At First, There Were Eight/ Part Four

 

My essay “At First, There Were Eight” just went up in Dark Mountain Journal. This is the companion piece to “Entering the Tunnel of Time in Cappadocia,” which went up last December. In both 2022 and 2023, these were the last pieces DM published for the year. Not sure what this means. I guess both involve panoramic views of world destructions, with hints of a larger cosmic context and hopes for cultural renewal. A pessimist’s way of saying “Happy New Year!” This is part four:

 How much, reader, do you know about yourself, how much is securely tucked in the realm of “known unknowns,” and what shards are still waiting to be unearthed by a shepherd? Yet beneath us, the ground remembers. There are skies that have solidified and cracked. There are oceans that turned upside down. There are urns that hold the bones of radioactive giants, of yogis so violent they can kill us with their love. There are eggs that have grown much larger than our planet. You who through these convolutions have followed me this far, who have climbed the broken stairs to a tower with no top, who floor by floor have plunged down through the flames of collapsing cultures, who have reached across dead oceans to a coast where the sun is green, you believe, perhaps, that you have read this book, but probing here and undoing blockages there, it could be that the book has read you. Fret not, the energies thus released are only the beginning. Great bliss and despair await.

 Do you not remember having read this book? Well, that is a separate issue. Such a book is fully capable of reading on its own, with no help from the living. I can empathize. Like you, I know how unsettling this can be. Be glad, at least, that your discomfort goes only this far, your sense of dread no farther. Just imagine what it was like to write a book that was not yours, to see your hand write words that were not quite your words, to cross them out then cross out your corrections, many dozens of times over, when you realized that no simple act of transcription was involved. What fun it would be to “channel” Occult Masters. You could win friends and influence people. With their higher-dimensional algorithms, they could help to market your Total Seerhood. If only you didn’t have to pass harsh judgement on your work, not once but every day, in this life and in others.

 Instead, my instructions were to actively descend, to actively ascend, to actively shrink, to actively expand, and to find some way to bring you with me, without your full consent, perhaps, without your even knowing you had come. I was to jerry-rig a technology that would let the fifth element speak, to call from hiding the primal power of the word. As satellites crash, as the ocean inches up and then finally pours through subways, as the last bees buzz, as we one day note there is no glass in our towers, we will have gained some fluency in turning against time, some skill in subverting the opacity of space. We will see the remnants of the First Ones in their graves, painted red, facing east, with those small stones clutched in their hands. Why is it that they clutch those small stones in their hands? Together, long ago, we will turn with our fingers the pages of this book.

 Continue reading at:

https://dark-mountain.net/at-first-there-were-eight/

Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence is available through Untimely Books and Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Masks-Origin-Regression-Service-Omnipotence-ebook/dp/B0BLTCBJP8/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2XISN0WF9K6ZA&keywords=brian+george+masks+of+origin&qid=1697981230&s=books&sprefix=brian+george+masks+of+origin%2Cstripbooks%2C77&sr=1-1

 https://untimelybooks.com/book/masks-of-origin/

 

A revised edition of my book of essays, Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence, is now available through Untimely Books and Amazon. The new edition contains six recently revised essays. This is the first of six books that I will be publishing with them. 

https://untimelybooks.com/book/masks-of-origin/

https://www.amazon.com/Masks-Origin-Regression-Service-Omnipotence/dp/0971663580/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2YPR14G645E9P&keywords=brian+george+masks+of+origin&qid=1702223300&s=books&sprefix=brian+george+%2Cstripbooks%2C100&sr=1-1

 Excerpt from the newly revised “Early Days in the Vortex":

 If you had a car, you could drive from my neighborhood to Boston in an hour. I didn’t have a car, however. I didn’t take Route Nine. I went by way of the abyss. I worked eight hours a day as a janitor at the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, cleaning ink off all the presses, and also as a counsellor at the Worcester Crisis Center, learning to treat the problems of heroin addicts and would be suicides as being almost as important my own. I then would spend most of my free time at the Clark University Library, going stack by stack in my search for any trace of the Philosopher’s Stone. An abyss had opened, and I entered it. We became good friends, more or less, not that I was presented with any other option. In the two years after high school, I chose to act as my harshest critic. There was lots of catching up to do. To do something once was to do it many times. I saw, I heard, I was led, I learned a lot, but each small gain felt deliberate and laborious.

 And then, in September, 1974, when I moved to Boston to go to art school, my self-imposed atonement came suddenly to an end, as though I had closed the book that I was reading with a snap. Don’t ask for what crime I had been sentenced to atone. A kind of antigravity took over when I stepped from the Greyhound bus. The top of my head flew off. The days appeared to physically grow brighter. The sun moved closer to the Earth. I was as happy as one of the roaches that scurried in my 92 dollars-per-month apartment.

 Did my kitchen not have a stove? Did water leaking from my ceiling destroy a dozen drawings? Was my wallpaper starting to fall off? Did the mice make so much noise that they kept me up at night? What of it? Such hardships fit my definition of adventure. So as not to grow too comfortable, a few days per week I would add to these hardships by sleeping on the floor. In Worcester, I had put my shoulder against an almost immovable wheel. In Boston, in search of the later-day descendants of Bohemia, on the cusp of a cultural moment that I had not yet discovered, not the effort but the sense of difficulty disappeared.

 I had intended to rent an apartment a few blocks from my school. Hopelessly ignorant of the city, I ended up a mile away. What luck was mine! My location was a perfect one, across the street from the Northeastern University Library, whose books would gladly welcome me when I fled from my apartment. Was this place the result of a series of wrong turns? No. I had accepted Baudelaire’s invitation to go with him on a voyage. I had gone where the Old Ones sent me. I was where I was meant to be. If the most important changes are internal, having to do with one’s subtle relationship to events, then there are also times when outer changes are essential, when one would die inside without them. These outer changes then shift the balance between the subject and the object, so that events begin to articulate the psyche, so that the psyche appears to be present in the most random of events.

 I have a new interview up with British transpersonal psychologist and podcast host Lucinda Lidstone for her Talking Tealeaves podcast. Lucinda asked probing questions, really listened to the answers, and had a flowing, intuitive sense of what I wanted to say. She was so much fun to talk with that I ended up saying things that I seldom reveal to anyone. (Artwork: #13 from my new Homage to Dhyanyogi Madhusudandas series) Interview with Brian George - Onevsp