By Brian George
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“Man’s quest for immortality, to ‘live forever,’ or to be self-sustaining in one way or another is modeled most economically by the vortex. ‘Looking into the world,’ he observed the vortex in fire, wind, and water, and in the weave patterns of the heavens above, etc. When, whether consciously or subconsciously, he recognized that vortexes represent ‘the only manner by which a self-sustaining motion can exist in a given medium’ (Arthur M. Young), he would naturally have gravitated to such an idea—specifically, the idea that a vortex appears to be other than the medium which sustains it, but actually it is one with the medium within which it exists.”—from Martin Farren, “In the Mirror of Creation”
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My explorations in Kabbalah and Kundalini yoga had led me in and out and upside down through the convolutions of an arcane curve, and deposited me, at a different turn of the spiral, again exactly in the place where I had started. It was in this position that I had always found myself—as a stranger with a social slot to fill, as a non-local presence with a local job to perform, as an ancient soul at a perpetual beginning.
As from a height, I had descended to a vehicle, and, from solid earth, into a state of watery flux.
There, the laws of electromagnetism could not be taken at face value. My evolution followed the path recommended to the student of Kabbalah—the “Path of Descent”—which was also the path taken by the first imploding hypersphere and its crop of unpronounceable gods, the Elohim—as they are called, for the sake of convenience, in this system. The name is a generic one, and, in contemporary terms, we could perhaps refer to them as “The Powers That Be.” We suspect—only—that they are powers now, although, in some respects, they seem close to being programs. When, amid flashing lights, they choose to put in an appearance, at times there does seem to be something of the manikin about them, and it is not clear if they really “act” at all. We do not know what they were before, or how they came to be in charge of the technology that projects us.
If it was they who lifted the first city from the Deluge, to do this they had, paradoxically, to descend. Most stories about this early race have been lost to public view. They have been buried beneath years of scholarship, darkened by paranoia, or warped by moral pontifications. “They are good,” say some, “for we choose to misinterpret all of the evil that they do.” “They are evil,” say others, “for they have shattered the once perfect world, nor do they understand what it feels like to be human.”
Our manic/ depressive hopes for total cleansing by an “apocalypse” do not really help to clarify the matter. Our sightlines have been blocked. Our intellects cannot penetrate their radioactive cloud, and, should we look on them directly, it is possible that our hearts would beat themselves to death. No, instead, we must make use of a different set of eyes, for the ones that we have been given are prosthetic. We must remember how to see from all of 360 degrees. We must think with our hearts. We must feel with the group intellect of our alien micromanagers, who, in their arrogance, may think of us as food.
We must touch the thread that connects us to the first word ever spoken. We must simultaneously speak each syllable in the Ur-Text. Only later should we pick our individual parts, as well as the cultures that correspond to them, and thus give birth to the straight lines that are History. At first, it was All for One. Then later, it was Every Man for Himself. Later yet, we would act as midwives for the rebirth of the Zero. We must listen with the eyes of the Elohim. We must see with the ears of space. We must put our trust in the depth and breadth of our experience, in order to revisit the many places that we have been. We must stop time, and, as if the ocean were a sheet, begin to smooth out all of the wrinkles. As we hover a few inches over it, we may still be able to view and then decipher the almost invisible outlines of our movements. Thus, the motives of this early race are obscure, but can be guessed:
The desire to share their accumulated wealth, which was great.
The desire to see and/ or make things happen.
The desire to remove one’s head—its awful vastness, and thus to escape from the burdens that are associated with omnipotence.
After Aeons of silence, the desire to explode.
The desire to seize Beauty by the hair.
The desire to get drunk, to pick a fight, to have sex, to wake up somewhere strange.
The desire to make a weapon of geometry.
The desire to test one’s strength against the ocean, to put one’s shoulder to the wheel.
The desire to make a name for oneself.
The desire to bind others to one’s cause; to manufacture a consensus.
The desire to express oneself, to which end one must have a particular point of view.
The desire to live life, to learn from suffering, and to outlast death.
The desire to make a mark on the big dream that is History.
The desire to make a complete break with the past.
The desire to be empty, after being pregnant with a world.
The desire to discover the beginning of the circle, its ancient origin; to thus inhabit the lost story one has read.
The desire to be many, after being one, and to be one, after being many.
The desire to give the gift that keeps on giving.
The desire to transmit the knowledge that is the fruit of one’s longevity.
The desire to let go, to not be in charge.
The desire to be free, to live in the one moment, to feel joy.
The desire to again throw caution to the wind, to follow where one is led.
The desire of the magician to say farewell to his powers.
The desire to be swept off by a wave.
—Yes, the motives of this early race are obscure, as are those of their descendants in the present. Their psyches are not other than our own. As the serpent force revolts against the magic of the microcosm—from head to heart to genitals to feet and then back again to head—I can hear the Elohim conjuring the dense Ur-Text of my body. However strange or familiar, their actions follow a predetermined course.
(Illustration: Brian George, Head with snake projecting out of forehead, 2004)
New posts every 2-3 days on my blog Masks of Origin
http://masksoforigin.blogspot.com/
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