Emperor Constantinero

DeFi Dave writes: “Around 12,000 years ago, certain wild plants took hold of humanity and for the first time, people left their nomadic ways to settle in one place in order to harvest a specific crop. This happened with wheat in the fertile crescent of the middle east, rice in the Yangtze River basin of China, and maize in the Tehuacán Valley of Mexic…Human society was about to embark on a 12K-year expedition of progress & advancement…

“It is often viewed that the start of the agricultural revolution was the beginning of history as we know it. Egalitarianism gave way to hierarchies and these hierarchies would be the basis of all great empires that would be built in the future. In every civilization in which an empire arose, what they had in common is that they claimed a divine right to rule whether it be the Mandate of Heaven in China or the Pharaoh being the chosen intermediary between this earthly realm and higher realm of the gods. As humanity became aware of its power to create & bend reality to its will, groups of people began authoring their own path towards [Terence McKenna’s] Transcendental Object at the End of Time for others to follow, which would end up causing all sorts of problems.

“When leaders espouse doctrine claiming divine right and profess a path on how people ought to live, what is actually happening is that by pushing people towards said doctrine, they are hijacking the Transcendental Object for their own purposes. This is the opposite from the pulling effect that the Transcendental Object naturally has on life in the universe. This shift from letting our intuition capture the frequency of the Transcendental Object that naturally pulls us toward it in favor of letting inherently flawed man-made ideologies push us toward something else has resulted in much of humanity being misguided for thousands of years.” defidave.medium.com/revisiting-mckennas-transcendental-object-at-the-end-of-time-5ae48a4c2e53

McKenna's Time Wave Zero theory combines elements of philosophy, psychology, and esotericism, focusing on the nature of time & consciousness. Key concepts include: (1) Time as a Fractal, not linear, suggesting that historical events and cultural phenomena recur in patterns. He believed that significant moments in history resonate with one another across different times. (2) a mathematical model based on the I Ching, and a graph that he called the "Time Wave," which plots periods of increasing novelty against time. This graph suggests that periods of high novelty are followed by periods of low novelty and vice versa.

Someone recently wrote, "We are living in the time of Nero,” but Nero, in AD 64, attempted to blame Christians for the Great Fire of Rome. I think of the current POS as more a combination of Nero and Constantine, who reigned in 306-337. Anyway, Someone continues, “the first six months (20Jan - 20July) will be a time of maximum peril…Trump replaces tens of thousands of career civil servants with loyalists…People will seek the protection of the courts, and find none. Lawyers & judges are either Trump loyalists or too scared to confront him…The administration has called the basic bluff of liberal democracy: the idea that, in the crunch, people in power agree to be bound by the law, and by its instruments the courts, the same as everyone else. Then everyone will take their cue. Executives will line up to court him. Media organizations, the large ones anyway, will find reasons to be cheerful. Of course, in reality things will start to fall apart fairly quickly. The huge across-the-board tariffs he imposes will tank the world economy. The massive deficits, fueled by his ill-judged tax policies…and monetized, at his direction, by the Federal Reserve, will ignite a new round of inflation. Most of all, the insane project of deporting 12M undocumented immigrants…will consume his administration. But by then it will be too late. We should not count upon the majority of Americans coming to their senses in any event. Some won’t [like it]. But they will find that the democratic levers they might once have pulled to demand change are no longer attached to anything. There are still elections, but the rules have been altered: there are certain obstacles, certain disadvantages if you are not with the party of power. It will seem easier at first to try to change things from within. Then it will be easier not to change things..."

(Abroad, meanwhile, “NATO [is] effectively obsolete, w/o US security guarantee. Maybe new incursions by Russia into Europe. After Ukraine is taken, the Baltics & Poles must worry. China may accelerate Taiwan plans.”)

*

Plenty of aware people who were paying attention in the 1980s-90s said that the US had become the new Rome, especially since the end of the USSR, and ensuing hubris among Them. In 1986, Frank Zappa publicly predicted that the US was transitioning from Roman Empire 2.0 to Holy Roman Empire 2.0 (“a fascist theocracy”), which has now, basically, come to pass.

In 2004, Ron Suskind interviewed an unnamed administrator (Karl Rove, likely): “The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community’, which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality’ [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’.”

*

Laozi, in the Tao te Ching, writes, “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished… Do you want to improve the world? I don’t think it can be done. The world is sacred. It can’t be improved. If you tamper with it, you’ll ruin it. If you treat it like an object, you’ll lose it.” The Bible would later express the next lines: “There is a time for being ahead, a time for being behind; a time for being in motion, a time for being at rest; a time for being vigorous, a time for being exhausted; a time for being safe, a time for being in danger. The Master sees things as they are, without trying to control them, and lets them go their own way, and resides at the center of the circle.”

*

Rome went from Republic to Empire, ruled by emperors, following Octavian Caesar Augustus’ assumption of effective sole rule in 27 BC. Christianity began to transition to the dominant religion of the Roman Empire during Constantine’s reign. I think his main objective was to gain unanimous approval & submission to his authority from all classes, so he chose Christianity to conduct his political propaganda because it seemed the most appropriate religion that could fit with the imperial cult…In 325, he summoned the First Council of Nicaea, the first ecumenical council, the first major attempt by Christians to define orthodoxy for the whole state, and started integrating the imperial government with the Catholic Church. Until Nicaea, all previous Church councils had been local or regional synods affecting only portions of the Church.

In 331, Constantine commissioned fifty volumes of scriptures, likely the Canonical Gospels the Four Evangelists, for the churches of Constantinople, which were to be bound in leather and easily portable. The reign of Constantine established a precedent for the position of the Christian emperor in the Church.

A scholar agrees with me that Constantine's conversion to Christianity was a matter of realpolitik, meant to serve his political interest in keeping the empire united under his control: “The prevailing spirit of Constantine's government was one of conservatism. His conversion to and support of Christianity produced fewer innovations than one might have expected; indeed they served an entirely conservative end, the preservation and continuation of the Empire.” — Hans Pohlsander, The Emperor Constantine

Theodosius became Emperor in 380, and issued the Edict of Thessalonica, making Christianity the state religion and the traditional religions illegal. In 381, to further unify the empire behind the orthodox position, he convened the First Council of Constantinople, to resolve matters of faith & discipline, which marked the first appearance of the term 'New Rome' in connection to Constantinople. Thus was the birth of the Holy Roman Empire, kicking off the 1,000-year-long Dark Ages.

Symbolic of this transition, Hypatia (born around 350-370), a Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician who lived in Alexandria, Egypt and taught philosophy & astronomy, and taught many Christian students, was murdered by a mob of Christians in 415, while on her way to the Serapeum, the "Daughter Library" of Alexandria, likely the largest collection of books for much of the late fourth century, and a major pilgrimage site for pagans. (The Great Library of Alexandria, one of the largest and most significant libraries of the ancient world, and its parent Mouseion research institution—dedicated to the Muses, the nine goddesses of the arts—had been destroyed by 272.) The seventh-century Egyptian Coptic bishop John of Nikiû, alleges in his Chronicle that the pagan Hypatia “was devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music, and she beguiled many people through her Satanic wiles,” and had intentionally hampered the church's influence over Orestes, the Roman Prefect of Alexandria.

Hypatia's death sent shockwaves throughout the empire; for centuries, philosophers had been seen as effectively untouchable during the displays of public violence that sometimes occurred in Roman cities, but the murder of a female philosopher at the hand of a mob was seen as "profoundly dangerous and destabilizing.”

DeFi Dave: “Over time, the Catholic Church became corrupted, engaged in the widespread selling of indulgences—‘tickets to heaven’—in order to fund its activities. In effect, the Catholic Church was not only asserting their version of the Transcendental Object at the End of Time through doctrine & scripture, but literally selling it for money. These indulgences were one of Martin Luther’s main motivations for coming out against Catholic Church and igniting the Protestant Reformation in 1517.

*

“McKenna once referenced that history is a shockwave of eschatology which is the part of theology that is concerned with death, judgement, and the final destiny of humankind. He continued by saying we should live as if the apocalypse has already occurred and will happen again. And since the dawn of the agricultural revolution 12K years ago, history has been filled with such events that could objectively be considered apocalyptic. The Bronze Age Collapse, the fall of Rome, the rapid demise of the Aztec and Incan empires at the helm of a few hundred Spanish conquistadors. To the people living in these societies during these times, it sure as hell would have seemed like the world was ending.

“Over the past 100 years, humanity has grown at a rate never before witnessed in recorded history. This has been met with profound advancements in technology and led to striking changes in lifestyle. We assume that the progress we made should have led to a better life for all, but the truth is that people are more anxious, depressed, and confused than our nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestors could ever conceive to be. Even in the face of space travel and quantum computers, our human brains are still looking for some ideology to latch onto in order to make sense of the world. Yet, the problem with all of these ideologies, both religious & secular, is that they presume what the Transcendental Object at the End of Time is and how to get there…

“I call the internet psychedelic because it has dissolved boundaries that were never thought possible. Ideas could be shared at the speed of light and people are connected with each other like never before. The ramifications of this are staggering because it shows us a glimpse of a world that could be. A world instead of being divided by nationality, religion, or race is united in the ideals of empathy, common purpose, and the collective betterment of humanity…an alchemical transformation by the other that is actively metamorphosing us from our earthly vessels to what could be considered Godhood.” defidave.medium.com/revisiting-mckennas-transcendental-object-at-the-end-of-time-5ae48a4c2e53

But the psychology of the theocrats, who are used by the billionaire techno-feudalists to subdue society, virtually ensure what’s more likely to happen: Dark Ages 2.0, during which a very small number of people are able to achieve a transcendental metamorphosis before the surface of Earth, then the missile-silo bunkers, become unlivable. Maitreya, where are ya when we need ya?