(esoteric / exoteric 1)

             My teacher used to say that most conversations are not dialogues, but ‘duologues’ – the content essentially lacking the connection, so that what is actually taking place is two monologues. But my problem seems to be the reverse. Whenever I stand in tandem, in any form of conversation, I seem to lose my own voice – not essentially, but in terms of substance. What I say begins from where I am, but mirrors my interlocutor. The substance corresponds with the limitations of the other, but seeks the leverage that expands back to my own view. Granted that I too am a limited creature, but the creative intuition, by nature, moves in a fairly large circle. And, within the frame of our own time, I seem to have always had the link back to the feeder root, severed for most of us by the educational process or simply missing because our intellectual forebears had severed the link. If I began with the question (one of two): what is the modern? it was because I already intuitively knew the answer. My savagery against ‘teachers’ appropriate to my ‘career’ who did not know or denied the next logical step toward the source seems to verify that essential precognition on my part.
             Apparently, I have required these months of silence to get back to my own proper voice, although certain questions about ‘my own proper voice’ as a prose writer now remain. The ‘pure’ work that emerged as prose beginning during the mid to late 80s was framed by the given structure of an ‘occult’ instrument and emerged in brief passages of sustained intensity, tantamount to poetry. The exploration and development that are apparently now indigenous to poetry as a consequence of the modern allowed for the ‘descent’ into prose; as did the hortatory underpinnings of my prose work here, as I just described. But I already hear the neutrality of a quiet letter in these lines, as I write – perhaps the consequence of the intensity of the work of the last three years, now presumably coming to a close; but also, perhaps, because an epistle to the reader is not my métier. One may face the mountain with only a pick in hand, but the tool is consciousness itself and the object is not to dig, but to lift and turn the whole, until body and mountain are one. And the only other in this process is one’s self.
             So possibly the only purpose here is a kind of self-advertisement, an inverse of the media commercial with its glittering or savage hooks for ear and eye, since what is being purveyed cannot be reduced to the sensory phrase.

             In the interval, I have written a number of potential posts, none of which I have posted on the blog; but for the moment I find it tedious to read through either. So I will assume that at some point among the posted pieces, I did in fact assert that all philosophy and theology must resolve into the esoteric. Part of the reason I can now assume that I have concluded my present cycle of compulsive writing is not simply the release, but also the retrospect. Yes, philosophy and theology must resolve in the esoteric. But the esoteric then automatically becomes exoteric. The fact that neither philosophy nor theology can finally resolve into the One, the Two or the Three does not mean that they cannot be resolved to structure. Nor does it mean that the only ‘structure’ is ‘only enquiry’ – an inverse or preclusive tautology: in other words, an oxymoron, since enquiry itself necessarily requires some ‘structure’, some ‘foundation’ or ‘foundationalism’, precisely what has hitherto ostensibly been negated by ‘the modern’; and presumably progressively negated into the nihil.
             While I was working with the ‘occult instrument’ – the Tarot – discovering, apparently, that it was intended as an access to reflective awareness, whose substructure is largely hidden from us by our own denial as well as its intrinsic nature as the ‘self’, I tried to sustain a common language base for the philosophical terminology that was emerging. But the number structure of the Tarot persisted into the subsequent work.
             Simultaneously with the first mature poetry and the opening of this investigation of the Tarot, I found myself entering into the historical study of the origin of the five elements, which spans the actual foundations of classical Greek philosophy, since Thales assertion of Water as ‘the principle’ begins Greek enquiry and, apart from neo-Platonism, Aristotle’s discovery of Aether as the fifth element closes it.
             Ten years earlier, I had found the key to both Upanishad and Tantra, beginning where many began at that point, in the late 60s and early 70s, with the conversionary experience of a western academic and psychedelic investigator. But I found a teacher teaching Sanskrit and honoring Veda in its peculiar force. As a consequence, I found intimate access to the Upanishadic injunction that ‘all the gods are in the body.’ And, of course, while the Tantric ‘kundalini’ description of the body technically stands outside of Veda, the Vedic roots are self-evident.
             All of which pivoted, finally, on the cryptic vocational map I had received ten years before that, while studying Einstein’s simplified explanation of the Special Theory, wherein the double nature of light – its simultaneously finite and infinite speed – points back as much to the nature of consciousness as it does to externality, thus not only certifying the shared nature of objectivity, but also creating a paradigm for dialectic that cannot be limited to consciousness alone, a paradigm for Two and Three.

             I did not set out to be a philosopher, a theologian or an esotericist. My only desire was for poetry. But the poetry only established itself on the basis of this first ‘illuminated map’. And all of the subsequent features emerged or developed out of the same evolving thread of luminosity, processes which held the poetry hostage against their resolution.
             Now I can say that, by this process, the poetry or the poetic impulse has resolved the mind / body problem. But if I say that ‘mind’ – or more appropriately consciousness and reflective awareness – is Five and body is Seven, I understand that I am necessarily still speaking an ‘esoteric’ language. But here, the esoteric has become empirical. These are the numerical sets by which reflective awareness and the sensory substructure of the body are properly experienced.
             These sets of numbers have an absolute experiential value that defines body and mind respectively. Their relationship posits the necessary differential in terms of what can and cannot ‘be shared’ between mind and body, a set of relationships defined by the first seven sets of numbers in terms of values we can call ‘symbolic’, but which in fact constitute the unfolding of awareness itself.