Chapter 6: OM
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct. - Sigmund Freud
The sixth concept is the Sun which is yellow. Like Jupiter, the Sun has many different personalities. The first and most important being a source of life. Saturn as creator, Dionysus as seasonal God, and many others are all solar Gods of life. All these life-giving concepts are called Helios.
The Sun is also considered pure purity and reason, called Apollo. Apollo is a kind of manager inside of us, which can choose and control our actions. Some people think that a person without this manager would live a chaotic life and be unable to build a happy life. I do not see any need for a manager, because I trust our human nature. If you do not trust human nature, you might think that we need constant control. Some people condemn people too quickly without trying to understand what human really is. A person who trusts people might see good in people that someone with a limited point of view would never accept.
Many people think that the biological instincts in us are all evil and that only reason can produce good. They seem to think that reason must rule over passion. A civilized person might be in conflict with his passions and think some kind of rational discipline will give peace, but a person living as part of Nature, the way people should live, would not feel these conflicts. The civilized person is an enemy of his passion; therefore he is an enemy of himself. These people consider passion dirty and want to be purified.
The words reason, Logic and rational do not always have the same meaning. Logic can refer to the art of categorizing information. Rational can refer to the art of evaluating proportions. Reason uses logic and rationality for careful thinking. Most people use these three words interchangeably. An example of a logical rational reasonable person would be Mr. Spock on Star trek. Spock is holding back his emotional human side? He seems cool but something is not right.
I write against reason to show its limitations. Our information comes to us through sensory organs, which transmit information to our brains. Reason or logic can be ways of using this information, but rational people do not always use this information. A purely rational person might spend his time reasoning the ideas he thinks he knows, but never check the real world to see if these ideas are true. Reason and logic can be used to support any argument you want. All you have to do is construct a rational or logical argument. Many rational sounding beliefs are not true. For example, before proper scientific investigation and experimentation, people would use rational argument to prove that the Sun goes around the Earth. Rationalists, who believe that the material world is an illusion, think reason will lead to truth. They feel free to use reason to invent more illusions.
We come to know what seems to be true or not by how the event affects our feelings. We can know whether something tastes good or bad. These feelings help us to develop our sense of right and wrong and the way we should live in the world. Instincts guide us to live a natural life. The purely rational person, who ignores his feelings, would have no way of learning how to live a natural life. We must feel the world to know how to live in it. Feeling is a complex process whose development is influenced by the environment. Growing up in an unnatural environment would produce different feelings than those produced in a natural environment. Perhaps people who choose reason over passion have never correctly felt the world.
Let us say you love your parents and wish to take care of them. Pure reason or logic will not care about them. Your emotions are what cares about them. These emotions originate in you from a biological process called passion. Reason is also a biological function, but pure reason cannot make a choice unless a passion is guiding it. The feeling of caring for other people is a social instinct. You can think of a human as an information-processing machine that has social instincts as part of its programming. If you eliminated the passions completely, you would be a sterile person, care about nothing, and have no motivation. I would say this unnatural life is also a form of death. You would then be one of the undead.
Apollo is an ascetic God who is pictured as an athletic man, who has discipline over his passions. This image is an idol many people want to be like. He has conquered his body and trains it to be something it is not supposed to be, a kind of self-domestication. Apollonian people like to think that passions are evil Devils, which they are fighting inside themselves. They fear that these Devils will drive them to evil acts. They might think reason is a spiritual act and strive to reach some higher reason. An Apollonian person has the Apollonian dream of another self, that is rational and disciplined. He will doubt his true, natural self. He might think that this Apollonian self is his true inner spiritual self. He strives to be this rational self. He might visualize enlightenment as a man sitting in the East, with a great halo of the rising Sun shining behind his head. He is unaware of the fact that reason does not have to be an enemy of passion and that these Devils could actually be his friends. I prefer to think of Apollo as the evil Devil.
Apollo is one of civilization's strongest allies. He can capture more souls that any other Demon. Usually, the Apollonian person is a slave of Jove's civilization. A purely sterile person can be trained to do anything civilization wants that person to do, even unnatural acts that we are not biologically programmed to do. Civilized soldiers deny their instincts of caring for other people so that they can kill. They must train their bodies to become killing machines. A factory worker has to work on a line and deny his need to be free, he becomes part of the machine he works on. His authorities might tell him that he must discipline and train himself and that it is rational to deny his irrational passions that might want to do something else. In order to be civilized, you must be domesticated. Anyone who believes in civilization might think that domestication is the more rational choice. This believer becomes a subscriber to the Apollonian book of the dead.
Civilization will break a person as part of the domesticating process. They turn the wild beast in us into domestic sheep. They might use punishment, the removal of privileges, threats, psychology, persuasion, torture, or any number of methods. For me it was difficult, growing up and having to go to a school, that wanted to domesticate me and make me a civilized person. I did not resist openly, because that would have caused them to use more effective domestication techniques. I refused to let their programming affect my mind and managed to hold out quietly. If someone, such as a teacher at school or a cop, tries to discipline me, I just ignore them and walk away. They do not know how wrong they are. I hope that some day all this will stop. I do not want other kids to have to go through it.
The element of reason is air. Passion is water. The flower of reason is the Lotus, which rises from water into air. This is the flower of Buddha and Apollo. Buddha is the Eastern Apollo. I do not like Apollo and I do not like Buddha. Buddha chose to reject life. He sat under the Tree of Knowledge and listened to the deceiver, Zeus, who tricked him into rejecting life. The lotus flower represents the fall from Nature, when people left Nature because of reason. Buddhists reject Nature and live sterile and civilized, but that is because they do not understand Nature. They think the fall is good and try to make others fall with them. The Tree of Knowledge will not tell us what is right or wrong. Knowledge is just there. Only Nature can tell us what is right, and Nature is passion. I prefer to sink into the ocean of passion and live life as the beast. Others want reason to rule over the beast, but I prefer to be the beast.
The sacred name of Apollo is "OM," which means, "I am not." Not to be is what ascetics want. OM's true pronunciation is O as in old, ending with soft G, followed by a vibrating U and a short, abrupt M. Start with your mouth wide open and end with it closed. OM can be spelled Ogum. Occultists often pronounce OM differently, because they do not understand its meaning. They think it means peace and ignore the self inflicted-violence that is Apollo. Apollo could bring peace, but only after he has violently destroyed everything else, including you. Imagine how orderly and sterile and dead an Apollonian world would be.
The Sun touches the Earth with pure solar energy, that is nothing, until it is used by life to grow. Without the Sun, the Earth would be a cold place, yet too much Sun can dry up the Earth. The Earth holds water that lets life move. Some people idealize the Sun and want to return to pure, solar nothing, but that is not what life is for. Life is supposed to use the energy. The Earth has solar energy and water, making life grow on it. The universe is enormous, but most of it is dead matter. The Earth is a rare place. You are matter, but a rare kind of matter that has life. Enjoy it, because it is so rare. The lotus-eaters are people who waste their life living as Apollonian ascetics.
A person may choose to become an Apollonian because he is dedicated to a goal. His life is a duty to this goal. He may think that civilization can help him accomplish this goal, that the goal may be the well-being of civilization, or that the goal may be a civilized law. He may believe that accomplishing this goal will bring about good results. A purely Apollonian person would not care about the results. Accomplishment of the goal would be its own purpose. This kind of thinking can lead to all kinds of insanity and is the foundation of the ethics of Protestant religion. Fanatical religions logically construct their opinions upon Apollonian principles, and in so doing, become weird and forget reality.
All the sacred names can be insanity, if you use them wrongly. Too many people use OM in the wrong way. OM can be used in harmless, religious ceremonies, where you may want to give yourself to a God to show devotion and dedication. Perhaps this use can even be a healthy part of one's religious practices, if it were done in a good way. If you are dedicated to a goal, beware that the goal may be unnatural or the methods you used to achieve a goal may be unnatural. I do not think Nature requires people to be unnatural to accomplish the natural.
Matrix the Creative Mother
A Hindu once told me that I should worship Kali, the violent Goddess, with skulls hanging all over her, because I eat meat. I told him that I worship Gods of Nature, and Kali seems to be some insane Apollonian concept that India developed after it became civilized. He said that a meat-eater can only be saved if he worships Kali, because none of the other Gods will accept meat-eaters. I listened to his explanation, then said that I do not really care to be saved. I am pretty sure that his weird Gods do not exist and in no way resemble reality.
He then began to explain that Kali is Nature. He told me details of a really complex, metaphysical doctrine to explain what he thought Nature was. He said that this is the age of violence, and all Nature is in action during this age, because Brahma has ordained it so. His Hindu Goddess resembles aspects of my Saturn concept. She is mother time who gives birth to material events. To give birth the creative mother needs an eternal father, who resembles other aspects of my Saturn concept. She is supposed to create Nature, but she is not Nature. This Hindu worships the divine in things, but does not worship the actual things. It must have taken Hindu civilization centuries of insanity to twist ideas around to develop something as freaky as the way this guy thinks.
People who spend too much time commenting on ancient books line for line tend to invent ideas like this Hindu. Jewish Rabies have a similar concept called Sheckina. Catholics have a bunch of regulations called the Holy Mother Church. These highly developed and ancient traditions all spend too much time following complicated procedures that were suppose to have been inspired by God. Lonely teenage boys who had no friends probably wrote all the great religious scriptures. What they need to do is get away from the books and go outside and hang out with living people.
I pointed at an apple tree and said, "You see that tree? That is part of Nature. I'm sure of that. When I talk about a tree nymph, I talk about something I see when I think about what the tree means. Today, I see a quiet, nonviolent Goddess who could care less whether eating meat is a sin, and she does not have skulls hanging all over her. Maybe tomorrow I'll feel differently and see something like Kali, but I seriously doubt it."
Some ascetics try to control their material self. Some try to focus their mind on something other than real matter. They are killing their old self. An ascetic wants to be reborn out of his creative mother as a new self. This Babe is suppose to be in tune with the ascetic's Ideals. Basically, he has become totally insane and dangerous. He has become civilized. Civilization is his mother.
This new Babe is sometimes said to be a primal essence. All things are made of him and he is made of all things. He is a hermaphrodite who has combined all qualities. He knows everything and can do anything. He is the goal of progress. The babe is called the Eon because he is eternal. The babe is called the One because he is complete. The Babe is called the Neo because he is just begining. Perhaps the Babe will realize that he should have remained as he was. The so-called divine rewards he was supposed to get are not there. He would then realize that he must go back, but he cannot go back, because he will no longer have the Sacred Grove. He destroyed the Grove while becoming the Babe.
Ascetics actually think that they must rescue the creative mother from material attachment, so they can make her the wife of their ideals. She becomes the cup from which they pour the water of death, as they use things in unnatural ways. They killed Tiamat and turned the Absu swamp into a desert. Sumerian was once a wet place, before the environmental damage caused by civilization. Sumeria was one of the first civilizations, and it gave birth to many others, before it collapsed thousands of years ago.
Civilization still fights over that piece of southern Iraq. They drain the Earth of its fossil deposits, turning the blood into smog, poisoning the rest of the planet. I saw those scenes on television of the oil wells burning in the desert during the Gulf War. That area was the Garden of Eden, and I do not mean symbolically; it is the actual place where the Garden of Eden used to be. Look at what has happened there. Do you really want civilization to spread?
Civilized people assume anything in their own culture that they do not like is left over from primitive culture. This assumption may be true with some events. Other events, such as war, poverty, social violence, and emotional trouble are probably new problems civilization developed that primitive people do not have. Some societies are more civilized than others and also develop problems that less-civilized cultures will not have, depending on how badly the civilized disease is affecting them.
The ancient Greeks had many aspects of Nature-loving religions in their culture before 500 BC. The small tribal kingdoms worshipped agricultural Gods. As these tribes were influenced by more advanced civilizations from the East, they built larger cities, full of confused people who worshipped a divine light and hated their material bodies. The Greeks became so confused that they invented Christianity. The Greeks also developed many life-hating cults, which wanted salvation through a death Dionysus. Christianity is the most successful of these cults. Modern Hinduism and Buddhism were also influenced by Greek thought.
Other societies have become even more civilized. Japan has used up its resources and overpopulated its islands. To keep their system going, the Japanese have developed a disciplined and aggressive civilization. I do not want the rest of the world to become like Japan. The Japanese live in tiny boxes with little freedom. They fanatically push themselves to work and practice discipline rituals, through which they get meaning from no meaning. Many forms of Japanese Buddhism consist mostly of mindless chanting. Japanese Shinto is puritanical. Shintoist want a clean Nature rather than real Nature. Shintoists would not survive in the real wild. Our society could become like them, if we let progress go too far. The Japanese have artificial gardens, but there is very little wild Nature left in Japan. They do have a Sacred Grove but it is very small. At least the West has never forgotten how to become dirty.
For thousands of years many changes took place all across the lands of Asia, Europe, and Africa. Cities, nations and empires expanded. Armies grew larger and became better organized as mercenaries replaced tribal warriors. Long-distance trade became common, and some people became richer. Small, family-owned farms were turned into large, cash-crop plantations owned by rich businesses. Slavery became common for large populations of people. Poverty became more widespread, as families who once lived comfortably off the land were forced to hustle in the cities. Almost everyone had to work harder and against greater competition. People became meaner and more likely to kill each other. Individual people became more expert and specialized at doing particular jobs and forgot how to be independent. More technological development occurred in response to more demand for new, improved products. New styles and techniques of art were adopted. More written records were kept. Monsoons became stronger when the Sahara grasslands were eaten away by domestic animals, leaving a desert. This and other man-made, ecological disasters caused more starvation, over-population, and disease. Anti-life salvation from the world religions replaced Nature-loving religions. Sacred she-male prostitution became less common, and female economic prostitution became more common. One event caused another event, each a part of a long chain, which kept growing.
Then around 600 - 400 BC the pace of progress started to get quicker. People began searching for answers to questions considered unimportant only a few centuries earlier. Socrates, Confucius, Shakyamuni and Lao tzu all spoke. A few centuries before 500 BC. some king put his stamp on a chunk of gold. He probably never realized the seed he was planting. Money acts as lubricant in the civilized machine. People who come from cultures that have not been influenced by money are amazed when they first see how it makes other cultures go crazy. Now, 2,500 years later, the insanity is still growing and will keep growing as long as money exists.
| 0 | Asatru | Rome | Greece | Iraq | Kemet | Hindu | Ifa | |
| 1 | AIN | Balder | Lucifer | Phanes | Anshar | Set | Bodhi | Iku |
| 2 | ANU | Heimdall | Caelus | Uranus | Anu | Yinepu | Varuna | Orunmila |
| 3 | YEUO | Ullr | Saturn | Cronus | Ea | Ptah | Brahma | Oldumare |
| 4 | JOVE | Thor | Jupiter | Zeus | Adad | Amen | Indra | Chango |
| 4 | EVO | Freyr | Bacchus | Dionysus | Tammuz | Wesir | Shiva | Oko |
| 5 | YESUO | Tyr | Mars | Ares | Nergal | Anhur | Skanda | Obatala |
| 6 | OM | Forseti | Apollo | Apollo | Assur | Heru | Vishnu | Ogum |
| 6 | OSHA | Sunna | Sol | Helios | Shamash | Ra | Surya | Oshala |
| 7 | MAYA | Frigg | Venus | Aphrodite | Ishtar | Hethert | Devi | Oshuna |
| 8 | ESHU | Odin | Mercury | Hermes | Nabu | Djehuty | Ganesha | Eshu |
| 9 | NEM | Hel | Diana | Artemis | Lilith | Nebthet | Kali | Oya |
| 10 | GAIA | Jord | Tellus | Gaea | Ki | Aset | Prithivi | Yemaya |
Rationalist and related topics
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason, 1788. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/5683
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, 1819 http://www.archive.org/details/theworldaswillan01schouoft
Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Published by Putnam Publishing, 1994. ISBN 0-399-13894-3