For the New Year

The Mayan codices are undoubtedly books of the dead; that is to say, directions for time travel. If you see reincarnation as a fact then the question arises: how does orient oneself with regard to future lives? Consider death as a dangerous journey in which all past mistakes will count against you. If you are not orienting yourself on sound factual data, you will not arrive at your destination, or in some cases you may arrive in fragments. What basic principles can be set forth? Perhaps the most important is relaxed alertness, and this is the point of the martial arts and other systems of spiritual training – to inculcate a psychic and physical stance of alert passivity and focussed attention. Suspicion, fear, self-assertion, rigid preconceptions of right and wrong, shrinking and flinching from what may seem monstrous in human terms – such attitudes of mind and body are disastrous. See yourself as the pilot of an elaborate spacecraft in unfamiliar territory. If you freeze, tense up, refuse to look at what is in front of you, you will crack up the ship. On the other hand, credulity and uncritical receptivity are almost as dangerous.

Your death is an organism which you yourself create. If you fear it or prostrate yourself before it, the organism becomes your master. Death is also a protean organism that never repeats itself word for word. It must always present the face of surprised recognition. For this reason I consider the Egyptian and Tibetan books of the dead, with their emphasis on ritual and knowing the right words, totally inadequate. There are no right words. Death is a forced landing, in many cases a parachute jump. The motor sputters ominously. Look around for a place to land. The landscape id deceptive. What appears from the air as a smooth field may turn out to be quicksand or swamp mud. Conversely, a mountainous area may contain a hidden valley or a smooth plateau. Focus attention. Look with your whole body. Pick your spot and land in the dark. Blackout.

Death must bring a measure of forgetfulness. Consider the Mayans, cut off in a small area; too much knowledge of death could remove the essential ingredient of oblivion. Death is always regression, a moving backwards to infancy and conception. So why stop there? They had to keep moving further and further back. Otherwise death would be remembered, and death remembered ceases to be operative. Finally they moved back four hundred million years. Who or what was there that long ago? Obviously, such time spans have no meaning in terms of actuality. However, in terms of remembered time, such calculations show how far they had gone in the direction of remembering death. Consider the social structure: a small percentage of priests could read the books and make calculations on the calendar, and a large percentage of illiterate workers. The workers must have served as a reservoir into which priests could reincarnate themselves and re-emerge into the priest caste, identified by certain signs after the Tibetan system.

Time has no meaning without death. Death uses time. This is a cumulative process so that time is used us faster and faster. There is an exact parallel here with inflation, since money buys time. So it takes more and more to buy less and less. How the Mayans react to this impasse? By back-dating time. Like this: the dollar is worth, say, one-fifth of what was worth fifty years ago. So we back-date money fifty years, Then a hundred years, and so forth, moving backwards in time. Eventually we come to a point where there was no money so we are back-dating the concept of money – the concept of time.

The workers could not read the books and undoubtedly they were prevented from learning. Had they been able to read the books they would have learned to remember, to familiarize themselves with death and identify with death. This would have conveyed immunity. Death is a virus and the Mayan books are a vaccine. Death is represented in the codices by one spot of decay through a series of shadings to skeleton figures. In short this is a gradient exposure. Also familiarity with death and consequent immunity is conveyed by actual copulation. A glyph depicts the Moon Goddess copulating with a death figure, and we may assume that the books destroyed by Bishop Landa contained many such scenes.

Time is that which ends. Time is limited time experienced by a sentient creature. Sentient of time, that is – making adjustments to time in terms of what Korzybski calls neuromuscular intention behaviour with respect to the environment as a whole… A plant turns toward the sun, nocturnal animal stirs at sun set… shit piss, move, eat, fuck, die.

Why does Control need humans?

Control needs time, Control needs human time. Control needs your shit piss pain orgasm death. So what does Control intend to do with this commodity that will be so smart? Like the Mayan priests they intend to use human time to make more time.

If time is that which is experienced by a sentient being, then death for that being is the end of time. And with death as zero, checks for any amount of time can be written by adding zeros. Even if there is some memory of past lives, the being has no way of knowing if he has been dead four seconds or 400 million years. These checks would seem to be overdrafts in that they are back-dated to a time when the checks the bank and the depositors did not exist. They bear however the signature of death, which is interruption of sentience.

I have spoken of the transitional forms of death and the identification of the death organism with the dying. This identification may take the form of actual copulation with death. Death, who can take either male or female form, fucks the young Corn God and the Corn God ejaculates 400 million years of corn from seed to harvest and back. This operation requires actual corn and an actual human body to represent the young Corn God. This then is an endorsed check signed by the young Corn God. Once he signed the check any number of zeros can be added. The Mayan time bank operated on these endorse checks. Death is accepted by the dying.

Now consider present time and the proliferation of unendorsed checks… air and car crashes, wars, fires, accidents, random deaths. These checks are good only for the actual time covered. A hundred thousands deaths may buy a million years, but there is always more and more human stock to consume time. The present-time impasse is less and less qualitative time for more and more people. Finally no qualitative experience, juts random time computed on a purely quantitative basis. Ultimately time will be exhausted.

The Mayan system is the exact opposite. Less and less people for more and more precise written time. One systems leads to an excess of mortals and a shortage of Gods; the other to an excess of Gods and a shortage of mortals. In either case, to a dead end. In the case of the present system the cycle of increased population, increased pollution, less and less to feed more and more, is now apparent. So attempts are made towards restoration of qualitative experience: meditation, communes, ecology, bio-feedback, est, encounter groups, magic – in short, transcendence. This is patchwork after the fact. The damage is already done, and the deadly formula of proliferation is already irreversible. These measures, even if successful, would then lead to the Mayan impasse.

And would measure could the Mayans have taken? They could have expanded, colonized, increased population to ensure human reservoir. This then would have led to present impasse. Also they were becoming less and less able to assimilate anything else. Consider the possibility of Mayan endorsed checks erupting in Present Time. This could lead to virgin soil epidemics, reducing the population to Mayan proportions, and finally the Mayan impasse. Similarly, the dumping of unendorsed checks onto the Mayan market would lead to the expansion and proliferation of population and the present impasse.

Time is that which ends. The only way out of time is into space. Why did the Mayan priests need human bodies and human time? Wait. They needed these bodies and this time as a landing field and as launching pad into space. They required actual corn and a human Corn God. (from )