Art and Ashe in the Yoruba Tradition/ Second Half

By Brian George

Ashe means literally “it is so, or may it be so.” It is sometimes defined as “power, authority, command, scepter” (Abraham),6 “a coming to pass…effect; imprecation” (Crowther).7  It is neither a moral nor an immoral force, but simply the force, by which all things are brought into manifest existence.8 Ulli Beier explains, “Yoruba believe strongly in the power of the word, or rather in a mysterious force called Ashe…that quality in a man's personality which makes his words—once uttered—come true”.9 Says Raymond Prince, “It would appear that their background conception is that to utter the name of something may draw that something into actual existence…not only within the mind and body of he who utters and he who hears the word, but also in the physical world as well.”10

Without ohun, voice, the verbalization or performance or the word, Ashe would not be able to operate.11 This formative action is the human being's contribution to the equilibrium of the worlds.12 The Yoruba do not distinguish between the efficacy of the different forms of art. Music, dance, invocation, story, sculpture, costume, and myth interact as a dynamic whole.

A person who has learned to harness and to work with the force is referred to as an Alaase.13 The sender aims his or her Ashe at the targeted object, and then, if he or she does not wish to incur unintended consequences, asks for permission to proceed.14 This is like the call part of a call and response chant. The initiator asks, “Is it right that you should exist? Am I doing what my soul, at this time and in this place, demands?” If the work of art is successful it will not just sit there on the ground, hang there on the lips, or project itself mechanically through space.

The living work is said to possess iluti, or good hearing.15 It does what it has been asked to do. It should not only inspire or satisfy the aesthetic appetite. It should be able to communicate with its creator(s) as an almost independent being, to answer, “je, “and to respond, “dahun.”16 The work of arts says, “Yes. It is right that I should exist. This is no doubt the beginning of a beautiful relationship, for both the upper and the lower worlds. Here I am. It will be so.”





Art allows the Ashe of the upper worlds to become available for use. It sweetens the ambivalence of the trickster. It focuses the attention, so that the viewer is better able to withstand the influx of other—dimensional force. Ashe, however indispensable for any form of action, is also volatile. It is both the rocket fuel and the chariot of the gods. Eshu wears a hat that is red on one side, black on the other. The force he guards operates in many ways, in many places, and its action never looks quite the same to any two humans. Safe access comes only at the price of calm attention, if the law of unintended consequences is to be avoided. The work of art should possess the dynamic symmetry inherent in the structure of the cosmos from the start. It should act as a landing pad where the mind can luxuriate in coolness. At the same time it should expand the mind by stealth, test it, and provoke it to jump beyond itself.

Lawal asserts, “To tame or pacify is to cool the face (tu l'oju). Thus, providing the non-figurative symbol of an Orisha with sculptured face facilitates the pacification of that Orisha, for what has a face is controllable.”17 Steve Quintana, a Cuban Santero and the godfather to my daughter, would laugh at the idea that an Orisha could be controlled. One might just as well talk of controlling the currents of the sea, associated with Yemaya, the flow of lava from a volcano, associated with Agayu, or the precise tilt of a tornado, associated with Oya. If the energy of the Orishas cannot be controlled it can, however, be invoked. A relationship can be established. Energy can be transduced, through the coils or ritual and art, from one state to another.

If the Orishas act on our behalf it is because, having first established a good rapport, having learned to speak a few words in the language of Ifa, having welcomed, fed and tended to them as beloved guests in our houses, we have then politely asked. A bow and the string of an instrument are brought together at cross purposes, as Heraclitus says.18 A human hand makes contact with the skin of the bata drum. The membrane of the interactive network vibrates like an ear. Feet stomp. Eyes pop open. Breathing swells. Some trauma from a past life bars full access to the hypersphere. Trespassers will be violated. The bald doctor who was old before the deluge pulls one’s hair. Our concept of what it is to breathe should then undergo an upheaval. Again, the mother drum breathes us. There is no self to fear death. The praise song can be heard at least as far as Saturn, beyond which interest in our baby steps becomes steadily more sporadic.

Our other-dimensional counterparts have business to take care of. Like us, they have worlds to make before they sleep. Thus, it is lucky that the influx of Ashe is not required to make sense. Polyrhythms open the ecstatic body like a book. Its pages are the strata of the worlds before our own. Each participant in the bembe should feel free to bend or modernize the laws of nature.

The bond between the human and the other, brought into the present, grows. Since the Yoruba idea of hierarchy does not involve a lesser or a greater, it will at the end be a relationship among equals.19 Each can offer the other what is needed for a more complete fulfillment of the work at hand.

We can offer to the past an alternate history of our species. A glass of rum should be left to wash it down. We can offer an experience in biology to the powers who have almost forgotten the great promise of Pangaea. We can add one piece to the puzzles left unassembled by many an alien civilization.

It is Ashe that weaves the threads of potential into the many colored fabric of existence. Clothes teleported from the upper worlds create a sensation on the Earth. Fashions lifted from the Earth provoke a corresponding stir above. The logarithmic spiral is in charge of a secret system of sizes; one superconscious dream fits all. Ashe connects. By fertilizing the separate, it creates both parts anew. Ashe builds a translucent bridge from the human to the Orishas, from the Earth to the ancestors, from the ego to the occluded parts of the soul.

A scent of sacrificial blood has returned across the ocean to lap the star hub of the 8-spoked city. It is Ashe that yokes the worlds in a constant wheel of communication, a reciprocal exchange of gifts.


Endnotes

Art and Ashe in the Yoruba Tradition
Illustration at top of essay: Eshu, Unknown Artist, 1880—1920, Museum of Science, London
1) James Hillman, The Soul's Code, Random House, Inc., New York, 1996, page 255
2) Migene Gonzales—Wippler, Santeria, The Religion, A Legacy of Faith, Rites, and Magic, Crown Publishers, Inc., New York/ 1989/ page 5
3) Reginaldo Prandi, Candomble and Time, Brazillian Review of Social Sciences, number 2, October 2002, pages 9—12
4) Mgene Gonzales—Wippler, Santeria; The Religion; A Legacy of Faith, Rites, and Magic, Harmony Books, a division of Crown Publishers, Inc, 225 Park Ave, NY, 1989, pages 96—97
5) Judith Illsley Gleason, Clever Eshu, Parabola (Fall), Crossroads Issue, 1993, Pages 41—42
6) R.C. Abraham, The Dictionary of Modern Yoruba, University of London press, 1958
7) Samuel Crowther, A Vocabulary of the Yoruba Language, Seeleys, London, 1852
8) Henry John Drewel and Margaret Thompson Drewel, Gelede, Art and Female Power Among the Yoruba, Indiana University Press, 1990, page 5
9) H.U. Beier, Yoruba Poetry, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge/ 1970, Page 49
10) R. Prince, Curse, Invocation and Mental Health Among the Yoruba, Canadian Psychiatric Journal 5, 1960, page 66
11) Richard Abiodun, Understanding Yoruba Art and Aesthetics, The Concept of Ase/ African Arts, July, 1994, page 73
12) George Brandon, Santeria, from Africa to the New World, The Dead Sell Memories, Indiana University Press, 1993, page 17
13) John Drewel, John Pemberton III, Rowland Boiodun, Yoruba; Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought, The Center for African Art and Abrams, Inc., New York/ 1989, Page 16
14) Richard Abiodun, Understanding Yoruba Art and Aesthetics, The Concept of Ase, African Arts, July, 1994, page 74
15) Richard Abiodun, Understanding Yoruba Art and Aesthetics, The Concept of Ase, African Arts, July, 1994, page 73
16) Richard Abiodun, Understanding Yoruba Art and Aesthetics, The Concept of Ase, African Arts, July, 1994, page 73
17) Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, African and Afro—American Art and Philosophy, Random House, Inc., New York, 1984, page 12
18) Philip John Neimark, The Way of the Orisa, Harper, San Francisco, 1993, page 12
19) John Drewel, John Pemberton III, Rowland Boiodun, Yoruba; Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought, The Center for African Art and Abrams, Inc., New York/ 1989, Page 18

(Illustrations: Yoruba sculptures of Eshu/ Elegua, artists unknown)

Art and Ashe in the Yoruba Tradition/ First Half

By Brian George

“Why do we believe angels prefer angelic persons? Why assume that the genius (activating spirit) wants only to be with geniuses? Maybe the invisibles are interested in our lives for the sake of their realization and as such are inherently democratic: Anyone will do. Maybe they do not recognize the concept mediocre. The daimon gives importance to each, not only to the Important. Moreover, they and we are linked in the same myth. We are divine and mortal twins, and so they are in service to the same social realities as we. Because of this linkage, the angel has no way of descent into the streets of the public common except via our lives. In the film Wings of Desire, angels fall in love with life, the street life of ordinary human predicaments.”—James Hillman, from “The Soul's Code”1

__

According to the Yoruba, Ashe is the foundational energy of this world and the other, existing from a time before the worlds themselves were created. Without Ashe the Orishas—the gods or active powers of creation—would be shadows hovering on the edge of nonexistence, the human body would be a corpse, words would be random noises, the greatest work of art would be a shell. When Oludumare spoke the primordial names, by which the Orishas and the stars and planets were conjured into the first light of visibility, without the power of Ashe the body of creation would have been unable to stand or move.2 It would have remained trapped in the memory of worlds before our own, a sad and impotent idea. The great Oludumare himself, eldest of the Orishas, would have less importance than an ant.

Millennia came and went like days, whole ages like weeks. The one-eyed, one-armed, one-legged keeper of the secrets, Osanyin, asked, “Does your mouth open? Do you speak ifa?” The first man answered, “Yes, I understand the code. My body has chosen the head it is to wear. I sweat with joy. Oludumare breathes me. It is necessary that I pour my own blood on the work.”

In Yoruba thought, cosmology and aesthetics go hand in hand. Each clarifies the half-seen purposes of the other. Time moves in cycles, in which species and the stage sets they inhabit may evolve, yes, in that patterns grow from earlier versions of the same, but the Rorschach blot of creation is not at all a random accretion. It is, from its inception, a work of conscious art. Human art is a much later variation of the prototypes. The light inside the void speaks. The myth gets physical. An act of interpretation opens the key signatures, collapsing the wave function and altering time/space. Ashe turns the kaleidoscope of a-causal correspondences. The planets dance. They explode with songs of celebration.

Nature collaborates with the energies of supernature to complete each task that she is scheduled to perform. The world is beautiful. It is almost certain, however, that any ultimate perfection of the artwork would be death. No story would have a beginning, a middle, or an end. It would not be possible to keep any gift in circulation.

There would be no wound to heal. Ashe would not have a catastrophe to remove. The lightning that once transported us would not be cooler than the sun, or as slow as the year is long. Earth with all her oceans would not be bigger than a pinhead. Wave upon wave, birth would not have contracted the full range of our superconductive memory, as hands cut us from an earlier but still beating state of connection. A chicken would not have descended with Obatala on a chain, to then scratch from the ocean the lost continent of Pangaea.

A bata drum summons the other bodies we inhabited. A piece of seaweed must be taken from one’s hair. Such an evolution of live memories is not distinct from repetition, as rerouted by the principle of uncertainty, and is perhaps governed by a return of the repressed. Says Reginaldo Prandi, “What happens to us today and what is about to happen in the near future has been experienced before by another human being, by an ancestor, or by the Orishas themselves… The mythical past, which is remade at every moment in the present, is narrated by the oddus of the Ifa oracle.”3





Aimed like weapons at the navel of the Earth, the concepts of chance and chaos do exist for the Yoruba, but each plays a role that is integral to a process. Without these subversive agents of the trickster, there would be no split between the future and the past. There would be no opening through which our language could emerge. The method by which order and disorder interact is the very thing that makes divination possible, that generates the occult potency of Ifa.

The Yoruba say: “It takes a little bit of everything to make the world.”

By a casting of the opele, the eight-linked iron chain that joins eight pieces of a coconut shell, the Orishas too must struggle to interpret the strange language of Ifa—the system of divination of which Orunmila is the master, but to which Eshu lends his catalytic energy. Each throw results in two columns made up of one or two line units—I or II—arranged four down to a side. At the end, you are left with a single pair of oddus, or configurations of the binary code. Eight x eight links correspond to the 64 codons of the DNA spiral. Eight links x 32 give rise to the corpus of the 256 oddus. Each complex oddu can be subdivided into another 16 subjects, forming a total of 4,096 oddus, and so forth, until we reach a temporary limit of 65,636 oddus. Furthermore, each oddu has 1,680 iterpretations.4

Our view is necessarily partial. To act is to remove one’s full attention from the whole. The most complex of equations are contained within the zero and the one. In the eight-spoked wheel of the city, we should always leave at least one gate open to fresh energies from the bush. Movement gives form to the story that is waiting to be spoken. It is our lack of knowledge that potentiates the fixed signs of the time-cycle.

When the movement of the worlds had once ground to a halt, Oludumare went to Eshu, the Orisha of the crossroads, the trickster who is the guardian of Ashe, to beg him to unblock the circuits, to reestablish the connections between each of the Orishas, between Orishas and their human  vehicles, between the upper and the lower worlds. Eshu saw his chance. He who would often appear as a young boy or a wandering beggar would remind others of his importance. He would become ubiquitous, as honored in art and ritual as he was indispensable in fact. He agreed to carry out the task, on condition that he be granted a portion of the offerings made to each of the other Orishas. Since that day, all rituals must begin and end with an invocation to Eshu, that is, with the generation and integration of Ashe.5

Ashe is the power to connect. Imagine the state of a human being before he or she is born: a sperm, an egg and a human soul each exist in their separate dimensions. Human DNA can be seen as one version of the chain by which a race of primogenitors had once descended to the ocean. Its links connect Ikole Aiye, the House of Earth, to Ikole Orun, the House of Heaven. It is not so much that Ashe creates something out of nothing. It rather brings what separately exists into a new and pregnant conjunction. A rhythm is generated, a meeting place opened, information is translated into form, a system of exchange established, a work of art, first almost inert and then more and more alive, produced.

The human being erupts, loud and kicking, as a three-dimensional object into the world. In the same way a ritual sculpture allows the Orisha a window that opens onto the Earth, a fuel depot, a base of operations from which it can carry out its agenda.


(Illustrations: Sculptures of Eshu, Yoruba, artists unknown)

After the Rig Veda



By Brian George

There was not the non-existent or its shadow the existent then. There was no space—and less beyond. Desire came at the beginning.

Are you sure that you live—or did the ancients mean something else by death?

Big bird had not unfolded his umbrella above the sky. No hand held it. There was not a body to contain the atom’s force. Was the mouth pregnant? Gods did not have complex clothes to put on or take off. Heaven flapped on a hanger.

Parapalegics blew instruments. Their skeletons were hung from wells. Species screamed at the non-existent waves.

Did the void breathe? The harmonic spheres were not yet hard. Ships were inhabited hallucinations. The Earth had no security force. Cargo was heaped on the docks. Fish flew into hungry mouths. Transparent wealth was free for the taking. Most signs were not difficult to understand. Myths demanded bodies.

Was no news good news? Nada. Sound’s messengers were not (quite) sound. Tornadoes were just embryos. They did not know how to act. They inadvertently swept gold cities off the ocean.  Bad poets developed the most prodigious memories. Chaos plowed the tundra.

Rulers could not separate the spirits from their spears. Pyres grew monstrous. The dead had not yet discovered the hygienic use of flame. Grass sprouted from the bones of decomposing giants. It lengthened like an ascetic's hair. Perfume swept the battlefield where an epochal war was fought. A holocaust echoed.

Bat men like a bow had not bent Asia. Though few its inhabitants the land looked young.

Things were great all over. Masters were generous. Slaves did not keep secrets. Magic was natural. Objects could be taken back from dreams. Paranoia did not sacrifice untouchables to the gods on the cold steps of Mohenju Daru. There was no image not present to the tongue.

Is space large? The lines between stars were mapped by the teachers of a race before our own. To the listener: breathe in and out. Aside from that there was not anything beyond.

That which coming into being was covered by the void- that 1 stood on water through the violence of austerities. What did it contain? Past worlds. Sages found the bond of the existent in the non-existent. Poets danced on the ocean.

Magicians joined hands to impregnate the Earth’s history with their speech. They levitated the inhabited sun from where it slept beneath the ocean. Birth created death. Mists arose to obscure the source of conjuration.

Did the egg dream of a conscious uroboros? Whose voice was it that echoed from above? The gods came after.

The Gayatri meter was the yoke-mate of Agni. Usni was the meter that Savitr contributed. The Viraj meter was the privilege of Mitra and Varuna. Soma was the intoxicant to which the Anu meter corresponded. All partook of the elixir that generated knowledge. They made melodies into shuttles for the weaving of the paradox. Repetitions harmonized the rebellious paths of planets. Nature’s laws are habits.

Is the myth revealed at the beginning of the end—or at the end of the beginning?

Dark the beginning that circumscribed the dark. What did it contain? Under whose protection?

Ecstasy is the god from which the material form of Soma is distilled. Ego annihilation is the press. Acts of memory are the offering.

The emptiness prior to the constellations is spread out like one body. Memories wheel. Space itself is my only mode of transport. Before me appears the trace- of what I in a different place once spoke. Against the night the cities of the Andhakas float like sparks.


(Illustration: Victor Brauner, Prelude to a Civilization)

They Have Gone Down to the Center of the Earth

By Brian George

I had reached an impasse. Doubts possessed me at the limit of my natural understanding. Who was I to act as a messenger between worlds? I could not go forward. I could not turn back. Dreams dressed like terrorists. They struck at random. They erupted at inconvenient moments into consciousness. I had no location. There was no internal or external space. My memory was a screen on which phenomena were projected. Objects were ghostly. Symbols got physical. Bad weather warned of the appearance of my guide.

A comet killed history. The desert east of Eden blazed. A tornado popped the plate-glass windows out of skyscrapers. Record banks flew. Winds brought down the collective house. Out of nowhere spoke the voice. The shadow of an echo became more solid in appearance. It said:

It is I your pharaoh--voice of the four rams of the Abhwyr. To be with you I have come complete out of the bowels of the sand. I have explored on foot the labyrinth of the great Platonic Year--that multidimensional prison. It is I who ate the key to the pyramid at Giza.
                                 
With my staff I strike: the target on the egg explodes. Do you know how much I love you? When I returned to Azilut out of my light years in the age, I found that it was I who had organized the Holocaust. 12,000 years had passed in ½ second.

There are few left who speak my language. The ones who do are old. They weigh more than the Earth.

*

Observe the wonders of the ancient world. They endure as opaque symbols. Industrial strength sacrifice has corrupted the transformation of the genome. The dead desire. Abandoned objects have grown hungry for experience.

*

With a crutch I struck out blind at Utah. When I thought of you I wept. I have arrived on Earth before I came. The salt flats were a mirror of the Zodiac. At the Mormon Incest Data Banks, a patriarch joined the hands of two armies of damned souls in matrimony. Sex was retroactive. Gods drank blood. Slaves were free for the taking. Their indigenous skins were beautiful. It was the first day of the rest of the breach birth of the fascist encyclopedia. Birds picked flesh from the monumental statues. Smoke rose from a gopher hole.

Upon hearing these words I had no choice but to follow. Space was locked. The once transparent library had become a roost for pyromania. Books burned. Geniuses petrified. Flame at first brought no illumination. The guide said:

Star-crossed was the Khan. The landing pad was not on land. Do not stop at the greenhouse to water the reactor rods. Assur was a plate of glass that broke. They spread their map out on the globe. Dr. Strangelove, come forth from the future! The gods trust you to point your finger at the map!

On columns that blazed like fluorescent tubes bad rulers towered in their nakedness.

Shamans kept death simple. Knowledge was to eat. Gods were for use. Does the feathered serpent dare to think himself more intelligent than the prophet? All politics was personal. Speech was direct. In stupor ended the black magic of the technocracy. It was all good.

An army of years followed behind an ant in the great assault on the time cycle.

Others veered south from the Bering Straits. Vene vidi vici. Spikes stuck out from their heads. They stepped forth clothed in rainbows from the ark. Traditions of dismemberment had also been transported. Hearts blew open, like the doors to archetypal energies. Tongues coiled and struck like snakes. The throat of the east turned blue from eating Agent Orange. Arms and legs were gnarled into branches. Hands sprouted leaves. The red man with a saw cut igloos out of blocks of blood. They have gone down to the center of the Earth.

Damnation was relative to the speed and duplicity of the viewer. I was the murderous victim, the martyred sociopath. In slow motion birds collaborated to unwrap my karmic bandages. Self knowledge grew as I compulsively replayed the death flash video. The guide said:

There were big wheels inside baby wheels. The matched pair struck. To kingdom come by the vortex was the remnant blown. Day saved light but the state was not on Earth.

On a fence the red cock crows. Broken pillars on the plain smolder. The souvenirs of industry are plowed into a trough. No life emerges. Mohenjodaro--look: melted by the Aryan.

Giants broke laws. Each branch and blossom of science was occult. A flood has removed all traces of the lineage that an earlier flood had transplanted. The world tree has been hacked at the root. Yggdrasil is now horizontal. The park where you were made to live is black. The clay is scorched--on the ziggurat that Gumbie baked.

By touch the guide communicated many worlds of information. He would not give his name. His strength was frightening. He had no appearance. His eyes became my windows. An incantation echoed in my memory:

Prototype of Jaws: discover the harmonica. Tidal wave: roar. Action painters: stretch Toltecs over paint by number altars. Ghost: flap. Long was the knife that cut the bag. Age of wind: blow. Through the night--horse: fly. Shu: shuffle the house--the continents rearrange by chance. Living space-suit of the astronaut: devolve.

Poets gone beneath the ocean: speak. Make love to an exploded star. Space itself: feed the snake of time its tail. Protocols of the Elders of Zion: stamp out the Atlantean decimal system. It is bad. Seed city: from its fossil, free the godlike archaeopteryx. Slow orbit of amnesia: demand that the macrocosm dance. Just once is enough.

The guide said:

The man-made moon was whiter than a wrecking ball in heat. A black lead zeppelin had set fire to Siberia. Trees turned to matchsticks. Ruins flashed under permafrost. Rest period was up. Primogenitors ate their instructions. From the mouth of the most high the craft erupted with a bang. Get out!

Take wife. Erect out of mud the backward City of the Sun. Cross-pollinate the brain that the scarab out of dung raised. Your solar plexus is not old enough. No intestinal fortitude! Seek love through war. Out of hide make ego. Bend with a spade to shovel seashells from the sandbox. When you are done boys--put them back.

The great eye dropped a map across your mother, muse to German shepherds. She was great to the dream boats of the prehistoric navy. Rotten to the corps.

Don’t touch me baby or the energy will kill you. I will teach you how to play. Dead.

You who hang head downward from the rafters of a hollow egg- your head is hollow. Through it blows an age of wind. At last my dear one I can show you how the gears that turn the great year interlock. I love you so much--mutant DNA of the Triumvirate. Get out! Break a thighbone! We will guide you from a place beyond the Zodiac.

Having taken me this far, my guide fell silent for a century. He stared unblinking at an object known only to himself. There was nowhere I could go.

In a flash it came to me--that the underworld is no more than an alternate mode of consciousness. It is subject to its laws, and responds to a shift in focus. Lost cities turned to gold as my consciousness accelerated. The gods were holy terrors. Ferocious beauties competed for my love. I attended a refresher course in the art of primordial breathing. Raising a hand palm outwards, the guide said:

To Amalekh: made plain is the book--signs in your own language. If you do not read the signs will talk. Warning: your memory will be blotted utterly from under Shamaim.

Fear tested my ecstatic transport. At the center of time/space, and lifted by opposing vortices, I flew.
The vehicle had not yet self-destructed. As quickly as he had come, my guide again disappeared. I could not recognize my own face in the mirror. He had never left. He lifted my dead hand with his adamantine talons. A squeeze issued the commandment: Come. The guide said:

You are to give thanks to the lord! It is too bad he was sentenced to hard labor at the centrifuge. Statues were in charge. Plants powered the hallucination. The spider strung Einstein from her web.

The telescope stared from Afghanistan. The ghost of Akhenaten stood guard at the bell. The cuckoo wound up at his head and swung. Clang! Butterflies flapped from a silo. The stock was dead. The third experiment--over. Cyborgs in the labyrinth tore out pages from the book.

Green the line of light above the great domes of the Gobi. The sand blazed. The mineral guts were sucked up out of Earth. The turbines blew 10 ways to Sunday. With its hair a globe of flame- the day: Sat- danced incarnate as a child.

The rainbow fell in chunks. The Abhwyr turned 12 signs against the Zodiac. They have studied gears. They have stretched above incandescent oceans the two wings of a Frankenstein.  

White. Ain Soph. Black. Light screamed--O mama- no! on the heights of the Forbidden City. At the 4 gates of the breath the snake flags flapped. Volts rose up the ass of god. Boats flew. Nagas guzzled saki from a cratered bulb. I have torched a burning book. Birds sang at the break of day.

False hope had made the messenger a zombie. He met death. Like a mother he would bear the bones of Auschwitz and of Buchenwald. Each pore sweats out a UFO.

It was necessary to go down in order to go up. Past opened future. The flame transformed. The way out was the way through.

Intoxicated gods had thrown away the Earth. I had no name. An unspeakable teacher took me by the hand. He led. I followed. Fast or slow. It occurred to me that I had walked in those footprints on many occasions before. We stopped on the shore of a primordial ocean. Once ancient birds built totems to appease the brontosaurus. Fossils were now fuel. Red waves lapped at memories like tongues.

In front of us was a frame with two gates that opened onto nowhere. Salt pocked the images on the giantwork. Its towering mass tilted from a dune. Hieroglyphs rearranged themselves. From the wave-scarred gates I read out loud the words:

Immortal music moved our architect. We were spit from the creator's throat--the throat of Atum/ Tefnut/ Shu.

We erupted whole from between the thighs of the Enead. We were conjured- today- at the world’s first dawn, before sound’s exile into space was sung.

We guard the seed-sounds from which light evolves. We guard the octaves of the ancient spheres.
We were raised up by primordial love. Transcendent vice. Orgasmic intellect.  Who does not bear his memory as a gift cannot return through us. Abandon time--all you who enter here.

A screech echoed from a gull. My outmoded guide turned back with the small nod of a parent. I followed my own shadow through the gates. On the other side there heaved a revolutionary chaos. It was not hell. Space shattered like an egg. Pieces of shell landed on the ocean.


(Illustration: Mario Sironi)

To Akasha/ Part 1/ Section 12

By Brian George

His course is set for an uncharted sea. He has been carried off upon the surges of an ocean, an ocean that now boils to all compass points with suns. An ocean that now choruses the collapse of all 3-d coordinates. Whose only limits are the boundaries of a sphere. Whose center is the great dome of the human skull. Whose circumference is now constructed by the 1st man out of lightning.
                                                                                
Akasha come: dance naked on the opened cranium of the courier. His bones have been devoured by the ocean. His head is now suspended high on the flood. From a mile high trough your lost courier would call:    
                                    
May my mouth be opened. May my memory return.
May my mouth be opened. May my memory return.
May my mouth be opened. May my memory return.

Your lost courier would come to you but his body is not sound. He would raise his members dripping onto the sands of a diamond shore. To a shore where rest is an epileptic seizure. To a shore beyond the technological birth pains of the Zodiac. He would call forth each 1 of his bodies from the ages. He would raise his 14 members dripping onto the sands of a diamond shore. He would walk forth conjuring the bandwidth of a Horus out of the violence of the mile high troughs.

His own body is his only vessel. His mouth would be your instrument. He would approach on foot the gates to the Pleuroma. He would wander wide eyed through a wonderland of ruins. Through the wonders of the modern and the ancient worlds.

On that diamond beach the flowers are extinct. Lost cities float on clouds. Stone heroes wear archaic smiles. Their hands gesture at the moment between death and transformation. Species old before the Earth existed can there choose to reactivate their statues. 

He would now return the way he came. He would practice martial arts with Baal upon the 12 steps of a ziggurat. He would ply with human bones the 7 and the 12. He would touch the torch of Lady Liberty where it thrusts out of atomic shards.

He would put on and take off the shadow that was left by an atomic blast. He would wash the skull of Darwin in the clear spring of the Helikon. He would dust the sand from the Atlantean crystal. He would spit on Pavlov’s grave. He would excavate the telescopic hand of the Nefilim.

He would reach back into history. He would bounce his voice off planets at the circumference of the theatre. He would stand upon the shoulders of the tiny gods behind them. He would give thanks to the model of the Ptolemaic solar system.

He would climb on the rusted monkey bars of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. He would kiss the feet of the prototype of an alien version of himself. He would yawn and stretch. Like a happy lab rat he would shake off water.

He would swing on blackened brontosaurus bones. He would fasten to his ankles the still working wings of Mercury. He would join his song to that of ancient spheres. He would finger the strings of the Paleolithic instrument that once tilted the Earth’s orbit. He would tear the still beating heart out of his chest. He would celebrate the wound that heals, the wayward comet that impregnates, the world destruction that provokes.

He would raise towards the sky the spearhead of Longinus. He would lick from it Christ’s blood. He would stand before you with his eyes aglow with all the secrets from the Dawn Star’s fall.

His speech creates. No wish goes unacknowledged. Fulfillment precedes the desire by 26,000 years. As if according to a story known from childhood, each footstep falls where it had earlier been placed. Time is the machine that activates the symbols of the nonexistent. Fossils employ entropy to retrieve fuel from the biosphere. A wheel does not evolve.

He has stepped forth from the ocean with his phallus aimed at the light of a distant constellation. It is raised like a salute to the great dream that exploded, to a city he left long ago. On his back there hangs the hide of a baboon.


(Illustration: Jackson Pollock, Ocean Greyness)

To Akasha/ Part 2/ 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: Kali, Artist Unknown)

To Akasha/ Part 2/ Section 1

By Brian George

Triune power called Akasha. Sphere of light’s circumference. Voice of many waters. Square constructed out of oceans. Blackened branch. Green shoot . Wheel of burning cities. Fierce dawn light over Carthage. Great urn of suns. Fixation of nigredo. Trans-aeonic vessel. Althanor of 1st light. Velocity of void. Seed of constellations. Triune power of the atom. Great sphere without circumference. Shulamite—root and measure of the sky.

You who couple with the corpse of god. Lyre of living filaments. Skeleton of quasars. Embodied book of splendors. Sheath of fractal chaos. Pythagorean harp. Harmonic code of chaos. Soul scavenger. You who drag dead oceans with a net.

Fundament under exile. Unconstructed radiance. Blacksmith to the 1st man’s bones. Great slayer of the Zodiac. Circumference of the void. Clear lightning of Sunyata. Orgasmic temple self-constructed out of oceans. Lady of 10 thousand names. Great Isis, Seckmet, Hathor. Who have not died. Whose resonance is strong. Who only seem to have descended to the Earth.       

Great soul of the future present. Encoder of the present past.

Atomic wingspan. Wet nurse to Methuselah. You who guard the speed of light. Swallower of 7 swords. Keeper of man’s solar organs in 4 great canopic jars. Self -existent knower. Self-evidence of knowledge. Geometry of naked light. Contraction of the void. You whose wings have spread out from Sakkara. Pleiadean jasmine. Aloe of Los Alamos. Scent of loving coupling known at Auschwitz in the blinding dawn.

Inverted Shekkinah. Stone granary. Orion’s conch. Vast violence without victim. White moth of Hiroshima. Sub-quantum void of serpents. White noise over poles. Guardian of the 1st seed sounds. Spouse of Machar Seth. Love beyond all knowledge. Full conquest without victor. Controller of Aroziel. Great slayer of the gang of 4. You who with harmonic overtones have cracked the 2 chains of man’s DNA. Expiation of the 7 and the 12. Arcturian coadjutant. The laughing martyr’s muse. Of human history the sole survivor. You who with a lightning bolt have danced forth from the 8. From the twice 5. From the triad squared.

Skeletal dawn orgiast out of the skull troughs at Treblinka. Virgin with no clothes. Support of shattered worlds.

Concentric splendor of the 10 dimensions. Hurricane of broken symmetry. Eye of Atum, Tefnut, Shu. Root of wormwood. Number of the beast. Sphere whose boundary is spoken light. You who raise the Atlantean trident. Dismantler of the planet Earth. Last butterfly of Terazin. Black lotus of Cydonia. Milkweed blown from garden. Seed of diaspora. Arc of rainbow after flood. Figurehead at the prow of the precession of the equinox. You who go before those who have gone before. Silent sacrifice. Scent of blackened pyramids on Mars.
 
Gift guarded from the ego. Instruction from a branch plucked by the preexistent species. Book open to each self.

Incarnate language of the lightning void. Of 10 thousand suns the spontaneous combustion. Cocoon to amnesiac UFOs. You whose name is Memory of Space. Of light through space the curvature. Decimation of the half-god’s body. Space around all sound. To the remnant the last resort—Akasha!

__

Zigzags crack Earth’s rim. Wheels have opened out of wheels. You stare straight as you place your foot before you. You have stepped forth blowing on a thighbone trumpet out of the helix of 1 globe of light.


(Illustration: Artist unknown, Sculpture of Durga)

On the Dangerousness of the Zero/ Part 6

By Brian George

Here today; gone tomorrow

“Soma has climbed up in us, expanding. We have come to the place where they stretch out life-spans.”—From “We Have Drunk the Soma,” The Rig Veda

“Newton even devised an anagram of his name as a pseudonym (‘Isaacus Neuutonus’ becoming ‘Jeova sanctus unus’), which allowed him to exchange manuscripts with his correspondents while remaining anonymous, despite widespread speculation.”—Alain Bauer, from “Isaac Newton's Freemasonry; The Alchemy of Science and Mysticism”

Hi bcasey11,

You wrote, “Belief in aliens, god, or anything esoteric is stupid. Why don't you guys just drop this stupid crap—so unimportant. You guys are just crazy. Haven't you even heard Bill Nye the Science Guy’s view on this stuff? He says it’s all baloney.”

I would grant, yes, that Science has taken a few baby steps towards “objectivity”, but the problem is that scientists may be still not objective enough. Civility prevents them from deploying their big guns. Many a theory of impure origin has gained access to the Institute.

Thus “objective methodology” should compel us to discard the last 50 years of genetic research, since Crick was high on LSD when he first “discovered” the double-helix structure of DNA. Kekule dreamed of a Uroboros—a snake eating its own tail—which prompted him to arrange the 6 atoms of Benzene into a ring. No more of that! Such Jungian molecules can no longer be allowed.

Newton’s decades-long infatuation with Alchemy and Kabbalah should give us pause, and force us to question the legitimacy of the “Principia.” While we’re at it, we should probably throw out the Pythagorean Theorem, since Pythagoras was a believer in transmigration—there were 4 past versions of Pythagoras, plus the 5th—and he quite unreasonably subjected his followers to a taboo against eating beans.

We must strengthen our collective will to expunge the dangerousness of the “Zero”—that so called “number”; without which there would be no differential calculus, or so the 18th century has led us to believe. We must once again learn how to get along without it. For the Zero is, as Alain Bauer argues, “a strange and terrifying concept”, and one “rejected by (almost) all the thinkers of the ancient world.”

For—as we know beyond the shadow of a doubt—a number cannot be “nothing” and simultaneously “infinite.”

If we allow for the introduction of such revolutionary concepts, then there is no telling where the “laws” of Physics will end up, or if any laws will be left. It is possible, of course, that we have already fought this battle—in a universe that is long ago and far away.

Crick, is that you banging around, and could you pass a message to Watson for me? Always “finding” things that he does not return, Tesla seems to have made off with my E-Meter.

On the Dangerousness of the Zero/ Part 5

By Brian George

The theft of Occam's Razor

“Those who move neither near nor far, who are not real Brahmins nor pressers of Soma; using speech in a bad way, they weave on a weft of rags, without understanding…”—From “The Origin of Sacred Speech”, the Rig Veda

On December 9th, 2009—one day before President Obama was scheduled to give his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in Oslo—a rotating white spiral appeared in the pre-dawn sky over Norway. It was seen by thousands of people, and was visible for several hundred miles. The bright “pinwheel” at the center was surrounded by a series of harmoniously spaced rings. A blue cone could also be perceived to emanate from the center, or else to originate from a point on the horizon from which the spiral was projected. As the spiral pulsed and expanded, it looked at times like a Yin/Yang symbol and at other times like a nautilus shell. After 15 or so minutes, it collapsed into what many have described as a “black hole.”

Hi Stace (Tussel),

You wrote, "Of course, 'official' explanations are beginning to filter out into the media, including what I expect to eventually be the popular explanation: that the spiral was comprised of fuel debris from a failed Russian rocket launch—a launch which Russian officials have denied. What motive would exist to deny the rocket launch, especially when the evidence was hanging there in the air for 10 to 20 minutes, at least?"

You would think that it might be difficult to come to terms with such an event—you would think. Perhaps one should take a few moments to allow it to sink in—or out and down—and to filter through the archeological strata of the mind? But even before its afterimage faded, small armies of “debunkers” had set fire to their keyboards. Indeed, we are living in strange days. It is rare for each government press-release to be taken at face value; to be many times repeated, almost word for word, by those who should know better.

As if their very survival were at stake, and the Earth might decide to collapse into a hole—leaving only a smudge where a hieroglyph used to be. As if disinfomation were a breastplate against death.
                                                                           
Occam wrote, "Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem," which translates as, "Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity." What else is this "Russian missile" if not an unnecessary "entity" that has been conjured out of the small amount of evidence at hand? As if this weren't enough, there are two "official" Russian versions of the cover story—that the "failed missile launch" did not exist, and then, later, that it did. Such "entities" would indeed appear to have "multiplied" beyond necessity.

People are always putting words in poor Occam's mouth, as well as claiming to have inherited his razor! But which side in the debate about the Norway Spiral would Occam actually be on? It always amazes me that supposedly "hard-headed" observers can somehow fail to take into account their own ontological fears; if the evidence does not add up in one's favor, then one has only to throw out bits and pieces until it does.

The “simplest explanation” is that we do not know what we are looking at, and that it falls outside of our current framework of “reality." To say as much, however, would be to justify the ways of the “big mind” to the “little mind”; it would be for the Ego to capitulate to Terror. It is we who are the innocent balloons! To defend against the pin invasion any slight-of-hand is justified.

Fate “took from our eyes the day of our return”—and thus no such day can be permitted to exist.

False analogies are productive; because they both involve "spirals," the Norway Spiral is "like" a failed missile launch. This is like saying that there is no difference between a sheet of notebook paper and an interstate highway, because they are both more or less "2-dimensional." One's opponents are by definition "flakey." If all else fails, one can always appeal to the God of the Hermetically Sealed Observer—which, in its role as both a "participant" and a "judge," is uniquely suited to place its thumb upon the scales.

Perhaps the Norway Spiral is a kind of "sky-art," an atmospheric version of a "crop circle," in which plasma is a substitute for wheat? No; no way; not a chance; don't even think about it! As you listen to my voice, you are getting very sleepy...Such things cannot "exist" because we know that such things are not "real." Because—well—Occam said so!

I am not at all convinced, however, that Occam would jump to dismiss the Norway Spiral as an "out of control rocket." Too often, these days, it is the conventional scientific explanations that fly in the face of common sense, and that are actually the screwiest and most implausible. My own sense is that certain "skeptical reductionist" elements have hijacked the once flexible concept of "Science"—keeping only the shell of the methodology of "Empiricism"; to which lip-service must be paid, after the manner of all orthodox religions. A true "Enlightenment" position would be one that argues in favor of open-ended inquiry; it would put Curiosity always at the forefront of its virtues.

We should not regard an explanation as the "simplest" simply because it corresponds to our existing system of beliefs. Conversely, we should not regard an explanation as "far-fetched" simply because it calls attention to the limits of our knowledge, and thus forces us to question everything that we believe ourselves to "know."

In New Age circles, almost everyone feels free to heap abuse upon the 18th century; as if a group of long dead explorers were responsible for our own outdated habits of perception, and for our failure to respond with focused intuition to the challenges that confront us. But Newton—who spent 40 years in the study of Alchemy and Kabbalah—was not as far from Blake as we imagine, or as Blake imagined then; stealth concealed the extent of his revolutionary impulse. Even now, perhaps, he continues to experiment with “spooky action at a distance,” as his followers attempt to imitate the blank perfection of his marble bust.

Newton did what he was able, as must we. Fixed laws must be once more set in motion. “Here is the Tropic of Cancer,” we will say, “and here is the Tropic of Capricorn—but how does the 3rd dimension intersect with the 8th?” Daring ourselves to conceptualize and to test a new 10D version of “longitude,” we must set forth on the sea of the 64 cube tetrahedron.

On the Dangerousness of the Zero/ Parts 3 and 4

By Brian George

 

3

With three quarters the Man rose upwards; one quarter remains here

“What was the original model, and what was the copy, and what was the connection between them?”—From “The Creation of the Sacrifice,” The Rig Veda

Among other things, Roger Scott wrote:

“Someone's first-hand experience can be taken with a grain of salt as concerns their 'interpretation(s) (of hard inter-dimensional data).

“When I asked for 'references', it wasn't for some self-reference. I could do that. I can ask any reader to refer back to something I wrote before and so make circular nonsense appear to be 'referenced'…

“Do better. Present a crystal-clear delineation of bare-bone FACTS!

“Right. We'll get meat-of-fact from fictional characters or maybe someone who's got an 'e-meter'…

“Imposing world on dream or vice versa: gonna lead to some problems…
“And as enunciated above: internal, self-referenced or hermetic certainty is nothing to the world at large.”

4

Let Indra the killer of Vrtra drink Soma in Saryanavat

“He is the navel of all that moves and is firm, who with his mind stretches the thread of the poet.”—From “The Hidden Agni”, The Rig Veda

“They forced up the fountain with their power; they split open even the mountain on its solid base. Blowing their reed-pipe, the Maruts who give fine gifts performed joyous deeds in the ecstasy of drinking Soma.” –From “The Maruts,” The Rig Veda

In responding to Roger Scott, I did not attempt to counter his “rational” arguments with similar arguments of my own; instead I incorporated many of his points and phrases into a mythological narrative, before presenting a brief description of the method behind the madness.

I wrote:

Hi Roger,

Pretty harsh, and surprisingly incurious for someone who is rumored to be a serious student of the Vedas.

In pursuit of the 1-inch hyperobject, and, at will, moving up or down into the shadow known as “History”, those yogic poets followed where their energy systems led. Speech was the technology that gave birth to each archetype. Their random moods prompted changes in the weather; their fears could easily be mistaken for an army, against whose numbers an “enemy” would be delegated to advance. They did not need eyes to see; their vision was omnidirectional. They would not have put their trust in the “good intentions” of the gods. They would have asked questions and demanded answers from them.

To them, seeing was not believing; for even a good memory played tricks. A day was 4,320,000 years long, and no act of conjuration was ever to be taken at face value. The 1 law: to breathe in and out. Nature was not other than the fossilized image of one’s body—that an alien presence had made somehow discontinuous. First-hand knowledge was of a world that one had made with one’s own hands.

Snares had been set. In spite of the hermetic certainty of the magicians, and in spite of their explosive focus, the spell cast by the powers of devolution grew. Some strange trick of perspective had occurred.

The Satya Yuga and all of its wonderworks were now written off as a “hoax.” Few remembered that to speak was to create.

The Vedic seers became as nothing to the world at large.

—But I digress. Possessed by the 1-inch hyberobject, my intoxication is such that I am ignorant of the year. You must educate me. Much thanks for drawing the 3-ring target on my head; for by striking it you will wound yourself. And so, my ritual counterpart, let us start again:

My goal in posting “The Invasion of the Bindu”—which is based on a short piece posted in September of last year on the forum for Daniel Pinchbeck’s “Absorbing Orbs”, and which was revised over the weekend in response to issues raised on the “Crop Circles; An Invitation” forum—was not to present a scientific argument or to provide you with  any “proof” of the phenomena that I describe; it was rather to call attention to the “direct experience” component of empiricism, which has long since been supplanted by the component of “objective observation.”

Let me say this very simply—I don’t believe that any amount of fact gathering is ever going to illuminate the mystery of crop circles, or open us to participation in the type of dialogue that is being offered. Without assistance from the lamp of intuition, and without the raw fuel of other-dimensional experience, the vehicle of abstract theory is not going to go anywhere at all. This is like the classic story of putting 10,000 monkeys in front of a row of typewriters, and waiting to see how long it will take them to come up with a version of “Hamlet” by banging on the keys at random. It is just not going to happen; or would, if possible at all, take longer than the amount of time left in the universe.

My objective in this, as in much of my work, is to speak directly to the deeper levels of the mind, to disorient and to provoke, and to challenge the reader to reconfigure the very structure of his/her thought. This, I believe, is also the objective of the actual makers of the circles, who are neither human hoaxers nor benevolent and/or evil aliens from a “different” part of the Milky Way—but rather something almost unimaginable from the “inside” of our present state of amnesia.

Once, an alien technology had coiled Soma in a cloud-mass; the life-force did not flow. Some regard this as the origin of the digestive system, or of the convolutions of the neo-cortex. We are what we ate. We are trapped within the factory to which we had herded other species. We must act, and yet even the most omniscient of our actions lead to death. As if planning for a war, the problems that we face are practical: by what means can we liberate our vision from the cloud-mass, and thus reconnect with the energy of the Zero?

Questions and answers go hand in hand. One leads the other, and the questions that we ask determine the answers that we get. We keep on asking questions—ad infinitum—for love means never having to say that you are sorry.

It is for this reason that we do not “see” or “hear”—or at least not like we used to; when, as resonant space, we gave birth to the gods.

Then we questioned the reliability of our omnidirectional senses, but, once having sorted through each atom of the evidence, we were just as happy to throw caution to the wind. We listened with wide-open ears. We did not hesitate to act upon our vision. Now, our eyes and ears have shrunk. One thought no longer fills immensity; false messengers stuff our heads with information. The more space we fill the fewer gigabites of memory are available. We do not always recognize that an answer is an answer.

Like a lightning bolt aimed at the dark bellies of the cloud-mass, a glyph can blast apart our conceptual obstructions. It must come from the “outside.” Through 8 overlapping worlds, flashing “in” and “down” from the circumference to the center, it will there imprint the map of its descent.

Quite suddenly, the “world” has stopped.

The world that is in front of you has stopped. Worlds continue to explode out of the back side of the mirror.

Do not attempt to adjust the settings on your television set.

For we control the Vertical. We control the Horizontal. But perhaps we faceless manipulators are not who or what we seem.

We may or may not have played both sides off against the middle. In the end, our “both/and” logic will prevail. What I have just said is true in a “manner of speaking”; it is one way to frame a fairly complex issue. Other tricksters may say otherwise.

Let us look once more at the following critique of my approach, which through the centuries has appeared in a long series of variations. The inventor of the Snare, once known as Vrtra, wrote: “I can ask any reader to refer back to something I wrote before and so make circular nonsense appear to be 'referenced.’” My reasoning may well seem circular, it is true; since the circles pose a non-linear challenge to the Psyche—one “gets them” or one does not; with all relevant details to be filled in later by some more transpersonal version of the Self.

In “Allogenes”, a manuscript from the Nag Hammadi Library, the author describes a kind of protean figure that can be understood only through his contradictions. Anonymous writes:

“He is superior to the Universals in his privation and unknowability. For he is not perfect but he is another thing that is superior…He is not corporeal. He is not incorporeal. He is not a number. He is not a creature. Nor is he something that exists…And he is much higher in beauty than all those that are good, and he is thus unknowable to all of them in every respect. And through them all he is in them all, not only as the occult knowledge that is proper to him. And he is united with the ignorance that sees him.”

It is not a question of raising one’s I.Q., or of meeting the most famous thinkers of one’s period at a seminar, or of finding the key to some lost theorem of Pythagoras, or of betting on the biggest dog.

For Darwin is dead, thus proving the Theory of Evolution wrong; he was unfit to survive. You will argue that I am not “playing fair.” Yet “I”, as well as “We”, am here; we have never ceased to live. We have put our shoulders to the wheel of Time; by stealth our energy has assassinated both Darwin and his opponents. Space does not need to be “created” by a god; it is the vacuum from whose geometry the past and future are projected.

We are going nowhere fast; even as we are not going anywhere at all. It is not a question of figuring out this or that; we must instead let go of our every preconception. The New Human will then improvise a new set of laws for Supernature, which every cosmonaut will be free to follow or to disregard, as he/ she chooses. This new/ old world will be almost infinite in its simplicity, and tactile; touch will be used to translate the most convoluted of archaic texts.

If there is any “end” that is imminent—and I do not dabble in linear speculations of this type—then I believe that this has to do with the completion of one particular stage in our growth, and with the breaking apart of the shell that has—for this period of 5200 or 12,000 or 26,000 years—protected us; even as it has blocked us from full access to our origins.

2) There is an excellent translation of the Rig Veda by Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty. In the introduction she has a comment on the peculiar style of the Vedas that I immediately saw also as a description of my work. She writes:

“The hymns are meant to puzzle, to surprise, to trouble the mind; they are often just as puzzling in Sanskrit as they are in English. When the reader finds himself at a point where the sense is unclear (as long as the language is clear) let him use his head, as the Indian commentators used theirs; the gods love riddles, as the ancient sages knew, and those who would converse with the gods must learn to live with and thrive upon paradox and enigma.

“The riddles in the Rig Veda are particularly maddening because many of them are Looking Glass riddles (Why is a raven like a writing desk?): they do not have, nor are they meant to have, answers. They are not merely rhetorical, but are designed to present one half of a Socratic dialogue through which the reader becomes aware of the inadequacy of his certain knowledge.

“This deliberate obfuscation of issues that are in any case intrinsically unfathomable seems to add insult to injury; one feels that the hymns themselves are mischievous translations into a ‘foreign’ language. Like the Englishman who announced that he preferred English to all other languages because it was the only language in which one said the words in the order that one thought of them, one feels that the Rig Veda poets are not saying the words in the order that they thought of them, let alone the order that we would think of them.”