Omnicon on Superliterate Societies

ACCESS CODE: TOT
PEN NAME: RDORJE
GROUP CONFERENCE: OMNICON ON SUPERLITERATE SOCIETIES
THERE ARE NOW I MEMBER ACTIVE

BEES AND FLIES

The colors of the Buddha of the north is called Amoghasiddhi Buddha among the five Dhyani Buddhas. The one of the north, associated with karma, not good or bad karma, just karma, which in Sanskrit is action; black is the color, midnight the time...and her name is Gloria... She comes here ‘bout midnight.

En espagnol se llama Amapola, my pretty little poppy. That would be the immature, green poppy buds of opium. A pop tune way back when, "Green Eyes." “Gloria" recorded by Them, with Van Morrison as lead. Also note tune of same title, "Gloria" by the Cadillacs, '50s.

Whereas rDorje is Tibetan for vajra in Sanskrit, meaning both lightning bolt and diamond, or the indestructible quality of meditation: adamantine, hard, diamond—like. What is hard is interior, prior rDorje--in Tibetan the initial "r" is silent--is associated with the Buddha of the east, the rising sun, the intellect and the color is blue, like psilocybin mushrooms. Ah, yes, about mushrooms...the blue and the red; of course the red is the amanita muscaria, surrounded by a little cloud of flies, muscae, hence muscaria called the "fly agaric" and shown by R. Gordon Wasson to have been the substance of the Rig Veda's Soma, and by John M. Allegro possibly to have to been the Eucharist. The cloud of flies is confused with a cloud of bees, as in the story of Sampson, and also in the Native American story of Coyote and the head of an elk, told by the famous american anthropologist Paul Rubin.

So the School of the Bees, one of the Sufi schools from Afghanistan, may also be identified with a cloud of flies, as in the play by J.P. Sartre. And the honey sweet cakes used to lull Cerebrus at the entrance to Hades may actually have been narcotic cakes containing psychotropic mushrooms and honey, or treacle, one of which names, in Greek, was Pyramis, from whence derives, according a reading of Liddell and Scott, the Greek name for pyramid.  

We now know that the invention of grain agriculture dates to some 17,000 years BC, and was in Egypt, ie., when the rising sign in the vernal equinox was Scorpio, called the Scorpion in everyone's zodiac--Chinese, Arab, etc. In Chinese the character equals the numerical value 10,000. In Arabic, it is called shaula. It happens to be jolly close to the center of our galaxy.

The grain is pearl barley, in Greek called alphita; this is the grain that was shown at Eleusis, the epopteia at the mysteries, with little ergot fungus growing on it, LSD-25, according to Wasson, Hoffmann in Road to Eleusis. The mysteries kept the classical world sane for 2 millenia, as if they were just interested in the product, and not the whole process of the mystery of growth. When I was a kid planting a garden, who wanted to harvest? I just wanted to watch the seed sprout and grow.

Sampson, bees, flies, mushrooms, lions, Lyles & slaves. This is a free country.

SCHOOL OF THE BEES

Dipping our fingers into the jar of Lyle's Golden Syrup, would the lines of treacle drip long molasses or molasses skinned people? What is the difference in the triangular trade asked Ed Dorn, one of the old beat poets from Berzerkeley. The north Atlantic turbine triangular trade and a question of slavery; an item in the San Francisco Comical last week: some slave keeper in Louisiana had men in chains and shackles. They were there last week, 1979 in October, no September it was. Okay, so the trade went like this, from the 8th grade history: Yankee clippers, the medium molasses, crude sugar and bales of picked cotton from Amerika to Great Britain, whose engineering and technology invented and perfected the chronometer, thereby rendering the British supreme as navigators by the reckoning of time. And so we all use Greenwich by convention, whereas the reckoning of latitudes is objective fact, the same for us now as it was for the Egyptians or the Chinese.

But longitude, setting prime meridians, is as always a matter of politics, and a question of who had the technology. In the 19th century, it was the British empire so we use Greenwich. Sir Francis Drake, the navigator, made the best maps charts—charts we call them...like deeds, titles to real real estate, the land itself injunction; look ..up the word real, American Heritage Dictionary, it gives the Indoeuropean roots, taking it back some 8000 years. Real...rex...regulus: king and measure.

Anyway, the longitudes depend upon chronometers, but the latitudes from angular measure of the sun's position and so the British manufactured clocks and watches better and before the Swiss, although the bank moved from Albion to Suisse, the backyard, the Hillbillys of Europe. And the Yankees carried cotton and sugar to England for refining...for he is like a refined fire, as Handel set it to great music...German music for the English king. Abram Lyle, founder of Lyle's Golden Syrup; out of some of it they made rum, and out of the cotton they made cloth, which they shipped in part to Africa which was traded to the dealers for slaves, molasses skins sent to the Indies to our south to work in the sugar fields and in the cotton fields far away. Around and around, according to Edward Dorm, the Berzerkeley poet; and art? There is not art. Ghiberti's doors, the Gates of Paradise, are the doors to the biggest bank: Roma, papa. “From out of the strong comes forth sweetness.” The motto is from Sampson, on the road to Philistia, against young lions and the way home; in the carcass of the lion, bees and honey.

Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise, chased in gold, were copied on San Francisco's Grace Cathedral. They knew what they were doing. But in Firenze, the grille of iron bars was to keep the tourists from rubbing off the gold. Then as now gold is the symbolic scarcity commodity, used with glass, the artificial precious stones, ie: lenses and spacesuits, for the most expensive and precise fine art sculpture of our time, solid state circuitry, gold in space coupled with silicon--more of it in the earth's crust than any other element--and Aug. ‘79 gold closed recently at $438/0z in Zurich and $419 in London; what a spread! Used to be 19 cents were enough to make some money, send the cable. But gold goes up and down like balloons; "towering madness" it was called by one of the dealers. In Florence, dateline AD 1401, Ghiberti submits a panel of bronze in the competition for the commission to do the north doors of the Baptistry. Big job. Half a dozen of the best artists.

Brunelleschi submits a superior panel, but uses the old technology; his cast bronze figures of Abraham and Isaac have to be bolted on. Lorenzo Ghiberti develops a new technique, casting the whole panel all at once, thereby saving much bronze--then as now another scarcity commodity (the age of gold, silver, bronze and now kali yuga iron). So Ghiberti gets the job.

Question: Who is paying for it? Same O, same O, this Omnicon and the rest of the shebang? Answer: The doors are paid for by the Guild of Florentine merchants, Arte di Calimala, one of the most rich and powerful, then as now. Later, Ghiberti got to do the east doors of the same Baptistry, the Gates to Paradise, so-called. Same bank, as Ed Dorn notes. Ghiberti was a member of the goldsmith's guild--associated with silk merchants: Arte della Seda, and was challenged as a bastard--paid his taxes under his step-father's name, then changed to his father's, but his step-father was the goldsmith, so he was fined for matriculating in the guild without paying fees; okay if it were his own father as a member, but the little kid just didn't know. As Engels pointed out (the family, private property and state) all children of the mother are beyond questions of legitimacy. Not so in the patriarchy of guilds, mason's lodges.

But it is a matter of record, in the Lombard laws of King Rothari, dated AD 642, the Stonemasons lodge are the first legal, free people, relieving the slavery of cutting stone for Romans. And as Chrys says, Carnot did more to free the slaves than Abe Lincoln. How? By providing theoretical justifications that led to the steam engine, after which slavery in the fields back home, cotton & sugar, just didn't make it any more on the bottom line. Just so, John von Neumann may do more to free the pink collar slaves of today than Gloria Steinem and  Jane Fonda. Although Jane Fonda does know something about art as information space, like LG 1401. Information spaces are characterized by economies of abundance. Feng, hexagram 55, l'abundanza, in Qabala 55= a & b, father & son as in Lil’ Abner, Abbie's Irish Rose, Alan Hamill's alpha beta?

But god said to Abraham, sacrifice your firstborn, who was not, repeat, not Isaac, but Ishmael, by Hagar. He wasn't handy, so old Abe led Isaac to the rock, famed as the black stone of the ka'aba at Mecca, the very one, they say. The Arabs are sons of Ishmael, who was wandering: Lu, hexagram 56 (I Ching), collecting notes for Moby Dick, Amerika's Sufi story from the whirlpool.

Warning: Only 57 lines may be used for this text

Item from San Francisco Comical, October ‘79, on Citibank, the number two outfit, signing a contract with Sotheby-­Parke-Bernet, the big fine art auction house, for expert coun­seling on collectibles, fine art investments. Citibank has the customers with the bucks. S-P-B has the information, presumably the fine taste. But, flies in the pyxis, ointment jar: investors are getting the expert advice from the very same people who advise the sellers. Ah, such a mysterious market. Fine art appreciates better even than gold as a hedge against inflation. But you gotta know how to pick 'em. The nitwits are worried about getting ripped off with fakes and forgeries. Since it takes about 35 years for the mass "eye" to see a fake for a fake, ultimately revealing more of the stylistic traits of the time in which it was faked than those of the supposed original. Exemplum gratia: the so-called Etruscan warrior in New York's Met, now obviously looking like a modern piece from the 1930s when it was made. Some saw it at the time, of course, but the big investors wanted so much to believe.

Transcending belief is the task of consciousness in coming to recognize itself. All of which prompts a few searching inquiries--specifically about the four "great killers" in the present history of our watery planet. They may be identified as pollution, population, climatic change, mismanagement of the earth's resources. Bad artists may be polluters, but not on the real scale of private enterprise chemical concerns, government testers. Abortion is always a very personal question--there can really be no public policy--but a love for all the children of the present generation is essential. Yet there will be so many, so much love—as the Provencal poets said, “Tant amare, tant snare. Habib, tant amare; ualion ton gaios”. And how shall we finish? “E gli occhi non l'ardiscon di guardare...coda dantesca?”

The climate can change at any time. The problem is not running short of fossil fuels, it is burning them. Already too much co2 in the atmosphere many say. Petro-nations want us to burn as if it were a scarcity commodity--but it is not, the abundance is the threat; ask any Gulf prawn or oily duck. When does this century's supernova go off. With what wave of consequences for us? Our direct control quite likely, but change the climate will. The global threat of Brazil, intending to chop down its Amazon greenery. The line actually concludes: “e dolen tan male.” Abundance: reference item 121 by anonymous, rDorje's anima.

But art and investment portfolios still assume scarcity commodities. Dummies. Andy Warhol realized that the more copies made and sold, the more value accrued to the vision, and so reinvented silkscreen as a modern medium. We have only been with high-quality color reproductions for some three decades on large scale of publications. The Museum of Modern Art NYC publications in color are what made the collection valuable, although this is only a question if one is selling.

The earth's resources: Mismanagement in the information domain is connected with the concepts of publication and secrecy. We can't really keep secrets for very long anymore. Never really could keep them--cats always getting out of bags--but the priestly caste, with control of the means of transmission, could get a stranglehold on info for millenia, then centuries, then decades and years. H-bomb data you ask? Who knows when the world's first h-bomb blast actually took place, and where? I do. President (then) Eisenhower, and elected members of congress didn't know for 15 months. Groundhog Day in a free country.

Hexagram number 57

We might well ask, with this 57 line max entry, what the hexagram number 57 indicates in the oracular book of archaic China, the number one bestseller of Princeton University Press, the I Ching, or book of changes. But first a note on change. The Chinese character shows a picture of a chameleon in the oldest forms, the bone style of writing. Still readable--with a little help from a dictionary or friend—by literate ordinary Chinese today. Accepting change is the key. No? But who want's to? What we, in America have to deal with in order to meet the challenges of the four great killers is to work with our big blocks, accepting change with respect to those things not yet adequately dealt with in our education. Namely beliefs about sex, death and sanity.

Any trenchant appraisals of this triplex information knot? Historically, some evolutionists say death was the invention of unicellular life forms that enabled the practice of sex--it may be that old and that deep. As for sanity; well, in Semitic languages there is the very close connection between the words for social greeting, Shalom, Salaam. And the idea of sanity as wholeness, completeness, ergo health. In the anal-retentive west, many mistake the root of sanitas, via latin, for cleanliness, as in sanitary napkins. But for wholeness we must understand—literally—stand under, or as the Greeks said, episteme. By which they stood over the distinction (artificial, verbal, arbitrary, imaginary, conventional, whatever) drawn. But the words have shifted in respect to the semene.

What lexically relates to episteme, we now indicate by the word knowledge, as when we say we really know some­thing; we have the experience of it as well as the conceptual "understanding." On the other hand, the Greek roots for "knowledge," gnosis, really just meant the conceptual part. Curious. Sanity obviously is related to knowledge and episteme, as insanity, imbalance, bias, etc. is to understanding and gnosis, unbridged to actual experience. The demon of progress is the conceptual mind assuming, usurping control of the whole organism, as society itself is an organism.

This is self-referential; we the superliterates in the process of healing ourselves, feeding back to the body whole, accepting all the paradoxes and contradictions, outlawed, forbidden by the formal logic of Boolean algebra. Indicted by Russell and Whitehead in chapter two of their Principia Mathematica—a much inferior book, by the way, in comparison with the other prior one of the same title by Sir Isaac Newton, himself, as we now know, deeply initiated into the esoteric tradition--so interested in the earth commensurate standard units of measure of the great pyramid, long before publishing figures on the oblateness of the earth.

Outlawing the self-referential paradox is merely a social convention. As G. Spencer Brown notes, the higher mathematics of the last half century or so would be largely impossible without use of the self-referential, imaginary values, as in recursive func­tions, etc. They work perfectly well. The practice of alchemy, as a set of objective exercises is thus provided with theoretical justification. Sanity, sex and death perhaps may be represented with group theoretical values. I like to use the power series of i, the ways of representing the unity numerically. There are four: Plus one and minus one, and plus and minus the square root of minus one. Closed and Abelian. 57= the gentle. The penetrating, wind, "sun." “Success through what is small...thus the superior man spreads his commands abroad and carries out his undertakings.” Mild. Bland. Insinuating the mythical man-month and the Tower of Babel.

A good story bears retelling

If you want to see Brueghel, gotta go to Vienna. The problem, as the Brooks knew, was communication of the workers. So the cautionary tales are inverted: the Babel explains why the Tower was incomplete, not the consequence. We may turn to two examples of vast projects from out of the past for further instruction. One: the great Pyramid at Giza. As the King Tut show closed in Frisco, some dude comes on the TV with the standard bit about pyramids being tombs. This, he sez, is one thing that we do know about Egypt. But this is precisely what we do not know. No body was ever found by any archaeologist at any pyramid--there are about eighty of them in the Nile Valley--with the exception of the body of a small child in a minor pyramidal structure associated with the site of the Pharoah Mykerinus. Now no one knows for certain when this body was interred--it may have been long after the actual construction. Certainly no body was found in the coffer of the so-called Kings Chamber of the Great Pyramid.

This, as we realize following the work of Livio Catello Stecchini, was a standard unit of volumetric measure. The artisan related to the standard load of an ass, could carry Christ entering the Heavenly Jerusalem, always on the back of an ass, never a horse, neither at the nativity--cattle and asses, like Set the Onager, the wild desert ass, never the horse, or the falcon of Horus. The load, Gomarion, of the bestia di soma (sic!); in other words, the weight of a corpse, but as an abstract standard measure which was used for grain.

The coffer is tuned to a standard “A” but not our standard A-440, rather a 438, 2 cps lower (see liner notes on the Paul Horn pyramid album). The pyramids were not actually tombs. Probably multipurpose structures: theodolite, geodetic points certainly, the physical material symbol of unity for the whole culture. Old National Geographic illustrations fantasized whuppin' slaves, etc. But no, it now seems. They couldn't have been built without an incredibly sophisticated realization of the unity throughout the entire society. Slaves there might have been, but they really show up later, in the New Kingdom dynasties, when Charlton Heston and Edward G Robinson hold sway.

It may very well have been the case, that non-members in good standing of the society were not permitted to work on the pyramids, like getting dinged by Social Security or losing your Green Card. And also, this for vast projects, we know the great pyramid was built in thirty years--one generation. Some Gothic cathedrals in Europe are still unfinished.

Okay. For another example in the New World, the vast structures of the Moche culture, in the north of Peru, called "pyramids" of the moon--this is a later, fanciful attribution. The largest structures in the new world; built cooperatively, lovingly perhaps, by village groups with their own "signatures" in bricklaying. The logistics, again incredible--how do you just feed all those people working together? How to direct traffic? Maybe slaves--probably not. Ritual, collective, honorable, possibly joyous work; the common work of the people as one of the archaic bases for unity. In other words, people speaking, and hearing the same language. As the motto on the back of our US one dollar bill states: Novus Ordo Seclorum, new order of the ages. Could this be our "superliteracy"? What then of the secret history of the US (Robert Graves) and why this motto? Though invented in 1776, it was not publicly shown until 1935? Freedom in the information space brooks secrets.

Warning only 57 lines may be used for this text

Kurt von Meier (aka Karma rDorje Wangdu)
10/5/1979