Two-Thousand, Five-Hundred and Fifty-Five Nights

In the spring of 2003, I met a woman whom I have (at the present moment)
dreamt of over a dozen times throughout the years. Each dream that I have constructed of
her was not a neurotic obsession; each dream was, as both Samuel Taylor Coleridge and
Jorge Luis Borges knew, an illustrated representation of the feeling that has, at the
moment of the dream, spellbound me. The fleshy woman (whom I refer to as Gula), is a
woman I love(d), and is not that different from the phantasmal character that I have
created in my mind. Giver of life, dancer beneath the moon, speaker of truths; this
formless body alive within my mind is wholly feminine and beautiful. I dreamt her in the
Yucatan, Peru, the Atlantic and Pacific oceans; Chicago, California and New York; from
the heights of heaven while traveling on airplanes, to the depths of the earth as is found in
subways: I have dreamt this woman. I’ve dreamt her pregnant, nude, tragic, ecstatic,
defeated, victorious and always, love-worthy. The communication and exchanges I have
had with her in dreams were always subtle, brief, metamorphic and allegorical. Always in
the subtly of a phrase or a single word, her image has told me a truth I needed to hear,
vanquishing a desire even if in her silence: the sound that devours all sounds with a
tranquil peace.
In a letter dated from the 14th of August 2003, she wrote that I, “hope never to see
us in life, but only in dreams,” and that we “dance in the observer’s eyes,” and later in my
“dreams of day and night.” We loved through the days, nights and weeks of April to
September: the preamble of the dreams to come. After September of 2003, by affect of a
difference of opinion, physical communication with her became impossible, thus I
learned, forcefully, the lucidity of dream-work communication. On a rainy night of June
2009, the slight curve of chance brought us together again. The worthiness of that night’s
conversation, lay in my confessing that I have been in communication with her for the
last 6 years. “In dreams,” I said to her who looked puzzled, “we find one another, talk
and exchange all we need to. It’s in dreams, or in the universe, where your image finds
mine.” The irony of our chanced meeting was that when I took departure, she gazed up
into the night sky, looked back to me and said, “Stay in touch.” I then knew she knew
that I knew what antiquity did; that there is no separation between dream-consciousness
and waking-consciousness, moreover, that which the world calls real and what it calls
fantastic, are, at root, one and the same reality within the human mind.
In ancient Egypt, the process of dream-incubation was offered to people who slept
in their god’s temple, so as to craft themselves a dream and have a priest divine a secret
interpretation of their night’s reveries. Time, fortune and destiny were outlined by the
Kemetic priests, for the dreamers who dream-incubated with a mystical religiosity so as
to unify their psyche to a god. It is said that the scribe, Kenhirkhopeshef, once owned a
papyrus book of 108 such Kemetic dream-incubations, and had it stored somewhere on
the dust-laden shelves of his ancient library. Hundreds of years later, the Gnostics teach
that there are 7 dimensions of reality in the human mind, wherewith dreaming is a
phenomena that happens in the 5th dimension (the astral plane), and if one awakens the
consciousness of this dimension, a dreamer is closer to a reality that is 9 trillion light
years in size and can thereupon realize life’s mysteries after experiencing 108 false
dreams. Pharaoh Kheti is believed to have been the author of the Teachings for Merikare,
a dream interpretation book dedicated to his son, composed circa 2070 B.C. In 1899 (or
1900?), Dr. Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, where he argues that
dreams are constructed “by the whole mass of dream-thoughts being submitted to a sort
of manipulative process [within the mind,] in which those elements which have the most
numerous and strongest supports acquire the right entry into the dream content;” it is
therefore crucial to understand that, “the dream is not a faithful translation or a point-for-
point projection of the dream-thoughts, but a highly incomplete and fragmentary version
of them,” (p. 315 & 318). In his Teachings, Pharaoh Kheti gives a similar mistrust of
dreams by suggesting that all dreams, in essence, are the inverted representations of what
the Gnostics would later call the 3rd dimension of reality, and that dream-interpreters
aught to take a great deal of caution in their converting dreams into knowledge.
The Mesopotamians, before the Egyptians, also took a great deal of precocity in
manifesting, interpreting and cataloguing their sublime divinations. In the great Sumerian
poem, the Gilgamesh, readers can glimpse, first-handedly, the methods by which the
ancient scribes offered the metaphysical dexterity of dream interpretation. In the 3,700
year old text, it is written that the tragic hero Gilgamesh, “woke anxiously from a dream,”
and quickly sought an interpretation from his mother who speaks “in her somber
monotone,” that calls “him from sleep,” and reminds “him that he once tossed in
dreams,” (pp. 19 & 32). Thus, the despotic Mesopotamian cries out to her, “O Ninsun, I
want your words to be true,” because “some life in me has disappeared/Or needs to be
filled up again,” (p. 20). Often, I have risen from a dream of Gula, and have conjured up
similar cries of unconscious desire that Gilgamesh had evoked over 3,000 years ago. The
weight that I draw from this Gilgamesh archetype (which has, upon deep reflection,
become my self) is that, if my memory serves me well, the letter composed by Gula that
is cited above, was given to me clandestinely and in an enchantingly remarkable style.
She had inserted the letter within some obscure pages of the Gilgamesh translated
by Herbert Mason, and returned the book to me after she had internalized the text over a
pair of days. Upon this retrospection, I now come to acknowledge that there is a
possibility that she had intentionally instilled a contagious strand of literary-nuerosis
upon me, sympathetically, by use of an unconscious suggestiveness. Did she know, or
magically implant her own “somber monotone” voice (in her letter), that were to
chronically echo in my mind and create a pathos within me, as now I come to see, that
she and her great love “has disappeared” for the duration of all my mortal days, thus
birthing in my longing heart, an internal void like Gilgamesh, that “needs to be filled up
again?” Was the case of Gilgamesh (and our erudition of him) a perfect opportunity for
her to mirror and create her alternate personae within my mind? I’m not certain; raising
such a question is only an aim toward moralizing the trickster intentions of a magician,
and one can save that for a priest. Nonetheless, this dynamic overlapping of the real and
the fantastical is enough for me to take a great deal of delight in researching,
comprehending and developing an understanding of some indefinite mental phenomena
that would, as I now see it, inevitably have taken place.
In the great Sanskrit Upanishads there are teachings which suggest that, “When
the wise [man] knows that it is through the great and omnipresent Spirit in us that we are
conscious in waking or in dreaming, then he goes beyond sorrow,” (p. 62). Under the
vain spell of his desire for the arcana that is needed in order to obtain immortality, the
weathered Gilgamesh meets the wise man Utnapishtim, only to have the wise man say to
his wife, “Look at the strong man who wants life;/Sleep follows him like his shadow,”
and more directly to the hero, “You [Gilgamesh] have slept [dreamlessly] for seven
days…How will you bear eternal life,” if, dreamless “Sleep is like death [that] only
slothful people yearn for,” (pp. 81 & 82)? The tragic element of Gilgamesh is that he did
not know “that it is through the great and omnipresent Spirit [or psyche],” that he was
able to go beyond the miserable conditions of mortality, and seek the wisdom in
acknowledging that there are both inner and outer worlds by which the human condition
is situated and contained. Dreaming, therefore, is a method by which one can transcend
the miserable conditions of temporality, and enter a labyrinth of an infinite number of
realities where, perhaps, one may live absent of the ephemeral. Thus projecting an image
of Gula within the content of a dream is possibly, the conjuring up of an agelessly
beautiful and infinitely perfect image/representation of an archetypal woman that will
never fade into time/history, nor ever suffer the ineluctable causes of human misery. A
phrase that she had once uttered to me in both waking and dreaming states was, “Go, to
never finding an end,” and in so doing, she had fortified her very demiurgical
timelessness. I sometimes ask myself, who is the Gula that I love(d), the one who 7 years
ago was 22 years of age, or the one who is ageless within my mind and murmurs her
wisdom with a quintessential poise and beauty? This question brings me closer to
unveiling the ivory statue of Galatea, wrought by the careful hand of the sculptor-prince,
Pygmalion, and allows me to realize the importance of the word imago.
In another text called The Circular Ruins, the Argentine, Jorge Luis Borges,
insightfully writes that his tale’s bearded, old and weathered dreamer, “comprehended
that the effort to mold the incoherent and vertiginous matter [that] dreams are made of,
was the most arduous task a man could [ever] undertake,” (p. 47). Again, the Upanishads
teaches readers that, “What lies beyond life shines not to those who are childish, or
careless, or deluded by wealth. This is the only world: there is no other, they say; and
thus they [like Gilgamesh,] go from death to death,” (p. 58). The tekhne, therefore, that is
needed by the imagination to craft numerous worlds and/or the material of dream-works,
is the tekhne that Utnapishtim has mastered, the one that Kheti has explored, a craft that
Dr. Freud has researched, an art that Borges demonstrates and one that I, as of late, have
been coming to understand. Today, astronomers hold that there are, circa 170 billion
galaxies in the known universe, which began some 13.7 billion years ago, thus I rouse the
curiosity to ask how many worlds are there within one of these galaxies, and how can
man, intentionally “mold the incoherent and vertiginous matter [that] dreams are made
of,” within the context of one of these worlds?
One answer to this question can be sought when a reader of the Gilgamesh observes
that it was he who saw life, Utnapishtim, who advised Gilgamesh to “bury your own loss
and build/Your world anew with your own hands,” (p. 80). Indeed this is an arduous task,
a challenge that was presented to me by Gula, the architect, when she once demanded
that I -instead of talking to her- put all that I have to say to her in writing. This demand,
this intentional (and almost coerced) production of image making via language(s),
challenges my psyche to push itself beyond the limits of rationalism, materialism and its
own finitude (for I do hold, like Lucretius, that the spirit can perish with the body); to
push the psyche itself ad astra per aspera, knowing that I, like any dreamer of Borges’
narratives, live with the possibility of being “the projection of another man’s dream,” (p.
49). Dr. C.G. Jung, too, holds this possibility, when in his Visions, he argues that we
“cannot even be certain that it [i.e., our psyche,] is our own psyche; it might be, but there
are many things in our unconscious, and we are by no means sure whether they really
belong to us or to somebody [and/or something] else,” (p. 1158).
It is thus by analyzing these dust-bound books that I have come to acknowledge
the mental dexterity that is involved in the compositions of conscious/subconscious
configurations. The skillful exigencies that are necessitated in the construction of dream-
works are of a metaphysical quality that expound the representations found in everyday-
consciousness, that I oftentimes, fall short of scrutinizing for the extraction of a savory
metaphor. Having a penchant for the poetical and the sublime, for “meanings” with all of
their attributed metaphors, for putting form to formlessness and arranging a chaos; I labor
and construct peculiar allegories from the phenomena that occur within a dream, so as to
enrich the activity of my mind in toto and formulate a coherent narrative while living in
an incoherently perplex world of ideas. Dreams, for me, are the very stuff by which we
can come to learn, appreciate and mold original narratives and images within the universe
that whirls inside each of our minds. Gula, a recurring phantom of my mind, delivers all
the effects that are essential for my formulation of such a narrative, and the richness of
each delivery, is not the content that is delivered; it is, rather, the setting in which these
deliveries take place and the physical actions which they motivate: psychical
transfigurations within the space of my mind.
In the introduction to The Four Agreements, (which I hold to be a dream
workbook), Mexican author Miguel Ruiz gives an account of the 10th century Toltec
master, Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, and his transfiguration from man to god by virtue of a
dream. “One day as [Topiltzin] slept in a cave,” writes Ruiz, “he dreamed that he saw his
own body sleeping,” (p. xvi). Upon waking from this dream, Ruiz tells readers that he
“came out of the cave on the night of a new moon,” to see that the “sky was clear, and he
could see millions of stars,” (p. xvi). Upon realizing the metaphysical composition of the
universe within and the universe without, a Tolteca “transformed his life forever,” (p.
xvi). He “looked at his hands, he felt his body, and he heard his own voice say, I am
made of light; I am made of stars,” (p. xvi). The ancient Mexica god of Venus, night,
dreams, the jaguar, sorcery and divination is Tezcatlipoca: the Smokey Mirror. Born as
one of the four sons of the first eon, Tezcatlipoca is the lunar counterpart of the solar god,
Quetzalcoatl: the Plumed Serpent. Both deities (solar and venusian) were often times
seen coupled during the phenomena of a Mexican sunrise or a sunset in the times of great
Anahuac. In Mexica cosmology, the two deities are the cosmic forces of creation,
destruction and lastly, that of metamorphosis. The marriage of Isis and Osiris in ancient
Egypt mirrors the same, as does the Gnostic conceptions of the lunar and solar Christs.
In Nahuatl, the word tolteca translates into something like: creator, maker, builder,
artisan; and the Toltec master Topiltzin had “realized that everyone” of the Toltecas in
the great city of Tula, “was dreaming, but without awareness, without knowing what they
really are,” (p. xix). Miguel Ruiz writes that the Toltecas “couldn’t see” the enlightened
Toplitzin as they saw “themselves because there was a wall of fog or smoke between the
mirrors,” of their perception, (p. xix). Readers of the narrative are told that the “wall of
fog,” that then came between the thing perceived and the mind of the perceiver, “was
made by the interpretation of [mental] images of light –the Dream [i.e., what we moderns
now call the perception] of humans,” (p. xix). Because of this, Topiltzin said, “I am the
Smokey Mirror, because I am looking at myself in all of you, but we don’t recognize
each other because of the smoke in-between us. That smoke is the Dream,” writes Ruiz,
“and the mirror is you, the dreamer,” (p. xix). Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl was said to have
then changed his name to Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl-Tezcatlipoca, after having had a vision
in a dream and thereby having had performed a mystical rite of passage. “Whatever you
experience outside of the body, in a dream for instance,” claims Dr. Jung, “is not [fully]
experienced unless you take it into the body, because the body means the here and now,”
hence the revelation of Topiltzin in his dream analysis whereby he contemplates the
subatomic composition of both his body and the celestial bodies, (p. 1316). “If you just
have a dream and let it pass by you, nothing has happened at all, even if it is the most
amazing dream,” as in the case of the other dreamers of Ruiz’s narrative who lacked the
tekhne for drafting their own dream-works; “but if you look at [the dream] with the
purpose of trying to understand it,” continues Jung, and somehow “succeed in
understanding [that dream], then you have taken it into the here and now, the body being
a visible expression of the here and now,” (p. 1316). Hence Topiltzin’s utterance, I am
made of light; I am made of stars, and his transfiguration by way of converting his dream
into knowledge.
The Maya to the east of Anahuac, have a traditional phrase that envelopes this
Toltec metamorphic idea: Inla’kech ala k’in, which translates into something like, I am
your you, and you are my me, thus the fog we call materialism, matter, ego,
consciousness, the other and/or any form of differentiation between things, are fictions
that have not the phenomenal power to separate or demarcate one thing from another; not
even in dreams. All things, ideas, worlds, realities, are essentially, an amalgam of dreams
contained in the space of a bigger dream. The human mind, claims Arthur Schopenhauer
in his Epiphilosophy, retains and compartmentalizes all “knowledge [that] is only added
[to the mind] as an accident, a means of assistance to the phenomenon of that inner being
[we call the psyche], and can therefore apprehend...itself only in proportion to its own
nature, which is designed with reference to quite different ends…consequently very
imperfectly,” (p. 375). He thus maintains his familiar pessimism in the possibility for
man’s self-realization in the western world, though the philosopher projects an
absolutism that is similar to many mystics when he writes that, “the inner nature in all
things is absolutely one and the same,” thus the “world as [an] idea appears merely per
accidens, because the intellect [mind], with its external perception, is primarily only the
medium of motives for the more perfect phenomena of will [or spirit], which gradually
rises to that objectivity of perceptibility, in which the world exists,” (pp. 375 & 377).
Gula’s phrase, “Go, to never finding an end,” in light of what Schopenhauer has claimed,
can hereby be interpreted as a compelling impetus for me to, Go, and tread the terrain of
all the possibly infinite worlds and be sure to never find an end! What force! What
vertigo! I recall once that we were discussing the idea of marriage and I said to her that I
was married to eternity; upon this, she smiled and kissed me.
With these insights in mind, Gula is, therefore, an extension of my self that is in
essence, an extension of the same stuff that composes stars. This idea is paralleled and
demonstrated by the late 14th and early 15th century Mexica poet, Tochihuitzin
Coyolchiuhqui, when he sings in his We Come to Dream, and realizes that, “Quickly we
leave the dream,” that Topiltzin called the smoke or the fog and enter another world in
which “we’ve only come to dream,” (p. 175). It is therefore foggy to say that waking-life
is the greater quality that validates reality than does the dream-life, thus is why
Coyolchiuhqui sings that “it is not true, it is not true,/that we come [simply] to live
among the earth,” (p. 175). In these brief cathartic lines of realization, Coyolchiuhqui
releases a diaphanous droplet of Mesoamerican-consciousness, that is suggestively aware
of the blurry distinctions that could be drawn between conscious and unconscious
activity; although the poet, like many other Mexica, inherits the ancient wisdom of his
forefathers, and is able to homogenize his mind into all things perceivable. Thus Gula’s
metaphor to “Stay in touch” was not an unfamiliar one to the Mesoamerican-
consciousness of my ancestors who, too, had a methodical science for dream
interpretation. It’s funny that in the year of grace, 1829, the North American poet Edgar
Allen Poe, composed these lines of verse which mirror Coyolchiuhqui: “All that we see
or seem/Is but a dream within a dream,” (ll. 10 & 11).
For Gula to have suggested years ago, that the I which she then perceived, (and
which is, somehow, also a fragmentation of a then possibly observed total self), “hope[s]
never to see us in life, but only in dreams,” is a suspicion that rouses a desire to perceive
her as a woman endowed with a mystical clairvoyance. It is as if she knew, without my
stating it to her, a secret desire whirling within my mind; a particular fondness that I have
for seeing her within the context of a dream. I favor the world of dreams over that of
what the common person would call the real-world, because dreams are much more
interesting, more ecstatic and kinetic than the mundane and oftentimes predictable reality
of everyday. If Gula is, like my self, incarnate in both the inner and outer realities that I
experience, and if her emanations/residuals 7 years of age, are excavated from time to
time in some cavern within the geography of my mind, than these privatized excavations
are revelatory of the stuff that lay beyond the physical; they are what the Greeks
understood to be, ta meta ta phusika.
This phenomena of mental excavation gives me a great deal of pleasure and
encourages my appreciation of Wilhelm Jensen’s novel, Gradiva, published in 1903, and
through this appreciation (whereby I also come to understand a work by Dr. Freud as well
as a bas-relief produced in the 4th century), I christen Gula with the evermore powerful
name of Gula-Gradiva: medicinal woman who walks through worlds buoyantly. Though,
the reluctance I have in professing this identification of her to someone else, is born from
an all-too-familiar fear that guards me from the possibilities of what some professionals
would consider to be mental insanity or delusion. Thus I turn once again to Dr. Jung, who
observes that visions (apparitions, prophecy, foresight & etc.) have “the purpose of
teaching,” the mind, “that it is a sort of magic procedure, as [a mind] might have a dream
telling [itself] that what [it] were experiencing was not that [the psyche] were losing [its]
mind, but that [the psyche,] was undergoing an initiation,” similar to Topiltzin, (p. 1056
& 1057). The appearance of Gula-Gradiva’s image within my dreams (as is noted above),
with the continual purpose of uttering some carefully crafted phrase -one that confirms an
un-surfaced intention of a remarkable action that is performed by me in what we call the
real-world- is an emblematic figure with the gift of prophesy, that is beyond, both the
world’s and my own, physical temporality. Let me illustrate such a confirmation that I
have experienced first-handedly.
In the summer of 2008 I was on a bus route in the great Yucatan peninsula of
Mexico, between a small town called Piste, headed toward the city of Merida and was
accompanied by a woman I had just met, when I dozed off for a quick moment of sleep
and a shade of Gula-Gradiva entered my mind. Her image stood smiling before me, in a
vacantly dark space, where an unfelt wind was blowing through her hair, transforming
those lose strands into a multitude of serpents that she fixed from getting in her eastern
eyes. As I approached her, she was continuing her smile as if she were concealing a
secret, a secret that my projected body had somehow already known within the dream-
narrative. When I fearlessly finalized my paces toward her, and stood only inches from
her, she let her hand down from her sinuously elaborate hair and said, “You’re doing it
Isac; keep going and never stop. Never stop.” It was then that I realized that her phantom
was genuinely happy for me who was actualizing a great act, i.e., forging for myself, a
visceral understanding of the Mayan civilization that for circa 500 years has been without
an accurately written history. When I woke up, I immediately realized that I was on the
road with a woman who could never equivocate to the serpentine phantom that had just
visited me. It was the image of Gula who was confirming, the un-surfaced intentions of
my physical act of traveling through a region of Mexico (one internationally renowned
for its monolithic serpents, temples and ancient cities), so as to (re)write a poem that had
been plundered and forgotten during the nightmarish years of European conquest.
It is in this light that I claim that Gula-Gradiva is, has been and always will be (if
I follow correctly in my erudition), a symbolic representation of what the Gnostics call
the divine mother (in Nahuatl: Coatlicue, or from the Sanskrit: Prakriti; the Quechua:
Pachamama, and/or from the Hebrew: Heva), who’s serpentine affiliation initiates the
operations for a rite of passage in both the world within and the world without. Her and
her visitations are, the collectively unconscious and changeless archetypal stuff that
esoterically finds currency in all ancient myths as is demonstrated in the few lines that
I’ve extracted from the thousand year old texts that are cited above. She is, what Jung
would identify as, a serpentine symbol that frequently reveals itself in literatures, dreams
and artworks composed by civilizations across the world, like a Nietzschean phantom of
eternal recurrence that is alive so long as the planet is alive. The illustration that I have
provided above is simply one out of many that I have documented throughout the years
of my secret experiences held in, what psychoanalytic thought calls, the unconscious.
Gula-Gradiva: Ninsun; divine mother of Mesopotamia.
Jung, again in his Visions, argues that the images which appear within dreams are
“only an appearance,” and that these appearances “will come back again in another
form,” if need be, because it is true that “the form changes, but nothing [of the form’s
symbolism] is lost,” (p. 1261). The recurrence of Gula’s image, as I mentioned in my
opening paragraph, is an illustrated representation of an emotional enchantment that
needs to be realized within the dreamscape where she buoyantly walks, so as to get to the
end of this labyrinthine bewilderment of deciphering the symbols of a dream narrative.
Though I am convinced, by Borges’ captive sage, Tzinacan, who in The God’s Script
makes the claim that “dreams cannot kill me nor are there dreams within dreams,” (p.
171), although in The Circular Ruins, Borges writes that “In the dreamer’s dream, the
dreamed one awoke,” (p. 48), thus permitting the potential for dream-characters to have
their own dream-works that they themselves can realize within the containment of a
dream. Is this to say that the realization of the emotion experienced within a dream, is
communicated through the dreamed image of Gula-Gradiva, who by the logic of Borges,
needs an awakening? Indeed! which leads me to another question. Does this realization
within the framework of a dream mean that there are more dream worlds (like those of
the Gnostics and Kemetics) that also need to be realized after a dreamer makes a
suggested 108 attempts at dream-interpretation? Need the imago of Gula-Gradiva be
woken up into a different plane of consciousness within a dream ad infinitum? Borges’
captured mystic seems to denounce the idea, thus he accepts his humanly tragic fate of
death after hearing a voice that murmured to him who has “not awakened to wakefulness,
but to a previous dream, [that] is enclosed within another, and so on to infinity, [thus the]
path you must retrace is interminable and you will die before you ever really awake,” (p.
171). If the thought is impossible to these literati, than I am left to draw from yet another
dream wherewith Gula’s image said to me, “All is possible, though nothing is certain,”
while I was in a profound state of sleep somewhere in the Andean heights of Puno, Peru.
Like Dr. Jung, I too hold that, “When a man’s mind comes to an end, he invents a
symbol, but that does not mean that there is nothing behind [that symbol]…there is
something divine behind it. And dreams themselves,” he continues, “which surely we do
not make, bring up that symbolism,” hence the feminine earth deities listed above, their
disguised appearance in my dreams with the mask of Gula and, overall, how dreams
essentially are similarly understood by many civilizations across the board of history, (p.
1272). Borges’ Tzinacan of The God’s Script, does not repudiate this Jungian idea, on the
contrary, Borges has the sage confirm it by suggesting that “Whoever has seen the
universe, whoever has beheld the fiery designs of the universe, cannot think in terms of
one man, of that man’s trivial fortunes or misfortunes, though he be that very man. That
man has been he and [he] matters no more to him. What is the life of that other to him,
the nation of that other to him, if he, now, is no one,” and by that realization alone,
becomes everyone and everything that he has ever known and will ever come to know,
(p. 172). I believe this is what the great Upanishads had suggested circa 3,000 years ago
when the Indian masters taught the gnosis of “What lies beyond life,” i.e., the Greek, ta
meta ta phusika, that when understood properly, enables the mind and body to “go
beyond sorrow,” and with a humbling conviction, is thereby empowered to utter the 7
syllable phrase, inla’kech ala k’in to all that existed, exists and has yet to exist.
To the practical mind of readers and to the critical spirit of philosophers, this
narrative may seem to fall short of convincing evidences or facts that support my humble
arguments. The poverty of my intelligence blooms from the pleasurable folly I have in
simply letting things be. I am more a poet at heart than say a philosopher. Though for
some clarifications, I turn to the American poet T.S. Eliot, who in his critical essay titled
Francis Herbert Bradley, in turn extracts a few lines from the philosopher F.H. Bradley’s
Principles of Logic, so as to make clear an argument as to the epistemological deception
of the consciously active human senses. I trustingly quote Eliot’s quotations of Bradley
who writes that if, “the glory of this world in the end is appearance,” than such an
appearance, “leaves the world more glorious, [that is] if we feel [that the world] is a show
of some fuller splendour; but the sensuous curtain [of the mind] is a deception and a
cheat, if it hides some colourless movement of atoms, some spectral woof of impalpable
abstractions, or unearthly ballet of bloodless categories,” (p. 198).
Thus I turn to Albert Camus, who in The Myth of Sisyphus, communicates the
same idea (which I hope gives some clarity in my narrative’s defenses) when he writes
that modern science (with all of its technological rationale), is essentially a metaphor that
“teach[es] me that this wondrous multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and
that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All is good and I wait for you to
continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate
around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you
have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know,” (p. 20). The word poetry is a word that
is critically important when reading the lines of my strange narrative; for the word poetry,
which in the Greek is poiein, means to create, thus the poet (again from the Greek
poietes), like the tolteca, is a creator/maker of imagos. It is no wonder why the French
playwright, Eugene Ionesco, in his Notes and Counter Notes, makes the claim that there
are no “private frontiers,” in a poet’s consciousness, that “can separate the real from the
unreal, the true from the false,” therefore, as I had written above, all philosophy, science,
literature; moreover, all human knowledge is itself a type of fiction, a poem in fragments,
a kind of creation, a particular dream whereby we order a chaos of the universe, (p. 158).
Bradley again, who in his Essays on Truth and Reality, writes that, “the number
of real worlds, in a word, is indefinite. Every idea therefore in a sense is true, and is true
of reality…For true in one world, an idea may be false in another world.”* In his A New
Refutation of Time, Borges again, writes that “The misfortune of today is no more real
than the happiness of the past,” thus all conscious/unconscious experiences are (when
seen objectively), no more that the created impersonal pluralities of one elongated and
diminutive act framed within an anti-momentous moment of the universe’s creative
growth. (p. 222). Though there is, I believe, a poetic method by which one may come to
mirror the universe’s impersonal growth, via the amalgam of our mentally fantastic and
real worlds, into one compositely collective world that many sages from antiquity had
took the labor in comprehending, naming, fearing and altogether, creating. Ionesco in his
Notes, reminds us that “the microcosm [i.e., man’s inner reality] being a small scale
reproduction of the macrocosm [i.e., the reality of the universe]…is a reflection or [a]
symbol of universal disruption,” that I suggest is involved in such an alchemical mixture
of real and fantastical elements of mental reality, (p. 159).
The English Romantic poet of the 18th and 19th centuries, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, makes the peculiar observation in his poem, Phantom or Fact, that there is a
singular bond that homogenizes a set of perceptual dichotomies in the mind, when he
writes that the poem (and the art of poetry) is itself, “a fragment from the life of dreams,”
and when the work is historicized by critics and biographers, the work then becomes, “a
record from the dream of life,” (ll. 18 & 20). Time seems to be remedial for such a bond
at first glance, yet considering Coleridge’s philosophical insights and his theories on
perception, it is indeed, otherwise. In The Bow and the Lyre, Mexican writer Octavio Paz,
informs readers that knowledge, for Coleridge, belongs to the faculty of the imagination
(which is essentially the same as reason), “since it is the necessary condition of all
perception; and moreover, [since] it is a faculty that expresses, by means of myths and
symbols, the highest knowledge,” (p. 216). In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud,
comes across the same idea some 100 years after Coleridge, when he indicates that both,
“Real and imaginary events appear in dreams at first sight as of equal validity; and that is
not only in dreams but in the production of more important psychical structures,” that are
analyzed in works of art, (p. 323). To know things by mere appearance is, therefore, only
a surfaced material knowledge of the thing perceived, whereas to inquire more
philosophically and imaginatively, is the evermore essential component needed for
acquiring knowledge in the sense that Coleridge (and Topiltzin) had suggested. I suppose
then that all of these authors would have delighted in the Maya’s seven-syllable phrase
transcribed above, for they all thus far, maintain that all perceptual knowledge is be
*
from http://www.elea.org/Bradley/
sought (and reexamined) in what the Greeks maintained as the ta meta ta phusika.
Perceptual knowledge (sensory knowledge categorized in the same) is best
demonstrated in the Proteus episode of the Ulysses authored by Irishman James Joyce. In
the episode, Joyce writes of the “Ineluctable modality of the visible,” which is the
unavoidable knowledge of a thing’s optical appearance, yet, when Joyce’s Stephen
Dedalus “closed his eyes” and began to walk, he realized that his optically perceptual
reality thereby shifted to a reality that is experienced in one, “stride at a time. A very
short space of time through very short times of space,” and it is then that Stephen’s mind
activated a second modality of the senses, what Joyce calls, “the ineluctable modality of
the audible,” (p. 38). Here he heard sea-crash, stone-crush and salt-wash that occurred on
some obscure shore of Ireland, and if a reader comprehends all that I have put before
them, then they come to hold the fire needed to see that this perception of the world can
be experienced on any shore of the earth and/or within the content of one’s own mind; for
this episode does, after all, hint at the epistemology of aesthetics. When Joyce’s personae
opens his eyes the second time, he says to himself and his perceived surroundings, “There
all this time without you: and ever shall be, world without end,” (p. 38). Stephen, like
myself, Gula-Gradiva, Tzinacan, Topiltzin and Gilgamesh, has experienced the world(s)
with and without the five senses. All of us (whether fictional or actual) exist in both real
and fantastical worlds that are, cosmically speaking, dancing in a singular world that the
Gnostics held to be Barbelo, whereas the Mexica held to be Ometotl. Thus, Stephen, with
his eyes closed, was simply, “one [experiential] stride at a time,” and with his eyes open,
he was a body that was contained, like all of us, in “the world without end,” and perhaps
even a body who in the Upanishads realizes that which “lies beyond [perceptual] life,” in
order to overlap, or erase the peripheries of mental borders/boundaries.
These demonstrations, with all of the equipollent and philosophical validations
that conceptually bond and synthesize the intangible with the tangible, are all mindful
expressions that occupied the geometrical mind of Rene Descartes when he wrote that,
“there is no criterion enabling us to distinguish our dreams from the waking state and
from veridical sensations,” in his Meditations on First Philosophy, (p. 65). Likewise, this
entire narrative is the bare bones and skeletal body that configures a methodical logic that
potentially curtails the infinitely possible reasons as to why I have dreamt of Gula, again
and again, over a span of approximately 2,555 nights. The self-same stuff of love and
faith that compelled Don Quixote to ceaselessly serve and rhapsodize a Dulcinea, is the
very material by which I come to build fantastical dreams that are as real as this common
dream we are all experiencing. Though Gula think I myself am Quixote, I know now that
I am neither less nor more of what I once was or will become, but am a man that has
been, will be and will always come to be as a imago of someone else’s dream.

Isac Rafael Galvan, 2010

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