Habits of the Heart
1
Liberty the Spiked Goddess Calls
In Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, the five authors -- R. Bellah, R. Madsen, W. Sullivan, A. Swidler and S. Tipton -- explore the ways in which contemporary Americans use private and public modes of thought to make sense of the world around them, even as that world is swept from under their feet. This book is the result of a research project in which more than 200 people were interviewed. Out of this number, the authors choose to focus our attention on four individuals, who represent the four dominant orientations found among the larger group. Each of the four is mature, intelligent, responsible, and involved in caring for others. These are people who act on their beliefs. Each is living proof of the magnetic force of Liberty -- that spiked goddess who draws home both the best and worst of her abandoned populations.
Like the dream that gave them birth -- which now exists in a state of suspended animation, and to whose upkeep they contribute -- each of the four presents both a solar and a shadow aspect, of which the first is on view. Neighbors would not hesitate to describe their characters as good. Each is successful in his or her chosen career, life path or calling. Each is at least normally self-aware.
At first glance, we would say that they were happy. As we come to know them, however, we realize that each wrestles with a similar and unacknowledged sense of isolation. Although confident as to their own choices, actions and values, all of the four find it difficult to articulate their relationship to any larger structure of shared meaning. Whether explicitly or implicitly, all seem to assume that there is something arbitrary about their goals -- that they may well be building hallucinatory castles out of sand.
But how much do we really know about our place within the time-cycle, or of how each act connects to the precession of the equinox?
Perhaps roles chosen before the present world existed are only just now coming into focus. There are ultimatums, no doubt, that we have chosen to ignore. Future versions of ourselves may be reaching backwards to destroy our habitual right/ left oppositions.
It is always possible that it is not 2008; somehow, we have gotten the year wrong. Even now, the archaic lifestyles I record may not exist outside of this essay.
2
Postscript
And we, the last survivors of the deluge, having boarded our UFOs, might comment on the signs that pointed to the freefall of the world economy, as though we were beyond it, as though the one self could be separate from the many. But hyperspace is not a shelter from the storm. It will leave no intellect standing.
3
Crusade of the Subcontractors
Said William Carlos Williams, "The pure products of America go crazy." Traditions divide. History was bunk -- a nightmare from which we alone with all of our true values had escaped. Dreams that have only half emerged from the nonexistent unite us. No roots connect us to a natural location. A moment's inattention has removed our trust in the permanence of the material object. An off-course plane, a box cutter to the neck can result in the destruction of the World Trade Towers. Paranoia invades the body politic like a virus.
Flat Earth patriots prepare to burn the Bill of Rights on the altar of the counterrevolution. Dead heroes are loaded into transfer tubes. Collateral damage corrects the balance of deception in Iraq.
Such drama attends the crusade of the subcontractors of Halliburton! Human capital helps to grow the technology of the organ harvest. Death gives meaning to the disaffected. There is no bread left at the circus, and there does not need to be any. Repetition turns the Big Lie into truth. Chaos integrates the collective unconscious. It appears that there are those who hate us for our universal values. Are the ignorant jealous of our wealth and beauty, or do evildoers hate us just because we are good? They should leave us in peace to act on our vision of the future -- if we have one, and whatever that might be. This assumes too that the individual can be proven to exist, that we know what freedom is for, that a word does not mean its opposite, and that each self can articulate its purpose to the other. There is a hunger in the heart for some larger structure of shared meaning that cannot be micromanaged by the media. It does not respond to myths of infantile omnipotence.
Meaning need not be imposed by fiat from above. Instead we should look more closely at the subtext of our daily actions. Small leads to big; the personal becomes the political, once again; destruction introduces the common wisdom to its shadow; the newly transparent body becomes a template for the city. Memory becomes an attribute of space, as correspondences subvert the spell of repressive desublimation, in turn prompting the oppressor to exhale a sigh of relief. "Only connect," said E.M. Forster. Reports of the death of Social Darwinism have not been greatly exaggerated. The future world is waiting for the past to arrive; it just hasn't done so yet, having taken a 5,125 year detour. Alternatives to fear grow. A symbol invites the inanimate object to dance. Being present is the key that opens the locked door to the macrocosm. Our values exist; we do not need to create them. Shared goals ask for permission to be conscious. How does this relate to Habits of the Heart, and to our view of the four subjects of the study?
Like many of us, the authors argue, these four individuals are much better at getting what they want than at determining what it is they should want.[1] They are even less prepared when it comes to offering an interpretation of the American Dream -- which has traditionally been understood as a dream of "freedom from" rather than "freedom to."[2] Centuries of struggle have brought us to this place. Is the ultimate goal of freedom only for each individual to do his or her own thing?
4
Exemplary Lives
Brian Palmer is no longer a workaholic. A period of reconsideration followed the collapse of his first marriage. He is now devoted to his second family -- but in exactly the same manner that he was formerly devoted to his work. Things could easily change again -- with a new romance, a few gray hairs, or even the most arbitrary of changes in the weather. To Brian, the great thing about California is that anything is allowed. The main requirements are to not harm others, to be affluent enough to afford a house, and to indulge whatever habits you may have behind the safety of closed doors.[3]
For Joe Gorman, the goal or a good life involves service to one's family and community. Oddly, Joe does not choose to see his extended family too often. Suffolk, the town in which he lives, is not really a traditional community at all but rather a "bedroom community" -- the majority of whose residents commute to work in Boston or to the large industrial parks in the surrounding suburbs. Joe inhabits the Suffolk that surrounded him as a boy -- a place of lazy afternoons at the soda fountain of a drug store, a place where white males argued politics at the barber shop, a place founded by the pilgrims in 1632. Joe does not see the same Suffolk as his neighbors -- upwardly mobile professionals drawn by the momentarily low housing prices -- who have no interest in history, and are glad to put Joe in charge of all commemorative celebrations. They will soon move somewhere else.[4]
Margaret Oldham is a therapist, for whom the goal of a good life is for each person to develop a mature sense of autonomy. No external demand should compel us. We are not answerable to the needs of others; in turn we should expect no assistance from them, except what they might freely choose to give.
As nature is red in tooth and claw, no guarantees will be offered to the Calvinist elect. Justice is blind. The modern therapist does not see evil in the machinations of the growing crypto-fascist state. Victims attract their abusers. Margaret says, "I just sort of accept the way the world is and then don't think about it a whole lot." Life is difficult. Relationships take work. Industry brings happiness. Rich frat boys with a history of addiction can go on to steal the presidency. The poor are free to inherit large amounts of wealth. Help is available at fair market value. Freedom, in the last analysis, is no more and no less than the freedom to walk away. Except by law, Margaret does not believe that she is responsible even for her own children.[5]
Wayne Bauer is a political activist, for whom the goal of a good life is the creation of a level playing field -- in the form of a society in which not only procedural but also some degree of distributive justice reigns. The poor would be free to compete on equal terms with the rich. He gives us little sense, however, of what a substantively just society would look like, or of what would really change following the day of liberation. The new society might look very much like ours --except that everyone would have an equal chance of getting a good job. Poverty could then be attributed to some genuine moral defect.[6]
Each citizen would be free to live out of a shopping cart beneath the underpass of a highway. There is, after all, only so much land along the coast of Malibu; it could accommodate only a few more than the existing number of houses.[7]
5
Opposites Attract the Past
Freedom can be interpreted as a presence or an absence. As an absence it is pregnant with a myth. As a presence no incarnation could be equal to the archetype. Opposites point to a common origin. Divergent readings of shared values lead to an unacknowledged war. Enemies can be found in one's own family.
Conservatives turn radical. Practitioners of the Tao of bait and switch, they objectify mass fears to introduce the brave new world by stealth. Neo-Federalists advance a strategy to suspend the Constitution. Leviticus replaces Christ. Death by stoning serves many purposes. Torture is again allowed. Militant Calvinism destroys the strategic hamlet it would save.
Wal-Mart uproots the last of the mom and pop businesses. As it laments the permissiveness of 1960s, and the child rearing practices that supposedly led to today's crop of sex and violence crazed narcissistic youth, the right pursues a reductionist agenda of every man for himself -- and himself alone, without regard for the social order that gives birth to the individual, the powers that protect him, or the shared resources that contribute to his growth. Born again materialists incite a war of any against all. Answerable to his version of the American Dream alone, the free economic agent is not a situated subject.
It is true that we are not "from" here, are we, any more than we are from "there"; but no act of faith can remove the ancient quarantine from the farm. There is no love lost between Earth's overlords and their livestock. Grace manifest as fear has aimed a death blow at each object that once bound the destinies of the young at heart to nature. Omniscient software is at hand. A Federal Freedom Net will soon monitor the e-mail of each citizen -- the least of whom could pose a clear and present danger to the corporate fascism of the state. Each suspect word will be tagged. Each insult to the true cross will be color coded for immediate or future use.
"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law," said Alistair Crowley, occult superhero and supporter of National Socialism. Here opposites attract. Crowley was also a darling of the counterculture. His books were fun to read after dropping LSD.
Following the injunction to "do what thou wilt"—for his own profit or in service to a cause, who can know—Prescott Bush, the grandfather of the current president, acted as a financial intermediary for the Nazis throughout the whole of the1930s and into the beginning of the Second World War. For this he was censured by Congress in October, 1942, when five firms controlled by Union Banking Corporation, of which he was a director, were seized under the “Trading with the Enemy Act.”8 According to Charles Higham, former investigative reporter for the New York Times, it was feared that prosecution on a charge of treason would lead to an untimely scandal—not that any time would have been good—and “would have drastically affected public morale, caused widespread strikes and perhaps provoked mutinies in the armed services.” At the war's end, the federal government seized an additional 18 firms that were controlled by the UBC.(9)
The enemy combatant looks very much like us. Six million plus skeletons fit comfortably into the closet of the oligarch. There is space left over. Compassionate conservatism may yet cleanse our homeland of the eugenically unfit.
6
The Enigma of the Sign
Though the champion of the common man, the left can be contemptuous of the superstitions that now hold sway in the Corn Belt. Social science will create a better Average Joe. Red state patriots are happy to return the contempt. The Clear Channel markets propaganda as consensus through the behaviorist technology of talk radio. The Big Lie also spreads like a virus. We must take heart, as even icons of disinformation are not always wrong.
Marxism has been discredited, and has vanished from all but a few strongholds, such as North Korea and Cuba. At the same time, as pure doctrine, its mystique grows ever stronger at the humanities departments of our major universities. The center left carefully keeps its distance from the edge, but also sacrifices a good part of its passion in the process. Unionized dock workers will not again engage in pitched battles with the police force of San Francisco, as they did in 1934, or impose their alternate order on the streets. Social justice as an immanent aspect of the real has now fallen into disrepute. Unions dissolve; their creators take with them the last living records of that year, of the death of greed, of the flash of mutual self interest that turned chaos into care.
Their descendants believe that it benefits the economy when a millionaire does not pay taxes. Warfare keeps us safe. Civil liberties are a threat to freedom. It is not cars but trees that pollute the atmosphere. The happy warrior takes a step back in order to leap forward.
A vision of archaic solidarity haunts the progressive imagination. "It takes a village to raise a child," wrote Hillary Clinton, quoting an old African proverb. This proverb was repeated to me by a friend from the Ebo region of Nigeria who, as it turned out, picked it up from reading Clinton's book. One may safely wonder if the anthropologist was told only what she wanted to hear -- even if this required the invention of a proverb.
The concept of social justice works better as a description; deconstructed lifestyle enclaves leap from the pages of a National Geographic. It is important that one not issue ultimatums to the living. One should not pursue an object just because it is good; one should pick, if one so chooses, the least bad or the most attractive object from the great variety that free trade with the third world makes available. Reluctant to take the moral initiative, to employ the word "should" or to reclaim the language of individual responsibility from the right, the left now advances a philosophy of incremental causes. Bold futurist experiments give way to the shoring up of relics from the Great Society.
"Liberty Leading the People", Eugene Delacroix, 1831
7
Damned If You Do; Damned If You Don't
The spiked goddess Liberty has a surfeit of defenders. Free traders scream for the growth of corporate welfare. All risk will be public; all benefits will accrue to the one percent, as is only fair. Radical feminists join forces with Christian reconstructionists to eradicate the scourge of pornography. Mind/ body orgasms rape the 144,000. Such violence is an initiation; it does not have much to do with sex. Alien wisdom will enforce the return of a solar cult, to be fed by a species die-off. We are heading nowhere fast.
8
Nostalgic Industries Reconstitute the Ideal
Right and left change places; unconscious myths create unnatural alliances. Perception lags behind the fact of interdependence in this technologically most complex of societies. The Human Genome Project has stamped its seal of approval on the engine of our descent. Reverse engineering will remaximize the conditions for our growth.
Why should it be so difficult for each good individual to explain the meaning of his actions, or to put her purposes -- already clear -- into the context of the macrocosmos, or to talk to a tree? It should not be difficult to create a circle out of stories, as other cultures have, or to celebrate the mute expressiveness of objects, or to touch the Earth, or to recognize the full existence of the other. It should not be difficult, but it is. The hand of a demiurge has intervened. We do not inhabit space. We are new -- although ancient evils corrupt us. Reality is virtual. Homeland security depends upon the reproduction of logos.[9]
"Character is fate," said Heraclitus. The external world provides each subject with the nurture he deserves. Accidents enforce the law. The subjective world turns inside out. Values diverge. Paths intersect. Is there anything human for which the self is not responsible? Does good character compel us to speak truth to power, to correct injustice, to defend the orphan and the widow? There would be a price to pay; our arrogance would upset the predetermined order.
Though wealth is no proof of providence -- as nothing could be -- perhaps poverty is a more certain sign that one is not of the elect. Luck is a tribute to the true values of the self. Injustice is the price of a civilized society. Hard labor teaches the unenlightened to obey. Exploitation by the Carlyle Group improves the net value of the wilderness. Exxon will transform the demonic wastelands of the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge. Grace cannot be earned. Wealth cannot be redistributed. The transcendent watcher legislates from above. Emerson wrote, "Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did today, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor?"[10] 150 years later we are waiting for an answer.
Luckily, the past does not exist. The future has not yet been created. A golden egg floats on the ocean. Archetypes are unmanifest. Symbols cannot act. There was no race before us. America is itself a dream. Do we have some obligation to those not present, to the dead or the unborn, to those who cannot speak for themselves? In his draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote that our settlement here was "effected at the expense of our own blood and treasure, unassisted by the wealth or strength of Great Britain" -- forgetting how recently the British had defended the young colonies from French and Indian attacks.[11] Fathers exist to be killed. Mothers more quietly disappear.
So too we are convinced that we have given birth to ourselves -- "ex nihilo." There is no one like us! There never was, never will be, and therefore we owe nothing except what we choose to give to anyone. The self is good. The other is -- at least potentially -- bad. The best government governs least, and all schemes to relate the self to the macrocosmos are suspect.
This approach provides us with a maximum of latitude to act. We "do what we will," but it is only chance that interprets what will come from the subconscious. We are free to create a place for ourselves, a hermetically sealed space to which no gods have been invited, and, if we are not happy, then we are free to walk away. The approach makes it difficult, however, to determine the true meaning of an action. If a part exists -- however perfect its autonomy -- the fact that it exists implies also the existence of a whole, as well as some just proportion between the two. If the whole does not exist then the part means almost nothing. Moods arise. Phenomena come and go.
Let us now return to Habits of the Heart. Again, let us ask what freedom is for; we should ask also if we serve some end beyond the self, and, if so, whose. Are we parts of one living whole? If we are, does this interconnectedness limit or expand the true potential of our freedom? Can the one be many? It is not that the four contemporaries from chapter 1 do not share in a common moral language. This language does exist-the authors refer to it as the "first language of individualism"[12] -- but it is not adequate, in and of itself, to allow them or us to address the nature of success, the meaning of freedom, and the requirements of justice upon which the creation of a good society would depend. As the power of the multinational conglomerate grows, it is paradoxical that our response is to define ourselves more narrowly. To each his own.
There is an almost tragic contradiction at the heart of the American Dream. If each of us is endowed with ultimate freedom -- not only to pursue our own happiness but also, if we choose, to ignore any demands that might be placed on us by others -- then it becomes difficult if not impossible for us to collaborate on any common project. Society becomes a blind accretion of competing interest groups. Reconciliation is projected backwards as the dream of a simpler time --that never was, in which the corrupt industrialist lay down with the wholesome worker to be exploited.
As the perfect is the enemy of the good, so too freedom -- as abstract ideal --subverts the potential for true liberation. No conceptual framework exists that would now allow us to translate the American Dream into reality. At the moment, it is best experienced through the golden haze of nostalgia.
9
Telos; the Wayward Comet
Revolting against fate, we can also project our desire for completion on the future, as though it were somehow different from the past. Six of one, a half-dozen of the other. The more things change the more they stay the same; it is not so easy to escape from the habits of the heart. We are the ghosts who inhabit the dead bodies we create. We are haunted by the Real. It is possible too that our habits are the teachers that we search for, however bad they may be. We are the archeological footnotes to a world that never was, the memory of which has been implanted in our genes; thus each act of our history has already been recorded. We, the slaves of post-traumatic stress, are true experts in the renovation of the labyrinth. But this is not the "future world" of which I earlier spoke.
__
Notes
1) "Habits of the Heart", Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swider, Steven M. Tipton, University of California Press, Berkley, 1985, page 21
2) "Freedom from...freedom to", "Habits of the Heart", Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swider, Steven M. Tipton, University of California Press, Berkley, 1985, pages 23-25
23) Brian Palmer, "Habits of the Heart", Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swider, Steven M. Tipton, University of California Press, Berkley, 1985, pages 1-8
4) Joe Gorman, "Habits of the Heart", Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swider, Steven M. Tipton, University of California Press, Berkley, 1985, pages 9-12
5) Margaret Oldham, "Habits of the Heart", Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swider, Steven M. Tipton, University of California Press, Berkley, 1985, pages 13-17
6) Wayne Bauer, "Habits of the Heart", Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swider, Steven M. Tipton, University of California Press, Berkley, 1985, pages 17-20
7) "There is, after all, only so much land along the coast of Malibu", "Habits of the Heart", Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swider, Steven M. Tipton, University of California Press, Berkley, 1985, page 26
8) Duncan Campbell, "How Bush's Grandfather Helped Hitler's Rise to Power", Guardian UK, Sept. 25, 2004.
Marc Ash, "Standing on the Dead", Truthout, Jan. 22, 2003.
Webster G. Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin, "George Bush; The Unauthorized Biography", Chapter 1; "The Hitler Project", www.tarpley.net/bushb.htm, 1991
9) "Homeland security depends upon the reproduction of logos."-"Logos" is used here as the plural of "logo", or corporate emblem; it is not "logos", the metaphysical concept.
10) Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Essay on Self-Reliance", quoted in "Habits of the Heart", Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swider, Steven M. Tipton, University of California Press, Berkley, 1985, page 56
11) Thomas Jefferson, Draft of the "Declaration of Independence", quoted in "Habits of the Heart", Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swider, Steven M. Tipton, University of California Press, Berkley, 1985, page 55
12) in "Habits of the Heart", Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swider, Steven M. Tipton, University of California Press, Berkley, 1985, page 20
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Comments
Culture cage
Crazy crossed wires frizzing miles and miles of toxic channels carved through your synapses through long fermentation.
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.
Mr McKenna stated’ culture is not your friend’. He wasn’t wrong.
Are you wearing clothes or are you the clothes?
People who formulate the rules that drag your life do so as promising young management types, enthusiastic interns; they evolve the dream until its twists. If you buy in who knows what will happen?
Truths are only evident in the pit of the stomach or the centre of the chest.
Plant vegetables or create your thing and chuck away the television or magazine.
The Enigma of the Labyrinth; Any Wrong Turn is Correct
Hi somatics,
I do believe that we—as the collective embodiment of the vision on which this country was founded—have reached an impasse, but it is an impasse only in terms of our own level of understanding. All of my work is premised on the assumption that the universe coheres in a state of multidimensional perfection; it cannot be broken. This, of course, presents us with a paradox, since Time would appear to break all things. Without being “broken” the Primordial Male/Female Body cannot act or reproduce, and creation would remain a hermetically sealed dream.
You speak of a “double edge sword”, and in this intuition you are correct; the energy of the trickster is never far from my thoughts, and a love of paradox is at the heart of my creative method. When faced with mutually impossible alternatives the mind can jump to a different level of connection. Ends and beginnings are not necessarily different.
Here is an excerpt from my essay “Ananse and Eshu; Liberation by Subversive Knowledge” (an exploration of the role of the trickster in West African tradition):
“If the cosmos is a wheel that is not different from a sphere, a calabash whose upper and lower halves are each the image of the other, transcendence need not move only upwards. Any movement upwards must not only be balanced by a movement downwards, it is, in a sense, that very movement downwards. Kaleidoscopic flux is integrated by the spokes of an unbroken wheel. If the cosmos is whole, darkness is not a threat but an energizing potency.
Any movement on the surface of a sphere becomes its own opposing movement. The world traveler approaches himself or herself from behind. Up becomes down. In becomes out. Then becomes now. What appears to be contradiction is the great kaleidoscopic turning of the sphere. Movement activates the agents of the invisible, as the sphere moves from abstract into living form.”
Habbits of the Heart
Gilberto
Hyperspace is certainly not a shelter from the storm. Although we (seemingly) escape, we only set the stage for a return to the same situation. Perhaps different settings, time periods, characters (genders), etc. In my humble opinion, the lesson not learned is the lesson gladly returned. Although I do like the option of escaping for a cosmic nap and dealing with certain things later....
Transparency is the only shield against disaster
Hi Gilberto,
My sense is that we are entering a period of transition in the relationship between dimensions, in which the interaction between the vertical and the horizontal axes will be redefined. No exchange will be fixed, and a shock wave will run upwards, through the “higher” worlds, as well as outwards, through the global body.
It is possible that there will be no non-participants in the revolution against History; that the “past” and the “future” will be seen as our wayward children, as flawed but necessary aspects of a project that we undertook long ago. At the moment, I feel that I am being carried forward in a small boat on an ocean, with no real way to steer. No matter, since even the small boat must go; all transport must begin and end with the body, in its role as a primordial vehicle.
Collectively, we are approaching a near death state, and the knowledge for our own good hidden beyond death is beginning once again to speak. There is no time like the “present” to confront the projection of our fears. At a certain stage in our initiation, it may dawn on us that trauma is not other than a door to ecstasy, or, conversely, that ecstasy may be the best way to interpret trauma.
“Non-attachment” is often seen as a meditative accomplishment, but it is naturally present, for a time at least, in the normal near death experience, as it may be also in the current transition between worlds. The freefall of the world economy may force us to make a virtue of necessity; we are picked up by the hair. Each ego must become a movable “omphalos.”
I Hate America
It is possible that there will be no non-participants in the revolution against History.
¥ou think? It seems to me that most Americans are happy to sit back and enjoy the show with a tub of popcorn. I look around and see zombie robots and then people with a light that shines around them. It becomes obvious who is ascending and who is not. I still clench my teeth every time some loud-mouthed American screams to me across the street, "It's not Halloween!" because costume is my form of social dissent. These cowboy fuckers see a gorgeous queen of a woman in her full sequined Egyptian attire and then think that an appropriate response is to scream rudely across the street to make her feel like crap. Am I to have compassion for their sheer idiocy and rudeness?
I think the problem with a sample study of taking four well-meaning Americans and writing a book based on the American Dream is that most Americans are stupid as hell. I apologize for being so vulgar about this- but freedom in this country has seemed to turn into the right to shut other people down. The internet has been launching demonic energy at me as a result of tagged words in my Election Art Battle, and I am having to fight multi-demented black magicians and demons right now to get them the fuck off of Earth. Please don't misread my passion for anger. I am immortally pissed. I am also strangely at peace in the battle of the multidimensional war of which I am now a part. I will not let them take me out. The fates of Sirius and Earth are interwoven. The veil between the dimensions has fully opened- at least from where I'm standing, grabbing demons and sending them back to the dimension from which they sprang through the Halls of Amenti- on a good day.
I do believe that America is a fallen country. The greatest hope for Earth's macrocosmic political schema/shmegma is having countries opposed to America (which is like every country in the world besides maybe Britain) forming alliances with the Galactic Federation since America has already made their alliances with the Draconian Federation/Orion Empire. I'm curious what Obama will actually be able to do, though I heard he supports the New World Order. I still think America is the ultimate puppet government as par for Orion corporate oligarchic tactics, though at least our new president has a soul.
I know I'm shooting off the hip off-topic (was the topic America?). I hate America. The End.
"You people are dead, but what a strange manner of being dead."
“You people are dead, but what a strange manner of being dead. Anyone might say that you were not.”—Cesar Vallejo
Hi Joan,
1) Where have all the red-blooded cowboys gone? They have no doubt been replaced by Wall-Mart employees, who, in their down time, wear even larger cowboy hats. Little do they suspect that they are actually metrosexuals. The lack of carnal fixation on the part of the Arizona male does not bode well for our culture. In Boston, we still have construction workers who would be more than happy to demonstrate their traditional sound effects and mating calls.
It has been a long time since I have been subject to the type of ignorant behavior you describe—so long, in fact, that it almost makes me nostalgic.
During the early 1970s I did quite a bit of hitchhiking, and I would often find myself in roadside diners. One of my favorite pastimes was to see to what extent I could provoke the redneck truck drivers there assembled, without actually having to get into a fight. Most often, it did not take much to push them over the edge, since my hair, in this period, was two feet long. Having grown up in a working class neighborhood, I could also quickly backtrack, if I had to, to find some bit of common ground. If ideology was the most apparent weapon, humor was the most effective shield. It did not pay to be offensive beyond a point, since this same group was my most immediate source of transportation.
Ironically, it is now the redneck truckers who have long hair, while I keep mine reasonably short.
2) If certain people were not ignorant, why else would you need to have compassion for them? Already, they would be members of the elect.
I can only hope that my other-dimensional teachers do not withhold their compassion until I am perfect; that would certainly be quite a wait.
3) In my essay “Memories of Mr. Trippi; The Trauma of an Urban Shaman”, set in 1972, I explore the origins of my current spiritual orientation. An upsurge of Kundalini had destroyed my rational mind, and inner exploration—a matter of life and death at this stage—had supplanted all desire for external revolution. In the essay I write:
“The moon was a vehicle. The true sun was black. Pursued by implanted memories, we were pawns lost on a flood plain of spent symbols, the victims of atomic bioengineering, the playthings of omnipotent beasts. We were the horizontal shadows thrown by a vertical geometry. Our bodies were not other than symptoms. Our brains the materialized fallout left from the sabotage of the hall of records.
I had discovered a poem by Cesar Vallejo which in part reads, ‘You people are dead. What a strange manner of being dead. Anyone might say that you were not.’ –These were my thoughts, exactly. I continued my back-breaking work on the scaffold of a Micronesian volcano, producing a few more pages for my journal, a few more drawings. Several weeks went by as I explored the non-local field, during which I let my homework accumulate.”
—Since then, my attitude towards human ignorance has changed, more on some days than others, but I still have immediate access to the emotions that I felt. When I find myself relapsing into judgment, however, I prefer to look at those parts of myself that I perceive as being “dead”; it is a place to begin. Any large scale surgery on the Body Politic I must trust to those with more ideological “pep.”
4) As regards the statement that you quote: “It is possible that there will be no non-participants in the revolution against History”—I certainly did not intend to come off sounding like an optimist! Few have ever thought to accuse me of such a thing. Instead, I meant to suggest that we all will be swept up by the unfolding of the time-cycle, for better or for worse, as we have been by the collapse of the world economy; “there will be no non-participants.” This sentence should be read in the context of the one that follows; “At the moment, I feel that I am being carried forward in a small boat on an ocean, with no real way to steer.”
If we are, in fact, involved in some vast process of cosmogenesis, it is always possible that we do not need to know more than we do; as fetuses, our job is to be what and where we are.
5) Change is inevitable; I would not want to place any bets on what form it will take.
The archetypal city and the desert of the real
Hi cj,
Telos is the magnet that rearranges History, the end in which all actions have been present from the beginning; it is the hospital where the gods recuperate from their addiction to our blood, the total recall institute, the museum of alien art, the stone whose transformations are beloved by the philosopher. Where it goes, we go; and it goes where it damn well pleases.
If Telos is the transpersonal object that creates us- our mother/ father, muse to the development of character, in politics the judge of courage, and is in some way of more importance than the subject who perceives it- such a tribute is all very well and good; it nonetheless only gains power through its contact with the Earth.
Of course, praise the transmission that removes the GPS remote-controlled collar. Gifts are owed to the mother of all environmental battles. Fathers will meet death by fake terrorist ambush at the crossroads. Telos is as unimaginably strange as each individual's life. The revolt comes together, the burning of the Rose Bowl, the contest over GW's bones, the planting of explosives at the feet of the miraculous spiked statue.
Egos have no place in the post-apocalyptic technocracy. But always, we begin where we are- happy to be one self made from many, with a raw will to exist that no hand can appropriate.
Mute immigrants, abused children, slaves to the dollar, we pick ourselves up by the bootstraps to greet each day as the first. Our past is obscure. The product of global engineering, turning noon into dusk clouds move in from the North. Grey cities buzz like honeycombs. Artificial suns have been set up. The present world looks darker than it is. The future is inconceivable- almost; it is also closer than our breath.
We are the radioactive descendants of the giant race Nephilim. We are the playthings of a force that acts absurdly from a distance. We are actors- with a conscious part to play. Through masks (personae) we project our voices to the back of the dead but still interested audience. We are the subjects whose narratives will at length transform the desert of the real.
Telos attracts. It does not ask that we do what is not already in our nature. This creates a problem- a Gordian Knot that we do not have the technology to cut. We are good and bad. We answer to a force that does not give clear instructions. Help us! cries the subject. Says the Telos: No- you must help each other. History subjects indigenous actors to a test. Overdetermined symbols wait years for the unveiling of the Kairos. Find your center. Exit through the door. Our dreams have the power to create appearance.
The Walking Dead
The persistence of the 3-dimensional book
Hi Dave,
Thanks so much for your response. 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. 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 just what Kundalini does; at the beginning of each cycle it can be sent forth 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; that 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 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.
Here is the end of a poem called “After the Rig Veda”, which explores how the different aspects of the time-cycle fit together. The last third or so of the poem reads:
“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 1 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.”
hermetic resurrection of the heart
I love this piece, Brian.
Your qualification that it is not a social critique is helpful. It makes it easier to look past frustration with collective “habit.” As it is, the collective is faultless (or perfectly faulted), seen through your apocalyptic deconstructions and reconstructions, measuring it from the perfection of the universe.
You wrote: Without being “broken” the Primordial Male/Female Body cannot act or reproduce, and creation would remain a hermetically sealed dream. This beginning is as easily overlooked as the end is unanticipated – the end being reunion with the “hermetically sealed dream,” only this time in consciousness instead of unconsciousness; in multiplicity instead of unity. I believe that the ultimate implication of the death of the so-called American Dream is its rebirth within the hermetically sealed one.
“There is an almost tragic contradiction at the heart of the American Dream. If each of us is endowed with ultimate freedom— not only to pursue our own happiness but also, if we choose, to ignore any demands that might be placed on us by others— then it becomes difficult if not impossible for us to collaborate on any common project.”
Yes, in the hermetically sealed dream there is no need to organize collaboration. Life happens as in a dance. It does now, only it is not recognized as such.
Maybe there is some drunkenness in the air. Had McCain won, this piece would have seemed much darker. Still, the world is so dark that I cannot bear it or be myself without being positivistic – meaning that I would have laughed in a carefree way had the Man won yesterday.
Here, in the face of your juggernaut of perfectly jagged existential truth, I still need to round the corners with positivism (not optimism – positivism, or the certainty that the world is as it should be, and where it is not I will laugh to keep from crying) - though I know it is ultimately about Time and perfection, and that opposites prove a point that transcends them.
For me this was the essay’s nod to positivism: Why should it be so difficult for each good individual to explain the meaning of his actions, or to put her purposes— already clear— into the context of the macrocosmos, or to talk to a tree? It should not be difficult to create a circle out of stories, as other cultures have, or to celebrate the mute expressiveness of objects, or to touch the Earth, or to recognize the full existence of the other. It should not be difficult, but it is.
I might continue, “but it is when the self is so indistinct and has not yet reached the impasse where it recognizes its indistinctness, let alone its distinctness.”
Ceci n'est pas une pipe
Hi Amy,
You wrote, “Your qualification that it is not a social critique is helpful. It makes it easier to look past frustration with collective “habit.” As it is, the collective is faultless (or perfectly faulted), seen through your apocalyptic deconstructions and reconstructions, measuring it from the perfection of the universe.”
Although, on some level, I always knew that this essay was not really a social and political critique, I did not fully acknowledge the fact to myself until I wrote the words to Dave Hanson. In the same way that a painting by Cezanne is first and foremost a painting by Cezanne, and only secondarily a depiction of a landscape or a still life, so, too, any essay by Brian George always ends up being an essay by Brian George. I am also reminded of the Magritte painting of a pipe, in which, beneath a photographically detailed picture of a pipe, there are the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”, or, “This is not a pipe.” There is a cosmological context that precedes and follows any more particular examination of an issue. Hence, the four female suns at their round table and the explosion of strange objects over Nuremburg; I was hoping that these illustrations might point readers in the right direction.
The Theatre of the Zodiac
Hi Don,
Thanks so much for your response. As always, it is a pleasure to hear from you.
Part of the difficulty with interpretation that you describe has to do with my background as a writer; I had written many books of poetry before turning my attention to prose. Even when I start out by trying to be as direct as possible, as I did here, each piece I write tends to go through several dozen revisions, and, in the process my tendency towards paradox tends to reconfigure all ideas. I do not think in terms of either/ or oppositions. And lately, as I struggle to push beyond the whole concept of duality, I find that most social and political modes of discourse are inadequate to the moment. Part of the process of coming to terms with the crisis that we face has to do with following where each contradiction leads; at some point to reenter the clear consciousness that surrounds us.
Often, I imagine that the Zodiac is a theatre, at the center of which is our small, illuminated stage. The Assembly Beyond Space has memorized every action in the drama. Ideas are the paper stage-props that our future selves will remove. The actors will be too big to even fit inside of the theatre.
Trial by paradox
Hi Don,
There is an excellent translation of the Rig Veda by Wendy Donniger 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.”
the infinite pumpkin
HI Don & Brian, the comments really helped me get my mind around the piece, too.
I was thinking, “What if Brian were to write a piece about his writing, his process, its background?” And you in fact did that in your reply to Don – and maybe those thoughts are already exhaustive, but perhaps there is more to offer that would help bring readers into your incredible pumpkin and its infintiy of seeds: a primer on your universe that tones down poetics as much as possible, and is a sort of skeleton key to understanding them. I mean, what if you could make Obama listen and understand? But, I know, that's not his job.
Still, in 2010: The Year We Make Contact, the President of the -->-->-->United States-->--> is played by a black actor.
About this thought: The actors will be too big to even fit inside of the theatre, I dreamed the characters from Oz were as big as hemispheres.
Ghosts of futures passed
The immanence of the "future world"
Hi Gary,
Thanks for your somewhat cryptic comment. It is a poem really, as slippery as a fish, and is a good illustration of the “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” logic to be found in the Rig Veda, about which I had spoken just above. My imagination could take a statement like “History is littered with the ruins of the future” in any number of directions, all of them productive. At the same time, in trying to get an overview of how your three simple sentences fit together, I can empathize with those readers who find the density of my style to be a challenge.
You have left it up to the reader to create a context for your words.
There is a kind of world weary humor in the statement “Tomorrow is yesterday, only a little more expensive.” This might lead me to impart a certain fatalism, or even cynicism, to what follows. But the lines “History is littered with the ruins of the future. We step over them every day” could just as easily be read as a visionary statement, along the lines of “The Kingdom of Heaven is spread out all around you, but you see it not.”
Did you mean to imply that the future already exists, in and of itself, or did you mean that we were surrounded by the ruins of failed social engineering projects?
Here are a few quotes from my work that may or may not relate:
My book of essays “Masks of Origin/ Part 1; Regression in the Service of Omnipotence” begins:
“Has the future a location? Yes. It came before itself. It was!”
In my essay “The Reconstruction of the Primal Lion”, section eight ends:
“Aeonic Speech by stealth now reconstitutes the genome. Space becomes more intimate than a sex act.
There are not many actors on the stage of the 1-inch city. Our future ancestors had found it necessary to cut the zeros from large numbers. Each actor plays several, and quite contradictory, roles. It is certainly possible that the Shadow is not different from the Guide; that each punishment is a test; that we must learn to interpret each obstacle that he puts in front of us as a symbol. There is no drama that has not ceased to exist. We are the fossils that our perfect avatars collect for their amusement.”
"In the year two thousaaand....
. ..in the year two thousaaaaand!" :)
"Before Hitler was, I AM" -Aleister Crowley
Hi ecolocal,
During the 1930s, enthusiasm for the Fascist cause was far more common than we tend to remember, even on the part of mainstream figures like T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats. Does it surprise you that a person whose own mother referred to him as “The Beast” might have had certain Fascist tendencies, if only due to his love of rites and symbols?
You are correct that the links between Crowley and Fascism are speculative, and, after doing a bit more research, I was surprised to find out how tenuous they are. There is, however, a widespread belief that such links exist, often fostered by those who knew Crowley well. For example, in his book “The Medusa Head; Conversations between Aleister Crowley and Adolph Hitler”, John Symonds, Crowley’s literary executor, argues for a direct connection. If not entirely, or even slightly, factual, these conversations nonetheless ring true in terms of Crowley’s serpentine intuition and tendency to provoke.
Symonds has Crowley say:
“I never met... someone as demonic as Herr Hitler. Why do you think I spend so much time with him? And come when he bids me? I tell you only the universe can prevail against Hitler. But the universe for the present doesn’t seem to be interested; though Hitler is the enemy of the universe, that is to say of God; for the universe is only God’s instrument. It is as if God said, “Let mankind learn a lesson; they need to open their eyes a little wider. Hitler will do that for them. Just wait. They will see things that men have never seen or heard before—such horrors that there will be no word in the German or any other language to describe them.’ That is what the demonic is when it appears in a very ordinary person, a man of the people, someone the intellectuals are contemptuous of but not the masses. With an uncanny instinct, they know who he is.”
It is no doubt best to read this as mythology, but there are also actual clues to follow. While living in New York, Crowley did publish several dozen pro-German articles in “The Fatherland” and “The Internationalist.” (How sincere these were is anybody’s guess.) In Berlin, during the 1930s, Crowley’s roommate, Gerald Hamilton, was a Nazi spy. JFC Fuller, Crowley’s friend and a member of the OTO, was also a prominent figure within Mosley’s "British Union of Fascists." Crowley’s disciple Marthe Kuntzel had become infatuated with Hitler as early as 1925, and had sent him a copy of “The Book of the Law” in a German translation. Peter Levandra, in “Unholy Alliance”, writes, “Crowley had told her that the first country to accept the law would become the master of the world, and Ms. Kuntzel was determined that it should be Germany.”
—Into these connections we can read as much or as little as we want.
What I had most immediately in mind in my reference to Crowley in the essay was the tone of archetypal inflation to be found in statements by both Crowley and Hitler.
Here is Hitler, as quoted by Ruaschning, (National Socialist President of the Danzig Senate in 1933-1934):
"The new man is living amongst us now! He is here!" exclaimed Hitler, triumphantly. "Isn't that enough for you? I will tell you a secret. I have seen the new man. He is intrepid and cruel. I was afraid of him."
"In uttering these words," added Rauschning, "Hitler was trembling in a kind of ecstasy."
And elsewhere:
“We must be brutal. We must regain a clear conscience about brutality. Only then can we drive out the tenderness from our people ... Do I propose to exterminate entire nationalities? Yes, it will add up to that ... I naturally have the right to destroy millions of men of inferior races who increase like vermin ... Yes, we are barbarians. We want to be barbarians. It is an honorable title.”
Here is Crowley from “The Book of the Law”:
“Let my servants be few and secret: they shall rule the many and the known,” the communicator revealed. The message continued: “We have nothing with the outcast and the unfit; let them die in their misery. For they feel not. Compassion is the vice of kings; stamp down the wretched and the weak: this is the law of the strong: this is our law and the joy of the world. … Love one another with burning hearts; on the low men trample in the fierce lust of your pride, in the day of your wrath. … Pity not the fallen! I never knew them. I am not for them. I console not; I hate the consoled and the consoler. … I am unique and conqueror. I am not of the slaves that perish. Be they damned and dead. Amen. … Therefore strike hard and low, and to hell with them, master. … Lurk! Withdraw! Upon them! This is the law of the Battle of Conquest: thus shall my worship be about my secret house. … Worship me with fire and blood; worship me with swords and with spears. Let the woman be girl with a sword before me: let blood flow in my name. Trample down the heathen; be upon them, O warrior, I will give you their flesh to eat. … Sacrifice cattle, little and big; after a child … kill and torture; spare not; be upon them!”
And finally, in a statement from the 1930s:
“Before Hitler was, I AM.”
Still, Crowley often seems to be playing games inside of games, and it is often fairly difficult to determine where his actual sympathies lie.
Night of the long wands; imprisonment is no proof of innocence
Hi cj,
1) You are no doubt right about Karl Germer, and I have removed the reference. During my research, I had come across a number of conflicting statements about him, and I was not sure how to interpret them. It does seem possible, according to some accounts, that Crowley himself believed that Germer was a Nazi spy at the time of his acceptance into the OTO. It is true that Germer was arrested on charges of being a Mason in February of 1935, but he was released in August of the same year. This was part of a general purge of all occult groups in Germany by the Ahnenerbe, the Nazi office of occult affairs, which should be read more as a consolidation of power than a repudiation of any particular belief or group. Even former enthusiastic supporters of the Reich were arrested, tortured and killed.
2) The roots that connect the various esoteric groups and traditions are unbelievably tangled.
3) Since the late 1980s, Miguel Serrano, the author of “Nos; Book of the Resurrection”, “The Ultimate Flower”, and “The Visits of the Queen of Sheba”, has been one of my favorite writers on esoteric subjects. Serrano was a friend of Jung, as well as of Hesse, Nehru and the current Dalai Lama, and I had always assumed that his relationship to fascism was similar to that of Jung- an overlap of esoteric and mythological preoccupations, expressed on a higher plane of ritualized symbolic action. I was shocked, about six months ago, to discover that Serrano was an honest to goodness Nazi. In later life, he became the leader of the Chilean Nazi Party and the proponent of a doctrine known as “Esoteric Hitlerism.”
What to do with him? Most progressive thinkers would simply condemn him or write him off- without, of course, actually bothering to read his work- but anyone whose relationship to the "Collective Unconscious" is more than theoretical will instantly be struck by the range and depth of his explorations. Luckily, I have spent many years in cultivating my ability to embrace both poles of a contradiction, and can honestly say with Walt Whitman, "I encompass multitudes."
4) Since the posting of Richard Merrick’s “Building a Religion”, I have been thinking a lot about the link between harmonic theory, esotericism, the pursuit of the Ideal, and Fascism. I was fascinated by the information that I came across on Julius Evola, Rene Guenon, Fritjof Schuon and others, whose Fascist sympathies often go unremarked when they are mentioned in such magazines as “Parabola.” Evola, for example, began as a Dada poet and painter. During the 1920s, he devoted all of his energies to becoming a magus and a Tantric adept, and then moved on to develop a close relationship to Mussolini and the SS, before becoming “apolitical” at the end of the Second World War. Guenon and Schuon would prefer to be known as “Radical Traditionalists”, but all of them could easily be characterized as “Spiritual Fascists.”
Interestingly, there is a considerable overlap between Fascist and New Age preoccupations. If you slipped much of this writing into a New Age magazine such as “Atlantis Rising”, few readers would bat an eye. In all of the “Radical Traditionalists”, there is a great preoccupation with the Platonic world of Ideas, sacred geometry, access to higher dimensions, alternate theories of history and far-flung myths of human origin, the concept of the Self, the transformation of the mind and body through contact with primordial energies, and the creation or restoration of a “world culture”, among other contemporary themes. There are so many puzzling connections within connections. Jocelyn Godwin, who wrote an excellent book on Robert Flood, the Renaissance metaphysician, also wrote the introduction to a translation of Evola’s “Men Among the Ruins.” So far as I know, Godwin does not have any right wing tendencies. Translations of number of Evola’s books have been published by “Inner Traditions”, which I believe is a part of Bear, and Co., the prominent New Age publishing house.
History, the future, and our perspective on them
Dear Brian,
I am a great reader of aphorisms, although not necessarily a great writer of them. As you note, a good aphorism ( you call it a poem) provides a tough kernel of thought - a kind of 'all day sucker' - that allows you to chew on it at length. Sticking with the food metaphor for a moment more, it's a kind of chewing gum that doesn't lose its flavour after five minutes.
My remark about tomorrow being yesterday is really a gloss on Gurdjieff's reply, when asked by one of his students what the future will be like. "You know what it will be like. Tomorrow will be exactly like today - unless you work on yourself." I add the thought that it will be a bit more expensive - in a superficial way in terms of the economy, but also in a perhaps more serious way, in the sense that unless we start working now, any change in the future will cost a great deal more effort.
My feeling about the "ruins of the future" is a reflection on the ironic way in which visions of the future age more rapidly than anything else. Nothing looks older than some superceded idea of what 'the future' will be like. Think of all those 'modern' 1960s apartment blocks, or those visions of flying cars and people with huge brains that frequented pulp magazines in the 30s and 40s. The future dates badly. It is odd how monuments that, however questionable the aesthetic, were geared toward the 'timeless' (and this can be any statue of any forgotten hero of the 'empire', like the many that pepper London, where I live)seem to age less than those aimed at celebrating some glorious 'future'. I recall when I was in Prague some years ago, visiting some ex-Soviet sites, and seeing how run down and abandoned monuments to the great future were. One in particular struck me: a statue of a huge rocket, aimed at infinity, nestled in old newspapers, plastic bags, and other rubbish. I know that some people read this as pessimistic, but we need to remember that our ideas of 'the future' are a product of our present, and are informed with all the elements of it. Which is to say that when we talk about the future we are really talking about ourselves. And just as visible monuments to the future age rapidly, so do invisible ones - meaning our ideas about it. Personally, I try to remain open so that I can be surprised by what turns up. On a perhaps more optimistic note, I am a great believer in Jean Gebser's notion of 'latency', the idea that future potentials and possibilities are present in a latent form now. In many ways, though, I think we need to slough off our 'ideas' about the future, so that what is latent can materialize.
I can't help but remark on your comments re: Serrano, Evola, Guenon etc. Serrano was a virulent neo-Nazi, and I'm sure neither Hesse nor Jung had any idea of his true character when they allowed themselves to be importuned by him; they were both very old men who allowed a younger 'fan' to ingratiate himself. I write about him in Turn Off Your Mind. Likewise, I examine the far-Right and fascist leanings of a number of 'esoteric' celebrities such as Evola, Guenon, Schwaller de Lubicz, and Mircea Eliade in my Politics and the Occult, which has just been published by Quest Books. Sadly there is a long association between esoteric and occult thought and far-Right politics, although, as I try to make clear in the book, there is a kind of left, 'progressive' occultism as well. Crowley's political beliefs were motivated by personal expediency more than anything else, but it's clear that the Book of the Law ('channeled' , as far as I'm concerned, via nothing more than his taste for Oscar Wilde and bad English translations of Nietzsche) envisions a 'future' embodied in many ways by National Socialism.
Oddly enough, I'm writing this in Munich, where I've been on holiday and also doing some research for a book on Jung. Through one of those strange synchronicites that often happen when I'm starting a book, a few days ago it was the 85th anniversary of Hitler's 1923 beer hall putsch. (Needless to say, there weren't any celebrations here.) Twelve years later, in 1935, by which time the Nazis had been in power for two years, on the same day as the putsch (Nov. 9) Hitler had the bodies of his followers who had been killed in the failed attempt moved to his 'Pantheon' of heros in Koningsplatz. It was eerie and not a little bit disturbing to find myself standing in this huge square, realizing that 73 years earlier, that madman led a massive march here to commemorate the deaths of the thugs who helped him almost take over the state ten years in advance. My imaginative grasp of that 'past' was helped by reading a gripping contemporary account of Nazi Germany, Germany Jekyll & Hyde, by Sebastian Haffner. If anyone wants some insight into how a highly cultured, spiritual and eminently civilized people could fall under the spell of a brutal, coarse, and ultimately banal thug, read this book. Although I lived in London during the Bush years, I did travel back to the US more than once during the height of 'patriotmania', and saw more US flags hanging from windows or gracing T-shirts than I had ever seen before. Although comparisons with Nazi Germany were inevitable and, in some cases, not too exaggerated, we should be thankful that conditions in the US never reached the kind of totality exhibited in Haffner's book.
The abduction of the household robot
Hi Gary,
1) You wrote, “My feeling about the "ruins of the future" is a reflection on the ironic way in which visions of the future age more rapidly than anything else. Nothing looks older than some superseded idea of what 'the future' will be like.”
My daughter and I have often commented on this fact while watching shows like “The Jetsons” and “The Other Limits”, or movies like “2001.” (!!!?) In the 60s, it was a part of the common wisdom that each family would possess a household robot, who would help to unload the groceries that one transported in a flying car. Vacations would perhaps be spent in a transparent and fully automated resort on Mars; not that anyone would really be in need of a vacation, since, with the ultimate triumph of the New Deal version of social justice, few would be forced to work more than several hours a day.
— Even the wildest flights of imagination did not hint at the ubiquity of the cellphone and the personal computer, or that “easy credit” at 28% interest would usher in a new age of indentured servitude.
2) At the end of my essay “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness; Interdependent Origins of the Good Society and the Telos”, I reminisce, with a deep nostalgic ache, about my childhood in the 1960s, and juxtapose the open-hearted idealism of that period with my present, far more paradoxical, attitude towards the future. The essay ends:
“The good must be powerful, more powerful than the ignorance (not evil) that opposes it, and— even in failure—its proponents can never afford to regard themselves as victims, or their cause as lost.
The good—although it exists, in another form, beyond us—depends on our power to transplant its image onto the Earth. We must choose, perhaps tragically, in the full knowledge that whatever choice we make will contain a mixture of (historically conditioned) elements, and that the path we choose will create us also in many unexpected ways. Always, we must remember that means have a way of turning into ends. The malefactor of great wealth is us; we cannot wish him harm without invoking a judgment that will soon or late fall on our own heads; he too deserves to be happy—but perhaps his attention must be forcefully redirected.
A ritual war has repeatedly started and then stopped between the illuminated public and the Calvinist elect; it looks like any broadcast of the news. We are not alone, and perhaps do not need to know too much more than we do. What is lacking is the will to act on what we know. Shopping is not an appropriate response to the destruction of the World Trade Towers.
As a child growing up in the 1960’s, in the shadow thrown by the atomic bomb, like almost every American I nonetheless believed that the human race was destined for the stars. Our technology had gone from a biplane at Kitty Hawk to a nosecone on the moon in just three generations. From the horrors of World War II came our love of flying-by-the-seat-of-one’s-pants inventiveness. The voyage to the moon was guided by banked computers with even less power than a cellphone.
We have lost our faith in each other. We have lost our intuitive sense that the future is a magnet with the power to rearrange the present in its field—and thus we have misplaced our capacity to grow. A dream is looking for some symbol that existed prior to the war between the subject and the object.
In itself, the origin is perhaps continuously present; it is only to our perception as the actors of a story that the ideal appears to be each day further off. The spiked goddess Liberty that we had rescued from the underworld has once again withdrawn in silence to the shadows. But perhaps, after all, it will not be necessary for each citizen with amnesia to reinvent the wheel.
The lost city built from archetypes is a true hallucination. The hub at the center of so many diasporas has not ceased to exist.
What is the nature of the good society that free individuals should join together to create?
It is finally not possible to buy or sell the planet Earth. Free energy is in charge, as Telos points to our interdependent trauma as the most ancient source of wealth. Virtue portions out keys to the good society. Near death experiences reverse the objectification by one self of the unwashed many.
Telos is a seed—that contains within itself the code for the transformation of the microcosmos.
Only subjects can free from the power of the simulacrum the still revolutionary genius of the real.”
Good Nietzsche translations
Varuna’s snare and the long arm of the shadow
Hi Gary,
You wrote, “Serrano was a virulent neo-Nazi, and I'm sure neither Hesse nor Jung had any idea of his true character when they allowed themselves to be importuned by him; they were both very old men who allowed a younger 'fan' to ingratiate himself.”
—If only things were that simple. Having read most of Serrano’s correspondence with Jung, it does not surprise me at all that Jung would have volunteered as a mentor. Serrano’s work is a peculiar synthesis of modernist and archaic elements, and he often seems to be speaking from the depths of the “collective unconscious.” His first book, “The Visits of the Queen of Sheba”, is, I believe, the only literary work to which Jung wrote an introduction. Serrano had many of the virtues of a great pioneer in consciousness, but, quite oddly, he never developed any real awareness of his Shadow. There is no way that Jung could have predicted such a glaring lapse in psychic integrity. Even in retrospect—from the distance of more than half a century—it does not make any sense.
This is an excerpt from a letter that Serrano sent to Jung. It is matter of fact in tone, and gives clear expression to an experience that I have also had;
"I remember that when I asked you in Locarno about the chakras, you said that they were 'centers of consciousness', and then you gave me their Sanskrit names. But a little while later, when I was talking with Dr Jacobi about the same thing, she said that chakras were not centers of consciousness but only of energy. Nevertheless, I know that you were right, for from my own experience I have discovered in my body what might be called distinct zones of consciousness.
Sometimes in the early morning, I have a feeling that my dreams come from different parts of my body. Some come from the knees, for example, and even after I wake up I can still feel them. If I don't interrupt them with rational thoughts, they continue to vibrate, and the images proceeding from my knees, or rather preserved there, flow up like a river towards my consciousness, or towards the light of day. Other truths like these can come from the heart or the belly. It is because of these things that I think a total being, totally conscious in all of its chakras, must be round, like the being of the alchemists, or like the stars and planets."
I was, as I have mentioned, shocked, to discover that Serrano was a Nazi; but this has only made it a more pressing challenge to translate and to analyze the glyph of his psychology. For the work itself—at least in the books with which I am familiar—does not in any way resemble propaganda. It is dense and provocative, yes, and perhaps disturbing in its echoes; but each reader is free to develop his/ her relationship to a subject.
Here is an excerpt from the introduction to “Nos; Book of the Resurrection”:
“In Nos; Book of the Resurrection I have been forced, as I said, to violate the aesthetic formula, so as to introduce lengthy semi-conceptual, but always symbolic, passages, which apparently break through the web of a parallel world in order to situate themselves in another one—thus forming the arrows which assassinate time. Of course, they are the defects which are necessary for a grandiose ultimate diapason. (‘This face does not have enough ugliness in it to be truly beautiful.’)
EL/ ELLA; Book of Magic Love, the work which preceded this one, sought the reintegration of him and her, the recomposition of the primordial Cosmic Egg. However, in the Initiation of A-Mor, which Nos; Book of the Resurrection attempts to reveal (with great fear and difficulty), I am going beyond the Androgynous of the beginnings, in search of an absolute differentiation, the Absolute Personality. I imagine that the ultimate solution is a leap into the Void, over the Sahasrara chakra, from the peak of Mount Meru, where the Magic Wedding of Siva and Parvati took place. Their union in sacred matrimony is called Gandharba—the Heiros Gamos or Mysterium Conjuntionis. From there the intention is to reach Sunya, the seeming Void, the Non-existent Flower, the definitive separation of tantric ecstasy: Kaivala as opposed to the Vedantic Samadhi. That is to say, the magician as opposed to the saint and the mystic. The ultimate aim of the Hyperborean Initiation of A-Mor.”
—Archetypal poets should probably stay far away from politics; it is only the theatrical element that really interests them. The desire to integrate the practical and symbolic realms of action can get even the most intelligent of explorers into trouble. Turning backwards from the ocean of the psyche towards the world, it is all too easy to overestimate one’s knowledge, and to underestimate the complexity of the trap that has been set.
Serrano
Well, I read Serrano as well and I have to say that while I found Nos interesting - I read it years ago and perhaps would feel differently now - I found other works of his less so. One book, Mysteries, seems a morbid example of blood and death worship. At the time Serrano knew Jung, Jung was depressed, and although he was one of the most famous men in the world - certainly the most famous living psychologist - he believed that no one understood him and that he was writing into a void. So I'm not surprised that he would welcome the attention of an enthusiast, who also happened to be a Chilean diplomat, able to drop a few names, like Arnold Toynbee and Arthur Koestler, who Serrano also befriended. My impression is that his acquaintance with Hesse was less involved. Perhaps because Hesse had been given the Nobel Prize and had achieved the kind of serenity Jung says accompanies a maturation of the ego (individuation) he was less inclined to accept the attentions of a 'fan'. But I could be wrong.
I have to say though, that the fact that Serrano believed Hitler was an avatar - an idea he shared with the rabid neo-Nazi Savitri Devi - puts him my bad books at the outset. Likewise Evola, who is a better, more incisive writer. That he tried to ingratiate himself with a regime founded on terror, hate, and crude barbarism gives Evola a very bad smell, regardless of how brilliant his books are - and they are, in parts. When esoteric ideas break bread with cretins like these, its time to chuck those ideas out the window. There are enough non-fascist examples of esoteric thought to occupy us. Having written about Evola, Guenon, Schwaller de Lubicz and others of their sensibilities, I find it difficult to appreciate their mystical insights when their political nastiness is so apparent. Jung at least admitted that he had 'slipped up' when, in the early 30s - before the anti-Semitic terror that led to the 'final solution' really got going - he suggested that Hitler might be a means to a kind of creative rebirth in Germany. He had the courage to recognize he had made a mistake. Schwaller de Lubicz never renounced his anti-Semitism, Evola railed against democracy until his last days, and a mainstream philosopher like Heidegger remained silent on his own brief but nauseating embrace of National Socialism. Eliade too never repented of his association with the Romanian Legion of the Archangel Michael, who became better known as the Iron Guard, or the Romanian Nazis. Read these people, grasp their ideas, recognize what, if anything, is of value in them, and then drop them. There are enough less odourous thinkers to occupy us.
P.S. to CJ above: I didn't learn to write in a "university writing class," if indeed your remark about one is supposed to suggest this. I learned to write in the forge of freelancing, where you're either good enough to get paid for what you write or you're not. I know about Nietzsche's translators because I have been reading Nietzsche since I was 17 and, as with all my interests, took the trouble to find out as much about him as possible. Ignorance may ensure an unruffled read about someone you like, but it makes for poor material to think with. As someone who spent quite a lot of time reading Crowley (everything, including the poetry), and also practicing his magick, at this point it's clear to me that there are a heckuva lot more interesting people to discover.
The “Future World” is not the “World to Come”
Hi Gary,
1) I do not in any important way disagree with your assessment, but I prefer my Fascists to be stupid thugs, whose repetitive diatribes are made up of clichés. In figures like Serrano and Evola, we have access to the mystery of human evil. It is the extent of their own intelligence that condemns them; we cannot dismiss their work as a mere symptom of social pathology, but instead must come to terms with the expression of an active, metaphysical force.
For me, such figures act as a kind of “koan”; instead of, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” I contemplate “What is the sound of an encyclopedic memory turning against the light?”
2) —Some more thoughts on the location of “the Future”:
I had thought of using the following paragraph as an epigraph for “Habits of the Heart”, but decided that it was a little bit too long. It is from “The Alef-Beit”, by Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, and reads:
“The only completely ‘closed’ letters in the Hebrew alphabet are the 'Samech' and the final ‘Mem’, the circle and the square. As the engraved letters of the ‘tablets of covenant” given to Moses at Sinai penetrated through the tablets ‘from side to side’, the ‘insides’ of these two letters, being entirely closed, were suspended in midair, within the stone of the tablets. Rabbi Chisda said: ‘the Mem and Samech of the tablets stood miraculously.’ In Kabbalah it is explained that these two letters are the secret of the two levels of the future revelation of Divinity to Souls. The closed ‘Mem’ is called …‘the Coming World’, and the ‘Samech’ is called …‘the Future to Come.’ The Future to Come is an even higher revelation than that of the Coming World. Grammatically, the phrase ‘the Coming World’ (in Hebrew) can be understood in the present tense—or even the past—as well as the future. Thus the Coming World is in truth the revelation of the future comprehensible to the present and the past. The Future to Come, the secret of the ‘Samech’, is the absolute revelation of the future, incomprehensible to the present…”
The “Coming World”, as I understand it, is the end result of the process of “Tikkun Olam”, the dynamic of historical “repair”, in which we have been engaged for the last 5000 years. It is towards and upon this “world” that we project our desire for perfection.
The “Future World”, on the other hand, is not subject to our mechanical opposition of the “future” to the “past”, and, though beyond our knowledge, it is perhaps not beyond the realm of our active imagination; it corresponds to “Atzilut”, the “world” from which all others “emanate”, and to the body of “Adam Kadmon”, the “Primordial Man.”
This figure is a variation on the Gnostic concept of the “Aeon”, the Primordial Female/ Male; who exists outside of time, but whose spherical form encompasses all of the energies of the time-cycle.
-a question for Gary Lachman
Hi Gary,
A friend of mine who is not currently an RS member asked me to pass along the following question:
"Gary Lachman wrote this comment in one of his posts on your thread:
'but it's clear that the Book of the Law ('channeled', as far as I'm concerned, via nothing more than his taste for Oscar Wilde and bad English translations of Nietzsche)...'
In that comment he's seems to be suggesting that he thinks Crowley's BOTL was a work of fiction, not channelled material.
Could you ask him if that is what he is inferring and how he came to that conclusion?"
Aiwass = I Was
It's not that the Book of the Law is fiction, it's just bad purple poetry, full of Crowley's particular interests. If you're familiar with Crowley's poetry and his predilection for rather 'decadent' writing - Swinburne and so on - it's not difficult to see that the Book of the Law isn't very far removed from his own style. It is also crammed with contemporary allusions, Wildean and Nietzschean motifs. This suggests that it wasn't 'channelled' from some objective, third-party intelligence, but came out of Crowley's own psyche. This is also true of the visions he reports in the The Vision and the Voice. Crowley was always too obsessed with himself to allow the psychic room as it were for something other than his own huge ego to occupy his inner world. If you compare his accounts of visionary experience with, say, Jung's encounter with the unconscious following his break up with Freud, I think you can see that where Jung seems to have really encountered manifestations of what he called the 'objective psyche', Crowley never escapes himself. Crowley himself admitted as much, when, in the Confessions, he writes that he only ever felt free of his obsessions and hungers when he was mountain-climbing. He seems in those instances to have had some authentic 'mystical' experiences, at least the kind of peak-experiences that Abraham Maslow writes about. Crowley admitted that at those moments, he could chuck away all of his demonism, his need to shock and give the finger to the bourgeoise, as well as his interest in magick. Alas, once he left the mountain top all the serenity evaporated, and he was back doing everything he could to promote his insatiable egoism.
To put it another way, if you know Crowley,there is nothing in the Book of the Law that's surprising. Jung said the entities he encountered told him things he had never and most likely would never have thought himself. This led him to feel that his interior world was like a forest, in which all sorts of creatures lived. 'He', the ego center named Jung, was just one of these inhabitants. Crowley's inner world was chock full of Crowley, and little else. This is why I think its a shame that many people get their introdution to the western esoteric tradition through his work, and come to equate the westen inner path with Crowley's.
I'm gonna get that Wabbit!
I have to laugh!
People villify Hitler and then see Roosevelt and Churchill as saints, evidently.
The winners write history according to their lights.
Hitler? A madman indeed. And all those who fought him?
Sane?
Why don't we talk about the dichotomy of the INSANE fighting the INSANE?
What is it being asked about here?
'Well, I think ZERO is above all things!'
'Well, I think ONE is above all things!'
Interesting. As for 'zero', it means nothing to me.
As for 'one', it is a limited number.
Not happy with 'nothing'? Not happy with 'one'?
What you gonna do about it?
They say 'variety' is the spice of life.
I'm rather in favor of that. Better to have options than to have no choice at all.
Yet, what is an 'option'?
Everyone wants to be a 'savior', and that, evidently, means: 'come 'round to MY point of view!'
So 'cults' grow.
What the 'hell' is this? Varieties of 'intellectualism'?
And what is daily life amongst the 'meek'?
People value most of all KINDNESS, and FAIRNESS.
People grow crops, cultivate plants, feed animals, and make and do . . . all for the delight and/or nourishment of others.
And we need 'LEADERS' for this common-sense daily activity because . . . why?
Some people, evidently, have over-active adrenal glands.
They have 'visions' they believe are theirs alone.
These are the 'giants' who will take our daughters and marry and produce 'men of renown': read 'elites'.
Evidently there is a principle amongst us all that hates such and mocks such.
From amongst our very own midsts, comes a very rebellion to both 'genius' and 'slowsky's.
We accomodate ourselves to the idea that what has 'retarded' us is 'monstrous', and what 'accerlates' us, is 'advanced'.
We are addicted to the idea of 'evolution' as being most 'egalitarian', and yet we also allow that the 'poor' are just 'destined to the trash-heap'.
Hitler was actually subject to hypnotism by Marx because he reviled Marx. He didn't 'turn the cheek', he gave energy to what he reviled.
And then he strengthened a principle that we have as of yet not quantified.
As soon as we try to 'universalize' ANY opinion as if it were an expression of PRIMAL REALITY, we invite attack and even warfare upon that.
If anything substantiates the concept of a multiple universe model, it must be when someone enunciates: HERE IS THE ANSWER! or says: I CAN EXPLAIN IT ALL!
Life lives a principle as of yet not delineated. It isn't fully captured by any form of intellectual model or speculation. We are unwilling to say: 'I don't know'.
And if we are willing to say 'I don't know', we still append to it: It can be known!
We are not able to add to that upon what grounds it can be 'known'. It is just a kind of 'faith'.
History is full of examples of individuals who have had faith, and by persistence, made that faith 'knowing'.
Yet, with such 'knowing' and 'knowings', we have as of yet not been able to project them into some system or systems of 'all knowingness'.
We are continuously surprised.
We are ever re-writing our 'dogma'.
We don't even, as of yet, have any definite delineation of what 'scientific method' fully comprises.
We have as of yet, not allowed that a part of scientific method must exert 'faith' in order to test what-all is involved with 'faith'.
If there is a power that is inactive untill believed in, and when active, must be kept as utterly internal, how can that be adduced or reduced to some quantification?
While that may seem to be an arbitrary series of queries for an 'alpha point', it only represents one amongst many millions of potential 'alpha points' or beginnings of enquiry.
If a power is only active when believed in, belief or 'faith' is a part of the basics of 'experiment'.
How odd. Easily capable of being self-defeating.
No wonder the 'yogis' claim their insights are 'most secret' and rely on 'direct transmission'.
Evidently, when one is at one's wits' ends, one is especially 'receptive' and capable of being 'taught'.
And we know what's being 'transmitted' is the 'full deal' how?
I can accede to the idea that 'pride' of knowing is a block to greater learning. Yet, that automatically implies that there is as many varieties of 'learning' as there are individuals.
What we are after is some standard or 'law' or 'principle' that is way beyond personality and the perversions possible by such 'temporal/spacial' perspectives.
A story by one individual from within the 'Hindoo' lineage is that of 'Babaji' and 'Kriya' yog.
And this lineage has some tales by one who says that Babaji was only vaguely aware of other potential methods of a kind of 'transformation' of the flesh. In other words: he hadn't done it that way, but knew that those other ways existed. And maybe even other and even many other ways outside his personal experience.
So, we are told of an individual who was, most of all, conveying into futurity things HE knew, HE experienced.
All things don't fall under his personal recongisance.
And we should 'worship' such as 'Deity' why?
We should limit 'Divinity' to such an example, why?
A step for us, to strengthen our 'faith', maybe. But as the 'bottom line'? Why?
The word of one who is said to have done something and who is said to have also said: All I do, you can do, and greater things . . . the fact that word persists seems to me to attest to an actual event . . . all by itself. It supports an internal instinct that refuses to be compelled.
For me, that rings so full of FACT, and is not dogmatic and is representative of so much of what has made every free thinker a 'beacon' in their own right. No matter where they were born or where they lived or live.
We live by hope. We hope beyond even evidence of the very limited lives we undergo. We still think: not this time, but another day becons. A part of us is 'universal' and 'infinite' and we have no grounds for thinking anyone is different from us or any other.
We fail, we get up. We fail again, we get up again.
And that, to me, is in and of itself a kind of evidence of the fact of a resurrection. And even 'resurrection' as a fact of life. And that also allows for reincarnation and bi-location and multiple simultaneous lives or over-laps of a life in several bodies. Why not?
We have no grounds for disallowing such.
We look forward. And it isn't even a matter of projecting our hopes into our children's lives or bodies.
Novus ordo seclorum and E pluribus Unum is the union of primal principle differentiated and an enunciation of the uncertainty involved in the idea that the 'whole is greater than the sum of its parts'.
It is an instinct that harkens back to something we carry forward in more than just 'genes'. In our consciousness is something most potent. And by combination more potent than even some 'absolute' egoism.
The question is: is that potency released by selfish culture, or by egalitarianism and according to all what we most cherish for ourselves?
If we can amplify that by worshipping that as our very neighbors and revealable by trying to see it in them, isn't that self-sacrifice? Doesn't that just mean we have salvation in being quiet and confident? Loving our neighbor? As we would be loved?
Wouldn't we just laugh when challenged? And ask: you're kidding, right?
So we just shrug, and we laugh, we say: this is just too much. and 'O well', for now. What are you gonna do? None can be compelled.
. . . and . . .
Yes, I respect my 'elders' who love more and more greatly than I do.
And so I reveal my criterion of judgement. I see no reason to believe on the basis of 'intellectual acumen' alone or great 'larnin'.
Simple folk who live by love and goodness of character can 'smell' a rat and know well enough fancy talk and much 'reasoning' don't have much traction compared to real, live goodness. So evil depends much on 'oratory' and 'reasonings' and suppression of day to day impulses that have nothing to do with things more than three or four houses away or the closest river and the ability to feed and build things pertinent to life right at hand. 'Politick' wants us to live part or much of our lives in 'imagination' and be concerned about things that have most to do not with us, but with so-called 'representives' or even 'royalty'.
Right. Our contact with the 'divine'.
Right.
======================
"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance -- that principle is contempt prior to investigation."
Navigation by scent
Hi Gary and cj,
1) Gary, you had written, “'but it's clear that the Book of the Law ('channeled', as far as I'm concerned, via nothing more than his taste for Oscar Wilde and bad English translations of Nietzsche)...” And a friend of mine had responded, “In that comment he's seems to be suggesting that he thinks Crowley's BOTL was a work of fiction, not channeled material. Could you ask him if that is what he is inferring and how he came to that conclusion?”
In “Aiwass = I Was”, you argue powerfully that Crowley was not transparent to the “objective psyche”, and that, like many of us, he could not get out of his own way. I would like, however, to present an alternative to this “either/ or” mode of judgment.
—During the 1980s, during the first wave of New Age “channeled” transmissions, I would often wonder why supernatural entities had such a talent for clichés, and why so much of the material felt less “uncanny” than much of the “non-channeled” material that I accessed through my own creative process. Did “channeled” just mean that the writer was too lazy to revise? Was the writer as medium involved in some elaborate form of theatre, in which the contents of the individual psyche were rerouted in to emerge in some grandiose and more archaic form, or was an actual “Atlantean” entity forced to project itself through the “reducing valve” of the writers mind, and to make do with the tools available? If the “vehicle” has a taste for Swinburne, then the “entity”, having mounted him or her, may have no choice but to rhapsodize like an 1890s aesthete.
This is not a simple issue to understand, or even to frame, and, in fact, it is one that becomes more complex, rather than simpler, at each new stage of exploration. In asking whether “The Book of the Law” is “a work of fiction” or “channeled material”, it is possible that the most productive approach would be to bypass the opposition altogether. First, let us answer an even simpler question: “Where does the ‘inspiration’ for any creative project come from?” To be “inspired” is, very simply, to “draw breath.” The energy comes from outside of the body and the psyche. The whole concept of “genius”, at its origin, is bound up with the Greek and Roman concept of the “daimon”, the inter-dimensional “double”; who has access to hidden realms of information. The “genius” was the activating power, not the person who made use of it.
The tension between the personal and the transpersonal is one that I have lived with, not merely thought about, for many years. I have explored the implications, from every angle, in my own work, as well as that of the writers and artists who have served as models. For example, in “Maps of the Metaphysical Double; In the Footprints of de Chirico”, the 14 poems that make up the second part of the book are written in the “persona” of the proto-Surrealist painter and writer Giorgio de Chirico. At the same time, de Chirico is presented as the “mask” or “vehicle” through which his “daimon” was able to project his power into the world. De Chirico speaks through me, through the skill-set of the poet “Brian George”, as earlier his “daimon” spoke through him. Beyond this, however, there is an even more complex level of connection, since, throughout the writing of the book, I felt more and more that I had been granted direct access to this “daimon.” We would sometimes joke about the artist’s megalomania, about his refusal to “play nice” with others, and about his childlike enthusiasm for the repetition of key symbols.
In the essay that begins this book (posted on RS last March) I write: “There is one question that we must always ask about de Chirico: Who or what is speaking or acting on any given occasion? For he is not one self-contained being.”
2) Here is the beginning of a piece called “Artist’s Statement”, which is section 6 from my book “Masks of Origin/ Part 2; Voyage to a Non-existent Home”:
“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.”
Alienation from the Self
Hi Gang,
These thoughts on channeling are excerpted from my blog, “Ask the Dream Queen:”
A lot of people channel aliens and various spirits. Some relay their communications to the world through the Internet, and claim it is extraordinary. I would agree, but see it as a normal function of their personal psychology. It works like this: Their egos have cracks that let in repressed power - which they then name “Sirian,” “Pleiadian,” “God,” “Spirits,” “Aiwass,” "Quetzacoatl," or what-have-you. Were the repressed power to become more balanced through increased self-awareness, the channeling would stop. It would be replaced by increased creativity and well-being.
When I was at my most psychotic, in 2000, I did some channeling with automatic writing. Because of my fractures, my wholeness - which extends far past what my ego perceives - was able to write to through me. When I did automatic writing, my fractures were new. Once my unconscious self became more conscious and integrated, the ability to do automatic writing went away.
Everyone has the wholeness that produces automatic writing and channeling. Some people are fractured enough to access it. Few attribute it to themselves, instead seeing it as coming from something “other.” The font of knowing they channel actually accesses God/the Self. This knowing is the same as the higher intelligence projected onto aliens such as the Sirians.
To anyone receiving a transmission from ethereal sources, I would recommend not jumping to the conclusion that it is a god, spirit or alien. Instead, I would advise just observing it as neutrally as possible. This is the first step to owning it, and making its power and knowledge one’s own.
Amy
www.amygeorge.net
“Bah! Let us make all possible faces.”—Arthur Rimbaud
Hi Amy, Gary, cj,
In my previous comment, I attempted to present a present a third position that does not depend upon an "either/ or" approach to Crowley’s “Book of the Law.” Is it or is it not a “channeled’ transmission? Gary Lachman wrote, “Crowley was always too obsessed with himself to allow the psychic room as it were for something other than his own huge ego to occupy his inner world.” This is certainly a powerful argument, with which we must come to terms, and, on the level of spiritual discipline, the statement is on the mark. But what applies to the yogi does not necessarily apply to the poet or the magus. It is their very peculiarity that defines them. Born outsiders, they have perhaps been given leave to violate the laws of the cosmos, as much as they do the conventions of society.
Let us look, for the sake of comparison, at a few quotations from “A Season In Hell”, which demonstrate, I think, a similar grand tendency to self-obsession. From “Bad Blood”, “If only I had ancestors at some point in the history of France! No! No antecedent.”
And from “Night in Hell”, “Let no one come near. I am certain that I smell scorched. There are countless hallucinations. In truth it is what I always had: no faith in history and the forgetting of principles. I will not speak of this: poets and visionaries would be jealous. I am the richest a thousand times over. Let me be as avaricious as the ocean…
I intend to unveil all mysteries: religious mysteries or those of nature, death, birth, the future, the past, cosmology, the void. I am the master of hallucinations. Listen! I possess every talent!—there is no one here and there is someone.”
If we were going to condemn Crowley for his—admittedly monstrous—egotism, should we not also condemn Rimbaud for his? Few would argue that Rimbaud was not one of the greatest of 19th century visionaries, as radical in his openness to the depths of the psyche as he was in the exploration of new modes of expression. Nonetheless, his ego is always present, and very big indeed; it somehow manages to coexist with the fact of guidance from beyond. How? It is “just one of those things”—a true mystery, as well as a hieroglyph left for the rest of us to decipher. Perhaps we do not really know what the “ego” is, or what role it is meant to perform in the war between dimensions, which, at the end, is no more than a play.
Many complex forces use us as their vehicles. Egotism, even on the grand scale of a Crowley or a Rimbaud, does not seem to slow them down, incur their wrath, or even cause them to sit up and take notice. Who knows why an other-than-human entity might choose a particular vehicle? Chances are, however, it is not because that person is "perfect", but more probably because he/ she is available, and willing, more or less, to perform the task at hand. It is possible, as well, that all of this is no more than a belated acting out of a mutually beneficial arrangement—one that all parties had agreed to before birth.
Every action on the Earth may depend on a multitude of interconnected actions in the Beyond; in a contest between the intellect and the fully embodied soul, the Human may depend on its ritual torture by the Alien; the potency of the higher worlds may depend on our bad behavior; present actions may depend on actions from a future that we have forgotten, and the boundaries between the “Self” and “Other” may be not at all what they seem.
In closing, let us turn once more to Rimbaud, who said, in “The Alchemy of the Word”, that, “To each being it seemed to me that several other lives were due. This gentleman does not know what he is doing. He is an angel. This family is a litter of dogs.”
"I saw quite frankly a mosque in place of a factory"
“The title of a vaudeville conjured up horrors before me. Then I explained my magic sophisms with the hallucination of words! At the end I looked on the disorder of my mind as sacred.”—Rimbaud, from “A Season in Hell.”
Hi cj,
Oddly, in my own work, and against the common Surrealist and Beat wisdom, I find that the earlier and more automatic stages in my creative process only give me access to the surface levels of the unconscious, and that my writing becomes steadily stranger and more unpredictable in the later stages of revision. As in any ritual, great energy is required, and this energy tends to grow stronger with obsessive focus and repetition. At the end, the writer may perhaps have accumulated enough of it to fuel his leap through the abyss; at the same time, a clear signal has perhaps been broadcast to its other-than-human recipient, the presiding “double”, who, if his/ her interest has been aroused, may decide to flood the writer with more information than he asked for, can integrate, or ever knew that he wanted.
—But that’s just me, and this is only intended as a description of my own creative process; it should not be read as a judgment upon anyone else’s methods. Through many years of experimentation, I found that I was incapable of just “going with the flow.” “If it works, don’t fix it”, is the maxim that I would prefer. Instead, possessed by the “a-cosmic” paranoia of the Gnostic, the maxim that I must follow is, “Take nothing at face value.” Always, I must negotiate a list of contradictory demands; presented, often, in the form of ultimatums. The simplest of images must be understood as a “koan.”
Soul-Nazis
I have to agree with Gary that Crowley was egocentric, while Jung was more attuned to psyche. If Crowley was channeling anything besides himself it was likely some part of him grander than his ego. As such, and as grandiose as his ego was, we can presume Aiwass was Self inverted and turned inside-out through ego.
Maybe it is so glaringly obvious that no one mentions it, but Crowley’s mantra, “Do what thou will,” is an edit of St. Augustine’s, “Love and do what thou will “ Crowley’s alteration speaks to the glorious revolutionary that intrepidly resists stricture, yet is self-dooming because of its refusal of self-control.
It is not surprising that fascism attracted occult personalities. An archetype that played them – an archetype that roams the far reaches of existence to subjugate it and master it, to steal something from God – as if such a thing were possible. To steal from God is to steal from oneself.
The archetype is the Thief. As such it steals from the perceived powers-that-be – from the blindness of the laity and the status quo, and from complacency, and anyone who feels secure in their illusions.
The archetype plays males into becoming collective figures. It likely plays females as well, but probably they have less obsessive need to self-glorify themselves to the public. They are content to enforce dominion as the crow flies.
People like this are soul-Nazis, so it is no wonder a few were attracted to fascism. The divide between the soul-Nazis and the collective was gaping until beatniks, hippies, subculture and Christ consciousness absorbed them. Socio-cultural spiritual revolution opened the numisphere to the collective, leaving first-world consciousness in the chaotic mess we are continuing to put order to through RS and other channels (Obama’s election being one). Today the soul-Nazi is relatively peripheral because the archetype has run its course.
25 years ago things were less clear. People following in occultist footsteps had a lot to explore. I knew other teenagers who fucked around with Satan, and absorbed power.
This excerpt from my memoirs happened when I was 14, in 1982:
I had been severely depressed, half-seriously thinking about what I would sell my soul for. A few days later I was walking with my eyes to the ground, taking a short-cut that led past the water tower. I was about to duck under the water tower’s access gate when a voice said, "Come here. I want to show you something."
Several paces away, before me on the access road, stood a very tall man in a black coat and black hat. He had a narrow face, narrow nose, and a goatee. With a leash he held two black dogs. They started barking at me. "Shut up!" he shouted and they instantly fell silent.
He repeated, "Come here. I want to show you something."
Looking at him, my heart was pounding. I turned without speaking and went the long way home.
Not long after the encounter I came across a French folk tale where a village idiot sold his soul to a man of the same description who was also accompanied by two black dogs.
Four years later, some friends and I asked a Ouija board who I saw that day. The Ouija window spelled "S" and "A" and then inexplicably zinged off the board. Maybe one of us did not want to see the unholy name spelled out.
I never hesitated to share the story of meeting Satan with others. Retelling it seemed to diffuse its power. I stopped needing to retell it once I accepted the burden of it, which I more or less had done by the end of this true account.
Meeting Satan traumatized me. Unlit places felt evil, but I would walk through them anyway, sometimes cringing with fear. I would feel evil emanating from the darkness of places I slept. When I was sleeping, I would awaken from the sensations of a hand slapping my face, a balloon popping inside my head, someone shouting at me, and being whirled round in dreams by a force I called “Satan.” Sometimes I would awaken paralyzed. Once, after a demonic attack, I could hardly hear for a week because my ears were ringing so loudly.
During sex with Djuna, when we had lived together in Haight-Ashbury, the spirit of a brutal, primitive man entered me to rape her through me. That night, in our sleep, he came back for more, but not through me. As she fought him in her sleep, her flailing arms and legs woke me up. I instinctively pulled her to me and my heart linked to her body. I felt love sweetly annihilate the presence. Then Djuna was tranquil. The love had come from far away. It was a deep, heart-love I couldn’t feel in ordinary waking-life.
There are two layers of being: one is the dominion of demonic principality that will do anything to bind the ego to itself. The other is the numisphere. When “channeled” to Earth it causes the demonic to evanesce into eternal sleep. These layers are not polarized. They are in parallel universes.
That's okay
Well, you asked for my input, but evidently it isn't worthy mentioning or responding to.
And with this talk of 'channeling' versus some 'equipotential-zone' beingness that takes on life for a time as two or more interact . . . I think much of writing channels such as a kind of tender-hearted 'sympathy' for a monstrous creation which has no heart, not sympathy nor any idea of what we would call 'co-equality'.
When 'magisters' try and attempt to justify why such monstosities should continue to live, it always devolves on their own opinion and not by principle all have access to.
The 'magic' or 'shamanism' always involves some very obstruse or complex 'metaphysic' they - - - with all their words - - - cannot make accessible to us 'folk'.
That's okay.
Evidently, what is being asked for, really, is that we join in a self-satisfying arena for or towards self-adumbration . . . read: dead end.
I thought it was deeper than what it turned out to be.
Eternal self-reference is a good definition of hell.
Something exists beyond my puny ego. Which is interesting to me . . . that is, that which is beyond my puny self. Why should I waste my time and life being sucked into a vortex of conversation that revolves like a maelstrom about gigantic egoism and self-alone-reference points?
Like, I want to go into a black-hole. Right.
Don't write me again. Unless you want more of the same castigation.
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"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance -- that principle is contempt prior to investigation."
Appologies from the event horizon
Hi Roger,
I wish you had just emailed me and said, “Do you think you could get around to answering my post?” I had every intention of doing so, but then the dialogue took off in a number of unexpected directions.
An analysis of Crowley was the last thing on my mind when I was writing “Habits of the Heart.” When ‘ecolocal” asked, “but where did you get that Crowley 'supported National Socialism?'”, I had to do a bit of research to refresh my memory of the subject. I do not have any particular interest in or feeling about Crowley, for or against, but he did serve as a useful pretext for the exploration of the links between the right-wing and esotericism, the relation of the “ego” to the “psyche”, the nature of creativity and the origins of “other-dimensional” knowledge. If the RS community is going to avoid the pitfalls of the 1980s New Age movement, it will be important to have a clear view of how “ego” and “world”, “higher” and “lower”, “right” and “left”, and other such reflex oppositions fit together. Such detours do, in fact, lead back to the original subject of the essay.
In any case, please let me apologize for not getting back to you sooner. I greatly appreciate all of the provocative energy that you pour into your comments. The issue, however, is not only one of time; too often, I do not feel that I am intelligent enough to do full justice to your comments. Your meditations on even a simple subject branch off in so many directions, and those branches in turn sprout even more complex branches, that I sometimes feel that I am back in Ms. Goldman’s junior-year high school literature class, and I have been asked to give a one paragraph summary of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” Or, to view it from a different angle, I sometimes feel that to respond to your virtuoso improvisations would be to talk, loudly, in a hushed auditorium, during a performance of Chopin’s “Preludes.” Does any of this make sense? My difficulty in responding to your posts should not in any way be taken as an insult. Quite the opposite; it is a tribute to the challenging nature of your thought.
Many years ago, during the 1970s, when I had first moved to Boston to go to art school, I was amazed by the explosive, late-counter-cultural energy that I encountered, and went out of my way to meet as many writers, artists, and musicians as I could. Most of these figures now have the weight of yellowed photographs. Some few have become a permanent part of the community in my mind—a community made up of both the living and the dead. When I am involved in any creative project, there they are: standing next to me, or looking with a strange expression over my shoulder, or speaking into my ear.
Their way of seeing things has become an inextricable part of my own; their voices echo in my head, as they offer the pointed judgments that they would if physically present. You, Roger, have become a part of this assembly, and, as I write, I sometimes feel the subtle formative influence of your style, like the faintest of magnetic fields. Things as small as your use of quotation marks, or as large as your particular way of turning and turning a subject to examine it from all angles, have most definitely left their imprint on my sensibility and my methods.
It is not so much that I could not examine a subject from all angles in the past, but that some recognizably new element has entered the equation; again, thank you for giving me access to your world. Truly, the imagination is a field, a-causal and non-local, and all of our efforts are interdependent in more ways than we can see.
2) You wrote, “Evidently, what is being asked for, really, is that we join in a self-satisfying arena for or towards self-adumbration . . . read: dead end.” Just briefly, for the moment, let us look at how the terminology of our world views and the movements of our creative explorations overlap. I don’t believe that we will find any significant grounds for conflict.
Here is a section from your comment “I’m gonna get that Wabbit!”:
“We live by hope. We hope beyond even evidence of the very limited lives we undergo. We still think: not this time, but another day beckons. A part of us is 'universal' and 'infinite' and we have no grounds for thinking anyone is different from us or any other.
We fail, we get up. We fail again, we get up again.
And that, to me, is in and of itself a kind of evidence of the fact of a resurrection. And even 'resurrection' as a fact of life. And that also allows for reincarnation and bi-location and multiple simultaneous lives or over-laps of a life in several bodies. Why not?
We have no grounds for disallowing such.
We look forward. And it isn't even a matter of projecting our hopes into our children's lives or bodies.
Novus ordo seclorum and E pluribus Unum is the union of primal principle differentiated and an enunciation of the uncertainty involved in the idea that the 'whole is greater than the sum of its parts'.
It is an instinct that harkens back to something we carry forward in more than just 'genes'. In our consciousness is something most potent. And by combination more potent than even some 'absolute' egoism.'"
And here is a section from “The archetypal city and the desert of the real”:
“Egos have no place in the post-apocalyptic technocracy. But always, we begin where we are—happy to be one self made from many, with a raw will to exist that no hand can appropriate.
Mute immigrants, abused children, slaves to the dollar, we pick ourselves up by the bootstraps to greet each day as the first. Our past is obscure. The product of global engineering, turning noon into dusk clouds move in from the North. Grey cities buzz like honeycombs. Artificial suns have been set up. The present world looks darker than it is. The future is inconceivable- almost; it is also closer than our breath.
We are the radioactive descendants of the giant race Nephilim. We are the playthings of a force that acts absurdly from a distance. We are actors—with a conscious part to play. Through masks (personae) we project our voices to the back of the dead but still interested audience. We are the subjects whose narratives will at length transform the desert of the real.
Telos attracts. It does not ask that we do what is not already in our nature. This creates a problem—a Gordian Knot that we do not have the technology to cut. We are good and bad. We answer to a force that does not give clear instructions. Help us! cries the subject. Says the Telos: No- you must help each other.”
guess
Habits of the Heart
That was surprisingly nice rejoinder
to what might actually have deserved something a little more mordant. Mine was petulant, yours was patient and very generous. And you needn't have apologised. I apologize.
Still, maybe, a little too heady for the likes of me. I would have appreciated any criticisms. After all, I think I was the one who didn't answer for a long time in the first place.
There's a lot out there we should be open to know about, and if not understand at least be aware of. I wasn't sure I could add anything relevent to this conversation. And am still not sure I have.
I'm sure part of my 'tetchy' response was somewhat of a cross-over from conversations elsewhere, for which you didn't deserve any harshness.
If by 'telos' reference is to 'principle', that is 'ends' that is living as though present, then the answer is most appropriate: we help each other and that is a living principle that does so from within and through each and all of us drawing us to something that has a dear cost: time. So I appreciate that, very much.
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I'm looking forward to a future where, when I get there, I can travel back in time and unwrite some things I've written or said; or say and write what I didn't but should have . . . to those now ahead; or maybe just learn to reign over my tongue while even in my cups and hold my reins so as not to just rush forward or simply stand idly by, and so let the poisen pen gather dust as the most rarely used tool, and add succor or aid where and when I could and not play myself my fool.
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refinancing all debts
Thanks
Hi
i know a great cure for a