Friday, December 21, 2012

They Are Standing Still

The culminating scene of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, involves a ritual of returning the thirteenth and final crystal skull to the skeleton of a throned alien. The alien sits in a circular temple, the floor of which is an obvious Mayan calendar.

As many have pointed out before, the return of this thirteenth skull is symbolically the same as the completion of the 13th Baktun of the Mayan Long Count, occurring right now.



This movie offers many clues on the significance of the present moment. The scene in particular has obvious parallels with the well-known climax scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Indy and the Ark have been captured by the Nazis and brought to a small island in the Aegean Sea. Here, the Nazis perform a ceremony to open the Ark. In doing this, they are destroyed by the supernatural beings that fly out from the Ark.



The connection of the two scenes is unmistakeable. The Nazis of the Lost Ark are replaced by the Soviet agents of Crystal Skull. Both of these groups crave knowledge and power, and both are totally overwhelmed and destroyed by what they receive. Neither possess humility and purity of heart.

The Seraphim of the first movie become the inter-dimensional aliens of the second. Even the Marion Ravenwood character returns in the later movie. It would be no stretch of the imagination to hear her saying to Jones, "doesn't this remind you of that time with the Nazis and the Ark?"

Rending the Veil


The two scenes essentially portray the same ritual. Opening the Ark is identical to rending the veil of the Temple where the Ark was held. The shekinah, the pillar of cloud and fire, the central pillar of the Tree of Life, is made manifest. The two rituals are, once again, depictions of the attempt to cross the Abyss.

When Spalko, the Soviet intelligence agent, demands of the aliens to "know everything," she is asking for Da'at, for knowledge. The aliens do not kill her. They grant her request. She is destroyed because she has not yet become "no man" or "no woman." She is destroyed by her own ego. She is too "dense" to travel through the portal in bodily form. Like the Nazis, she disintegrates.



The completion of the circle of 13 crystal skulls also recalls Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal , released in 1982. One thousand years before the events of the film the central, sustaining crystal of the film's world is cracked. Two opposite races of beings appear in equal number, the tyrannical and cruel Skeksis and the spiritual and gentle Mystics.

The film takes place just before the Great Conjunction of the triple suns. A Gelfling couple bear the broken shard, thus fulfilling prophecy, which will repair the Crystal and rejuvenate the world if it is returned at the time of the Conjunction. The Skeksis try to do whatever it takes to prevent this as they will attain immortality if the Crystal is left incomplete after the Conjunction passes.

In the end, the shard is returned and the two opposing races merge into one race of light, beings which are very reminiscent of the inter-dimensional aliens of Crystal Skull.
 

By weaving the three scenes into one narrative, we can begin approach what may be going on right now. We are collectively passing through the Abyss. The dualistic aspects of the two fishes of Pisces, which as Jung taught are representations of Christ and Antichrist, are merging (or not!) at the point of Conjunction. This happens at the completion of the thirteen Baktuns, and it is precisely at the site of Da'at.   

Slouches Towards


2001: A Space Odyssey gets even deeper into these themes. Again, the climactic "beyond the infinite" sequence offers clues on what is now occurring. Here, we witness a successful passage through the Abyss.



David Bowman defeats the Cyclops, HAL -- the Guardian of the Threshold, and unlike Odysseus he truly becomes Noman, not in name but in being. As in Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, alluded to by Kubrick in his musical choice of Richard Strauss' famous tone poem of the same name for the monolith scenes, where we read of the metamorphosis of the Camel (gimel) to the Lion to the Child, Bowman transforms into the Starchild.
 

Jay Weidner also compares Bowman's journey with the passage through Da'at:

In the case of this film, the final realm of the Tree of Life can be only attained by one man. And this can be done only with the help of the monolith, or the stone. Bowman - the furthest out and the loneliest person in the universe - is that man. Interestingly, in the Tree of Life, there is an abyss that lies between Tiperoth and Kether. This abyss must be crossed by the initiate before they can successfully complete their journey. This abyss is called Daath in the Kaballa. Bowman crosses this abyss during the famous light show sequence. The colors and shapes on the screen are shown in such a way as to create a 'falling' sensation in the viewer. Kubrick is taking the viewer through the abyss of Daath and into the world of Kether where all illusions fail.

Bowman returns to Earth as the Starchild. And where have we seen this child recently? Oh yeah....



What is being born? When do we realize what has been born?

How To Survive The End Of The World


Another successful crossing is shown in the recent film, Melancholia. The world is on the edge of absolute destruction due to its collision with the rougue planet, Melancholia. There is seemingly no escape from this fate. All will end. The movie is largely about the reactions of different people to the apocalypse -- the consummation of the world by fire, as Blake puts it.

There is, however, an escape -- through the imagination. The depressive sister, played by Kirsten Dunst, constructs a "magic cave" out of sticks for her sister and nephew. The three hold hands in the "magic cave" and their bodies are instantly incinerated by the exploding atmosphere. But as our imagination is fire, as Blake revealed, these three would survive in some plane of being. Fire does not destroy fire.
 
 
There is no amount of "preparation" that will suffice for this moment. No amount of food or guns or supplies will save you. The passage happens only for those who have cut their attachments for the objects of this world, and instead flow with the imagination which animates and sustains all truly good and beautiful things.

The Black Fluid


The McKenna brothers in 1971 dreamed that they could exteriorize the imagination -- to combine spirit with matter and have it be visible to the senses. It is not apparent that this happened in 1971, but eventually, with the Mushroom's prodding, the Timewave was developed and its endpoint fixed to this very day. This experience of the imagination being physically manifest, becoming "dirigible," would end history. It would become eternity.

But I do think there is some kind of, for want of a better word again, hyperdimensional object at the end of history which is casting an enormous shadow over the historical landscape and causing it to be what it is. It's as though history were the shock wave of eschatology. There is an event at the end of history such that when it is finally reached, all time which preceded it will be seen to be adumbrations and reflections of the approach to this thing. It's as though consciousness is attempting to become more and more self-reflective. 

And since language is the way, the strategy that is being used, we are getting a fantastic accumulation of languages and cybernetic technology -- technologies of storage and delayed replay -- so that consciousness is bootstrapping itself toward this omega-point. But the creode, the cleft in the epigenetic landscape that is directing it toward this end point already exists in some sense. This is like a Platonic model of hyperspace. Plato said, "Time is the moving image of eternity". What he simply meant was that we have a low-dimensional slice of reality in the form of what we call the present, with its perspective on the past, but that actually it is part of a higher dimensional manifold which, beheld in its entirety, is eternity.


Blake wrote that infinity could be in the palm of our hand. Joyce made us realize that a Jewish salesman walking around the streets of Dublin in search of pig's liver is identical to the greatest epic of the West. Kubrick retold the same epic in terms of the entire evolution of humanity. Odysseus has finally reached the Mountain of Purgatory and gone up and beyond.

All Falls


McKenna used to say that "Rome falls nine times an hour." That was in the early nineties. Now it is falling every few seconds or faster. There it goes. Again! Again! Terence speculated that one of the ways the "hyperdimensional object" might arrive is through the development of true Artificial Intelligence. There is much speculation that the Net might eventually become this. But would we know that this mutation has taken place? Perhaps it has.

This is 2012. This has already happened. This will keep happening. The darkest day. The return of the light. The Fall is over and the world holds its breath.

7 comments:

  1. I was thrilled to discover your excellent sync blog on the suggestion of a friend. Great work! I can't wait to read more. I'm writing something for my blog about all the fire syncs I've seen in the media this past week and your post have given me extra fodder. Thanks!

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  2. Thanks for your great comments and the connection. They have led me to check out your own amazing blog. I really like what you wrote in a recent post:

    "Either way, this most recent chain of murderous events (Aurora, Clackamas, Sandy Hook, Webster) are the death throws of a dying organism. These events bear the same signature elements of past historically devastating events (i.e. JFK, MLK, 9/11, Tucson, etc.) because they're all projections of the same ongoing battle between a healthy, living universal organism and an evil, insane, dying one."

    This "ongoing battle" is exactly what I'm planning to blog about next. So thanks also to you.

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  3. It may be profitable to connect the Wake to recent events.

    Adam Lanza is, naturally, HCE, Adam of the wandering phallus who steals the fire of his Mother ALP in the great Original Sin.

    Olivia Newton-John starred in Xanadu, where ALP, the sacred riverrun. The Garden is the New Town, now perdita. But she is the Alpha point, Spirit descending into Chaos at the creation of the world; Miss Universe (Olivia Culpo) is its apotheosis. Ezekiel beheld a Wheel within a Wheel.

    This is Aurora, the Sleeping Beauty Awakening.

    A James Holmes (James-James the Demiurge) is in your home (the Garden); the torturous Red Hook (Tzaddi the Emperor) of the Flaming Sword that guards the sanctuary and guns down the sleepers in the Cave of the movie theater, entranced by shadows on the body of Nuit. The Apocalypse is eternally forestalled by the sorcery of time.

    Kira is one of James Joyce's Rainbow Girls, a shard of divided light. The Dark Crystal herself, a glyph of psychic wholeness, was made the protagonist of Jim Henson's subsequent film, Labyrinth.

    Kingdom of the Crystal Skull also recalls another Kubrick film, Dr. Strangelove, with its mystical penetration of Mother Russia, the Black Monolith, at the End of the World. Cate Blanchett's character, like the Fisherman's Wife in the Grimm's fairy tale, wishes to devour the universe. The wrathful Kali is balanced by Marion, the devoted wife; the two faces of the Goddess depicted by Miranda and Selina in The Dark Knight Rises.

    We see that the first appearances of the New Earth or New Jerusalem are met in the Nigredo stage of Melancholia, as the Darkness Dawns.

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  4. Amazing. Lots to ponder there. I was struck also by the name Adam Peter Lanza -- APL or ALP. I think we can read the riddles in several ways at once.

    "But this ol' river keeps on rollin', though,
    No matter what gets in the way and which way the wind does blow,
    And as long as it does I'll just sit here
    And watch the river flow."

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  5. "But the creode, the cleft in the epigenetic landscape that is directing it toward this end point already exists in some sense" is like word porn, great stuff. So do you think we are seeing a spike in Mckenna's time wave zero theory or is it a bust? Maybe we reset, I'm not finding much sync in 2013, it's almost like it was measuring our hopes. I'm just getting into this stuff so please keep blogging really enjoying it!

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    1. Thanks for your comment. The Timewave may be The Dark Side of the Moon to history's Wizard of Oz. McKenna himself calibrated and reset it several times before arriving at 12/21/12. Clearly it needs further twiddling to get the timing just right. I don't like the quantification involved in the Timewave, but as a flowing metaphor it is fascinating. 2012 was real, I think, but in a different way.

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