Alchemical Bio
I have always been drawn to knowledge, as a way of understanding both reality as a whole and the mind.
n 2004 C.E., I discovered the document hidden by the Sphinx. The layout of the three temples in the Sphinx complex forms a design that represents a ‘creation of man,’ a pattern-image as stylized as it is compelling. I immediately grasped its meaning and knew well that all religions and traditions uphold the same narrative — repudiated only by contemporary science.
It is clear that a document reporting an event is not proof of the event itself, but only of the document’s existence. And even if there is no particular reason to grant this document the seal of truth, the fact remains that Egypt’s majestic monuments (especially those so extraordinary in their engineering as to seem impossible) repeated the same claim.
More precisely, what the Sphinx conveys is nevertheless a discursive notion, yet still a knowledge in a merely objective sense (analogous to vikalpa or to jñāna, not a ‘knowledge’ in the sense of the rigvedic vidya or the tantric vijñāna). The Sphinx’s document is technically a representation: representation of an occurrence, the apprehension of an event however shocking. Representation is the very soul of Western thought, from Aristotle through Descartes to the neurosciences: it means that knowledge is, and can only be, the mind’s acquisition of notions, facts, and events external to it — that is to say, in both philosophical and scientific terms, the apprehension of objects by the subject.
Higher-order knowledge, such as vidya or vijñāna, is not the representation of ideas or concepts beyond the rational, but rather a mode of knowing other than representation, in which the mind partakes of knowledge in a way that bypasses representation and the conceptual elaboration of materialistic-sensorial inputs
I came to all this only many years after my first vision of the Sphinx’s document. In those days I went on exploring Western thought, with the event enshrined in the Sphinx’s temples as one of my points of reference—at times forgetting it for long stretches, at other times returning to it, as if to catch my breath before plunging back in.
As the outcome of this journey, I came to conclude that Western philosophy—and with it the very foundations of Western thought—is nothing more than a sequence of opinions spun out through rationalistic elaboration; and that Western science, in parallel, is nothing more than a sequence of opinions empirically confirmed. Western thought, as such, rests upon the dichotomy of a subject that experiences and objects that are apprehended. Yet of the nature of mind, and of those singularities that mark the disarming limit of every exact science, Western thought knows nothing; it merely undergoes the condition in which it finds itself—what I later discovered the Orientals to designate precisely as saṃsāra.
Within this self-referential continuum that is Western thought, there are nevertheless certain minds which—if approached for what they in truth lay bare, and not forced into representational-rationalistic schemata—emerge as lights breaking through the darkness. Plato and Heidegger, as well as Nietzsche and Parmenides, affirm, clearly and time and again, that the higher knowing of the mind stands apart from that grounded in representation and, in consequence, in the calculating faculty of reason.
If the pre-theoretical philosophers mark the breaking points of rational thought, and if Alchemy and the Qabbalah sketch out dimensions of consciousness that elude comprehension, might there not exist a higher form of knowing, one beyond representation—a knowledge before which reason, the sole goddess of Western man, reveals itself instead as a tragic surrogate, crude and vulgar?
In this ocean I encountered my first revealed text of a yogi, Abhinavagupta’s Tantrāloka. To my astonishment, the noetic structures, prior even to the gnoseological, appeared identical to those in Heidegger. The difference, however, is decisive: what in Heidegger represents the culminating point of the Western philosophical tradition after more than two millennia—the recognition of the self-referentiality of representation—is, in Tantra, only the initial presupposition.
Entering with this key, I was able to venture into the world of the operative doctrines of Indo-Tibetan wisdom, ascending through the diverse currents of the Sanātana Dharma to the supreme source of knowledge that is the Ṛgveda (provided, as is fitting with revealed texts, that one can read what the ṛṣis inscribed therein rather than what rationalistic minds presume to find).
And at this juncture I encountered the duplication of the cube, the noetic synthesis between the true history of humanity, as narrated from every quarter of the globe, and the fundamental nature of the mind as disclosed within the Sacred Science.
All operative esoteric doctrines stand upon the presupposition that within every human there abides a ‘divine component,’ forgotten and concealed, whose awakening makes possible the surpassing of the duality of subject and object. The word borne by the Sphinx says not only that man was brought forth by higher beings, but that his coming-to-be took place through a coerced genetic evolution concentrated in the encephalon, as evolutionary biology in its own way attests. The document of the Sphinx shows precisely the entry of this ‘divine component’ into the human, which within Tantra is named Kuṇḍalinī.
The convergence of these two domains—the effective dimension of operative esoteric knowledge and the recognition of the events of true history, from the formation of homo sapiens to the apprehension of the Wisdom expressed in the ancient civilizations—marks the decisive point of my exposition. The relation between what is called alternative history and the sphere of operative esoteric knowledge is one of causal reciprocity, for nothing effective can be known without surpassing representation itself.
Horus, from the Seventh Hour of the Amduat (my Bazar NFT Collection ARduat).