From 1998-2000 I had an enjoyable stint as a musician working in the house band of an alternative theatre company that staged the revival of Neil Oram's notorious 1970s play The Warp. At this time, I taught a course in Star Mythology as a means of personal and transpersonal development and began a never-competed adult educational project called 'Live Learning'. The article below (and the next to be posted) were written for a magazine produced mutually by some of those drawn into the wacky world of the Warp. The magazine was known as the I Opener and I will post more details about this defunct publication if circumstances permit.
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HINTS FOR HERETICS: (MEMOS OF A SPY FOR LOVE) THE EXPERT IS DEAD. LONG LIVE LEARNING!
“In Chaldea, Babylon, Egypt, Rome, we have always had this group of people who control everyone else through the trick of mystification and privilege. For instance, in Egypt a situation arose, whereby only a certain people were allowed to use number. All financial transactions had to be conducted by them, and of course they took a cut out of every deal.” Buckminster Fuller
In any war it's essential to know the enemy. Many of us feel that human insanity is putting us all in grave danger; but we need to isolate the source of infection to combat it. We must see that the problem is not simply technology, aggression or leadership. All of these human (or rather, animal) qualities have decayed, but in their true form they're among our greatest assets.
For example, humanity only survived and thrived in a world shared with bigger and stronger predators thanks to the use of technology: the discovery of fire, the bow and arrow, the blade...Since prehistoric times, our instincts haven't changed that much. Despite our pretences of being essentially superior to animals, world affairs show us that sex and territorialism still run the show, at least for male... politicians.
If we weren't so hypocritical, we would accept these instincts, and handle them rather than pretending to be oh-so spiritual and transcendental. The difference is, our 'cave-man' ancestors didn't have the option of destroying the world at the flick of a switch. What on earth is going on?
For all our technology and information, the human species is sick to the core. And Buckie's quote directs us, ruthlessly, to the real symptoms of decay, namely: the hoarding of specialised knowledge, the self-aggrandising of an 'elite', and their intrinsic greed. And all these in connection with the realm of NUMBER.
How you find yourself in the universe depends on how you understand number. We have long been 'educated' to see the cosmos as 'obeying impersonal laws'. Needless to say, this prepares us, as good citizens, to obey inhuman laws and be treated as quantities in a vast equation. Yet, once number was regarded as a profound, sacred mystery: the revelation of the Cosmic Intelligence woven through all things. The Music of the Spheres! Once, the whirling of the stars was felt as a great dance. Caught up in the ecstasy of the cosmic love that makes the universe spin round unceasingly in praise of its creator, the great Sufi poet Rumi once started to whirl spontaneously, and so originated the tradition of the Whirling dervishes.
But we lost the Music of the Spheres through profaning the mysteries of number. The inner dynamics of this process have much to do with the Myth of the Expert, and its origins in the decline of The Mysteries. However, on the historical plane, this profanation became a global human crisis through the agricultural revolution. We settled down. We divided up the land and invented the sacrilegious concept of 'property'. We quantified the land in terms of 'yield'. We invented new laws and social mores to maintain the property-structure. Amongst other things, this led to the nuclear family, rigid abstract laws of justice, and the standardisation of barter into MONEY.
Thus arose the era of patriarchy, money and status. It is obvious that this gave prime significance to quantitative mathematics and geometry, which literally means 'measuring the earth'.
Putting fences round your land!
Our growing selfishness helped deceive us into to a view of nature (and women by extension) as something to be exploited, which eventually closed our minds to the living perception of nature. The stars begun to be seen merely in terms of a useful 'clock' for farmers' harvesting, just as the earth became a machine for food-production. The Music of the Spheres was lost. And later a 'deterministic' astrology arose, which viewed people as identical 'crops' of a particular month. And so arose the situation evoked in these profound and surreal words:
"So don't mention the stars! You call that fun? Infernal machinery! High precision turbines. Whirling gears, hammering on the anvil. And look at the sparks shooting out! And what's coming out of the sparks? Machine gun fire. Rolls Royces. Baby elephants. Tea and coffee. And porkpie hats. You call that fun? It's bloody torture. Torture day and night." King David, the 'aristocratic tramp' of The Warp
The Cosmos is beauty itself. It is humanity that has lost the cosmos and left torture, in its greedy will to exploit, and its loss of reverence and love for the earth. Every musician knows that numerical rhythm can be felt. So does every dancer. Every student of nature who uses their eyes and living senses rather than merely electron-microscopes sees the wonder of the mathematical harmonies that fill nature: logarithmic spirals, pi and phi ratios etc. Every architect traditionally knew that mathematical proportion results in beauty.
The arts have preserved our links with primal, human sanity. Against all odds.
LIVE LEARNING VS SCIENTIA DEMENTIA
It's almost as if we were punished for our betrayal of nature and the secrets of number by an evolutional decay. Or even as if we wanted this decay to hide our exploitative mentality from us. For the use of number-knowledge to enslave nature and humans was felt by many sane humans in the past to be a pure form of 'black magic'. How convenient that we feel no empathy for life, as it's all become so abstract! Maybe other people don't even exist! Certainly, animals don't mind being used for experiments!
Farcically, this decay is praised everywhere as the mainstream of Western intellectual tradition of philosophy and science. It's commonly known as 'abstract thought'. Consider the gruesome cultural phenomenon now seen in the 'train-spotter' or 'anorak'. His counterpart in academe is the 'abstract philosopher' and the pure researcher. Thinking in the abstract; dreaming of 'other' realms; playing with the 'print-preview' software of the frontal brain; pretending that shadow-thought is more real than anything else, especially matters of ethics and aesthetics.
Clever little boys with their toys! But imagine if a group of super-bright boys with an average emotional age of 9 found themselves in charge of nuclear technology... Pure science! Like the 'pure science' the nuclear physicists of the 1930s were doing, with no particular concern for its possible applications. The ape-leaders of the world found a use for it, though, didn't they... And Einstein was racked with guilt for his part in the development of 20th century physics, even though he was the most intuitive and aesthetic genius among them.
We all know that abstract thought is ethically dangerous, that it produces ugly music, and ugly buildings. It kills life. But most people are intimidated by the academic establishment, who they feel must, unfortunately, be right (in spite of everything). After all, they write on the blackboard, and punish us if we're not 'good pupils'...
As Live Learning* (LL) agents, we have to say that abstract thought is just plain wrong. The 'success' of material science doesn't change this. For, a materialistic scientist is like a sorcerer casting spells and incantations in an ancient, foreign black magic language. Something happens, but the scientist has no idea what his 'words of power' truly meant. Yup, most scientists really have no idea of the meaning of all the technology of the 20th century, as little idea as an ape has of the mechanism of a bomb when it presses the big red button.
But there is a true alternative to 'scientia dementia': an imaginative-aesthetic knowledge of nature. Here at LL we are interested in the potentialities of imagination as a way of knowing the world in more intimate and dynamic ways. Obviously, this puts the arts at the centre of our sensuous- salon- seminars. This mood underlies the great imaginative 'sciences' of the world, especially alchemy and Tantric cosmology. It is implicit in the work of pioneers such as Einstein himself and Wilhelm Reich. It is explicit in the thought of Buckminster Fuller, and especially the science of the great poet-scientist Goethe.
Inspired by past Live Learners, we may hope that imagination will be progressively discovered as our key tool for an authentic knowledge of life. In our up and coming LL meetings, we'll be making some tantalising approaches to imaginative knowledge. It's the least we can do in the war-effort for poetry, and probably the only way to save humanity from destroying itself and the planet. (If we can be bothered and there's nothing on TV).
Author's Footnote: The ultimate reason for choosing 'star mythology' as the inaugural LL course was to point to the need to find the magic in astronomy (star number) by working with myth as a method of opening the imagination. The dead rational brain silenced The Music of the Spheres, and gave us a mathematical-deterministic astrology. LL begun the counterattack!
James North 1999
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HINTS FOR HERETICS: (MEMOS OF A SPY FOR LOVE) THE EXPERT IS DEAD. LONG LIVE LEARNING!
“In Chaldea, Babylon, Egypt, Rome, we have always had this group of people who control everyone else through the trick of mystification and privilege. For instance, in Egypt a situation arose, whereby only a certain people were allowed to use number. All financial transactions had to be conducted by them, and of course they took a cut out of every deal.” Buckminster Fuller
In any war it's essential to know the enemy. Many of us feel that human insanity is putting us all in grave danger; but we need to isolate the source of infection to combat it. We must see that the problem is not simply technology, aggression or leadership. All of these human (or rather, animal) qualities have decayed, but in their true form they're among our greatest assets.
For example, humanity only survived and thrived in a world shared with bigger and stronger predators thanks to the use of technology: the discovery of fire, the bow and arrow, the blade...Since prehistoric times, our instincts haven't changed that much. Despite our pretences of being essentially superior to animals, world affairs show us that sex and territorialism still run the show, at least for male... politicians.
If we weren't so hypocritical, we would accept these instincts, and handle them rather than pretending to be oh-so spiritual and transcendental. The difference is, our 'cave-man' ancestors didn't have the option of destroying the world at the flick of a switch. What on earth is going on?
For all our technology and information, the human species is sick to the core. And Buckie's quote directs us, ruthlessly, to the real symptoms of decay, namely: the hoarding of specialised knowledge, the self-aggrandising of an 'elite', and their intrinsic greed. And all these in connection with the realm of NUMBER.
How you find yourself in the universe depends on how you understand number. We have long been 'educated' to see the cosmos as 'obeying impersonal laws'. Needless to say, this prepares us, as good citizens, to obey inhuman laws and be treated as quantities in a vast equation. Yet, once number was regarded as a profound, sacred mystery: the revelation of the Cosmic Intelligence woven through all things. The Music of the Spheres! Once, the whirling of the stars was felt as a great dance. Caught up in the ecstasy of the cosmic love that makes the universe spin round unceasingly in praise of its creator, the great Sufi poet Rumi once started to whirl spontaneously, and so originated the tradition of the Whirling dervishes.
But we lost the Music of the Spheres through profaning the mysteries of number. The inner dynamics of this process have much to do with the Myth of the Expert, and its origins in the decline of The Mysteries. However, on the historical plane, this profanation became a global human crisis through the agricultural revolution. We settled down. We divided up the land and invented the sacrilegious concept of 'property'. We quantified the land in terms of 'yield'. We invented new laws and social mores to maintain the property-structure. Amongst other things, this led to the nuclear family, rigid abstract laws of justice, and the standardisation of barter into MONEY.
Thus arose the era of patriarchy, money and status. It is obvious that this gave prime significance to quantitative mathematics and geometry, which literally means 'measuring the earth'.
Putting fences round your land!
Our growing selfishness helped deceive us into to a view of nature (and women by extension) as something to be exploited, which eventually closed our minds to the living perception of nature. The stars begun to be seen merely in terms of a useful 'clock' for farmers' harvesting, just as the earth became a machine for food-production. The Music of the Spheres was lost. And later a 'deterministic' astrology arose, which viewed people as identical 'crops' of a particular month. And so arose the situation evoked in these profound and surreal words:
"So don't mention the stars! You call that fun? Infernal machinery! High precision turbines. Whirling gears, hammering on the anvil. And look at the sparks shooting out! And what's coming out of the sparks? Machine gun fire. Rolls Royces. Baby elephants. Tea and coffee. And porkpie hats. You call that fun? It's bloody torture. Torture day and night." King David, the 'aristocratic tramp' of The Warp
The Cosmos is beauty itself. It is humanity that has lost the cosmos and left torture, in its greedy will to exploit, and its loss of reverence and love for the earth. Every musician knows that numerical rhythm can be felt. So does every dancer. Every student of nature who uses their eyes and living senses rather than merely electron-microscopes sees the wonder of the mathematical harmonies that fill nature: logarithmic spirals, pi and phi ratios etc. Every architect traditionally knew that mathematical proportion results in beauty.
The arts have preserved our links with primal, human sanity. Against all odds.
LIVE LEARNING VS SCIENTIA DEMENTIA
It's almost as if we were punished for our betrayal of nature and the secrets of number by an evolutional decay. Or even as if we wanted this decay to hide our exploitative mentality from us. For the use of number-knowledge to enslave nature and humans was felt by many sane humans in the past to be a pure form of 'black magic'. How convenient that we feel no empathy for life, as it's all become so abstract! Maybe other people don't even exist! Certainly, animals don't mind being used for experiments!
Farcically, this decay is praised everywhere as the mainstream of Western intellectual tradition of philosophy and science. It's commonly known as 'abstract thought'. Consider the gruesome cultural phenomenon now seen in the 'train-spotter' or 'anorak'. His counterpart in academe is the 'abstract philosopher' and the pure researcher. Thinking in the abstract; dreaming of 'other' realms; playing with the 'print-preview' software of the frontal brain; pretending that shadow-thought is more real than anything else, especially matters of ethics and aesthetics.
Clever little boys with their toys! But imagine if a group of super-bright boys with an average emotional age of 9 found themselves in charge of nuclear technology... Pure science! Like the 'pure science' the nuclear physicists of the 1930s were doing, with no particular concern for its possible applications. The ape-leaders of the world found a use for it, though, didn't they... And Einstein was racked with guilt for his part in the development of 20th century physics, even though he was the most intuitive and aesthetic genius among them.
We all know that abstract thought is ethically dangerous, that it produces ugly music, and ugly buildings. It kills life. But most people are intimidated by the academic establishment, who they feel must, unfortunately, be right (in spite of everything). After all, they write on the blackboard, and punish us if we're not 'good pupils'...
As Live Learning* (LL) agents, we have to say that abstract thought is just plain wrong. The 'success' of material science doesn't change this. For, a materialistic scientist is like a sorcerer casting spells and incantations in an ancient, foreign black magic language. Something happens, but the scientist has no idea what his 'words of power' truly meant. Yup, most scientists really have no idea of the meaning of all the technology of the 20th century, as little idea as an ape has of the mechanism of a bomb when it presses the big red button.
But there is a true alternative to 'scientia dementia': an imaginative-aesthetic knowledge of nature. Here at LL we are interested in the potentialities of imagination as a way of knowing the world in more intimate and dynamic ways. Obviously, this puts the arts at the centre of our sensuous- salon- seminars. This mood underlies the great imaginative 'sciences' of the world, especially alchemy and Tantric cosmology. It is implicit in the work of pioneers such as Einstein himself and Wilhelm Reich. It is explicit in the thought of Buckminster Fuller, and especially the science of the great poet-scientist Goethe.
Inspired by past Live Learners, we may hope that imagination will be progressively discovered as our key tool for an authentic knowledge of life. In our up and coming LL meetings, we'll be making some tantalising approaches to imaginative knowledge. It's the least we can do in the war-effort for poetry, and probably the only way to save humanity from destroying itself and the planet. (If we can be bothered and there's nothing on TV).
Author's Footnote: The ultimate reason for choosing 'star mythology' as the inaugural LL course was to point to the need to find the magic in astronomy (star number) by working with myth as a method of opening the imagination. The dead rational brain silenced The Music of the Spheres, and gave us a mathematical-deterministic astrology. LL begun the counterattack!
James North 1999