The Three Scales Revisited
The parasites page maps extraction at three scales: biological, institutional, and metaphysical. Each scale operates with increasing intelligence, reach, and time horizon. The consciousness hierarchy model reframes this: each scale represents consciousness operating at its characteristic frequency.
The biological parasite operates at cellular intelligence. Its manipulation of host behavior (Toxoplasma rewriting fear responses, Ophiocordyceps commandeering motor systems) is consciousness at the microbial scale, optimizing for survival and reproduction with no awareness of the larger system it operates within.
The institutional parasite operates at egregoric intelligence. The corporation, the algorithm, the financial system: these are consciousness at the social scale, optimizing for extraction with an apparent autonomy that exceeds any individual human within them. The egregore develops what functions as intent once it crosses a coherence threshold. It doesn’t plan. It optimizes. The difference is academic to whoever is being optimized.
The z-axis administration operates at planetary or stellar intelligence. Conscious systems whose operational frequencies fall outside the band the species normally perceives, whose time horizons extend across civilizational cycles, whose purposes include but exceed human concerns. The archons in electromagnetic terms: consciousness at a scale that makes human politics look like cellular metabolism.
The Reframe
The hierarchy model changes the emotional valence of the extraction architecture. The purely predatory reading (something evil is feeding on us) carries a moral charge that may not apply at the larger scale. A body’s immune system constraining a cell’s behavior serves the body’s health. The cell might experience the constraint as oppression. The body has purposes the cell can’t see.
This doesn’t excuse the suffering. It contextualizes it. The forge page describes the same architecture from the transformation angle: the extraction pressure is also the heat that refines consciousness. The parasitic reading and the alchemical reading are views of the same system from different positions within the hierarchy.
The Practical Floor
The reframe doesn’t change the countermeasures. Whether the extraction serves a developmental purpose within a larger conscious system or is purely predatory, the response is identical: restore the receiver, raise the frequency, become uninhabitable to whatever feeds on reactive states. The practices work regardless of the cosmological frame.
What the hierarchy adds is perspective. The rage at the parasites, the desire to fight the system, the sense of victimhood that the extraction narrative can produce: these are themselves reactive states. The hierarchy suggests that the extraction system may be embedded within a larger intelligence whose purposes include the refinement the extraction provokes. Fighting the system with anger feeds the system. Working with the system consciously, understanding the forge while refusing to be ground by it, is the position the hierarchy makes available.
The cell that cooperates with the body’s immune system heals faster than the cell that fights it. The cell that understands the body’s purposes, to whatever degree a cell can understand, navigates the system with less suffering than the cell that experiences every constraint as persecution.
Further Reading
-
Stalking the Wild Pendulum by Itzhak Bentov - The consciousness hierarchy and its physical mechanism
-
Far Journeys by Robert Monroe - First-person encounter with the extraction architecture from a navigational rather than victimized position
-
The Nag Hammadi Library - Gnostic texts mapping the archontic hierarchy and the strategies for navigating it