(The labyrinth as macrodimensional maze)
Chapter One LOST IN A MAZEMENT Unknowingly we voyage in a labyrinth, a macrodimensional maze of living electrical force, cloaked by a thick layer of ordinary life. Our most serious obstacle is the uncontrollable urge to convert everything to the familiar, to reduce it all to the level of the primate brain; to reject the living, breathing reality of the totality of all possible attention. FROM PREVIOUS EFFORTS AND UNDERSTANDING, we have established a new relationship between the nonbiological essential self and the human biological machine, and have already demonstrated to our satisfaction that the human machine does indeed provide us with the means of transformation; we clearly see the path which we must take.
It ought to be obvious that we are only at the very beginning of our path, and we are anxious to take further responsibilities as beings, but before we can take effective steps toward fulfilling these responsibilities, we must first understand just precisely where we are, and what we are, in the general scale of things, and where we stand in relation to the Absolute so we can develop a method of work within this context. We can now come to understand the essential self in its work-role as eternal voyager, exposed to perils and opportunities, purpose and distraction, fatal attraction and ultimate destruction in the nearly infinite immensity of the labyrinth.
possess—prior to cultural conditioning and psychoemotional imprinting, which is to say, the usual deep-brain impulse-responsive pain and pleasure formatting—precisely the same initial intuitional innocence largely through the inattention which can only come from lack of self-motivation in the absence of environmental and biological stimuli, and the general perceptual occlusion which results from environmental alienation, a hazy uncaring withdrawal which is symptomatic of deep-seated unexamined fears about things I’d rather not think about just now.
The labyrinth: a macrodimensional maze camouflaged by the fabric of biological boundaries. In ordinary life, no matter what we do or accomplish, no matter where we go or who we become, we find ourselves ultimately a prisoner of the rigid rut and, submerging ourselves in a nonstop self-invoked bombardment of daily pressures, distractions and self-pity, manage somehow to successfully avoid all real help. If we know how to look, we can seize the opportunity to work our way through the passages, pitfalls and primrose paths of the macrodimensional maze; but we don’t know how to look, and in the beginning we work to fathom the reality that we can be in the maze and yet be completely unaware of it.
This is the nature of our whole experience in macrodimensions. We have been trained to compartmentalize our experiences, to isolate their connectors, thus overlooking the subtle continuity amidst apparent change and discontinuity. We have a flip-flop perception of events; where there is change, we see stability; where there is stability, we see change. What we believe is real is definitely illusion, and what we believe is illusion is probably real. Compulsive primate hallucinations constantly impose an artificial grid of time and space on our purely sensory and mental experience.
(Awakening higher perception beyond the primate brain)
Chapter Two MAZE BRIGHTNESS When we awaken a higher learning process, we no longer exhibit confusion and disorientation in the macrodimensions. Through special internal processes which we can learn, we are able to penetrate far beyond the ordinary spectrum, into the macrodimensions, resembling consensus reality in form, but radically different in other ways, perceivable only with long, difficult training of the non-machine attention.
It might be possible to artificially induce maze awareness and transition into macrodimensional space, but we can fully expect that any resulting momentary understanding which may have been gained will almost instantaneously be mangled, mashed and mauled in the all-devouring jaws of primate convention and found thoroughly indigestible.
Pure macro-molecular structure becomes visible, matter is revealed as swirling patterns of raw energy, and time becomes nonexistent—a simple expedient to encapsulate an event or to move from one frozen energy-tableau to another; then we know that we are beginning to see things as they really are…but we mustn’t mention this to anyone in a lab smock if we don’t want to spend the rest of our lives interpreting Rorschach blots, calling off Rhine cards and singing doda kupanga udoda kukala, doda kupanga ukala shatti background vocals for Leon Russell.
Help, real help, is available only to those already well on their way toward nonprimate life, who show an already deeply rooted aptitude for the labyrinth, who have demonstrated themselves to be courageous voyagers, despite personal fears of the more terrifying aspects of the labyrinth, shown the potential ability to perform special work under very difficult and often overwhelming conditions, and most importantly, do not display the kind of delicate psycho-emotional nature we were likely to see in children who left summer camp the first or second week.
What is really useful is a method of developing intelligence through active interaction, learning from the game how to play the game, and in at least one important sense, voyaging is a game, on a very much higher level than we are used to playing; a game in which the stakes are far higher, and correspondingly much more dangerous.
One comes out of inertness, builds acceleration and gathers momentum for macrodimensional voyaging only through sheer repeated effort in voyaging; we become adept at puzzle solutions by working puzzles; one learns to work under stress by working under stress; one learns to work under conditions of profound and incessant distraction by working under conditions of profound and incessant distraction. This is important, because the maze is composed almost entirely of distractions.
In the waking state, however, we see clearly that what we had ordinarily taken to be a variety of disconnected events are, in fact, just parts of a single thing which, if we could perceive its totality, would give us a direct experience of the Absolute. Patterning is a natural part of our perception, but pattern recognition depends entirely upon our ability to eliminate occlusion, to accept larger and larger perceptual-informational topological field structures, not necessarily anthropocentric, taking an entirely different, somewhat less obstructed, view of the morphology and scale of the universe.
Chapter Three THE ULTIMATE PUZZLE The labyrinth, as would any maze, has puzzle-like characteristics; obeying the rules of puzzle-solving should, if the laws of the maze are understood and the signs are read correctly, enable us to voyage consciously as well as remembering previous passages and having a connected overview which takes into account everything we have ever learned in the maze.
It is not with the mind that we can grasp the nature of events in the labyrinth. The mind is an obstruction to this process, always one step behind, grasping at rapidly dimming after-images, unconnected to energy flow, just barely catching the reverberations.
(Keys, combinations, and the necessity of unlearning)
Chapter Four THE KEYS TO ELEGANT VOYAGING The keys to elegant labyrinth voyaging are generally those little, nagging, insignificant items which we would ordinarily dismiss as inconsequential; one such key is the rudder with which we steer ourselves through the labyrinth. VOYAGING DEPENDS STRONGLY UPON LEARNING to recognize releasing, opening and unlocking and triggering combinations; a combination in this sense can be an object, word, posture, phrase, sound, movement, gesture, even a joke or pun…virtually any mechanism of sound, sight, smell, motion or thought which creates an access point or opening which would otherwise be closed.
Rats who achieve maze-brightness rapidly are also capable of untraining, unlearning—an important part of learning, particularly in rapidly shifting reality structures—while rats which do not achieve maze-brightness show no evidence of the ability to unlearn previously acquired skills and behavioral habitude. Unlearning is a very important and powerful prerequisite to relearning. To relearn essentially means to empty an established neural pathway of its existing imprints in the form of favored synaptic connections, and then to develop a new set of intentionally programmed imprints super-imposed upon the same neural pathway. As roshi Basho would say, you can’t pour more tea in the cup until it’s empty.
Chapter Five NEURAL NETWORK PROJECTIONS Our knowledge of the environmental world is entirely dependent upon synaptic processing of organic perceptions which come to us at the speed of light; still, this is not fast enough to be in the present; bypassing these organically bound perceptions can provide us with the possibility of direct unfiltered views of the real world, unencumbered by the brain and its significances.
In this sense, as we voyage through the labyrinth, it is not so much that we experience dimensional transitions—it is more accurate to say that we actually remain in the same location in view of the fact that dimensions are all contained in the same space, and that we experience a change in headset, in the amount of perception we are able to perceive and process, modified by the increase or reduction of brain-created occlusions, determined by our momentary state which in turn is determined by a variety of modifiers the cataloging and conscious control of which have eluded philosophers, educators, psychologists and stressed-out executives for countless centuries.
Neural network projection is just a pseudo-scientific gobbledi-gook way of saying that we exist only in the world we perceive—not the world which is actually there, that we live in a totally subjective holographic brain-projection, a dim analogic reflection of the real world.
The environment is infinitely more complex than anything the brain can project. The brain is limited to a certain number of symbolic references. It only has so much memory, capacity and simulations to work with, and it can’t be expected to yield any greater detail in its simulations than the available number of units of attention will allow. The finite number of simulations affords a finite amount of detail and resolution.
(Time as a spatial dimension, not a linear flow)
Chapter Six THE ILLUSION OF TIME As we upscale into the macrodimensions, we soon discover that what really prevents us from living macrodimensional life in the timeless, eternal state is our extreme psychological dependence upon the ordinary flow of time as measured by clocks; it is hard to accept time as a function of space and not a linear flow through events.
When the information-processing in the brain is accelerated to the level of unobstructed perception at approximate speed of light, it produces what we call the eternalized moment; we experience an event as if it were frozen forever, encapsulated in an eternal suspension. This introspective impression is entirely subjective; the attention no longer seems to flow along a higher dimensional frame; in this unfamiliar form, time can be seen to be a subtle value-sensing of a next higher dimension, a function of space in the form of an event-horizon.
Linear time corresponds to the passage of the Absolute through the Creation. Linear time is brief in comparison to real time, but linear time corresponds to every new passage of the Absolute. Real time can be said to be an endless back-and-forth shuttle, an unsubtle repetition unconsidering of detail. Together these two forms of time produce the warp and woof, the woven effect of Creation as a multi-dimensional matrix, planar elements within what is ultimately an empty sphere. The Creation is crystallized, a solid set of waveforms, a topological figure whose morphology can best be described as some sort of Klein bottle.
The knowledge we have of the Absolute should not form an attachment to qualifiers, attempts to put the Absolute in contact with, and dependent upon, time and events. Qualifiers can only refer to the Creation. No matter how exalted they appear to us, they are totally inadequate because they attempt to bring the Absolute, a non-dimensional something-or-other, into the apparent context of a time-space continuum.
Ritual is the basic recognition of elements of a chamber, those invocational instruments which can be utilized by a voyager to make intentional transitions.
sensation poised in breathless anticipation, an infinite ocean of light in which everything hangs in the balance of stillness and silence, and then try to drink a cup of tea in that position.
(The heart lifts the veil)
Chapter Seven THE MYSTIC VISION The veil is not in the mind, but in the heart. Only the heart will lift the veil. When this happens, when we have softened and ripened, we will find ourselves to be at the very Heart of the Labyrinth, for which we have longed all our lives.
If we seriously expect to penetrate our vision past the clouded occlusion of the visual senses, we must enter another perceptual level, the secret vision of the mystic, who allows sensation to suggest interpretation of the vision. We can use this secret in an exercise to reveal and develop the higher emotional centrum and higher mental faculties, bringing us ever-deeper and more dangerously into the domain of the shaman, the playful participant in the self-generative cyclic dance, the Leela, of the majestic Shakti, energy in the raw.
Fixated beliefs have an effect on everything we see, distorting things in one particular direction. Anyone who voyages through macrodimensions discovers hidden assumptions, attitudes and beliefs operating covertly—silently and invisibly influencing all one’s perceptions and decisions.
It is here that we will be cleansed by the harsh, intense, distortion-free and unveiled radiation of love, raw energy in its Absolute form, of our remaining primate contaminations; we are purified, made clean, baked by radiation, slowly—excruciatingly, agonizingly, achingly slowly—purified, cooked little by little, each time we pass through the Heart of the Labyrinth… The journey to the Palace, the Heart of the Labyrinth, always occupies the key place in traditional shamanic teachings. We need only soften, ripen, mellow with age, open ourselves to it without reservation, without thought for ourselves, of what will become of us.
attention into our inner stillness and quietude of presence, we might occasionally note a slight tremble which could possibly indicate to an outside observer that we are experiencing this yearning adoration. In the ordinary process of primate lovemaking, the more subtle higher emotional moods and realizations are somewhat submerged in the urgency of ganglia-directed thrusting and humping.
The pain is our direction-finder to the heart. Of course, for those who wish to avoid feeling the raw, raging power of love, there are many ways to avoid the pain: eating is a well-known and regularly used substitute for just about anything; shopping is also a very effective means of distracting ourselves from these deep, gnawing feelings. Movies are an all-time favorite for getting away from everything in general. Why do we feel so much pain? The machine is covered with electrical anomalies—geodesic warts, so to speak, much like those found on a toad, and the radiation we expose ourselves to in the Heart of the Labyrinth, the cleansing radiation of love, acts as a slow wart-removal medicine, dissolving the warts a little at a time.
The closer to the heart, the more the pain’s intensity. Eventually, like Lawrence of Arabia, we learn that the trick is not avoidance, but in not minding the pain. We can use the sensation of pain as our beacon, our direction-finder. The more intense, the closer we are to the Heart of the Labyrinth. This idea of the directional use of emotion is similar to the use of the sensations associated with the “chronic” in the intentional awakening of the human biological machine in its use as a transformational apparatus. The secret Is not minding The pain.
(Love as annihilating electrical force)
Chapter Eight LIGHTNING HANDLERS ALWAYS CRACKLE We work to develop what remains after personal annihilation, because only that is truly able to work. To understand love is to dissolve the self and the subjective mysteries of appearances into it.
In this way, the effect of the waking state is cumulative, because each time we open to the presence of love, a little more habitual ego-self, all the accumulations of the egoistic identity, which are not pure presence, is inevitably annihilated.
Using the force of love is like grasping a huge electrical conduit in each hand and allowing the current to pass through us; some part will surely survive…the part that is able to work, but the primate self will not. Of course, even without such intentional repeated shock, the biological will die anyway, but peacefully, quietly, in sleep.
Chapter Nine THE ART AND SCIENCE OF INVOCATION All macrodimensional invocation is focused on the activation of corresponding resonators between chambers until they vibrate in sympathetic unison. We also have the ability as a being to self-invoke, to expand our morphology into a space where we are not.
Our work-attention is only as effective as the attention of the essential self. This special form of attention is the tool to which we will return again and again throughout our lives as voyagers in the labyrinth.
If we depend on machine-attention, we are bound to bitter disappointment just shortly following the death of the machine, because everything which the machine has fixated in its attention will also die; everything accomplished by the machine, all its precious self-improvements, will be lost. It should by now be obvious that magic is strictly a conceptual construct, a convenient way of viewing increased and decreased contact with a segment of the reality spectrum which ordinarily passes unidentified and ignored even in full view.
Chapter Ten DATA RETRIEVAL IN THE HIGHER DIMENSIONS Shamanism was first developed thousands of years ago to satisfy macrodimensional needs, something rejected because it is not focused on common primate goals, subject only to higher laws beyond the reach or ken of the human world.
Chapter Eleven SHAPESHIFTING UP THE TOTEM Voyaging back and forth between the human and other dimensions, using powerful mental and emotional equations to produce a tangible construct, a totemic ladder, a dimensional elevator, the voyager shapeshifts through the totemic morphologies up, down, or both at once.
Shamanism is the fastest, most ego-disintegrating and emotionally explosive of all the ways; it brings us directly and wholly into the Work, now and forever, long before we feel really ready to tackle the job. The shaman must take risks, some quite serious; in this high-risk occupation the survival rate is not too high; those who happen to survive do so by sheer chance, and then they’re around for a very long time after; those who don’t, tend not to last very long in any case. The casualty rate is high, but we can rest easy; the truly deadly mistakes are all fatal; the quivering cadaver tells the tale.
The shaman is therefore forced to use the most ruthlessly efficient means to accomplish shamanistic purposes, as long as it doesn’t cause harm, and quickly learns that personal profit cannot be taken from the general fund. Above all, the experienced shaman is aware of the terrible cost of recreational voyaging, and is convinced, sometimes at great personal expense, of the need for voyaging honorably, maintaining an unshakable, but not unnecessarily grim, integrity of purpose.
The objective fate of those who do not enter the Work is no worse than the fate of those orange-uniformed security troopers and, in a sense, the fate of those of us who got ourselves engulfed, swallowed and absorbed into the Work is much worse because, by choosing to remain in the Work, among the never-resting, we have chosen the path of no return, a never-ending fate far worse than death, and it is this aspect which is most forbidding to the neophyte.
macrodimensional voyaging, unless we remember to be aware of these alterations in morphology and have learned to see beyond our automatic transference of imagery from the shockingly bizarre into the all-too-familiar.
The key to macrodimensional movement: we never know where we are going, nor the deeper meaning of what we are doing, but we always can know where we are. Extending our morphological identity into greater and more complex topological domains we must solve the riddle of the present chamber, allowing us an easy penetration into deeper domains.
We discipline ourselves to the task, to voluntary slavery; voluntary because although we can let the cup pass from our hands at any moment, we choose to drink from the cup of life, letting the peace of death pass us by.
We love life; we do not reject it with occlusion; this is the secret of our extreme presence; we accept our place in the world, and seek no refuge in sleep.
Chapter 12 ENCOUNTER WITH THE SIMURGH: A SCHOOL EXPERIMENT In the course of several centuries, it is only rarely that a large group of individuals may be able to openly organize penetrations into macrodimensions and explorations of sectors of the labyrinth ordinarily inaccessible to individuals or smaller groups.
Pain and fear soon gave way as we discovered that nothing worse was likely to happen…as every experienced voyager knows, in the labyrinth, things are already as dangerous as they can get…and they’ve always been that way.
What we see is fragmentary and incoherent, although when viewed from the point of view of the Absolute, to whom the totality of chaos is perfect order, it makes easy reading.
(Creation as the Absolute’s involuntary self-entrapment)
Chapter Thirteen THE INITIATION OF THE ABSOLUTE The Absolute is fragmented into an infinite number of parts which take the shape of a multi-dimensional labyrinth. The Absolute in the form of the Creation is the labyrinth through which we are voyaging. The Great Work is an attempt to bring the corpse of Creation to the most profound state of livingness. In its native state, the Absolute exists only in relation to itself as the undifferentiated void, an ocean in a drop of water within water within water. The Absolute has presence and attention, but not existence, a state quite apart from anything knowable to the human primate consciousness, although the subjective experience is available to the voyager in the consciousness of expanded morphology. Undifferentiated as it is, the Absolute is able, even so, by a compounding process of self-induced semi-intentional shocks, to form within itself at its epicenter, in its deepest attention-centrum, a high-energy plasma concentration contained and suspended in a basket-like magnetic web, a force-field of positron-active electroconductance, which in its containment forms an electrically viscous high-density particle field which we who dwell within it call the universe, or in our special language, the Creation, a class of universes containing all possible classes of universes in ascending and descending octavic order, manifesting on a common fundamental according to the laws governing the periodicity of harmonics and subtonics in the electromagnetic spectrum.
It is this ironic laughter, this spasmodic reflex at the aloneness of it all which produces Creation; in a sense, Creation could be considered a gag-reflex reaction to absolutely nothing.
A secondary result is a type of macrocellular mitosis, fissioning of the Absolute—a self-produced “division between the waters and the waters,” meaning simply that a buffer, the Creation, has been whomped up out of nothing, a sort of macrocellular creampuff, which maintains a workable separation between the Absolute and itself It is this high-energy plasma buffer which makes possible the relationship of the Absolute with itself in a cosmic lover-beloved balance game in which the Creation fulfills the function of an opposing gender sandwiched between the Absolute in its positive form and the Absolute in its negative-adversary form, thus avoiding the most profound taboo, self-annihilation by absorption into oneself, a taboo which, when translated into human primate terms expresses itself as narcissism and homophobia. In this way, the Creation remains eternal because, once created, it exists without end, flowering repeatedly in periodic recurrence, always the same; same set, same play, same cast of characters.
So, nu, during the Creation, what becomes of the Absolute? The answer to this question forms the basis of the Great Work. During the Creation, the Absolute is entrapped by it because, although the Creation just happens by itself in reflex reaction, it is created of the Absolute; this idea is clearly expressed by the secret esoteric meditative phrase, “I had nothing but myself with which to create the world; out of myself the world was made.” One consequence of which is that the Absolute temporarily loses the quality of absoluteness without losing the quality of being the Absolute.
From this first rather inauspicious beginning, the Absolute is further enthralled by rapidly dancing illusions, its attention swept up in a continuous stream of distractions, and therefore becomes powerless to alter events within the Creation, even in a small, insignificant way. All dimensions existing within the Creation are subtonic fragmentations of the Absolute, isolated and compartmentalized—only to the perceptions, not in topological reality—sections of the enormously complex body we call the Great Labyrinth which, viewed as a whole from outside itself takes the form of a clear drop of water; yet, from within, it seems an endless expanse of darkness filled with a vast, unimaginable quantity of matter and energy in an inexhaustible variety of forms.
At some point in the development of our macrodimensional life, the option presents itself to sacrifice our normal destiny, which would have been a painless, joyful death, generally coming directly on the heels of a painful, joyless dying, as we permanently sever our ties to the Creation and reunite with the formless void in a return journey to the Absolute; total dissolution into the cosmic ocean of light. We remain in this self-created hell, this aching separation only as long as we choose to remain in voluntary separation for the sake of the Work.
computer RAM chips, random access modules which are, for the moment, changeable and vulnerable to reprogramming and erasure, striving to be permanently burned EPROM chips, read-only modules, unchangeable and inaccessible permanent crystallizations of programming and metaprogramming which will, if we are successful at our self-programming shamanic work, be secured with a Write-Protect shield, ensuring our unalterability, our utter inerasability, especially after the death of the primate self
While the life of the machine partakes of death, the life of the essential self, a fragmented remnant of the Absolute engulfed in Creation, is the only part of Creation which can be said to be really alive. We are destined to eternal rebirth in the Creation, forever chained to our corresponding primate selves, and we cannot get free of this automatically recycling rebirth except through the transformation of the essential self, and by transcending the life of the human primate, learning the life of the essential self, the eternal voyager, reaching the Heart of the Labyrinth and beyond… When we think of eternity, we ordinarily understand it to mean a very long time, but eternity has nothing to do with time. We can think of eternity as a single, unfragmented tonic, the Creation existing forever at the primary tonic. Time exists below the level of eternity; time can be viewed as a function of space, a perception by sensation of the next-higher macrodimension which, when perceived from the higher dimensional level includes in its formal configuration the totality of all possible events, a framework of frozen tableaus activated only by the passage of the voyaging essential self rummaging through the crystalline webwork of Creation, finding order and significance where there is none.
Even movement, which suggests the passage of time, is a fractional result of a tonic macrodimensional spatial configuration. In this sense, then, we can say that we never actually observe movement, we merely tend to connect a series of events and images, as a film, a series of still photographs, can suggest movement when projected at roughly one-thirtieth of a second, the visual image alternated with black.
The fragmentation of sound produces all matter, which can be thought of as slowed down light. In effect, we are walking mathematical equations, each a small part of an enormous but unexpressed—except in pure potential—mathematical equation which, in the end, regardless of exponential factors to which it was taken, still adds up to zero. The macrocosmic machine which we call the Creation—not just the Creation at this moment in our subjective temporal perception but the Creation taken as a single object containing all time viewed as a form of spatial dimension—is the same in relation to the Absolute as our machine is to our essential self, and this is of utmost importance to the nonphenomenal voyager.
The essential self is similar to the Absolute, if not exactly the same as the Absolute, in terms of activities and general effects. The human biological machine and the being mirror the relationship between Creation and the Absolute. This is the only sense in which we can rightfully consider ourselves to be “made in the image of the Absolute”.
We suffer in a sleeping machine, and we can imagine how the Absolute must also suffer in the face of an all-but-infinite and unbanishable lifeless, limp, unmoving, utterly unresponsive, unconscious and inattentive dead thing. How utterly astounding to realize the predicament of the Absolute through our own experience of the invincible power of the momentum of the machine. Imagine the crushing power and momentum of Creation in the maintenance of its corpselike state.
How can the Absolute hope to encourage the Creation—of its own will—to life? This in technical terms is called—but only on the highest macrodimensional level, from the Absolute to the Creation—The Invitation. The secret of The Invitation is well-kept, given only by initiation; it is soundless, undetectable by word or deed; it has no gesture, no visible prompting, yet the invitation is clear: to awaken, to come to life.
and what real hope can there be for the Absolute other than utilization of the Creation as an evolutionary apparatus, considering that nothing within Creation will ever change?…
We know that the essential self has two—and only two—genuine powers: the will of attention and presence, and that these two acts of will are sufficient forces in the awakening of the human biological machine, responding as it does to the compelling pressure of attention by coming to life, and in the same way, as voyagers, shamanic workers, we can and must learn to develop will of attention and presence and apply these to the awakening of the Creation.
How ironic, this reversal of the Prometheus problem; no one can stand before the Absolute without experiencing total annihilation; yet we must find a way to make the Absolute aware of Creation, but in the fullest possible detail, the totality of all potential attention.
Meanwhile, the Absolute is aware of Creation, painfully aware; it’s a fact, it’s there, but it’s dead, horrible, unconfrontable, a rotting corpse, yet what else is there to love, to keep company in the emptiness of the void?
This should begin to throw light on the Great Work and why communication to the Absolute is both necessary and difficult. The Absolute can’t derive answers—it doesn’t know where to look. It has no reference library—we are the reference library, but it can’t reach down to our dimension with its enormously scaled attention… We, as part of Creation, can perform the basic and practical research—and communicate the results of our research to the Absolute by the performance of the awakening process. Attention is beyond scale, and the attention of a shamanic voyager is equally effective in the macrodimensions.
A human primate, who has always been just one faceless part of an enormous, swarming herd of similar cow-like creatures, can’t know what real loneliness is, but we who are labyrinth voyagers can leave the herd, and feel its fullblown intensity—an unforgettable and deeply disturbing experience with questionable value to anyone but the most determined shaman.
How can the Absolute avoid the magnetic seduction of sleep, which we call the Creation, since it finds itself entrapped every time? The fact is, it’s up to us to extricate the Absolute, and that can only be by evolution, which begins with encouraging the Creation to bring itself to life and this self-initiation—which means, not activated by the Absolute but by itself, as a self-initiating and inner-directed being—can only be brought about by the continual pressure of concentrated attention and presence, the adoration, The Invitation.
The ancient shamen from Sumer and Babylon understood this, and had obtained firsthand knowledge that the Creation is an involuntary effect, that the existence of the Creation was not for the benefit of human primates. They understood also that the Absolute is the all-pervading living spirit which is caught up in its own involuntary Creation. This idea is found also in Manichaeism, Gnosticism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Lamaism, Egypto-Roman deification, Pharaonic deification, esoteric Christianity, Jewish mystical teachings and several contemporary lower Manhattan spiritual doctrines. The shamen learned how to produce a long term change on the Creation itself, which without this change would remain fixed, crystallized. This thing they learned, we now call binding in the Kingdom. What change is possible within a fixed and crystallized Creation? No change is possible where time and space are not, which is to say, in a pure mathematical causality. Yet binding in the Kingdom is a shamanic fact; what is bound in the lower dimensions has an effect in the macrodimensions. The concept of the Great Work originated as far back as Babylon and Sumer; the idea of helping the Absolute to accomplish something, the definition of which it is the province of this volume to provide.
What can a voyager, who arises from the human primate, do to help a being who is not in time and space and has no time and space; has life—such as it is—in one single breath, and whose every breath produces a new—but not different—cycle of Creation? A definite change of being is possible for us, and if we are capable of evolution then it must also be possible for the Absolute; imagine what this hope must mean to an unchanging eternal involuntary Creator confronted with a lifeless corpse upon which it must eternally fix its gaze; its pain must be all the more because for a while, a moment or two, the Creation has sometimes come to life.
THE SPEED OF LIGHT Love is the speed of light. The Absolute is love. The Absolute is the speed of light. The speed of light is stillness and silence. The Absolute is stillness and silence. Love is stillness and silence. Where is stillness? Between motion. Where is silence? Between sound. Where is the Absolute? Between motion and sound. Silence between every sound. Stillness between every motion.
(The voyager’s quatrain)
Chapter Fourteen THE LABYRINTH VOYAGER’S QUATRAIN All phenomena is illusion. Neither attracted nor repelled. Not making any sudden moves. My habits will carry me through.
All phenomena is illusion refers to phenomena as a totality—not as a series of individual phenomena, therefore the use of the singular verb is not a colloquialism, but semantic exactitude. Neither attracted nor repelled. A good illustration of the full consequences of what this means can be found in a contemporary movie entitled Raiders of the Lost Ark. In this otherwise strictly entertaining movie, the Ark of the Covenant is opened, revealing the invoked presence of God.
bag. Once there is nothing separating him from this higher presence, he is then free to cave in from the psychic, emotional and organic effects of the full force of his reaction to fear. His organic tensions cause the machine to become a frozen field, thus stopping and absorbing the radiation. He could have, with just a little training and discipline, allowed the vibrations to simply cause the machine’s electrical field and liquid concentrations to go temporarily out of phase or stasis without reacting—as unpleasant as it might have been.
Any vehicle will be more or less unstable at high velocity where there is inertia, and the slightest overreaction can cause an immediate disaster. This brings us to the third line: Not making any sudden moves. This should be self-evident. During the course of a voyage it is important to know which actions are appropriate, and which ones actually bring the voyage to a grinding halt. Every time we produce a malaprop, we’re forcing expulsion from the macrodimension and re-entry into the lower.
There is an expression to remember, Wandering is not voyaging.
The fourth line, My habits will carry me through, tells us that if all phenomena is illusion, and we’re neither attracted nor repelled, and we make no sudden moves, then let our habits carry us through. If all phenomena is illusion, that means we perceive it fully, not just vaguely. All phenomena is illusion means I perceive all phenomena as a whole, not just bits and pieces, not just local phenomena. It doesn’t mean almost all phenomena. It doesn’t say, all phenomena is illusion except for my son, my daughter, my automobile… Under what circumstances would one be likely to perceive all phenomena as a whole? This is something we don’t need in the human sector. We are able to perceive all phenomena only in chambers which are in themselves composites of all phenomena. There are not many chambers of this sort. In fact there is only one chamber which is almost infinitely reassembled. One chamber which when disassembled can be reconstructed in a slightly different format to obtain a new matrix, not created but synthesized out of the same stuff as the first chamber.
What causes Creation in the first place is what we call God, in a particular form which we may visualize as a name, an attribute, or, giving form, dimension and substance, a chamber. In this respect, matter doesn’t truly exist except as an after-image, a residual phenomenon of light after the passage of the livingness of God through the firmament of the void. However, it’s not affected by deterioration or decay. Decay, in fact, is non-existent because matter is already decayed—slowed down—light. Then further decay takes another form in the continuing fractionings of the Absolute.
Creation is not one thing that happened after another, but rather an inevitable event that occurred as the Absolute tumbled through a series of form changes, all imposed one upon the other in and as the same matrix, all co-existing simultaneously, one on top of the other like an impossibly complex folded tesseract. But while we who are within the Creation seem to hold one form, we’re only attuned to three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension; from our limited view, nothing else exists beyond this. We tend to view our passage from one form of spatial structure to another as a corridor, but there is no corridor; it’s just an alteration of form. Since they all occupy the same space but not the same dimensions, all chambers interface equally with all other chambers, providing total instantaneous accessibility to all possible forms from any other form. All planes, angles and points mutually coincide within the Creation which can be conceptualized as a series of cubes folded in on themselves to make a single cube, where the surfaces of each cube coexist with all other cubes, something like a Klein bottle composed of a single surface and, technically speaking, no volume whatever.
A Moebius strip is a section of a Klein bottle; a Klein bottle can be sectioned into an infinite number of moebius strips. We can think of the entire Creation as a Klein bottle.
But it’s all so easy if we know how—even an enormous quantum leap into unimaginable multidimensional fields is not that great a step. When one perceives correctly, one sees all phenomena as a whole, because all of Creation is apparent. One sees the illusion of line-of-horizon dimensionality. Ironically, the fact that one can see all phenomena as illusion is itself an illusion; the obvious, observable immediate perception that all phenomena is visible—is an illusion; that one is seeing all phenomena is illusion, and the phenomena that one is seeing is an illusion… Mystics have traditionally had a lot of trouble explaining this one, and it’s not going all that well for me, either… Neither attracted nor repelled; attracted to what? Repelled by what? Obviously, phenomena; what we can see, smell, touch, taste, sense. Its attractive and repellant nature indicates that we’re identifying with it, and are for the time being unable to see it clearly as an illusion. We have identified with a phenomenon within the phenomenal structure and, in doing so, we demonstrate that we have missed the meaning and importance of the first idea, that All phenomena is illusion. If one perceives all phenomena as illusion, then one is able to be neither attracted nor repelled because phenomena is phenomena. Let’s examine the third line, Not making any sudden moves. What constitutes a sudden move? A sudden move goes counter to whatever happens to be happening at the moment. It will break the flow of the chamber, of the action, of the continuity.
Consider the fourth line once again, My habits will carry me through. Whose habits?… And what is it through which they’ll carry me? We already know about the rebound effect—the machine habits will reflex us back to the human sector. We can depend on them to saturate us with the somnambulant state. Our machine’s habits and its implacable will and insatiable hungers are our return ticket. This is very convenient because we don’t really want to stay in foreign territory all that long. We want to stay where we live like cockroaches.
How does one encourage new habits in the essential self, since one can’t get at the essential self directly? We need to use the machine as a transformational apparatus, which naturally programs the essential self to perform work-functions in the multi-dimensional labyrinth. Let’s go back to the question about the differences between the universe and the Creation. Each chamber is a cube, an all-but-mathematically-and-topologically part of a folded tesseract, a nearly infinite number of cubes folded in upon themselves, in which each plane and angle is coincident with every other, all adjacent, all equally interfaced.
Think of the Creation as a very complex equation composed in turn of very simple sub-structures—an algebraic geometric matrix built upon a totally known falsehood. The basic axiom, when effectively buried, produces the effect of existence and, when fully recalled either intentionally or accidentally, causes its complete disintegration, at which point it becomes a high-energy non-material potential. Creation is the remaining after-image of something which we can never know or experience directly and survive to tell the tale.
The question really comes down to: what business do we have out there in the labyrinth, if any, Mr. and Mrs. Cockroach? Why are we crawling around in other dimensional levels? What is our purpose? In our search for the Heart of the Labyrinth, once we’ve found it, all we will have accomplished is that we will have seen and experienced what caused the labyrinth.
At first our natural tendencies to downscale will lead us back to safe territory, and yet perhaps sooner than we expect—we will no longer return to the human sector. The Heart of the Labyrinth, known as the Middle Pillar, or Grand Central Station, will become our base of operations, our only home. We will find the Heart of the Labyrinth and make our nest there, and from then on, make excursions from the heart outward and back again. The Heart of the Labyrinth is not a maudlin, drunken, romanticized, sentimental, sobbing, goopy mood. It is a swooning mood; the mood that mystics tried to explain without ever quite being able to, but I’m going to. It’s “as if” sentimental, maudlin, romantic, but it isn’t. It’s coldly logical with a sense of beauty, a sense of irony, and a sense of humor all taken together, a sweeping falling effect without descending into unconsciousness. It’s hard to understand this emotion if one has never experienced it. It’s the emotion which is the whole point of monastic life, the emotion of The Man on the Cross. If we can climb into this emotion, we will find ourselves at the Heart of the Labyrinth. The cross is associated with the heart because the Sacred Heart describes so clearly the mood of the Heart of the Labyrinth.
A Bodhisattva is able to leave the place of enlightenment to work in spite of a complete lack of desire and necessity to strive toward the future…because the Work does exist and is necessary. We’ll laugh when we see the irony of our achievement—the Heart of the Labyrinth! Let’s hope it’s not an insane giggle! That’s one danger associated with sarcastic voyagers—they inevitably go insane in the Heart of the Labyrinth, because they have so much fear, but no sense of humor to accept the futility of primate-driven purposes; they aren’t able to accept purpose for its own sake.
Everything we know of as a phenomenon is detectable in terms of waves, therefore in terms of odor. Essential oils can be used to create an atmospheric odor which can help us to track a particular chamber, dimension or direction; we can find a particular chamber by following its smell. Through mood, it is similarly possible to locate, with some precision, any chamber in the labyrinth. One needn’t have to have been there before to infer its existence. Another way that one can find a chamber is by seeking a high-pitched sound, something like a distant smoke-alarm, and following the sound to the chamber where it originates. There is an extensive array of means at our disposal to locate any chamber, and a nearly infinite number of chambers…
Quality or type of sound can also help us to detect a chamber—a gong-like ringing, a siren-like sound, a clucking, clicking, clacking; the distant hum of a star drive…a strange languorous buzzing…the imperative nagging blare of an Excedrin commercial; a fanfare and roaring crowd sounds as someone wins the fifteen-million-dollar pyramid… Qualities of light and dark can also be employed in the detection of chambers; such qualities as hue, tone, pastels, gray scale, all have meaning in the description of certain exact atmospheres, as are humidity, chill, clammy heat, balmy breeze, oppressive heat… Light quality can be influenced by almost anything; something as incongruous as a television set, a candle; a sparkling ray of sunshine peeking through a crack in the curtain…
What is a mood? We know it has to do with combinations of emotions and state of mind. So far, this is still part of the human sector experience… But how does one convey the compelling quality of higher and much more subtle moods such as are encountered in nonhuman spaces? How does one express and notate for another these unique moods that transcend anything in our ordinary experience?
What enables the flow from mood to mood? How to describe the rich subtleties of intensity, the fine texture of exaltation? Each mood is different from the other; all have their distinguishing qualities… As we remain huddled like hairless rats in the four-dimensional human sector, our moods resemble those of the smaller, Norwegian variety of rat—fearful, suspicious, protective, grasping, restless, easily irritated, and savage, and destructive as an automatic result. If we venture outward, we discover an incredibly rich palette of emotional coloration.
As for the deep, almost intolerably excruciating intensity of the emotional transmissions at the Heart of the Labyrinth, very little guidance can be provided to help us find our balance beforehand. For obvious reasons, we want to decrease the potential for regret at ending up in the wrong chamber. Even so, we will find many lookalike chambers but there’s really nothing else like the chamber at the very heart.
The Heart of the Labyrinth occupies the very center of the labyrinth, and yet it is the labyrinth in its totality—both the epicenter and the circumference. This is important to remember because when we’re in the center we’re not just in the Heart of the Labyrinth, we are the labyrinth itself as a whole.
One can eliminate random motion in the labyrinth insofar as one is able to obey the second line, Neither attracted nor repelled. Attractions and repulsions will create “as if” Brownian motion, in which case, we will be forced—aesthetically speaking—to banish whatever vestigial dark forces are around or within us at the moment, exorcising ourselves of those nefarious demons of Maxwell’s, just in order to be able to move freely from one point in the labyrinth to another. It is Maxwell’s demons which produce the drunkard’s walk.
Psychics and clairvoyants do this all the time, whether they know it or not. They invoke themselves into chambers without even knowing how they did it or what they’re doing; they just follow the motions. They were taught to put a crystal ball in front of themselves, and stare at it until they felt funny, then to start talking. They may fling crushed rose petals all around the room, put a blue or white candle on, wear a particular perfume, put on a certain costume, ring the bell, and so on, but they haven’t any of the “why’s” and may never come to realize that all this is part of an elaborate shamanistic interdimensional tracking system. We, on the other hand, try to follow the trail of the Absolute. This is somewhat misleading because anything we find is going to be the Absolute, but of course, once removed, like a second cousin by marriage. We already know that time does not exist in the objective sense, that it is the dim awareness of the next higher spatial dimension which provides the impression of the flow of time. When we traverse any part of the labyrinth, we are always in the after-image, never in the “thing itself.”
Eternity is just a whole lot of now. No later, no then, just lots and lots of now. But that doesn’t preclude events! It just means that there’s no passage of time except the temporal sensation of the next higher dimension. Not that there is only one passage of the Absolute through Creation. Eventually, of course, we lose track—it’s just another pass through the Creation, and yet it’s always the first… We get to the point where we can detect the patterning without the specific arithmetic detail, we are able to determine by rapid non-analytical assessment whether we’re breathing in or out at the moment.
If we had all our faculties in the most objective sense, as a higher multi-dimensional being, we would remember exactly how this is all done. It’s a very complicated compound equation, but it’s built of simplicities. There are only three basic building blocks. Will, presence and attention; Father, Son and Holy Ghost; affirming, denying and catalytic-reconciling can all serve as names for the building blocks as well as some of the things that the building blocks are made of Or one, two, three; a, b, c; x, y, and z; Peter, Paul and Mary… Any three names or designations will do if we understand it to mean that they’re the basic building blocks of Creation, elements which, repeated in certain patternings, produce an equation like binary code in one and zero, with which we may be more familiar. Here, however, we are dealing with trinary equations. Of the three distinct building blocks, each is predicated on the others—there’s no first, second and third; they’re all equal, each exists only because the others exist. Out of this continuum we can select three other elements in a descending or ascending order, and continue to build from them.
The voyages into the labyrinth are in the larger sense business trips. A certain amount of playfulness may arise in the course of events which would be safe and desirable and productive, but where it isn’t, we must make certain that we don’t get too playful when we can’t afford to… One can have a certain amount of pleasure on a business trip, but it should never be at the expense of business… It all refers back to attention. We’ve lost attention on where we are and what we’re doing, in which case, our habitual assumptions—of who we are, where we are, and what we’re doing—will tend to color our every move. The potential for destructive impact that this can have is immeasurable.
An important part of the business of voyaging is to remember that we’re not voyaging for pleasure—although we’re certainly going to want to play where we can, and we ought to lack the artificial primate inhibitions which would or could prevent us from playing exuberantly whenever we get a chance to.
Chapter Fifteen GOING MACRODIMENSIONAL Often when we think that we are at our best, we are at our worst, and when we believe we’re at our worst, we are at our best, but we can be assured that if we are in the macrodimensions with presence and attention, always and automatically our functioning in the Work chamber conforms to law; we cannot help but be correct.
These macrodimensions can feel so strange, so foreign, so terrifying; we might be left with the distinct impression that we have been here before, that we know this place; an eerie impression of “dejà vu” in which visual elements, sensory experiences and all-encompassing cognitions awaken deep memories of a dim and primal past. The familiarity is vague, disturbing, misleading. We may occasionally glimpse macrodimensional reality in our ordinary lives; somehow, accidentally, the perceptual limits expand and we see more than we think we ought to…
Macrodimensional beings, for all their vast perceptions, clarity and effulgence, cannot access the unobstructed universe because, while they may perform their own unique generative functions faultlessly, providing a steady-state configuration and all necessary activity to achieve flow and stabilization within their own unique dimensional matrix, the topological laws governing their existence do not permit them the freedom to exit this matrix since, unlike the human primate who corresponds to a superfluous form of viral or bacterial planetary infestation, they are a profoundly integral component of their home dimension.
Access to macrodimensional beings may require a psycho-emotionally and electrical-field-bonded-cluster of specific typicalities to achieve coalescence. The number of individuals participating in an experimental macrodimensional upscale determines the targeted chamber in conjunction with artifact correspondings which conform to the laws of resonance, and morphological correspondings which conform to the laws of topology.
Fastening our psycho-emotional seatbelts and abandoning the safety and comfort of the primate level, we might find ourselves swamped and barely able to move within a dense, heavy electrical field, and then, just as suddenly, the atmosphere changes; we are struck by a cold, chilling dampness coming from seemingly nowhere… A moment later, we find ourselves surrounded by familiar landscapes dissolving not quite as gradually as we’d like, into endless, mysterious intertwining caverns reaching into an unfathomable depth of distant darkness.
As primates, we have been trained to restrict our emotional responses to a narrow sandbox-level band within the totality of wide-spectrum hues and colorations of
mood which, if we could allow them, would provide us with instantly accessible keys to macrodimensional labyrinthine chambers. If we were free of primate limitations, even if only the laundromat-centered, daytime soap-opera engendered emotional limitations of the human primate, we would find ourselves able to experience vast, unimaginable emotional heights and depths, most of which even the above-average primate would consider completely intolerable, a searing, seething, screaming Hell created by the flames of unbearable emotional intensity.
Only a shamanic voyager, being nonphenomenal and having no intrinsic place as part of a dimensional construct, is able to enter or leave the chamber via the voyaging mode.
It might, on the other hand, be disquieting to the organized mind to realize that no two voyages through the labyrinth will ever be exactly the same; one voyage might seem dull and uneventful in comparison to another from which we return in psycho-emotional shreds, but from the objective view, they’re all the same, except for what happens and to whom. The facial masks of each of the voyagers can, if not too distorted into bizarre forms of grimace by involuntary reactions to macrodimensional events, provide the means to exit and enter a chamber and, in any case, subjective primate interpretations of macro-events will fall far short of the actual disaster.
Machine manifestations should be treated with the utmost discretion and attention. The experienced shaman takes care not to impinge upon events proceeding in the chamber, especially during a contemplative period of stillness and silence while temporarily inhabiting the form, identity, memory and awareness of one of its macro-inhabitants. The feeling of danger and fear of permanent entrapment—being stuck in a macro-reality for what feels like forever—is ever-present. We want to learn to recognize traps and to work within them and pass from them as required by our work. The danger of traps increases as we fall into fascination, distraction, and seduction.
You might as well know right now that some states of confusion are bound to arise at certain predictable periods during any serious incursion into the labyrinth; this is only a reflection of the voyager’s predisposition toward the chronic sleeping-state; subjectivity enters when we decide that we are not functioning correctly, when we don’t understand the process of self-cleansing automatically caused by the raw radiations to which we are inevitably exposed in any macrodimensional environment.
All events in a macro-chamber are part of the construction of the chamber; what appear to us as linear, connected temporal events over which we have control and within which we ought to be able to exercise our personal will on an immediate experiential dimensional level can be perceived from the next-higher dimensional level as an integral and inalterable part of the whole configuration.
We might participate in the reunification of macrobeings, prime fracturings of the Absolute, who have taken the form of interflowing male and female aspects sandwiched on either side of an intermediary plasma float, reaching out toward one another in an energy-enforced illusion of separation; as the macrobeings close the gap between themselves, the plasma becomes noticeably more dense, at last unbearably so, just short of actual contact. We may find our host macro-beings bypassing Creation, working directly together to achieve the same goal of total contact, at the same moment discovering once again to their utter dismay that one is all alone…all one.
It’s always The insignificant Little things That turn out to be The master Keys.
Chapter Sixteen LIFE IN THE LABYRINTH We work to overcome our fears of seeing the horror of the situation and to achieve the Heart of the Labyrinth where we are able to perform a special kind of work, view the Creation as a whole, and put life into it, if only momentarily.
But there is nothing romantic or imaginary about this enemy; the fact of the matter is—a human primate’s only natural enemy is the Absolute. This idea can be better appreciated if we understand that human beings are, in a very fathomable way, useful to the Absolute—but only when they’ve graduated from the claustrophobic kindergarten world of the human primate. Our whole relation with the Absolute can best be summed up with the idea that the Absolute is in pursuit of human beings and that the primary occupation and majority of energy expenditure of human beings seems to be dedicated almost entirely toward protecting themselves from the Absolute. All our involvements, pursuits, pleasures and pains are protective projections and buffers, which serve as barriers between ourselves and the Absolute. It could be said that the whole of life is a struggle against eternity. This catastrophic primate struggle is a clear demonstration of our flight from the Absolute and from the macrodimensional worlds which the Absolute has left in its immediate wake.
Understanding in what way time does not exist enables us to grasp the idea that the Absolute is not in a hurry to get results out of the Creation. The Absolute, being free of time and space, isn’t working against a deadline, and so impatience is not an aspect of the Absolute. Anxiety, possibly; gnawing preoccupation, less probably; but certainly not pressed for time. If macrodimensional beings have learned anything at all about the Creation, it’s that instilling life into the Creation can’t be rushed any more than a loaf of bread or a good bowel movement.
We could describe our deep and unbreakable obsession with primate life as a game of “Hide and Seek”—heavily loaded on the side of hiding and mighty slim on the seek side—in which we skillfully avoid all contact with the whole uncomfortable question of macrodimensional reality. It is in the macrodimensional that we will learn to perform the Work, that we will inch our way closer and closer to the heart of the problem and also at the same time toward the very heart of the Work. And so we must have the courage to explore beyond our self-imposed human primate limitations, and open ourselves up to the silent cry that beckons us from within, that haunts us to the core, and that has always been our inner guide through the dark oppressive passageways behind us and which lie still ahead of us an uncountable and unguessable distance.
The intelligent labyrinth voyager is constrained by artificially induced habit to see and to know with clarity and lucidity, to feel with full intensity, to function effectively, to respond elegantly, which is to say, minus those primitive pursuits and superstitions which keep the primate self so bound up in negative emotional knots. The disciplined shaman is expected to remain relaxed and calm while exposed to the full impact of macrodimensional reality. Reality… a hell of a dirty trick to play on an unsuspecting voyager… The first degree of shamanistic proficiency is attained when we are able to perform the exercise of Objective Prayer or Prayer Absolute.
We may then passingly note the mood of irony at the sheer eternityness of it all, when we suddenly realize, perhaps for the first time, that it really isn’t ever going to end, and that there is no real escape outside the subjective dreamstate of the lower dimensions…
Absolute, outlined and illumined in a nimbus of brilliant radiation, almost invisible, which flashes and is gone as instantly as it appears. In this act, the Absolute is seen and known. The truth, clarity and force of this experience will leave a permanent scar across the mind, and an insatiable yearning in the being. The performance of this special sharp inbreath is derived from ancient Greek practices at Delphi. The Greeks had a word for it; we today call it “the Classical Gasp.” Prayer-Absolute is not prayer toward the Absolute, it is the descending incantation of the Absolute itself, roughly equivalent to the thought, Oy, oy, somebody get me down from here…hurry…I can’t hold out much longer!
The shocking inbreath of the Classical Gasp causes a reverberation within us—an electrical tingle which overtakes us as recognition dawns upon us, and allows us to instantaneously transform ourselves into living lightning rods for the descent of the Absolute toward ourselves and, through us, down the totem, the progression of descending macrodimensional formations from the highest to the lowest crystalline mineral world, surprisingly, the least dense, having the least amount of mass-energy contained in its nucleic chambers and the greatest mass-energy density in its surrounding environment—near which we find the world containing human primates busily engaged in wiping out any genuinely intelligent life forms such as the dolphin, the eggplant, and the tomato.
In our performance of Prayer-Absolute, we must bring ourselves into the posture, subjective mood and cognitive position of the Absolute—suggested by sculptural representations of the Man on the Cross, but which we have just glimpsed in its reality—maintaining this in stillness and in silence as long as we can possibly tolerate it, at least to a slow count of 24, timed to a full, sonorous cycle of inbreath and outbreath, corresponding to a full creation cycle regulated by the “breathing”—if it can be called that, and it often is—of the Absolute.
It might be interesting to note that what human primates might call “davening”—a rhythmic rocking motion in time to silent or verbal intonation of sacred chanting—or “lovemaking” is, on the highest dimensional level, “breathing.” The flow of apparent location of the Observing Absolute within this unicellular—but obviously nearly completely mitotic—organism determines the duration of breathing cycles, passing from the non-existent absence of all attributes, the Absolute, to and through the presence of all possible attributes, the Creation, and back again.
When we can’t hold out any longer, we needn’t worry; another shaman, refreshed from a short vacation on one or another of the lower worlds, will probably wander nonchalantly along…just as we did…and slowly taking notice of our distress, will offer in a slow drawl—as sweat, metaphorically speaking, gushes down our macrodimensional brow—to take our place; of course, always far too slowly and, for our taste, just a hair too late… As we lose our sweaty macrodimensional grip on the Absolute a split-moment before our relief shaman takes hold, we note en passant—which in this case means “on the way down”—the chilling fact that very few beings are willing…and able…to perform this intensely impersonal sacrifice. It provides no comfort to know that every living being will, completely involuntarily, perform a single moment of this sacrifice during that millisecond in the process of organic death when the essential self and the biological machine are terminally wrenched apart.
In every labyrinth voyage we undertake, (and here we must pause to consider the necrotic condition of the Creation) we are forced inevitably to pass through the Heart of the Labyrinth, the central gateway to all macrodimensional chambers and as we do so, we must not neglect one part of our work, to bring transforming catalysts to various macrodimensional beings of a slightly lower order, trapped eternally in a single, generally unbelievably boring, cosmically bureaucratic work-chamber. One such catalyst is, “You can’t change the situation, but you can learn to like it…” We are expected to charge about from chamber to chamber as energy and attention allow, delivering this and other similar little nuggets of useful information to the residing and presiding inhabitants.
The key to all this is to be able to assume the posture of the Absolute and then act from that viewpoint; this requires many factors of mood, thought, sensation, perception and reaction quite different from our customary primate state.
A blend of exaltation and horror produce the mood of the Man on the Cross. This balance of extremes, at its most intense, is what we have been both running away from and at the same time looking for, all our lives. It is the goal, knowingly or unknowingly, of every saint living and dead. The figure of the Man on the Cross is, as we can see by its representation in three dimensions, fixed firmly in place by three nails, the affirming, the denying and the reconciling…father, son, and unseen essential spirit which moves freely within. Each nail is unreal in the sense that they fixate the form only because the Bearer of the Cross holds them in place: the first, by self-initiated and self-directed attention; the second, by intentionally invoked self-presence; the third, by sheer will, the will to remain on the Cross strictly voluntarily, disregarding the intensity of discomfort and the ease by which one could descend if, for a single moment, one succumbed to the sweet seduction of sleep and relief, our only refuge from eternity.
Imagine being attached forever to a dead lover, and suddenly, without warning, finding oneself making love to this grisly, empty creature, knowing all the while that, if it only would, it has the potential to come to life. Wouldn’t we make every possible attempt to bring this lover to life?… Form a minyan of ten, a decalogue, bowing in motion, lovemaking prayer to coax the Creation, in the form of the Shekinah, to life.
If we understand that being is a single thing of definite measure, then we will understand that we infuse life by giving up some of our own, but in the form of attention and love. On the dimensional level where this can take place, being is not fractioned and Creation can be viewed as a dead lover. At this level even above the highest macrodimension, no labyrinth exists; the universe is just an empty sack. Its internal complexity increases only as the dimensional levels decrease by an elaborate fractioning process which follows the laws governing light, sound and other electromagnetic wave and particle phenomena.
If there’s a moral to all this, it’s probably something like, never assume you know who you’re with just because they look like someone you know…and were with a moment ago, and who hasn’t left the room since you last looked.
Many gateways That lead To the Heart of the Labyrinth Have no human connotations. The price Of Absolute intimacy Is to be alone.
Chapter Seventeen BRINGING CREATION TO LIFE The effort to bring Creation to life is never-ending. At first distant, the actual possibility of performing this task will be achieved again and again during our work in the labyrinth. This talk is a reconstruction of a successful group voyage.
In a different sequence, when I began working actively at the nucleus once again, E.J. instructed me that I should view the form I saw before me as dead. He stressed that I must not initiate any reaction or response unless it happened of itself, from its own self-initiation.
After the voyage, I had the opportunity to ask about this, and expressed the fact that it had been very clear to me that this was extremely serious and that I felt that the consequences of a wrong move would have been enormous. It had occurred to me that I might be utterly repulsed by the vision of a solid eternally unbreakable connection to a dead lover and had felt inside myself a mild apprehension about the possibility of rejecting what I would see, which I felt would be very wrong. I knew that this was going to be for real and that such a faux-pas could only be accidental, a result of momentary inattention…
Any such reaction would have constituted a sudden move—something to avoid at all cost because, as we know, the consequences of actions in macrodimensions reverberate all the way down to the lower.
The sensing changes were the strongest element throughout the whole voyage. They were subtle but recognizable, definable, and distinctive. I was in the same place, only it wasn’t the same place. Nothing new appeared in my perception, but the quality of new surroundings—the characters and the dimensionality were very different. I was struck by the scale on which things were taking place. This was not the human level, although this creature in front of me had an identity which I could conveniently assign to it—something familiar on the human level. But here, it was something else. We were on a macro scale.
changed places and became once again a passive observer. I remember lying on my side with my full attention once again riveted to the central nucleus, feeling very connected to it. All of a sudden, out of nowhere I saw what was in front of me as the Creation, and plainly saw that it was dead. It was as if I was looking at it, seeing it as an ordinary configuration, and then suddenly doing a doubletake, realizing that it really was dead. There was no detail to this perception, no added features. It was still the same chamber, same cast of characters, but they were incorporating the totality of Creation and the whole thing was really, really dead. It was truly horrible! Far beyond anything I could ever imagine, because it was real, it wasn’t just a thought.
The realization that the Absolute is, in a sense, really practicing necrophilia, can be thoroughly terrifying, utterly devastating. How can one be prepared to make love to a truly cold, limp dead thing?
(Attention as the primary tool of the essential self)
Epilogue THE FORCE OF ATTENTION Having made several attempts at penetrating the labyrinth, we will return to our starting point, asking ourselves what the shamanic voyager’s secret is. The answer is simple—everything depends upon attention. It is a tool which we all possess; the rest is up to us.
Involvement in primate pursuits is one of our principal obstacles to approaching the Work and seeing where we as voyagers are in the labyrinth as well as where we might be able to go. Involvement with the outside world, with desires, repulsions, attachments, or the vital interests common to monkeys everywhere is a symptom of our lost and restless wandering, oblivious to the awesome majesty of the macrodimensional labyrinth, as we allow our precious lives to dribble through our fingers like fine sand. What ordinarily becomes of the attention, our most precious possession? We foolishly spend it on trivia, allowing it to be caught and diverted, accepting the total organic exploitation of our extremely finite work energy. If only we could learn to protect ourselves from the urgent demands of nature, we would at least cease to allow our higher intentions to be dissipated.
Competent labyrinth voyaging depends upon the ability to develop attention, and from the platform of waking-state skills, to move out of the primate morphology into unfamiliar macro-morphologies compatible with the Work. Along these lines, we will begin ruthlessly evaluating everything which purports to be important and making uncompromising value judgments about our attention on a minute-to-minute basis. We may eventually be able to resist the pressure of lower dimensional intrusions, and begin to see them as mere reflections of our profound state of sleep and occlusion.
We begin to perceive the devastating influence of primate pursuits, ripping the attention away from the macrodimensional perspective; it is the mechanism which inevitably forces us to descend involuntarily into the lower human sector preoccupations.
Attention motivated by a low-grade biological machine hunger indicates a definite lack of understanding of the most basic labyrinthine discipline, and of the fundamental demands of Work. We must first find the attention of the essential self, and then develop the will to place, withdraw, re-place, expand and concentrate the attention, to put it where we want it, and make it stick—without intrusions—for as long as we wish it to remain. Without this first ability, we have no platform from which to hope for any serious work in the macrodimensions.
All forms of attention—mental, emotional, and physical—can be retrieved and replaced elsewhere as we would place a stone or chess-piece on a gameboard; for example, we can voluntarily place our emotional attention, our heart, as we choose, just because we decide to direct in this way and have through our preparatory work developed the will as one develops the strength and skill of coordination in the eye and the hand. If attention fails, it means either that the essential self is not producing presence and attention because it has been distracted, or that something has broken the attention, perhaps even violently. Should we seriously try to develop the three voluntary skills; presence, attention and attitude, inevitably we will notice some interruptive, distracting and intrusive elements; some more strident and insistent than others.
The most seemingly harmless and insignificant reactions which arise in ourselves, or events which arise in our surroundings and pull us away from even our most firm purposes and intentions are those very things we should be most on guard against, because they are so insignificant as to penetrate the defenses of our attention; so small as to easily bypass the immunity-screen of self-knowledge; involuntary interruptions of the attention are symptomatic of a blind spot in ourselves. If we saw what distracts us, we might not be so easily seduced into the trivial and commonplace. The most seemingly harmless habitudes, those things we take for granted within ourselves and which, to us, are the very substance of life itself, the calm center from which we gaze upon and react to our world, are the things to look for, and we can assure ourselves with just a little self-study that these are indeed the most deadly of all our enemies; they indicate an area where we unconsciously deceive ourselves, legitimize machine habits, and blur our scale of realization.
Attention is the key for effective voyaging in the labyrinth, for our own work and also for the Work itself, because attention is the primary tool of the essential self.
We must learn to experience things as they are, not as the mind wishes them to be. This is not the easiest attitude to achieve; after all, it requires of us that we retrain our whole perceptual apparatus and information processing system, and that we throw out everything we want to believe, the tinted glasses that make the Emerald City green.
As long as the headbrain is the source of awareness and attention, representing to ourselves and to others our totality of being, we will continue to produce these headbrain hallucinations, and we are destined to follow the machine down into identification; our attention will continue to explode into infinitesimal fragments at every little distracting factor; we will continue to find ourselves caught up in the trivial social-emotional significance of events as we play out our part in the daytime soap opera of primate life. If we can find the attention of the essential self, and then train it, give it the skills necessary for life in the labyrinth, we can do anything; we literally can move mountains. Until it is understood that it is not a question of being here now, but being here more, we won’t be able to do anything to improve our situation. We will eventually come to the realization that what we are looking at is what we are, no matter how we feel, no matter how we think of ourselves at the moment, we cannot be other than what we are looking at. We will see that our self-image is a convenience to assume a viewpoint, but we are actually looking at what we are. We are not looking at something other than ourselves. We are alone, yet not alone, and must someday come to accept our endless fate as a single being existing alone forever, surrounded by flashing, distracting hallucinations, the dancing vision which springs from the pain of eternity. The Shabbas is considered a day of rest; in fact, the ancients knew that it was to be a day of work, the day we give to the Absolute; six days a week we work to feed our faces, to insure our basic survival, but on the seventh day we give over our time, our energy and our attention totally to the service of the Absolute. Yet if we knew how, we could work every day. We know that this would be the right course, but we have no idea how we should go about it.
Author’s Afterword JUST A WEE LITTLE MACRODIMENSIONAL MATTER YET TO BE CLEARED UP
The word “morphology” is usually interpreted to mean shape, while topology is completely independent of shape. Two morphologically similar figures might possess the same topology, but we cannot say that if two figures have the same topology they necessarily have the same morphology.
but the kind which really portends an end to identity as we presently understand ourselves to be and from which we act, think, and to which we turn for comfort and a sense of continuity. Extending the boundaries of our morphological identity in a domain-devouring tour through external objects we find that we have full presence in the new morphology, including sensing, mood, perception and memory. We are now more than just a biological machine and an object, however; we are now something entirely different, which just coincidentally happens to resemble the two lumped together.
As a matter of fact, there are a number of books on shamanism which do suggest that one assume the coyote or the serpent eating its tail, or the roadrunner, or the rabbit, the baldheaded hunter, the black duck or the cwazy wabbit, but this is an unworkable formulation for our present culture; of course, for all we know, it may have been just as unworkable fifty-thousand years ago; we can’t be entirely sure how well these ideas were abused by those who went before us. We need none of these ancient stylizations, however; we could just as easily designate the morphological constructs as in the Periodic Table of Angels. Let’s just say that what we’re trying to do is eliminate restrictions and occlusions on our sense of identity, expanding our sensations, feelings and perceptions through a variety of morphological assumptives, not all of which are entirely rational.
The skills of morphological extension—shapeshifting—are acquired through morphological corresponding, adaptation, expansion, or similarity, determined by the objective topological configuration and found or artificially defined but stable morphological sub-sets within the target chamber. The overall configuration of the chamber can be considered to be the topology of the chamber, within which we may be able to define corresponding morphologies which can give us presence in the chamber; as we are presently, we consider ourselves a more or less autonomous, individual, singular, separate, unique and inviolable form in the human; for our voyaging to be effective, we must find the psycho-emotional freedom to allow the morphos to change.
We find it difficult indeed to break the bounds of that familiar electrical field which we see and feel as a comfortable enclosure, encapsulating and defining our identity-domain; weird distortions obtain in different dimensions, weird at least from the human primate point of view. We must, as voyagers, change this point of view until we can accept ourselves in widely varying format without losing the sense of identity which is independent of shape and definition of form.
As we begin to work with morphological extension, our morphology ceases to be limited by the form of the human biological machine. We begin to realize that we are able to allow ourselves to be a connected part in a much larger unit, with a very different sense of identity and an extended, impersonal will, no longer just a primate; our total identity is much more complex, more cosmologically cosmopolitan. If we can allow ourselves to extend our morphology even a little outside the primate domain, we’ve already extended our lives, because we now begin to exist in domains in which the human biological machine doesn’t exist, but our new morphology does; this is true life extension, far beyond the biological meaning of the phrase. Whole body attention is a necessity for morphological extension; we expand outward from the platform of a basic occupation of the machine with the fullest possible attention and presence; in extension, we must match the intensity of attention and presence of the domain into which we extend, the matching impedances producing an automatic homogeneous reconciliation of the forces of presence and attention in the blending of the two formerly irreconcilable domains.
Appendix One MACRODIMENSIONS: A MATHEMATICAL MODEL
When we begin studying the labyrinth, we are confronted with new ideas of the world which are radically different from those we acquire in our ordinary efforts to survive in the organic world. We hear that in addition to our own familiar dimension, there is a hierarchy of “macrodimensions”, which exist in exactly the same place and have exactly the same appearance as our own dimension, yet are qualitatively different. This concept may even be incomprehensible at first, yet is necessary for an understanding of the labyrinth.
Let us consider some characteristics of attention, viewed from an information-theoretic framework. Ordinary attention is definitely limited, though not necessarily fixed, in quantity. When we perform the simple psychological experiment of concentrating our attention on a small object, we discover that as the scope of our attention decreases, the amount of detail perceived increases. The greater amount of detail corresponds to a greater information density, just as greater clarity on a computer-graphics monitor requires a higher pixel density. The total quantity of information processed I, measured in bits or some other suitable measure, might be represented as the product of the angular area A encompassed by the visual attention and the information density D: I = A × D The approximately-inverse relationship between the scope of visual attention and the information density perceived then suggests that the total information-processing capability of the ordinary attention is, if not exactly fixed, at least bounded.
I = ∫ D(A) dA To further generalize, we are not speaking simply of visual attention, but at the very least, of all the information processing capability of the organic machine, from all the senses, of data deriving from both outside and inside the body. Thus the space we are integrating over is not the geometrical space of spherical angles, but a space of possible units of information which could be available to the attention. In order to give this abstract expression, let us create a space P consisting of points p0, p1 etc., which we will call unit perceptions, each of which represents a unique unit of information which could be processed by the attention, so that P contains all possible perceptions. Let us further assume that we define a topology T over P, in which the open sets t0, t1, etc. represent neighborhoods of similar perceptions, and that it is possible to define a measure µ over the topology, where µ (tn) represents the total amount of information contained in the open set tn.
This mathematical model is also useful in refining the questions for empirical study, as our aim is not simply to study the mathematical properties of an arbitrary structure, but to improve our understanding of the real world through an accurate model. We need to ask questions such as: what does P contain? (i.e., what types of data are potentially available to the attention?); what restrictions need to be added to the definition of the clarity functions C? (i.e., in what possible ways can the attention be distributed); and, what restrictions need to be added to the definition of the dimensions D? (i.e., what dimensions other than D0 actually exist, if any?).
However, the voyager can use this factor to force macrodimensional transitions by expanding the morphology of his presence to the limit of the morphology of attention. This greatly increases the probability of a macrodimensional transition to a clarity function with a morphology of attention that will contain the expanded morphology of presence. Hysteresis or latent field memory effects will inhibit the free form expansion of the morphology of presence. This will effectively constrain the set of available clarity function transitions to a band of “acceptable” clarity functions. It is here we may have a clue to the nature of the Heart of the Labyrinth. Perhaps the Heart of the Labyrinth is not a specific clarity function or domain in the macrodimensional network, but a condition of undistorted presence lacking hysteresis or latent field memory, a condition in which the presence is not prejudicial to any particular clarity function and does not preclude any given clarity function.