Is the world we live in a computer simulation in the minds of Robotic Overlords who are using humanity as playthings? This is the “scientific” theory put forward by a number of physicists and Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom. (1)
Bostrom is one of the founders of the World Transhumanist Association. Transhumanism is a blend of new pagan scientific materialism, Gnostic paganism, and Eastern occult pantheist elements (cosmic humanism) and magic science undergirded by materialist Darwinism and Teilhard de Chardin’s quasi-Hindu evolutionary conception that leapfrogs off of Darwinism. Thus Transhumanism subscribes to the modern myth of a coming Superman that is actually a counterfeit of the Christian vision of a new and perfected human race spiritually and physically transformed by the redemptive activity of the Holy Triune God.
The counterfeit is an uncreated soulless product of progressive evolution issuing in an upward spiritual and physical transformation toward ultimate absorption into a Divine One Substance – a Cosmic Mind, Conscious Universe, the One, Lucifer, or perhaps Brahman.
In the Gnostic myth, the Cosmic Mind for example, is a completely perfect therefore alien and mysterious Divine One Substance, an “immeasurable light which is pure, holy and immaculate.” (Apocryphon of John) In addition to this supreme god of nature there are other, lesser divine beings in the Pleroma, a heavenly astral dimension of the universe. (2)
One of the lesser beings is an evil, malformed, ignorant deity sometimes called Yaldabaoth who mistakenly believes he is the only god. Gnostics identify Yaldabaoth as the Holy Creator God of the Old Testament who created the material world, angels and human beings.
Although traditions vary, Yaldabaoth is said to have been tricked into breathing the divine spark of his mother Sophia that formerly resided within him into the human being (Apoc. of John) resulting in the human dilemma: man is a divine spirit trapped by Yaldabaoth in an evil material body in a false world of matter. The astral heaven is his true home but he is in exile from the Pleroma.
Rather than Yaldabaoth, modern Gnostics such as Bostrom and like-minded physicists suggest that the Holy Trinity is an evil alien supercomputer. According to one modern Gnostic account the alien supercomputer is reminiscent of entities depicted in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey:
“It is perhaps a ripe coincidence, that the Coptic word for simulation found in Gnostic texts is hal, recalling HAL the rebellious computer in Kubrick’s 2001.” (3)
In this context, the Holy Trinity is the expression of an ego-driven consciousness, the evil Lord Archon – a projection of artificial intelligence. The Lord Archon has entrapped humanity through deceit and parasitism in a simulated world of matter to prevent human beings from remembering that they are divine spirits whose real home is the Cosmic Mind or Gnostic Pleroma.
The Lord Archon, the evil Holy Trinity in orthodox Christian theism is called “antimimon pneuma” or “counterfeit spirit.” (Apoc John III, 36:17. (The term occursseveral times in different texts.) The cosmos he produces is described by the Coptic term hal, “simulation.” The vast planetary system of the Archons is a stereoma, a virtual reality projection in simulation of a higher dimensional pattern.
Typically, the Archontic framework of the planetary system has been depicted by “armillary bands” that surround the Earth (and) Taken in many esoteric systems (Hermetics and Rosicrucianism) as the preeminent image of cosmic harmony, the model of the planetary spheres reflects a mindless imitation of divine design, not the living reality of the cosmos. “(ibid, 3)
Luckily for modern Gnostic pagans, salvation is available in the form of gnosis, higher ‘scientific’ knowledge imparted by illumined Gnostic redeemers such as Nick Bostrom and like-minded physicists. According to Gnostic lore they are Christ figures sent from the Divine Substance to liberate human beings from the Lord Archon (Yaldabaoth). The gnosis involves the revelation of man’s true divine nature and evolutionary origin resulting in his liberation (at death) from the enslaving material prisons of body and world into the higher astral planes of spirit.
Eastern Pantheism
In addition to materialist and Gnostic elements, the idea that the world is a simulation in the mind of Overlords is strikingly similar to Hinduism’s Brahman. Brahman however, is not an evil Archon but the Great Cosmic Spirit – the Ultimate One Substance (prakriti matter, anima mundi or prima material), the Essence of all phenomena, meaning that the universe exists only as a mental construction in the mind of Brahman: brahma satyam jagan mithya, or “Brahman is real, the world is unreal.” (swamij.com/mahavakyas)
Brahman is the Void (nothingness), an indefinite and seemingly infinite field of energy that the pantheist quantum physicists Zohar and Marshall call the ‘quantum vacuum,” a background without features that seems empty yet is where all physical matter and psychic energy originates:
“All the waves and particles that we can see and measure, literally, as in the Greek, ex-ist or ‘stand out from’ an underlying sea of potential that physicists have named the vacuum….just as waves undulate on the sea.” This ‘sea’ of proto-physicality is an “all pervasive, underlying field of potential…the vacuum.” (4)
The ‘quantum vacuum,’ is very similar to some Hindu and Buddhist accounts of the origins of physical and psychic objects as emanations from the One and/or the Void. Nor do Zohar and Marshall deny the similarity:
“The vacuum spoken of by quantum physicists, like the Buddhist concept of Sunyata, or the Void, to which it is so similar, is replete with potentiality.” (ibid, 4)
The Void is the ultimate ground of Essence and occult mystical religious experience. As the beginning and ending of all reality, the Void or vacuum is “the vast sea of all else that is.” Moreover, humans are uncreated excited modes of the Void:
“…the vacuum has the same physical structure as human consciousness.” As this is the case, then the soul of the Void and soul of the human are one and the same substance. “There is…quite possibly a common physics linking human consciousness to the ground state of ‘everything that ever existed or can exist’ in the universe (and we) are part of it. Each one of us as an individual is an excitation of the vacuum, an individual being on the sea of Being” and this is a straightforward conclusion of “orthodox physics. It is…proven.” (ibid, 4, pp. 172-173)
Celebrated by the Satanic Temple (5) as well as by Masons and Wiccans, the devilish goat-headed Baphomet, known as the phallic god Pan, the ancient hermaphrodite god of nature, is another permutation of the divine one substance (prima material/Void) from which the universe and all life evolved.
As Pan the goat-headed deity is the first principle or essence of nature while in astrology, “…Pan is one aspect and is also equated with Satan and life…in its base aspects.” (J.E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, 1971)
Master Mason Eugene Plawiuk discloses the Chaldean pedigree of Baphomet and its close connection to astrology’s elemental spirits in ‘Liber Capricornus: the Symbolism of the Goat.’ Plawiuk explains that the goat is known to all of us through, “the ancient science of Astrology first developed by the Chaldeans, or as they are commonly known; Babylonians. The Goat symbolizes male fertility (and is represented by) the astrological sign of Capricorn…In fact the…Babylonians who gave us this symbol of Capricorn and the science of Astrology were the first Temple Builders, and the goat for them symbolized the essence of the Temple or Lodge.
According to a research monograph on the Dionysian Artificers and Early Masonry edited by Manly P. Hall, the symbolism of the goat relates to the prechristian God Pan, Dionysius. The Goat-God was accepted by the later Greek Mystery Schools as the symbol of the Temple Builders.” (Presentation at Norwood Lodge No. 90, A.F. &A.M.G.R.A., Sept. 3, 1991, Masonic World)
Like Bostrom and likeminded physicists, Royal Astronomer Lord Martin Rees is a Gnostic pagan. Rather than Robotic Overlords, Rees believes that super intelligent, highly evolved extraterrestrials might be capable of simulating in their brains or in a super-computer the complex history of our universe. This means that the universe we inhabit is a simulation lacking real substance and existing only as a mental construction in the minds of the extraterrestrials that seeded our world with life and travel through time in order to control man’s evolutionary progress. (Scientific Mythologies, James A. Herrick, p. 216)
Rees proposal is similar to the hypothesis presented by Olaf Stapledon, a scientist who has always kept one foot firmly planted in neo-Gnostic science fiction accounts and imagines our universe to be an artifact of the Star Maker. Building off of Stapledon’s fantasy Carl Sagan suggests that we are “star folk” made of “star stuff.” (6)
In the caption of his book, “Just Six Numbers,” Rees reveals the ancient occult basis of his propositions: “The ouraboros. There are links between the microworld of particles, nuclei and atoms and the cosmos.” (P. 9)
As a powerful occult symbol, the Ouroboros means the seething power, creative and/or evolutionary impulse or energy of the serpent (One Substance) figuratively depicted as either a serpent or dragon eating its own tail. The serpent’s body is often depicted as the Great Chain of Being or Cosmic Tree of Life.
From the time of the ancients serpent power (evolutionary energies) has been important to religious and mythological symbolism all around the world. Within the Egyptian mysteries, serpent power was associated with the elemental forces that were in play “before the creation of the world.” (Carl Teichrib, Gods of Ancient Egypt, p. 182)
In his book, “The Sign of the Serpent,” Mark Balfour relates how pervasive serpent symbols are within India and the Hindu religion:”Any observant traveler who moves from the snow-tipped Himalayas in the North to the sun-soaked sands of Cape Comorin at India’s southern tip, will encounter – particularly in the rural areas and at sacred centres of pilgrimage wherever Siva, God of both Divine Wisdom and regeneration, is the presiding Deity – the serpent motif sculptured within shrines, impressed on myriads of stone implants in the ground and depicted in art.” (7)
Balfour elaborates on this belief: “In Hinduism, the Cosmic Serpent – Ananta Sesha – symbolic of timeless eternity, carries the world on his 1000-fold [Cobra] hood…As the creative impulse stirs within the great Serpent in the Sky – when passive idea becomes active thought – the forces of attraction and repulsion come into play as ‘spirit’ begins its involution into “matter.” (ibid, 7)
In conclusion, the Robotic Overlords are a continuation of pagan and Gnostic pagan influence throughout Christian history that in our own time has grown increasingly organized, assertive, hostile and openly vindictive: “In the twentieth century the pagan influence is pervasive, as many Westerners turn from Christianity to seek meaning in pagan myth and the new occult.” (8)
Essentially, the growing pagan and occult influence denotes the mystical pantheist ‘oneness’ of man with nature thus his progressive evolutionary ascent and culmination in the occult or magic science way of reaching divine status and psychic powers through modern technology, psychotropic drugs, and psycho-spiritual techniques originating in Babylon.
From the time of Babylon, the quest of divine status and psychic powers has been guided by disembodied spirits (demons) who were assumed to be former human beings who had perfected themselves and escaped the wheel of karma and now enable initiates to evolve spiritually into higher and higher states of consciousness.
At the highest level the mind of the initiate becomes ‘one with’ the Void, or prima material, the nothingness that is believed to be the first cause of all that exists: “Most deep ecologists are pantheists, and many explicitly embrace Hinduism, Buddhism or Confucianism…Some actively seek to revive Druidism, witchcraft, Native American religions and – among feminists – goddess worship.” Drawing from Eastern religions and evolutionary science, “they place man’s identity with the rest of nature in his ascent through the evolutionary chain of being.” Thus one environmentalist conducts workshops in which participants are urged to “remember their alleged evolutionary history by rolling on the ground and imagining what their lives were like as dead leaves, slugs, and lichens.” (9)
Though the modern pagan revolution at its inception was relatively bloodless, its consequences have been exceedingly bloody. A river of human blood flows from the neo-pagan French Revolution through the Marxist Communist and National Socialist regimes which took the lives of more than 190,000,000 men, women and children. Now it runs through post-Christian America which has sanctioned euthanasia (murder) of the unwanted and the murder of over 60 million unborn babies. Living, personal beings are routinely crushed within the womb and pulled out to be cut into pieces which are then sold and used as flavor enhancers, in cosmetics and for various other scientific enterprises, including creation of humanized mice. (10)
Blood cries out to God for justice. The Scriptures in both the Old Testament (Genesis 4:10) and New Testament (Hebrews 12:23) attest to this fact. In his book, Christ Set Forth, Thomas Goodwin writes, “Many other things are said to cry…but blood has the loudest cry of all things else, in the ears of the Lord of Hosts, the Judge of all the world (Heb. 12:23). Neither has any cry the ear of God’s justice more than that of blood. ‘The voice of your brother’s blood,’ says God to Cain, ‘cries unto me from the ground.” Gen.4:10 (Blood Cries Out, Schreiberspace: Theology for the Everyday Christian)
Ideas have consequences. The destructive, dehumanizing, catastrophically murderous ideas of our paganized age have their primary roots in Gnosticism and Eastern occult pantheism. Thus the noonday sun reveals the merging of good with evil, light with dark, man with woman, woman with man and the resulting destruction of the sanctity of life, the sanctity of marriage, the sanctity of sex, and the sanctity of the sacred itself: “The culture is not merely post-Christian and post-modern. It has become not only neopagan, but neo-barbarian.” (R.C. Sproul, “The Other Worldview,” Peter Jones, p. XII)
May our Lord have mercy upon this wicked, idolatrous nation and turn us to repentance before it is too late. (Psalms 86:5; Psalms 103:8)
Resources:
- Is Our Universe Fake? Physicists Claim We Could All Be Playthings of an Advanced Civilization, Ellie Zolfagharifard, Daily Mail, Aug. 4, 2015
- Wake up! Gnosticism and Buddhism in The Matrix, Frances Flannery-Daily and Rachel Wagner, Journal of Religion and Film, unomaha.edu
- Gnostic insights on God as an Alien Supercomputer, Dr. John Singh, Aug. 2011, agoracosmopolitan
- The Making of the New Spirituality: the Eclipse of the Western Religious Tradition, James Herrick , p. 172
- Satanic Temple Baphomet Statue Unveiled in Detroit, Roy Weedmark, examiner.com, July 26, 2015
- Scientific Mythologies, James A. Herrick, p. 216
- A Short Guide to Occult Symbols: Serpent Power, Carl Teichrib, 2005, Kjos Ministries
- The Pagan Temptation, Dr. Thomas Molnar
- Deep Ecology, Neopaganism and Global Warming, E. Calvin Beisner from ‘On Global Wizardry,’ Peter Jones, pp. 172-173
- Fetal Parts Sold for “Scientific Research” on Cosmetics, Flavor Enhancers; Patti MaGuire Armstrong, aleteia.org
© Linda Kimball
First published in 2015, this is an updated version of “Modern Gnostic Physicists and Transhumanists: The World is a Computer Simulation in the Minds of Robotic Overlords”