Genesis of EdenBiodiversity Pages:
Abstract: A reasoned case is made for a specific visionary approach to solving the problem of eroding genetic diversity, which complements scientific and political initiatives. This visionary approach utilizes a prophetic aspect of synchronicity based on the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics and the cosmological anthropic principle.. The solution involves abrogating the patriarchal social and religious order in a paradigm shift to a natural Tao of conscience, complementary to and compatible with the scientific world view, which consummates the founding archetypal myth of human civilization. A union between the physical and the mental is achieved through a natural sacrament. So far as I know this work is completely unique in human history, being the first time a visionary prophetic statement, intended to establish a fundamental shift in human spiritual belief, has been presented for scientific scrutiny as an academic paper, a welcome precedent.
Review of the Paper: Environmental Conservation
1.1 Scientific Conservation of Genetic Diversity: The approaches outlined here are already well documented and followed with spirited devotion by the majority of the world's ecologists, many life scientists and conservationists generally. A summary is included to complete the comprehensive agenda proposed in the paper.
I intentionally use the term 'genetic holocaust' to describe the collective loss of genetic, species and ecosystemic diversity, not to promote a sensational or emotional attitude, but because in all frankness, the rapidity, and severity of the current extinction fully justifies the term, as does the fact that it is occurring, not by natural or astronomical catastrophe but by the intentional application of human impacts which, in all evidence, are knowingly arriving at the extinction of the majority of genetic diversity on this planet, which has taken a time scale of 3500 years to accumulate and which we will never replace and at best can recover from over a time scale of 50 to 100 million years of 'new' evolution.
Past and predicted species diversity : Choose a Soft landing!
(Porritt 76, King)
1.1.1 The communication agenda is to promote public awareness that 'genetic holocaust' is an irreversible loss on time scales of 50-300 million years, not only to human economic well being and quality of life, but to our medical future, longevity and to the robustness and dynamic stability of the biosphere. We depend on the genetic diversity of the food plants, and in the same manner depend on biodiversity of animals, particularly insects, medicinal plants and the whole "Gaia diversity" of Earth for the future adaptive health of the planet. Scientists also need urgently to promote sustainable economics and sustainable population policy.
1.1.2 The technical agenda is to develop effective strategies for preserving as many unique ecosystemic hot-spots of diversity as possible as well as the genetic diversity of essential medicinal and food plants and their progenitors through germ-line banks and similar measures. It is essential to develop strategies to guard major ecosystemic areas of genetic diversity, from the tropical forest of the Amazon to the Arctic Taiga. This may require concentrating on regions where population factors can be handled more effectively and unfortunately sacrificing some irreplaceable treasures which cannot effectively be rescued because of unremitting social factors.
Every ecologist knows this response is necessary, as do a good proportion of any educated population (especially females who already have a nurturing evolutionary strategy biologically), but factors of resource exploitation and short-term GNP economics - what I call the 'spermatogenic initiative' act against it. The basic problem is that short term exponentials (male evolutionary strategy) are built into both the capitalistic and socialistic viewpoint - that we should make whatever impact we can to exploit what resources are available and wait until the impact proves damaging before initiating damage control. In the case of genetic diversity , this will be too late and cause a hard genetic landing.
Two satellite views of Earth over the Amazon (Revkin),
the upper one was during extensive burning.
The decline of Sumatran pristine forest (Lean et al.). Fires over
Sulawesi from the Space Shuttle (Nat Geog).
1.2 Prospects: Some marginal success at reducing human impact in sensitive areas, confounded by increasing population, deforestation, environmental change and the ballooning of monoclonal culture, new genetic engineering techniques and patent laws which will further collapse genetic diversity of natural food and wilderness species. There may be some prospect for protecting part of the Amazon, but this too could be confounded by national political defensiveness and the failure of 'North-South' economic dialogue.
1.3 Caveat: Science has great value as a detailed description of reality founded on the sceptical principle, but science has nil net ethical content. It is the description of how, not why, or what humanity should do. For every enlightened ecologist there is an unscrupulous genetic engineer working for a multinational corporation, so all the work many enlightened scientists are trying to do is simultaneously being offset by other scientists, by exploitive corporate practices, government expediency and complacency and by poverty-stricken migrant populations.
In the longer term we run a significant danger of building a cybernetic biosphere full of genetically altered species of near zero diversity with little or no evolutionary potential (plus some weeds, rats and cockroaches), and becoming accidentally wiped out by any minor disturbance on an astronomical scale. We also run significant risks to the human population through the rise of eugenic manipulation of the human germ line for political as well as social ends.
Science cannot solve these sorts of question because they are a function of what human society chooses to do in its vision of itself and its future. For this reason this paper stresses a visionary approach involving abrogating the existing patriarchal religious and social order in an evolutionary consummation of human archetypal myth.
1.4 Conclusion: We have no guarantee at all of a soft genetic landing next century by scientific measures alone. Even given the sure suicide of nuclear holocaust we still retain massive nuclear stockpiles. The prospects for genetic holocaust remain that much more contingent in the human psyche and hence are unlikely to be addressed until too late.
2.1 Political and Economic Dynamics and Sustainable Society: In terms of environmental health, the planet is a dynamical system driven by at least four major factors: (a) the 200 or so national governments some democratically elected some otherwise, (b) multi-national corporations, (c) the globalist influence of the UN and its bodies such as UNEP etc.and NGOs, (d) the 'North-South' dialogue between developed energy-hungry countries and developing energy-lean countries, which also possess a large proportion of the genetic resources of the planet. Previously the capitalist-communist dynamic would also have been of significance, particularly in terms of nuclear risk.
These factors interact in ways which currently tend to maintain the 'business as usual' scenario, but which could be rapidly thrown aside by a suitable political watershed which simultaneously effects all four factors. National politics is a valuable regional guarantee against tyranny of a single 'Earth state' but invokes the 'tragedy of the commons', partly as a result of the consensus politics of non-interference in internal national interests and the incapacity of single states to make economic sacrifices for the environment unless they are matched by commensurate contributions from others. [ The difficulties of Brazilian politics over the Amazon is a stock case. ] Multi-national corporations form a second economic entity which permeates national boundaries, making it very difficult for national governments, given foreign debt and investment, to make independent financial decisions. Such corporations can appropriate and destroy major resources very rapidly and then diversify into a new area. [Asian timber companies operating in the Amazon are a stock case.] The globalist response centred on the UN, the Rio Earth Summit and conservation NGOs can and does attempt to mediate a rational approach to population and biodiversity, but is hampered in any effective response by (a) and (b) and by the failure of the North-South dialogue to provide any cooperative approach involving economic sharing of ecosystemic solutions. [Failure of the US to ratify the Biodiversity convention is a stock case.]
2.1.1 Without such a dialogue, the 'demographic transition' which resulted in slowing of population growth in developed countries cannot take place globally because the per-capita energy demand in developed countries is unsustainable globally, because it will not occur at best until too much genetic damage has already been done and simply because world food production is unlikely to sustain it without a massive redistribution of resources.
2.1.2 At the basis of world economic thinking is a 'spermatogenic heritage' from three thousand years of patriarchal ascendancy which has been only marginally altered by the rise of women's suffrage and women in management and politics in some developed countries. The spermatogenic approach is to create exponential impact on as many fronts as possible and to consider damage control only if and when damage is conclusively proven. This will inevitably cause a genetic hard-landing. Capitalism with its principle of pure competition is the ideal model of spermatogenesis, but the exclusively male-dominated hierarchical history of communism means that, despite socialism's appearance of an oogenic nurturing welfare state, it is based on hierarchical regulation and still lacks sustainability in ecosystemic terms.
2.1.3 Free-market economics purports to function in terms of ecosystemic principles of natural competition, but lacks any of the genetic principles that ensure biological organisms are 'survivors in a surviving biosphere'. A fishing company can for example destroy an entire fishery, liquidate its assets profitably in advance of the crisis becoming recognised and diversify into a completely new activity, such as prawn farming (Canadian cod fishery). Current company law allows corporate entities to operate purely for the benefit of their shareholders without any test of social or environmental benefit. Fundamental change to both law and central government is needed to engender sustainable economics in the qualitative sense.
2.2 Prospect: A critical change is required to set up active policies which will achieve long-term sustainability economically, and ensure they are adopted on a world-wide basis. This process requires a series of political changes hinging on ecocrisis and the concept of ecosystemic society. Generally elections in individual nations finesse environmental issues and sustainability by concentrating on short-term crises, and the contrast between left and right. Green issues are consistently submerged in conflicts of social justice, and allegations of mismanagement or corruption.
2.3 Proposal: A world movement to ensure a referendum in every country by the year 2005 on the issue of long-term economic, environmental and genetic sustainability, to be then facilitated through the UN. The free vote of women is essential because their reproductive strategy, unlike that of men, already depends on sustainability. The core reason for the population explosion is male control of female fertility through the 'spermatogenic initiative' of the male hegemony. It remains doubtful whether effective action will occur on population unless women have a free vote and free access to education. Sustainability needs to be defined carefully in advance by a wide-ranging debate on ecosytemic economics and society which can take account of technological change.
3.1 Traditional Religious and Moral Paradigms and the Patriarchal Hegemony:
The visionary response is at once the most difficult of the three, but is the one which can really make the most difference, provided it is well-founded. By contrast with the scientific world view, which has been utterly revised since the industrial revolution and evolved out of recognition in this century alone, religious and spiritual beliefs have remained stranded in archaic traditions, locked in by factors which can only be overthrown by a major and almost super-human paradigm shift.
The Transactional Interpretation: (a,b) Feynman
diagrams of virtual photon exchange give exceedingly accurate
electrodynamic calculations. (c) The actuality of time-reversed
solutions: If electron-scattering (i) becomes time-reversed (ii),
the (advanced) electron is equivalent to a conventional (retarded)
anti-electron - i.e. positron creation-anihilation.. Photons are
their own anti-particles and can thus adopt both solutions. (d)
By combining both advanced and retarded solutions, the Transactional
Interpretation sets up a hand-shaking interaction between emitter
and absorber. The emitter sends out a retarded offer wave to which
each potential absorber responds with an advanced confirmation
wave running 'backwards' through space-time. Once reduction selects
a particular emitter-absorber pair, the interference between the
advanced and retarded solutions resolves into a single exchanged
photon.
3.2 The Hard Problem: The scientific description of reality has one Achilles heel which is the stumbling block of any relevance it might have to guiding human action - the so-called 'hard problem' in consciousness research. No matter what description we invoke of brain dynamics, subjective reality, by its very nature, subtends the objective basis of scientific inquiry so that even when detailed and plausible models of brain function are invoked, they do not answer the 'hard problem' of subjectivity, because the model in no way predicts the subjective experience, nor is even on the same existential footing. The reverse situation is more straightforward. Scientific description, although it deals with abstractions which lie beyond direct sensory experience, does form a valid description of the stability properties of conscious experience we subjectively associate with states of the physical world. This suggests that subjectivity may manifest a complementary principle which is in a sense deeper than objective description, as hinted at in Indian philosophy.
On the other hand conscious experience as we know it is manifest through the intricate physical structure of our brains, and is thus dependent on the physial universe, for its incarnate elaboration. In turn, biomolecular structures and ultimately the brain, far from being fragile and insignificant in a universe of awesome forces are the cumulative interactive product of cosmological symmetry-breaking.
For the sake of brevity I will simply state the key hypothesis - that consciousness is a subjective manifestation of the way in which the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics solves reduction of the wave packet over space-time to create a consistent world history. Because this problem involves future contingent states of the absorber, it cannot be solved deterministically from initial conditions alone and thus violates any form of temporal determinism (King 1989). Consciousness provides for us an additional sub-quantum principle by which we perceive a single consistent history evolving from Everett's many probability worlds. In so doing, we use our consciousness to alter the course of history, both by our actions and by 'anticipating the indeterminate future'. The evolutionary advantage of this odd anticipatory sub-quantum property accessed through transtion in and out of neurodynamic chaos has led in turn to the evolution of conscious brains (King 1991, 1996, 1997). . This has a profound effect on our understanding of reality, because in this model the so-called randomness of quantum events is actually a complex system spanning space-time, mediated through consciousness and probably all chaotic processes, which appears pseudo-random in a given measurement. It is the elusive 'implicate order' - the 'synchronistic' aspect of reality, which falls into the domain of quantum indeterminacy and thus remains difficult or impossible to mount a deterministic experiment upon. Conscious foresight does not imply predestination but realizes potentialities.
3.3 The Two Visionary Traditions: Human history records two responses to the existential dilemma. One is the approach of shamanism, in which the human merges with natural experience in conscious trance or a vision quest and attempts to propitiate or assuage hidden aspects of reality which may effect health or future events. In a sense it is the conscious experience of a death or bardo state. Such practices also underlie aspects of meditative trance and samadhi seen in Eastern traditions. The other approach is the worship and invocation of deities, often in anthropomorphic female and male form, generally by sacrifice and ritual. This is also held to propitiate the forces of nature, maintain fertility and as an expression of national identity and vigour. Both approaches use myth to evoke the central themes of existence and both have used in various forms oracular divination based on chance, dreaming or trance. Deity worship has also been characterized by gruesome traditions of human sacrifice still exemplified today in the Christian eucharist of Christ's sacrificial flesh and blood.
The so-called temptation seal British Museum Akkadian
circa 2200 BC
Possibly Naram-Sin (horned) and consort (Nikkal), Seven-branched
Tree of Life and the wise serpent Nabu.
3.3.1 Archetypal myth and Prophetic Synchrony: Archetypal myth such as the Fall from Eden, despite the insertion of male-oriented distortions, so successfully sums up the entire existential dilemma of civilization in its mistrust between the genders and current relationship of domination over and fall from unity with the biosphere that it can validly be perceived as a manifestation of the space-time action of synchronicity in the unfolding of human culture.
The central case expressed here is that the prophetic impulse has a scientific basis in the 'implicate order' - that these traditions owe their continued existence to a feedback between conscious experience and synchronicity which has given rise to a degree of complementation between conscious expectation and circumstance, particularly when whole societies are locked into a world view in which prophecy and oracle are perceived to interact with the natural forces, which has proved effective enough to maintain an unbroken social tradition in virtually every culture up to the time of the scientific revolution, despite extensive cases of religious fabrication, and contrasting human tendencies to superstition and scepticism.
3.3.2 The Patriarchal Ascendancy: During the history of deity worship, a process of masculinization occurred which upset the natural balance of this description of reality, concomitant with the emphasis of patriarchal genealogy. Certain male deities firstly syncretically accumulated the attributes of other male gods and then laid claim to universal dominion, finally ejecting their female consorts and assuming Lordship over all reality as monotheistic creator gods of order. This change involved a massive distortion of the natural relationship between humanity as conscious sentient beings and the quantum and biological universe. In historical terms, this transition is typified by the rise of Yahweh to dominance in post-exilic Jewish thought, the emergence of Christianity based on God the Father and the subsequent rise of Islam founded exclusively on male Allah, but it also has earlier roots in Zoroastrian Ahura Mazda and permeates the majority of Hindu thought (particularly Krishna) and extends even to Buddhism, where Queen Maya is relegated to the illusory role by comparison with the Buddha Mind or 'no mind'. The transition to monotheism has had major impacts on human society which still continue today. It has two common motifs which need to be understood clearly in relation to science before we undertake the visionary quest:
3.3.2.1 The first is that adoption of the exclusive male principle involves sacrifice of the validity of the material world as a flawed or even sinful realm of impermanence and death to the eternal heavenly world of the cosmic mind or a prophesied heaven. This results in a severing of human responsibility from maintaining balance and atonement with nature, causing instead dominion over or domination of nature, resulting inevitably in the Fall. Even Buddhism, despite avoiding killing in case it involves a reincarnated human, rejects the natural cycle for the inner light. The idea that the physical is impermanent is a misunderstanding on any realizable time scale. While the universe is perhaps 10 to 15 billion years old, life on earth is at least 3 billion years old. The biosphere and the germ-line are both in principle immortal, having no specific life-span like higher animals. The problem of death and impermanence in our individual incarnations is a problem of atonement with nature, not escape to the eternal mind. By being at one with nature we become one with immortality. Given the capacity of the mind to enter cosmic trance and to merge with space-time synchronicity, realizing such atonement may actually facilitate entering the eternal bardo state in which we realize that our actions, if impeccably performed, stand eternally in space-time, whatever the eventual heath-death, or otherwise of the universe.
3.3.2.2 The second is that the light principle of order is in combat with the dark principle of chaos that underlies all new fertility and complexification in natural complex systems. In the mythology of the ancient goddess, reality was perceived as a natural cycle in which the light and dark principles alternated. The sacrificial aspect of this was wanting and flawed, but the ascendance of the male principle has resulted in the myth of mortal combat between the forces of good and evil. This finally leads to the visionary cul-de-sac of the Day of Resurrection in which the entire natural order is overthrown by a complete dominance of the heavenly inner light, the reappearance of all souls and the eternal judgement and damnation of those who do not follow the male principle - a monstrous projection of spermatogenic competition in complete violation of nature. All patriarchal paths aim at the spermatogenic folly of an individual egotistical afterlife, either as sexless heaven or Buddhist transmigration of the soul to a new body, denying a complete reintegration with nature.
3.4 The First Apocalypse: By taking too literal an interpretation of the myth of Genesis and by placing too much faith in the Father, Jesus in his shamanic vision quest, in the words of Clement of Alexandria, claimed: "I have come to destroy the works of the female" (Graves 1946 6) to undo the mortal sin of Eve, who by enticing Adam to eat the apple, introduced death, along with sex, into the world. Jesus played the shamanic foil right into the eye of death and became immortalized. This was fully expected both by himself and his immediate followers to result in the arrival of the heavenly Kingdom in their lifetime. Although this did not occur and should in all honesty have been discarded as a failed quest, the mythical explosion caused by his combination of the miraculous nature of Dionysus, the urgency of his vision, the cathartic overtones of traditional sacrifice of the male sacred king to the Goddess and Jesus' admittedly Jewish pretence to the divine Messiahship as Suffering Servant and Paschal Lamb of slaughter, locked human society into spiritual schizophrenia about the relation between the physical and the mental, which despite the many contributions of Christian thinkers to European social development, quite apart from the horrors of martyrdom, the crusades, witch hunts, inquisition, religious wars and Jewish holocaust has profoundly prolonged and broadened the destructive aspects of the male domination and the continuing and deepening downfall of society from equilibrium with and respect for nature. The paranoic vision of the apocalyptic struggle with Satan (Pagels) and the 'evil empire' very nearly became our own nuclear Armageddon. The advent of Islam has significantly exacerbated this imbalance. Because Christ has been launched into the eschatological status of the Son of God for the entire history of the Earth, for us who now stand at the real time of nuclear and genetic apocalypse, it is time to break these bands of illusion.
3.4.1 The problem is not one that we can pass on to science, because with the advent of genetic technology, humanity can now shape the biosphere into whatever vision it dreams of, a cybernetic nightmare or a natural near-immortal paradise. It will become what we envision and we thus have to assume the visionary role in destiny because, as Jesus is quoted in John 10:34 following Psalm 82:6: "Ye are the gods". We have finally come of age, whether we like it or not.
A natural evolution to the feminine is imminent, driven by the scientific revolution itself and social change. It is essential that this transition is brought forward by taking advantage of the wild card of synchronicity so that the transition can occur in time to save the bulk of the genetic diversity of the planet for the future. I am going to mount as brief a description as possible of this re-entry: Archetypal myth has correctly described our existential dilemma as a Fall from the balance of nature through a schism in the balance between the genders. Is there a way out? The idea is to fulfil the Consummation of Eden and complete the archetypal myth of civilization by bringing the Fruit of the Tree of Life back to the garden and healing Gaia by human vision, will and love and doing this in a way which is at the same time fulfilling many of the prophecies of the Old Testament, Christianity and Islam, in a twist of poetic irony which reveals at once the missing emergent feminine principle of chaos and fertility in a way which does not violate any principle of quantum mechanics or the scientific world view.
4.1 The Visionary Path to Gaia: All visionary perspectives are contingent rather than objective realities. This does not mean they are fanciful, or impractical, for while the reality they convey may be only one of many possibilities, choosing a 'path with heart' which saves genetic diversity is a 'choice for life'. This is central to the evolutionary role of conscious perception and the contingency of history itself as an act of choice. This method to save species diversity works from the opposite side of the 'bubble of perception' from scientific conservationists to push the 'assemblage point' (Casteneda) of the human psyche towards the Path of the Seed by capitalizing on my gnostic CV - the identity of Isa, a synchronicity rooted in the prophetic tradition. This is a traditional shamanic vision quest and not a pretentious claim.
I will avoid any miraculous unscientific claims to preserve compatibility with the scientific world view. I prefer to call this paradigm shift the path of nature - or as Taslima says conscience 'with science', rather than religion, to emphasize its complementary relationship to scientific thought. It is Tao just as body and mind, female and male, wave and particle are complementary in the Tao of existence, gender and physics. It is not a matter of belief, but of inspiration to preserve the immortal genetic endowment in a prophetic myth-fulfilling way. It's visionary Eucharist enables any person who chooses to do so to assume the gnosis or inner realization of the prophet and is thus a matter of experience rather than faith alone. This mitigates future 'avatars' having a strategic monopoly on the visionary condition. The essential transformation is to convert the Christian message of spiritual love into an immortal love for the biosphere by realizing the prophesied paradigm shift expected of Christianity in the millennium as the 'Gaia Messiah'. Far from being a cliche, I will demonstrate that this title has a continuity of history in Old Testament, Christian and Islamic prophecy and is a manifestation of synchronicity to protect the genetic endowment of the biosphere. Scientifically, this could be thought of as an application of the anthropic cosmological principle (Barrow and Tipler). It also captures the heritages of Teilhard de Chardin and Matthew Fox.
4.2 The Twin Kettle Drums of Prophecy: In January 1945, just as the first plutonium began to come on line at Hanford for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the visionary poet Robert Graves was completing two works which he called his 'twin kettle drums', 'The White Goddess' and 'King Jesus'. Artemis is called the 'lady of clamours', surmounted only by the awesome din of Dionysus. Robert figures poetically as John the Baptist. In the White Goddess he prophesied the last days of Christianity in the environmental crisis and the imminent return of the Goddess (Graves 1948 482-7). In 'King Jesus' he described Christ's untimely crucifixion in the light of Isaiah 60:25 'I The Lord will hasten it in his time' by having Mary Magdalene say prophetically 'The woman abides and cannot be hastened' (Graves 1946 343-4). These two books thus combine to prophesy the return of Christ as the Son of the Goddess in the environmental crisis of the millennium.
Missal of Odalricus
- early 12 th century (Lavin).
"We keep this day holy in honour of three miracles:
this day a star led the wise men to the manger,
this day water was turned to wine at the marriage feast,
this day Christ chose to be baptised by John in the Jordan,
for our salvation, allelu-Yah" - Magnificat antiphon.
By a coincidence which might at first appear superficial, I am Chris King born on the Epiphany, in the week Graves submitted 'The White Goddess' to T. S. Eliot (Oprey 1982 327) under circumstances which became famous enough that Colin Wilson dedicated his book 'The Occult' to Graves (Wilson C 65-7). The Epiphany is the earlier date Eastern date of the Nativity (Frazer v4/1 304) and is the celebration of Christ's triple manifestation, including his first Dionysian miracle at Cana, and baptism, a particularly auspicious date by comparison with the Julian winter solstice, the later contrived nativity of Christmas Day. In Aztec terms I have inherited the 'nagual' or 'nahualli' of the Christos (Brundage, Castaneda).
4.3 The Eucharist of Maria: Five years later, Robert became a pivotal intermediary in a discovery which is central to the unfolding of twentieth century consciousness. He was approached by Valentina Wasson concerning the fact that Claudius died on mushrooms. Subsequently he played a pivotal role in providing the contacts which enabled the Wassons to set off on a journey which resulted in the discovery of teonanactl, the 'flesh of the gods', the psilocybe or 'magic' mushroom. Once again, Robert was prophetic, saying two full years before the discovery 'The Goddess has a sense of humour and to reach down to 23 Wall St. and say "You there, recover my lost mushroom lore, and make Morgan & Co. foot the bill" is just like her.' (Oprey 1984 75). The synchronicity also involves Gordon Wasson's father Edmund, a Dionysian Episcopal priest who wrote 'Religion and Drink' and never tired of telling his son that Christ's first miracle was the conversion of water into wine at Cana and that the last act was the eucharist at the Last Supper (Riedlinger 1996).
When Wasson finally found Maria Sabina, she had had a vision that a westerner was going to come to receive the transmission of the sacrament (Estrada 70, Riedlinger 1996) that dated back to the Maya and had remained hidden through half a millennium of Spanish repression (Schultes 144-153). The sacrament was first collected by virgins and blessed in the local church. Maria kept a corner of her room for the Holy Ghost to descend and invoked both Christ and the Mazatec deities during the velada. In Maria's words: "And you also see our past and our future, which are there together as a single thing already achieved, already happened ... I knew and saw God ... and inside the stars, the earth, the entire universe, the day and the night, the cry and the smile, the happiness and the pain. He who knows to the end the secret of teonanacatl - can even see that infinite clockwork" (Schultes and Hofmann 1979 149). In response, her son was killed and her house burned down and the magic of teonanactl which she had extolled had now become lost, drifting among the clouds and was now speaking English instead of her native tongue. Wasson however described the session as 'holy communion' and specifically likened it to the day of Pentecost in Acts 1:12-2:5, seeing in it the metamorphosis of the Mazatec tradition to a new cultural form (Riedlinger 1996). Before he died, he prophesied the return of the sacred use of this sacrament within 10 to 30 years.
The Transmission : Maria and Gordon 1956 (Riedlinger
1990 Pl 13)
4.4 Isa and the Gaia Messiah: Although Jesus manifested as a human who became deified in death, the second coming has become a human impossibility, a stumbling block to religious evolution. Christ was supposed to come back transcendentally in clouds of glory, however the Kingdom did not arrive as prophesied by Jesus in Mark 9:1 "There be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power." Revelation is an allegory following Daniel's, Isaiah's and Ezekiel's visions and is a prophecy that the second Messiah should live in strength, rather than a sacrificial death, that the immortal age is imminent and that the form of the recurrent Christos is a Dionysian 'Gaia Messiah'.
Jesus already had many of these attributes. He was the Dionysus of Cana in John 2:1-11, the 'true vine' and the Lord of the Eucharist. In Luke 7:34 "The Son of man is come eating and drinking; and ye say, Behold a gluttonous man, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners! But wisdom is justified of all her children". In the Book of Thomas, which contains many of Jesus' root sayings in their most archaic form (Robinson 125), saying 13, he states: "I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated from the bubbling stream that I have measured out". Christ's gnostic birthday, like 'Chris's', is the day of the festival of Dionysus, celebrated throughout Anatolia and the Aegean Islands, who was also in his second incarnation the Son of God Zeus by a mortal woman Semele, and is likewise the progenitor of 'tragic passion'.
In the Qur'an Jesus is universally referred to as Isa, or Esau, like Adam the 'man of blood', the 'red man' of Edom - a title supposedly adopted by Muhammad from Jewish satire. In Islamic prophecy, the Isa of the Resurrection is still a mortal human prophet with a reasonable life expectancy - 40 years from manifestation (Sachedina 171-2). In Jesus' time, Edom had integrated with Nabatea, whose God was Duchares - a form of Dionysus - the 'God of Gaia' (Negev 107) the 'deathless God' who conferred immortality on those who wore his tragic mask (Glueck 242).
"It means taking a hefty pay cut, but I've
decided to accept the position as god of wine" (New Yorker)
The key reference to the second coming, in which Christ appears in glory is Revelation 19:11-16 where 'I saw heaven opened ... he was clothed in a vesture dipped in blood ... out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword ... he treadeth the winepress'. This reference is derived from a passage of Isaiah 63:1-4 'Who is this that cometh from Edom that is glorious in his apparel, travelling in the greatness of his strength? ... I have trodden the winepress alone ... their blood shall be scattered on my garments ... and the year of my redeemed has come'. The patriarchal blood aside, the prophecies of the second coming are an elliptical reference to the transition to the 'immortal age' brought about by the God of Gaia bearing from the winepress the Eucharist, the 'flesh of the gods' to end sacrifice and bring back true 'at-one-ment' with nature. To the patriarchal hegemony however this will indeed appear to be the day of judgement, the 'vengeance of the lone treader', because it is the feminine transition, the return of the balance of chaos and order in the sacred Tao, just as Duchares was very much the consort of al-Uzza, the goddess Muhammad overthrew. But this is vastly preferable to nuclear or genetic holocaust. It is also a scientific transition because the feminine aspect of the Goddess is nature realized physically.
4.5 Prophesying the Eucharist: The Kingdom enters into union with the Garden, manifest in the visionary eucharist, the union of heaven and earth represented by the lightning bolt, by which Zeus fertilized Semele, just as it is represented in Mexican mythology by the lightning of Tlaloc from whose torrential rains the mushroom springs and serendipitously by Quetzalcoatl, whose resurrecting Christ Topiltzin attempted to end human sacrifice and was believed by Moctezuma to be Cortez.
The divine sacrament is prophesied in both the Bible and Qur'an. In the final chapter of the Bible, Revelation 22, we find the immortal age heralded by the sacred monthly fruit. Christ sits on the throne in the New Jerusalem out of which flows the abysmal waters of life characteristic of both Dionysus and Mari. Entwined about is the Tree of Life with twelve manner of monthly fruit. In Sura 76 of the Qur'an likewise the blessed will drink from the ginger-flavoured draft of the Fount of Sesabil. Muhammad is reported to have embraced Isfand, or Syrian Rue (Rudgley 52).
The second coming of Christ plays an equally prophetic role in the adoption of Peyote by the Menomini: "That's a man coming this way, ... he got long hair ... it's Jesus himself. So he told this boy, ... 'I'm not supposed to come; I said I wasn't going to come before two thousand years,' he said. 'But I come for you, to come tell you' ... So they went up a hill there. There's a tipi there, all ready. So Christ, before he went in it, offered a prayer. ...Then he showed him the [ritual] ways; the medicine, how to use it, he gave him the songs ... 'Whoever takes this medicine, he will do it in my name.' So that's how it represents almost the first beginning." (Anderson 23)
4.6 The Consummation of Eden: In the 'reverse Passion' - the fruit of the Tree of Life, the 'Eucharist of Maria' is borne symbolically by 'Chris King' back to immortal Eve, the germ-line of the biosphere, properly realizing Christ's previous mission to end death by rejecting the same Eve. This act symbolizes the beginning of the 'immortal age' - 100 million years as the stewards of the great evolutionary unfolding, thus bringing our feet back on to the ground of scientific reality.
The Passion is a symbolic process to celebrate the millennial apocalypse or 'unveiling' of Eve. This process is necessary to realign human attitudes to both the immortal genetic endowment and natural visionary sacraments, which have been tabooed by the patriarchy precisely because they are the physical fruit of Gaia, the Mother's route to vision. The sacrament is not an imperative, but a resource to provide visionary democracy, access to the secret of eternal consciousness. It is an evolutionary endowment of the very biosphere we are here to unfold, a gift of the biosphere to us to ensure we do not again lose contact with nature. Great religious ideas are profoundly simple. This one is no exception.
4.7 The Path of the Seed: The future role of the Christian church is to become a key ethical guardian of genetic diversity, protecting the wilderness heritage of the natural species and acting as the conscience of the biosphere in considering the changes we may make using genetic engineering and making sure these will not reduce biodiversity. Its global network can provide both a uniquely powerful means for active conservation - 'the true vine' realized - and a repository for germ lines of key species and varieties held for the benefit of All, alongside botanic gardens and germ plasm libraries. Its message shall be the feminine one of sustainable population and fertility - the 'way of the valley' as Lao Tsu described. This is the Church's natural heritage, as the last global manifestation of that ancient fertility cult which goes back all the way to the paleolithic as the Great Goddess and Bull of Heaven, now represented by the mother-son figure of Mary and the resurrecting sacrificial Christ. Its celebrations, mysteries and rituals remain for us to rediscover and refashion in this mingling of 'light' and 'dark' principles.
4.8 The Apocalypse of Eve: There is one and only one way this transition will be achieved and that is by synchronous wisdom - by enlightened people choosing to act together to give the Path of the Seed the momentum of true enthusiasm, infectiously like mushroom spores, the last spermatogenic crisis, not for the hypothetical reality or heroism of a visionary Messiah or Mahdi, because we are accidental players just like you, but for the wisdom of preserving of the immortal heritage of the Mother - the genetic endowment of Eve. It is from Eve we have come and it is through the love of Eve that we are immortal in the flesh. This is the science and this is the truth! In Jesus' own words: "To this end I was born and for this cause I came into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth" This truth is both science and conscience.
Carl Linnaeus the father of taxonomy, who named humanity Homo
sapiens
holding a Lapp shaman's drum. Despite holding to a Christian view
of God's perfection
of nature in its diversity, in his shamanistic intuition, he named
man prophetically (Ayensu 23).
5.1 Postscript: As Isa, I am obliged to close with the 'key' of Solomon - wisdom - in the 'parable' of the 'mark of the beast' - the 'unholy' secret. The mark of 'Homo' is 'sapiens' - wisdom or Sophia as Linnaeus prophetically decreed. The number 666 is the bounty of gold Solomon received in 1 Kings 10:13-14 for his wisdom in giving the Queen of Sheba 'all that she desired'. Even that bounty is the bounty that we will share through the Gaia Messiah giving to the Female 'all that she desires' and through the men of the world giving to the feminine principle 'all that she desires'. This way we will have the eternal vision of the Kingdom while retaining the immortal Garden of Eden, regardless of what fate the heat death of the universe may have in store for us, for both in its inflationary beginning and in its final consummation it is forever in space-time the eternal conscious Tao.
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