The Quantum Sutras of Shiva, Shakti and the UFOs

(122 poems, 4 hours 25 minutes)

All of the places I’d been were shaped by globalization, network culture, and planetary condition: yet all had a regionality, a particularity that one could taste and hear. To locate in the particular some of the grand and granular, the ideas, tastes, and smells, the skies and seas, the many things I’ve mentioned that have come from particular places of this particular earth – that was very much part of this project.

If in Everything is Everything I was taken by the trope of exile, and in Luxor by durations of time, given all sorts of agencies, beingness, and bodies (geologic, galactic, microscopic, infinite, infinitesimal), in these last three writing pieces, I would discover new cosmologies and cycles of time.

Different control systems, unique musical signatures, varied ideas of life and death, of pleasures and presence, foods and eroticism, all of it playing out, again and again, in the tumultuous making and remaking of empires, dynasties and the smallest of towns and villages, and all their accompanying environs, from single individuals, one love affair amongst many, to societies of humans, plants, bees and fishes, seas and winds. Ah, what is it to exist in, amongst, being-with, present to the world, and just what a world it is to me. Ah, there you go, it’s me, something of me, in love with the wreck and beauty of it all.

I would seek out cartographies of human and non-human appetite, the speeds and intensities of them, the metabolism of so many things – one of which would be how the psyche conceives of the universe, makes a map of it. The Hindus were brilliant at it. Perhaps they are our most astounding metaphysicians, as well physicians of the body, the mind body.

I desired in this project to find language, and with the writing, other media that would allow for an expressive scale shift of such thoughts. So these words – one letter at a time, appearing here, letters becoming words, then sentences and more – this semiosis, a plastic hybridity of prosody and poetry, history and storytelling, one more element – these words, that is, when spoken and recorded, would in performance add to dance, movement, sound, lights and imagery, comprising an evening performance with which to commune.

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Once again I would have to invent a story and not simply recount the things I had seen. It is said that what drives the desire to compare, contrast, and comprehend literatures, religions, and cultures across the globe is a body in trouble. Perhaps it is, but perhaps as well it is to provoke and invite curiosity – to wonder and observe the fragility, absurdity, and deepness of life, entangled together.

When I arrived in Hong Kong, the text of Hong Kong (a place itself of language and cascading words), I let go of this idea of having a consistent fictional storyline – one that ran alongside the travelogue, one that exceeded the facts, yet one that gave another sense to things. It was not that this questioning ‘I’ was an unreliable narrator, but that the ‘world’ itself was uncertain and unreliable. What some would call a mystery. One which almost everyone wants to figure out.

How to perform the uncertainty of the world. The narrator (narration itself) would have to gain the trust of the reader and the listener – let them relax and ease into this uncertainty to access human and non-human histories, with an extra sense through an innate knowledge that would exceed the sensible and knowable – sensing things from intuition, from a poetic register that questions what knowing is, asking 'what do we know?' in our knowing. Nothing. Ah, the plentitude of nothing. Nothingness, the void, the voidness that constitutes ultimate reality – sunyata, understood not as a negation of existence, but rather as an undifferentiation out of which all apparent entities, distinctions, and dualities arise.

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Yes, on the whole, the West’s receptiveness to the voice of the East (with respect to Europe) has been limited to periods of spiritual emergency, to moods of futility and despair; its attitude toward Asia was either that of the conqueror, armed with his gun and gospel truth, or that of the pilgrim in sackcloth and ashes, anxious to prostrate herself at the guru’s feet.

If the Greeks aspired for immortality, granted to men by exceptional deeds, the Hindus aspired for something beyond time and history, and that was eternity.  By the time Hegel wrote his lessons in the philosophy of history, the East of the world was situated in the past – where history began, but where it no longer dwelled. The East belonged to a different 'time.' Tradition. And tradition did not have its own discourse. It was created by the discourse that defined modernity.

The 'primitives' belonged to history outside of Europe, conceived either as the 'past' (China, India), 'the future of history' (America), or people without history (Africa).

To be modern became an ideal, and the standards of these ideals were established by the discourse that defined modernity as the location in time of the ideals to be attained.

There could be no writing of this work without acknowledging this discourse of post-coloniality. In graduate school, I read Edward Said’s book Orientalism, where he gives copious description of the Western construction of the East as a means of asserting dominance and control.

The Indian author and intellectual Pankaj Mishra takes this further in his book From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia (2012), where he describes the complexities of East-West interactions, arguing that such encounters created a profound sense of humiliation, dislocation, and anger for many in the East.

Mishra also explored the ways in which Eastern societies engaged with and responded to these challenges. Mishra did a reading one evening in Varanasi at the very real Harmony Book Store. And he and our narrates, Shiva and Shakti would spend long walks on the ghats and evenings discussing dystopias, the west, Kashmir, his life as a writer in a small village town and  his novel, ‘The Romantics’.  So yes this writing had to more than a spiritual emergency, more than imbibing the rich treasures of the ancient but also the present Hindu culture in the holiest city of India, Varanasi.

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Sutra is a Sanskrit word that originally meant 'string' or 'thread.' It was commonly used to refer to the discourses of Shakyamuni Buddha. Sutra is derived from the same verbal root as the English words 'to sew' and 'suture.' There are prose and verse texts that often begin with the words “thus have I heard.”

I love this idea of "Thus have I heard." Therefore. So. Consequently. Hence. Accordingly. Thereupon. In consequence. Wherefore. "Thus have I heard," I am me and you are you and I am you and you are me and we are all together.

Here is how this works. In ancient Hindu philosophy, Brahman is the ultimate, formless, and all-pervading reality or cosmic consciousness. It is the source and essence of everything in the universe. Brahman is often described as beyond attributes and is not limited by time, space, or individual identity. It is the unchanging, eternal, and immeasurable reality that underlies all existence.

Atman refers to the individual soul or self within each living being. Ancient Hindus believed that the Atman is essentially identical to Brahman, suggesting that the individual soul is interconnected with the universal consciousness. The realization of this unity is a central goal of many Hindu spiritual practices.

Deities serve as various manifestations or facets of the divine, offering devotees different avenues to connect with and understand the ultimate reality.

For Hindus, there is not an end of time, but time without start and end – there is the entanglement of all things, something quantum physics tells us. Things are here and there at the same time, things are always there and not there until we look for them.

In a work where facts and entities were continually contesting facts, such ideas were most welcomed. They would bring into question not only the idea of me and 'I,' but nation states, religions, ideologies, and science.

Was it all maya, the cosmic illusion that the phenomenal world is real? That what human beings believe is an illusion? That the universe is experiential in essence, that it is a spatially unbound, transpersonal field of subjectivity, of which we are segments? That universal phenomenal consciousness is all there is? That, as Bernardo Kastrup argues – we, as well as all other living organisms, are dissociated alters of universal phenomenal consciousness, analogous to how a person with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) manifests multiple disjoint centers of subjectivity (also called 'alters’)?

The inanimate world we perceive around us is the extrinsic appearance – i.e., the phenomenal image imprinted from across our dissociative boundary – of this activity. The living organisms we share the world with are the extrinsic appearances of other alters.

Both Hindu philosophy and Kastrup's idealism point to a unified consciousness underlying all existence. Atman (the individual self) is ultimately the same as Brahman (a universal consciousness). Both perspectives suggest that there is an underlying unity and interconnectedness of all things, transcending the apparent diversity of the world.

The Sutras were not only a way to write a prayer or hymn or pilgrimage or trial for myself to become present to myself, but a method to set these inside and along questions of reality, consciousness, and perception, told from different cultural and philosophical perspectives. This is precisely how the Mahabharata is written as both story and philosophical reflection.

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The writing was not about belief or disbelief, or skepticism – more so, it was about the seduction of fabulation, the brilliance of inventing stories, and the engineering of life-world solutions. It seemed that realities were all contingent – we were making it up as we go, it was making us up, it, whatever ’it’ was.

How to tell such stories in the last cycle of these poems? Each prose poem had a bit of a different tone, the last writing in India being the least fantastical, as the subject of the divine and the mystical is already in some sense is fantastic in itself.

After all, mystical states of being imbued with ‘God’ are deeply held feelings – the light of the divine so personal – that they are both interior and outside of language, as they are deeply embodied states in their own right.

The quest for the divine, eternity, bliss, and God is often filled with folly. (Similar to the quest for glory, riches, and control – the Realpolitik of India today.) I suppose folly is what interested me most. The longings and aspirations that must find their way into the 'real.' How, as embodied creatures, did 'we,' do 'we,' find ourselves imaging something beyond the body, beyond this life? All too often, the consequences of such beliefs of the beyond are deadly. One person’s truth is another’s heresy. This was not of interest to me – states, religions, border conflicts.

Ideologies, no: individual experiences of ecstatic states, yes. Then again, no need to create an 'either or' – it’s that my interest here was the embrace of lovers, of love and states of time outside time, imagined in time.

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The Quantum Sutras of Shiva Shakti and the UFOs would trace a search for my self-realization through the figures of Shiva and Shakti. Now, what does that mean, after all this writing about the elusive self? Well, self-realization may not be quite right.

Maybe it means being equally seduced by such grand and beautiful notions as the whole of time and its conception – as it is with what can’t simply be an idea, but an actuality of a coming into the presence of myself, being, here and now. Being embodied and present, being with death, being with finitude. Yes, how seductive the infinite, what a conception, the elasticity of karma, reincarnation, the Akashic fields, time outside of time: and with that, well, life, living one’s actual very fleshy life before it’s gone, done, finished, over. No wonder mourning is so difficult – to let go, and to let go of what, memory, where is memory. What is the place, the place of memory? But most importantly, now, what is the place of being? The experience of being alive? I think it was this that brought me to performance – not performing, but performance. A singular event of making myself present. Yes, Marina Abramović: the artist is present. I know exactly what you are expressing.

How to tell stories about such ideas? The now and forever. The infinite and finite. The pain inside the body, the mind, inside the body politic, in the oceans and atmospheres. My body is that body, those bodies: well yes, well no, well yes, Brahman and Atman. How to situate such ideas in the everyday? And why perform them? Well, to present them to, and with, others. To feel them collectively.

I was, I realized now, writing a pilgrimage for myself in search of what I could call myself … or feel as me. Here we go, someone’s here. This figure of me – not just an image, or an idea, or disembodied words.

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The Quantum Sutras would thread and suture a story of two young contemporary San Franciscans who called themselves, Shiva and Shakti. They would go from an imaginary sense, a projected sense of each other, to getting closer and closer to the finite and separate persons they were. In this way, their love is deepened. The embodiment of themselves, alone and together (can two people be embodied together?), would become more sensitive to their unbounded limits.

Decamped in Varanasi, the two very soon find themselves involved in the city’s rich history and with many of its local residents, including musicians, sadus, booksellers, authors, intellectuals, fakirs, tailors and pilgrims.

There our narrator’s companion is asked to be called Shakti who morphs in and out of roles – at one time guru, another lover, another alien abductress, then Buddhist, then fertility goddess, and always as the divine within – who tells him, he is Shiva, ideas and thoughts in search of a body and the sensual. In search of his embodiment.

One fine day, through narrow alleys, passing cows and pilgrims in brilliant colored saris and bindis, the early morning light throws a crisp shadow of our narrator on a temple wall as they loo out at pilgrims immersed in the waters of the Ganges. What a shadow. Me and this shadow. What a wondrous thing, this shadow, this sun and light. Sun and shadow, darkness and light. Ah, what a planet, what a sun; a planet without sun, what is that?

In this play and revelry, the shadow decides to run off.  The narrator reaches their hand out and – nothing, nothing at all. The sun is still there, no clouds, bright as ever, but no, no shadows at all. This is strange. This is uncanny. Oh my! What am I without my shadow! That left-behind, unconsidered, unconscious me.

So, me and not me – with my lover Shakti, my feminine other, my double – together walk endlessly through time, until we arrive at a Ghat. As the two picnic and the lover falls asleep, a hovering Sadu, a genie of sorts, comes to the narrator, saying something like, “why don’t you give yourself the peace, the equanimity (I do love that word) you want? I can help you help your shadow if you let me." Recounting this to the lover in a cheeky manner, the lover strikes him, as do Zen monks who have lost their focus, with 30 blows on the back of the upper shoulder. Too much nonsense narrator, you must address the pain, the hurt, the trauma that you have been avoiding.

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What was this trauma – but a wound, unacknowledged. A hurt, put away to be forgotten. The very idea made me most uncomfortable. There was this period in the 90s wherein repressed memories were being recovered or surfacing everywhere. It would often turn on the sexual abuse of a child by someone in their family. This would be the locus of hurt and shame. True or not true, it would offer a key to help a ‘victim’ or the victimized understand what was holding them back, keeping them from realizing the inner child from becoming an actualized empowered adult.

Trauma, of course, extended much beyond the family circle and into many institutions of society – in sports teams, schools, religious groups the pervasive prison and policing system, corporate America and its treatment of so many people. We only have to look at the #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter, the continual mass shootings, Abu Ghraib, The Abuser in Chief, America’s politicians, the ecological crisis, the media, the history of the extermination of the indigenous peoples of the America, on and on. You could almost say American society was under an onslaught of trauma everyday. Is such a claim hysterical? I often felt like something so grave, so pernicious, would too often be casually invoked, and as such, rid it of any power – especially as abusers now themselves claim to be abused and aggrieved. Helpless, without power to truly change anything, while destroying everything, 'we,’ the body politic, hysterical (I know this sounds a bit hysterical) would try and manage as best they can. (Really?)

It seemed the whole of the culture needed coming to some truth and reconciliation – a proper grieving and mourning, the power of which was very much part of the writing and performance of Everything is Everything and There is Nothing Else.

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This pervasive trauma, indeed, was a spiritual emergency, and the moods of futility and despair I mention above provided an opening and an increasing receptivity to Eastern ideas of death and rebirth, of reincarnation and Karma.

I was interested in how such ideas and practices came to America, starting with the transcendentalists, Thoreau and Emerson in the late 19th Century, popularized with Madame Blavatsky and brought by peoples of the East themselves as new immigrants to America. With the Chicago Religious World Fair of the late 1890s, great swamis and sages would come and start schools, religious centers, study groups, and monasteries.

Many of them eventually settled in Southern California, like the Vedanta group that Aldous Huxley would join. It was with Huxley, who would write The Divine Within and The Perennial Philosophy, where these esoteric ideas would join psychedelics, moving through the Beats and into the Human Potential Movement.

I was keen to know more about the New Age and what its promise was. How the ideas of sages and swamis meshed almost perfectly with quantum physics. Along the way, we would meet the Brothers McKenna, Terrance and Dennis, and join the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss. We would site UFOs in the desert and, there, speak with Philip K. Dick about the pink light and exegesis and reality as a waking dream, a projection disguising something deeper and more real. Wasn’t this the whole of the Hinduism’s insight: that there was something else, vast and beautiful and purposeful?

Shakti and I would spend weeks in bookstores, meet local guides, attend seances, do walking meditations, go to raves along the Ganges, meet Krishna Dior and learn of India’s musical rhythms, hear anecdotes of local Hindus, and voyage to the Akashic records beyond space and time.

Through all of this, the two of us would become one and each other – not myths, but distinct persons, situated and embodied, finding our shadows – and with that, we would form a Quantum society, a telepathic monastery, attuning to the OM of the world, sending out cascading alpha waves to the planet in a desire to achieve great healing.

And what a ‘healing’ it is. For a moment. A ecstatic galactic orgasm!

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I am at the Ganges; it is so polluted, I think of the new green colonialism, sustainable development, the capitalist dream, regenerate the Ganges, let’s go! I am siting on my rock – a Sadu, a turtle. In 2023, we had already exceeded 1.5 degrees celsius warming above pre-industrial levels. It’s madness, everyone is mad – Hindus are bathing in the most polluted river in the world, their piety as earnest as the entrepreneur pitching on Sand Hill Road, we’ll get a little regenerative farm in Indonesia – the sun is getting so hot, where is the water, I am thirsty, my cells want water, I am dying: not a beautiful death but being swallowed up a whale – post-modernity, the poly crisis, spit out on hot bleached coral reefs, the mammals are dying, the earth is suffocating, who gives a fuck about the you, me, I complexity – that lovely gin, special K on the playa …