Monopolization of contact with the divine world

The muzzling of the spirit
After having passed through a moment of pure bliss and awareness of the corruption that affects our minds through the deception fostered by official discourse, we revolt against the fake discourse that distorts the significance of this paramount spiritual experience. Cursed be those who pretend to commandeer us in the name of the Most High, the source of our experience of oceanic belonging, the ocean we share with nature and all of creation. Humanity has been fighting nature for short-sighted selfish interests, following its rulers while they proclaimed that only they had the ear of God, the only god to boot.
But worst of all, the rulers' proclamations have been based on lies, lies used to legitimize their usurpation of power in the name of the most wholesome. Their web of lies and their prohibition of the plants of the gods have made the oceanic belonging become an experience of the past, and have cut humankind off from nature so as to be able to subjugate it better.

We read in ancient Babylonian literature that the entrance to our personal divine world was first guarded by Scorpion people, although they failed to stop the foremost man, king Gilgamesh, from going to the ocean at the end of the world and beyond, to the realm of the immortals. There he was refused entrance but was entrusted with a divine gift for his people: the plant of rejuvenation, which the king irresponsiblhy lost on his way back home.
The thirteenth century BC scribe that wrote this epic story that ended with the sundering of the world of humankind from the realm of the gods, did not think yet of including a form of punishment for those who would try to regain entrance to that divine realm. As a consquence the people continued to use the plant and many different gods were worshipped, leading to political chaos within and the eventual downfall of the Babylonian empire at the hands of Cyrus, king of the Persians.

The priests of Yahweh put Cherubim in charge of guarding the entrance to the world beyond. These biblical guardians were armed with a flaming sword, conveying an unequivocal message: from now on death awaits all those who will but try to go to the other shore. More important still was the place given to the prohibition on the consumption of the fruit of knowledge of good and evil. Whereas the Babylonian scribe had put the loss of the plant as a curious detail at the very end of the Gilgamesh Epic, in the Jewish Bible the command not to eat from the fruit comes at the very beginning, forming the cornerstone of the law, the Torah, to be explained in subsequent books of the Bible.

As we mentioned above, this is what royal ideology is all about : the ruler decrees a monopoly on the relations with the gods by means of the prohibition of the use of entheogenic substances.

pdf 151 Knowable knowledge is relative, while unknown knowledge is absolute and transcendental and is not communicable through the medium of ideas. Absolute (pdf 152) knowledge is the knowledge which the subject has of himself directly without any medium between him and his knowledge. He does not divide himself into factors such as subject and object in order to know himself. We may say that it is a state of inner awareness. And this awareness is singularly contributive to keeping one's mind free of fears and anxieties. [Suzuki, Studies in Zen]

This prohibition inhibits his people's relations with their personal divine world, and in so doing, silences their inner voices. As a result of the muzzling of this voice, the mind is deprived of the intuitive knowledge hitherto received in the ecstatic state and humankind loses the existential certainty of yore, which now turns into anguish. With the voice from within gone silent, the people become dependent on another voice, the one from the seat of power, promulgated from the palace. (Nick Wyatt)

In this story, written at the occasion of the Ugarit king’s enthronement, sovereignty had been given to a ruler and society would have to make do with the symbolic ritual that invested the king with the sovereignty in representation of all his people. Wyatt explains: “This ritual process was in one, psychological, respect the whole purpose of the liturgy, because the identification of men with the gods, even if only through their representative, the king, was an escape from the alienation that marks the human condition.” (Idem, p 57 [pdf 16R])

Here we have reached the point where the will to power raises its head. Existential knowledge gives certainty and cultivates security, something all humans yearn for.
If you want your word to be heard and obeyed, than you need to hinder these others from listening to their voice from inside. Without the knowledge which that voice provides them, these people will not be so certain anymore and will feel less secure about the value of their own ideas. If in that situation you proclaim in a loud voice that you have gotten the answers, gotten them in heaven from the Almighty in person, you will be the chief, especially if you have the stick, to make your words stick.
In this lust for power the lie is fabricated and prohibition is born, in order to keep the truth from illuminating the minds of the people, for the greater glory of the ruler.

By obstructing the flow of existential knowledge, the knowledge which anchors one’s mind in the heart and maintains the feeling of belonging experienced in the ecstatic state, the mind is set adrift like a ship wrecked at sea, the reward for whomever tows it ashore, for whomever throws the alienated mind a life line to help it survive. Moreover, if you take that existential security away you will be seen as the saviour when throwing the rope to the drowning.

Fervent defenders of the shamanic age will assert that evil entered spiritual life with the development of the priestly classes, but students of the shamanic societies have shown that greed and the will to power were already important factors motivating the individually operating shamans. A straightforward example of this materialist shamanic trait is explorer Rasmussen's account of meeting an arctic shaman – in the company of his new wife – who told him how during a very cold winter some years earlier, he had eaten his first wife in order to survive. And historian of religions Paul Radin explains how among the Eskimos "the angakok or shamans, have managed to gather firmly into their hands whatever political power exists."

A third example from among the Yokuts of south-central California by American anthropologist Anna Hardwick Gayton, will make the blatant economic interest shown by the shamans even clearer: