The Divine Narcissus

On the Seventh Day, the Divine-Child-God rested from his labors, and curled up snakelike beneath the Tree of Life, jealously guarding its fruits. … And humankind has been sleeping ever since, captivated by the dreams of a slumbering God, a somnolescent Super-Consciousness, a snoozing Supreme Being just now beginning to awaken and shake off His dreams and slumbers and come to Himself once more. (In fact, it’s when the Divine is in this hypnogogic state between sleeping and waking that we are blessed with incarnate existence as we know it—when the difference between the Knower and the Known, the Spirit Player and the Sexy Avatar, is still a bit woozy, and all things are still dew-wet and shiny with the hallucinatory presence of the presumed ‘Other.’ … Cosmical aeons are begun and ended by such paradoxes of Supreme Consciousness, this slight-of-hand in the Mind’s Eye of God.)

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When, in the course of human history, behavior once believed Godlike becomes all-too-human … where we find activities considered Holy and Divine when undertaken by the Supreme Being of God, but slanderous and selfish and sometimes downright satanic when enacted by a mortal man or woman ... it is then that we see the tell-tale deja-vu glitch in the matrix. That in-between ‘Now’ moment is precisely where all the secrets are hidden, where the full richness of our human potential as conscious-beings has been stowed away. It is only in that in-between ‘Now’ moment that gnosis, anamnesis, or “retrieval” is possible. That in-between ‘Now’ moment is exactly where we will find the Secret that awakens the little gold-nugget of God glowing emberlike in the inner chamber of our heart, and fan and feed its flame, till we are each set aglow with inner Light and enlightened through and through once more.

When one consensus culture conquers another, and assimilates and subsumes the vanquished culture’s logos and mythos into its own corporate conglomerate— The behavior of the old, departed gods comes to be regarded not as evidence of said demi-god’s divinity, but rather his or her all-too-human (or “pagan” or “luciferian”) ungodliness. I believe now that this is where secret aspects of our own very divine humanity can be accessed — in meditative, majickal and theurgic activities normally regarded by the consensus as “sinful,” “selfish,” or otherwise “ungodly.” But these will now be celebrated like never before— because they will now be celebrated and expressed with a much fuller depth of meaning, responsibly distilling knowledge of these myths’ true import and meaning.

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For example, in the opening of Genesis, God is moving over the face of the waters. This is an unbelievably tranquil, zen-like activity, rushing at light-speed hawklike round and round the slowly balloon-blossoming sphere of the Cosmos … The sheer velocity of His flight blows the glassy, star-flecked bubble of the Universe into an ever higher and deeper and wider ball of glowing Light… until the plasma-bubble begins to collapse torus-like upon itself — BANG!— and our Divine-Child-Horus-God is puckered like a snuffed flame and sucked deep into the cloudy event-horizon of Creation’s beginning, down deep, deep into the Sacred Burning Heart of the Stars. —BANG!— All that comes ever after is born of His hands, His mouth, His eyes — all bearing the stamp and impress of His image and likeness forever for all Eternity. …

—And we have much the same in an even older telling of the tale— of a beautiful youth Eternally Young, an Immortal named Narcissus. … The limpid pool that uplifts the god’s reflection skyward is us — we are the reflected images dancing and dappling in the Waters of His Eternal Life, colored and sized according to the tee-tottering forward approach and backward withdraw of the god as he rocks to and fro in mystic trance. … Creation, as we know it, is but a snapshot, in limited dimensions, of the opulently Great Life of the Godhead— the reflected likeness of a Being much more dimensionally greater than we can even fathom. Yet the god is entranced by us nevertheless— He is captivated, riveted, He cannot look away. …

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This is “it,” the “trick,” the “secret” that the Maji (the original priesthood) kept and then lost and forgot— the surprised shock of seeing your own face staring back at you in your every experience of supreme beauty or devastating terror… the romance of loving yourself so very deeply through the guise of so very many convincingly-imajined strangers that there can be no denying that you, indeed, You, and You alone, are the God busily building the Universe anew around You, where You will forever love the World over and over again and again into bigger and better and more beautiful being. …

This is the gnothi seauton of the Gnostics and the Platonists, the true aim and end of all psychologies, be they religious or philosophical. —Surely this could not also be the heinous egotism of a God? A God that is so selfish for Self-Consciousness that He has incorporated and subsumed all conscious-being into His own I-AM — and we call this Creation. …

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The mystic practice of ‘knowing yourself’ is really the process of laboriously cleaning the mirror in the back of your Mind: the moment you really, truly ‘know yourself’ completely is the moment the Face of God (Narcissus) appears in the mirror. … For we are not only the impermanent reflection of a narcissist daemon dancing flamelike on the surface of the waters, we are also the Immortal God lost in the swirling theophanic wonder of His own mad and mesmerizing gaze.

Philosophically speaking, we have just reconciled the One and the Many. The Mind does a little flip-flop; the Heart skips a beat and does a little excited leap of recognition. Our eyes crisscross; the reflection before us in the mirror disappears and reveals the infinite deepness of pure blue sky looking back at us through a window looking back at itself infinitely. For a moment a mystic wormhole unfolds in plasmic slithers, bridging the entranced initiate and the neon-streaked vastness of Deep Space in a tunnel-vision of epic proportions. The Mind’s Eye of God winks back at itself lustfully … the egg of the thalamus cracks open like a flower suddenly exploding into flowery bloom, and the Soul flames forth in a sputtering shower of white-hot electric bliss. …