The Archons and the Attention Economy
We have discussed more than once that one of the principal mechanisms by which the human mind is held within Heimarmene is “attention management”: the governance and redirection of psychic currents from productive vectors into the “channels of pleasures.” This is accompanied by considerable activation, yet by only a very slight “working-through” of pneuma, which leads, on the one hand, to keeping people within controlled boundaries, and on the other, to a great release of energy into the Interspace.
Here, precisely attention may be regarded as the only truly common currency at once for three levels of energy consumption:
· biological (neurotransmitters, fatigue/arousal);
· social (money, influence, ratings);
· interworld (currents of pneuma).
From this perspective, any directed attention — any focusing of the mind upon an action, event, or object — can be regarded as an energetically significant act: a kind of “act of payment.” Therefore the real question is not whether we “pay,” but to whom and for what we pay with our attention.
Accordingly, one may distinguish three interrelated and mutually conditioning levels at which an “attention economy” is formed — that is, the transformation of psychic energy into other forms: two “worldly” ones, market and power, and one “interworld,” “purely” Archontic. It is clear that the Archons, as the creators and de facto rulers of the manifested world, exert influence at all its levels; however, the aims, tasks, and ultimacy of this influence vary substantially.
The market level is the simplest and most obvious: it includes various platforms, media, and games, which in the most “direct” manner monetize attention into resources, money, and/or data.
At the political level (agendas, scandals, wars for “screen minutes”), the masses are governed chiefly through the provocation of fear, xenophobia, hatred, and indignation.
Finally, on the properly interworld level of influence, all these levers together convert attention into stable, regulated, and predictable flows of energy, and into a stable outflow of pneuma into the Interspace.
At the same time, all three levels of control aim at the maximal retention of attention with a minimum of inner dynamics, tension of awareness, and human development.
Economic analogies can be extended to the ways in which the energy of attention is produced and expended. In this sense one can speak of an “inflation of attention,” in which impressions are “printed” like ordinary monetary resources. It is well known that the more certain stimuli are “printed,” the “cheaper” a stimulus — or an experience — becomes. Therefore the system of “milking” low-tonic pneuma is forced to behave almost exactly as an economy under monetary inflation: it has to shout ever louder and flash ever more brightly, intensely, and colorfully in order to keep receiving the same response.
Accordingly, Archontic policy is precisely a kind of managed inflation, in which the depth and duration of experiences are devalued by increasing the quantity of events, news, topics, and conflicts.
We have discussed more than once that the Archontic world is a system of great breadth of experience with minimal depth. In this sense, the development of society in the era of postmodernism— and the current era of metamodernism— demonstrates this tendency on ever-growing scales. All intense experiences, deep awarenesses, completed actions end up “in the red,” and Archontic influence may be described as a peculiar “tax on depth.” Any prolonged, serious effort demands from the human being continuous concentration and holds attention within a single channel — and this, of course, means direct losses for the “Archontic economy.” Therefore any forms of sustained concentration of attention (reading books, study, prayer, practice) are structurally placed at a disadvantage: they are, as it were, burdened with an additional tax, since they are always accompanied by ever-increasing fatigue, boredom, social pressure of the “don’t overthink it” and “why do you even need that” kind. Under such conditions, deep attention increasingly becomes a “psychic luxury,” which fewer and fewer people can “afford” without inner or outer “sanctions.”
At the same time, attention, as a “universal currency,” is often forced to “work on credit”: subscriptions, series, feeds, endless games are arranged as “debt repayment schedules,” in which a person, in advance, gives away a portion of future time/attention in exchange for a guaranteed stream of small pleasures.
And it is clear that such a mechanism of “attention lending” is fraught with falling into “debt pits,” when an unwatched season of a popular series, a missed stream, an unopened feed are experienced as a debt to one’s own pleasure-system.
For the Archontic “attention economy,” this is a very convenient instrument, since the person himself voluntarily allocates not only the current focus, but also the future resource of attention for the “needs of the Interworld.” Views, retention, likes: these are all a kind of meters of the “success” of channels through which the energy of attention leaks away. And even when the initial intentions are simply to earn money, convey a thought, share something, the very logic of optimization of the modern digital environment gradually subdues the content, forcing one to follow the lead of “market needs,” producing not what is interesting to the author, but what is in demand. Accordingly, more and more content reflects market tendencies rather than real spiritual or psychic processes, which in turn creates a vicious circle: what is produced is not what is interesting to the soul, and gradually the mind itself begins ever more to believe that what matters to it is not what arises from itself, but what “hype” or tendencies require. Thus self-betrayal arises — which, of course, leads to colossal outflows of energy and the exhaustion of the human will.
And if “existential crises,” boredom, waiting, the road, solitude, and so forth — until quite recently — were situations in which many productive thoughts were born, one’s own limitations and fears were recognized, revelations and insights emerged, now every such “empty” moment is offered to be immediately filled with screen reinforcement. In effect, the digital environment “privatizes silence,” when attention is deprived of its own inner “wastelands” and “forests,” in which something of its own could grow, and all its space is turned into a cultivated field with a harvest fixed in advance.
Accordingly, if a person wishes to reduce (and in the longer perspective, even to cease) his resource-value for Archontic chains of energy distribution, he should move from an “Archontic” to a “Pleromic” or “Aeonic” attention economy. Then, just as Archontic mechanisms are aimed at ensuring the predictability of attention flows, their short-term flashes, and the minimization of risk — promising quick and easy reinforcements — Aeonic forms of attention are oriented toward what will lead to growth, but in exchange require effort, may wound and then transform, provide depth, meaningfulness, fullness of experience, and the surpassing of present forms.
Therefore any action (to read, to honestly do one’s work, to go against the trend) is unprofitable in the Archontic system of energy exchange, yet brings “profit” in the Aeonic.
In this sense, resistance to Heimarmene can also be expressed in economic analogies and strategies. Attention requires its investments: a conscious choice of precisely those matters into which it is invested in larger quantities, with the understanding that a “minus” in Archontic logic will inevitably arise, yet it may be possible to obtain progress in the Aeonic.
Another strategy of resistance may be the cultivation of the “white zones” of attention mentioned above: those kinds of activity that consciously do not yield to direct monetization or “digitization” (practices/prayers/meditations, walks in nature, time with loved ones, “handicraft” creativity, and similar “warm” actions) as personal “sanctuaries” to which the Archontic market has no access.
Of course, as long as the manifested world exists, the Archons will remain within it as an inevitable external system of administration. Yet it is important to remember that within the bounds of one’s own life, each person retains the right to conduct his own accumulation of those actions and events in which attention is invested not in maintaining the habitual and the rewarded sleep, but in creativity: in the making of what has not yet existed; in experiencing to such depths where his attention has not yet descended. Where we go against the logic of Archontic exchange — reading what is not trendy, praying or practicing when there is “no time,” honestly doing work that no one will reward with likes — there attention again becomes not a resource, but a free gift. And the more such investments a person makes, the less he is merely a battery in someone else’s system of consumption, and the more he becomes a being who himself determines which worlds will be born and sustained in being by his attention.
Archons and the Virtual World
Archons and the Lines of Probability
Archons and Energies
Archons, Clip Thinking, and the Modern World
Archons and the Loss of Discernment
Mind of the Archons
Archons and Fatigue
Archons and the Dissipation of Energy
Good day.
How did you ‘reach’ the understanding of archons? Do you perceive layers of their habitation? Can they be addressed as demons?
For example, demons – you invoked them and thus understood them.
They came to me themselves – as I described in a comment to ‘Stockholm Syndrome’.
As I understand it, there is also the concept of arhats – they are rather the opposite of archons.
Arhats promote evolution rather than ‘freeze’ it.
It is quite possible that archons are a kind of ‘demonized’ arhats. Who ‘decided’ that it would be easier for them to exist at the expense of those living in matter.
Archons are not demons; they cannot be summoned or imprisoned. They are the very foundation of manifested being. However, they can (and should) be studied based on their manifestations – gemarment, as well as through one’s own energies, via the perception of the interspace.
Magnificent.