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PSYCHOGENESIS IV:

MYTHOPOESIS (Part 2)

EASTERN WISDOM

Eastern enlightenment comes in many varieties of spiritual experience and practice from Tantra to Tibetan Buddhism.  They express the pursuit of the One, or the One through the Many forms of existence, which are actually only differentt forms of sacred Emptiness.  Tantra presents the ultimate Nondual reality as the sexual embrace of God and Goddess, of Shiva and Shakti, of Emptiness and Form.  Neither Ascent nor Descent is final, ultimate, or priveledged.  Like yin and yang, they generate and depend on each other, and find their own true being by dying into the other, only to awaken together, conjoined in bliss, as the entire Cosmos.  We find that eternity is wildly in love with the production of time, the non-dual Heart radiating as all creation, and blessing all creation, and singing this embrace through eternity.  When we experience this in our own awareness, this union is the Nondual vision.  God and the Goddess, Emptiness and Form, Wisdom and Compassion, Eros and Agape, Ascent and descent -- perfectly and blissfully united.

The God of the Ascenders is otherworldly, usually monastic, ascetic, seeking to flee the Many and find the One.  It is purely transcendental, and pessimistic about finding happiness in this world, shunning time in favor of eternity.  The other approach finds practitioners of Descending finding the divine embrace through the Many.  It is in love with the visible, sensible God, and sometimes Goddess.  It is a God of pure embodiment, of pure immanence, fascinated with diversity, and found its glory in the celebration of this diversity.  Great variety is the goal of this God.  It celebrated the sense, and the body, and sexuality, and earth.  It is creation-centered spirituality where All is divine.  Emptiness and form are not-two.  Emptiness is the immanent ground of all Form.

Direct mystical intuition is not mediated by any forms of objective nature or subjective mind.  In the ultimate emptiness of the abyss, there is no differentiation, but only Supreme Identity.  The entire world of Form ceases to arise.  However, the pure Emptiness of the Witness (or Seer) turns out to be one with every Form that is witnessed (immanence), and that is one of the basic meanings of nonduality.  Ultimately, there is no seer and no seen; in this illusory gap between the subject and object, it is said, lies the entire misery of humankind.

TANTRIC HYPERSPACE

Tantra is perhaps the oldest form of Eastern alchemy.  According to tantric philosophy the whole universe is built up of and pervaded by two basic forces which are in intiate and intricate union.  These forces, named Shiva and Shakti, are personified as male and female deities.  Of this divine pair, Shiva is the subordinate one, for it is the Female Principle that ultimately underlies all manifestation.  There is a Tantric saying, "Shiva without Shakti is a corpse."

The main subjects of tantrism include the creation of the world and its final dissolution; the various gods and goddesses and their worship; mental and spiritual discipline; and the rites by which magical powers can be acquired to enable one to control oneself, others, and the forces of Nature.  The ritualism parallels that of western occult practices--candles, incantations, etc. and especially sexual mysticism with breath training and postures to rouse the sleeping serpent, the Kundalini.  This alchemy takes place within the body itself, turning gross substance into the divine quintessence, as the serpent fire rises through the body centers or chakras through the subtle spinal channel.  Upward ascent creates a sympathetic resonance between the chakras, igniting each until it reaches the Crown.

Salvation through sex would be an understatement of the aim of tantrism.  The terrifying aspects of Shiva and Shakti are the subject of tantric meditation in graveyards during rites of contact with corpses.  This is in stark counterpart to even, equanimious enjoyment of the sex act.  Other rites include a ceremonial meal of wine, flesh, fish, and bread followed by intercourse.  Wine symboizes the draught of immortality; flesh, the bodily functions which must be controlled; fish, water and the techniques of sexual occultism; bread is the earth and natural environment which must be controlled.  Sexual union symbolizes the ether, quintessence of the elements.  Sacred sex reveals eternal truth and transcendence, Being, the Way to redemption--union of the personal self with the transpersonal Self.  The Diamond Body is the crystallization of the archetype of the universal Self as a permanent part of the individual psyche.

DEATHWATCH: THE JEWEL IS  IN THE LOTUS

Richest in symbolism of all of the flowers of the east is the Lotus, which figured in both the Egyptian and far Asian rites.  In Egypt, it was the symbol of fertility and resurrection, signifying creation and the female principle of life.  Horus, in his apect of god of silence, sits on the flower, Buddha-like, with his finger on his lips.  The Indian lotus is also a holy plant.  The cosmic flower is sacred to the sun, symbolic of regenerative powers.

In Hindu mythology, the lotus represents the female life principle, and is the symbol of the yoni or femal generative organs.  Lakshmi, consort of Vishnu, emerged our of a lotus which sprang from his forehead.  In their creation myth, the spirit of thee Supreme Being was personified by a golden lotus on a great sea.  From Vishnu, the "lotus-navelled" issued a lotus on which Brahma sat.  The lotus expanded into the universe.  Buddha was associated with this flower at birth and it is his symbol.

Chinese Buddhists believe in a heaven where a sacred lake of lotuses the souls of the dead await admittance to paradise in lotus buds.  Each soul rests in its bud until the time appointed for itss opening; the plant flourishes or wilts in accordance with the piety of the individual soul during its earthly existence.  A pure soul is released immediately into the divine presence.  In China, the lotus is the emblem of purity, since it is not of the earth but rises spotless and immaculate from the waters.

Tibetan Buddhism uses the mantra Om Mani Padme Hum, the Jewel is in the Lotus ...the Jewel is in the Lotus ...the Jewel is in the Lotus.  This crystallized Self, the jewel is the "inorganic" form of the Lotus, and its realization in permanence during life and persisting into the bardo states of death.  The 1000 petaled lotus is the Crown Chakra of enlightenment.

BUDDHA DREAMING

Buddhism denies that there is a personal world-creator, yet it affirms our capacity to meet and become superhuman saints, saviors endowed with vast wisdom and compassion.  It denies that there is an immortal soul, but affirms that there is personal continuity from life through many rebirths until liberation is attained.  All Buddhists agree the supreme goal is Enlightenment, liberation, or Nirvana.  It implies the cessation of the cycle of rebirth and transmigration--liberation from the Wheel of Life.

Buddha says, "all is sorrow and suffering," and meditation on its root is the path to liberation.  It kills lust and inspires compassion.  The ending of suffering is Nirvana.  The 'three trainings' include morality, concentration, and wisdom.  Contemplation includes meditations on the body, the feelings, mental states, and doctrines.  You imagine the successive states of decomposition of the body after death, pleausre, pain, and neutral feelings of body and mind, concentration or distraction.  What hindrances are present blocking enlightenment?  Vigor, rapture, tranquility.  Contemplate the Four Holy Truths until enlightenment comes.

Concentration is characterized by single-mindedness.  Rapture gives way to serenity and clear awareness.  Beyond pleasure and pain is pure awareness.  Psychic powers are among the fruits of meditation, though their indiscriminate use is condemned.  Magic powers include flying, walking on water, shapeshifting, projection, clairaudience, mind-reading, memory of former lives, clairvoyance, and extinction of outflows.  Doing one's right duty, livlihood and worship are merit-earning activities.

Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha are the three Jewels or Treasures.  We take refuge in the community of holy practitioners.  You become a Buddhist by saying, "I go to the Buddha-refuge."  The non-returner gets rid of all his fetters and is reborn in a high heaven where he reaches Nirvana.  Nirvana is annihilation of eternal existence.

MEDITATION OF THE JADE WARRIOR

When the Life Elixer pearl is finished, the holy embryo can be formed; then work must be directed to the warming and nourishing of the spiritual embryo.  When the energy body of the child is fully formed, the work must be so directed that the embryo is born and returns to emptiness.  That is the method of ending the work.

This embryo is not corporeally visible, but is the breath energy of the ego.  When spirit and breath-energy as firmly united and thoughts quiet and immobile, this is described as the embryo.  As in the case of all projection, there is a kernal of truth: sexual and religious drives are metaphorically related.  Both seek union and wholeness, both are associated with ecstasy and release of tension, and the union of ego with something greater than itself.

Sexual gratification may lessen the drive for psychic or spiritual wholeness, as creativity can find lesser outlets--hence the emphasis on celebacy in many religious practices.  If Jung is right, the evolution of the lapis into the spiritual embryo is what is missing in Western alchemy, but this is hinted at in the images of the foetus spagiricus, the filius macrocosmi, and the filius philosophorum.  Eastern alchemy and meditation make this a distinct goal and realization.  They are actual experiences that take place during meditation.

Seperation of the soul and body occurs when we withdraw psychic energy from physical sensations, emotions, and thoughts, with a resulting death-like condition.  There is difficulty in maintaining concentration.  One must practice regularly to focus and maintain attention at the proper level.  The meditation complex is actually the fire of one's emotional being where raw psychic energy is transformed or sublimated, revealing the circular mandala-like quality of the Self composed of positive and negative forces.  Objective light is a metaphor of conscious illumination and emotional equilibrium.  For the practicing meditator, the Self as the caelum--or the appearance of a transparent shining sky--is a phenomenon that appears after a certain amount of psychic energy has been cleansed and consciousness held empty.

THE SECRET OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER

Secret of the Golden Flower

Western alchemical goals and procedures were paralled in Eastern Alchemy with concern for the elixer of immortality and the extraction of spirit from matter and its liberation through meditation.  Chinese alchemy is a mixture of alchemy, kindalini and tantric yoga.  Its secret was the great creation of agolden fetus which represented the seed of enlightenment.

The Chinese view is that every individual possesses a central core that is an aspect of the universal Tao.  In the Tao, the principles of opposites, yin and yang, are united.  Spirit and soul together make up the personality and view for supremacy.  The goal of Chinese alchemy is to free the spirit from its entanglements with instinctive drives and emotions by providing a place in the human body where the primal spirit may crystallize and gestate.  The beginning of creativity is called prenatal, (undivided yin-yang).

Personal spirit is joined with transpersonal spirit and soul then reunited.  The product of this union is called The Golden Flower or the Elixer of Life, literally Golden Ball or Golden Pill, which ensures the survival of the individual after the death of the body.  "Circulation of the Light" refers to repetitive cyclical mixing of spirit (psychic) and soul (physical) energies, of the positive and negative principles, to create the "yellow bud" or "mysterious pearl."

Through a coniunctio, inner copulation of positive and negative "crystallization" occurs as the appearance of inner light, white like moonlight.  In the next step, the resulting light is reddish yellow.  The union of the two lights produces the immortal seed.  Golden light within the white light between the eyebrows means primal spirit is forming the immortal foetus and the Elixer of Immortality.  The primal spirit emerges from the foetus and leaps into the "great emptiness" through the gate at the top of the head, forming an indestructibe Diamond Body.

BARDO THODOL:

OTHER REALITIES OF LIVING & DYING

The Tibetans use the word bardo to mean a transition or gap between one situation or set of experiences and another.  It denotes being "thrown" or "suspended in between", i.e. a transition state.  It is the transition state between death and rebirth, but also indicates a way of dying daily while living through meditation.  There are four classical bardo states: the "natural bardo" of this life, the "painful" bardo of dying, the "luminous bardo of enlightenment," and the "karmic" bardo of becoming.

Upon first entering the bardo state, we may not realize we are dead, and the mental body is still attached to the physical body and its habitual tendencies.  The experiences of the past life are reviewed, and frightening sensations assail the taveler between lives and worlds.  The winds of karma sweep us relentlessly on until the helpless, fearful consciousness is pulled down into a womb for rebirth.  The whole landscape and environment is molded by our past and future karma, since all reality is simply formed of mind-stuff anyway.  Tibetans say the span of time in the bardo of becoming last from one week to forty-nine days.  We wait in the bardo until we make a karmic connection with our future parents, and that karma sweeps us into embodiment.

Different signs appear, such as flashing lights and colors, visions, and alignments of the gaze.  These are to be guarded against for they lead to undesirable rebirths.  Certain realms create instinctive, intense desires and longings.  This is the time for prayer and intense concentration for rebirth in the buddha realms, or for aspiration to be reborn into a human family where you can meet the spiritual path and continue toward liberation.

Pray even when you enter the womb, and visualize yourself as an enlightened beeing, so your sacred environment becomes "a palace of the gods."  The mind's urge to solidify culminates in rebirth, and this manifestation takes place through the bardos and in the return of consciousness to regular life after meditation sessions.  When you can go through the dissolution and the dawn of the Grand Luminosity and remain there, rebirth ceases.  The real secret of this sacred text is that it teaches us that this is not only the process of dying and death.

It is unfolding now, at this moment, and every moment, within our mind, in our thoughts, emotions, and at every single level of consciousness we experience, even during our dreams.  The bardo teachings show us how to step outside of the uncontrolled cycle of death and rebirth which comes from ignorance and attachment.  We can learn to recognize and maintain a stable awareness of the nature of mind.  What happens in our mind now in life is exactly what will occur in the bardo states at death, since life and death form a whole, unbroken flowing movement.

THE KNOT WITHOUT BEGINNING OR END

The Hindu myths of the Tripartate god Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva, the dancing Shiva stands as a symbol of the Universe as Embryo.  His dance is the Universe; he is universal Creator and Destroyer.  The Knot Without Beginning or End is the symbol of the doctrine of reincarnation.

In Shiva's hair is a skull and a new moon, death and rebirth at the same moment, the moment of becoming.  In one hand he has a little drum whose beat signfies time, the tick of time which shuts out the knowledge of eternity.  We are enclosed in time.  But in Shiva's opposite hand there is a flame which burns away the veil of time opens our minds to eternity.

Shiva can be the terrifying aspects of the nature of being, but he is also the archetypal yogi, canceling the illusion of life and time.  As such he is also the creator of life, its generator, as well as illuminator.  He is also the divine physician, whose hand is "soothing, healing, and cool."  He embodies the dichotomy of unbridled erratic force and an almost material gentleness.  As Lord of the Dance, he either dances in the sheer joy of overwhelming powers of destruction.  He is the reconciliation of all opposites, eternal rest and ceaseless activity.  His flaming wheel is the wheel of rebirth.

Rebirth, seen from a gene's-eye view, shows us that these "selfish" genes ensure their own survival by enabling their hosts to live long enough to reproduce.  Humans have always wondered about the meaning of life.  For Shiva, it has no higher purpose than to perpetuate the survival of DNA, which with its four genetic substances may pervade the universe for all we know, according to the panspermia theory.

Thus nature is fairly indifferent to the survival of any given individual or species, for in this vision all beings are created equally as "survival machines, with various adaptations designed to constantly evolve to changing conditions.  We are engineered by natural selection to propagate DNA.  It is a "utility function," which means "that which is maximized."  More than one utility function can be imagined for human beings, but this one is obvious and inescapable.  Life has no higher purpose than to perpetuate the survival of DNA, the knot without beginning and without end.

MYSTERIOUS VISITORS

BIOFIELDS AND TULPAS

By proper coherent tuning through time synchronization, an object from a maverick world of fantastic possibilities can be orthorotated into our own frame and objectified.  This is what Tibetan monks call a tulpa, an objective materialization of a thought-form.  The tulpa will hardly ever be closed entirely in phase, however, and so it will almost always be unstable.  UFOs, angels, imps, and demons go away.

But the materialization of one of these can be entirely objective and perfectly objective traces can be left, such as photographs, broken limbs, scorched asphalt, indentations, and depressions in grassy fields.  Any thought object can be so orthorotated and objectified.  Beings, religious figures, angels, fairies, imps, UFOs, and monsters can all appear.

At death, the now disembodied mind finds itself in its own deep, unconscius world constructs (bardos).  Reincarnation is simply the resonant coupling which automatically establishes itself in the flux.  The disembodied, confused mind will simply be coupled again to a new physical body pattern.

The cycle of rebirth can be broken completely simply by dying with a totally detached mental framework.  The cessation of all tuning attatchments results in structureless, hence all-structured being, part of universal Godness.  Absence from any and every single place exclusively leaves presence at all places, each nonexclusively.

Consciousness--the thread of the relation between consecutive changes in thee two respective frames--and time are identical.  Time is a duration of consciousness.  Thus time and the mind (and universal mind) are identical.  Hidden variable theory (chaos) is also a mechanism which can directly amplify the virtual mental state into the observable state.  It is the fundamental mechanism that causes kindling and orthorotation.  It can be used to materialize tulpas and other parapsychological phenomena.

Most of what we term physical reality is prescribed by the collective human consciusness.  And if the collective human consciousness is changed in its conception of reality, then four billion stages start kindling with the hyperchannel effect, and immediatelya the new conception is physical reality.

All tulpoidal manifestations are kindled through this mechanism--multilevel unconscious tuning caused by unresolved conflicts in the deep unconscious.  By time coherence in the virtual state, a virtual entity can be amplified into the observable state, according to physicist Thomas Beardon.

EARTH MOTHER/SKY FATHER

Myths of the Great Goddess teach compassion for all living beings.  The real sanctity of the earth itself is because it is the body of the Goddess.  The world of the goddess was a world of fertile river valleys, and then there came invasions by warring nomads who brought a domineering sky-father god who usurped her preeminence.  Great agricultural civilizations were wiped out by cattle herders, whose storm god travelled with them.  Warrior gods, and thunderbolt hurlers, like Zeus and Yahweh have their roots here.

In Babylon, each of the cities had its own protective god or goddess, which annihilated the god or goddess who was there before.  Before the Babylonian god Marduk was the All-Mother Goddess.  So the Semitic story begins with a great council of the male gods up in the sky, each god is a star, and they have heard that the Grandma is coming, old Tiamat, the Abyss, the inexhaustible Source.  She arrives in the form of a great fish or dragon -- and only the god of the great city can vanquish her.  So when Tiamat opens her mouth, the young god Marduk of Babylon sens winds into her throat and belly that blow her to pieces, and he them dismembers her and fashions the earth and heavens out of the parts of her body.

This motif of dismembering a primordial being and turning its body into the universe appears in many mythologis in many forms.  The mother goddess in old mother-goddess mythologies was herself already the universe, so the great creative deep or Marduk was a supererogatory act.  There was no need for him to cut her up and make the universe out of her, because she was already the universe.  But the male-oriented myth takes over, and becomes -- apparently -- the creator.  And the interest turns frrom the Goddess to her son--in Babylon the divine male governs.

These cultures were ruthless to their neighbors.  Love and compassion were reserved for the in-group.  When the Hebrews came in they really wiped out the Goddess.  Exclusion of the goddess is not found in most Indo-European mythologies, where the sky god generally marries the goddess.  First, there is the early stage of the goddess, then the reverse, when the male takes over her role, and finally the two are in harmonious interaction.

SUMERIAN ECHOES

Sumerian Dreams

Astronomy and asstrology have their roots in the ancient traditions of Sumerian cosmology.  Sumeria is also the source of the beginnings of recorded human history.  These ancient skywatchers are still influencing our mythic and literal notions of history, the cosmos and the intimate relationship between time and space.

Psycedelic eschatologist Terrence McKenna suggests a more modern perspective: I've taken [Whitehead's] notion of concresence and attempted to consttruct a terminal cosmology that literally stands on its head the scientific explanation of the origin of the universe.  I don't believe the universe is the push outward into substntial existence by primal explosion.  I believe the universe is being pulled and shaped into an ever more complexified and concrescent entity that is in fact a transcendental attractor ocated in the future.  It's transcendental in the sense of residing in a higher dimension than ordinary space, and in the feeling/tone sense in which we ordinarily use the term "transcendental."

According to McKenna, there is a shockwave which precedes eschatology. "This is the appearance of history on the surface of nature, a churning anticipation of the emergence of the concrescence, or the transcendental object at the end of time."

"The Greek word eschators refers to the last things, the final things.  The Eschaton is a neutral way of naming what some call the Buddha Matraiya, some people call it the UFO intervention at the end of history, and some call it the second coming."  He sees the whole history of life as known to us as some kind of strategy for the conquest of dimensionality.  In his Eschatonic transitions, the deployed world of three-dimensional space shrinks to the point where all points are cotangent.  We literally enter hyperspace, and it's no longer metaphorical hyperspace.  In his vision, the transition from one dimension of existence to another is the continuation of a universal program of self-extension and transcendence that cannot only be traced back to earliest human history, but to the most primitive kind of protoplasm.

If we extend our search for a universal crisis beyond the earth, we may be suprised to find paradoxical, yet plausible, answers.  All points of both systems, physical and hyperdimensional becoming cotangent instantaneously means the physical universe disappears in a single moment--no history!  Only light remains.  All the resonances of all past times are squeezed down, boundaries dissolve, and contradictions disappear.

According to McKenna, to think of history as a trendless fluctuations as is taught in academia is an existential absurdity, since it would be the only such trendless fluctuation.  Complex dynamics has shown us that processes are not trendless but maximize some set of known or unknown parameters.

SUMERIAN LEGACY

Sumerian Legacy

The Sumerians initiated a cultural revolution which gave the world the dawn of recorded history through writing, ccities and a body of religious practices and concepts.  They developed both a complex pantheon of deities and a complex system of demonology and magic.  Not only religion, myth, and magic were codified, but libraries were established.  This ancient religion provided an attitude to life which gave it cohesion, meaning, and pattern.  Man was linked to heaven by the Annunaki, "those who came down from above," and their appointed earthly counterparts, God-Kings.

Evidence suggests southernmost Mesopotamia was occupied by 5000 BC.  By 3500 BC this region was settled by the Umerians, an ethnic group of unknown origin, who initiated a cultural revolution, and the beginning of recorded history.  The epic of Gilgamesh recounts the prehistorical Creation Myth, as well as the prototype of later accounts of the Great Flood.  Tiamat, the cosmic ocean, was the primordial dragon of chaos, the original primeval being from whom all the gods originated.

Themes, still reflecting modern concerns, included the creation and organization of the physical universe, the creation of the gods and their functions, the creation of man, the origin and prehistory of the exissting order, the origin of disease and healing, and stories of the Flood and the underworld.

Their theology reflects the fact that the gods created mankind primarily to serve the gods.  The Sumerians were the first to sspeak of abstract concepts embodied in symbols, regarded as physical entities.  Thus, they seem to have institutionalized personificationas, perhaps, an outgrowth of primal animism.  Other philsophical developments included kingship, priestly offices, sexual relations and prostitution, musical instruments, truth and falsehood, various crafts, peace and victory.  They give us the first accounts of the visit of the Goddess to the Underworld (Inanna's descent).  In the first recorded story ever, she encounters the judges of the underworld, dies and is restored to life like the resurrecting grain of this agricultural culture.

WHAT EZEKIEL KNEW

According to Rupert Sheldrake (The Evolutionary Mind, 1998):  "Before the seventeenth century, when perople used the word heaven, they were referring both to the sky and to the abode of God, the angels, and the blessed.  Since the seventeenth century the sky has been secularized and the heavens are now considered simply the domain of astronomy.  Heaven...is considered some kind of psychological or spiritual state that has othing to do with the actual sky.  Heaven isn't located out there, it's located in our persons some way, or else in some spiritual realm utterly disconnected from the sky."

Even though we may say "Our Father who art in heaven," we brush aside the suggestion that this is literally true, but for our forefather the sky was not irrelevant nor was the abode of God a subjective realm.  They saw the two as related--the traditional sense and the actual sky.  Our modern notion of the cosmos as a developing organism may help us recover a sense of life of the heavens, with presumed intelligence, yet it is hard to overcome our scientific notion of mere unconscious matter in motion.  The heaven of the inner world of mystical states remains somehow divorced from an embodied universe.  We can consider the notion that heavenly states might be located at places other than inside our cerebral cortex or inside our bodies.

Even astrology has become divorced from the actual sky while considering the cosmos as meaningfully related to what happens on earth.  Most astrologers don't know the most fundamental aspects of astronomy.  Ancient traditions believed the entire cosmos was animate.  God resides beyond the sky but also in the sky.  Giordano Bruno was burned in 1600 for insisting that the universe; the Church objected that this left no space for God, and that threatened the entire system.

Modern people assume heaven doesn't mean the actual sky, but is a metaphor, a state of being, or a state of mind.  We can entertain the notion that if God is omnipresent, then this implies also a presence throughout the heavens, and since the heavens are vvastly greater than the earth--about 99.99 recurring percent of the divine presence must be in the sky.  The same can be said for the ancient celestial Goddesses, such as the Egyptian Nut, or Nuit--the womb of heavens who gives birth to the sun, moon and the stars.  She is the cause of Space, the night skies, the womb from which all things come forth from No-thing.  This is also the image of Astarte, and Mother Mary, the Queen of Heaven.  The celestial hierarchies of angels can be revisioned as superclusters of galaxies, solar systems, and planets, which were traditionally believed to be the abodes of supraintelligent beings.  Gnostic experiences of direct contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, however, doesn't require physical matter, energy or morphic fields.  What is important is the dialogue.

EZEKIEL'S POSTMODERN VISION

In this version of close encounters with the ancient world, enigmatic faces stare with bitumin-accented eyes.  They look like aliens from some otherworld, and in a way, they are, for they have come to us from across nine millennia.

The figures, each about 3 1/2 feet tall, are from a cache discovered in 1985 after a bulldozer cutting a road in Jordan exposed an ancient archaeological site.  Broken into thousands of fragments, the figures were far too delicate to be execavated on the site, and so the entire block of earth in which they were entombed was dug up and shipped to the Smithsonian.  Painstakingly reassembled, they are on display at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.

Of the artists who made them, we know they lived by farming, hunting and gathering.  They employed stone age tools and were technically adept.  And the figures themselves?  Perhaps they represented the ancestors or heroes or gods or goddesses from some spirit world.  We only know that after 9,000 years, their haunting faces, like archetypal figures from our collective past, have the power to speak to us still.

There are ancient Hebrew texts (Hekhaloth, Merkabah, Book of Enoch, etc.) which describe Qabalistic mysticism of the Riders in the Chariot.  They describe journeys to heavenly palaces and the visions experienced there.  They describe Seven Heavens with seven minor heavens within each one.

Part of the Merkabah vision is the use of certain symbols to enter various spiritual or psychological levels, much like the Egyptian and Tibetan Book of the Dead.  They describe how to put any visionary experience to the test.  Apart from the experience of Enoch, the next most important experience allotted to Merkabah is the Vision of Ezekiel.

A more modern viewpoint would term this an exploration of Inner Space.  The Qabalist uses special meditational techniques to go through a series of projection working where his visionary expressions accord with his teachings.  These archetypes vary from school to school, but are consistent with archetypal similarities.  Merkabah relates to both ascent and descent which means rising and climbing down the Tree of Life.

UFOs II

UFO are an endlessly fascinating speculation.  Their popularity is second only to sex on the Internet.  Sex, death, religions, and now UFOs?  Arguments about the debate over God's existence evoke a sense of wonder and mystery.  They cannot be accounted for except on the theistic hypothesis.  The order and regularity of the world, as well as human moral awareness, point to God as a possible explanation.  But the arguments--all of them--only point, they do not coerce.

The theistic arguments are nonetheless significant.  The ontological argument, in particular, is useful because it clarifies some of the logical implications of the concept of God.  This is especially important in view of the suggestions of modern researchers, such Erich Von Daniken and Zecharia Sitchin, who allege that earth visited by a race of nonterrestrial supermen who were viewed by ancient humans as gods.

Though evidence to support this view is open to disput, it is possible the earth has been visited in the sense that such a claim is not logically contradictory.  It is possible that ancient people would attribute divinity to beings who exhibited extraordinary power.

But our ontological argument shows that there can be no confusing the concept of God with the idea of spacemen from another planet.  God is not the greatest being eve encountered by humans; God is not even the greatest being of which human thinking has formed the idea.  God is a being than which nothing greater can be conceived, eternal and necessary, omnipotent and unlimited in knowledge.  This is a vastly different concept than that of superhuman beings armed with advanced technology visiting the earth in spaceships.

But would any arguments we could investigate convince a skeptic that God or UFOs exist?  Probably not.  If someone could construct an absolutely undeniable proff that Gods exists, it would be a blow to the deepest  mystery of faith.  Faith is only possible where there is room for doubt, leaving open the possibility of faith.  This brings up another area of philsophical investigation--the relationship between faith and reason, belief and falsification, self-deception, subjectivity and will in belief.

MAYAN MYSTERIES

ABDUCTEES DREAM OF MUTANT HYBRIDIZATION

24 x 36, 1994

Trapped in the cocoon-like sarcophagus, terror grips our group of abductees whose very souls they feear are being sucked from them.  Alien sex, DNA experiments, etc. sounds like an episode from the X-Files--or every other report by abductees themselves.

In my book LOST IN TRANSLATION (see UFO Phenomenon, in my Collected Works), I explore many of the psychological mechanisms of the alleged abductee experience.  It treats the UFO phenomenon as an informational virus.  It is a report on the nature of consciousness, perception, the malleability of memory, dreams, neuroscience, and the ET phenomenon.  Despite the true essence of any alleged alien manifestation, this notion functions as an informational virus which is a psychosocial reality.

Permeating the living reality of our culture are certain contagious notions which have the ability to influence the way we think about the nature of ourselves and Reality.  Jung described the concept of psychic contagion by certain archetypal forces inherent in the human psyche, which manifest in our spiritual lives and belief systems.  He spoke of both consciou and unconscious contamination.

Notions like this range from simple superstitions to scientific concepts, to urban myths.  Notions sweep through our culture and insinuate themselves within its fabric, as fads, whether they are "real" or not.  Ana analysis of these notions is useful in distinguishing a common human phenomenon from any potential "alien influence" which may be exerted on us from an unknown Source.

"Alien invasion" is a powerful root metaphor for penetration by forces we perceive as originating outside of ourselves.  A contagious notion like this can contaminate our conscious and subconscious life, much like a computer virus moves through an operating system creating wormholes in the informational net, destroying the old order and leaving fragmentation and disintegration in its wake.  Like some weird parody of "The Alien" this notion eats at us from the inside out.  The Trickster Archetype, and its personal component the Shadow are at the root of this Mystery.

DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?

We have yet to answer Asimov's primal question.  But here sexy robots, tumbling androids, and wetware make up the incubatory fantasies of a mankind fascinated with the prospect of artificial intelligence.  Perhaps someday we can ask the question, "Does she do the Vulcan mind-meld on the first date?"

Who are we to know what these silicon-based entities might at some time imagine in their own half-baked brain matter?  This is just another stop in our intergalactic journey to the fringes of human consciousness, where we project our own hopes and dreams for the not-so-certain future.  Perhaps they will become our bodies, perhaps their bodies will be partially human, perhaps those prospects will be hideous to them.  Imagine being invaded by a wet-ware creature and made a symbiotic servant.  But "live" and evolve they will, in their own sense of Time, and by their own evolutionary mandates.  Shall we start the dating service?

ARCHAIC ANCESTORS

EVOLUTION'S MESSAGE

"If you're not recycling, you're throwing it all away."

SHAMANIC DREAMS

Shamans, or primal medicine men, perform many services for the community.  They talk to spirits, influence the course of worldly events, divine the identity of criminals, foretell the future, call up the dead, etc.  This is done through a variety of techniques involving fasting, drumming, singing, storeytelling, self-flagellation, special breathing, and psychotropic drugs used to explore the spirit world or metaphysical realms.

Shamans are born, not made; they have a particular psychology.  From birth, they usually display odd behavior, show very strange, often incurable diseases and act somewhat insane.  He (or she) often becomes a scapegoat, an outcast or is looked upon as an outsider.

From this a myth develops around this wounded person called "the myth of the wounded healer."  This wounded healer script serarates the shaman from other metaphysical paths.  From very early childhood the shaman is concerned with the idea of being wounded, and thus carries this script into adulthood where he acts to heal himself, then others around him.

The shaman is often self-healed; he or she "discovers" eclectic methods which work to alter his psychology and body - which he then uses on others.  Usually the shaman combines this eclectic mix of methods with tradition passed from shaman to shaman.  In this sense, while all the shamans in a tribe may make a "dream bundle," the content of each bundle may or may not vary from shaman to shaman.

After many generations of this sort of activity, complicated systems of metaphysics develop.  They are usually not written down, and if passed on to others, they are given orally and in secret.  The shamanic  myth of the sounded healer usually confers the personal power of charismatic authority.

The shamanic path is also associated with a metaphysical paradigm or style of perception called animism, which holds that all physical objects are alive and conscious.  And certain objects within the nvironment have special significance or connection to the shaman himself.

Shamanism concerns itself with survival pure and simple.  The shaman helps primal man to understand--and control--his environment: the weather, animals of prey, other hostile tribes, or sickness and death.  From his own suffering andd redemption, the shaman wields intense charisma and acts as a mediator between the world of the spirit and the mundane.  Today, shamanism helps us reduce the gap between ourselves and our environment, reintroducing us to Mother Earth, and rebuilding our fundamental relationship with our planet.

THE UNBROKEN LINK

NEANDERTHAL DREAMS

ANCESTRAL VOICES

As Mircea Eliade pointed our in Shamanism, the archetypal pattern of shamanic initiation invarialy combines descent into the underworld with ascent into the heavens.  And the accomplishment of this dual feat both in rituals and in the dreams is the necessary precondition of shamanism:  "He who has undergone them has transcended the secular condition of humanity"; that is, he has become holy, sacred, numinous through his encounter amanic initiation invariably combines descent to the underworld with ascent into the heavens.  And the accomplishment of this dual feat both in rituals and in the dreams is the necessary precondition of shamanism:  "with the healer archetype in him or herself and the subsequent ability to constellate it for others.

The charismatic power of the shaman depends not only on his ability to fall into a trance but on his ability to do it at will - i.e. he is not the victim of the trance but its master.  He controls it.  He has the art of lucid trancing, perfecting the skill of voluntary entry into the liminal state.

He imparts to all those who encounter him "that sense of an immortal inhabitant within the individual which is announced in every mystical tradition...which [itself] neither dies nor is born, but simply passes back and forth, as it were through a veil, appearing in bodies and departing." (Campbell, 1962).

This phenomenon was well understood by the Vedantic tradition, which is the psychology of the perennial philosophy: it defined three states of consciousnes - waking, sleeping, and dreaming - and a fourth state which transcends and incorporates them all.  Could it be that the shaman is the virtuoso of the fourth state?

The survival of cultures, as well as genes, dictates that each generation must integrate old wisdom with new knowledge.  This was the function of myths, ritual, initiation rites, and religion, as it still is the function of dreams.  Myth provides a people with its unifying metaphor, its narrative sense of ownig a place in the story of creation.  Too readily we overlook the simple truth that we are here as temporary guests of our Mother Nature and father Spirit.  Mythic consciousness is informed with the intuitive wisdom of the dreaming mind, the visionary self, as well as the factual knowledge of rational awareness.

Richard Dawkins has proposed the concept of the "meme" as a unit of culture, spread by imitation, the cultural analogue of genes.  It is a metaphor for the ideas, myths, customs, works of art and science that are passed along in human cultures as unitary and competing entities, a cognitive virus.  Selfish memes, like selfish genes, are interested in their own perpetuation and may guide natural selections for bigger brains, language, religion, sexual selection, altruism, urbanization, etc.  Memetic evolution, retransmitting and self-propogating ideas, is only made possible by the human ability to imitate.

THE FRUITFUL DARKNESS

IN THE DREAMTIME

VOODOO MAGIC

YOU ARE HERE: THE EGO HAS LANDED