Your iconic imagery is colorful, here, Debashish, and describes aspects of our current human and inhuman/non-human condition well. Although I can’t say I know what “ifrits” are (thank you for the opportunity to bone up on my demon-lore), I’ve met a jinn or two in my time, and have probably even been one on occasion (which would explain a lot!).

Speaking of balrogs, however, I saw what was for me an amazing allegorical movie which I highly don’t recommend unless you love caves, called “The Cave”. I watched it because of a certain history with and passion I have for caves in general, and in particular because of the extraordinary work of the fellow who was the principal cave photographer (Wes Skiles). Cinematographically it was one of the most extraordinary films I have ever seen because that type of shooting has never been done in caves before. It was a humongous, brilliant exercise in cave shooting, with both HD and film. A labor of love for these unigue, magical environments, shot by a team unparalled in their expertise. A topic for another posting (hmmm. . .a seed is planted, another idea born).

That aside, and getting back to those pesky balrogs (bear with me, this is all actually related to your editorial), here is the brief synopsis of the film from their website:

“Deep in the Romanian forest, a team of scientists stumbles upon the ruins of a 13th century Abbey. On further inspection, they make a startling discovery - the Abbey is built over the entrance to a giant underground cave system. Local biologists believe the cave could be home to an undisclosed eco-system, so they hire a group of American cave explorers to help them investigate its depths. . .But what they find deep inside the cave is not just a new eco-system, but an entirely new species altogether…”

Well, you get the idea. The new species is a Hollywood knock-off of the balrogs of yore. Interestingly, (and now I’m giving the story away trusting you will *never* see this extremely well done but goofily scripted movie, which I nonetheless shamelessly ripped for my own cave archive), the balrogs were originally created from an indigenous microscopic parasitic form which dwells within the cave (at its origins the cave was apparently an enclosed ecosystem). It enters the human bloodstream and when it does, the human is transformed into the darkest aspects of themselves. They become reptilian, parasitic, physically hideous, sprouting wings and a glinty set of drooling incisors, a boney skeletal looking head, and of course, claws - gigantic hooked appendages which look more like scythes than anything else. They are capable of impossible acrobatics; they can fly, they can swim, they can spelunk a cave canyon in no time. They are quite a marvel in the physical domain. And they have a seemingly insatiable appetite for human flesh, or anything organic. They’re at the top of the food chain in their overhead environment. And for hundreds of years they have been confined to their subterranean dominion, with no hope of escape, as the only entrance was sealed off by terrorized monks in the 13th century. But now, by a twist of fate, the cave explorers have provided these beasts with an exit. The “uncontrollable cthonic forces under our feet” - to use your great imagery - have been given the opportunity to emerge, spewed as it were “from the earth’s bowels”. What species perpetuating beast would pass up *that* opportunity! These wiley pseudo-balrogs, cooped up for generations, are now ready to be “free”. An unfortunate turn of events for us surface dwellers!

So we have an interesting allegory here, not Plato’s allegory of the cave, though worlds are certainly moving behind the shadows, and our cavers don’t seem particularly curious about moving from appearances to reality. Through some outside influence, in this case parasitic, we evolve, or devolve into our most beastly selves. We are the beasts and the beasts are us! An old theme, but an important reminder that some of the most hideous balfrogs are within us, just as the Divine is within us. It doesn’t take much influence to call either aspect forth, imho.

I don’t know much about cosmological tectonics and the battles of the Gods, but I do know something about their trickle-down in this plane as do any of us who have lived. It’s a rough world. The human has created more hideous things than I can even imagine with my limited sight, and with that sight I’ve already seen enough. (I often wonder what the world would look like if I could see what the Divine has seen with my eyes. Pretty different, I’m guessing) And it’s probably true that the world is newly populated in greater numbers with the Ravanas, “djinns, ifrits, balrogs and other distortions” you mention, a counter-measure to the current of congealing Divine forces all over the planet.

I used to think we as a species were on the brink of some great bifurcation point, a split, as one faction moves toward the Divine and the other dies off or goes in some other direction. Now I see that our species trajectory is riddled with multiple striae - we could bifurcate any which way. Where we will evolve or devolve to is unknown at this point, but none the less compelling for wondering at the result.

This is rambling on longer than I intended it to, but what I last want to say, and I suppose getting rather circuitously to the point, is something about SCIY:

SCIY shows up to me as a sanctuary, a place free of negative forces. In this ever-troubled world, it stands as a force for good, mainly because of the human forces that created it. This webzine has a purity to it and a power, thanks to the efforts of you, Rich, and especially Ron for his long labors and for his inspiration for it in the first place. It has its own kind of protection, and Grace. There is no thought of fear here. And it is taking us somewhere. It *is* in potentia part of - to use your words again - the “riveting” of a new kind of infrastructure into which the Divine can pour itself in it’s ever more substantial materialization. It is a training ground for the mages of the future. Through open dialogue a new form evolves, and on top of that another, and another. It multiplies, forever exponentiating on itself. And it’s creating forms on its own, all its own.

So thank you, Debashish, for continuting the Jyoti Journal here so that we may all dialogue about it and benefit from this important contribution to SCIY.


**************

Written on Super Sunday
Marina del Rey, CA

Deb,

Nice touch on the editorial, yes hopefully something of mahasaraswati's perfecting of our inner technologies to facilitate the yoga of self-perfection will be powerful enough to radiate outwardly into the cultural will to technology as well, to facilitate the physical ordering of perfection.

As I see it this means the “outering” of the psychic being enveloping the Mclunhanesque notion of the “outering” of the planetary nervous system which is the result of the deployment of terrestrial communication technologies.
(btw. The planetary nervous system metaphor is often employed by bill gates in his nietzchean conception of planetary digitization)

Kim

Wow your account of the balrogs, (perhaps coupled with Debashish's reference) has my imagination spinning metaphors, in something like a dark vision from the Mussorgski half of the finale scene from Disney's Fantasia. I am seeing them as symbolic in representing some physical embodiment of the lower collective vital imagination, which makes one wonder whats shaping up for our terrestrial future, especially if these symbolic forms also ( as our Sufi's tell us) correspond to worlds and dimensions which are overlapping our own reality.

I also like the following which you wrote:

“I used to think we as a species were on the brink of some great bifurcation point, a split, as one faction moves toward the Divine and the other dies off or goes in some other direction. Now I see that our species trajectory is riddled with multiple striae - we could bifurcate any which way. Where we will evolve or devolve to is unknown at this point, but none the less compelling for wondering at the result.”

you, deb and ron are bringing an extremely compelling cultural aspect of our yoga to the fore,

We could indeed bifurcate in any which way, and it would be futile to try and predict any exact course or courses which the channels of evolution may flow through, and would be in fact quite counterproductive to the real work which needs to be done. However, there is a call to action in the yoga, and one must ponder what such actions are likely to mean to a yoga which seeks the transformation of the future through the transmutation of spirit in matter.

(So here again is my entry for the National Enquirers Nostradamus section)

My own hunch is that Nietzsche's 200 year prophecy of the going over to the Ubermensch, and the Mother's 300 year prophecy (made 70 years later) of the advent of the Gnostic Being both will have something to do with it, although one should not get to hung up on time lines and for that matter prophecies in general, and there is a very real possibility that it all could go haywire, and the species will have to reboot itself over several millennium.,

but since there were twin species of humanoids preceding the age of homo-sapien, sapien, to have humanity bifurcate in a forked trajectory again would not surprise me.

a bit of pre-history: Cro Magnon and Neanderthal may have lived harmoniously from 100 B.C.E to 40 B.C.E but then from 40 to 30 B.C.E there appears to have been a struggle in which Neanderthal went extinct. Although the Neanderthal may have become extinct because they were an evolutionary dead end, there is also ample evidence to support and many anthropologist to think that it may have been Cro Magnon who put an end to Neanderthal in what was the first genocide in human history.
So does the future repeat the past, my own imagination conjures up the notion of one track driven by a will to power fulfilling Nietzsche's prophecy through a will to technology driven by the streamed capitalist values of nihilism and the morality of domination, and then that of another track aspiring towards the aim of the yoga of self-perfection.
But I need to get Charles Stross to help me flush the entire idea out a bit more.

rich

Rich,

Though this does not invalidate your central argument, and though Nietzsche is ambiguous enough to lend himself to a variety of interpretatons, his Will to Power seems (as also per his most articulate modern interpreter Heidegger) to be more a Will to Aesthesis than a Will to Technology. A Will to Aesthesis is another name for the Creative Consciousness arising out of the primordial chaos and structuring a progressively intergal Order - the calm but also proud gods of Olympus, replete with mastery over the elements but refusing to be subjugated by mediovrity. This Overmental vision may not be identical with the Aurobindonian superman but I believe it may be seen as a possible stage in that direction. The Mother, we know, was in the process of manifesting such a world of the Overmental Gods, but Sri Aurobindo stopped her from doing so, since he felt the material basis was not prepared enough and it would end up being an allurement too great for humankind to transcend it and aspire for the supramental life. Nevertheless, as per the Rig Vedic hymn on the colloquy of Indra and Agastya, the Overmental Gods seek participation in the supramental yoga and the second of the three transformations of Sri Aurobindo's yoga involves them directly - as in an apotheosis of Nietzsche's vision. The Will to Technology can of course be seen as another form of the Will to Power, the asuric way or Way of the Titans, graceless and brutal. Of course, in both the ways - of aesthesis and of technology, what is signally lacking is the fundamental surrender which is the basis of the Aurobindonian Overman - "A vast surrender was his only strength."

Debashish

The Will to Power has been interpreted many ways by many post-Nietszchean philosophers. Nietzsche himself took the concept from Schopenhauer whose concept was of a will to live and survival not a will to domination as is most often identified with Nietzsche. However, there are other interpretations, and one possible interpretation of the "will to power" is that it is a process of expansion and venting of creative energy. However another view is expressed by Hannah Arendt in the Life of the Mind, “the famous power of negation inherent in the Will and conceived as a motor of history is an annihilation force that could just as well result in the process of annihilation as of Infinite Progress” (Arendt). It is just these nihilistic overtones of the will to power turning back on itself in the process of annihilation in which Kroker extends his metaphor of the will to technology.

Since you mentioned Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche, I would go on to say that Kroker also cites Heidegger and his critique of technology as rooting the phenomena of nihilism in a will to technology or technicity. Here is Kroker: “Heidegger was apocalyptic in his prognosis of what is disclosed by the coming to presence of completed “technicity”: objectification as the result of technological willing; the harvesting of humans, animals, plants, and earth into a passive “standing reserve” waiting to be mobilized by the technical apparatus; the liquidation of subjectivity itself into an “objectless object” streamed by the information matrix; the appearance of “profound boredom” as the essential attunement of the post-human; the potentially fatal transition of language of destining to the last “enframing”, post-human culture under the ascendant sign of “completed nihilism”(Kroker)

Now I should reiterate that there is no one size fits all interpretation of the Nietzschean Will or the Ubermensch, and the from Kroker of completed nihilism expresses one aspect of it. I refer to this aspect myself as the Vulgar Will to Power, (a will separated from knowledge) to differ from any interpretations which may construe it to be a will to transcendence or as a vehicle for aesthetics. And I would also point out that even a post humanity which evolves from such a vulgar will to power may prove just a transitional stage on the way to the Aurobindian envisioned superman.

And of course the difficult thing here is in rendering a value judgment based on a humanist ethic (which according to Althusser or Derrida maybe a fascist ethical formation in itself concerned with the self-aggrandizement of the subject or group) about what this all means, because if we take Sri Aurobindo seriously we understand that our notions of good and evil are shifting values in themselves, so simple moralizing about the future wont do.

In this sense it is essential that we remain open to whatever unexpected rupturing of the future may occur without imprisoning ourselves is any simplistic humanist value system, since the Gnostic Being
will itself define the meaning of “hour of the unexpected”. However, since we are condemned in some sense to choose and act, and the outcomes for this present humanity are far from certain, I feel that conversation is very important. Thanks for the opportunity.

rc

Absolutely. I quite agree with all of the above, particularly, yes, of course, technicity and its alienation and consequent disappearance of the Being of beings is Heideggers's major theme on the present and the most predictable future.

Debashish

Kim,

Thanks for your reflections on the editorial. How true it is as you write:
"I used to think we as a species were on the brink of some great bifurcation point, a split, as one faction moves toward the Divine and the other dies off or goes in some other direction. Now I see that our species trajectory is riddled with multiple striae - we could bifurcate any which way. Where we will evolve or devolve to is unknown at this point, but none the less compelling for wondering at the result. "

Indeed, multiple futures surround us at all times and press for fulfillment through each of us. The less conscious we are of this, the more pathetic our state of blind manipulation with very little understanding of what we are promoting unconsciously. All our best moral intentions (ethics, sastras, the glowing words of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother) can be used by the worst of the denizens of the underworld to push us towards the failure of the divine life. You are right. we have seen enough of the djinns and balrogs with grief-stained human eyes, not with God's integral vision. This limited human understanding, even with its best intentions, can fall easy prey to the same forces it would exorcise. To be effective, it is only a consciousness enlarging itself into the Divine intergality which can transform and transmute.

Just a quick note to say that I'm totally enjoying this conversation between the three of you. I'm amazed at your erudition and am very grateful for this unanticipated "seminar" in these critically important issues.

I had dinner with Rod Hemsell and his wife Kirti last night & shared some of your comments with him. He said he's feeling it's time for him to get involved in SCIY, so be prepared for an additional voice in the dialogue.

Namaste,

~ ron