By Brian George
7
In his comment titled, “The Walking Dead”, Dave Hanson wrote:
Thanks, Brian. You describe well the end of the world. Margaret the therapist expresses the spirit of the times perfectly. Margaret says, "I just sort of accept the way the world is and then don't think about it a whole lot." She likes the notion of "a mature sense of autonomy." "No external demand should compel us to be answerable to the needs of others," etc. In other words, we can have a "good life" as alienated, terrified slaves to the machine of civilization. The Kogi, on the other hand (as one example of many) are responsible for the health of the world. They came down the mountain to tell us to grow up and begin caring for our planet. Throughout the indigenous world we find that our work, our intention, must be in part to sustain everything else. We must be compelled by that external demand.
You have accurately described a culture of domesticated animals using language and myth to fool themselves into thinking they will not be slaughtered. Words, words, words. Endless words. Unless we can reintegrate ourselves into the living, conscious, multidimensional web, we will annihilate ourselves and our planetary home. We either will, or we won't, and I'm betting on the latter.
When, 12,000 +/- years ago we decided on agriculture and religion, we sealed our fate. The end began. As it accelerates, what does one say? What does one suggest? As this bus careens off the cliff should we open the windows or leave them closed? Is it possible (this idea keeps cropping up in my head) that we should stop reading, writing and talking? Could we, in silence, be more agile travelers, more easily merge with our living brothers and sisters? Perhaps the only dialogue we should have is with our plant helpers and those beings who have been pushed aside and kept silent all these horrific generations. Let's try it!
8
The persistence of the 3-dimensional book
Hi Dave,
You have correctly understood that this is less a piece of social criticism and more a diagnosis of our particular point in the time-cycle. Time—whether or not it actually exists—does appear to be accelerating. We can feel this physically, as around us we see the objects that the stagehands have rearranged. It is not surprising that these objects block our view. More surprising: That the stagehands that we see are not usually the same ones that have moved the objects. So: In the foreground we have objects, which we—as “domesticated animals” or livestock herded to the slaughter—must once more learn to read as signs, as we fill in all of the relevant missing pieces of the Ur-Text. Our eyes see what is in front of us; to see the rest, a different faculty is required.
You wrote, “When, 12,000 +/- years ago we decided on agriculture and religion, we sealed our fate. The end began. As it accelerates, what does one say? What does one suggest? As this bus careens off the cliff should we open the windows or leave them closed?” I would answer: that this is not the first time that the world has been destroyed. We should go off the cliff with the windows open.
As the man said when he jumped off of the 50th floor of a building, “So far, so good!”
There have, indeed, been many words spoken over the past 12,000 years, and even more words over the past 108,000 years, and even more words over the past 432,000,000 years—more words all the time, the great majority of them useless. There are those few that are not. “Words, words, words. Endless words,” you wrote. Let me add: Words float like the wreckage of an inter-dimensional ship on the surface of black water. Gone: The greater part of the ship, its passengers, and its cargo.
You wrote, “Unless we can reintegrate ourselves into the living, conscious, multidimensional web, we will annihilate ourselves and our planetary home. We either will, or we won't, and I'm betting on the latter.” As paradoxical as this might seem, to say that we must “reintegrate” ourselves is perhaps to repeat the very mistake that we criticize. Somehow, it is up to us to “fix” the large-scale movement of the cycle—but perhaps our greed and our alienation and our near-suicidal arrogance are also parts of the process.
Laird Scranton, in “The Cosmological Origins of Myth and Symbol,” writes, “Commensurate with the notion that each Word of the civilizing plan was meant to be reflective of a stage of creation, Ogotemmeli says that one consequence of the introduction of the First Word, like the initial act of perception in a massless wave, was that it resulted in a great deal of confusion and disorder among mankind.”
Let us imagine: That we are standing on the curve of a curriculum as solid as the gradually changing surface of the Earth, and as fixed as the Earth’s orbit around the sun, as fixed as that of the sun around its hyper-dimensional source. Let us imagine that all of the oceans of the Earth are just stage-sets in a tiny theatre—a theatre that itself is turning through the oceans of galactic space, whose energetic currents lash the globe. So, is there anything in particular that we should do? I would say: That we must find a way to see and then to act from more than a single location.
It is possible that each step in the march of evolution—which some, with equal justice, might view as the march of devolution—has to do with the educational stages that unfold in the primordial egg. Laird Scranton writes, “For the Dogon, as in string or torsion theory, these vibrations occur inside a primordial egg. As we have mentioned, the vibrations, which are characterized by the Dogon as the seven rays of a star of increasing length, eventually grow long enough to pierce the egg. This act of piercing, which the Dogon consider to be both the eighth and culminating stage of a first egg and the initiating stage of a new egg, is defined as the conceptual point at which the finished Word is spoken. For both the Dogon and modern astrophysicists, these eggs in a series form the membranes that constitute the woven fabric of matter. Consequently, the process by which matter is formed is compared by the Dogon priests to the act of ‘weaving words.’”
We can certainly view words as just another type of object. If we do then they are just more clutter, which, at some point, we must clear away. Let us also imagine, however, that our words may still conceal some spark of genuine power: that they are tools of memory—the quaint traces of a supernatural technology—and that, even in our semi-conscious state, we can use them to transmit, to embody, and to reveal.
Somatics had advised me, “Language is black magic and the double edged sword. Please only take it out of the sheath to reflect light into the dark not to hack away at gifts placed around you.” But, to my mind, this is simply a description of the two-fold movement of primordial energy, and of the particle/ wave ambiguity of the serpent-force itself. This is just what Kundalini does: At the beginning of each cycle, it can be sent forth—like a beam from the forehead—to create; at the end, it frees energy from its projection into form. It is the potency that can generate either knowledge or illusion, that directs us in through the door of the strange labyrinth that is History, and then out again, bearing gifts.
You wrote, “Is it possible (this idea keeps cropping up in my head) that we should stop reading, writing and talking?” My thoughts, also, have often wandered in this direction. During the early 1990s, almost every day for several years, I felt overwhelmed by a flood of other-dimensional information, which proved no more difficult to access than my breathing. On the one hand, it almost felt like an assault, on the other, death appeared to be my friend, and it did not seem necessary that I should slow the process down. Space was transparent from one end to the other. The records of all time periods were now simultaneously present.
In a poem called “Opening of the Records” I had written “War will be declared on the improper use of trees. Books will have no pages. Telepaths will judge the haunted farms. Few of the many will not at first go mad.”
During this period, I worked with a sociopath called Richard, who had confessed to me that, after being fired from his job as a software engineer, he had purchased a rifle with which to kill his former coworkers and friends. A few practical considerations had interfered with his plan. He also believed that Hitler had been too soft on the Jews. He was a sociopath, yes, with a very limited insight into people, but he did have an amazing eye for the carefully hidden weakness. Once, he had asked me, “If you have so much faith in what you call “Akashic Memory,” then why do you have so many thousands of books in your house?” He had me there. As a husband and a father, I have learned to make due with a less absolute approach.
If the Akashic Memory and its bank tellers have any use for me at all, I doubt that it is as an example of perfection! I can barely remember what I said to my wife yesterday, or to pick up milk at the store.
If we are swept along by a process that is as perfect as if needs to be, then why should we add our words to the total of those spoken? Let us think of space as the preexistent sun—as a sphere whose center is both local and non-local—and of the last 12,000 years of civilization as the moon. In a “total eclipse,” from our vantage point, the moon appears to be a foreground object that blocks access to illumination. A foreground ball of rock conjuncts a background ball of flame. How odd then that their sizes match up so exactly! My words point to the fact that the sun has not departed from its orbit.
(Illustration: Mario Sironi)
New posts every 2-3 days on my blog Masks of Origin
http://masksoforigin.blogspot.com/
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