Gaia Responds to a Sane Human Witness
Introduction
Recently, new readers and long-time followers of metahistory.org have been asking me the same question. Well, two questions in one, actually. First, How can I behold the Organic Light, with the aim of taking instruction? And second, What does Gaia herself have to say about the current collapse of global society?
It’s obvious how the two questions are related: Whoever can behold the OL and take instruction is in a unique position to ask Gaia directly about her view of the current breakdown of society. Well, folks, there’s the job description and the assignment in one sentence. Since I appear to be the first in line to qualify for this position, I will now begin to report directly from my ecstatic encounters with the Organic Light. I will describe the questions I put to Gaia and attempt to transcribe the responses I receive. I invite readers to comment on the entries in this section of the website. Unless I am advised with the comment submitted to keep it off line, I will post all entries that I deem appropriate, copying them from the email into this page.
Infinity Ridge, Monday 23 June 2008
Infinity Ridge is a place in the Serrania de Ronda I discovered in June 2002. Over the last six years, it has became a sacred locale for visionary practice for myself, Joanna Harcourt-Smith, and other mystic travelers and psychonauts who share the aims of telestic shamanism.
Infinity Ridge, Andalucia
I week ago I went up to Infinity Ridge with the express intent to ask Gaia this question:
How can those who recognize you as the living, indwelling intelligence of the planet find their way through the present extinction?
I spent seven hours on the Ridge contemplating the light over the Sierra de Libar, toward the north, and toward the point of Tarifa, southwest, at the mouth of the Straights of Gibraltar. I would not say that my audition was pitch-perfect on that day. (Audition: clairaudience in a state of trance learning, usually induced by psychoactive plants.) I had quite a lot going on due to some tantric operations I am currently engaged in. Ideally, I ought to have concentrated the entire session on taking instruction, but I had my attention on two other tasks as well. The result was, a semi-toned rather than a full-toned audition. Let me take a moment to clarify the jargon here.
In a full-toned audition, taking instruction from the Light, you are totally overwhelmed by serenity and clarity, if I may use the word “overwhelmed” in this context. This is impeccable silent knowing, with no room for distraction of any kind. You are immersed in total awe and fullness, steady as a mountain. You do not think: you are the subject of a wordless thinking that arises from a current that moves like a huge serpent through your body and sheds a skin of cognitive signals, a skin-chain of scales that flicker in your synaptic lights and flare into ideation, forming a stream of coherent thoughts. The thinking you register in this state is not your own, and may originate from various supernatural and superhuman sources. When it originates from Gaia, from the Aeon Sophia directly, it registers in your body tonically like a familiar, soothing voice. The aural tonality of Gaia’s voice sounds different for each of us, but it is unmistakable. It sounds like the voice of someone you love, speaking to you beyond the limits of time and death.
In full-toned audition, I hear Gaia’s voice in her way of speaking to me, which is sultry and comforting. I did not hear this last Monday on the ridge, so I refer to semi-toned audition. I heard Gaia but as if through a filter, or as if registered on an answering machine. I intend to return to the Ridge in a few days and complete this audition in full-toned reception.
Transception
For the moment, I will transcribe what I heard last Monday. It was a unique experience for me, in that it came in three distinct surges, each with its own emergent content, or curl. I use the analogy to surfing: the surfer “in the curl” rides under the crashing edge of the wave. In trance-learning, the shaman rides in the curl of immense waves of information that pour through the atmosphere, the ambient field of the planet. The surf of clairaudient instruction unrolls in an opening movement, rather than rolls and crashes. As it unrolls, you store it, or try to. The act of receiving and storing instruction is called transception—a term from the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan shamanism. (The Tibetan word escapes me at the moment.) It means that you receive and retain what comes through you. A kind of channeling, if you will. Retention of instruction is a high shamanic discipline and can never be more than partially accomplished. In some instances, I have not retained more than a third of what I received. Of that third, only a fraction could be translated to others….
The first instruction I retained is:
Pay attention to water, RIGHT NOW.
I capitalize RIGHT NOW because that it how I heard it, and I was, I must say, rather stunned. I have not heard this tone or urgency before in any audition. Usually, the tone of transception is calm, sober, detached. This command came with acute urgency. It was an instruction like others I have received, but pronounced with emphatic urgency.
Next, I heard this:
Pay attention to the anaerobic systems, how they interface with water, drinkable water.
I had to take about an hour to contemplate this statement. I am not sure that I understand what Gaia was telling me here, but I will tell you how I worked it through, so far. I understood that the planetary ecosystem is not in endangered by human activity. We can’t get near anything that would harm Gaia in other than a minor way, like a scratch, a paper cut on your finger that would heal in a couple of days. “Forest ecosystems collapsing,” “species going extinct” is human hype, a reflection of our arrogance, but real enough from our perspective. These events are not to Gaia what they are to us. They do not threaten her at all, they are in fact her measures for regeneration and a future enstatement of her purposes. They are cathartic. She is detoxing us. The more toxic we are, the less likely we will survive the process.
Back-Up Generators
As I reflected more, I glimpsed that the anaerobic systems are comparable to a back-up or emergency generator bank for Gaia in regard to what I will call the epi-culture of human making. In epiphenomenon is a phenomenon that arises secondarily to another, primary phenomenon. Human culture on this planet is an epiphenomenon, an epi-system or epi-culture humanly conceived and constructed, not a direct product of natural processes, not a direct expression of Gaian intelligence. What I glimpsed— and what I intend to investigate further, because I am not certain that I have it entirely right—is that the “back-up system” (such as we see in a hospital or office building, to provide emergency power when the main power goes out) kicks in, not because the Gaian ecosystem as a whole is at risk of collapse, but because the human-centered episystem cannot sustain itself on main power, natural resources. We have passed the limit where we can continue to function socially and globally as we do on existing resources. Not so much because resources are limited, but because we have surpassed our capacity to use them in a timely and adequate manner. (More on this point below.)
The message that echoed over Infinity Ridge that day seemed to well up from the mountains around me, amplify through the clouds, and shiver in the wind:
Your cultural system is not going to collapse
IT IS IN COLLAPSE
NOW
IN TOTAL COLLAPSE
RIGHT NOW
The episystem on which we depend for food, clothing, and shelter is collapsing right now, all over the planet. There is no point in waiting for the moment when it will collapse in front of your eyes, when the ripple will reach your front yard. It is insane to wait for something to happen that is already happening. The sane and sober response to this realization is act before the panic.
The collapse is now. Then follows the panic. And the panic is coming fast. I had a quick preview of it on the ridge. It looks like a disaster movie that makes Escape from L.A. and Mad Max as innocent and amusing as Disney cartoons. You do not want to be in this movie. You do not want to wait until the Blockbuster DVD comes out with you in a cameo role. The dialogue is atrocious and the acting will drive you mad. The production values are hideous. Avoid being in this movie. Consider what to do before the panic. Consider it for at least twenty minutes each day and act on what comes to mind. Before all else, Pay attention to water, RIGHT NOW.
The panic when it hits will be like a glacier calving in your Wheaties one morning at breakfast. There is no way for anyone to prepare for what comes in the panic, but you can prepare for the panic. This is a key message I extracted from the Monday audition, unlike any I have ever received from Gaia. The urgency was electrifying.The message is: Prepare for the panic before it hits you, because no one can prepare for what will happen when the panic hits. Practical measures, survivalist strategies, group emergency drills, whatever– at this is fine. There is just one thing you are overlooking because it is inconceivable: what will happen to your sense of time. A day, a week, a month, will go in a flash. No even a flash. A blur. You will not be able to think fast enough to manage what comes to you. At moments you will forget who you know, even your closest relatives, your parents and children. You will be saved by people you don’t know, who will disappear in a minute, and threatened to death by others you do not know, who may not disappear so quickly. Your time on earth, your sense of being alive in the moment, will blur into uncertainty under a tension whose intensity you cannot begin to conceive.
Call to Beauty
Lest all this sound negative and, worst of all, alarmist, let me qualify. On the ridge I pondered until I sweat about the alarmist element. Read The Throw of Dice for some sobering advice on this issue. The message of what to do before the panic is not an alarmist message. It is perhaps the anti-dote to alarmism. I will do whatever I can to make this point clear and use the right language to convey what I am transceiving about the current collapse of our episystem. I urge everyone reading these words to make a determined exercise of clearing their minds of any and all forms of alarmism. NEVER speak or communicate with an alarmist intent or tone, if you can help it. NEVER.
Against alarmism, Gaia responds with a message that will register in the heart of all those who are truly her devotees, those who desire nothing more than to learn the sublime discipline of her purposes. To instill this message in your minds, I give you her words, verbatim:
To survive in Beauty is my safe passage for you.
If the human experiment fails, and disappears in the current extinction, it will be because of one failure, one supreme shortcoming, above all others: not to observe beauty. The epi-culture we have created must go because it is too ugly to endure, too ugly to be tolerated. We perish from not observing beauty: this is the epitaph of the human species. The same for the behaviours of greed and deceit that run that epiculture. These behaviors must perish. Only what is beautiful does Gaia deem worthy to preserve. Only what is beautiful in us will preserve us. Indeed, only what is beautiful will serve us, when push comes to shove. In Beauty we have safe passage to a future worth living. The call to Beauty counteracts the disorienting hysteria of alarmism because alarmism triggers a need to survive at any cost, in any fashion, but in the sanity and honor of our hearts, all we really desire is to be beautiful in Gaia’s ways. Beautiful, sober, playful, serene.
That is how those who recognize Gaia as the living, indwelling intelligence of this planet will get through the current extinction.
The Bee Omen
Curiously, epiculture is the word for the cultivation of bees. Recently I saw a quote from (Xenosh alert) Einstein to the effect that, “Once bees disappear from the world, the human race will have four years to survive.”
jll: 30 June 2008. Andalusia