We have spoken about "Astral War" before on this blog. Like here and here. Now for some more deliberations on the subject. -- Edit 2023: the ideas discussed below is now part of a book, aptly called Astral War.
As
we have said before, "Astral War" can be defined as "propaganda war," "psychic war,"
"Kulturkampf," et cetera. It is a rather silent, rather discreet kind of war.
In this post we will look at diverse aspects of the Astral War. We will begin with the angle of
Astral War Today, continue with
Astral War Myths, and close with
Astral War Tactics.
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The
Astral War has raged since the beginning of time, when man’s souls were enveloped in materiality, in corporeal bodies, in the 3d duality of mine-yours; body-mind, good-bad, me here-God there, etc.
Parallel to this, there has always been a striving back to spiritual realms, Nirvana, and godhead. A special terminology pertains to this: the fall into corporeality is the
involution, the way back to godhead is the true
evolution.
This might sound easy and clear-cut but there are aspects of it that needs to be discussed. For instance, will all of humanity evolve, raise out of materiality and strive for heaven? We surmise that this will not be the case. A large part of humanity is not disposed for spiritualism. They are stuck in atheistic, STS negativity. [STS = "Service to Self" = mindless egotism.]
Thus, you could say that humanity is facing “the great divide”. On the one hand, we have STO ["Service to Others" = mindfulness] disposed mystics acknowledging that they have a soul and that reality is structured in layers from 3d and up, being more immaterial and more real as up we go. On the other hand, we have atheist STS people denying the spiritual side of reality, only seeing 3d reality, only seeing material reality, reducing everything to what we see with our material senses, denying the capacity of intuition.
However, “great divide” or not, you might say that human civilization with time has gained an increased element of “idealism, conceptuality, mentality”. Ideas and abstract concepts play a larger role today than yesterday. At least, we see this in the realm of warfare, which is the subject of this chapter. Reading the Wikipedia side on “Fourth-generation Warfare” we are presented with the theory that today’s conflicts are not merely focused on regular forces in combat, it is also about “psychological warfare, especially through media manipulation and lawfare” [sic]. The last concept is about using law as a weapon, like delegitimizing the enemy through a legal process. And “media manipulation” is of course giving the events a certain spin, it is about propaganda, about portraying blue forces as saints and red forces as demons from hell.
If Fourth-Generation Warfare is the war of today, it also has tangible elements of terrorist attacks, guerillas and such. But the propaganda war element is the most important one, we suggest. In the successive major, all-out wars from the 30 Year’s War through the Coalition Wars and WW1 and WW2, the propaganda element has played an increasing role. Then, as we propose in
Actionism, today there will not be any more major shooting wars like WW2. After 1945 the trend goes down, both regarding longevity of conflict and the number of dead. However, the propaganda war today is more intense than ever.
The wars fought today are rather low-intense but every single shot is mythologized beyond belief, given media spin so that the common news consumer thinks that Harmageddon is nigh. Of course, there will not be a major warlike cataclysm, it can’t be after Earth ascended in 2011. But try to tell that to the media-drugged, materialist zombie.
This is the modern war, this is propaganda war, this is the astral war today regarding world events of a warlike kind. It is not about what tangibly happens, it is about what people believe happens.
So, how to rectify this? How to turn people away from letting their souls be the battlefield of this war?
As intimated it is nearly useless to say to people that a single 7.62 cartridge fired in a MENA desert doesn’t mean that WW3 is looming.
Again, it is about the Great Divide. Negative people will always be hooked to this kind of news. However, finally, when mankind at large is ready for creating “paradise on Earth,” then these other, STS people might be given the opportunity to translocate to a grand-scale, parallel world VR simulation to live out the remains of their negativism, duality and fear. The rest of mankind, STO disposed, of positive and spiritual mindset, can then create their spiritual civilization undisturbedly.
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Now for the subject of
Astral War Myths.
To a modern mind, “myth” means “a lie, something made up”. However, in a more archaic, holistic vein, “myth” is golden. You could say that a story being labeled as myth has “graduated” – it has become immortal, an astral world narrative, a dreamworld story. A legend.
In this respect myths are 4d stories, stories with soul. Conversely, stories merely pertaining to 3d are conditioned, “all too human,” banal.
So, in search of stories pertaining to the astral war, what do we find? Inspiring stories, morally guiding stories? Stories about the forces of light fighting the Demiurge? – To begin with, we find this story by Robert A. Heinlein, the novella Lost Legacy (anthologized in Assignment in Eternity, 1953). It is about a group of academics feeling fenced in by reductionist psychology. They discover anomalies in the concept and then become spiritual adepts fighting the cabal of materialist, nihilist operators ruling the land.
The group in question challenges behaviorism, the “man machine” paradigm. Next, they venture into esotericism, they learn about will controlling thought, and they become spiritual supermen. It is a bit simplistic – but – we’d say, show us another SF story telling about this in such a succinct and readable manner. In
Science Fiction Seen From the Right we said that Heinlein, with this story,
… can be seen as an informal teacher of esotericism – indeed, even better, a myth-maker for the coming golden age of spirituality, depicting as he does how the group our trio joins gets embroiled in a psychic struggle all over the land, a fight between the forces of Light and Dark. This is unique – because, fiction on the theme of spiritual elevation and the fight between willpowered Light and desire-driven Darkness, is a rare thing indeed, in and out of the SF field. However, maybe Edward Bulwer-Lytton in The Coming Race (1871) and Frederick S. Oliver in A Dweller on Two Planets (1905) come close to the dramatic spirituality of Lost Legacy.
[Svensson 2016, p 24-25]
If we should mention another, equally pertinent story it will be C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength (1947). It has the same theme of determined Responsible Men fighting chauvinist nihilism. And, as well as Lost Legacy was footed in post-war USA, That Hideous Strength captures post war England with some charm. It is about a university being forced to give way to a modern research institute, it is about an old wood, Merlin and a spiritual leader in the form of the space-farer Elwin Ransom, known from Lewis’s sf sagas Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, to which That Hideous Strength forms a finale.
In
Science Fiction Seen From the Right we said this of Lewis’s book, for instance holding it above 1984 and Brave New World, two other British novels discussing the nature of nihilism. We said that these two novels…
… tend to indulge in the evil, antagonistic sides of the plot while Lewis’s novel along with showing us evil shows us a way out. Lewis has balanced the incredible with the eminently relatable. Orwell’s and Huxley’s novels were dramatically credible in stressing how “the enemy is well organized” but Lewis, in showing the power of The Common People, of the echo in medieval vaults and of acknowledging the Light, is more relevant to the era of Sat Yuga we live in today, the Era of Truth following on the Iron Age of Kali Yuga having just ended.
[Svensson 2016, p. 57]
This is very important. In fighting evil, you can’t just indulge in the fight per se. You have to have a vision of what to replace it with. To merely fight evil and praise victory over it is equal to power positivism, to acknowledge nothing beyond 3d realities. This merely leads you to become another tyrant.
The vertical dimension is always important. To acknowledge that reality is structured from “less real” to “more real” is essential for any worldview. If not, then everything gets embroiled in relativism, in the social, horizontal dimension, the realm of “human, all too human”.
As we saw above, the Heinlein and Lewis stories in question had this perspective. Their heroes fought the Demiurge with an ontologically footed ethic.
They were, indeed, astral warriors.
What more examples of such astral war myths do we have?
You might think of some stories of Philip K. Dick. He didn’t tell about such clear-cut astral fights as the above but he did approach other key elements of the struggle. Like acknowledging the Gnostic perspective of souls being caught in the material world, acknowledging esotericism, acknowledging God.
Dick’s opus is complex and we portrayed it from the view of esotericism in Science Fiction Seen from the Right. And this excerpt captures the gist of it, of Dick first writing the novel Galactic Pot-Healer in 1968, about an unhappy man being approached by a god. Then virtually the same thing happens in Dick’s everyday reality, in 1974, portrayed in the novel VALIS (1981). This novel gives you a theophany, a vision of God.
This is authoritative esotericism. This is Swedenborg in his Dream Diary, “The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa,” Isaiah seeing “new heavens and a new Earth”. It is incomparable in its vision of the divine, of Being, of That Which Is, that which ontologically can’t be questioned. It is supreme bliss and rest.
VALIS is a relatable theophany. The best of Dick’s opus was “serious fiction in popular form” and this gloriously applies to VALIS, a book in under 300 pages giving us both a story and a mystic’s vision of the world. The appendix has a 52-paragraph, 15-page philosophical statement, the summary of Dick’s Gnostic studies and divine experience.
VALIS underlines this: that the battlefield of the astral war is you and your soul. VALIS is the story of a man in agony; the divine experience doesn’t enlighten and enliven him, not at first. Rather, he regrets having been illuminated by the divine light and then being left out in the cold, the divine experience cooling off, as it were. With time, after Dick had digested his 1974 experience more fully, he became more placid and tranquil, more “spiritual”.
That said, VALIS can be a trying read, of going through all of Dick’s interpretations and misinterpretations of his experience – but – all things considered, it has value as such, as a document of a divine experience. Again, it is like Swedenborg’s Dream Diary which also was about a man in agony, haunted by visions that, in the end, illuminated and elevated its recipient.
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Now, on to
Astral War Tactics...
The concept of “astral war” doesn’t occur in this author’s recent essay,
Actionism – How to Become a Responsible Man. We used the term “frequency war;” this is the same as astral war. So – for all its worth,
Actionism can be seen as a virtual astral war handbook for the keen individual. It is a pre-school in astral warfare.
“How shall I live?” This is the timeless question of morality. Actionism tries to give an answer to this. It paints the same ontological background as the book you’re now reading, that of God being a fusion of light-imbued will, thought, and passion. As fragments of the divine light we soul-endowed humans must sum up our will and let it guide thought. Additionally, we must affirm the role of passion to give the whole operation color and pizazz, warmth, and compassion.
The role of the will is important. Hitherto, excepting Nietzsche, it has been virtually eradicated from the realm of ethics as a central concept. Actionism wants to change this, by stressing that will, pure will, always is free. It spontaneously chooses light. Conversely, “a bound will” is equal to desire and indulging in darkness.
So, stop deliberating on “whether there is a free will or not”. By having the perspective of “a hierarchy of realities,” ethics is put on its feet. Will is free, will is divine. Sum up your will and let it guide thought, let will fuse with thought into a higher amalgam of Will-Thought.
Do this, and you will become a spiritual superman. This is the virtual astral war armor.
So then, what more to say on “astral war armor, astral war tactics, astral war survival for the common operator”? – You might need to remark on the latter wording and stress that in this war there are no “common operators,” no “random observers” and the like. Conscious presence is the only ideal, mindful engagement is the only way. To sit by and think that things will rectify themselves is not an option. The battlefield is you, stick to the program.
A general advice when operating conceptually, when fighting a frequency war, is this one from Saul Alinsky: a good tactic is one that you and your friends enjoy. This highlights the element of inspiration; some kind of creative joy, of spiritual uplift, must be present when fighting the astral war, when fighting the Demiurge, when fighting for the light against the dark. Conversely, activities that drain you or energy must be avoided.
Details aside, since the battlefield is you, every emotion, every breath, every single nano-second of your existence counts. Sum up your will, take a deep, gentle, breath, say I AM – and so you’re ready for anything.
This author’s creed can be summarized as holism, intuition, will-driven ethics. As for the first term, holism, it is about seeing wholes, the big picture. For its part, Borderline was an essay exploring holistic science, art, and ethics – and, conversely, advocating against reductionism on the scientific level. To reduce phenomena into cases possible to study in a controlled situation might give us mastery of material nature, 3d reality, but it will not give us an ontologically viable world-view.
Aspects like these (holistic science, art and ethics) were covered in
Borderline. Then, to take the reductionist-holistic dichotomy into the realm of astral war, our advice is: when venturing into mythical realms, into subjects of gods, myths and legends, don’t fall into reductionist patterns. To reduce, say, a god into “social factors” is madness; it is applying a horizontal, human, conditioned perspective on a phenomenon that is vertical, essentially real and unconditioned. It is seeing the astral from a material point of view. It is reductionism gone awry.
Related
Astral War -- Your Soul Is the Battlefield (2023)
Propaganda War as Total War
Actionism
Science Fiction Seen From the Right
The Coming Race
Pic: Astral War Decorations
