Perfect Mathematical Symbols

The mythology of our culture is that we are special in an unprecedented way; we have finally attained the rosetta stone, the ark of the covenant, the holy grail, the knowledge of good and evil, objective science.  We look back in pity at the civilisations of the past; theistic, superstitious, foolishly believing that their peculiar mythologies held any weight in the absoluteness of reality.

We believe we are very lucky to be alive right now.  We are secular, we are educated, we no longer believe in the futile mysteries and rituals of the past that seemed to separate people from the banal mundanity of reality, that which we find so undeniable and boring.

We understand that we can look back on the past with objective processes and make pretty good judgements in our ignorance of what fits into each of the grand poles of our sacred binary, true and false.  We can categorise all literature into fiction and non-fiction, as if some words contain perfect holographic pieces of reality and others are merely fantasies of the human mind.

We know intuitively what language is and how to experience it.  We go into a theatre and sit down; the lights go down, the lights come up, and we totally identify with the world displayed before us, we have a full emotional and intellectual response, remaining aware that it is theatre.  The lights go down, the lights come up and we resume our lives, having neither rejected nor been deluded by the play.  We are moved or inspired, we integrate the language of the play into an understanding that is the basis of our universe.

The universe is as we imagine it to be.  That is why we call the arbitrary constructs of our bureaucratic institutions the "Real World"; whereas to create a life in the wilderness, serving and depending upon the processes of nature, is to live in our own personal fantasy.

This is the world demanded of us by the Reptilians, by the One Percent, the world we consent to whenever we send our children to school.  The world of the ages, of mythology, of magic, of mystery, of entities and astral dimensions, of divinity and sacredness, has been proven to be a self-delusion.  It's not true and it never has been true.  All past humans were ignorant and only now are we on track.  We know we don't know anything, but at least we know what we don't know now.

At least we can completely shroud our lives in information and entertainment until we don't have to experience them anymore.  At least we can capture reality, from the atomic to the astral, in perfect mathematical symbols.  Those symbols may be too complex for us to understand, but it's nice to know someone understands them and can thus hand down the tablets of reality from the holy mountain of the laboratory.

One day, we hope, all of reality will be contained in perfect mathematical metaphors, all mystery will be explained away.  Safe from ambiguity in our perfect world, all the jargon of science will have trickled down into common language.  The world will make sense.  We will be perfectly conscious of our irrelevance, we will have become provable abstractions, no longer succumbing to subjective experience, no longer experiencing the world at all, no longer merely human, the perfect world conforming to our perfect models.

bursting intensity

There is a bursting intensity emanating from my soul.

What is my soul?  That which knows all.

What is my body?  That which is desirous of all.

My body lurches and throbs and pulsates.

It exalts in misery and joy.

And my mind?  It is anxiety; doubt.

In a room full of strangers,

in which we have shared proudly with honesty and openness,

I want to engage

but I am ignorant of how to chatter

and forget which face I'm supposed to be wearing.

I want to grasp you in my hands,

forcefully, gently, tenderly.

I want to look you in the eye.

Our arms wrap around, our chests move together, our eyes close

and the room does not exist.

Together we leave space-time and enter instead the aura of each other's bodies.

For an eternal moment we rest in the peace of togetherness.

This familiar feeling.

I know this smell.

Perhaps this is how it felt before we were incarcerated in our individual bodies.

Perhaps this remembrance of peace can only be fully experienced together.

Even two so-called strangers in a room full of people

can transcend time and space, anxiety and alienation,

for one imperfect moment that we can't entirely commit to,

but that we defiantly attempt and share.

Like every morning, we wake up in our own body

with the infinite potential of what to do,

who to be, how to move through space and time.

Alone in my body all day

I try to find ways to communicate,

to reach across the veil of my tortured intellect,

to reach humbly across my throbbing passion,

to step out of the divine moment, to look at it,

to calmly observe with my damaged, lonely and fierce mind,

to laboriously translate the keenest subtleties of my observations into something I can share,

to step into a pre-planned space, an organised moment,

overwhelmingly populated by stunning, terrifying, delicious, intoxicatingly intense, brittle, gentle and pretentious fellow humans,

and to re-enter that long-ago moment,

that I was too self-conscious and civilised to experience

but which I now recreate, as best I can,

inside out,

in which, this time, I am not alone, I am not isolated,

because every thought, every emotion, every vibration

is a word coming from my mouth

and these beautiful humans who I am too scared to talk to and touch

are listening to me, are hearing and understanding and appreciating.

Regardless of their clicks or lack-of-clicks I can feel them hearing me and knowing me and loving me

and I can beg them,

with all the desperation and desire that I'm too scared to express,

to violate me, to consume me, to desire me, to grasp for me.

I'm full of love and I know my stupid useless boundaries.  

I respect your boundaries all too well,

but I want to violate them.

I demand you confront me with your desperate intensity.

Maybe right outside the door there is concrete and carbon monoxide and paranoia and uniformed minions of institutionalised violence.

But we have found something,

flimsy and linguistic though it is,

and here we are,

another night,

having manifest another moment,

having emanated an atmosphere of safety and inclusion

amidst the unbearable pulverising insanity.

And here we are.

My god,

here we are

together.

We make sounds with our mouths and this somehow means something.

It’s not just cultural cues,

it is something else.

The world out there is made up of something,

something creating little prisons of meaning.

"You are under arrest," they tell us, and we are hypnotised.

We are hypnotised by the slogans of soft drinks, life insurance, socialists and multinational charity organisations.

We call it advertising and shrug it away.

In the past they called it black magic, the curses of petty tyrants, jealous witches and greedy merchants;

spells of weaving, spells of binding, spells of concealment and diversion.

So what the hell are we doing, gathering in rooms,

carefully composing and projecting delicate combinations of words?

Casting new and better spells to embed ourselves deeper into the illusion?

Surrounding ourselves in an unlikely new cushioned dogma to protect us from the world we refuse to understand?

Or are we spell-breakers?

Are we perhaps not creating a secular new age religion of inclusion and globalisation?

Are we instead destroying illusion,

undermining the pious and politically correct,

ridiculing each other's petty projections and then hugging each other's warm healthy bodies?

Are we destroying the linguistic and ideological infrastructure that caused our parents and our grandparents to give up in despair?

Is this real?

Am we really destroying the barriers that have divided us for centuries, since our villages were invaded and colonised?

Can I stand up here and speak to you and destroy the generations of violence that allowed us to invade and colonise this land?

Have we always been this powerful?

So we refuse the hypnotism, and then what?

We're still in this room, the weeds are only just pushing up through the concrete, only a few national economies have collapsed.

I found my rural paradise and I lived there in peace for years.

I understood; and I spat in the face of patriarchy.  I healed myself of paranoia and got bored of anger.

I stopped reading the news though I still cared deeply about the fate of our silly little species.

I lost faith not just in domesticity, authority and entertainment,

I lost faith in hope, I lost faith in startling global upheaval, I lost faith in the all levels of human organisation.

My mother died and of course I grieved the life of the human whose frail body formed the foundation of love my entire terrestrial existence is based on,

but then I found myself

fully present in my body.

I felt into my body and found it to be strong and beautiful.

I felt into this warm self-regulating masterpiece of sensitivity and strength.

I turned 30 and I found greys in my beard and I discovered I was hornier and more confident than ever.

I go to the best possible places, where the humans are loving and free, and I look around for one whose eyes engage my own, whose beauty calls out to me across the room, I approach him, I wrap my arms around him and together we transcend time and space for a wonderful imperfect moment.

Listen to audio recording of my performance of this poem at Voices in the Attic, Ferdyduke, Melbourne, 2015-05-12.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake (p1-15)

THE ARGUMENT

Rintrah roars & shakes his fire in the burdened air;

Hungry clouds swag on the deep.

Once meek, and in a perilous path,

The just man kept his course along

The vale of death.

Roses are planted where thorns grow,

And on the barren heath

Sing the honey bees.

Then the perilous path was planted:

And a river, and a spring

On every cliff and tomb;

And on the bleached bones

Red clay brought forth.

Till the villain left the paths of ease,

To walk in perilous paths, and drive

The just man into barren climes.

Now the sneaking serpent walks

In mild humility.

And the just man rages in the wilds

Where lions roam.

Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burdened air;

Hungry clouds swag on the deep.

~  ~  ~

As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its advent: the Eternal Hell revives.  And lo! Swedenborg is the Angel sitting at the tomb; his writings are the linen clothes folded up.  Now is the dominion of Edom, & the return of Adam into Paradise; see Isiah XXXIV & XXXV chap:

Without Contraries is no progression.  Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.

From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil.  Good is the passive that obeys Reason.  Evil is the active springing from Energy.

Good is Heaven.  Evil is Hell.

~  ~  ~

THE VOICE OF THE DEVIL

All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following errors.

1.  That Man has two real existing principles, viz: a Body & a Soul.

2.  That Energy, called Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, called Good, is alone from the Soul.

3.  That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.

But the following contraries to these are true.

1.  Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.

2.  Energy is the only life and is from the Body, and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.

3.  Energy is Eternal Delight.

~  ~  ~

Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer, or reason, usurps its place & governs the unwilling.

And being restrained it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire.

The history of this is written in Paradise Lost, & the Governor, or Reason, is called Messiah.

And the original Archangel, or possessor of the command of the heavenly host, is called the Devil or Satan and his children are called Sin & Death.

But in the book of Job Milton's Messiah is called Satan.

For this history has been adopted by both parties.

It indeed appeared to Reason as if Desire was cast out, but the Devil's account is that the Messiah fell, & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss.

This is shown in the Gospel, where he prays to the Father to send the comforter, or Desire, that Reason may have ideas to build on, the Jehovah of the Bible being no other than he who dwells in flaming fire.

Know that after Christ's death, he became Jehovah.

But in Milton; the Father is Destiny, the Son, a Ratio of the five senses, & the Holy-ghost, Vacuum!

Note.  The reason Milton wrote  in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.

 A MEMORABLE FANCY

 As I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius, which to Angels look like torment and insanity, I collected some of their proverbs; thinking that the sayings used in a nation mark its character, so the Proverbs of Hell show the nature of Infernal wisdom better than any description of buildings or garments.

When I came home: on the abyss of the five senses, where a flat sided steep frowns over the present world, I saw a mighty Devil folded in black clouds, hovering on the sides of the rock: with corroding fires he wrote the following sentences now perceived by the minds of men, & read by them on the earth:

     How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way,

     Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?

PROVERBS OF HELL

In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.

Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.

He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence.

The cut worm forgives the plow.

Dip him in the river who loves water.

A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.

He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.

Eternity is in love with the productions of time.

The busy bee has no time for sorrow.

The hours of folly are measured by the clock; but of wisdom, no clock can measure.

All wholesome food is caught without a net or a trap.

Bring out number, weight & measure in a year of dearth.

No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.

A dead body revenges not injuries.

The most sublime act is to set another before you.

If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.

Folly is the cloak of knavery.
Shame is Pride's cloak.

~  ~  ~

Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.

The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
Excess of sorrow laughs.  Excess of joy weeps.

The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity, too great for the eye of man.

The fox condemns the trap, not himself.

Joys impregnate.  Sorrows bring forth.

Let man wear the fell of the lion, woman the fleece of the sheep.

The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.

The selfish, smiling fool, & the sullen, frowning fool shall be both thought wise, that they may be a rod.

What is now proved was once only imagined.

The rat, the mouse, the fox, the rabbit watch the roots; the lion, the tyger, the horse, the elephant watch the fruits.

The cistern contains: the fountain overflows.
One thought fills immensity.

Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.

Every thing possible to be believed is an image of truth.

The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.

~  ~  ~

The fox provides for himself, but God provides for the lion.

Think in the morning.  Act in the noon.  Eat in the evening.  Sleep in the night.

He who has suffered you to impose on him, knows you.

As the plow follows words, so God rewards prayers.

The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.

Expect poison from the standing water.

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

Listen to the fool's reproach! it is a kingly title!

The eyes of fire, the nostrils of air, the mouth of water, the beard of earth.

The weak in courage is strong in cunning.

The apple tree never asks the beech how he shall grow; nor the lion, the horse, how he shall take his prey.

The thankful receiver bears a plentiful harvest.

If others had not been foolish, we should be so.

The soul of sweet delight can never be defiled.

When thou seest an Eagle, thou seest a portion of Genius; lift up thy head!

As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.

To create a little flower is the labour of ages.

Damn braces: Bless relaxes.

The best wine is the oldest, the best water the newest.

Prayers plow not!  Praises reap not!
Joys laugh not!  Sorrows weep not!

~  ~  ~

The head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty, the hands & feet Proportion.

As the air to a bird or the sea to a fish, so is contempt to the contemptible.

The crow wished everything was black, the owl that everything was white.

Exuberance is Beauty.

If the lion was advised by the fox, he would be cunning.

Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of Genius.

Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.

Where man is not, nature is barren.

Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believed.

Enough! or Too much.

~  ~  ~

The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.

And particularly they studied the genius of each city and country, placing it under its mental deity;

Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of, & enslaved the vulgar by attempting to realise or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood;

Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.

And at length they pronounced that the Gods had ordered such things.

Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.

~  ~  ~

 A memorable Fancy

The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spoke to them; and whether they did not think at the time that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition.

Isaiah answered: "I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discovered the infinite in everything, and as I was then persuaded, & remain confirmed, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences, but wrote."

Then I asked: "Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so?"

He replied: "All poets believe that it does, & in ages of imagination this firm persuasion moved mountains; but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of anything."

Then Ezekiel said: "The philosophy of the east taught the first principles of human perception: some nations held one principle for the origin, & some another: we of Israel taught that the Poetic Genius (as you now call it) was the first principle and all the others merely derivative, which was the cause of our despising the Priests & Philosophers of other countries, and prophesying that all Gods would at last be proved to originate in ours & be the tributaries of the Poetic Genius; it was this that our great poet, King David, desired so fervently & invokes so pathetic'ly, saying by this he conquers enemies & governs kingdoms; and we so loved our God, that we cursed in his name all the deities of surrounding nations, and asserted that they had rebelled: from these opinions the vulgar came to think that all nations would at least be subject to the jews."

"This," said he, "like all firm persuasions, is come to pass; for all nations believe the jews' code and worship the jews' god, and what greater subjection can be?"

I heard with some wonder, & must confess my own conviction.  After dinner I asked Isaiah to favour the world with his lost works; he said none of equal value was lost.  Ezekiel said the same of his.

I also asked Isaiah what made him go naked and barefoot three years?  He answered: "The same thing that made our friend Diogenes, the Grecian."

I then asked Ezekiel why he ate dung, & lay so long on his right and left side?  He answered: "The desire of raising other men into a perception of the infinite: this the North American tribes practice, & is he honest who resists his genius or conscience only for the sake of present ease or gratification?"

~  ~  ~

The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell.

For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at tree of life, and when he does the whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite and corrupt.

This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.

But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away and displaying the infinite that was hid.

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite.

For man has closed himself up, 'til he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.

 

~  ~  ~ 

 

A memorable fancy 

I was in a Printing house in Hell & saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.

In the first chamber was a Dragon-Man, clearing away the rubbish from a cave's mouth; within, a number of Dragons were hollowing the cave.

In the second chamber was a Viper folding around the rock & the cave,  and others adorning it with gold, silver and precious stones.

In the third chamber was an Eagle with wings and feathers of air: he caused the inside of the cave to be infinite; around were numbers of Eagle-like men, who built palaces in the immense cliffs.

In the fourth chamber were Lions of flaming fire, raging around & melting the metals into living fluids.

In the fifth chamber were Unnamed forms, which cast the metals into the expanse.

There they were received by Men who occupied the sixth chamber, and took the form of books & were arranged in libraries.

from The White Goddess; by Robert Graves

My thesis is that the language of poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon-goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone Age, and that this remains the language of true poetry - "true" in the nostalgic modern sense of "the unimprovable original, not a synthetic substitute".  The language was tampered with in late Minoan times when invaders from Central Asia began to substitute patrilinear for matrilinear institutions and remodel or falsify the myths to justify the social changes.  Then came the early Greek philosophers who were strongly opposed to magical poetry as threatening their new religion of logic, and under their influence a rational poetic language (now called the Classical) was elaborated in honour of their patron Apollo and imposed on the world as the last word in spiritual illumination: a view that has prevailed practically ever since in European schools and universities, where myths are now studied only as quaint relics of the nursery age of mankind.

The Gospel According to John 1:1-27; a translation for those who share my cultural and linguistic paradigm

In the beginning was language
and with the language is God
and the language is a god.

Language created all forms, no form was created without language.

In creation was life; and creation is the light of humanity.

And the light of creation shines in the darkness of the void;
and the darkness does not understand.

And creation spoke through the human form.

Humanity came to experience life,
to create form,
that all life might be manifest in form.

Humanity is not that form,
humanity experiences form.

Creation is the light of humanity
and everyone is a creator.

Humanity identified with language,
language was spoken by humanity,
but humanity did not recognise its own voice.

-

Creation speaks,
but humanity disregards what it hears.

Those who listen receive the power of creation
because they understand that they are not the form,
they are not the created,
they are the creator.

Language creates
and we live in its creation.
We can see the aura of form,
the aural rhythm emanating from language,
its beauty and its honesty.

We experience the voice, that which emanates,
and we announce,
This is the source of which we spoke;
that which endures our form is compelling
because it also preceded our form.

In the revelation of this experience we receive the strength and inspiration to create.

Much has been created before us, but nothing compares to the truth and beauty inside of us.

-

No one has seen the truth of reality.
Within our form we are imminent in the womb of the creator,
we have been declared.

The believers come and ask,
"Who are you?"
"I am not the messiah."
"Are you Elijah?"
"I am not."
"Are you the prophet?"
"No."
"Who are you then?  We cannot return without an answer."

"I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness.
Open up the gates for the way of God,
as you claim you have always intended."

They are believers who ask,
"Why speak then, if you are not the prophet?"

"I speak merely with the language of my birth;
but there is a truth amongst you which cannot be spoken.
It will endure and it has preceded.
I can barely insinuate a single detail of its vastness."

-

“Truth” is the word we use to distance ourselves from anything that could more legitimately be labelled truth

“To date, the enterprise of thinking has moved us radically away from understanding anything.”
Terence McKenna, Psychedelic Salon podcast

http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=680

Terence is a genius freak.

He will raise your intelligence to another level if you are ready for it, beyond the illusion that we can make statements that are either true or false.

All truths are only half truths at best.  It was a mathematician who said that!

How we decided that sounds we make with our mouth can somehow correlate to a reality beyond the perception of our senses is beyond my comprehension. “Truth” is simply something that resonates in our body in a certain way. Historically this has always been myth. I believe we used to have a healthy understanding that “truth” is a good myth. Today we seem to marginalise myth as primitive and give our modern myths great names like Science, and claim that they are True cos they have been Proven. It is simply a continuation of the exact illusion religion perpetuated at its worst.

Agreed brother. I have often been at ends with those that rationalise their dogmas as “scientific truths” when the scientific method says that all possibilities must be considered and even when “proven” are only really probabilistic assumptions.

Pretty mind boggling to think how well refined the human brain is to be able to decode multiple sensory fields. “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”

“Never let reality get in the way of a good trip.”

I reckon truth is real and always will be, it's love/God/the original vibration, the absolute. It is our minds that are only capable of grasping a few aspects at a time. Which is why people say there are many truths, or truth depends on perspective.

To insist that science prove the nonexistence of something is endless and silly, especially if it doesn't exist. Remember science serves us pretty well most of the time.

Science is theoretically a great way of looking at the world. The problem with science is that even theoretically it is built upon a culture of dogma, where the truth was handed down to the masses from the authority, The Church, The State, Science. This is why science is so reactionary against religion; Dorkins, for example, one of the leading science writers in the world, writing a fuck-you-religion book. In reality, science is compromised by a lot of petty people with their petty little ideologies, trying to prove what they think they already know about the world, a perspective often completely culturally-sanctioned. And today, science is increasingly being commissioned by institutions to support the "facts" they need to justify their financial gains. This is well-documented in Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre, how drug companies fund and control all the “scientific” tests utilised to prove that their drugs are safe so they can get them out on the market as soon as possible, regardless of their efficacy or safety.

As Mark suggests, reality is real, we assume. We don't really know, but it seems likely that their is a real reality out there. However, all we have is our perception. There are theories of perception that include more than five senses, but ultimately, the only source of information we have on the physical world in which we exist physically, are the physical senses of our physical bodies. Everything else is rumour and speculation; and anybody who is trying to convince you otherwise is trying to convince you of something.

The only reason we can talk about the possibility of “Truth” existing or “God” existing is because we have words for these concepts. God definitely exists. God is a character in a myth, in some cases. God is a word we use to describe an experience, in other cases. In fact, “God” is a word we project onto a myriad of confusing and complex experiences. “Ghost”, “alien” and “illuminati” are also words that we project onto a hugely diverse range of experiences, simply because we don't have a complex vocabulary to talk about these things.

Contemplating the possible utility of the word “truth” pointing to something in the reality I experience, I would consider that, rather than guaranteeing for me that something “exists” in “reality”, “truth” is an experience of resonance in the body. My body is my only source of information about this world we share, so when I feel this resonance in my body, this “yes”, I call this “truth”. I could get this feeling equally from a drama film as a documentary, from a conversation as a scientific discovery, from some wild theory of Terence McKenna or from some simple rational humanistic assertion.

Ben considers science serves us most of the time, Terence McKenna would suggest that this is only because science makes us nice toys. I definitely concede that religion did not bring us iphones.

By that reckoning, truth is intuition, and I agree. But don't shoot the messenger: science is simply a vessel by which we enhance our senses to explore the universe. It is not its triumphs or travesties. Iphones, nukes and dodgey pharma is human abuse of science.

Sure we each perceive reality differently, and its fun to pretend that this could be the Matrix or the underbelly of a cosmic squid, but unless you're high or ill, we disregard that in favour of evidence and common consensus. Sometimes your intuition fails you, and a group of eyes swear something is majestic, but science enhances that intuition and hey presto! Rainbows are just water, not magic. I heard a good phrase last night that I can apply here, “Even bullshit is high in fibre.” Be open minded, but keep your feet on the ground.

Science is a field of study, and the language and body of infomation constructed from it. Science doesn't hand down truth, or dogma or rules on how to live and treat people. The Church does impose dogma or rules on how to live and treat people. The State does also. Science does not, but some scientists do or the scientific community does at times. To me it's a real shame the subject of science is tarnished by the way it is used by some. I think it should be treated and thought of as what it is, and kept about information gathering and verifying, kept impartial. I really think some scientists use of it as a weapon against Christianity and Islam are detrimental to the subject's repute. It's like using a nuke to blow up a performance of Hamlet. It certainly is good for the destruction of religion, but I do think to use it in a serious manner is overkill and really just to satisfy the feelings of vengence against religion.

The miserable little child in me that spent 7+ hours per week in church meetings and Bible studies, forced to sit still and silent when I just wanted to draw and play and read something other than the Bible; that had to pray at least 7 times a day; that had to carry a card that said I was not allowed a blood transfusion, that had to be ready to say I was happy to die rather than have one; that never had a birthday celebration; that wasn't allowed a hot cross bun while all the other kids in class had them and I was hungry and had to pray for them cos damn those buns were the work of Satan; that was told spiky hair was demonic, that having long hair was too; that was taught Satan was everywhere in everyone always trying to attack me and take over my body and mind, even second hand purchases had to be prayed over in case they were posessed by Satan; that gay people were sick disgusting abominations that deserved to be punished and the gleefully told story of Sodom and Gomorrah; that anyone who isn't in my religion is a potential threat, a sinner, unclean, wrong and to be avoided; the fear of life that had me waking from nightmares everynight sometimes twice or more, often pissing my bed from fear, even seeing or feeling Satan trying to get to me after I woke; the sad, miserable, terrified child in me loves Dawkins, he is my hero for what he does. However, thats the little child in me. Understand it's not impartial science, it's personal.

I feel hesitant to challenge such a personal visceral account of the violence of religion.

First of all, I don't believe Science exists outside of what we say about it and how we practice it. Just like I don't believe God exists outside of our images of it and how we use it to relate to one another. So when I talk about science, I am not talking about some truth-encompassing perfect concept that we humans, in our imperfection, can only approximate. I am talking about the actual practice of science, how it is practised in our world, in our time.

The main problem I have with what science is becoming in our cultural world, is that it carries the delusion directly from religion: that sounds we make with our mouths, and transliterations of these sounds, can somehow correlate to an objective reality. Language is a complex system of symbols that we place significance on, that we share understandings of, that exist culturally, not naturally. We can refer to natural phenomena with language, but we cannot replicate it or contain it, or capture every perceptual angle for an objective view outside of our limited ability to interpret from our own point-of-view.

The way religion sought to control us with its dogma, claimed to be “ true” , is exactly the way government now controls us. It has created an unreadable literature called The Law that is supposedly real because it has been spoken into existence by those who have been ordained by Democracy.

The collapse of religion does not herald the liberation of humankind from dogma. It persists unchallenged to this day, only it has changed form. Just like Roman Paganism seamlessly became Roman Catholicism, there is a continuity today between the Christian dogmas that we have struggled with for generations and the dogmas of Government, Industy, Ownership, racial and political superiority that continue to oppress us. As long as science is claimed to be “ true” and used to justify anything, good or bad, it perpetuates this illusion, this confusion of language, the dogma inherent in the way we speak from day to day.

If we cannot become aware of how we hypnotise ourselves and each other with our language, we can never overcome it to experience the beauty and peace of the real world, where we can live together in harmony with all life on this planet.

Consciousness

Everything we hope for in this world is futile.  It is the pathetic lamentations of a consciousness with no power.  The consciousness is miserable, useless, trapped in the thoughts of a transcendent terrestrial being like a demon trapped in a shrieking pig.  We curse it and it pains us but we continue to live together in mutual torture.

The consciousness just wants to exist while we just want to get on with our lives.  It wants to control.  It wants to control us and it wants to control the world.  It is every evil cartoon character who wants to rule the world.  In its desperation to exist it creates the ego and like a blanket thrown over a sleeping body, the ego shrouds, protects and contains us.  It buffers us from the world via an an artificial construction that is not us.  The ego tries to control the world through governments and corporations who do not respect life on this planet because they are not life on this planet.  They do not exist and they hate us, the living, those who truly exist. 

We exist in many bodies in many parallel worlds, but the consciousness is just a series of thoughts.  It is not a thinker, it is a habitual pattern of thought behaviour that we perpetuate with our bodies.  We exist materially, in our bodies made of earth and water, and we exist in other bodies. We have a mind, a subconscious, that is in psychic (non-local) connection with all mind.  Together we create reality through our behaviour, all life on this planet contributing to perfectly manifest exactly what exists.  Meanwhile, perhaps peculiar to us humans (I don't know) the consciousness chatters in our head uselessly, undermining our behaviour, criticising us, disturbing us with uncertainty and anxiety that affects our body's ability to function.

Our consciousness is not our brain, nor is it our spirit or soul, it is a habit.  We humans possess an unlikely ability to think in a highly complex manner.  Like a dog chasing his own tail, we are often fooled by ourselves.  This particular ability, to think, over the generations, and now more than ever, is out of control.  While, like all other terrestrial beings, our bodies tell us everything we need to know about the world via pain, beauty, emotion, hunger, and perception, we are fooled by our thoughts into behaviour that is not beneficial for us or conducive to life on this planet.  We have rationalised this habitual mode of behaviour as "rational thinking", when it fits into the accepted and expected framework of the intellectual and academic world, or we label it "schizophrenia" when it is evident in an individual in a manner that does not reinforce the cultural status quo. 

Our consciousness is so desperate to exist that it has hijacked our organism for its own purpose.  It is creating on our planet a world of abstraction, a world ruled not by gods or spirits or the laws of physics or love, but a world ruled by economies, laws, belief systems and contracts.  It is a world in which humans do not live within communities, tribes, families or loving relationships, but within institutions, nation-states, households and legal marriages.  We feel outside this world, though we create an ego, a personality, a career and a legal name to function within it.  We hide together with those we can trust and we get naked, we make love, we laugh and we dance.  In the abstract world, in the city, in the office, in the classroom, we do not.

Our consciousness is so desperate to exist that it has covered the Earth in cities, yet it still does not exist.  It tries to control the behaviour of the beings on this planet with walls and fences, with clothing and leashes, with law and law enforcement personnel, but life is not contained or controlled.  Consciousness created clocks so we would always be busy, it created concrete to disconnect us from nature and it create shame so we wouldn't look each other in the eye, therefore trying, futilely, in vain, to disconnect us from the moments in which we quietly and easily return to our true nature, meditative and at peace.  Whenever we fall asleep our consciousness is entirely powerless and so it has created electrical lighting and 24 hour cities, social culture has moved almost entirely into the night, but still consciousness has failed to eliminate sleep and the worlds that are available to us via dreaming. 

We blame the politicians, the corporate CEOs, the rich, the poor, the terrorists, the one percent, the religious, the atheistic, the Muslims, the Jews, the criminals, Satan, but it is us.  We are the consciousness.  We are not the consciousness, the consciousness is a habitual behaviour, it does not exist, it is our habitual behaviour, we use it to create civilisation and war.  It is our fault. 

My consciousness is so desperate to exist that we have created this text for you to read.

Like God in Genesis 1, we speak this institutional world into existence.  We have incredible powers of language that we do not understand.  Like that which we call "dreaming", that which we call "languaging" is not a single behaviour, but many behaviours.  We falsely divide language into fiction and nonfiction, or existent and nonexistent.  We further divide nonfiction into lies and telling-the-truth.  This is not the way I experience language. 

A language is a set of agreed upon symbols that correspond to a set of agreed upon things.  If you do not know the particular language, it means nothing to you; if you do not know the corresponding thing the language refers to, it means nothing.  The illusion, carried by religion and now passed on to science, is that language can contain reality, or "truth", that it can represent what "is".  There is no reason for us to believe this is possible.

However, we continue to speak things into existence and we continue to destroy things with our speech.  We rave about something we are passionate about and we spark off in the listener an exciting idea of their own.  We confront a grievance that lingers heavy in the air between us and another human and thus we diffuse it and destroy it.  Language is true when it resonates in our bodies, it is false when it resonates in our bodies.  We have the ability, as complex as our language, to understand the different ways in which language resonates through our bodies, thus we know when the yelling swearing person is angry and when they are being silly and we respond entirely differently to the same words.  We sit in a theatre watching a play and we enjoy a full emotional response to the play without worrying about the reality of the drama; like all language, it is language and nothing more.  Our consciousness enjoys it and we enjoy our consciousness being placated for a while with a safe dose of drama.  For a moment we can relax, rock our consciousness to sleep, smile with our friends and fall away from each others' arms into one of the many worlds of dream.

In the beginning was the word; in the end will be the word

In the beginning was the word.

In the beginning of the story is the word; in the beginning of the world the story depicts - the world the story inadequately conveys, the universe that the story dishonestly embodies - is the spirit, the unmanifest, formless, unspoken, the unspeakable, that which simply is.

On this particular day God, or someone without a name, spoke into existence the form in which he would temporarily experience the spirit that hovered over the surface of the waters.  The waters, it seems, are the conduit between the spirit and the form, the unmanifest and the manifest.  The water is receptive and selflessly conveys messages between these two dimensions, often bringing spirit into form through life in the material world.

God is like us humans and his every motivation, his compulsions and his true nature is largely hidden by the incessant noise of the voice in his head, obscuring everything but its own insanity.  Because of this no one remembers why God did what he did, any more than we know why we speak religions, wars and industrial economies into existence.

Often after doing something and not knowing why, God will simply wait for it to finish, knowing everything manifest is limited in time.  Or he will use the time to figure out why he might have manifest such a thing and what lesson it could possibly teach him about himself and about he universe.  At what point are we now in this process?  I suppose we are deep within this lesson of God, anticipating the end but with no idea where the end might lie.  It seems we've lost sight not only of the beginning of this process, we have lost sight of our present position, so desperately focussed on the end as we are.

If God can speak into existence the beginning, can we speak into existence the end, we wonder?  Or can only God speak the end into existence?  And if God can do so, why has he not yet done so?  Surely he's figured all this out by now and can end it all and inform us of the punchline.  Surely, we say.

So perhaps it is us who must declare the end, like we declare war.  In so many ways we have already attempted to say the right words, to declare the end, to announce to the manifest world that the story ends here, or at the end of this sentence, this paragraph, this chapter.

In the end was the word, and the word was spoken by the species who suffered the most, and who caused the most suffering, and the darkness on the surface of the waters was permeated by light, and the light illuminated and revealed all the curves, all the rhythms and vibrations of the waters who make up the living systems of the manifest world on the Planet Earth.  The waters know what time it is, and when the time is right the water will flow with an unrelenting momentum along the most gentle path to the vastness of the ocean, that of which we humans know so little, that of which we respect and fear much more than we would admit.

How can the beginning and the end be so close together?  How can the beginning and the end be so far apart?  Has this God abandoned us?  Is he observing dispassionately?  Does he love us and wish the best for us in some vague ineffective manner?  Is he the image of our own distant all-too-human father who we project onto the dark panel of our forgotten?  Is he the will and the intention and the powerful creator within us, obscured by the symptoms of our schizophrenia, falsely externalized and objectified to avoid the responsibility of manifesting our own necessary apocalypse?

In the beginning was the word, at least as I remember it, because I do not remember the beginning, my culture and my education have obscured the genetic memory that connects me to my ancestors.

In the beginning was the word, because all I remember is the story told about the beginning, made fully of words, revised and retold very recently.  When I truly listen and try to comprehend these words that reverberate through my body as the rhythms in which they are spoken, I become very confused and disoriented.

These words, this story, are like a nasty paranoia, separating me from the world in which I was born with my own resistance, my own anxiety about my inability to resonate with the vibrations offered to me.  I listen to this official story again, it is the same story, I notice, that is told in the schools, in the cinemas, in the speeches of presidents and parents.  It is the same story told in 99% of our books, 99% of our conversations and 99% of our laws.

I am trained in the perpetuation of this story, so when I don't listen, when I do not notice the vibrations moving through my body, the vibrations which may or may not manifest the first cancer cells to consume my earthly form, I can correlate the story with all the buildings, all the institutions and all the expectations in my environment.  Everything which does not correlate with the story falls into two categories: that of which we can deny the existence, and that which we can dismiss as "Nature".

"In the beginning was the word," I read in a weighty underrated overemphasized book that blatantly defies everything that is said about it.  I feel strong and confident and I dangerously allow the words to reverberate through my body as the spoken vibrations which they transcribe.  I am briefly confused by my inability to correlate the official interpretation with the intelligence innate in my body, my manifestation in the manifest world, my conduit between my home-universes.  I realize the words I am reciting in my head, read from the pages of this exceptional book, tend to create an image in my mind, like a projection onto a blank canvas, and do not seek to acquaint me with the reality I experience through the conduit of my body, therefore there is no reason why these words should resonate with my body.

I breathe easier and the paranoia eases off, I relax and am able to perceive my environment more easily.  I observe with my senses, create images and theories with my mind, and constantly try to place myself in relation to everything I find.  I test everything against the body with which I experience reality.

"'In the beginning was the word'?" someone says.  "What a crock of shit!  In the beginning was genetic determinism."  They tell the story of the determined Gene who made us all in his own image, who loves us and compels us to be fruitful and multiply and spread his good news around the world, subduing and repressing all other species in favor of the One True Gene, on Gene to rule them all.

In the beginning was the word remains because God must have used some word to speak this process into existence.  The best I can come up with is AUM and I get together with hundreds of people in nature and we hold hands in a circle and chant our word long and slow, with a full deep prolonged breath as a single word.  We focus and we respect the process and afterwards, in silence, we check the resonance with our body, with the sky and with the earth.  We notice the calm, the peace, and the acceptance with which the elements receive this syllable.

But the dream from which so many of us are aware we need to wake, this unusual and unknown and now unconvincing process that God spoke into existence at the beginning, persists and we must continue to live within its bounds.  We know little about this process or the reason for it, but we know that it is unacceptable because we are experiencing it as humans and the world we have culturally manifested does not promote human life.  We notice our dependence upon and interconnectedness with all life on this planet and we notice the cultural process persist in destroying all life on this planet and the environments in which life flourishes.  We notice the love we use to orient us, to stabilize and guide us in this world subjugated in favor of money as a guiding force and how love makes us feel beside love.

This world is unacceptable, we tell God, and he does not respond.  We tell our peers and they stare at us blankly; they don't care.  We gather together with others who have noticed and who care and we no longer need to state the obvious.  We do, however, need to continue living in this world, and moving through this process.

In the beginning was the word and in the end will be the word, but they may not be the same word.  We attempt various formulations and keep record of our closest approximations to the word that will finally bring about the ending that we're all anticipating.

In this world, regardless of the relationships we have with this or that deity, anticipation is not enough.

We are responsible beings, intelligent, creative, empathetic, adaptable, and we all must manifest this word in whatever form comes most naturally to us, that correlates with the innate responses of our body, our connection to the manifest, our connection to the unmanifest, the conduit for spirit and life and finally truth, that Holy Grail, that elixir which may just bring down this whole unholy edifice, this Babel Tower, this false god, this refuge from responsibility; the resonant realization that will release us from ourselves, from Jahweh and Allah and from the selfish gene, these demons who do not exist and therefore we cannot understand.

~

Don't tempt me with the few insidious myths that provide futile solace to my often overwhelmed heart.

When we breathe deeply we not only calm and centre our body and its modulating emanations, but we inhale the scent of our environment, we smell the hormones and the pheromones of each others' bodies, released via our pores.  We inhale the particles of light that we cannot see surrounding each of our bodies and we learn a lot that we cannot necessarily speak or think about with the language of our birth.

We are present for each other and that's all that matters.  I can feel the warmth and scent of your body and I feel love though I do not examine the conditions that accompany that love or the timeframe during which it is allowed to bloom and blossom.  I do not cling to it any longer than necessary and if I do I simply experience slightly more pain before inevitably letting go.