Descent to the Merkavah/ Part 1 (Revision)

By Brian George

1

“Man’s quest for immortality, to ‘live forever,’ or to be self-sustaining in one way or another is modeled most economically by the vortex. ‘Looking into the world,’ he observed the vortex in fire, wind, and water, and in the weave patterns of the heavens above, etc. When, whether consciously or subconsciously, he recognized that vortexes represent ‘the only manner by which a self-sustaining motion can exist in a given medium’ (Arthur M. Young), he would naturally have gravitated to such an idea—specifically, the idea that a vortex appears to be other than the medium which sustains it, but actually it is one with the medium within which it exists.”—from Martin Farren, “In the Mirror of Creation”

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My explorations in Kabbalah and Kundalini yoga had led me in and out and upside down through the convolutions of an arcane curve, and deposited me, at a different turn of the spiral, again exactly in the place where I had started. It was in this position that I had always found myself—as a stranger with a social slot to fill, as a non-local presence with a local job to perform, as an ancient soul at a perpetual beginning.

As from a height, I had descended to a vehicle, and, from solid earth, into a state of watery flux.

There, the laws of electromagnetism could not be taken at face value. My evolution followed the path recommended to the student of Kabbalah—the “Path of Descent”—which was also the path taken by the first imploding hypersphere and its crop of unpronounceable gods, the Elohim—as they are called, for the sake of convenience, in this system. The name is a generic one, and, in contemporary terms, we could perhaps refer to them as “The Powers That Be.” We suspect—only—that they are powers now, although, in some respects, they seem close to being programs. When, amid flashing lights, they choose to put in an appearance, at times there does seem to be something of the manikin about them, and it is not clear if they really “act” at all. We do not know what they were before, or how they came to be in charge of the technology that projects us.

If it was they who lifted the first city from the Deluge, to do this they had, paradoxically, to descend. Most stories about this early race have been lost to public view. They have been buried beneath years of scholarship, darkened by paranoia, or warped by moral pontifications. “They are good,” say some, “for we choose to misinterpret all of the evil that they do.” “They are evil,” say others, “for they have shattered the once perfect world, nor do they understand what it feels like to be human.”

Our manic/ depressive hopes for total cleansing by an “apocalypse” do not really help to clarify the matter. Our sightlines have been blocked. Our intellects cannot penetrate their radioactive cloud, and, should we look on them directly, it is possible that our hearts would beat themselves to death. No, instead, we must make use of a different set of eyes, for the ones that we have been given are prosthetic. We must remember how to see from all of 360 degrees. We must think with our hearts. We must feel with the group intellect of our alien micromanagers, who, in their arrogance, may think of us as food.

We must touch the thread that connects us to the first word ever spoken. We must simultaneously speak each syllable in the Ur-Text. Only later should we pick our individual parts, as well as the cultures that correspond to them, and thus give birth to the straight lines that are History. At first, it was All for One. Then later, it was Every Man for Himself. Later yet, we would act as midwives for the rebirth of the Zero. We must listen with the eyes of the Elohim. We must see with the ears of space. We must put our trust in the depth and breadth of our experience, in order to revisit the many places that we have been. We must stop time, and, as if the ocean were a sheet, begin to smooth out all of the wrinkles. As we hover a few inches over it, we may still be able to view and then decipher the almost invisible outlines of our movements. Thus, the motives of this early race are obscure, but can be guessed:

The desire to share their accumulated wealth, which was great.

The desire to see and/ or make things happen.

The desire to remove one’s head—its awful vastness, and thus to escape from the burdens that are associated with omnipotence.

After Aeons of silence, the desire to explode.

The desire to seize Beauty by the hair.

The desire to get drunk, to pick a fight, to have sex, to wake up somewhere strange.
The desire to make a weapon of geometry.

The desire to test one’s strength against the ocean, to put one’s shoulder to the wheel.

The desire to make a name for oneself.

The desire to bind others to one’s cause; to manufacture a consensus

The desire to express oneself, to which end one must have a particular point of view.

The desire to live life, to learn from suffering, and to outlast death.

The desire to make a mark on the big dream that is History.

The desire to make a complete break with the past.

The desire to be empty, after being pregnant with a world.

The desire to discover the beginning of the circle, its ancient origin; to thus inhabit the lost story one has read.

The desire to be many, after being one, and to be one, after being many.

The desire to give the gift that keeps on giving.

The desire to transmit the knowledge that is the fruit of one’s longevity.

The desire to let go, to not be in charge.

The desire to be free, to live in the one moment, to feel joy.

The desire to again throw caution to the wind, to follow where one is led.

The desire of the magician to say farewell to his powers.

The desire to be swept off by a wave.

—Yes, the motives of this early race are obscure, as are those of their descendants in the present. Their psyches are not other than our own. As the serpent force revolts against the magic of the microcosm—from head to heart to genitals to feet and then back again to head—I can hear the Elohim conjuring the dense Ur-Text of my body. However strange or familiar, their actions follow a predetermined course.


(Illustration: Brian George, Head with vortices and snake projecting out of forehead, 2004)

Bird arising out of snake arising out of pot

This is a large black and white drawing from a series that I did between 1989 and 1993. This one was done in 1990.

Trust But Verify

By Brian George

Jonathan Zap, in his essay “”Foxes and Reptiles; Psychopathy and the Financial Meltdown,” wrote:

“Many have commented that the SEC tends to employ those trained in finance but who are not as clever, ruthless or determined as those they are trying to monitor. I would suggest that they be open to hiring psychopaths with MBAs and offer them multi-million dollar bonuses and recognition, celebrity recognition if possible, for catching high level scams. Since psychopaths are a force of nature we are unlikely to eliminate, we should instead harness their unique talents to serve the socially useful purpose of catching other psychopaths. Who could possibly be better qualified, better able to pierce strategies of deception, than other highly motivated psychopaths? To use Wall Street metaphorically, we need a highly motivated team of clever reptiles and foxes to catch other reptiles and foxes.”

A key principle in medicine is that few things are toxic in and of themselves, or rather, that the amount of the toxin is what determines its effect: a large amount might result in death, but the right amount might heal us of a dangerous disease. The way that the toxin is introduced would play a role. “First, do no harm,” wrote Hippocrates. If only things were so simple! For “what harms can heal.” In their different ways, Allopathy and Homeopathy make use of this principle, which perhaps can be more generally applied. The current global laissez-faire economy is like a body without an immune system.

Death is imminent; doing nothing is not safe. No laws protect us, and a vast shadow eats the animatronic organs of Democracy—which should leave, in the near future, just a shell. It has been 66 years since happy US soldiers jitterbugged with nurses in the street, or grabbed random strangers to kiss. We had beaten the Axis powers. The Free World loved us. We were a beacon to the dispossessed. Now Corporate Fascism rules. Lawyers are the new Luftwaffe. Judges are the SS. Hedge funds are the new Reich Bureau of Occult Affairs. MSNBC, FOX, and CNN compete for the mantle of Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. They report all the news that’s fit to be projected, that is to say: Before its Time, and provide us will all viewpoints from A to B.

In love, from childhood, with the American Dream, we are hesitant to acknowledge that the year is not 1948. A few dollars are left: they will be sent to an off-shore bank in the Caiman Islands. We are not what we were, but at least let it be said that we have kept up our appearances. No one knows when the Barbarians walked casually in through the gates. Now, they are more inside than we are. They are closer to the Mad Fetus in the control room than we ever were—except, perhaps, at ceremonies for dead heroes in their transfer tubes. There are rings inside of rings, with fail-safe mechanisms at key bioenergetic points. The gods that descend from the Black Sun must be fed. Select Stockholm Syndrome victims may be called upon to remove the remnants of the burnt offering from the table, at which point the law specifies that it be ritually re-sanitized. The Barbarians wasted no time in dismantling the gates, in order to put up their own gates—which keep us from getting out. The life of the Republic is hanging by a thread. The Supreme Court will soon meet to decide a case about scissors. Perfectly dressed, a force that is not quite human has been scheduled to attack.

There are those who say that our response is several decades behind the curve.

And so, to develop our analogy: If we think in terms of “the sociopath-as-toxin,” then we had best be prepared for each possible side-effect in advance, and, in each test case, pay close attention to determine just what it is that we see. We could also compare the two systems in terms of “the sociopath-as-virus.” In Allopathic medicine, whose key principle is supposedly that “opposites treat opposites,” it is—oddly enough—accepted that a neutralized form of a disease might also serve to catalyze the cure. Homeopathic theory is supposed to be the opposite—180 degrees off, on the other side of the circle—but the key principle is “let like be cured by like”—not that different in the abstract from mainstream immunology.

What does this tell us? Perhaps that opposites interact in ways that we don’t expect. Perhaps to put aside pet theories in order to focus on whatever works. An almost occult correspondence exists between the toxin and the symptom, such that a small amount of something can help to protect us against a larger and more threatening quantity of the same. A virus attacks, and, once our system has gained access to its encrypted DNA, we are able to manufacture the corresponding antigen. Unseen to the world, a transfer of life-altering data has occurred, which brings the earlier right/ left opposition to a halt, as it redefines the nature of the contest. In Chapter eight of the “Tao Te Ching” we read, “The supreme goodness is like water…It gathers in unpopular places. Thus it is like the Tao.”

The best defense is to co-opt one’s enemy, and to get him to do exactly what one wants.

In a similar fashion, Jonathan Zap has suggested that we could use a sociopath with an MBA to root out other sociopaths on Wall Street. If bureaucrats are impotent, and less sharp than those they monitor, then sociopaths may be the necessary agents—whether calibrated toxins or pre-processed viruses—to prompt healing in the Body Politic.

Brian P. Akers, one of the participants in the Reality Sandwich forum for this essay, was somewhat horrified by the suggestion. He wrote, “Any notion that evil or manipulative psycho-malignancy can be hitched up to our wagons plays right into its hands. Evil loves such good but misguided ideas…To afford it an opening, of any least kind, is only to woo, court and flirt with disaster…Psychopathy rests on inherently violent interests or abusive purposes. Period…(We must) recognize that stuff for exactly what it is, and deal with it accordingly…Otherwise, we become its host or prey, no ifs ands or buts."

I would categorize this as the classic “You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists” approach. Well, that isn’t always foolproof, as we have seen. Evil does exist, but it can be a mistake to attribute to it vast mythological powers. Much evil is, indeed, banal, and only appears strong because of our ignorance and the mystique that we lend to it.

As a society, we make a great many “bargains with the Devil,” and, whether rightly or wrongly, we believe that our very survival depends upon some use of “controlled lethality.” On Wall Street, for example, we trust sociopathic hustlers to make vast amounts of money for themselves, in the hope that some portion of the wealth will “trickle down.” And it’s not as if we are unaware of what Wall Street firms are capable of; financial speculation and corruption have fueled countless boom and bust cycles, which have caused incomparably more suffering than all the serial killers who ever lived. Why is it such a problem to employ a sociopath to attempt to take back a little of what another sociopath stole?

The military is another illustration of a bargain with the Devil. In the current climate, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are not aberrations, and then there are all of the dead Iraqi civilians that nobody seems to notice or to talk about. 120,000 is one official estimate—but who knows? It is so unimportant that we have not really bothered to count. We could no doubt do things in far better ways. My point is that, in practice, most societies do tend to do exactly what you suggest—to strategically make use of the particular talents of the sociopath, or, at a minimum, to activate and harness their members’ sociopathic shadows. Sometimes this works. At other times—such as now—it tends to blow up in our faces.

In spite of wholesale surveillance programs, such as the NSA’s NIMD—or “Novel Intelligence from Massive Data”—and the FBI’s now (supposedly) defunct “Carnivore”(!), there can be no prophylaxis against Evil. But we can ask questions that might help to keep us conscious, such as: Have we incorporated the enemy on purpose or by accident?

The key thing is perhaps transparency. It would probably be best, too, to remove the fox from his role as supervisor of the chicken coop. Somehow “regulation” has become a dirty word.

How does that saying go?—Something like, “The greatest achievement of the Devil is to convince us that he doesn’t exist.” In the same way, sociopaths in high places have convinced us that “markets are self-regulating,” that the jet-setting heirs to family fortunes are heroic Ayn Randian “job creators”—veritable Atlases!—and that the best thing that the victim of the Stockholm Syndrome can do is to kiss the hand of his/ her captor. So too: that the 3497 of our 9/11 dead must be avenged by the murder of 120,000—and still climbing—innocent civilians in Iraq, that US citizens can be arrested and detained for a lifetime without being charged, and that midnight military tribunals are a substitute for Justice. A bit of intelligent oversight might be nice.

In the end: Sociopathic evil, as sly and charismatic as it is, is generally not quite as strong as goodness that is active—as opposed to merely polite—and that does not allow itself to be treated like a mark.


(Illustration:  Victor Brauner) )

I Left at Dawn for the Eternal City; It Seems that I Have Misplaced Several Days/ Part 9

By Brian George

Hallucinations erupt from the red ocean; it is dawn

In presenting this alternate view of the “Apocalypse,” of an end that opens the door to a perpetual beginning, I have used, as a convenient frame of reference, the concepts of the “horizontal” and the “vertical” axes; in turn, this provides us with a method of speaking about space—of moving up and down, as well as in and out. Each direction will lead us eventually to the circumference of a sphere—a sphere that can also be imagined as a point, as a pair of intersecting triangles, as a 10-D torus, or as a 64 cube tetrahedron.

This sphere is both our destination and the vehicle that we must activate; it will take us from where we are to where we have never ceased to exist.

Let us “fix” the world—by letting space implode; in the eye of the storm will test the explosive power of the small. If we travel far enough and fast enough in the direction that we are going, we will at some point overtake our alternate versions from behind.  To them, we will seem to be arriving from the future, or from a past whose depth subverts all current archeological theory. Who knows what each will think of the other’s odd appearance?

Once, the Great Year set up oars along the coast, to mark each spot where our surrogates had been buried, facing east. No trauma could remove the sun from before their eyes; however much tectonic plates have been—as if by accident—rearranged. Pangaea is a puzzle; there will always be pieces missing. For without such a catastrophe there would be no “primal schism.”

To the 1-inch city will return the storytellers—good to go!—from all of the cultures that a wave has carried off.

In one frame of reference, I am looking down and backwards at the Earth—at the fossil known as “Brian George”; he is little more than fuel. In an alternate frame of reference, I am standing like a new-born child on the Earth, feet bare, and with an ocean where my head should be; I am looking up and outwards at the clockwork of the Macrocosm—now once again translucent.

“Breath by breath”—I say to no one in particular—“we will sink our yogic drill-bits into History! By the power of our austerities we will renovate the Zero; one size will again fit all.” The music of the spheres becomes cacophonous, and then stops. As I stare, an atomic power plant half-materializes on a cloud; its warning signs flash, and lightning fills the air with the aroma of burnt ozone. The dark energy of omnipotence moves in for the kill.


(Illustration: Enzo Cucchi)