Summer Harvest

Continuing on with our collection of “Greatest Hits” from fantastic planet, we now present the “Fear” series, an intersection between forteana and Gnosticism. This particular series appeared over the course of a year or so and wasn’t originally intended to be smushed together, but it’s easier to repost it that way over here. The posts are also available in revised, dead-tree format in my two collections of essays, Running Towards the Bomb and The Pirate’s Garden. Once again, there may be broken links, etc. etc. etc.

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One: Fear, Surveillance and the Alien Other

WARNING: Spooky stuff ahead. That’s right, baby– from dandelions to evil ultradimensional entities all in one day. Viva verisimillitude!

Tim and Dan both have exceptional posts about the encroaching surveillance state, both coming to the excellent conclusion that the best way to approach the monitors of the Authorities (be they temporal or Archonic) is without fear. Here’s a great excerpt from Dan’s post that illustrates the point:

So in light of that view it seems that police-state style surveillance merely re-ignites issues that are inherent in our human makeup and always have been. Those at different psychological stages are the ones who are disagreeing. But I still don’t think this justifies the surveillance. There’s one more issue, which I think explains why our rulers want this surveillance and why we must “neutralise” it.

Fear.

I very much doubt that the authorities care what they’re gonna see on these cams. Police state surveillance as an incredibly effective psychological operation, which gives the rulers a sense of control, thus fulfilling their psychopathic needs, while at the same time pushing most of us into a state of fear. Fear is the hoofprint of the Archon, and fear is the way in which we further empower authority, evil or any appropriate Archonian manifestation. This is what’s wrong with surveillance, the fear part, but it’s also what will allow us to break free of it. When there is no fear, there is no point in the surveillance; by not fearing, you rip the heart out of the psyop and thus render it useless.

As some of you may have discerned, one of the direction’s I’m taking with the Ultradimensional Terror series, and other posts on the blog in general, is that there are Ultradimensional entities which exist on a border between objectivity and subjectivity that may indeed feed on our Fear (and other heightened emotions). These entities have been referred to, in various cultures, as demons, aliens, fairies, etc. etc. etc., but for the sake of brevity, and since this is, after all, a Gnostic blog, we refer to them herein, as did Dan, as the Archons.

Now then, why would these entities need to feed on intense human reaction? Well, for the same reason we need to eat food: if we stop eating, we’ll die. The difference in this case is that the Archons, according to Gnostic myth, are essentially illusory creations of what may be an insane demigod, who are sustained by the reactions they create within human experience. Take, for instance, the veritable catalog of Archonic names and their attributes found in Gnostic literature. We find critters like “Blaomen,” the ruling Demon of “fear” passion. Bearer of dread, fawning, agony, and shame. We find “Ephememphi,” Ruling Demon of “bodily pleasure” passion. Bearer of wickedness, empty pride, etc. We find “Nenentophni,” Ruling Demon of “grief” passion. Bearer of envy, jealousy, distress, trouble, pain, callousness, anxiety, mourning, etc. For almost every single possible heightened human state, we find a corresponding Archon.

Let’s pretend, for a moment, that Blaomen actually *physically* exists. It sits in a dark section of the universe, connected to tubes and wires, through which it draws life force by emitting and collecting “dread.” Suppose, however, that human beings no longer felt “dread”? Gnostic myth would claim that, since this Archon an illusion, Blaomen would begin to weaken, eventually simply fading away. In other words, the Archons need to stimulate heightened passions within humanity in order to continue their existence!

Okay, so let’s suppose that there is some program with which Ultradimensional entities basically harvest human “passions.” First of all, since we all contain a “spark” of divine salvation granted us by the Logosophia, they couldn’t get away (at this time) with doing so *overtly*. It’s easier for them to operate covertly, undetected. Now then, throughout human history, these critters have relied upon what are essentially Direct Current power supplies: isolated abduction incidents, ritual abuse, pseudo-religious ecstacy of the false variety, the sensations produced by the confusion and cognitive dissonance of a ghost sighting or an abduction. These are incredibly effective methods by which to “harvest” passions, because “normal” people don’t believe in them, but remain attracted to them.

However, let’s assume that, like all powerful individuals, they want lots more of it. They want to produce, somehow, an Alternating Current of passions that would allow them to maintain and expand their power. What would be the best way to go about doing such a thing? It’s glaringly obvious: by hijacking the Political State. By utilizing Direct Current power supplies, the Archons can create Alternating Current power supplies within any organized body.

Although these entities can feed on any heightened passion, the easiest one to instill is Fear (textbook stuff, but true nonetheless). Not only is it easier to frighten people, there’s a weird little part of all of us that *enjoys* being frightened (otherwise, why all the roller coasters?). How better to frighten people than by turning the State into the Strict Father? Sure, it’s easy to argue that War could be an excellent powerhouse for the Archons, but even the longest wars have to end, and to often (for the Archons) the citizens of states which are constantly at war overthrow the tyrants in power. No, one of the best powerhouses for the Archonic machine is the State which is constantly expecting war.

If the Archons can create and maintain a state of constant anticipation and fear, the Security State, they can open up an all-you-can-eat buffet! With mysterious “enemies” on the horizon, the Security State can get away with increasing levels of secrecy, which contribute to those DC power supplies, too; in a Security State, the press doesn’t ask uncomfortable questions about prostitutes in the White House or hundreds of missing kids. Most citizens feed the Archons unwittingly, by believing that there’s a constant need to be afraid. And here’s a kicker: those who are outraged — OUTRAGED, I TELL YOU! — by the actions of the administration in power *also feed the Archons with their passions!*

Don’t get me wrong: by no means does this mean that we need to all become passionless monks. Nor does it mean to imply that non-Security States can’t be just as insidious as Security States (vide The Clintonian USA, for instance– atopic for another discussion). The difference is this: the passions that *we produce on our own* cannot feed the Archons, because they’re genuine. Riding a roller coaster is a blast of harmless fun! Being forced to ride a roller coaster by a six-armed alien is most certainly *not* fun. In the same way, being afraid because you’re *genuinely afraid* is normal, natural– it’s even a defense mechanism against the Archons! Eliminating all fear wouldn’t only be impossible, it’d be dangerous. However, the fear resulting from being afraid because *you’ve been told to be afraid* feeds the Archons! Because the Archons are illusory beings, they can only feed on illusion!

In Castaneda’s books, don Juan is constantly telling Carlos that he’s just pretending to be afraid of the weird experiences he has, that he’s not really truly afraid at all. This is the same thing. Carlos isn’t *actually* afraid, he just thinks he’s afraid because his culture has instructed him to fear. His pretend fear is an illusion, but it’s different from his actual, valuable fear. And, of course, it doesn’t have to be fear upon which the Archons feed. It can be joy, grief, pain, suffering. If you’re doing it because you’ve been told to do so, you’re feeding the Archons. If it’s real, you’re not.

And, this brings us to another, horrifying but somehow just conclusion concerning people who do awful things to other people. When we consider, for instance, ritual abuse, or abduction scenarios, or even Abu Ghraib in terms of “feeding the Archons,” we automatically assume that the Archons are feeding off of the pain or grief of the victim. However, that pain or grief isn’t genuine. The emotions off of which the Archons feed in these cases are, instead, the emotions of those perpetrating the crimes! In many of these cases, it’s not fear, pain or sorrow upon which the Archons feed, it’s the elation, lust, power or other drives being experienced by those who hold the whip!

You see, there’s a caveat to all of this, and it’s connected to the definition of evil as “anything that vilifies the Other by reducing its value.” In an imperfect world, acts of evil are part of the imperfection, and therefore illusory. And, the reactions caused within humans by committing acts of evil are also illusory, and capable of feeding the Archonic forces!

Before I conclude, I wanted to mention one thing in relation to this treatment of individuals as others. It’s really fun to consider the creepy possibility that some people who live on the planet Earth are aliens, or are possessed by demons, or are shape-shifting reptiles or, worst of all, “organic portals” — empty masses of protein with no intrinsic value. Hell, I’ll bet David Icke loved “V” as much as the rest of us. However, when you start thinking like this and allowing it to affect your perceptions, are you not committing an evil act?

Everybody who lives and walks the Earth and experiences reality has a part of the divine spark. Every individual being, no matter how repulsive or evil their actions, no matter whether they’ve got million-year contracts with Cthulhu and deliver fresh babies daily, is still a human individual and needs to be treated as such. To claim that evil is committed because of the presence among us of “nonhumans who look like humans” is to claim that some individuals have no intrinsic worth. Everyone– everyone– is open equally to the influence of the Archons and to the influence of the Logos/Sophia. Should it turn out that there are indeed “aliens among us” or “organic portals,” they are *still* individuals who contain the divine spark, and are therefore human and open to the Logos/Sophia.

To be sure, one can posit until one is blue in the face that certain individuals may or may not be knowingly working for the Dark Forces between history’s lines, but to deny them humanity is to committ an act of evil and, in so doing, feed the Archons.

Finally, one more note about whether the Archons are “real” or “internal products of the mind.” I refer to a quote from the LA Weekly’s article on Bishop +Hoeller:

Hoeller is speaking of the Demiurge and his cohorts, the Archons, and I cannot stop myself from asking the agnostic question: Are we talking allegorically here, or should I double-bolt the door tonight? His answer provokes a shiver, and makes me wonder if M. Night Shyamalan should be added to the list of Gnostic filmmakers. Hoeller describes these “enemies of gnosis” as “forms of transpersonal consciousness which have been actualized in some way and have an existence outside the individual psyche.” In other words, they’re not simply “in our heads.”

Two: Fear Itself: Gnosticism and Spiritual Terror, Parts One and Two

When analysed in any kind of depth, fear is a really interesting emotion. The hallowed halls of SCIENCE generally maintain that fear is a useful biological tool designed to help thrust the body into the “fight-or-flight” response, in which biological reaction to unexpected and threatening stimuli prepare us to stand our ground against, or flee in terror from, any sabretooth tiger we happen to stumble across on our way home from work. Modern conditions known as anxiety disorders result from the fact that there are no longer sabretooth tigers, so when we experience ‘panic’ attacks or social anxiety we’re interacting with the world incorrectly, or at least unproportionally.

Although this certainly seems an adequate description of what happens when one is afraid, it doesn’t really address the root cause of fear. After all, one could argue that a more effective response to a sabretooth tiger might not be fear, which often causes irrational reaction, but swift and reasoned assessment of the situation *without* fear: recognizing the danger and reacting based on the safest set of options. We tend to claim a value exists in fear, and perhaps one does in extreme situations, but nonetheless facing extreme situations– internal and external– without fear in this fashion is often considered a mark of enlightenment on many mystical paths.

On the other hand, some spiritual paths value fear to such an extent that they focus upon the experience of the fear of God(s) as a necessary component in religious experience. Hellfire and Damnation, Human sacrifice, Greek worship of Pan (”panic!”), Mystical FEAR as a complement to Mystical Love– why the dichotomy? Does it actually exist? What, exactly, is this fear thing, and where did it come from? Is there spiritual value in being afraid of the God?

According to the Gnostic Gospel of Truth, “[I]gnorance of the Father brought about terror and fear. And terror became dense like a fog, that no one was able to see. Because of this, error became strong.” Conceptually, this origin of fear makes perfect sense: the greatest fear is fear of the unknown. What would be the greatest fear of all? FEAR of everything! This fear occludes, and forces us to create images and possibilities of which we are afraid because we have no way of knowing otherwise. It’s a modern cliche that horror movies are scarier when the horror is subtle, psychological instead of blatant and in-your-face. Universal fear proceeds in the same fashion: ignorace of the All by its Parts causes said Parts to create images or shadows. Since we’re unsure how to react to these shadows, we become afraid.

Because of our image-creating predilections, we only ever really fear the possibility that something might happen. For instance, someone afraid of drowning isn’t afraid of the act of dying via suffocation, a purely physical phenomenon, so much as she is afraid of the *possibility* of drowning, so she doesn’t go into the swimming pool. Similarly, someone afraid of being mugged isn’t afraid so much of the actual mugging as the possibility of being mugged and the resultant pain and loss of personal control it entails. So, she doesn’t walk down dark streets at night. Even someone facing a gruesome axe murderer head-on isn’t afraid so much of the physical, material aspects of the axe murderer as by the (rather immediate) possibility that said axe murderer will kill her. You are *not* afraid of killer bees, you’re afraid of the possibility that they’ll sting you to death. You are *not* afraid of heights, you’re afraid that you might fall.

In reality, these possibilities rarely, if ever, come to pass. Our aquaphobic will most likely *not* drown, our mace-carrier will most likely *not* be mugged, and most of us will *not* be party to a chainsaw massacre. This doesn’t prevent some of us from obsessing over it to the point that it becomes a disorder, which, of course, affects our lives in an extremely negative fashion. Most of our fears are False, and self-created, and those that have honest-to-goodness reason to be afraid are truly experiencing the manifestation of their worst, but imagined, potentialities.

So, what does this mean in practice? To the Gnostic, it means that, as image-creating denizens of an imperfect Universe, we are direly suceptible to control by the Demiurge and the Archonic entities under his wings. We read in the Dialogue of the Saviour that, “Truly, fear is the power [of the Rulers]. So if you are going to be afraid of what is about to come upon you, it will engulf you.” In Gnostic mythology, they’ve been using this fear as a control method since the very beginning. As that old Dragon Yaldabaoth and the Archons desire to maintain control over the world in which we live, they do so through the rule of FEAR, letting us scare ourselves into submission with illusory threats and vacant horrors.

[T]he archons do not know that it is an ineffable union of undefiled truth, as exists among the sons of light, of which they made an imitation, having proclaimed a doctrine of a dead man and lies so as to resemble the freedom and purity of the perfect assembly, (and) themselves with their doctrine to fear and slavery, worldly cares, and abandoned worship, being small (and) ignorant, since they do not contain the nobility of the truth, for they hate the one in whom they are, and love the one in whom they are not. For they did not know the Knowledge of the Greatness, that it is from above and (from) a fountain of truth, and that it is not from slavery and jealousy, fear and love of worldly matter.

If this reminds you of the current political atmosphere in much of the world, you’re absolutely correct. As I mentioned in “FEAR, Surveillance and the Alien Other“:

How better to frighten people than by turning the State into the Strict Father? Sure, it’s easy to argue that War could be an excellent powerhouse for the Archons, but even the longest wars have to end, and to often (for the Archons) the citizens of states which are constantly at war overthrow the tyrants in power. No, one of the best powerhouses for the Archonic machine is the State which is constantly expecting war.

If the Archons can create and maintain a state of constant anticipation and fear, the Security State, they can open up an all-you-can-eat buffet! With mysterious “enemies” on the horizon, the Security State can get away with increasing levels of secrecy, which contribute to those DC power supplies, too; in a Security State, the press doesn’t ask uncomfortable questions about prostitutes in the White House or hundreds of missing kids. Most citizens feed the Archons unwittingly, by believing that there’s a constant need to be afraid. And here’s a kicker: those who are outraged — OUTRAGED, I TELL YOU! — by the actions of the administration in power *also feed the Archons with their passions!*

The essay I’ve just quoted is predicated on the idea that the Archons and their servitors actually feed on our fear. Whether literal or metaphorical (or, as I prefer, both), fear is based on the creation of internal possibilities, or images. Every time we make fear-based images and allow them to control us, an– er, Archon gets its wings, as it were. This is because we’ve internally divorced ourselves from the All, and widened the gap between the All and its Parts in a recreation of the original error of ignorance, strengthening the Archonic forces– “Feeding” the Archons. Thus, the more we fear, the more we create images (and assign them value via passion), and the more images we create, the more we invest the Archons with control, and the cycle continues. Thus, the Security State, a concept that we call modern, but actually evident in any culture in which people feel the need to lock their doors at night.

There’s also another kind of fear produced by the Archons, the supernatural fear inspired by their servants, what we’ve referred to previously as “Ultradimensional Entities” or, sometimes, Jinns. If maintaining a Security State is a way by which the Archons create a kind of Alternating Current power supply, the Jinns administer Direct Current batteries in the form of human experience of the passion of fear. I’ve covered a lot of this already in “FEAR, Surveillance and the Alien Other,” and refer the reader to that essay for an in-depth look at the Archonic feeding process.

Okay, so let’s suppose that there is some program with which Ultradimensional entities basically harvest human “passions.” First of all, since we all contain a “spark” of divine salvation granted us by the Logosophia, they couldn’t get away (at this time) with doing so *overtly*. It’s easier for them to operate covertly, undetected. Now then, throughout human history, these critters have relied upon what are essentially Direct Current power supplies: isolated abduction incidents, ritual abuse, pseudo-religious ecstacy of the false variety, the sensations produced by the confusion and cognitive dissonance of a ghost sighting or an abduction. These are incredibly effective methods by which to “harvest” passions, because “normal” people don’t believe in them, but remain attracted to them. . . .

So is there such a thing as “good” fear? On an individual level, it’s questionable whether or not we could call honest-to-goodness *enjoyable* “fear” experiences real fear. For instance, roller coasters do instil a sense of “fear,” but people like it enough to keep coming back for the “rush.” Are they really afraid if they keep coming back? Or, take those who enjoy being scared by attempting to encounter spooks. Are they *really* afraid of spooks? Or, as in most cases, are they simply scaring themselves by creating imaginings based on ghost stories they’d heard before? Scary movies, Hallowe’en Haunted Houses– it seems that when fear is a personal choice, it’s okay. It’s based on an individual decision, so it doesn’t require a complete loss of control.

What about Spiritual FEAR, the proverbial “FEAR of God”? It seems important to differentiate between the false fear of the Archons and the genuine, directed experience of Cosmic Terror, between the FEAR of God in Love preached by St. Francis:

If a man possesses any grace or any divine virtue, it is holy fear which preserves it to him. And he who has not yet acquired grace or virtue, acquires it by holy fear.

The holy fear of God is a channel of divine grace, inasmuch as it quickly leads the soul wherein it dwells to the attainment of holiness and all divine graces. No creature that ever fell into sin would have so fallen had it possessed the holy fear of God. But this holy gift of fear is given only to the perfect, because the more perfect any man is, the more timorous and humble he is.

Blessed is the man who looks upon this world as his prisonhouse, and bears in mind continually how grievously he has offended his Lord.

and the Evil FEAR of the Demiurge preached by Jonathan Edwards:

Consider the fearful danger you are in: it is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you, as against many of the damned in hell. You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it, and burn it asunder; and you have no interest in any Mediator, and nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done, nothing that you can do, to induce God to spare you one moment.

In Gnosticism, as in Zen, *anything* can lead to enlightenment, including a profound experience of genuine fear. For instance, consider the following selection from Thunder, Perfect Mind, spoken by Sophia, the Feminine aspect of the God:

Be on your guard!
Do not hate my obedience
and do not love my self-control.
In my weakness, do not forsake me,
and do not be afraid of my power.
For why do you despise my fear
and curse my pride?
But I am she who exists in all fears
and strength in trembling.

The FEAR of God preached by St. Francis, as with the Gnostics, is the genuine “fear” cultivated in the heart of the imperfect being through the knowledge of one’s own inner ignorance. It’s completely different from the paltry imaginal fear of the Archons (or Jonathan Edwards), and is expressed far more potently by the phrase “panikon deima,” literally “panic fear,” ascribed to Pan, the Greek All-God. This kind of fear is sudden, intense and imageless– the kind of fear that strikes one with uncanny immediacy when all alone, sans external influence.

To put it another way, Johnathan Edwards et al speak of “being afraid of God,” an essentially Demiurgic concept that helps nobody but the Archons. St. Francis and the Gnostics, however, speak of being given the graceful experience of God’s fear, sharing an experience with the God. It’s the fear of the suffering Christos on the Cross, of coming to understand that the All is Broken and needs healing.

HAWK
There is also a legend of a place called The Black Lodge: the shadow self of the White Lodge, a place of dark forces that pull on this world. A world of nightmares: shamans reduced to crying children; angry spirits pouring from the woods; graves opening like flowers.

COOPER
Dangerous.

HAWK
The legend says every spirit must pass through there on the path to perfection. There you will meet your own shadow self. My people call it the Dweller on the Threshold. But it is said that if you confront the Black Lodge with imperfect courage, it will utterly annihilate your soul.

COOPER
Holy Smokes.

– Twin Peaks, “Episode 18 : Masked Ball”
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In Part I of this essay, we discussed the nature of FEAR: where it comes from and how it manifests. We broached the subject of Archonic control systems, fear as a spiritual battery for nasty critters, and the idea of “Holy FEAR,” an experience of the Terror of the God when it encounters its own dissolution. Today, we’re going to take another tack and look at some ways to combat fear, and to turn the tables on the demons (external and internal) that seek to turn our fear against us.

So what’s your biggest fear? What is it that keeps your eyelids tightly open in the middle of the night, keeps your monkey-mind chattering until dawn? Is it the possibility that you’ll be awakened in the middle of the night by a bright beam of light and taken away by large-eyed figures? Is it the idea that your own government might kidnap you and perform unspeakable acts upon your body and soul? Is it the concept of death, the potential that you’ll suddenly stop breathing? Or, that you’ll die alone? Or is your fear of the Devil, that if you don’t pray properly every night, or don’t control your evil urges, you might be banished to the lake of fire? What do each of these examples have in common?

The common element we see is that these fears are internal aspects of one’s own mind. This is the first step one must acknowledge if one wishes to overcome fears of any kind.

Along with this, it helps to keep in mind that fear cannot be considered “valid” or “invalid;” what seems like a perfectly valid fear to one person might be laughable to another. I once knew a girl who was absolutely terrified of humpback whales. We’d laugh about it, but if she saw a whale on TV or heard “whale music” she’d literally freeze in terror or run out of the room. There is no “stupid” fear, no reason to be ashamed or embarassed because you’re afraid of a particular something.

This isn’t to say that none of these possibilities will *actually* happen. These events very well may occur. Our fear of these possibilities, however, exists only within our psyches. If something we’re afraid of actually happens to us, we’re not *afraid* of it while it’s happening– we’re *experiencing* it. This might sound odd, but think about a scary situation– let’s say the dentist’s drill. Our victim is strapped into the chair, the drill emits a high-pitched whine, comes closer and closer, all the while the victim experiences fear. When the drill actually hits the mouth, however, the fear is transformed into passionate experience.

Think about all of the stories you’ve read or heard about people facing down situation that sound terrifying. In many of them, the storyteller mentions that at a certain point when the manifestation of the situation becomes inevitable, the fear vanishes. In very many cases, once one has emerged through the situation in question, one loses one’s fear in general– we’ve all heard about the old cliche about how “you must face your fears to overcome them.”

Of course, this isn’t necesarily true in the literal sense. There’s only one way to literally face the fear of, say, death, and although I’m sure if you do it you won’t be afraid anymore, you also won’t be much of anything else. Still, though, there’s a bit of life in this tired old horse, as facing one’s fears in the internal sense is the best way to get past them.

Tradition tells us that the best way to overcome fear is to face one’s fear with “perfect courage.” A common method for people trying to face their fear is to try to deny the fear, to chant some mantra in the hopes that the fear won’t manifest if you don’t believe it will manifest. We’ve all done it; walking down a dark street at night, we might try to reassure ourselves by repeating, “I’ll be fine, nothing’s going to happen to me,” until we reach the light. The problem with this method is that nobody told the mugger in the shadows that he doesn’t exist. We’re like the Cowardly Lion in the Wizard of Oz, who enters the Haunted Forest chanting “I don’t believe in spooks, I don’t believe in spooks,” until he’s hoisted away by the winged monkeys.

At this point, of course, he switches from banishment to appeasement: “I do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks; I do, I do, I do, I do, I do!” This is another method for facing one’s fears, one that’s particularly poignant on Hallowe’en. When confronted with the fact that spooks and entities might be wandering about lookin’ for blood, we might be tempted to leave out sweets or milk or cookies to keep the buggers at bay. The same inclination has us referring to the baby-snatching faerie folk as “The Good People,” or even begging Jehovah or the Archons for their infinite mercy so they don’t burn us for all eternity. Sure, these methods might make us feel better by making us think we have a bit more control over our fears, but they actually serve to reinforce the fears in question, giving more power to the entities or Archons of which we’re afraid.

We even try to appease our internal fears by “making deals” with God. How often have you heard this one inside your brain?: “Dear God. Please help me get this raise and I promise I will never gamble at a casino again.” Once more, it’s a matter of trying to overcome one’s fear of going in to ask for a raise by appeasing God with promises of good deeds.

All of these methods, though perhaps efficacious in the short-term, miss out on an utterly essential and powerful component of the fight against fear: *How* one combats fear is substantially less important than one’s *attitude* while so doing. In literature dealing with “Ultradimensional Entities,” be they Demons, Jinn or UFOnauts, we find the same thing again and again. I discussed this earlier in a post called “I Dream of Jinni“:

According to Islam, it’s possible to defeat the Jinn using “strength and faith.” The following tale from the literature includes a telling description of a typical Jinn, and an effective response:
Strength of faith and religion in general will also prevent the jinn from harming a person, so much so that if they were to fight, the one who has faith would win. ‘Abd-Allaah ibn Mas’ood (may Allaah be pleased with him) said: “A man from among the Companions of Muhammad met a man from among the jinn. They wrestled, and the human knocked down the jinn. The human said to him, ‘You look small and skinny to me, and your forearms look like the front paws of a dog. Do all the jinn look like this, or only you?’ He said, ‘No, by Allaah, among them I am strong, but let us wrestle again, and if you defeat me I will teach you something that will do you good.’ The human said, ‘Fine.’ He said, ‘Recite, ‘Allaah! None has the right to be worshipped but He, the Ever-living, the One Who sustains and protects all that exists…’ [Aayat al-Kursi – al-Baqarah 2:255 – interpretation of the meaning]. The human said, ‘Fine.’ He said, ‘You will never recite this in your house but the Shaytaan will come out of it like a donkey breaking wind, and he will never come back in until the next morning.’”
Small and skinny, paw-like forearms– this description could have been taken right out of the Humanoid Sightings Database.

Note also that according to every source I could find, the best way to protect one’s self from Jinn is to face them with perfect courage. This conflicts only slightly with the Muslim admonition that prayer and faith should be used to combat the Jinn. I maintain that it’s less the prayer and more the ability to face down something this weird without fear that does the trick. Of course, UFO literature records many accounts of prayer effectively disspelling encounters with these creatures, but contains just as many accounts (such as the infamous Da Silva account) of religious prayers and paraphenelia having absolutely no effect whatsoever. It seems to me that the key to repulsing these entities isn’t within the particular prayer or ritual used to disspell them, but in the attitude of the individual in question!

This is what we mean by facing fear with “perfect courage”– it means facing fear with absolute certainty and understanding, with a cultivated, open attitude and overcoming it with assurance.

Yeah, it’s not an easy thing to do.

There’s no perfect way to overcome an immediate fear, but one can cultivate an attitude via gradual practice and slowly allow fear to release its grasp. As mentioned, the first step is in realizing that one’s fears are typically projections of images in one’s own mind, that the substance of one’s fear is pretty much completely illusory.

Next, one must really decide exactly what one is afraid of. We’re rarely afraid of what we think we’re afraid of. For instance, someone afraid of drowning might actually be afraid of asphyxiation, or of dying alone, or being swallowed by a whale. Or, it might be that their farily standard fear of mortality is manifesting itself as a fear of drowning. The point is to REALLY investigate the fear in question, to sit in a dark room and meditate on it.

Then, when one has a firm grasp on the root of the fear, one THROWS one’s self into it! NOT literally, of course, but experiencing as much as possible the effects of one’s internal fear-images, addressing all possibilities, “facing” the fear-images in their full potency– sinking into them and realizing that they are part of one’s self. The idea is NOT to banish one’s fears, but to experience them as much as possible within and to embrace them as part of one’s self, to realize that the external experiences of which one believes one is afraid are simply experiences, and that the fear itself comes from within.

As one has this realization, one will begin to feel a sense of calm and acceptance, which is the weapon one can use when confronted with external fear. This sense of calmness is the beginning of perfect courage. It becomes a well into which one can tap when confronted by something fearful. Instead of instilling a false sense of security and control, this calmness becomes an actual weapon which one can use to have actual control over the fear one feels.

And this, my friends, is how fighting your own fears helps fight against the Archons. Through coming to an understanding that fear is within, and learning to combat the fear that lies within, one begins to realize that 99.999999% of the fears we have are nothing more than shadows. When one has this realization, it begins manifesting itself in one’s interactions with the universe itself. After all, we’re all parts of the universe, experiencing itself as a plurality, so when we’re afraid of something, we’re only being afraid of ourselves! The only true terror is the terror of one’s own reflection, one’s imaginary doppelganger. Beginning to overcome this fear causes one to overcome the fear of the Eternal Otherness of things, and grants one the gift of a more complete interaction with the Universe. Every time this happens, the Archons lose control.

The Archons *want* us to fear, to fear one another especially. When this cultivated calmness is extended to one’s surroundings, one finds it affecting everything. One becomes less afraid of things like other people, be they terrorists or robbers or pizza delivery men. One starts getting crazy ideas about hunting for spooks, or leaving one’s doors unlocked at night. One begins to realize that there’s really not all that much to be afraid of, and begins actually talking to strangers.

Hallowe’en (Samhain) is so cool because it allows us the chance to do this collectively. Is this why the servants of the Archons are always so keen on banning it?