The Kirby Codex: Cosmic Journeys

(This post is a chapter in a book  I have begun working on, tentatively to be called "The Kirby Codex". Stay tuned for much more!)

A recurring mythic theme in Jack Kirby's work is the cosmic journey: an ordinary person is taken on a trip across the universe, and is forever transformed by the experience. Knowingly or not, Kirby was telling the most ancient of myths, one which goes back to those first shamans who ventured beyond the mundane world and returned to share their acquired wisdom with the tribe.

One of the earliest examples of a Kirby cosmic journey is from the story "Donnegan's Daffy Chair," published in Alarming Tales #1 in 1957:

In this tale, a lowly office sweeper named Timothy Donnegan is asked to watch a very special chair, which he can't help but try out. The chair soon launches him faster than light into deep space, where he vanishes among the stars. Five years later, Donnegan returns to Earth, wearing strange garb and speaking an alien language. As the final panel puts it: "Timothy seemed to have forgotten his own language. And no one could interpret his new one! To this day! Nobody knows where Timothy has been and the things he has seen!"

This story seems almost autobiographical, because it was around this time that Kirby's work took an unmistakable turn toward the cosmic. It was as if Jack too had gotten a glimpse of a world beyond and no longer spoke his old mundane language. The question is, where did he go and what did he see?

Two years later, in 1959, Kirby wrote "The Great Moon Mystery," which wouldn't be published until 1965 in Blast-Off #1. In this story, astronauts discover a million year-old alien monolith on the moon, which sends them on a psychedelic journey through alien landscapes. Sound familiar? Somehow Kirby seems to have foretold Kubrick and Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1959!

Fittingly, in 1976, Kirby would get a chance to tell that tale in its full glory, in the pages of the 2001 Treasury Special, and in the short-lived 2001 series:

It's interesting to see how Kirby revisited and expanded on his favorite esoteric themes over the decades. Donnegan and his "cosmic chair" would be more fully realized in the pages of the New Gods via the character of Metron – to me Metron is Donnegan, the humble earthman transformed by his shamanic journey into a new god.

 
 

Metron to me is perhaps the definitive Kirby creation. When I see Metron in his Mobius Chair, I can't help thinking of Jack, sitting at his battered drawing table in his basement, taking us on journeys to the very edge of the cosmos and beyond.

One more cosmic journey of note is contained in the pages of Fantastic Four #49 – part one of the incomparably epic "Galactus Trilogy." Here, Johnny Storm is sent on a quest across the cosmos by another shamanic guide figure, Uata the Watcher, and is permanently transformed by the experience:

After completing his quest, Johnny Storm asks himself, as many college students must have asked themselves who were exposed to Kirby's four-color magic,

"Did I do the right thing, coming here? What can an ordinary college life hold for someone who's travelled beyond the galaxy... Someone who's had a glimpse of the wonders of the unknown cosmos!"

This story must have been quite a revelation to comic book readers in 1966! It was this incredible tale that launched the Cosmic Age at Marvel, and in the process transformed comic books and our culture at large forever. And while I don't want to detract from Stan Lee's undeniable genius, I hope it's clear by now that this revolution was primarily the work of one inspired mind: the great cosmic comic shaman, Jack Kirby!

Mystic of the Week: Julius Evola

“America ... has created a 'civilization' that represents an exact contradiction of the ancient European tradition. It has introduced the religion of praxis and productivity; it has put the quest for profit, great industrial production, and mechanical, visible, and quantitative achievements over any other interest. It has generated a soulless greatness of a purely technological and collective nature, lacking any background of transcendence, inner light, and true spirituality. America has [built a society where] man becomes a mere instrument of production and material productivity within a conformist social conglomerate”  –Julius Evola

Baron Julius Evola, Italian aristocrat, esotericist, mountaineer, Traditionalist and fascist ideologue, is one of the more interesting and controversial Western mystics of the 20^th century. Like Aleister Crowley and G.I. Gurdjieff, Evola was an influential early example of a Westerner who looked Eastward for inner enrichment in a cultural milieu that had been made barren for mystics by the West’s embrace of rationalism, materialism and exoteric religiosity. Like Crowley and Gurdjieff, Evola’s mystical dissent from the orthodoxies of modernity has made him something of a cult figure, whose influence only seems to grow with time. Like Crowley and Gurdjieff, Evola sought to actually become the kind of spiritual superman prophesied by Nietzsche, rather than to merely philosophize about it, via disciplines like Tantric Yoga, Hermeticism, mountaineering, esoteric Buddhism and Taoism. Like Crowley and Gurdjieff, Evola is often considered a somewhat sinister figure for his esoterically-enhanced Will to Power and rejection of Judeo-Christian moralism. Such has long been the fate of mystics who walk the lonely road of mental liberation and inner empowerment in the Western world!

However, thanks to the pioneering work of people like Crowley, Gurdjieff and Evola, who paved the way for the massive influx of esoteric and Eastern ideas into the West starting in the 1960’s, Eastern mysticism and esoteric practices have gained a foothold in our culture that  seems unstoppable. The spiritual hunger that Evola felt, which led him to support fascism as a means of overthrowing the mediocrity of spirit which is so epidemic in our civilization, is no longer limited to a few eccentric men of privilege. Yoga is now mainstream, part of the curriculum of every Young Men’s Christian Association chapter, and self-improvement gurus promoting ideas based on Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism are frequent best-sellers. The ancient esoteric idea that each human being has within her the potential for godhood was quite a radical and subversive idea not long ago, but has become almost a cliché in our time. Since the New Age explosion, the stranglehold of science and exoteric religion has been broken in the West, probably forever. In fact, the West is well on its way to becoming the new East, and vice versa!

Julius Evola’s life is fascinating because it reminds us that esotericism is not, and should not be, a path to emasculated, feel-good, New Age navel-gazing. On the contrary, Evola’s “Yoga of Power” is a path of self-mastery which taps into the power of the shadow self, leading naturally to other-mastery when applied to the outer universe, and which find its most natural political expression in hierarchy, esoteric theocracy and fascism – or what Evola called “Traditionalism.”

Traditionalism is a critique of the modern world more radical than anything offered by Voltaire or Marx, for it is an ideology that seeks nothing less than the overthrow the entire Enlightenment project and a return to the divine orders of the Pharaonic God-Kings, Islamic Caliphs, Christian Holy Roman Emperors, Hindu Brahmins and Tibetan Lamas. To a modern steeped in Enlightenment values, Evola’s ideology seems shocking and misguided, but I would argue that in the longer view, history and human nature are on the Baron’s side. After all, the Pharaohs reigned for 3000 years and the Brahmins and Roman Emperors are still with us after more than 2000, while our post-Enlightenment democracies are less than a tenth as old and already seem to be coming apart at the seams.

One of the first things all mystical paths must do is decondition the mind, and when a Westerner does so, he will soon discover, as Evola did, that he has been programmed with a whole array of ideas that have no deep basis in the human psyche – ideas which are really shallow cerebrations to satisfy the rational mind, but which fail to inspire the deeper levels of the unconscious mind which are the source of our greatest power.

Mystic of the Week: Edgar Mitchell

Edgar Mitchell is a mystic for the Space Age – an astronaut who experienced a cosmic epiphany while returning from the moon during the Apollo 14 mission. Born in a small town in Texas, raised a Baptist, with a PhD in aeronautical engineering from MIT, Mitchell wouldn’t seem to be a likely candidate for any kind of “New Agey” mystical revelation. However, so powerful was his epiphany in space in 1971 that Mitchell soon devoted his life to trying to understand the experience.  According to Wikipedia:

Mitchell's interests include consciousness and paranormal phenomena. On his way back to earth during the Apollo 14 flight he had a powerful Savikalpa samadhi experience, and also claimed to have conducted private ESP experiments with his friends on Earth. The results of said experiments were published in the Journal of Parapsychology in 1971. In early 1973, he founded the nonprofit Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) to conduct and sponsor research into areas that mainstream science has found unproductive, including consciousness research and psychic events.

The sight of the Earth, moon, sun and a 360 degree panorama of the heavens from his cockpit window triggered a Samadhi experience in Mitchell:

“And suddenly it settled in, a visceral moment of knowing that the molecules in my body, the molecules in the spacecraft, and the molecules in my partners had been prototyped and manufactured in an ancient generation of stars. It was not an intellectual realization, but a deep knowing that was accompanied by a feeling of ecstasy and oneness that I had never experienced in that way before.

In that instant, I knew for certain that what I was seeing was no accident. That it did not occur randomly and without order. That life did not, by accident, arise from the primordial earthly sea. It was as though my awareness reached out to touch the furthest star and I was aware of being an integral part of the entire universe, for one brief instance. Any questions that my curious mind might have had about our progress, about our destiny, about the nature of the universe, suddenly melted away as I experienced that oneness. I could reach out and touch the furthest parts and experience the vast reaches of the universe. It was clear that those tiny pinpoints of light in such brilliant profusion were a unity. They were linked together as part of the whole as they framed and formed a backdrop for this view of planet Earth. I knew we are not alone in this universe, that Earth was one of millions, perhaps billions, of planets like our own with intelligent life, all playing a role in the great creative plan for the evolution of life.”

Other astronauts report similar changes in their consciousness from being in space, a phenomenon which has been called the “Overview Effect.” One of my more speculative ideas is that the human mind may be able to more easily sense some kind of universal “Force” from outside the electromagnetic, gravitational or other influences of the Earth. I have even imagined an entire science fiction future history based on the idea that entering the larger cosmos will cause this latent ability to awaken in homo sapiens, who will become “homo cosmicus” – real Jedi, Bene Gesserit and Kohlinaru space mystics!

To see the world through the eyes of a newborn, prior to all categories of thought, to experience the cosmic unity of all things, to be in awe of reality, to glimpse infinity – these are the essence of the mystical experience. In the Zen tradition it is called “Satori”, in Hinduism it is “Samadhi”, for Gnostic Christians it is “gnosis”, in Kabbalism it is “Ein Sof”, Taoists call it “Te”, in Sufi Islam it is “fana”, and apparently for astronauts it is the “Overview Effect”.

This effect could even become the prime motivator for manned space exploration – imagine space temples in orbit or on Mars which offer panoramic views of the heavens to visiting spiritual adventurers, or pilgrims voyaging ever deeper into space in search of a more profound cosmic gnosis, or a new cosmic religion exploding out into the universe, inspired by a prophet such as Mitchell. To me these scenarios are no more unlikely than Stone Age Egyptians suddenly erecting vast pyramids, or Arab barbarians conquering the Near East, or Christians colonizing entire continents, and it's certainly a more inspiring vision of our cosmic future than a solar system full of mindless space probes and automated asteroid mines!

Mitchell corresponded with last week’s featured mystic, Gopi Krishna, about his experience – another beautiful example of science and mysticism, East and West, working together to try to unravel the grandest of mysteries. Krishna composed a rather epic poem to Mitchell, which begins:

Dear Captain Mitchell;

Thanks for your letter written to my friend,
Gene Kieffer, through whom I this answer send.
May God bless your fine efforts for a cause
Which, at the moment, is and always was
The most important project one could take
In hand, with all his heart and soul, to slake
The burning thirst to peer behind the scenes
Of this Creation to know what it means,
To find out of what stuff our soul is made:
A lasting substance or a fleeting shade,
To explore the mystery of life and death,
And know what happens after the last breath.
Does any fragment of our conscious being
Survive the end, still knowing, feeling, seeing?
And in what form or to what planes ascends
This deathless essence when life's drama ends?

(more) 

Hardcore skeptics may dismiss Mitchell as a New Age crackpot, but to me he is a modern shaman – one who has journeyed outside the bounds of mundane reality and returned with a message for the entire human tribe. In these trying times, faced as we are with a global shaman's test, perhaps the consciousness-expanding Overview Effect is the mystical revelation we need for a new cosmic age. May the Force be with us all...

Further Reading:

For an interesting discussion of the scientific study of the Overview Effect, see

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/05/will-our-brains.html

Two organizations dedicated to promoting the Overview Effect are The Overview Institute and Homo Spaciens.

For more thoughts about what Einstein called the "cosmic religious feeling," see my blog The Cosmist.

For the definitive book on the Overview Effect, including interviews with Mitchell and other astronauts, see The Overview Effect by Frank White. Mitchell's autobiographical account of his epiphany and his subsequent mystical investigations is also quite interesting.

Mystic of the Week: Gopi Krishna

"In no other period of history were the learned so mistrustful of the divine possibilities in man as they are now." –Gopi Krishna

I'm going to start a new feature here today, which is to post information about a mystic who I find inspiring. I'll start things off with Gopi Krisha, the renowned Indian Kundalini master. Here are some excerpts from his Wikipedia entry:

Kundalini awakened in him quite forcefully in 1937 after 17 years of intense meditative practice. From that moment onwards, his consciousness was radically altered and over the next 12 years or so, it underwent an even more dramatic transformation to a perennial state. It was Gopi Krishna’s belief that knowledge of Kundalini is essential for the survival of the race, and that with this knowledge we would then begin to explore aspects of creation totally hidden from our view at present....

In the light of Pandit Gopi Krishna's experiences he himself has started to search the life of geniuses and enlightened persons in history for clues of kundalini awakening. He proposed an organisation to be erected to conduct scientific research on the matter. The research should, according to him, consist of research on biological processes in the body, psychological and sociological research of living persons. According to Mr. Krishna the lives of historical persons should also be investigated.

One organisation has picked up the wish of Mr. Krishna to further investigate the lives of saints, geniuses and inspired people, namely the Institute for Consciousness Research.

I think this is a beautiful idea, and is the kind of alliance of science and mysticism that I am very passionate about. Why should science and mysticism be foes, when only as allies can they bring mankind to a higher state of awareness and knowledge?!

Below is the last interview of Gopi Krishna. Enjoy!

Between a Hammer and an Anvil: A Mystic’s View of the Atheist-Theist Holy Wars

“Politics and Religion are obsolete. The time has come for Science and Spirituality.” –Jawaharlal Nehru, quoted by Arthur C. Clarke

"Believe nothing on the faith of traditions,
even though they have been held in honor
for many generations and in diverse places.
Do not believe a thing because many people speak of it.
Do not believe on the faith of the sages of the past.
Do not believe what you yourself have imagined,
persuading yourself that a God inspires you.
Believe nothing on the sole authority of your masters and priests.
After examination, believe what you yourself have tested
and found to be reasonable, and conform your conduct thereto." –The Buddha

"The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties - this knowledge, this feeling ... that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious men." –Albert Einstein

Now that the intellectual climate in the Western world has become so nasty, polarized and ideological, I've decided to go ahead and join the fray by attacking both sides. In broad strokes, the situation seems to be this: On one side we have the specter of “nerd fascism” – aggressive atheist materialists armed with the hammer of the scientific method, determined to stamp out all traces of “unscientific” religion and magical thinking from our culture. On the other side, we have the anvil of the religious fundamentalists, who are equally determined to crush heretical ideas which don’t conform to their faith and scriptures. And between the hammer and anvil of this holy war, we have people like me – the mystics and Jedi woo-masters – who think both sides are simple-minded fanatics!

Of the two opposing armies, I am culturally much closer to the nerd fascists – in fact I was one of them not so long ago. Raised an atheist, encouraged to study math and science from an early age, I had absolutely no time for religion when I was younger, which I rather arrogantly dismissed as an outmoded relic of a pre-scientific age (despite knowing absolutely nothing about it). However, as I mentioned in my last post, I defected from this camp when I discovered that things weren't so cut-and-dried and found the atheist-materialist worldview to be uninspiring and unsatisfactory.

To cut to the chase, the point that both sides need to try to grasp is this (in large blinking letters for emphasis):

The human mind confers value to things, not God or the universe!

This is what I’ll call the mystic’s “mind-centric” model of reality, as opposed to the atheist’s “universe-centric” and the theist’s “god-centric” models. The atheist looks to the "objective" outer cosmos and his powers of reason for his values; the theist looks to God and his power of faith; the mystic looks to the "subjective" inner cosmos and his powers of mystical insight. Which model is superior? By what means can we arbitrate this question? Can it be settled somewhere other than the battlefield?
 

To illustrate why these models are important, consider the way materialist ideologues like to rail against both “New Age woo” such as homeopathy and acupuncture and “Christian woo” such as faith healings and exorcisms. The science, these skeptics say, doesn’t support the effectiveness of any of these practices, and they may be right. But if people find these methods subjectively helpful – it makes some of them feel better – then this is all that matters in a mind-centric model of reality. As shamans have understood for tens of thousands of years, the placebo effect isn’t some aberration to be controlled for, it’s the whole point of the exercise! Scientific studies which don’t account for subjective states of being are therefore rather like a person going to an opera with earmuffs on and declaring that music is of no value. In fact, this whole debate reminds me of an earmuffed person and a blindfolded person arguing over whether music or art is superior. I say we need to open our eyes and ears and appreciate both!

To a mystic like me, the bottom line is this: Everything we truly value in life is subjective, unique and non-repeatable – i.e. it is magic, not science. There is no science of epiphany, insight or inspiration, and I doubt there ever will be. Science, at least as it is currently conceived, is therefore all but useless in illuminating those aspects of experience that matter most to me.

I don’t want this post to be just rant against science though, because I have tremendous respect for the scientific enterprise – science being an expression of man's spiritual nature. What I would like to suggest is that while scientists are undoubtedly responsible for producing the “outer modernity” of our technologically advanced civilization, inwardly they seem somewhat primitive. The mystics, on the other hand, are great navel-gazers with impressive powers of self-awareness, but left to their own devices are likely to produce a world of increased material suffering. What is needed, therefore, is a union of the scientist’s outer modernity with the mystic’s inner modernity – which we are beginning to see with the Dalai Lama’s dialogue with physicists, for example. Another example is the effort by people like Stuart Hameroff to develop a science of consciousness which takes seriously the discoveries of mystics throughout the ages, rather than dismissing them as pre-scientific woo. Even Sam Harris, the leading new atheist, has acknowledged that consciousness may be forever inaccessible to science, and has called for the development of what amounts to rational mysticism.

So to me this seems like the best route going forward – a fourth way which combines science and mysticism and offers an interesting and constructive alternative to the hammer and anvil of the atheist-theist holy wars. May the Force be with us all...

The Singing Tortilla Monster

Not so long ago, I was a fairly standard-issue atheist materialist, with an advanced education in mathematics and a faith in reason and the five senses as the only arbiters of truth. I can still parrot the atheist line on just about any subject under the sun and make convincing-sounding arguments against every religious belief and spiritual path in existence. However, somewhere along the line I found this worldview limiting and uninspiring, so I abandoned it for the greener, if murkier, pastures of mysticism, magic, mythology and art.

I think the main reason I am so put off by atheists now, including my previous incarnation as a card-carrying member of their club, is that they seem so stubbornly devoid of spirituality or an inner life. The atheist's fixation upon the mechanical processes of the outer, "objective" cosmos, while simultaneously denigrating the mystical processes of the inner, "subjective" cosmos, strikes me as a particularly unhealthy form of neurosis. Where out there among all those stars and galaxies does an atheist hope to find his purpose or inspiration? Will she find it in the next deep-field survey or cosmological theory? Will black holes and dark energy become her gods? Doesn't he see that this universe of matter is a hostile, entropic void with little to offer in comparison to what is within our minds? Doesn't she realize that all that science is just a fancy finger pointing straight back at herself?

Speaking to an atheist who is in denial of his own spirituality, I often get the disturbing impression that I am in the presence of a zombie. Doesn't this high-IQ intellect-idolater understand that the truth is trans-rational, that to be spiritual is to be fully conscious, and that mystical insight is the highest form of intelligence? This is a reality the real scientific giants like Newton and Einstein understood, but which the ideologues standing on their shoulders seem to have forgotten. It's as if there is music playing all around them, but the atheists refuse to hear it!

Here is a parable I invented, inspired by the beautiful stories of the Sufis, which hopefully makes my point a little clearer:

The amusical people of the world held a convention to denounce this thing called “music” which the rest of humanity was constantly raving about. “It’s ridiculous,” said the spokesman for these non-hearing people, “we have analyzed the data, searched the cosmos and studied the equations and we find no evidence for any ’music’. Face it, music doesn’t exist! You musicists might as well all be raving about the Singing Tortilla Monster. You people are crazy and ignorant! And stop your silly dancing!”

Then a little girl stood up, pointed to the gathered amusicists and said: “You don’t believe in music because you can’t hear. But the reason you can’t hear is not because you are deaf, but because you have your hands over your ears. Try removing them, and just listen!”

Then a miraculous thing happened. One by one, the assembled non-hearers removed their hands from their ears, smiled as they had never smiled before, and began to dance…


This is the core message of every spiritual path, whether Sufi, Buddhist, Vedantic, Yogic, Taoist, Jedi, Kabbalist, Esoteric Christian, Hermeticist, Fourth Way, Shamanic or what have you: that man is asleep and must be awakened to his higher spiritual nature. I sincerely hope that Richard Dawkins and friends will wake up, hear the music and stop waging war on mankind's spiritual nature, because with or without God, this life is far too short not to dance!

Introduction to the Jedi Path

As promised, here are some more thoughts on the Jedi Path. Enjoy!