August 2011

Avatars in Second Life?

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También en español You can refer back to our last post talking about Krishnamurti as an example of two concepts of avatar as they played out in the life of one person. Initially, Krishna was publicly identified as an avatar representing a fixed system of belief, Theosophy. When he renounced this role that he had been thrust into, his willingness to sacrifice the false social foundation of his life to honor the truth he found in his own mind made him into an avatar of the living truth, the only thing humans can achieve or become avatars for.

he word avatar has a much more recent meaning in the universes of virtual reality (VR). There are a number of virtual realities in which vast numbers of people cooperate and compete, design and build, and interact with each other in all manner of visually simulated environments and actions. Best known is probably Second LifeWorld of WarcraftMinecraft, and others built on variations of theme and system architecture. Among these, the avatar concept is most fully developed in Second Life.

In Second Life (SL), you are called a resident. Your presence is represented by a visibly displayed 3-D figure, you as an avatar, at a location within the simulated world that is visible to all participants within visual range. Your avatar has a great many basic and inherited characteristics, as well as the ability to accommodate a virtually unlimited number of visible, functional, and interactive augmentations.

When you view a scene in SL, you see the shapes and surface textures of the avatars that are located within your view. When this data is combined with a representation of terrain, including elevation and vegetation, structures and oceans, a composite scene can be rendered that places three-dimensional images of the avatars in a three-dimensional terrain context.

SL avatars are most often humanoid in form, some in animal or human-animal hybrid forms. and are often equipped with alien, gender-variant, and species-variant erotic organs.

One of the virtues of the use of artificially constructed forms for the avatars is the ability to give the avatars any shape, articulation, and surface texture desired, as well as the ability to animate parts of the avatar body or face, given sufficient scripts and code. At all times the avatar is under the control of a human being through a viewer that connects to the SL servers and provides local interfaces and image generation. Your avatar can walk, run, and fly around, observing an entire simulated patch of earth.

As the resident of the avatar, you have complete control over everything it says and does. You can hear what other people say or communicate by text. You can see the world from the avatar’s viewpoint, or from any other accessible place. You can hear ambient sounds in the simulated environment. The avatar is an extension of your self into the virtual world. As such, the acts of the avatar in dealing with the virtual world and its inhabitants are your acts for which you are ethically, if not legally, accountable, to another avatar and its resident (who can be physically located anywhere in the world).

In the relationship of the SL avatar to its resident we find a metaphor for the relationship of the human avatar to living truth. An avatar in SL can have default behaviors which cause them to be in a state of motion appropriate to each situation, e.g., still when seated and in a constant “dance” when standing. This level of behavior is akin to motor and reflex functions of a human body. The avatar performs a great range of simulated actions under the direction of its resident. The human body similarly performs actions in Real Life (RL) under the direction of higher mind functions. This division of mind levels in humans and avatars is conceptually similar, though the actual human mind content is a universe  greater than the most elaborate of all present day avatars.

A major theme of Transhumanist thought is the future emergence of Artificial Intelligences (AIs) that can simulate human thought faster and more accurately than a biological human. Any part of one’s mind that could be accurately modeled in an AI could, in principle, be immortalized by simulation in an artificial substrate. If this can be done, there would be no problem in endowing an SL avatar with the same human mind function.

We have no idea how far this idea might be carried because the first necessary steps to move beyond mechanical mind to minimal cognitive functionality by a machine are not yet well understood in humans. In the meantime, experimentation with AIs in VR interfaces like SL seems likely to help identify “low hanging fruit,” such as augmenting apparent avatar autonomy, while retaining a control link to the mind of the resident. The definition and implementation of such an interface would itself be a major accomplishment.

Coming up: What would it be like to live inside the world of SL?

 

Becoming and Being an Avatar—Choosing the Transhuman

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También en español “I think when one sees something true and beautiful, one wants to tell people about it, out of affection, out of compassion, out of love. … Can you ask the flower why it grows, why it has perfume? It is for the same reason the speaker talks.”                                            —Jiddu Krishnamurti

Krishnamurti was “discovered” at age 14 by Charles Leadbeater, a prominent Theosophist, who proclaimed him destined to become a spiritual teacher and a great orator, likely to be the “vehicle for the Lord Maitreya,” an advanced spiritual entity, according to Theosophical doctrine, who periodically appears on Earth as a World Teacher to guide the evolution of humankind.

Krishna was removed from his family and educated by the Theosophists, preparing him to assume the great role for which he had been chosen. His education in colonial India was followed by the worldwide development of the World Teacher project, of which he was the nominal head. Apparently he had more serious and personal thoughts about this matter than his sponsors in the Theosophical Society, for in 1929, at age 34, he publicly repudiated the project and Theosophy.

The remainder of Krishna’s life suggests that Leadbeater’s recognition of the boy’s destiny as a spiritual teacher and great orator was entirely correct, at least after he was educated and prepared by the Theosophists to be their messiah. Krishnamurti denounced the concept of saviors, spiritual leaders, or any other intermediaries to reality, and urged people to directly discover the underlying causes of the problems facing individuals and society. He declared allegiance to no nationality, caste, religion, or philosophy, and spent the rest of his life traveling the world as an independent speaker. In the end, he came to be recognized worldwide as a noteworthy teacher and advocate of Truth.

Krishnamuti is unique among those who have claimed to be avatars, literal embodiments, of Truth. His story shows us that an ordinary person may become an avatar of Truth if only one’s potentiality is understood properly. Krishna truly embraced the concept, even though it overturned the entire foundation and supposed purpose of his life and education. By refusing to be proclaimed an avatar to serve a human dogma, he demonstrated the very quality of being a genuine avatar in the service of Truth.

But what do we really mean by avatar? The word comes from Hindi and refers to a deliberate descent of a deity from heaven to earth, or a descent of the Supreme Being. In the New Age of sexual freedom we are revealing through VenusPlusX, the supreme ideal of Truth holds a position comparable to that of a deity in legacy human religion and it is entirely reasonable to use the word avatar to describe a person who chooses to become an embodiment of living Truth. An avatar is most definitely not a messiah. True avatars arise as ordinary human beings who become sensitive to the living Truth that is always present in their minds, and resolve to live their lives in service to its direction.

Why would anyone want to be or become an avatar? There are plenty of wrong reasons born of  the temptation to imagine oneself to have been “chosen” by some cosmic force to perform some heroic function, as is the case with the avatars known through the distortions of myth alone. Of course, as Krishamurti’s case shows us, there are two sides to this quest and its personal experience. Krishna received the material bounty and attention of being the publicly recognized avatar chosen to bring Theosophical truth to humanity. But Krishna did not take this on as a label of himself, so much as a life task to be lived out. By rejecting the distorted image of himself, overburdened with Thesophical doctine, he was able to live the Truth.

In effect, the path of personal development for one who would become an avatar is basically the same as the path of one who would transition to become fully Transhuman. The human state is hardly transcended by the installation of new body parts. The human state is also a shared consciousness—a common story of what our life experience is about or if it be about anything at all. Transition of this consciousness from simple reliance upon myth and fact to incorporate vision and truth makes the human mind become more than human, indeed, it becomes Transhuman. And this phenomenon is what separates visionaries like us from the simply human. Initially, this is simply a change of viewpoint, a commitment to a certain way of approaching challenges; however, with experience, as the response becomes automatic, completely new modes of coordination with physical reality are opened up to us.

In the virtual reality known as Second Life, each participant makes their selves visible to other participants in the form of an avatar, a three dimensional model of a human body or some other form that can be manipulated by an operator (who is, of course, a real human being). This experience is a powerful addition to the original avatar concept, which we will explore in our next post.

 

Time to Make Corporations into People? Give me a Break!

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We want to continue an earlier discussion of the fallacies of the decision of the US Supreme Court in the Citizens United case from a viewpoint of pure logic and how it is a subject with which the legal profession as a whole seems quite unfamiliar.

The essential error in the decision in that case stems from the assumption that a corporate person is functionally equivalent in society to an individual. The patent falsity of this concept is well known to political scientists of the rationalist school since the 1940s; however, rationality is not a feature of today’s US political discourse.

It is quite common for societies to enact laws that are completely contrary to physical, social, and motivational reality. Indiana once legislated that the value of pi should be 4. Such misconceived law is always destructive. In fact, if our society were to ever enact sane, rational legislation it would be a cause of great celebration. The pillars of society—religion, government, and commerce—were never intended to function for the benefit of the public, rather they were developed by men to dominate and enslave people in service to a small conspiracy of worthless bullies.

Our liberation from enslavement is the recognition that these pillars rest upon the unsound foundation created by the violent suppression of erotic freedom, and our collective and unquestionable destiny is to undermine these foundations and demolish the false channels of support they offer to the delusions of a failed legacy social order. Anarchism (not anarchy) is the process by which we systematically replace old, worn, and coercive systems now enforced by the religion, government, and commerce with new, adaptive, voluntary systems that care for each human in equal measure.

Today we are witness to the initial quivering, the aura, the sense of deja vu of the American body politic as its collective psyche ramps up to the quadrennial grand mal seizure known as a “Presidential election.” Once again we test whether an irrational convulsion of uninformed public opinion can be exploited by the media to herd the ignorant, and everyone else caught up in the stampede, into the slaughterhouse. It makes no difference which slaughterhouse you choose—all provide equivalent service and none exist to foster the best interest of yourself or the converging mob of marching morons. And today, leading one of the marching moron contingents, is a descendant of George Romney, who was once the leading right-wing candidate for the presidency, with none other than “the movie actor who once played George Gipp” as his vice. What a load of vice that would have been!

Just yesterday little Romney, the spitting image of the man who once drove American Motors and a good part of Michigan into the toilet, spoke up with great faux-intellectual profundity to inform his audience that “corporations are people, my friend.” It is hard to imagine how any sane person would expect people to believe this or to vote for anyone who did. The parasites that perpetually inhabit the judicial chambers of the Supreme Court may be beyond the reach of common sense, but candidates are not so immune. Both people and politicians well understand the differences between individual decision making and that of groups. Our most skilled legislators have been expert at the manipulation of these differences to their advantage, while anyone who has personally faced corporate anonymity has experienced the difference first hand.

Groups of people, no matter how organized, whether as corporations, governments, or religions, are not in any way equivalent to individuals. Most critically, they are fundamentally incapable of prioritizing their desires or agendas in a way that fairly and equally addresses the needs of all their members. As an individual, you are free to consider your alternatives and choose what seems to best meet your perceived needs. If you are a very thoughtful person, you may make a brief cortico-thalamic pause before taking condign action. And you may, of course, be undecided until you are able to collect additional information.

While a group or team may make its best effort to simulate such a personal and individual process, the model being followed is inevitably deficient. It is easy to see how this deficiency develops. A rational individual follows a four-step process in taking action, which has been conveniently summarized in the acronym “OODA.” OODA stands for “orient, observe, decide, act.” OODA is executed in a loop, and the loop is executed as rapidly as practically possible to be maximally responsive to a shifting situation. When a committee tries to follow this process it is necessary to divide the labor or require synchronization of activities. In either case the behavior and capabilities of each team member combine with those of every other to diffuse personal responsibility for the decision or the outcome of the action.

In such a case, when no one bears personal responsibility, there is no possibility of accountability and thus no way to recursively improve the quality of decisions. A rational individual learns from mistakes. Groups will repeat mistakes unless solutions (which may themselves be mistaken) are dictated by a single individual. Let’s examine one case in which the diffusion of responsibility comes home to roost and unarguably shows the foolishness of imagining collectives to be individual persons.

On December 3, 1984, a Union Carbide Corporation pesticide plant in Bhopal, India leaked around 32 tons of toxic gases, including methyl isocyanate gas which led to the worst industrial disaster to date. The official death toll was initially recorded around 5,000. Many figures suggest that 18,000 died within two weeks, and it is estimated that around 8,000 have died since then of gas-poisoning-related diseases.

This disaster was caused by incompetent design, operation, and maintenance of a hazardous industrial facility. The largely anonymous parties who could have prevented it through greater technical competence and more attention to detail caused the deaths of 26,000 people. If this were a single, simple case of manslaughter, someone would be charged and punished, if only to discourage others from following their example. But how is any enforcement to be levied against the responsible firm? If the firm is a person, then there must be a way to make enforcement take on personal significance. But there is no personality in a company, no potential for collective accountability. Rather, the structure of most companies encourages the guilty to scapegoat the innocent and suffer no consequences at all for evil actions.

Financial judgment, the vehicle by which the judicial system imposes penalties on companies, is clearly inadequate. If a company can avoid responsibility for its crimes by a cash payment, why is not the same generosity extended to individuals? If an individual can be executed for premeditated murder, what comparable judgment applies to a company? Shall the entirety of its assets be seized? Should the corporate structure be dissolved? Should the company be forced to cease all operation?

There is no equitable answer to this challenge. There is no congruence or even similarity between persons and companies. Anyone who asserts such is non-rational and thus non-sane. It should be no surprise that an ignorant, thoughtless, and bigoted politician holds such views. It is truly tragic when delusional beliefs are held by the persons who seek responsibility for giving true meaning and value to our system of government.

—Dan Massey

Why Has Everyone Lied to Me All My Life?

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También en español Check out Terence McKenna’a “Culture is Not Your Friend” on YouTube for a quick overview on the subject of this post.

From cradle to grave, most of us fail to realize how comprehensively devoid of truth many fundamental precepts of “modern society” actually are. People are always talking to us from the day we are born. Eventually we figure out what they are trying to say and we try to do what they tell us to do, to be a part of “group think.” After a while they tell us to read stuff. And then they start telling us what is what. They tell us this is real and that is not. They tell us this writer is right and that one is wrong. To believe this and not to believe that. If and when we ever have an original opinion, stray away from the group thinking or chance to have our own opinion, to not behave or not believe or not speak as they demand, they show us they will go to any end to crush our resistance and make us support their ridiculous viewpoint. There are no bounds on the dominating group’s willingness to abuse us nor to what extent collective society comprehensively defends itself against truth when presented with it. It is said Hitler killed 20 million Russians, but Stalin killed 200 million.

For the most part, the person who tells you a falsehood and tries to force you to believe and act upon it is themselves acting on a falsehood delivered to them by another presumed “authority.” The fact that they believe they are telling you the truth is no excuse for their actions for they have within their minds the ability to discern truth if they will but try. If there were truly a Hell, then the road to it would indeed be paved with these assumptions.

Each and every individual has the personal power to discern the truth for themselves and a moral obligation to refuse to accept and, when feasible, to actively oppose and refute the impositions of falsehoods by blighted bigots who presume to “guard” the false foundations of human society. The chain of deliberately communicated ignorance in human discourse necessarily begins with an individual who, knowing the truth, deliberately communicates a falsehood, usually with some authority or even force of violence.

Unfortunately, these social assumptions are the false beliefs that are invariably laid down when we are open-hearted children who have no intellectual defense against the ignorance and bigotry of our parents and society. When we are most vulnerable, we are viciously abused by those who actually owe us the greatest duty of fairness, truth, and honesty. And this parental and societal abuse of children becomes the foundation upon which, as young adults, they will be forced to accept as given the obvious and demonstrable insanities promulgated by all religions, governments, and economies of our past age. This systematic lying, which penetrates every aspect and dimension of societal engagement, destroys the personality potentials of those who engage in it more surely than physical suicide.

How is one to deal with this torrent of falsehood that streams at us from every media outlet, every organizational mouthpiece, and most of the people we randomly engage in life? My personal policy is to believe nothing anyone tells me until I have had a chance to evaluate motives, content, context, and other factors. Then I will decide whether to conditionally adopt the idea into my personal noosphere. A constant reevaluation your most fundamental assumptions is required in modern society to assure you can maintain a consistent, coherent, current, and true world view.

Every individual is faced with a fundamental choice in life. The outer world, the environment, provides a wealth of sensory inputs as well as information-carrying data in the form of interpersonal communications, by speech, reading/writing, etc. When this information enters the human mind, it may then be tested against the individual’s inner sense of Truth. Under ideal circumstances, all true information would be identified and incorporated into the individual noosphere, while the untrue information would be discarded. This capability is certainly attainable by those open minded people able to learn from their mistakes and undertake extensive reformulation of their concepts of reality, when shown appropriate evidence. Unfortunately, it seems a lot of people feel their inner sense of Truth to be something that is not especially important to worry about when dealing with an external apparent reality. In response to threats of force, these individuals disregard their inner sense of Truth and fling their support behind their oppressors, becoming bullies in their own right. Whenever you allow fear of oppression to undermine your dedication to Truth, you transfer your personal power to the ignorant and despicable bully who wants you to believe what he says.

There is no reason anyone should have to choose between becoming a victim of socially sanctioned physical and/or psychological violence and living in a way that is true to their inner selves. Coerced into living a life of accumulated falsehoods, you enlist in automatically indoctrinating the next generation.

In understanding and living the truth, we have indeed entered the age of the Crowned and Conquering Child. Although completely freeing youth from the distortions of an immature society may take a generation or more, we have entered the New Age spirit of Transhuman consciousness symbolized by the Child, that today is freeing more and more people who are forever liberated from  decrepit and misguided legacy of our pastfathers.

The Crowned and Conquering Child is the newborn spirit of the Transhumans of the New Age, which cannot and will not be bullied. Rather, they are the final judgment upon all bullies and all social systems based upon bullying.

—Dan Massey

What Happens When Atheists Pray?

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A lot of people seem to think that, by believing in the myths of a religion, they will acquire some sort of privilege above all other people—they can become those chosen by their god to impose his will on the world around them. In return for their dedication, they expect some kind of payoff—a manifold return on their investment. So they pray for what they want. Sometimes they get it. More often they don’t. From this many conclude there is no god. Of course they would be more accurate to conclude that there is no god that fits their image of deity or, if there is, he’s not inclined to give them what they want. At least not just because they want it. And, in the final analysis, if  your god won’t give you what you want, what good is he?

But stop and look at this the other way around. Suppose you were a genuine omni-cubed god, how would anybody know you were around unless there were places and times you weren’t around? But you can’t ever not be around if you are omni-cubed. And how could one ever expect that such a deity would be directed by the personal wishes of one person among the vast number populating the universe? So let’s start by accepting that, if a prayer is going to be answered in a personal way, the answer won’t come from the omni-cubed god, if he exists.

Many people think that, if they only believe in god, then he will exist and solve their problems for them. That is mere magical thinking. Suppose, however, a believer comes to know the existence of god and understand a part of his very nature. Such a knower, self-aware of the power and limitations of divine action in the finite realm, will not seek the unattainable. A knower is aware of how to act efficiently in context to foster destiny and how to accept the enhanced understanding of reality that comes from analysis of each adventure.

Put another way, anything you would get from divine reality must be in accordance with the divine will. It must also be a bonus that can be delivered through the higher functions of mind, emotion, motivation, and experience. Even the Bible says that King Solomon prayed for wisdom and was also the wisest of all kings of the Hebrews. If the human mind indeed contains a spiritual connection through which the more positive attractors of behavior can be illuminated and strengthened, this is surely the domain in which the correct attitude of receptiveness to concepts that will fill a cavern of desire can be translated directly into enlightenment.

But what of the atheist, the person who cannot or will not believe in a personal “god”? And here we come to a basic paradox in the human limited concept of spiritual faith. Just as the individual “names of god” have no meaning in and of themselves, so the individual “beliefs in god” are also meaningless. An atheist who needs and knows that he wants a shot of wisdom is going to get it from somewhere. And it makes little difference whether we believe or science shows us it is from some otherwise imperceptible level of divinity or from the associative capabilities of the human mind. And if it comes from that mind, it does not matter whether it emerges from the physical architecture of the brain or from some inherited or learned cognitive process.

In the final analysis, what happens in life that matters is defined by the satisfaction of basic drives, be they human or divine, to make life better for ourselves and the generations that come after us. And that is a high destiny that all may share, regardless of their imagined or real relationship to some undefined “higher power.”

To truly know what you need is to possess it. And that is the key to true creativity. And that is real magic.

—Dan Massey

Sex Futurism, Erotic Mysticism, and Transhuman Separatism

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Preparing to launch our redesigned website in the next few weeks, we have been testing alternate tag lines for our banner head, looking for the most accurate way to define our work in less than a half dozen words.

This evening (8/3), VenusPlusX hosted a book party in our home for sexologist Gloria Brame PhD, with Woodhull Sexual Freedom Alliance. Dr. Brame is the keynote speaker at the Alternative Sexualities Conference  in DC (sponsored by the Community-Academic Consortium for Research on Alternative Sexualities). A few days ago, when Gloria announced the event on Bilerico, she happened to characterize VenusPlusX as “sex futurists,” which  strikes us as a very succinct and accurate description of much of our program, captured amazingly in just two words. Gloria is good with words. Read her new book and see just how good.

Another phrase I’ve grown fond of is “erotic mysticism” to describe the exploration of sex and gender cooperatively with the higher levels of the mind, also a key column of our work. Another is “transhuman separatism” implying a person who has become transhuman through conscious and deliberate modification of body, mind, or spirit to the point they no longer fully identify with non-transhumans because of radical differences in life experience that are difficult to communicate in words.

VenusPlusX is about a lot of things—social justice, faith in an ecology of gradually perfecting perfection, and making life better and more meaningful for everyone. We posit that erotic repression (repression of the free expression of sex and gender spanning the entirety of known or assumed human history) is the foundational cause of the evils that have been designed and embedded into society to enslave us. This is why we are passionate and committed to educate all who will listen to the true nature of reality, and the immediately available and powerful tools for beginning the necessary social transformation in the collective human understanding of reality, starting with sex futurism, erotic mysticism, and transhuman separatism. That’s a lot of -isms for a movement that wants to get rid of useless -isms. But these -isms (OUR -isms) are SPECIAL because ours are new and revolutionary breaks with the assumed legacies of the past in all the areas of sex, religion, and social relationships. Let’s examine each one.

Sex Futurism

Sex Futurism: We are activists focused on changing the future course of human social development by anticipating and leading the adoption of the most advanced, most liberating explorations of sex and gender. We use the term Transgender Transhumans to more specifically characterize where things are currently headed.

Erotic Mysticism: We are mystics in that we have had personal experiences with the higher levels of mind that combine all aspects of body and intellectual/philosophical mind on behalf of a more universally accessible and shared reality, often indescribable in words. By its nature it leads to a total personal integration in the erotic. Mystics are people who are engaged in experiencing the personal presence of a concept greater than themselves. Erotic mystics worship by having sex and enhancing erotic pleasure through dedication to this acknowledged higher power. We are determined advocates for the sanctification of all expressions of sex and gender towards increasing manifestations of universal love, truth, goodness, and beauty.

Transhuman Separatism: We were introduced to this concept by our friend, the irrepressible Rachel Haywire. We have freely appropriated the term, using it to designate the meme of emerging Transhumans, as distinguished from the remainder of pre-transhuman-humankind.

VenusPlusX wants to extinguish the entire worldwide subtext of hostility towards and oppression of all forms of erotic expression. We affirm the essential goodness and inspirational power of the erotic senses, while showing how such power may be used to better oneself and one’s world.

VenusPlusX offers a heady brew of these adventurous ideas. We invite all to drink deep, feel the rush, and join us in eventuating the world as it should be, a real future that is everyone’s for the taking.

—Dan Massey

The Crowned and Conquering Child–Transhuman Lord of the New Age

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Throughout all human history, those who understood the central mysteries of sacred sexuality and gender variation as keys to inner joy and outward satisfaction have hidden away their knowledge of such matters. Why did they conceal this marvelous knowledge, now freely available to all?

First, these mysteries are the most direct way to open the inner gates between the purely sensory and the transcendent spiritual experience of the individual. And this inner attainment enables the individual to break free from unfactual and untrue beliefs and habits acquired from the social environment. Once set free, the individual can cast off all sex and gender oppression and refuse any longer to be intimidated by the ignorant braying of the masses. A critical mass of such free people will overthrow the false religious, social, and economic structures of the past. Conservative forces will forever oppose such growth because of their investment in the dead cultures of our pastfathers. Human religions are deliberately designed to thwart such social maturation and at the same time deliberately deface, hide, and twist all past revelations of truth to conform to a false consistency within the foolish myths of human history.

Prophet of the New Age

The second cause of this earlier secrecy stemmed from a real fear of ruthless oppression by powerful social elites who derive their existence from mass ignorance. People are educated to question and resist integrating the evidence of their own eyes, senses, and erotic experiences. They are told that any internal personal experience is a delusion unless sanctified by a self-appointed middle-man  who presumes hypocritically to place himself between the individual and deity.

Sex and gender freedom, erotic freedom, is the foundation of all personal rights and interpersonal fairness. When a bigoted bully or other psychic degenerate (who might be a priest, a parent, a pastor, a teacher, a physician, an enemy, a peer, a “lover,” or just about anyone) convinces you to surrender your total personal erotic sovreignty in any way, they have gained unearned, unjust, and unwarranted control over your most basic physical being and made you their slave. Today’s slaves do not understand they are slaves or how they have been enslaved.

In late 19th century England the recovery of lost knowledge became an interest of Rosicrucian scholars who founded a secret order known, for short, as the Golden Dawn. Well-know cultural and social figures, such as William Butler Yeats were active members. Aleister Crowley, another member, most clearly enunciated the ideal of a New Age. He claimed to have received a direct revelation of the opening of the New Age, the Age of Aquarius, at the vernal equinox of 1904, through a supernatural contact. Crowley published his three-day revelation as “The Book of the Law” and built much of his career with occult and secret societies around this text.

Transhuman Lord of the New Age

One of the key ideas that emerges from the book and Crowley’s interpretive writings is “The Crowned and Conquering Child,” who is the deity of the New Age. Superficially, the term stands for the idea that the spirit of the people of the oncoming age will be fresh and open like a child. Child-like, but not childish. And such people will be free of the fears that turn the human heart from the truth. They will truly know the truth and the truth will truly set them free. It is a more complete expression of the concept, “The meek shall inherit the earth.” When one inquires into the esoteric significance of these ideas, a richer, though speculative, picture emerges with grand prophetic connotations. I love it!

Crowley associated the Crowned and Conquering Child with the deity Harpocrates, the God Horus as a child. Much as Sturgeon speculated inVenus Plus X, Crowley visualized the new age wherein the child-like becomes divine, god-like. This new order of being will be distinguished by having an unbiased will to live truth and by staying uncorrupted by impositions of false formalities, responding solely to the truth of each occasion. Thus we see that the Child is also the emerging Transhuman identity, free from the encumbrances of mythic belief, ready to perceive what is, and act constructively on those perceptions.

The Crowned and Conquering Child is not a single special person or even a single expression of personal freedom. The Child stands for the complete action of the new people of the new age, who embrace the future willingly and openly to create happiness and joy. The Child consciousness appears violent to anyone who holds to false ideas because it reveres nothing and is the sworn enemy of all such rubbish. The Child consciousness quickly rejects and overturns systems based on false premises, bullying, and forcible exploitation of others. Once the Child has fully emerged, the overthrow of status quo is intense, rapid, and trusting the pieces will all fall where they belong. In the words of Crowley:

The Quest of the Holy Grail, the Search for the Stone of the Philosophers—by whatever name we choose to call the Great Work—is therefore endless. Success only opens up new avenues of brilliant possibility. Yea, verily, and Amen! the task is tireless and its joys without bounds; for the whole Universe, and all that in it is, what is it but the infinite playground of the Crowned and Conquering Child, of the insatiable, the innocent, the ever-rejoicing Heir of Space and Eternity, whose name is MAN?

The course of the New Age is determined by the actions of the Crowned and Conquering Child. Nothing that does not fit eir plans survives from the past.

—Dan Massey