Time I Am

"Sañjaya said: Having spoken thus, Arjuna, chastiser of enemies, told Kṛṣṇa, “Govinda, I shall not fight,” and fell silent." Bhagavad Gita, 2:9

The world is teetering on the brink of a much larger war; the first salvos have already been fired. The sickening atrocities committed by Hamas are now followed by a brutal bombing campaign against the people of Gaza, nearly half of which are children. Israel has cut off food, water, medicine, and electricity from getting in; this is on the heels of a sixteen-year-long blockade by Israel. A bombing at a hospital, almost certainly an errant missile fired by Islamic Jihad, has killed perhaps hundreds in central Gaza. The people are not going to be accepted as refugees by Jordan or Egypt. They have nowhere to run.

The bombing inflamed the Arab street. Protests were held outside of Israeli and U.S. embassies, and outbreaks of violence have reportedly broken out in the occupied West Bank. At home, here in the U.S., American Jews, and left-wing, pro-Palestinian, and peace groups are demanding a ceasefire. Corporate-controlled media pundits and Right Wing political hacks have come out with predictable lockstep opposition to this, touting the same slurs, and ringing the same fear note. The Israeli people have suffered a devastating blow; the reverberations of this, assuming it doesn't draw the world's powers into an annihilating, full-scale World War (which will be the end of the human race), will be felt for decades to come. The people of Gaza are being destroyed; their children are dying. For what? What will this war accomplish except, more war?

Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare. Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare.

We're staring into the bottomless abyss, and most haven't even realized it. But they soon will.

It is not my place to write this. It is not my struggle. "Someone else's struggle cannot be my struggle. Only my struggle can be my struggle." So saith Max Stirner, never a widely-known philosopher. Schopenhauer might have simply stated that the natural state of man is suffering. Nietzsche would have likened it, perhaps, to "staring into the abyss." On the other side of that abyss, he postulated a transformation of the individual into his concept of a "Superman."

Please.

Man's capacity for genius is only matched by his ruthless, self-destructive greed, his wanton capacity to invent greater and greater means of exploiting and killing his brother, taking his possessions, slaughtering his children, and standing self-righteously in the sunshine, hoping God will smile upon his blood-spattered brow. He is the only primate whose brilliant technological evolutionary ascent has culminated in a destructive killing technology; but not one with the ability to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, or care for his children. He can kill, and kill, and kill, but he cannot save himself.

In three years we've gone from the social programming brought about by the Pandemic to the civil unrest of the George Floyd protests, the storming of the U.S. Capitol, to a year dominated by the birth of AI, the revelations of government UFO retrieval programs (testified to under oath before the United States House of Representatives), and now an almost unprecedented, barbaric terrorist attack on the State of Israel, followed by the inevitable Israeli response, which has been brutal.

Somewhere in the past three years, perhaps actually beginning many more decades back, we crossed the line into a dystopian science fiction novel.

Will the new, virtually sentient AI technology, having arrived this Evil Year of Our Lord 2023, bring us back from the brink of the abyss? Or, perhaps, will the Alien Other that mankind has ALWAYS, I would argue, lived side-by-side with (being scrutinized, as Wells said, by "intellects vast, cool, and intelligent") come to our rescue at the eleventh hour? Arthur C. Clarke postulated, at the end of the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, that the enigmatic "Star Child" which Dave Bowman becomes, would stop the missiles from destroying the world.

As it said in the old Genesis song, "Land of Confusion", "Oh Superman, where are you now?"

Time I Am

"I am that womb. I make and unmake this universe." -Krishna

I have been riding a fence of anger and grief for a few days. Which side will I fall off on tonight? It is not my struggle. My struggle is mine alone. I am a filthy man, and should never write of serious matters.

Only an eternal outcast can know a thing from all sides. Only someone rejected by everyone can see every angle, and judge the world and its actors by standing back and appraising, coldly, its foibles and failures, its hypocrisies and misdeeds. I look through the window of the world and what I see on the other side is futility and damnation, the self-destructive hairless monkey caught in his Dance with Death, trying to outdistance his desire for destruction, balance it and overcome it with the self-deluded idea that he can arrive at a utopia. Whether he's a leftwing anarchist, utopian socialist, or Right-Wing reactionary, what have you? In the end, he is oblivion.

Bhagavad Gita, 11:32: "Time I am, the destroyer of all the worlds, and I have come here to destroy all people. With the exception of you, the Pandavas, all the soldiers on this battlefield will be slain." This is my favorite verse from the Bhagavad Gita, a book I virtually revere, one I am slightly even superstitious about (I don't, for instance, like to put another book on top of the Gita). This verse was quoted by Robert Oppenheimer at the Trinity nuclear test range, after the detonation of the first atomic bomb. Thus began the ticking of the clock.

I am not worthy to write of the Gita. I tried in vain to find a few verses that might explain what is going on to my readers (which are virtually nil, but I suppose anything is possible) and put the war and the current world in a greater context. But my spirit has become polluted, and my eyes in a spiritual sense, have grown dim. Stirner would tell me not to "spooky it up" (in modern parlance), that "that is only sacred which I affirm is sacred." Rimbaud said, more to how I feel right now, "Having only pagan words to express myself, I want to be still." In the Bible, the Book of Job states: "Behold, I am vile--how will I answer you? I will lay my hand upon my mouth." (40:04)

The Bhagavad Gita takes place during the Mahabharata War, on the Plains of Kurukshetra, in Northern India. It is excised from the much longer Mahabharata. It begins before a battle, a war between the noble Pandavas and their unrighteous cousins, the Kauravas, who refuse to share the kingdom of the Pandava's birthright with them, but want it all for themselves. Arjuna, a noble Prince of India, realizes that his charioteer, Lord Krishna, whom he has considered as a brother, is actually an avatar of Vishnu, God in the human form. Lord Krishna drives the chariot between both armies before they fight, and begins the timeless discourses of the Gita, the living truths of man and why he suffers, why he must live and die, and be reborn, time and again. "The end of birth is death, the end of death is birth. Never the spirit was born [...] end and beginning are dreams." (Bhagavad Gita, Edward Arnold translation)

By Chapter 11, Krishna reveals himself in the "Universal Form"; i.e. as the living incarnation of God Himself. Arjuna says, "Lord, I see all the worlds rushing into your fiery mouths." The Kings of the Earth, and their peoples, race toward their own doom, consumed by Krishna, who has come as the incarnation of Time and Destruction. And rebirth. (Or perhaps I haven't understood it at all.)

Krishna reveals himself as the totality of ALL. "My opulence is limitless, Arjuna," he tells the Prince of India. Also, he says, cryptically: "I am that womb. I make and unmake this universe." There is a story, one of the Krishna Leela, or tales of his boyhood, wherein his mother Yashoda looks into his mouth because he has swallowed mud. In it, she sees the yawning vast, dark abyss of the Universe.

Hindus, or many of them, speak of the cycle of Yugas, the ages of man, beginning with Satya Yuga, the Golden Age, and commencing with Tetra Yuga, Dwapara Yuga, and culminating in our present Age of Iron and Gloom, the "Kali Yuga," the "Age of Quarrel."

Yes.

Lord Krishna tells Arjuna, "I descend in every age [...] to punish the guilty, and to annihilate the miscreant." The Last Avatar of Vishnu, the Final Coming of this Age, will be the avenging KALKI, the Destroyer, who will ride out of Schamballah upon his white steed, Devadatta, at the end of Kali Yuga, to indeed "punish the guilty." He will reestablish religious principles, and bring an end to the Age of Gloom.

And what is the prophecy telling us? Now? In 2023?

"I am that womb. I make and unmake this universe."

Today has not seemed real to me. I awoke, knowing fear and also a detached sense of all things in heaven and earth. My soul is shriveled. But, on some occasions, it can be revived by the feeling of a vast mystic consciousness. As the world indeed teeters on the brink, as we look into the turning of the Wheel of Fortune toward the Paradigmatic shift, I thought for the first time, in a long time about the Seven Visitors of Facius Cardan, left to us in an account penned by his son, alchemist, doctor, and occultist Jerome Cardan, quoted below from the incredible book Passport to Magonia, by Jacques Vallee (1969):

Jerome Cardan lived in Milan and was not only a mathematician but also an occultist and a physician. In his book De Subtilitate, Cardan explains that he had often heard his father tell the particular story and finally searched for his record of the event, which read as follows:

August 13, 1491. When I had completed the customary rites, at about the twentieth hour of the day, seven men duly appeared to me clothed in silken garments, resembling Greek togas, and wearing, as it were, shining shoes. The undergarments beneath their glistening and ruddy breastplates seemed to be wrought of crimson and were of extraordinary glory and beauty.

Nevertheless, all were not dressed in this fashion, but only two who seemed to be of nobler rank than the others. The taller of them who was of ruddy complexion was attended by two companions, and the second, who was fairer and of shorter stature, by three. Thus in all, there were seven. He left no record as to whether their heads were covered. They were about forty years of age, but they did not appear to be above thirty.

When asked who they were, they said that they were men composed, as it were, of air, and subject to birth and death. It was true that their lives were much longer than ours, and might even reach three hundred years' duration. Questioned on the immortality of our soul, they affirmed that nothing survives which is peculiar to the individual...

When my father asked them why they did not reveal treasures to men if they knew where they were, they answered that it was forbidden by a peculiar law under the heaviest penalties for anyone to communicate this knowledge to men. They remained with my father for over three hours. But when he questioned them as to the cause of the universe they were not agreed. The tallest of them denied that God had made the world from eternity...."

And then we have the most breathtaking of the revelations, one that has stayed with me lo these many years:

On the contrary, the other added that God created it from moment to moment, so that should He desist for an instant the world would perish.... Be this fact or fable, so it stands.

Be this fact or a fable. But, perhaps, be it a living metaphor. Be it the Alien Other showing its face? And will it come forth, through a computer, or from the stars, to pull our fat from the fire in time to save a future for the children of tomorrow? The Eternal Womb from which New Birth, New Epochs, New Aeons spring. Fact or Fable.

Both.

Even so, as filthy and fallen a fool as I am, I had to write this. Because the greatest teaching of Lord Krishna is that one does his duty, regardless. "Do thou fight for the sake of fighting, and by so doing, and not considering happiness or distress, loss or diminution, victory or defeat, thou shalt never incur sin."

Never.

Note. All quotations here are paraphrases, except where noted.

Below is one of my favorite of all Kirtans (Hindu devotional singing and reply) on YouTube. The singer is Jahnavi Harrison.

Jahnavi Jivana - Day 2 - Radhadesh Mellows 2020