Karma is a Rigged Game

Archontic Influence in Human Psychology and Social Order

This essay is an attempt to elucidate one of the more perplexing aspects of human
experience: "karma," that is, cause and effect in human behavior. If that were not
difficult enough a challenge, I will interpret some passages from The Apocryphon of
John, a text that presents material on the archons unique in the corpus of Gnostic
writings. My aim is to show that Gnostics held an extremely sophisticated view of
human self-delusion, especially regarding morality and accountability.

The Sanskrit word karma simply means action, but more precisely, actuation, the way
one action leads to another in a chain reaction, each act in the chain actuating the next
one. Hinduism and Buddhism refer to the "law of karma" is if it were a binding
formula somehow enforced by cosmic authority, or perhaps due to a closed looping of
energy exchanges in the universe. By the usual definition, the law of karma assures
that every act will eventually return to the doer in a equivalent way. Good will be
returned with good; evil with evil. The law works through all events in the course of
life, a seemingly iron-clad process of fate, and extends beyond the limits of mortality.
Conditions suffered or enjoyed in this life are due to actions in a previous lifetime.

Karma is sometimes called "the moral law of cause and effect." It is supposed to
encourage doing good, loving deeds and shunning evil or harmful, destructive actions.
The Christian formulation is "as ye sow, so shall ye reap."

Without Retribution

The compensating function of karma is sometimes called karmic retribution, i.e.,

payback. A person who does harm to others will suffer retribution, having harm done
to them in turn, etc. In Hinduism and Buddhism, teachings on karma are inseparable
from the assumption of reincarnation. Why? Generally, it is believed that karma must
work through time, spanning many lives, because it a universal principle. This is a
lofty concept of morality, indeed. It implies that any action undertaken by a person
when alive will have repercussions and ramifications after they die, and will
ultimately rebound upon the reborn doer, for good or ill. Thus there is long-term
cautionary power in the doctrine of karma.
The Tibetan Wheel of Life illustrating the karmic roundabout of three poisons, six
realms, and twelve links (nidanas) in the chain of rebirth. A profound psychological
teaching device, perhaps, but does it actually represent laws operating in human
morality, equivalent to laws of nature? In other words, is this design a verifiable chart
of chain reactions that occur mechanically in human behavior, or a just a contrivance,
a useful model for reading behavior? Does it represent how behavior actually works,
or does it merely present a scheme for interpreting behavior?

Reincarnation itself is a complicated subject. The veracity of karmic retribution

depends on assuming that successive lives really do demonstrate a pattern of cause
and effect. This premise may be impossible to verify, leaving the law of karma
contingent upon something that remains unproven, if not improvable. However, there
is a simple way to explain why reincarnation is invoked when the doctrine of karma is
promulgated. In plain reality, karma is not demonstrable. It does not match the facts of
reality. It is non-intuitive and non-evidential, unsupported by the facts of human
experience. Karma defies common sense and run sharply against the obvious.
In human affairs, it is undeniable that people frequently do harm without having harm
done to them in return, and good deeds go uncompensated, or as one cynic put it, "no
good deed goes unpunished." Good folks suffer atrocious harm. Bad folks get away
with murder. Deceit is rampant and most often never exposed. If exposed, not
punished. Perpetrators are almost never brought to account. There is very little justice
in human reality. This is a plain and brutal fact of life that must be ignored by a
conscious act of denial.

The raw evidence of experience makes it obvious that karmic compensation is

bullshit. People occasionally get their due, of course. And it is most satisfying when
that happens. A great many Hollywood films base their appeal on this prospect. But as
a rule, this is certainly not the case, and not something to count on. Horrible acts go
down without the perpetrator being known or made accountable. Those known and
proven to be guilty of heinous acts often walk free. They flaunt impunity. This
situation is difficult to accept, but nevertheless the evidence is everywhere in the
social order, in politics, in intimate and familial affairs. Those who commit bad deeds
rarely get the same in return, although it can happen in specific situations of gang war
or Mafia feuds. In such cases, though, it is hardly necessary to suppose a vast
impersonal law of karma at work. People are taking revenge or exercising reciprocal
violence. No cosmic law required there.

Hence the appeal to reincarnation: if I cannot show you how the hurtful action of a
person is compensated by equivalent hurt done to that person, because it is not evident
in the course of human affairs, then I will readily revert to the scenario of successive
lives. So-and-so does not get his comeuppance in this life, okay, but it's coming later,
be sure of that. Reincarnation, which cannot be proven, is called in to shore up a
premise that is flatly disproved by the facts of life. This is an instance of what
existentialists call mauvaise foi, bad faith: i.e., that is, believing or pretending to
believe something you know is not true, for some ulterior motive, for consolation and
a sense of justice, or simply out of sheer inability to accept the brutal truth.

Christianity and Islam are religions whose adherents do not usually consider or accept
reincarnation. Yet the notion of karmic retribution is inherent to these belief-systems.
If there is no reincarnational process to insure retribution, no problem, just leave it to
the Creator. Hence, the belief in divine retribution that figures so markedly in those
faiths. God will punish wrong-doers and reward the good behavior of the faithful, who
tend to be downtrodden and abused. Divine judgment will prevail over every single
person and even over the drama of history. Christians and Muslims alike cling to this
conviction with vehement intensity.

Imagine how it would be to live without the assurance of retribution. To witness what
happens in the world, the ongoing spectacle of injustice, and totally forgo the comfort
of retribution. In the minds of the faithful, living with no retribution is not an option.
It is a terrifically frightening prospect. It is intolerable in the extreme. It shatters the
mind and anguishes the heart. And what's worse, it opens the gateway to moral chaos.
After all, if there is no retribution, no punishment and reward system that operates
upon human behavior, then everyone is free to do anything with no concern for
consequences that may redound upon the doer. As long as there will be no undesired
consequences for me, I can do as I damn please, acting to the harm or benefit of
others, either way, free of reciprocal action on myself, either way.

It is worth noting that good deeds, performed with compassion, in a benevolent

and non-self-seeking manner, just because it feels good to do them, and the
results for others are happy and productive, do not require reciprocation. As
Walter Kaufmann observed in his critique of the "prudential" morality of Judeo-
Christian faith, a truly moral act is done without prudent concern for how it
benefits the doer, i.e. by the reward of God's favor or eternal life after death. Evil
and deceptive acts, by contrast, are always performed with concern for the result
to the doer. I will return to this point at the close of this essay.

Adherents to the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are called
"people of the Book" because they rely on rules of behavior found in books attributed
to divine authorship: the Torah, the Bible, the Koran. Such people universally agree
that good, "moral" behavior is only possible among human beings by following
prescribed rules. The argument for faith in God is closely linked to an argument for
moral order authorized by a superhuman agency, and this assumes that such authority
is the sole basis for morality. Without God-given rules, enforced by a reward and
punishment system, why would anyone do anything but follow their own selfish
impulses?

Obviously, bad faith in karmic retribution (implemented by god or by impersonal

cosmic law, no difference) has a huge controlling effect on human behavior, keeping
people in line. With no retribution, there would be total moral anarchy. But perhaps it
would be worth considering what "moral anarchy" might actually look like. I'll save
that topic for the close of the essay.

Archon Influence

The Apocryphon of John is a long cosmological text that appears in three versions in
the Nag Hammadi Codices, and independently in another Coptic text, the Berlin
Codex. It is a treasure trove of dazzling obscurities and arcane theological raving. In
the mixed bag of Gnostic Coptic writings, this text is unique because it contains two
features not found elsewhere in the otherwise redundant literature. As it happens,
these two features concern two key questions that frequently arise in discussion of the
archons, the malicious tricksters of Gnosticism. These questions are:

What role, if any, did archons play in the creation of the human body?

How do archons influence the actual course of actions undertaken by human

beings—that is, how do they effect karma?

Needless to say, these are pretty large questions. I have to advise that The Apocryhon
of John does not provide anything like clear and adequate answers to either question.
Sorry about that. It does, however, presents a tentative basis for such answers, if
inference and extrapolation be allowed. Objectionable as this method may be to some
minds, inference and extrapolation are the exercises to follow, with sobriety and rigor,
to get anything viable out of Gnostic literature. To those who object to my well-
known technique in this regard, I say, sue me. To those who follow my drift, I must
warn that the answers that may be developed from this material are not simple. On the
other hand, although the explanations required for both answers are complicated, the
outcome of these explanations may be surprisingly simple. In this essay I will only
address the second question.

By exposing the origin, motives, and methods of the archon mind-parasites, Gnostic
writings confront us with the daunting question of their influence on humanity. This
influence may be characterized as having several vectors. First, archons affect humans
by subconscious or subliminal insinuation. In this respect, they operate through a
telepathic link to humankind—to us, their cosmic cousins, so Gnostic cosmology
informs us. Not all that happens in the human mind originates there. The specific
insinuation of the archons is evident in religious and spiritual thinking, especially in
the mental virus of salvationism and the messiah complex. Gnostics warned explicitly
that archons infect human thinking with false religious ideas, including the belief in a
male mastermind or paternal overlord, the off-planet father god.

The Gnostic expose of archontic influence is a double whammy: the overlord of the
archon hive, the Demiurge, is that very entity who would be recognized as the sole
and supreme and creator god, if the religious delusion insinuated by the archons
works. The Demiurge himself is insanely deluded, believing he is the sole cosmic
deity responsible for the heavens and the earth, and the creation of the human race to
boot. The God of Abrahamic faith exists, for sure, but he is an insane alien predator
bent on deceiving and enslaving humanity—such is the bizarre warning from Gnostic
seers in the Mysteries.

But how actually do archons affect humankind apart from the nefarious delusions they
can engender in our minds? By another vector of influence, they use fakery and
simulation to divert our attention from the reality of human potential, the gifts of our
species such as rational thinking and imagination, and distract us from the presence of
nature and the supernatural power within nature. I have discussed this tactic
of counter-mimicry at length in Not in His Image. Ialdabaoth, the Gnostic name for
Jehovah, is called the counterfeiting spirit. The Coptic word for simulation, HAL,
denotes the signature of the archons who can imitate but not create. They are a mimic
species. They imitate our faculties to substitute their mind set for our own, hence
living vicariously through us. As Castaneda said, they function as a "foreign
installation" in our own minds.

Both on psychological and parapsychological terms, the Gnostic archon profile is

truly sophisticated and warrants careful and respectful consideration. It is without
doubt the most lucid descriptive paradigm of subliminal mind control produced by the
human mind. Dismiss it at your peril.

Cosmic Adultery

All this dia-Gnostic stuff is instructive, but we really want to know how archons may
actually distort and deviate human behavior, if they can do so in some manner apart
from, and going beyond, subconscious insinuation. The Apocryphon of John has some
startling and perplexing information on this issue. I will concentrate on one key
passage.

The Coptic Gnostic Library in five volumes lays out the four versions of this text in
columns spread across facing pages. The top of the columns gives the Coptic text and
below, the translations. You can read all four versions in parallel. The damned thing
goes on for 95 pages. The most complete text of the four versions, NHC II, 2, has
thirty-two passages. A little more than two-thirds of the way through this opus, at 27,
we are presented with a remarkable event:

When the Chief Ruler (archon overlord) realized

that they [human beings] were exalted above him in the height
and they surpass him in thinking,
and that he will not be able to seize them...
He made a plan with his authorities (exousiai), which are his powers,
and together they committed adultery with Wisdom (Sophia)
and bitter fate (hiermarmene)
was begotten through them,
which is the last of the changeable fetters,
and it is of the sort that is interchangeable,
and it is harder and stronger than she with whom
the gods united and the angels
and the demons and all the generations
until this day.

This cogent description of a system of karmic binding with "fetters" recalls the
Buddhist chain of reincarnational links, nidanas, pictured round the periphery of the
Wheel of Life (above). I believe that this passage presents the Gnostic equivalent to
Buddhist doctrine of karma, but the Gnostic teaching ought not to be identified point
by point with Buddhist doctrine. It has perhaps a different lesson to teach about moral
cause and effect.

To paraphrase freely in mythological jargon: The Divine Sophia cuts a deal with the
archon overlord, allowing him to have his minions bind human actions by fetters of
some kind. These are the fetters of hiermarmene, the workings of fate, or, translated
more fully, the entrainment of blind compulsion, one act compelling the next. When
the archons commit adultery with Sophia, the goddess allows something in the natural
make-up of humanity to be adulterated by the archontic influence. For adultery,
read: adulteration, the inclusion of a foreign or extraneous element, as corn syrup can
be used to adulterate honey. The result is that archons put an entropic bias into
behavior that would otherwise be free to exercise self-correction and self-
regeneration. Just as the corn syrup additive spins the natural chemistry and
nutritional value of honey.

Previous passages going all the way back to 19 establish the superiority of humanity
over the archons. Through nous, divine intelligence, and the luminous epinoia,
imagination, humans can correct themselves and keep their behavior in line with all
that is good and productive and consistent with the ultimate designs of life. Humans
have a huge advantage over the archontic horde, so the text repeatedly says. Even the
archons know this:

And the Chief Ruler (archon overlord, Ialdabaoth)

knew that humankind was disobedient to him,
due to the light of imagination (epinoia) innate to humanity,
and which made him more correct in his thinking
than the Chief Ruler. (II, 2 : 22 ff)

Archons cannot compete with human imagination, the very faculty endowed in
humanity for the detection and defeat of those mind-parasites. But the text says that
the archon overlord commands a certain power: "he brought a trance over Adam," but
not like the trance put on Moses, a stupor of sleep, rather "it was in his perception
(aisthesis)" (ibid). Meaning, the archons can actually fog and skew our perception,
which they do mainly through HAL, simulation. But it must be added that we perform
the simulations, acts of modeling and imitation, by which they cloud our perception.
Even at its best, archontic power over the human mind is borrowed from the mind.

Now here's the rub. Although we humans are vastly superior to archons, we do not
automatically exercise our advantage: rather, we need a test or challenge to activate it.
Just as other animals in nature need a signal from the environment to trigger their
instinctual programs—beavers respond to seasonal cues by constructing dams, for
example—so humans benefit from the triggering of their unique endowment, the
luminous epinoia, the power of imagination. So Sophia, who endowed these superior
capacities in the human race in the first place, gives the archons an edge in their game
against humanity by allowing them to provide the trigger signals. Facing these
tricksters, humankind is challenged to use its imagination for its very survival.
Archons are both the agents and expressions of the power of deception in the human
mind, and not just in a general way: with us they co-effectuate the self-deceptive
capacity of the entire human species.

To realize that we are not alone in deceiving ourselves, but always involved in a
cosmic orchestration, a rigged game, is the great truth for liberation of humankind
from all forms of deceit, manipulation, and enslavement.

Blind Compulsion

Clear enough, perhaps, but how does archontic input "adulterate" human potential?
The additive (equivalent to corn syrup in honey) is a tendency to trance, to self-
hypnosis or auto-suggestion, as the text clearly indicates. That tendency is purely
archontic. In effect, Sophia allows the archons to induce a trancing factor into human
minds, as if you would handicap the mechanism of the inner ear to keep someone
slightly dizzy, off-balance. What is handicapped is perception, due to the blurring of
suggestion: merely suggest that something be seen in a certain way, and humans will
tend to see it that way. Hence, the magic of advertising. Hence, the impact of psi-ops
using simulation technology. Sophia does so, so that, by detecting the spin of auto-
suggestion, we can arrest delusion at its root and rise to our true potential, using
imagination to merge into the sublime reality of terrestrial designs, rather than for
fantasy and evasion.

Fine, so far. This is halfway to the full exegesis of the passage on hiemarmene.The
Apocryphon of John suggests that the delusional bias is not merely left to operate as a
mental disposition, but is actually, functionally "installed" in the mechanism of human
behavior, corporeally active. The blind compulsion of fate is due to the way behavior
repeats itself through imprinting itself on the human organism, NLP-style Our
bondage to karma resides in this: behaviorally, we imitate ourselves.
Now, I realize that mixing mythological language with psychological analysis will not
go over well with some people. But there is simply no other way to frame the
diagnosis here. The mythological metaphor, "Sophia cuts a deal with the archons,
allowing them to bind human behavior functionally into patterns of blind
compulsion," describes physically lived psychological reality. Compulsive activity
imprints the human organism so as to reproduce itself in ever-repeating patterns
(interchangeable fetters), but is then enacted through different, one-time-only actions
(changeable fetters). For instance, the drunk who beats the wife who is the enabler of
his addiction, repeats a compulsive pattern of abuse, and she repeats her involvement
in that pattern, but each time it happens, they are two people performing distinct
actions at that moment in time. Each time he hits her in the face is a unique instance
of physical abuse, even though his act exhibits a repeating pattern of abuse.

The corporeal power of repetition compulsion binds humankind to fate "harder and
stronger than she with whom the gods united and the angels and the demons and all
the generations until this day." Sophia really takes a chance with us by allowing
karma to function corporeally and not merely as a mental process. I would venture to
say that she does so because our divine endowment of epinoia is also corporeal, and it
takes one to match and master the other.

(On this point, see Not in His Image, ch. 22, Divine Imagination: "Epinoia is the
directive power of imagination, the true saving factor in Gnosis. The Apocryphon of
John tells how the Divine Sophia, when she realized the problem that humanity would
face with the Archons, invested “the luminous Epinoia” in Zoe, the life force, so that
in our biological makeup we would carry an imaginal capacity.")

The essence of karma in the Gnostic model is not reward and punishment, as seen in
the Abrahamic creed of divine retribution and, in another way, in the Hindu-Buddhist
doctrine of rebirth. Rather, it is pure compulsivity that feeds on itself and gets rutted
in patterned repetition. The deal with the archons binds every human act to corporal
entrainment, so that an act done automatically tends to produce a similar act or an
opposite, compensating act, by the same person. The key idea here is entrainment,
which is what hiemarmene means. The chain of karmic bondage does not cause a kind
deed to generate another kind deed, nor does it cause an evil deed to generate another
evil deed, qualitatively speaking. It just causes any kind of deed to become repetitive
and take on a life of its own. This being so, someone who harms others is condemned
by their own actions to continue doing so until they self-correct—or until someone
else corrects them, or stops them, dead cold. Repetition compulsion forces the doer
toward self-correction, or else the sheer physical entropy of repetition will eventually
undo the doer.
This is how Sophia sets up human karma: without a reward and punishment system,
except for the reward or punishment that one inflicts on oneself by blind, compulsive
action. A genuinely free act has no merit or detriment, no mechanically derived
consequence for the doer. Repeat: liberated action has no external or extraneous
consequences for the actor. Its consequences, if any, inhere in the sheer pleasure of its
performance, the gesture in perfect transience.

The common sense conclusion of this arcane behavioral diagnostic is: those who do
harm will continue to do it and never attract punishment from the cosmic order, for
there is no such system of retribution. Then they will either see what they are doing
and self-correct, or just do it to the end when they wear themselves out, or self-
destruct in a violent blow-out—if they are not stopped by someone else first. The
option of self-correction means that there is no accountability from outside the
sovereign will of each solitary individual. There is no cosmic system of moral
compensation. There is no ordained justice in the universe, although justice can
occasionally be attained by human initiative in certain situations. The evil-doer who
harms and deceives others, and who cannot self-correct, can only be stopped by
another individual, in direct and first-hand interaction. How many Hollywood films
demonstrate that obvious truth?

Anarchy at Last

Karma as moral compensation is a lie, but the behavioral game of hiemarmeneworks

exactly as it is intended to work. The game is rigged by the archontic bias that Sophia
allows: the trancing factor or power of suggestion. The mechanism of moral entropy
operates in the human body, in the physiological and neurological circuits that sustain
behavior and retain behavioral patterns. If Sophia did not allow it to happen this way,
we would experience total resilience of mind and body, bounding from one moment
of peak expression to the next, correcting and improving ourselves in every single
action taken. But we would never fool ourselves and become that much wiser by
catching the act. Due to compulsion, we run down and wear out, behaviorally
speaking. But overcoming compulsion gives us a lift, a special elan, that does not
arise in the constant unhindered thrust of our potential. Archons provide the resistance
against which we generate a an ever-higher release of potential. From Sophia's view,
it's a fair trade-off: without that challenge to our potential, we would not go for the
optimal scope of our species. With the challenge, the archons get to play their game.
But self-correction can be realized in each and every situation where they intrude.

Above I noted that a good deed does not seek compensation. Or it if does, prudential
morality is at work. "In The Faith of a Heretic Kaufmann argues that Judeo-Christian
morality 'does not know the value of a deed done for its own sake,' without
expectation of reward (or punishment). 'The ethic of the Old Testament is an ethic of
prudence and rewards, as if the point were that it pays to be good' "(Not in His Image).
It don't pay to do good, that is just a brutal fact. Itcan, but not necessarily. But in the
expression of innate goodness, no payoff is sought. Or needed.

It is worth noting that there is often more vigor involved in doing harm than doing
good. Evil, malicious people can be possessed of truly demonic determination. "The
best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity" (Yeats, The
Second Coming). Why? Because to persist in doing harm you have to work
vigorously against the natural order of things, and the benign disposition of the human
animal, but the archontic entropy that informs blind compulsion increases as you
resist it. To overcome that entropic bias requires continually hyping your system,
ratcheting up your forces. This goes some way to explaining the success of Starbucks,
doesn't it?

On the other hand, it is natural to act in goodness and go with the flow of the universe,
co-operating with the beauty and elegant functionality of life. One never tires from
doing good and so one doesn't have to make a super-effort to persist in that
behavior—to which we are naturally disposed, as Pagan ethics affirms. But
perpetrators can thrive on the amplification of vital force required to persist in abusive
and controlling behavior. Another brutal truth of the way things are in the human
condition.

There is no karma as it's been pitched to us. No one has the authority to hold you
accountable for what you do, not even God. Not even Sophia, the planetary mother
animal. Only you can do that for yourself. An-archy is composed of the root arch,
found in archon. An-archy is the condition of being "not- or un-archonic." Anarchy is
against all authority except that which resides in the sovereign will of an individual
person. There is no such thing as karma considered as a system of reward and
punishment. That is a bald fabrication of old men for intimidating children. You are
free to do whatever you like in life, and treat people just as you wish with no
prescribed moral regulation of any kind. "Do as thou wilt," as Crowley notoriously
advised. That adage is just a little under half of an essential truth, and a most
dangerous half-truth, indeed. The other half is, whatever you do happens in a pattern
of blind compulsion, unless you see that pattern and break through it. Then you
are really free to do as you will; but unfree of compulsion, you can't realize what free
will actually is. Freedom depends not merely on the liberty and capacity to act, but on
action free of patterned repetition, blind compulsion, archontic entropy, heimarmene.

Kali's Game

Karma is a rigged game. Liberation from karma comes first with seeing how it is
rigged, how the archontic spin induces auto-suggestion and clouds perception, and
then by simply choosing not to play that game. In a liberated view, there is no karmic
law by which you may gauge the cause and effect of your actions. Imagine
how that kind of freedom feels.

At this late date in human history, it may well be time to admit how human
compulsion is rigged by an adulterating force in the mind. Everyone is equally subject
to the trancing factor, but not all people succumb to it to the same degree. Some
human specimens are entirely consumed by it. They become totally archontified. They
shop and kill with equal abandon. There are plenty of them running around these days.
So we find a cabal of psychopathic control-freaks managing human affairs. Big
surprise. Orchestrations of archontic behavior are by now so painfully obvious on the
global scale that Sophia may be looking us over with a keen eye to the test she set for
us, checking on the results. Every single problem in the world at large is rigged,
orchestrated, deliberately instigated and deceitfully implemented and managed: the
food crisis is rigged, the financial meltdown is rigged, mass media are rigged,
entertainment is rigged, democratic elections are rigged, statistics are rigged,
education is rigged, epidemics are rigged, vaccines for epidemics are rigged, Google
is rigged, the immanent UFO invasion is rigged, anthropic global warming is rigged,
WW III is rigged, terrorism is rigged. How much rigging does it take before we snap
to the way karma works and see through the blind collusion of a self-deluded species?

The single decisive factor in the much-heralded "planetary shift" may be, not a
massive spiritual awakening across the globe with everyone suddenly vibrating to the
higher freauencies of their light-bodies, but some agreement on this elementary
perception: the only problems of human society that cannot be solved in a relatively
happy and productive fashion are deliberately created ones. Were it not for those
problems, we might all be working things out quite well. But you cannot win a game
rigged for you to lose.

But there is good news, too, in this excruciating diagnostic that now grinds to an end.
Seeing how the game of karma is rigged brings liberation on Kali's terms, that is,
according to the metaphor of gaming which resolves all forms of human behavior in
Kali Yuga. (Translation: In Kali Yuga, any situation can be mastered by putting it into
the metaphor of gaming.) It could be said that Sophia cut the deal with the archons,
but Kali sees out the deal. She oversees human enmeshment with demonic powers of
deceit and manipulation. She is called Durga, "invincible," because no archontic or
demonic impulse in the universe can defeat her. Kali liberates humankind from all
illusions, including the illusion of compassion.

Like Kali, Sophia loves to gamble, to play the odds. This is evident all through nature
in the way Sophia throws the evolutionary dice lavishly for a minutely selective win.
The planetary animal mother is indeed teleological, goal-oriented, but she plays
wildly with chance and novelty to keep the margins of her world open and fluid. She
loves running through the odds like an autistic child conjugating square roots to 50
decimal points. The Gnostic scenario ofhiemarmene shows how Gaia-Sophia has set
up a precarious gamble pitting humankind against itself with the archons for leverage.
Kali oversees the game for a particular purpose, because admission to Kali's Game
becomes an option upon getting out of the rigged game. You do not beat that
archontic game, you just get off it. There is no karma to master or overcome. The act
performed for its own beauty and pleasure is already a Kalika initiation.