Towards a New Socialist Theocracy


 

Today there is no such thing as a non-theocratic state – a state not ruled by an explicit or implicit ‘god-concept’. Instead, every state is ‘theocratic’ - whether its god-concept be Allah or Neo-Liberalism; whether its prophets be Moses or Jesus, Mohammed, Darwin or Adam Smith; whether it be founded on the fundamentalist dogmas of monotheist religions, market economics, or materialist sciences, and whether its high-priests are corporate managers, Islamic Mullahs, Zionist zealots, or Christian missionaries. Nazism and Stalinism too, were atheist theocracies, divinising the Nation and its Great Leader and combining materialist science with militarism and industrial feudalism. Hitler’s ‘religion’ was not some archaic form of Teutonic neo-paganism but biologism - supposedly ‘scientific’ medicine and genetics. His principal individual, social and political ideology was a form of ‘New Age’ health fanaticism – not only promoting vegetarianism and leading the first nationwide anti-smoking campaigns, but seeing Jews, gypsies and the ‘mentally ill’ as a dangerous genetic strain, infectious bacillus or tumorous cancer - threatening the ‘wellness’ not only of the individual but of the ‘Volk’. His high priests were not the esotericist elite of Himmler’s S.S. but renowned geneticists, physicians and psychiatrists.

Today there is no such thing as a non-theocratic state. Yet the grave civilisational crisis we face today - economic, educational, ecological and cultural – can not be seen as a result of a ‘clash of civilisations’ with their differing values and God-concepts. Instead this very clash is the result of an attempt to impose a single global monoculture – that based on the religious dogmas of neo-liberal economics, the worship of The Market. Its single ‘mission’ is the use of economic and military power to ensure transformation of the entire globe and all its natural resources – from genetic raw materials of life to water itself - into the most profitable commodities that can be made of them - irrespective of their affordability by the vast masses who cannot pay the price for them. It is the drive of capitalist theocracy – the theocracy of private capital, of the commodity, and of commercial exploitation and commodification - for global dominance that now threatens civilisation as a whole with ecological, economic and nuclear catastrophes. It is global capitalist theocracy, centred in the United States, that can spend 3 trillion dollars on a single war whilst allowing 15,OOO children to die each day of malnutrition and keeping billions in poverty through the abuse of its global economic power.

Today there is no such thing as a non-theocratic state. Equally however, there is no such thing as a truly theocracy in the original sense of this term – rule by the spiritually knowledgeable or wise - as opposed to the spiritual and cultural illiterates that pose as our political leaders. The original theocracies on which human civilisation itself was founded were ‘gnostic’ theocracies – founded on knowledge or ‘gnosis’ and not on military or economic might. Yet the knowledge borne by humanity’s ancient ruler-priests or priest-kings was not second-hand dogma of the sort that today’s self-styled theocrats borrow from their Bibles, Korans or economic and scientific textbooks. It was in-born bodily knowledge - genetically inherited from previous incarnations and/or genetically imprinted by their soul in the life between lives.

 The most ancient theocratic civilisations are also the only civilisations described by historians using the term ‘theocratic socialism’ – indeed it is only in the context of such civilisations that the term was first coined. Today the warning rung out to humankind through Marxism – ‘socialism or barbarism’ – has never rung more true. Except that we can rephrase it –civilised socialist theocracy or barbaric capitalist theocracy, the latter aided both by its chief ally (Zionist theocracy) and its chief rival (Islamic theocracy). A total collapse of civilisation and with it the self-destruction of humanity can only be averted through the building of a new and saner civilisation. It was the entirely new knowledge, and the entirely new sciences - spiritual and technological - brought by the Sumarians to Mesopotamia, that laid the foundation of many of humanity’s cradle civilisations – from the Indus Valley to Egypt, Greece and Europe. Today civilisation can only be saved and re-built – or rather a new and saner civilisation built - on the basis of new knowledge and new sciences - indeed an entirely new understanding of ‘knowledge’ and ‘science’ as such. This new knowledge is what I first termed ‘the new gnosis’ and ‘the new thinking’ – one which encompasses many distinct fields of deeply spiritual but also highly practical knowledge - including ‘the new science’, ‘the new medicine’ and ‘the new yoga’.

Together these fields of knowledge constitute basic ‘blueprints’, ‘building blocks’, or ‘foundation stones’ for ‘the new socialism’ - a new scientific and socialist civilisation. What the Sumarians prized and termed their ‘Mes’ (pronounced ‘mays’) were foundation stones of this sort. The common basis of the new foundation stones, like the old, lies in what is termed ‘subjective science’ as opposed to ‘objective science’. ‘Subjective science’ means science sourced in inner, subjective knowledge or ‘gnosis’, and in subjective or ‘phenomenological’ research. Subjective science and research alone is true science and research - for it alone is rooted in a recognition of the essentially subjective nature of reality as such. The different fields and applications of subjective science are unified by a single principle - what I call The Awareness Principle. It is this one principle which in itself unifies science and religion. It does so through the understanding that subjectivity or awareness is not a by-product of matter or the private property of any being - human or divine. Instead it is the source of all beings and all worlds.

Along with The Awareness Principle goes a new God-concept, one based on the recognition that ‘god’ or ‘divinity’ IS not a being with awareness. Instead God IS awareness, infinite, unbounded - and not the private property of persons or of any personal god or personified gods. God is a ‘multi-person’ and more - each person’s awareness being an individualised, living portion of the Divine Awareness. And each of us, like God, is a multi-person - for our awareness is not the function or private property of one self, one body, one life or even one world or universe. Instead our own physical ‘world’ or plane of awareness is one expression of the Divine Awareness in all its countless manifestations – as space and time, as beings and as what we perceive as ‘material’ bodies, as thought and language, and as our own inner, knowing awareness. It is because the Awareness Principle challenges the unquestioned dogma that subjectivity or awareness is the private property of individual persons, egos, selves or ‘subjects’ that it also challenges – and in a deeper more fundamental way than ever before - the whole Property Principle on which capitalist class society and theocracy is based.
 

‘Socialist theocracy’ does not in any way imply a lack of freedom or ‘democracy’. We must remember too, that the modern term ‘democracy’ actually had its origins in the slave society of Athens – as democracy for the few not the many. Then as now, Western ‘democracy’ is in practice a form of oligarchy and plutocracy – a society in which only the wealthy wield real political influence. True freedom can only be founded on economic democracy of the sort totally lacking in capitalism – where the majority have no choice but to sell their labour to owners of capital, where not a single corporate director or management board is elected by employees – even though it is corporations that wield most power in the political democracies and ‘elected’ governments so much vaunted in the West.

In a true theocracy, divine awareness and wisdom rules because the ruling priests, sages or ‘Rishis’ are revered for their wisdom - not because they are voted in. As for ‘grass-roots’ participatory democracies, these have been invariably initiated and guided by men and women of wisdom – innate ‘liberation theologists’ or ‘liberation theocrats’ who took a leading role in fostering dialogue and human relationships. Jesus was a ‘liberation theocrat’, whose teachings emerged from and - before the assimilation of Christianity by Empire – guided the growth of religious communities which knew no divisions or inequalities of property, gender or class.

Many important kings and rulers in turn have sought to transform their kingdoms into true theocracies by cultivating and calling upon the knowledge of wise priests, scholars and sages, by gathering them together, creating libraries for them and seeking to learn from them directly. Today however, true wisdom – inner subjective knowledge - has given place to superficial calculation and cleverness, to dry academic intellectuality and purely theoretical ‘knowledge’, or to soul-less ‘objective’ sciences. These seek to reduce all meaningful qualitative dimensions of human ‘empirical’ experience to measurable or statistical quantities - and in doing so serve only the cultivation of purely technological and commercial ‘skills’ and ‘applications’. The bizarre mentality of these sciences is such as would treat the purely quantitative measurement of different oranges as more important and ‘real’ than any direct qualitative experience of their taste – as if the latter were ‘merely’ subjective. Would any sane human being seek to quantitatively measure ‘love’ - or deny its ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’ reality just because it was an immeasurable quality of subjective awareness and reality?

   The subjective irrationality of the purely quantitative sciences – indeed their schizophrenic insanity - is the principal reason why they can give no truly human account of ‘insanity’, nor ever rationally ‘explain’ such subjective realities as love, or religious feeling, let alone the source of all empirical or experienced realities, namely subjective awareness as such, infinite and divine. When Marx and Engels themselves coined the term ‘scientific socialism’ however, it was not this sort of ‘science’ they were thinking of. Nor was their ‘science’ a crude form of social or economic ‘materialism’ or ‘determinism’ in which the individual’s consciousness is determined by their economic and material status in society. For Marx, such economic ‘determinism’ merely reflected the status quo - being the temporary historic state of class society. Were this determinism to have been an a-historic truth or eternal reality, Marx could not have explicitly defined ‘communism’ as a society in which “… the free development of EACH is the condition for the free development of ALL.” As for Marx’s famous denigration of religion as “the opium of the masses”, this was part of a far broader project of rescuing human beings from all sorts of false gods – principally what he called the “fetishism of the commodity” and the implicit worship of ‘The Market’ - with its invisible yet supposedly benevolent and godlike ‘hidden hand’.

   Marx, unlike Lenin and Stalin, did not seek state power of any sort. He simply offered human society a deeper knowledge of itself. For him ‘Communism’ was neither social democracy nor dictatorship but a “withering away” of the state itself - one only attainable, paradoxically, through the wisdom of individuals such as himself – a spiritual sage of “scientific socialism” and thus also a priest and prophet of a new ‘socialist theocracy’.

   It is clear that both Stalin’s ‘Cult of the Personality’ and Mao’s ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ had a quasi-religious character - the former imposed from above by an ex-priest on what he knew was a deeply religious people, the latter an extraordinary evocation of mass religious feeling. Yet whatever their dire consequences may have been, both these caricatures of ‘spiritual socialism’ or ‘socialist theocracy’ arose in practice from the very failure of crude, materialistic interpretations of Marxism to accept the idea of Theocratic Socialism in principle. It was this failure that forced the hidden spiritual dimension of Marxism, and with it the unacknowledged spiritual needs of individuals in ‘socialist’ societies to come to expression in distorted ways – through divinised dictators able to recognise and exploit those spiritual needs for their own selfish purposes. How else can the seemingly irrational yet persisting ‘nostalgia’ for monstrous tyrants such as Stalin be understood - or the positive dimension of the Cultural Revolution be squared with its depraved sides?

  China today is an outright capitalist theocracy run by a ‘revisionist’ Communist Party of just the sort that the Cultural Revolution was launched to nip in the bud – but ended up fostering through the backlash against its excesses. Russia today is a neo-Tsarist capitalist theocracy run by ex-Stalinists – yet built on the backlash against the distorted Stalinist expression of Socialist Theocracy – a principle that only became so distorted because it was rejected in principle.

   Whatever the distortions and dogmas of historic religions, the God-concept’ and its reality has always been - and will always remain - the most important way in which human beings can step back from and adopt a position outside their own immediate experience of themselves and the world. The more confining the self-experience or social reality of the individual, the more they will seek a God-concept which allows them to find a standpoint outside it. When, amidst the most dire or confining of circumstances, followers of Islam exclaim ‘Allahu Akbar’ – God is Great – what rings out is not some luke-warm declaration of intellectual ‘belief’ in a ‘monotheistic’ god entirely separate and apart from the world and human beings, but a heartfelt exultation in the great reality of the Divine, one that allows each individual to feel themselves again as a part of that greater reality. Indeed the worse the conditions under which they live, the worse the suffering they experience, the more the awareness of the faithful rebounds back to that independent anchor point or assemblage point of awareness that is their ‘God’. Both Jewish and Christian God-concepts have in the past served a similar role in empowering the oppressed or suffering masses. The primary significance of Islam today therefore, lies not in ‘praising’ God as some benevolent Father or Son ‘above’, nor even by following ‘His’ laws and regulations, but by affirming and identifying with the Greatness of God.

  Knowing themselves as a part of God’s greater reality allows each individual to feel again the divine and inviolable reality of their soul - even amidst the worst experiences of bodily deprivation or violence. The inner truth of Islam today therefore has nothing to do with its complex doctrines, laws or practices. It is what rings out through the simple exclamation of God’s Greatness. This does indeed strike fear into the hearts of all those who - despite their massive economic, political, technological and military power - remain spiritually impotent, having no way of stepping outside the confines of their own purely egotistical ‘self-structures’ and the racist, imperialist or money-worshipping ideologies that go along with them. Neither the Islamist genocide of Hindus in Kashmir nor the rise of Islamist ‘terrorism’ can hide the deeper Tantric truth uniting Kashmir Shaivism and Islam, the truth that God alone IS power (‘Shakti’) – both an awesomely TERRIFYING power (Shiva as ‘Bhairava’) and a GREAT power (‘Allah’), the source of all powers (‘Shaktis’) and thus truly the Greatest of them all.

Shiva resides in every atom of the universe.

Do not differentiate between a Hindu and a Muslim.

If you are wise, then you should realize your true self.

That alone is your acquaintance with the Lord

Lalleshwari