Your Enna has been very quiet for too long - apologies for that!
The big excuse has been the next book. The past few months have required tunnel concentration, and left no space for other writings.
Said book is being printed locally, and should soon be in the pipeline in the US.
It is the sequel, so to speak, of Krivda, for it introduces what I like to call the simple way of the natural human mystic - practical-and-mystical - back into re-integration from all the dis-integration to which humanity has been subjected.
What this post is about has much relevance to this new book, although the latter does not discuss the doppelganger and the wetiko as such, for these are not its specific focus.
It did however, due to some precious contributions from early readers, make me add some material related to the ‘alien inhabitant’ inside us - call it doppelganger, wetiko, or variations of mind virus. I lump them all, for practical-contemplative purposes, into the ‘ego-mind’, rather than dwell on the nuances and differences.
Where Rudolf Steiner and Paul Levy have devoted deep study and work to the doppelganger and wetiko respectively, I mainly perceive different facets of the ‘alien inhabitant’ of the ego-mind. To the latter, we obey. Or we fight against it. It depends how aware of it we are, and whether we have a contemplative practice that fosters such awareness. But in any case, it puts us in a stress response of fight or flight.
You will find my practical-and-mystical approach to it all in the book. Here I would like to give just an appetizer, by highlighting a few major points from Steiner’s vision of the doppelganger for it definitely refers to an ‘alien inhabitant’.
Fortunately Steiner’s work on the doppelganger is laid out very clearly by Andreas Neider in a book titled The Electronic Doppelganger’ - which I highly recommend for it is oh-so relevant to our times, even if one does not agree with all that Steiner says.
Doppelganger means ‘double goer’, not just ‘the double’ - it is dynamic, not static. It makes us ‘go places’ and ‘do stuff’ that mostly serves it rather than us. It is not who or what we are as humans.
It is a distinct discarnate entity that, according to Steiner, enters into a new human just before birth, and is some kind of soul-entity of a formerly living human who remains stuck in attachment to the physical for lack of spiritual cultivation. This notion may be very close to that of the death-trap whereby the occult forces recycle hapless human souls over and over again. I would say it can also be an entity of not-so human origin, or even a demonic entity.
The crucial and practical insight from Steiner is that this ‘alien’ in us is lives in and governs the electric circuitry in our bodies, namely that of the nervous system. Furthermore, all such entities are said to be driven by the materialist-mechanist ahrimanic impulse that is intent on taking over this reality - Earth, life, and in particular the human being - into its own dream of a machine realm.
Since the nervous system goes hand in hand with the brain - whereby brain-thought is tied up with sensory nervous input - the ‘alien’ has everything to do with cultivating brain intelligence at the expense of the other intelligences and subtle senses that used to be better integrated in the human past. This drives the accelerating evolution of today towards the merging of human and machine, via the brain and nervous system. The process involves making human soul and spirit power available to the machine realm, via electricity. These energies of the human are not directly accessible to the envious and greedy machine gods.
Is it any wonder that for western modernity, the ‘mind’ nowadays is so easily conflated with the ‘brain’? And how exquisitely pernicious the notion that this mind is the monkey-mind and ego-mind that spiritual people must control or manage to make empty… when it is not them in the first place. How exquisitely perverse the association of an alien mind with ‘ego’, meaning ‘I’… so that spiritual people can spend a lifetime fighting an ‘ego’ that is not them, while the alien mind will continue to rule from the electric shadows as long as it is not recognized for what it is.
The alien mind must keep us busy with whatever it wants for us not to go searching beyond its empire. That translates as stress, doing-ness, distorted spirituality, and the rule of the sympathetic nervous system in which the nerves are busily pushing their electric currency throughout the whole psycho-physiological human. It drives our fears for its own specific kind of intelligence is predicated on its own far greater fear. It makes it difficult to switch to the parasympathetic where the nerves do not run the show and the mind stops its otherwise unrelenting churning of thoughts not of our true human nature. It keeps us from activating the cerebrospinal-spinal fluid where our spiritual nature operates, says Steiner.
In this way, the ‘alien’ mind that never allows the body to truly relax, rest and repair, is the largest source of our ailments. And it ends up making us hate the body, dream of escape from this earthly illusion if we are spiritually minded, and divorces us from Nature and Earth - body and Nature are thus the scapegoats for sins not of their doing.
You can draw your own conclusions from this very small sample of what Steiner has to say about the doppelganger. And you might have some astute contributions for a discussion right here.
Cultivate the other energies and the true powers of the human being outside the realm of the impostor mind; identify stress moments when the alien mind dominates; discover how this alien mind tricks you into false beliefs, and into how its empire ushers in the machine human; fall into your true self in the embrace of Nature, with hands in the dirt… and in remembrance of a cosmic human identity.
The upcoming book is all about putting the natural human mystic in charge. For us to restore our broken humanity. And without fighting off the alien mind, but eventually by gently neutralizing its fears and bringing it round to become our friend in this life.
So very wonderful to hear from you, Enna.........( Also very serendipitous as I just purchased Steiner's Theosophy yesterday as I have not yet read it.) Looking very much forward to your new creation.
Dear Enna,
This comment is out of place, but I have an etymology question and you are the perfect person for me to ask it. I keep seeing references to the sun god cult, that Jesus is part of. Writings often include the word "son" as relevant (sun = son). I speak (modern) Greek, and am wondering if there is a relationship in Greek, which would give that correlation more relevance to me. I found this etymological breakdown:
'son (n.)
Old English sunu "son, descendant," from Proto-Germanic *sunus (source also of Old Saxon and Old Frisian sunu, Old Norse sonr, Danish søn, Swedish son, Middle Dutch sone, Dutch zoon, Old High German sunu, German Sohn, Gothic sunus "son"). The Germanic words are from PIE *su(e)-nu- "son" (source also of Sanskrit sunus, Greek huios, Avestan hunush, Armenian ustr, Lithuanian sūnus, Old Church Slavonic synu, Russian and Polish syn "son"), a derived noun from root *seue- (1) "to give birth" (source also of Sanskrit sauti "gives birth," Old Irish suth "birth, offspring"). '
... and can see possibly a relationship between 'ηλιος and υιός, which is spelled γιός these days. What do you think about this?
I love you! I have watched as many videos as I can of you, and have bought Krivda. I'm about halfway through it. When I watch you in videos I want to just sit with you, in silence and in conversation.
Φιλιά πολλά!