The Predator from the Depths of the Cosmos
Gaza is the microcosm of the World
For the last 20 years, I have been compelled to try to communicate a vision of the end of the world. Not a vision of Armageddon, though the end of the world may well look like that, though it may well look like Gaza, but something at first more subtle, a silent and total takeover. Once visible, it will be too late.
I decided to communicate it via fiction, rather than critical theory, metaphysics or shamanism, the input channels that drove the compulsion to communicate. In many ways, this is an absurd task. Condensing the ending of the world into a manageable narrative, edited, honed, and subject to the laws of fiction—setting, inciting incident, development, tension, release, narrative drive and so on—is nearly impossible. Writing “five minutes into the future” means there is five minutes to construct, write, edit, re-edit, re-write. A Sisyphus task, probably best abandoned. Yet, probably narcissistically, I harbour a Cassandra complex. The compulsion to communicate continues.
The title of this article comes from Carlos Castaneda’s last book, The Active Side of Infinity (1998). In Chapter 16, Don Juan, the shaman, takes Castaneda, the apprentice, into the Sonoran chaparral to discuss “the topic of topics.” As on many previous occasions, Don Juan’s power—mastery of the nagual—allows Castaneda to perceive the world energetically. This time, he sees a proliferation of black shadows flitting about. Don Juan says:
“The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were the first ones to see those fleeting shadows, so they followed them around. They saw them as you're seeing them, and they saw them as energy that flows in the universe. And they did discover something transcendental."He stopped talking and looked at me. His pauses were perfectly placed. He always stopped talking when I was hanging by a thread.
"What did they discover, don Juan?" I asked.
"They discovered that we have a companion for life," he said, as clearly as he could. "We have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos and took over the rule of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners. The predator is our lord and master. It has rendered us docile, helpless. If we want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it demands that we don't do so."
“Protest” will bring to the reader’s mind the global protests against the Israeli onslaught on Gaza. Protests against the ongoing bombing of civilians, including those already hospitalised. Protests against the stated objectives of the State of Israel to wipe Gaza off the face of the earth. Protests the UK government, for one, seeks to suppress by smearing them as “hate marches.”
Millions are protesting all over the world. Many millions more are not.
"I want to appeal to your analytical mind," don Juan said. Think for a moment, and tell me how you would explain the contradiction between the intelligence of man the engineer and the stupidity of his systems of beliefs, or the stupidity of his contradictory behavior. Sorcerers believe that the predators have given us our systems of beliefs, our ideas of good and evil, our social mores. They are the ones who set up our hopes and expectations and dreams of success or failure. They have given us covetousness, greed, and cowardice. It is the predators who make us complacent, routinary, and egomaniacal."
Readers familiar with Paul Levy’s Dispellling Wetiko—a Lakota word describing the affliction indigenous people observed in American settlers—will recall the book’s central illustration of a “vampire squid.”
The image above inspired this article’s feature image, which was artificially “imagined” by the Midjourney app to illustrate a scene from my novel, LIGHT.
Readers familiar with the Matrix trilogy (1999) will recall the flying squids that form the Machines front line.
We should also mention the Schwarzenegger movie, Predator (1987). This more simplistic narrative yet channels some essential observations:
There is a predator.
It has been here since time immemorial.
It has sophisticated camouflage that renders it invisible.
Predator sees Dutch (Schwarzenegger) squirting a gatling gun at the jungle canopy, disabling his foe’s invisibility before capturing him in a trap. Face to face with him, he asks, “What are you?” The predator laughs, and points to the self-destruct timer already running on his spacesuit.
Readers who have drunk enough ayahuasca will have encountered the predator directly, including in vampire squid form.
The links between the Active Side of Infinity, Wetiko, Matrix and Predator are obvious. It is very likely their authors have drunk ayahuasca. The convergence of these narratives implies a shamanic-scientific fact: There is a predator.
While Matrix and Predator locate the predator outside of us—an alien, a machine—Wetiko brings the settler home. He refers to the syndrome befalling its human prey as Malignant Egophrenia, or ME.
There is a contagious psychospiritual disease of the soul, a parasite of the mind, that is currently being acted out en masse on the world stage via a collective psychosis of titanic proportions.
This collective psychosis will destroy the world. It has destroyed it several, even many, times before. Hence the perennial myth of The Flood, which foreshadows the forthcoming Apocalypse.
Levy again:
Wetiko flavors and manages our perceptions by stealth and subterfuge so as to act itself out through us while simultaneously hiding itself from being seen. Not constrained by the conventional laws of third-dimensional space and time, this ‘bug’ in the system deceives us by working with the intrinsic projective tendencies of our mind so as to appear external to and other than ourselves, utilizing the seemingly outside world as the canvas for its full-bodied revelation of itself.
As its tanks and infantry amass today outside the beleaguered Al Shifa hospital in Gaza, the IDF claims on the one hand that “there is no assault on the hospital” and on the other that "the hospital is a legitimate target” as it is “the secret headquarters” of Hamas.
Having supplied Western media outlets with falsified and debunked evidence of Hamas operatives planning the destruction of Al Ahli hospital by mobile phone, they supply another audio recording, which “proves beyond doubt” that Hamas are hiding under the hospital.
Dr Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian doctor at Al Ahli firmly rejects these claims. Whatever your beliefs, whatever your stance, I recommend watching the video.
Or, if you are inclined to dismiss Al Jazeera reports as propaganda, try this CNN interview with Medecins Sans Frontiers nurse Emily Callahan, recently evacuated from emergency medical care in Gaza.
Meanwhile, the West vetoes international calls for a ceasefire, Israel defies the will of the General Assembly, whom it smears as “antisemitic,” and dismisses the many and substantial reports of its crimes against humanity as “lies” and “antisemitic” even when those reports originate in Israel.
This is where our collective psychosis has gotten us. But how did we get into this in the first place? Castaneda:
"But how can they do this, don Juan?" I asked, somehow angered further by what he was saying. "Do they whisper all that in our ears while we are asleep?"
"No, they don't do it that way. That's idiotic!" don Juan said, smiling. "They are infinitely more efficient and organized than that. In order to keep us obedient and meek and weak, the predators engaged themselves in a stupendous maneuver—stupendous, of course, from the point of view of a fighting strategist. A horrendous maneuver from the point of view of those who suffer it. They gave us their mind!
Think about that.
Especially if you are persuaded by IDF reports of terrorists hiding in ambulances and bunkers beneath hospitals. Especially if you are afraid of protestors calling for ceasefire. Especially if you believe your personal safety demands the eradication of “Hamas terrorists”.
I do not believe we can apply, by some “spiritual” doctrine of symmetry, the same argument to the Palestinians. It is difficult to accuse them of projecting their fears of oppression when oppression has been violently manifest for decades, when it bursts through the front door and ransacks the house, arrests children and takes them away for inhumane interrogation and torture.
Don’t believe me? Think the endless video footage of butchered children on Youtube are Hamas propaganda? Then go back before October 7. Read a few posts from
or Finkelstein’s 900 page account, Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom.Like Castaneda’s response to don Juan’s revelation that humans are prisoners, the natural response to the bombing of a hospital full of wounded children—whether or not Hamas is hiding in the basement—is either rage or despair.
The problem with the natural response of rage or despair is that most of us cannot handle it. As don Juan warns Castaneda, as Morpheus warns Neo in Matrix, it will drive us mad. Going mad is also a natural response.
From the safe remove of anywhere outside the 25 mile long Gaza Strip, we go mad at the TV screen, where suited pundits line up to justify the madness of bombing children in hospital, or shooting medical staff in the head through the window. Israel has a right to defend itself! Hamas cannot be reasoned with! They are terrorists. They are animals. They are nazis.
From the safe remove of the internet, I am reduced to going mad at my laptop screen, for instance at former UK MP turned celebrity ballroom dancer, Covid and NHS-dismantling profiteer Ed Balls, resorting to puerile assaults on the heroic Owen Jones’ arguments on Good Morning Britain.
Or the equally cool-headed—and Jewish—James Schneider—in the face of puerile insults hurled at him by Israel lobbyist David Mencer on Talk TV.
Balls and Mencer’s exercised faces are the face of British Establishment. It is an establishment that unequivocally defends Israel’s right to imprison and torture children, and shoot, maim and bomb them as they shake with fear on a blood-soaked hospital floor. There is no justification for the bombing of wounded children in a hospital. None. Period.
One response to these displays of self-justified hatred is hatred. One response to Suella Braverman’s strategic smearing of anti-bombing protests as “hate marches” is hatred. Another is disgust and another is despair.
I am not calling for hatred. As the (Jewish) trauma expert Gabor Maté says, “we have to go beyond our feelings.” But we have to have the feelings before we can go beyond them. To turn away from those feelings, from the horror of what is unfolding, is to allow the predator from the depths of the cosmos to remain invisible and continue to imprison and torture us.
According to don Juan, the predator cannot be defeated.
"What we have against us is not a simple predator. It is very smart, and organized. It follows a methodical system to render us useless. Man, the magical being that he is destined to be, is no longer magical. He's an average piece of meat. There are no more dreams for man but the dreams of an animal who is being raised to become a piece of meat: trite, conventional, imbecilic."
Six million or six—however many cycles of human evolution have passed—we have come full circle once again. The world is tired. The Palestinian holocaust must serve as a call to arms against the predator.
It is not about turning away from the horror it wreaks upon us, in Gaza or the TV studio. It is about taking it in, being triggered and following the lines of activation. Only then can we know our oppressor and adapt. It is the evolutionary duty of all of us to to do so. Neither conscience nor evolution will permit otherwise.
Know the predator. Know thyself! Work with the elements, the shamanic mesa and the Gene Keys to unravel shadows and bring the light of your natural wisdom to the world. The Mesa of Alchemy online retreat launches next month. Join us!