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Live Blogging The Eschaton (2012): part 1 Introduction

Terence_mckenna

Finally, I  get to blog about 2012.  (All 2012 posts here) Over the next few days, I'll post as often as possible to talk about the solstice, 2012.  Whatever this is, it's a great reason to dig through a lot of rich imagery and powerful ideas.  Please use the comments thread to elaborate ( Also, sign up for email blog alerts, and  follow @ZenGlop on the Twitter.)

I'm not going to call it the Coming Mayan Apocalypse.  I'm not going to call it The End of the World, either.  Every moment is the End of The World, so nothing special about 06:11 AM EST, December 21 2012.  I don't think I've ever thought there was a prophetic catastrophe on its way.  

Although  we've been through various planetary alignments  together - to a soundtrack of bleeping/blurping music - including a rioutous reading of R J Stewarts small but powerful book  The Prophecies of Merlin,  still  I'm not sure that anyone I've known has really thought that either. 

This is a riff, an improvisation. Nobody knows anything, but all these shiny objects in the air - ideas cast up like sycamores, clouds of whirling seeds falling in patterns complex and unpredictable.  I've got a stack of books (next to Merlin), including Teilhard de Chardin, John Michell, Rupert Sheldrake.  Alan Watts.  A bit of Stephen Hawking, although I'm better of with Brian Greene , and the source physicists didn't write atractive books for lay people.   James Joyce for a laugh, and some American Civil war stuff, just because that's what I'm reading right now so why mess with it just because we're facing the end of time (I'll have that on the record  player also, Messiaen).

Those guys are great, with lots of mileage.  But I will keep returning to Carl Jung and Terrence McKenna.  Carl Jung sets up a profound  model for thinking about UFOs in his monograph Flying Saucers:  A modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, and I'll propose using something similar to talk about 2012.

 "If we close our eyes a little so as to overlook certain details, it is possible to side with the reasonable opinion of the majority ..., and to regard the thousands of UFO reports and the uproar they have created as a visionary rumour, to be treated accordingly.  They would then boil down, objectively, to an admittedly impressive collection of mistaken observations and conclusions into which subjective psychic assumptions have been projected (my italics)."

Jung identifies the process of projection, where the psychic form  "extrapolates it's contents into an object" .  Up, down, all around or singing the blues, there's a load of psychic form extrapolated on to the idea of 2012.  In Hollywood movies.  In quiet disquisition late night on the fire escape.  Everywhere in between.   It is important that the 'object' could begin as either a psychic,  or as a physical phenomenon.  That disctinction isn't useful so much in the discussion of the UFO phenomenon, and it isn't useful so much in talking about the 2012 meme.

 And '2012' is a meme in the strongest and strangest sense of the word.  NASA gives primary source to Terrence McKenna:

Dennis and Terence McKenna discussed it in The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching. That book at least got the Baktun-13 end date right: Dec. 21, 2012. It also noted that the date is the winter solstice, when the Sun will be "in the constellation Sagittarius, only about 3 degrees from the Galactic Center, which, also coincidentally, is within 2 degrees of the ecliptic." The McKennas continued, "Because the winter solstice node is precessing, it is moving closer and closer to the point on the ecliptic where it will eclipse the galactic center." In reality this event will never happen, but it hardly matters. The McKennas linked the whole arrangement with the concept of renewal and called 2012 a moment of "potential transformative opportunity."

The Mayan calendar is actually incidental to the insight that Mckenna was writing about, which is the Timewave. More on that in the next post.  I first heard of Terrence McKenna in 1992, close enough to 20 years ago.  (That fact alone baffles me more than the immanent end of time. ) I heard him in a track by The Shamen:

 

What does he say here - he says an awful lot, which I'll keep coming back to.  But this first:

It's almost as though this object in hyperspace - glittering in hyperspace - throws off reflections of itself which actually ricochet into the past illuminating this mystic, inspiring that saint or visionary. 

I love that image.  This object, whatever an 'object' is when it doesn't reside in time/space, shooting off sparks, substance raining down into becoming.   Beautiful.

 

McKenna  also talks about history as the "shockwave of the eschaton".  It's wildly sexy.   I've used the word ZenGlop to capture what I feel when I think through the idea of the eschatological object.  ZenGlop....good name for a band, or a blog.  Or maybe a brand new puppy dog?

Anyway.  Thursday night heading in to dawn on Friday morning, I'm going to be sitting, perhaps meditating, perhaps sleeping.  Listening to Messiaen, drinking tea.  

 

 


Emily Dickinson in Tibet (a mash-up)

Last week, I had the opportunity to teach a session at Olmo Ling. We worked through the drumming techniques used in the Chod practice. The chants of the Chod practice have a strong structure, centered on two "Feasts" where we visualize offering up own physically dismembered corpse.

Such formal and complex visualizations are part of the tantric path, where the obstacles to enlightenment are transformed. Often quickly, perhaps within the course of a single lifetime.

But what is a practice? Check out this poem, by Emily Dickinson.

The Props assist the House
Until the House is built
and then the Props withdraw
And adequate, erect,
The House support itself
And cease to recollect
The Augur and the Carpenter -
Just such a retrospect
Hath the perfected life -
A Past of Plank and Nail
And slowness - then the scaffolds drop
Affirming it a Soul.

It's like a pith instruction, this poem. A Pith instruction is a lifetime of teaching and practice - meditation and observation - distilled into a single phrase. It is guidance, imagery, and support for the practitioner.

So then, point by point through the poem, taking Emily to Tibet:

And then the Props withdraw. The meditation practices are of the mind. Even the deities, the images of the practices, are impermanent, delusion. Are the deities real? What is "real" meant? Our visualization, or the inherent existence of the deities, is impermanent. Without form. A Prop.

House support itself I don't understand why the House "support" itself, rather than "supports": (Perhaps a koan of declension). But this self-supporting structure is at home in the foundational view of reality. What is that view? That's the question, isn't it. At the least, we are in the manifest, the born.

And cease to recollect // The Augur and the Carpenter. This line intrudes a bit. I wonder if I'm mis-reading the word, "Augur", and that maybe there's some old fashioned tool, like a level or a sextant. There could be a perfectly contemporary tool, like a hammer or a chisel, and it would still sound medieval and alien to me. So probably not the best person to read through this line. Except I'm pretty sure an augur castrated bulls on temple steps in old Rome.

- Just such a retrospect // Hath the perfected life- There's a break in the poem at the hyphens. The hyphens...a Dickinson fetish...marks the break between birth and death. What is that break? Time spent on earth, time spent living - life is wrapped in those hyphens. But such an oblique reference, such emotion left intuited. The blood of childbirth, blood remaining after the augury?

A Past of Plank and Nail // and slowness This really is a perfect description of the practices. Basic, essential, mundane. Workable. Tools. Practice is. Practice does. Even Not Practice is a Kind of Practice.

The foundational practices in Bon are called Ngondro and include prayers to acknowledge the teacher, the teachings, the heart of compassion. To consider impermanence.

One version of the refuge chant as we have been taught at Olmo Ling is translated:

Root lama magnificent source of the three bodies
Buddhas of the three times, the principle saviors of 
sentient beings
The statues, stupas and scriptures are the Buddhas 
and their teachings
Compassionate beings of the ten directions are the 
lamps on the path of liberation
We now and take refuge in these four supreme sources of refuge.

A stupa is a sacred building constructed to a precise blueprint, with meticulous care taken to use all appropriate materials. When I chant the "lamps on the path of liberation" I see a beautiful trail of oil lamps leading to a monastery on the sacred mountain. In another chant, the Mandala offering, we say:

On  the foundation of the five elements Mount Meru 
and the seven golden Mountains
Including the external and internal precious objects of the four worlds and eight continents
And millions of universes, decorated with the sun andmoon
Please accept and bless as I offer these from the 
core of my heart

 

Traditional lamps in Tibet use yak butter to light the wick, with a rich evocative smell against the darkness of the high sky. This imagery, and these words - they are the repeated patterns that train the mind. A still body is refuge for the mind. A still mind is refuge for the awakened consciousness. This is the perfected life, isn't it?

then the scaffolds drop And don't they for all of us. Impermanence. The young prince Siddhartha saw a sick man, an old man and a dead person. He saw the scaffolds falling.

Affirming it a Soul The word soul is rough. I mean rough in the sense of unfinished, partial. Perhaps there is an aspect of us that is unchanging.... but I don't even now what kind of language to use to say that I don't know. It's moments like this that I wish I could talk to Abraham Lincoln about Emily Dickinson.

So there it is, a a few longer words about a short poem. The perfected life - implied, in retrospect - with birth and death, each being an architectural moment for the awakening mind.

 


The Larkin Project (more)


Another short selection from The Larkin Project, while I figure out uploading to iTunes.   (More available https://soundcloud.com/andrew-kaiser.) Follow @ZenGlop on Twitter for details.
The Larkin Project is music inspired by the recorded voice of Phillip Larkin.    Here's a line or two from Aubade...
And so it stays just on the edge of vision, 
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill 
That slows each impulse down to indecision. 
Most things may never happen: this one will, 
And realisation of it rages out 
In furnace-fear when we are caught without 
People or drink.

The Larkin Project

I'm working on the final edits for a new album, The Larkin Project.  Pieces inspired by the recorded voice of poet Phillip Larkin....follow @ZenGlop on Twitter (or sign up for notices from this blog). I'll be sending out short , sweet little teasers for the next few weeks while I figure out how to get the thing up on iTunes.  
The Larkin Project title.001


What medium is outside of time?

How to make a work of art from a walk? Not looking for a narrative, a journal entry that contains imagery and foot-sore description.

There is a model, a psychogeographic model, where the walking-voice wanders around, in condensed reflection and reflected conversation. The landscape acts as an irritant, a catalyst. The landscape becomes a skeleton around which these ideas form. The walk is a precipitant. The land is a map for the internal discussion.

A book certainly contains the walk. That walk exists outside of time when the book is unread, or when the book is read and then remembered. But the reading of a book is essentially time-laden.

To create a work outside of time, this will require a craft to propel the reader into a perspective where all facets of the work can be witnessed at once. This is true no matter the medium,whether the reader is really a viewer or a listener.

This is not a feature of the piece, it is a function of Art. There is no art piece that can do this, but there is Art. It is the only art, essentially liturgical, and fundamentally alien. The Technology of Ecstasy.

Asides from all that, I don't know.



 

 


The Overview Effect and Leys

I got an email notice about this movie, The Overview Effect just a few days after starting to post about Leys and The Overview Effect. Here's a blurb from the website....

"The essential nature of the Overview Effect experienced by space travelers is a shift in their internal model of the world, or “Worldview,” often resulting in changed or enriched ideas, attitudes, and behaviors concerning life on Earth. It is similar to other better-known and more widely studied experiences that broaden one’s conception of the world.

Examples are global travel, higher education and the heightened sense of the natural world that often accompanies mountain climbing, wilderness trekking, ocean sailing, and other extreme experiences. All create shifted worldviews previously based only on media portrayals. Frank White, author of The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution, calls them “Overview Analogues.” While the analogues focus on individual aspects, the extraordinary scope of the Overview Effect shifts one’s perspective on the entire Earth."

Leys are a poetic structure. They are an Overview Analogue, one that places the viewer ( contemplator? Psychogeographer?) in a position to experience the intersection of landscape and consciousness. (Remember, it is the place Auden describes as "the crux, left of the watershed...")

Consciousness is what? Let's start with the mechanism of active imagination. This is one of the features of consciousness, the ability to create objects, experiences within the mind. These artefacts do exist, although they exist within the sense organ of the mind. The physical sense organs feed in to the mind, but there is a perception that is only mind. This is where visualisation of the deities resides, also where sports psychologists work. Propagandists: artists.

And so confronted, with images etched on the earth, figures that extend beyond out capacity to see as a whole, we are compelled towards the sense organ of the mind. The sense organ of the mind resides outside linear chronology.

A ley represents distance outside of time. Space outside of time. Space experienced in the imagination, which is the noosphere or at least a gateway to the noosphere. Perhaps think of it as the memory of an anticipated walk.


Shaving - a quiet prerogative

I just got a proper shave. Before and After...you have to guess which is which:

 

I've kept a pretty full beard for close to 5 years now. Before that, I would let some facial hair grow over the winter, shave it off in the late spring. I remember running the Mt Desert Isle Marathon, 2008, with a full beard going on. But memory is a funny thing, I also remember deciding to keep a beard ahead of my second round of brain surgery ( nothing serious, but don't you think I should be able to drink out on that for a lot longer?). I was worried about several possible negative outcomes. Deaf. Stupid. But the one I could prepare for was facial paralysisI've grown to love a beard. Who hasn't? But as Springsteen says: " I check my look in the mirror".

I grew a beard also because shaving was an ordeal, a trivial moment, the bailiwick of the clean-faced. But it doesn't have to be that way.

 


Take a walk outside the time it takes.

I want to take a walk, go out walking. Then turn it into a piece of work.

Perhaps I walk alone. Maybe with the dogs - Reggie and Buford. I want to walk out, following no particular path. I want to walk out, with design and intent. Either way, I'm good. But there's a formalist conceit, which is that there's something waiting to be extracted at the end.

What would that look like? Or sound like? I like a good story, a knotty narrative fills with reflection, tangents and occasional poetic flight. But it takes time to read. I ask if there is medium outside of time, where I can take the walk and consider each angle? I want to hold it. Can I represent it as a sculpture? Can I weave strands of wire together to create the form of the walk?

And not the pedestrian representation of topography. I wrote some short studies once, using the KML file downloaded from a GPS unit to upload to Google Earth. I think I just assigned one set of values to a pitch, and let a sine wave warble for about 10 seconds. There are more interesting ways to assign values to sonic vectors. And besides, the sound still unfolds in time.

I like very much Richard Long, his lines created by walking through a field. The walk itself is constrained, but the line is a single artifact. It is a representation of the entirety. Time is wrapped in the soil. The molecules of the soil are changed, they have been held outside the earthy processes of decomposition, seismology. The line has removed the walk from the topographic domain, placing it above the realm.

If this sounds familiar, it is because you are a loyal reader. Loyal and attentive, for you are noticing that I describe Richard Long with the same language I used a few days ago to talk about Leys. And indeed, I do think that the awareness of sight-lines (the Old Straight Track) is a long form vision shared across the poetic landscape. A Ley is a non-narrative construct of distance. I wish all readers were as delightful as you are - for you surely know who you are.

I've thought about a piece, set in Pittsburgh, working title "Cairn-Seeds". I walk, and I place small red stones at each terminus. These stones are the Cairn-Seeds. I publish the GPS locations, with directions to bring also a red stone and add to the pile. ( I'd publish using the geocaching sites, which would increase the population sample). Then, I walk the same path repeatedly. The frequency with which I walk each path is based on an algorithm that I haven't figured out yet. Lets say it works out to be once every 7 weeks. I visit each cairn.

Do I document the growth of the stones? Photography? Journal of the estimated weight? Or do I leave, knowing that it is known somewhere, at least by the last person to leave a stone?

There can be many walks. The stones could be any color.

 


Some thoughts on Leys

(Auden, perhaps contemplating Leys?)
 

From my notebook, working on ideas for a book ( saints and ley lines in east anglia?).

  1. To say Ley Lines is redundant, the ley implies the line. Where I work, we have a report called the Technology Portfolio Report, always referred to as The TPR report. That's also redundant.
  2. You can think of leys in two ways. On one hand, the Old Straight Track documented by Alfred Watkins. A ley is defined by the visible alignment of ancient sites, often then drawn on a map. On the other, The New View Over Atlantis, and other work by John Michell. Leys are mystical lines of energy, connecting powerful points of concentration often empowered by architecture, often considered alongside the UFO phenomenon
  3. A straight line alignment is an intersection of the human psyche and the landscape. the individual human psyche as much as the collective. It is an essentially poetic structure, defined in the vivid imagination of a single walker, footsteps on the earth create morphic resonance.
  4. The Ley is a poetic construct. Defined in the vivid imagination of a single walker, understood and communicated through art, shared and experienced by others. Like morphic resonance, the accretion of meaning on the landscape.
  5. In the poem, The Watershed, Auden positions the reader left and up from the artifacts of the scenery: those objects which hold on to the Quiddity.
  6. This sense of remove is important. The sense of remove defines the psychogeographic stance, which is also the poetic stance. Considering the Straight Track -a distant steeple or the mountain cairn - inserts the psyche in the noosphere above the realm.
  7. When I look along the sky, from many places in Pittsburgh, I see the  water tower in Garfield, I am circuited. I am both places at once. I like the word " circuited" here, but it is an irregular coinage. Reminds me of 'bruited', but only in pronunciation. Bruited is archaic, meaning noises, or a rumor. Medical term, an abnormal sound heard in auscultation.
  8. I think this is an intimation of the Overview Effect and is a conspicuous function of the straight track alignments. This awareness is Liminal. Profoundly available to all humans. Even - or particularly - the mundane.
  9. I'm throwing some words around here. The relationship between leys, the noosphere, and The Overview effect...well, if I write that , I won't be sitting here drinking Wild Turkey from a coffee cup any more.