Post by MagnetMan on Jan 19, 2010 16:33:03 GMT -5
Childish Idealism
Once upon a starry night, far away in Johannesburg, I lay beside my father on the front lawn of our house, under the blazing light of the Southern constellations. Directly above us, magically suspended amidst the jewel-studded Milky Way, floated the Southern Cross, a Christian totem shining its benevolent light over darkest Africa.
As a child I found it romantic for a Christian babe to be born under the sign of the Cross. Next to Orion's Belt in the North sky, there is no other constellation as singular or as mystical as the Southern Cross. It is a pity that northern Christians can't share in its elegant configuration and never ponder like us southern stargazers, at its missionary significance. The Zodiac is unseen down South. Those once familiar astrological birth signs that forecast our Aryan fate lie beyond our northern horizon. Except for the Southern Cross, the angled view of the Milky Way seen from the bottom half of our world, is far too crowded with stars to easily pick out and isolate fanciful constellations like our ancestors did up North. In the Southern night sky up on the Witwatersrand at six thousand feet above sea level where the air is thin, there are vast swaths of starlight, so dense with concentrated energy the radiant spectacle literally seems to hiss an awesome anthem of God. For the stargazer there is a profound sense of cosmic bliss that bathes the soul in that fused mass of Divine energy. It cannot help but stir the psyche of a youthful idealist and send him soaring away from the body on galactic safaris, trailing a silver chord.......
Newly taught to count the time and measure my step and fully entranced by the mysteries of eternity and infinity, I asked my Dad on that starry night, how big the Universe was. "For all we know, son," he began, with a glint in his ice-blue eye, "All those billions of stars and galaxies out there and the millions of light years between them; together with all the planets that revolve around their solar systems, and all the life forms that might be on them, including you and I having this conversation on this little planet on the edge of the Milky Way, might simply be the expression of a single molecule inside the wooden leg of a giant's dinner table."
In a sense, as my childish mind tried to encompass the relative dimensions of his answer, it could be said that any future material goals that I might have aspired to were, more or less, quashed that night. In this manner, through metaphor, he presented me with the sum of human knowledge, and in the process he leapt across the future years of my learning and touched the sage that resides in every child. Once I had learned how to read and add up sums, I never really wanted to continue in school and learn to rehash and regurgitate that which was already known. I wanted to measure the universe on my own terms. By my ninth year I had escaped the mundane by becoming an inveterate reader of books - mainly of fantasy and science fiction. I remember no material ambition to become a tinker or soldier or a corporate CEO. I did not want to be the president of a country, or an astrophysicist behind a telescope or a particle physicist behind an electron microscope. All of that was mundane stuff compared to the Cosmic summons my father's reply had evoked inside me.
I was forced of course, with millions of other reluctant scholars, to attend classes and kept finding myself bored to distraction for twelve interminable years. Try as they might my teachers never really reached me. Some of us, the majority, are born materially ambitious. Others, alas a sad minority, are born idealistic. I am unquestionably of the latter class by nature. The fact that I was born at home in the middle of a World War, in a miner's house made of iron and not of straw or wood or bricks, and reputed by the mid-wife to weight fifteen pounds at birth, twice that of a normal infant, tickled my fancy and made me feel that I had a special Iron Age destiny. From the start the materialistic ambitions of the middle class held no attraction for me. I would not allow myself to be indoctrinated into my colonial culture's exploitative capitalistic view of reality. Born a poor white in Southern Africa, and surrounded by an even more impoverished multitude, I was incapable of being hypnotized into hard competition with others on an uneven playing field, in what I viewed to be an unrealistic and selfish race for excessive riches. As an idealist who dreamed that there must be a better way, the mundane practice of investing my whole life on the mass production line - in pursuit of a one in a million shot at making myself a millionaire and the object of mass envy - did not hold any real charm for me.
The older I grew the more I wanted a life that lay beyond the limits of gravity and the speed of light. Newtonian physics would never allow me to ride in a space ship that was capable of transporting me to even the nearest star system, let alone travel the whole length and breadth of the whole Cosmos. What I wanted to do was make a quantum leap forward in consciousness beyond the dreary artificial arguments of all earth-bound ideologies. I wanted to get myself outside of the table leg, to see what the giant was having for dinner, and find out what life was like in the unlimited reaches of our cosmic potentials. In an earlier agrarian period when most sons worked the family farm, I would have unquestionably gravitated towards the Church as a monastic student of theology.
I believe that deep down in our Soul Consciousness that same esoteric challenge to transcend finite limitations has been the focus not just of idealists, but also of our entire specie. That is why all cultures, without exception, invented Gods - Super Beings - able to soar above the pull of gravity and the enslavement of material wants. This soul yearning has been so ever since the very first day the first one of us found ourselves looking outwards into the starry night sky, dimly wondering as we stared out from the cave-like overhang of our brow: "Who, is looking at What?" I believe that our collective journey out of the jungle towards the stars, and to our Cosmic Self, began for all of us, one prehistoric night - maybe two and half million years ago - when our infant ego was born and the first of an endless stream of questions began tumbling off our baby lips. Way back then we knew nothing. We had to start right from scratch, one unsteady step at a time. And the more we found out about what was what, the more we needed to know.
Now, one hundred thousand generations later, we have finally arrived at something close to the answer my father gave me more than fifty years ago. We stand now on the edge of space, staring intently into our giant telescopes, searching for something out there that is greater than ourselves. We want to know that we are not alone. That soul yearn in human nature refuses to see itself limited to a lowly molecule inside the leg of a dinner table. We want to believe that there is a God out there - one that is witness to our journey. It seems to me that there is a preprogrammed homing signal imprinted in the atomic core of every soul which gets triggered off by some undeniable charismatic attraction. There is a spiritual mystique which eventually woos each one of us to stop gnawing at the edge of material things, and bids us to go beyond the larva stage. An inner "voice" calls to us to transform ourselves inside, to break out of the chrysalis of our mundane lives and fly back to our creative origins and reunite with the God who created the Universe.
That night long ago, when I had just turned seven, staring up at the Southern Cross, has come to mind time and time again for many different reasons. The memory of that night and how it pushed me beyond the mundane, has made me want to share some of the strange flights of fancy that my cosmic journey has taken me on since then. Without me knowing it, my father's semi-serious answer laid the foundation for a lifetime of introspection and contemplation. It planted the first seed in my young mind of an eventual life's work that would lead to a search for a comprehensive understanding of the Divine origins of our human consciousness, and allow me to eventually become familiar with each graduated stage of our growth.
At the beginning of my search I discovered a long-lost path that was not marked on any existing map. It led me through the over-growth of our modern existence, back in Time to the accumulated treasure of our prehistoric ancestors. I uncovered a wealth of lost information, both esoteric and exoteric, which lay hidden among the roots of our species' family tree. The knowledge I gained from unearthing our early family secrets that were still preserved in Africa, the home of our kind; seeing each step of the long evolutionary journey of MAN from the roots upwards, and thereby, keeping my bearings and not getting caught out on a limb, or not knowing which branch I was on; laid the foundations for the formulation of an original anthropological theory that I have called Psyche-Genetics. You will find it outlined at the back of this book
Beyond that earthly journey, believe it or not, I did manage for a few mystical
moments to get out of the leg of the giant's table. Not very far out it is true - but far enough, like Jack, to take a peek and catch a glimpse of the giant Himself. Though I have tried to capture in words the metaphysical magic of what I experienced and share it with you later in this book, that holy moment of extra-terrestrial contact, of knowing that mankind is not alone and without witness in the Universe, is unutterable. Such relief! Such joy! Such clarity! Such thankfulness! Such a moment of grace is not the right of any single person.
The enormity of Divine realization is directly related to one hundred thousand generations of ancestral effort. Human consciousness has evolved a long way from the naivete of our Stone Age beginnings. Our modern genes are imprinted with the accumulated experiences of billions of souls struggling to survive and prosper through increasingly complex Ages of social and spiritual cooperatives. That collective knowledge allows us to transcend our early superstitious concepts of God and measure His awesome dimensions ten thousand light years out into space. In this respect the peace and resolution of the spirit that I was graced with for a timeless instant belongs to all of us. Until the fine day arrives when we all share it together, no one can stay out there alone for long, amidst the magic of the stars, and feel worthy. "There can be no heaven while one of us remains in hell." The realization of our individual obligations to each other, and to our ancestors, brought me back inside the table leg. I can report that the giant outside exists indeed. And the wonderful meal that He has prepared and laid out on his table is for all of us.
My mystical journey into the sacred has focused me on the meaning of Self and our reasons for Being in a way that lies far beyond anything that science can ever teach us. The lessons I have learned over a life time of searching for answers, is that we all have to do more than just Believe in the spirit, in order to get out of the leg we have to continue to work for that Divine meal. Before us is one last Age of extreme effort, cleaning up the industrial messes of a dying Age, sharing our resources and our genius equally in the new Nuclear Age as Global Stewards and Stewardesses, before that shared Heaven can be ours.
The goals we need to strive for are not just for private wealth, or the mastery of physics. Whatever path we choose the ultimate goal is the mastery of the Self. Our arrival at a state of wizardry reveals the reason for our being. The Master Key to the inner Self lies far back in our past, and the Door of Self-Realization lies far forward in our future. In order to find the Key and attain such mastery, we have to learn how to transcend the present artificial limitations of Time and Space that we have imposed on ourselves. In order to become transcendental, we have to deprogram ourselves from the thousands of hours of brainwashing that we all experienced in the classroom. We have to become familiar with the relative nature of an atomic universe that lies beyond measurement, beyond rationalized determination. The metaphysical implications hidden inside the Nuclear Theory, and Quantum Mechanics, have justified twenty-five centuries of scientific effort. Our religious Protest has taken us beyond naïve superstition. We have opened a doorway into a 6th dimension that lies far beyond the table leg. This is a new Nuclear Age, and the moment has come for us to enter that door and time travel, so that we can find the Key to our past life and an eternal future.
For me, the work of getting to know my true self began in Africa - mankind's ancestral home. Africa holds all the secrets of our earliest memories. While the prodigal son has been away from home gambling our inheritance in Europe and Asia; black Africa has remained at home as the dutiful son, faithful guardian of the wisdom of forgotten Ages, still practicing some of our ancestral disciplines and retaining basic human values. In a sense, Time there has stood still. One has to become like a child in order to understand the magic of that - and in that understanding know Mother Africa, the womb from which we all have sprung.
Once upon a starry night, far away in Johannesburg, I lay beside my father on the front lawn of our house, under the blazing light of the Southern constellations. Directly above us, magically suspended amidst the jewel-studded Milky Way, floated the Southern Cross, a Christian totem shining its benevolent light over darkest Africa.
As a child I found it romantic for a Christian babe to be born under the sign of the Cross. Next to Orion's Belt in the North sky, there is no other constellation as singular or as mystical as the Southern Cross. It is a pity that northern Christians can't share in its elegant configuration and never ponder like us southern stargazers, at its missionary significance. The Zodiac is unseen down South. Those once familiar astrological birth signs that forecast our Aryan fate lie beyond our northern horizon. Except for the Southern Cross, the angled view of the Milky Way seen from the bottom half of our world, is far too crowded with stars to easily pick out and isolate fanciful constellations like our ancestors did up North. In the Southern night sky up on the Witwatersrand at six thousand feet above sea level where the air is thin, there are vast swaths of starlight, so dense with concentrated energy the radiant spectacle literally seems to hiss an awesome anthem of God. For the stargazer there is a profound sense of cosmic bliss that bathes the soul in that fused mass of Divine energy. It cannot help but stir the psyche of a youthful idealist and send him soaring away from the body on galactic safaris, trailing a silver chord.......
Newly taught to count the time and measure my step and fully entranced by the mysteries of eternity and infinity, I asked my Dad on that starry night, how big the Universe was. "For all we know, son," he began, with a glint in his ice-blue eye, "All those billions of stars and galaxies out there and the millions of light years between them; together with all the planets that revolve around their solar systems, and all the life forms that might be on them, including you and I having this conversation on this little planet on the edge of the Milky Way, might simply be the expression of a single molecule inside the wooden leg of a giant's dinner table."
In a sense, as my childish mind tried to encompass the relative dimensions of his answer, it could be said that any future material goals that I might have aspired to were, more or less, quashed that night. In this manner, through metaphor, he presented me with the sum of human knowledge, and in the process he leapt across the future years of my learning and touched the sage that resides in every child. Once I had learned how to read and add up sums, I never really wanted to continue in school and learn to rehash and regurgitate that which was already known. I wanted to measure the universe on my own terms. By my ninth year I had escaped the mundane by becoming an inveterate reader of books - mainly of fantasy and science fiction. I remember no material ambition to become a tinker or soldier or a corporate CEO. I did not want to be the president of a country, or an astrophysicist behind a telescope or a particle physicist behind an electron microscope. All of that was mundane stuff compared to the Cosmic summons my father's reply had evoked inside me.
I was forced of course, with millions of other reluctant scholars, to attend classes and kept finding myself bored to distraction for twelve interminable years. Try as they might my teachers never really reached me. Some of us, the majority, are born materially ambitious. Others, alas a sad minority, are born idealistic. I am unquestionably of the latter class by nature. The fact that I was born at home in the middle of a World War, in a miner's house made of iron and not of straw or wood or bricks, and reputed by the mid-wife to weight fifteen pounds at birth, twice that of a normal infant, tickled my fancy and made me feel that I had a special Iron Age destiny. From the start the materialistic ambitions of the middle class held no attraction for me. I would not allow myself to be indoctrinated into my colonial culture's exploitative capitalistic view of reality. Born a poor white in Southern Africa, and surrounded by an even more impoverished multitude, I was incapable of being hypnotized into hard competition with others on an uneven playing field, in what I viewed to be an unrealistic and selfish race for excessive riches. As an idealist who dreamed that there must be a better way, the mundane practice of investing my whole life on the mass production line - in pursuit of a one in a million shot at making myself a millionaire and the object of mass envy - did not hold any real charm for me.
The older I grew the more I wanted a life that lay beyond the limits of gravity and the speed of light. Newtonian physics would never allow me to ride in a space ship that was capable of transporting me to even the nearest star system, let alone travel the whole length and breadth of the whole Cosmos. What I wanted to do was make a quantum leap forward in consciousness beyond the dreary artificial arguments of all earth-bound ideologies. I wanted to get myself outside of the table leg, to see what the giant was having for dinner, and find out what life was like in the unlimited reaches of our cosmic potentials. In an earlier agrarian period when most sons worked the family farm, I would have unquestionably gravitated towards the Church as a monastic student of theology.
I believe that deep down in our Soul Consciousness that same esoteric challenge to transcend finite limitations has been the focus not just of idealists, but also of our entire specie. That is why all cultures, without exception, invented Gods - Super Beings - able to soar above the pull of gravity and the enslavement of material wants. This soul yearning has been so ever since the very first day the first one of us found ourselves looking outwards into the starry night sky, dimly wondering as we stared out from the cave-like overhang of our brow: "Who, is looking at What?" I believe that our collective journey out of the jungle towards the stars, and to our Cosmic Self, began for all of us, one prehistoric night - maybe two and half million years ago - when our infant ego was born and the first of an endless stream of questions began tumbling off our baby lips. Way back then we knew nothing. We had to start right from scratch, one unsteady step at a time. And the more we found out about what was what, the more we needed to know.
Now, one hundred thousand generations later, we have finally arrived at something close to the answer my father gave me more than fifty years ago. We stand now on the edge of space, staring intently into our giant telescopes, searching for something out there that is greater than ourselves. We want to know that we are not alone. That soul yearn in human nature refuses to see itself limited to a lowly molecule inside the leg of a dinner table. We want to believe that there is a God out there - one that is witness to our journey. It seems to me that there is a preprogrammed homing signal imprinted in the atomic core of every soul which gets triggered off by some undeniable charismatic attraction. There is a spiritual mystique which eventually woos each one of us to stop gnawing at the edge of material things, and bids us to go beyond the larva stage. An inner "voice" calls to us to transform ourselves inside, to break out of the chrysalis of our mundane lives and fly back to our creative origins and reunite with the God who created the Universe.
That night long ago, when I had just turned seven, staring up at the Southern Cross, has come to mind time and time again for many different reasons. The memory of that night and how it pushed me beyond the mundane, has made me want to share some of the strange flights of fancy that my cosmic journey has taken me on since then. Without me knowing it, my father's semi-serious answer laid the foundation for a lifetime of introspection and contemplation. It planted the first seed in my young mind of an eventual life's work that would lead to a search for a comprehensive understanding of the Divine origins of our human consciousness, and allow me to eventually become familiar with each graduated stage of our growth.
At the beginning of my search I discovered a long-lost path that was not marked on any existing map. It led me through the over-growth of our modern existence, back in Time to the accumulated treasure of our prehistoric ancestors. I uncovered a wealth of lost information, both esoteric and exoteric, which lay hidden among the roots of our species' family tree. The knowledge I gained from unearthing our early family secrets that were still preserved in Africa, the home of our kind; seeing each step of the long evolutionary journey of MAN from the roots upwards, and thereby, keeping my bearings and not getting caught out on a limb, or not knowing which branch I was on; laid the foundations for the formulation of an original anthropological theory that I have called Psyche-Genetics. You will find it outlined at the back of this book
Beyond that earthly journey, believe it or not, I did manage for a few mystical
moments to get out of the leg of the giant's table. Not very far out it is true - but far enough, like Jack, to take a peek and catch a glimpse of the giant Himself. Though I have tried to capture in words the metaphysical magic of what I experienced and share it with you later in this book, that holy moment of extra-terrestrial contact, of knowing that mankind is not alone and without witness in the Universe, is unutterable. Such relief! Such joy! Such clarity! Such thankfulness! Such a moment of grace is not the right of any single person.
The enormity of Divine realization is directly related to one hundred thousand generations of ancestral effort. Human consciousness has evolved a long way from the naivete of our Stone Age beginnings. Our modern genes are imprinted with the accumulated experiences of billions of souls struggling to survive and prosper through increasingly complex Ages of social and spiritual cooperatives. That collective knowledge allows us to transcend our early superstitious concepts of God and measure His awesome dimensions ten thousand light years out into space. In this respect the peace and resolution of the spirit that I was graced with for a timeless instant belongs to all of us. Until the fine day arrives when we all share it together, no one can stay out there alone for long, amidst the magic of the stars, and feel worthy. "There can be no heaven while one of us remains in hell." The realization of our individual obligations to each other, and to our ancestors, brought me back inside the table leg. I can report that the giant outside exists indeed. And the wonderful meal that He has prepared and laid out on his table is for all of us.
My mystical journey into the sacred has focused me on the meaning of Self and our reasons for Being in a way that lies far beyond anything that science can ever teach us. The lessons I have learned over a life time of searching for answers, is that we all have to do more than just Believe in the spirit, in order to get out of the leg we have to continue to work for that Divine meal. Before us is one last Age of extreme effort, cleaning up the industrial messes of a dying Age, sharing our resources and our genius equally in the new Nuclear Age as Global Stewards and Stewardesses, before that shared Heaven can be ours.
The goals we need to strive for are not just for private wealth, or the mastery of physics. Whatever path we choose the ultimate goal is the mastery of the Self. Our arrival at a state of wizardry reveals the reason for our being. The Master Key to the inner Self lies far back in our past, and the Door of Self-Realization lies far forward in our future. In order to find the Key and attain such mastery, we have to learn how to transcend the present artificial limitations of Time and Space that we have imposed on ourselves. In order to become transcendental, we have to deprogram ourselves from the thousands of hours of brainwashing that we all experienced in the classroom. We have to become familiar with the relative nature of an atomic universe that lies beyond measurement, beyond rationalized determination. The metaphysical implications hidden inside the Nuclear Theory, and Quantum Mechanics, have justified twenty-five centuries of scientific effort. Our religious Protest has taken us beyond naïve superstition. We have opened a doorway into a 6th dimension that lies far beyond the table leg. This is a new Nuclear Age, and the moment has come for us to enter that door and time travel, so that we can find the Key to our past life and an eternal future.
For me, the work of getting to know my true self began in Africa - mankind's ancestral home. Africa holds all the secrets of our earliest memories. While the prodigal son has been away from home gambling our inheritance in Europe and Asia; black Africa has remained at home as the dutiful son, faithful guardian of the wisdom of forgotten Ages, still practicing some of our ancestral disciplines and retaining basic human values. In a sense, Time there has stood still. One has to become like a child in order to understand the magic of that - and in that understanding know Mother Africa, the womb from which we all have sprung.
