The Arcanum of the Loom

Something from a distant and masked future lays its seed in our present. Is it Beast or Angel? How will we raise it, educate it, nurture it? Will we be in charge of it, or will It be in charge of us?

How can we know what lives in this erupting electronic entity? The number of people on-line has been doubling every 6 months, more or less. Web pages are growing at a similar rate. Is it a cancer? Or an intervention divine?

When America was being born in revolution, electricity was almost a magician's art. Some felt that in discovering this energenic power, they had finally found the soul!

Many are writing about this unusual phenomena, which is to accompany us on our journey into the third millennium. In the pages that follow is just one more picture, perhaps ...

Lets start by just trying to hold in our imaginations a picture of these events from a certain point of view.

Picture the Earth, a blue-white sphere in space, the human habitat, embeded in a field of stars. Now form a close-up of this surface, using the inner camera of your imagination pan inward, until you see just a part of the glope, the details of the clouds, and a mere slice of starlite darkness off to one side. Next paint on this part of the sphere millions of tiny tiny light points, places where individual human beings sit before a computer screen. Next, draw very thin lines joining these light points, a seeming image of the physical bindings, the wires and other transmission links, joining these computers together.

From this view, the blue-white Earth is interwoven with a very thin weaving of light, bringing countless humans into contact with each other.

Now picture the human beings, sitting before the screens. What is outer physical is only partially relevant. More significant is what is invisible, the mind, the spirit and soul, sitting before the screen. From this inner landscape comes thoughts, feelings, activity. Two aspects of this product, this generative consequence of the inner human, are very important.

The first is this. The material structure, the computers, the links, the software, all that which exists as tool was first imagined, then created by the human being. So when I sit before my computer, this tool which I am using, owes its origin to human creative deeds, to imagination, thought, heart, will, labor, stress - all that humans have done, so that computers exist and are joined together in this weaving of light. Human consciousness has extruded from its own nature certain possiblities onto the physical world. Much like a plastics factory takes liquid plastic and molds it, so human consciousness has taken the physical world and molded this tool.

The second aspect is this. When these woven joinings are used, that is when I "surf the web", "explore the loom", send e-mail, download software, play games, buy products - all that is done via the internet, does not involve the physical, except as tool. It is my inside, my mind, my soul and spirit, which "surfs the web" and so forth.

Now consider two human beings, joined by the woven light. The physical is irrelevant. Only the soul and spiritual, the mind, the inner life, is involved. Someone sends e-mail. The next reads it. A very special process happens in these most simple acts. When I compose e-mail, before my fingers type, my inner voice speaks, and my feelings and will are involved. When I read e-mail, again my inner voice speaks, and my feelings and will are involved. The most significant acts are all invisible to the eye. The only trace left in the physical is the image-symbols, the letters, mere lines of dark on light. The meaning attributed to these symbols is all an internal act. If I mis-speak, or if I mis-read, this is my responsibility.

Not easy to communicate, one mind to the other, on the loom of woven light. Understanding the word*, both in its inner and outer manifestations, is crucial, if true communication, community and communion is sought for.

Truth can be ignored. False statements are commonplace. Abuse is not unknown. The use that is made of the loom of woven light is a moral act. The loom itself is neutral; it is simply a tool.

Imagine now the content on the loom. Webpages, websites, homepages, commercial sites, game rooms, chat rooms, talk (most written), content, pictures, information. How does it get there? Why is it there?

Certainly that which is done for the purposes of commerce is fairly clear. But much that is on the loom, comes to be there because of love, even that which is on commercial sites. Love? Yes, love.

Go take a look. Ask about orchids, for example. Do a search for orchids. Many sites, beautiful pictures. Why is this there? Because someone loves orchids and wants to share that love with others. Much that is on the loom is there because of time and effort which is completely unpaid. No money is earned, yet the "information" is there, free, for the asking.

Suppose you thought you might have adult onset diabetes. You hear that diet can manage this disorder. You go to the loom, and behold, site after site. Information on diet, food, advice, doctors, medicines and more. Commercial sites, some, but mostly just ordinary people who have faced this problem themselves, and who, out of love, place this information, that they have won through hard labor and suffering, on the loom so that others can find it.

Now, let us imagine again our picture. The blue-white globe, nested in the field of stars, covered over with individual stars of its own, individuals, fallen stars, living on the Earth, joined by weavings of light, singing to each other, sharing, offering, giving ...

Rub your feet or shoes or socks across a carpet, and touch another person to see a spark. Heat and light and sound appear, a miniature lightning flows from our finger to leap the gap between that and another object, person, wall, whatever.

On a desk, bigger than a breadbox, a computer sits. Subdued, channeled, perhaps mastered, that spark runs effortlessly, faster than thought itself, performing a million tasks a second, often in a space not much larger then a postage stamp.

What is that spark? What is electricity? One very deep thinker calls electricity "fallen light". Let us for the moment assume this is true. What is this person trying to say to us?

Lucifer is called a fallen Angel. Prideful, independent, disobediant, Lucifer could no longer face God, and fell, from Grace, from heaven. So if electricity is "fallen", or graceless and prideful and disobediant, separated from the Divine, what was its original state? What is unfallen light?

In Goethe's Farbenlehre (Theory of Color), he speaks of the "deeds and sufferings of light". What kind of physics is this which sees "light" as Being? "Fiat Lux!" spoke God, in the Creation: "Let there be Light!".

We only think we see light, when in fact true light is invisible, and we only see color. Think on this. Look around for yourself. Look! At night, while the moon is full. During the day, when the shadows move. Yes, I know what your physics book says, but, there is a revolution coming, and it is coming right at science, and its name is: magic. (See also: Catching the Light: the entwined history of light and mind, Arthur Zanjonc)

Stand in a narrow doorway, facing into the room. Move your arms out until the backs of your hands rest against the side of the doorway. Now begin to press outward with your arms. Press hard, it needs to hurt some. Hold this pressing tension with all your strength for at least a full 60 seconds. Then quickly step into the room and completely relax your arms. Place no will in these limbs at all. If you've done this correctly, your arms will rise of their own accord, then fall, then rise again, but not quite as high as before, then fall, then rise again. Usually at least three risings.

In this way you can experience for yourself a force called levity, which is the counter pole of the gravity force. This levity force works from the cosmic perifery in toward the center as a drawing or suctional force. The rising of the sap in all plant life comes from the action of this force. However, this force is not light itself. In the science of the future, which already is appearing in this century, this force is also called the ethereal formative force, in its biological ramifications. It is the force which takes the plastic maleable nature of the biological organism and gives it form. Its existence is a by-product of the existence of light. It is our will which impels the levity force into our limb muscles, so that when we relax, the excessive levity is strong enought to overcome gravity, until it is used up. It is our will that is of the light.

Take a magnifying glass and look closely at the palms of your hands. The lines there are produced by the streaming in and out of your body, through the hands, of the ethereal formative forces. The Beings who create these forces are what the aboriginal Americans honored in their Ceremonies connected to the Four Directions.

Form an image in your imagination. Try to hold this image, not letting it slip away, or disolve. Not at all easy to use the light, is it?

Modern materialistic science posits a completely consciousless and beingless universe. This science is only able to do this by systematically excluding data from its experiments, so that at each new stage the knowledge produced is more and more about less and less. Science can't find soul and spirit, consciousness and essence, at the basis of the universe, because at each turn of its examination it has eliminated and reduced the facts it would admit for consideration. Having excluding all that was difficult to control and count, of course it could only find a universe that was controllable and countable. Science didn't find the truth of the world, it just invented a new myth. To see the history of this, get and read: Man or Matter, by Ernst Lehrs. See also this essay: The Misconception of Cosmic Space* As Appears In the Ideas of Modern Astronomy
- and as contained in the understandably limited thinking embodied in the conceptions of the nature of parallax and redshift

Sit quietly in a chair, upright, relaxed, yet alert. Imagine that you are breathing through all the pores in your body. Don't control or alter in any way the natural semiconscious rhythm of your breathing, just form the imagination that as you inhale, light is also drawn into your body through the pores, then out again when you exhale. With some practice, you will learn to breath in and out of your body, the light. See Step II, Initiation into Hermetics, Franz Bardon.

Matter arises from the condensation of the elements. This condensation has occurred over time in rhythmic pulses. The elements in this case are the magical-classical ones: fire, air, water and earth. This rhythmic condensation produces in its wake an organism of a variety of types of matter, ordered according to the elemental gravity-levity balance therein - gravity and levity being by-products of the activity of the elements during this condensation. This produces the well recognized table of chemical elements. See in this regard: Radiant matter: decay and consecration, by Georg Blattmann, and The Nature of Substance, by Rudolf Hauschka.

The elements are the product of the activity of beings - invisible cosmic beings. In the human being, the seed of these cosmic powers is found in will (fire), intellect (air), feeling (water) and consciousness (earth). People forget that Newton was an Alchemist.

Matter then is magically enchanted Being. Gurdjieff describes this in All and Everything, as the sacrifice of a group of beings who forever then accepted complete passivity. Woven into this arrangment is another class of beings, who joined in the rebellion against heaven lead by Lucifer. It is their nature which appears then in matter as cohesion. That matter has the quality that it coheres is due to the presence of these fallen light beings, as their part of that great sacrifice from which the acceptence of eternal passivity creates solidity out of pure spirit. That I have a physical body and can't put my fist through the wall next to me is due to this sacrifice.

Our technological civilization - our electified civilization - is made possible by the unconscious breaking of this enchantment, and the freeing of this fallen light from its true and natural place and placing it instead into seemingly man made devices, so as to perform services for us. Lest you think this is completely crazy, just recall for a moment some comic book magic grimore you have seen with its strange style of writing, the sybolism of incantation and spell weaving, and then look at an electrical diagram, or wiring diagram, and realize that without the acts and symbolic thinking that has gone with this development, electricity would have remained an obscure and misunderstood element of science.

Faraday perceived the polaric and reciprical arrangments of the energies of electricity, but his concepts regarding ponderable and imponderable natures was discarded as those who followed preferred a more spiritless set of conceptions. Clerk Maxwell's equations are not possible without Faraday's laws. Thus, the understood (by Faraday) spiritual nature of what he was working with disappears, and mankind gains some apparent mastery of electricity, but no true understanding of its nature.

Perhaps, you who are reading this, are sitting in front of a computer, and you have had some experience of what in electrical circles are called "glitches". Electricity does not always behave, and we do not always understand when it does not, because when it misbehaves it acts contrary to our assumptions about its nature. We dismiss these acts and ignore them because they do not fit the pattern we assume is true. But anomylous electrical phenomena abounds, and there are deep mysteries for those who are willing to be open to them. Keely, Russel, and Tesla, created works difficult to reproduce, which yet inspire others to follow into many places outside the mainstream thinking of modern physics (which has trapped itself in the repeating loop of the quantum assumption).

We use a tool we do not understand, and about which we hold tragic illusions. In our minds lives a false idea, a ghost, a shadow of the truth, and if we are to master the next phase of the electrification of our civilization, the so-called information revolution (a big misconception by the way) we have to begin by understanding the nature of electricity first.

A computer is a dark servant, just waiting to be even more freed from its bindings. A copper wire is not a hollow tube through which little bubbles of electricity dance. The word "current" is a misconception. Electricity does not flow. When electricity is present in an object, such as a copper wire, the deep nature of that wire is altered. The matter (the copper) exists in a different condition then it does when electricty is not present. This is why "superconductivity" is aided by extreme temperatures of cold. Consider:

We are told cooling lowers the electrical "resistance" of the matter cooled. The truth is not so difficult. Water freezes and becomes ice, that is it "crystalizes". Which means that the deep structure (what we imagine as "atomic", and "molecular", that is as very small bodies, are in fact not material bodies at all, but "points of intersection" of forces - forces being the passive will of enchanted beings) of super cooled matter is pushed in the same "direction", i.e. toward the crystalline - that is the tension in the matter between the tendencies toward chaos and the tendencies toward order is overbalanced in the direction of order. In matter so overbalanced, so placed in an "unnatural" state, "fallen light" has more freedom.

The brain has electricity in it. Our nervous system exhibits some qualities similar to electrical systems. Are our thoughts the movement of these electrical impulses? Are our thoughts some form of fallen light?

No. Our thoughts are of another nature entirely. As a by-product of that activity which produces thinking, the material aparatus of the brain (which doesn't think by the way) displays the release of "fallen light", which is also in the matter of our bodies. Our material bodies also have "coherence", and when thinking occurs, the matter ages, loses some small part of its coherence, and "electricity" appears.

The brain is an organ which mediates between the spiritual and the material. One of the ways thinking is thought about today, uses the computer as a model. Our brains are seen as similar to a computer, hardwired systems, with software built in. There is some value to this image, as long as we are careful not to make too much of it.

Consider this: A computer consists, apparently, of hardware and software - material apparatus and programs that run on that apparatus. The mind, in the view of some, is similar, just that instead of inorganic matter, it is organic (whatever that is). This view is in error, but the analogy might work if a missing parts were not left out.

Someone made the computer, thought it up, created it, and wrote the software. In addition someone uses all this in order to accomplish something, to express something. So, if this analogy is to mean anything, we have to keep the whole thing, and not believe the computer and the software evolved through blind chance, or that it operates itself purely on the basis of its internally determined structures.

So the human being has aspects which are given. He/she has other aspects which are self determined. You doubt this, you think the human being is a bio-chemically determined thing? Elsewhere on this site are materials, which if followed, will show the individual the true nature of their inner (spiritual) freedom.

Thinking is a transcendent act, not a material one. As an aid to the discover of this I refer again to The Quiet Suffering of Nature , especially the aspects concerning the study of projective geometry. Consider this:

Many years ago, Abraham Lincoln is said to have studied Euclid's Elements of Geometry, an early classical geometry text, in order to discipline his mind. Now and in the future we might study Olive Whicher's Projective Geometry: Creative Polarities in Time and Space, seeking by this study to bring a whole other level of discipline to the mind. This is the key to so many things, which are not possible without it.

Everyone understands the need for physical exercise. The mind needs exercise as well, both in terms of "stretching", such as the study of the above geometry, and "discipline", which is to tame its (the mind's) excessess with true moral understanding (see again the gift of the word; pragmatic moral psychology , and Living Thinking in Action).

When this stretching and discipline become common practice, then mind transcends ordinary thinking, and the idea of mind as an electro-chemical physical organ disappears (see also: The Idea of Mind: a Christian meditator considers the problem of consciousness , this site). There is no other way of it but to walk the path and discover matters through one's own experience. To argue about what has been written above is deny discourse and scientific method, which requires reproducible experiments and protocols. To acquire the stretching and discipline refered to above is to accomplish all that.

Which comes first the chicken or the egg? Which comes first the big bang and evolution, or our ideas that these should or could be? Can mind arise spontaneously by accident? Or must mind come to be born of something of like nature? Can anything exist, which was not first conceived? Consider this:

Nothing a human being has created (which is not real creation anyway, just a re-arrangement of the already given) was not first thought. That is, all material re-arranging flows from a prior invisible act. In this, is it not possible that an echo exists of something which has preceeded it.? Does not our process of creation - even just in re-aranging - mirror our own creation? It is said that before we became, we were first thoughts in the mind of God. For the purposes of this, the third and last interation, let us consider this an axiom.

In another place of this part of the loom (my cyber-home) can be found a description of God's "splitting", the initial process of creation (see Earth Ranger 2323 , this site). Creation in this sense has more to do with music then with things "blowing up". Kepler, for example, who not only was an astrologer, in his third law of planetary motion considered that he had rediscovered the Music of the Spheres.

Music has themes, melodies, counterpoints, changes of rhythm and texture. In that God has split Himself in the Creation, the music has now more that one Instrument. Some Instruments never leave the Realm of the Invisible to live and learn in the realm of the visible. Some of God's children, the human beings, do. But as Instruments, these children are incomplete. Other Instruments are more complete - but in thinking this we must not conceive of these instruments as material. Earthly music is only a poor echo of the Music of the Spheres, and the instruments with which we make earthly music are only poor imitations of the real Instruments, the cosmic spirits, the hierarchies, angels, archangels, archi, and on, all the way to the sublime Cherubim and Seraphim.

The given world, the material world, is the Creation out of the Deeds of the Instruments - an Echo, as it were. In a way, we can look at the material world, the world of the senses, and recognize that it reveals something hidden. Just like the pattern in the iron filings given by the field of the magnet unveils that invisible field, so does the material world (at a much greater level of complexity) unveil the invisible within the visible. Evolution, in that as an idea it attempts to portray creation as a kind of accidental combining and re-combining, looks but does not see. The Natural world expresses, in material form, the Music of the Spheres, and it is no wonder at all why nature is so beautiful, endlessly fresh, rhythmic, melodious, and full of all the mirth and drama we find so astounding in the great symphonic works of classical music. Moreover, we, as the children, are essential and central to the scheme of things.

Of what point music without an audience? A sunset without a human being to see it has no meaning. We also are a theme, expressed from out of Cosmic Music. Not only that, but only within us, within our own invisibleness is the symphony completed. Outer nature is but a part of something which is not whole unless the human being forms the thoughts, gives the names, utters the inner word, without which meaning would not exist. And in that we give meaning, we but echo that larger Word from which Meaning comes.

So what part of the Music is the computer? What has the human being expressed in his mastery of the re-combiniing of the given material world in creating a machine that uses fallen light to perform so many calculations a second that it stands on the threshold of becoming able to mimic the human mind?

Consider what is missing in this image. Unfallen light is missing. Life is missing. Real intelligence is missing. The work of the human being is incomplete. Can we give a machine a conscience? Do we dare, or must we finish the work begun, and learn first to understand light and life and intelligence and conscience, before we attempt to truly echo the Creation?

Look at the symbol carefully. Start at the upper left, where we start when we write this symbol. A small sphere, a symbol of wholeness, leaps into movement and then descends, disappearing into a point, before leaping a gap and ending in a second sphere. The first gesture disappears, sacrifices itself, before recreating another image of its basic form. Consider: "God said, "Let us make mankind in our image and likeness;..." Genesis 1:26.