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As Below, So Above | James Lindsay

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New Discourses

Education

4.82.5K Ratings

🗓️ 5 May 2023

⏱️ 102 minutes

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Summary

The Secret Religions of the West, Session 3 of 3 In the Esoteric Religion known as Hermeticism, there are a number of core principles of operation, perhaps most famously the Principle of Correspondence. It's often worded "As above, so below," but this is only half of the principle. The full expression is "As above, so below; as below, so above," which outlines a snake eating its own tail as a driver of Hermetic alchemical magic. In his third lecture for the Mere Simulacrity conference in Phoenix, Arizona, in December 2022, James Lindsay explains how this principle is a driver of what he calls the "Secret Religions of the West" in an elucidating way. He contends that Karl Marx was the first to realize that the principle of correspondence must be applied from the bottom. Working on the world (as below) to change it (so above), and then the world (as above), changed, will socialize and condition people (so below) to accept the changes and make them "actual." Marx called these two dynamics "praxis" and the "inversion of praxis," but now we can expose them clearly for what they are. Join Lindsay to understand the mechanism behind the activism in many evils, including Marxism, Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory and feminism, Modern empire building, and even right-wing reactionary response, which plays its crucial role in this ongoing dynamic of destruction. Session 1: https://newdiscourses.com/2023/04/the-negation-of-the-real/ Session 2: https://newdiscourses.com/2023/04/gnostic-parasite/ Get James Lindsay's new book, The Marxification of Education: https://amzn.to/3RYZ0tY Support New Discourses: https://newdiscourses.com/support Follow New Discourses on other platforms: https://newdiscourses.com/subscribe Follow James Lindsay: https://linktr.ee/conceptualjames © 2023 Sovereign Nations. All rights reserved. Used with permission: https://sovereignnations.com. #NewDiscourses #JamesLindsay #gnosticism

Transcript

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0:00.0

So, earlier during the panel, Andy Woodard said, as goes the SBC, so goes the American church.

0:22.0

And actually what he's pointing out is this principle that I want to articulate to you,

0:27.2

which is how these Gnostic and especially hermetic secret religions of the West operate.

0:33.6

And that is the title of this talk within my three-talk sequence of the secret religions

0:38.4

of the West is as below, so above, as goes the Southern Baptist Convention, so goes the

0:46.5

American church, as below, so above.

0:49.8

Now, it turns out that that's actually a hermetic principle.

0:54.4

So to make sense of how our secret religions of the West operate, we have to understand

0:57.9

their basic framing of reality, their creation myths, their underlying mythology, but also

1:03.6

the operation because their religion is a religion of activity.

1:06.9

It's not a religion of just belief, it's a religion of practice, so we have to understand

1:11.5

how that works.

1:12.8

We talked about negative theology, we talked about negating the real, but we haven't

1:16.6

talked about the mechanism of their sorcery.

1:19.2

I gave you a lot of stuff yesterday about examples of people who are the ones who have

1:24.0

the mind and the people who are excluded from the mind and how that justifies different

1:28.3

treatment, parallel sets of principles, in other words, that they get to excuse themselves

1:34.1

from their own evil.

1:35.1

We read that directly out of the corpus hermeticum.

1:37.8

They have a double standard that they erect for themselves, why?

1:40.6

Because they know, so they know better why they're doing an evil thing for a good outcome.

1:45.6

And thus, it's what Hegel actually referred to as something called the cunning of reason.

...

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