remembering. reclamation.

Giordano Bruno lived from 1548 to 1600. part of his work had to do with the art of memory, the intensive training of the imagination in the occult arts of memory, the hermetic gnosis being the reflection of the universe within one's own mind or memory. man's mind as itself divine and reflecting the divine mind behind the universe.

pkd writes that "the kind of memory that Bruno was cultivating--and teaching techniques by which to restore the memory--is the long-term DNA gene pool memory that spans many lifetimes. The retrieval of this long-term meory is called anamnesis, which literally means the loss of forgetfulness. it is only by means of anamnesis, then, that memory truly capable of 'reflecting the divine mind behind the universe' is brought into being...Anamnesis is achieved when certain inhibited neural circuits in the human brain are disinhibited. the individual cannot achieve this himself; the disinhibiting stimulus is external to him and must be presented to him, whereupon a process in his brain is set into motion by which he eventually will be capable of fulfilling his task...if there is penetration in the microcosmos to the divine substratum, the divine substratum of the macrocosmos will manifest itself to the man...the point of entrance to effect this transformation lies in the person, the microcosm, not the macrocosm. the sanctifying metamorphosis occurs there...all the mystery religions...hold the individual human as target by which to transmute the universe. by changing the person the world is changed...our process universe is a mechanism by which God meets Himself at last face to face...the artifact is teaching him, painfully, by degrees, over thousands of years, to remember--who he is and what he is...the Urgrund has dispatched a Champion to assist us. The Advocate...He is invisible, except for those whom he rescues. The artifact does not know that the Advocate is here again; the rescue is being done in stealth. He is everywhere and nowhere." And he brings destruction, the annihilation of one's world as one knows it.

pkd, continuing, "The protonarrative of this is found in Euripides' The Bacchae. A stranger enters the kingdom of the 'king of tears,' who has him imprisoned for no cause. the stranger turns out to be the high priest of dionysos, which is equal to being the god himself. the stranger bursts the prison (a symbol of the enslaving world) and then systematically destroys the king by driving him insane, and in a public way that not only abolishes him but (also) turns the king into a laughingstock for the multitude that his reign has oppressed. if the prison represents this world, what does the 'king of tears' represent? nothing less than the creator of this world: the mechanical, ruthless, unheeding artifact itself, which is to say, the king or god of this world."

a key word here is trigger. the mystery is that one can't awaken oneself. nor can the effect of the awakening be described. the apocalypse. the day of judgment. the horn blows and "here is your life." a cruel gauntlet is walked. if the ecstatic did not bolster, one would be lost.

resurrection is a matter of rising again, or reawakening. "Jesus when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost. And behold the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake and the rocks rent; and the graves were opened, and many bodies of the saints which slept arose. And came out of the graves after his resurrection...." The Greek word for those graves is mnemeion, from mneme, meaning memory. Christ split the veil of his body in two, so that memories opened and the preserved bodies of the victims, sound and whole, emerged from memory after his rising again.

involved is a version of initiation by terror. successive shocks. yet "the end does not justify the means." the pedagogical infliction of pain "for your own good" is sheer perversity and creates a deformed psyche. pkd writes that he believes pain is required for gnosis, is employed for purposes of gnosis, and it is true that shock enables the brain to reformat its wiring. but this does not make the infliction of pain for purposes of illumination "good."

rather, if it hurts breaking a leg, it hurts having the bone pulled back into place.

when done looking at the "reclamation" page, click away the browser window it popped in to return here and continue