Description

“It is the duty of the Book of the Mystery to bring to the forefront the fact that, yes, human civilization is swimming in an ever-increasing sea of images, and many people are depressed and struggling every day just to survive. Why? The reason lies in a whole system disconnect from Source reinforced by the bombardment of images. According to Cosmic History, this situation can change in an instant when the human learns to shake off preconceptions of the world and regain their imaginal freedom. Once everyone returns to the core of their unique, imaginal essence, our planet will be transformed.”
—Book of the Mystery

Sample Excerpts

Chapter 4
Andy Warhol – Self-Creation of the Artist

“God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.” —William Shakespeare

“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” —Andy Warhol

The elevation of certain archetypes and prototypes is essential in the evolution from the human to the superhuman. The artist represents the human prototype that is unafraid to explore the unknown. Only in pursuit of the unknown, does the artist awaken to the power to create and recreate him/herself anew. This power is available to all who dare shake off conventionalities and plunge into the unknown.

Every genuine artistic intuition goes beyond what the senses perceive and, reaching beneath reality’s surface, strives to interpret its hidden mystery.

Once we understand that creative imagination is the highest stage a human can aspire to, then we can proceed into a deeper spiritual comprehension of art as a dimensional bridge, inclusive of the artist as his/her own creation. The Creator creates the human and then it is up to each human to recreate him/herself into ever-higher stages of artistic vision.

The artist who chooses to define him/herself as a work of art — as with Jimi Hendrix — is actually in a process of ascending a ladder fueled by creative inspiration that ultimately leads to divine embodiment. In this process, the physical body is used to project a particular creative image or “art personality”. This is an alchemical process. The outer aspect of the creative process in which the artist is engaged conforms to some strange, perhaps unconscious, interior work.

True artists have an inner calling to create and in so doing are entered into the deeper mysteries; while others are driven to create to achieve fame and fortune seeking to profit him/herself and promote their image. All external work has value only insofar as the interior is evolved and developed accordingly — the form of outer expression is a direct mirror of what is occurring inside. In this way, the conscious artist is a hinge between the third and fourth dimensions. The third-dimensional body contains the core essence or the divine self, and the fourth-dimensional, or etheric body, contains the core imaginal realm. It is beneficial for the artist to connect the central channel between his/her essence self with the imaginal core; this process is called, plugging into the central channel of creative power.

The central channel of creative power is available to everyone all the time. This central channel is responsible for springing cosmic consciousness in the noosphere. Sooner than later, every human will realize their connection to this central creative power and will, therefore, realize him/herself as a medium. When this knowledge arrives, each individual will naturally seek to purify and refine their minds to receive messages from ever-higher realities. Each person will also realize his/her own unique artistic nature. In this way, the artist as a third-dimensional self is in charge of sculpting him/herself as a work of art, and at the same time, is responsible for reshaping the environment as a work of art.

The process of the artist creating him/herself anew is actually the method of becoming divine. This aspiration is the divine blueprint of evolution imprinted from the beginning of creation. We are always aspiring toward the cosmic template of divine being and embodiment. Everyone is imprinted with an inner image of his or her highest self. The stronger this divine image is felt, the more we will exert to change our habits, inclusive of diet, speech, and appearance. This is how we become a conscious work of art.

Chapter 6
Cybersphere and Identity Crisis

“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.” —Albert Einstein

“The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.” —Marshall McLuhan

If rock and roll is the sound texture of the electronic ocean of the final stage of history — the technosphere — then the cybersphere is its cultural medium. What is the cybersphere and how does it reflect the impact of the human on the machine of the human on the Earth, and of the machine on the human? What does this have to do with the expressive modalities of the human being? The cybersphere is the sphere of influence of computer communication technologies.

To begin this exploration of the cybersphere and the effect of the machine on the human psyche, three factors must be considered:

1. Increase of population (that expands globally, becoming exponential over the last 200 years).

2. Increase of technology (that becomes exponential in its rate of innovation, propagation and multiplication).

3. Loss of and/or search for identity (the consequent effect of factors (1) and (2), causing the human to enter into a prolonged identity crisis).

With these three factors in mind, let us travel back to 1840 to view planet Earth. At this time, the human population had just reached 1 billion, a 100 percent increase of 500 million in 90 years. This showed that the exponential curve had begun around 1750 with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Here, we see the uprooting of people from agriculture and the introduction of mechanical means for farming. For example, manual farm tools, such as sickles, were replaced by mechanical contrivances for harvesting, forcing peasants into urban areas to become factory workers. There was a struggle to find new identity in urban centers after having lived and worked in rural areas for so long.

This was the first stage of the loss of identity; the traditional way was gone, alienation set in, and urban problems entered with violence and crime. Drug abuse and alcoholism grew to relieve the tension of laboring at the factory. In the 1840s, Morse code was invented, along with the telegraph and the camera. The camera, which is now taken for granted, was the first major mechanical-artistic medium. In its formative decades, photography was extremely slow — people who wanted their portraits taken had to sit in front of the camera for at least 30 minutes while their image was slowly burned into a plate. Photographers would often place a stick behind the subject being photographed to hold their head still.

Photography had a great impact on the artistic scene. With the introduction of the camera, the visual arts were slowly driven out of traditional cultural havens. Increasingly, the artist no longer received aristocratic patronage, and so had to move toward commercial venues, like art galleries, theatres, etc. At the same time, photography became an increasingly appealing and popular medium, particularly with the accelerating production and distribution of newspapers, magazines, journals and reviews — this was the beginning of popular mass media. At this point, illustrations had relied primarily on lithography, an inexpensive but artistic craft medium that made numerous visual reproductions.

As photography gained popularity, high art moved into more experimental and esoteric forms. As the population grew, the number of people that proportionately could fit into an art gallery diminished. This shifted the value of art toward a more elitist trend, leading to the increasing exploitation of new art forms. With photography, for the first time, an image could be duplicated into the likeness of a person or any other object. As a result, the artists’ urge to paint in a realistic manner lessened, giving way to more experimental art forms.

As a consequence, many painters changed their style into new subjective modes of expression. By the nineteenth century, the machine was the principle instrument for mechanical self-replication, and would soon become the modus operandi of the entire society. By the twentieth century, the human had fully taken on the role of biological accomplice to the machine. As the machine propagates and replicates faster and faster, so also does the human need to propagate ever more rapidly to keep up with the machine, while inventing ever faster machines. This is the story of modern life.