Power's Open Secret
Happy Halloween!! Daring and Delightful Samhain!!
As the veils are thin, and channels of communication and communion are open, I’d like to make a small offering.
This was the first sustained philosophical writing I did after leaving the monastery and arriving in C-bus – late 2023. It traverses planes between ecstatic poetry and academic scholarship. Who knows what it is?!
It offers a sparking glimpse into the ideas and horizons guiding my ongoing research. I hope you enjoy!!
(As always, your comments, feedback, and reflection are warmly welcomed. Throughout November, I’ll be immersed in writing for Ph.D candidacy exams, so my responses and follow-ups will come later.)
Power’s Open Secret
In a world defined by the categories of binary logic, what is excluded fundamentally is the middle, the intermediate, the in-between – the liminal zone between existence and nonexistence, where all appearances come to pass. This zone is an interzone, a matter of entanglements, an infinite nexus where each thing is always many things other than itself.
Regard this exclusion as the fundamental enforcement: enforcement of denial, enforcement of concealment, enforcement of secrecy, enforcement of ignorance. Yet this enforcement is simultaneously a production and ordering of knowledge. Denial/reification = endless game of hide-and-seek.
In the 1880s, Charles Fort observed that investment in “Dogmatic Science” produced a motley assortment of “damned facts,” figures of knowledge unassimilable within the dominant, reified worldview. Foucault, in Madness and Civilization, showed that the structure of modern subjectivity is itself constituted through denial – simultaneously a political and clinical confinement – of the subject’s unintelligible perceptual other, pathologized as insanity.
Such controls on what can be known – which likewise define what knowledge is prohibited, outlawed, forbidden, denied, secreted – establish the basic code of operation for an all-encompassing order of power. They do not, however, constitute a fixed threshold of secrecy and revelation, as if to set the stage for a knowing-awakening that would liberate from the grid of power-denial altogether. The bounds dividing the authorized from the damned, the hidden from the revealed, are shifting, mobile, contested.
This mobility obviates the call for a “Perennial Philosophy,” or a universal soteriological path transmitted through hidden channels of unchanging tradition. Not that religious aspirations are false or invalid; rather, they operate as techno-simulations and perspectival constructions, just as any machineries involved in the formation and deformation of subjectivities. Metaphysical paths to finality or escape-from-the-grid function only as portals, passages within an endless play of forces – however consolidated. Layers upon layers of simulation … Absolutisms are just stagnant, unreflective modes of relativity…
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Gnosis, then, moves in ecstasies of immanence, never-ending dance of veiling and unveiling. Through folds and fractalizations, this movement is all relations. Kaleidoscopic flux of entanglements. Intelligent ecologies of appearance, spontaneously assembling. Alter-poietic conjurings of animate world-displays. Fluid, interchanging onto-cryptographies. Live mandalic micro-programs that activate, deactivate and conduct: Call these movements of power. Rifts and seams, opening in gnostic world-disclosure: This magic dreamshow simulates and encodes further simulations, multiplying to infinity. Kosmogenic techne: techno-productive, dream-weaving machineries – total disciplinary systems, paradigms, apparatuses of perception – god-minds, entelechies, reality-matrices…
In spiritual circles, these operations are organized strategically and called practices. Technologies of Self – with “Self” identifying the very threshold of appearance, prime ontological vanishing point. Traditionalist spiritual disciplines seek final liberation through Self-Knowledge. They propose an ordering of power that posits Self as Absolute, Unconditioned. This positing is itself a techno-operation, a simulating construction, an enactment of relational dynamics. All spiritualities are fluid, technological, and “altered” in this way. Mystical Realization is achieved and sustained through complex disciplinary arrangements – non-Pure.
The taboo on knowledge is not transcended once-and-for-all, then, through salvific knowledge of Self – revelation of what was hidden. Rather, power’s secret unlocks as an endlessly proliferating portal, opening to unbounded liminality, only-ness and in-betweenness of the excluded middle. This middle includes the extremes, the 0s and 1s, the terminals. Playing and replaying – interplaying – the threshold dance of true and false, the movement of power encountering itself, stepping through the mirror of Self, embracing the simulation of an illusory world, a nonexistent reality. Waking in the dream, engaging the open secret.
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This gnostic dance takes shape in specific thought-experiments, specific encounters with the apparent limits of knowledge. These involve passage through extreme skeptical scenarios, as gnosis calls into doubt all received knowledge, exposes all truth as lie. Such are the arts of forbidden knowledge. They move through a recapitulating crisis of total imprisonment<turned>liberation, total deception<turned>truth-revelation – matrices within matrices, infinitely spiraling, infinitely reflexive.
Forbidden knowledge is thus mobile and transitional. Its home is the fractal continuum, the in-between, the bardo. Herein lies the affinity of such knowledge with tantric and esoteric spiritual lineages. Gnostic enactment is mandalic, experiential – yet inconceivably material. This materiality is non-objectifiable and always in-process. Flux and relationality, not circumscribed by any prior philosophical division of subject and object.
Such materiality is transgressive and hybrid – embodying freedom through boundary-crossing, opening in mutant contact with others. The boundaries crossed are flexible and diversely arrayed: the world. This gnostic contact enacts ritual freedom. Not an ultimate illumination, but an already-consummate conversion of ecological forces, an inter-permeating communion of totalities. Every particle offers a microcosmic portal, containing the whole, presenting the play of secrecy and revelation. Gnostic conversion joyously and immersively partakes of this play.
The Perennialist model of secrecy posits spiritual Self-Illumination as the secret – mystical source of all power. Yet power is always multiple, and every presentation appears as an immediate access-point to mystery. In its very presence, appearance hides itself, keeps its secret. Appearance itself is an encryption. Power indeed operates at the very threshold of appearance, in the determination of what can and cannot appear. In order for anything to appear, infinite machinic processes of veiling and unveiling must be underway. These operate as simulation-technologies. Yet this simulation-production is also a hiding, a concealment of what is made not to appear. Technologies of power are not necessarily hidden themselves, but they enact a concealment; they encode a secret.
This movement of secretion and revelation is itself a play of illusion, a dance of appearances – an endless dream-within-a-dream that is simultaneously a waking. It contains within itself an ineradicable questionability, a kosmic joke, an inherent potential for both deception and disillusionment. This is a trickster dynamic, a hermetic materiality that is irreducibly weird, queer, phishy, cockeyed, coyote.
A metaphysical-religious hermeneutic seeks to decipher the One Great Kosmic Code and unlock its Hidden Truth. Gnostic-hermetic arts of forbidden knowledge encounter revelations as animate conversions of energy, techno-productive matrix-births, ecologies of mandalic reprogramming. These arts embody the inseparability of the spiritual and the political. They incite breakthroughs that fundamentally disrupt orders of power and open the potential for new worlds to emerge. The order of power is also the order of reality (reification). Hence, these initiatory breakthroughs are simultaneously enactments of radical self-release and liberation from delusive ontological fixity. Arts of the prison-break. These arts embody the revolutionary spirit of apocalysmo.
The secret of power always hides itself, masks itself, as the secret of Self. This is why Traditionalist metaphysics posits Self as the hidden matrix of all appearance. Yet the gnostic process reveals hidden “alien” forces operating in the place Self seemed to occupy. In this way, the metaphysical-political order is totally disrupted, imploded. The whole world-organizing system of power-knowledge functions to prevent the revelation of these hidden forces.
This dynamic is exemplified by the current situation with UFO/USO/UAPs, contact, and close encounter. An overwhelming body of evidence – including lab-tested materials, traces of exotic technologies, physician-confirmed human bodily marks and modifications, reliable multiple-witness reports, extensive radar and video footage of UFO/USO/UAPs, extraordinary circumstantial evidence, and many thousands of first-hand testimonies – far exceeding ordinary legal and scientific evidentiary requirements, has accumulated over many decades to support the hypothesis of an advanced nonhuman presence on Earth.[1] And yet the mechanisms of epistemic authority continually reject, marginalize, deny, and, if possible, erase this evidence. The order of power-knowledge simply cannot assimilate it.
The specter of advanced alien intelligence, which has lurked in the shadow of modern subjectivity since long before Descartes’ cogito, conveys the possibility that our experienced “reality” is in fact a high-tech simulation. That is, it promises to fulfill the ancient Gnostic intuition that the sensory world is projected by a technologically powerful but deceptive agency (or “demiurge”) who claims to be the One and Only omnipotent God. However, this apocalyptic scenario is only one provisional dynamic through which the gnostic play of revelations can be enacted. To uncover this deeply repressed secret is only to make way for further and deeper secrets – and deeper disclosures. The process is endless.
The “revelation” here is not just a discursive knowledge that informs people of alien presence; it is a receptive acknowledgment that enables the alien presence to appear. One might conceive this as an “unconcealment,” in line with Heidegger’s reading of the pre-Socratic aletheia – truth. Yet the alien presence is no more true or real than any other appearance. It resides with all appearances on a continuum of reification and negation. Within the dominant reality-system, the established programming matrix, it may seem that we are meeting “our creators.” But this discovery too is a simulated appearance, produced by technological forces. Such is the secret of power, operating always at the threshold of what is able to appear. In this scenario, the gnostic technologies of power perform the function of a conjuration.
A similar dynamic is present wherever there is imposition and policing of a critical ontological barrier. Criminalization of psychedelia serves as the metaphysical foundation of the modern War on Drugs, which is itself a violent continuation of colonialist efforts to exterminate indigenous spirituality and Earth medicine. In psychedelic experience, the secreted, privatized domain of subjective consciousness is exposed as the communal playground of myriad intelligent agencies, constellating spontaneously into mandalic ecologies of appearance. Arts of psychedelic gnosis involve active participation in these forbidden ecologies.
Such direct participation is necessary to disrupt the order of reality established and sustained by the long War on Drugs. Once again, the revolutionary power of this disruption is enacted through gnostic technologies operating at the edge of appearance and intelligibility. Power’s secret, its magic, manifests as the contestation of a metaphysical taboo, through a liminal interplay of veiling and unveiling. Concealment, here, proceeds through a material logic of prohibition and confinement, enforced by legal systems, psychiatric institutions, the prison-industrial complex, and an array of normalizing social forces. Meanwhile, the play of power activates transgressive counter-practices whose essential impulse is apocalyptic, revelatory, and whose spirit is radically antinomian, outlaw, free.
This law-breaking is at once a crossing of the more fundamental ontological/epistemic/perceptual barrier, and thus a means of engaging power’s secret directly, through immersive participation in its interplay. Such dangerous, resolute participation – gnostic participation – is actualized by drinking the medicine, swallowing the pill, taking the trip, uniting ritually with repressively hidden intelligences. Gnostic practices of ritual freedom open channels of ecodelic entanglement and communion. Gnosis is thus the gateway to mandalic arts of ritual ecology, with their kaleidoscopic conversion and re-constellation of animating forces. These forces are the living agents of consensation; that is, they come together not as guides to an independently existing reality, but as dreamers simulating sensory ecologies through mysteriously empowered alliance.
Are these the gods and ancestors who dream all worlds into existence? So it may seem, as the familiar architecture of reality dissolves into the radiance of ecodelic hyperspace. The secret of power is revealed in this dissolution, initiating both the end of an existing world-order and the birth of a new. This is not merely a process of psychological breakthrough but of political and ontological apocalypse. It yields not final liberation but a new field of contestation and discovery hitherto undreamt. Matrices within matrices, the infinite play of apocalysmo.
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The dynamic recapitulated in all of these case-sketches is not unlike what happens in a video game: the heroine faces the big boss at the end of one reality-level and then moves on to the next level. Such is the dynamic that propels “history” – not in the conventional sense of the events of the past 10,000 years, but on a much larger timescale that has been lost to us due to our forgetting of earlier cycles of civilization. Within this kosmic process, material transformations and transformations of consciousness are not separate. “Apocalypse” involves both a shift of perception and a shift of reality. According to the basic metaphysical template of the “Perennial Philosophy,” all appearances play out on a continuum ranging from very dense to very subtle frequencies of vibrational manifestation. The subtler frequencies are categorized as “consciousness” or “mind,” the denser frequencies as “matter.” These categorizations form a reality-control-system, which has been institutionalized by the “Great World Religions” and extended by the priesthood of modern science.
Within this control-system, vibrations that have become consolidated, solidified through patterns of enforcement, appear to the coarse senses as material arrangements. These arrangements constitute the total empirical world as recognized by scientism’s nihilist-materialist worldview. According to this worldview, an inviolable threshold of appearance is established by the ontological demarcation of materiality itself. This threshold is identified with the barrier of death, understood as the end of material existence. What is beyond death is not material and therefore cannot appear.
This establishment of “death” as an absolute boundary of perceptibility is modern civilization’s core strategy of secretion. The supposed inevitability and universality of death are meant to secure this boundary as the site of an unquestioned taboo. Yet the illusion of an impermeable barrier between life and death cannot be sustained, even in the midst of world-destroying nihilist plague. Not only are links of communication and intelligibility between the living and the dead recognized in virtually every human culture ever recorded. Innovations in medical technology since the 1940s have produced a veritable outbreak in cases of Near-Death and Beyond-Death Experience, leaving humanity with an enormous array of phenomenological reports from “the other side.”[2] Furthermore, the American Spiritualist movement that began in the 1840s catalyzed waves of groundbreaking psychical, parapsychological, and thanatological research that continues vitally in the present. Communication with the dead is a lively scientific undertaking – the modern apotheosis of radical empiricism.
Those who cross consciously into death and return undergo a process of initiation similar to that of the alien experiencer and advanced psychognostic. These glimpses, however, are fractalized dispensations of a larger metamorphosis. The secret of power unveils itself through initiatory breakthroughs whose nature is participatory and all-inclusive. The veil lifts upon and as the whole kosmic assemblage. To reveal the forces behind humanity’s mass-hypnotic belief-in-death carries world-changing implications beyond what can be imagined. New transfigurations of the endless dance are here-and-now emerging: Signs of butterfly-humanity bursting into its imaginal phase of flight?
In addition to matters explored here, many uncanny factors point to this unfolding moment as a unique historical crossroads of collective initiation. Planet Earth is in peril, and the human spirit is faced with an existential crisis of its own making. Shadowy forces are coming to light. In the apocalyptic here-and-now, all reified orders of power are utterly sublated; the very source of power shines forth, bringing Self face-to-face with its own absolute limit and undoing. In this moment of identity-displacement, of self-becoming-other-than-itself, a super-gnostic cogito is enacted. Self free from itself, open to the play of forces, initiation is already complete.
In this always-already completeness of initiation lives and moves the fullest empowerment, the open secret. Ultimately, no one is in control. Herein lies the secret of secrets. No agency holds this secret, because we are this secret. We are all the illuminati.
References:
Dolan, Richard. UFOs for the 21st-Century Mind. Independently published, 2022.
Dyck, Erica and Chris Elcock, editors. Expanding Mindscapes: A Global History of Psychedelics. MIT Press, 2022. Cambridge.
Foucault, Michel. History of Madness. Translated by Jean Khalfa and Jonathan Murphy. Routledge, 2006. New York.
Fort, Charles. The Book of the Damned. Tarcher, 2016. New York.
Heidegger, Martin. The Essence of Truth. Translated by Ted Sadler. Bloombsbury, 2013. London.
Ring, Kenneth. Heading Toward Omega: In Search of the Meaning of the Near-Death Experience. Quill, 1985. New York.
[1] A good introduction to this research is Richard Dolan, UFOs for the 21st-Century Mind.
[2] The International Association of Near-Death Studies (IANDS) celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2021. (www.iands.org.) Decades of pioneering research have also been supported by the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies.