The missing puzzle piece, I think, is “WHY?”
Incomplete enlightenment. Just look at neo-advaitins. All of them will agree wholeheartedly that form is empty. But all of them will fight tooth and nail and struggle to come to terms with the fact that emptiness is form. Thus, in their worldview anything goes (everything just is, in their parlance), and as a result most of them are pretty selfish and arrogant. If not worse. AFAICT they definitely feel special and better than the rest of the population. They realized the Absolute, but cannot live it. But “to realize” has two crucial meanings — “to know” and “to manifest”.
Thus, no fully awakened being would adopt the position, “Control them, for they know not what they (or I) do.” for such person would literally rather die than go back to sleep, and as you say, “continue to control the dream by granting the dream importance, and importance is the same thing as sleep,” so there’s no way an awakened person would strive to dominate others.
However, this still does not explain why would someone suddenly feel the urge to exploit their own tribe (especially if they were brought up in an egalitarian society).
Enter bad idea.
Frankly, I take Gurdjieff, but essentially whole 19th and early 20th century mysticism and occultism, with even bigger grain of salt than Castaneda. It was all product of the romantic era, and it shows. After papal Rome definitely lost its 1500 years old grip on society, old myths resurrected and reigned supreme, but modern science was still in its infancy.
Just a single remark to make clear what I mean — extremely old humans (500 and more years): well, that Natufian shamaness was ca. 45 years old and considered elderly as compared to other excavated individuals. Also, if human physical body was theoretically immortal, why on Earth would we have reproductive capability? Sooner or later we would be bound to run out of space and resources. And I could go on.
The same is true for Castaneda’s Flyers.
I look at it this way — we know that the brain activity can be induced by external mechanical, electrical, or magnetic stimulation and we also know that e.g. Moon’s gravity generates tides. We also know that those external stimuli in brain can manifest as phosphenes, but also emotions (we know how Moon influences menstrual cycle, and it’s not a stretch to assume that it has a significant influence on our bodies in general — it can move oceans after all), and I’m certain that it’s also true for thoughts.
So, we can literally get feelings and ideas from Sun, Moon, and planets in our Solar system (astrology should be seen in this light), but also other energy that passes around/through Earth (some of it may indeed come from pretty distant parts of cosmos). Not to mention energies that originate on Earth.
I completely digress, but look how even a tree reacts to electric power line:
Now, shamans were/are highly respected in their community (still true even for priests). Imagine what a disaster would cause partially awakened one for whom anything goes and who feels special, who, during a food crisis, just got a “bright idea out of the blue” — “Let us built a holy granary and I will ration out food for you.” That person might even thought that it’s for the best of all. I really think it’s not more complex than that.
And I add one pretty crazy observation — during the lockdown I witnessed something spectacular. Not only I don’t remember when was the last time I saw such a clear sky (and I don’t even live in a huge city — so much for human caused environmental damage), but what struck me the most, we had a very calm spring weather. During past years, we would have normally experience storms, cold fronts with violent winds, and similar phenomena. But now it was a calm spring as it should be. What’s more, as soon as the lockdown was lifted/eased and people slowly returned to their usual rat race these tumultuous conditions started to reappear. It almost seemed as if the mental state of people influenced the skies, so to speak. If it was indeed true, nothing would prevent us attracting certain forms of cosmic energies toward Earth.
Anyway, the final result is exactly as you describe it — we are “under the thumb of a global religious control system with no awakened person or people at the control board.”
As for dualism. I think you hit the nail on the right spot. Animism is, indeed, an unconscious symbiosis with the whole. All what “enlightenment” adds on top of it is that the same symbiosis becomes conscious. Again, a striking echo of Genesis 3.
So, if the answer to why is incomplete enlightenment, the solution should logically be to finish it. And I cannot shake the feeling that the whole Earth assists us in this endeavor.
