Why Trance
By Z'EV
Basically, even though there are many different Creation stories
indigenous to the Peoples who eventually comprised Non-Animistic Culture, in
the Cosmology which eventually became the premise upon which this World View
grew to prominence, there were a couple of implications that will be elaborated
on in this discussion.
And the first implication is, that however Deity was imaged and imagined,
It [or hey, if that was the case], was/were seen as being
fundamentally transcendent to
their Uni-verse. That is, there was an implicit Verticality/Heirarchy which had
to be enforced.
So here is a fundamental separation based on difference, where
Deity [i.e., the divine/transcendent] is that which is somehow other
than the world of Its'/Their creation. So then Creation is a this...which is somehow different from a that.
But yet THIS Deity etc. still holds power and dominion over THAT
Creation.
Paradoxically there was also a concurrent implication, and often dogma,
that Humanity must yet somehow be connected to this Deity.
For in most traditions there must be, at some point, an attainable union
with the Divine.
For example, in Greek myths a God will impregnate a human or a Goddess
will give birth to a human.
As so it is in the Catholic/Christian Mythos where a God or Holy
Spirit impregnates the mortal
Mary.
black madonna
So these implications created a conceptual construct where for the Human
to achieve this union they too had to escape/transcend our material reality and
go to this ideal world of the
Deity/God/ etc.
In his book 'Coming to our senses: body and spirit in the hidden history
of the West' Morris Berman distinguishes two world-views; the vertical and the
horizontal.
Verticality is clearly the view adopted by Non-Animistic cultures, with
their love of hard edged differences and hierarchies, and especially in their
'exterior' concept of the dynamics of trancendence.
In contradistinction the horizontal view involves a continuum of
interpenetrating relationships and experience, a view obviously held by
Animistic cultures. And this view also allows for 'interior' as opposed to
'exterior' modes of 'sacred' experience.
So this vertical view of transcendence helped create the Non-Animistic
paradigm where our beautiful world, is simply material.
In this paradigm the Earth, is not involved in the process of the Human interacting with the Divine.
Dig it, the Earth had/has no inherent spiritual dimension.
Granted the Earth was seen as a reflection of the Divine, and so could be
seen as potentially 'holy', but it was not Spirit. No way. It was material.
So while the notion of a 'Mother Nature' still exists for most
Non-Animistic peoples, it has long been relegated to just a 'figure of speech'
.
It is no longer absolutely the Earth; who gave birth to them, nurtured
them, stood beside them, and is waiting to take them back.
Paradoxically however the roots of this view go back some 6-8000 years
ago, into the period when the Great Mother goddesses ruled supreme.
For it was the development of agriculture in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the
Indus Valley, and China that was responsible for beginning the shift from the
horizontal/animistic view of the hunter-gatherer to the heirarchical/vertical
view of the farmer.
And this expansion of agriculture was easily achieved
because the farmers knowledge was not tied to a particular patch of land as the
hunter-gatherers' had been.
For farmers colonisation was easy, because they
systematicaly knew how to transform any piece of land into a farm.
Unfortunatly this expansion proceeded into land already
occupied by the ancient hunter-gatherer communities.
And so this began the conflict between two fundamentally
different views of the land.
The hunters saw their land as a place to which they were
attached, like the trees that grew from it.
To the farmers land was property, not a place.
It was a 'thing' to own. To buy, to sell and subdivide.
And the hunter-gatherers were simply outnumbered.
Twenty comparitivly malnourished farmers could always
overcome one healthy hunter
Kybelle statuette, anatolia, c.7500 BCE
And it is this perception of an objectified and 'material' World View
that enabled Non-Animistic peoples to evolve a very real and very literal
detachment and abstraction from the Earth, and worse, an arrogance where they
felt they had dominion over it.
And it was that very selfsame sense of detachment and obsession with
abstraction that enabled Non-Animistic Culture and her Science to put Nature on
the rack and force Her to give up Her secrets.
Which translates as observing Her purely physical and mechanistic
attributes and functions. And it was by applying the results of those
observations that allowed the development of what Non-Animists so proudly call
their Technology.
And this 'objectifying nature' of science could be seen to have its roots
in agriculture as well.
The bastions of science then, Mathematics and writing, can both be seen
to have been outgrowths of agriculture.
The measuring of land was necessary for the division of properties, and
the measurement of amounts, seeds or grains, was also a factor in farming.
As the small fixed agricultural communities evolved into cites the
institution of the measuring of commodity and the attendant notion of value and
currency would have evolved as well.
Measurement, commodity, value and currency all required some form of
record keeping, naturaly leading to that most paramount of abstractions, the
development of writing.
Paramount because, in no way imaginable is the written word the thing.
In his article 'Resonant Media', Marshall Soules writes;
'Only alphabetic cultures have
ever succeeded in mastering connected linear sequences as a means of social and
psychic organization; the separation of all kinds of experiences into uniform
and continuous units in order to generate accelerated action and alteration of
form--in other words, applied knowledge--has been the secret of Western man's
ascendancy over other men as well as over his environment.'
And so it was this same fetish for Abstraction and Technology, and its
elevation to a, maybe only, semi-divine status, that allows the Non-Animist to
think they also have dominion over Animistic, or what they generally refer to
as pre-Technical, Cultures.
And all of this arises from their initial heirarchical Cosmological frame
of reference.
Now this is very different from Animistic cultures.
Closest to home as I write this, for example; the earliest inhabitants of
the Americas were coming from a totally opposed Cosmology.
For them, the
AmerIndians etc.; the Great
Spirit, their divine creative force, suffused a Multiverse.
Their Great Spirit was no different than the Earth. And because they believed that, it
consequentially followed that the Earth was an actual 'presence' of the Great
Spirit.
image of
the souix sun dance for preserving the balance
And that paradigm was what determined how they evolved their concepts of
sanctity and their manners of worshipping and maintaining their contact with the Divine. And that maintaining was what determined how they shaped their moral,
ethical, economic and etc. systems.
Because if the Great Spirit was inside all things, then every thing reflected in a concrete, incarnate way the power
of the Great Spirit that was manifesting through that thing, be it an: animal, vegetable, mineral, element,
thought, idea or disembodied Force of Nature. [no etceteras here, 'cause I'm
fairly certain that's the lot.]
For them it was an innate understanding that, for example, both the Water
and the Trees were their relatives.
For them it was self-evident that these relatives were alive and that the reason that they were breathing
[because both water and trees do breathe] was because the Breath of the Great Spirit was within them.
And, again, this relationship is a direct result of their Cosmology.
And I am living in
Europe now as I finish this piece and this same was true here. For the
indigenous pre-Christian tribes of Europe also saw the natural world as
breathing a special kind of life force and spiritual power.
Just as it was a direct result of Non-Animistic Cosmology which enabled
its' adherents to take what they thought of as the last dense piece of
'matter', that is the atom, and learn how to split it apart.
And, of course, by and through that process, be faced with the
realization that their Cosmology had then become completely inadequate.
manhattan
project atomic test, trinity 7/16/1945
And since the time of that insane splitting, great groups of people began
to come to grips with the fact that we are living under a set of assumptions
that can no longer remain the underpinnings of our Culture if we, and this
includes the Earth and all of her inhabitants, are to survive.
For unfortunately, by and large and for the most part, the dominant and
dominating World Culture is Non-Animistic.
A graphic example of this schism is related in a narrative by a Navaho
medicine man which occurs in a novel by William Eastlake, entitled Go in
Beauty;
"...a white man is just an animal with just enough brains"...
the medicine man looked out toward the mountain that held Los Alamos..."to
build something complicated enough to kill himself with".
Because as Big Science has probed the interior of the atom, it's been
faced with the fact that its' whole paradigm of what's real, a reality totally dependant upon and invested
with materiality, dissolves.
Because even a simple vision/version of reality is just not measurable nor simply quantifiable. Because
what's real can either be a this or a that,
depending on the observer [and etc.].
That, in fact, mirrored in the depths of the atom are very deep Spiritual
and Psychic inner dimensions.
So the old paradigm;
a totally physical vertical Universe, totally furnished, completely made
up, all set up, which we simply inherited and had been placed in charge of to
do as we would with, has to be replaced with that of a horizontally
transforming and transformative Multiverse.
Which is a process. And not only a process, but also a process with deep
Spiritual interiors which have been expanding and unfolding over eons of time.
In fact, however, we, and our solar system, are only a very recent occurrence in a process which began some
say some 15 billion years ago with the emergence of Hydrogen.
A Nearby
Barred Spiral Galaxy
So what would it mean to throw away the old Cosmology and take a 15
billion-year process as the basis for a new one? And what would this new story be?
Well, let's start with; that some 15 billion years ago an event took
place.
And does it really matter what it was?
The 'Big Bang' of Big Science or the 'Shattering of the Vessels' of the
Qabalhists, or whatever is your favorite?
[Although my personal favorite is Wilhelm Reich's notion of a Cosmic
Superimpositon.]
[And since this is one of the few times that Reich is mentioned in this
work I simply must take this opportunity to most highly recommend his same titled book (i.e., Cosmic
Superimposition) to anyone who seriously considers these issues and has not yet
explored Reich's work.]
Anyway, some event took
place out of which the Hydrogen atom emerged.
radio
telescopes have mapped the neutral Hydrogen in our galaxy. The above image
represents the neutral Hydrogen gases within the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy
running horizontally through the center. In this false color image no stars are
visible, just diffuse clouds of hydrogen gas tens to hundreds of light years
across which cluster near the plane. The gas clouds seem to form arching,
looping structures, stirred up by stellar activity in the galactic disk.
But it seems that for only some seven seconds were those Hydrogen atoms
alone.
Because out of an infolding of Hydrogen atoms came the unfolding of
Helium.
Ionized Helium Atmosphere
Ultraviolet image
of sunlight scattered from the Earth's extended atmosphere of helium using an
Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging instrument. This image shows that the ionized
helium atmosphere extends to about 2 - 3 times the size of the Earth.
Irregularities at the fringe of the image, such as the upper left, indicate
magnetic storm activity.
And then out of the unfolding of Helium atoms infolded the unfolding of
Carbon.
diagram
of the carbon atom
And once you have those three differentiated elements in place; the
physical Universe, as we know it, can begin to infold and unfold to greater and
greater levels of complexity.
Now as Big Science has just so relatively recently discovered;
within the Hydrogen atom are spaces so vast that they are literally
immeasurable.
So not only does the Universe unfold externally, but internally as well there is an unfolding towards greater
and greater complexities of potential.
And the permutations of all these possible potentials manifest in-and-as
what is more commonly now being referred to as the Multiverse.
And in his book, The Infinity Concerto, Greg Bear put this concept quite
nicely;
'Analogous to the groove in a phonograph record, which is
easily distinguished into horns and strings by the practiced ear - horns one
universe, strings another. .....
A universe, a world, [a life] is just one long difficult
song. .....
The difference between worlds is the difference between
songs'
So. By the time our sun came
into being some 5 billion years ago in this process, and with our Sun our solar
system, there were atomic elements capable of becoming the heavy metals which eventually
formed the crust of the Earth.
So. Our planet goes back
then something less than those 5 billion years.
Which fact makes us incredibly young in the overall scheme of things.
And just how young we will soon be getting to.
But first a slight bit of herstory:
Earth reached nearly its present size with the impact of a mars-sized
body some 4.5 billion years ago that was so catastrophic as to give birth to
the moon. This impact probably was also responsible for the 23 degree tilt of
Earth's rotation axis with respect to the orbital plane that gives rise to the
seasons of the year.
Although Earth had essentially reached its present diameter of 12,742
kilometers (7916 miles) by 4.5 billion years ago, a vigorous meteorite-cometary
bombardment continued until about 3.8 billion years ago, periodically boiling
off the oceans and expelling the atmosphere into outer space.
Evidence for this has been provided by a statistical analysis of both the
heavily cratered surface of the moon and the dating of geologic specimens
returned from the moon.
Only a small portion of Earth's two outer layers, the hydrosphere and
atmosphere, are thought to have been derived from volcanic outgassing from the
interior.
Rather they were were born from the waning stages of this rain of comets
and meteorites, which continued to fall long after Earth had reached 99 percent
of its present size.
So. If we look at the
Earth's development it's not too hard to discern an extraordinary acceleration
in the unfolding of the complexity of Her processes and structures.
So let's take that 5 billion years and compress it into the framework of
12 months and then we can hopefully get a totally new take on the unfolding of
the potential of what Ms. Miriam calls; the Fate of the Earth.
Perhaps the best way to continue to write this which is rapidly turning
into a Creation Story is, like in all Mythic Structures, to rely more than just
a bit on Poetry. Ok? Ok.
So let's sit back and enjoy, neh?
From its first gaseous state, which gases are still burning in the core
of the Earth at this very moment...burning fires which cause the volcanic and tectonic activities that are
responsible for any-and-all of the Earthquakes and Eruptions which seem to be
occurring with such an almost regularity at the present that the Apocalyptic
Wet Dreamers' Dreams seem so soon to be fulfilled.
picture showing the lithosphere, the tectonic
plates which fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.
These plates are, in general, lightweight
compared with the denser, fluid layer underneath,
and allows the plates to "float" on
top of the denser material.
MAPPING OF the
'rings of fire', areas of most intense Earthquake and Volcanic activity [in
red].
Note how closely they follow the image
of the tectonic plates, above.
volcanic
eruption at Mt Etna in Sicily
Anyway.
And in fact;
In that first gaseous state, those gases still burning, and enflamed
again and again by meteoritic
rain, in the time that it took for that burning to produce gases which could evaporate
- and then condense - and then when falling again - become our Oceans...
those same Oceans out of which all life-forms emerged, and thus have an indebtedness... .
So it would have taken the Earth about 8 months of this hypothetical year
to create, through an almost unbelievably coincidentally unbroken sequence of
events, the conditions which:
enabled the Crust to foldingly form,
the Oceans to fallingly form,
and the original mass of what we now call Land to amass into the
Ur-continent oft' referred to as Gowandaland which would itself eventually
break up and then eventually redistribute itself spreading further over the
surface of the Earth.
And all of this in three-quarters of our allotted year.
For during this time too came the development of the complex biological
structures which created the conditions necessary for the emergence of amino
acids.
amino acid L-alanine
the atoms are color-coded as follows:
Hydrogen: white; Carbon: gray;
Oxygen: red; Nitrogen: light blue
Note
that Hydrogen and Carbon are the predominant elements in all 20 amino acids
Amino acids which
themselves were coded and encoded and came together to form a total of just 20
proteins from out of which Life, as we know it, was able to unfold, in this
Process of Unfolding.
And we come back to
Hydrogen here also as, and this should maybe come as no surprise, hydrogen
bonds are what hold the bases of the two strands of DNA together to form their
double helix.
 
The image on the right shows an isolated
length of DNA making a loop and crossing over on itself, on the left a graphic
representation of the helix [note, the beige horizontals are the hydrogen
bonds.]
So this Life-as-we-know-it, unfolded on the Earth, relatively, about 4
months ago.
And then out of that process, in terms of an accelerating of genetic
complexity... [the permutating chains of amino acid proteins]...
the Earth began, in what has to be seen as a most extraordinary way, to
express Herself through Life,
beginning with 'simple' bacterias, planktons, and multi-celled algaes.
And then between some 570 and 530 million years ago what is
referred to as the 'Cambrian explosion' took place.
This event takes its name from the geological age in whose
early part it occurred.
But it was during this 40-some million year evolutionary
flowering of multicellular life that the genetic lineages of almost all animals
living today began to unfold out of her
gene pool.
And they began and continued
to evolve and continue even still, although not one new phyllum has emerged since this event,
not even after the breaking up of the gowandaland supercontinent or the
cometary impact which ended the reign of the dinosaurs.
Prokaryota [single cell microorganisms w/out
nucleus
Archaea [single cell w/ nucleus
|--Eubacteria [microorganisms w/ rigid cell walls
`--Eukarya [multi cell organisms
w/sexual reproduction
|--Fungi
|--Plantae
`--Metazoa [multi cell organisms w/tissue & organs
|--+--Annelida [segmented worms
| `--Mollusca [range from
snails/clams to squid/octopi
`--+--Arthropoda
[no spine; crustaceons, insects, spiders
`--Vertebrata [w/spine; fish, amphibions, reptiles, birds, mammals
a Cladogram, or 'tree of life', is an image
for associating the developmental links between organisms varying from
single-celled organisms to truly multicellular forms. They do this in the most general way, however and are only
considered the rough equivalent of a three-color map of the world with just
some of the major continents sketched in.
But getting back to our poem then:
too with their breathing,
She learned to breathe.
And as her many varied children's sensory organs evolved
She learned to touch
She learned to taste
She learned to smell
She learned to hear
She learned to see
And She learned all this through their senses
But, and this is the salient here, in the face of this teeming multitude
of Life...
this is still, not just, but only the Earth whose story I am here retelling.
The subject of this Prologue, that is this Story, is the Earth.
It's the Earth in her Inner [Spiritual and Psychic] Dimensions becoming
more and more capable of expressing her Spiritual Dimension.
For she becomes capable of ever greater forms of expression as her
exterior material Dimensions unfoldingly unfold.
Simulated
three-dimensional structure of Magnetosphere, with inward (blue) and outward
(yellow) directed field lines. Field lines extend two Earth radii from the core
[appx 36,000 miles]. The location of the core-mantle boundary is evident where
the structure becomes complex.
 .
later we
will be getting around to Shiva, but for the moment please note the resonnance
between
this rotated image of his drum and sceptre and the magnetosphere
  
arc like northern lights band like northern lights
central image
A global view of the northern auroral oval superimposed
on an image of the Earth's surface.
And note that there is also a southern auroral oval as
well.
Now if we were to trace the last 4 months of this hypothetical year of
Life on our planet;
It was during this time-period that her efforts in the unfolding of
complexity and diversification and evolution were rewarded with:
a brain and nervous system in charge of a skeletal system so highly
organized that the Earth was now capable of not just;
living and breathing and touching - and tasting and smelling and hearing
and seeing - and moving and feeding - and reproducing and healing itself -
but now She had evolved an organism so complex that She was now capable
of thinking about Herself as well. And well, well that's Humanity as well.
vetruvian
man by leonardo di vinci 1492
And that's no coincidence then that the Earth's surface is +/- 60% liquid
and
The Human's body is +/- 66% liquid.
And that's close enough for rock and roll, no?
So let's pause and consider that, in this time frame, the human has only
been around one day. One day.
And to stretch that
out, that one day then;
in the past 24 hours that we've been on the planet's surface;
the majority of that time was spent in the great Tribal Age that vastly
predates even what we would call Ancient History.
And it was during this period that the supercontinent Gowandaland, oft'
referred to as the 3 ancient continents/empires of Mu, Lemuria or Atlantis, was
in existence.
The southern
supercontinent Gondwana (originally Gondwanaland) included most of the land
masses which make up today's continents of the southern hemisphere, including
Antarctica, South America, Africa, Madagascar, India, Australia-New Guinea, New
Zealand, and New Caledonia. (The
remaining continents at that time--North America and Europe-Asia--were also joined,
forming the northern supercontinent, Laurasia.)
And that accounts for the first 23 1/2 hours of this hypothetical day.
And yet, the Human is the Being through whom the Earth becomes
Spiritually Aware.
Believe it or not, the Human is the Being through whom the Earth has
awakened into Consciousness.
[And I can't but help but wonder what she could have been thinking at the
time.]
Whatever Her Altered State of Consciousness, the Earth has evolved us
such that She can become Self-Aware and Self-Reflecting.
For it is in-and-through Humans that the Earth enables Herself to reflect
on Her Self:
To reflect on Her meaning, to reflect on who She is.
For in our deepest definition, and in our deepest subjectivity, Humans
are the Earth -- now conscious.
For better or worse we
are the Beings in-and-by whom the Earth thinks, knows, comprehends, analyzes,
rationalizes, judges, chooses, acts, decides, and most of all; remembers.
And in the last few moments of the remaining 30 minutes which started
from what is now considered Ancient History [app. 20 thousand ago years by the
most conservative of estimates]; the Earth is coming to a new level of
awareness.
And this level is being reflected in the we who are the Earth's thoughts.
For the developments over the last 100 years; like the ecology movement,
like Holistic Health, like the "consciousness revolution" and all the
so-called 'New Age' or 'New Edge' or New What-Evers; these came to us through
Her continuous folding and unflolding.
and how do we help her unfold
through listening to Her
and how can we listen to Her
through the Trance state
for She speaks to us
in that soft inner voice
through the Trance state
note: these 4111 words are part of the prologue
to:
HEART BEATING / EAR DRUMMING
mantic animistic musings on metaphors, mythos,
metaphonics and the trance state
which i am currently in the process of
completing.
and i drew the notion of the time line from the
audio tape entitled;
Fate of the Earth, a lecture delivered by
Miriam Theresa MacGillis.
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