The Feast of the Epiphany is traditionally the holiest day of the Gnostic calendar. (It is also, totally non-coincidentally, the first day of Carnival.) I haven't observed it in a while... in fact for a long time I've lived as more or less an atheist, with no spiritual or esoteric practice whatsoever. So I've been meditating today on the idea of making space for the sacred. In my head and heart and in my life, mainly, though the final plan for my room (which I'll hopefully work on by this weekend) will involve setting up an altar.

I'll start with a few words from Neil Douglas-Klotz's The Hidden Gospel:

The word for holy in Aramaic, qadash, combines two old Semitic roots. The first (KD) points to the pivot or point upon which everything turns. The second (ASh) suggests a circle that unfolds from that point with power and heat. To become holy in an Aramaic sense then means to create separate space for whatever becomes the pivot of our lives, the axis on which our universe turns. In this way, we clarify the essence of our being so that we can find our unique place in the cosmic Unity. We fully individuate -- which feels like a process of separation -- in order to enrich the whole texture of the reality of Alaha.

This makes me mindful of a passage I have not thought of in a long time, the 37th Ode of Solomon:

I stretched out my hands to my Lord:
and to the Most High I raised my voice:
And I spake with the lips of my heart;
and He heard me when my voice reached Him:
His answer came to me and gave me the fruits of my labours;
And it gave me rest by the grace of the Lord.
Hallelujah.

Quite some time ago I unpacked an esoteric formula described by this passage, representing the readiness of the mystic to receive the ruach, the breath which is spirit and life. (See also the 8th Ode, which is more explicitly esoteric.)

Concluding my commentary on the passage I quoted the Gospel of Thomas: "Jesus said, 'Let the one seeking not stop seeking until he finds. And when he finds he will marvel, and marveling he will reign, and reigning he will rest.'"

"Rest" or "repose" or "silence" (alternately "the abyss") is found throughout the Gnostic literature as the companion (or residence) of the Root of All, implying that the repose of the individual mystic in prayer or meditation is one and the same as the ain soph, the cosmic limitless abyss that precedes the moment-to-moment manifest unfolding of all that exists and all that happens in the universe.

Making space for the sacred is both the beginning and the end of this process.

My previous entries marking the Feast of Epiphany can be read here:
http://sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com/107424.html
http://sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com/329818.html
http://sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com/482919.html

There's been some interesting discussion in transgender about "A Game of You," which was a story in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. (I'd link but it's a locked post.) You can read a synopsis of the plot at Wikipedia.

One of the major characters of this storyline is Wanda, a transsexual woman. Many of the folk in that community have, as do i, very mixed feelings about the way Wanda's place in the story was handled. Is it a sympathetic portrayal? An objectifying portrayal? Why is transgender even an element of the story at all? Was the purpose simply to make one of the characters quirky? Or is the intention to explore something deeper?

I'll start by saying that i do believe that Gaiman (and Grant Morrison, whose portrayal of Lord Fanny in The Invisibles i want to compare and contrast) does not seem to approach transgender as a metaphor or literary device (e.g. movies like "The Crying Game" or "Hedwig and the Angry Inch"). It doesn't "mean something," it is just a way some people are. He also does seem to understand that transgender is rooted primally in a transperson's experience. It is fundamentally an aspect of what it is like to be me; it does not come from culture or abstract gender conceptualization, although the way in which it manifests is shaped by those things. It is not a religion to which i converted; there was never a time in my life when i was not transgender. Gaiman seems to understand these things about Wanda.

I also want to say at the outset that authors are not required to do things that make us happy. I don't mean that in the sense of, was his portrayal tolerant or intolerant. I mean, sometimes an author may, if it suits his or her purpose on the way to making a bigger point, narratively affirm a concept or point which seems discordant.

And so it is during the part of the story when Thessaly, who turns out to be a witch who by hook and crook has kept herself alive for thousands of years, draws down the moon and creates a bridge into the dreamworld. Two other women who are present can cross; but not Wanda, because she was born male and has no menstrual blood to offer. A disembodied face Thessaly has nailed to the wall, who speaks with supernatural knowledge, affirms this and refers to Wanda as a man. Actually i found an excerpt of the dialogue between Wanda and the disembodied face:

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On a certain occasion the Blessed One [the Buddha] was dwelling at Savatthi in Jetavana monastery in Anathapindika's Park. Now it happened to the venerable Malunkyaputta, being in seclusion and plunged in meditation, that a consideration presented itself to his mind as follows:

"These theories which the Blessed One has left unexplained, has set aside and rejected -- that the world is eternal, that the world is not eternal, that the world is finite, that the world is infinite, that the soul and the body are identical, that the soul is one thing and the body another, that the saint exists after death, that the saint does not exist after death, that the saint both exists and does not exist after death, that the saint neither exists nor does not exist after death -- these the Blessed One does not explain to me. And the fact that the Blessed One does not explain these to me does not please me nor suit me. Therefore i will draw near to the Blessed One and inquire of him concerning this matter. ... If the Blessed One will not explain to me [the answer to these questions], in that case i will abandon religious training and return to the lower life of a layman."

Then the venerable Malukyaputta arose at eventide from his seclusion, and drew near to where the Blessed One was; and having drawn near and greeted the Blessed One, he sat down respectfully at one side. [And then Malukyaputta asked the Blessed One his questions and demanded an answer.]

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I quoted this at great length because it is illustrative of a Problem on which i've had my eyes set for quite some time. It is a subset of a greater pattern which i have previously described: the misappropriation of radical speech by the statists and the upper class, and the subsequent redirection of radical movements so that they come to favor and promote the social stratification to which they originally objected.

In this case, it is an example of misappropriation of mystical speech by the adherents of religious edifice. Mysticism is raw observation about human experience, followed by exploration of practical, i emphasize, practical solutions to problems which make people miserable. Solutions proposed two or three thousand years ago may, in light of modern understanding, seem not to directly address the ills of human society -- they may, for example, consist of meditation and/or ritual -- but they are done with the intent of directly minimizing suffering in some way.

Contrast this with religious solutions, which involve appealing to deities to intervene on our behalf.

The difference between the two paradigms is that under the mystical paradigm humans have the power and duty to fix their own problems. Under the religious paradigm, any action we take is merely a band-aid on the true source of our ills, because it is up to God to save us.

Whether the view i am here calling religious is true or not, it tends to find favor among authoritarians because the underlying message is that we are fundamentally powerless in the face of human suffering. If the authorities intend to enhance their own well-being in ways they know will increase the suffering of everybody else, the state of existential helplessness caused by relying on divinity to save us works in their favor.

From that perspective, the teachings of mysticism are a mixed blessing; they could on the one hand encourage people to question and revolt against the status quo -- or they could pacify people just enough to help them tolerate the pain of being slowly cannibalized. In any case, it helps to redirect mystical teachings so that they pose no radical threat; the populace-pacification provided by a "tamed" mysticism is a useful bonus.

At the outset, the teachings of Buddha began with the observation that people suffer, followed by a way of life designed to alleviate that suffering. This included meditation, now proven scientifically to make people happier. (It doesn't work for everyone, but for many it does provide tangible, quantifiable benefit.) The general gist of the proposed way of life is avoiding extremes. According to the passage above, none of this relies on what one believes about things that have no impact on one's immediate suffering or happiness. Emphasis is on action, not belief. Thus i characterize the above as exemplary of mystical teaching -- probably the clearest mystical passage i have read in all of ancient scripture.

And yet... and yet we can see that this passage comes to us couched in religious terminology. Most Buddhists are adherents of a religion; they prey to a pantheon of Buddhas and Boddhisattvas to save them. They meditate, yes, and this reduces their suffering, but is employed as a balm to soothe suffering caused in part by social stratification.

"Spirituality" is what i call mysticism that has been tamed and misappropriated. Spirituality is notably concerned with 'lofty' matters, which are vaguely considered to be less important or pressing. In spiritual contexts one is considered vaguely out of line if one asks questions about material problems, because these arenas are considered to be strictly divorced. Activism as a solution to suffering is portrayed as entanglement in the "web of illusion" and is therefore to be avoided.

The benefits to those at the top of any social heirarchy are easy to see.

The questions posed by spirituality may or may not be valid, but they have the effect of discouraging and even denigrating attempts to view action as a viable solution to social ills. If action is ultimately pointless or fruitless in the face of metaphysical adversity, then what is the point of taking any action at all? Taking action is sometimes even explicitly forbidden; for example, some communities forbid accepting medical care or blood transfusions because healing is left up to God.

The promotion of spirituality by religious teachers has worked so well that i have had to construct more or less from scratch an 'embedded theology' that considers material concerns a valid dimension of mystical inquiry. Guide books on material-practical mysticism are hard to find, because as soon as they're written they are spiritualized -- or, in the case of many ancient texts, they were spiritualized before being written down, such the highly stylized passage i quoted above (or, as i have contended at length, the teachings of Jesus).

The questions with which Malunkyaputta concerned himself in the passage above are typical questions of spirituality. They are rejected by the Buddha out of hand as being of "no profit," which, from the standpoint of practical mysticism, is true. It does not alleviate suffering to know whether or not the world is eternal.

In order to keep the focus away from immediate pressing problems and put it onto lofty matters, proponents of religion and spirituality must convince people that something even greater than life or death is at stake. Again, even without directly commenting on the truth or falsehood of ideas like eternal life or eternal damnation, it's interesting how, seen this way, religion and spirituality begin to look as though they have almost been deliberately constructed to draw people away from concerning themselves with practical matters -- especially when we look at the long history of mistreatment and subsequent misappropriation of mystics and prophets by members of religious establishments...

For a while now i've been toying around from time to time with the idea that mind is a field. Under this view, mind is given the respect it is due as a phenomenon in its own right, but without a metaphysical dualism of the sort with which mind/body theories typically wrestle.

Some implications of this are interesting. Fields have properties like resonance, and theoretically extend over the whole universe. Noön particles would be quantum-interlinked just like other particles. So our individual minds, thoughts, feelings, are not as isolatedly individual as we seem to experience them. While noöns may be concentrated inside living brains, they wouldn't be found only there.

If noöns exist, why haven't we seen them? I think they possess a rather unique place in nature, in that they serve as an explication factor which draws spacetime reality into being from the melange of the holomovement. Trying to observe one directly would be difficult for the same reason it is hard to pinpoint the exact nature of first-person experience. Noöns are, in my hypothesis, what acts on quantum fields to produce what we perceive as the "quantum wave collapse." In other words, what defines "reality" as distinct from the fullness of existence is the influence of a noönic field. So to look at a noön would be analogous to looking at a mirror; you don't see an image, but only a reflection of what is around. Seeing anything at all *is* the process of seeing a noön.

(It sounds like i am proposing a duality here between explicated and otherwise, but i do not imagine a universe where explicit matter is free from influence by that which remains enfolded. If you said this sounds like a hidden-variable-invoking Bohmian interpretation, you'd be right. Heck, noöns themselves are a hidden variable.)

There is a lot that might be explained by the supposition that each mind extends over all of spacetime. It might partly explain, for example, instant attraction or repulsion. Have you ever met someone and felt like you recognized them immediately? Perhaps there is a strong resonance between your noönic fields. If however you meet someone whose noönic field is dissonant with your own, you might be inclined to dislike them, and you'd likely be right: that person would think and act in ways very different from you.

Many different aspects of collective human behavior might be explained this way, from mob consciousness to the intuitive appeal of ideas like Jung's collective unconscious, or Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere as the endpoint of human evolution.

It also allows for the possibility of noönic solitons or persistences. I could write a whole entry on what that means, persistent noönic waves floating around free of brains to shape them, affecting thought, feeling, and perhaps even matter. Some memes might be noönic solitons -- as might memories or experiences some people attribute to "reincarnation." Perhaps instincts and patterns of human behavior i referred to recently as "human nature" are noönic solitons as well.

There are interesting implications regarding will and causation, too. Jeffrey Schwartz proposed a notion he called "mental force" to explain the observable change in brain structure which can result from focused meditation. That the brain is capable of self-reprogramming is fascinating and opens a wide range of potential for human improvement. But this result also gives us hard evidence that consciousness is something real. (Contrast the views of Daniel Dennett and other eliminative-materialists who claim that consciousness and self are pure memetic illusion, on the basis of the observation that there is no place within the brain where consciousness resides.)

I've come to think that being abusive, hateful, and intolerant is evidence of having a weak will in the face of external influence. A person who displays these traits is less of an individuated person; they are blown about and easily carried along by external currents. In my opinion, the work of individuation, of learning to focus one's will by way of discipline (meditation, contemplative prayer, martial arts, esoterica, and other kinds of discipline) is inseparable from the work of cultivating a better human society.

This morning i had an idea for a new book project. It would actually be something of a companion to The Serpent's Wisdom, though would require several more years of research.

The working title would be something like As Above, So Below: The Politics of Mysticism, and the book would trace the role of economics, politics, and struggle against oppression in the formation of mystical practice and teaching. My rough idea is that in antiquity many mystical movements sprung up in response to the encroaching dehumanization of urban society, imperialism, and oppression; and that this commonality of experience can explain certain parallels between various movements. I want to examine the Jewish prophetic movement in this light, as well as the Cynics, the Essenes, the Gnostics, the Hermetists, the Kabbalists, the early Christians, and the early Buddhists, and probably others to be added as my research progresses.

To give an example of what i have in mind, i want to explore the notion that vegetarianism among the encratite Jewish/Christian sects may have been a form of protest against the monopoly on salted meat held by the Temple in Jerusalem. In the Tanakh we can read about several centuries of struggle between classes of priests, one of whom sought to establish in Jerusalem a nationwide monopoly on slaughtering sacrificial animals, and others who sought to establish temples in the countryside where sacrifice could be practiced -- these are called in the Tanakh ("Old Testament") the "high places." One king would tolerate the high places, the next would side with the Aaronide priests and abolish them.

(Along similar lines, there's some controversy over the work of a historian who claims that beef-eating and cow-sacrifice was widespread among the upper classes of ancient India. If this is the case -- i still have to examine the evidence -- then perhaps vegetarianism in India could be explained as a similar radical response. But this is even more speculative than the above.)

Another example of the interplay between mysticism and oppression which i've mentioned before is dystheism.

Yet another dimension is the competition, mentioned in the Tanakh, between the priests of Yahweh and the qedeshim, who were proponents of the cult of Asherah in the same region. This would be competition to establish what Pascal Boyer called a monopoly on religious services. Since the priests of Yahweh won, they were able to immortalize their version of the conflict in written history.

I want to also further explore a counter-notion that the development of religious doctrine and edifice is a cultural misappropriation of radical mysticism by the upper classes. Historically, radical movements are either successfully suppressed, or they grow widely enough that they begin to affect the shape of society. The privileged classes respond by adopting the imagery of the radical movement while sanitizing it of its socially-transformative elements -- thus creating a "religion" that deals only with "spiritual" matters.

An old essay of mine on the sacred-sexual aspects of transgenderism was re-published online in an_gadhar's journal, The Shadow Sacrament: a Journal of Sex and Spirituality. Not work-safe.

75 pages into The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf it hits me: in women's magazines, the fnords are not in the articles, they are in the advertisements.

From time to time I have pondered whether there is an older "messianic monologue" in the Gospel of John, around which narrative material was spliced to construct the final text. Consider this:

( John 10:1-30 )

The parts of the passage which I bolded flow seamlessly one into the next, even though these are supposedly different conversations from different days. Sure, it's entirely possible that Jesus picked up exactly where he left off a day or so later, but the monologue makes more sense as a single, unspliced whole. When we read this chapter of John's Gospel, the discontinuity gets glossed because this is obviously a written work rather than a recounting of a literal conversation that took place.

If you take the first-person messianic monologue out of the gospel, it resembles very strongly texts like The Thunder: Perfect Mind and Primary Thought in Three Forms, not to mention some of the Montanist prophesies.

In short, my opinion is that the messianic monologues of the Gospel of John are, like these other exampls, the product of an esoteric/visionary process whereby a person speaks for the divine in first person as a way of connecting with the divine and making the divine more personal and immediate.

Edit. This previous discussion on the possibility that John was originally a Gnostic document bears strong relevance here.

Marshall McLuhan considers the story of King Cadmus and the dragon's teeth to be an essential metaphor in the examination of Western history. King Cadmus, who was said to bring the Phoenecian alphabet to Greece, planted dragon's teeth like seeds, and up sprouted an army, ready for battle.

It may be impossible to overstate the effect of alphabetic literacy on humankind. Since it warps our perceptions before they hit the conscious mind, we are numbed to it; we cannot tell where letter and number stop and raw reality begin, because our brain is designed to look for shortcuts. The conscious censor makes us unaware of the seams in our text-inspired reality-narrative. (The brain also numbs to redundant sense data -- a process called "adaptation" -- so it is no surprise that since we are immersed in literate culture we become numb to the evidence of literacy's affects inside us and outside us.)

Once writing was developed, our brains latched on to it. We can recognize power and potential when we see it, and the abililty to trap words (thoughts, concepts, the universe itself) in writing conveys immense power. This power is reflected in the forms of the alphabets themselves -- the Hebrew letters designed to resemble flames, the Tibetan alphabet inspired by the cracks in the human skull.

It is reflected also in the apotheosis of the alphabet, which we see explicitly in the Hindu and Jewish traditions. The Hindu alphabet is called "devanagari," the "writing of the city of the gods." In the Jewish tradition the divinity of alphabet was captured much more vividly, with the innovation of an invisible God whose name exists only in written form -- it was (and still is) blasphemy to translate God's name to spoken form, or to destroy a medium bearing the written name of God. Letters are used as an oracle in many traditions (for example, the tradition of casting runes). Esoteric traditions find magical significance in the ways letters and numbers combine, or in the interplay of consonant and vowel, and often assign metaphorical or transcendent meaning to each letter, dividing up the cosmos in an explicit way, to match the implicit ways language, alphabet, and number chew up our experience of the world.

A creation myth from Jewish Haggadah included in The Other Bible describes the creation of the universe through the expression of the Torah in written form, an interesting contrast with the Genesis story itself which describes God creating through speech. The intent may have been to establish a mythical primacy of alphabet over speech.

Esoteric traditions seem to be ambivalent about the use of writing. While the written/unspoken God was called the chief demon (archon) in the Gnostic tradition, along with rejection of the written code of law and the imperial edifice it makes possible, there is also extensive use of writing. I think this may be because they found they could harness the power of writing for their own use as a tool in psychological self-exploration. In Gnostic esoterica (as in certain Hellenistic, Egyptian, and Jewish esoterica) initiates are able to assert power over angels, demons, and forces of nature by using their signs or knowing their names. With that power thus granted, the initiate is able to access parts of the mind or the collective unconscious usually closed to conscious awareness.

During one of my qabalistic pathworkings several years ago, I found myself in the Devil's labyrinth. The maze was arranged inside the walls of a cube. Each person in the maze was lost in his or her own individual trip. Looking up I could see the devil on a throne watching over all. After I ascended to his throne, he allowed me to sit.

From this perspective, I could see that the devil sat on a throne facing the way out of the maze.

Perhaps this was so that he could watch for people who might be getting close to the exit. Or maybe he was the devil simply virtue of the fact that he knew the way out but does not divulge this.

But isn't it interesting that both Christ and Lucifer are compared to the morning star in scripture? Or that the Hebrew words for Messiah and serpent have the same gematria?