"Predictive History" and the Second Coming
Evil Cabals and Angelic Communities
I recently traveled to Amsterdam to talk to a group of investors and business owners on the topic of the Art of Quality in life and work. We met at The Embassy of the Free Mind, which houses a collection of thirty thousand books of wisdom, all made available to the general public.
On the flight to the Netherlands I watched a few videos and read a few substacks by Professor Jiang. He’s an English teacher in China that’s going viral for his concept of “predictive history.” He pulls together a vast array of sources to make some questionable arguments and forecasts. His core claim is that the world is run by a cabal of secret societies backed by an array of wealthy families. They all share a convergent framework for hastening the apocalypse by means of World War centered in the Middle East. Israel will then emerge triumphant at the center of a new world order. The key feature of this new era is that technological acceleration through A.I. will reach a climax with a totalizing surveillance state and the triumph of transhumanism.
Given the extremely convenient timing of his emergence, I can’t work out to what extent his work is a Chinese Communist Party psyop, free-associative psychosis or genuine insight. But whenever I encounter this kind of content, I now ask myself: is it increasing either my consciousness or agency? Even if partially accurate, conspiracy theories rarely do that. If I discovered that the world was actually run by lizard people, there’s probably very little I could actually do about it.
However, Jiang’s work was unexpectedly helpful. I run a community for the exploration of consciousness, purpose and mystical truths. Reading his theories prompted me to ask myself what the worst kind of secret society could look like, and what kind of world they would try to create. One thing history teaches us is that small groups of powerful people can push apocalyptic agendas based on destructive worldviews. Even more provocatively, it made me wonder that, if Jiang was somehow right about the push towards armageddon, what agency would we each have in trying to stop it?
It turns out the “free mind” may hold the answer.
The Michael Community
Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner devised detailed spiritual-scientific theories of the forces he believed were influencing human civilization at this stage of our history. Why are Steiner’s esoteric visions of Archangels and Atlantis any more valuable than a guy drawing spaghetti maps of Freemasons and Illuminati on a whiteboard? One reason is that Steiner was a polymath who made profound contributions to the fields of education, agriculture, medicine, and the arts. Another reason is that, even if they are metaphorical, his frameworks still resonate with my own explorations. Conspiracy theories use stories to construct misleading lies, myths use stories to reveal guiding truths. Apocalypse or not, I believe Steiner’s ideas lead to the kind of agency that reduces unnecessary suffering.
For me, this is the primary purpose of learning pretty much anything.
I’m new to Steiner’s cosmology, and it’s pretty complex stuff (this interview with James Tunney is a powerful introduction). As I understand it, a core duality in his worldview are the twin forces of Ahriman and Lucifer, reflected by the two extremes of human temptation. Ahriman represents cold materialism and technological dominance, and Lucifer is spiritual bypassing and the denial of our earthly responsibilities. Full left brain versus full right brain.
I don’t consider myself to be a “traditional Christian” but, the more I learn, the more I have been drawn to Christian mysticism, particularly to the archetype of Archangel Michael.1 Steiner believed that we were currently in the Michaelic Age, the cosmic intelligence that clears the path for humanity's conscious reunion with what he called the “Christ impulse.” This is a marriage that allows each of us to freely choose the path of heart-driven co-creation. The superpowered left hemispheres we’ve cultivated over the last few hundred years could be redeployed in contribution with the whole.
According to Steiner, Michael defeated Ahriman in the heavens and he was cast down into the world of men. He prophesied that Ahriman would eventually manifest in the physical world, around the end of the start of the 21st century. It’s almost impossible not to equate this with the rapid rise of A.I. and Silicon Valley transhumanism. There is substantial overlap in Steiner’s view of Ahriman and the techno-dystopian worldview people like Jiang claim is now being forced upon us. This is one reason these metaphorical warnings may have value.
Twenty years in finance taught me to reflexively dismiss any grand forecasts of imminent doom or the dawning of a glorious New Age. But I confess that I’ve become increasingly unsettled by how many normal-seeming people I meet are anticipating a dramatic shift of some kind over the next two years. As most of us know, “apocalypse” actually means an unveiling. And without predicting, just observing, it’s clear we are currently living through an unprecedented period of A.I.- assisted discovery, governmental disclosure of institutional corruption and potentially even declassification of advanced technologies. Most importantly, it’s also blindingly obvious that we are going through a radical reframing of our relationship with reality. I have repeatedly noticed little synchronicities that the “Second Coming” will actually be in the form of this collective transition in consciousness.
The term “crystalline consciousness” has really stuck with me. If you put a single grain of salt into a super-saturated solution the whole container suddenly transforms into a crystal. Small-seeming influences can change things very fast. Steiner talked about how this dramatic crystallization of the Christ impulse could be catalysed by what he called The Michael Community.2
These groups would be able to balance the polarity of Ahrimanic materialism and Luciferic spirituality. Steiner also believed they could incorporate both the Platonic and Aristotelian worldviews, a distinction that maps pretty closely to McGilchrist’s left and right hemispheres.3 As I wrote recently, I believe that the modern Michael Community will need to hold five different polarities in order to be successful.
For me, the most interesting part of the philosophy behind Steiner’s Michael Community is that it also seems to support the most powerful and effective worldview I’ve encountered in all my explorations so far. It’s also the one that has most increased my sense of individual agency; my free will. This is the concept of Earth as a kind of “school.” Steiner makes a fascinating distinction between backward-looking analysis of your karmic history and forward-looking interpretation of the signals being presented by reality.4
If this is literally true, as I increasingly believe it is, then once you learn the lessons your past has presented, they might stop repeating (I find usually after one last test to check you got the message). Then, looking forward, if you can be open to the signals our limitlessly intelligent reality is offering you, choosing the right path forwards becomes easier. Emotions and sensations are a catalyst to orient your attention, so if you ignore them they often grow louder and more intense. Irrespective of whether we are in some sort of “end times” right now, this perspective has significantly improved my daily life. Left hemispheric analysis of your past and right hemispheric intuitive navigation in the present can combine to reduce your unnecessary suffering.
Variants on this core worldview have been consistently reinforced by many of our most resonant teachers, as well as recent Leading Edge guests like Dr. Chris Bache and Dr. Bill Plotkin.5 Most importantly, it directly rejects the dominant disempowering and dehumanising lies of materialism: that death is permanent and the material world is indifferent to you. This worldview, more than any other, keeps people trapped in inauthentic lives that slowly crush their humanity. And yet, if reincarnation is real, and the soul survives the body, it makes sense that the deliberate evolution of consciousness is the purpose of our time here. That’s why learning the backward-looking lessons is so important. And if reality is intelligently responsive to our actions, there is a path of co-creation that is specifically meant for us. For centuries, mystery schools have taught these heretical secrets, and even demonstrated them by inducing out of body experiences among their members. But these secrets previously reserved for initiates are now increasingly mainstream scientific research.6 This information now needs to be generously shared through a network of networks, rather than greedily hoarded by cabals.
I have called these truths the Sword that Slays the Dragon. In the corner of our meeting room in Amsterdam my eye was drawn to a sketch, apparently by the owner’s wife. To me, it immediately spoke of Archangel Michael’s sword of truth. Curled on the blade is an ouroboros snake eating its own tail. This was the image the channeler Mary recently said came to her when she spoke about me. I inhale the world’s information and try to synthesize and share the resonant truths. I keep meeting people who love doing the same. I read that the Michaelic Age will see the emergence of a kind of “cosmopolitan mind”; someone at home in every spiritual tradition, driven to bring them all back together. The sword’s blade itself balances light and dark and there’s a five-pointed star on its handle. Coincidentally this is the same shape I had just used to represent the five polarities held in a Leading Edge community. The sword’s point meets at a rose, representing the opening of the heart.
I left Amsterdam with fresh optimism that we’re going to make it through. The Art of Quality project is run by heart-centered investors William Oliver, Paul Higgins, John Candeto, and Ferdinand von Bennigsen. They are trying to balance the polarities of material and spiritual. And in the middle is the Tao, Quality or the Christ impulse. The emphasis was on love, curiosity and culture. Many of the attendees have access to substantial wealth, power and influence. And, like most people I now meet, they know it’s now time to freely share it. To let it spread through the Network of Networks. Money is the most significant perceived constraint on free will for the people that I meet. I’ll be honest, the possibility that we may also be on a pretty tight timeline has made me a lot more generous with my own time and resources. What am I saving it all for?
Sitting in the Embassy of the Free Mind I was struck by the resonance of that name. They have deliberately made the world’s mystical wisdom available to everyone. Every single mystical tradition has the sanctity of free will at its heart. A “bad” kind of secret society, mystery school or power structure seeks to manipulate and the “good” kind seeks to empower. It is striking, for example, that Jeffery Epstein was a patron of so many scientists, ideologies and technologies that see the human as a machine to be exploited.7 Our greatest wealth creation engines now derive their value precisely from their capacity to capture and direct human attention. This gives a tiny group of largely interconnected men the power to manipulate, at unprecedented scale, what people notice, feel, and want. This is not a conspiracy theory.
Evolving your free will doesn’t mean the anything-goes “do what thy wilt” of black magic, it means deliberately aligning with creation. One of the Leading Edge members who joined us at the event is an enthusiast on the origin of words. He noted that the word sacrifice derives from “making sacred.” Whether truth or fiction, secret societies have always been associated with blood sacrifice. Taking someone else’s life in return for power. The ultimate infringement of free will. It struck me that the Michael Community would do the opposite. Self-sacrifice doesn’t mean self-destruction, it means integrating your consciousness so you can freely use your gifts in mutual flourishing. And you make yourself sacred in the process.
The telos, the inner direction and goal, of the Western mind has been to reconnect with the cosmos in a mature participation mystique, to surrender itself freely and consciously in the embrace of a larger unity that preserves human autonomy while also transcending human alienation.
-Richard Tarnas
I have a pretty confused relationship with traditional Christianity, so I’ve been very grateful for Jeff Williams’ guidance on Christian mysticism, especially his latest piece Jesus Left Humanity with a Simple Test.
Aristotelians tend toward precision, system-building and careful development of concepts. They want to understand how things work. Platonists tend toward direct perception, imagery, mythic thinking, and cosmic scope. They want to experience things before they can explain them.
On the topic of backwards-looking karma, Dr. Chris Bache talked about how our task is to integrate all our past life experiences into a single embodied consciousness and then to live that consciousness here on this planet. Bache calls this the “Diamond Soul,” which he experienced by gradually journeying through five ever more expansive scales of reality. He gained this perspective after twenty years of unimaginably intense LSD sessions then another twenty years of integration. In terms of forward-looking guidance, Dr. Bill Plotkin talked about how we find our soul’s purpose by reading the mythopoetic symbols presented to us by nature. If we are open to the intelligence of the world around us, we can gain powerful insights on how best to contribute to the world. His perspective is the result of a lifetime of studying Soul Initiation practices and over forty years of running wilderness vision quests. This resonates with Steiner’s view of Sophia as a source of living wisdom and inspiration.
Listening to Brett A. Hurt’s latest interview with Eben Alexander it’s It’s becoming hard to argue with the fact that death isn’t what we think it is, which is a fatal blow to materialism and nihilism. I learned that, thanks to cardiac resuscitation techniques improving after 1968, we’ve gone from essentially no systematic documented report, to 8+ million on record by 1982, to somewhere between 9–13 million Americans by the early 1990s, with roughly 200,000 new reports per year today.
I really enjoyed Douglas Rushkoff’s chilling essay My Dinner with Jeffrey: “Dawkins’s model of human-as-hardware, and other anti-human ones of Daniel Dennett or Stephen Pinker, won out in Silicon Valley. Their views were entirely more compatible with business models that depended on manipulating human beings instead of empowering them— exploiting them for profit rather than giving them opportunities for collective creativity. If people were really just passively responding to lines of genetic or cultural code, then why not be the ones writing that code and capitalizing off it? Jeffrey Epstein liked and funded these scientists because they helped him formulate a picture of the world that gives cover to those who would exploit other human beings: as they see it - “people aren’t really alive or aware— they’re just behaving in service to their genetics. And, if you play your cards right, in service to your genetics.””
I feel sick that you would amplify Jiang's antisemitic conspiracy theories, only to then say his work was "unexpectedly helpful" and to argue that maybe the guy has a point about the evil cabals and the blood sacrifice.
The idea that there's a secret cabal trying to remake the world for the benefit of Israel is not revolutionary or challenging or inspirational in my opinion. It's the same old hatred repackaged for a new generation, and it's being disseminated at a terrifying pace thanks to the internet.
I'm in genuine shock. You're better than this, Tom.