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Biblioteca Esoterica Esonet.ORG
http://www.esonet.ORG
feeling of a subliminal presence. Only in rare cases is the physical shape or outline of an
actual being seen or a voice heard. In such cases a psychiatrist, or even friends or family,
are likely to respond to any mention of the appearance by calling it a hallucination; indeed
reports or experiences of such appearances or voices may not be easily distinguished from
apparently similar ones occurring during psychotic episodes. The possibility exists, at least
in some cases, that "psychotic episodes" may be preludes to or intimations of spiritual
transformations which become aborted, partly because of the incomprehension and lack of
support met by the psychically distraught yet (for a brief moment) spiritually open person.
Both the process of developing personhood (the condensation and integration of the
emotional and intellectual elements fostered by a culture) and the process of
individualization (the emergence of an individual out of the cultural matrix) almost
inevitably produce a residue of irrelevant psychic movements — unassimilated images,
symbols, and concepts that block or deviate the flow of the inner personal life. This
residual material can be compared to the more or less toxic waste products disgorged by
factories in the production of culturally and socially useful objects. These waste products
may combine, lead an unnoticed life of their own, and often poison the "water" and "air"
(the collective psychism) of a culture-whole.
Moreover, a culture's attempts to build a collectively accepted religious system to
comfort sinners, and especially to give mental or moral support to persons eagerly but
confusedly aspiring to a state of more-than-human perfection and bliss, always tend to
result in a rigid and materialistic establishment. As a religion becomes institutionalized —
and like any institution seeks societal and psychic powers, self-perpetuation and
expansion — a vast psychic network of distorted images of spiritual reality and
misinterpreted metaphysical concepts is produced. These images and labels also assume a
psychic life of their own, and the unwary may feel certain that these are indeed the forms
or voices of the great founders of religions, planetary Pleroma beings who originally had
sought to sow the "seeds" of some of the values of their realm into the soil of the culture's
beginnings.
Especially in times of personal or social crisis, "false gods" often act as substitutes for
Pleroma beings, because inherently devotional and insecure people, unable to think of
spiritual realities in terms of basic principles, easily confuse these simulacra with the true
models. Such confusions and misinterpretations of formations of the psychic (or "astral")
realm are always to some degree the product of collective fears and emotional insecurity.
Many people whose minds lack individualized formative power are impelled to worship
the idols fascinating their community, their peer group, or even their entire culture.
At its mountain source, a culture is pure; its symbols and myths are attempts to give
concrete form to a spiritual Quality (or set of Qualities) seeking exteriorization because
"the time and the season" for it has come in the process of cosmic or planetary evolution.
But after crossing human plains and being filled with the waste products and psychic
poisons of many cities, the river is often not much better than a glorified sewer. The people
who drink its water have become mainly if not exclusively concerned with diverting some
of the river's flow for their own personal use or profit. They fight for their "rights" to own
and sell it and perhaps proclaim that they have purified what they sell: all this in terms of
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