We can also look at JADE from a developmental perspective. In Meditations on the Tarot, the anonymous author states that “Antichrist, the ideal of biological and historical evolution without grace, is not an individuality or entity created by God, but rather the egregore or phantom generated through the biological and historical evolution opened up by the serpent, who is the author and master of biological and historical evolution that science studies and teaches.  The antichrist is the ultimate product of this evolution without grace and not an entity created by God—the act of divine creation being always, without exception, an act of grace.  He is therefore an egregore, an artificial being who owes his existence to collective generation from below.”

If we look closely at Robert Powell’s description of Christ’s descent through the subearthly realms throughout the end of the 20^th and the start of the 21^st century, he points to certain technological developments occurring at each transition into a new subearthly sphere (the atomic bomb, satellites, space travel, nuclear defense, the internet, etc). I don’t think these are chosen randomly—they actually describe a progression, the development of a particular being that culminates with AI. In a certain sense, we have built another “Tower of Babel,” although with an important difference:  the Tower of Babel was constructed with the aim of returning to the gods through human effort. This is, conversely, humanity’s attempt to escape from the gods; essentially, the opposite of a Tower of Babel—a Bottomless Pit, exactly the description used in the Book of Revelation.

The Tower of Babel was brought about through the capacity of human beings to speak the primal tongue: a tongue understood by all people, which carried within it the force to affect Nature. This force was misused; Lucifer was brought to the aid of the guiding spiritual powers by dividing up the primal tongue into many tongues and many nations, thereby taking from speech its destructive power. While human beings found themselves divided in terms of speech, the power of Christ offered them a place where they could meet: the universality of the conceptual life. Regardless of what language it was dressed in, the Truth of the conceptual life could be understood among all humanity. This was only gradually and partially discovered, as tribal and national wars have been a theme of human history.

How is the Bottomless Pit coming about? Not from the universality of primal language, but from the universality of Reason. It is the end result of a process stemming from rational, materialistic, sense-bound intellect—the dried up residue of the universal conceptual life. The thinking process emulated by and embedded into JADE is predicated on this rational mode of thinking, taken to a superhuman level, but nonetheless existing in one paradigm of thought life.

How can the spiritual powers come to our aid in our time? I believe they already have begun to do so. Rather than language being separated, it is the conceptual life that has begun to divide: we are no longer divided by nation, but by ideology and developmental disposition. These are but the beginning of a greater shattering in the conceptual life of man. Increasingly, one will not be able to discover the Truth through dialogue with another—each will remain speaking in his own “conceptual language,” unless he can become “multilingual.” The phrase used by Tomberg in Meditiations on the Tarot is “multivocal concepts” versus “univocal concepts.” This is discussed explicitly in the fourth letter, The Emperor. It is our task as Hermeticists to become linguists of the conceptual by learning to think in “arcana,” symbols bearing a whole spectrum of conceptual meanings, but which are fundamentally moral activities engaged in and with by the soul.

How else can we go about doing this? By harnessing the new gift of the grace of Christ—the power of the Good. When we can develop true tolerance for the other person; when we can go so far in our empathy for the other that they are embodied in us, and us in them; when we can truly view the world from their perspective, which may be radically different from our own, then we begin to be multilingual in our conceptual life. This is the path we will take until we will be able to “speak the Good” into existence. Our words will no longer compel by nature of the concept embedded in them, but through the Good, the experiencing of the other being expressed through them.

In the sixth epoch, it may no longer be a universally accepted fact that 2+2=4; but the Good, the moral will be universally agreed upon. What has only just begun to show itself, on the one side through radical “close-minded” ideologies, and on the other through developmental “disabilities” such as the autistic spectrum, will only become more and more pervasive. For all intents and purposes, each and every human being will be radical, will have “special needs” in the far future. Unless we can redeem Lucifer’s influence in the realm of thinking with the force of Christ, of the Good, the force of tolerance, empathy, and intuition (not to mention “Arcana”), the War of All against All will come all the more quickly.

The presence of the “radical” and the “special needs” are actually our saving grace against the advent of AI. How can a device that is predicated on rational thought, on the ability to predict activity based on patterns, begin to approach those with special needs? I have personal experience of many who simply cannot be understood through the rational mind; they can only be embodied, understood through making the attempt to become them—and then one’s words, regardless of their intellectual content bear a force that has a positive effect on these individuals. In the face of those with special needs, AI is powerless. This is why the radical, and those with developmental differences, have rigorously been discarded by fascist regimes. But the situation will become pervasive. This is one of the ways the second Tower of Babel will be toppled: through the nonsensical element in the human being becoming the norm rather than the pathology. Our goal as Hermeticists, as “bringers of the Good through the Word,” is to intuitively understand the other; to become linguists of concepts through “picture-thinking”; to be able to speak to anyone where they actually exist and not where we do. Only then can we begin to “speak the Good,” and truly meet the forces emanating from the Bottomless Pit. As Karl Koenig says, we must digest the leading images of the archetypes, and through their activity in us, silently shepherd those around us. Indeed, the path of the Maitreya is the path of a Shepherd.

Overall, my picture is that humanity will enter a period of semi-manufactured “impending doom” over the next few years, only to be “rescued” by a technology that does all the thinking for them. We will be presented with a false choice between order and chaos. In reality, the choice is between mechanized peace on the one hand, and two distinct types of chaos on the other.  The chaos, left to unfold on its own, could be simply that:  that which the Asuras bring, utter destruction.  That chaos, however, is also the soil in which the Christ force can be planted to become true Life. Very likely, many will choose technological order.  However, at the end of the 40 Days in the Wilderness, at Christ’s meeting with the Mother in the 2040’s, this technology will fail, as all technology that supposedly “makes life easier” does in the end. By this point, most of humanity will have forgotten how to be human, how to be creative, how to function organically in social groups. Then those of us who have truly cultivated communities of the Etheric Christ, communities that work in concert with spiritual beings, will have an enormous task present itself to us—rescuing the “lost sheep” who have succumbed to the numbing influence of overwhelming technology. Most likely, the “persecution” awaiting those who align with the Etheric Christ is one of marginalization by default—if we separate ourselves from a culture run by technology, it will be almost impossible to live but by the grace of the hierarchies. However, in thirty years, it will be up to us to stretch out a healing hand to those who are attempting to climb out of the Bottomless Pit.

It seems that the natural course is for Ahriman to be overtaken by Sorath:  the complete mechanization and de-spiritualization of humanity and the earth.  Lucifer, if he is unredeemed, devolves into complete destruction through the Asuras.  If Lucifer is redeemed by Christ, however—if he is filled and permeated with the Good—then we have the chance to wrest evolution away from the Asuric and Sorathic impulses that will become every stronger after the confrontation with Ahriman.

A friend pointed out that all sense organs began as wounds.  What does this imply in terms of the “sensory apparatus” of mass surveillance?  It is a massive wound on Mother Earth. This wound is the crucifixion of the Etheric Christ.  But just as Christ’s wounds reestablished the lost connection between humanity and the hierarchies (all the way up to the Father), so the Crucifixion of the Earth will lead to a resurrection, reconnecting us with the elemental beings (all the way down to the Mother).  It is this force that will overturn the tables of technology; it is the advent of such a time period that we will turn to in the section “Rosicrucian Impulse.”  There we will find further tools available to us to come to the aid of the Good and transform Evil.

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