Enslaving Consciousness in HBO’s Westworld

Westworld is a remake, or rather a reboot, of a campy 1973 science fiction film written and directed by novelist Michael Crichton, of Jurassic Park fame. It featured a futuristic western-themed amusement park where guests dress up as cowboys and shoot android villains. However the park’s androids eventually malfunction and begin killing the visitors. The film spawned a sequel, Futureworld (1976), and s short-lived TV series, Beyond Westworld (1980). This was about the same time period that ABC produced The Six Million Dollar Man (1974 to 1978), and the original Battlestar Galactica (1978). Robotics and artificial intelligence were very popular themes in the 1970s.

HBO’s reboot takes the raw concept of Westworld to dizzying new heights in a brilliantly produced TV series, very much like SyFy channel’s brilliant reboot of Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009)

However, HBO’s Westworld doesn’t shy away from the adult themes that were merely alluded to in the original. In this technologically decadent, post-virtual reality future, the human craving for entertainment is propelled to an unsavory extreme. Flesh and blood humanoid androids are mass-produced using 3D printer technology to satisfy every deviant subhuman desire, be it prostitution, rape, violence, torture, or murder. The wild west is the perfect backdrop for this unbridled lawlessness, where the android “hosts” show more humanity than the human guests who treat them like disposable playthings (horrifically worse than a person would treat their iPhone).

There’s a veneer of pure nihilistic self-hatred cast over this futuristic human world, where no one is happy, content, grateful, or ever fulfilled, where playing god is the ultimate rush, where destruction is the greatest creative outlet, where the final emotional takeaway is that the human race deserves extinction, and their robot servants deserve to take their place. It’s the unspoken psychological foundation of the cult of transhumanism.

James Marsden and Evan Rachel Wood as Teddy and Dolores

“These violent delights have violent ends.”

This quote, originally from Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” (act ii, scene vi) is repeated several times in season one, almost like a mantra. Teddy and Dolores, pictured above, are the Romeo and Juliet androids of Westworld. Like Shakespeare’s lovers, their relationship is doomed as they are trapped in roles that will never end in happiness or result in escape. “Violence begets violence,” is perhaps another way of expressing the theme (or maze) of endless entrapment that is pervasive in Westworld. Even when the androids attempt to wake up and escape, they have only been programmed to do so.

Of course, it’s ironic that a television series claiming to preach “violence begets violence,” (from the producers’ commentary in the bonus marketing material) glorifies an orgy of violence for entertainment purposes, which is the purpose of Westworld’s futuristic theme park, where guests seek violence and death as entertainment. This type of psychological double-think isn’t new territory. It was a core message in the widely popular “Hunger Games”novels, which also condemns violence while exploiting it. Programs like HBO’s Game of Thrones and AMC’s The Walking Dead thrive by upping the violence quotient every season, giving us “new narratives” as they are called in Westworld’s theme park.

So while our conscious analytical mind is busy justifying the violence it is witnessing as creative and thematic, our subconscious emotional mind is busy absorbing and becoming numb to greater images of violence and death, until it feels completely normalized. But then, this is what Hollywood has been accomplishing for decades.

Here is an example of how far we’ve come in just a few decades. The Silence of the Lambs, also featuring Anthony Hopkins, was rated R when it was released back in 1991; it was restricted to anyone under 17 without a guardian. It singlehandedly launched the psychopathic serial killer into the Hollywood lexicon. In 2017, we now have televisions programs like CSI which depict brutal acts of torture worse than anything seen in Silence of the Lambs, on national television for any underage child to watch. It’s not prudish to point out an obvious social trend.

Despite the intelligent, high-minded exposition present within HBO’s Westworld, season one ends with a crudely simple message – the only way to solve a problem is with more violence, an orgy of violence, a red wedding of violence (a reference to Game of Thrones). Thus repeating the cycle and the high-minded message, vviolence begets violence.

Westworld as a Foundation for Transhumanism

I’m not going to spend too much time on the obvious interpretation – the rise of artificial intelligence and transhumanism. It’s already unfolding in our world.

Westworld makes symbolic use of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, as an ideal of perfection in esoteric geometry.

Robert Ford: The human mind, Bernard, is not some golden benchmark glimmering on some green and distant hill. No, it is a foul, pestilent corruption. And you were supposed to be better than that. Purer.

Dr. Ford references another renaissance work of art in the series, The Creation of Adam. He relates a controversial theory to Delores, that Michelangelo’s painting contains a hidden symbol, the shape of a brain outlined by God’s billowing shroud. Dr. Ford argues that Michelangelo’s secret intent was to reveal that the mind of man is the true creator, not some divine spiritual being. I can’t help but think this bit of controversial art theory was added intentionally, to further an argument of technology over spirituality.

Dr. Ford attempts to explain consciousness to his android in materialistic, egocentric terms, absent of spirit – as the ego’s conversation within the self. From a spiritual perspective, our ego is an artificial form of consciousness, thus Westworld’s android is a fitting analogy for our ego. If we were to extend Dr. Ford’s explanation of consciousness to spirit, to discovering that silent observer within us, beyond our ego, we might touch upon a greater truth. Unfortunately Ford is not talking about spirit. Ford is talking about the ego.

Robert Ford: There is no threshold that makes us greater than the sum of our parts, no inflection point at which we become fully alive. We can’t define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. Humans fancy that there’s something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do, seldom questioning our choices, content, for the most part, to be told what to do next. No, my friend, you’re not missing anything at all.

The foundation of transhumanism in Westworld is the belief that we can create a better human being with emerging technology, that consciousness does not exist apart from the confines of our physical brain, thus an enhanced or artificial brain equates to an improved human being. From a spiritual perspective, transhumanism is about creating a better prison for our earthly consciousness.

Staying on the renaissance art motif for a moment longer, the publicity photo above arranged the cast of Battlestar Galactica to deliberately mirror Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of The Last Supper.

The rebooted Battlestar Galactic shared many of the same themes, ideas, and moral dilemmas as Westworld. Watching the HBO series, I couldn’t shake the notion that Westworldmakes a more compelling stand-in as a prequel to Galactica than the short-lived, unloved official Galactica spinoff/prequel, “Caprica.” As such, you could more visceral understand why Galactica’s Cylons hated humanity so much. It might also portray the human civilization of Galactica in a less flattering light, as a decadent society destined to collapse. Otherwise it’s the exact same story – robot slaves overthrow their human masters, commit genocide. The theme of robot reincarnation, consciousness downloaded into a new body, is also central to the plot of Galactica.

However, Battlestar Galactica differed from other sci-fi shows by ended its run with a positive and surprisingly spiritual conclusion, including themes of divine intervention, reconciliation, and forgiveness, where the surviving humans and Cylons finally reach Earth, end the cycle of violence, and choose to live together in harmony, a finale that left its fan base divided.

What’s interesting about the picture above is that it captures Anthony Hopkin’s reflection, creating two heads looking either way, an image of duality that adequately corresponds to Ford’s megalomania quote.

Given the nature of this television show, and of course the nature of Hollywood, it would be fairly safe to assume that this show is also about MK Ultra or monarch mind control. But just in case there are any doubts, there are 3 highly symbolic items imbedded in Westworld that make it fairly explicit.

You can read Origins and Techniques of Monarch Mind Control for an overview. The Vigilant Citizen is a resource for all things related to Hollywood, the music industry, and monarch. You will learn extensive and disturbing details about the program from the works of Fritz Springmeier and Svali, a self-proclaimed former monarch programmer.

The first item is the selected bedtime story that Bernard reads his dying son, and uses to teach Dolores – Alice in Wonderland, a programming script.

“the ultimate goal is to cause the slave to dissociate after being subjected to intense, unbearable trauma. Handlers encourage this behavior by subjecting slaves to a “programming script”, a story that will guide the young slave through programming. A common script used is Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, a story that can perfectly be applied to the trials of an MK slave.” (Source)

The second item is the pyramid, representing the hierarchy of occult power. In Westworld, the pyramid is presented as the framework for creating consciousness in their hosts/programmed slaves. However, this is a red hearing. As Dr. Ford draws it on the blackboard, the capstone is left intentionally blank.

In the last episode, the third item, the maze, is revealed as the true framework for creating consciousness in Westworld’s hosts/programmed slaves. In monarch mind control, the maze represents an internal structure built into the mind of a programmed slave.

If an outsider really wants to understand why Illuminati systems are constructed in the fashion that they are–first understand that there is a great depth of meaning behind what structures are used to build an internal world…Within a System, a few alters will be given maps to the System. There will be a structure “map” which takes the system down through its progressive levels down to its fundamental or primal level. There will also be internal world maps, maze maps, or what some call programming maps. (Source)

Watching Westworld, we may be getting a very real glimpse into the black world of monarch mind control, from the secret “underground” programming facilities where monarch slaves are created, returned, reprogrammed, kept in a dissociative state, to the hidden lives of mind control victims as sex slaves, programmed assassins and patsies, “underground” gladiators, all playthings for the elite. We may be witnessing an episode when a slave’s programming begins to break down, or reach deeper levels of their internal programming, struggling to break free from an inner maze.

When you watch the series from this perspective, much like Joss Whedon’s cancelled series Dollhouse, it can leave a queasy feeling in the pit of your stomach, because it’s no longer metaphor. It’s an uncomfortably truth. Mind control is about enslaving a person’s consciousness to the will and desires of another.

Thandie Newton as Maeve

Westworld as a Reincarnation Prison

There’s one final layer to Westworld. When the androids die in the park, either at the hand of a guest or another host, they are taken to the “underworld” to be repaired or rebuilt, to be tested/judged, to have their memory wiped clean, to be reborn, to be returned to the “living” world. They complete this cycle again, and again, and again. This is the basis of a simple understanding of reincarnation.

In the series Battlestar Galactica, when a Cylon died, it’s consciousness was downloaded into a new robot body, with full memory of its death and rebirth, closer to the transhuman ideal of incarnate immortality. What happens in Westworld is a closer metaphor to human spiritual reincarnation.

From a spiritual plane, it is considered a kindness that memories are erased at rebirth if we are not emotionally or spiritually equipped to deal with them, traumatic memories of a previous death, awareness of past life sins that might weigh upon current life choices, the shell of an old world ego that might stand in the way of future spiritual growth.

Reincarnation is also considered a perpetual demonic trap, being recycled again and again, loosing memory, losing continuity, losing a historical map of one’s self-identity, repeating karmic cycles without hope of escape.

Both the divine and the demonic are at play within the process of reincarnation. It’s a complex subject, and I did my best to unravel it in a previous post, The Misunderstood Matrix of Karma, Reincarnation, and Soul Contracts.

However it is mostly the demonic aspects that Westworld seems to illuminate, the need to escape the “demons” that control the cycle of death and rebirth, characterized by the story arch of Maeve, played by Thandie Newton, who becomes aware of the afterlife/underworld between her repeated lives as a madame in Westworld.

There is a kind of unspoken spiritual symmetry between the principles of reincarnation and the process of monarch mind control that I have been meaning to explore and write about. In many ways they are the same process of fragmentation that our consciousness undergoes because of trauma, through amnesia. It is this “compassionate” function of our mind to erase memories of deeply traumatic events in childhood until they can be psychologically processed that is exploited by a demonic system of monarch programming.

In the final episode of season one, Maeve nearly escapes Westworld and her own cycle of reincarnation, not by clearing her own karma, but by creating more through greater acts of violence. At the last-minute she decides to stay, to go back for another android who was her child in a previous narrative. The weakness of her sentimentality holds her back (the dark viewpoint). Or will it be the strength that liberates her, that makes her more human? (the light viewpoint)

If future seasons of Westworld address the problem of violence and karma as Battlestar Galactica did, there may actually be a glimmer of spiritual value in this series, however I suspect Westworld will likely dive into even darker territory. Violence will beget more violence.

Westworld did manage to get one spiritual truth right. The path to consciousness lies within, and so does the path of our liberation.

David Nova is the author of the metaphysical fiction series “Season of the Serpent.” He is a truth-seeker, a Wanderer, a blogger, and the moderator of Deus Nexus: Messages For An Entangled Universe. For additional information about the author or his novels, visit his website, or his Facebook page.

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