Jerrimooism
Jerrimooite beleifs today rival Neolodian and Islamic beliefs in terms of public acceptance, when we define the public as the total mass of humanity. The beliefs have entrenched themselves within their seperate, rival civillizations and their differing ideologies.
Jerrimooism is championed by the various Xanji clades and civillizations, or at the very least this is the only set of governments that have codified the belief system into their constitutions and laws. Jerrimooism however existed well before the first Xanja Panjan breathed air.
Throughout the ages, ideas have emerged that now form part of this belief system. Carl Gustav Jung, for example, developed the idea of the collective unconsciousness in the early 20th Century. Later that same century, James Lovelock developed the ideas that were to be captured in his Gaia hypothesis. Although ideas like these are cornerstones of Jerrimooite beliefs, it was the early visionaries that made the greatest strides.
By pouring back over Arcananite literature, we are able to uncover these visionaries, though we wonder if their idenities have been smothered by ideological license. Fernanda Gomez was argued to be the first, appearing in the mid 20th Century in Columbia. Although completely unknown to the greater public, Gomez was seen as a faith healer and psychotropic messenger. Athough such things are hard to identify amidst the beatnik and later new age do-it-yourself religions, we are told that this woman was the real thing.
Her early writings have her beginning to control the course of her dreams, and using this medium to contact others on a purely subconscious basis. Although there was no formal psychciatric training (she was the daughter of a cocoa-growing peasant in the Cauca province of the south), her writings included detailed treatises on the collective unconscious and even identified disembodied consciousnesses, whom she labelled as angels and demons. Unlike the Catholic influences around her, she saw no distinction, between human or animal consciousness, and saw both of them as largely illusory before the collective, and tied more to physical, rather than eternal aspects.
Humanity shunned Fernanda Gomez throughout her life, and she had very little personable contact with anyone. Troubled people would come to stay the night at her forest shack, so that she could contact them in their dreams. Aparently, early pre-Arcananite researchers had uncovered her and documented her life story and teachings. She has been labelled Jerrimoo's first prophet. She was able to forsee the destruction of her homeland and the appearance of the last prophet in a dead world.
The second prophet came to be the ecclesiatic ruler of the Arcananites themselves in 2156, and was none other than Guntas Bhat. History tells us that he was born into the lower castes in India in 2101, and ordered to work on farms from the age of six. His insanity became manifest by about the age of ten, and when much of his family succummed from an outbreak of bubonic plague, he was cast out. Over the following 20 years, Guntas existed as a vagrant in Calcutta, babbling and begging. Somehow in this time, he acquired the ability to read and write and we see his earliest writings. Guntas was able to interpret people's outward emotions and speak to people through their subconscious. He made a living out of fortune-telling.
The flavour of Guntas' ideas lie with he extant hindi beleifs around him, though it isn't long before you find that he departs from this belief system very quickly. Like Fernanda Gomez, Guntas Bhat believed in an eternal living consciousness in the universe, that is manifested in life. His answer to reincarnation was that formation of a human being, or any for that matter, was the result of a drop of this eternal consciousness being joisted in body machinery, which shapes this drop throughout life until the machinery breaks and the drop is released back into the pond. In conscious life, there is little difference between the mind and the body, and it is well that these are considered as one. Subconsciously the story is a bit different. While there are body structures in this, there is also a sea of temporary and potential structures, which are more essential to the eternal forces of consciousness. These realms are sensitive to the consciousnesses nearby and indeed to the collective consciousness. Guntas merely travelled to this "land of few structures" to contact other people and what he called "the unstructured people". It was perhaps a symptom of Guntas' madness that he could not easily distinguish incarnate and carnate consciousness. It was often the case that Guntas would ask for a cup of tea when he was completely alone.
In his thirties Guntas accreted a large gathering of disciples, that raised money for him and housed him in a temple. People would come and receive their teachings as if he were the figurehead in a legitimate religion. Representatives of the "legitimate religions" investigated and were soon requesting that the authorities close the temple down. In one way or another Guntas and his followers survived. Arcananite interest was sparked when the Brother Benoit Jerome of the Spirit Occult stumbled accoss his works. Jerome saw immediately how similar his ideas were to that of Fernanda Gomez. A group of spirit-occultists spent several months with Guntas, wherein they learnt some of his technique. With some cross polinisation taking place, the sciences of psychics and psionics were born. While both of these were studied or practiced in isolation as wild talents, Guntas' techniques and teachings gave them form, substance and reason.
A Guntas-Arcananite picture of the universe began to emerge, which is summarised as the following.
The ultimate formative substance in the universe is the firmament. This is the most concrete substance of life, and can be considered pure thought, or as some have put it, love. This essence is actually unknowable and inexplicable to us, and can travel to us only through the most torturous paths. The machinery of the universe is designed to do just that. Life has evolved in the corporeal universe in order to receive the firmament in small measure for interpretation. In essence the brain has evolved to cope with its environment, which is partly the physical constraints of nature, and partly what has been labelled the "talk".
It is possible to travel toward the essence through focussed meditation. In very rough terms, by knowing yourself, you can come to know the universe. There are specific mantras for acheiving an "open eye", having much to do with the release of tensions and preconceptions. While this seems easy, it can actually take years of practice before the conduit to the greater mind can even be seen. The descriptions of the gateway are varied, and involve all of the physical senses.
The procedures and practice lead the initiate to an apopreciation of a recursive universe. The physical universe is one of an infinite number of concentric universes, with each more rarified and less physical than the last. In modern terminology, the nearest three universes are called the corporeal, the ethereal (or spirit world) and the hypereal (or the xoul - to some). Much of this can only be imagined as to just about all of humanity, even the ethereal is inexplicable, complex, frightening, and dangerous to ones sanity. The picture does, however, allow one to understand the raw nature of the trickle of consciousness from the source to a receiver such as an individual person, or indeed, the collective unconsciousness.
When the initiate travels up into the mind and out the gateway, they are entering their own pocket of the ethereal, where psychic signals can be given or received. Strong bolts of ethereal signal can enter the conscious mind when, for example, your thinking of a freind you haven't seen for a long time, and suddenly they come to visit you. Because we spend so much time in the conscious world, we are, effectively asleep to this larger world.
Humanity's slumber in this respect lead to the study of the "natural" world in science, wherein the corporeal was studied to the exclusion of any other realms. Mysticism and spirituality were relegated to the conservative forces of established Christianity by Western Civillisation, so that no progress was made in this respect for centuries. These things made it invisible and seemingly esoteric or unreal.
This leads us to the final edifice of the Guntas-Arcananite picture, which is to say that all religions are likely to be a subset or view of this larger reality. Practitioners generally keep this pretty quiet, but what is often said is that religious or spiritual experiences are often given Christian symbolism whenever the witness is of Christian faith, this need not be the case, though it does help to frame and interpret the experience, rather than appealing first off to the Guntas-Arcananite picture.
Latter Jerrimooite Religious Beliefs
Clearly much theological discussion of Jerrimooite belief systems must come from the Last Prophet himself. Though there is little or no written record of his/her teachings, the scant physical remains carry a strong dischordance. It was the subsequent analysis, that yielded the essence of this belief system.
The Cosmic Potential
This is now referred to as the Xoul. It is the Xoul that brings cause to the universe. Many sects prefer the term negative material, and its existence as the Negative Material Plane. In the realms of the Xoul, everything is potential, but never actual. It is the not to the Rational Plane's is.
In practical terms, a rationalist may consider a human thought as the sequential firing of neurotransmitters. Presumably, this sequence constitutes the thought by the fact that a complex algorithmic process has taken place and various experiences are processed by comparing the current experience with other experiences. In Jerrimooite terms, it the the Xoul that constitutes the thought, and the firing of neurones plus the resultant memory are the rational and physical incursions into this universe of the pure Xoul thought.
To state that the Xoul is pure is not to impart some Platonic definition to the Xoul as some ideal world that the real world seeks to approximate. In fact the universe is a facsimilie of the Xoul, as are people. It is more correct to say that the rational and the potential are aspects of the one.
The Birth of the Universe
It is perhaps helpful to consider, for a moment, the chain of events that lead to the formation of the universe in the Jerrimooite faith. The Xoul formed the universe, or more correctly, they formed each other. They lay originally in complete opposition, the yin-yang (union of opposites) were seperated by a smooth and fine line. As the physical universe evolved, it began to accept more from the Xoul (and vise versa). The capacity for this acceptance was very small to begin with. Nonetheless the acceptance began to make the dividing line very complex and chaos found its birth. As chaos evolved in the universe the inanimate began to become animate and life spread throughout the universe. This increased the rate of acceptance, and accelerated the evolutionary process.
With the advent of the sciences, came a very obvious push by the rational to understand the Xoul. In this time, chaos itself was discovered. Though, it might be pointed out that concepts like entropy were in themselves a discovery of chaos and, indeed, the arrow of time in the universe.
The Human Being
This is the closest thing we have seen to a meeting point between the Rational and the Xoul. On the one hand, we understand the mechanics of the Universe, yet we barely understand ourselves. This has more to do with a devotion to the obvious than with any great mystery to the Xoul. We are self-aware, and have seemingly infinite universes within us. If we look deeply into the window of our minds we see great paradoxes and irrationality.
The Jerrimooites hold that this is the Xoul staring back at us. The paradoxes resolve themselves as the ego is destroyed.
The destruction of the ego is the path that every Xanja Panjan must take. There must be gained the firm realisation and conviction that the individual soul does not exist and that consciousness does indeed end at the grave. Why are we conscious of our passing, is a question that is answered when we realise that we are the Xoul. Our soul cannot live forever for this would be at the exclusion of the Xoul. We therefore go through life with the beleif that we are individuals, but we are confronted at our death that we are enmeshed in the Xoul. All life is the Xoul, and the Xoul is all life.
Our consciousness, is therefore the physical manifestations of the Xoul in its rawest form. Our birth marks the acceptance by the rational world of a large piece of the Xoul. This xoul-piece is fed and nourished through dreams, and is carnate form fed with the energies of the Universe in some ecosystem or another. After some time this xoul-piece must be returned by the rational Universe to the not.
The Eporrhynchine Death Probes
A group of devout Jerrimooites saw reason to undergo death, such that others could study the enmeshing of the soul into the xoul and record the experiences by the volunteers. Each Death probe was a highly learned devotee, who had spent decades focusing thought into the projection of psychic disturbance so as to make for easy recording as far into the enmeshing process as possible. When over a hundred devotees suicided, thousands more gathered and recorded.
"the soul enters a phase of deep schzisophrenia here the present self is annihlated in the face of a greater force. The force appears only as talk and is familiar in the form of the talk heard in dreams. It quickly takes on a more gregarious nature and seeks to envelop the mind. Amid blinding light the tussle continues for a time before wonderment and relief depart as the last traceable mind cognitions."
"Each node of body-consciousness follows a differant path to the creator. It is important not to focus on one thought as one is experiencing death. It leaves much of the remaining wonders unexperienced. To the one who considers one thought death is like a dark tunnel that ends in light. At the light lies instant scattering in a sudden loss of dream-consciousness. To those who float of the bubbles of their consciousness, death is the drawing of their soul into a greater. A being is lifted by his/her head into the ceiling and beyond. Parts of your thoughts are not recogniseable to you, then you fail to recognise yourself, you are all animals in one, and then you are the universe, and therefore the Xoul."
"All animals in one" was a thought that was to be greatly expanded upon in the now famous lycanthrope tomes. In here the meeting of the Xoul is found in the destruction of the present self. This is enacted mentally and finally physically by the lycanthrope. It is not surprising that lycanthropy is considered indistinguishable from divinity in Jerrimooite beliefs. It is a matter of interest that the two terms have the same word in the Xanja Panjan tongue.
The Collective Unconsciousness
The existence of the idea of a collective unconsciousness predates Jerrimooite beliefs considerably. Carl Gustav Jung first posed such ideas in the first part of the 20th Century.
Certainly the most remarkable process of the universe its consciousness. To define consciousness as a process is deliberate, as it is not a property. Soul is not a thing, its an action. The human individual is not so much a seat of consciousness either, but a kind of receiver and local processor. The feeling of consciousness is fleeting and transitory, and subject to change. Its apparent continuousness and contiguousness, being illusory. Yet this local seat appears to have been responsible for the larger, more continuous collective.
The collective was first identified to be motive force behind synchronicity. This phenomenon was identified through psychotherapy in the 20th Century. Fairy tales told to children became part of their neuroses in certain cases, and their lives mirrored that of the character in the fairy tale they most identified with. The fact that later events in their lives, such as a parent dying, also mirrored the life of the character in the fairy tale, was the synchronicity. Rational thinkers at the time put this down to coincidence, but this coincidence was astoundingly commonplace. While this did not prove synchronicity, even by induction, its existence was strongly suspected.
Observations of learned behaviour in monkies also in the 20th Century lead to another property that has been tied to the collective unconscious. It was Richard Dawkins during that same century that made much of memes. These were theorised as being social viruses, whereby ideas were passed via communications, and seemed to carry a life of their own. The monkey observations indicated that such memes were passed between two groups of monkeys without physical contact. Certain survival strategies were acquired by both populations simultaneously (in evolutionary terms). It was argued at the time that the survival strategies in question must have been the only correct answer to a stress in the evironment experienced by both populations, or that the observations were nothing but a series of coincidences. The weight of observational evidence, though, once again, placed suspicion on some extra sensory transferrence of information.
The reigning ideology of science at the time, made little of these observations, using the first as a psychoanalytic tool only, and largely ignoring the second. The most mundane conclusions, coincidence, probability etc. being the favoured, however unlikely. It was not until the late 21st Century, when the rational bias was slowly eroded that more exotic conclusions were admissible. Up until that time, only new age and trash science drew these conclusions, usually more exotic versions therein, further hardening the rationalist line in "respected" academia.
A third observation lies well within the rationalist line, and that is the collective unconsciosness of Carl Gustav Jung. At the time, this was observed as a deep part of every human mind, that contained images of archetypes. It was supposed that the collective unconscious was inherited by every human being, thus universal, and the thing we all have in common. This explained why the archetypes were universally experienced. In this view the collective unconsciousness is a mind fossilised within the skull of every human being and not subject to change within the individual's lifetime. This observation was used extensively in psychoanalysis, but was not tied to the other two observations until the late 21st Century by any kind of "respectable" academia.
The Self
With consciousness described as a process and an illusiory vision of self, it can be asked if there is anything in there at all. The answer to this lies partly with the clues we are given in synchronicity.
Synchronicity is the eqivalence of psychic and physical events, where the experiencer is fortunate enough to recognise the meanings. Such events are said to be acts of creation in time, and they feel like some supernatural force is aiming at you, what is rather the case is that the meaning or archetype becomes manifest in the event, through some creative process in the universe.
The other part lies with the very nature of self itself. This is a very difficult concept, because we write and think in our conscious minds, which are physical manifestations of the self and the collective unconscious. The self is a mass of suprapersonal and creative contents, but behind veils is an absolute object about which no verifiable statements can be made.