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PARTISAN REVIEW
have universal sex in the head, "psychic culture will replace sexual culture."
Through a certain Gopi Krishna, Thompson learned how
through meditation, the prana of the semen is reversed and begins
to
flow up through the spinal column into the brain . As the sexual secre–
tions go up the spinal column, an intense and ecstatic consciousness is
generated , and the individual feels that he is both male and female at
once, for the spinal column becomes a vagina and the brain becomes the
worn b for the birth of a divine child. The transformed yogi thus becomes
an angelic androgyne.
Cosmic consciousness, or sex in the head, therefore, not only incorporates
nature, society, history, space, time and other people in general to escape the
prison of the self; it also absorbs in specific the sexual Other in its escape from
the coffin of the body: "If the individual becomes both a man and a woman,
then he is no longer asexual like the timeless amoeba, or tragically mortal like
the sexual human; he-she becomes eternal like a divine being ." See?
"Credo quia absurdum est,"
says Thompson, but he is not the first to
believe in this particular set of absurdities. The self-love that smothers the
world in its embrace is Gnostic. So is the self-hatred that projects inner
compulsions onto external agents. So is the hatred of the body and its needs,
the repression of which turns them into compulsions. So is the hatred of
things as they are, of perceptible reality, whether natural or social. So is the
hatred of those who con trol things as they are, whether the source of the power
by which they control things is conceptual or political , whether they are
technocrats, bureaucrats, liberals, leftists, or New York intellectuals. So is the
apocalyptic longing that projects a resentment against things as they are and
those who maintain them onto cosmic agents of retribution, agents unerring
in their ability
to
separate the sheep from the goats. To the outsider, however,
such gods look like denizens of inner space, inadmissible fears and longings or
fears and longings for which one does not want to take responsibility, pro–
jected into outer space. The believer longs for atonement with them because
they are alienated portions of himself, but he also fears them precisely as he
fears what in himself fear caused him to repress.
It
is the devils you cast out
that return to possess you.
The first gnosticism was the ghost dance of ancient civilization .
It
spawned Christianity, the subsequent relationship of which
to
Gnosticism
was that simultaneously of the parricide and the sibling rival. The return of
the repressed is perhaps slow, but it is also inexorable, and most Western
millennial sects have been gnostic to one degree or another, from Apollonius
