KARL JASPERS FORUM

Note 54

FOOTPRINTS IN THE SNOW
by Adrian van der Meijden
23 July 2004, posted 21 August 2004

Prolegomenon
TO SENG TSAN, 3RD PATRIARCH
(3/01/97)

You talk truth, my friend,
Yet I don't believe you.
Even the Buddha had it wrong,
He spoke only for himself :
Suchness is not such to everyone.
The fault lies not in us but words;
To which he would agree,
And so, my friend, would you.
I did not even search for it,
But hindsight says I did.
Did I practice, pray or meditate?
I did no such thing,
Yet yearned for it most earnestly,
But, pray, don't call it love or longing,
more something like a wish sustained,
Who was I to know that that works too.
I ran away from truth to have it find me.
When left alone Mind clears itself;
No help, no teaching, truths or faith required.
It fills, it empties,
Which we should neither help nor hinder
The rest, awareness will have done.
Religion, Logic and Philosophy
they are all the same :
A Spanish Castle in the aether,
And which is where it should be,
Neither here nor there.
Agreed, I ramble but with words,
There is nothing wrong with that,
Nor even rightly either,
So where's the difference?
One may find the secret for oneself,
Nor is there any way it can be told,
Although it can be talked about.
It's neither in between, nor in nor out.
But one may darkly mutter: It exists,
It is not mine, nor thine or ours,
nor here or there but everywhere;
Yet, in me, it found a centre:
A most wondrous platitude.
It has more facets than a brilliant:
Pure, Perennial, Immortal knowhow,
It is not there unless it's lived.
It is distincted undistinguished suchness.
A diamond sceptre it is called
and ten thousand other names:
The Unmoved Moving Tao:
all symbols of its voidness,
A multi-hued Chameleon.
Nor can I tell you how to find it,
Only that it's there,
And, yes, I contradict myself,
But only in appearance.

A surface mimicry of skin,
So who decides:
Chameleon, the tree, its skin?
Yet mindless mind cooperates.
That's how it works within me too,
Which one can only recognise,
But still, make nothing of it:
No definitions needed, only sight.
So there, I told you,
The rest is only jargon.
Some men observe The Tao,
which makes all things flow smooth,
Others turn to Yin or Yang,
Male against the female,
A Unio Mystica
by dominance and subordinations.
Still others see but hsiao i,
the trivial that blocks and hinders.
And all who lean this way or that
Together make the Great Way.

--o-0-o--

N.Bene:

[comment to J. Johnson on my lacking a theory]

That makes me out as a holist, anomalist, generalist, mereologist, syncretist, morphologist, non-specialist, not to ignore Zen, and as one outcome a generic sceptic [mostly puzzled & curious] about what one may call the embedded POVs of specialists about inconsistencies across all mainstream thinking in fields of knowledge. I have a theory about that, which is shared by a large number of others.

ESSAY,

which means attempt as well as epistle, something cobbled together, spun from imagination. This essay is all about thinking with forms. Or: what Aristotle failed to tell us. A visit to the Cloud of Unknowing. Recovery of a lost Art. Eulogy to Morphogenesis

[0a]
SUMMARY:

The proposal is that intuition is an older form of thought than intellect, to be found used during the mythological period. It's older roots lie in Stone age art, as shown in actual epigraphic forms [ie Not as represented in textbooks] to underpin poly-synaesthetic modes of communication that include alchemy and sacred languages and modern survivals found in the kabalah, I-Ching, astrology and other such glyphs. The change into intellect developed with the onset of writing around 6-4,000 BCE to record mundane transactions which emerged during a period that ended with Demotic as the ground of our alphabetic writing. I merely highlight crucial phases of this development that fall into three sections. Astrology is used as a chopping block theme, typical of dynamic, time linked holistic schemata or gestalt patterns, which is rather well known. Two poems have been included to show that as expressed in a philosophical versus experiential mode the manner of discussion varies from doing this in prose. This hopes to show that 1st, 2nd and 3rd person modes would be better named as conventions that each highlight different aspects of a same event frame, while also hiding others by way of what are called assumptions. In the intuitive mode of prose psychological aspects foreground. It further contrasts the analytic and synthetic styles of representation. Logically speaking all this suggests that one must both include as a whole, the relevant and irrelevant, or linear and non-linear of "discourse".

[0b]
To grasp this reality beyond words will be *paradoxical*. That is, some two types of paradoxes may be noted:

(1) definitional paradoxes, of the kind Godel, Chaitin and Cantor explore, and well shown in B. Russell's Theory of Classes.

(2) Epistemic paradoxes, embedded in how we abstract order from chaos by various methods [or styles]. Reality per se or an sich, being infinite, may be said to incorporate no paradox, or equally well as incorporating all paradoxes. Therefore all paradox results IN between the relations made between reality and appearance. This reveals distinctions between the word bound, the concept bound, where concepts are tagged, while they amount to complex patterns, form or the morphogenic or archetypal ideas and lastly an apprehension of the boundless unformed or potential. Alchemy specifically highlights those paradoxes, especially the texts written before the split between religion and science was made. This may be said to fall into the three stages or phases of *realisation" enumerated by John Curtiss Gowan as trance, art and the psychedelic or as dissociated from the whole, interactive with and integrated as a whole or in union with. Effectively this amounts to a linguistic and semeiotic effect. This is quite well shown on http://www.digiserve.com/mystic/ where the various metaphors deployed in different religions and cultures are comparatively shown.

[0c]
"Self and object reinforce each other. Drop one and the other disappears. It doesn't matter which we drop. Drop the self and objects disappear. Cease to focus on objects and the self disappears. Body and mind drop". (p. 55) "Whatever we identify with has to be dropped", p 38; Dennis Genpo Merzel, for Zen. " (The liberated soul) no longer seeks God through penitence, nor through any sacrament of Holy Church; not through thoughts, nor through words, nor through works; not through creature here below, nor through creature above; not through justice, nor through mercy, nor through glory of glory; not through divine understanding, nor through divine love, nor through divine praise. (p. 160) Marguerite Porete; heretical Christianity. "...The divine Reality, when it "combines" with the creatures in a strictly conceptual mode, is hidden to the eyes of the spiritually veiled, who see only the creatures. Conversely, it is the creatures that disappear...Abd al-Kader "Although necessary to be able to discriminate, filter, analyze, describe - to engage the environment actively, it is equally important to be able to be receptive to information we would "normally" disregard. In the receptive mode we are able to see the greater picture, to reconcile difference, to be creative. There is an idea in our culture that the rational mind is preferred, even to the point of exclusivity, over the intuitive/non-rational mind. A. Deikman

As the identity of the immanent and transcendent, or esoteric vs exoteric, or non-imagistic and imagistic versions of experience, the options are, as per usual, one of dissociation vs association in an either'or vs both'and moved into a union of all that together with optional choices. As Rudi Rucker expresses this, once realised it no longer matters to attain to a mystical state, since it is always *there". This suggests a para-synaesthetic ability or option beyond the sensory by which we can contingently or permanently identify with or believe in or adopt these various states. Again, this can account for all varieties of human experience. The core notion is that awareness is flexible in its ways.

[1]
ARGUMENT:

To get Astrology in a historical perspective we have to start at the beginning of recorded knowledge. The oldest painted pebble dates 3,000,000 BCE give or take a couple of 100,000 years. This is like Hamlet, "Meet, I shall write it in my tables", meaning his diary. An insight not unlike the Red King in Alice in Wonderland forces us to record it so we won't forget. Perhaps too it was to share it with others like we attach a word to a concept. The pebble shows a pattern though; one may imagine it marks a relation between several things, perhaps not unlike an event where the experient saw several influences come together at once. A like example comes in Alchemy and Astrological images of the planets. They are not some arbitrary wiggle but point out relations, linear direct and curved indirect done geometrical style that much later turned into math.

[2]
This phase lasts quite long and we may jump into the Stone ages when Art seemingly bursts forth. Something like this has been ascribed to genius who, gathered from the many works of ordinary folk all put together, suddenly shows us a new perspective the isolated bits don't reveal. To get an insight the mind has to be both overstuffed and have spare time to mull this over. Stone age bone and rock paintings, contrary to how today editors publish them, are psychedelic, poly-associative complexes. A painting of a woman in the laMarche cave, wearing clothes, hat and handbag, is overlaid with many seemingly random squiggles one could easily mistake for other or earlier attempts at a picture. But if we connect the dots and colour in the spaces between the lines what emerges is her history. She has been pregnant, was once young and and slim, in short we do not get just what the eye sees but a story of a life. Practically all stone age imagery is of this kind, poly-associative, more than just a physical image.

[3]
A more typical example shows a duck's nest, surrounded by sprigs of grass that show it's spring. Nearby a snake crawls off with an egg in its maw. No self-respecting Mama duck would let that happen were she there. But she must forage which makes the snake's opprtunity. Alexander Marshack calls it a seasonal image and confesses he does not know what it means. To me it is an early example of the sacrifice, you win some, you lose some, and not always what you choose to lose. The artist collapses several significant parts of seasonal events into one event frame, the hatching of a batch of eggs. This produces a conflict in the details understandable with enough natural bushcraft knowhow about Nature. These conflicts to our logical sense are the meaning of this art form and force us to consider and re-consider what it means when taken all together. It is, in a word, psychedelic art, surrealistic, not naturalistic, although the details look natural enough as the eye would see it. It is a collage of heterogeneous insights yoked together. The universe is alive and everything in it interlaces to produce events that change things. The duck's misfortune is the snake's fortune and so it is for all of us. I'd say it is a precursor of the idea of the sacrifice. In Moby Dick the universal thump, as Ishmael names it, takes a long, complex story to show all the connections between a point A and B where the thump saves Ishmael and nobody else. Story has a logic all its own.

[4]
Archaic man visualised more easily than we do, us being handicapped by words. The paintings are not flat but in the round, a perspective of at least 3 dimensions Picasso noted to say that since then we have not invented anything new. The surface of the rock wall used, it's place in the cave, everything was taken into consideration. One can only paint a bull from memory when the entrance to the cave is half way up a mountain and one needs to crawl into it on one's belly. LeRoy Courhan studied a 100 odd caves in France and found male signs at the entrance, female signs at the end and child or neuter signs in the middle, parked on or close enough to the images. This is the origin of our sentence patterns with nouns, passive and receptive, verbs active and male. Caves are wombs, houses are wombs. The male signs are arrows, sticks, the female ones chevrons and boxes redolent of gender. The neuter signs are mixed and may be taken as products of this male female interaction. By this deerhorn is only good for handles so it's male and cowhorn was used to make spoons, cups and containers making it female. We still call a ship she. Their bows were always decorated with female gods or nymphs.

[5]
We cannot get this from books, one has to visit caves and sit and ponder. Vainomoinen in the Kalevala so sits and ponders how a dell in the woods, made by lightning, is more fertile afterwards. An active mind cannot help but make connections and events outside and inside the head were so connected. A typical spear thrower, made of deerhorn, shows us a young deer arched with a turd projecting in a loop behind. Turds don't naturally come in loops so it is an artistic contrivancy, done to a purpose. It is where one hooks the other end of a spear while the head serves well as a handle. It embodies a kind of curse one might render 'as the Lord of the Flies poisons this turd so may my spear kill you'. It was not, of course, put in so many words as I do, but an association of images that acted as words do for us; in a magical way because Logic had not yet been invented. One thing, like flies using excrement to lay their eggs, leads to another so the spear acts on a a man or animal to make something happen to the target that is good for the thrower and bad news to the receiver. Life finds ways to take advantage. It is a complex thought one can hardly complete without a knowledge of its uses and a bushcraft knowhow of the parts so put together.

[6]
By all this we cannot deny that archaic man was able to think as well as are we, although done with different means, more natural to our senses. But even there we can also recognise that he put the products of such thought to practical uses to make his life simpler and easier. This process we now reap took 1000s of years since stone age art lacks a timeline, earlier and later paintings being made in a same cave just as we do in our homes. One does not get an insight very day, perhaps not even once a lifetime. They have to be hoarded for someone else to make sense of, perhaps. Nobody so far, to my knowledge, has tried to put this into some order of time for lack of our ability to grasp the meaning as it develops into more sophisticated ways. It also seems archaic man was not self-conscious which implies the split in our mind between conscious and unconscious that had not yet taken place. Our notion that we cannot access the unconscious is mere nonsense. Of course we can as when we dream and meditate. It talks to us in our idle moments. Recent studies show that our unconscious thinks in its own right. We are not aware of this but we may think of this as modifying our experiences into attitudes that follow the schema of our seven ages and stages of growth and development. The unconscious is not ego-centred as is the conscious, but issue or problem centred. Children are not ego centred anmd they can think quite well. Once acculturated though they do turn ego centred. To think of multi-tasking our unconscious handles it by the cartload and never runs short of memory. We digest our food, constantly update any changes in our environment, repair a wound all that and dozens more while we do things with our conscious mind focussed on it.

[7]
Simply put this virtual world we now explore more deeply to re-assemble what Nature Provides. We've now extended it to create things not found in Nature. Nature was called Neter, the gods in Egyptian. It took us a long time to move the gods off scene, ob scena, in "another world". The gods were fictions used to name what we lacked control of. They signify power in action that we can engage to do our bidding. Not until some fifty years ago did we remove Creativity as a sole power of the gods and assigned it to our own minds. And funny enough we've rediscovered complexity, that events are not caused linear fashion, as logic would have it but are poly-associative schemata. Such patterns, morphs or forms we play with in the head. There's nothing "wrong" with logic but our insistency there's nothing else we use. Rupert Sheldrake has revived our interest here. Morphing we now do as data crunching to find it needs a form used as a container to park the details as they go, or are made to fit together. We still don't recognise that's how Creativity works and know it comes in ways we do not rightly know the HOW of. Our gaze must shift here from details to context or container in order to wring new sense and meaning by what we now call a theory of it. We assign it to intuition because it is our whole mind, not just Intellect. We do not know whither it comes and goes as Beowulf images forth as a bird flying in and out the castle windows. At first we thought it was all out there hidden behind the facade of objects and now we fancy that it's more inside by way of what we project into our world. But just as we have to learn how to shape transform by metaphor hopping or turning ideas this way and that there is a rich collection of morphs in myth. In effect it's neither inside nor outside the head by the way the universe functions.

[8]
In the Gorakh, a Tantric text, about 1500 BCE, the Guru tells the student, over and over again, that it's not here or there but neither here nor there and both here and there. Our mind is well connected with our universe as a whole. Jung discovered that his patients rewrote the mandala which imposes order on their psyche. Mandala, means chapter, unit, set, contained as in a picture frame to make it finitely fit our indviduality, and anything we can tackle isolated from the rest. Universal mandalas are also found and called archetypes, personified as the gods in myth. In Egypt a young priest, in a manuscript dated 5,000 BCE, in conflict where the parts or aspects of his psyche fit together. He has an argument with the gods, just like Don Camillo, and "sees" then wander in and out of his imagination as he questions them. Today he would be called a schizophrenic and forced to become rational to allow only one such mandala in his psyche. But the Bible tells us that "in my Father's house are many mansions" and a mansion is also a container and mandala. Language conveniently handles it either way and any way at all although we now oppose it as poetry and science. And no way can we isolate language from culture. Astrology alike is also a mandala or cartouche. We may think of them as static images, but that is because we deny them life.

[9]
There is another, larger pattern that holds true for mankind. Bolke, the biologist, reckons that the history of the individual rehearses that of the species. I would like to suggest that in the case of our mental development it is the other way around. The potential of the species guides the development of man and by this reflection back into the species it guides the development of our communal knowledge. It may seem random, but it is anything but that. The child begins its drawings with a circle, symbolic of the head, inside which are heaped the other body parts. By much repetition those parts move beneath the head until it comes to resemble a human figure. By this we can imagine that for the child it begins with what it finds in the head or mind and slowly matches this to how the senses see things. Thus it brings imagination and conformity to Nature or our senses together. Physical growth and development begins with the head, moves outwards to the hands and feet and then recurses back to start the next phase. Once sufficiently developed the environment begins to be included and that too expands around our body moving around. For some this goes no further than the neighbourhood and in others it continues to encompass the universe. And thus the world goes around around a pivot that is our indviduality. We don't think of our dreams as so integrating our experience but they do. They even warn us of dangers, in nightmares, but we seldom get the message. Our parents pacify them away.

[10]
But this child's mandala can extrude outside of itself and inside of itself. Kant told us that the immanent and transcendent are the same. To become a house we change the circle into a box with a cap and fill in windows and a door. To do this slowly we first cleave the continuity of the circle, to make it have infinite parts or dots, and re-arrange their relation to one another. But once we get the idea of a mandala we can do this just like that. Culture, so called, amounts to being hooked into a single mandala forever and a day, as like in dogma. Then we can call it a maze or labyrinth for all to wander through. Then for person A it has blind alleys and for person B the blind alleys are arranged otherwise. Custom and habit creates the walkthru passages. The basics here are dots and their negation, an empty space, and no rules at all as to what shapes or morphs we may design. Music consists of sound and silences arranged in nicely syncopated ways. And so does math and language. Once we have acquired or created a given morph laws arise to ensure we stay consistent with that form. Our mistake is to imagine that the rules we abstract are made absolute thereby. The only difference between an aeroplane and vacuum cleaner that one flies through the air and the other makes the air fly through its inside. For a fridge we do this with temperature and call a fan a pump. To make a laser use light forced through a crystal form. Nicolas Tesle designed our entire a.c system all in the ehad by forcing electrons through a tube, which means knocking the sides off little boxes stuck together. Knowledge has switched from analog or continuous to digital or by hiccups, but it's much more fun to make them dance together and then we call it space and time.

[11]
By using such a morph dancing with a-morphs archaic man domesticated plants and animals and that completed moved to domesticate himself. He invented all our tools still used short of the electronic era and all we did in history is tinker with them to improve. Our hammer began as a lump of rock on a stick. Buckminster Fuller tells us that last Century some hundred patents went into the construction of our modern claw hammer. The old one, with a wooden handle, made one's arm and wrist ache, but it does no longer. HOW? We made the inside soft and the outside superhard. We also had to regularly file the head flat, it was not hard enough. The first rope to make a loop to catch a hare was made from hair. To catch birds honey stolen from bees was smeared on a stick and proverbs reminds us of the fact. A better way than flyspray is to put some honey and water in a container and flies will come drown themselves. Altogether, until last Century, we made do with what Nature provided. But the virtual world of knowledge and imagination took off very early. We just learnt to take better advantage of that. And that's how the gleam in the eye of the beholder is turned into something we can use, both inside and outside the head. It is how the poet gives to aerie nothing a local habitation and a name. It is also how the gods come visit our imagination. I find Wittgenstein amusing when he tells us that whereof we do not know we may nor speak. We've done little else than talk about it, changing the hitherto formless or unknown into forms or the known.

[12]
Plato told us that "nothing from Nothing comes". Well, if he can tell us where else it comes from he's a better man than all of us. We should remind ourselves that "unknown" means unknown to us. It is not UN-knowableMan, in case you have not registered so far, is the one non-domesticable being in our world. It is not that Man has broad, flat nails as Aristotle would have it, or with Huysmann a Homo Ludens, a self that plays, but that he makes up his own games to play. Thus Man is the Microcosm of the Macrocosm, as Quantum Physics recently reminds us. Of course if we think of ourselves as an animal, of course it's weird. Plotinus told us "ye are the gods". Well, that's only asymptotically true, as Kierkegaard told us to to make a leap into the void to bridge the gap by another morph called the revolving castle reached by an invisible bridge to walk that turns quite tangible on our return to earth. Homo sapiens sapiens means the self that knows he knows. He never quite knows what he knows but he is and has been very busy repairing that missing link. And thus, as T. S. Eliot tells us is how he brings home the bacon from what looked like a waste land, when the Fisher king is sick of his own ennui or mal de mer. But he can heal himself too. We're a hunter still except we've moved into a virtual world.

When he tries to extend his power over objects,
Those objects gain control over him.
He who is controlled by objects
Loses possession of his inner self.

-- Chuang-tzu --

[13]
II
So I now jump to a next phase. The hundred french caves Gourhan compared show that insights were shared not unlike the 100th monkey effect. We show a friend and somebody watches who is made curious and that is as how the good news spreads. This went as far as what were early called god-kings, stuffed with knowledge, who travelled the world. That is how we find an early mythic period had globally shared knowhow, as well shown in "Hamlet's Mill". It takes about 30 years to wander the world and return home. In "Moby Dick", Queeqeg, son of a Maori chief, joins the whalers, keen for new knowledge and experience. We cannot quite retrieve this way to learn, being called magic. Magic amounts to an empathetic grasp and relation with our world that emerged before our style of communication developed. We should never forget that magical thinking started off civilisation; also being how we learn, although we then call it play. We get hooked into what happens and then need to visit the cave of Brahm, inside, to make sense of it. A typical example is the Boomerang. Watch a bird fly. A boomerang so takes two wings and reverses them with a twist, just so, to make it spiral in a loop, back to the hand of the thrower. The chark or firedrill began life as a stick, held in the toes and twirled with the hands its tip stuck in a hole dug in a piece of wood filled with dried fungus to make it catch fire. It changed into what we now call a jeweller's drill. It has a pole and a horizontal bar. From the top of the pole to the ends of the bar is a string. If now we place our hands on the bar and pump it up and down it moves. Put a nice sharp piece of chert or rock, well shaped into a point at its other end and you can make holes. The oldest needle to sew clothes has a hole just big enough to insert a long hair. Eskimos still so sew together the animal hides they wear as clothes, and use gut as well. Reversed and with a handle it turns into our Cross, as shows on Hermes' wand. Otherwise it makes a sword so we can choose to use it to make war and peace.

[14]
What we may not realise is that this found application in physical and metaphysical ways. The Chark survives as our car and steam engine and any electric motor that converts vertical motion into twirling round. Altogether we call this play science. This was no mean feat to figure out how to change action from one dimension into another. It also survives as the wand of Hermes, messenger of the gods, and Kundalini yoga, milk churns and more abstractly what we call math which is about axiomatic morphing, using rules instead of freedom. The Mahabharata, a monster of an epic, has it that the gods and demons - meaning by oppositional action - wind the world snake around the pole of the universe and churn the elixir of immortality from the ocean of darkness, meaning our ignorance. An epic is an art of memory device that packs an entire body of knowledge and experience of a given culture into one story, with an overcoupling form. One worldmodel is conceived as like a four sided tent for the four corners of the world with a central pole for the canopy of the sky. In any Hindu temple you'll find some as a baldaquin for the gods to sit inside of. From above, by an invisible vertical descent drips soma into a yoni pond. Indra to perform his deeds drinks whole vats of soma which Indra being but a morph, he can hardly drink literal plant juices, so we make do with second best. Our knowledge is now so diverse that we can no longer do encompass our "all" in one mandala, glyph or form. That alone forces us into paradigm changes as we don't like sitting outside in the cold. We're forced to find a new one that will or may, as science calls it the hunt for a Grand Universal Theory of everything. The danger is, as Carrol tells us, he who sang with math, that The Snark may turn into a Boojum, but should that deter us ? Yes, we may lose a game of chess as some will lose and some will win. As the Beetles sang: "We all live in a yellow submarine", and what shall we use for a periscope, a mobile cave ? Plato told us to get out of that cave into the sun. The last epic was written during the 17th Century. All this also shows that during this period no distinction was made between esoteric versus exoteric knowledge or what takes place inside and outside the head.

[15]
A form is not an object even though we make it so. Whence comes a knot in a string and whither does it go when taken out ? it makes a shift from non-existence into existence and back again. Inside that non-existence lies our potential. The I-Ching so wraps it up into an egg whose form marks a cycle rising from below to above and Tao makes it return unseen to us. It's all explained in Wilhelms "Secret of the Golden Flower", also known as the Rose and Fleur de Lis, equipped with three petals. Anarika Govinda, for Tibet, in "The Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism", Weiser, 1970, makes us imagine the force, Freud called it ID, as like a small candle to have it grow ever larger into a fire that consumes the world. Having done we restore the Goddess Kundalini to her bedroom down below, to retore our pristine intuition. Tibetan Mysticism also makes us change the gods into the demons, as merely enantiodromic mirror images of our good old opposites. And so it is with being "enlightened" or having found Nirvana, it is not a permanent residency but something we wander in and out.

An ordinary man is Buddha;
desire and passion is
enlightenment. One thought of
folly makes a man an ordinary
man. The next enlightened
thought and he is Buddha.

--Hui-neng

What is important is to know and realise, within the marrow of our bones says Aldous Huxley, that we can now always find *home*, should the need arise. The oldest shape changing trick I found was a cave drawing of an upright standing Ass, 'How very like a man'. Indeed should you have a chance to look at all the shapes a skeleton can adopt, Mother Nature knew it well before we did. Our alignment from the horizontal to the vertical wrought certain changes in us. And as I read somewhere, In Lyall Watson, our senses all are devices for knowing at a distance. Salmon knew that long before we did. How does an amoeba know where to find food and which is food ? By taking it into its body to spit it our again should it turn out not to be food. A crocodile can tell by just looking. We do all this by taking it into our minds and doing ditto. A cat needs whiskers to tell it whether its body can pass through a hole and we tell at a glance, no matter what our body size. What else is New?

[16]
The same recipe it started with still in-forms our metaphysics, Alchemy has it that The ONE begets the two and the TWO begets the three and from the THREE derives the myriad. Looking at stone age drawings we find triple dots, sticks, figures, heads and all. The Vedas are said to be uttered by the Three-faced head of Brahm and the Rg Veda, its logical compendium, was the crown. The Kabiri [kobolds, kabouters, dwarves, the wee people] were drawn as three divergent sticks. If you think of those stick as like pipe cleaners there's no end of forms one can devise. They may well be the oldest live image of this idea. It is copied by the Greeks as the Fates who spin the thread of life while one spins up and one spins back to undo and the third cuts the thread. They have but one eye between them so only one can act at a time. In indian myth we find this as Siva who creates, uncreates and maintains this world. The Kabiri so create, uncreate and maintain the world, and they are not personified. Discovery of their tricks takes an initiation ritual, its needs shown experience. Initiation rituals show outwardly what to do inwardly, by which we call them symbolic. And yes, the oldest spinning tool is the yoyo which winds a thread as it bobs up and down. There is a hole in the middle where the thread comes out and on which a weight is hung to do the trick. Typically once such a live idea popped up all manner of extensions and adaptations were made of its form. We still do that. They are, so to speak, embodied figures of thought. The joy of reading in the Vedas is its play with symbols and metaphors.

[17]
II
But they are figures of thought quite otherwise than you can find in a handbook or as named. Each of us has a glimpse of it and works with that as our own truth. The wheel of astrology and feng shui is one kind, a relativity machine. Out of the syntax of what we can recover from the stone ages emerges, quite suddenly in terms of history, these more grand figurae that herald the onset of what we are pleased to call civilisation. They are still resident in our mind, hiding in the miscalled unconscious, like life's prokaryotes took refuge inside our cells. Our Western culture has acquired many of them, called archetypes as renamed gods. Up until the arrival of our kind of written language, around 6,000 BCE or so, it was the only means of sharing insights, starting, omegad, about a 100,000 years ago, give or take a couple. Robert Temple, of Dogon fame, found another one, that of the fishman. Rupert Shelldrake calls it morphogenesis. The oldest image of a god I found was of (H)Umbaba, a body filled with mazy trails, like intestines, inside a dolmen in Normandy. I could not photograph it as going into that cave I was faced nose flat against that wall. One had to stoop to get in, the best thing for security inside as its resident standing in its hallway could have knocked me off while peering at Umbaba. And what better place for Grandma but to stuff or dry her into a mummy in place of photographs ? It makes her safe from saber toothed tigers. { MBanaba; One of his names, in the African language, sir, is Umbaba-Samahongo-"the lord king, the great father of the ... It is said, sir, the Umbaba ran away from an eastern land ... he has but one eye. Also found in the Epic of Gilgamesh as Huwawa} Essentially Umbaba symbolises gut feelings, one of the ways intuition *Talks* to us.

[18]
The alchemist's triadic recipe is pure epistemology in that for the Universe, which is infinite, to act on itself, there being only one, itself, to act on and with, has to divide itself into a part that moves and acts and another that is acted on and yet another that ultimately starts the charade, whether by desire, curiosity or whatsoever we have no idea of. There's substance in its madness. The same recipe works for our mind, from whence it emerged. This matches our conscious and unconscious, the first one which acts, like the Vedic birds, Jiva and Jivatma, one that eats the other just looks on, both sitting on the tree of life. Jivatma does not quite "just look on" but it does not not-act either. It's most like Za-zen, action through non-action or 'no-mind, our deeper inner core'. We're currently told it is the genes that build our body, but they also build our life, quite unlike how our society plans to have it be. Antiquity called it the gods, roughhew it as we may. We cannot see how the mind directs it, because we've only the use of part of it, although connected to the whole, so we can tap it as a resource. Should we manage to get in full contact, our body would probably just go poof and disappear.

[19]
When I first found the Kabala I took away all the words and hung a blank version on the wall and looked at it for three months going. By then I could take it apart and put it together again. Legend has it that it was produced by Moses and legend is probably right. It is a a portable version of the Egyptian Pantheon by what one might call its math or geometry. Compare fi the Bembine tablet as a 3 x 7 matrix of the gods. Astrology comes from Sumeria, so we are told, as a triple time-bound wheel. The virtual aspect, the outer wheel was projected into the sky, then psychically known now electro-magnetically known to drive our solar system's behaviour pattern. It shows 12 x 12 x 12, my calculator says 1728 possible subsets for us as individuals. That's a shade tough to pack all in a mind at once and together, combining whole and part in one insight. But it was done. The T'ai Hsuan Ching, the book of the profound mystery, comprises three outward moving spirals in a cube with 91 subsets, each of them an oracle. The I-Ching, the book of Changes, supposedly dualistic but also triune in its ways when we include the Tao. The sad thing, to my mind, is that most everybody coming across it rushes into its applied forms without a look at its syntax. The I-Ching uses two wheels, counter rotating like a square dance, as a form of permutation. That leads from 8 x 8 = 64 with subsets six amounting to somethinglike 4096 possible subsets in toto. But there are two such wheels, one passive, the other active and published. So just as for the Kabala having its Kellipoth or negative opposite so here. We may think of this, as did Jung with our psyche, and copied this from Apuleius, his golden Ass and his triple initiation as a mammy god, a daddy god and an unknowable god, the All Father of Creation, three in Nature, one in kind, found in Genesis as "in the beginning was the word....". Sanscrit for word is Vac, as in vacuum we now know is not quite a vacuum but a sea of energy. The mystery, as ever, is how come we can create something from Nothing, a nothing to which we cannot assign a cause.

[20]
We can from all this recognise that all Creation myths follow a same basic recipe as something too complex for our modern minds which took the charade a further step of implosion into "the simple" only at the end of that trip finding it infinite inside the atom, the smallest part of matter as the Buddhist searched for the smallest part of mind. For all I know it is likely that this amounts to the massless neutrinos for the mind which have just been captured recently. They stream out of the sun and seem not to affect anything but I fancy in this a likeness to Jivatma who looks on as candidates of mind when collected into a mass by thought. I lack the Physics to regale you with a detailed explanation and, besides, it would disrupt my focus of attention. What I am saying is that zodiacal cycles as a whole in turn collapse inwards and explode outwards, this round being into more and deeper enquiry about the Nature of the Universe. The outwards, of course, happens to be mind, which I like to call IT for intelligence Transcendent. They are wheels and they run like the breath of Atman, the inwards turns into the physical by what is called evolution. We may think of the Universe as The All Father god having constructed his own learning tool, and the physical world as the womb between which conjugations take place.

[21]
My birth sign is Scorpio or a Chinese dragon, world snake, wound around the wheel of life at large. It comes on three levels, crocodile, scorpion and eagle as three symbols for honing in on one's target, whatever that happens to be. The Astrological subsigns are also a triple set in four modes as squaring the circle between active and passive or dynamic and static. By this one All Father glyph begets its tribe of children as archetypes by what nowadays we can call superpositional aspects. I'm fascinated what would be typical for astrologers, Gauqelin style, but don't hold out much hope we'll get a simple answer. Just like schools of thought in specialities of knowledge so here we need a round table dozen + one Arthur or chairman. A chairman is supposed to be detached and unbiased but any smart chairman can make his board members jump whichever way he likes without anything showing up as him DO-ing something. I wrote an article on it once, now somewhere on my disc. You see politics comes on two levels, Palace Parlour politics and applied public politics. The first kind is very tough and nasty, to create and maintain a power base in competition with the other gods, hence the Indic war of the gods which Indra won, and Greek sneaky doings behind Zeus's back. 1001 Arabic Nights is about that too. Once one has a power base to work one one may smile and be a villain, while claiming sainthood, not unlike Billy Gates, not to mention any others. Here and there like the Buddha, Edward de Vere, 17th earl of Oxford and the Duke of Windsor certain players decide not to play such games. The type comes as Loki and Hermes, messengers of the gods, yourthful in a way and very sneaky lads. Every myth cycle has one of them around, like Jesus had his Judas. One dissentient an is enough to stop a unanimous vote a chairman overrides. Up to the Middle Ages kings had their fool who alone could tell the king when he made a fool of himself. The number of the beast, 666, reduces to 3 in dualistic mode. Pythagoras thought of 2 as a sterile number. All it yields is opposition, a continuing war in the heavens, which we find in Sumerian myth. We cannot, then, marry the two and have peace. Karl Jaspers, philosopher, speaks of Dasein, being pickled in knowledge, versus Existenz, embedded in experience. He looked at Experience through the glosses of knowledge where I use experience to consider knowledge. As Dante wrote of mysticism: to reach the heights quarry the depths.

"I will be free, even to the uttermost, as I please, in words."

The Taming of the Shrew.

W. Shakespeare

[23]
IV.
You either get the picture or you won't. The next bit comes as an overview and synthetic collapse or integration on how to do this. We have a mind and need but observe it in action, kindly and mildly and patiently. Its outgrowths may be thought of as like a plant, vegetative. Most people when they find something that annoys them about our self, which is really not a self at all, then will pluck it our or cut it off, an indulgence in dragon killing. The plant will just grow new and other branches and leaves until everything is as before. The only effective and affective maneuver is to be patient until one can envision the plant as a whole and take it out roots and all. Any tactic whatsoever will do as long as it acquires that goal. The roots are archetypes and therefore on the basis of the astrological wheels it needs a round dozen to see it whole, three times over. Other such glyphs use different numbers, The I-Ching is centreless, the Tao being everywhere at once and all together, so that needs another style of recipe. We might say at the time of its invention man was conscious and only intuitive but not self conscious and thus in touch with our mind as a whole, whence it is called oracular because it does not rely on concepts. Look at T'ai Chi and its strange body movements. They are there to restore our 3D imagination and all round body awareness, something quite missing in our society. I had it once when walking past a rather snappy yappy dog who attacked me angled from the flat of my buttock sideways from behind. Before I knew what I did I sideswiped him back into his box and he was very careful not to see me ever after, something dogs are very good at, called a hang dog: "Look I'm not looking at you". It's a kind of berserker rage, like Hector picking up his shield or one of those Nordic Vikings being jumped on from behind a tree, quite lethal and undefeatable, a phase of total commitment. To able to be like that helps not suffering from fear. On another occasion, being surrounded by six burly cops, I sat down in the middle in the Buddha posture. I cast down my eyes, and put on that Buddha smile, for the sergeant, facing me to see. The silence was frozen. After sustaining a minute of that I said, in my sweetest, smarmy voice: "I thought this could be discussed peacefully?". The sarge dismissed his henchmen and we talked to solve a problem. There was no thought or planning or design, it just came out that way. Call it spontaneous but I know it was not. It was the only hole this rabbit found.

[24]
The enlightened man, really more the detached experient, dually self observant, is beyond good and evil in the standard sense. The T'ai Hsuan Ching has it as "good is what works, bad what fails", more of a dynamic imperative than a Kantian one. One has to decide what works in any given situation and circumstance and that may be judged by others as either good or evil. Sufism calls it playing God's fool. It is well explained in Amleth, in the Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus, dated 1185. "When they averred that he had given a cunning answer, he answered that he had spoken deliberately: for he was loath to be thought prone to lying about any matter, and wished to be held a stranger to falsehood; and accordingly he mingled craft and candor in such wise that, though his words did lack truth, yet there was nothing to betoken the truth and betray how far his keenness went." The plot shows likeness to Hamlet but it is how Edard de Vere distorts it that shows he adapted it to his own condition in the Court as the Lord Chamberlain. Hamlet too dissembled in a Zen Fashion, should one know the truth, as he was told by his Father's ghost. When one will not be believed and the situation ranges outside expectancies one tells the stark, raving truth. At a same time one is highly aware of how other people's motives affect one's personage. This switching between two peoplle, [Hey, ?friend?, what are you doing to me?] to one trying to extract their truth from Hamlet and Hamlet knowing this quite well, has him suggest he is treated like a sponge, wrung dry to confirm the suspicion that he knows that King/wicked uncle Claudius is a villain, not unlike the situation between Isis and Seth. We could call that a meta-conversation which includes the transactionals between people. "The condition of man ... is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.", says Thomas Hobbes In his Leviathan. Lacan, post Freudian, calls us all paranoid. A king, as an exemplary figure head, has to be above suspicion, at all costs. Oedipus Rex in reverse all over again.

[25]
This shows up well in the three Matrix films. The first one has Morpheus find Neo, the Saviour, and they fight the Mr Smiths in a near equal battle. In the second Matrix the Mr Smiths try to fix up the escape hatch used by Morpheus and of which they were unaware. In the third the Oracle asks Neo when he is going to make up his own mind ? Neo does not understand her but he doestowards the end in another fight with Mr Smith, the archetype of the bureaucrat, who tells us what we ought to do, in the hope we won't think of what we can do. Beaten right down Neil absorbs Mr Smith in himself and with it come along all the other Mr Smiths. Then he bursts out in a body of light whose rays flick everywhere and no more Mr Smith. This, as it were, shows us that war comes first but ends in peace, a dynamic one not quietistic. God and evil are in harmony and it is neither good nor evil which can achieve that. One is serene and only acts when needed, as dictated by circumstance, not by a self. This fits in with John Curtiss Gowan's trance, art and creativity or dissociation, being split inside, versus association or incorporation by learning as in art and play, and finally integration where there is no self, no good and evil, only action as required, or none. A baby uses trance to learn to walk in a focus on what moves the body. Interrupt it and baby falls on its bum or face, concentration broken. It takes it some eight odd years to move into the graceful wriggles of the child who delights in moving its now under control body. In creativity we can take all this for granted and pay attention to whatever fails a fit in us, and seek a balance. There's Mr Gandhi for you, making war in peace. It is what Siva tells Arjuna, concerned he must fight his relatives. It is, in effect, an age old tale.

[26]
Within the context of the Astrology wheel the variations on a theme are 12 x 12 x 12 my calculator shows 1728 variations on a theme. For the I-ching, The book of Changes, reputedly dualistic for Yin and Yang, which ignores the interplay with Tao which is everywhere around, the numbers come as an 8fold matrix dual wheel, run counterclockwise, like a square dance to permute all the possibilities into 64 hexagrams with six subsets each, heaven above and earth below, with four inner subsets which takes triples from between, and one or two are ruling trigrams. All together that comes to 4096. But there are two such wheels so we deal with two modes, one static, one dynamic, as compounds of heaven and earth. This is like the two birds in a Vedic tale, sitting in the tree of life, one incessantly eating, the other looking on. It does not just do nothing but as for Za-Zen, action in non-action in No-mind. One does not, in one's own right, act from selfish motives, the self is gone, transmuted into a yet higher self that is no self. One wholly relies on an intuitive creativity. Yet another glyph, the cross of sacrifice, which Kepler adapted to our solar system, as found in the Vedas is a compendium of how it works by three axes, the Buddhic wheel of life as its spokes and the circle symbolic of the whole. The I-Ching is centreless, Tao taking care of all relations between heaven and earth this one is centred with our well known magical numbers 3 and 7 for a 3 x 7 matrix which permutes into 21! = 5.1090942 ^ 10 [to the power of ten] a million possibilities per person on earth. We can see that it depends on which glyph we use as to what pours from its wellspring or horn of plenty.

[27]
Lately there has been a lot of interest in the Mayan wheel of time. In the Mahabharata, a monster of an epic, the gods and demons wind the worldsnake around the centre pole of the Universe - the unknown - to churn the elixir of immortality from the sea of darkness. Its origin comes as the Chark or Firedrill which started life as a single stick held between the toes and twirled between both hands. It was changed into our modern jeweller's drill with an upright pole and horizontal bar. A string is wound between both ends of the bar and through the top of the pole. This needs three and a half turns of string when wound up. One pumps the bar up and down, UP quick, Down heavy to make the drill twirl round. But that goes back to the boomerang. Observing a bird the idea occurs to reverse connect the wings with a twist just so that spirals through the air, not unlike Helicopter. Its action for the chark converts vertical motion in one direction into roundabout in another. As it were these are figures of thought for which we don't have names other than provided by myth. Altogether there are dozens of such figurae that have hardly been studied. Most people rush into the applied without so much as a thought about its construction.

[28]
When I first came across the Kabala I stripped off all its labels and hung it blank on the wall. After some three months of peering at it and minding it I could take it apart and put it together, going upstream as it were. "Nothing is so easy to ignore as something that does not {readily} yield freely to understanding." writes J. M Jenkins in his preface of "Hamlet's Mill", by Santayana and von Dechend, which is that very Cross. If we take the three axes and bend them into a circle we get the triple astrowheel. As it were one has to mind it, even to a point of obsession with it as Andrew Miles, who solved Fermat's last theorem, tells us. Archaic man applied these figures in both a physical and metaphysical sense. On the one hand the Chark underpins the motion of the car and steam engine, in ways our math still finds hard to manage. On the other hand we find it as the wand of Hermes and in Kundalini Yoga "Hamlet's Mill" shows it as a world global motif found in all myths. As writ in Genesis all the world was of one language, but it was not our kind. That one came with Egyptian Demotic where a hieroglyph was treated like a letter to assemble words. All the letters of our alphabet may be found carved or painted on stone age walls, allowing for the difference in the manner of writing. One cannot read either Egyptian or Chinese, which lacks verbal moods and tenses until one has first gone through a parcel of text and figured out, for Egyptian, whether it is a universal, hence mataphysical, symbol, metaphor or simile and literal. For Chinese it comes as "boy eat apple" where we need fo figure out the context which decides whether he eats, is eating, did eat, will eat, can eat, is allowed to eat and so on. Our verbs come in two modes, real and transcendental, something no grammar text book teaches. Can, will, must, ought and should, may and shall, could and would, may and can, all auxiliary verbs, are transcendental, being outside of time but not experience. If I will do something, or must, I have not done it yet and so it hangs around somewhere in a nowhere of a virtual fantasyland, ready to be used but not yet. The time or when depends on the conditions set to do it. If it rains, take an umbrella, or stay home. IF, the hypothetic and conditional, lives outside of our Logics.

[29]
It follows that this kind of mental data crunching and processing is heavier than for our intellect as a reduction into the simple. Our intellect was originally contrived when stone age shamen created their sacred language to swap experiences of other worlds, and like Oprah found we not that unalike. All occult, esoteric and yogic disciplines aim to retrieve that mind state, which is wordless and encompasses more of our mind than the culture morphs we in-habit. It begins with the blooming buzzing confusion of the numinous, which gradually implodes into structure and detail. This, we may say, takes an aeon, which when fully explored, will explode once again into further enquiry of the unknown and reality. We are facing such a change right now. The cleavage between conscious and unconscious is artificial since the child uses its whole mind to acculturate before it talks. Then it changes through the one, two and three word sentence schema, to now in-habit the intellectual world of concepts. We have gone about as far as we can into detail and have ended up inside the atom with cosmology or, once again, the nature of reality. A paradigm change really, ?really?, amounts to resetting the containing structure of our mind, Jung's female unconscious, which has nothing much to do with women's psyche, needs a transmutation. There's no such thing as sex in the I-Ching, for instance. It just so happens that the leading morph for our culture uses sex for its grammar as a keyterm or leitmotif. And maybe the "happen" is not quite a just so, who really knows?

[30]
Nor do I imagine that we need to revert to this mythic mode in order to go foreward once again. I can form no idea about what this cycle will be into since it would take, as usual, a full cycle of the wheel and all its twelve phases to be fully structured and detailed. I feel like Dante, summing up an aeon or as in "Hamlet's Mill" which shows us the ubiquity as a depth psychology of such morphs. As happened with Aristotle's Logic, now expanded into many variations on a common theme that our just past will become a minor - binary - subset of a larger whole encompassed by Symbolic logic, data crunching and other new theories of thought. It will, of course, incorporate consciousness as a non-local function of reality. For all I know it could be the hologram for which every detail encompasses its wholeness and operates in fractal ways. For a certainty it entails networking in a way quite unlike the God-king's pyramid with one authority figure at the top. Here and there one hears the spider's web as a natural image for this, where each of us, as the child makes neural pathways in its brain, weave our own web, to connect in individual ways to our world.

[31]
I could say more but in a crude and clumsy way this amounts to the bare bones of what otherwise we could call evolution, our own. If I consider the stooped, hairy ape we are supposed to have as ancestor, or maybe cousin twice removed and our own body structure then the drive started by our ancestors to be rid of our animal instincts might come true with a higher self more aware of this and finding fresh uses Nature's doing did not achieve so far. This is the coming of the age of Aquarius, as the song has it, whether tied to the zodiacal wheel or not. Already a new breed, the indigo children, show the way of it, with an even more recent, different kind, the crystalline children whose psyche is a balanced whole. The Russian proposal that our junk DNA amounts to the recipe for a hologram has acquired some proof and this implies we are able to affect it. Curiously our antiquity points out that the All is in the ALL and the All in the all, as about as good a definition of the hologram we can attain. But not until we could make a physical version of it can we begin to explore it in metaphysical or virtual ways.

[32]
Poem 206

I AM.

I am a butterfly forever on the wing,
Focus of my environment
In gratitude and multitude
which is my food to make me sing.

A ballad to my livelihood.
A hymn to my existence
A paean to persistence
And graciousness of good.

But Alchemy is incomplete
The metaphor effete.
It should be empathy, analysis and synthesis.
The first it took for granted
When it first began as is.

Empathy to get entangled and break loose.
Analysis for maps and pathways
Synthesis to keep it whole
In every evanescent moment
IN every visit to a here and now.

That, more than truth and beauty,
comprises all existence too,
The glory of experience,
The multi-hued variety.
Ineffable complexity,
And altogether being there.

Copyright, 27 June 2004. Adrian van der Meijden

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Adrian van der Meijden

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