The Double Dream of Spring
Marc Lazard, in "Cellular Memory and the Essence of Healing", wrote: "Something bad happened -- a threat to survival. Information regarding survival and possible threats to it is valuable. Therefore what happened is valuable and must be held on to. Hence: bad = good."
This association of memory with trauma is a fruitful one. It can be approached on many levels in addition to the Darwinian, and is pregnant with implications. One connection that comes to mind is to the key Kabbalistic concept of "Zim Zum," or primordial contraction; in order that the knowledge encoded in Ayn Soph, the ocean of the nonexistent, should become generative, it was/is necessary for G-d to withdraw his/her/its superconsiousness out of "Everywhere" in order to create a "Somewhere." If this were not done, then it would be impossible for any separate world or beings to exist.
Thus the first act of creation is/was also an act of obfuscation, which is perceived, on the level of the human psyche, as a trauma. What allows us to exist as fully conscious beings is the flip side of the trauma that has cut us from the whole.
This process of "contraction" is at the heart of the mystery of what Jung called "individuation." Yet what "contracts" can just as easily "expand", as naturally as an "inhalation" follows from an "exhalation," and vice versa; to illuminate the paradoxical anatomy of a circle. Second by second and millennium by millennium, a great clock reveals the potentials of the Primordial Female/Male, whose dismembered body has been hidden in plain view.
I tend to distinguish between two very different types of memory.
The first, as Marc describes, is the type of memory that is natural to a biological entity with an "ego"; it is dependent upon the chemical mechanics of the brain, on the emotional field, and on all of the interacting systems of the body. In a sense, our memory creates us; we ARE what has happened to our brains, our emotions, and our bodies. And if our experiences have been traumatic, then that is no reason to let go of them; for, when all is said and done, they are ours. Who and where would we be without them?
It is no accident that the return of the supernatural can be perceived as a demonic or an apocalyptic threat.
Joy would be the more appropriate response. Yet if, courageously, we have faced our traumas, and have found methods for transforming the worst of our experiences into gifts, at a certain stage in the reintegration of our memory, we will, nonetheless, hit a wall.
This brings us to the second type of memory, which I will call "transpersonal" or "akashic" memory; this is the memory of space itself -- whether imagined as an omniscient emptiness or an omnidimensional web -- in which all past, present, and future forms and actions coexist. Space projects us from off-stage coordinates. Some records are projected front and center, just underneath the spotlight, while others have disappeared into the basement of the theatre.
Each forgotten prop illuminates some small part of our story -- the story of pure energy translated into form, of once godlike powers that were squandered on a dare, of the egg that fear made pregnant, of the darkness that was once our oceanic womb, of myth petrified into history.
Biology holds tight to the three-dimensional book. Space instructs us to let go. True memory begins on the other side of trauma. Quite curiously, however, it need not begin very far on the other side; the most heavily armored intellect can be shattered by the flood of the near-death experience, as space empowers us to see the whole of our life-story in a flash.
In altered states, when then flames of Kundalini have demolished the Kali Yuga, when the music made by the planets has once again become audible, I have sometimes peeked at the unclothed body of creation, at Akasha, my first beloved, She has a face, in this version of the story, but has inexplicably not brought along her guards. She is brighter than 10,000 suns; she is blacker than the magic that gave birth to the Bindu. Our intercourse is perpetual, each playing his/ her part, yet this is not enough to correct the disproportion between our powers. Always, a clock's hand has returned me to the Earth.
I remember what transpersonal memory is; how it smells to the newly dead; what it feels like when it penetrates the heart; and how it dances without moving on the tongue. Sadly, I do not have automatic access to it now. As I age, each year my biological memory becomes steadily more disobedient; suspecting, perhaps, that my loyalties lie elsewhere.
If our "egos" are the end result of some process of contraction -- a process perhaps stretching many thousands of years back -- it is possible that this process has an end point, which we can also choose to interpret as a goal.
"Telos" is the self-organizing genius of the circle. Telos draws us through the 28 turns of the labyrinth, where our feet always seem to be pointing straight ahead; as we move, without interruption, from one world to another. There are no gaps in our records. We have never heard of sleep! We will one day declare victory in our war against the future.
Telos is an obelisk that hovers above the menstrual blood of the Deluge. Will these bones live? No; our cultures are disposable. Some bent scraps of technology are left poking from the mud. What fuel did those giants use? The end has come -- periodically, yet on a schedule known only to the Assembly Beyond Space -- and it is Telos who must activate the metalinguistic vortex; thus gathering home the broken letters of all alphabets. It is true that sequential traumas have tied our life force into knots, but there are few things in nature that move in a straight line. There is no reason that cosmogenesis should be any simpler than biogenesis.
Memory is the mind killer; it assassinates even gods. Elasticized, our psyches are stretched between the little and the big, as we are shown how a city can be fit inside an atom--with enough room for a galaxy left over. There is no place that will not become transparent.
Image by roel1943, courtesy of Creative Commons license.
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It was just after my
Through the looking glass
Hi “the music”,
Quoting Abraham Lincoln, you wrote, “Opposite where I lay was a bureau with a swinging glass upon it (and here he got up and placed furniture to illustrate the position), and looking in that glass I saw myself reflected nearly at full length; but my face, I noticed had two separate and distinct images, the tip of the nose of one being about three inches from the tip of the other.”
—How wonderful! Although I do not deal very specifically with the concept of the Double—also known as the Daemon— in this essay, you correctly zero in on the fact that this alternate version of the self is central to my argument. He/she/it is the vehicle for inter-dimensional exploration, as the physical mind/body is the vehicle for the exploration of the immediate world.
In the period of 1990-1992, I underwent a kind of apocalyptic breakthrough—a radical transformation of my energy system, which opened me to an almost daily interaction with my Double. Quite often, he would appear to me in the mirror, manifesting in a variety of forms—as a slight distortion of my normal image, a face peeking from behind my face; as a semi-independent shadow; as a radiant sphere around the biological body; or as a monstrous presence, alien and terrifying. Although the appearance of the Double is traditionally seen to be a harbinger of death, I knew this to be a test, and was determined not to overreact.
Somehow matter and anti-matter had met, head-on, and were in danger of destroying all projected structures. Perhaps some new self was in the process of being born? But no, this primal male/female self did not need to be created. Already, it was there—as close as one’s last breath; as violent as the sun; as dark as the new moon; as terrifying as the occult geometry of the ocean; as revolutionary as the first race of descending gods; as incomprehensible as what existed before the time-cycle.
During this period, I was working with a woman called Lee Cox, who was very energetically open, although her conscious orientation was that of a Pentecostal Christian. She felt no need to judge, and did not automatically classify each phenomenon as being either “good” or “evil.”
One day, I informed her that I was heading over to Chinatown for lunch—about a half-mile distant from where we worked—and would be back in about 45 minutes. Perhaps 15 minutes after I left, just as my food was arriving at my table, a being that looked almost like me, but not quite, entered through the doors of our workplace. He stared at Lee with wide, unblinking eyes, passed by without speaking, and then disappeared through another door.
When I returned to work a half an hour later, Lee looked fairly shaken up. Quite oddly, however, she knew exactly what she had seen.
The Double Dream of Spring
Gilberto
'Second by second and millennium by millennium, a great clock reveals the potentials of the Primordial Female/Male, whose dismembered body has been hidden in plain view.'
I wonder if Mr. George is referring to the original human being as both male & female and the alien meddlers creating two separate genders as a way to more effectively manipulate us.
The newly lobotomized Adam
Hi Gilberto,
You have asked an excellent question— as to whether “alien meddlers” have created “two separate genders as a way to more effectively manipulate us"—and I wish I could provide a simple answer.
Since I have a tendency to paranoia as it is—at least when it comes to politics, the media, and the world economy—I much prefer to set aside this reflex in my explorations of the “higher worlds.” Upon departing from the Earth, fear almost immediately takes hold of the Psyche, but I believe this to be a kind of theatrical effect—one that poisons our perception of the geometry in play.
Beings who do not have our best interests at heart may indeed have had some role in the dynamics of our history—although what is “good” or “bad” for us has yet to be determined—but in what way does this make the “alien other” unique? Many of our fellow “humans” also fit into this category.
In any case, while it is possible to perceive the division of the primal male/ female body as a disaster, as an act of violence that destroyed the original transparency of our consciousness, it is also possible that we lack a truly cosmic sense of humor. Putting fear aside, I tend to see the “alien overlord” as an alternate version of myself, and our opposition as a function of the large-scale movement of the time cycle.
The newly lobotomized Adam
Gilberto
Hello Brian, that perspective is certainly more empowering than the 'they're manipulating us and there's not much we can do about it' approach that I tend to lean towards when lazily seeking to rationalize all of my less than enlightened behavior & thought patterns. The idea that alien consciousness is an aspect of ourselves (and ours theirs) is far more interesting and is a crucial step towards ultimately unifying these aspects of the one consciousness. What great stories we will share when all of our exploratory 'selves' unite once again! The sooner the better!identifying & dissolving trauma
(If I understand) human reality = memory of trauma + memory of superconsciousness that overarches the trauma, or which contracts from existence leaving in its wake trauma. That is my experience. I still have jitters from the trauma, but my focus is on letting superconsciousness dissolve the shadows cast by trauma. My dream is that all trauma dissolves into superconsciousness, leaves our bodies, and finds eternal stillness in books and computer chips. The dream is not a goal, but something to witness and participate in/
Here is a vision I had of primordial contraction of superconsciousness from itself – Zim Zum. It is from 2000 (I posted this before to RS – can’t recall where.):
There were five naked women in a circle, looking up. The perspective was from above. They looked like a flower with five petals. The countenance of each was nymph-like and pure. Their faces were similar, but each had its own subtle character. Music was playing. Music was indistinguishable from the women’s existence, and that of the place they were in. It was a churchlike place inside God’s mind. God’s mind was the place where we were created.
The vision changed perspective. I was still in the churchlike place, but floating on my back with others, all of us naked, in a peaceful pool. I looked to the side and saw that all of us were side by side, like cells in an organism. We belonged there and flowed perfectly together as if we ourselves were water. Our eyes were gazing up into the high dome of the place.
I was at peace in the safety of our unbreakable belonging, and then the peace was suddenly annihilated, as it had been in the first instant of Creation. God tore us from his mind, jettisoning us into existence and time and space. Our Creation was synonymous with the obliteration of our unity.
Knowing nothing, my mind reflexively rushed back through the force propelling us into existence, time and space. I was reaching back through time for the balance I had lost, in the same way people do when they are preoccupied with the good old days, only it happened in a split second and instead of forty years
Like shrapnel, a scene of my story, as it was written in the Book of Life, punctured my mind. The Book of Life was a real thing to me, something introduced to me through my dreams. In waking-life I understood it contained the story of how God would use history to weave himself, as Jesus, through people back into existence. It was also about how people would be woven into one Family.
In the scene from the Book of Life, a voice said, “Rose Mary Pillowwater,” as I glimpsed her standing with Jesus in front of a lush forest. The air was fresh and cool. Rose Mary was wearing a hat. She was a beatific buddha in a world without violence.
We are such stuff as dreams are made on
Hi Amy,
Shakespeare, at the end of “The Tempest”, has Prospero (who is Shakespeare) say:
“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”
—Reading this, I cannot help but think of the Maya, in whose cosmology the four directions of the flat Earth are surrounded by an ocean, but not by a flat ocean; it is an ocean whose edges tower to the sky. The apparently solid Earth is surrounded on all sides by water—the raw material of magic, the element of inter-dimensional transformation, the catalytic power that turns nothing into something, and then something back into nothing.
We are “rounded” by a “sleep.” I would argue that both meanings of the word “rounded” are intended; we are not only “surrounded” but “completed”—each returned to his/ her original existence as a sphere.
(Just what did Shakespeare know, and when did he know it?)
“The great globe itself” is both the immediate theatre in which the play is acted out, i.e. “The Globe”, as well as the much larger planetary and metaphysical context. However vivid our perception of the present, and however emotionally compelling the events that draw us in, subject us to their power, and then sweep us off, some part of who we are perhaps always remembers “the great globe” that surrounds the tiny one, and the even greater “sleep” which preexists them both.
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” Shakespeare, significantly, does not say that we are “made from dreams”, but rather that dreams are “made on” us—as on a loom were the vertical and the horizontal axes cross, as on the omnipotent dummy of a tailor. What are dreams “made on”? Dreams are made on the explosive emptiness of space.
“Die before you die”—Rumi
Hi Jeff,
It is great to hear from you again. It sounds as though you have had some very similar experiences of the Double, and, like me, do not feel the need for any hard and fast system of interpretation.
You know what your experience is, if not exactly what the larger implications are, and are willing to follow your intuitions wherever they might take you. You trust that your guidance system will provide whatever signs and initiatory traumas might be required—such as that with the “praying mantis(!!!)."
There is always some odd sense that these events are happening on a schedule—a geometrically intricate one—whose pattern only becomes apparent later on. Suddenly, one day we stop and exclaim, “It seemed like such a horrible accident at the time, but where, or who, would I be if my life had gone more smoothly!”
Part of the problem with becoming aware of and attuned to the signals from this alternate self may be no more than a matter of terminology. If we refer to this being as the Daimon, then the word stirs up very spooky associations. He/ she/ it immediately becomes suspect, and we are only one step away from assuming this being to be evil.
If, on the other hand, we refer to this being as the Guest or the Beloved, as in Sufiism, then we automatically tend to assume the best. Al Hallaj writes, “I am he whom I love, and he whom I love is I; we are two spirits dwelling in one body.”
It is significant that the Double is fond of appearing in the mirror, where he seems at first to be an almost exact image of ourselves. The mirror is the doorway between the existent and the nonexistent—but which is which, and who are we to judge?
Upon entering through the looking glass, we experience a world that we only seem to know, but that operates according to a separate set of laws. Rumi said, “The mind sees things inside out. What it takes to be life is really death, and what it takes to be death is really life.”
2 Poems - Enjoy And Thanks For Double Dream Of Spring
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Maybe this elixir
Will bring me back to life
I've been dead for so long now
Was I your husband or your wife
Or the disciple of an alchemist
Reconfiguring the void
Did I decipher alphabets
Before they were destroyed
Who did I think I was
Was I someone that you loved
Did I have a name, I can't recall
What was I thinking of
Am I the herald of a revelation
Eternally concealed
Dormant intuitions cluster
Mist and fog congeal
Inside my head emanations drift
And there's a crypt inside my heart
In the crush of your grip, kissing your lips
I can't endure if we should part
Will I find release in the afterlife
When I awaken from this dream
Without fear or dread or earthly strife
Flesh and blood redeemed
Bedeviled
I call upon a nameless beast
Shunned but lurking still
In the portents of the shaman priest
Chanting on the hill
A malignity festering
In an outer unseen realm
A hideous, unnatural thing
Bending course and helm
Though forbidden I recall
Your glamour in my dreams
Rappings and whisperings
And a diabolic gleam
I half-remember in the mist
A wretched howling wind
Tentacles that snatch and twist
A mad bewildered grin
A palsied mumbler in a panic
Plaintive in the din
Iridescent, talismanic
Cadaverous and thin
What progenitor of cryptic lore
Spawned this lowly brute
Lonely, dumb, and creeping
And slowly taking root
“The Beast’s desire erects its face”
Hi Dark Nerve,
Thanks so much for sharing your poems. They are really more like spells or invocations. I can hear echoes of Blake’s “Songs of Experience.” The rhythmic pulse seems to be used as a means of intoxication, as a vehicle for exploratory flight. I have frequently used rhythm in this way myself, although usually in not so lyrical a format. Here is an excerpt from a very youthful piece, from around 1980, in which the rhythmic pulse—picked up as through by contagion from Blake— preceded the creation of the poem.
From “The Great Beast Unearths the Keys to the Kingdom of Agarthi”
“The great brain soars
Waste is no more
The lost are nowhere
To be found
The night consumes
The body’s whole
Slave breeders seek
A twice-born mom
Stern madam seeks
Dark death by mail
The shadow falls
Its magnetism grows
His pulse engulfs
What’s his by right
Particles spasm
At the speed of light
Corpse-destroyer
Steals light’s bones
Agarthi League
Seran-wraps friends
What’s eyed is owned
The code-net’s thrown
The trance-pulse ciphers
The flesh exposed
The Great Beast calls
His members rise
They spray paint corpse
Strap spare parts on
The living dead
Consume what glows
Great Beast unlocks
Agarthi’s genes
The Great Beast lays
What’s seen to waste
The particle
And wave reform
Re-membered form
Deflowers death
Rays violate
The haunted mines”
You may agree, or not -
- but I think you've incorporated some of Heraclitus' quantum remains an the journeys from that side of the river to this side of another river.
I'll happily read this more than once, to better see, touch, and taste what I hear...
Stace Tussel
“If all things were turned to smoke..."
“If all things were turned to smoke, the nostrils would distinguish them.”—Heraclitus
Hi Stace,
Heraclitus has certainly been an influence. Of the Greek philosophers, he is the one to whom I feel the closest. His short statements are like depth charges, which send shock waves through the strata of one’s memory. In their evocative brevity, his sayings might at first seem like haikus, but they function in a different way.
A haiku is a direct perception of a microcosmic/ macrocosmic intersection. It is often humorous, and reflects the poet’s rootedness in nature.
A saying by Heraclitus is a sign pointing to an object that has been removed. Ringed with alien echoes, it is more than a bit unsettling, and confronts us with the writer’s breadth of inter-dimensional experience; which, if we choose, can be interpreted as a threat.
Its pregnant opacity presents us with a kind of ultimatum; in this way it is similar to a koan.
BTW: It was a delight to discover your pieces on “Evolver Net.” “Cosmic Key; The Double Helix” and “The Cosmos “Neither Declares Nor Conceals” manage to stir up at least as many questions as they answer.
LET GO
Primordial Dream - The Unbegotten
Dreams frequently vanish from memory upon waking. They melt away in the light of day. This is why the visionary habitually reinvents himself, preferably in the twilight.
Certitude and precision do not thrive in the Dream, only faith and infinite space. Oddities and wonders, miracles and magicians make their home here. Angels and devils are commonplace. The Dragon dwells here too.
The Dreamer subverts order, bringing all of reality into disorder, translating the sights and sounds of other worlds. Occasionally he is successful. When he is successful he outshines the clairvoyant. Like bolts out of the blue, new insights come to him.
The Dreamer is first and foremost a traveler, an explorer navigating the realms of reverie. He is often more interested in the world of spirit. Material existence is not malleable enough.
He communicates quite effectively with the subconscious and subliminal self, transversing the boundaries of Heaven and Hell. Reflecting on the imponderables, he examines the paradox of life and death with enough impiety and blasphemy for both nihilist and optimist.
In order to transmit his visions the dreamer must become a metaphysician. Goaded by ideas and images, the metaphysician experiments with sacred dimensions but not in search of evidence. He is seeking impossibilities, pursuing his destiny without a ghost of a chance.
Wise folly is the dreamer's specialty, a talent he uses to explore the invisible realms. Reasoning power, madness, genius will only take him so far. It is the wise fool who helps him to complete his journey.
Sometimes the dreamer is a harlequin-gamester convulsing with laughter. Mediocrity and monotony are signs that his dreaming has not taken hold. Farce and fancy are the antidotes, the harlequin's anecdotes, the confessions and recollections of his life, remedial medicines for his soul and ours.
Acts of violence help to heal the nostalgic amputee
Hi Dark Nerve,
A wonderful comment! We seem to have visited some of the same places. You may be interested in a piece called “Artist’s Statement”, which is the section 2 from my book “Masks of Origin/ Part 2; Voyage to a Non-existent Home.” Here is the beginning:
“Artist's Statement
‘The I is an other’, said French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud. When I write or paint, from the age of 16 this has also been my experience—or perhaps that of the other, who appropriates my hand. As at preexistent moments, or with no cause—bit by bit, then suddenly, as soon as energy accelerates around the body and coheres, dismantling the ego—the one self empties, becoming not less but more. Moving from behind, a strange but oddly familiar shadow takes control. Both one and many, he/she can be harsh, and it is difficult to know to what extent our interests may diverge.
He/she is a teacher who communicates by paradox. I am fuel, or raw material. He/she is not concerned about my comfort. You might say that this is just a metaphor for the personal subconscious, but that explains little, at least if you think of the subconscious as being the bargain basement of the brain.
The alternate self is not an epiphenomenon of biology. I inhale. The other exhales; each dies the other's life and lives the other's death—as Heraclitus said. Forces are few when the nonexistent first appears. There are not many actors. The different parts of my consciousness now assume archetypal roles; I am he and/or she. Waves break in the background. Hallucinations erupt from the red ocean. It is dawn.
Treating the dream as a kind of ultimatum, able to exist in a state of ‘negative capability’—until the synchronistic symbol reinvents the dreamer in its image, creating the world, each day, through the primordial act of speech, the true artist can execute the role of “shaman” for his culture. Regressing in the service of the ego, he exists at the perpetual moment of creation. She subverts the boundary between self and other. Memory becomes transpersonal.
A mysterious conjunction projects my body/mind towards an unknown destination. I am an electric spheroid. Musical. Crackling with contradictions. As from a great height looking out and down, I observe that this is so. Desire creates a corresponding body. An ancient audience watches from the circumference. Should cloud separate from the oceanic mirror, my prosthetic limbs would flash like lightning. Cultures sit down on chairs around the table of my solar plexus. An argument is about to start.”
A Non-existent Home & The I As an other - Yes...!!!
Often I act as an 'intermediate' for various agents, riding the waves as semi-familiar voices compete for my attention.
I stopped watching tele/vision. I'd rather open to other channels of communication.
Perhaps spirits of dead parts of myself yearning to make my acquaintance again.
My work reflects an ongoing exploration of and fascination with assorted mythic realms, and multidimensions of the imagination.
For years, I've been interested in poetry as an act of conjuration or spellcraft, taking as a given that archetypal space/time is fully inhabited with various aspects of the soul/self.
I'm currently working on a more articulate vision of the myriad paradoxes and enigmas that exist within that barely visible continuum, giving shape to various psychic forces and attempting to manifest the often unseen, calling forth the unknown and perhaps unknowable into the realm of the known.
I liked what you said about the teacher communicating by paradox. There is always an argument about to start, that is for certain.
I do believe these various aspects of consciousness extend in different directions from a common point and have no unique limit or have infinity as their limit.
When I meet the contrary that is myself and the other, I do so in hopes of translating the more obscure aspects of my knowing/known self.
Here are two more published pieces...enjoy...!
Thanks for the feedback...!
Incubus
I'm a stinking rabble dabbler
It's the patter that I rap
When I strike the frenzied babbler
It's more than just a tap
Tainted and chaotic
Unruly from the start
As grotesquely unmelodic
As the reconciled heart
Torn and misbegotten
In a medley of dismay
Incomplete and shortened
And mangled on the way
The pattern that I mold
Is too nebulous to grasp
It's barbarous and old
But perfect for the task
Of losing what you want
Before you even ask
In the dark a lonely haunt
Peeping through a mask
I'm the tongue without a view
The mind aptly out of reach
Rambling, misconstrued
Stranded on a beach
The wound that opens like a mouth
Without the gift of speech
Belated answers blurted out
Widening the breach
Straggling anomalous
Revoltingly obscene
Stridently anonymous
But hungry to be seen
Foretold
Sibyl, my governess
Diverted and adrift
What prophecy bound by your circle
Sputters from my lips?
Talk to me
As I think aloud
Scribbling frantic script
In open court
Without reserve
In the face of this eclipse
The dark diviner strikes a light
And trees of knowledge burn
Wrangling augurs glimpse the truth
That wiser fools unlearn
Second sight Cassandra
Ostracized and spurned
Mantic maenad chaperone
Delirium confirmed
If there is nothing more to be said
Which way do I turn?