Dupes of Non-Physical

THOMPSON


In a planetary village of contemplatives, nature could be great, the machines tiny, and man in just proportion between the two. No longer need there be economies of scale in which massive amounts of fossil fuel are used to grow wheat in vast acreages so that huge trucks can burn gasoline to take flour into the enormous cities where great factories can make Ritz Crackers that can then be trucked again to the airports so that jumbo jets can fly them down to Venezuela where multinational forms of advertising can convince the peasants to abandon their locally made tortillas in favor of the creations of Nabisco. No longer would Madison Avenue heat up the economy so that shoddily built goods with built-in obsolescence could destroy nonrenewable resources and produce disastrous pollution. In industrial society, you are what you own. In contemplative cultures, your being is the source of your identity. Contemplatives need less, consume less, and therefore can produce less. No man need labor eight hours a day at the same dreary task of putting a door on a Cadillac. In industrial culture, poverty is a disgrace; in contemplative culture, poverty is the elegance of simplicity. As long as we continue to live in industrial culture, we will need an authoritarian government to control unemployment, create jobs, subsidize the auto industry, and strip-mine the Dakotas so that America can become one continental Los Angeles. If we have a spiritual transformation and create a meta-industrial culture, the drastic solutions of mass government will be unnecessary. EW-WT-99


When God created the world He divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. The human body is a recapitulation of this principle of order, for the body itself is the firmament which divides the waters of the brain from the waters of the genitals. Because of the sacred numinosity of the waters, all the fluids of the human body - saliva, sweat, semen, and blood - are sacred and mysterious substances. If Onians has dug up an ancient image of the body in which head and genitals intercommunicate through the spinal column, we do not have to wonder what such a system of meaning could have been like, for that ancient physiology still survives in Tantra yoga.
In Tantric practice the yogi silently intones a special mantram while he focuses his attention upon his "third eye". After several years of this practice, the yogi reaches a state in meditation where the vibration in his brain reverberates (note the literal meaning of this as a vibrating word) in his spinal column and begins to stimulate a sympathetic resonance at the base of his spine. The spinal column then begins to feel like a rod in which there are two strong magnetic poles at the extreme ends. As the vibration at the base of the spine responds to the vibration intoned with the mantram in the brain, the genitals become flooded with another feeling of vibration, the penis becomes erect, and the vibration within the brain becomes light, intensely energetic, and ecstatic. In Tantra, the Fall into the body is reversed and human consciousness is able to escape its entrapment in matter. In the religious traditions of Tantra, "loss of semen is loss of soul", and so the yogi is counseled to keep himself free of women so that the seminal flow may reverse itself to move up into the brain in the awakening of kundalini. In the ancient Jewish tradition, the seminal flow of men was also emphasized. In other stories of the midrashim, Adam, in penance for his fall, abstains from sexuality for 130 years, but he is not able to control his nocturnal emissions; in his dream state female spirits, the succubae, come and have intercourse with him, and with Adam's seed they give birth to demons. The succubus lying on top of the man in his sleep and stealing his semen away is, of course, another image of Lilith, the female being who refuses to stay in her "proper place".
The physiology of Tantra yoga focuses on the magical numinosity of the male semen, but the experience of the awakening of kundalini is not an exclusively male phenomenon. With women, however, it is the menstrual blood which is seen as the sacred carrier of power, and it is the womb which is its sacred vessel. The spinal polarity in women is not between the genitals and the brain, but between the heart and the womb. In the intense religious practices of yoginis or nuns, the menstrual period can stop altogether. When the energy (prana) associated with lunar menstruation is stopped, time stops and the woman is taken up into eternity. She gives birth to herself. By withdrawing into celibacy, the woman no longer generates karma (relatedness and relatives in time); instead she gives birth to the divine child. At this stage the nun may have visions of the baby Jesus nursing at her own breast. Now, whereas the experience of the awakening of kundalini in man floods the genitals and causes spontaneous erection in meditation, the equivalent experience in the woman causes an ecstatic rapture that can be described as "an orgasm in the heart", or "giving birth in the heart". The sudden opening of the heart, chakra, causes an ecstatic experience of illumination; the heart of the woman becomes at the heart of the universe. The Sufi image of this experience is the winged heart. It is for good reason that the sculptor Bernini pictured St. Teresa in ecstasy as a woman in orgasm with an angel opening her heart with an arrow.
In the etheric body of a yogini in meditation, the polarity is, therefore, not between the brain and the genitals, the second and sixth chakras, but between the inner sexuality of the womb and the heart. Some Marxist feminists who have never practiced yoga become exercised at what they imagine is a sexist doctrine that locates man's consciousness in his brain, but woman's consciousness in her heart. In fact, consciousness is not, as Whitehead would say, "simply located" in the brain; the consciousness is suffused throughout the subtle bodies, and after a yogi has opened certain centers in the brain, he is counseled to center his being in the heart, not the head. Thus the place where yogi and yogini alike end up on the path of Illumination is the heart, to experience "l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle " (the love that moves the sun and other stars). TF-WT-18,19&20


It is absurd to give a lecture in five minutes, so I'm going to be even more absurd to try to give a mini-lecture on one end of history to the other in 4-1/2 minutes. The geologists who spoke before me have tried to give us a sense of where we are as a way of gaining a sense of where we are going, so I want to talk about history by talking about cultural change, about six great cultural transformations: the Hominization of the primates, Symbolization and the origins of notation and art in the Upper Paleolithic, Agriculturalization in 9000 B.C., Civilization in 3500 B.C., Industrialization in the eighteenth century A.D., and the cultural transformation we are in now, Planetization.
The first one, the Hominization of the primates, should be called the feminization of the primates, because it all started when we got kicked out of the forest in the Pliocene, and we became so scared, being out in the open, subject to predation, that the females unconsciously lured the males around them by abandoning the old estrus system and becoming open to sexuality at all times. So the males left palling around with their buddies in the old male pair-bonding pattern and clustered around the females. Next thing you know, there is a whole new set up, with the males scrounging and the females gathering: that created the basic division of labor between male and female.
So, the origins of human culture come from women, and so, Thank You, since I'm a cultural historian that's important to me. The women did it again in the next big change, Symbolization. When language began to emerge it really split consciousness by creating the unconscious and the conscious. Like an island rising out of the sea, language was a piece of the old ocean floor held up to new light, and the symbol, like a piece of coral or a rock, could help to relate the one to the other. One seemingly small thing which helped relate the one to the other was menstruation, for it established the first observable periodicities between the phases of the moon and the internal life of the womb, with ovulation at the full and menstruation at the dark of the moon. In observing this synchronicity between their bodies and nature, and in keeping track of the ten lunar months of pregnancy on the lunar tally sticks of the midwife, woman was the first to establish the system of notation and symbolism upon which all later calendrical systems are based. So, the roots of science, contra Marshack, are with women; it's the story of the Great Mother holding up the lunar calendar incised on the crescent of the bison's horn (the well-known Venus of Laussel), and not the story of the Great Father with his phallic wand.
The third basic change came again from women when, through gathering wild cereals, they discovered that they could collect enough food in three weeks to last an entire year. Women and children could collect more food than man the hunter could ever kill. But the food required storage and heavy grinding bins, and so they began to settle down to create agriculture and the neolithic village. Unfortunately, agriculture gave us enough of a surplus that men had some time on their hands. Since they now had "property" which could be taken away, the men found that trading and raiding could be as exciting as the old days of the hunt, and so warfare came into being.
After the domestication of plants and animals in Agriculturalization came the next big change, the domestication of women, or Civilization. Warfare enabled the old custom-bound, religious, matrilineal society of the neolithic village to grow into the great city with its patriarchal structure, its great male gods, its religiously controlled economic surplus, and its standing armies. Small wonder that the Sumerian goddess, Inanna, comes to the great male god, Enki, and says: "I, the woman, why did you treat differently; where are my prerogatives?" Enki responds by saying, "Enki perfected greatly that which was woman's task." A woman as a cook is a mere housewife, but a man is a chef. Woman may have invented the lunar tally stick, but man takes it over to create writing, the measurement of wealth in the temple storehouse.
From 3500 B.C. to the eighteenth century A.D., all the civilizations of the world are agrarian, but then in Great Britain another big change comes along and we get the next transformation, Industrialization. Industrialization is really an intensification of Civilization, and so through science and technology the culture becomes even more patriarchal and militaristic than its Sumerian ancestor. In Hominization, the old forest home had been absorbed into the clump of trees, the new home base for the hominids. In Symbolization the animals were absorbed into artistic images on stones and cave walls.
In Agriculturalization the plants were absorbed, and in Civilization women were absorbed. In each case of cultural absorption there was an attendant process of miniaturization: first the forest had been miniaturized in the clump of trees of the home-base, then the animals had been miniaturized into an artistic image and time was miniaturized in a lunar tally stick; then plants were miniaturized in a garden, and finally women and neolithic matrilineal culture were miniaturized in the patriarchal household. In the eighteenth century all nature was surrounded and miniaturized by culture. The wrought iron and glass structure of the Great Exhibition of 1851 surrounded the trees and fountains of Hyde Park and proclaimed for all the world to see that in the Crystal Palace of industrial technology, wild nature had been turned into a potted plant. (Small wonder that most Victorian drawing rooms became civilized jungles of potted ferns.) We historians now see all this, of course, with 20-20 hindsight. Then people thought they were returning to nature in romanticism, and the Great Exhibition featured such camouflage of industrialization as Sherwood Forest Robin Hood Chairs, Gothic sewing scissors, and rose-decorated sewing machines. Through the Medieval Court in the Crystal Palace, everyone grooved on nostalgia, with cute little vines engraved on the legs of the machines. You can see it all in the world's first Whole Earth Catalog, the catalog for the Great Exhibition itself.
What was true of Industrialization is true of Planetization. A nostalgic and false consciousness tried to camouflage the structure with a romantic content. All the artifacts and cultures of the world were miniaturized in Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, and although people grooved on wood stoves and fantasies of self-sufficiency, the catalog itself was absorbing everything into its giant collage. All culture was now being absorbed and miniaturized as the preparation for stuffing it into one of Stewart's beloved space colonies. Just as the Victorians had once grooved on rose-decorated sewing machines, so people now grooved on wood stoves, windmills, and solar collectors, but the folksy nostalgia merely camouflaged the technological collectivization. When the CoEvolution Quarterly later openly came out in favor of Herman Kahn and O'Neill's space colonies, it showed the true skull and bones under the costume: all nature was to be turned into a potted plant in a tin can, and all culture was to be trashed into a television-sensibility collage.
But the Whole Earth Catalog and the CoEvolution Quarterly do not express the full dimensions of Planetization. In what Sri Aurobindo would call "the descent of the supra-mental", there is a new level of human consciousness which is now surrounding, absorbing, and miniaturizing the old civilized and technological consciousness. As the Supramental surrounds the old mental level, the mind becomes an artifact, and intellection becomes a mind-dance. Ratio becomes logos once again and the central icon of the econometric state, the dollar sign $ falls on its side and the bars that cross it melt and turn it into a sign for infinity. CQ-WT-106&107