Tessa Lena’s Letter to Fellow Dissidents

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Welcome back to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Today I thought I would share with you a column from Substack by a friend of mine, Tessa Lena. Tessa’s Substack is called Tessa Fights Robots. She’s an immigrant from Russia and she lives in New York. She’s a really wonderful writer and her heart is in such a good place. She speaks about love most of the time in her columns.

This week’s column by Tessa is called “Letter to Future Dissidents, subtitled Don’t Become a Dissident Before Reading This,” and it was such a good article that I’m going to share the whole thing to you. I did get permission from Tessa Lena to do this. She says go for it. By the way, Tessa Lena was a guest on Gnostic Insights, two interviews back to back. It was called Interview with Tessa Lena Part 1 and Part 2, and those were posted March 13th and March 19th of 2022. So if you go to the GnosticInsights.com website, you can find all of the past episodes posted. Just search for Tessa Lena or March 13th, 2022, and you ought to be able to find those interviews.

I like to run every episode past my brother for discussion before releasing it to you. My dear brother Bill was somewhat shocked that I chose this essay to read to you this week. He’s concerned that the essay is not uplifting and may bum you out rather than inspire you. So let me address that concern here at the top.

Tessa’s article is about the interpersonal challenges of being a dissident, whether we are talking about spiritual disagreements, such as we Gnostics may encounter with other spiritual seekers, or political and cultural disagreements we run into with others. What Bill asked me to say here at the beginning is that the negative spiritual encounters we may have with other people is really the Demiurge and its archons messing with us Second Order Powers. We need to remember that we are not enemies with any person, but rather we are fellow Second Order Powers defending ourselves against the Demiurge.

Bill also shared an article called “The Science of Spiritual Narcissism” by Scott Barry Kaufman that was posted this week on the GetPocket app. I’ve put the link into the transcript here. That article is relevant to today’s podcast, so let me start by reading you a couple of paragraphs from that Pocket article to prepare you for Tessa’s essay. Kaufman says,

Self-enhancement through spiritual practices can fool us into thinking we are evolving and growing, when in fact all we are growing is our ego.

And by the way, we’ll drop in that we’re not really growing our ego, but we’re growing our memes. Our memes are stuck onto our egos. Our egos come along with us. They are our personality. They are our self-identity. They’re part of our aeonic inheritance. So we’re not really growing our egos with wrong beliefs. We’re simply growing the beliefs—the memes—that are stuck onto us and overshadowing our God-given egos and pure selves.

So back to Kaufman’s article.

Some psychologists have pointed out that the self-enhancement that occurs through spiritual practices can lead to the “I’m enlightened and you’re not” syndrome and spiritual bypass by which people seek to use their spiritual beliefs, practices, and experiences to avoid genuine contact with their psychological unfinished business. In Kaufman’s recent book, Transcend, he calls it pseudo-transcendence—transcendence built on a very shaky foundation.

Kaufman goes on to say,

One serious obstacle to healthy transcendence is how spiritual practices are sold to the masses. Yoga and mindfulness are big business in America. The purported benefits of mindfulness meditation have generated a billion dollar industry. Yoga is the most popular mind-body practice in Western societies. Many of these programs offer a long list of promises, including the reduction of stress and anxiety, along with greater confidence, creativity, focus, achievement, success, eating habits, sleep, and even happiness. But here’s the thing, healthy transcendence doesn’t stem from an attempt at distracting oneself from displeasure with reality. Healthy transcendence involves confronting reality as it truly is, head-on, with equanimity and loving kindness.

So going forward in this podcast, remember the key words, equanimity and loving kindness.

So without further ado, here is Tessa Lena’s letter to future dissidents.

So how are you doing today? Have a couple of minutes to talk about dissident life? Have you been trying to just go about your business? But strangely, life has been taking you places where you saw cracks in the matrix that others refused to see? The facade is cracked. You’ve seen it with your own eyes, and things don’t feel quite right.

You feel different than others. You must definitely smell a rat, and you cannot cover your nose hard enough to make the smell of rat disappear. But how come you are so alone in this? How come other people are just fussing around like busy bees? Isn’t there a giant rat sitting and smelling right here in broad daylight and in plain sight? Isn’t there an elephant in the room too for all eyes to see? You feel very strange.

It’s not great to feel different from other people like this, and you honestly just want to fit in with your friends and not stick out like a sore thumb all the time. And you try to blend in. Oh, you try.

You work hard to be normal. You try telling yourself that you are probably crazy. You deny the evidence of your lying eyes.

It turns out that a life of compliance is not enough for you, though. Other people seem to be getting away with living shallow in a man-made matrix world, but not you. Your denial of the evidence of your lying eyes doesn’t go over well for you.

Something happens. Things get crazy. The carefully stitched together comfy blanket over your lying eyes gets destroyed, and you find yourself totally naked, still alone, despite your attempts to bond with others by betraying yourself, humble tears pouring out of your human eyes.

It’s just you. No one else. Just you between the earth and the sky. No one else. Just you and your heart and your unfitting thoughts. And the world? The world doesn’t really care about the fact that you’ve just seen the face of the machine. It’s spinning in a shallow and glittery make-believe way like before, pretending there is no machine. Things keep happening, and at some point you can no longer hold your tongue back, and you open your heart and your mouth. You act brave. You act bold. You start singing your truth in a louder voice. But nope, no change as far as being alone. You are still alone.

Okay, Cyd here, popping in to say that we are not alone. Remember, we are embodying all of the Second Order of Powers of the Fullness of God. And if you have invited the Christ in, you are embodying the Third Order of Powers of the Christ as well. So we are not alone in this struggle, even though it may appear to be so. Okay, back to Tessa’s article.

You discover that people often want their opinions coming out of your mouth, not yours. If your message fits into pre-existing talking points, into pre-existing emotional interfaces often formed by centuries of psyops, you may get somewhere. If you share original insights that explain the world, then nope, no fireworks and no orchestra that you’ve read about in a book about the hero journey. You are still alone.

Then, unexpectedly, your time comes. All of a sudden, the world is bleeding in a new way and wants to hear what you have to say. You are almost surprised because for such a long time, nobody cared at all about the things that now the world suddenly wants to hear. As surprised as you are, you spread your wings and start singing your song, the song that you’ve spent your entire life composing, the song that is sacred to you, and you are oh so happy that other people find it useful to them too. You rejoice. You relax a little. You pour your heart into your noble fight. You do your absolute best. You make new friends. You think that this is your new life.

And then you learn, in a hard way perhaps, that your movement, your dissident tribe, is not real. You learn that the purity of your heart is actually rare, and it’s true even for the self-proclaimed freedom warrior folk. You learn to walk with a few real friends who are strong enough to withstand enemy mind tricks, but the movement, the movement, you watch it collapse. Or rather, you watch it being hijacked by the predators in freedom warrior suits right before your eyes.

You try to salvage the unity of good people, but barely anyone wants to hear because the proverbial negative witches are waving their proverbial magic wands, and people go crazy. Not to mention the fact that even without them, many are simply busy building their freedom brand. That is the moment when your rosy glasses get smashed, and your delusions go the way of the dinosaurs. It sure shocks you. It shocks you to see how good people lament about the normies going for dirty tricks, and then go for similar dirty tricks designed for them.

Okay, Cyd here popping in again. This is discussed in A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel in the chapter called The Never-Ending War. Listen to what the Tripartite Tractate has to say on this.

If both orders, those on the right and those on the left, are brought together with one another by the thought which is set between them which gives them their organization with each other, it happens that they both act with the same emulation of their deeds, with those of the right resembling those of the left, and those of the left resembling those of the right. And if at times the evil order begins to do evil in a foolish way, the wise order emulates in the form of a man of violence also doing what is evil, as if it were a power of a man of violence. At other times the foolish order attempts to do good, making itself like it, since the hidden order too is zealous to do it. [verse 108 of the Tripartite Tractate]

Never-ending War

Now back to Tessa Lena’s article.

You also see how folks who know a lot less than you self-promote quite aggressively, and sometimes in dirty ways, and become industry experts on the subjects you’ve been looking into forever, and they, well, they haven’t.

Oh well, you say. You are here to help the world after all. It’s about the world, not about you, and so you tell yourself, it’s okay, carry on.

Meanwhile, the massive snake pit keeps giving. In disbelief, you learn that some of your dissident colleagues go to great lengths trying to push you aside. You learn that the competition for the best freedom brand is real, and so is the quest to dominate the direction of the freedom buck. You also find that some of the people whom you have held in extremely high regard choose to invest in their envious side. You find how by day those envious souls tout themselves as lovable, brave, pet-friendly, freedom warriors of light, while by night they try efforts to make you invisible and alone. They envy you. Oh, how they envy you. And even though you never tried to cause them harm, they still hate your light.

You feel appalled. You didn’t expect this kind of behavior coming from folks whose brands are about healing trauma and resisting mind control. Snake pit or not, though, you carry on.

Then there are agents. You discover that the agents are a piece of art. Shameless, hurting, wounded, cruel, lying, really strange people. Over time, you realize that they are so deprived of love that they take to desperate measures trying to yank a presentation of love, aka gullibility and submission, out of anyone who allows them to do that. Very strange people, those agents. Very wounded souls.

Okay, I have to pop in here once again, Cyd speaking now.

Those very wounded agents that Tessa refers to, I would think of as people who are not merely confused or deluded by the archons, but have actually, well, what in the old days people would say, sell their soul to the devil. They are people who are actively conspiring with the Demiurge and the archons. They are not archons, they are Second Order Powers, but they have given themselves over consciously to the Demiurge. And so they are working for the Demiurge and not for the God Above All Gods. They are, as Tessa Lena is pointing out, bereft of love. That is why they appear so strange and archonic. But even they, at the very end of time, will see the light. And when the Demiurge is redeemed, these people will be redeemed along with the Demiurge. Okay, back to Tessa’s article.

When you figure out who is really trying to do what and how different it is from what people in your circles talk about, aka controlled opposition talk, you may find yourself disappointed again when you learn that enchantment and mind control in the dissident circles work exactly the way they work in the mainstream. Every weakness, every pain point, every wound gets exploited and milked, and the stakes are high.

You discover that the predators try to flatter you and to harm you and to scare you and isolate you from your friends. You discover how they do tricks designed to transform your beautiful, well-intended allies into bleeding, wounded traitors of you who would rather side with the tricksters based on mind control than believe you. When you follow your natural human instinct of love and make a step forward to protect your friends, you occasionally find that some of the folks whom you have treated well, whom you have gone out of your way to protect and promote, who are brilliant and sincere, they may forget about the good things you have done for them and still betray you, turn on you, and side with the predators in sheep’s (make that) freedom warrior’s clothes.

As your friends betray you, they feel very superior, like they won a game of 5D chess and have figured out mind control. As you look at it with sadness, you feel disappointed. You feel disappointed and hurt. You pull your hair in frustration over how such smart and sincere human beings chose to betray you and themselves. You feel very disappointed. You ask the spirit why you lost them, why this is happening to you. You just want to explode because you see what is going on, and you care, and you want to help, and your allies act lost. But then you stop crying, say a prayer, and tell yourself that they will wake up when it’s due. In the meanwhile, you have to keep going because you are here with a job to do.

Then you see how predators in freedom warrior clothes volunteer their lying selves to save the movement, and at that point you start laughing, first bitterly, then wholeheartedly, because there is grand comedy in all this. What a circus! Traitor witches with magical wands, wounded agents pretending to be fearless freedom fighters, intrigue, confrontations over the freedom buck, and you and your ethical standards, and your friends who are also honest and pure, and your truth. As you are dealing with all this, you keep asking the spirit, why is all this showing up in your life? Why? You say, oh my god, this is just incredible. How can they? But they can, and they are. And you are here, and you need to live, and in order to live, you need to fight better. And in order to fight better, you need to understand the nature of reality better.

And at some point, you see that the predators are an excuse for you to get in touch with yourself. They’re not important. You realize that all this is the spirit teaching you about your being, leaving breadcrumbs for you to pay attention to. And your task is to understand the nature of reality and to learn how to live well. They are experiencing their journey. They will pay their price. It is their choice. You are living your life, your way. You are practicing your faith and your ethics, and frankly, you feel sorry for them.

As you pray, you are reminded again that all good things come on God’s will, and they come on God’s time. At the end of the day, you are doing this because this is what you were born to do. You are here and now, but you are also eternal, and the world is worth saving, and your fellow travelers are worth loving, and you are not weird for practicing your good ethics.

It’s the good way. You are good. You are love.

They can’t kill love. It’s impossible to kill love. Love always wins.

Love always wins. Love always wins. You know this.

If you didn’t know this, you wouldn’t have chosen to fight the good fight. Keep fighting the good fight. It’s your fight.

It’s your way.

I’m all choked up. I think it’s so touching. Of course, it means a lot to me because I fight the good fight, and I know that my faithful listeners and readers also have been fighting the same good fight as Tessa and myself.

Please go to Tessa Fights Robots on Substack. It’s tessa.substack.com. I’ll put a link in this episode transcript also. Subscribe to Tessa. All of her articles for years now have been along these lines, and she’s a beautiful woman. She’s a singer. She’s a performance artist in New York, and she’s a beautiful writer as well.

God bless Tessa. God bless all of us. Remember, love always wins. Keep fighting the good fight, and onward and upward.

Tessa Lena, from her album Tessa Makes Love