“Mystery of the inner world, with a relative contempt for the outer, must inevitably lead to great catastrophes. Mystery of the outer world, to the exclusion of the inner, delivers us over to the demonic forces of the latter and keeps us barbaric despite all outward forms of culture.” [1]

Our present-day culture is between two extremes: on one side we are given the means and the knowledge to evolve so as to reach that human standard which should be the goal of a wise, peacefully and salutary existence; on the other hand, nolens volens, consciously or unconsciously, the majority accepts the slavery imposed on it from the abominable political, financial and clerical systems that hold the reins of the chariot. Moreover, it seems all too evident that a greater part of humanity presently has transferred its consciousness; it moves around distracted and hectically with its fingers frenetically hitting small buttons on a small incredible electronic gadget, with a semi-hypnotized sight on its display and absorbing, more often than not, all the nonsense and brainwashing which it releases to the percipient, seemingly a strange semi-zombified being walking with his fingers, hardly aware of his environs, of the planet’s beauty, of his responsibility toward the same and the life thriving on it; has man’s consciousness been transferred to his fingers? Not completely, sometimes it raises his/her head for a selfie! A perfect humanity is utopia, and it ought to be so; a humanity not bent on self destruction is a chimera; but a better individual is within almost everyone’s powers. Albeit with a few exceptions, there are lots of excuses not to delve into the practice of a saner and more rewarding way of life, because the ‘rewarding’ within the present system and cultural trend is thought of merely in terms of material gratifications, we have become like the farmer polluting the upstream river, giving no thought to the farmer downstream and ignoramus of the stranded inner alien’s call.

Our life is strictly symbolic, it is made of symbols; of the myriad symbols that impinge on our perceptive faculties, which means not just our sensory physical faculties, some go unnoticed, some alert our awareness, some sink deep down in the unconscious. Once they are painted on the canvas of the mind the psyche appropriates them and there they converse with all the other symbols present in our mental structure. Chopin’s piano, Mozart’s violin or Bach’s organ will not create the same feelings in a large audience even if there may be some approximation; the vision of a handsome man will create e definite image in her mind, so will the vision of a beautiful dame give rise to a definite sensation in his mind; admiring the full moon or looking at the surging waves of the sea will paint diverse pictures in different minds; a hammer and an anvil, a bee, an ant or an old wretch with a tattered umbrella will suggest something to an observer but not the very same thing to diverse observers … and so on, ad infinitum; not two persons will have the same response to a given perception. Even those atavistic symbols that invade our mind and those released from the zoo of the collective unconscious, hardly if ever fully comprehended, will not relay a similar meaning to diverse individuals.

From the most archaic times we have evidence of symbols of a very definite pattern which act on the human mind, those symbols making up that which Dr. C. J. Jung labeled as the collective unconscious, "…the outcome of countless generations of man and his forebears, in which life still moves" [2] and which are a common heritage as well as part and parcel of our psychic life. "The world of the archetypes of Jung is like a Platonic world of ideas, in that the archetypes are impersonal and do not participate in the historical Time of the individual life, but in the Time of the species - even of organic Life itself." [3] Symbols are the mainstays of the human mind as well as the base of creativity and that mental tool of utmost importance which we call imagination, the creators of its fantasies; only a corpse can do without them! Else we have those symbols that we create by a conscious act of will for a specific purpose, i.e. a crescent, a cross, a swastika with the arms in an anticlockwise direction and so on. In this context, symbols that appear in the same garment are described approximately with the same words in cultures well apart both physically and in time. Not less so we have those symbols devised in order to obtain a definite effect, so prominent in the Eastern philosophies and religious practices. We know that the tantric practices of visualizations of very complex mandalas or yantras [4] can create extreme experiences and at times very frightening ones: "Visualizing mental formations, either voluntarily or not, is a most mysterious process. What becomes of these creations? May it not be that like children born of our flesh, these children of the mind separate their lives from ours, escape our control, and play parts of their own? ..." [5] There should be no doubt that there is a common mental - or better, psychical - substratum which so far we have not yet been able to fathom, something that is encoded at the very root of our being and that appears to be an unconditional necessity for the psychical evolution of what we label as Homo Sapiens. We have discovered, with little reason for doubt, the existence of this common substratum which puts all men whatever their culture or ethnic group on the same level; how this common substratum is encoded into the human being and its mode of action are two questions which perhaps we will never solve completely thus forcing man to rely on the transcendental question. The only difference is that this transcendental question is deep within us while a good lot of people are searching it, and its answer, in the world without; in worlds often utterly alien to the base and core of their real being.

While myths have always being a driving power for man, we have now reached a maturity that has empowered us to rely on our own symbolic emergence; more often than not a symbol is the irrational pedestal supporting the rational, if we only take the trouble to bring it to the surface and confront it. The means for such a task are to be found everywhere in art, religion, literature and science, this is a truly great evolutionary feat but the state of the industrialized societies appears to be the greatest hindrance for this evolutionary step, "… the high development of rational intelligence in Homo Sapiens has led to a serious and regrettable impoverishment of his powers of intuition, a lost treasure which we today must strive to recover" [6] as well as the greatest menace, a menace brought about by the very refusal to pursue and understand these symbolic manifestations of the mind; the refusal of a humanistic evolution sacrificed in a frenetic pursue of materialism, sacrificed in the wild, egoistic pursue of the utmost material well-being and commodities; the satisfaction of the ego to the exclusion of everything else: greed ("The world has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed." Mahatma Gandhi) and lust! This means a refusal as well as a corruption of our symbolic life and understanding, a refusal of spiritual evolution and as such a corruption of our understanding of the primordial and primal shaping forces within the temple of our being. "The function of eastern religion (psychology) is to allow the mind to escape the confines of the symbolic. According to this view, everything is a symbol, not only words and concepts, but also people and things. Beyond the confines of the symbolic lies that which is, pure awareness, the experience of the "suchness" of reality. Nevertheless, every eastern religion resorts to the use of symbols to escape the realm of the symbolic." [7]

This excursion in the topic of symbols is relevant in the context of this essay since we must have a clear vision of that which is the spring board in the realm of that self enmeshed in a decadent society because we have to contact and converse with the alien within if the survival of our offspring, of the species does have any importance for us. There are a plethora of methods pointing to this goal; some are indeed convincing and reliable, others are not suitable to the present-day frame of mind or within a given culture and a good many are freaky methods to be simply avoided if we want to preserve our sanity; on the whole, there is a wide choice suited to the seriously motivated researcher. This is what we are concerned with in this disquisition; eastern practices have proved their value so long as they have not been corrupted, particularly in the western world; here we will not jump into Kundalini Yoga or alchemical Taoism still a couple of exercises, one about breathing and one easy but effective meditation will be suggested; breathing exercises and meditation go hand in hand. You may follow those suggested in this essay or other simple practices which you deem more suitable for yourself but avoid to ensnarl yourself in the great promises of something recondite, unless you have a sound cultural background of the same; unless you are an Hindu it will never profit you to recite daily the Thousand Names of Sri Lalitha, (Sri Lalitha Sahasranamam) nor to entrap yourself into advanced Tibetan yoga or imitate a swirling Dervish unless you belong to that specific culture.

Breathing [8]is the most obvious and vital process of everything that thrives on the planet, it is the basis of biological life, but man normally misuses it since as a rule he has something else to think about; we just breath in an automatic way as dictated by our autonomic nervous system and our life goes on at its best immersed in the beautifully polluted atmosphere of this gorgeous spot in space, as we think it should, but that might not be the case. Breathing is a sensorymotor act integrated by nervous influences that arise from nearly every level of the brain and upper spinal cord. In higher mammals and especially man, respiration subserves two major functions, metabolism and behavior. Withal, breathing can be both an art and a discipline and as such it is disclosed and taught in many diverse forms of breathing exercises more or less exotic, more or less exacting and time consuming, and we may have proof of that in any yoga treatise but for the sake of practical simplicity we may cling to something easy and effective, like that which follows.

It is not mandatory to sit in the lotus posture or choose any inconvenient or exotic position which will simply avoid relaxation because we would have to get used to it; the purpose is to get free of corporeal sensations which would impede mental concentration, we must tame the body before we can tame the mind; our exercise may be carried out sitting comfortably on a chair or lying supine on a hard surface. It is well if our spine is kept erect and straight as that will make it easier to properly oxygenate ourselves, as we well know from the fact that a folded balloon is not so easy to inflate. A quiet dim or dark environment obviously is preferable and it is left to us to decide whether to keep our eyes slightly opened or closed, or fixing the sight to the place within the bony box above the neck where our pineal gland is supposed to lodge, or to concentrate on some external object. Hence breathing should be carried out with no forcing as stress might obtain the opposite result and be noxious while timing among inhalation, retention and exhalation as well should follow a natural unforced pattern although this will change by itself with time and exercise. It is not just oxygen and vigor that you are taking in; the mind as well is a primary beneficiary of the breathing exercise; assuredly you will not get a good painting from a painter ill at ease, hence relaxation and quietude of mind is paramount. The mind is the canvas whereon the picture of the present moment, as the summation of past events, appears together with the set of probabilities which might materialize subsequently; the psyche [9] is the interface, the mediator between the mind and the brain, (a quantum mechanics physicist would say between the 'wave' and the 'particle' and would equate it to consciousness) it is the translator of the picture which will relay the composes, presumptively to the actuator, the brain, which translates it into action, overtly or covertly to man that, as a whole psychophysical entity, is the actor in the comedy of life; you should visualize this with your mind's eye, namely, both the physical and psychical benefit that you derive from a good breathing exercise. Altogether any good breathing exercise reflects the Hindu's concept of life-force, or prana, not barely oxygen and vigor, but a total benefit of both body and mind.

The breathing itself should be as follows: inhale, slowly and naturally but with a perfect consciousness of that which you are doing, filling first with air, as much as you can, the part of your body at the height of the abdomen so that it looks like a reversed beggar's bowl; then without stopping the intake push your breath to the height of the stomach (this will to some extent deflate the beggar's bowl) and after that up and above the sternum just to have the feeling that the intake of air, now your chest fully inflated, reaches all the way up somewhere around or above your neck or, still better, that it envelopes your being completely, just like a chrysalis is enveloped in a cocoon and here have a pause, retention, just so much as it is comfortable than slowly exhale, to complete emptiness, in the reverse order and here have a short pause before the next cycle of inhalation. The inhalation and exhalation should be performed through the nostrils.

The immortals of ancient China are thus described by Chuang Tzu: "The true men of old slept without dreams and waked up without worries. They ate with indifference to flavor, and drew deep breaths. For true men draw breath from their heels, the vulgar only from their throats." It is hard to say what the meaning of "true men draw breath from their heels" may be, nor a plausible explanation might have been given, much less that they walked on their lungs and that we should imitate this difficult art, but we may take it as to mean that a little auto-suggestion, like in anything else may help. The breathing from the heels might imply a perfect and total oxygenation of the whole organism, just like if every single cell of the organism were breathing; we might in the exercise close our eyes and imagine the air coming in from under our soles and leaving our body from the fontanel, the yogi's Brahmarandhra or ‘Aperture of Brahma’ corresponding to the junction of the parietal bones of the skull on the crown of the head. And to keep up with the little auto-suggestion, we might even visualize the air that we inhale as a source of life-giving essence, or light, with the color of a white-cold light or eventually a nice color which is pleasant to us and leaving the fontanel just like the water leaves a fountain and returns to the same so as to complete its cycle. This breathing pattern should become an integral part of our life so much so that it should become so much as possible instinctive even in normal activity aside from any concerned exercise. Whatever sensation is experienced while doing the breathing exercise, like cold feet, numb arms, or images crossing the mind: just let them have their way, do not heed them, you are simply not concerned with them; but avoid hyperventilation, i.e., excessive depth and rate of respiration; it will lead to an abnormal loss of carbon dioxide from the blood and might give rise to dizziness and tingling of the fingers and toes and chest pain if continued. Your task is to get to the top and apex of the pyramid and everything else has its own life apart from you, mind it not.

We are not just flesh, bones, and all the rest. All in all we are a veritable collection of mental phenomena, an incredible collection. Every single cell, its proteins and amino acids, its genes, every single molecule if not every single atom making up our physical structure speaks to the mind and, from the mind, receives an appropriate feedback; an unimaginable two-way traffic, mediated through the brain; an incredible chemo-electrical exchange and related, or resultant, noise and superimposed electromagnetic frequencies. No wonder that achieving a good degree of relaxation is an uneasy task, much more so to let go completely and transcend this chaos which is, indeed, a strange kind of chaos because it obeys those precise rules which keep a functional organism adapted to itself and to the environment. This is what we are not, normally, aware of and it is the lack of this awareness that makes things more difficult; we live in an unperceived mental frenzy which obscures our vision of life. Nothing is predetermined by a thought or by pure willpower but it all is decided beforehand by the interactions taking place in the structure which carries us around. Indeed hard to materialize, within this frenzy there is also a mechanism, a sort of switch that can dim and greatly decrease the turmoil that these interactions generate in our psyche but that switch must somehow be activated and that is a long and strenuous psychical feat. We must believe, have faith in ourselves that we can achieve this momentous, if not gargantuan task; were it an easy task humanity would be much better off.

Mind control is very expensive in terms of psychic energy and the effort to control your train of thoughts, to get rid of them and to ‘think-not’ more often than not is a stumbling block. The ‘heed them not’ is psychically more economical but where it meets some difficulty, a little visualization may be effortlessly and profitably employed. Just imagine two rails well spaced apart, ending nowhere into oblivion and that your thoughts can move only on these rails, whichever way they like. The rails are immersed in nothingness, nothing laterally and nothing in between and if any thought strays it is just lost in nothingness. Focus your attention on the empty space between the rails and let the thoughts go their way, you are concerned only with the void or naught in between the rails. That will require little if any effort and will be effective. Once a quite, controlled state is reached you may immerse yourself in meditation or a mental exercise suitable to your frame of mind while letting your subconscious wielding the breathing exercise. So far so well, nevertheless the obscure emptiness between the two rails is the threshold to your unconscious; if you cross it, you will suddenly find yourself face to face with the alien within. The outcome is unpredictable since you will find yourself facing your innermost psychical reality; crossing unknown or forbidden territory without being prepared is a daring adventure.

Actually ‘meditation’ and ‘mental exercise’ are not really the same thing; meditation often is static, a mental fixation on some symbol, while a mental exercise is kinetic, it comports action; the goal of the practices however might be the same. Let us recall the chrysalis above mentioned; you are immersed in your breathing exercise; envision yourself as a chrysalis within its cocoon. This cocoon is infinity itself, made up of vital energy, a life giving force; to use the Hindu term, ‘prana’ and that is what every cell of your organism is enriching itself with (just as "The true men of old …drew deep breaths. For true men draw breath from their heels…) to the point that slowly but steadily each single cell loses its individuality in merging with this life force, hence you yourself are transmuted into this vital energy, now you are the cocoon’s infinity, the cosmic reality; duality, space and time are transcended, the world has vanished. What tale will you bring back from this experience? How will you recount it? Here language fails.

A mental exercise might be like the following:

Just imagine yourself as being the shadow of a three-dimensional object between a source of light and a far away world whereupon the shadow (yourself) of the three-dimensional object is projected. In this stance something becomes clear: the shadow is a bi-dimensional projection of a three-dimensional object somewhere up there in a three-dimensional world; how can you comprehend the world upon which you are lying on if you are inferior by a degree of dimension, how can you comprehend the object in the way if, due to your being inferior by a degree of dimension the object in the way cannot be perceived simply because the dimension that you lack does not allow the perception of the object in the way between you and the light source above it, while at the same time you can still have a sort of feeling of the world upon which you are resting even if its degree of dimensions is the same as that of the object which projects your shadow on the world and lastly, and this is the important point, is there a way through which you can have a feeling, even an extremely dim perception, of the existence of a light source beyond the object which is the cause of your shadow-existence if there is no way by which you can perceive the object because you lack an all-important dimension?

Supposing that as a shadow-being, with an extreme effort or by some sort of miracle you are able to leap onto the three-dimensional object; you rest a while and then you decide to explore this mysterious thing which, as you are lacking a degree in dimension you cannot understand even if now being onto it you have a different sensation, you feel strange, awed and the feeling of a different, greater world is pervading the whole of your shadow-being. The exploration is hard and perilous, after all your bi-dimensional shadow-being does not experience a real good time moving on that object which is not perfectly flat, but that is the very thing which makes you feel strange and awed: for the first time, the bending of your shadow due to the pits and hills making up the three-dimensional object makes you perceive the possibility of an extra dimension even if there is nothing that you can do with it, you just cannot understand it no matter how you shadow-bend and shadow-twist but then something wonderful happens, you suddenly reach the top of the object and there your shadow-being is annihilated by the light source and no one is left to tell the tale, you are simply gone, gone within that light which was the primary cause of your shadow-life, gone because you dared climb around an object with an extra dimension than the mere two forming your shadow-being.

What might be the meaning of this annihilation, this deprivation of your shadow-essence on being exposed and absorbed by the light above?

So let us try to get an explanation of these two experiences, the transformation of your being into the cosmic vital energy and the annihilation by the light above the mysterious object. Perhaps the word ‘cosmic’ is the key to the apparently transcendental experience reached in the two practices above. The most mysterious symbol in our existence might be time itself, the life-giving nymph of the cosmos; in sanity we cannot but have the full awareness that we are inexorably subject to time, we “see” it flowing from the past to the future; we say ‘yesterday’, ‘now’ and ‘tomorrow’, yet something, that very ‘now’, is but a mental image, a concept of something that cannot exist in the perennial flow of time. The ‘now’ is the stoppage of time, an inexpressible condition; the ‘beyond’ reached in the two practices above. Before and after this paramount experience you were conscious of yourself and your environment, what was it in-between the before and the after?

There the eye goes not,
Speech goes not, nor the mind.
We know not, we understand not
How one would teach it.” [10]

"The Tao that can be told of
Is not the absolute Tao;
The names that can be given
Are not absolute names." [11]

… ‘You can hear the sound of two hands when they clap together,’ said Mokurai.’ Now show me the sound of one hand!’ [12]

Let us "p r e t e n d" that we have reached that state, time-lessness; we have experienced the perpetual present and the complete detachment from the world of matter, from our physical reality. Regaining our normal stance we will be wiser, our intuitive knowledge will be immensely enhanced, such will be our love of humanity that we will wish to give our life to free it from its miseries, to reform this deranged planet. We have achieved liberation, nirvana, moksha, satori, fana; we have become a Buddha, a Christ, a Mohamed, a Padma Sambhava, a Lao Tzu. A greater, richer and beautiful image has displaced all the other mundane images and symbols from our mind but something cannot be escaped: within our constricted mind we now have another image; mystical, indescribable, the final truth, whatever it may be but we are still, and quite likely to a greater degree, bound to an image even if it is within a beautiful mental frame; now it has an inner reality without outward form and speech cannot describe the formless. This is the stage when we become one with the universe, wholeness; 'wholeness', however, as undifferentiated and all pervading is a no-thing, it is a process. The perceptual vision and the other sensory experiences of the physical reality are a resultant of this process and this reveals the illusoriness of the perceptual world; this is self-realization. Here we find ourselves once more at a starting point and have to admit that freedom, liberation, enlightenment are mental concepts which enslave us even if the effort to reach this goal is worth the price we paid for it; we are still with or feet on the planet and bound by it physical laws and environment. As such, transcendence is a myth; what we transcend are certain innate psychic propensities which we substitute with psychic propensities of a new order or value, propensities which we adopt and adapt to; this required effort and discipline, the whole organism and its cognitive system were involved in the process.

The mystic experience almost invariably has a common factor, oneness with the whole, with the universe where the universe itself, to the mystic, is god. Perhaps that state can be explained: when all impediments brought about by the senses are fully overcome and the mind is perfectly still, free of any psycho-physical perception we are, so to say, tuned to the fundamental cosmic frequency, in perfect syntony and unison with the same; a uniqueness, that is to say, we vibrate at the very same rate of the sustaining medium of the universe. Frequency and resonance [13] make up the golden key, the East knew it thousands of years ago; we do not need to dive into quantum physics’ uncertainty principle, (I abide in my certainty, the other way around would be depressing and pathological!) concepts of singularity, (that is why I used the word ‘uniqueness’) wave function and entanglement which are used to fabricate God [14] or disturb Heisenberg’s cat; nor, in this context, call relativity into question since the perpetual present, whatever it may be, if it is, does not belong to time and space but the other way around. The key factor is ‘vibration’ “… [15]either the mind or the brain as containing an assemblage of selective filters, designed to cut out unwanted signals on neighboring frequencies … what William James called 'the blooming, buzzing multitude of sensations'” [16] and we are well aware of how diverse frequencies affect every living system on the globe, not less so inert matter. This reflects what was stated above; the ultimate reality, from our point of view, is a unique and eternal undulatory, wave-like process; metaphysical or theological speculations will not reveal what is the wind moving the waves. An Islamic saying aptly proclaims: “Thus far and no further”!

We thrive within a dimension which is negated to our senses and our mundane awareness but we have some subconscious hints that there is a diverse, greater reality beyond the cosmic appearance; I call it simply ‘Life’ as contrasted with ‘life’ and I trust that I am an experience of Life and not the other way around, that is to say, that life is not my experience, even if to a certain degree within my objective reality it is so. So much so the universe as a whole has a life span, possibly a consciousness of its material appearance, of its own works and the laws sustaining it, yet it is but an expression of something beyond, Life, that present where its manifestation dances in space-time, a mysterious terpsichorean which defies every human conception of reality.

We are like vapor which rise up from the ocean, condense into a drop that then falls back and is dispersed in the ocean; each single atom of the drop will disperse into the ocean with a memory of the wonderful event of rising up in the sky, forming into a drop and returning to the ocean. This metaphor will clearly suggest that nothing whatsoever is lost; the transitory moment of our life becomes part of the ocean's experience in an unending cyclic recurrence. The purpose of biological life is a most recondite mystery; with the emergence of intellectual powers and reason we have always confronted it and without any answer whatsoever to the bewildering conundrum we have been left with the single alternative of creating gods, a plethora of mental images which under this wise, i.e., god, regulates our destiny and the universe as a whole which he created perhaps in a moment of leisure. Seemingly only to bring about conflict and misery on this beautiful planet; this imagery was not a folly, rather a necessity of an evolving mind; the folly is that man still clings to this concept, that there are still so many gods in this world, each of them a diverse image and an undeniable truth so much so that to assert this one-sided truth humanity is perennially plunged into war, strife and death. That we cannot understand this creator, god, is not ignorance of his ways since the strange way he acts is quite evident, that of a selfish brute exacting adoration and sacrifices from his subjects so that they may be spared the torments of hell; but the blight ignorance of our real self is evident since the hoary being somewhere up there in the sky, the selfish brute, is nothing but a reflection of the dark side of human beings.

It is difficult to say how necessary throughout human history the struggle for survival has been; the real struggle more often that not has been to wantonly kill so as loot and plunder; in other words, what is plainly evident to this very day, not to share! To hold on with all their might on this usage people all over the world still kneels in prayer in temples, in groups or intimately in order to gain wealth, health, long life, happiness and a direct path to Paradise with or without the help of a group of greedy donkeys who are god’s representatives on earth. It seems that, not completely unaware yet apparently impotent, man is plunging head first into an immense global catastrophe. Only a few with due insight try to discern the true fabric of their structure, to strip the self off this ugly contemporary garment but not one of them will save humanity.

“The four "isms" of the apocalypse: chauvinism, sexism, racism and fundamentalism are riding roughshod over the gardens of civilization. When we take a long look around at the effects of the modern world, it's not a pretty sight. Blackened stumps of ancient forests smolder in the mid-day sun, young children stare from (and at) television sets, stunned with hunger and lack of love; torture and cruelty are the trademark of governments throughout the world; and wars are raging all over the face of our planet. For all the shimmering beauty of life, for all the exquisite potential waiting in the wings, when we take a long look around, we find ourselves none too sure about the future of our species, or for that matter, of any other.” [17] But this is an old story, all of us know it. What we refuse to know is the fact that each of us has his share of responsibility in this state of affairs. Let us recall the above quoted passage: “Mystery of the inner world, with a relative contempt for the outer, must inevitably lead to great catastrophes. Mystery of the outer world, to the exclusion of the inner, delivers us over to the demonic forces of the latter and keeps us barbaric despite all outward forms of culture.” [1]

On this maltreated planet a great multitude is awaiting Doom's Day, e dreadful day when God will decide to put an end to man's iniquity and, at the same time, they are looking for a Savior to redeem them. (A small group of chosen ones will have the privilege to spend eternity in the beatitude of one of many available paradises, which obviously are never overcrowded.) Tragic! Looking without for what they have within, the ‘alien’ mentioned at the beginning of this essay.

Many years ago this prompted me to write these lines: [18]

And of death will they live
Who Light Divine accepted not,
Time of doom will they be spared
For doom’s pillars will they be.
Knelling a faithful friend will it be
For them who the Faithful Friend forgot;
The Beginning will be its end,
Its end will there begin anew.
Knelling a faithful friend,
To their gloomy dark selves.

We are aware of other real possibilities however, without disturbing that very busy God up there: [19]

• Damocles’ sword: thousands of nuclear heads inside atomic silos always on the alert should an insane Chief of State push a single charming red button and unleash them on an equally armed opponent.
“Evolution has been compared to a labyrinth of blind valleys, and there is nothing very strange or improbable in the assumption that man’s native equipment, though superior to that of any other living species, nevertheless contains some built-in error or deficiency which predisposes him to self-destruction.” [20] "Would you like to liberate yourself from the lower realms of life? Would you like to save the world from the degradation and destruction it seems destined for? Then step away from shallow mass movements and quietly go to work on your own self-awareness. If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself. If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation." [21*] From the stone axe to the sword and the crossbow, to the cannon and the hydrogen bomb not very much has changed in this respect, it is an ancient problem which humanity has never willed to solve because egotism is the pivot of the problem.
• Gaia, the Earth, might get some unexpected convulsion and bring both the mythical Mu and Atlantis back into the sunlight and sink some other overpeopled unhealthy part of the planet into the depths of the oceans.
• A cosmic missile, a meteorite or a comet of great magnitude could hit the globe and another Immanuel Velikovsky in a remote future will have a chance to write a couple more books to narrate an incredible story.
• The sun’s light is not eternal and even if this will take place after a few billion years an already lifeless Gaia will meet her demise under a spent star.

[1] Cary F. Baines in the Translator’s Preface to “The Secret of the Golden Flower” (Translated and explained by Richard Wilhem with a forward and commentary by C. G. Jung) – Routlege & Kegan Paul –London, 1969.
[2] - P. W. Martin. Experiment in Depth - A Study of the Work of Jung, Eliot and Toynbee. p. 54. London. Routlege and Kegan Paul. 1967
[3] Mircea Eliade. The Sacred & the Profane - The Nature of Religion. p. 178. New York and London. A Harvest HBJ Book. 1959.
[4] The yantra is a complex pattern of intertwined - or interlaced - triangles, a mandala used as a representation of the chakras - psychical centers, or planes - in man. "Such is the power of the form-pattern which manifests the embodied deity, that it is called yantra. Yantra is an instrument, a machine, a store house of power. Rather it contains in itself a controlled form of the uncontrollable power of the deity." S. Sankaranarayanan. Sri Chakra. p. 9. Pondicherry. Dipti Publications. 1973.
See also Sir John Woodroffe’s Tantraraja Tantra and Kama-Kala Vilasa. Madras. Ganesh & Co. Private Ltd. 1971.
[5] Alexandra David-Neel. Magic and Mystery in Tibet. p. 141. London. Golgi Books. 1971.
[6] Jacques Monod. Chance and Necessity. p. 35. Glasgow. Collins, Fontana Books. 1974.
[7] Gary Zukav – The Dancing Wu Li Masters – p. 313 - Bantam New Age Books – 1980.
[8] ‘… the practices of magicians and hermits not only were intended to achieve heightened contemplation but had also a therapeutic purpose. This is confirmed by an inscription on twelve jade stones which has come down to us from the 6th century B.C.': “This is how breathing must be done: the breath is retained and collected. When it has collected it expands. When it expands, it goes downward. When it goes downwards, it becomes quiet. When it has become quiet, it grows firm. When it is firm, it begins to germinate. When it has germinated, it grows. When it has grown, it must be pressed back. When it has been pressed back, it reaches the crown of the head. At the top it presses against the crown of the head, down below it presses downwards. Whoever follows this principle lives; whoever does the contrary dies.” (Wilhem Helmut: A Chou Inscription on the Technique of Breathing. Quoted by Needham, Joseph: “Science and Civilization in China”. Cambridge (Cambridge University Press). I: 1954, II: 1956) from The Chinese Art of Healing by Stephan Pálos. Bantam Book, 1972.
[9] ”… we neither know nor pretend to know what ‘psyche’ is …” C. J. Jung in his psychological commentary to “The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation” edited by W. Y. Evans-Wentz – Oxford University Press 1969-2. In the treatise “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle” quite oddly Jung writes: “We must completely give up the idea of the psyche’s being somehow connected with the brain …” quoted by Arthur Koestler - The Roots of Coincidence - p. 97, 98 - Picador Edition. 1974.
[10] Maitri Upanishad, 6.17 – Quoted in Fritijof Capra in “The Tao of Physics”.
[11] Laotse, the Book of Tao (The Tao Teh Ching), trans. Lin Yutang in “The Wisdom of China”, ed. Lin Yutang. London, a Four Square Book. 1963. pp. 31-71.
[12] Paul Reps – Zen Flesh, Zen Bones – A Pelikan Book, 1957.
[13] Frequency and resonance: that is what in the first instance motivated me to build the an Apparatus for experimental research with magnetism in biomedicine and biota still I hesitate to make a Cavia cobaya of myself.
[14] Titles which we presently find in the internet: “ Quantum Physics of God: How Consciousness Became the Universe and Created Itself” or “The Nuts and Bolts of Meditation - Unleash your Quantum Brain!” and so on.
[15] "We may suspect that ... there is an agent through which the resultant of our brain's electrical circuitry at a given moment (an electromagnetic field which is detectable around the skull) can access to, use or elaborate upon in accordance with its resonance, or affinity - within a specific, as such restricted, frequency band; with some part of the mysterious medium which sustains the electromagnetic spectrum which is the core of the physical universe. It is that beyond which, consciously, we cannot access to but which gets a feedback from the images brought about by its own being. Were it not so there would be no affinity between two similar, although non-identical, brains and the span of perceptions common to them; each one of us would be a lonely sort of zombie lost somewhere on the planet, unable to share or communicate with each other. Hence I envisage an ‘imponderable’ to which we have limited access, so far as we can tune into it and which is a commonality for that specific organic structure which does have an indisputable existence, that human brain which is, to use an analogy, a microprocessor made up of seven layers of neocortex coordinating all the activities of the structure which brings it along." www.dankalia.com/delloro/LifeMindBrain
[16] Arthur Koestler - The Roots of Coincidence - p. 130, 131 - Picador Edition. 1974.
[17] Rebecca McClen Novick – Downloaded from http://mavericksofthemind.com/
[18] http://www.dankalia.com/delloro/2Dbeing/irrational.htm (Rational and Irrational).
[19] Stake, beheading, torture, bloody sacrifices, conquest, extermination, looting, rape, wanton killing, slavery; this is the legacy of the world's religions, 'The Will of God', any god up there in the skies. Notwithstanding, man spends his life, his lip-service, and his resources to feed all these donkeys who promulgate the infallible word of all these gods chanting love and fomenting hate, any word suitable to increase the herd of lamebrains within their corral. Let us thank and pray to all these gods for these bounties so that we may attain salvation, liberation, enlightenment, eternal beatitude in one of the many available paradises of any of these gods who make all, explain nothing, and keep the minds of their bloody and stupid robots in bondage of its whims. (It is not my intention to be offensive in this remark and my apologies are extended to anyone whose susceptibility has been stung.)
[20] Arthur Koestler - The Ghost in the Machine -p. XI -Picador Edition. 1975.
[21] Hua Hu Jing Translated by Bian Walker.

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