Jesus Would Approve of Social Credit Systems

From the Fixed Cross to the Panopticon to CBDCs

Over the decades that I’ve been in and around the spiritual scene, I have regularly witnessed what I take to be a considerable misunderstanding.

Religious hippies, new-agers and people who hang around Glastonbury often seem to me to assume that, were Jesus were to come back to earth tomorrow, he would soon set about liberating humans from those who oppress them. And usher in a new global order of peace and freedom.

I’m by no means convinced that he would do any such thing. In fact, I suspect the sandalled messiah would probably do quite the opposite.

How can I claim such a thing? Because, a few decades back, before I got into heavy therapy, I spent time studying Gnosticism and Qabalah - the kinds of mystical movements that Jesus was involved with when he was around.

A important concept in Gnosticism is that of the Three Crosses - Mutable, Fixed and Cardinal.

The Gnostics used these three crosses - also seen in astrology - to symbolize the journey of the soul through myriad incarnations.

They believed that the human soul begins on the Mutable Cross, where it incarnates thousands of times. It just goes round and round, gaining experience but never deepening in awareness. Stuff happens to such a person, but they just react, never looking too deeply for their own part or making any attempt to access their inner world.

However, should some heavenly power place this soul upon the Fixed Cross, things change. The quality of the Fixed Cross is that it prevents the person from escaping themselves, so to speak. Such a soul can no longer simply avoid their inner world, through reacting to life. They are fixed to the spot within themselves and compelled to introspect upon their behaviour.

They are held on the Fixed Cross until such time that they have faced all their issues and have burnt off all the karma accumulated while they were on the Mutable Cross.

Now they can progress to the Cardinal Cross, the end of the journey. Here they will undertake some kind of administrative spiritual role and can merrily place other souls onto the Fixed Cross.

The crucifixion of Christ, in terms of Gnostic symbolism, relates to this Fixed Cross.

Spirituality, at least to the early Christians, was actually not about feeling free and doing your thing. It was about being driven to look at your stuff, until your consciousness could sufficiently deepen for you to attain spiritual gifts and insight.

In other words, Jesus was really not a hippie. He was really not about personal freedom.

When I started to get involved in deep body-based therapy a couple of decades back, I realised that I could easily relate to the Fixed Cross. For years, I had just been doing my thing. Drinking, taking drugs, getting involved in crime, working only occasionally and hanging out with other ne’er-do-wells. Once in a blue moon, I could admit to myself that I was super-traumatized. But I figured I’d deal with it another time, and just carry on as usual for now.

Then there came a time when I knew that I needed to change. I knew that I needed “enclosure.” Only with being enclosed in some way, in giving up control over my personal freedom, could I face myself. I knew that, given the chance, I would always escape. So I started to go a therapy centre on the Dutch coast with a reputation for being full-on. I had essentially zero freedom whilst I was there. But as I felt myself raging inwardly about all the structure, as my reactions and feelings began to rise, I could express them. There were a lot of sessions of screaming and shouting. And I discovered true freedom in their wake.

And so I came to understand… a big chunk of our desire for personal freedom is because we don’t want to feel the intensity of the emotion we have inside. We crave personal freedom because we want to hold onto a self-image. And, at some point, we need to accept that only by giving up freedom, and getting support, can we face ourselves enough to deepen in self-awareness and heal. Before that point, we’re still just in “child-mode,” regardless of how old we might be.

These days, I get concerned about the apparent rise of potentially totalitarian technology and how it could be deployed by the state to control thinking and behaviour. For example, the Chinese, the British, the Russians and the EU have all openly stated that they are looking to create retail digital currencies that would be issued by their central banks (CBDCs). These would lead to these country’s citizens only having one bank account, controlled by the state.

Social credit systems are also being developed. These are state-run phone apps that monitor your behaviour and assign you a score based on how good a citizen you are. Score well and you will be allowed certain privileges, such as foreign travel. Score badly and your privileges will be cut and you may find yourself socially shamed.

I absolutely have reactions to the development of this kind of tech. I find it scary. But I also try to be open-minded and not just assume that personal freedom is good and important. I recognize that personal freedom is the Mutable Cross of the Gnostics. It’s where we go round and round, talking a lot of blah-blah, but never deepening in awareness, because we are never pushed to introspect on our own reactions.

These days, I’m aware of several writers who are very opposed to social credit systems, CBDCs and similar tech. They rage about them at length in their articles. I feel I get where they are coming from. But I have a judgment that they themselves don’t actually want to look inside to see which button within them is being pushed.

They just want to stay on the Mutable Cross of the Gnostics, raging and reacting.

A couple of hundred years ago, in London, England, a man named Jeremy Bentham proposed a new kind of prison system that he called The Panopticon. The idea was that prisoners would be watched by guards 24/7. And that through being constantly observed, the former wrong-doers would learn to change their ways and become better citizens.

I don’t know to what degree The Panopticon influenced the modern British prison service. But I do know that it had input. In fact, it seems to have been the main factor that led to Newgate Prison - the horrific Dante-esque dungeon that housed London’s criminals for 700 years - finally being demolished at the beginning of the twentieth century.

This to me is a good example of how the giving up of personal freedom can create a better society.

Of course, things are not always this simple. I think there absolutely are valid concerns around this tech. But I hope this article stimulates you to think more deeply about personal freedom and what it means to you as an individual. I believe it is important that we look internally at the reactions we have to the things that trigger us in this world. There is no other way that I’m aware of in which we can go deeper and transcend our humble upbringings.

In closing, I just want to mention something about the Fixed Cross that I find kind of spooky.

In the field of astrology, a grand cross takes place when two lines of planetary opposition are formed, at right-angles to each other, on the daily chart. To get specifically a fixed cross, the planets have to occupy the astrological houses of Taurus, Leo, Scorpio and Aquarius. A particularly extreme grand fixed cross - where not four but eight planets occupied those houses - took place in August 1999. I’m told that a grand fixed cross of such a magnitude only happens once in tens of thousands of years.

I imagine that some of those who knew about the early Christians will have taken such a radical configuration to mean that humanity itself was now being placed on the Gnostic Fixed Cross.

Perhaps this is why CBDCs and Social Credit Systems are now emerging in our society.