports.
The
ancients believed, as modern psychology does, that the inner
SELF is composed of a fundamental duality.
Whether one
calls the two parts of that duality a conscious and an
unconscious, or a mind and a heart, or (as in ancient China) a
p'o and a hun, or (as in ancient Greece) a thymos and a
psyche, or (as in ancient Egypt) a ba and a ka, or (as in
ancient Persia) an urvan and a fravashi, or (as in ancient
India) an asu and a manas, or (as in ancient Hawaii) the uhane
and unihipili souls, or (as in ancient Israel) a soul and a
spirit, humans have always seen themselves as possessing two
non-material psychic components.
Like that
ancient SELF described in so many cultures, modern science has
in this century also discovered that our mind is composed of
two parts - one conscious and one unconscious. And the
characteristics of the two parts that science has discovered
(surprise!) are the very same characteristics those ancient
cultures described the two parts of the ancient duality has
possessing.
The ancients
(Greece, Egypt, Persia, China, Hawaii, Israel) all believed
that these two parts separated from one another at death; most
cultures believed that one of their two parts would become
trapped in some sort of netherworld (a heaven/hell type
scenario), while the other part slipped away freely. Some of
these ancient cultures believed that this second part went on
to reincarnate.
What is
particularly interesting to me about this is that:
(A) These
ancient cultures described the functions and characteristics
of the two parts in terms virtually identical to how modern
psychologists describe the functions and characteristics of
the conscious and unconscious halves of the human psyche.
(B) If one
then asks what would happen if the two halves of the human
psyche survived the death of the physical body, but divided
from one another in the process, one finds that the
unconscious would seem to become trapped in a self-induced
dreamworld (think netherworld), while the other would loses
its memory and sense of identity but remain free to go on to
have new experiences (think reincarnation).
(C) The
Bible, as well as many other ancient scriptures, includes
literally hundreds of passages supporting such a soul/spirit
division concept (although no one seems to have noticed this
relationship).
This Division Would Hide Itself
What is
particularly interesting is that such a division, if indeed it
did occur, would naturally hide itself: If such a division did
occur, no one would be likely to report the division itself,
but only the effects of the division (the division itself
could only be discovered through deductive reasoning, or if
you accept the possibility, divine revelation).
No one would
report the division itself because after the division, neither
side of the mind would be aware that any such division had
occurred at all. Each side of the mind would be prevented from
arriving at this realization, because after the division, each
side of the mind would be crippled, because each would then
lack the mental capacities of the opposite side of the mind:
If the
conscious and unconscious split apart, each side would report
the very afterlife experiences we have seen come down through
history, and which continue to be reported today. The
afterlife experience of the conscious mind would reflect the
traditional reincarnation scenario, while the afterlife
experience of the unconscious would reflect the traditional
heaven/hell netherworld scenario.
As has
happened for thousands of years, each is still being actively
reported today, in NDEs and Past-Life memories. For the last
20 years, science has researched these phenomena, and this
research has produced yet further evidence supporting
DivisionTheory.
When subjects
are regressed in their memories to a point in time in-between
lives, they report an afterlife scenario dramatically unlike
that reported by NDE subjects. In-between lives, they report
possessing no memories or emotions, just calmly floating in a
tranquil nothingness. They don't recall their own names, or
having ever lived any previous lives, or having ever been
anywhere else besides that nothingness they are experiencing
at that very moment. This contrasts sharply with the scenario
described by NDE subjects, who report undergoing profound
memory-reviews - confrontations with their memories of their
past-life- after which they visit emotionally-intense heavens
or hells populated by any number of other people. NDE subjects
do often report a similar episode during their experiences, in
which they seem to temporarily "lose track" of their own
emotional state, during the first few moments of an NDE. But
shortly after they begin the subsequent events (traveling
through the tunnel, experiencing the memory-review, etc), they
again report having vivid, intense emotions.
The Evidence
This century brought many discoveries which stand as evidence
supporting DivisionTheory:
(1) the
psychological discovery that the human mind is naturally
divided into two halves, and the discoveries that each half
possesses unique traits and characteristics.
(2) the
DivisionTheory discovery that, if the mind was to survive
death, but divided apart in the process, those innate
scientific characteristics of those two halves, the conscious
and the unconscious, would cause them to neatly reproduce
humanity's two classic afterlife scenarios (the conscious
would lose its memory but remain free to go on to new
experiences, i.e., reincarnate, while the unconscious would
become trapped in a dreamworld created out of its own
reactions to its own memories, i.e., a memory-review, a
judgment, and then heaven or hell), and
(3) the
archaeological discovery, in the Nag Hammadi scriptures, that
the afterlife theology of the early Christian church
originally focused on such a division of two halves of a
person's spiritual self, and
(4) the
historic discovery that the ancient religions of Hawaii,
Egypt, Greece, China, Persia, and many other cultures also
focused on such a belief, and
(5) the
sociological phenomenon that subjects hypnotically regressed
in their memories to a point in time in-between past lifetimes
(as during Past-Life Regression) consistently describe
floating calmly in nothingness, feeling no emotions, recalling
no memories, and possessing no sense of identity, and
(6) the
sociological phenomenon that people describing Near-Death
experiences frequently report experiencing a similar, but
temporary loss of feelings and emotions (this occurs
immediately after leaving their bodies, but before they travel
very far away from that body, and their sense of experiencing
emotions returns shortly thereafter), and
(7) the
sociological phenomenon that modern exorcists consistently
describe the devils and demons they encounter as possessing a
single identity, but being at the same time composed of
innumerable separate entities.
Does this
constitute final, definitive, conclusive proof of
DivisionTheory? No. But DivisionTheory does explain ALL the
phenomena being reported, up to and including the peculiar
memory- and emotion-loses being reported by NDE and past-Life
Regression subjects. DivisionTheory suggests that the NDE
group is reporting the afterlife experience of the unconscious
soul, while the Past- Life Regression group reports the
afterlife experience of the conscious spirit.
But neither
side, neither conscious nor unconscious, would report the
division itself at all. There could be no direct eye-witness
reporting of such an event. Neither part would be aware such a
division had occurred, because:
*The
conscious would not remember the division. Memory is stored in
the unconscious.
* The unconscious would not be able to figure out that
the division had occurred, because, having lost the conscious
mind with its rational intellect, it could no longer
objectively figure out anything. It would be as unable to
discern logical conflicts and irrationalities as the mind is
during dreams.
This would
explain why the reports of heaven/hell netherworlds and the
reports of reincarnation both continued through the ages,
keeping both legends alive, but the reports of the division
itself got lost in the confusion during the Dark Ages. After
the Dark Ages, the division was no longer understood. or was
the distinction between the soul and spirit comprehended, and
they became thought of as interchangeable terms for the same
thing, whereas in the original texts, the two were clearly
separate and distinct components of the human spiritual
economy.
Given that,
we must ask, what part of "ME" is the soul, and what part is
the spirit? If we do divide apart, this question becomes
crucial - are they parts I will miss much?
The ancient
cultures speak of these two parts in the same way modern
science speaks of the conscious and unconscious. If the spirit
splits away at death, and the spirit is in fact our conscious
mind, death suddenly become far less hopeful a place than
merely the reincarnation scenario of the East or the
heaven/hell of the West. Instead, we are split apart, losing
our very SELFhood.
This rings
true in my ears. When something deteriorates, it breaks down
into its constituent components. Perhaps the mind does as
well. Perhaps this explains what so many ancient religions
focused so strongly on the importance of INTEGRITY.
D I V I S I O N T H E O R Y
THE FOUR PILLARS
Like the
four legs of a table, DivisionTheory rests on four empirical
facts:
1. The
Netherworld All over
the world, in every land and every era, human beings have
arrived at the conclusion that the experience of the afterlife
contains or includes or occurs within a heavenly or hell-like
netherworld. Netherworld traditions appear across the board,
from continent to continent to continent, on isolated island
after isolated island. Time after time, these netherworld
traditions offer similar descriptions of such places.
2.
Reincarnation. All over
the world, in every land and every era, human beings have
arrived at the conclusion that reincarnation also occurs after
death.
3.
Binary/Dividing Soul Traditions
- All over the world, human beings have arrived at the
conclusion that human beings are composed of two separate and
distinguishable components, calling them the soul and spirit,
the head and heart, the conscious and unconscious, the ba and
ka, the sun and moon, and on and on, each culture having its
own words. Within many of these traditions, the two parts of
humanity's binary soul are said to split apart at death, each
going off to a different afterlife experience. Most of these
cultures maintain that one or the other of the two halves of
the binary soul either experiences heaven/hell, or
reincarnates, and some cultures maintain that one part
reincarnates while the other becomes trapped in the
heaven/hell netherworld.
4. Modern
science has, after a century, arrived at some degree of
agreement as to the natural characteristics of the conscious
and unconscious. These
innate characteristics, as it turns out, are precisely those
necessary for the conscious to experience a reincarnation-type
experience after death, and the unconsicous to experience a
heaven/hell netherworld after death, but ONLY IF THE TWO
SURVIVED DEATH UNCONNECTED TO THE OTHER. DivisionTheory rests
on these four facts. The four facts each exist on their own,
and logic connects them together.
D I V I S I O N T H E O R Y
THE SCIENTIFIC TESTIMONY
"Whenever a true theory
appears,
it will be its own evidence.
Its test is that it will explain all phenomena."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Is there a
scientific basis to humanity's afterlife beliefs?
An intriguing
new discovery has uncovered compelling evidence that such a
basis does exist. The Division of Consciousness [Hampton
Roads, 1997] introduces a simple and cohesive scientific
theory which directly addresses and elegantly accounts for the
vast majority of different afterlife phenomena appearing in
humanity's cultural records. This is the first work ever to
present a scientifically grounded hypothesis that accounts for
the traditional afterlife descriptions of both East and West,
while also speaking to the ancient beliefs of a great many
other cultures, and even addressing such modern phenomena as
Past-Life Memories, Near-Death Experiences, ghosts &
apparitions, and more.
Ten years of
independent research yielded a mountain of scientific and
scriptural evidence which all pointed to the same promising
yet highly disturbing conclusion - that the human psyche does
survive physical death, but divides entirely apart in the
process into separate conscious and unconscious components.
Not only do
elements of classic psychology and modern sociological
research support such a hypothesis, but eerily similar
concepts appearing in Biblical, Persian, Egyptian, Gnostic,
Greek, Hawaiian, Chinese, and many other traditions raise the
intriguing possibility that this peculiar and unfamiliar
"Division Theory" may actually be a millennia- old case of
deja-vu.
If this
extraordinary hypothesis holds water, it will revolutionize
the entire field of religion. In this website, you will meet a
number of respected scientists, theologians, and philosophers
who are already convinced Division Theory will do just that.
Many aspects
of accepted scientific theory strongly support this
hypothesis; under the conditions being proposed, both
surviving components of the psyche would, due to their very
natures, encounter entirely different conditions after death,
conditions startlingly similar to those described in Eastern
and Western traditions.
THE EXTRAORDINARY EVIDENCE FOR
DIVISION OF CONSCIOUSNESS
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MECHANICS OF
LIFE AFTER DEATH
JUNG
NEUROBIOLOGY RECONFIRMS THE BINARY
PSYCHE
SOCIOLOGY: NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE
RESEARCH
SOCIOLOGY: PAST-LIFE REGRESSION
RESEARCH
SOCIOLOGY: GHOST REPORT RESEARCH
ARCHAEOLOGY: THE GOSPEL OF THE
NAZARENES
THE CLASSIC PHILOSOPHERS ON THE
DIVISION OF THE COSMOS
KEN WILBER ON THE DIVISIONS OF THE
COSMOS
EVOLUTION OR DEVOLUTION?
In Ancient Times, There Was A
RELIGIOUS CONSENSUS
ON LIFE AFTER DEATH
I believe in the fundamental Truth of all
the great religions of the world.
I believe that they are all God-given....
I came to the conclusion long ago...
that all religions were true,
and also that all had some error in them.
- Mohandes Gandhi
The Teachings of a Binary Soul
The Biblical Teachings
The Teachings of Hinduism
The Teachings of Buddhism
The Teachings of Taoism
The Teachings of Ancient Egypt
The Teachings of Ancient Greece
The Teachings of Hawaiian
Hunaism
The Teachings of Native Africa
The Teachings of Native America
The Teachings of Australia's
Aborigines
The Teachings of the Alaskan
Eskimo
The Teachings of Primitive
Cultures
The Teachings of the Nazirite
Essenes
The Teachings of Atlantis?
The Teachings of Emmanuel
Swedenborg
The Teachings of Rudolf Steiner
The Teachings of Edgar Cayce
The Teachings of Carlos
Castaneda
The Teachings on The Fall of
Man
The Teachings on the Price of
the Fall from Grace
The Teachings on the Division
Within Each of Us
The Teachings on Losing the
Soul During Life
The Teachings on the Afterlife
of the Soul
The Teachings on the Afterlife
of the Spirit
The Teachings on Preventing the
Afterdeath Division
The Teachings on Two Different
Options for Eternal Life
The Teachings on the Origin of
Hell
The Teachings on Babylon
The Teachings on the Devil
The Teachings of Exorcists
THE SOUL & THE SPIRIT
THE TWO HALVES OF THE SELF
"On the day you were one you became two.
But when you become two, what will you do?"
- - - The Gospel of Thomas 11
The soul and
the spirit of the Bible ARE the unconscious and the conscious.
(Science simply hasn't figured out that they are immortal
yet.) This ought to be considered true for two very good
reasons:
The Bible presents the soul and
spirit
as possessing those very qualities which
science grants to the conscious and unconscious.
This fits an existing larger
pattern.
Similar binary soul doctrines exist
in many other cultures.
Behold the
mystery : like man and woman, the conscious spirit and the
unconscious soul are opposite in nature, but do not
necessarily have to be "opposed" to one another. On the
contrary, these two can integrate, fitting together as
perfectly and as intertwined as the Yin and the Yang in the
Tao symbol, each helping to support and define the other, each
consisting, in its deepest center, of the other, each
providing its partner with precisely what it needs most.
This is the
mystery of the sexes.
The mystery of the psyche.
The mystery of life.
The mystery of death.
The natures and characteristics of the conscious and
unconscious ARE opposite to one another in many obvious ways.
The conscious is aggressively active, the unconscious
passively reactive. The conscious deals with facts and figures
and details, the unconscious deal with relationships and
systems. The conscious is objective, masculine, and has
control over the intellect and free will, while the
unconscious is subjective, feminine, the unconscious does NOT
have free will , instead being preprogrammed with material
universally present in all minds (archetypes), but the
unconscious DOES have control over the feelings and memories.
(While knowledge of good and evil is but one of the archetypes
that exist preprogrammed in the unconscious, it is certainly
the most troublesome one of them all).
Study of the
mind has revealed that the conscious and unconscious are,
despite what their names suggest, not merely two different
forms of the same substance; the unconscious is not just a
lesser or lower form of consciousness. They are fundamentally
different types of mind, with completely different modes of
operation. The fact that the unconscious is not more
immediately present to our normal waking awareness seems
almost beside the point; if the unconscious was somehow lifted
up so it could be perceived more directly, it would still be a
fundamentally different kind of mind, functioning differently
in the psyche than the conscious does:
Consciousness
proceeds in terms of analysis and differentiation, in terms of
special attention to "the most minute details". The
unconscious, on the other hand, has an opposite way of
thinking. Non-analytical, undifferentiated, it takes its
symbols as they are, and does not break them down as
consciousness does. ... the basic categories and ways of
procedure are different in consciousness from those that
prevail in the unconscious ... Its mode of thinking is
altogether different from what we understand by `thinking.
- Ira Progoff, Jung's Psychology and Its Social Meaning, Grove
Press, New York, 1953, p. 75
Each side of
the psyche possesses characteristics and capacities unique to
itself. However, neither part is sufficient alone; each needs
the input of the other. The two sides of the mind thus comple
ment one another, together forming a whole far greater than
the sum of their parts:
...the unconscious processes
stand in a compensatory relation to the conscious mind ...
conscious and unconscious are not necessarily in opposition to
one another, but complement one another to form a totality,
which is the self. - Jung
The conscious
mind's objectivity allows it to distinguish and differentiate
between forms, providing humanity with its logic and analytic
reasoning, the foundation of all science, technology, and
civilization. And more importantly still, the conscious mind
has free will, the power to make choices and decisions. The
basic design of the human mind grants all the free-will to the
conscious and none to the unconscious, which risks letting the
mind become one-sided. The conscious is able, under this
design, to repress and inhibit its other half, the
unconscious; and since it is essentially masculine, or
self-assertive, in nature, it tends to use this ability
regularly.
The
unconscious has equally essential qualities. Although much of
its activity does occur outside our awareness, the unconscious
is constantly releasing material into the conscious mind; this
secret participation of the unconscious is vital, providing
the balance necessary for a healthy psyche.
Whereas the
conscious is logical, the unconscious is emotional; and since
it does lie below the threshold of awareness, we tend to
experience the emotion it releases into the conscious not as
something we have chosen, but something which happens to us.
And whereas the conscious is active, enterprising, and takes
the initiative, the unconscious is almost purely reactive in
nature; much of what it does is in response to outside
stimuli. It is also receptive, which allows it function as the
mind's memory center, receiving and storing all information,
experiences, and other memory data. The unconscious contains a
complete, perfectly preserved, unedited record of all the
thoughts, feelings, and experiences of a person's past.
However, since the memory-bearing unconscious is also
emotionally-based, memory recall tends to be an emotional
experience; memories are generally found to be imbued with an
aura of emotion. People often find that past memories which
lack an emotional charge, having little personal meaning or
importance, tend to be more difficult to recall than memories
which do contain strong emotional ingredients. Storing all
memory, the unconscious is necessarily both vast and deep, and
has often been likened to a limitless dark ocean within the
psyche.
Essentially
female in character, the unconscious is also the source of
value-awareness in the human psyche. While the conscious will
coolly note an object's outer characteristics, it takes the
unconscious' more intuitive perspective to recognize if those
characteristics hold any personal value or meaning; the
conscious quantifies, the unconscious qualifies.
Although the
unconscious is subjective, allowing feeling, rather than law,
to form the ultimate basis of its value system, it also
possesses an innate understanding of good and evil, making it
the source also of humanity's moral consciousness. And, as the
inner creator of images and patterns, the "matrix-mind" that
gives birth to thought-forms in the psyche, it is also the
source of all instinct, intuition, and dreams.
While the
conscious mind tends to recognize specific details and
differences between things, the unconscious focuses instead on
issues of connectedness and unity; thus, the unconscious often
reflects a certain timeless quality, a feeling of oneness and
universality.
These two
halves of the mind are fully dependent upon one other; each
lacks and needs what the other possesses. While the conscious
is the seat of free will, able to make new and creative
decisions, by itself it has no ability for recall, and must
rely on the unconscious to provide it with memory-data when it
needs it. The unconscious, the equal but opposite partner of
the conscious, lacks free will; like an automatic computer, it
is incapable of making any independent decisions whatsoever.
But the unconscious instinctively recognizes all subjective
value content, automatically processes all command messages,
and, as the seat of all memory, precisely records all input
from the conscious.
Although
psychology first discovered this binary mind in the days of
Freud and Jung in the early 1900's, it took biology nearly a
full century longer to make the same discovery for itself. In
recent years, however, medical research on the hemispheres of
the human brain has reached essentially the same conclusions
as those arrived at by Freud and Jung - that a fundamental
division exists within the psyche. Each hemisphere seems to
have a mind of its own, or rather, each hemisphere seems to be
related to a different half of the whole mind. The two
hemispheres seem to have, again, completely different styles
of processing information: the left hemisphere seems language-
and analysis- oriented, while the right seems to process
information holistically. The left brain, like the conscious,
is critical and detail-oriented, while the right brain, like
the unconscious, seems emotional, creative, comprehensive,
pattern-matching, and analogy-forming, and
is even suspected of being the source of dreams.
WHAT HAPPENS
WHEN WE DIE?
This is the
oldest question, the first question, the most important
question, for on this question, all else depends.
Mankind's many ancient
spiritual traditions pretty much all agree that it is possible
for people to survive the death of their physical bodies. But
it is hard for many people to take much comfort in this
apparent agreement, for these spiritual traditions all differ
very dramatically on just what it is that they think survives
death, and what (if anything) is necessary to enable that
‘whatever it is' to survive. Some traditions say that survival
depends on certain things being just right, and if those
things are not right, then the person will fail to survive
death. Other traditions, however, insist that survival is
guaranteed, and nothing can prevent it from occurring.
Modern research into paranormal
phenomena (such as Near-Death Experiences, Past-Life Memories
and Past-Life Regression, and ghosts, apparitions,
poltergeists, and possession and exorcisms) leave us pretty
much in the same boat. While all this phenomena seems to point
in roughly the same direction, suggesting that survival does
occur, these different phenomena paint very different pictures
about just what it is that does survive, and what changes
happen during the transition.
In short, both our traditions
and our modern scientific research seems to disagree almost as
much as they agree, leaving us wondering why we should believe
any of them if they all seem to be telling us different
stories.
But the
ancient Binary Soul Doctrine provides a solution to this
dilemma. Through an ancient hypothesis substantiated by modern
science, it presents an argument for the processes of death
and the afterlife that neatly explains virtually all the
different traditions of mankind's past, as well as all the
afterlife phenomena being studied and reported by today's
paranormal researchers.
The Division of Consciousness is the first book in the
DivisionTheory trilogy.
It reintroduces the world to
the ancient Binary Soul Doctrine, and demonstrates that the
entire vision of history described by the Judeo-Christian
Bible was not only consistent with the BSD, but in fact would
be predicted by it!
The second book in the series,
The Lost Secret of Death, demonstrates that the ancient
BSD is not only consistent with the data emerging from modern
research into afterlife phenomena, but actually predicts it,
including a great deal of the most mysterious and otherwise
inexplicable aspects of this data.
The third book in the series,
yet to be titled, will focus on the Biblical prophecy of
Judgment Day and the Universal Resurrection. It will explore
the hypothesis that this will not only be a time when all of
mankind reawakens to all our lost past-life memories, but also
that this event will be the latest of a cyclical series of
such events which occur approximately once every 6500 years.
Ancient cultures all around the globe once held remarkably
similar beliefs about death and the afterlife. Ancient Egypt,
China, Greece, Persia, Australia, and native tribes throughout
Africa, North and South America, and the Pacific Islands all
believed that people had not one, but two souls, and that
those souls were savagely wrenched apart from one another at
death, each experiencing an entirely different, but equally
crippled afterlife. Many of these cultures believed that one
soul would become trapped in a fixed and unchanging
heaven-or-hell netherworld, while the other, although
remaining free to go on to new lives and/or new experiences,
would be struck with total amnesia.
Ancient Israel also believed
that people possessed two souls, calling them, of course, the
soul and the spirit. Early Christians even believed, as had
those other nations, that the soul and spirit could, and
sometimes would, divide apart from one another:
The word of God is living and
active
and sharper than any two-edged sword
and cuts so deeply it divides the soul from the spirit.
- - - - - - - Hebrews 4:12
TO FIND THE RIGHT ANSWER,
SIMPLY ASK THE RIGHT QUESTION
-
Why did so many cultures hold this same peculiar notion that
people possessed not one, but two souls, and that those two
souls divided apart at death?
-
Why were the characteristics and afterlife experiences of
those two souls described in consistently similar terms from
one culture to the next?
-
Why are those ancient descriptions of the two souls so
similar to modern science's descriptions of the conscious
and unconscious halves of the human psyche?
-
And what WOULD
happen if those two halves of the human psyche were to
survive death, but separately, each going on without the
other? What would each half experience?
Were these ancient beliefs simply coincidental
superstitions, or were they based on something common to all
human experience regardless of cultural heritage? It may now
finally be possible to determine the answer to these
questions, thanks to the recent publication of the long-lost
Christian Gospels unearthed in Nag Hammadi Egypt in 1945.
These lost scriptures bring to light a forgotten chapter in
Christianity's history, revealing that there was once a
branch of early Christian theology based directly on
Division. Armed with these newly found documents, the time
may have finally come to comprehend the bizarre and
disturbing facts behind these mysteries, a truth unspoken
since the earliest moments of the Christian era, a truth
buried and forgotten for nearly 2,000 years.
"My God, my God! Why, O Lord,
Have you forsaken me?"
It was on the cross that He said these words,
for it was there that He was divided.
- - - - - - The Gospel of Philip 68:26-29
On the day you were one you became
two.
But when you become two, what will you do?
- - - - - The Gospel of Thomas 11
Afterlife
Research and the Binary Soul Doctrine:
Keynote Address at the July 2004 Conference of the
International Association for
Regression Research and Therapies
Back in 1975, Raymond Moody's book “Life After Life” changed
the world for a lot of us. It really looked as if science was
finally going to prove life after death. Since that first book
on near-death experiences, there have been over 300 books
published on research into different kinds of afterlife
phenomena. We have seen works on near-death experiences,
past-life regression, after-death communication, ghosts,
apparitions, poltergeists, and more.
Unfortunately, that wealth of
data has proven to be a problem. All these reports didn’t seem
to paint the same picture about what happens after death. One
set of reports pointed in one direction, while other sets
pointed in other directions. Each set of reports seemed, on
its own, to provide valid information about the other side of
death’s door, but when they were compared with one another,
they all seemed to disagree with one another and cancel each
other out. This has been very frustrating, and I think it is
responsible for this research having received so little
attention on the world stage.
This is very much the same
situation that modern religion is in. Each religion seems to
say something different, and would-be believers are left on
their own to more or less arbitrarily choose which one they
want to believe and then just ignore all the other competing
claims. This lack of uniformity, this lack of agreement among
mankind’s belief systems, is leading more and more people to
conclude that they are all equally wrong, that no one has the
right answer.
And I think we see the same
dynamic occurring in how the world is reacting to research
into afterlife phenomena. So long as all these different
reports continue to describe mutually exclusive visions of the
afterlife, the average person will see no reason to believe
any of them.
Today we stand at a critical
threshold. A mere thirty years ago, a handful of scientists
began to recognize that people around the world were reporting
similar afterlife experiences. This insight sparked the first
organized research into NDEs and PLRs, which then spawned
grassroots movements dedicated to researching these phenomena,
followed by worldwide organizations which grow larger with
each passing year. If any model of the afterlife is going to
be widely believed fifty years from now, it will have to
recognize and convincingly account for the data emerging from
this research.
Over the coming years, we can
only assume that our advanced communications will continue to
more deeply integrate our cultural perspectives, unifying our
collective vision of reality. The invention of the telephone,
the radio, the TV, and now the Internet has struck a severe
blow to cultural perspectives that can only exist in an
informational vacuum. Eventually, the day will come when all
the different varieties of afterlife data being researched
today will be familiar to the majority of the people. When
that day arrives, only two possibilities are likely to remain
: either there will be some theoretical model of the afterlife
that accounts for all the data, or there won’t be.
If such a model does emerge, it
seems likely that it would eventually be accepted across all
borders, becoming, in time, a single world religion.
Not so long ago, when the world
was fractured into a multiplicity of different isolated
cultures, many different localized, non-integrated afterlife
beliefs existed side by side around the world, each providing
its own little sliver of humanity with their own unique vision
of reality. But as human culture grows more globally
integrated and homogenous, a new uniformity of belief will
also tend to establish itself on that new global scale, and
humanity’s different conflicting beliefs will become a thing
of the past.
If, however, no model of the
afterlife can be found that meets this challenge, if no
afterlife model successfully and convincingly accounts for all
our different reports and traditions, then it seems inevitable
that the human race will, slowly, perhaps reluctantly, cease
to believe in life after death altogether. So long as we keep
hearing radically different and contradictory descriptions of
the afterlife, our generation, and then our children’s
generation, and then their children’s generation, will keep
believing less and less in life after death as history marches
on.
And THAT, ladies and gentlemen,
is the great tragedy of our time. This modern research could
have changed the world, finally proving the reality of life
after death. It SHOULD have changed the world. But it didn’t.
And so long as these reports continue to disagree with one
another, it won’t.
And so, the great promise of
this work has gone largely unfulfilled. In the eyes of the
world, all this research has been in vain. In the eyes of the
world, we still don’t know the secret of death.
You already knew all that. What
I came here to tell you tonight is that --- it may have not
always been this way. In ancient times, I believe, men knew
the secret of death. I have been researching mankind’s modern
and ancient reports of death and the afterlife for the last 16
years, and I have become convinced that mankind once knew the
real secret of death. Thousands of years ago, at the very dawn
of written history, cultures all over the globe were on the
same page when it came to their afterlife beliefs. There was
none of today’s bewildering maze of conflicting reports and
incompatible theories. Instead, they all professed the very
same faith -- that man had two souls, which divided apart from
one another at death, each soul experiencing a different and
separate afterlife experience.
In time, we forgot that great
insight, and this forgetting, I believe, has been our undoing.
When we forgot what death was, we forgot what life was all
about, what our true identity was, and the importance of
integrity. Today, as we look around the world, if there’s one
thing that’s clear, it's that integrity is valued too little,
and we are suffering from its absence. We live in a dark time.
We live in a time when our soldiers laugh as they torture
their enemies, a time when our children show no qualms about
stealing music and art over the Internet, a time when the
majority of our college students admit cheating on tests, a
time when our executives are getting caught right and left
cooking their books and ripping off their shareholders, a time
when the greatest nation of the world looks for ways to get
around the Geneva Conventions.
The problem behind all this is
not that people no longer know the difference between right
and wrong. It’s just that they no longer see what’s in it for
them to choose right over wrong.
But today, in this time of
moral darkness, a light has arisen. That lost secret, the
faith of the ancients, has been rediscovered, pieced back
together from the surviving shards of its last days, scattered
among cultural antiquities across the globe. And this
discovery, you will see, may be just what we need right now.
It may be just what we need to rekindle our collective
interest in personal integrity.
For the last 16 years, I have
been researching an obscure religious belief called the binary
soul doctrine, an ancient idea that was once the centerpoint
of religions all across the planet. Once it was reconstituted,
the binary soul doctrine was found to have extraordinary
properties, properties suggesting that those ancients may have
actually known what they were talking about. That ancient
belief system, as it turns out, translates into a modern
scientific hypothesis that explains virtually everything we
currently observe in afterlife phenomena, including near-death
experiences, past-life regression, ghosts, poltergeists,
after-death communication, and much more. It even seems to
explain obscure anomalies like the zombies of Haitian Voudou,
the death prayer of the Hawaiian Kahuna, and the reports of
Catholic exorcists. This lost secret seems to reconcile
mankind’s sciences, religions, and paranormal phenomena into a
single coherent picture of what happens after death. It seems
to take all the pieces of the puzzle and show how they all fit
together.
This secret, you will see, is
not unfamiliar to the modern mind. This makes sense; it was
once the central cultural focus of nations all over the globe,
and it left a continuing imprint on our ideas, our languages,
and our ways of looking at life. For thousands of years, the
lost secret of death has been hiding in plain sight. But like
an unexploded bomb from an ancient war, its power, and
potential, and meaning, have gone unrecognized.
At the dawn of recorded
history, cultures all over the globe believed essentially the
same thing about death. Thousands of years ago, dozens of
cultures in Africa, Europe, Asia, Australia, Hawaii, Alaska,
and both North and South America believed that human beings
had not one, but two souls, two souls which would divide apart
at death. Greece called these two souls the psuche and the
thumos. Egypt called them the ba and ka. Persia called them
the urvan and daena. Israel called them the ruah and nefesh.
Christianity called them soul and spirit. Islam called them
ruh and nafs. India called them atman and jiva. China called
them hun and po. Hawaii called them uhane and unihipili. The
Dakota Indians called them nagi and niya. The list goes on and
on. At death, these cultures believed, a person’s two souls
split apart, each going off into a very different sort of
afterlife experience.
If that’s all there was to the
story, it would already be an amazing story. Today, the world
entertains a hundred different notions about what happens
after death. How did the world manage to agree on this subject
thousand of years ago?
But that’s just the beginning.
Our modern science has reproduced that ancient belief. These
ancient cultures described those two souls the same way modern
science now describes the two halves of the human mind. The
ancient world believed we have two souls, and modern science
recently arrived at the same conclusions. Psychology calls
them the conscious and unconscious. Neurology calls them the
left brain mind and the right brain mind. And the descriptions
of the ancients match the descriptions of modern science.
The ancients felt that these
two halves of the mind split apart at death, each going off to
have an entirely different sort of afterlife experience. One
half was often said to reincarnate, while the other half would
become trapped in some sort of dreamlike netherworld.
This ancient idea is
interesting for many reasons. It is interesting because it
once existed in many different cultures all over the planet.
It is interesting because it reconciles Eastern traditions of
reincarnation with Western traditions of an eternal heaven or
hell. And it is interesting because it suggests a link between
modern science and ancient religion.
But it is perhaps most
interesting because it seems to explain a lot of modern
research into afterlife phenomena. It is consistent with
reports of ghosts and poltergeists. It is consistent with the
phenomena known as “after-death communication”. It is
consistent with shamanic soul-retrieval. It is consistent with
reports of near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences.
It is consistent with reports of past-life regression.
The binary soul doctrine
reconciles these different reports, suggesting that they are
all descriptions of the same phenomenon, simply from slightly
different angles. The idea that we are complex, rather than
simple, creatures, having two parts to our souls, is a very
old idea, but it is still is a living idea today. The Bible
calls them the soul and the spirit. Astrologers call them the
sun and moon. The average person on the street often calls
them the head and the heart.
They are BOTH the ‘self’. But
they are very different selves, equal-but-opposite selves in
many ways. One is more objective, rational, decisive, and
masculine, and the other is more subjective, intuitive,
emotional, and feminine. One possesses the free will, the
other possesses the memory.
Many ancient cultures believed
that one of these halves would reincarnate after death, and
that the other half would get stuck in a dream-like experience
that could seem just like heaven or hell.
The bizarre thing is, if the
two halves of the mind DID divide apart at death, they WOULD
experience something like that. This didn’t make any sense
before science rediscovered the properties of the conscious
and unconscious. But now that we again know a little about how
these two halves of the mind work, we can see that dividing
them from one another at death would produce some very
interesting results.
If the two parts of the human
psyche each survived physical death, but divided from one
another in the process, what would happen? Where would they
be? What would each experience? Well, this really isn’t so
hard to figure out; each would lose what the other half gave
it, and would be forced to rely exclusively on its own
capacities. After death the conscious mind would still possess
free will and intellect, but not emotion or memory. The
unconscious would still possess memory and emotion, but not
free will or intellect.
When people died, their minds
would essentially divide into two fragments. Both parts would
still possess awareness of a sort, but vastly different kinds
of awareness. Neither would be the whole self, but neither
would realize that, either.
Alone, the conscious mind would
have no reference of perspective, no context in which to
understand its environment. Without the unconscious, the
conscious mind would have no memory, no sense of form,
connection, or context, leaving it just like a newborn baby,
unable to make out recognizable patterns in anything around
it. Without any sense of context, without any instinct or
intuition, everything it observed around it would just seem
empty, meaningless, irrelevant chaos - pure nothingness. The
left brain conscious mind perceives details, distinctions and
differences, rather than connections and similarities, so it
would see the trees but not the forest, the text but not the
context, the data but not the significance. It would be aware
of every last speck of all the raw data, but it would be blind
to the patterns within the data. The data would have no
meaning, completely empty of significance. It would be like
static on a TV screen.
And without any subjective,
emotional perspective, it would not feel related or connected
to anything. It would feel completed isolated, detached,
dispassionate, and uninvolved. Without the unconscious, it
would not experience any feeling or emotion whatsoever.
Objective to the end, the conscious would then just be a
bodiless, identityless, emotionless, historyless,
uncomprehending point of pure, living awareness, floating
calmly alone in an empty field.
However, it would still have
free will. It would still be free to make new choices. And
those choices would, in time, cause it to move on to new
experiences and new cycles of experience, never knowing or
even suspecting that any previous life had ever occurred. In
time, such an amnesic conscious spirit could be expected to
eventually enter into new experiences, from which it would
slowly build up a whole new sense of identity. Free as a lark,
it would be likely to repeat this reincarnation-like process
indefinitely, perpetually creating new identities and leaving
behind a steady stream of discarded past selves, like a plant
endlessly growing shoots that are pruned as soon as they are
grown.
Meanwhile, an afterdeath
division would affect the unconscious very differently. The
unconscious would lose all ability for objective thought,
logical analysis, and discriminative reason, as well as all
ability to make new choices. The conscious mind holds the free
will and the intellect, and the unconscious would lose these
talents at the division. But the unconscious would still
possess emotion and memory, it would still be reactive and
responsive, and it would still see form and structure and
connections and patterns and relationships.
The unconscious would contain
the person’s complete and unedited memory, including every
thought, belief, impression, and suspicion that had ever
crossed the person’s mind in life. But it wouldn’t really be
the same person it remembered being when alive. Without the
conscious mind, the unconscious would no longer have any free
will - it wouldn’t be able to change its opinions, or make any
new decisions, or be creative, original, or spontaneous in any
way whatsoever. But since the unconscious would be cut off
from its rational intellect, it would never realize it was not
the same person. Unable to use reason or logic, unable to
arrive at any genuinely new conclusions or make any new
decisions, it would remain convinced that it was still the
same person it had been prior to the division. It would never
notice that anything had changed or that anything was missing.
Without any free will, the
unconscious would be unable to objectively act or move in any
way. It would have to just sit perfectly still, with nothing
to do but fall back deeper and deeper into itself. Being cut
off from the input of both the physical body and the conscious
mind, cut off, in effect, from all it had known outside
itself, from all objective reality and external stimuli, it
would turn its attention inward. There, it would rediscover
everything the person had stashed away and forgotten inside
his own unconscious over the course of his life - all his
memories, feelings, ideals, insights, and self-judgments.
And this, it seems, would
produce the famous “panoramic life review” described both in
near-death experiences and past-life regressions.
We would judge ourselves. Or
rather, we would discover that we had already judged
ourselves.
While we are alive, our
unconscious is constantly reacting and responding to all our
different choices and decisions. It is forever whispering to
us, continually comparing those choices and decisions with our
own inner sense of right and wrong. That’s its job. But, while
we’re alive, we can consciously choose to block out those
whisperings. The conscious mind is stronger, and can repress
the unconscious. We can, and often do, choose to ignore these
whisperings, pushing their messages back down, out of our
awareness.
It is these repressed judgments
and emotional reactions, this still-energized content of the
unconscious, that we would be re-confronted with after death.
If our unconscious found itself cut off from the conscious
mind after death, that conscious mind would no longer be there
to repress those judgments any longer, leaving them free at
last to surface into our awareness. Without the ability of the
conscious mind to discriminate between one thing and another,
the unconscious mind would not be able to reject, deny, or
ignore any of its memories, or the feelings and self-judgments
stored up inside those memories. It would not be able to hide
from itself any longer. The unconscious would suddenly find
itself face to face with all those repressed self-judgments, a
whole lifetimes’ worth, remembering all its memories at once,
and feeling all the feelings connected with them. It would be
swimming in them.
Collapsing into itself, the
unconscious would become completely preoccupied with
redigesting its own memories. Running on full automatic, the
unconscious would review and re-experience its memories,
feelings, and self-judgments over and over. And since the
unconscious is automatically responsive and emotional in
nature, it would also be expected to react emotionally to
them. If those self-judgments were favorable, the unconscious,
being automatically responsive and emotional, would
automatically respond to them by generating even more positive
feelings and emotions.
And since it is image-, form-,
and pattern-oriented, the unconscious would create dream
images for itself out of those memories and emotions. If those
memories and emotions were more self-affirming than
self-condemning, then the unconscious would create a
dream-experience for itself that was filled with positive
emotion — pure pleasure and happiness. It would think it was
in heaven. But if those memories and emotions were more
self-condemning than self-affirming, it would experience a
dreamland filled with the images and feelings of
self-condemnation. It would think it was in hell.
With no external input
possible, and no decision-making ability available to make
changes, this process would continue without interruption,
compounding upon itself - one’s afterlife dreams would just
keep growing ever stronger and more intense. The unconscious
could never awaken from these dreams, at least not under its
own power, since it would have no independent volition of its
own.
Is there a division of
consciousness at death? Many who believe in reincarnation
already believe so — the part of the mind containing the
memories is thought to be taken away before the spirit
reincarnates again. But there’s a huge difference. Traditional
views of reincarnation do not hold that this memory-containing
part then falls away into a netherworld. Instead, the
memory-containing part is generally thought to just be 'filed'
harmlessly away into a state of dormancy in the back of the
mind.
However, science has discovered
that the unconscious mind, the half of the mind that stores
memories, is never dormant. Freud’s great discovery was his
realization that a half of the mind exists that we do not
naturally see and cannot easily reach, which nonetheless is
very much active, running along robustly outside of our
conscious awareness. 100 years ago, the world of science was
very shook up about Freud's discovery. Why? Because they were
being told that a part of their own minds was beyond their
ability to monitor and control.
When we sleep, the unconscious
mind is dominant, but the conscious mind is still running and
functioning as well. When we are awake, the conscious mind is
dominant, but the unconscious is still running and functioning
too. The parts of the mind do not ever become dormant. If the
unconscious was cut off and separated from the conscious mind
after death, modern science suggests it would still continue
to function - energy, after all, cannot be destroyed.
And this means that those
cut-off parts of the mind that contain the memories of our
past lives are probably still living out their own dreams
somewhere, off on their own, possibly imagining that they are
in heaven or in hell, just as ancient cultures believed
thousands of years ago.
My research suggests that this
soul-division occurs often, perhaps even most of the time, but
it does not occur all of the time. As we will see, there is a
certain class of afterlife phenomena reports — afterdeath
communications — that seem to be of recently deceased souls
who have suffered little or no soul-division. And of course,
every culture also contains reports and legends of ancient
heroes and saints who briefly reappear from time to time, and
when they do, they too seem to present no evidence of having
suffered any soul-division . They seem to still possess all
their mental faculties, all their memory, intellect, and free
will.
The binary soul doctrine, then,
suggests that death has four different faces. You can
encounter a whole soul that has not divided after death; you
can encounter a conscious without an unconscious; and you can
encounter an unconscious without a conscious. Those are three
very different faces of death, and different religions and
belief systems around the world have repeatedly reported
encountering each of these. Those who feel that the conscious
mind is the true self are right to maintain that after death,
the self goes on to reincarnate again. And those who feel that
the unconscious is the true self are equally right to say
that, after death, the self becomes trapped in an eternal
heaven or hell. All of these stories have persisted down
through the ages because all of them indeed seem to be
correct, depending on one’s perspective. But there has also
been another story persisting alongside those three, and the
binary soul doctrine suggests that it too is based in truth.
There have always been those who feel that, after death, the
self dies and ceases to exist. And for those who feel that the
true self is the self we actually experience while alive, the
thing created by the union of the conscious and unconscious,
that more dismal assessment would also seem to be true, at
least when soul-division occurs.
Most people haven’t heard about
afterdeath soul-division before, but there’s a very good
reason for that. The division would hide itself. It would
virtually never get reported by any of its victims - only the
aftereffects of the division would get reported. Neither of
the two halves of the mind would be aware, after the fact,
that any division had occurred. Each half would be prevented
from understanding what happened, because each would be
functionally crippled after the division, lacking the mental
capacity to arrive at this realization. The conscious would
not remember the division, and the unconscious would not be
able to figure out that a division had occurred. Since memory
is stored in the unconscious, the conscious mind would have no
reason to think that anything had changed after the division -
it would have no memory of anything prior. And, since the
unconscious would have no rational intellect after the
division, it would never analyze the data and arrive at a
logical conclusion. This would explain why reports both of
heaven & hell and of reincarnation have both continued side by
side down through the ages, keeping both stories alive, while
the report of the division itself got lost over the course of
history.
However, a few eyewitness
reports of the division have managed to slip through. A
handful of near-death experience subjects have reported such a
division, as also have a few past-life regression researchers.
A few modern psychics and mystics have also reported this
division, such as James Van Praagh, Rudolf Steiner, and
Emmanuel Swedenberg.
One of the things that makes
the binary soul doctrine so amazing is the realization that
the simple mechanics of the human mind would reproduce the
classic afterlife scenarios of Eastern and Western religion,
but ONLY if the two halves of the mind divided apart at death.
... which, of course, is exactly what ancient cultures all
over the world once believed.
The other thing that makes the
binary soul doctrine so amazing is that it accounts for most
of the reports emerging from modern research into the
different varieties of afterlife phenomena. Ghosts,
poltergeists, after-death communications, near-death
experiences, and past-life regression all seem to exhibit
symptoms of soul-division.
The least amount of
soul-division seems to occur in after-death communications.
This is phenomena where departed souls return to earth briefly
to say goodbye to their loved ones or take care of other
unfinished business on earth. These kinds of afterlife
contacts usually occur in the first year or two after the
person has died. And for the most part, these souls don’t seem
to have suffered much soul-division at all. They seem to still
retain most of their mental faculties. They usually seem to
know who they are and who their loved ones are, they seem to
still possess some degree of free will, and they still seem
able to think and communicate rationally. However, it usually
does seem that they have suffered a little soul-division.
These deceased loved ones are generally unable to communicate
verbally; instead, they rely on nonverbal gestures or symbolic
images to get their messages across. This is consistent with
the binary soul doctrine. The left brain conscious mind is
verbal, the right brain unconscious is not. This inability to
use verbal communication suggests that the abilities of their
left-brain conscious minds are diminished, forcing them to
rely more heavily on the capacities of the right-brain
unconscious. Another curious thing about these after-death
communications is that they rarely occur after the person has
been dead a couple years. This suggests that the soul-division
might not happen immediately after death, or that it starts
off slowly and gets worse over time, and after a certain point
they are too divided to engage in this kind of communication.
Real ghosts, on the other hand,
seem far more seriously divided. Ghost reports often seem to
describe beings suffering from extreme mental dysfunction.
They often appear to be sleep-walking, re-living memories and
emotions from their past. Seemingly frozen in time and
oblivious to the present-day, haunting ghosts usually appear
at the same place every time they are seen, always wearing the
same apparel and going through the same motions. The majority
make no attempt to communicate, and seem unaware of the
living. However, when communication is received from ghosts,
it is, much like after-death communications, virtually always
‘subjective’ in nature — using right-brain communication, like
gestures, images, and symbols. Ghosts seem not to even realize
they are dead, as if they’d lost the ability to make
elementary logical deductions. Ghosts can apparently have the
most obvious clues staring them in the faces. They can walk
through walls, or climb staircases that have long been
removed. They can apparently do this for centuries without it
ever crossing their mind that they might have died.
Essentially, the majority of
ghosts seem to suffer from a pronounced diminishment of
reasoning ability, cognition, free will, verbal skills, and
objective awareness, which is exactly what the binary soul
doctrine would predict. What’s lost always seems to be the
capacities of the left-brain conscious mind, and what’s
retained always seems to be those of the right brain
unconscious. .
Poltergeists, I think, are the
other side of the same coin, the equal-but-opposite version of
haunting ghosts. Unlike ghosts, poltergeists tend to be heard
rather than seen. Unlike ghosts, they virtually never resort
to symbol or metaphor to get their messages across, but they
have been known to employ ‘left-brain’ communication, and a
few have even used speech and the written word. Poltergeists
usually seem objective and extroverted. While most ghosts
never notice the presence of others, poltergeists always seem
to be aware of what’s going on around them. Poltergeists also
exhibit more free will than the typical ghost. While ghosts
are known for very consistent behavior, poltergeists are very
unpredictable. They show up suddenly, engage in all sorts of
different strange behaviors, and usually don’t repeat their
behaviors at all. They carry on for anywhere from a few weeks
to a year or two, and then they inexplicably stop their
activity, usually never resuming again. And while haunting
ghosts seem to have a clear identity, poltergeists often seem
not to. Sometimes they present no identity at all, and other
times they seem to offer a variety of different, mutually
exclusive identities.
This is all exactly what one
would expect from a disembodied conscious mind that had lost
its unconscious. It would have no sense of identity or right
and wrong, but it would still be very active, willful, and
able to communicate through language and linear codes. Since
the conscious mind focuses primarily on the differences and
distinctions between things, the poltergeist would focus most
of its attention on the differences and distinctions between
itself and everything else it observed. The poltergeist, then,
would be the ultimate alienated being, which would explain a
lot about their infamous anti-social behavior.
Near-death experiences also
fall into step with the binary soul doctrine. Near-death
experiences typically occur in two equal-but-opposite stages —
one dark and one light — which seem to be exactly what one
would expect if the two halves of the mind were functioning
independently of one another. The conscious half would
experience the dark stage, while the unconscious would
experience the light stage.
In the first stage, the
experience is usually described as floating alone within a
black void or tunnel. This stage, which is usually experienced
as being very brief, is characterized by decreased distress
and anxiety, decreased emotional investment in one’s earthly
life, decreased form, pattern, and meaning recognition, a
sense of being separated from everything, and a hyperalert
awareness with enhanced logic and reason. Near-death
experience subjects often report that they couldn’t see
anything in this dark stage. They don’t know where they are,
where they’re going, or what’s going on. However, instead of
panicking about this, a strange emotional disconnect occurs.
Subjects often feel divorced from what is happening, unable to
feel their own feelings, relate to their own lives, or, even
see themselves at all - a complete absence of the subjective.
Subjects often report feeling no distress over having just
died, no grief over leaving their loved ones, no concern for
their loved ones’ future welfare, nor, for that matter, even
for their own. Instead, they describe being overcome with a
sense of calm and peace. Although they’d just left everything
that had ever meant anything to them, this sudden turn of
events doesn’t bother them at all. Subjects often remark how
peculiar this state of mind seems in retrospect, but at the
time, they weren’t fazed by it at all. Many have returned from
near-death experiences feeling very guilty over having not
been more upset at the time about leaving loved ones who
needed them, but during the dark stage, all that just didn’t
seem important to them. Nothing seems to be very important
during the dark stage. Interestingly, subjects often also
claim increased mental acuity during this phase. Their minds
are sharpened even as their emotions are dulled. Reports of
increased clarity and swiftness of thought, heightened
alertness, increased curiosity, and improved logic are all
common during this phase.
Many subjects then move on to a
very different stage — the famous ‘Realm of Light’ — and this
second stage of the experience seems to be the mirror opposite
of what came before. Now subjects report increased emotional
intensity, increased sense of connections and relationships,
increased form, pattern, and meaning recognition, along with a
diminished sense of separateness and distinctness, and a
diminished tendency to employ analytical reasoning. Instead of
total darkness, they find themselves in brilliant light.
Instead of a lack of emotion, they are suddenly consumed with
intense emotion. Instead of being alone in an empty void,
subjects are surrounded by all sorts of fabulous forms and
patterns. Instead of being objective, they feel extremely
subjective, affected by everything around them. Instead of the
‘ultimate alienation’ experience of the first phase, where
they seemed to be the only thing in the entire universe,
subjects now find themselves interacting with many others just
like themselves. Instead of feeling unconnected, subjects now
report a delicious sense of community. They feel emotionally
connected to those in their past life, to those in this new
realm, and to the entire universe. Instead of being in a
formless and meaningless limbo, subjects report seeing
meaning, pattern, form, and structure everywhere. Often, they
are overwhelmed by visions of BIG patterns of meaning. They
see “the big picture”, and feel they finally understand the
grand pattern of all reality. This is the exact opposite of
what was experienced in the black void, when they couldn’t see
any forms or meanings or connections at all. And instead of
experiencing mental acuity, subjects often exhibit signs of
reduced logic and increased gullibility during this phase.
Subjects regularly maintain that it would have been impossible
to disbelieve anything told to them during this phase, that
every thought passing through their minds seemed true beyond
all possibility of doubt.
These two stages perfectly
match the two halves of the human psyche. The conscious left
brain mind is logical, objective, nonemotional, and geared
towards distinguishing and separating one thing from another,
while the emotional, subjective, and intuitive unconscious is
geared towards noticing form, pattern, relationship, and
meaning. And the unconscious lacks the ability to distinguish
truth from falsehood, accepting all thoughts it is given;
this, of course, is what makes hypnosis possible. The
objective and dispassionate perspective of the dark stage
perfectly reflects the characteristics of the conscious left
brain mind, just as the emotional, subjective,
relationship-oriented nature of the light stage reflects the
right brain unconscious. And although most subjects do not
themselves conclude that their minds were splitting apart
during these experiences, some do; accounts of those who
reported their own minds splitting into two disconnected
fragments during their near-death experiences are found in Dr.
Kenneth Ring’s book Lessons From the Light, Dr. Barbara
Rommer’s book Blessing In Disguise and my own book The Lost
Secret of Death.
Still more evidence supporting
the binary soul doctrine has surfaced in past-life regression
research. Like near-death experience subjects, many past-life
regression subjects also describe both the dark and light
stages, and some have also claimed to have personally divided
apart into two soul fragments between one life and the next.
However, there are important differences between these two
sets of reports : near-death experience subjects tend to focus
more on the second phase, while past-life regression subjects
speak more commonly of the first phase. The dark void is more
frequently described as the primary afterlife experience in
past-life regression reports, and it also seems to have a far
longer duration than in near-death experience reports. In
fact, for a long time most published past-life regression
reports only mentioned the void, and never said anything about
a Realm of Light at all. Past-life regression reports often
describe people floating calmly alone in that empty darkness
for years, even decades, before returning to life again in a
new body, with many subjects never catching so much as a
glimpse of the light stage between lives. The details of these
reports are very similar to near-death experience reports of
the dark stage. Subjects hypnotically regressed to memories of
being in-between lives often describe themselves floating in
blackness, not knowing where they are, not seeing anything,
feeling anything, doing anything, or experiencing anything.
They usually feel totally detached and peaceful, neither
suffering any emotions nor concerning themselves with any
memories. Unlike the vibrant and thrilling "Realm of Light"
experience, this dark void experience mutes one’s feelings and
emotions, and often one's memory and sense of identity as
well. This is, again, exactly what the conscious mind would
experience after soul-division.
When past-life reports do
mention the light stage, their descriptions seem in agreement
with those of near-death experiences. But there is one glaring
difference — the relationship between the dark and light
stages seems very different from near-death experience
reports. In those reports, the light stage usually seems to
follow the dark stage sequentially, the one occurring after
the other. But in past-life reports, these two experiences
seem to be occurring simultaneously, independently of one
another.
Both stages may actually be
experienced by all past-life regression subjects. The reason
we hear one stage being reported more frequently than the
other may have more to do with the hypnotic commands of the
therapist than with the actual experiences of the subjects. In
those past-life reports where the light stage is reported, the
hypnotist usually uses a certain command, and when that
command is not given, all we hear about is the dark stage.
At first, when they are
regressed to a point in time in-between lives, subjects
usually only report the void. But when the subject is then
instructed to “go to the light” or something similar, this
essentially asks the subject to shift gears in his mind — to
transfer his awareness to a different part of his mind — then
he is able to recall his light stage experiences. This
supports the soul-division hypothesis. At the beginning of the
between-lives regression, one part of the mind seemed to be
experiencing the void, and floating calmly alone in the dark
was all it knew. It was unaware that anything else was
occurring, and certainly didn’t seem to know that there might
be a whole different part of itself that was busy having all
kinds of fun in a Realm of Light. But then the hypnotized
subject’s attention is made to shift to another part of their
mind, a part that seems to have been having a very different
experience at the very same time — in the light realm. And
after this mental shift is made, that new part of the mind
seems to be just as myopic as the first part was — it seems
unaware of the part of itself floating alone in empty
blackness.
These hypnotic techniques seem
to allow people to do today what they couldn’t do when these
experiences were actually occurring — monitor the experiences
of both parts of the mind at the same time.
And again, just as in
near-death experience research, there is also some eyewitness
evidence of an afterdeath soul-division in past-life
regression reports : some regression subjects also report
afterdeath soul-divisions occurring between one life and the
next. They have described dividing in two after death, with
one part of their being going on to reincarnate, while another
part gets left behind in some realm of the dead. Such reports
can be found in Dr. Bruce Goldberg’s book Peaceful Transition,
Dr. Michael Newton’s books Journey of Souls and Destiny of
Souls, and in papers published by Dr. Janet Cunningham and Dr.
Roger Woolger in the Journal of Regression Therapy. In his two
books, Dr. Newton maintains that one part of the soul goes on
to reincarnate, while another part stays behind, and sometimes
becomes a ghost. But more often, this ‘left-behind’ part does
not become a ghost, but just remains in the netherworld realm
in a noncommunicative, sleeping state. This is exactly what
the ancient binary soul doctrine cultures used to believe.
The shamanic practice of
soul-retrieval also supports the binary soul doctrine. In
fact, most of the primitive shamanic cultures DID believe in
the binary soul doctrine, and outside of that conceptual
model, the practice of soul-retrieval doesn’t make much sense.
Soul-retrieval, of course, is the idea that parts of one’s
soul can split away and become lost, and that a specially
trained or gifted person can make a mystical journey into the
other world and find that lost soul fragment and bring it back
to its owner. Although shamanic soul-retrieval is a very old
practice, many modern paranormal approaches have been designed
to try to do the same thing. Some past-life regression
practitioners have done this on occasion, and we’ve seen some
articles in the Journal of Regression Therapy about these new
approaches.
Another interesting approach to
this is being explored at the Monroe Institute in Virginia,
where they use specially designed audio technology to
stimulate mystical mental states. They are teaching students
there at the Monroe Institute how to go out on out-of-body
experiences and track down and recover their own lost soul
parts from past lives, as well as those of others. Even though
they have reincarnated, they find that they left parts of
their own souls behind, still trapped in the moment of their
deaths, still reliving the same memories and emotions over and
over. It’s very interesting to read reports of these modern
soul-retrieval sessions. One subject at TMI described going
out and finding his own past-life soul still wandering in
anger and confusion on the site of an ancient battleground,
the place where he’d been killed. Centuries later, he still
thought the fight was going on. It’s interesting that
virtually all versions of soul-retrieval report that it is
very difficult to reason with these lost souls. The binary
soul doctrine would explain why — because these lost souls are
just unconscious minds, and don’t have their rational
intellect, and so can’t appreciate a logical argument. Often
these lost soul fragments have such fixed opinions that they
cannot be reasoned with at all. But then sometimes they can be
tricked into letting go and leaving, and for the same reason —
they just aren’t very bright while they are in that condition.
This idea of soul-retrieval is
the same thing that people around the world believed 5,000
years ago — that when we die, one part of our soul could go on
to reincarnate, while another part could split off and become
trapped in a dreamlike heaven or hell experience. This IS the
binary soul doctrine, and modern-day practitioners of
soul-retrieval are experiencing its reality first-hand.
Soul-retrieval, like past-life
regression and a few other techniques, does seem to help
repair some of the soul-divisions people suffered in past
deaths, allowing people to reintegrate lost mental content
from past lives. But these practices are very slow and
tedious, and the problem they are trying to fix is very big.
They are tools, but they just don’t seem to be big enough
tools for the whole job. We have been dividing apart lifetime
after lifetime, losing our memories and sense of identities
again and again. We are being forced, again and again, to go
through the same motions, relearning the same skills, making
the same mistakes. How many different past-life souls do we
each have still languishing in its own hell deep in the back
of our minds, still waiting to be rescued?
Soul-division makes me mad. It
seems like the most intimate violation possible. When I think
of being stripped of all my memories, and having all my
hard-won knowledge and skills ripped out of my hands at the
end of each life, it feels like being raped. And when I think
of all of us going through this same atrocity lifetime after
lifetime, suffering again and again through the same
time-wasting processes of relearning how to walk, talk, tie
our shoes, multiply , divide, get along with others, and all
the rest, soul-division seems like a cruel and pointless joke.
And when I consider that we
may, each of us, also have hundreds of past-life selves
trapped in endless nightmares deep in the backs of our minds,
I begin to appreciate the tragic urgency of mankind’s ancient
religions.
My daughter told me a story the
other day. When she was in class, the professor asked the
class why people studied history. When someone answered “To
learn from our mistakes”, he asked the class “Do you really
think we learn from our mistakes? Look at the world today,” he
said. “Does it really look like we have been learning from our
mistakes?”
The same thing could be said
about our past lives. The literature of past-life regression
is full of reports of people discovering that they’ve been
making the same stupid mistakes lifetime after lifetime. If
past-life regression is telling us anything, its that much of
the human race is caught in a repeating cycle of behavior,
doing the same things over and over, going through the same
motions lifetime after lifetime, learning the same lessons
again and again, but never being able to capitalize on it and
proceed further.
There might be a few exceptions
to this rule, and past-life regression provides us a very
useful tool to help beat back a little of the memory loss that
occurs between one life and the next. But it is a limited tool
for a very big problem. The same can be said for those who
practice soul-retrieval one soul at a time. Even though the
process works, it is still like trying to bail out the entire
ocean with a soupspoon.
In my books, I suggest that
what Jesus tried to do was to solve this problem, by trying to
achieve a mass, universal soul-retrieval, trying to rescue and
restore all the split-off soul fragments of all humanity. If
so, it’s too early to tell if He succeeded or not.
The ancient cultures that
believed in the binary soul doctrine felt pretty much the same
way I do about soul-division. They hated it. They thought it
was the worst thing imaginable. Once death shattered a
person’s mind into fragments, the ancients believed there was
no way to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. In Egypt,
when the two souls, the ba and ka, split apart at death, they
called it the “second death”. They thought that this was the
absolute worst thing that could happen to a person.
Some binary soul doctrine
cultures thought that the afterdeath soul-division was
inevitable. It was going to happen, and there was nothing
anyone could do to stop it. These cultures tended to try to
minimize the apparent effect of the soul division by devaluing
one or the other of the two souls. One soul, they
rationalized, was real important, the other was not so
important. And so when they divided apart, the ignored the
fate of that one soul, and concentrated on the fate of the
other. “No harm done”, they said, “that part of you wasn’t
very important anyway.” But I think that was just a case of
‘sour grapes’, trying to put the best face on a bad situation.
However, other cultures thought
that the afterdeath soul-division was not inevitable. In
ancient Egypt and ancient China, for example, they felt that
if someone lived their lives just so, they could bond their
two souls together so tightly that they would not divide apart
at death. Instead of devaluing one soul or the other, they
sought to integrate them together. In fact, the whole of
Egyptian religion, including all the effort they put into
building all those monuments and pyramids, can be seen as part
of their effort to achieve this integration. The whole point
of Egyptian religion was to get the ba and ka to unite
together to the point that they created a whole new soul,
which they called the akh. In China, they had the same goal,
but called the integrated soul they were trying to create the
“immortal fetus”. And once they created that newly integrated
soul, the person was considered completely immortal. Death
would no longer bring any division, no memory loss, no ill
effect of any kind. They would never again lose track of their
identity, but would from that moment on possess an “eternal
name”.
The same goal, the integration
of the two halves of our psyches, is again being trumpeted as
the salvation of the human race. Modern psychology teaches us
to unite and integrate together our conscious and unconscious
minds.
The ancients believed that this
was the key to surviving death without suffering any mental
deterioration during the transition. This ancient goal, I
believe, has also come down to us as the religious imperative
to have integrity, to be true to ourselves, to honor the voice
of our own conscience. Most modern religions can still be
defined as teachings to promote self-integrity. And I believe
that those who do this are less likely to suffer soul-division
at death.
I have an example for you. The
binary soul doctrine suggests that living one’s life with
complete integrity will lessen the likelihood of having one’s
soul split apart at death. The more integrity you have in
life, the less divided you will be in death, and the less
alienated you will be from the memories of that past life.
This suggests that cases of spontaneous recollection of
past-life memories will happen most frequently in those who
had the most pure integrity in their past lives, and we may
have an example of that here with us tonight. William Barnes
had spontaneous memories of his past life as Thomas Andrews,
and that life would appear to have been one of remarkable
integrity. Thomas Andrews, I believe, may be a spiritual
success story, and an example we might all do well to follow.
The ancients knew we tend to be
divided beings. They knew we often suppress the voices of our
own souls, and try to silence the whisperings of our own
conscience, rejecting, denying, and ignoring part of our own
minds. Soul-division is really nothing more than
disassociation, a form of mental illness. The ancients knew
that even though the human mind was immortal and would survive
the death of the physical body, the two halves of the mind
could still become so profoundly disassociated from one
another that all communication between them failed. The
history of the binary soul doctrine may really be nothing more
than the tracking of a mental illness through multiple
lifetimes.
The ancients knew the horrific
consequences of humanity’s self-betraying behaviors, and tried
to provide humanity a way to heal the division between the two
halves of our souls.
In the long-lost Gospel of
Thomas, for example, Jesus tells His followers that the only
way to eternal life is to “make the two one”. He said
"When you make the two into one,
and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside
like the inside and the above like the below, when you make
the male and the female into a single one, then you will enter
the kingdom."
To me, this is a very poetic
way to say, “integrate the conscious and unconscious”, and I
believe that to have been the original goal of early
Christianity. And part of that effort, you might be interested
to learn, seems to have involved something very much like
past-life regression. Although the Roman Church never wanted
you to know it, early Christians tried to discover and
reintegrate their past-life selves. In fact, this seems to
have been a very major element of their earliest theology.
References to such a practice can be found in a great number
of early Christian scriptures, including The Gospel of Thomas,
The Gospel of Philip, The Gospel of Truth, The Secret Book of
James, The Treatise on Resurrection, and The Teachings of
Silvanius.
Of course, all these books were
banned by the Romans when they took over the church a few
centuries later. Over time, this knowledge of mankind’s
divided souls was lost, and without it, eventually all our
religions seemed to be pointing in different directions,
saying different things and giving different advice. When that
secret was lost, nothing made any sense anymore. Without that
secret, our religions no longer spoke the same language.
Without that key to the puzzle, our research into afterlife
phenomena seemed to paint incompatible pictures of the
afterlife. Without that insight, science and religion seemed
to have nothing in common.
But with our rediscovery of the
danger of the “second death”, our religions have a chance to
heal the divisions between them, re-embracing their common
foundation, common vision, and common purpose. With the
rediscovery of the phenomenon of soul-division, the various
categories of afterlife reports can again be understood as
describing the same condition. And with the rediscovery of the
binary soul doctrine, science and religion at long last find a
common denominator and a common language.
This modern discovery of the
division of the human soul, it seems, has the potential to
heal many of the divisions afflicting our world. Once, all the
world know of this division. Egypt knew, and built its whole
civilization around that one concept. China also knew. So did
Persia, India, Hawaii, Alaska, Australia, and North and South
America.
But we forgot. Somehow, the
whole world forgot, until this idea was finally introduced by
Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung in the early 1900's. And then it
was reconfirmed and expanded upon 80 years later when
neuropsychologists started studying the different mentalities
of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Most people
still don’t realize that they have two separate minds in their
heads at the same time. It is a very counter-intuitive
realization. But that’s the conclusion science is handing us.
Dr Fredrick Schiffer, a psychiatrist on the faculty of Harvard
Medical School, wrote in his 1998 book “Of Two Minds” that
“ordinary people generally have two selves in one body.” He
also writes, “split-brain and other neuroscientific research
compellingly demonstrate that two separate minds can exist in
one person.” Dr. Schiffer insists that these two minds can be
completely autonomous from one another, each operating
independently of the other.
This is exactly what ancient
cultures all over the world once believed. The only difference
is -- the ancients also believed that those two minds would
survive the death transition.
Now, I don’t know if this
binary soul doctrine is true, although its ability to explain
and account for so many of humanity’s different religious,
cultural, and paranormal reports of the afterlife cannot be
easily ignored. And even if the binary soul doctrine is true,
it still doesn’t solve the whole puzzle, although I do
personally believe that it represents a major step in that
direction.
This modern discovery of
humanity’s divided mind, almost miraculously, seems to
reconcile our different religions, our different afterlife
phenomena, and our different sciences. This makes sense to me.
Our minds are the lenses through which we view the world. If
that lens is fractured and divided, then everything else we
view through it will seem that way as well.
It is my fervent hope that the
rediscovery of this lost insight might reignite a passion for
integrity in our society. The ancients believed that integrity
was the key to surviving death, and I believe they were onto
something. I am here tonight to ask for your help in drawing
attention to this ancient wisdom, a wisdom urgently needed in
today’s world, a wisdom which once caused people all over the
world to value personal integrity above all other qualities.
When people again view
integrity as a guarantee of personal success rather than an
impediment to personal success, much of our current social
problems will disappear on their own. When people are again
convinced that their own integrity and psychological health
will determine their long-term future, they will pay more
attention to it, and the whole world will benefit from that
new attitude.
D I V I S I O N T H E O R Y
GHOSTS AND APPARITIONS
"Ahhhh.
Ahhhh. Ah! You're the first one! You're the FIRST one, that
has ever, Peter, explained that to me in a way that I could
understand. Now that suddenly makes sense. If there IS a
division, that would explain the "tapeloop" ghost.
Fascinating! That makes all the sense in the world."
-- Art Bell, on hearing how DivisionTheory explains the
reported behavior of ghosts
Ghost reports are a universal
element of the human experience. In every continent, country,
and culture around the world, and in every age we know
anything about, human beings have been reporting strange
encounters with ghosts and apparitions. Despite our modern,
intellectually-sophisticated society, surveys indicate that
even today a surprisingly high percentage of people believe
they have personally experienced such encounters.
Whatever is going on here, SOMETHING certainly is.
Any attempt to explain the nature of death would be required
to address these anomalies. Division Theory does. Many of the
most commonly reported characteristics of ghosts, such as
their mindless repetitive behavior, their seeming inability to
communicate, their focus on emotionally-intense locations
and/or past-events, even the sensation of cold and strange
smells that are often reported to accompany them, are all
consistent with the conditions proposed by Division Theory. A
disembodied unconscious would mindlessly and endlessly replay
its past memories, focusing on the most emotionally intense
memories, just as the most commonly reported form of ghostly
behavior. It would not be able to communicate, except in a
very "right brain" sort of communication, and this too is
precisely what we find to be the most common form of ghostly
communication, using symbol and metaphor far more commonly
than precise language. A separated unconscious.
D I V I S I O N T H E O R Y
NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES
If there is a life after death,
then how different
must the stories that we now hold to be true really be
from the reality of an afterlife? Even those humans who
have been revived after near death are unanimous
in assuring us that earthly language cannot convey
the nature of the extraordinary experience they had
when they crossed into death.
-------- Raymond A. Moody Jr., M.D.
The belief in heaven and hell
seems to be a universal element of the human experience. In
every continent, country, and culture around the world, and in
every age we know anything about, human beings have believed
in a continued existence in some sort of afterlife, quite
often imagined as an underworld or netherworld.
Today, researchers are
discovering that people haven't just been believing in old
passed-down stories, legends, and dogmas of such afterlives,
but have instead been experiencing vivid sojourns in apparent
heavens or hells personally, in what have become known as
Near-Death Experiences.
This makes sense. No matter how insistent a legend is, if it
doesn't resonate with people's own experiences generation
after generation, it will cease to remain a living, vibrant
part of their culture. Yet we find that the belief of an
afterlife is quite universal, apparently independent of any
specific culture or creed. I propose that it remains precisely
because the experience itself continues to be repeated, and
reported, in individual's lives.
Any attempt to come to terms with the Great Mystery of Death
must take into account these ancient, seemingly universal
legends, and the experiences that continue to keep them alive
today. Division Theory does.
To a degree far more than anyone realized when The Division
of Consciousness was first published, DivisionTheory
explains the data emerging from modern NDE research. The most
commonly reported details of near-death experiences conforms
quite precisely to the expected and predictable effects of a
mental split between the conscious and unconscious. This
correlation is explored in thorough detail in the second book
in the DivisionTheory series, The Lost Secret of Death.
Zombies and
Vampires
Distorted
Cultural Memories of the Souls of the Dead
The binary
soul doctrine would even seem to explain our many cultural
traditions about beings like vampires and zombies. Both of
these mythical creatures, along with the haunting ghost, can
now all be identified as the same being — a separated
unconscious soul that has lost its conscious spirit in the
afterlife. All these legendary creatures are credited with the
very same characteristics a disembodied unconscious soul would
have after the "second death."
Without a
conscious mind, such a being would have no objective
awareness, autonomous will, or independent initiative, but it
would both be very suggestible and also able to drain energy
away from other energy sources.
Zombies are
said to be mindless automatons, dead people with no will of
their own. That is exactly what a separated unconscious soul
would be. Without the left brain conscious mind, it would like
a hypnotized person, perfectly ready and willing to accept and
carry out any idea it is given. It would have neither any
rational intellect nor any independent will of its own.
Legends in Hawaii and other cultures maintain that shamans
once knew how to find and communicate with these disembodied
creatures, turning the mindless souls of the dead into
invisible slaves that could be sent to do one's bidding.
The myth of
the vampire is quite similar to that of the zombie, if you
think about it. They are both dead people who come back to
life in a horrible and dangerous distortion of their original
humanity. I think the cultural memory of the vampire heralds
from the same original insight that also eventually spawned
tales of ghosts and zombies. In many cultures, vampires were
not thought of as real flesh-and-blood beings, but more as
ghostly entities that could invisibly suck your life from you.
A separated
unconscious soul might be able to do that very thing. While we
are alive, the soul is attached tightly to its spirit, and the
spirit's energy activates and enlivens and enriches and fills
out the soul. Basically, the conscious spirit is the
energy-generator, and the unconscious soul is the
energy-absorber or energy-consumer. When the soul and spirit
split apart at the second death, the soul finds itself cut off
from the only energy source it ever knew, and it dries up and
condenses and falls psychologically back into itself. However,
if that separated soul subsequently came into contact with
another living person, it might be able to siphon off some of
the energy from that person's living spirit. If the soul can
feed off the energy from one spirit, it might be able to do so
with others as well. If such a disembodied soul siphoned off
enough energy to completely cut off the living person's soul
from all access to its own spirit's energy, then that person
the dead soul attached itself to would probably die. Same
result as with the traditional vampire myth, but without the
incriminating neck marks.
That trick is
just what the Hawaii's ancient Kahuna priests reputedly did,
on a regular basis no less. They apparently knew how to find
ghosts just wandering around (the folks at The Monroe
Institute in Virginia claim to have figured this part out) and
give them commands like a hypnotist would do. These Kahunas
would put them under their control, turning otherwise mostly
harmless ghosts into lethal zombie-vampires being directed by
a living person ordering them around. But having this
zombie/vampire/ghost thing under one's control would only give
the Kahuna priest one weapon, for those crippled dead souls
only had one talent in their present condition. They would
attach themselves to a living person's spirit and slowly
siphon away the person's life energy, eventually killing them.
Thus, it began to be said that the ancient Kahunas knew how to
simply "pray" someone to death, when in fact they were
enslaving the ghostly souls of the dead and turning them into
spiritual vampires.
Ghosts have a
world-wide reputation for being energy-absorbent. One of the
most common elements of ghost reports is the strange cold spot
near the ghost. Ghosts actually seem to suck the thermal
energy right out of the air, causing it to be eerily cold in
their vicinity. This makes perfect sense to the student of the
BSD. The soul needs energy to function, and if it is no
longer getting that energy from its own living spirit, then it
is free to engage alternate sources of energy if the chance
arises, rather like a free electron's ability to reattach
itself to other molecular systems.
Poltergeists,
by the way, seem to be the exact opposite in this respect.
They are commonly associated with strange bursts of heat.
Fires spontaneously pop up on a regular basis in poltergeist
cases, as well as fiery hot stones that seem to fall
unaccountably from the sky. Such a surplus of energy, of
course, is consistent with the idea that the unconscious soul
(zombie/ghost/vampire) is an energy-user, and the spirit
(poltergeist) is an energy-generator.
The Gnostic
Christians not only knew about these matters, but they also
believed there was a way to avoid ever being the victim of one
of these half-beings. If one perfectly united his own soul and
spirit, then none of these half-beings could mate with one's
spirit :
"Great is the
mystery of marriage! For without it, the world would not
exist. Now the existence of the world depends on man, and the
existence of man depends on marriage. Think of the undefiled
relationship, for it possesses a great power. Its image
consists of a defilement. The forms of evil spirit include
male ones and female ones. The males are they which unite with
the souls which inhabit a female form, but the females are
they which are mingled with those in a male form, though one
who was disobedient. And none shall be able to escape them,
since they detain him if he does not receive a male power or a
female power, the bridegroom and the bride. One receives them
from the mirrored bridal chamber. When the wanton women see a
male sitting alone, they leap down on him and play with him
and defile him. So also the lecherous men, when they see a
beautiful woman sitting alone, they persuade her and compel
her, wishing to defile her. But if they see the man and his
wife sitting beside one another, the female cannot come into
the man, nor can the male come into the woman. So if the image
and the angel are united with one another, neither can any
venture to go into the man or the woman."
- The Gospel of Philip
Philip seems
to suggest that separated spirits of the dead can also bond
with a living person's soul, just as the separated souls of
the dead can bond with a living person's spirit. That union
may be what today's culture knows as spirit possession or
demonic possession. For more on that subject, visit the
"Poltergeists and Possession" link to the left.
D I V I S I O N T H E O R Y
REINCARNATION & PAST-LIFE MEMORIES
We must...keep in mind that
reincarnation
- if it exists - may be very different
from how we imagine it to be.
It may even be incomprehensibly different.
-------- Raymond A. Moody Jr., M.D.
The belief in
reincarnation seems to be a universal element of the human
experience. In every continent, country, and culture around
the world, and in every age we know anything about, there have
been human beings who believed that life and death were
cyclical, that people who died eventually returned again to be
born anew as memoryless babies, starting all over with new
lives and new identities.
If any
religious belief could be said to be even more universal than
that of the Netherworld, it would have to be the doctrine of
reincarnation. Repeatedly appearing among the most ancient
beliefs of every continent, the belief in rebirth seems to
also be a naturally-occurring element of native religions.
From the Indians of North America to the tribesmen of Africa,
from the Aborigines of Australia to the teeming masses of
India, China, and Japan, people everywhere seem to have
independently reached the same conclusion: that after death, a
person is always reborn again, given a new chance, a new life,
and a new identity.
The belief in
reincarnation seems to have covered the entire world at one
point or another. In the East, the Zoroastrians of Persia, the
Egyptians of Africa, and the Pythagoreans and Platonists of
Greece all maintained this belief. In ancient Europe, this
doctrine was native to the Finns, Danes, Norse, Saxons, Celts,
and Prussians, among others. In the Americas, similar views
were held by the Incas and the Aztecs, and later by the
Mayans, Hopi, Iroquois, Algonquins, Dakotas, Tlingits, and
many, many other tribes. Since this doctrine has been found in
native cultures all across the world, from Africa to South
America to Alaska to Australia to a myriad of completely
isolated oceanic islands, rebirth cannot be a tradition handed
down from any one source, but instead must be considered a
truly universal indigenous belief.
Today as
well, this doctrine is taught far and wide; and besides the
larger reincarnational nations (Hinduism's India and
Buddhism's China, Tibet, and Japan), the doctrine of rebirth
is still alive in the native religions of over a hundred
African tribes, and, among ocean peoples, in the religions of
the Australian Aborigines, the New Zealand Maoris, the
Tasmanians, the Tahitians, the Solomon Islanders, and the
Okinawans, to name just a few.
And although
it is often assumed to be completely foreign to the West,
reincarnation theology is even found thriving within the
religions of Abraham, most notably in Islam's Sufism and
Judaism's Cabalism. The place of reincarnation within Judaism
has long been debated; according to the famed Jewish historian
Flavius Josephus, in fact, only one of the three schools of
Jewish philosophy at the time of Christ was known to clearly
reject the doctrine of reincarnation: the Sadducees. The
Pharisees' pro-reincarnation views were well known, "that ...
the souls of good men ... are removed into other bodies". The
Essenes' views were less well known; however, they did
acknowledge the pre-existence of the soul, a necessary
prerequisite for the belief in reincarnation. Although it's
not widely known, the doctrine of reincarnation still exists
in modern Judaism as well:
"[Even today] in mystical
Judaism,
we believe in reincarnation. It's called 'gilgul'.
We believe each time we incarnate,
we move a step forward."
- Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi
Today, researchers are
discovering that people haven't merely been accepting and
passing down old stories, legends, and traditions of
reincarnation, but have instead been personally experiencing
vivid memories of past-lives themselves. In this modern age,
such memories are sometimes accessed with hypnosis, through a
technique that has become known as Past-Life Regression. But
others, throughout time, have spontaneously found memories of
past-lives arising in their memories without the assistance of
such techniques.
This makes sense. No matter how insistent a legend is, if it
doesn't resonate with people's own experiences generation
after generation, it will cease to remain a living, vibrant
part of their culture. Yet we find that the belief in
reincarnation is indeed quite universal, apparently
independent of any specific culture or creed. I propose that
it remains precisely because the experience itself continues
to be repeated, and reported, in individual's lives. The idea
continues precisely because the experience does.
Any attempt to come to terms with the Great Mystery of Death
must take into account this ancient, seemingly universal
belief in reincarnation, and the experiences that continue to
keep it alive today. Division Theory does.
To a degree far more than anyone realized when The Division
of Consciousness was first published, DivisionTheory
explains the data emerging from modern research into past-life
regression. The most commonly reported details of past-life
memories conforms quite precisely to the expected and
predictable effects of a mental split between the conscious
and unconscious. This correlation is explored in thorough
detail in the second book in the DivisionTheory series, The
Lost Secret of Death.
D I V I S I O N T H E O R Y
POLTERGEISTS AND POSSESSION
Besides apparitions of the newly dead and the haunting
ghost, there is also the poltergeist, the most feared of all
ghosts. While other ghosts might seem merely ‘eerie’,
poltergeists are loud, mischievous, willful, and destructive.
While they seldom appear visually, these mysterious entities
tend to make a lot of commotion : objects float in mid-air,
furniture moves around, fires ignite, lights flash, puddles of
water appear out of nowhere, and showers of stones occur both
inside and outside the house. These physical phenomena are
often accompanied by a variety of raps, scratches, knocks,
explosion noises, animal noises, laughter, whispers, and
strangely mechanical- or artificial-sounding voices.
In many
respects, the poltergeist seems an equal-but-opposite version
of a haunting ghost. While ghosts tend to be more frequently
seen than heard, poltergeists are far more commonly heard than
seen. People often mention how strangely quiet the air seems
to get when a ghost appears; and when a ghost does make
audible sounds, they are usually nonverbal whistles, chirps,
screams, or moans, all of which are subjective right-brain
sounds that need to be interpreted by the listener. The
poltergeist, on the other hand, seems to be more of a
no-nonsense left-brain communicator; many have been known to
employ a sophisticated linear communication code consisting of
knocks, raps, and scratches, and a number have even been known
to use language, sometimes speaking and occasionally even
using the written word. While haunting ghosts’ communication
attempts are usually limited to nonverbal signals, gestures,
and images, poltergeists virtually never resort to symbol or
metaphor to get their messages across; they’re just not that
subtle.
While the
haunting ghost seems tied to a particular place or physical
object, poltergeists instead usually have a connection to a
particular living person, its ‘focus’ subject. Sometimes the
poltergeist seems linked to both a physical location and a
particular person, and the disturbances only occur when the
focus subject is at the one location. But this is not a hard
and fast rule; some poltergeists have not been tied to a
particular location, and were able to follow their focus
subject from place to place, and other poltergeists have not
had a focus subject at all.
The general
consensus among parapsychologists today is that poltergeists
are not disembodied entities at all, but instead, these
disturbances are held to be the unintentional and unconscious
manifestation of the focus subject’s own psychic ability.
There is no ‘ghost’ at all, these researchers maintain; all
the trouble is being unconsciously caused by the focus subject
and no one else. However, this theory fails to account for all
the facts. A number of poltergeist cases have had no focus
subject at all, which has led other researchers to ask if the
focus subject is simply ‘leaking’ psychic energy that
disembodied entities occasionally discover they can use. If
so, then the focus subject is not the author of the
disturbances at all, but instead takes on the role of an
unwitting victim, while the poltergeist would be something of
a psychic parasite.
Whereas the
haunting ghost seems to be very subjective, introverted, and
self-oriented, caught up in their own private memories and
emotional turmoil, the poltergeist usually seems quite
objective, extroverted, and other-oriented, not particularly
interested in its own memories or emotions at all, but very
attentive to the memories, emotions, and reactions of others.
While most haunting ghosts never notice the presence of
others, poltergeists always seem to be aware of what’s going
on around them in the real world. In fact, many researchers
have remarked that poltergeists seem to like having an
audience and getting attention from others, almost as if they
feed off others’ attention and emotional reactions. Many
poltergeists have demonstrated the unnerving ability to read
the thoughts, memories, and history of others, but rarely seem
to reveal any well-defined thoughts, memories, or history of
their own. In fact, even in the rare cases when poltergeists
do communicate verbally, as often as not their statements are
incoherent and meaningless, like a parrot mixing and matching
phrases it has heard without any insight into what they mean.
While the
haunting ghost is known for its fixed and consistent behavior,
poltergeists are known for being unpredictable and inconstant.
Ghosts tend to be seen again and again at the same place,
doing the same thing in the same clothes; many even adhere to
a specific timetable, appearing at regular intervals, or on
the same anniversary date year after year. But poltergeist
manifestations tend to be erratic, appearing suddenly,
carrying on for anywhere from a few weeks to a year or two,
and then inexplicably stop just as suddenly, usually never
resuming again. Poltergeists, in short, seem to exhibit much
more free will than the typical haunting ghost does.
In one study,
more than 80% of poltergeists did not seem to present any
clear personal identity. Poltergeists often seem uneasy about
the whole concept of self-identity; in fact, one of their
favorite tricks is destroying all portraits and photographs in
the house.
Interestingly, in a number of ‘possession’ cases (which are
like poltergeists in many respects) the possessing spirit has
seemed to lack any sense of personal identity, often calling
itself “no one”, “nobody”, or “nothing.” And while possessing
spirits often claim to be individuals, they almost never
reveal any trace of real personal identity. Swedenborg’s
explanation for this is a lot like the Binary Soul Doctrine;
he taught that such possessing spirits had their personal
memory taken from them at death, forcing them to rely on the
memory and abilities of the people they are able to possess.
While the
haunting ghost seems constitutionally incapable of presenting
a false image of itself to others, the poltergeist seems both
comfortable and adept at doing this. In fact, while the
haunting ghost may not know anything else, it is at least
clear about its own identity, about who it is. But at least as
often as not, the poltergeist leaves us not only with
questions about its true identity, but leaves us even
wondering if it itself really knows who or what it is.
Of course,
the reader will by now realize that many of the classic
characteristics of poltergeists are exactly what one would
expect from a disembodied conscious mind that had lost its
unconscious. It would have no sense of identity and no sense
of right and wrong, but it would still be very active and
willful, and would still be able to communicate through
language and other linear codes. (One might object that the
poltergeist often seems stupid, while one of the primary
qualities of the conscious mind is rational intelligence.
However, while every child is born with a conscious left-brain
mind, it takes many years of practice to harness and use that
inherent intelligence.) Being objective and other-oriented,
the poltergeist would observe that most other beings do
possess fairly well defined identities, and would realize that
this was something it lacked. Feeling unsure about its own
identity, it might seek feedback from others to substantiate
and re-define its own sense of self. Having no well-defined
sense of perspective, context, or self- identity, it would at
times become confused and disoriented when observing the inner
mental depths of others. But since the conscious mind focuses
primarily on the differences and distinctions between things,
the poltergeist would focus most of its attention on the
differences and distinctions between itself and everything
else it observed. In its mind, it would seem alone and
alienated from its environment, and its actions would
illustrate that perspective, emphasizing that it was different
from those around it, behaving divisive and destructive rather
than related and supportive. The poltergeist, then, would be
the ultimate alienated being.
Another thing
which suggests that poltergeists are disembodied conscious
minds is the fact that, in a number of cases, the
poltergeist’s voice seemed strangely artificial or mechanical.
As it turns out, this same observation has been made by NDErs
in the dark void of the first stage. In P.M.H. Atwater’s book
Beyond the Light, one NDEr encountered beings in the dark void
who communicated with “a clicking sound ... they were jeering
and tormenting, not evil, exactly, but more mocking and
mechanistic.” Similarly, poltergeists often use knocking or
rapping codes to communicate, their voices have also been
described as artificial or mechanical, and they have also been
described as more jeering and tormenting than truly evil. And
like poltergeists, the dark void has also been shown to have
strong ‘left-brain conscious mind’ characteristics.
D I V I S I O N T H E O R Y
A SINGLE WORLD RELIGION
The Binary Soul Doctrine is probably as close as the human
race has ever come to having a single world religion.
Thousands of years ago, people all across the globe believed
much the same thing about what happened after death - that
human beings possess not one, but two souls, which were in
danger of dividing apart from one another when a person died.
After leaving the physical body, one of these souls was often
expected to reincarnate, while the other was believed to
become trapped in a dreamlike netherworld. Some of these
cultures believed that the afterdeath division of these two
souls could be prevented or reversed, while others saw the
division as being inevitable and permanent.
Simultaneously present in numerous cultures at the dawn of
recorded history, the Binary Soul Doctrine apparently predates
all currently known civilizations. This peculiar afterlife
tradition not only seems to have saturated the entire Old
World at a very early date, appearing in some of the earliest
writings of Egypt, Greece, Persia, India, and China, it
somehow managed to jump the oceans as well, leaving yet more
of its footprints in the cultural traditions of Australia,
Hawaii, Alaska, the Dakotas, Mexico, Peru, and even Haiti.
Greece called
these two souls the psuche and the thumos, Egypt called them
the ba and ka, Israel called them the ruwach and nephesh,
Christianity called them the soul and spirit, Persia called
them the urvan and daena, Islam called them the ruh and nafs,
India called them the atman and jiva, China called them the
hun and po, Haiti called them the gros bon ange and ti bon
ange, Hawaii called them the uhane and unihipili, and the
Dakota Indians called them the nagi and niya. The list goes on
and on.
The most
extraordinary thing about this ancient belief, however, is not
simply that it was so widespread, but that this lost model of
the afterlife seems to be consistent with the latest findings
in a number of areas of modern scientific research. For one
thing, these cultures’ descriptions of the two souls are
strikingly similar to modern science’s ‘right brain/left
brain’ descriptions of the conscious and unconscious halves of
the human psyche, distinguishing between one part of the self
that is objective, independent, masculine, logical, verbal,
dominant, active, and possessing independent free will, and
another part that is subjective, dependent, feminine, fertile,
emotional, nonverbal, recessive, passive, responsive, and in
possession and control of the memory. Even more interestingly,
the ancient Binary Soul Doctrine also seems to anticipate,
even predict, many of the conditions being described in modern
reports of near-death experiences, past life memories,
past-life hypnotic regressions, ghosts, apparitions,
poltergeists, and other afterlife phenomena. These unexpected
correlations carry profound and disturbing implications.
D I V I S I O N T H E O R Y
AFTER-DEATH COMMUNICATIONS
Many ghost reports do not describe true ghosts, but might more
properly be classified as “after-death communications” (ADCs).
In 1988, Bill and Judy Guggenheim began a private research
project on ADCs, collecting, cataloging, and analyzing
thousands of reports from around the world about departed
souls who briefly reappeared to say goodbye to their loved
ones or take care of other unfinished business on earth. The
Guggenheim’s research indicates that the vast majority of ADCs
occur within the first year after the person’s death ; very
few occur more than a few years after, and practically none
after 15 or 20 years (suggesting that something, possibly a
later division, prevents them from occurring later).
There are, of
course, notable exceptions to this — apparitions of a very
small number of religious holy figures have been reported
century after century. In these apparitions, the religious
figure always seems mentally whole and uncompromised : all
mental functions still seem intact and operational, and they
seem fully oriented to place, time, and person. Of all the
different types of afterlife phenomena, such apparitions are
the only ones that appear to demonstrate true ‘eternal life’,
showing that a person who physically died long ago still
exists, and hasn’t suffered any deterioration of his or her
mental faculties even after extremely long stretches of time
have passed.
Oh, a few
others also still seem to exist after great stretches of time,
such as (1) ghosts, (2) poltergeists and possessing spirits,
(3) the personalities that are briefly reawakened during
past-life regression, and (4) the miserable inhabitants of the
Realm of Bewildered Spirits witnessed during NDEs. But these
are, one and all, crippled personalities, dysfunctional
beings, damaged goods, fractured psyches.
In most ADCS,
on the other hand, our departed loved ones usually seem
perfectly normal; they don’t seem to be suffering any
emotional or mental disturbances; they act the same way they
used to, they still seem to know who they are and who we are
and what’s going on in the world. Their characteristic
mannerisms, memory, and intellectual skills all seem
unchanged. In other words, they show little or no evidence of
any soul-division.
“I had just
gotten into bed and ...was still awake when a cloud appeared
right next to the bed. The cloud was all lit up, and the rest
of the room was all black. My grandmother was in this cloud! I
could see her from her waist to the top of her head. [...] She
was beautiful! She looked so radiant and so happy. I had never
seen my grandmother look that beautiful because she was always
a hardworking woman. Her hair was gray, but it was like she
had just come from the beauty parlor, and she appeared years
younger. I said, ‘Grandma!’. She didn’t say anything, but she
was smiling at me and radiating love and peacefulness. It was
as if she had come to tell me she was fine and everything was
okay, and that she was in a wonderful place.”
- Cindy, whose grandmother had died two years earlier
As such, ADCs
represent some of the best evidence that soul-division either
does not occur in all cases, or at least doesn’t occur
immediately after dying in all cases. There are some
peculiarities common to these reports, however. For example,
much like NDErs’ reports of the Realm of Light, our deceased
loved ones frequently (but not always) seem unable to
communicate verbally in ADCs; instead, they rely heavily on
nonverbal gestures, scents, or symbolic images to get their
messages across. Furthermore, when they do speak verbally the
message is almost always very brief and one- sided; extended
back-and-forth conversations during ADCs are extremely rare.
When ADCs
include a visual apparition, the deceased’s appearance is
often subtly different, usually looking very healthy and
happy; however, the deceased often seems to be surrounded by
light or glowing from within. This is very similar to reports
that can be found in many ancient traditions, such as
Judeo-Christianity’s angels and Egypt’s aakhu, both of which
were also described as having a luminescent radiance. An
interesting difference, however, is that Egypt’s aakhu were
thought to be extremely rare — the ultimate spiritual success
story, while shining ADCs don’t seem very rare at all today.
The Guggenheims’ research includes case after case in which
the deceased was enveloped in a shining radiance, looking
utterly happy, healthy, and whole.
D I V I S I O N T H E O R Y
JUDGMENT DAY
If DivisionTheory is correct, and reincarnation really is a
part of life's picture, then the Bible's whole concept of
Judgment Day must be radically reevaluated. Surprisingly,
adding reincarnation into the mix actually makes the whole
idea of a Universal Resurrection necessary and predictable,
but at the same time changes the whole face of such an event.
If we have all been reincarnating down through history, then
raising the dead takes on a whole new meaning -- reawakening
the past-life memories of our own previous selves.
This
hypothesis has been explored in depth in both the
DivisionTheory books.
The first
book, The Division of Consciousness, searches Western
scripture for indications of such an event.
The second
book, The Lost Secret of Death, explores the
theological ramifications of such an event, showing it to be a
logical consequence of the loss of memories that typically
ocurs in-between lives.
The third
book, yet to be named, will explore the hypothesis that this
coming "Judgment Day" event will bring the latest of a series
of species-wide psychological reorganizations that have
occurred in human history, each time transforming in a very
fundamental way how the human mind functions. The most recent
one, recently rediscovered by Julian Jaynes to have occurred
around 3,000 BC, is responsible for many of our current
creation myths, but there were at least six others that
occurred previously, one occurring roughly every 6500 years.
Each time one
of the Judgment Day events occurs, the species experiences
such a radical reorientation in its thought processes that
civilizations on opposite sides of such a shift cannot
comprehend or appreciate the mindset or world-view of the
other.
D I V I S I O N T H E O R Y
THE LIFE AND THE RESURRECTION
“I am resurrection.
He who believes in me will live, even though he dies.”
----- Jesus Christ
All the
ancient cultures that believed in one form or another of the
Binary Soul Doctrine also believed that they possessed the
knowledge that would allow a person to avoid the afterdeath
division of soul and spirit. Each culture taught their masses
to try to achieve perfect integrity, although their approaches
to this goal were often quite different. But together, they
believed essentially the same thing -- that if one did not
achieve integrity before dying, it was too late; once the
afterdeath division of soul and spirit had occurred, nothing
more could be done.
Unfortunately, this old path of integrity was just not good
enough to actually solve humanity’s problem. While it was
effective on the level of the individual, the old path was a
miserable failure on the level of the collective. It worked
wonderfully when people actually tried it, but it was a path
few ever started down, and fewer still completed. And even
though generation after generation also produced healers who
valiantly struggled to beat back humanity’s ever- increasing
division with various types of soul-retrieval or soul-rescue
techniques (whether shamanic, OBE, psychological, or ghostly),
there have ultimately just been too few of these spiritual
warriors to make any meaningful impact on the pathology
affecting our species. OBE pioneer Robert Monroe recognized
this dilemma, as also does ghost rescuer Robert H. Coddington,
who admitted :“We consider rescue of unaware souls a
beneficent objective unto itself, even though aiding them, one
individual at a time, may be like draining a lake one drop at
a time.”
Alas, we may
win a few minor battles now and then, but the real war seems
all but completely lost. For every individual these
soul-retrieval specialists do help, millions more slip by
untouched, lost and trapped in a merciless downward spiral of
unconscious self-destruction. So, instead of getting closer to
finally conquering the pathology that has gripped our species,
humanity has just kept inching inexorably closer to seeing it
finally conquer us. Day after day, lifetime after lifetime, we
slice off more and more fragments of ourselves, endlessly
indulging in insane acts of self-betrayal that violate our
integrity and endanger our health and safety, ignorantly
dropkicking shards of our beings into the garbage dump we call
the unconscious.
Everything
has a price, so we probably shouldn’t be surprised that we now
find ourselves standing together at the ultimate precipice,
wondering if our divisions will now finally be the end of us.
There seems every reason to assume they might. When cells
don’t integrate with the rest of the system in a biological
organism, it is called cancer. And left to their own devices,
such pathologies inevitably destroy the whole organism. As
Luke (11:17) warns, "Any kingdom divided against itself will
be ruined, and a house divided against itself will fall.”
At one time,
the old path was believed to hold great promise. All the world
once embraced it, believing it to be the ultimate answer to
humanity’s problems. People everywhere built huge monuments to
it, but in the end it failed us. Despite the entire old path,
despite all the Binary Soul religions, shamans, soul-retrieval
specialists, psychologists, and ghost-hunters, humanity is
still imprisoned inside this pathology. Yes, from time to time
a scattered few of us have been able to escape via the old
path; but the vast majority of the Earth’s tired, insecure,
misinformed, and perpetually distracted population have never
even tried to climb out of the trap on their own.
And that
could very easily have been the end of the story.
Humanity
needed help. Like an infant that had wandered into dangers it
didn’t understand and had no chance of coping with, humanity
needed to be rescued. Once it became clear that the old path
wasn’t a panacea, rescue became our only hope. We had attacked
the problem the best way we knew how, and had come up
embarrassingly short. It had seemed like such a good idea at
the time, but despite a unified world-wide commitment to the
old path, we failed in the end. Humanity came away from that
sociological experiment just as pathologically divided as
ever, leaving nothing left to be done but humbly admit our
inadequacy and hope for a miracle. We needed a savior.
We got one.
With the
advent of Christ, a whole new hope was born — that even if
one’s soul and spirit did divide apart at death, that still
wasn’t necessarily the end of the story. Even after that
defeat, a person could still hope to have his divided parts
united again one day. Like a car whose parts had been
disassembled and scattered across the country, a person could
hope to be reassembled. A person could hope to live again.
Jesus taught
TWO hopes. There were now, He said, not one, but two paths to
eternal life.
Today,
conventional Christian teachings don’t distinguish between
these two claims any more than they distinguish between the
soul and spirit. But they seem to have originally been two
quite separate and distinct promises, one about resurrection,
about rising up from the dead after one has died, and another
quite different and far older promise about finding a
permanent source of life, about never dying at all. Both those
who “believed” in Christ and those who “lived” in Christ would
enjoy eternal life, Jesus promised, but just how they would
each come to receive that prize was very different.
Those who
“lived” in Christ would never die : their soul and spirit
would never split apart. They would never lose their memories
or sense of personal identity after departing their earthly
bodies. But one who merely “believed” in Christ, on the other
hand, and didn’t fully “live” in Him — that person would still
die. That self , that identity, would still suffer the ‘second
death’ and cease to exist, at least for a while. But thanks to
Christ, the second death would have no permanent victory, and
they would be resurrected again one day, reassembled, made
whole again. Their soul and spirit would split apart, but were
guaranteed to be reunited again eventually.
"I am the resurrection and the
life.
He who believes in me will live, even though he dies;
and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.”
---- John 11:25-26
“Whoever finds the
interpretation of these words
will not experience death.”
- The Gospel of Thomas 1
These two passages, the first from the Bible, and the second
from the long-condemned writings of the early Christian
Gnostics, show themselves to be related, both indicating that
Jesus’ original message dared to include a claim that a person
could actually avoid experiencing death altogether. But these
two passages also show, by their contrast, the dichotomy of
doctrinal focus that eventually split the newborn Church into
warring halves — Roman and Gnostic. Most of the New Testament
revolves around the first option — faith; but many of the
works of Gnosticism, such as The Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel
of Philip, and The Gospel of Truth, revolved around the second
option — the old path. Almost as soon as it was born, the
Church began cutting pieces of itself away; eventually the
Roman half of the Church erased the Gnostic half right off the
map.
Christian Theology’s Missing Cornerstone
In recent
years many elements of the Church have glossed over the
concept of a coming universal resurrection, as if embarrassed
over such a seemingly absurd notion. This is but one casualty
in the war going on inside Christianity over what to make of
all the different confusing ways death is portrayed in the
scriptures. What happens when we die is a crucially important
question for Christianity; after all, the conquering of death
was the genesis of the whole movement. Yet, despite the
centrality of this issue, conventional Christian theology
fails to account for many Biblical mysteries about death and
the afterlife. For the greater part of 2,000 years, Christians
have wondered why the next world is presented in so many
different ways in the Bible. What, they ask, is the ‘Second
Death’? What was ‘Baptism for the Dead’? Why is there an
apparent reincarnational relationship between Elijah and John
the Baptist? What does the Bible mean when it states that the
soul and spirit can divide apart from one another? And why
does the Bible report that Jesus’ actual mission was not
merely to conquer death, but to ‘make the two one’, eerily
echoing the universal anthem of the Binary Soul Doctrine?
The Bible, as
it has come down to us today, seems to raise more of these
questions than it answers, but the authors of the New
Testament give the impression that it all made perfect sense
to them. It seems as if there is a fundamental piece to the
picture that modern Christian theology isn’t seeing, some key
detail that was originally understood in the early church, but
has since been forgotten.
Like the rest
of us, the Church exhibits the characteristics of being caught
in a pathology, a sickness that is tearing it apart. On the
surface, the Church held together for nearly 1500 years, but
with the Reformation, the apparent unity of Christianity began
to fracture, a process that has accelerated ever since. There
are now dozens of different Christian factions around the
world, each with its own divergent idea of what Christianity
is about. And the more fractured Christianity gets, the weaker
it gets. In fact, Christianity has fractured so thoroughly and
deeply today that many around the world consider it an
irrelevant, archaic, and dying perspective.
Why is
Christianity fracturing so? This is the inevitable consequence
of trying to base a system of thought on a fractured and
incomplete model of life and death. Even many steadfast
believers will admit that there seems to be a key point in
Christian theology that the world just isn’t grasping — a
crucial missing piece to the puzzle which, it is hoped, would
finally make sense out of all the Bible’s textual mysteries,
showing all its statements about the afterlife to be logical,
predictable, mutually consistent, and interrelated. The Binary
Soul Doctrine, as it turns out, does just that.
In the Old
Testament, the fate of the dead is described in many seemingly
contradictory ways. Thirty-two times, the soul is referred to
as being able to die, but the spirit is presented as never
dying, instead always returning to God after the person’s
death. Some passages seem to suggest that the dead cease to
exist altogether after physical death, but others seem to
present the dead as weakened, but still-existing and
partially-functioning ghostly spirits.
The New
Testament doesn’t clear this up very much. There the dead are
often said to be ‘sleeping’, which is often taken to mean they
are in some sort of stasis. But other passages suggest one’s
soul goes immediately to Heaven or Hell after death, where it
continues to be active and aware. And a few passages suggest
that the spirits of the dead sometimes return to life on earth
by reincarnating. One theme, however, weaves in and around all
these others — all the world’s dead will be reawakened back to
physical life again one day, at the universal resurrection.
These
different ways of portraying the fate of the dead have caused
great division within Christianity. Today some believe that
after death the soul ceases to exist altogether until it is
re-created by God during the universal resurrection. Others
believe the soul continues to exist, but in a sleep-like
dormancy, until it is re-awakened for the resurrection; still
others believe the dead remain active and aware at all times
between their deaths and the resurrection. Curiously, this
last group tends to believe that the dead experience not one,
but two Judgments. People, they insist, are judged once
immediately after dying, and sent either to Heaven or Hell as
appropriate. But then at the resurrection they are plucked out
of their Heaven or Hell, re-judged, then sent back in again.
Many subscribe to this last perspective, even though it seems
to reduce what was once thought of as the supreme biblical
hope — the universal resurrection of Judgment Day — to a
pointless and redundant event.
The Binary
Soul Doctrine clears most of this up. If the unconscious was
cut off from the conscious mind after death, it would find
itself falling ever deeper into unconsciousness, where it
would be expected to behave automatically and subjectively,
unaware of anything external. It would have nothing to focus
its attention on except whatever feelings and memories it
contained within itself. Being automatic in nature, it would
review those memories and feelings again and again. Just such
a state seems to be described in the scriptures, in such
phrases as “division of soul from spirit”, “being cut off”,
“falling into the pit”, “sleeping”, and “treading the
winepress”. “Being cut off” suggests the separation of the
unconscious from the conscious, while “falling into the pit”
reflects the increasing depths of the unconscious experienced
after this separation, and “sleeping” reflects a deeply
unconscious state. “Treading the winepress” suggests what it
might feel like to perpetually reprocess one’s memories,
squeezing out every drop of feeling and meaning from the life
just lived, churning through them again and again. And if
one’s conscious and unconscious split apart, rupturing the
fabric of the person’s very being, then in a very real sense
that person would not exist anymore. A person indeed would,
just as some passages in the Bible declare, “return to dust”
and be no more.
Christianity’s Unique Attitude Towards The Second Death
Many Binary
Soul cultures, including Israel’s close neighbor Egypt,
believed that the second death was the absolute worst thing
that could happen to a person. Its victims were thought doomed
beyond all hope; they would cease to exist, and would never
exist again. This very same phrase — “the second death” — also
appears in the Bible, but there, we see something new,
something found nowhere else in the ancient world : the
suggestion that even the dreaded second death might not be an
insurmountable defeat. The Binary Soul Doctrine suggests why
Christianity alone seems to have had no fear of it; thanks to
Jesus, even those who did suffer the second death could
eventually be returned to life again, in the great universal
resurrection.
Reincarnation Versus Resurrection
The Binary
Soul Doctrine also explains how reincarnation fits into
Christianity. The one place reincarnation does seem to make an
appearance in the Bible — the John and Elijah connection —
precisely fits the BSD pattern. John the Baptist is
specifically identified as being Elijah, and is even declared
to possess the very same spirit that had lived earlier as
Elijah. Yet when he was asked, John denied being Elijah. This
is precisely what would be expected if Elijah’s unconscious
soul, which stored all his memories, had been cut away from
his conscious spirit before it reincarnated.
This
troublesome, inconvenient relationship between Elijah and John
has long been a thorn in the side of the Church. These
passages sound like they are talking about reincarnation, and
it is challenging to argue that they are not. Yet Christian
theologians have been struggling to do just that for nearly
2,000 years. Why? Because, without the BSD, it is even more
challenging to integrate reincarnation into the rest of the
Christian message. As things stand today, the Church is firmly
convinced that if reincarnation is correct, then everything
Christianity believes must be completely wrong. A fantasy. A
mistake. If people naturally rise back up from death all by
themselves through reincarnation, then what need have they for
any concept of a universal resurrection, or for that matter,
any savior who guarantees that resurrection? If we routinely
come back to life again and again, all the air goes out of the
sails of the Christian promise of Eternal Life. If we are
already enjoying eternal life, one must ask “What did Jesus
save us from?” Jesus' resurrection is the entire foundation
and promise of the Church, but if reincarnation is real, then
we already survive death, so there seems no need for Jesus’
noble sacrifice.
Many
calculate that the public acceptance of reincarnation would
kill Christianity as it currently stands. The Church believes
that if reincarnation is proven correct, then Jesus’ whole
life is transformed into a sad joke, saving those who had no
need of being saved. Unfortunately, with scientific evidence
supportive of reincarnation piling up, the Church’s stance is
getting ever more tenuous. Many clerics holding high positions
already doubt some of its most basic tenets, but, seeing
themselves as stewards devoted to their vessels, they intend
to go down with their ship.
Christianity
is in a dire predicament, and is losing courage fast.
Reincarnation research is ongoing in universities around the
world, and thousands of people are experimenting with
past-life regression. In recent years a number of researchers
have published extensive reports of young children claiming to
recall data from previous lives, and in a number of cases,
this data has been substantiated. The Church has painted
itself into a corner; with reincarnation breathing down its
neck, there’s little room left to hide in. Within a
generation, the battle of reincarnation vs. the Church will be
fought and over, and virtually everyone expects Christianity
to lose.
It doesn’t
have to.
Today we
stand at a critical threshold, at which the destiny of the
Church will be decided forever. Either Christianity finds a
way to embrace these new discoveries about reincarnation, or
it will perish. Fortunately, the Binary Soul Doctrine shows
how reincarnation and resurrection can both be true at the
same time — one half of us, the conscious spirit, reincarnates
again and again, while the other half, the unconscious soul,
does not arise again until it is resurrected. Christianity’s
entire dilemma, it turns out, is based on a single, reversible
mistake: the assumption that the soul and spirit were one and
the same thing.
Of course,
this still leaves us asking: “What did Jesus save us from?”
Amazingly, the answer seems to be the same as always. He saved
our souls from death. Our souls, not our spirits. The spirit
apparently never dies, but Jesus may indeed have found a way
to save our souls from death, the soul which lives but one
life and then is discarded into Heaven or Hell. Unable to
prevent the second death from occurring in most people, Jesus’
rescue efforts seem to have revolved primarily around finding
a way to reverse it, getting all those discarded souls to come
back to life one day.
The marriage
of reincarnation and resurrection would change things on both
sides of the fence. In the religions of the East where
reincarnation is accepted, little spiritual urgency is felt.
Unlike the anxiety that characterizes Western religions,
people of the East often take comfort in their belief that if
they don’t address spiritual issues in the current life, there
will always be more opportunities to do so on down the road.
What's the hurry to awaken, if a number of lifetimes are
available?
But there is
a huge difference between the teachings of the West and East.
While the East knew about reincarnation, the West knew about
Judgment Day, and realized that time was limited, that there
is such a thing as ‘too late’. Traces of reincarnation still
exist within the earliest teachings of Christianity, but this
doctrine was not emphasized, eventually being jettisoned from
the tradition altogether. Why? Perhaps because the West
realized that the opportunities for future incarnations are
not unlimited. There will be, according to Judeo-Christian
tradition, a great finale to history during which all our past
dead will rise again. Unlike the East, which teaches that
fresh opportunities never end, the West was convinced that we
get only so many chances to ‘get it right’. If one is still
procrastinating and one's work is still unfinished when
Judgment Day comes around, then it would be too late.
Day of the Dead
The Binary
Soul Doctrine suggests that we all have died, split apart, and
reincarnated many times in the past. Lifetime after lifetime,
it declares, people keep discarding their souls into the
blackness of the unconscious before reincarnating again. If
so, the numbers of souls trapped in the unconscious would have
just kept increasing down through history, with nothing to be
done about it. And that, the Binary Soul Doctrine suggests,
was Christ’s mission — to free those captives and prisoners
trapped in the pit of the unconscious. To save the dead.
to proclaim freedom for the
captives
and release from darkness for the prisoners.”
- Isaiah 61:1
“The Son of Man came to seek
and to save what was lost."
- Luke 19:10
Of course, if
we all have many past-life selves, this would change the whole
meaning of the universal resurrection. If reincarnation is
real, then the only way our lost dead could possibly return to
life is by having the memories of our past selves reawaken
themselves in our minds. Admittedly, this is a very strange
concept, but even more strange is the fact that it actually
seems to be reflected in the scriptures, which describe a
great invasion taking place during Judgment Day, an invasion
which causes much of the world to go mad. An “ancient and
enduring army”, the “most ruthless of all nations”, will
invade the world, the Bible says. What army would be more
ancient, enduring, or ruthless than an army of the reawakened
dead invading the minds of the living?
Jesus’ Role
“I am the resurrection.”
- Jesus Christ
Was this
universal resurrection inevitable from the beginning or did
Jesus personally bring it about? Would the resurrection occur
if Jesus had never even been born? We don’t know. Perhaps His
actions directly caused the coming resurrection, or perhaps it
was already on its way and all He did was make it possible for
us to survive the event when it does arrive. The answer
depends on whether or not the Division is an illusion.
If the
Division is an illusion, then the underlying unity of the soul
and spirit has always secretly continued to exist. If so, then
the apparent division between them was only temporary, and
eventually they would have reunited on their own without any
outside interference or assistance. Since the psyche is a
natural system, it will automatically try to compensate and
adjust for any imbalances. Like a gyroscope, it can be counted
on to eventually find its own center again without any outside
help. And when that balance is restored, what had been
separated will be reconnected.
Eventually
the wall between the two separated parts would have collapsed
on its own, allowing all the repressed contents of the
primordial unconscious to flood into the conscious. In this
scenario, then the most Jesus could have done would have been
to make it possible for us to survive this traumatic reunion,
helping us integrate all our past-life memories, feelings, and
selves into some kind of structured and cohesive order. In
other words, perhaps all He ultimately did was insure this
coming reunion would be an integration instead of just a
melting pot.
It wouldn’t
have to be. Even if it was inevitable that our divided parts
had to reunite again one day, that doesn’t mean they would
necessarily have to integrate. Instead, they could melt
together, regressing back to their pre-differentiated state,
in the process causing all the differentiated parts to lose
their separate qualities. Instead of ending up integrated and
functional (like the highly organized ‘ones’ and ‘zeros’ of a
complex computer program), all the memories, thoughts,
identities, and experiences of humanity could just be
meaninglessly shuffled together like a deck of cards, losing
all the meaning in the data. The coming psychological reunion,
in other words, posed the ultimate danger for humanity; it
could result in absolute chaos, melting and dissolving all
memory and identity, the foundational elements of the human
ego itself. And indeed, repeated references to melting, the
melting of people and the melting of the foundational elements
of the world, are scattered among the Bible’s prophecies of
Judgment Day:
As they gather silver, brass,
iron, lead, and tin into the midst of the furnace to blow fire
upon it and melt it, so will I gather you in my anger and
fury, and I will leave you there and melt you. ------ Ezekiel
22:20
The day of the Lord will come
as a thief in the night, in [...] the elements shall melt with
fervent heat, the earth and the works in it shall be burned
up. [...] all these things shall be dissolved. - 2 Peter 3:11
The idea that
all the psychological material humanity has stored up since
the beginning of time, all our lost memories, feelings,
thoughts, insights, experiences, and identities, could one day
all come flooding back into our conscious awareness at once,
is unspeakably horrendous, and begins to explain why the
coming of this ‘Judgment Day’ was portrayed so dreadfully in
the Bible. Caught in the middle of such a chaotic inner flood
of images, memories, and past-life selves, the average frail
human psyche wouldn’t stand a chance, being completely
disintegrated under the torrent. Everyone whose sense of self
depended upon maintaining their own inner lies would perish
when the dividing wall in the psyche finally came crashing
down. Interestingly, from the perspective of the BSD the Old
Testament is also replete with warnings of such an event
during Judgment Day:
"This is what the Sovereign
LORD says: In my wrath I will unleash a violent wind, and in
my anger hailstones and torrents of rain will fall with
destructive fury. I will tear down the wall you have covered
with whitewash and will level it to the ground so that its
foundation will be laid bare. When it falls, you will be
destroyed in it; and you will know that I am the LORD." -----
Ezekiel 13:13-14
On the other
hand, if the Division is real, then there might not ever be a
universal resurrection at all. If our parts have genuinely
been completely divided, then there would be no particular
reason to expect them to reunite on their own at all. Thus,
creating such a reason might have been Jesus’ primary
motivation. By using His death as a tool to absorb all our
past memories into Himself, He might have primed the pump for
the eventual coming of Judgment Day, for the eventual release
of humanity's past-life memories and repressed soul-pain into
our full conscious awareness. In this scenario, Christ’s
return brings a baptism of psychological fire:
"I have cast fire upon the
world, and look,
I'm guarding it until it blazes."
- The Gospel of Thomas 10
“He will baptize you with
fire.”
- The Gospel of Matthew 3:11
Do we know
for sure whether this universal resurrection is going to
occur? Is there any reason other than some dusty old religious
scriptures to take this warning seriously? That again depends
on whether the Division is real or an illusion. If the
Division is an illusion, then the living system of the human
psyche is really still perfectly whole, and the two parts are
still securely connected together. If this is the case, then
any apparent division between them is but a temporary illusion
that is certain to disappear one day, which would make the
eventual reunification of the two parts (i.e., the
resurrection) an inevitability, regardless of any other
considerations.
On the other
hand, if the Division is real, there is no solid evidence
(besides the scriptures) that the divided parts will ever
reunite. And considering how awful such a reunification would
be to experience firsthand, many might hope the divided parts
never reunite ... if not for the fact that this would also
guarantee that the human race would never know true
immortality.
I don’t know
which of these two dreadful options we should prefer, but that
decision may be out of our hands anyway. Jesus may have
already chosen for us, choosing life. Even with all its pain
and horror, He has reportedly chosen life, both for Himself
and for us.
At any rate,
one thing is certain : the ultimate success of any coming
resurrection would depend on Jesus having first completed His
job of processing and integrating all of humanity’s memories
into His own personal consciousness.
And a job
that size would probably take some time, even for someone like
Him.
D I V I S I O N T H E O R Y
IN PHILOSOPHY
One of the teachers of the law
... asked [Jesus],
"Of all the commandments, which is the most important?"
"The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this:
`Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One."
- Mark 12:28-29
In the arena of
philosophy, Division Theory seems to have been long
anticipated. As far back as the 5th century BC, Plato related
a story already thought quite ancient in his day, a legend
about a primordial "Fall" from unity into multiplicity. Seven
centuries later, Origen, one of the leading theologians of the
early Christian Church, apparently placed such stock in this
timeless creation-legend that he placed it at the center of
his own teachings. A thousand years later, Saint Bernard of
Clairvaux was still expounding upon this theme to his
students; the specific purpose of the many exercises and
observances of Christian life were, according to Saint
Bernard, to make people aware of their own inner state of
division. And four hundred years after Bernard's teachings,
the Church still found this ancient stream of thought being
supported, this time in the work of St. John of the Cross.
This famous Christian mystic taught that all dichotomies and
dualities, such as subject-object, male-female, or even
conscious-unconscious, are no longer real or meaningful for a
soul who has achieved divine union. For such a one, St. John
insisted, all contraries are resolved and all divisions
dismissed, leaving the soul knowing only absolute oneness.
Philosophers
seem to have been climbing on this bandwagon in ever greater
numbers in recent centuries, often using the idea of a
foundational division as a framework to assist them in their
efforts to define the essential nature of reality. Immanuel
Kant, for instance, focused intently on the division between
phenomena and noumena in developing his thought, while William
Blake addressed the distinction between imagination and
reason. Similarly, it was the subject- substance dichotomy
that got Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's intellectual juices
flowing, just as did the will-idea polarity for Arthur
Schopenauer. Being-in-itself contrasted with being-for- itself
in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, while, to Paul Tillich's way
of thinking, existence wrestled with essence. And, of course,
the famous I-Thou relationship was the key to understanding
the universe for Martin Buber.
What's more,
Blake, Hegel, Sartre, and Tillich all specifically endorsed
the theory that an original Primordial Unity suffered an
ancient, catastrophic rupture, in an event powerfully reminis
cent of the creation-legend of the `Fall' of Man. Blake, in
fact, went so far as to claim that all subsequent divisions
and dichotomies, whether in objective existence in the
physical world, or merely subjectively apparent to the human
mind alone, were the direct consequences of that primordial
fall and rupture.
Hegel named
this Original Unity `Spirit', and its divided halves he
identified as `subject' and `substance'. He viewed their
division as part of a profound metaphysical circle, a great
recurring cycle that spirals ever upward. Upon dividing apart,
Hegel maintained, the two halves then begin struggling to
reunite anew, eventually doing so at a more mature, more
advanced level of being. This newly reformed Unity then
divides apart once more, repeating the cycle endlessly
(reminding one eerily of double helix diagrams of DNA
molecules). While the Unity's two halves are divided from one
another, Hegel believed, they are tormented by the need to end
the division. Hegel thought that the ultimate reunion of the
two halves was inevitable, that they could not help but
eventually merge back into a singularity again at the far end
of the cycle. Such an image is not without its Biblical
parallels:
I am Alpha and Omega,
the beginning and the end, saith the Lord.
----- Revelation 1:8
But the
reunion of the two halves would not, according to Hegel, be
achieved merely by returning to their earlier states; the
reunited Unity, he believed, would possess a hard-won new
quality, a new state of being, a new immediacy, as if the
Unity, although infinite, was none the less able to grow,
progress, even evolve, through the agonizing,
self-confrontative process of division and reunion, the
process, in other words, of living and dying:
Everywhere, no matter what the
sphere of interest (whether religious, political, or
personal), the really creative acts are represented as those
deriving from some sort of dying to the world; and what
happens in the interval of the hero's nonentity, so that he
comes back as one reborn, made great and filled with creative
power, mankind is also unanimous in declaring.
------ Joseph Campbell
...schism in the soul, schism
in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of
return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs
guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or
even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together
again the deteriorating elements. Only birth can conquer death
- the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something
new." ------ Joseph Campbell
One of the
greatest stumbling blocks Christianity has ever encountered is
the question `How could God ask His own Son to die?' But if
this vision of the Supreme God Himself dying and being reborn
is correct, then the life and career and crucifixion and
resurrection of Jesus Christ is just all that more
appropriate; indeed, it is exactly what one would expect the
life of the Son of such a God to be, an absolutely perfect
representation of, a perfect reflection of, His Father's own
reality:
Anyone who has seen me has seen
the Father. ------ John 14:9
One wonders
why, where one philosopher was convinced he'd found
imagination and reason to be the foundations of reality,
another saw subject and substance, another, will and idea, and
still another, existence and essence. Fortunately, Sartre's
thought seems to include an intriguing suggestion as to why
all these profound thinkers might have arrived at such
dissimilar visions of ultimate reality:
Being is
never exhausted by any of its phenomenal aspects; no
particular perspective reveals the entire character of being.
...Be ing ... never becomes totally translucent to
consciousness. Being is ... in no way exhausted by any
particular perspective that man has of the phenomena.
If true, this
would explain why all these philosophers' individual
approaches, their celebrated attempts to describe ultimate
reality, all drew maddeningly different conclusions; indeed,
it would also explain why humanity's various religious
founders all seem to have painted different pictures as well.
But isn't it curious that all these profound thinkers,
philosophers and theologians alike, used the framework of
Division Theory as the tree upon which their thoughts took
bloom?
If these
philosophers are correct, and a Primordial Unity indeed did
once rupture into two parts at the dawn of time, and if, as
virtually all religions claim, that Primordial Unity was
infinite in nature, then each of the two parts of its division
would also be infinite as well. If this was so, there would
have to be an infinite number of ways of perceiving the
divided halves, an infinity of perspectives available to
observe the division. But no single perspective could
completely capture and define it in its entirety, except for
one: the perspective that is only visible from within its
Reunited Center. Innumerable mystics from every culture and
time have, in fact, claimed to have achieved this ultimate
perspective, but upon doing so, they quite invariably and
all-too frustratingly inform the rest of us that the
perspective they found there, although glorious, is virtually
impossible to describe in words.
The problem of the theologian
is to keep his symbol translucent, so that it may not block
out the very light it is supposed to convey. "For then alone
do we know God truly," writes Saint Thomas Aquinas, "when we
believe that He is far above all that man can possibly think
of God." And in the Kena Upanishad, in the same spirit: "To
know is not to know; not to know is to know." ------ Joseph
Campbell
These
celebrated philosophers tried, and perhaps even succeeded, in
grasping and relating genuine glimpses of the Divided Unity
that is our reality; all their approaches, and doubtless
countless other possible approaches as well, may indeed be
correct (though necessarily incomplete) perspectives of the
ultimate nature of our divided reality.
The Hebrew
prophets seem to have concealed their vision of the split
within the meta phors and symbolism of the Old Testament's
passages. The ancient Hindus, notwithstanding their famous
devotion to religion, seem to have never become more than
partially familiar with the full picture; nor did the
Buddhists of Tibet or the Taoists of China. The worlds of
psychology and philosophy have likewise each recognized no
more than part of the picture; the origins, climax, and
eventual outcome of this condition seem even now to remain
beyond the scope of pure scientific inquiry or intellectual
analysis alone. Even the mainstream Christian denominations
never recognized more than part of this story. Didn't any
group, at any time in history, ever perceive the whole picture
- what the split was, how it originated, what its significance
was, what its consequences were, and what its ultimate
solution would be?
Yes. The
Gnostics knew.
D I V I S I O N T H E O R Y
INTEGRITY IS SURVIVAL
Moral integrity or structural integrity? Why does language use
this same word to point to these two apparently different
meanings? The word ‘integrity’, of course, is related to words
such as integer, integral, and integrated, all of which point
to a similar underlying concept — the idea of a pure undivided
unity. When we speak of a piece of wood, or a piece of iron,
the word ‘integrity’ brings to mind a solid wholeness with no
defects, splits, holes, or weaknesses. But when one speaks of
the integrity of a person, why then do we think immediately of
the perfection of moral qualities, and not of constitutional
unity as we do with physical materials? Obviously, this is
because we had forgotten about the binary quality of the human
soul (even though language itself had not).
Our sense of
morality rests in the unconscious. When we do something that
deep down inside we feel was wrong, our unconscious always
tries to tell us this (as in the universal cliché "I just knew
in my heart that it was the right [or wrong] thing to do").
But in all us ‘less-than-enlightened’ folks, the moral sense
shares its home with all the repressed material we also force
down into the unconscious over the course of our many lives,
and this material, once there, functions automatically,
compelling us to do various things largely without being aware
of it, or at least without being aware of why we are doing it.
So long as the contents of the unconscious remain unknown and
hidden, the moral sense that resides there must compete with
these automatic behavior patterns, and often fails.
The conscious
mind is dominant and the stronger of the two, and can repress
the messages from the unconscious (except for a little that
always manages to leak through), and often does. The more the
voice of the unconscious is repressed in order to avoid its
moral judgments, the more a person also finds that he or she
becomes cut off from his own feelings and emotions. This is
why it is a classic cultural image that the most evil people
in the world seem to feel no emotions, for in the process of
turning off the voice of their own morality, they had to block
the voice of the entire unconscious, and so became cut off
from their own feelings as well.
Integrity is
‘integral’ to spirituality itself. A person who does not
possess the first could only pretend (or deceive himself) that
he had the second. Radio's "Dr. Laura" is one voice speaking
this message, insisting that true spirituality requires the
most perfect and unflinching self-honesty, responsibility, and
integrity. The concept that these two things — spirituality
and integrity — are related, no, not merely related, but that
they totally depend on one another, often seems to be utterly
lacking from today's ‘New Age’ thought. The ancient Binary
Soul Doctrine, however, explains why integrity has always been
traditionally taught to be a prerequisite for spirituality,
why, in fact, pure integrity actually constitutes
spirituality.
In Search of ... the Nondual
Perhaps
nonduality is the answer; after all, teacher after teacher
seems to have pointed in that same direction. But if so, then
what precisely is the question? What is the problem that must
be overcome? Wouldn’t it be duality — experiencing reality,
life, and even oneself as dual, as divided, as two divided and
alienated parts instead of one perfectly united and integrated
whole?
Paradoxically, however, the very same Eastern philosophies
that hold nonduality up as the ultimate goal tend to dismiss
the entire right-brain unconscious human soul, with all of its
subjective feelings, moral attitudes, and personal memories,
as completely irrelevant. In fact, to attain the ultimate
goal, many Eastern philosophies maintain that one’s subjective
half needs to be entirely discarded, blaming it for preventing
us from experiencing nonduality in the first place. Of course,
many others take the exact opposite approach, insisting that
we can simply say, "it is right because it FEELS right", and
ignore, deny, and reject the intellectual half of one’s being,
even when the objective self is saying "No, it is wrong. It
doesn't make sense."
But if we can
only honor our feelings by rejecting the voice of the
intellect, or if we can only honor our objective intellectual
self by rejecting our subjective feeling self, isn’t this,
either way, still only honoring half of our Maker and half of
ourselves? When we are not acting from our full selves, but
only from selected bits and pieces of ourselves, then we are
not being fully WHO WE ARE, and so will inevitably fail to
reach our highest potential and greatest good.
Still, most
people seem to assume that it's easier to reject one side in
favor of the other. For example, men have historically favored
allowing the objective conscious mind fuller expression, while
relegating the expression of the subjective unconscious to a
back burner, while women did the exact opposite. Isn't this
the opposite of non-dualism? How can we hope to achieve
nonduality if we are splitting ourselves apart to do it? How
can we know ourselves if we are rejecting half of ourselves?
Aren’t we acting rather like the split-brain patient who had
one hand trying to button up his shirt while the other hand
was trying to unbutton it? Division is the problem, not the
solution.
To reject the
soul, the Binary Soul Doctrine suggests, is the original
problem. The unconscious soul is subjective, feminine,
emotional, intuitive, artistic, caring, nurturing, loving. And
these are precisely the qualities that humanity has repressed,
to its own detriment, for thousands of years. To say that the
rejection of the soul is necessary for salvation is to
authorize and encourage the continued rejection and repression
and denial of all the values the soul provides. To approve the
rejection of the feminine soul is to give unwitting approval
to the continued repression of women by men, to approve the
domination of the strong over the weak in all avenues of
society and civilization. It is to reject art in favor of
science, to reject faith in favor of reason, to reject the
East in favor of the West. The unconscious soul is where our
feelings reside, where they come from. Our feelings are what
make us human, what allow us to care and feel for each other.
No salvation that leaves this out is worthy of the name.
In the final
analysis, any approach to solving humanity’s problems, whether
individual or collective, must come from and satisfy both the
head and the heart, both our male and our female, both our
right and left brains. Sooner or later, all attempted
solutions that don’t satisfy both halves of the equation will
be abandoned as ineffective and unworkable. This is a lesson
that our religious leaders, as well as our politicians, should
have figured out a long time ago. Humanity has tried for
millennia to place male above female, science above faith,
logic above feeling, Republicans over Democrats, law and order
above right and wrong, justice over love (and vice versa), and
it never works. Having tried this partisan, divisive,
fractured approach for millennia, we as a species should be
about ready by now to admit that it just doesn't work. Society
as a whole, as well as its individuals, have all just been
stunted and crippled by this naive approach.
The simple
truth is, human beings are not more right-brain than
left-brain, not more head than heart, not more intellect than
emotion. Or vice versa. Whenever we find ourselves in a
dilemma and willfully choose to honor one side by rejecting,
denying, and ignoring the needs of the other side, we betray
half of ourselves, dividing both our selves and our world in
two. The only successful solution would seem to be to
integrate them together, balancing them as Taoism teaches,
‘making the two one’ as early Christian doctrine taught,
achieving true ‘nonduality’.
THE CHRISTIAN CONNECTION
DIVISION OF THE SOUL FROM THE SPIRIT
"If the woman [the soul]
had not separated from the man
[the spirit], she would not die with the man.
His separation became the beginning of death.
Because of this, Christ came to repair the separation
which was from the beginning, and again unite the two,
and to give life to those who died
as a result of the separation and unite them."
- The Gospel of Philip 70:9-22
Long-lost 2,000
year-old documents have recently revealed that early Christian
beliefs included an afterlife doctrine that seems to have been
based on modern scientific principles. Six lost Christian
Gospels found among the recently unearthed Nag Hammadi
scriptures describe a previously unknown Christian afterlife
doctrine which appears to have been modeled upon the
psychological structure of the human psyche itself.
Furthermore, this lost Christian doctrine - that the soul and
spirit divide apart at death, each experiencing an entirely
different afterlife - is closely paralleled in the traditional
beliefs of dozens of other ancient cultures around the globe.
These
teachings were outlawed in the church shortly after the Roman
Emperor Constantine presided over his first church council, in
an act many church historians consider to have been a wrong
turn for the church.
In the next
thousand years, the church attempted to erase all traces of
these teachings from the face of the earth. It used all
available methods at its disposal, including mass murder and
book burnings.
But this
ancient belief, once an integral element of early church
teachings, have now been recovered. The first book in the
DivisionTheory trilogy, The Division of Consciousness,
includes a lengthy examination of these lost scriptures,
showing the unmistakable presence of DivisionTheory within
early Christian thought.
This newly
recovered, ancient vision of the afterlife substantially
reconciles and integrates 3 schools of thought which until now
have seemed mutually exclusive - Western religion, Eastern
religion, and modern science. Outlawed, buried, and forgotten
since the fourth century, the teachings within these ancient
scriptures maintain that a person's spiritual self divides
into two distinct parts after death. The conscious mind, or
"spirit", they suggest, reincarnates after death, while the
subconscious mind, or "soul", descends into a deeply
unconscious heavenly or hellish dream-world reality.
The modern
science of psychology, as it turns out, would arrive at more
or less the same conclusions as these ancient scriptures, but
only IF the mind both (1) survived death, and (2) divided
apart while doing so. If the human mind did continue to
function beyond death, but each half of the psyche was forced
to continue alone, cut off from the other half, each side
would then experience a dramatically different sort of
afterlife based on its own inherent nature. If the mind did
split at death, the innate psychological characteristics of
each half would neatly reproduce the traditional afterlife
scenarios of East & West. The conscious, although losing its
memory, would remain free to go on to new experiences, much
like the East's tradition of reincarnation. The unconscious,
meanwhile, would find itself abandoned and alone, swimming in
its own well of memories. Simply by experiencing vivid
emotional reactions to those memories, it would quickly find
itself in a heavenly or hellish dreamworld of its own
unwitting creation.
The conscious
mind would lose all its memories, since memory is always
stored in the subconscious half of the psyche; but the
conscious would nonetheless remain free to make new choices
and have new experiences. In effect, it would undergo memory
loss and enter a fresh new cycle of experience, just as in the
traditional Eastern doctrine of reincarnation.
Meanwhile,
the subconscious would find itself cut off and alone, with
nothing to do but fall back into its own well of memories and
emotions. Modern science suggests that the subconscious would
be condemned to review these memories repeatedly,
automatically experiencing emotional reactions to those
memories, and then more emotional reactions to those reactions
as well, becoming trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle. In
effect, the subconscious would review and judge its past, and
then would automatically generate its own unique dream-world
reactions to those judgments. If the subconscious viewed its
past as admirable, it would mindlessly generate an
emotionally-positive, heavenly dream-world for itself to
experience, but if it judged its past as dishonorable, it
would automatically generate an emotionally-negative, hellish
dream-world, much like the traditional Western afterlife of
heaven or hell.
This
previously unknown teaching appears in 6 of the 47 lost
Christian works discovered in 1945 in Nag Hammadi Egypt: the
Gospel of Truth, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Thomas,
the Exegesis on the Soul, the Teachings of Silvanius, and the
Apocryphon of James. Some of these books are believed by
scholars to have been written earlier than the Biblical
Gospels, suggesting that they may present a more original and
uncorrupted version of Christ's original teachings.
Ancient Stories of the "Second
Death"
Although
novel to our modern eyes, this unfamiliar vision of a divided,
binary afterlife experience may not actually be new at all.
Scriptural passages from a number of different ancient
religions seem, upon inspection, to possess startling
parallels to this "Division Theory". Parallels occur within
the scriptures of many ancient religious traditions, including
Persian, Chinese, Greek, Eskimo, Hawaiian, Australian
Aboriginee, and, most prominently, Egyptian. Like the Nag
Hammadi Gospels, all of these cultures' beliefs also included
the curious concept that the deceased would have not one, but
two souls which departed from the body, each of which would
then continue on to different afterlife experiences.
Echoes of a
"Division" theology appear in religions all over the world.
Many ancient cultures, for example, believed that humans
possessed two different 'souls', each of which successfully
survived the death of the physical body, but only to then
separate from one another as well: in ancient Egypt, the ba
separated from the ka at death; in ancient Greece, the thymos
separated from the psyche; in ancient China, the p'o separated
from the hun; in Persia, the urvan from the daena; in India,
the asu from the manas; and in Israel, the soul from the
spirit (Eccl. 12:7, Heb. 4:12). Even in many primitive
cultures still existing today (such as the Alaskan Eskimo and
the Australian aborigine), strikingly similar belief patterns
can still be seen.
LOUD echoes
of such a "Division" theology occur in the banned, long-lost
1st century Christian Gospels rediscovered in Nag Hammadi
Egypt in the 1940's (especially so in three: the Gospel of
Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Truth).
The Division
of Consciousness:
The Secret Afterlife of the Human Psyche
If the two
parts of the human psyche each survived physical death, but
divided from one another in the process, what would happen?
Where would they be? What would each experience? Well, this
frankly doesn't seem so hard to figure out; each would,
obviously, lose what the other half gave it, and would be
forced to rely exclusively on its own capacities. The
conscious half, then, would lose all its memory and emotion
(modern Near-Death Experiencers, curiously enough, commonly
report just such an absence of emotion immediately after
leaving the body; similarly, Past-Life Regression subjects
frequently report a pronounced absence of both emotion and
memory during the time spent in-between lives). Although the
conscious would lose its entire memory if separated from the
subconscious, it would nonetheless remain free to make new
choices and move on to new experiences; and this sounds an
awful lot like the East's reincarnation scenario, if you ask
me.
The
subconscious, meanwhile, would lose all ability for objective,
rational, independent thought, as well as all ability to make
new choices, and thus, deprived of its ability to move in any
way, would just sit perfectly still, with nothing to do but
fall back deeper and deeper into itself, deeper and deeper
into the levels of the unconscious, deeper and deeper into its
own emotions and memory (Swedenborg saw something very similar
to this in his mystical experiences). And since the
subconscious is responsive and emotional in nature, it could
be expected to react emotionally to those memories as well,
feeding off its own emotional reactions to its own life
memories; it would, in effect, be emotionally judging its own
past life and then creating and experiencing its own
dream-world reactions to those judgments. And as it would be
cut off from all external input, it would remain in this
unconscious dream-state permanently (kind of reminds you of
Jesus saying "He is not dead, only sleeping", doesn't it?),
and 100% of its experience would derive from its memories and
its reactions to them. Caught in a circular pattern of
automatic behavior, it could be expected to perpetually review
its memories, react to them emotionally, and react to those
reactions emotionally as well, all automatically, over and
over, forever, squeezing every last drop of emotional content
from its life memories (which reminds me of the "treading the
winepress" quotes scattered throughout the Bible). If the
subconscious judged its memories of what it had done in its
past life favorably, it would thereafter experience a
dream-world filled with absolute, positive emotion - pure
pleasure and happiness. If it judged itself unfavorably, it
would experience a dream-world filled with absolute negative
emotion - the pain of self-condemnation. And this, if you ask
me, sounds alot like the West's heaven-and-hell scenario.
Thus, the
20th century's scientific discovery of the natural division of
the human mind seems to produce two radically different
afterlife scenarios, which are, interestingly enough,
virtually identical to the two major religious scenarios that
have been in existence for millennia. The East's tradition of
reincarnation and the West's tradition of heaven and hell are
each thousands of years old; science's discovery of the
natures and qualities of the conscious and unconscious, on the
other hand, are less than a single century old. Nonetheless,
they are somehow the same; somehow, the latter has
reconstructed the former. Science, it seems, has arrived at
conclusions religion embraced centuries ago.
Simply by
taking what science now knows about the human mind, and asking
how that mind might function under a different set of
circumstances (the two halves of the mind continuing to exist
and function after death, but divided apart from one another),
we arrive at answers that replicate beliefs thousands of years
old. This seemingly impossible anachronism suggests the
existence of a single, potentially verifiable scientific
reality which underlies and substantiates both Eastern and
Western religious traditions. Thus, this "Division" theology
not only works toward unifying the divisions within humanity's
religions, but also the chasm between religion and science as
well.
And in the
process, it carries profound, disturbing implications for both
the legendary 'Fall of Man' (i.e., the division of Adam and
Eve, or Hegel's Primordial Rupture) and the prophesied
'Resurrection of the Dead' during the West's classic Judgment
Day scenario ("you will be invaded by an ancient and enduring
army, an army of old, such as has never been seen before" Ask
yourself - what does "Resurrection of the Dead" become, if
reincarnation is part of the picture?).
Perhaps the
Secret of Death hasn't remained elusive because it was too far
removed from us, but because it was too close. Division is,
after all, the very core and essence of the human experience.
What was a historic revelation to Freud 100 years ago (and
through him, to the whole of the scientific world) - that we
are all divided - is, and has always been, Man's surprised cry
of discovery.
We are all
divided; whether we use psychological terms ("conscious and
unconscious"), physiological terms ("male and female"),
colloquial terms ("head and heart"), Biblical terms ("soul and
spirit"), Egyptian terms ("ba and ka"), Chinese terms ("p'o
and hun"), or Greek terms ("thymos and psyche"), we always
find ourselves ultimately referring to two separate components
of our reality.
The modern
philosopher Ken Wilber distinguishes two sets of opposites :
the inner/outer and the individual/collective, and in doing
so, he pays homage to a long and honorable tradition among
philosophers. Kant focused on the division between phenomena
and noumena, Blake on the distinction between imagination and
reason, Hegel on the subject/substance dichotomy, and
Schopenauer on will vs. idea. Being-in-itself contrasted with
being-for-itself in the work of Jean- Paul Sartre, and
existence wrestled with essence for Tillich.. And, of course,
the famous I-Thou relationship was the key to understanding
the universe for Martin Buber.
Ultimately,
if you track them down, you find that opposites pervade every
facet and level of the reality we experience, up to and
including our own selves, and even beyond that - our own
perspectives and ability to perceive; for are we not made up
of both mind and heart? Both conscious and unconscious mind?
Both objective and subjective awareness? Both active and
passive, male and female elements? Both soul and spirit?
Each time, we
find we can never quite completely get a handle on any of
these sets; we can never quite completely identify or fully
define them. No matter how hard or carefully we try to look at
them, we can never fully wrap our minds around any of these
sets of components.
That would
make sense if they were infinite.
DivisionTheory suggests that no matter what terms we happen to
find ourselves using at any given time, we are always really
referring to the same two components, which each have an
infinite number of different names, faces, and facets.
Whether one
is speaking of the division between conscious and unconscious,
male and female, head and heart, or soul and spirit, Division
always ends up enthroned as our single most basic and intimate
reality. Is it more reasonable to suppose that we have an
infinite number of different divisions within us, or that we
have just one division that can be viewed from an infinite
number of different perspectives?
Is this inner
division, Division Theory asks, identical with the division
between life and death, between Man and God?
If so, then
to heal this division is to conquer death itself.
What did
Jesus hold up as the key to eternal life?
Integrity.
Being undivided.
THE GREAT
PYRAMID and the BINARY SOUL DOCTRINE
Ancient Egypt
is one of the best-documented examples of a culture that
believed in this "binary soul doctrine" (BSD). They devoted
huge amounts of their societal resources to the problem of
death and the afterlife, and their most famous monument
reflects this obsession. The interior of the Great Pyramid of
Cheops, with its multiple chambers and forking passages, seems
specifically designed around their binary soul afterlife
theology. Just as they believed the living possess three
elements, a body, a soul (Egypt's ka), and a spirit (Egypt's
ba), this pyramid has three unique chambers that seem to
mirror the expected afterlives for each of these elements.
Similarly, the passageways between these chambers closely
reflects Egypt's vision of the processes and changes thought
to occur along the journey from life to death.
Fifty feet
above the base, the pyramid's entrance opens into a steeply
descending, claustrophobically narrow corridor that shoots
down almost to ground level before it finally forks into two
branches. One branch plummets further down to an underground
chamber known as ‘the pit', while the other branch ascends
back up again. This ascending passage eventually forks into
two branches as well, one leading to the ‘Queen's Chamber' and
another to the ‘King's Chamber'. The first fork in the
pyramid's corridor seems to represent the "first death", the
initial change a person experiences upon their demise, when
their mind and body disengage and go their separate ways.
Similarly, the second fork seems to reflect the "second
death", when the spirit and soul disengage as well, fracturing
the mind apart.
At the first
fork, one branch continues downward, tunneling deep under the
monument until it reaches a rough-hewn cave containing nothing
but a shallow, empty pit. Crudely carved out of the actual
bedrock the pyramid rests upon, this grave-like cell is small,
dark, and airless, perfectly symbolizing the end of the
physical body at death. Meanwhile, the ascending branch rises
just as sharply upwards again, appropriately symbolizing the
hopeful promise of the mind's survival as it separates from
its failing corpse. However, the very beginning of this upward
passage is blocked by a thick granite plug, an appropriate
reminder that nothing physical can escape the inevitable
descent into death. Of the three components Egyptian theology
credited a living person as possessing, only the two
nonphysical elements, the ba and ka, could hope to pass into
this ascending corridor.
On the other
side of that granite plug, the person's ba and ka could
continue on together, proceeding up the passage until they
reach the place where it also forks off into two directions,
one path leveling out to the Queen's Chamber and another
ascending higher still to the King's Chamber. The Queen's
Chamber seems to represent the final destination and
afterdeath fate of the ka. The room is void of contents except
for a niche in the East wall thought to once hold a life size
‘ka -statue' of the king, within which his living ka would be
able to endure eternity. This chamber is aboveground, perhaps
symbolizing that the soul living here does successfully
survive death, continuing at least to exist. However, multiple
features of this chamber suggest the unpleasant nature of that
existence. Built of limestone, the walls and ceiling are
smooth and polished, but the floor has been left rough and
uneven, suggesting that the soul left here will not find his
afterdeath experience easy and joyful, but instead quite rough
and unpleasant. Also, both this room and the King's Chamber
contain something like air shafts, tiny vents extending out
towards the exterior walls of the pyramid. But unlike those of
the King's Chamber, the Queen's air shafts come up
disappointingly short, stopping many feet before they reach
open air. This seems to symbolize that the soul living here,
even though technically still alive, remains trapped and
imprisoned after death.
The air
shafts of the larger and more luxurious King's Chamber,
however, do reach all the way outside, making it the only room
in the pyramid equipped with any way out. This reminds us that
the ancient Egyptians believed the ba to be the only part of a
person guaranteed to enjoy true freedom after death, the only
part guaranteed to completely escape the bonds of death, going
on from there to visit new realities and begin new
experiences. Built entirely of beautiful rose granite, the
finely polished stones of the King's Chamber are the heaviest
in the entire pyramid, reflecting the magnificent afterlife of
the ba.
But the ba
did not have to enter the King's Chamber alone, for the second
fork in the pyramid's passageways is quite different than its
predecessor. While the first fork had the upper path blocked
off, the second fork leaves both its branches open. While all
BSD cultures acknowledged the inevitability of the first
death, some felt the second death was avoidable if the proper
steps were taken. Egypt believed it was possible to prevent
the ka and ba from dividing, in which case both of them could
travel together to the paradisiacal afterlife symbolized by
the King's Chamber. Indeed, not only does the second fork
leave both branches open, but instead of blocking the upper
branch, the structure actually seems to encourage one to
choose the upper path. Known as the Grand Gallery, the
ascending passageway from the second fork to the King's
Chamber has an extravagantly tall ceiling, which is a huge
relief after squeezing through all the tiny corridors that led
to this point.
Some BSD
cultures taught that the afterdeath division of the soul and
spirit was inevitable, but a few believed that it was possible
to avoid it.
D I V I S I O N T H E O R Y
LOSING YOUR SOUL?
It has become popular in New Age culture to scoff at
suggestions that a person could ever lose their own soul. “You
are your soul,” they insist, “and so never have to
worry about losing it.”
But this is a
new (read that “questionable”) teaching on the planet, and
doesn’t have the support of many traditional beliefs.
Shamanistic cultures around the globe not only held, like the
Christian church, that it was possible to lose one’s
soul, but also believed that it was common for people to lose
their souls a piece at a time, a little here, a little there.
Ancient
Binary Soul Doctrine cultures believed that we have two souls,
and that they split apart from one another at death.
DivisionTheory takes this concept a step further, suggesting
that the reason we lose our souls at death is because we have
been discarding them, one piece at a time, for all of our
lives. Every time we reject, deny, and ignore the insights,
feelings, and advice (read that “conscience”) that rises up
from the depths of our unconscious mind, we in effect push our
soul a little farther away, alienating ourselves from
ourselves and violating our own integrity.
And when we
spend all of our lives pushing our own souls away, we
shouldn’t be surprised to find them missing altogether once we
stride across the threshold of death. Why do they leave
entirely then? Because there was nothing left to stay for.
You get pushed away all your life and see how fast you
leave the scene at the first opportunity.
D I V I S I O N T H E O R Y
IN OUR MYTHS
DivisionTheory puts a new face on humanity's Creation Myths,
showing them to all be describing the origin of the division
between soul and spirit, which DT calls the "Primordial
Division".
In the Bible,
this division is signified by the division of Eve from Adam's
body. The early Christian Gnostics taught of this at
considerable length, blaming this division as the cause of all
death.
Both the
DivisionTheory books explore the Primordial Division. The
following is an excerpt from the first book, The Division
of Consciousness:
In the
beginning, working backwards from Division Theory, there would
have been only `Soul' and `Spirit', joined together in an
eternal embrace. The Spirit would have had a purely objective
perspective, the Soul, a purely subjective one; the Spirit
would have been the decision- maker, but the Soul would have
always been placing conditions and restrictions on those
decisions. The Soul's `water-like' feeling and the Spirit's
`wind-like' thought would have thus been intertwined together
like husband and wife, like male and female twins occupying a
single egg. The two would have functioned as one, comprising a
dynamic, self-sufficient whole complete unto itself.
But this
original idyllic condition must have changed, according to
Division Theory; there must have been some great `falling-out'
between these two primordial parts, some catastrophic fracture
of their perfect unity. The Spirit seems to have risen up
against its partner, perceiving the Soul's programming as
dictatorial, unnecessarily limiting its freedom of behavior
and self-expression. By overpowering the Soul and forcing it
down into submission, down into unconsciousness, the era of
the Soul's overt control over the behavior and expression of
the Spirit would have effectively ended.
Following
such a primordial conquest, the Spirit, believing it had
legitimately won the right to all power and authority, would
have seen itself as a great conqueror, a champion of
intelligence, rational order, and vitality. However, the Soul,
while defeated, would not have been out of the picture
entirely; although condemned to a lower status, it would have
nonetheless continued to exist and function in the unconscious
depths of the psyche. Once there, though, it would have only
been able to make itself felt and known as something dreadful
and mysterious, a source of dreams and chaos, a murky, black
abyss, an underworld haunt for the dead.
According to
Division Theory, before such a change had taken place, before
such a `Fall from Grace', there would have been no such thing
as death in the human experience. But with the fracture
between these two primordial parts, death of the individual
would have also entered the picture.
Such a
Primordial Division would have been a questionable trade; not
only would humanity have ended up paying for the `Freedom From
Conscience' it wanted so badly with the price of Death - it
would also have had to given up both `Destiny' and `Justice'
in the deal as well. Before the Fall, the as-yet uncompromised
memory of the Primordial Soul would have made it easy to tell
if Justice really did operate naturally and automatically,
whether or not a person really did `reap what he sowed' in
life (as the reincarnationists' theory of karma maintains
today). For, in such an era, both `causes' and their `effects'
would have remained ever-present in each person's conscious
memory. But with the Fall, the Soul's memory would have been
carved up and lost, and thus, not knowing the past, it would
have become impossible to anticipate what might happen in the
future, what `Destiny' would hold. And since those `effects',
or long-term consequences of people's actions and choices,
would no longer always be able to be traced back to their
forgotten `causes', any natural workings of Justice that
actually were taking place would have been rendered
unrecognizable and unprovable, and would seem, in fact, to be
altogether non-existent. While Justice before the Fall might
have seemed obvious and inevitable, Justice after the Fall
would have become a beautiful but seemingly impossible dream.
A `Cause' could come in one lifetime, its `effect' in quite
another, and without the memory of the Soul to connect the
two, true and perfect Justice would seem, instead of a
certainty, merely a vain hope.
This is the
story of humanity's origins that Division Theory would seem to
reconstruct. Outside of the scientifically unconfirmable
possibility of direct divine revelation, there would seem to
be no way to know if this story is true. However, the world
does seem to hold a full measure of evidence in favor of this
theory, in the form of creation myths that closely echo the
very scenario described above.
In many of
the ancient civilizations of the Near East, including Babylon,
India, Egypt, Canaan, Sumer, and even Israel, the same
archetypical creation myth appears, describing a primordial
binary system, two parts existing as one at the very dawn of
time: a negative, feminine, watery chaos-creature (a perfect
symbol for the Primordial Soul), and a masculine god of wind
and light (a perfect symbol for the Primordial Spirit). At
first, these two coexist and interact peacefully, but at some
point the wind god raises up against its partner, subduing the
primordial watery chaos-creature and dividing it into pieces.
In these legends, the feminine chaos-creature originally holds
the power to restrain and control the masculine wind-god (just
as the Primordial Soul would have held the power to restrain
the Spirit in Division Theory), but loses this control when
the wind-god rises against it. After the wind-god conquers the
chaos-creature, he seems to be in possession of absolute power
and authority (just as the Spirit would have felt itself to
possess after successfully subduing the Soul and all its
restrictive programming). And even after the chaos-creature
has been vanquished, somehow it still continues to exist,
posing a constant threat to the order of the universe (just as
the Soul, although similarly overthrown and exiled in the
unconscious, still makes its continued existence known through
seemingly irrational urges and impulses which rise up from the
depths of the human psyche). Further echoing Division Theory,
elements of these myths even declare that death did not enter
human experience until after the defeat of the feminine watery
abyss, and that some all-important `Record of Destiny', which
was originally a possession of the watery chaos, was lost
during the conflict.
Babylon's
Enuma Elish
This
archetypical myth is perhaps best represented by the Enuma
Elish, the Babylonian creation epic. In this version, nothing
originally existed except a chaos in which male waters,
`Apsu', mingled with female waters, `Tiamat'. From these two
first parents, male gods were born. Tiamat, the great mother
who ruled the universe, was envisioned as a fearsome monster.
Feeling that Tiamat was a threat to their free
self-expression, the male gods eventually rebelled against
her, choosing the storm-god Marduk, the embodiment of youthful
strength and creative intelligence, to be their leader. Tiamat
appointed her second husband, the god Kingu, to defend her in
this battle, giving him the all-important `Record of
Destinies' to guarantee his success, but to no avail. Tiamat
was slain, Kingu was deprived of the Record of Destinies, and,
splitting Tiamat’ s body in half, Marduk formed heaven and
earth from its parts. Thus crowned the supreme god of heaven
and earth, Marduk was given a new function - maintaining order
in the universe. Still, the world was never secure; although
Tiamat had been killed, somehow she continued to exist, posing
a constant threat to the world order.
The Hindu
Myth of Indra and Vritra
This story is
also found in India's Rig Veda; in this version of the myth,
the storm-god Indra overcomes the primordial chaos and brings
the ordered world into existence. In the beginning there were
again the cosmic waters, being held in restraint by Vritra,
who represented primordial chaos. Although thought of as a
`cosmic mother', Vritra's very name means `restrainer', and
she was thought of as a giant dragon living in eternal
darkness, covering all the space between heaven and earth. In
an effort to free up the cosmic waters, Indra, a young
storm-god of limitless vitality and creative energy, agrees to
fight Vritra, but only on the condition that if he succeeds,
he would be granted all power and authority, becoming the
leader of the gods.
Indra
promises not to kill Vritra either by day or by night, neither
with anything wet nor anything dry; but then Indra does kill
Vritra, with foam, at the juncture of day and night. This
curious detail fits Division Theory perfectly, suggesting that
the actual primordial event represented by this legend must
have taken place before opposites such as `day and night' and
`wet and dry' had first been separated and distinguished from
one another in human consciousness, i.e., before "God
separated the light from the darkness", before the separation
of the subjective perspective of the Soul from the objective
perspective of the Spirit.
When Indra
pierces Vritra, releasing the primordial waters from the
chaos-monster's belly, Vritra asks him "now cut me in two"
(this image of the primordial chaos being cut into two parts
appears in most of these Near-Eastern myths). After this,
Indra uses the pieces of Vritra's body to create the world,
while confining the primordial chaos beneath the earth, which
becomes the netherworld abode of demons and the dead. And
again, although Vritra has been defeated, he still somehow
remains as well, in the form of other demons who also
represent chaos; whatever their names, they are all really
Vritra, who must be battled over and over again to keep chaos
at bay.
The
Egyptian Myth of Seth and Apophis
A parallel
legend is also found in Egyptian mythology, in the story of
Seth and Apophis. Apophis, the embodiment of chaos, a demon of
falseness and injustice, was envisioned as a monstrous serpent
living in an eternally dark abyss, the primordial chaos of the
netherworld. Seeking to overturn the order and stability of
the world, Apophis tries to restrain the sun-god by drinking
up the water on which his boat sailed. But again a young and
powerful storm-god opposes him. Now named Seth, the storm-god
stabs the chaos-monster and cuts him into pieces, allowing the
cosmic waters to flow so the sun-god could continue.
The
Canaanite Myth of Baal and Yamm
This
archetypical myth finds what is believed to be its earliest
fully intact version in Canaanite mythology. In the beginning,
the people of Canaan taught, there was a rivalry between two
great primordial deities, `Yamm' and `Baal'. Yamm, known also
as `Prince Sea', was "identified with or accompanied by two
fearsome sea monsters, Litan (the Biblical Leviathan) and
Tunnan (the Biblical Tannin)". This sea-god Yamm was itself
thought to be a sea-monster, being variously referred to as
`the dragon', `the twisting serpent', and `the seven-headed
monster'. Since this Canaanite sea-god may be an ancient
symbol for the Primordial Soul, which would have functioned as
a controlling `judge' over its partner the Spirit, it is worth
noting that the other name commonly used for Yamm was `Judge
River'. And Baal, in the role of the young storm-god, was
variously called `Lord of the Storm', `Rider of the Clouds',
and `Conqueror'. Again, at first this sea-god Yamm was master
over Baal, holding power and control over him. But Baal
ultimately overthrew Yamm:
The club danced in Baal's
hands,
like a vulture from his fingers;
it struck Prince Sea on the skull,
Judge River between the eyes;
Sea stumbled;
he fell to the ground;
his joints shook;
his frame collapsed.
Baal captured and drank Sea
he finished Judge River.
Successfully
defeating Sea, Baal gained absolute authority, securing an
`eternal kingdom' for himself. But after this supreme victory,
Baal was defeated by Mot, the god of death, and was forced to
enter the underworld.
The Lost
Sumerian Myth of Kur and Enlil
In the
recently rediscovered mythology of ancient Sumer, one of the
oldest civilizations to leave written literature (and the
supposed birthplace of Judaism's patriarch Abraham), yet
another parallel to this archetypical creation myth has been
found. Thought to predate the Egyptian, Hebrew, and Hindu
versions by more than a full millennium, and even the
Canaanite version by at least half that time, the Sumerian
version may be the original, from which all the others were
adapted.
In the
beginning, as Sumer's mythology relates, there was originally
only the goddess Nammu, the primeval Sea, eternal and
uncreated. This Sea brought forth a cosmic mountain, known as
Kur, which was itself a binary system, composed of heaven and
earth united. Kur, although a mountain, was somehow also
recognized as being both the "Great Below" and the Sumerian
netherworld, and was even identified with a great dragon
thought to live at the bottom of the "Great Below" where it
came into contact with the primordial waters and restrained
them. This same Kur, Kur the mountain, Kur the Great Below,
Kur the dragon, Kur the union of heaven and earth, was split
in two by a storm-god named Enlil (`Lord Wind'), thus forever
separating the male heaven-god from the female earth-goddess
(in some versions of the myth, however, it is Enlil's son
Ninurta, god of the Thunder-storm, who conquers Kur). This
storm-god Enlil, curiously enough, also had a strong
association or identification with a mountain, and is referred
to, in certain myths, as `cohabiting' with a mountain, and
even as himself being a mountain (this of course further
strengthens the connection between this myth and Division
Theory's concept of the Spirit originally `cohabiting' with
the Soul). After dividing the female earth from the male
heaven, Enlil, like all the other storm-gods who followed him,
then became supreme in the Sumerian universe; being honored as
`Lord of Heaven', and `Prince of the Earth', he was given
authority to plan and order the affairs of the entire world,
and even organize the universe itself.
It is
particularly interesting, in light of Division Theory, that in
the Ninurta version of the myth, after Kur is vanquished,
Ninurta builds up a great Wall over the body of the dead Kur,
to hold back the "mighty waters" which threaten to destroy the
land (just as Division Theory suggests that the Spirit's
suppression of the Soul also formed a Wall that held back the
Soul's flow of input to the Spirit).
There is yet
another mythical reference to Enlil which also parallels
Division Theory. Enlil, the myths report, once overpowered the
female goddess Ninlil, forcing himself sexually upon her, and
for this crime he was condemned to death and sent into the
netherworld. This, of course, calls to mind Division Theory's
image of the primordial male Spirit forcing his dominance over
the primordial female Soul, after which death first entered
human experience.
Israel's
Myth of Yahweh and the Sea
Such an
archetypical vision of a `wind-god' defeating a `sea-monster',
it seems, also held an honored position in early Hebrew lore;
some ancient legend of a storm-god defeating a watery
primordial chaos, even though it is never addressed at any
length, is hinted at repeatedly in the Jewish scriptures.
Enough fragments of this tale remain scattered throughout the
Old Testament to recognize it as the same myth that was
obviously so well-known throughout the rest of the ancient
Near-East.
The Jewish
Torah starts, in fact, with the very same creation-myth
scenario found throughout the rest of the Near-East: a
masculine storm-god interacting with a negative, feminine
embodiment of chaos:
Now the earth was formless and
void,
darkness was upon the face of the deep,
and the Spirit of God moved
upon the surface of the waters.
----- Genesis 1:2
The sea, or
`deep', is here again a symbol for the primordial chaos; it is
described as dark, empty, and without order. The feminine
Hebrew word teh-home', commonly translated in this passage as
`the deep', can also be given as `an abyss', or as `a surging
mass of water', bringing it even closer into alignment with
the universal image of the primordial chaos. And the word
given here as `spirit', roo'-akh in Hebrew, is actually more
accurately translated as `wind', and has traditionally been
thought to refer to the `breath' of God. But in fact the most
literal translation of this passage's original Hebrew would
describe the `wind' of God hovering over a watery chaos-
symbol, neatly recreating the same Near-Eastern image of the
beginning of time starting with a storm-god engaged with a
primordial watery chaos.
While the
fuller storyline of the common myth is conspicuous by its
absence from the Hebrew texts, an early tradition of Yahweh
battling and overcoming a sea-chaos monster is discernable in
various passages of the Old Testament, such as Psalms
74:13-14, 89:9, and Isaiah 51:9-10, as well as in the
following:
With his power he stilled the
sea,
with his skill he smote Rahab,
with his wind he bagged Sea,
his hand pierced the fleeing serpent.
----- Job 26:12-13
It is evident
that much of the original version of this Near-Eastern myth
never found its way into the Hebrew scriptures in its earliest
form; however, rather than just being dropped, the myth seems
to have been revised and then inserted in the text in a
different form. Still, just as in the Egyptian, Hindu,
Babylonian, and Sumerian myths, the Hebrew God is also shown
overtly splitting various sea-chaos symbols into pieces:
Was it not you who cut Rahab
into pieces?
----- Isaiah 51:9
God divided the waters.
----- Genesis 1:7
But instead
of emphasizing this primordial battle between Yahweh and the
Sea (which would imply that the Hebrew's deity was not
all-powerful, since He would have had a formidable opponent to
overcome in that tradition), this ancient myth seems to have
been reedited in Hebrew literature into a different story of a
primordial entity being cut into two parts: the legend of Eve
being created out of Adam:
God took one side of the human
and ...
made a female from the side he had taken....
----- Genesis 2:21-22
While this
passage is usually translated as taking a `rib' from Adam, the
Hebrew word tsal- aw' usually translated as `rib' can also
correctly be translated as the `side' of a person; thus it
seems that the Hebrew scripture might not have been originally
stating that a single bone was removed from Adam, but instead
that a complete side, a full half of his being was removed
from him. Such an alternate translation would gain great
relevance in light of Division Theory's hypothesis that
humanity originally suffered just such a division, being
broken into two separate but equal parts, a feminine,
unconscious soul and a masculine, conscious spirit.
THE TEMPLARS
and the BINARY SOUL DOCTRINE
Although the
Orthodox Church succeeded in stifling the public activities of
the Gnostic Church, it was never able to completely shut it
down or totally eliminate its teachings about humanity's
binary soul. By receding into the shadowy fringes of Western
culture, the BSD was able to survive the world's transition
into Christianity. In much the same way that the Mesopotamians
believed in two souls (the napistu and the zaqiqu) two
thousand years before Christ, and the Canaanites believed in
two souls (the nps and the th) one thousand years before
Christ, so too the Jews, Manichaeans, Mandaeans, Muslims,
Cathars, and Templars continued to do so long after Christ as
well.
Within the
West, however, the BSD had a much harder time surviving. Being
outlawed by the Orthodox Church, it had to rely on secrecy to
make sure its teachings continued to be passed down from
generation to generation. Certain idiosyncrasies of the
legendary Christian order of the Knights Templar (1118 -1314
AD) suggest they were intimately involved in that mission. The
seal of the Templars, for example, depicted two knights riding
together on a
single horse. Like the enigmatic Templars themselves, this odd
symbol has remained an inscrutable mystery for hundreds of
years, and dozens of different theories about its meaning have
been advanced. The orthodox explanation was that it symbolized
the Templars' poverty, but since their order was one of the
richest and most influential institutions in Europe, this
assertion would appear a little preposterous. The binary soul
doctrine, on the other hand, seems to suggest a far more
reasonable explanation. The Templars, of course, were
Christians, and would have looked to their religion's rich
heritage for inspiration in designing all their symbols and
logos. Their unique seal, as it turns out, seems powerfully
reminiscent of a key passage in one of Christianity's earliest
gospels:
Jesus said, "It is impossible
for a man to mount two horses or to stretch two bows.
And it is impossible for a servant to serve two masters."
- The Gospel of Thomas 47
The Templar
‘s seal almost seems to have been designed as a specific
response to this passage in Thomas. If the BSD's problem can
be symbolized by one man's inability to ride two horses, its
solution can be symbolized by two mens' ability to ride one
horse. The Templar seal is yet another elegant symbol of the
soul and spirit uniting together within a person . When the
two halves of our being are at odds with one another, each
straining in different directions like two separate horses,
the person trying to ride them is unable to get anywhere. But
if both halves of a person's being are united, one becomes
incredibly powerful and successful, no longer wasting his
energies fighting against himself. The Templars, of course,
were known for just that -- becoming extraordinarily powerful
and successful in a very short period of time.
But did they
know of the Gospel of Thomas? History certainly suggests that
the Templars discovered something extraordinary while fighting
the Crusades in Jerusalem, something which led them to adopt
unorthodox religious practices and teachings that eventually
attracted charges of heresy against them. While the recovery
of the Gospel of Thomas in 1945 was hailed as an historic
discovery of a scripture that had been lost for ages, it would
not have been outside the realm of possibility for the
Templars to have fallen across a copy during their
seventy-year occupation of ancient Judea. When the Roman
authorities originally outlawed the Gospel of Thomas in the
4th century, they held strict control over the Holy Land, but
with the rise of Islam a mere two centuries later, that
control quickly vanished. By the time the Crusaders retook
Jerusalem, those censorship policies had long remained
uninforced in Palestine, and bootleg copies of Thomas'
forbidden gospel may well have been available. In any event,
the similarity between the Templars' Christian logo depicting
two men riding a single horse and the Gnostic Christian
injunction that one man should not try to ride two horses
seems unlikely to be a complete coincidence.
In much the
same way, the Templar ‘s mysterious battle flag, known as the
Beauséant, also seems related to the binary soul doctrine.
Consisting of two equal but opposite vertical blocks, a black
one atop a white one, this flag also suggests that the
Templars' secret teachings revolved around the integration or
unification of two
equal-but-opposite elements. It seems odd, however, for a
Christian order to adopt a flag which raises black above
white. Black is usually equated with evil and white with good,
just as an upper position represents preference or dominance
while the lower suggests inferiority and subservience. And as
if that wasn't strange enough, these black and white fields
are of equal shape and volume, suggesting that the flag
designer viewed them as equal opposites. This all seems
inconsistent with the views of Orthodox Christianity, which
holds good to be superior to evil. But if these black and
white fields instead represent the two halves of the human
psyche, the Templars' flag makes perfect sense. According to
the binary soul doctrine, while the two halves of our being
are equal opposites, the unconscious, or ‘black' half must be
‘raised up' within each of us for our spiritual salvation to
begin.
The Templars
were also famous for their veneration of the Virgin Mary, but
curiously depicted her with black images, seeming to prefer
black over the more traditional white in that case as well.
Hundreds of these Templar-era Black Madonnas still exist in
Europe, mostly in France. While the majority are found in
churches and sanctuaries, a few Black Virgins have been moved
to museums. Most were sculpted out of wood, while a few are
paintings and several others are frescoes. These black images
cannot help but remind the BSD student of similar religious
images of the Egyptian ka, which were also often rendered in
black, almost as if they were negatives or reverse images.
Why would the
Templars redesign religious imagery in black that had
previously been consistently portrayed in white? Probably for
the same reason they raised black above white in their battle
flag. Two chief symbols of the unconscious soul, of course,
are femininity and the color black. Taken together, the
symbolism of their seal, their flag, and their penchant for
Black Madonnas suggest a strong connection to the BSD. Like
the Gnostics, the Templars seem to have also understood that
achieving the Christian salvation required worshiping (that
is, recognizing and embracing) the dark or ‘invisible'
contents of the feminine unconscious. While both our halves
must be united and balanced, the way to accomplish this is to
place the black above the white. Since humanity's whole
spiritual problem has always been one of repressing, denying,
and rejecting the unconscious, balance can only be restored by
compensating for our present imbalance. Just as the ancient
Egyptians believed that Osiris, as great as he was held to be,
could only be saved in his time of need by his female
counterpart Isis, so too did these Templars apparently believe
that the female side of our beings was the half that possessed
the power to restore our equilibrium and wholeness, healing
our inner divisions and "making the two one." As if to confirm
this, the Templars' chosen name for their flag, the French
term Beauséant, translates directly into English as "beautiful
bottom" or "beautiful buttocks". While this translation has
been odd enough to keep most would-be interpreters busy
searching for alternate translations, it makes perfect sense
to the student of the binary soul doctrine, which insists that
the path to spiritual success begins via deep soul-searching,
exploring one's own backside, searching the darkest,
bottommost levels of our own psyches. And just like the
ancient Gnostics, the Templars seem to have believed that what
awaits us in that dark hemisphere possesses surpassing beauty.
The
Freemasons, another mysterious group rumored to have descended
from the Templars, tellingly uses the compass and square for
their own logo. Since a compass draws circles, a female
symbol, and a square draws squares, a male symbol, this choice
of emblem again seems to reflect a symbolic union of
equal-but-opposite masculine and feminine forces, suggesting
that it too descends from the ancient world's binary soul
doctrine.
Masonic
symbolism also places a similarly dualistic emphasis on the
two large cast-bronze pillars that once stood on either side
of the entrance to the Temple in Jerusalem, obscurely teaching
that when these two pillars are conjoined, they would create a
desirable state of stability and endurance. They are
mysteriously said to be the two pillars of the universe,
which, when united together, support and sustain it. Tradition
reports that in Solomon's original Temple, one of these
pillars was black and the other was white; and together they
somehow explained all the mysteries of the universe. Even
though they were identical in every other respect, they were
not only given different coloring, but were actually given
separate names as well, obviously to distinguish between them
and emphasize their ‘separate-but-equal' status.
D I V I S I O N T H E O R Y
IT'S A BINARY WORLD
People often
react very negatively to the idea that we are double beings,
that the human soul is binary in nature. It rarely occurs to
them that this is just the reaction one would expect if the
soul was bifurcated. To be dual, after all, is to be
duplicitous and double-dealing. To have two parts to the self
makes it possible for one hand not to know what the other is
doing. It paves the way for violated integrity, unintentional
falsehood, self-betrayal, and self-deception.
Plus, it just
seems odd. Why do we have two souls?
Perhaps the
answer is as simple as this : because that’s the way
everything is made — with two parts, two equal-but-opposite
complimentary components. The ancient Egyptians certainly
thought so, as did the Chinese. One has but to step out-doors
for a moment to be reminded that the world, and everything in
it, has a two-part, divided or binary form. Simply by looking
at a tree, we are reminded that the root structure beneath the
tree looks just like the branch structure above it. When we
look at the form of that tree’s leaves, or for that matter the
form of practically any living thing, we notice that its shape
and body is symmetrical, having equal-but-opposite right and
left sides.
Such symmetry
seems a hard and fast rule of this world. We see it in the
equal-but-opposite natures of the sexes, of day & night, of
summer & winter. We see it in the positive & negative poles of
electricity and magnetism. We see it in the dualities of life
& inanimate matter, of plants & animals, and, of course, in
the natural law that for every action there is an
equal-but-opposite reaction.
We see it in
the double-helix of the DNA molecule that splits down the
middle during reproduction, the two halves becoming perfect
complements to one another. Although equivalent, these copies
are not identical, but equal opposites, just as a mold and a
cast contain inverted forms of the same image.
Indeed, we
see this duality in the very make up of the universe, composed
as it is of matter & antimatter. Cosmologists speak of virtual
particles constantly appearing and disappearing in the
universe. According to quantum field theory, pairs of these
virtual particles, one positive and one negative, appear
together in the primordial vacuum, move apart, then come
together again and annihilate each other.
And while we
once thought that space and time were quite separate things,
we’ve since realized that they are but two sides of the same
strange coin. In the same way, we once thought that matter &
energy were quite separate substances, until Einstein cleared
up the issue with the famous E=MC2 equation. We even see the
universe’s duality in the nature of light itself, which
somehow manages to be both particles & waves at the same time,
two equal-but-opposite, seemingly mutually exclusive natures.
And, as if to drive the point home to the modern age, the
machine that has completely revolutionized the world in the
last few decades — the computer — does nothing more
complicated than distinguish day in and day out between ones &
zeros.
We see the
universe’s immanent duality smiling out from behind science’s
struggle to incorporate all the laws of physics into a single
equation. For more than half a century, our scientists have
unsuccessfully tried to integrate and reconcile two seemingly
equal-but-opposite theories; each, on its own, seems obviously
and indisputably true, and yet the two seem utterly
irreconcilable with one another. Quantum Theory addresses the
laws that govern how things work on the scale of the extremely
small. We know Quantum Theory is correct. Relativity Theory
addresses the laws that govern how things work on the scale of
the extremely large. We also know that Relativity Theory is
correct. The ‘holy grail’ of science today is the Grand
Unification Theory, which, it is hoped, will finally reconcile
and integrate these two together into a single complete
picture that accurately describes the universe as a whole. The
problem is, Relativity Theory simply does not seem to describe
the same universe as Quantum Theory; no matter how our
scientists twist and squirm to try to make these two
perspectives interface, they seem to have nothing in common,
as if each was describing an entirely separate and unrelated
universe. And yet, impossibly, they are both here in the same
one.
Hidden in Plain
Sight
DivisionTheory and The Holy Grail
When Rome
took over Christianity, the true faith disappeared from public
view in the Empire, and might have died out altogether in the
West if not for the Crusades. The First Crusade was launched
in 1096 CE, but the Crusaders only held their colonies in the
east until 1291. However, during the 200 years Europeans had
free reign over the Holy Land, a great mix in cultures
occurred between east and west, and many strange new ideas,
legends, and religious behaviors swept into Europe. One of
these was the legend of the Holy Grail, which seems never to
have been mentioned in Europe before the Crusades. The great
majority of the Grail romances came into existence between
1180 and 1240, and after the last Crusade, nothing new was
added to the legend.
The Holy Grail is generally
considered to be the chalice Christ drank from at the Last
Supper, which Joseph of Arimathea used later to catch blood
from Jesus' spear wound on the cross. At the same time,
however, it is also supposed to be something very different, a
profoundly sacred and mysterious object credited with
miraculous properties. It was thought to provide spiritual and
physical sustenance, restore youth, heal the sick, provide
immortality, and even raise the dead. It was said to provide
the highest knowledge, wisdom, and enlightenment, allowing one
to communicate directly with God. Closely associated with the
concept of purity, the Grail was considered so profoundly pure
that only the most pure and worthy could approach it. If one
was not worthy enough, he could not see the Grail even if he
was standing right in front of it.
The quest to find the Holy
Grail is one of the most enduring myths in Western culture.
The Grail was profoundly mysterious, and the search for it was
presented as the highest religious mission one could aspire
to. The Grail legend presents an elusive mystery, and until
now, no single theory has been able to explain all the details
of the legend. Some say the Grail is a real physical object,
an ancient relic from Christ's era. Others say that the legend
is allegorical, and that the Grail is not a real object at
all, but just a mystical concept of spiritual enlightenment.
However, when the famous Grail hunter Trevor Ravenscroft
claimed to have found the Grail in 1962, he mysteriously
maintained that the Grail was somehow both a form of knowledge
and also a real object.
The legend of the search for
the Holy Grail is particularly associated with King Arthur and
his court, who were supposed to have lived around 500 -550 AD,
just after the Roman Empire outlawed Original Christianity and
drove it underground. In order for Original Christianity to
survive in this hostile cultural environment, it could no
longer openly and publicly declare itself to be an alternate
version of Christianity. It could not, for example, use
traditional Christian symbols such as the cross or the Ichthys
symbol, but had to invent alternate symbols which would pass
safely under the cultural radar.
The binary soul doctrine
suggests that one of those symbols eventually spawned the
entire Grail legend. The Holy Grail, it seems, may have been
an underground symbol for Original Christianity. The Grail
was, after all, credited with the very same properties
ascribed to Christ. The Grail could heal the sick, raise the
dead, and provide divine nourishment, knowledge and
enlightenment. And like Original Christianity in 500 AD, the
Grail was also mysteriously hidden from public view in
Arthur's era. One had to diligently search for both the Grail
and the Kingdom of Heaven in order to find them, and in each
case that search was the highest religious mission, a quest
that could provide salvation and eternal life. Like the
kingdom of heaven in the Gospel of Thomas, the Grail was
something hidden right out in the open, which needed only to
be found.
Those still faithful to
Original Christianity could no longer publicly present their
outlawed ideas as Christian, so they had to search for
alternate symbols so believers could identify one another
without risk. Prior to the advent of Christianity, many
ancient BSD cultures used a combination of masculine and
feminine symbols to represent their faiths. Some of the most
ancient of these used simple circles and straight lines. On
the stela known as the Code of Hammurabi, for example, the
Babylonian god Marduk is shown holding two large objects in
his one hand — a rod and a circle.
These
might have been mankind's first truly abstract symbols; they
portray exact opposites — one perfectly straight with a
beginning and an end, the other perfectly round with no
beginning or end. These symbols seem to reflect the
Babylonians' awareness of two fundamental, equal but opposite
elements in the universe. They may be the earliest symbolic
representation of the male and the female, the yin and the
yang, the soul and the spirit, the conscious and the
unconscious. Marduk holds both symbols in one hand, suggesting
that he possesses and controls both, forming what may have
been mankind's very first "the-two-made-one" symbol.
Such cultural portrayals of
ancient gods holding both a rod and a circle were once common,
and even today seem a natural choice for anyone looking for a
way to visually symbolize the tenets of the binary soul
doctrine. If those loyal to Original Christianity found
themselves suddenly searching for a new symbol for their
group, they might well have returned to these sorts of earlier
representations. However, Original Christianity declared that
while we all possess a whole and healthy conscious spirit, our
unconscious soul is damaged and incomplete, and it is that
part of ourselves that needs healing. This new insight would
have required those ancient BSD symbols to be revised to
reflect this incompleteness. While the rod would be whole, the
circle would have to be incomplete in order to reflect our
souls' need for completion. Thus, the new symbol for
Christianity after 500 AD might have been a rod and a
half-circle.
These two elements could be
visually combined together in any number of arrangements, but
if one design seemed to produce a particularly pleasing or
meaningful image, it would have become the preferred symbol of
the underground movement. And as it turns out, one particular
alignment of these two elements does produce an image that
might have seemed very evocative and meaningful to those early
Christians. If our rod and half circle are arranged as shown
in this graphic, they
seem to suggest a Grail-like chalice that is half-shrouded in
darkness. Even before the legends of the Holy Grail appeared
in Europe, Christians would have naturally associated such a
chalice symbol with the gospel stories of the last supper, and
of Joseph of Arimathea catching Jesus' blood. It would have
been a perfect symbol for their hidden faith, an image that
simultaneously evoked thoughts of Christ, the Eucharist, and
the binary soul doctrine.
Just as the legends declared,
such a Grail would have been invisible to the average person.
This abstract, stylized symbol only looks like a chalice if
one looks at it with that idea already in mind; otherwise, it
just looks like a meaningless rod and half-circle. But by
looking instead at the empty space and interaction between the
rod and circle, the mysterious, half-darkened image of the
Holy Grail manifests itself to the viewer's mind. In the same
way, the binary soul doctrine declared that neither the soul
nor the spirit held the key to salvation, but instead the
space and communication between them had to be addressed. And
even though the orthodox church had compromised Original
Christianity's focus on purity and integrity, the Grail
legends had not, maintaining as the ancient Gnostics had done
that only the most pure could find this treasure. And just as
Original Christianity had gone underground and needed to be
sincerely searched for, so too the quest for the Holy Grail
became a symbol of the ultimate religious quest.
Was this simple symbol, then,
the origin of Europe's legends of the Holy Grail? Those tales
mysteriously insisted that the Grail was both a real object
and also a source of supernatural knowledge, health, and
eternal life. This symbol was indeed all that. As a visual
symbol, it was a real object, existing and observable in
three-dimensional reality. And yet it also reflected the
abstract truths of Original Christianity, which indeed did
promise knowledge, enlightenment, and eternal life to its
followers.
Was this symbol actually ever
used by Christians? We have no evidence that it actually
existed during the era of King Arthur. The only historic
occurrence of this symbol seems to be in Da Vinci's fifteenth
century painting of The Last Supper. However, it stands
out like a sore thumb in that painting, the only purely
abstract symbol in the whole work.
For centuries, people studying
Da Vinci's painting of The Last Supper have been
looking in vain for the chalice Christ was supposed to have
used at that meal.
Then he took the cup, gave
thanks and offered it to them,
saying, "Drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the
covenant,
which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.
- Matthew 2: 27-28
Although this
ceremony was seen as the most important element of the whole
supper, Da Vinci seems to have forgotten to include the cup in
his painting, a glaring exclusion that seems certain to have
been intentional. For centuries, the cup Jesus used at that
supper, known later as the Grail, was no where to be seen in
the painting. But when the painting was restored in the 20th
century, and centuries of touch-ups were removed, the truth
was revealed. The Grail was not depicted as a cup sitting on
the table, but instead as an abstract symbol on the wall, as
if Da Vinci was saying that the true Grail had never
been a physical cup at all, but a visual symbol.
I gratefully credit
Gary Phillips II
with
the original insight that this symbol in Da Vinci's "The Last
Supper" probably represents the Holy Grail, and agree
completely with his observation that once you notice the Grail
staring back at you from Da Vinci's masterpiece, it jumps
right out at you every time you see the painting. You cannot
not see it there. That little ‘ah-ha' moment, that
slight shift into greater awareness and consciousness, was at
the very heart of Original Christianity. We increase in
knowledge, integrity, and perfection through the smallest of
steps, inching back closer and closer to ourselves and our
Creator with every healthy choice we make. Recognizing the
Grail hidden within in Da Vinci's painting is a perfect
example of this sort of shift in perspective, and the increase
in knowledge, or gnosis, that was once so central to the
Christian faith.
Choosing this symbol to
represent Original Christianity would have been like saying
"Despite what Rome would have you believe, this religion is
not merely about faith. It also requires you to stretch your
mind, increasing your knowledge and awareness of both yourself
and your world. But do not despair, for that goal is not
beyond your abilities. In fact, it is as easy and natural as
seeing the chalice in this symbol."
All serious SEEKERS should read
Division of Consciousness
"recognize what is
in front of your face, and what is concealed
will be revealed to you. For there is nothing hidden
that will not be disclosed."
-Jesus Christ, The
Gospel of Thomas
ProphetsForPeace.com exists to expose False
Prophets, not by telling you what to believe,
but by encouraging you to FIND the truth for yourself!
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ProphetsForPeace.com
All rights reserved.
Revised:
March 07, 2012 |
