An "anti-Kunstlerroman" so performatively telegraphing every one of its' sentiments that it comes across ironic, an irony the book also tries to trick you into finding plausible by way of a faux-Hegelian omnipresence—a desperate cry of the sophomoric "this is book and anti-book"—that it ultimately leaves anyone already familiar with the concepts therein metaphysically deflated. The main motif is a gnostic one, thinly veiled as veils can thin themselves: "Picketists" who protest the flesh as prison, yet limpidly, as protestors of social issues would: cosmopolitanizing the true gnostic sentiment, these generic repetitions of lamentation and the problem of evil (stated not as the Nag Hammadi would, where the question is squarely placed on the Split within creation itself) and a cringe-inducingly overstated desire of the author begging you to see his book as the "hypercubic book whose covers gather the hundreds of cubes of its pages", a hyperbolic book that devours all other books by no other merit than it tells you to do so, an idea so empty that it doesn't realize it embodies the exact naivete of the fictional book the author fails to succeed with in story's start—"The Fall"; other motifs include: "the history of Mathematics" a.k.a re-explaining in templated collocations Boole-as-logical-prophet, Hinton's dimensional thought as a spoonfed analogy for anagogy (cart's before the horse here) in the same way Flatland or Sagan or your resident stoner has explained many a show more time before, and how "Mandelbrotian" his narrator, his book, his mind is, where he just means "fractal"; his writing self-proclaims itself as Kafka's gates, Borges labryinths, Escher's hand drawing itself, inserts a Virgil, namedrops a Klein bottle here, quotes word-for-word "Do Not Go Into That Gentle Night" there . . . convolution apparent at this point must be furthered that this is at no fault of the translator, since these faux pas can somehow be met with a pretty phrasing yet surrounded by platitude at the diegetic and conceptual level, these referents weave a flimsy quilt, none delved at depth or plunged for weight or held with suave or dropped in play and it's made clear this is out of lack of capacity and ability, not artistic choice. A tragic sign of literatures' denouement: the book who wants to escape the prison of its own 2-dimensionality, tricks the literary types fluffed but not nourished on philosophy proper into thinking the book truly a tesseract (have not Joyce, McLuhan, Deleuze, Derrida already written the tesseract non-book, almost exclusively?); the book does not perform what it describes, it simply choreographs for you in clear terms what it wants to do narratively but can't out of its own lack, a convincing facsimile in passing but executed in the conceptual block equivalents of poorly rendered CGI. show less

The ultimate meta-system systematically systematizing the systemics of system itself.

While Gebser is a metaphysical continuation of Spengler; the inversions done to the latters cyclical rhythms constitute a new mode in which to view the field [that I've formalized as] of 'metahistory'. Though he uses the term 'mutations of consciousness', Gebser maintains that one should purposefully avoid using evolutionary (only insofar as its 'progress' based) and organism-related analogy. One sees in this schema [though attempting to work past schemas] a 5 structure-model of consciousness, each qualitatively creating a new 'structure' itself. The archaic, the magical, the mythical, the mental, and the Integral: the final of which we are now entering into [This review will end with a linguistic summary of all 5 structures, whereas in the book it is done diagrammatically]. The main key to this polyvalent opus is almost a proper application of Heideggers main project, modeling or mapping the "Being-events" where a radically novel Event changes the way Being itself is thought of. Of which, Heidegger seems almost lackluster in only positing his two Beginnings, the First with the Greeks and the one that we are about to enter into with the "Coming of the Last God" and the transitional stage of which he [in his time] was only caught inbetween. Nonetheless, even 5 structures seem too little to properly access every civilizations mode of consciousness also keenly paired with the fact that the first 3 structures [Archaic, Magical, Mythical] have insufficient detailing to show more properly see them metahistorically. While the execution is a step down from Spengler; the first half of the book being a detailing of the 5 structures of consciousness, and the second half being a sort of repetition of the coming of the newest Integral structure of consciousness: the poetry of the 'Decline' has been replaced with a more neutrality of 'mutation'. The rejection of a progression model, similar as it is in evolutionary theory proper, is constantly reaffirmed in EPO.

The pre-birth of the mental (rational) consciousness structure happens in the first sentence of the first work of the Western mind, the Iliads opening words Menin of Menin aidre thea . . . , "Sing, Goddess, the wrath . . ," this Menin is the same root for words such as mental, and even Man [Mensch]. Discovered here is the advent of seeing etymologies as spiritual resonances; eteologemes. As if history has an unconscious of its own. This ma:me primal root extends across many fronts from the maniac and a menace (who is wrathful), the Sanskrit ma- me- prefixes, the Greek menis or menos, the Latin mens - the mental 'directs' itself, imposing itself on the world wrathfully (in the abstract) to create directed 'ratio'cinative thought. The act of rationality is one of, by definition, isolation, atomization, dissection. Mirrors of Heidegger echo clearly, as when he states that Being is showing itself as if its not showing itself, "Being conceals its own concealment". This is a very small example of the kind of thing Gebser attempts to survey, the usage of resonance to realize the origins of all things. Historical examples across all fields [art, science, jurisprudence, sociology, economics, music, painting, mathematics, poetry, literature, philosophy]. To be able to analyze beyond analysis, and even deeper, this can be used to inform gnosis for the mystic, where one can realize the variance within invariance, the origin is ever-present. The Integral consciousness structure is the one that realizes all its past modes of consciousness and transcends yet includes them [as if a Hegelian Aufhebung] yet is not a mere summation of its past parts.

It is as if history has a meta-pattern of its own, as if the world is a dream with its own unconscious to psychoanalyze.

The Archaic consciousness structure - zero-dimensional, no perspectivity, pre-spatial and pretemporal, no sign or geometry, essence based in identity, its properties are integral, its potentiality is integrality, Outer emphasis is unconscious spirit, its inner emphasis is none or latency, its consciousness-degree is deep-sleep, its consciousness-relation is universe-related: breathing-spell, its forms of manifestation has nothing when efficient and presentiment/foreboding while deficient, its basic attitude is of Origin / Wisdom, its organ is none, its basis is none, its mode is originary, its process and expression is presentiment, its formulation of thought is world-origin, no Limits, Valence, forms of expression or articulation, its temporal and social relation are none, its general relation is Universal or "cosmic", the Universe is the localization of its soul, it has no form of bond or tie, its Motto is (All).

The Magic consciousness structure - one-dimensional, preperspectival, spaceless and timeless, its sign / geometry is the Point, essence based in Unity, properties in non-directional unitary Interwovenness or fusion, potentiality in Unity by unification and hearing/hearkening, its outer emphasis is Nature, inner emphasis is Emotion, consciousness-degree is Sleep while consciousness-relation is Outer-related (Nature: exhalation), its forms of manifestation are spell-casting in the efficient mode and witchcraft in the deficient mode, basic attitude is Vital: instinct, drive and emotion, and its organ is the Viscera or the Ear, forms of realization are in empathy and identification and Hearing in basis, pre-rational pre-causal analogical in Mode, and Associative, analogizing, and sympathetically interweaving in Process, vital experience in Expression, World-knowledge, the 'recognized' world in Formulation, conditioned in Limits, univalent, its forms of expression are in Magic: graven images, idol, ritual, and asserted in Petition (prayer): being "heard", relationally it is temporally undifferentiated, socially tribalistic, clan/kith and kin, natural, generally egoless and terrestrial, soul localized in semen and blood, forms of bond or tie are Proligio, emotive and pointlike and its Motto is "Pars pro toto"

the Mythical consciousness structure - two-dimensional, unperspectival, spaceless with a natural temporicity, Sign / geometry is the Circle 〇, essence based in Polarity (ambivalence), properties are circular and polar with Complimentarity, potentiality based in unification by complementarity and correspondence, outer emphasis in Soul/Psyche, inner emphasis in Imagination, consciousness-degree of Dream, consciousness-relation is inner-related (Psyche: inhalation), forms of manifestation are primal myth (envisioned) in the efficient and Mythology (spoken) in the deficient, basic attitude is Psychic (Imagination, Sensibility, Disposition), organ is the Heart / Mouth, its forms of realization have basis in imagination and utterance (contemplation and voicing), irrational (non-causal, polar) in mode, internalized recollection, contemplation (externalized utterance, expression) in process, undergone experience in expression, world-image or Weltanschauung (the contemplated and interpreted world), temporally bound in Limits, ambivalent, form of expression is the Mythologeme (Gods, Symbols, Mysteries), form of assertion in Wishes (Ideals: fulfillment; "wish (pipe-) dreams"), related temporally to the past (recollection, muse), socially to the parental world [ancestor worship, predominantly matriarchal], generally in the egoless "we"-oriented psychic, soul localized in the Diaphragm and heart, forms of bond / tie are in Relegio observing, internalizing and externalizing (recollecting and expressing), its Motto is "Soul is identical to life (and death)"

the Mental consciousness structure - three-dimensional, perspectival, spatial and abstractly temporal, sign / geometry is the Triangle show less

the soul is a meteor / a blossom of light / burned by harsh skies. so influential it is the skeleton key to Christian thought and Renaissance Painting, a primary text alike the Timaeus, the Vedas, the Nikayas (which all happen to rhyme), and an indispensable guide to the mystic on how to become One with the Void. scaling up the Ennead of Parmenides 8 1 affirmative/negative to eventually reach the Top, an ineffable meta-principle. the circle of emanation and return is the ultimate story of the stuttering of the One, recoils of shots in the War in Heaven that sparked between the logos and the void that took place before the Fiat Lux, the war was not fought with missiles and spears but axioms of being, propositions and proofs in the vacuum. and God won through reflexion: in the Nothing only the tautology of identity is self-supporting. the One is the ultimate meta-tautology, Atum masturbating ouroborically, a self-study in henosis. the main concepts are the arborescent hierarchy of the One-Being-Intellect triad. this fractalizes and is responsible for spirit's descent into matter which one must eventually escape by tracing back up the emanationist ladder one has tragically fell down from. oneness is goodness because individuation commits an object to being an intelligible unity. there can be no distinction between inside and outside within the One, being and center as a dimensionless point, God's being is his centrality and yet also this flickering as its own emanationist show more contraction and expansion in all its quasi-gnostic contours with theses like the badness of Nature but doesn't quite reach finality. finality as gnosis cannot be voiced or even thematized, yet even a deeper truth is the apophatic non-conceptualization of a negative/unknowable God is yet another capture mechanism, the inclusion of its own negation within the meta-logic in the Game with Being as an internal production of the One, that black hole brain structure you see from time to time: the Demiurge is a donut. the annular repetition of the torus coinciding and retroactively refuting yet clarifying Campbell's monomyth: the Hero's Journey is really an immanentized Spirit's journey. somewhere Plotinus says that the Odyssey is the eternal story of the Journey of the Spirit. spirit always has a story to tell precisely because it's there to tell it, because its being and its telling are one and the same. the One's overflow is the jouissance that fissions into Two. there is no room for a positive Evil in Plotinus only privations just as the monists before him, the Nous for him is Good. the Gnostic co-opts it as the origin of Evil, determination: the Demiurge. the je ne sais quoi, things best left unsaid, the black square as an art piece, or better, a black Sphere. man as a creator is himself co-operating in demiurgy, his art and ornament distractions or reminders to re-member your true Self, like how re-membering the limbs of Osiris is akin to restructuring the estranged Self. Plotinus thought the world-soul was something like a star that radiates Light (internality) everywhere and "adheres" only in that substance given to adhere to it and this mutual relation between ground and issue became the principle of non-contradiction. the One neither is one, nor is. the hierarchy of Spirit is the only hierarchy climbed by its recognition: it is hierarchy as such, of which all others participate in only formally. the chain of being as it should be. symbols speak in rhizomatic bursts of signification. there will come a time you'll read in color. the One overflows because it overflows, yet this statement seems more like an evasion than anything else and perhaps even neoplatonism is yet another root in this meta-intellectual fingertrap of the Demiurge, which is the God creating this material world easily demonized to a being of affect, terror, sense and horror. one question resounds and echoes after all the mysticalization: why did the One plunge himself into nescience?

he who is self-luminous is his own shadow show less

MOBY DICK IS THE SPARK OF DIVINE GNOSIS: blubber as those densified sheaths of matter that surround the warm interior, husks of the unseen being. If such an epic sprawling novel is said to contain within it a biblically allegorical mythos; it would only be of the true esoteric route to note that every biblical allegory has its selfsame gnostic roots, hermeneutically bubbling up from such aquatic and critical depths. The descents into cetological minutiae is that same descent of the soul into matter — as Ishmael wrestles with the duality of “docile, verdant peace of the land” and the “crazy cannibalistic chaos of the sea”; he draws his analytical rationality towards that ocean he can only know from a ship; so too Science draws its Pequodic boundary to stave off the abyssal waters of Nun, mystic night of the soul. The artifacts of the mundane realm, which Melville turns into an art of Digression (loci of contemplation), are only existent in contrast with the mysticism of the transcendent ocean, which is one with the Sky - as the archaic consciousness of Queequeg’s when he reveals his cosmology: "the stars are isles, but that far beyond all visible horizons, their own mild, uncontinented seas, interflow with the blue heavens". Though critical readings of the ‘homoerotic’ are not correct, on the surface, since the homoerotic is revealed not as within sexuality, but outside of it, when Ishmael is purifying that divine Semen of the Whale that represents gnosis: show more he goes into an ecstatic trance; a frenzy in which all of mankind, not homoerotic but Homo-Eros, becomes unified — “let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness”. As for Ahab; testament to the old figure and a figure of the Old Testament, has been ‘dismembered’ — much like Osiris, where the loss of his ‘members’ is the forgetting of the Self, only to be ‘remembered’ in anamnesis of the soul. Mystical is his every word that isn't bound to the locale of the ship: Ishmael says “the body is the lees of my better being”, “my shadow here on earth is my true substance”, Ahab says “the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy”, he gnostically laments the scandal of autogenesis: the ontological loneliness of God who so longs to know himself in the void of himself.

Thou knowest not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun. I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief.

The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.

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The unfoldment of the Self through the City is one of isolation and alienation, a gradual displacement of a spiritual unity into a materialistic space, the gridlock of the city and its world-feeling. So it is no wonder that, in history, when things are beginning to vanish, they blossom and explode into its largest cultural expression, a sunset effect of consciousness. When knights, with dull chainmail and little aesthetic form are dying out is precisely right when the knights in shining armor with their plethora of angular aesthetic and a sculpted, glossy and 'noble' knighthood visage. So, too, when nature begins to become exploited and is becoming lost, the stories of Grimm and fairy tales, gingerbread men and worlds of fantasia come back to grasp what was lost. So, when nature is invaded by trains and machines, the Poet clings tightest to nature and must return to the trees in an artistic solipsism and a celebration of the Artist / Poet with capital letters as an identity as such.

What the Prelude metahistorically signifies is the birth of a new consciousness into a modern world — of knocking back on the womb of nature — and using language as a means to return to it (by seeing the trees and rivers speaking to him) though language is the means by which the Poet becomes conscious of his own alienation — yet ironically Language is the force of his alienation — for were he not trapped in linguistic, serial time he would be in the cosmic sentience of the babe. show more Thereby, he hears language in nature itself (in close relation to Kabbalah, and the knowledge of the true name of things).

The ghostly language of the ancient earth,
Or make their dim abode in distant winds.
Thence did I drink the visionary power;

And so the constant need to instantiate the poem into the land, the object of the world, itself. Either by implanting the poem into a location and giving it a localized sense of being, or by literally carving the poem into the rock, the clinging becomes tighter. Wordsworth, losing both parents by age 13, representing Oedipal undertones through this loss of the connectivity with nature, the orphan lost in the world, and so lacking the real parent is resolved unconsciously through the archetypal Parent of Father Sky and Mother Earth. At one moment, stealing a bird away from a snare that someone else has caught, runs away and hears low breathing of himself being caught by the neighbors and townsmen but on a higher turn on the spiral: that Bird is the symbol of the Self and he is stealing himself away from nature and the breathing and rumbling heard is of Nature itself for the process of individuation is the crime of individuation.

Others will love, and we may teach them how —
Instruct them how the mind of man becomes
A thousand times more beautiful than the earth
On which he dwells, above this frame of things.

All during the poem, Wordsworth struggles to put consciousness back in nature and attempts to reachieve Nature — but after his experiences of the celebration of the Artist (with capital A) and the artistic unity of being to heal the wound is reached — he reaches the integration of his consciousness equal to nature. Many miss these concluding lines, marking him as a mere simple animist who is trying to get back into nature but what the poem is really about is psychology and consciousness and a phenomenology of the Self in almost Hegelian terms. show less

Through bardic oration, Thompson creates lectures of a quality that cannot be surpassed. Serving moreso as artifacts of artwork sans script one can admire a tapestry of riffing on concepts that truly does become musical both in performance and content (as in the later fascination he tethers to with the Pythagorean monochord) through an aperture of telescoping through entire civilization with a prescience only reserved for the deeply introspective and the obsessively hyper-read. Through an unconscious lineage of Spengler and Gebser (the latter of which he becomes consciously fascinated with only decades later) he marks a beginning of a polymathic interest in, what I've formalized and concretized as, the project or map of metahistory.

This text stems and follows from those lectures, those mp3's that act as rites of initiation, and variations upon the themes touched in them. Through a keen sensibility in myth, anthropology and philosophy - he creates a truly Batesonian ecology of mind, through taking every variation upon a myth into a tree directory of that myth's Source as an application of Levi-Strauss's structuralism (Freud's Oedipus and Sophocles' Oedipus can be seen as part of the same myth), a focal lens study of the Paleolithic and Neolithic that is only highlighted amongst its contrast to the study of the cybernetic Gaian planetary culture we create today giving us a "commodious vicus of recirculation," an understanding of metareligion that maps the scientific basis show more for myth and the mythic roots of science.

Though, one cannot see it as highly as Spengler or Gebser, since Thompson does not reach the grandiose depths that they partake in their complete surveyals of entire civilizations and archaeological listings of every domain of study in them - this more works as an introductory dive towards the project of metahistory.

The gnostic realization of this metahistory - that it is our demise, the nightmare in which we are trying to awake, the fall of unity into multiplicity, the One into Two - and each metamyth we pulse and emanate out of our minds of civilization, those nodes that make networks, the knowing that makes Indra's Net work, is a recapitulation of that fractal Fall. show less

A beautiful scholarly summation of the rituals of deification and theurgic ascent. One can't help but revel in Uzdavinys' process as an academician to provide the source and resources of telestic transformation, philosophical rebirth, being and beyond-being within Egyptian thought, the mystical origins of Platonism, divine semiotics, gnostic hermeneutics, and the framework of which theurgy can be internally derived and seen, as such, transforming the ba into akh within the solar barque of Ra

One shouldn’t forget that Pythagorean cryptic utterance: “Do not cut in two what is on the road.”

Philosophy indeed, it seems, is a road. The utterance means then: choose that philosophy and that road to wisdom in which you will not ‘cut in two’, in which you will propound, not contradictions, but firm and unchanging truths. Yet with the introduction of that scission dividing the ontic and the ontological, we find ourselves sitting at the very road cut in two we swore would be untouched. As the philosopher too concerned with the psychophysical, we begin and end with the wrong tools and placements of anything through which one cannot work out of. When Heidegger begins to enter ‘in-the-world’ we begin to see this as a precedent to ramble upon the endless infinite variations that prompt themselves to the physical—a Pollock painting of verbs serving no philosophical use. Through the obvious obfuscation only evident in the confused and the obscuring of Daoist origins do we finally understand the relevance of the entire deviation of authenticities and inauthenticities that permeates a portion of this book. That play of words that becomes the archonic instrument breathing dualisms finds itself losing its charm after every verb is a proverbial transmitting, charioteering, boomeranging (and so on) into new fractal amorphous verbs. The modalities are endless for all and Heidegger gets lost in the complexity while ultimately not doing metaphysics, but rather show more displacing common orderings of semantics. The case of the phenomenologist who identifies with his phenomenology. Though one may disagree with the book in its entirety, partially nod along or frown with foul intent, one must admire the beautific simplicity of Dasein, the self-reflexive meta-fictionalized Reader whose thoughts are splain in real-time and whose splaying is thought of in itself—though these “places” may not be of use. It’s format certainly is. The book ends with an unfinished question mark. Or rather, a concretized question mark with no discernible answer since the Aletheia of such inquiry would result in absolute blissful theurgy.

That demiurgic intellect placed in the crux of the theurgic One. I solemnly weep, won’t you respond? I am you. Be. show less

The Three-Cornered World was written in 1906, but it's "action" if one can use that term with regard to so static a work is set two years earlier, at the time of the Russo-Japanese war. The war plays no direct part in the novel, at least in not the last few pages but, at that point, its rather jarring denouement has an uncanny similarity to the World War 1 motif which brings to a close another great, alpine novel: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. The Three-Cornered World, is among other things, about meditation versus action, detachment versus duty, about Western versus Eastern value systems, about the perceived perils of modernism. In my opinion, it's one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.