2: ‘English’, ‘Publishing’ and Genesis   Many of us have heard that there is more to reading the bible than understanding the superficial story-elements. We know for example that ‘there is supposed to be something magical’ in this book. Whether or not this is a fact really depends more on how we approach what is there, than it does on our ability to understand the superficial elements of the text, such as story, place, person, etc. The most important elements are hidden in a way such that a simple reading of the surface will not yield their precious fruit, yet if we have the opportunity to sit at the knee of an ancient teacher, we can find our way past the barriers that stand stolidly between us and liberal access to the stories and their meanings — and their powers when embodied in us. Luckily, this game is set up such that — as long as we can agree — we have such access, always at hand. The problem is really about our inability to agree, and thus move together (to attenuate: aten-u-ate — literally: You Ate Aten — you have ‘swallowed the sun’) in the direction of greater access to potential, and greater emotional, intellectual, cognitive and physical liberty. One of the places these treasures are hidden is in ‘the orders and shapes of the relations’ in the Bible as it proceeds forth from Genesis. In other words, the first portion of the bible contains more than stories — it is meant to be a sort of deciphering guide, to multiple layers of meaning and transports of communion. Whatever ‘comes first’ has a special meaning: it is speaking of the schema or template that all future elaborations and echoes will follow in service to. In essence — before the beginning — the keys to understanding what follows must be provided. Another aid to our exploration is the realization that the elements and stories assembled in Genesis are meant to be very general in the temporal dimension. We don’t conserve this understanding, and thus we have no common access to the experience of this sort of story from any perspective. The experience of it is quite surprising, and holds vast terrains of unexplored wonder. An example would be a position where this story is constantly replaying in every possible scale, domain and participant. Each second, would be a unique replay of Genesis at that scale or position, as would each minute, hour, day, year, &c. From this perspective we can see Genesis as extremely general in scope — perhaps more general that we consider it possible to make stories like (or about) o:O:o. In all of human communication the beginning is information about how to exchange information, and how to decode it. This is metalanguage, and sets us up to be able to communicate at all by establishing characters and transports of mutually agreed circumstance and context. All of this happens with extreme rapidity and subtleness — almost like a snakebite, if we can watch from a perspective that grants us more clarity regarding the precursor-dances we can gain profound insight into the process of communication at a scale we modernly have no access to. The beginning sets up the schemas of communion that will be most actively attended and nurtured. It is a ‘template’ of the character of what will proceed from it. Humans and other animals will, before beginning formal communication, ‘signal’ about the character, form and context of the emotional, physical and intellectual language we are about to use. These nearly invisible events occur long before speaking in the chosen sublanguage of the moment, which is defined much more in reality by agreement and circumstance (the stances of participants in various circles of relation) than rules. In humans, much of this ‘character-language agreement’ is accomplished with subtle gestures and physical expressions — which comprise foundationally crucial transports in the game of communication — that often go unnoticed or get co-opted due to their largely nonlinguistic garb. But it is not just the nature of the initial signals that informs translations in the participants, especially in human beings. In our species, what we expect shapes what we emerge with as a translation of experience almost more than the content we are translating — to such an absurd degree that we cannot even glance in this direction under normal circumstances: to do so would reveal something so embarrassing and humiliating that it would be better to have walked through a week of our lives with our asses bare and our pants on our heads. When we start to notice how communication proceeds and changes all participants in process, we begin to see the source of the majority of confusion and misunderstanding — and of atrocity on our world. The vague inklings of workable and non-dogmatic answers to many of these problems emerge at the same time. The early portions of Genesis are a gesture of precisely this sort. But more than that, they are a sort of impossible device of reMembering. Their structures and underpinnings hold compressed information of a sort that is cognitively explosive whenever it is readily accessible. Genesis was meant to comprise a sort of instruction-manual about sentient relation — but it also contains the keys necessary to understand it in a way that leads not to knowledge — but to movement.   o:O:o The ‘way of reading’ that offers us the potential to explore these matters arises most often in its real form when stories and understanding (not mere knowledge) are shared ‘eye to eye’, primarily because we require each other’s diversity, uniqueness, same-ness and connectivity to thrive and prosper. Text and other media are simply not sufficient. We are organisms, not media — and we do not require media to sustain ourselves or to learn what we are and may become. Truly in these matters we require each other, and a living planet. Without elemental access to naturally recombinant games of human unity, we lose something elemental and irreplaceable. We needn’t name this lost thing — but its loss wrecks our ability to forge our persons, communities and assemblies at every scale. A part of what is lost is invariably the ability to see what we might playfully refer to as ‘the source(s) of the One in the Many, and the source(s) of the Many in the One’. If we can but restore common access to this ‘already fully present thing’ — this essential understanding (this is not knowledge, but experience and the experience is one of direct contact) the ‘Compass of One’s Being’* can be ‘re-tuned’. We could consider this compass from one of many available perspectives, as the human mind — and also as my own mind — your actual mind — real human individuals, so to speak. *(to paraphrase T. McKenna) When the internal compass of a species is miscalibrated something quite dangerous happens, and this quickly becomes the only thing that happens for such a species. Instead of pointing ‘north’ (giving us a bearing), it points randomly at things we already notice as large, and ‘reports these’ as a ‘true bearing’. This is not so much a compass at all, nor is it as useful as an anti-compass. It is a deception-rod. The more we use such a rod to find our bearings, the more alike with it we will ourselves become. Consider the power of the magnetic Compass: to inform us of direction based upon some of the subtlest information that can be easily contacted (with the appropriate availability of metal and electricity or a natural magnet, and perhaps some water or a thread). The least tangible, the least obvious — magnetism is ‘a great secret’, known only to those with the technology to build compasses. Or is it? I suggest the opposite is true. Yet imagine a compass whose needle always pointed to the largest physical (and obvious) object that is nearest — it would merely be confirming size — and offering nothing about direction, while claiming to be primarily an instrument of direction-revelation. This is alike with our internal (our biological, emotional and cognitive compass) compass in the modern moment. It ‘has lost its subtle likeness’ and now points only toward ‘what we consider to be size-significant’. o:O:o A proper understanding (which would be an understanding that is alive, and always growing) of Genesis is the recognition of its identity as a cognitive impossibility device. It is somewhat like a metaCompass — but not in the way we commonly consider — for example, it is not (and was not meant to be) essentially admonitory, nor accusatory. This ‘strange myth’ points not only to a story, and a ‘toyBox’ of powers of understanding — but also to a way of learning that is so powerful our species ‘would simply fail to believe in it’ unless we had direct experience of it. We do in fact have such experience, but they are ‘hidden far behind us’ in the ladder of our personal progress into the dimension of complex sentience. The record of it is hidden in the memories of our infancy and childhood — and in a place that we very rarely have access to, primarily due to our habits of belief — be they ‘spiritual’ or ‘scientific’ — it makes little difference since both hide reality of what we really are (are being and capable of being) equally adeptly from our access. This story is not so much ‘a fable’ as it is ‘a transport’, and a large portion of our standing misapprehensions converge around interpreting Genesis as ‘mostly a story’, or a myth, when in fact the ‘correct metaphor’ for it is very difficult to locate, but has some features in common with the idea of ‘a living door’. It is not, for example ‘more like a story’ than it is like a living doorway. To have experiential access to this reality we must ‘see’ much more generally, and also we must also be able to relate clearly not only to what we know of the universe we encounter (what we understand, really) — but also to what we feel, emotionally and as an organism. o:O:o In the west, we are too commonly faced with the extremely puzzling situation of having no good access to the meanings of the stories our ancestors wrote, and lived. What we do have is largely comprised of translations — and most of them were translated ‘more than once’ before they got dressed in the business-suit of English. Again, over time, many of these were further retranslated, so as to better appeal to modern or popular idiom, which would result in the ‘better fulfillment of their purposes’. Unfortunately for us and for our children, these purposes were and are confusing. For example, with ‘a book’, one of the purposes might be to sway populations to the support of an idea or paradigm of thought — such as a religion, or commercial philosophy. It might also, however be ‘to be able to make more books’. Consider that almost no publisher will proceed to make books with the idea of doing this such that ‘fewer and fewer’ books need be made. Instead, the very printing of a book begins the circular prerequisite of ‘copying’ this book. And thus it is with knowledge, which could be said to ‘always be selling itself’ by its very nature. Generally, the publisher will want the opportunity to copy (linearly or in parallel) not only the book, but the entire printing — if possible. And then, more — and then...new editions. Some of these publishers become adept at copying the means of copying — and thus become publishers not of books at all — but of ‘better’ ways of copying. Some of these end up, for example, as printers. So all of these ‘translations’ which the various texts we may have access to have undergone have often been as much at the service of ‘making book’ as they have at the service of ‘the greatest accuracy in the most numerous of domains’...which one might consider to be the very heart and soul of the craft of translation. And perhaps it is, but the ‘purposes’ of publishing have (and will, I fear continue to) always directly interfered with this — especially in the modern moment. I believe my primary ‘point’ about translation is that first, there is such a thing as ‘a bad language to translate’ into. Although I do not have time to delve deeply into the evidence for this here, let it momentarily suffice it to say that English is probably the worst of all possible languages to translate anything into primarily because of what it discards automatically, merely by being ‘more and more alike with’ the specific communications-goals it is commonly applied (and has arisen) in pursuit of. In a sense, we could say ‘A language is a tree shaped first by what it is most used for’. Worse still, if English is our only language, we will never have the opportunity to notice what it discards – because we will have never experienced a language (and known it as such) that didn’t discard important transports of relation in the way the only one we know consistently does. These ‘discarded dimensions’ of meaning, character and relation turn out in reality to comprise most of the most important relational elements that any language must and does yet struggle to contain. In the operational requirement of an industrial society that a language gain compressibility, specificity and relational complexity — what is sacrificed first is often the most hearful and organismal likeness in language. Where we have particularly demanded of English a common servitude to commerce and science, we have given birth to something of a monster: a language so mechanical that it cannot but abhor its utterly charactered and complexly amechanical sources and, need I add, hosts. This particular problem with English is as subtle as it is terrifying: this language conserves as a formative goal the shaving away of poetics. Gone in English is the gendering of nearly all common terms, and by its nature and function as an assembly-platform for ways of knowing, this invisible tyrant implies that the psychological, physical and emotional reality of the world is that the value of abstraction comes before (and ‘rules over’ above) poetics Taken by itself, this constitutes a horrifying cataclysm; one which I believe most of our species is almost entirely unaware, and one that we are continuing to enforce upon each other and our world with a rapidly increasing velocity. We need to apply the brakes — and stop to examine why what I am offering here is true, and we need as a people to experientially understand together why it is a terrible thing to have access only to a language that removes the poetics and gendering of relations before it even begins making words. The simple reason this is such a vast problem is that human beings, and organisms in general are character first, and ‘mechanical’...well, never. The only time any form of life ‘acts like a machine’ is where there is a human who is familiar with machines nearby. In such a case, the human ‘cannot even see the animal’ anymore. It just sees ‘a sort of moving machine’. This has nothing to do with that being observed, and is entirely the bias of the observer, who has mistakenly equated objectivity with mechanico-linear assembly of tokens that utterly fail to represent what is being observed with any sort of accuracy at all. I have wandered far afield already — yet I will bring us back to the focus of this birdwalk which is primarily that our ancestors experienced, understood, and recorded something far more amazing than our science or philosophy can openly admit, and we were meant to have direct access to why they recorded these things, and the experience that results from understanding it actively — rather than frozen codicils which bind us ever-more complexly into cycles of arbitration, worship, servitude and atrocity. Toys such as these are far too easy to kill or sell or subjugate or imprison each other with — their very nature attracts these consequences. At first glance, this seems absurd: why would we ever have traded that away if we had it? The answer is complex, and has a lot to do, metaphorically with ‘why we wear sunglasses on bright days’. We ‘think’ we know the generally correct answer, but the real answer has ‘many scales and dimensions’ and is very little indeed alike with what we will generally think about if we consider ‘sunglasses’ and ‘brightness’. One thing about this ‘real answer’ is that it should change when you contact it — radically...in an expanding dance. This is nothing at all like what we would expect, and we ‘don't even have a concept for this class of thinking-object or momentum’. The closest thing we have is this:   dream.