I Left at Dawn for the Eternal City; It Seems that I Have Misplaced Several Days/ Part 4

By Brian George

“There was Earth inside them, and they dug”—Paul Celan

Hi Jeff,

You wrote, “The main point I made was that I could not reconcile the call for transparency with an article I could not comprehend. It was not the context—I am familiar with many of the other thinkers you cite—but the meaning.”

There has perhaps been some misunderstanding about this concept of “transparency.” As you say, in the form that I present it, the meaning of this concept would seem to be anything but self-evident. In this, it is similar to the space inside an atom, which physicists now tell us is 99 percent empty. How strange, then, that the one percent that we do see is so good at blocking our view. The world is an act of archaic conjuration—a bird up the sleeve, a box to be sawed in half—and yet, to us, it is the emptiness that seems unreal.

The transparency that I am talking about is not the transparency of a government bureaucracy, but rather the transparency that will allow us to see from one dimension to another—from center to circumference, and then back again to center. It is the transparency of the self as a kind of grounded electrical outlet, which is located only as a matter of convenience on the Earth. It is the transparency to be found on the back side of the mirror, through which we have learned to slip. There, at last, we will have learned to ask better questions, and, though information would still operate on a “need to know” basis, there would, in fact, be very little that we do not need to know. It is the transparency that will empower us reenter our “junk DNA,” whose stairways we will climb, and whose hieroglyphs we will once more learn to read. We must make up for many years of inattention.

Have I fully achieved this type of transformation in myself? No, not at all, but I have had any number of experiences that suggest what the implications of this mode of transparency would be. The goal is to make the human Body/Mind the equivalent of space—not physical space, but rather the space of the “Akasha”—the non-existent fullness from which opaque worlds erupt, and in relation to which all forms are not other than hallucinations.

In my poetry, I often choose to personify this “concept” of “Akasha” as a goddess—as an infinite library with the capacity to act. Within her body, time moves in a series of interlocking formats, both forwards and backwards, nor is one location separate from another. To illustrate: a reference to the destruction of the World Trade Towers appears in a poem called “Descent,” which I wrote in 1992. The relevant section reads, “The World Trade Towers for a fourth time fall. Their shadows stand. The holder of “hegal” has launched the 53rd Kirugu. The master of the Abzu, Enki, sails towards Gaia in his magur boat. There were wheels inside of wheels. Today it came. Each saw the event that long ago they spoke of. Industrial strength sacrifices flash and then repeat before the large eyes of the watchers at the circumference of the Zodiac.”


(Illustration: The inside of an egg, 2002)

I Left at Dawn for the Eternal City; It Seems That I Have Misplaced Several Days/ Part 3

By Brian George

The brow of the universe bears no eclipse

Hi Bogomil,

You wrote, “Did I detect an inclination towards a Richard Bach's attitude (Jonathan Livingston Seagull): Existence is either a school or for entertainment...? This is a simplistic assumption, against which I would propose a hardcore Gnostic option: If the universe/cosmos is 'error', there's nothing to learn or enjoy except finding an end to ignorance (of reality), i.e. finding 'gnosis'…Which leads me to the next step; how do we find 'gnosis'/ realization/ knowledge? You make it seem easy by assuming Samsara equals Nirvana (and later returning to this by stating that there's a hair-thin line between 'error' and truth)…”

And a bit later on in your post, “'Everything is OK' is a highly debatable point, not centering on the inconvenience of terminating the 'ego' or even fear of death, but on the existence of suffering…When my cat takes a mouse, the mouse suffers in a direct and very un-academic way.”

I do not believe that I said specifically that “Samsara equals Nirvana,” but, if I did, I was not the first to make this correlation, which is anything but a recent New Age nostrum. Perhaps the most succinct statement of this idea can be found in the “Prajna Paramita Hridaya Sutra,” more commonly referred to as the “Heart Sutra,” which announces, “Emptiness is form and form is emptiness.” This is not an elitist statement, since it virtually eliminates the difference between “self” and “other.” It is also one of the key concepts upon which the elaborate superstructure of Mahayana Buddhism is balanced. As you probably know, monks in Mahayana Buddhism take a vow that they will not cross over fully into Enlightenment until they can take all past and future beings along with them.

“All life is suffering” is the first of the four “noble truths” propounded by the Buddha. This is followed by “The origin of suffering is attachment”—i.e. “attachment’ to any “dualistic” point of view. If there is no difference between the “self” and the “other,” then empathy for the sufferings of others is not a question of personal virtue or of adherence to any external system of morality; it is instead a matter of the clear perception of reality—one cannot help but feel, and to then “help” in whatever way is most in keeping with one’s nature. For a parent, this might involve the working of two jobs to make ends meet, the changing of diapers, the telepathic knowledge that one’s child has been hurt, and the dropping of all else to be on the scene. For an activist, this might mean the reclamation of a public space, which, at some point during the Kali Yuga, had been taken over by the agents of unconsciousness. For a monk, this might involve the whacking of a meditating student with a stick, or, for a writer, the whacking of a drowsy reader with a metaphor.

So: space is more real than whatever else might happen to exist within it. There are no free-standing objects, and the line between self and other is mercurial.

I wrote, “A hair’s breadth of a difference separates discovery from destruction.” This is, as you have noted, a “poetic” statement, and thus is open to any number of interpretations.

One way to read it is in the context of the second “noble truth”; as we move “outward” into the world of society and nature, which I will refer to here as the “horizontal axis,” or upwards and downwards on the “vertical axis” that connects the various “worlds”, we have only a limited control over the phenomena that occur. Things happen—both good and terrible. What we can control is our own interpretation of the event.

Each experience can be viewed as either an “obstacle” or a “door.” It is up to us to figure out how these apparently contradictory viewpoints fit together. The challenge is an alchemical one, which involves a radical transmutation of all elements. We must exit one world, in order to step into another, and yet, paradoxically, they are one and the same world. The person who exits is not the same one who enters, nor is either of these the creature that returns, his eyes as wide as zeros, and unblinking. I do believe that the relationship of the “little mind” and the “big mind” can best be understood as a “koan.” The “koan” presents us with an almost opaque ultimatum—with a question that is meant to torture us, and which can only be answered by a sudden jump between levels. The challenge is not to “create one’s own reality,” but rather to return to the primordial depth of consciousness from which all later versions of “reality” arise.

It is in our simultaneous awareness of all apparent oppositions—up and down, good and bad, obstacle and door, life and death—that the “hair’s breadth of a difference” can be found.

It is here, too, that the writer is able to act out the role of “catalyst,” whatever his personal flaws or limitations. It is generally assumed that the job of the writer is to inform, and this is certainly true, but, once having lulled the reader into a false sense of security, it is also the job of the writer to subvert. As with a stone thrown in a pool, a writer will throw out an almost but not quite incomprehensible statement, which, perhaps, then immediately sinks; rings ripple from the point of impact, from the local to the non-local mind. Years later, the reader may suddenly feel the impact of the stone, as, gasping, he then stops to rub his head. There was no way, at first, to determine that the stone had struck, or that it would, eventually, begin to function as a lamp.

(Illustration: Hakuin Ekaku, Monk)

I Left at Dawn for the Eternal City; It Seems That I Have Misplaced Several Days/ Part 2

By Brian George

No weapon can cut emptiness in half

Hi Lance (Gilbert),

You wrote, “I could not agree more with the concept of transparency shielding one from disaster. It reminds me of advice given to me by an acupuncture teacher when I inquired if being too ‘open’ was the reason I was picking up ‘stuff’ from my clients. He responded that I was ‘not open enough.’”

Those clients are just bad, and you should probably stay far away from them. Of course, you will have to become independently wealthy first! A small detour—to be followed by a new Golden Age of hermetically sealed harmony and contentment, in which all citizens will belong to the Democratic Party, vampiric oligarchs will be cured by Bach flower remedies, and no one will ever say a harsh word about another. Of course, the acupuncture teacher was probably correct in saying that until then we would do better to keep all things in our field of vision, and to confront, as best as we are able, all undesirable energies head on.

The sentence “Transparency is the only shield against disaster” is one that just popped into my head, but I immediately understood what its implications were. There is a refrain from an old spiritual that goes, “I went to the rock to hide my face; the rock cried out “No hiding place! There is no hiding place down there.’” At times, when I have managed to access an expanded state of energy, and have attempted to move up what I call the “vertical axis” between worlds, it has seemed as though every carefully encoded secret has come bubbling to the surface, forced out of the body, the intellect, and the psyche by the power of an energy that desires to return home.

This is a mini-version of the “Apocalypse” that can erupt out of the “collective unconscious” at the end of a historical period or an astrological cycle. Some degree of physical destruction may or may not be involved; the new world might look almost exactly like the old. Space, I believe, is the ultimate destination of this energy. This is not space as it is generally understood, but rather the space of the fifth element, “Akasha,” a form of emptiness that is also a kind of 10-d encyclopedia.

Something gains in power to the degree that it is hidden. The massed genius of the past 12,000 years can still not prevent us from ignoring what is right beneath our noses. If a human holds up a hand in front of his face, he may be powerless, for whatever reason, to perceive it, and will be convinced that it must belong to someone else. We do not see what is in front of us but we do see many elongated shadows that are projected from behind us.

Our blindness is a reflex, yes, but a reflex that Earth’s Rulers lock in place. Fueled by trauma, a necromantic act has rewired the neocortex, muting the volume of the Music of the Spheres, and clouding the Van Allen Radiation Belts. Some common problem areas are as follows: our fear of the supernatural, i.e., our sense that nature does not follow its own laws; our contempt for the evidence of an ancient world maritime civilization; our investment in the belief that we used to live in caves; our fear that each man may actually be a woman, and vice versa; our fear that we are not completely good, or, rather, that we are actually pretty bad; our suspicion that the Earth is not fixed in its orbit, and that it might, at any moment, tilt; and our awareness of the fact that, almost certainly, we too are going to die. If we can acknowledge and then integrate an energy or a piece of information, then, to that extent, we become free of its capacity to wound us.

This was one of the ways that Zen Buddhist monks were able to gain such authority in Medieval Japan. They had no real self-image to defend. They had no hair to pull. They spoke in haikus, into whose 17 syllables they were able to squeeze the Macrocosm. They were happy to piss on statues of the Buddha, or to break up shrines for firewood. Even the greatest of horrors was perceived to be a joke. They had few beliefs, and were somewhat farcically unconcerned about death. Bowing down, they would stretch out their necks for decapitation, saying, “Let’s hurry it up. I’ve got things to do!” The warriors that they were trying to teach thought, “These guys are even crazier than we are!” And then stopped trying to kill them.


(Illustration: Brian George, Hawk with interdimensional crown, 1991)

I Left at Dawn for the Eternal City; It Seems That I Have Misplaced Several Days/ Part 1/ End

By Brian George

Here, let me change the pose that I have adopted for this essay, that of Rebel Agent, who would toss a monkey wrench into the clockwork of the spheres. No, let me put my shoulder to the great wheel of the Zodiac, that I may help the powers that turn it. For, appearances to the contrary, they and I are not in any way at odds.

Like their human counterparts, the activating powers of creation cannot go forever without praise, which serves as a kind of food. Starved for feedback, these “friends” that we have forgotten may for no good reason turn against our cause. If they are mad, so be it; they are only “imaginary,” so who cares what they do? Taking masks out of their skeleton-filled closets, and brandishing in each of 10,000 hands their hallucinatory weapons—their Tuning Forks and their Mirrors and their Geomagnetic Bows and their Species Changers and their Nets and their Bags of Wind and their Scalar Tornadoes and their Gongs and their A-Ankara Bolts—they then appropriate the blood that we have been too myopic to give. Strands of DNA unzip—both “ours” and “theirs”; a “hair’s breadth of a difference” can thus lead to a World War. Out of vast technology a bumper crop of death.

Fear spreads its hypnotic field across the architecture of the vacuum, a dark cloud mass, prompting “interspecies” hatred, and disrupting any sense of how the two halves of a symbol interlock. We must stare into the sun. We must set fire to the “conscious dreaming apparatus,” which has made the one sphere pregnant. We must share our wealth—as tiny as it may seem to us—with the birds that terrorize the back-side of the mirror. Out of one race the masters of Kundalini have spun many. We must dare to celebrate their feats of reptilian camouflage. Focused praise is best—from a knowledgeable equal.

It was no easy matter to sell shovels to the dead, by which means they could excavate the snake that ate the world. They dug slowly, and, without maps, they just tended to throw dirt on each other’s excavation sites. The fact that the birds had turned against us did not help.

As I have said, the art of memory was already in decline in what we now view as the “ancient world”—which was little more than a comma in the long sentence of devolution. Since then, the general tendency has been to “point” at the Beyond. We can ask for guidance, yes, but such guidance may be quite slow in arriving. This is no doubt just as well! In 391 AD, for example, the New World had at last descended from the stars, but in the form of a belated hate-crime. It was then that Christians set fire to the Great Library of Alexandria—or to the remnant that was left by Caesar and Aurelius—along with all of its well-meaning but just barely adequate texts. Simultaneously, the Mithreum was cleaned out, as if it were a whorehouse. Its relics were smashed, and, before jeering crowds, the phalli of Priapus were paraded through the Forum. Now, even the debris of the First Age has disappeared. No ashes are left, only see-through bones, and the chunks of a broken sky, as we wander through a land of giant radioactive tear ducts.

We believe that we are evolving towards the light. What we take to be progress is, in fact, a slow step by step process of decline. Though hairless, more or less, we have somehow become convinced that we are monkeys, and not gods. Monkey see; monkey do, as the saying goes. Unlike Rumi or Blake, we tend to see ourselves as the direct products of our environment, which we use our tongues to describe. We accept that the role of language is no longer “ex nihilo” to create.

It is only over the past 150 years or so that some significant few writers have made a Promethean effort to push beyond these limitations, which are mostly self-imposed, and to free themselves from the force-fields that were locked in place by Earth’s Rulers. You will notice that I said “writers” and not “mystics”: for I believe that writers and artists have inherited—or perhaps “appropriated”—the role that was earlier filled by shamans, prophets, saints, and yogis. There is much work to be done, and someone has to do it! A partial list of my models would include Arthur Rimbaud, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Eluard, Osip Mandelstam, George Seferis. Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Henri Michaud, Paul Celan, Czeslaw Milosz, and Zbigniew Herbert. These writers would probably not be on anybody’s list of saints, but I believe that they point the way to the reclamation of our birthright, i.e, of the breadth of our primordial vision, and, with it, of our capacity to create by word of mouth.

But why should it be necessary to coagulate the ocean? What—are there not already enough objects in the world, that, from the luminous mist, we must conjure a few more? Are there not already enough humans in the world—about 7 ½ billion—that are waiting to return from whence they came? Why add to the countless books already in existence when we cannot read even one page of the Ur-Text? If we are all just the refractions of a single primal body, to what end should we multiply the images that divide us? In the Fourth Age, with all of its technology of corruption, why do we still pretend to be as young as in the First, and that our hearts weigh no more and no less than a feather? Of what use is art in the face of an invasion by the Absolute? As the Great Year turns to three minutes before 12, what sense does it make to tamper with the two hands of the clock?

I would argue: it is not as if we and the Absolute were strangers! Also: that we must put our bodies were our consciousness would go. Mini-death precedes Mega-death. “To be enlightened is to be present at one’s own funeral.”

Beyond death, a shockwave flattens the atomic cities of the gods, leaving nothing except a seed from which will sprout the non-existent. Again: of what use is art in the face of an invasion by the Absolute? A powerful breakthrough can bring with it the sense that any language will be inadequate. How can language give form to a reality that is beyond imagination? I would argue: that the limits of imagination are in no way fixed, and that the very difficulty of the task is what will catalyze the ecstatic transport of our speech. Then too, this question implies that the role of art is to describe, whereas, in fact, a more fundamental relationship to reality might be involved. Its goal may be to liberate, to bear witness, to invoke. By rolling back the projection of the sky, behind which is revealed the technology that projects it, it may, in the end, just be possible to observe what we have made.

This dilemma, of course, cannot help but bring to mind the dilemma faced by writers in post-war Eastern Europe, when the trauma of the Holocaust was at first thought to make all literature irrelevant, as though any metaphor were an insult to the dead. Ironically, this turned out to be one of the most fertile of all poetic periods, in which writers dared to play with the Unspeakable; from out of the depths they radically redefined the relationship between silence and expression, between memory and the external world. Wrote Paul Celan, “Burnt fumes of Beyond leak thick from our pores.” In him, we see the wounds that have traumatized the Macrocosm, which no uplifting sentiment can heal. Celan does not “point”; he instead “embodies”—as an alien voice bears witness to his fate.

Out of silence—an echo; out of nonexistence—a glyph. Statistical “renormalization” had cut the zeros from large numbers.

There was space to move. The cost of antigravity was enormous, and of memory, even greater. Already, the Apocalypse had happened. It was possible to begin beyond the end.


(Illustration: Anselm Keifer, Nero)

To Akasha/ Part 2; The Gate that Opens Out of Nowhere onto Nowhere/ Section 9

By Brian George

You are the I that is that. Blue luster. Void one. Whose conch sounds fearfully. Of a preexistent race the incognito explosion. Resolute. Muse to the egg Hiranyagarbha—last survivor of the flood. Body conjured from the numbers 1 through 10. Brahma’s logarithmic spiral. Pitcher of the curve ball in the game of world destruction. Atomic skeleton. Shiva’s juggernaut.  

Beyond movement the circumference. You who execute the art of dance. Great solar chariot—Shakti. Purusha’s pyre. Ark of dawn. Eurika!—without amnesia. The Siddhas’ V8 wishing well. Nurse to tribes the Burning Ground aborts.

Horizon hung from zero. Spontaneous grain. Cracked code. Space created language. Self-entrainment. Resonant wave. Joy void made of void joy. Decimation’s octave maw. Geometer to the x y chromosome. Austere 1. Form of letters. Ananda. Sat. Chit. Sleep erected. The 1 standing. Rigor of unconscious law. Millions. Knowledge. Defect. Waking state. The 4th state. Of the egg born. Shape of serpent. You who cast the net. Maya. Coiled sun. Unknowable. Clandestine.

Up rooter. Power of action. Without thought. Diamond hacked in battle. Primordial 1. Bondage. Abode.  Who have chained the ocean Ten Ten. Varuna’s snare. To the antipode—arch enemy. Deconstruction’s builder without bounds. Ahangkara in the form of Chit. Youthful. Who hold the Pinaka Bow. The bent low victim of Orion’s tusk. Of Doomsday—the word. Curtains to the Cow Cave. Vishnu’s tantric intercourse partner.

Star hub. World half maker. Vajra backward. The only 1—love of violence. You who have shattered Vala. Seed of the Assembly Beyond Space. Of Aryaman and Bhaga the reunion. Who have brought from Earth a crop of fragrant wood. You whose ark is measured 3 x 4. To UFOs—the fuel.

Surya—of great age. Muse to asteroidal iron. D-day at the gates to the beyond. Transducer of sequential music to the spheres. Erupting bank. Gong struck by a revolution. Auspicious sign. Bridal gown—constellated. You who hold the atomic trident. Of the lotus foot. Made for Krishna. Breaker of the law that separates the vertical from the horizontal. O sandal made of wood. Biology transported.

When the sun is in Agha they kill the cattle. When in Arjuni your remnants are shipped glowing back towards home.

Awakened Kundalini. Milk maid power. The Bharata’s final solution. Refractive wave of salt. Body thrice wound—soma. It burns. It bites and migrates. More dangerous than poison.

It has been made to eat. Asvins only may contain that measure—by the mouth of Mitra known. Magnet to Matruka- the future’s tractor beam. You who move beyond the speed of light.

Inverted radiance. Of no land. Without fear. Self-knowledge gone to ground. Triadic zigzag. Agent of anathema—constructor of the A-ankara bolt. Harvester of corpses. Retracted seed of Gaia. Soul maker. Holder of 10 thousand weapons. Root of law. Sunyata’s shadow. Giver of strength. To Agneya the acceleration. Sound. Unstruck. Nada. Void. That can not be moved.

__

O Durgashatanamastotra—you have danced forth thumping on a man hide drum out of the helix of 1 globe of light.


(Illustration: Victor Brauner)

Life Returns to the Uroboros/ Space Does Not Go Anywhere/ Parts 25 and 26

By Brian George

25

“I don't develop; I am.”—Pablo Picasso

In “The Republic, Book X,” Plato writes, “When all the souls had chosen their lives, they went before Lachesis. And she sent with each, as the guardian of his life and the fulfiller of his choice, the daimon that he had chosen, and this divinity led the soul first to Clotho, under her hand and her turning of the spindle to ratify the destiny of his lot and choice, and after contact with her, the daimon again led the soul to the spinning of Atropos to make the web of its destiny irreversible, and then without a backward look it passed beneath the throne of Necessity.”

26

As you read (or hear) this, my voice echoes in your short-term and then long-term memory. As I speak to myself I imagine your—as of yet—nonexistent face. We both ask, “Who let You in here?” Daylight savings time assaults the nocturnal light of dreams. It does no good. Earth suddenly goes black. The transparent moon returns. To what end should we argue about the title of the preexistent death-flash video? Dreams hang on the tree of knowledge. It continues to sprout branches. Images are waiting for whoever stops to try them on.

The dead reproduce. Cities land on clouds. An epileptic bird damns robots to the labyrinth. Earth’s rulers act at a distance, as mechanics reverse the pull of the great magnet of dissociation; you are not where you are. Your small hands violate the precession of the equinox. It is clear to me stranger that your tribe grows monstrous. Your prehistoric boats now dare to take x-rays of omphalos!

Of course, it is also clear that you do not approve of me. I copulate with a race of questionable gods. A starfish is my master. The most considerate thing would be for each of us to go back where we came from.

Symbols exchange fluids. You wake smelling of the ocean. Someone has put seaweed in your hair. A squid snores beside you. Is everything ok? A spell enforces the inviolate order of appearances.

What a strange thing it is for the self to be inhabited by the other. How strange to be almost dead, to be viewed by other subjects as an object. What a strange thing it is to forget one's mother tongue. How strange to be an omnipotent mushroom trapped inside an atom. How strange to find yourself projected into someone else's dream—to know it is not yours, but not be able to get out.

There is a unique horror to such experiences. How odd, since they are nothing if not common. How quickly the disorientation is written off as over. Hermes goes in one ear; a pedestrian falls out the other. Amnesia voids the traveling violation. The ego is a useful construct; it allows us to take possession of even the most surreal of events.

Perhaps each of us inhabits and acts out not one but many dreams. Their intersection allows us to create a role for choice. If the role is real, it is also perhaps more circumscribed than we are willing to admit.

In the physical world each actor sees himself as the enormous central character, without whom no story would exist. The actor is provisionally conscious. Let us say that the ego gets with the preexistent program. The actor follows where the death-flash video leads, as the future and the past trade places. You are that actor; the remnant of the shadow of an enigma, the warrior once swallowed by the dream. You will work with the phenomena that present themselves. You will use what is put before you.

Doors open as you pass. Impediments dissolve. Your head cracks like a seed— whose chromosomes go crazy. Junk DNA becomes an audio-book, a spiral memory theatre, a see-through encyclopedia whose symbols you can read. It does not appear that your memory is native to the Earth. Your arms reach for the land of no return—where a radioactive treasure blossoms. Omens bounce. Empires fall up. Your heart is in your mouth. A breeze harvests you.

If you cooperate with the instructions that the three fates have embedded in the dream, it is possible that you may actually have fewer choices. Paradoxically, you may also experience a greater wealth of opportunities. Freedom becomes less of a burden in becoming less rational and more intuitive; action becomes an aspect of attention. Knowledge roars like a recombinant species. An instruction manual on ecstatic death appears, a bit wrinkled from the flood, perhaps, but just lying on one’s doorstep and waiting to be picked up—as if we and not death had all along been the problem!

Water fuels the broadcast of the social hallucination. Boundaries are plastic. Voices interpenetrate. Faces serve as cues to prompt the interest of the dead, who, for the past 12,000 years, have had better things to do.

“Hey, I know him,” one exclaims, “that is Argos Panoptes, of the 360 degree vision, who Hermes—that delinquent—had once hypnotized with his music, then beheaded!” Once, the world was much smaller than it is today—about the same size as an eye—while the beings who inhabited it were almost infinitely large. Sex is happy to interpret the most abstruse of symbols. As you exit the labyrinth, light towers to the sky. You are right at home. The hand of synchronicty throws gifts across your path.

(Illustration: Rene Magritte)

Life Returns to the Uroboros/ Space Does Not Go Anywhere/ Part 24



By Brian George

The objective world presents us with a wealth of information. There are clues to follow, patterns to trace, enigmas to wrestle to the ground, keys to discover, signs in foreign languages to obey, labyrinths of interconnection—through which a string may be rewound into a ball. An acupuncture manikin is waiting at the exit; she is the beloved—who transforms.

“Immortal mortals, and mortal immortals, each living the other’s death and dying the other’s life,” as Heraclitus said. After study, we may more fully understand how the part relates to the whole. What are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? Is the self the shadow of a nonexistent sun? How does our consciousness interface with the sex-life of the world?

One approach is to regard the human body as a microcosm, in which each detail of anatomy corresponds to some macrocosmic coordinate. It is possible that space is actually no bigger than an ovum, in relation to which each life is a kind of kamikaze spermatozoon. If we say that nature is made up of “laws,” does this not imply that we have chosen to obey them, and that, with a fluctuation in our mood, we might just as easily choose to disobey?

But whatever the method we may choose to follow—esoteric or empirical—we may find ourselves no closer to answering the key questions we have asked. The whole problem may be in the method of our asking. We are too polite, and should not ask teachers for help. We must locate by blind reckoning the beginning of each circle.

In his “Oration on the Dignity of Man”—a kind of shotgun marriage of Kabbalah and Neoplatonism—Pico della Mirandola argues that human beings and not angels are the true messengers of creation. I had originally written, “Human beings and not angels ATE the true messengers of creation.” My wife pointed out the problem. But the accident was perhaps correct. And so, to paraphrase Pico della Mirandolla:

To all other species one nature was assigned; each had a single job to do. Beasts are less contemptible than we are. The damned feel glory over us. It is the very lack of a fixed role that defines our position in the hierarchy. We are many—and one self embodies the diverse powers of the spheres. In being nowhere we are able to be everywhere. In being nothing we are able to create and then interpret our own project as we go.

The Human Consciousness Project predates the disjunction worked by the Deluge. Age by age, in a series of slow, catastrophic steps, we forgot that the sum of knowledge was contained within one volume. We forgot, as well, that the human body was a star map and an atlas. Today, we write things down. Decadence makes meaning necessary.


(Illustration: Rene Magritte, The Philosopher's Lamp)

Life Returns to the Uroboros/ Space Does Not Go Anywhere/ Parts 22 and 23

By Brian George

22

To the radioactivity of an object out of mind each detail of one’s memory is a screen. Quite suddenly, as though no time had passed, the whole of history weighs no more than a feather. It is once more possible to review one's death on video. Again, the music of the spheres is audible, or even overwhelmingly loud. There are no hypnotic fields to block access to the macrocosm. If a tribe of watchers appears to be sitting on one's head, you can rest assured that this is purely a coincidence.

23

Gaps open. There are conflicts among the forces that govern the microcosm and the macrocosm. Scientists now compete to develop a Unified Field Theory—or a Theory of Everything, as it is sometimes called—that will unify the principles of relativity with those of quantum mechanics. No one knows what the new universe will look like, or who will discover the theory, or what strange games it will play with our consciousness, but many do believe that such a theory will exist in the nest 20 or so years.

It is tempting to think that the Human Consciousness Project could be brought to some similar resolution. The ancestral war between the subject and the object would end not with a bang but with a wedding. The neocortex would be transubstantiated. Dance would spread like a virus through the Luddite version of the World Wide Web. With their planetary chanting, cyborgs would awaken every megalith at Stonehenge. Intellect would lift all symbols from the sewers of the Sargasso Sea.

The New World Order would not depend on oil, but, instead, on breath. Clones from a Calvinist think tank would give away their hearts, their car keys and their houses, as they ran to hug random derelicts on the street. Prosthetic limbs would attach themselves to torsos. Nanotechnocrats would free the great apes that were hung on the tree of recombinant knowledge.

These microcosmic adjustments would be good. It is more likely, however, that philosophy does not progress. Nagel is smart, but not necessarily more evolved than Plato. Parallel universes agree to disagree. An 11-dimensional superstring coordinates the agon. If consciousness grows from the discovery of a preexistent object—the knowledge guarded by the self, to which the other had systematically denied access to the ego—then the resolution would occur not in the future but in the past. A mysterious conjunction has already taken place.


(Illustration: Pierre Roy)

Life Returns to the Uroboros/ Space Does Not Go Anywhere/ Part 21

By Brian George

Where should the snake locate meaning in the dream of the objective world? We can study the growth of plants, the silent honor code of the chromosome, the formation of crystals. We can plot the movements of the Earth's tectonic plates. We can say that gravity is a field capable of action at a distance, or that an object will move at a continuous velocity—unless it is acted upon by an external force.

There are different laws for different classes. Each class can be regarded as an object. Different lenses create different appearances.

We can say that in a closed system energy is conserved—when heat is taken into account. It is true also that entropy rules. We can note that water burping down a bathtub drain moves in the same spiral motion as the galaxy. Belief tells us that an abstract singularity preceded the Big Bang. Others believe that there was life before the egg, that a hand made the macrocosmos.

It is possible to build a world from correspondences. We can posit that trees are a solidified slow-motion form of lightning. As above, so below—their life force follows the same fractal branching. We can say that, for the most part, evolution creates forms that are more and more complex. Through objective austerities light learns to curve. Time is what is measured by a clock. Einstein's brain is perhaps an improvement over that of a protozoon. There are anomalies, of course. It is certainly odd that Mozart's brain is smaller than that of the Paleolithic shaman.

Meanings point everywhere. The self is an experiential object. A bird opens the intestines of the philosopher with a key. An atomic energy commission charges, having come to monitor the breech birth of free energy. The other world institutes a chain reaction. A philosopher is first and foremost a human being—an unconscious object waiting to be born, a subject caught in the net of interdependent origination. He should not lead with his mind where his body cannot follow.

Forgetfulness brings the body of the world / snake into focus. I know this from my own experience, for, at the age of 18, I saw the world destroyed. To this day, I still hold myself responsible.

My crime was this: I discovered that no object was inanimate. No, for our own safety, we just pretended that they were. Each object was inherently unstable. It could overheat, like the rods in a nuclear reactor, and, if one stared at its light for more than a few seconds, it could easily melt down. Winds would rip away the cardboard of appearances, to leave only an epileptic sea.

Before birth, we had passed beneath the stern gaze of Necessity, which caused us to forget the extent of what we knew. So too, as our energy expands, we must choose to forget that we only have two eyes. If, suddenly, we were able to see from all of 360 degrees, it might be difficult to act out our own part in the story, since we would not be sure whose face was looking back from the mirror. There are worlds inside of worlds.

All of them look real. Each is real, in its way, yet only to the extent that we have limited our focus, and then chosen to agree upon a single set of laws.

Conscious and unconscious methods must collaborate to create a Unified Field Theory.

Some say that the world snake is for use, others that he keeps the philosopher for a pet, and still others that the figure 8 is the most beautiful of conundrums. “A hidden connection is stronger than an apparent one,” as Heraclitus said. The more an object changes the more it becomes more fully what it is. Human consciousness is perhaps the irreducible element. It is the shadow cast by an untranslated symbol, the dream left over, the philosopher's stone hatched from the fires of the althanor.


(Illustration: Rene Magritte, The Liberator))

Life Returns to the Uroboros/ Space Does Not Go Anywhere/ Section 20

 By Brian George

In “Working Notes,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “Meaning is invisible, but the invisible is not contradictory of the visible: the visible itself has an invisible framework, and the in-visible is the secret counterpart of the visible.”

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There is a disconnect between the software and the hardware of the human consciousness project. The creative will has withdrawn to a dimension of its own, as have the earliest races. We cannot motivate the inanimate god to dance.

It would be hard to understand a Beethoven symphony by taking apart the radio through which it had been broadcast. The music has no one meaning; they are many. Communication follows on the self's attunement. Love helps also—to a degree.

As detached observers we have inadvertently become members of a cargo cult. Ceremonies of innocence ensue. Dreams explode with promises of apocalyptic contact. Drums imitate the oceanic movement of the symphony, which the seer, at the end of a three-day, torture-induced trance, once heard in a transcription for kazoo.

Like the eye of god, a great propeller turns at the center of the airplane altar. Oil burns in the tin-can lamps that adorn the blackened fuselage.

In the cockpit—or rather the few jagged shards that are left—the eight arms of the pilot are left to decompose where they fell. Row upon row, other canned goods have split open. Flies buzz to celebrate the superabundant wealth.

In awe, and with decontaminated hands, we lay out the components of the radio on the beach. There is no climax. A wave of melancholy washes the high spirits from the cult. Contact with the alien relic brings no illumination.


(Illustration: Alberto Savinio)