Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind.1
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The American Scholar’
Dreamtime, the title of Moriarty’s first published work, is derived from the Australian Aboriginal word Altjeringa meaning the ‘Dreaming’ or ‘Dreamtime’, a sacred time of creation. As Aborigines envisage it, the Earth in the beginning was a wasteland devoid of any mountains, valleys, lakes, rivers, bushes, trees, forests or any living thing. Then the Eternal Ones of the Dream (the Altjeringa Mitjina), came along and went walkabout across the desolate Earth, dreaming and singing these and others of the Earth’s geophysical features into existence. Thus, a once barren Earth was transformed into the thriving Earth we now know.
For Moriarty, just as the Earth was somehow dreamed into existence so too was culture, it ‘having its origin in things said and done in the beginning’.2 Chiefly preoccupied with this cultural sense of Dreamtime, Moriarty focuses predominately on Celtic, European and Judaeo-Christian Dreamtimes. However, the range of his discourse extends far beyond these particular cultural Dreamtimes. He has recourse to a plethora of diverse cultures including: Mesopotamian, ancient Egyptian, Native North American, Inuit, Nordic, Chinese, Australian Aboriginal, Indian and ancient Greek. Acutely concerned with humanity’s cultural beginnings, he claims many of its various origins and subsequent developments are inherently degenerative. Attempting to come to terms with Western humanity’s corrupt cultural origins, Moriarty poses the question: ‘What are poets for in a destitute time?’ (‘… wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?’), first articulated by Friedrich Hölderlin in the poem ‘Bread and Wine’ (‘Brod und Wein’) in 1801 and later taken up with great rigour by Martin Heidegger in his 1946 essay ‘What Are Poets For?’
(‘Wozu Dichter?’).3
According to Moriarty, the poet’s task is to heal. He contends that the great poets are those who, having healed themselves, have then gone on to heal us culturally, through the visions, myths and rituals by which we live. Moriarty’s understanding of the poet as a healer of culture lies in close proximity to Friedrich Nietzsche’s conception of the philosopher. In a letter to Erwin Rhode, dated about 22 March 1873, a young Nietzsche detailed his plans to write a book on Greek philosophy entitled The Philosopher as Physician of Culture.4 Drawing on Moriarty’s and Nietzsche’s perspectives, a kinship between the poet and philosopher is revealed, as both share the task of striving to revive and revitalize humanity and culture. But what constitutes a destitute time? What does modern Western humanity need to be healed of? Why does Moriarty regard Éire, Europa and Ecclesia as being in serious trouble?
His response to these questions is manifold, nonetheless, it is possible to gain some insight into Moriarty’s understanding of Western humanity’s destitute condition by paying close attention to specific important pieces from Dreamtime. The extracts chosen for this Reader largely relate to Moriarty’s preoccupations with European and Christian Dreamtimes. Although his exploration of a Celtic Dreamtime is also pivotal to this work, ‘Ces Noidhen’ is the only piece of a Celtic persuasion to find its way into the current Reader since it is given Moriarty’s full attention in his later book Invoking Ireland.
The presence of ‘Ces Noidhen’ is nevertheless significant, for it alerts us to the possibility of ignorant trespass into Fodhla, a name Moriarty ascribes to Ireland’s Dreamtime. Signifying both a mood of the mind and the universe, Moriarty declares that one must be aware of rite not right at the borders of Fodhla.5 To suffer the Ces Noidhen, the pangs of labour of the Celtic Horse Goddess Rhiannon/Macha, is an invitation to undergo a rite of passage. In ‘Ces Noidhen’ it is Pwyll’s and his warriors’ willingness to endure the labour pains of the divinity Rhiannon that allow them to experience what the Stoics call a sumpatheia ton hollon, ‘sympathy with all things’, an underlying affinity interconnecting all things with each other. However, Pwyll and his men were only able to undergo the Ces Noidhen because they were of an exceptional nature. As Moriarty writes:
They had it in them, living now, riding now to Arberth, to be a tale told by a fireside in the far past, to be a tale told by a fireside in the far future. And they would say, would sometimes say, that their only reason for being in the world was to give the world a chance to live out its own strangeness, its own danger, and its own wonder in them.6
Not only serving as a threshold ritual, Moriarty regards the Ces Noidhen as a way of sanctifying humanity’s life in Nature. While he does not settle for the Ces Noidhen it does provide a necessary note of caution and indicates the extreme difficulties involved in venturing into or being ventured by Dreamtime.
The piece entitled ‘Ulropeans’ denotes what Europeans have become for Moriarty. The term ‘Ulropean’ is inspired by William Blake’s account of humanity’s Fall through the states of Eden, Beulah, Generation and Ulro. Moriarty informs us that these are to be thought of as states of mind rather than ‘states of independently existing objective reality’. Moreover, Moriarty is keen to illumine how the Ulro state of mind signifies confinement to what Blake calls in ‘The Four Zoas’ and ‘Jerusalem’, the ‘Limit of Opacity (or Opakeness)’ and the ‘Limit of Contraction’. Restricted to the limits of opacity and contraction, Moriarty contends that the Ulropean has a wholly reductive way of perceiving the world.7
In order to describe and explicate the implications of the Ulropean’s narrowed way of seeing things, Moriarty coined two new words, namely ‘Gorgocogito’ and ‘Medusa mindset’. Gorgocogito is a mythico-philosophical word, conjoining Gorgo and cogito. Gorgo refers to the Greek mythological character Gorgon, a terrifying female creature whose appearance turned anyone who laid eyes upon her to stone. According to Greek myth there were three Gorgons named Euryale (‘far-roaming’), Stheno (‘forceful’), and Medusa (‘ruler’), the chief Gorgon. Additionally, cogito relates to René Descartes’ famous statement Cogito ergo sum (‘I think, therefore I am’). As an indubitable first statement it provides the foundations for Descartes’ epistemological enterprise by which he sought to show all knowledge as a totally deductive system. Moriarty’s use of the word Gorgocogito suggests modern Western thinking transforms everything thought about and looked upon to stone. Likewise, when the term Medusa mindset arises in Moriarty’s writings it has a similar connotation. For Moriarty, the Ulropean eye is determined in its mode and manner of seeing things by its gorgonizing concepts and Medusa mindset. Consequently looking at a cow it sees gallons of milk and kilos of meat and looking at a tree it sees cubic metres of timber. Through contracted Ulropean eyes the Earth becomes an economic resource, there to be manipulated for human use and benefit.
If Europe or Ulropa has gone culturally astray and continues to do so what can be done to alter such errancy? Discontented or bewildered with the modern world, or perhaps succumbing to a deeper yearning, an Australian Aborigine will one day walk to the edge of his town or city, drop his modern clothes, tools and civilized habits, and will go walkabout in the Altjeringa that was in the beginning. Similarly, in Dreamtime Moriarty drops or disinherits those aspects of his European heritage which he regards as a hindrance to standing beautifully upon the Earth. Unlearning those concepts, ideals, categories and forms of sensibility that inform the Cartesian’s and Ulropean’s stunted level of perceptual awareness, Moriarty enters into creative dialogue with an array of the world’s traditions, seeking to reimagine Europa’s past in the belief that a healed past can bring forth a healed present and future. Claiming the ‘dirty devices’ of the everyday world referred to by Thomas Traherne in Centuries of Meditations have not irredeemably impeded the prospect of human flourishing, Moriarty endeavours to bring about a Bastille Day for Ulropa. Not restricted to human liberation, Moriarty’s Bastille Day involves the liberation of all beings and things. He remarks:
So perhaps there is hope. We can perhaps imagine it, Bastille Day for Michelangelo’s Captives. Bastille Day for everyone who is embedded in the Medusa mindset. Bastille Day for rocks, rainbows, rivers and stars. Rocks, rainbows, rivers and stars walking free of our petra-fying perceptions of them.
Quatorze Juillet.
Quatorze Éternité.8
Besides his focus on a European Dreamtime, Moriarty also examines a Christian Dreamtime. ‘Triduum Sacrum’, ‘Job and Jonah’, ‘Crossing the Kedron-Colorado’, ‘Passover’ and ‘Watching with Jesus’ are those pieces relating to a Christian Dreamtime that have been selected for this Reader.
Moriarty identifies Jesus Christ as the ‘prototype and patron’ of the Dreamtime he is attempting to evoke. By way of attaining an initial sense of his interpretation of Christ it is worth pointing out that the question, ‘Who, as experiencer, is Jesus?’ takes precedence over the more Aristotelian question, ‘Who in his nature, who in his being, in his substance, was Jesus?’9 For Moriarty, the Triduum Sacrum, the three sacred days of Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday, are paramount to understanding who Christ is as an experiencer. According to Moriarty, during the Triduum Sacrum Beast and Abyss erupted vicariously within Christ, leaving him religiously, philosophically, mythologically and archetypally unaccommodated: ‘made flesh, The Word was verbally unhoused’.10 Unhoused and unaccommodated to such a radical extent that nothing could bear witness to what Christ endured; Moriarty argues that it is the ultimate philosophical challenge to watch with him. To watch with Christ is not to passively observe but to undergo what Christ underwent ‘on all the old karmic floors of the psyche, on all the old karmic floors of the Earth’.11
However, Christ not only journeyed to the ancient karmic floors of the psyche and the Earth, according to Moriarty, he also ascended the metanoetic Nunatak known as Golgotha, the place of the skull. Dürer’s ‘Christ on the Cross’ and Mantegna’s ‘The Crucifixion’, to mention just two of the many portrayals of the crucifixion, depict Christ looking downward upon a skull. These paintings offer visual intimations of the philosophical significance Moriarty associates with Good Friday. In the very short but tremendously powerful piece entitled ‘Passover’ Moriarty succinctly outlines how Christ’s sense of selfhood was overthrown on Good Friday. Venturing beyond the thinking mind, Moriarty regards Christ as the pioneer of a new philosophical tradition he calls metanoesis. Paradoxically, while Moriarty asserts in ‘Triduum Sacrum’ that the sheer enormity of what Christ suffered and achieved in the course of these three holy days means ‘we can’t watch with him’, in ‘Watching with Jesus’ he attempts to do exactly that. Wrestling with extravagant metaphors and images drawn from a variety of religions, in an effort to articulate what Christ experienced, Moriarty provides a tremendously unique interpretation of the Christian story.
Stepping back from the extracts chosen for the present Reader, it is important to retain an overall sense of Dreamtime. Dreamtime consists of an ‘Introduction’, sixty-one pieces Moriarty calls ‘songlines’ and an epilogue entitled ‘The Last Eureka’. Songlines or Dreaming tracks permeate the stories, songs, dances and paintings of Australian Aborigines. As an intricate sequence of song cycles they celebrate the suite of events that brought about the creation of the Earth’s landscape. These songlines manage to preserve the land, the stories and the dreaming of the Altjeringa Mitjina. However, the meaning Moriarty associates with the word ‘songline’ is to be distinguished from how Australian Aborigines understand it. In Moriarty’s case, songlines enact and celebrate a journey from one to another way of being in a world that already exists. The Triduum Sacrum can be considered such a songline; celebrating a journey in identification with Christ into newness of life.
Poetically interweaving a rich and complex series of songlines, Dreamtime represents an extraordinary feat as it seamlessly merges disparate cultural, religious, philosophical and mythological perspectives. The transformative qualities of Dreamtime are immense, giving rise to a heady mix of potent insights. Altering modern humanity’s Medusa mindset and gorgonizing concepts, Moriarty’s shaman-like utterances prepare an opening into Dreamtime, fostering possibilities for a profoundly more enlivened and courteous way of being in the world.
If Emerson’s dictum that the greatness of an individual is to be gauged by his or her capacity to alter one’s state of mind stands true, then Moriarty’s Dreamtime is indisputably a great and prodigious work.
NOTES
1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The American Scholar’ in Representative Men: Nature, Addresses and Lectures (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1883), p. 379.
2. Moriarty, Dreamtime, p. vii.
3. Ibid., p. xii; Friedrich Hölderlin ‘Bread and Wine’, Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (Oxford: Anvil Press Poetry, 2004), p. 327; Martin Heidegger, ‘What are Poets For?’ in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (NewYork: HarperCollins, 2002), p. 89.
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Christopher Middleton (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), pp. 115–16.
5. Awaiting an invitation that might one day be issued forth from Fodhla summoning him to walk in Ireland’s Dreamtime, Moriarty does not claim to have immediate access to it and emphatically states that his book is to be thought of as a propaedeutic, or preliminary study. (Moriarty, Dreamtime, p. 239.)
6. Ibid., p. 5.
7. Ibid., p. 99.
8. Ibid., p. 169.
9. Ibid., p. 39.
10. Ibid., p. 40.
11. Ibid., p. 38.
Towards the end of the last century, Yeats and Lady Gregory spent many days together collecting folklore in the countryside around Coole in the west of Ireland. In the course of their work they discovered that
When we passed the door of some peasant’s cottage we passed out of Europe as that word is understood.
The Europe they here have in mind is of course official Europe, the Europe that continues to have its cultural origins in Hebrew prophecy, Greek philosophy and science, and Roman law.
And now at last a door, and we lift the latch, and the voice that says come in could be the voice of Fintan Mac Bóchra. It could be the voice of Merlin or Taliesin. It could be the voice of Morgan le Fay.
And how strange it is to stumble on the path that takes us to that door. And how strange it is to lift that latch. And how strange it is to hear that voice. And how strange it is to discover we were always so near home.
Coming again the next day, that path might not be there.
There, but not there for us.
Not there for us because now again we have no eyes for it.
Our eyes are for seeing hard facts.
Hadrian’s Wall is a hard fact.
First, it fenced us into a world of hard facts.
Now, stronger than ever, it fences us into a world of manufactured hard facts, it fences us into official Europe. And we don’t even wail at it. Nor do we take a sledge to it. It is within a great prison we are unconscious of that we celebrate our Bastille Day.
Almost from the beginning, the wall that Hadrian had built across the north of England became an inner wall. A defensive wall, it has served its sundering purpose only too well, and we, its prisoners, we have gone on building it, deepening it, widening it, filling up cracks in it. Fortunately no crack was wide enough, not even the crack we call Romanticism was wide enough, to let Merlin walk through.
From before a foundation stone of it was laid, Aristotle had a hand in it. More recently, Descartes had a hand in it. On a morning when he celebrated Christ’s nativity, Milton had a hand in it, forced his Saviour, infant though he was, to have a dredded hand in it. Locke had a hand in it. Indeed, all rationalist and empirical philosophers had a hand in it. Hardly an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century scientist but had a hand in it.
We have gone on building your wall for you, Hadrian. Building it inwardly and outwardly against shamanic Eurasia. Building it inwardly and outwardly against Faerie. Building it inwardly and outwardly against our Dreamtime.
Against Merlin, Taliesin and Morgan le Fay.
Against Boann, Badb and Cailleach Beara.
Against Ollamh Fódhla
Against Fintan Mac Bóchra.
Against Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed. […]
Like all of us, although in our case at an unknown or unrecognized depth of ourselves, Pwyll was a Lord in two worlds. Had the banners of two worlds flying from his towers.
Every year, at leaf-fall, Pwyll and his men rode to Arberth. Riding through a valley five valleys from home they were like an old story Taliesin would tell. And they had it in them to go with the story. They had it in them, living now, riding now to Arberth, to be a tale told by a fireside in the far past, to be a tale told by a fireside in the far future. And they would say, would sometimes say, that their only reason for being in the world was to give the world a chance to live out its own strangeness, its own danger, and its own wonder in them. And this year, reaching Arberth, that’s what they looked like. They looked like men who had survived. They looked like men who had come through a dream that Ceridwen, having drunk a new brew from her cauldron, had of them.
After meat and good cheer in his hall the next day, Pwyll announced, as though something had come over him, that he would now go out and sit on the throne mound. At his bidding, a score of men, and they the bravest, accompanied him.
Famous in all worlds, even in worlds we rarely cross into, the throne mound in Dyfed was called Gorsedd Arberth. A thing of crags and swards, of furze and whitethorns, it was lair to a man’s own fear of it. It was lair to his fear of himself. In some of its moods, horses, in screeching refusal, would rear at it. And so, it wasn’t in ignorance of its perils that Pwyll climbed it. Today, sitting there, he knew that one or another of two adventures would befall him: either he would endure wounds and blows or he would see a wonder.
It was Teyrnon Twyrf Liant, Lord of Gwent Is Coed, who first saw it: in fields all about them not a horse but had stopped grazing and was looking intently, as if in a trance, towards the wood.
Pwyll was of the impression that they were looking into a depth of themselves and into a depth of the world that only the most privileged of us have ever walked in.
Persons so privileged, Pwyll was aware, had rarely come back.
Although he could never afterwards say how or why, Pwyll had come back, a pennant and banner of the Otherworld streaming above him in the January wind.
And as he once came home having slept for nine nights on the nine hazel wattles, so now he came home with a boon for his people. He had news for his people: the Otherworld is a way of seeing this world, it is a way of being in this world.
And still the horses were entranced.
And sure by now that it wouldn’t be blows and wounds, Pwyll expected a wonder.
And a wonder, yes, a wonder she was.
She was riding a roan horse.
The roan horse she was riding had red ears.
As soon as she had fully emerged from the wood, the horses of this world neighed.
And the horse the high woman was riding, the horse with the red ears, she neighed.
And then it happened.
Not a man on the mound but was utterly helpless, utterly struck down. It was with each one of them as it is with a woman in labour.
And it went on.
And it went on.
And it went on.
They had come to defend Pwyll. But not a hand let alone a sword could any one warrior lift.
And it went on.
And it went on.
And then as mysteriously as they were afflicted they were released.
When at last they could come to their feet and had vision for things outside themselves, they looked and saw that she was gone. And strangest of all was how utterly like its old self the world was. As if nothing had happened, a robin was singing.
As if nothing had happened, the horses were grazing.
On each of the three following days things fell out as they had on the first.
Pwyll and his men went to the mound.
In fields all about them the horses stopped grazing and, standing there in a trance of vision, they looked towards the wood.
The woman emerged.
Two worlds, one of them our world, neighed to each other.
And then, more frightful every day, more frightful because more intense, the labour pains of Pwyll and his warriors.
In a vision they would have of it, in their moment of deepest affliction, the throne mound in Dyfed was a red mound. It suffered as they suffered. In the way that Pwyll suffered the crags suffered, the furze suffered, the thorns suffered. For as long as it lasted, this suffering was the ground of their oneness with each other. For as long as it lasted, Pwyll might as well have been a thorn, red with haws, on the side of a hill.
It was strange.
A power against which spear and shield and sword were useless had emerged among them. And what, as warriors, they would most instinctively resist, that was happening to them.
Being warriors though, they would see it through to the end. They would go everyday to the mound. And even if it meant that he would indeed end up as a bush, too haunted and too dangerous for anyone to approach, too haunted and too dangerous for anyone to pick haws from – even if by doing so that is what would happen to him, Pwyll would nonetheless go every day to Gorsedd Arberth. He would sit where all previous kings of Dyfed had sat. He would sit in the chair, called the Dragon’s Lair, between the crags. It was only in the engulfing danger of this chair that he could do what he was born to do. It was only in a willing self-sacrifice of all that he was in all worlds that he, Pwyll Pen Annwn, could mediate between them.
The burden of Pwyll’s destiny was simple, and dreadful: a world that is cut off from other worlds will soon die.
Come what may, therefore, Pwyll must go to Gorsedd Arberth.
It was late on the sixth day when Pwyll and his men recovered their eyesight for things outside themselves. Wondering what it might portend, they saw that instead of turning her horse and riding back into the wood she had slackened rein and was coming along the road that passed beneath them.
At Pwyll’s request, Teyrnon Twyrf Liant rode, as courteously as he could manage it, to meet her.
But how can this be, he thought reaching the road, how can it be that she who rides so slowly and at such an even pace has already gone past?
Putting spurs to his horse, he gave chase.
In a short while he was riding at full stretch, and yet, even though she continued in her unhurried, slow pace, the distance between them continued to lengthen.
Soon she was out of reach and, discomfited in the way we sometimes are in our dreams, Teyrnon gave up and rode back to the mound.
Pwyll and his men, their arms at ease, returned to the court.
Again the next day, after meat and carouse, they went to the mound.
It was as they expected. In the fields near and far there was not a horse but had stopped grazing. As in previous days they were looking enraptured at the wood.
Anticipating what would happen, Pwyll had asked his best rider to fetch the bay, his best horse, from his stables. He was on the mound, mounted and waiting, when she emerged. He rode to meet her.
Great was his wonder when, reaching the road, he saw that she had gone past.
He gave chase.
In a while he was riding at five times, six times, seven times her pace, and yet, she never changing demeanour or motion, the distance between them continued to grow.
On the day following, Pwyll was alone on the mound. Mounted and waiting, he showed spurs to his horse as soon as he saw her.
But no!
When he reached the road she had gone past.
He gave chase.
Never did a horse know so well what was expected of her.
Never had a horse such heart for hard riding.
Never did a horse yield so at length to her rider’s desire.
But no! No!
It was all in vain.
The echoing hills carried his call
Stay for me
Stay for me
In the name of him you best love, stay for me.
On a crag, looking down at him, she waited.
Who are you, he asked? Who are you and what is your errand?
My names are many, she replied. There are those who call me Epona, those who call me Macha, those who call me Rhiannon. But by whichever name they know me, they know me only as a woman who rides a roan horse. A horse with red ears. You, however, you have seen the enraptured horses.
You have seen my demeanour and motion. So you know who I am. I am who you feared, yet hoped, I might be.
And your errand? Pwyll asked.
You’ve already suffered it, you and your men.
And must we continue to suffer it?
That is for you to choose. It’s by choice from now on.
Turning her horse, she rode away, and soon she was out of sight, gone into another way of being in our world.
And that’s how it happened.
That’s how, after long ages, the Horse Goddess came to us, bringing us the terrible yet perfect gift of suffering her labour pains with her.
She foals on May Eve. But for anyone who at anytime chooses to endure them, her labour pains are a door between ways of being in the world.
Will you walk through it Hadrian?
And you Europa, will you walk through the labour pains of the Horse Goddess into our Dreamtime?
In the Academia in Florence there are four unfinished sculptures by Michelangelo, or at any rate from his workshop. They are commonly called The Captives. Names assigned to them individually aren’t invariable, but they will often be referred to, in series, as, The Youthful Giant, Atlas or The Blockhead, The Bearded Giant, The Awakening Giant.
As we would expect, given their provenance, it isn’t always easy, even in their reproduced presence, to remain aesthetically distant and uninvolved. Looking at them isn’t, as Schopenhauer might have hoped, to experience a Sabbath day of the will.
Aesthetic responses to them aren’t what interests me here, however. My purpose in calling them to mind is philosophical. Given the history of European thinking in the last three centuries, they lend themselves, I believe, to retrospective reinterpretation as portents.
They are images of what we would become.
They are images of us in Cartesian captivity.
They are images of us in hard bondage to Gorgocogito. Let me explain.
Let Blake be our guide.
Central to William Blake’s understanding of our human condition is the Christian doctrine of the Fall. Open as he was, though, to Platonic, Hermetic and Gnostic influences, Blake didn’t understand the doctrine as most Christians do. In his vision of it, our Fall wasn’t a homogeneous sinking through homogeneous space into nether or near-nether depths. We declined or sank or wandered desirously downwards through qualitatively distinct states. These he called
Eden,
Beulah,
Generation,
Ulro.
It is important that we should think of these as states of mind not as states of independently existing objective reality.
Esse est percipi aut percipere.
In our Ulro sate of mind we perceive the objective world to be an echoing, hard rockiness. We perceive it to exist independently of our perceptions of it.
As desert rock walls would, it echoes our theories and creeds about it back to us.
Like letters undelivered and unopened, our cosmologies come home to us.
In Ulro, any theology we send out should have on it the name and address of the sender.
We receive but what we send out. What we send out comes back to us through slits in our limits of contraction and opacity.
René Descartes was the Moses who led us into this desert of Zin. In it our souls are dried away.
But when in that desert René, like Moses, strikes a res extensa rock, only a mocking mirage of water issues from it. Looking into that mirage, we see reflections of ourselves as Michelangelo’s captives.
In the image and likeness of The Blockhead are we.
Our heads are blocked into Gorgocogito.
We are bedrocked rockily in the Medusa mindset.
Gorgo was Descartes’ God. In the name of Gorgo and her cogito he led us thither.
Gorgo sum, ergo Gorgocogito, ergo Ulro.
What do you think, Bishop of Cloyne? Will you chisel us free? Will you lead us out? Will you be our Perseus? Our philosophical Perseus? Our epistemological Perseus?
Will you sing the songs of Beulah in Ulro? In Ulro-Europa? In Ulropa? Will you sing your Philosopher-King’s song?
It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing amongst men that houses, mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects, have an existence, natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding. But, with how great an assurance and acquiescence so ever this principle may be entertained in the world, yet whoever shall find in his heart to call it in question may, if I mistake not, perceive it to involve a manifest contradiction. For, what are the forementioned objects but the things we perceive by sense? And what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations? And is it not plainly repugnant that any one of these, or any combination of them, should exist unperceived?
Will you sing that song to Ulropeans? To Coleridge sitting in dejection, to Arnold on Dover Beach, to Wallace Stevens at Key West?
To whom does the future belong, Bishop? To the captive called Blockhead? Or to the captive called The Awakening Giant?
Will you help him? Will you give him a hand? Will you give The Awakening Giant an epistemological hand?
Come back, Michelangelo. Come back and chisel us free of the Medusa mindset that has made blockheads of us all.
Asked to make a statement about the universe at large, a modern scientist would probably say, E=mc2. Were I to be asked, I would almost certainly say, Early Spring.
‘Early Spring’ is the title of a painting by Kuo Hsi, a painter of the Northern Sung Dynasty in China. I will not attempt a verbal equivalent or even a description of the painting. Suffice it to say that in it, given its provenance, is much that you would expect to find: mountains, high shoulders of mountains, summits of mountains, near neighbours of heaven. Mountains that could be apparitions of mountains. Mountains that could be the Void’s memory of mountains or the Void’s dream of mountains. We cannot say till the mist clears. But the mist of course will never clear. And the Void could wake up or could sink into dreamless sleep and then they’d be gone and we who perceived them, we too would be gone, no apparition or memory of us remaining. But that would be no loss to us or to the Void because the Void is as full when it is empty as it is when innumerable universes have sprouted in it. And the universe we live in, the universe these mountains belong in, that universe isn’t only vast in big things, it is vast, universally vast, in littlest things, in starved little things, in things that are desperate attempts to be things, in that fierce wizened will to be a pine growing from a rockwall. And that little wisp crossing a causeway – don’t ignore him. Surrendered to the great universal way, working with the great universal way, letting the great universal way have its willess way with them, little wisps such as he is have built that monastery, geomantically perfect, in its high valley.
The Valley Spirit never dies
It is named the Mysterious Female.
And the Doorway of the Mysterious Female
Is the base from which Heaven and Earth spring.
It is there within us all the while.
Draw upon it as you will, it never runs dry.
It hasn’t run dry for the monks and sometimes at evening maybe the Mysterious Female comes and meditates with them. Predisposing them to sink into womb-breathing, predisposing them to an effortless return from yu wei to wu wei, the cantor sings:
Learning consists in adding to one’s stock day by day;
The practice of Tao consists in subtracting day by day,
Subtracting and yet again subtracting
Till one has reached inactivity.
But by this very inactivity
Everything can be activated.
Afterwards, lying down to sleep for the night, an old monk says, now I’ll let the pines do my thinking for me. He paints them, these pines. Lost to himself after hours looking at them, he paints them not as he sees them but as they see themselves. His work done, he closes his eyes and lets Tao speak:
Heaven is eternal and Earth everlasting.
How come they be so? It is because they do not foster their own lives;
That is why they live so long.
Therefore the Sage
Puts himself in the background, but is always to the fore,
Remains outside, but is always there.
Is it not just because he does not strive for any personal end
That all his personal ends are fulfilled?
And the dark gorge below the Monastery – it’s as if, the mist momentarily dispersed, the Earth was showing us the doorway of the Mysterious Female, the womb from which, eternally, heaven and Earth spring.
Looking up into that gorge the man crossing the causeway will surely remember the Way and its Power:
He who knows the male yet cleaves to what is female
Becomes like a ravine, receiving all things under heaven.
And being such a ravine.
He knows all the time a power that he never calls upon in vain,
This is returning to the state of infancy.
He who knows the white yet cleaves to the black
Becomes the standard by which all things are tested,
And being such a standard
He has all the time a power that never errs,
He returns to the Limitless.
He who knows glory, yet cleaves to ignominy,
Becomes like the Valley that receives into it all things under heaven.
And being such a valley
He has all the time a power that suffices;
He returns to the state of the uncarved block.
It is early spring in the mountains behind you, Mona.
You’ve been blocking the view for a long time, Mona.
It is time to come down from your high, humanist chair, Mona.
It is time to make contact with the mountains you have turned your back to, Mona, for
In Tao the only motion is returning.
It is time to return, Mona.
That little man on the causeway, that’s Lao Tze.
Singing his song with him, you can cross with him into
Early Spring
Singing his song with him, you can cross with him into
Tao
Great Tao is like a boat that drifts;
It can go this way; It can go that.
The ten thousand creatures owe their existence to it and it does not disown them.
Yet having produced them, it does not take possession of them.
Tao though it covers the ten thousand things like a garment
Makes no claim to be master over them.
Therefore it may be called Lowly.
The ten thousand creatures obey it,
Though they know not that they have a master;
Therefore it is called the Great.
So too the Sage just because he never at any time makes
A show of greatness in fact achieves greatness.
We will miss you, Mona.
We will miss you, Spirit of the Valley.
We will miss you, Mysterious Female.
Out of the exile into which we conjured you,
We will follow you.
Out of the exile into which we conjured you,
We will follow you
into
Early Spring
And Jacob went out from Beersheba and went toward Haran. And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set: and he took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. And behold the Lord stood above it and said, I am the Lord God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon you thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed: and thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and in thee and in thy seed shall all families of the earth be blessed. And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land: for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of. And Jacob awakened out of his sleep, and he said, surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not. And he was afraid and said, How dreadful is this place! This is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.
A dream dreamed long ago.
Dreaming itself even now through history.
At work, even now, in territorial quarrels.
And when the choir of Canterbury Cathedral, an amazement of gothic daring, was being dedicated, it was with these, the amazed words of Jacob, that the tiered singers filled the vaults:
How dreadful is this place!
This is none other but the house of God,
And this is the gate of heaven.
Doing so might be as arrogant and irreverent as wanting to redesign the choir of Canterbury Cathedral, but I sometimes find myself wanting to reimagine Jacob. In a vision I have of him, he is a Middle Eastern Aborigine, not a Bedouin. Having neither conscious direction or intention in it, his journey is a walkabout in the Dreamtime. And the stones he sets for his pillows, I think of them as Dreamtime stones: they dream his dream with Jacob, or, daring to say it, it is the same Dreamtime dream that is dreaming Jacob and the stones.
Sometimes I go all the way: the dreamers are being dreamed and the Dreamtime dream that is dreaming them is the stuff the dreamers are made of. That’s how deeply surrendered they are on this first night of Jacob’s journey.
Imagine it: Moses goes down into Egypt and, going in to him, he says to Pharaoh, let my people go.
Imagine it: Moses goes back into Old Testament times, into culturally Genetic times, and seeing them in hard bondage to their biblical biographies, Moses calls out in the desert, let Abraham go. Let Abraham, Isaac and Jacob go.
Imagine it: Abraham going out of his city. Abraham going out to go walkabout in the Dreamtime.
Abraham going walkabout. Isaac going walkabout.
And, in a world before Beer-Sheba was, or Haran was,
Jacob going walkabout.
Imagine it: imagine Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to be Eternal Ones of the Dream, to be our Dreamtime Ancestors, to be Altjeringa Mitjina.
It is time to change our past. It is time, touching it with Aaron’s wand, to turn
it into an aboriginal past. It is time we had a Dreamtime past. It is time we had
a Dreamtime past to which even now, being consecrated, we have sacred access.
To change our past is to change our present. To have lived differently in the past is to live differently in the present.
To touch the Old Testament with Aaron’s wand is to touch the present. How glad we are, Ancestor, that you walked out.
It means that Gorgocogito won’t have hegemony.
It means Uluru not Ulro.
It means the stone is enfranchised.
It means the dream is enfranchised.
It means that a latter-day Moses won’t have to go in to Gorgocogito and say to her:
Let Michelangelo’s captives go.
Let persons embedded in the Medusa mindset go.
Let rivers go, Let rocks go, Let stars go.
Let all things that are in hard epistemological bondage to our
Gorgocogito perceptions and conceptions of them go.
How glad we are that the past can be changed, that a perilous present and future can be averted.
How exceedingly glad we are, Ancestor, that you went walkabout.
That day long ago was Bastille Day for us, Bastille Day also for star and stone. Bastille Day it was for perceiver and perceived. And the stone that Jacob set for his pillow, an a-stone-ishment it is turned inward into the vision it has and is of the House of God, the vision it has and is of the Gate of Heaven.
And Jacob rose up early in the morning and he took the stone that he had put for his pillow, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it. And he called the name of that place Bethel [meaning house of God].
And the stone you set up for a pillar, this stone, which until now was an Ulro mullán, a Medusa mullán, what shall we call it? Looking forward to our Dreamtime, what shall we call it?
Anantashaya Mullán
Looking forward to our future, what shall we call it?
Mondukya Mullán
Mullán which, changing our past, changes our present and future.
Glory to God for this great day.
Bastille Day.
Bastille Day for rivers. Bastille Day for stars. Bastille Day for Medusa’s, that is, for Michelangelo’s Captives. Bastille Day for the ‘naked shingles of the world’. Bastille Day for the ring of Darwin’s geological hammer, that ring now becoming
Om
Om
Om
Aum
Aum
Aumen
Being awake in the way that modern people are awake isn’t something I’m good at. After only a few years in it, therefore, I left the modern world and came back, putting my hand, happily now, to the spade and the shovel I had left down.
Ivy I had planted against the walls had grown thick and strong, blinding two windows. I didn’t cut it, preferring an intuitive twilight in the house. It was for the same reason also that I didn’t often light the lamp. Even on winter nights I didn’t often light it. Itself so full of shadows, there is more understanding in firelight for the kind of man I am.
Bringing water from the well and turf from the shed, these were the last two jobs I would do, darkness closing in, on a winter’s evening.
If the weather was hard I’d select hard sods. Cut from the deepest spit of a high bog, they were older, I’d remind myself sometimes, than Ireland’s oldest folktale.
What that folktale was I didn’t know, but how strange it was, crossing a yard at nightfall with a prehistoric landscape in a bag on my back. For the rest of the night I would sit prehistorically by the fire and life and light of it. That suited me. That was something I was good at. It came naturally to me on winter nights to sink to the sod’s level. It came naturally to me, sitting there, to sink into the deepest spit of mind in me. And that was a dreaming spit, dreaming its dream with a hawthorn bush, dreaming their dreams with mountain and star.
One night the chimney wasn’t drawing so well. The wind was from the north and when it gusted there would be a downdraught of billowing, blue smoke into the room.
It was hard on my eyes. I closed them, continuing to sit there, inhaling the fragrance.
Soon something was happening. Landscapes I had glimpses of, landscapes Partholon might have walked in, were taking me over. It was like they were fostering me. I was and yet I wasn’t myself. I was their dream of me. I was doing their dream of me. I was digging peat. In the deepest spit, between two tree stumps, I uncovered a pair of boots. Of deerhide I thought. But I couldn’t be sure, so strangely transparent in places were they. Going up onto the bank, I put off my own boots and I put them on, criss-crossing a tracery of thongs about my shins and collops, knotting them under my knees. To test them, to get the feel of them, I got up and started walking, going the wind’s way.
A lake I came to, following an otter path, was strange. It didn’t mirror some things it should mirror. It didn’t mirror a red horse on a ridge. It didn’t mirror its own islands. It didn’t mirror a wood growing along one side of it. And yet, so clear, so deadly calm, so far-sighted a lake I had never seen. It mirrored mountains so far away it must, you would think, be clairvoyant.
Otters, I thought, wouldn’t lead me astray, wouldn’t lead me to evil, so I kept to the path, going with it, not frightened.
As I entered the wood the horse on the ridge behind me neighed. It was a red neighing.
Farther along I smelled something dead. Something big, I thought, a boar or a deer. And yet, though I searched a long while, I found no carcass. There was no sign of anything carnivorous feeding.
How can this be? I wondered, walking on. How can there be such a strong smell of death where nothing has died?
From a long way off I heard it. It was a birch. Invisible beings wielding invisible axes were felling it. It was frightful. Every axe blow to it was an axe blow to me. All savage damage to it was savage damage to me. I was a limbless trunk. Infinitely felled, infinitely hurt, I was a stump of me.
I was me and I kept going.
The two sides of the path came together. I entered thick darkness and I didn’t see the house until, seeing an old man by the fire, I realized I’d already walked into it.
The chair he pointed to was withered. He was withered himself. And the fire was withered.
It was a fire of three last gasps. It gave no heat. But it didn’t go out.
The house smelled of stored apples, like apples in March, too shrivelled for use.
Where am I? I asked.
What where could there be when the two sides of your path have come together? What where could there be when both sides of the mirror are blind?
Even his words were withered. Leaving his mouth they were withered. They were born withered.
Only people the lake doesn’t mirror come this far, he said.
I kept silent, wondering.
I knew you were coming, he said. I heard the red neighing.
Where are we? I asked.
In a wood, he said.
What wood? Where?
In a wood between worlds. In a wood the lake doesn’t mirror.
Does it mirror this house?
No.
Does it mirror the smoke from its chimney?
There is no smoke from its chimney.
Does it mirror you?
He didn’t answer.
Does it mirror me?
No. It doesn’t mirror you. You heard the red neighing didn’t you? And there’s something more. It was your own death, all your own deaths, that you smelled coming into the wood.
Who are you? I asked.
I’m the mask of your own state of mind. As you yourself are so do you see me.
You have otter’s whiskers.
Have I?
An otter path led to your house.
If it did, then it led to that, he said, pointing to a hag-bed I hadn’t seen. I went and lay down.
And now, he said, bending over me, touching my mouth with his stick, now you must ask no more questions. Your words have no meanings now. Like the boughs outside all their meanings have fallen from them. All their mirrorings are quenched.
I felt weak.
So weak I couldn’t even be weak.
Consciousness blurred. It brightened. It blurred. Breathing was hard. Every breath was the last breath, the death-rattle breath, of beings I had been. In a seizure of sightless seeing I had unblurred, perfect vision of a doe I had been. All my deaths were dying me. Like the fire, it wasn’t for life, it was for death I was gasping. Only all my deaths was life in me, and it death-rattled me, and it death-rattled me, and it death-rattled me, and then, in a moment of clarity consenting to be, consenting not to be, it death-rattled the life I’d been living, modern life, out of me. And now when I thought it was over, it came again death-rattling six spit of history out of me.
Like a dropped fawn, mother-licked, I struggled to my feet. But there was no chair, no fire.
Like a mirror turned away, there was no house.
Self-detached, like placenta, and fallen to the ground, the boots I’d been wearing were being overgrown. Looking at them, I felt sure that in time a high bog would cover them.
The boots I had put off I found, how, I don’t know. And I came home, how, I don’t know. I only know that I was sitting in my own chair by my own fire when I heard a knocking.
The man who opened my door and came in had come, he said, because he had dreamed that I was a healer.
Metamorphosis in insects, Triduum Sacrum in human beings.
In insects, metamorphosis is of two kinds: it is complete or incomplete.
In human beings, the Triduum Sacrum is of two kinds: it is complete or incomplete.
Metamorphosis in insects is a change of form: a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, a nymph becomes a dragonfly. The Triduum Sacrum in human beings is a going beyond form. It is ego-centred form losing itself in the Formless Divine.
Persons undergoing the Triduum Sacrum, persons engulfed and swallowed up in it, will sometimes feel that, body and soul, they are evaporating. Like a saucepan of water over a fire, they sometimes feel that, body and soul, they are being boiled away, saucepan and all.
Only it isn’t like that. It isn’t like a saucepan of water over a fire – a saucepan of clear well-water over an ordinary fire, over a turf fire. No, it isn’t like that. I feel like a cauldron of unregenerate dark energies over a Ragnarok fire. I am boiling away. A steam of nightmares and dreams condenses on my bedroom window.
I wake every night at the hour of the wolf. Recording another kind of time in another kind of way, my clock always says it is twenty to four. My room is thick with moral pollution.
As the peoples of northern Europe imagined it, Ragnarok was something that happened to the world. But whoever I am, it can happen to me.
Ask not for whom the bell tolls …
Ask not for whom Fenrir howls or Fjalar crows …
But, fear not, fear not, O nobly born.
For look at his shadow. Even as he howls his Ragnarok howl, look at Fenrir’s shadow – it is the Abhaya Mudra.
And look at Fjalar’s shadow. Even as Fjalar crows his shadow is the Abhaya Mudra.
Fjalar crows,
Goldcomb crows,
Rustred crows.
When Rustred crows at the bars of Hel his shadow too is the Abhaya Mudra.
And Ragnarok itself? Even as it comes, cataclysms coming before it, even as it comes engulfing all worlds, what else but the Abhaya Mudra is Ragnarok?
Fjalar has crowed.
Announcing Chasm Time, Fjalar, Goldcomb and Rustred have crowed.
Chasm Time,
Quake Time,
Time of Earth Yawnings.
Cup of Trembling Time,
Wine of Astonishment Time.
Hell is naked before me Time,
Out of the Depths have I cried to Thee Time,
I am a brother to dragons and a companion to owls Time,
I am come before the King of Terror’s Time,
I am sore Broken in the place of Dragon’s Time,
Tempest and waters steal me away Time,
Terrors take hold on me Time,
Fearfulness and trembling are come upon me Time,
Horror hath overwhelmed me Time,
Spirits move before my face Time,
Hair of my flesh stands up Time,
He breaketh me with breach upon breach Time.
A Wide Breaking in of Waters Time,
A Wide Breaking in of Waters Time,
A Wide Breaking in of Waters Time.
A Wide Breaking in of the Waters of Nun Time.
A Wide Rushing in.
Tohu Wavohu.
Tehom.
Ginnungagap.
But throughout it all, and after it all, the bow, the Abhaya Mudra, in the cloud.
Abyssus abyssum invocat (Deep calls unto deep).
In my nothingness is my only hope
In my nothingness is Divine hope
May I be as out of your way awake, God, as I am in dreamless sleep.
I can’t sense you or know you or commune with you, God, I can’t find you inside me or in the world outside, but I still want to be your servant, God.
Jesus turned to cross the Kedron. But the Kedron he would cross was Colorado-river deep in his own and in the world’s karma.
And how well protected were you, Jesus?
Were your garments inscribed with coffin Texts? Was the great red robe you were wearing inscribed, on its inside, with the Tibetan Book of the Dead, on its outside, with the Papyrus of Ani? Were the straps of your sandals inscribed, on the inside, with The Book of Gates, on the outside, with The Book of Caverns? Were the soles of your sandals inscribed, inside, with Upanishads, outside, with Sutras?
Did you ask all the praying of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia to go down with you?
Were you wearing the worlds praying?
All the praying of Incas, Eskimo, Yoruba, Aranda, Yakut? And the praying, not yet, of Christendom and Islam?
Was the praying of all peoples, in all places, in all times – was this praying an immune system in you against the terror you must surely walk into?
Or were you destitute?
Did you only have your destitution and dereliction to wear?
How well provided, in his awful going down, Ani was.
How well provided for underworld faring Atreus was.
How well provided for oceans unknown the Sutton-Hoo chieftain was.
And your chosen companions didn’t watch with you.
They were willing in spirit
But, incarnate, they were weak.
And we don’t watch with you. We can’t.
Even now, after centuries of Christian praying, we can’t.
To watch with you is not to observe. It is to undergo what you are undergoing on all the old karmic floors of the psyche, on all the old karmic floors of the Earth.
On the heaved-up trilobite seafloor you have gone down into.
On the black, pink-flamed firefloor well below the last depth in which it is possible to be alive biologically.
The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.
Willing initially to watch with you, we protect ourselves by falling asleep.
Sleep on now.
Sleep, Chasms. Sleep, Canyons.
Sleep, Sun. Sleep, Moon.
Sleep Taurus. Sleep Ursa.
Sleep on now.
His God walks out on him.
Even his Cross, even his sufferings, walk out on him.
Dreaming walks out on him. Waking walks out on him.
He is in the Dark that was before world was, before psyche was.
Out of Adam’s empty skull, empty of dreaming, of waking – speaking comfortably to him out of that skull he hears his own Divine Voice:
Yatra na anyat pasyati, na anyat
srinoti, na anyad vijanati, sa bhuma!
(Where nothing else is seen, nothing else is heard
nothing else is thought about, there’s the fullness!)
O Dichosa Ventura.
(O happy lot.)
And, on the mountain, Jivanmukta Jesus. And how beautiful upon the mountain are the feet of him who comes to us out of the Triduum Sacrum.
His time has come,
He comes down.
Our teacher comes down from the Hill of the Koshaless Skull.
Watching him, we know there is Palm Sunday before the Triduum Sacrum and Palm Sunday after it. On the Palm Sunday after it, the writings of Christian and other mystics are the palms we wave welcoming him back into Christianity.
A question early Christians asked with passionate urgency was: who in his nature, who in his being, in his substance, was Jesus? A very Aristotelian question to which, at Chalcedon, there was given a very Aristotelian answer.
There is, however, another, not less passionately urgent question these same seeking Christians might have asked: who, as experiencer, is Jesus? Who as experiencer who has crossed the Kedron, is Jesus? Is he, having crossed the Kedron, utterly unique, utterly without analogy to anyone or anything, so that we cannot, as a consequence, talk about him? Or, given the fullness of humanity in him, can we not assume that there are archetypes to which, if only partially, we can assimilate him, seeking to know. We mustn’t assume, a priori, that the most hospitable archetypes will be biblical.
Maybe there is no room in the archetypal Middle-Eastern inn. No room, maybe, in the archetypal Mediterranean inn, in the archetypal European inn, in the archetypal Christian inn.
A lonely man.
A man sore amazed.
A man whose intuitions and experiences caused him to be archetypically unaccommodated, archetypally unassimilable?
A man religiously and culturally out at heel, out at elbow, out at medulla, out asleep, out awake.
A man with whom, philosophically or mythologically, his culture couldn’t watch.
As the fourth Evangelist, had he so perceived it, might have put it: made flesh, The Word was verbally unhoused.
There are persons whose vision of things isn’t culturally validated, isn’t in, their lifetimes, culturally assimilable. Of itself, their vision of things excommunicates them.
If the gospels say sooth, however, experiencing himself archetypally dis-enfranchised wasn’t a sorrow the Man of Sorrows was acquainted with.
On the contrary, it is, Christians believe, his willingness, in obedience, to be the Archetype he was and knew himself to be that most characterizes him. It is his willingness to stupendously enact, to stupendously endure, the stupendous consequences of being the Incarnate Archetype he was that so religiously appals, so religiously delights, them.
And Jesus returned in the power of the spirit into Galilee: and there went out a fame of him through all the region round about. And he taught in their synagogues, being glorified of all. And he came to Nazareth where he had been brought up: and as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and stood up for to read. And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised. To preach the acceptable year of the Lord. And he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and sat down. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him. And he began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears. And all bare him witness, and wondered at the gracious words that proceeded out of his mouth. And they said, Is not this Joseph’s son?
He was Joseph’s son. Sure he was. But placating a neighbour whose gate was lying there uncompleted didn’t preoccupy him now:
Then certain of the scribes and the Pharisees answered, saying, Master, we would see a sign from thee. But he answered and said unto them, an evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it but the sign of the prophet Jonas: For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh shall rise up in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: because they repented at the preaching of Jonas; and, behold, a greater than Jonas is here.
Greater than Jonah.
Greater not just as a prophet, we presume. Greater, also, in that, when his time comes, he will be more able than Jonah was for the Jonah initiation.
Out at sea, in a tempest, Jonah was thrown overboard. Swallowing him, a whale turned flukes and sounded, carrying him down under the roots of the mountains, under the roots of psyche and universe, not under them as two realities, under them as one reality, because, at root, at centre, and at summit, psyche and universe are one and the same.
Jonah was carried down into the Great Deep under experienceable reality.
He was carried down into the Great Deep that was before the psyverse was.
The Great Deep. Hebrews call it Tehom. Hindus call it Turiya.
Turiya is Nirguna Brahman, the Brahman without attributes, the Divine Ground that is groundless, and out of which, in playful delight, the psyverse emanated, back into which, sensing bliss, it will return.
For all its emanative vastness, the psyverse hasn’t left, hasn’t emerged from, the Divine Ground it is emanating from. When it wakes from the dream of its emanations, it will know that it never left home.
And when he returns, the raven that Noah sent out will bring Good News.
To Christians, Muslims, Jews, to all peoples who don’t yet know, the raven, returning, will announce
Tehom is Turiya
Carried down under the roots of the mountains, carried down, subjectively that is, under the roots of awareness-of, the weeds of the Great Deep, of Nirvikalpasamadhi that is, were wrapped about Jonah’s head.
And Jesus, Joseph’s son, says of himself that he is greater than Jonah. Clearly, an immense spiritual breakthrough is at hand.
Greater than Jonah.
Greater than Job. More able than Job for the Job initiation.
Job and Jonah are rites of passage. In Jesus, these initiations, these rites, were sanctified. In Jesus, in him, and through him for us, these rites, these initiations, became religiously available, religiously safe.
Job was a good man. Civically and domestically, he was rock solid. So habituated in an unquestioning, unconscious way was he to conventional living that there was little or no trace of irrational, first or pristine nature in him. From his core out, calmly and contentedly, Job was honourable, acceptable civic second nature. At evening, Job would sit in the big city gate, being wise, conventionally. He was much given to proverbs.
Suddenly, as if in the night while he slept there had been a wide breaking-in of waters, civic, domestic living was swept away, and Job awoke, his proverbs no use to him now, at the frontier.
Job had come before himself.
The self he had come before was a King of Terrors.
Nights now when Job was a brother to dragons and a companion to owls.
Nights now when Hell was naked before him; when, before him, within him, Destruction had no covering.
Nights now, when, like it or not, Job must drink the wine of astonishment. Nights now when, drinking it to its dregs, Job must drink the cup of trembling.
A man inwardly clairvoyant to all that he inwardly was, behemothically.
A man sore amazed.
A man sore expectant of what had already come to pass: a man sore expectant of Abyss and Beast irruptively from within.
A man sore broken in the place of dragons.
His religion couldn’t watch with him. Wise only in the wisdom of its city gates, civilization couldn’t watch with him.
Job was in trouble. Job was at the frontier.
The untameable God of all untameable frontiers, inner and outer, a theologically untameable God, a God before whom Hebrew prophecy and Greek philosophy were without arraignable resource, a God who, whatever else he was, was Pashupati, Lord of animals – this terrifying Lord of all untameable frontiers, this Lord of animals, this Lord of Abyss and Beast, confronted Job, commanding him to take stock of himself, as a man, before daystars, Abyss and Beast.
Job’s biblical bluff was called. With unlobotomized mind, with unlobotomized eyes, Job beheld the unlobotomized Earth.
When they passed before him in Eden, Adam named the animals.
When, more brutally but also more bounteously, they passed before Job, Job, falling silent, shook dust and ashes on his biblically betrayed, biblically blessed head.
For recovering of sight to the blind, Jesus came.
For us, as for Job, this means the falling away like scales from our eyes, the falling away like idola tribus from our eyes, of verses twenty-six and twenty-eight of Genesis, Chapter one.
Jesus, Joseph’s son, came to set at liberty them that are bruised epistemologically by their naïve realism.
It was claimed for Jesus, Joseph’s son, that, genetically, he was of the royal line of David.
Crossing the Kedron, his genetic ancestry doesn’t count for particularly much.
His ancestors now are Job and Jonah.
It is to Job and Jonah, in the fullness of their de-vast-ating experiences, that he will be experientially assimilated.
And because he is greater than Job, greater than Jonah, the Job and Jonah rites of passage will enact themselves more comprehensively and more inwardly in him than we have been biblically prepared for in the biblical versions of the Job and Jonah initiations.
The names ‘Job’ and ‘Jonah’ aren’t only names of two fictional characters in the Bible. Like the name ‘Osiris’ in ancient Egyptian religion, they are generic names. They are the names of all those people who, while they are undergoing them, undergo the Job and the Jonah anagnorises.
Nowadays, in many societies, it is expected of persons that they will become inimitable, unique individuals. There have been and are societies, however, where a contrary outcome to our growing was or is desirable. Archetypalization not individuation is the goal. In medieval Christendom, for instance, there were persons who, in the hope of becoming an Alter Christus, another Christ, attempted, sometimes with fierce ascetic determination, to suppress or eliminate what was unique and individual in them. And in ancient Egypt, a person, having died, was sacramentally assimilated into the image and likeness and post-mortem destiny of Osiris. So complete was the assimilation, that the person was sometimes referred to as the Osiris.
Having crossed the Kedron, Jesus, while remaining uniquely himself, is also, in experiential assimilation, a Job who is greater than Job, a Jonah who is greater than Jonah.
Rites of passage enacted themselves in Job and Jonah.
In plenary realization of their inherent possibilities, these rites of passage re-enacted themselves in Jesus, and in him in whom there was sorrow but no resistance, they opened out into a continuous way through into the bliss of self-loss in Divine Ground.
We are heirs, if we choose, to this way through.
And, as a consequence,
We are, most humbly, heirs with Hindus to Upanishads.
We are, most humbly, heirs with Buddhists to Sutras.
We are, most humbly, heirs with Taoists to the
TaoTe Ching.
We are, most humbly, heirs with Christians to
Evangel and Evangelanta.
We are, most humbly, heirs with Jews to heard of and unheard of
Books of Splendour.
We are, most humbly, heirs with Sufis to Bezels of Wisdom.
We are, most humbly, heirs with Navajo to sacred circles and songs.
We are, most humbly, heirs with Siberian, Inuit and Aboriginal shamans
to sacred songs.
Jesus crossed the Kedron.
There is a way through for us, when we are ready.
When they are ready, for stars.
To cross the Kedron seeking phylogenetic and chakral awakening and integration in oneself, to cross it seeking moksha for or from oneself, is one thing. To cross it as Lamb of God, and for Lamb of God reasons, as Christians claim Jesus did, is altogether another thing.
To cross the Kedron as Lamb of God, for Lamb of God reasons, is to cross it where it is Colorado-river deep in the world’s karma, it is to absorb willingly that karma, all of it, into oneself, and to climb with it, carrying it to an abyssal summit of Moksha Mountain called Golgotha.
Lamb of God who absorbs the world’s karma, walk with us.
Lamb of God who absorbs the world’s karma, walk with us.
Lamb of God who absorbs the world’s karma, guide us, climbing,
to the abyssal summit.
There is Holy Thursday in the Garden of Olives. And there is Holy Thursday in Gethsemane.
There is Good Friday, reconcilingly, on Calvary. There is Good Friday, advaitally, on Golgotha.
Golgotha means the place of the skull. Elaborating, we might say, it is the place of the empty skull. Remembering the acosmic dark that prevailed from the sixth to the ninth hour, we might go yet further and say, Golgotha is the no-place, beyond space and time, of the empty skull.
Golgotha is the no-place, beyond space and time, of total kenosis.
‘God expects but one thing of you’, Eckhart says, ‘and that is, that you should empty yourself insofar as you are a created human being, so that God can be God in you.’
On Golgotha where, from the sixth to the ninth hour, abyssal emptiness prevailed, Adam’s skull was empty.
The skull of the First Adam. The skull of the Second Adam.
A process of self-emptying which began in heaven had its end, most triumphantly, here.
The triumph isn’t visible. It isn’t visible to someone who might look for it with ordinary eyes. It isn’t visible to someone who might look for it with Easter eyes.
On Golgotha we are beyond the dream division, the dream wound, that opened in the beginning between seer and seen. In the gulf that yawns between Good Friday on Calvary and Good Friday on Golgotha, rock of faith becomes abyss of faith. Veda gives way to Vedanta in that gulf. Evangel gives way to Evangelanta.
Could it be that the Second Coming which Christians expect and pray for will be a new understanding of what has already happened?
Dying, You destroyed our death.
Rising, You restored our life.
Lord Jesus, come in glory.
Could it be that the glory will be a glorious understanding of Good Friday on Golgotha?
Could it be that the Second Coming happened simultaneously with the First?
Could it be that the Second Coming is a mystical opening within the First?
Are we waiting for something that has already happened?
Crossing the Kedron
into
Holy Thursday in the Garden of Olives,
Good Friday on Calvary,
Easter Morning in the Garden of the Sepulchre
into
Holy Thursday in Gethsemane,
Good Friday on Golgotha,
Nirvikalpasamadhi.
Good Friday on Golgotha: Dereliction Day on an abyssal summit of Moksha Mountain.
Day deeper than day, than night.
Day when I see that, conscious and unconscious, psyche is the blind not the window.
Day when, conscious and unconscious, psyche is the veil that is rent.
Day when I see that psyche in me isn’t Ground in me, isn’t Ground of me.
Day when I see that awareness of self and other-than-self isn’t Ground in me, isn’t Ground of me.
Dereliction Day,
Dis-illusioning Day,
Dis-identification-with-illusion Day,
Dereliction Day: Divine Ground Day,
Coming home unobstacled by awareness-of-self
And other-than-self to Divine Ground Day.
Day which, from the beginning, is.
Day which, from the beginning, the First and the Second Comings have been waiting for.
Day which, from the beginning, the First and Second Comings have been preparing us for.
Dereliction Day: Divine Ground Day,
Call it
Good Friday.
A question comes to mind. But who is big enough to ask it? Who is morally big enough to assume moral responsibility for asking it? I am not. And yet in fear and trembling I ask it: Is Easter as we have traditionally understood it a satisfactory answer or finale to Good Friday? Is Good Friday itself the only adequate answer to Good Friday? Is an advaitavedanta understanding and experience of Good Friday the only adequate outcome to Good Friday?
Must we, given the fact of Good Friday, be open to the possibility that, as in Hinduism, there is Veda and Vedanta, so, in Christianity, there is, or there ought to be, Evangel and Evangelanta?
Pondering the varieties of religious experience, William James concluded that ‘there should be no premature closing of our account with reality’.
Have we Christians closed our account prematurely with what crossing the Kedron might mean?
‘At stroke of midnight soul cannot endure
A bodily or mental furniture.’
—W.B. Yeats
These are shocking lines. Rooted, as most of us are, in our empirical identities, they might even be devastating lines. They de-vast-state us, as, in the person of Jesus, humanity was de-vast-stated on Golgotha.
Plato, a teacher of commanding stature in these matters, he didn’t state us so vastly. He did, however, give currency to the idea that body entombs the soul. It didn’t, it seems, occur to him that mind entombs it also. As we might conclude from Yeats’s lines: even when mind is at its best, unrestrained and free, exercising its highest, noblest and most visionary powers, even then it entombs the soul, even then it palls and appals it.
The senses and faculties with which we seek Reality eclipse Reality.
Vision veils.
In or out of the body, vision veils.
Supercelestial vision veils.
The Triduum Sacrum didn’t engulf Plato. The Triduum Sacrum didn’t earthquake, eyequake, psyquake Plato.
It eyequaked, mindquaked, psyquaked Christ.
Christ came to Golgotha. He came to
The hill of the skull
The hill of the empty skull
The hill of the Koshaless skull
Good Friday is serious. Democratic as Death, Good Friday is a universal opportunity.
On Good Friday, in the person of Jesus, European philosophy moved house. It moved, it passed over, from metaphysic to metanoesis.
The new house European philosophy moved into is a new song:
Yatra na anyat pasyati, na anyat srinoti, na anyad vijanati, sa bhuma.
Christ’s song,
Miriam’s song. Her song now.
Our song,
Our Passover song.
Song we sing in the Desert of Zin,
Song we sing in the Garden of the Sepulchre,
Song two angels sing in the tomb.
Yatra na anyat pasyati, na anyat srinoti, na anyad vijanati, sa bhuma.
In St Matthew’s Gospel it is written,
Then cometh Jesus with them unto a place called Gethsemane, and saith unto the disciples, Sit ye here, while I go and pray yonder. And he took with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be sorrowful, and very heavy. Then he saith unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death: tarry ye here, and watch with me.
Continuing to read, we learn that these, his three chosen companions, didn’t watch with Jesus. Leaving him in an extremity of red anguish, they fell asleep. But we shouldn’t perhaps judge them harshly on this account, it being possible that for them sleep was a kind of fainting, a stratagem for shutting out the immensities that had engulfed them.
O God, thou has cast us off,
Thou has scattered us,
Thou hast been displeased;
O turn thyself to us again.
Thou hast made the earth to tremble;
Thou hast broken it:
Heal the breaches thereof; for it shaketh.
Thou hast shewed the people hard things:
Thou hast made us drink the wine of astonishment.
Breached Earth. Breached psyche.
Earthquake and psyquake. The psyche’s sutures opened. And in the cloud no rainbow that anyone could see.
Little wonder they fell asleep.
Little wonder that Jesus began to be sore amazed.
And he went a little farther, and fell on the ground, and prayed that if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. And he said, Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt.
And still they slept. And we shouldn’t blame them. Rather should we have compassion for them, because to watch with Jesus isn’t only to look on, it isn’t only to be a spectator, it is to undergo, in a separate red solitude, what he is undergoing.
Having crossed the Kedron, Jesus is now Grand-Canyon deep in the Earth’s karma. Earthly bad blood boiling over in him. Palaeozoic, Mesozoic, Kainozoic bad blood, overboiling, transformed fin and femur in him. Forehead in him. Self-consciousness in him.
Jesus, our friend, is in trouble.
Inwardly he has come before the Karmic King of Terrors. He’s a brother to dragons and a companion to owls.
He’s in trouble.
Phylogeny is coming flush with ontogeny in him and anyone who watches with him, then or now, will know
That there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.
That in us also is all whatsoever the Sun shines upon.
In us are all the Heavens, all the Hells and all the Deeps.
That mind has mountains, cliffs of fall frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.
Karmically now he is Vishvarupa.
In Gethsemane now, on the deepest Grand-Canyon floor of it, he is Coatlicue. Anatomically, like her, he is mostly Mesozoic.
And he cometh unto the disciples, and findeth them asleep, and said unto Peter, What, could ye not watch with me one hour? Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak. He went away again the second time …
But how far away did he go? As far away as the Devonian? As far away, downwards and backwards, as the Cambrian?
‘Watch and pray.’
But, remembering that now tonight we are in Gethsemane, remembering that now tonight we are walking karmically under a karmic overhang of Silurian sea floors, remembering where we are, we ask, now, tonight, is it enough to watch with Kainozoic eyes? Is it enough to watch with Jewish eyes? With Greek eyes? With eyes that watched The Atreidae on stage? With eyes that watched The Labdacidae on stage? With eyes that watched Oedipus blinding his eyes?
Is it enough to watch from the heart of the Minotaur myth? Enough to watch from the heart of the Andromeda myth?
Are all myths, including the Minotaur myth, too modest in Gethsemane? Too modest, too myopic, and, when all is said and done, too trivial.
Knowing where it is we are, knowing how Grand-Canyon deep we are in the world’s karma, can Judaism teach us how to watch, how to pray? Can Hinduism teach us? Under these overhangs here, here in this place of igneous anguish, here we ask, can a fully evolved Christianity teach us how to watch, how to pray?
The spirit is willing, but the biological is weak.
Palaeozoic, Mesozoic or Kainozoic, whatever its stage of evolution, the biological is weak. Too weak for Gehsmane. Too weak to watch there, to pray there.
He went away again the second time and prayed, saying, O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done. And he came and found them asleep again: for their eyes were heavy. And he left them and went away again, and prayed the third time, saying the same words. Then cometh he to his disciples, and saith unto them, Sleep on now, and take your rest: behold, the hour is at hand …
Jesus, our friend, friend to trilobite, friend to stegosaurus, friend to Neanderthal, friend to us, friend to every stage and phase of evolution in us, he, Jesus, he had taken the cup: incarnating each phase of evolution in its turn, he had prayed palaeozoically in the Palaeozoic, he had prayed mesozoically in the Mesozoic, he had prayed kainozoically in the Kainozoic.
He had prayed with and from the Silurian lobes or nodes of the universal mind. He had prayed with and from the medulla of stegosaurus. He had prayed in and from the commonage consciousness of the Pleistocene.
He climbed. And behold him now. Behold the man, Orient his name.
But Jesus is Orient with a difference, he is Horus with a difference: all the unredeemed, dark impulses and energies of the Duat have come over the horizon in him, with him.
How delighted by sun-rise, by Horus-rise, were the green baboons of the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
How de-lighted this morning by Christ-rise are they.
How de-lighted we are.
The Great Ecumene is a religious ecumene, is the ecumene of all that is.
Parousia, Christians, by extension, might call it.
Parousia. Pleroma. Great Ecumene.
The Great Ecumene includes the Divine Mirum, Plenum, out of which it has emanated.
All emanation is emanation within the Divine. The Divine within which emanations emanate remains transcendent, immanently transcendent.
There is no outside. No outer darkness. Nothing is eternally lost. Nothing is eternally shut out.
No matter how far downwards, into the limits of opacity and contraction, a thing might descend or sink, it isn’t on that account excluded. It isn’t on that account excommunicated, execumened.
All limits of opacity, contraction and forgetfulness are limits within the Divine Mirum.
It is within the Divine Plenum that emanation and return take place.
That the Divine is transcendent yet inapprehensibly immanent is Good News.
‘Sleep on now,’ he said to his disciples, ‘Sleep on now and take your rest: behold, the hour is at hand …’
At hand the hour when Jesus, our friend, walked into Good Friday.
Fifteen hours later, on the Cross, exhausted, his head fell forward onto his chest and he looked down into Adam’s empty skull, into his own and Adam’s complete kenosis, into his own and Adam’s De Profundis, into his own and Adam’s abyssal praying: I can’t sense you, or know you, or name you, God. Eclipsing you with the eclipse I empirically am, I can’t find you inside me, or in the world outside, but I still want to be your servant, God. The skull at the foot of the Cross.
There are Hindus who would call it the Koshaless skull.
And, looking down into it with Jesus, we might, with the Chandogya Upanishad, say:
Yatra na anyat pasyati, na anyat srinoti, na anyad vijanati, sa bhuma.
Upon the emptiness of the empty skull the Divine Plenum supervenes.Upon the emptiness of the empty skull the Divine Mirum, not moving, moves.
!O Dichosa Ventura
There is an Easter which is an awakening to ordinariness.
Ordinariness, for those who have a capacity for it, is tremendous.
Every river is a medicine river.
Every bush is a burning bush, burning with green fire, burning with red fire, burning with jewel-blue fire, burning with fire auroral but ordinary, burning with fire we haven’t senses or faculties for.
Every stone is a yearning. If it wasn’t, there would be no Venus de Milo. Every stone has a capacity for Gothic ecstasy. If it hadn’t, there would be no cathedrals. Every stone is an a-stone-ishment turned inwards into its own rose-window wonders.
To stand on the floor of the Grand Canyon is to stand on a blessed, a delighted, symbiosis of samadhi and magma. To stand on the floor of the Grand Canyon is to stand on a blessed, delighted, identity of samadhi and magma. To stand on the floor of the Grand Canyon is to stand on blessed, delighted sa-magma-madhi.
On Easter morning it isn’t only Horus-Christ who is of the horizon. Apophis also, and all the theriomorphs of the Duat, are of the horizon.
On Easter morning all ordinary things are of the horizon.
Shouldn’t we therefore rejoice,
Shouldn’t we be exceedingly glad,
Shouldn’t we dance with the green baboons?
On the spot where the Buddha won enlightenment there is a temple called Buddh Gaya.
On Easter morning, Horus-Christ coming over the horizon, can’t we, looking east, look forward to a time when the whole Earth will be Buddh Gaia?
Shouldn’t we rejoice?
Shouldn’t we be exceedingly glad?
Shouldn’t we dance with the green baboons?