GLOBAL IMPERIALISM

WAS ESSENTIALLY AGAINST OTHER BELIEF SYSTEMS.

ADDITIONAL NOTES.

Philip Pullman . . .

 “We’ve had nothing but lies and propaganda and cruelty and deceit for all the thousands of years of human history. It’s time we started again, but properly this time . . .”  

and:

 “There are two great powers,” the man said, “and they’ve been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn from one side by the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.”

Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife, Scholastic, London, 1997.

As a Buddhist with about 20 years rummaging around in Eastern Philosophy, parallel to research into `European' systems of transmission; it became obvious to me that Michael Maier was not a `Christian' and that the entire foundation of the Hermetic Renaissance of the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries, was of such a threat to the forces of materialism, as to deserve and receive almost total annihilation. But not altogether. For though printing presses were smashed, libraries were burnt or captured and people `disappeared', and the books of Maier and his circle were dumped on the trashcan of history - we are still in a position today, to restore these events to a correct historical perspective.

As M. Esther Harding says:

"In order to gain a new vantage point from which a fresh world philosophy may, perhaps, be built up, a renewed contact with the deeper levels of human nature is needed, so that a really vital relation may be established with the laws or principles which activate humanity. Only through such a renewing experience can we hope to be able to bridge the chasm which has opened up before our Western civilization."

The `archaeology of human experience' and the `deeper levels of human nature' were all the concern of Maier and the Hermetic circle. They were working with areas of human experience that were ignored, hidden, crushed and deprived of expression. C. G. Jung personally owned a copy of the `Atalanta Fugiens' and from the merging of depth psychology and the renaissance of speculative and semiotic alchemy, one strategy of `salvaging' has emerged. We are bloated with the accumulated effects of the hegemonic world view. Materialistic knowledge is reductive, rational and linear - but enough has been said about this.

The intuitive, holistic approach has always suffered with the rise of materialism. The rot has eaten very deeply into the fabric of our society that we take for granted inversions of human nature as natural, and we even defend these anti-social patterns of behavior. Erich Neumann calls this:

"...a symptom of the decline of the ordering principle that has hitherto enabled European Christian mankind to regard itself as the culmination and climax of human development."

 (Here) (it) becomes necessary to re-write history from the causal factors that generated materialistic sterility that rules imperialism. By causal factors, I refer to the process by which living religions crystalize into dogma and eventually have to resort to violence to inflict their beliefs on 'others.' Having dehydrated, these religions, as rigid as they are fridgid, stiff and cold against the warm flow of Life - can only embrace materialism. They become shells, and eventually, are recycled into the Earth of human history. Unfortunately, images of self-destruction are so deeply imbedded in these terminal religions, that they often represent a danger to the general ecology in which they are situated, and which does not subscribe to their beliefs. For example, the Rapture theory - which showed a Christian Right that prepared its adherents for a nuclear holocaust. Indirectly, this may have been propaganda from the Military Complex to prepare the masses for a nuclear war - or at least to justify the buildup of Arms through religious reasons. Only the Arms Industry would profit.

The military aspects of current fundamentalism are not only confined to Christianity, and the Branch Davidian phenomena; but we have recently seen it appear in Japan in the Aum Cult, and similar brittle and apocalyptic trends within Islam and Judaism. The Oriental religions are also not free of the virus - as we have Hindu and Buddist versions as well.

Prof Gerrit Huizer in his research has pointed out how in widely dispersed cultures resistance:

"...has strong spiritual overtones and a religious inspiration."

The "archaeology of human experience" is not of necessity Euro-centric, but it was the psychic terrorism against spiritual liberation as an ongoing experiential Right - that laid the foundations for a decimated morality, that could then lay the world out for plunder. And the situation still exists intact today.

"Salvage operations" on the victims of this global imperialism, for example as in the founding of DQ University is California for the study and revival of the spiritual and cultural heritage of the native American Indians; the researches into African mysticism and therapeutic traditions; work under way in Australia, South and Central America; the popularity of the work of Carlos Castaneda; the vast influence of Eastern Philosophies on the Old West; the rise of Shamanistic studies &c are all of great value. But it is also necessary to expose the lies and corruptions at the heart of the spiritual imperialism of Christianity itself.

It was Christianity that destroyed the Inca and Aztec civilizations, that dropped the bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima; and the torture and murder in South Africa was to "defend Western Christian civilization."

The destruction of the impetus for a `Universal Reformation' during the 30 Years War - laid the foundations for the imperialism of materialism. Thus the work of Michael Maier is of some significance.