Reading Heaven

Above the linear time of the present, that moment of intersection between and including causation and reaction, a second cyclical time sits, like a platonic realm of unfolding, above and over all events taking place in the lower happenings. Again and again, mystics look up to the clouds and see the heavens unfurled, revealing the events of the sacred history taking place before their eyes in personalized hallucination. Art from around the world tends to depict the sacred through the lens of its readers. Jesus becomes Italian, Buddha becomes Chinese, illuminated manuscripts depict the apostles wandering about a Jerusalem modeled more after 11th century Paris than anywhere in the Near East.

Like an ideal informs the platonic object, this eternal scriptural text informs the texts produced locally in response to it. Each reader of the sacred history takes the history upon themselves uniquely, becoming from the higher object as it descends from heaven onto them. This descent occurs via forms, mapping onto the material content of the circumstances of the reader, the forms cause the sacred to be taken up locally and without direct reference to that which originated it. Such is the of the mythic narratives proposed by Campbell, Jung, etc. The narrative is already fully decided, the hero knows what will happen, in what order, where it begins, middles, and ends, because the temporal unfolding of this narrative is something which only occurs in the momentary reception of it. The form of the narrative is eternal and in all directions looking upon the encapsulated events of the journey, it was unfolding fully predicted as well. Such generates the cyclicality of myths, the mandala form. As this form is closed and eternal, it can only be a circle, a map with no true beginning or end, but a pattern that descends downwards, influencing those who look to the heavens for guidance. 

These heavens don’t form from nothing, nor do they have a single author. The textual history that led to the creation of what we know as the Hebrew bible is a history of accumulation, redaction, compilation, etc, and the same story holds true for the Christian bible. These texts formed as complete wholes at the end of long histories until the people who needed them as their mythic text came into full being. Christianity was birthed in its modern form along with its bible around the 4th century, just as the second Babylonian exile finally made what was once a splinter of Canaan into what we know today as the Jews. These myths emerge as emanations of the collective unconscious of the culture, the commonalities of all the creativities and dreams of the people as a mass, coming into being when all of these merge into one writing, as they merge into one entity. Legends and tales are birthed in the same way, vague ideas emanating from some collective imagination, added and redacted by their passing through minds of various people. Grand Theft Auto San Andreas players remember the countless tales of what lies in the liminal spaces of the game’s world, the map deliberately designed as a maze to create an illusion of space inspiring countless speculation. The backrooms has emerged in online lore as an expression of patterns of life in modern infrastructure, an extrapolation upon all the unspoken ideas of the spaces inhabited in day to day life.

It’s these creations from the collective mind that are channeled by those engaging in shamanic explorations. The spit-off dreams and hallucinations are taken within the mind of the shaman, who returns it to the culture in artistic form. It’s this action which forms the backbone of reading’s relationship to writing, of interpretation’s relationship to creation. Even in modern cultures, all artists must engage in this in some way. A film set in a house requires some concept of the house in order to work, the composition of this house being, even if unconscious, a channeling of cultural ideas left floating, forms of heaven reinterpreted downwards by the writer. Vaporwave artists regurgitate commercial products in this way, taking the abstractions and forms of the material they work with and turning it into new productions spun off these forms and nothing greater. It’s this action which makes the general way of reading into writing that begets artistic evolutions forward, as the context of artistic production shifts. This codependent relationship of culture channeled into the next generation of culture is the eternal accumulation that has formed cultural history in interlocking layers that can be peeled back all the way to the beginning of time.