the timboucher experience

Another very compelling quote from The Pentagon of Power, p 34:

Dr. Henry A Murray has given this skyward orientation a name, Ascensionism: he associates it not only with he practices of astronomy, but with the general psychal orientation toward brightness, levitation, flying, climbing, upward pointing and moving, perhaps even with hierarchic order in which the highest unit or the highest person represents the utmost in power, intelligence, or numinous authority. But Murray has also pointed out that the actual environment becomes more empty of living organisms as one ascends towards the symbolic mountaintop, and the air likewise becomes rarer and harder to breathe: less capable both physically and figuratively of supporting human life.

Murray also used the more popular term “Icarus Complex” to describe this. Although, I like the term “Ascensionism” because it lacks the moral warning against this way of being. Anyway, reading all that stuff about climbing and rising and everything made me pull together a few different strands. First from pop culture, we have the imagery of the band Led Zeppelin:

You’ll see it all over their official art: themes of light, of flying, of climbing, or rising upward. Stairway to Heaven, anybody? Also interesting is that their music and lyrics also featured hyped up male sexuality - which I imagine is the key ingredient of Ascensionism: “getting it up” so to speak, and “blasting” into the heavens (via the phallic rocketship).

And while we’re on the subject of space exploration, there’s a great quote on Wikipedia about Lewis Mumford’s analysis of space travel:

In cataloguing the “obsession” of classic thinkers with space travel, Mumford turns his attention to an obscure work by Johannes Kepler entitled Somnium where Kepler speculates about the possibilities of lunar travel (supposedly attainable as early as 1609). Mumford cites this work as an example of a science-driven transition from Heaven to space travel as the salvation and ultimate goal of the human race …

Sound much like the entire science fiction genre, perhaps? The original Star Trek series was making waves when Led Zeppelin first hit the scene, and was merely riding the crest of a decades-long popularity. Nevermind the building UFO craze, the use of mind-expanding Ascensionist psychedelics…. our entire culture seems permeated by Ascensionist imagery.

Although Ascensionism is not the most glamorous name we could give it: Luciferianism is a bit more sexy and controversial. As explained on Alchemical Braindamage, Western mystic giant Rudolf Steiner believed that the Luciferian current was one of the main drives in human society:

Lucifer is the symbol of energy, dynamic motion, dissolution of boundaries, and in a larger context, light, transcendence, and immateriality, hence an association with spirituality and even morality that can be misleading. …

From Steiner’s perspective, the Lucifer current is responsible for movement away from Paleolithic hunter gatherers in prehistory, triggering the slow technological advance toward the present day. Initially this was characterized by the growth and abstraction of the mind, and the growth of philosophy and mathematics …

Jumping back to Star Trek for a moment, Gene Roddenberry was a well-known advocate of Humanism (and yes I know that I am jumping all over here connecting things). Intertwined with scientific philosophy, Humanism replaced the theological Christian worldview which placed importance only on the afterlife. Humanism said that the realm of human affairs was decent and important in it’s own right. Which leads me in turn to Transhumanism - which I originally thought was just about transcending the limits of the human body, but I now realize is also about transcending the Humanist philosophy itself. In fact, I found a group of Transhumanists who refer to themselves as Ascensionists:

Ascensionism is a new branch of humanism composed of humanists of various beliefs united by a common thread. That thread is the idea that through science and technology, we can not only improve the world around us, but we have a sacred duty to humanity to improve upon and move past the “natural” human condition and progress into immortality and beyond.

Their symbol just so happens to be a stepped pyramid surmounted by a sun (see: “Stairway to Heaven” - and the seal on the dollar bill).

One more spicy ingredient I want to throw into this word salad comes from the philosophy of Auguste Comte, who some 150 years ago created the discipline of modern sociology. As his wiki page explains, he believed in three stages of human society, the Theological, Metaphysical and Scientific (also known as Positive):

The Theological phase was seen from the perspective of 19th century France as preceding the Enlightenment, in which man’s place in society and society’s restrictions upon man were referenced to God. By the “Metaphysical” phase, he was not referring to the Metaphysics of Aristotle or any other ancient Greek philosopher, but for Comte was rooted in the problems of French society subsequent to the revolution of 1789. This Metaphysical phase involved the justification of universal rights as being on a vauntedly higher plane than the authority of any human ruler to countermand, although said rights were not referenced to the sacred beyond mere metaphor. What he announced by his term of the Scientific phase, which came into being after the failure of the revolution and of Napoleon, was that people could find solutions to social problems and bring them into force despite the proclamations of human rights or prophecy of the will of God.

…human development (social progress) progresses from the theological stage, in which nature was mythically conceived and man sought the explanation of natural phenomena from supernatural beings, through metaphysical stage in which nature was conceived of as a result of obscure forces and man sought the explanation of natural phenomena from them until the final positive stage in which all abstract and obscure forces are discarded, and natural phenomena are explained by their constant relationship. This progress is forced through the development of human mind, and increasing application of thought, reasoning and logic to the understanding of world.

In other words, Comte believed in the occult doctrine of evolution or progess, - Ascensionism - which was antithetical to the Church who taught that you toiled on Earth and then received a reward in Heaven (or else went to hell!), rather than things just getting progressively better here on earth. Humanism was the ultimate shape this philosophy of human/life-centric thinking took - the values of which seem to correspond fairly well with what Comte described as the Metaphysical stage. And so I’m speculating that Transhumanism continues the trend, perhaps taking the first tentative steps towards a pure form of Comte’s Scientific stage, in which we shed all the trappings which we no longer need - including, it would seem our very bodies and human natures within the Singularity!

Apologies for the rambling nature of this post. I just had to download all these ideas together in one big package in order to save them to my mental desktop for later sorting. It’s funny how one idea, one key passage will unlock something for you like that.

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