Whenever we have a literal belief about the nature of reality then we have fallen victim to the Predator. Whenever we have any kind of belief the Predator is feeding on us, is feasting on us, is dining upon our essential energy. This is what it means to be living in the predatorial universe – it means we will means that we are food for the Predator.

Whenever we have a thought about anything and we believe in that thought then we had been ‘jumped’ by the Predator Principle, we have been eaten up by it so that there is nothing left of us. How often do we have a thought and at the same time see that the thought is only a thought and that it has no claim at all on reality? How often do we find ourselves in the world without having any beliefs about that world, without having any beliefs about what it means to be in it’? How rare a situation would this be? It doesn’t take long to work out that this is the rarest situation there is – there simply isn’t any situation that is rarer than being in the world without having ideas about what it means to be in the world.

Almost the whole of human activity is predicated upon beliefs, predicated upon thought. Beliefs of one sort or another are what we are all about, so it seems. We think beliefs are great – when children are born to us the first thing we do to them is to imprint our beliefs upon them. We can’t wait to do this, imprinting our beliefs on the next generation is the most important thing in the world to us. That which is most precious to us is also that which we are in the greatest hurry to feed to the Predator, and this – needless to say – is a horror that we never dwell upon. The Predator must feed, after all! It may not be polite to mention this, but that’s the bottom line all the same. This is the great law that trumps all others, this is the Great Principle that lies behind everything we do, it seems.

There is no perversity greater than this, and yet we remain profoundly oblivious to it. What we’re talking about here is nothing less than ‘the systematic murder of the human spirit’, and yet this crime goes entirely unreported, as Jean Baudrillard says. The great religions of this world provide a particularly poignant example of this terrible perversity. Religion’s original function was of course to guide humanity out of illusion (and the suffering that comes from illusion) and reconnect us the truth that we had forgotten. It seems fair enough to say this, one would imagine. It doesn’t take too much in the way of observation however to see that the religion business is all about imprinting beliefs on people in the most heavy-handed way imaginable and beliefs don’t reconnect us with the truth that we have lost sight of, they actually disconnect us from it very thoroughly indeed. The ‘religion business’ has nothing to do with the truth; or rather it does but it has to do obscuring it.

There was never was such a thing as ‘a belief which can reconnect us with the truth’, or ‘a belief that can free us from illusion’! A belief is a literal description of what reality is and as such it is a prison; when we believe in the literal description of what reality is then we are disconnected from everything – literal descriptions only get to be literal descriptions by excluding all other possible ways of looking at the world. Any thought that we have about the world only gets to be ‘a thought’ by excluding all other possible viewpoint and – at the same time – preventing us from knowing that they were or are any other viewpoints, any other ways of looking at the world, and if this isn’t prison then what is? The extraordinary thing is that we lack the imagination to appreciate just what a terrible prison this is – it is the most terrible prison there ever could be and the key aspect of it is that we have absolutely no imagination to appreciate exactly how terrible a restriction it is.

What is left of us after the Predator has finished with us is a kind of ‘inert remnant’, a ‘residual token’, so to speak, of the whole person that has been devoured. This inert remnant or residual token is cherished by us and guarded by us 24/7 as if it were the most precious thing in the world, although it is nothing of the sort. This ‘residual token’ that the Predator leaves us with (after it has dined on us) is the rational self or ego, which is of course the very thing we make our whole lives to be about! The rational self or ego is not us, however. It’s got nothing to do with us.

This is obvious enough when we get when we reflect on it – what else is the rational self or ego but a ‘literal belief’, after all? We believe in nothing more literally than we believe in the rational self, clearly; we accept the literal existence of the self absolutely unquestioningly – we would question anything else rather than this, and yet the self is just another construct of thought that we can’t help believing in, nothing more. It’s a construct of thought that we are powerless not to believe in. The unwavering and uncritical belief in the self is proof positive that we have been eaten alive by the Predator, we think that everything is fine and that we haven’t been devoured (we imagine in fact that nothing has happened) but this is just a fantasy the predator creates for us (Aka The Matrix).

It is hardly necessary to point out that we are ‘owned’ lock, stock and barrel by an alien force once we have been subsumed by the False World. When we have been consumed by the Arch Predator there is nothing about us it is truly ours; as Carlos Castaneda says, our very mind, our very way of looking at the world, has been given to us by the Predator to suit its own purposes. This is the Predator’s manoeuvre. Nothing about us is ours, everything about us has only been given to us has been given to us by a principle that is both alien and inimical (or hostile) to us and this is the uncompromising reality that we have to live with. There are of course two ways in which we can do this: either in consciousness of it, or in denial of it.

This isn’t new knowledge, it is knowledge that humanity has been in possession of for a long, long time (although it’s also true to say that it is knowledge that we have forgotten). What we’re talking about here is ‘Knowledge of the Predator’! In the Bible there are a number of references to the fact that Satan is ‘the Prince of this world’, and that he operates by occluding our awareness of God, or the Divine Nature. This is stated in Orthodox Christianity, albeit in a somewhat veiled fashion, and it is of course also referred to by the Gnostic heresies, which do not veil this message. This is in fact the key message of Gnosticism – that we live within the hostile dominion of the False Creator God, and that we do not know it.

This Predator’s characteristic is that he always outmanoeuvres us however and the truth is that we are ridiculously easy to outmanoeuvre! The Gnostics were violently wiped out by the Christian church and the Church itself is nothing more than ‘a system of beliefs’, as we have already said. There is of course often a lot of talk about Satan and how bad he is, particularly in the more evangelical varieties of the church, but this is of course a ploy of the Predator – when we believe in a literal figure of evil such as Satan or the Devil that is how the Predator gets to eat us alive! The Predator invents the idea of Satan as a literal or concrete entity in order to frighten us and that is how he bamboozles us because in reality there is no literal anything! Literal things only exist in the Predator’s world, which is the World of Slavery….