The External Gaze of the Global Shadow

by Kingsley Dennis

what has no parallel is this gigantic collective hallucination by which a whole section of humanity has come to take the vainest fantasies for incontestable realities.
René Guénon

What has materialized as our so-called ‘modern world’ can no longer be seen or considered as a ‘breakthrough’ but as in a breakdown mode, for the external outreach of globalizing forces and powers has brought humanity to a threshold. It is a threshold – a crisis point – of meaning and future orientation. It is, in other words, a period of existential crisis for the human race. René Guénon, in the above opening citation, refers to this predicament as a ‘gigantic collective hallucination.’ He is right in a general way. And yet, within the human collective, there is no longer a shared hallucination but a fragmentation of hallucinatory visions. The reality construct in which we inhabit has become a fragmentary, splintered landscape. It is a scarred terrain upon which can be seen the pockmarks of a dried materialism. Dried – and shriveled – for it is absent of any genuine spiritual or transcendental component. Deepening material forces have pushed, and continue to push, out across the planet, forcing itself upon a largely organic environment. Intelligence is being substituted by intellect – a force utilized to act on matter to produce utilitarian ends. And science, by and large, is an area that has been developed into an industry and with industrial applications. Science has been invested in as a driving force behind the military-tech-industrial complex. Intellect, devoid of a connection to an inner, reflective world, is heavily used in the manufacture of what can only be termed ‘artificial objects.’ It is a turn away from the metaphysical, toward the categorization of the ‘other’ or ‘meta,’ and a diminishing of the perceptual spectrum. It is an outward gazing eye of intellect that is inwardly blind to intuitive insight. And yet it is perfectly suited to an era of machinic advancement. Genuine intelligence is being subtly replaced by its lesser cousin – the intellect. 

 Parallel to the outward gaze of the intellect lies a continued onslaught and assault against those aspects deemed as organic – the bodily, agricultural, and environmental domains where carbon reigns as a vital and necessary component. Those elements vital to organic life are being demonized, targeted for eradication, and also monitored and monetized. The administrations of control are hijacking utilitarian narratives to underpin the pseudo-morality of a modernized, globalized world order. It is a morality that has inverted essential human values (as I discussed in my previous book, The Inversion). A corporatized, oligarchical civilization has formed as an abnormal bodily cell from the perspective of essential human values, and yet it is setting itself up as the controlling world order for the future trajectory of a globalized civilization. Here, the tumour is metastasizing, and it is cancerizing the many cells within the organic host body. 

 Any notion of progress is now defined within terms of material development, regardless of whether this development has a corresponding set of values and ethics. The concept of ‘progress’ has become interchangeable with the notion of ‘civilization’ as if the two naturally go together. And any arguments against this will be considered as coming from a Luddite or ‘primitive’ perspective. The modern idea of progress can be seen as a relatively recent invention based upon a material paradigm rather than one of inner growth and conscious evolution. The word itself – ‘civilization’ – only entered our lexicon within the last couple of centuries. Again, it is a perspective that belongs to world creation, or worlding, that fits into an agenda of global scale. Western, especially European, expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries took on the mantle of ‘civilization’ to export it upon less so-called ‘developed’ or less industrialized cultures. The notion of civilization from western eyes was thus tinged from its beginnings as a hierarchical and colonizing scheme, with high value placed upon westernized notions of superior intellect and empirical science. Corporatized ideas of civilization then are clearly tied with a paradigm of materialism and material progress – the very thing now epitomized by A.I. deep machine learning, algorithms, and digital systems. Furthermore, the mentality of the globalized ‘collective civilization’ of today is a mass suggestibility – a programmed mentality.

The Russian-American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin noted that societies could be recognized according to their ‘cultural mentality.’ These, he wrote, could be distinguished as ‘ideational’ where reality is primarily considered as spiritual and immaterial; ‘sensate,’ where truth is seen as material and to be gained through materiality; and ‘idealistic,’ which is a synthesis of the two. Past crises to hit the human realm were responded to according to the type of cultural mentality at the time. And for centuries, human society, cultures, and civilizations have had a religious and/or spiritual base or framework of one type or another. This does not mean that such cultures were predominantly religious but that they had a religious underpinning and organizational order. People overcame crises at the same time as believing in some form of religious framework – they believed in their god(s) even if they didn’t know what it was exactly that they believed in. They just harboured some form of religious/spiritual worldview that aided them when it was necessary.

Yet in more recent times, atheism has crept into cultural programming, as it was deemed better suited to an industrializing worldview based upon a paradigm of material progress. The idea of a divine Source has been substituted by the forces of material progress; a randomized reality where the survival of the fittest is based upon who can imprint their will most strongly upon the materially malleable environment. As we shall see in later chapters, this has proven to be an ally in the transhumanist narrative, where technology has replaced divine order. Institutionalized religion has befallen the sins of corruption, and faith has been diverted into online metafusions of digital fantasy. Within this profusion of fragmented realities has arisen the psychological and emotional egregore (psychic entity) of nihilism. The Absolute has been removed from the reality paradigm and in its place dark matter, empty space, and meaningless has filled the vacuum. A global order is emerging, orchestrated from the shadows by an elusive and nefarious empire of elite hands, which in Sorokin’s terms is primarily sensate in nature and design. And this, I would posit, is the crux of humanity’s existential crisis. 

The global shadow being cast across the planet is rewriting the historical narrative by attempting to create the illusion that a westernized Anglo-American based empire is being demolished and replaced with a more equitable multi-polar brethren of beneficial governance. And yet as Herbert Marcuse warned us decades ago, the free election of masters does not abolish neither the masters nor the slaves. The brethren of a ‘beneficial multi-polar world order’ is the behemoth of Moloch in a new historical disguise. Within this reconstructed historical framework, any notion of the ‘human spirit’ is now polarized into a mentality of medieval theology or rebranded through the corrupt corporate practices of commercial well-being, feelgood factors, and online guruism, etc. Within this dry, intellectualized, external gaze of progress and economic development there is virtually no space, no access, for development upon a perceptual and intuitive level. Within today’s material systems, structures, and institutions, inner growth is housed within life coaching sessions, managerial training, positive psychology, motivational retreats, and other economically certified courses. Within this abusive environment of the spirit, the worst pseudo-mystical extravagances are manifesting. The path to illumination has long been lingering on the borders of cruel madness. We may say that a hybrid form of ‘Neo-Spiritualism’ has morphed out from the 20^th century trend in pseudo-spiritual materials and teachings. A form of ‘syncretism’ has arisen where the modern person is plied with a mix of materials – a ‘pick n mix’ style of self-teachings for a heady homebrew recipe of modernist mysticism. This largely westernized mentality has become the model for a global psyche that is scattered in many directions, fragmented and splintered. This materialist approach to metaphysics is a mutation through the mutilation of materials. 

 It seems that the natural order of things has been cruelly reversed within this global world order. I have spoken before on how this current reality can be said to be an ‘anomaly’ as it is not in correspondence or aligned with universal resonance. And when things come out of alignment and resonance for too long, a sharp jolt of realignment may be necessary. Yet such drastic realignments are not committed solely through the systems and structures of the physical world – such as through economics and/or geopolitics – but are also beyond these material gestures. It is for this reason that recognition and/or acknowledgement of a metaphysical foundation to existence is, in my view, critical. For without this, all comprehension of the changes and/or upheaval will be met with an empty materialistic response. And this will hit the human being even harder than necessary. In approaching the threshold, the boundary between crisis and revelation, a person’s state of being will decide how, and to what degree, such events and encounters are received and experienced. Much of modern human society displays a ‘spirit of negation’ in that it places everything into systems and structures that, by their nature, have limited or no place for transcendence. This is a contradictory position to universal laws of ongoing transcendence and evolvement. Globalized modernity, especially, negates consciousness as primary (as ‘before matter’) and this negation is part responsible for the inverted dominance of the materialistic narrative. Rational knowledge systems lack a transcendental impulse; as such, they are incomplete and only a mirroring, a shadow, of more complete reality. Human cognition and perspectives are conditioned, under a modern approach, to be rationalistic and linear. Anything that is not linear is seen as chaotic, random, unpredictable, and thus something to be feared or contained. This then forms blinkered perceptions that are constrained by external artefacts, just as horses are tacked with blinkers that reduce their vision. Humans are restrained or fastened not by physical blinders but by programmed ones. Each individual, then, is faced with the choice of whether or not to maintain their own immunity against cognitive and perceptual decline and degradation.

 Within the external gaze of the global shadow, physical comforts and conveniences are seen as the epitome of progress. As such, mechanization that can provide a short-cut to these conveniences, and which can elevate modes of comfort, are considered a sign of humanity’s progress. The extreme extension of this linear view sees the rise of the digital domains, the metaverses, as being the pinnacle of physical convenience. Less and less will participants realize the contrary discomfort of the physical body, strapped in a chair with its headset, as this posture becomes ‘normalized’ into routine. The ideal of modern progress being fostered upon an uncertain world is being sold through the saviour of illusionary domains and the relegation of the natural, organic world to the mechanical impulse that constitutes the control regimes and architectures of oppression of the artificial, regulated realm. 

 The programmed mass mindset is attracted to popularism and to ‘mass event’ information and stimulation. Popularist information is almost totally serviced through sponsored propaganda. Yet this popularized form of propaganda comes at a price – the detriment of truth. By making such information ‘accessible to all,’ this means diminishing it to the lowest possible denominator. For these ‘truths’ are not ‘Truth’ at all, but information bites piecemealed together. Popularized knowledge (aka, information) contains nothing of the transcendent. In fact, mass popularism is a hollowing out of transcendent aspects – an empty shell serving the whole. This is part responsible for the deformed mentality that passes for modern intelligence. This is not meant as a highbrow statement but rather the recognition that what passes for education these days is a form of programmed information and behavioural conditioning. Due to this early-stage programming, the mind becomes used to fixed patterning, and is flexible only to a degree, yet not far enough. The arrival of new thought patterns can cause an irritability – a mental irascibility – that brings on a reluctance for changing ideas. Yet change is upon us now more than ever. If we are not able to question our own beliefs, opinions, and ideas, then we are vulnerable to the increasingly sophisticated mind programming mechanisms of the encroaching global order. Approaching the threshold – or any threshold for that matter – means being prepared for experiencing the new, or that which has previously been beyond the periphery of perception.

 Let us be warned that the surface-dwelling intellect is drawn to matter, materiality, and physicality more than it is to the non-visible domains. The globalizing mindset that has been fostered upon humanity, over the past few decades especially, is creating a mental entanglement into material life.  Globalization is not of goods and services only – it also belongs to a programming of the human mind. A globalized mindset aims to be a homogenized one, where diverse thinking patterns are gradually reduced to a mass denominator thinking – a collective mob mentality. Such a standardized model of thinking is then easier to control and manipulate. Sovereign thinking, the once bastion of free will, becomes mechanical and outwardly steered through censorship parading as a politically correct ‘cancel culture.’ We end up self-censoring our own minds for fear of not fitting in with the mass mentality. Through this, a person becomes imprisoned in their life as they act as both jailor and prisoner – they have thrown away their own keys. 

 The only modality of life is change and constant renewal. And this also includes our thinking patterns and modes of perception. As humanity approaches its threshold – a looming cultural event horizon – we are compelled to choose between a global indoctrination or a species initiation. As it stands, the present incarnation of human civilization does not include any transcendent order and few potentials for it. Because of this, the general individual today, caught up within the funfair of a heightened entertainment culture industry, has no knowledge, or even interest, in metaphysics and a transcendent order – they are only aware and/or interested in those aspects that belong to the rational order. Yet metaphysical understanding – a perception of events beyond the normal ken – does not depend on nor operate through logic, linearity, or current time scales. The current reality narrative that is being pushed through the materialistic global order is in complete disorder. It has broken away from humane principles, morals, values, and ethics.

A restoration of human civilization is necessary – and thus, a threshold is necessary. Elements of calculated intervention and control have trespassed across the world in the name of a new global order. It is a carefully managed commercial and psychological intrusion into as many territories as possible. This reprogramming and recalibration of human life has attempted to eradicate any notion of a suprasensible realm. Such notions have been pushed further and further to the periphery and even disparaged through such terms as the occult, fantastical, superstitious, or phantasmagorical. The relation to a transcendental reality has been lost through the encroachment of a worldview that sees the superiority of materialism and the quantifiable – the realm of mechanistic life that now fully supports the acceleration of inorganic, artificial forms of intellect. Science has penetrated matter to its depths – into the quark and neutrino of existence – and believes it has mastered the very foundations of life. This materialistic hubris has given modern humanity a false sense of progress and a two-dimensional view of human evolution. This skewed understanding has also created an inverted sense of scientific and industrialized supremacy; and this comes at the expense of the transcendental impulse. Present human civilization is undergoing an existential crisis.

That which is most necessary to us now has become more hidden and inaccessible. The inward gaze – the inner realization of one’s connection to the Absolute – has become translated into seemingly obscure symbols, myths, and secret cults. This is another form of commercialization: the commercialization of secrecy and mystique. These practices only serve to satisfy the lowest elements of human psychological needs by feeding the so-called ‘spiritual’ through the material side of curiosity and greed. Taken to the extreme, this continual reliance upon the external, the material, will force human evolutionary development into a suspension: a ‘state of dissolution from which it is impossible to emerge otherwise than by a cataclysm, since it is not a mere readjustment that is necessary at such a stage, but a complete renovation.’¹ Disorder and confusion will come upon the world in a way that dramatizes a global solution through an all-encompassing world order. The gravity of the situation should not be left to go unrecognized, for the endings of old worlds will foreshadow the beginnings of a new. Yet as the following chapters will describe, a form of what I call ‘pure technicity’ will be pushed forth that aims to consolidate a ‘will to technology’ instead of a ‘will to purpose.’ The drive toward progressive materialization indicates a new cycle we do not wish to go down, for it will drown out almost entirely the suprasensible worlds – the supra-consciousness – from coming through into this realm (which is necessary for the next stage of planetary and human evolution). 

 The more that human beings give their autonomy to a technologically driven world (managed by a technocratic elite), the more they shall become slaves for they will have moved away from their inner transcendental impulse. The more that human civilization drops into and is absorbed into an architecture of artificial construct, the further silenced are the finer realizations of the sacred order. We become dazzled, and entertained, by the multiplicities of material life at the expense of the higher principle of unified perception, cognition, and consciousness. Our perceptual vision is broken down into fractals, so that we attach externally to the increasing quantity of abstract distractions and thus diminish the quality of inward reflection and conscious awareness. Time is running out to awaken to the situation, before the perceptual entrapment has suddenly mutated into a physical one as well. And the reality construct of the entrapment shall be a profane one. In truth, there is no actual ‘profane realm’ as all realities exist as manifestations from the Absolute. Yet the snare here, in this case, is that the reality construct shall be a domain for the profane point of view to be dominant. And this, at the bottom line, is a realm of ignorance. A realm closed off from the recognition of sacred influences and the potentials, and parameters, of transcendental development. A realm where imagination is controlled according to alignment with a machinic-intellect environment within an algorithmic architecture of expression. An individual’s ideas shall be claimed as their own, for there will be no recognition for the allowance of inspirational influences from beyond the material brain. Notions of ‘the beyond’ shall be fantasy waiting to be colonized by material possibilities – just as dreams of space were colonized by metallic constructs and moon mineral mining.

 That which is not the product of the human or machine mind will just not exist. Knowledge will be classified as those ideas workable into empirical findings. Anything outside of the human-machine intellect will be an error. The great Gnostic ‘error’ shall have been consumed by the very artificial construct it was once warning us against. And all residual memory of these variables in the program will have been erased – and subsumed by the very program now running. There shall be nothing recognized beyond the horizons of the external gaze. Reality shall remain a bubble where the membrane is non-visible, and all truths shall be tightly kept within its domain. Only the gatekeepers (perhaps now machinic intellects) will know of the other dimensional realms, and yet such knowledge will be concealed from the inhabitants of the Enclosure. Everything will have been reduced to a ‘sensible order.’ An order expanded through the ‘sensible’ augmentation and merger with machinic interfaces, digitally rendered and algorithmically ordained. The new priests of the high castle will be the gods of Artificial Intellect who can interface with the quantum soup of the reality program. The human individual will no longer be longing to climb Jacob’s Ladder but will be content to voyage into meta-innerspace. Truth as an Absolute will become a residual memory held by the dying elders – the last ones to remember campfires and starlight. 

It will become increasingly difficult for the higher influences arriving into this reality to reclaim humanity’s evolutionary lineage as, according to the developmental law, the ‘higher cannot proceed from the lower, because the greater cannot proceed from the lesser’² Genuine developmental influences must come from a realm that is, using our terms, higher or beyond. The influences for higher development must be allowed to flow into our domain from a realm beyond. If they are cut off, then development within this reality construct is limited. And this limitation shall be fixed by material parameters. Technology cannot go beyond these limitations for it too is a manifestation of the material construct. True and genuine development is sanctioned by that which is beyond in order to reach down the ladder to assist in the climb. Our tools are with us, here in this reality, yet the impulses must come to activate us. The reversal of this universal order is when temporal, phenomenal power (of the senses) seeks independence from Absolute authority. 

The current trends vying for dominance in these times are pushing the human condition to become fundamentally out of synch with its natural, organic abode. It is a deeply materialistic drive towards a profane reality that augments the senses into perceiving a spectrum of enclosure (the ‘profanity’). As we walk, stumble, or transcend towards a looming civilizational threshold, we race against an impending enclosure against the developmental human future. The mechanistic forces of materialism seem intent on gaining dominion over this reality domain for the foreseeable future (however long that will be). And yet we know that matter itself is a divisive element for it shadows over the metaphysical – that which is beyond the physical – and clouds the senses away from the magical and onto the calculable and quantitatively mundane. In this, humanity has an adversary. It is a force, or range of forces, that persist in maintaining what I have referred to in my previous book as the inversion.³  In this, our known reality construct is upside-down and fosters the spirit of negation and subversion. It marks the descending arc in an opposing direction away from the influences of the Absolute. It is an infernal path that seeps deeper into the entanglements of a beguiling and often bedazzling perceptual reality where the senses are technologically stimulated into further rungs of the artificial kaleidoscope. The future speaks to us in a hundred signs, or so said Friedrich Nietzsche. For starters, the signs of our future can be toward a beingness or a non-beingness. And from there, we shall take the next steps.

1. René Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World, (Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 2004), 17.
2. René Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World, 73.
3. See Kingsley Dennis, The Inversion: How We Have Been Tricked into Perceiving a False Reality (Aeon Books: 2023).