Culture & Cosmology: The Promethean Destiny at the Heart of Nature and Mankind

00:00

So I want to talk a little bit about Terence McKenna and culture. One of the late modern thinkers who made it very clear that he understood that culture is not your friend.

And I have spoken a great deal about culture being the most important thing or the most important part of being human in terms of the distillation of the human energetic form into the letter or into the symbol or into the hieroglyph or into the image — as a profound form of extending the teleology of creation… meaning, down from the stellar nucleosynthesis and the recombination of elements in the forge of stars… down through the process of interstellar transformation, which is to say, the creation of different artifacts and forms and species and cells and chemicals, which are active in the field of play of being.

01:29

So — many profound spiritual figures and scientific figures from Einstein to Bohm to Vivekananda to Heraclitus — all have this same fundamental intuition, as in the Hindu sage Shankara. We come to this conception of Maya or the illusion of existence being a jungle gym or... a forge of transformation, a child at play with colored balls, a rasa, a play of the design of creation in which all of these different elements or forms or figurations are continually transforming and shape shifting through their interaction with one another in the field of space time because they are that which creates it.

And with culture, what the primary idea and situation with culture is… is that we must actually reveal through culture. We must, we must disclose. And this, this goes back to Heidegger and the concept of being and the nature as disclosing being.

Culture itself is a way to come into deeper beingness by way of revealing the hidden nature or substratum of existence as in the energetic form beneath the appearance of reality. As Blake says, printing in the infernal method. This is out from beneath or out from under Maya.

03:22

So there are essentially two different forms of culture. There’s the culture that’s carrying out the unconscious genetic imperative — it’s pulled into the whirlpool of ancient language and it doesn’t have any idea how to comprehend it. This is mass culture, it’s pop culture. It’s culture that’s trapped within the continuum of the human and it’s reproducing the human ancestral and biological and chemical history. It’s not creating revelation, which actually has the capacity to change the nervous system through an epigenetic reaction. It’s not reprogramming, it’s not repatterning the human condition.

It’s not changing consciousness, it’s not redirecting the electrical circuit of humanity or mankind towards greater revelation or consciousness. And this is the other form of culture. This is revelatory culture or disclosing culture. And I’ve brought up Van Gogh. I’ve brought up Artaud. You could bring up figures as diverse as Camus and Nietzsche.

04:12

We’re talking about figures that are.. they’re revealing out from under the appearance of things the deeper energetic form and source of being. And this is a revelation of the true identity. So in this way, these figures are deeply allied to the Vedic tradition. They’re deeply allied to a figure such as Vivekananda or Siddharameshwar or the pre-Socratic philosophy of a thinker like Heraclitus — because this is what the great human culture does, the transcendental human culture does — is it peels back the veneer of the image and shows you the energetic form beneath the image.

And this is why Van Gogh is such a fantastic example of the true meaning of culture. Which is to say… it is to transmit down through creation and project out from the human psyche, which is a nervous system processing mechanism, a true vision of the real — which is to say, witnessing the character of nature and the heart of nature, the energetic child at play with colored balls or the energetic jungle gym through which perception arises…

Which is to say the evolution of mankind or the evolution of species, up from single celled organisms and ultimately up from the thermonuclear radiation and reaction, which is at the birth of the universe itself.

05:41

And this is what is realized in a late stage spiritual sense, that the universe itself is a recombinatory forge of creative elements that are always already in discourse as in the field of space-time, fundamentally as fire.

Fundamentally as the reactor and the radiation and the explosive energetic force, the engine of creation and existence itself, which is a long term deep time reaction of billions and billions of years… which has formed the apparent crust of the universe, the crust of the earth and the planetary circles of the solar system… and the intergalactic networks which surround it — which are for the most part utterly unknown to humanity.

06:59

So you have these two forms of culture. You have the culture that reveals and the culture that resides in concealing.

And concealing culture forms 99.9999% of human discourse and human history. It’s the noise.

It’s actually the preventative noise, the distractive noise, the noise that drags the human being down into the unconscious genetic imperative. It’s the whirlpool of the ancient language that’s uncomprehended. Survival, reproduction. Fear as an organism lost in a massive continuum — a jungle of epigenetic nature.

So these are the names and the titles and the words in the rooms and the architectures all around the human being that spring up… as in civilizational mechanisms or tribal mechanisms that give… this utter unconsciousness — which is the unconscious genetic imperative, the whirlpool of the ancient language — again, this is such an important term, because it’s a thread of linguistic creation, which is toward enlightenment, it’s toward revelation of itself, it’s toward revelation of the lila or the Maya.

It’s toward the... human being is entranced with the colored ball itself, which is the world as it appears to be.

But to look behind the colored ball in motion is the child juggling it or the child being at play with it — and to inquire into the character of that child.

08:26

And this is the same as the nature of the human body. The human is ensconced in the human experience. But to inquire into the why and the what and the how behind the human experience or the appearance of the glittering leaves.

And mountaintops and trees of nature… is to inquire into the nature of being itself.

And this terrain is necessarily the entrance into philosophy, just as it is the entrance into science. Quantum mechanics and physics… and the ancient tradition and history of philosophy are inseparable. They are inseparable. And the reason for this is because they are authentic inquiries into the heart of nature, which is ultimately the primary and origin source and force in all human history and knowledge of metaphysics, which is the principle and character of being itself.

This is where science and philosophy is disciplines unify and ultimately realize themselves through aesthetics — as in art, creativity and play.

09:23

The universal principles articulated in philosophy and physics are fundamentally formulae, right? They are quantifications or qualifications of the being at play as in practice. And it’s, this is what is meant to be utilized at the heart of culture — which is an authentic, integral disclosure of the heart of being which is the child at play, perhaps most clearly seen in a figure such as Basquiat — but also in the Van Gogh. Also in a profound and intense way with Artaud.

Which is to say, the stripping back. And Artaud is a paint thinner of consciousness and language, which is to say he is at work to reveal the somatic heart at the heart of Western culture and civilization, which is to say he’s seeking to return life to the death in life of Western civilization, which is the sleepwalking.

It’s the creation of the everyday social, bureaucratic, and institutional and empirical systems which dictate the false life — which Artaud, being deeply intuitive and sensitive, feels a profound sense of entrapment within and shares a deep kindredness with the painter Van Gogh, who he later writes about in the Suicide of Van Gogh, one of his essays.

10:50

And this is the particular… and when we get to this form of culture, when we’re talking about transcendental disclosure, we’re talking about genius — we’re talking about creative genius. And this is why Artaud resonates so deeply and so profoundly with Van Gogh, because they both are creative geniuses.

And what creative genius is, is the revealing — as Heidegger speaks about with the poet, Holderlin. It’s a revealing of the gleaming of nature. Nature’s gleaming… which is to say that which is shining out from under and beneath nature, what is the essential character of that which is moving the shining of nature?

This is again, this is the deepest inquiry which unites philosophy and science under the helm of metaphysics. And this level of inquiry is actually answered and mastered in the form of creative genius, particularly in the Van Gogh. I think of his… Van Gogh’s paintings of the night sky, just as I would think of the paintings of the tree.

It’s a mastery in depiction of nature and the realm of nature through color and through brushstroke, which is a profoundly correct articulation of the character of the child at play. Profound articulation of the rasa. Of energy, chemicals, and elemental compounds recombining themselves fluidly in space-time.

12:44

So it’s an articulation of the energetic dimension behind the appearance of the real. And this is what is pierced and perceived by creative genius and… is being brought into the field of play through the creation of the cultural object, which is the symbol, the sign, or the image.

And this is what is so utterly necessary in a profoundly redemptive vision of culture.

The archetypal form or vision of Venus is to redeem creation and to redeem creation is to articulate the truth of the character, which is to say the soul or the inner dimension behind the appearance of that which appears to be created, which is to say the character of creation.

The creative force of being itself.

13:17

So when we talk about nature, it’s to talk about faces and masks. And this is something that’s deeply shamanic. It’s deeply embedded in the history of shamanism. That nature itself is a mask, as it appears to be phenomenologically to the human being.

The human being navigating the sensate world full of touch, taste, and smell is interacting dormantly with an equally dormant force which is seeking to reveal.

Nature is already itself revealed… but it takes the mind, as Da Vinci says, that realizes that everything is connected to everything else and that has cultivated the union and intersection with art and science, which is necessarily metaphysical philosophy, to inquire into the nature of reality, as in Da Vinci’s notebooks.

And this human being’s inquiry is itself like the scientist in the lab or the artist at the canvas.

Because this is an iterative process of comprehending the equally iterative process of the universal whole itself.

14:34

Which is to say — the energetic jungle or the lila of creational energy, which is circulating and moving in a deep time, deep space sense beyond the appearance of formal… stoic forms and figurations, which appear to the human being to be solid or total… even something proximal to eternal, just in terms of the human being’s lifespan.

A structure or a tower or a cathedral that stands for hundreds of years, appears to the human being to be an eternal mass — because the human being passes underneath it, in a generational sense.

And so… the articulation of the energetic dimension is something that is so essential to the transcendental form of creative genius, because it is to reveal out from under the appearance of reality that child at play — through, again, through the teleological process, the downshifting of the thermonuclear dimension into equal parts, the metabolic and neural scripture of the human being, just as much as the respiration and reproduction of the cell.

These are scalar universes carrying the same inherent principle of energetic recombination, translation and compression. And the human being as a finishing act, right? There’s essentially culture and reproduction as the human being acts. And we’ve split culture again into culture that discloses and then culture that encloses, which is to say to continue out the unconscious genetic imperative.

16:28

And this isn’t to say that reproduction can’t be conscious, but this is to say that the transcendental cultural act of articulating a symbolism that represents… it’s to, in the words of McKenna describing one of his DMT trips — he describes the DMT gnomes, which is a hilarious and fascinating symbol for this.

They’re holding these great balls of light, which are transforming and articulating linguistic devices. And he’s saying this is these are post linguistic devices, post the human small mouth noise.

And what this represents is a higher interdimensional, transdimensional form of creation that the human being is capable of. It’s articulating the transcendental object at the end of time, so to speak — to remix Hegel and McKenna in this one admixture formulation.

17:38

It’s to articulate the compressed symbolism… and this is the great gift of transcendental culture if you understand this — it’s that it’s the cultivation and the craft which is able to penetrate into the character. Inquire and penetrate into the character of nature, and represent it symbolically. And thus introduce the truth of being into the field of being itself proper.

This is a radical transformation of the terrain.

Because when you look at the literal physics of the movement and process of material and materialism as a grand history of space-time, the introduction of a conscious artifact, which is to say the symbolism which encapsulates the entirety of space and time and history, and articulates it — through the genuine character and being of nature, which is true aesthetics…

18:38

It is able to actually change the way that nature as a process functions. Because nature is primarily and foundationally linguistic.

This is what I mean again to return to the term unconscious genetic imperatives — because what unconscious genetic imperatives means is that the genome itself is a linguistic scripture or a linguistic scroll which is furled into the human being body and is actually articulating the presence of the human being.

And this genetic scripture is altered in real time epigenetically, as in the human being experience in space time. And the genome itself is activated or latent depending on certain encounters and interactions that the human organism has in space and time. This is a real time transformation of the language of the species proper.

And this of course is recombined and reproduced via reproduction, human reproduction, sexual reproduction.

So this is an iterative scripture. It’s an iterative language and speech which actually contains the genetic evolutionary history of the human species itself proper within the scroll.

19:56

And this is the foundational principle of life on earth, as itself a genome, which itself is with minor deviation self same across species and across kingdoms.

And to understand this scripture, again cosmologically — in terms of the stellar nuclear fusion, which is literally creating out of the forge of this… this fusionary process, the elemental building blocks of life itself. These elements are again, linguistic devices.

When you look at the combination of elements, they create gesticulations of the appearing real, such as the elemental compound of water.

20:47

We’re talking about carbon, we’re talking about hydrogen, we’re talking about oxygen. We’re talking about the fundamental building blocks of all of life.

20:59

And so this is what we mean by a total linguistics of the cosmos, which is to say a space time linguistics of energetic production and reproduction of forms that have different densities and elemental characters, chemical characters… and in the human being, a grand elemental chemical synthesis — which creates the articulation of the figuration of the human as it interacts in space time with the nervous system, the vascular system, the profound system of the brain — which is synaptic, with all of its different compartments which have different functions which articulate the total proprioception of the human being, the total color and the lens of the perceptive capacity of the human, as it interacts as a nervous system in this space-time reality and has the epigenetic encounter with life itself as in a space-time encounter.

22:11

And this is precisely what a revolutionary, as in disclosure, culture articulates.

And it articulates it in the simplicity of the direct presentation of the brushstroke of Van Gogh, just as it articulates it in this essay, just as it is articulated in the Heraclitean Axiom.

Just as it is articulated in Shankara’s concept of existence itself as a jungle gym in which one makes one’s consciousness strong. Vivekananda asks for man with steel and iron. Muscles and nerves.

23:03

This returns us to the nervous system, and the nervous system’s relationship with expansive culture, which is the uttering and articulation through the symbolic device, which is actually able to repattern and reprogram the fundamental plasticity of the human being experience in real time… and thus create an epigenetic marker within the human body of transformation itself.

This is recorded in the genome.

It’s recorded in the genetic record of mankind. This is the impact of visioning Guernica.

23:42

If you understand this, because this is a real encounter in space time. It’s an epigenetic encounter which changes the record of the human being experience, which is the scroll of the genome.

So we’re talking about radical encounters with the revelatory or the possible disclosure within the human. And this is the importance of the craft of the distillation of the symbol, the sign, the image, which is itself the condensation of an articulation of creation into a profoundly transcendental revelatory artifact.

And this is precisely what McKenna is gesturing towards, if symbolically, in his discussion of the DMT gnomes, and this gesturing ball of light, which is is post-linguistic.

And this is what the highest culture is. It’s a post-linguistic culture of direct perception, its imminence, its presence.

24:40

It makes present and makes real, makes appearance — the profound, absolute form of being itself.

It pierces into the veil of nature and draws and characterizes nature and being itself, out from under the appearance or the veil of space-time and the veil of things as they appear to be.

25:05

And this is precisely what happens in the Bhagavad Gita with the appearance of Vishvarupa, which is to say the thousand faced apparition, which is the totality or universality of Krishna.

Which is to say being itself, the wholeness.

And what this is in the Bhagavad Gita, and this is why Bhagavad Gita is such a transcendental piece of culture — is that it is an articulation and a representation of the fundamental and the absolute.

But it is being articulated through the human being concept, through the human being experience. And this is actually what transforms the human being experience, is this articulation itself.

25:54

It’s absolutely utterly essential.

26:00

Because this is the fundamental creative principle, which is active and manifests cosmologically down to the source and substratum of creation itself. It is the transformation — the articulation and transformation — linguistically, through the letter, through the compound, through the sign.

Through the genome, through the figure.

Through the chemical.

Through the elemental. These are all figurations, they’re encapsulations and distillations… spheres of information, which themselves are concentric, which is to say, they’re scalar.

26:55

And thus both translations and transformations.

27:02

And they’re actively, in process exchanging… energy. And in this exchanging of energy, they’re interpreting, translating — thermonuclear radiation into metabolic transformation.

The human life… in the creation and articulation of the transcendental symbol, it’s… the distillation. Is a unification of the grand principle of creation at sum and at full and at total.

To form the full circle, which is to form the grand chain of being. It is to fulfill the human and transform the human as in the revelation of the truth of nature and being. The truth of nature and being and time.

28:08

To bring about face and bring to the human eyes and perception… to bring to the human nervous system — the revelation of being itself.

And thus to change the human being… in time, in the encounter with the timeless. But the encounter with the timeless must be phenomenologically present. It must be in time. It must be in space. But what is necessary is, is again — to pierce the veil of Maya.

To retrieve the true cultural artifact of transcendental perception and disclosure, to craft it within the forge of the body, to make oneself ready, to prepare oneself as in the nervous system… to perceive what Dostoevsky says is the blinding flash of light which the human being can only withstand but for a moment or otherwise perish…

To make oneself strong as Vivekananda asks. Nerves and muscles of steel and iron, to receive the prophetic vision. This is just as much Ezekiel as it is Jacob. These are the prophetic visions and the dreams, which are the archetypal, metaphorical and symbolic representations of transcendental creation, such as Moses and the burning bush.

29:48

You understand… the function of the prophet. It’s the same function as creative genius and transcendental genius. It’s to receive the vision of nature, the true character of nature — and to then articulate it through the transcendental cultural object… and thus reveal to the human nervous system, to reveal to the nervous system of the developing and unfolding cosmological — that which it is.

And this revelation and this disclosure is utterly and foundationally changing at the level of the genome.

30:16

Because it’s an articulation of the language that the genome always was and is, but was carrying out unconscious imperatives towards… as in unconscious, somnambulistic mechanization.

It’s a withdrawing out of the human consciousness and the soul of the universal, as in the character.. from the machine in which it is processing unto revelation. It is to reveal the worker to the working. The inner mechanism to the ritualized linguistic. The one who is speaking behind the work and word that is spoken.

30:44

The whirlpool of the ancient language… which is uncomprehended in nature and thus dormant, locked within the cage and the chains of the everyday — the returning and recurring experience of the basic primal and hormonal functions of life on earth… to reveal the energetic character… hid from within and beneath them.

And thus this is a profound form of liberation and an absolute form of liberation.

This is the true meaning of transcendental culture.

31:21

This is the culture that frees the human being into a perception of that which it truly is. The eternal, the energetic force of being itself.

This is the true imperative at the heart of reality…

That is being made possible within the human being form to perceive.

To inquire and thus to penetrate into the heart of existence and to know it truly and then to draw it out from itself and depict it within the craft of the vision.

And thus to free and liberate creation.