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READERS NOTE "The universe rose from an infinitely curved, infinitely dense, and infinitely hot space-time. And where did that come from? Good question." Charles Pelligrino Everything probably started some twelve to seventeen billion years ago, so far distant a stretch it is virtually impossible to imagine. During that great outburst of what we have come to call the Big Bang, or the beginning of time, all the stars of the Milky Way, Andromeda and the farthest galaxies would have fit inside the size of a dime. And 8.5 billion years ago it was still out there somewhere amidst the stars, jets of gas shimmering with incomprehensible heat; particles colliding and clouds swirling in brilliant glowing colors. Cosmological theory has it that our solar system condensed out of this energy bursting forth to streak cross billions of miles of space, clocked at hyper speed - 186 miles per second - the speed of light itself. Or as Albert Einstein put it, "space will have to be regarded as a primary thing with matter derived from that." 1 The Earth itself is 4.5 billion years old and, when new, it was hot, very hot. Single-cell life appeared just about a billion years after that, like some countless eggs floating around in a giant watery womb until, so to speak, they began to hatch. Prior to 600 million B.C. all life was found in the ocean, so we say that is where it began half a billion years ago. Then the Earth began to wobble and the land to wriggle and squirm as life emerged from the waters. First it was the invertebrates, or reptiles, followed by the dinosaurs - some horned, some feathered, some armored and scaled. They roamed continents and climbed mountains, eating each other and leaves, and for more than one hundred and twenty-five million years they were the dominant form of life on planet Earth. Yet, when the undersea mountains began to sink of their own weight, the equilibrium was unsettled. The swollen waters subsided, draining back in from the continents to fill the gaps, leaving in their wake, by 16 million B.C., the lush forests and savannas of Europe, East Africa, Asia, Greenland, even northern Alaska - a veritable paradise. For the dinosaurs, however, their home had been irrevocably changed, and over the course of the next five million years they slowly began to decline until, finally, it is believed an asteroid crashed into the planet. They were wiped from the face of the Earth. The earliest known form of man, more of a man-ape, didn't appear until 15 million to 8 million years ago. It was a time when enchanting sheep-sized elephants, pygmy hippos and dog-sized dears also could be found. PARADISE REDEFINED Imagine the phenomenon of the evolutionary process as a pendulum on its swing. At one end it begins in that undifferentiated state in which the physical and nonphysical not only interpenetrate each other, they are each other. It is a belief that is as old as time, with science finally catching up. Most of the global scientific community now agrees that all living things are electromagnetic in nature. "This energy in one of its forms is the underlying 'prematter' from which physical matter as we know it condensed or 'materialized.'" 2 Or as Albert Einstein put it, it is the energy ejected from exploding stars, The Big Bang compressed into a fluid system of direct electrical current of which all the forests, rivers, squirrels, and even man, are only but a part. Indeed, an adult human being consists of 350 trillion highly specialized cells, each of which is a tiny electric battery generating its own charge. What's more, this "human energy" is not only sensitive to the energies from the rest of the environment, but it is also responsive to other modes of interaction-what we call "extrasensory" or "paranormal"-with different people, animals, and plants. That's right. It has been documented, for example, how plants respond to human feelings and thoughts, as well as the other way around. 3 It's like the apple fight between Dorothy and the talking trees when she and the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion find the Tin Man in "The Wizard of Oz." Sort of.This subtle force - energy - is also one of the principle factors in magic. Indeed, the scientists have learned that "the state of mind is reflected in [the] electromagnetic field; that is, the mind can influence the field, [bridging] mind and matter," or mind over matter. 4 They gave out Nobel prizes for discoveries such as that. And so, when the scientist's mind affects the outcome of his experiment, it is the same as what the magician does with his wand. It is what in modern times we call a focusing or exchange of energy, such as in mental telepathy or psychokinesis. Perhaps if you think of the psychics bending spoons with their minds you'll get a clearer picture, though it's much more intriguing than that.The word "energy" itself comes from the Greek energeia, meaning active. In its original sense it meant vital energy, "that which can move or quicken inert matter." Remember Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer's Apprentice stirring the forces alive? Fanciful as it might seem, it is entirely within the realm of possibility. When originally moving to combine or reform, these forces appeared in the single-celled life in the sea, a process of evolution comparable to biological man, himself evolving from a single-celled organism in the waters of a mother's womb. In either state, the strands of the DNA contained the "memory" of everything which came before. As the evolutionary pendulum begins to move the cells split, fishes evolve, adapt, come out of the waters, onto land, and ultimately become upright Homos. Though the tails might be gone, there is no need yet for language as we know it, for these precursors to modern man maintained highly developed functions, the source of which resides in what is now referred to as the"primitive" or old brain. It is part of the instinctual side of the mind, the fundamental processes of awareness which, for example, animals also possess. The first certain ancestor of the human species - Original Man - was discovered in east Africa, in Ethiopia and Tanzania, dating from 3.8-2.5 million B.C., at the advent of the Paleolithic period, or Old Stone Age. Not yet devolved from his extrasensory perception, he maintained a supernormal contact with all of life. It is similar in some ways to how the high keening pulsations are interpreted by dolphins or whales, or to the as yet undifferentiated state, to take a different case, of a modern-day newborn human child. It is a wholeness of the mind, some say "psychic wholeness," in which the old forces of awareness have not yet been cast aside. Consciousness - the real other reality - doesn't live in Kansas, so to speak. It resides in the primitive system. For Old Stone Age man, it is still a paradisiacal time of lucid chattering cousins swinging through the trees, or smiling clover bending their brows to encourage the honeybees; a time of harmony, peace and plenty, it is a paradisiacal garden, before the biblical fall. The OLD STONE AGE ~ c. 2.5 million - 10,000 B.C. Walking as much with the aid of his arms as with his legs, mankind still hunkered around on his knuckles in a bent and galloping swagger, but he wasn't just some dumb ape. He hunted in groups, fished, and gathered plants. He could also control and use fire, and he made tools, the earliest of which were made of chipped stone around 2.3 million B.C. It indicates a moment of mental awakening when the human ego or intellect recognized itself and felt its power to discriminate. With a brain about one quarter the current human size he began to reason: "I think, therefore I am," or perhaps more appropriately: "If I shave this stone to a razor-sharp edge, it will be easier to dig and hack and scrape." The MIDDLE STONE AGE ~ c.10,000-3000 B.C. The true human being was the genus Homo. Homo dates back 2 million years. Then he learned to stand up. That is, Homo erectus appeared next in line with a brain about half of modern man's. Homo erectus shared Africa, the mid-East and Asia with other early people, though he is the only variety of Homo to have survived. Over the next one million years the size of the brain progressively grew, and Homo erectus gradually evolved into Homo sapiens, and then our own sub-species, Homo sapien, sapien, a process which took almost another half-billion years. Homo sapien translates to mean "wise or intellegent human." Indeed, it is believed he developed the use of language by, at the latest, 500,000 B.C., and although technologically limited and economically unsophisticated, his primitive societies probably began to form about 250,000 years after that. Stone Age primitive peoples, such as the Australian Aborigines and the Tasady of Mindanao, had social structures with rules governing behavior, such as courtship, coupling, and burial of the dead, so it is also the likely case for Homo sapien sapien. Clearly, by around 58,000 B.C., the story which the bones from a variety of burial sites tell is one not only ofdeep sorrow at the loss of one of their own, but also of a belief in the persistence of consciousness outside of the human body, or the spirit beyond death. Homo sapiens are known to have appeared in Europe around 35,000 B.C. The practice of the shamans - what you could call the first psychologists or priests - date from this time, records of which are preserved in the images of the cave-temple paintings. Starting from about 30,000 B.C., they include the dancing horned "Sorcerer of Trois Freres." These early Europeans also began carving "Venus" or goddess figurines. Combined, they are some of the earliest religious accounts. More of an engraving than a painting, the horned sorcerer, with a prominent flaccid feline penis flopping between the legs, expressed the creative urges of the species. That is, the dancing sorcerer or shaman depicts a highly skilled magician who had put on the costume of a god. Among other attributes, these men are credited with "evoking awe by bridging or transcending gender roles." 5 But this wasn't just some bad hair day hidden beneath their horns. Taking the guise of the animals served not only as a channel of elemental power - energy - meant to communicate with the animals, draw them out, so to speak, and thereby facilitate the hunt, but in the supernormal rites of their magic these horned shamans actually became the god.Around the same time, this cultural sphere also extended across the northern plains of Asia, and these same people are accepted as the ancestors of the native inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere. They journeyed to the Americas across a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska and colonized the hemisphere, subsequently sending offshoots to the coastal and island cultures of the eastern Pacific and Indian Oceans. The Old Stoneagers, or as they were called in Europe, Cro-Magnon man, were thus living virtually around the world. They were quite civilized in their caring for each other, sophisticated in their rites and beliefs, and, so it seems, the cave-painting artists and magicians were a bit queer. Between 10,000 and 3,000 B.C., the earth's human inhabitants shared characteristics of both the older Paleolithic and newer Neolithic periods, and there was widespread cultural uniformity. The clan was thebasic unit of government, and religion centered on the worship of Mother Nature, a Great Goddess figure in charge of the plants and wild animals, and later corn, wheat, and rice. Essentially, women, as mothers and nourishers of life, were thought to assist the Earth in her productivity, though it was probably more than that. 6 That is, the experience of the realms of consciousness was typified as "feminine," a bit like Dorothy's dream of Oz when the Good Witch Glinda is carried in bubbles to arrive in Munchkin Land. The most important powers of and phenomena perceived by the individual were personified and treated as divine. It was expressed as nature-worship, including human nature, and nature was the world of the goddess. In actuality, an experience of something like the Good Witch Glinda riding in from the sky is a picture of the reality of extended consciousness, and, if not the sole origin, it is at least the most essential support underlying all religions.The oldest layer of religion in and around the Mediterranean focused on the Great Mother Goddess and, particularly after 7,000 B.C., her male consort. The son or lover or brother of the Goddess, he is often depicted in the form of a bull or other horned figure not unlike the ancient "Sorcerer of Trois Freres." Indeed, he is a direct descendent, and his religious rituals were often homosexual in nature. And so this consort of the goddess, this "Horned God" and his follower sare next in the line of what we could call the prehistoric queer. He traveled in his migrations back to his old stomping grounds, moving from the northern grasslands of the European and Asian plains, south through what we now know as Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey and into the Near East, where the Neolithic period, or New Stone Age began around 8,000 B.C. A restless lot, these Horned Gods and their followers carried in cultic form from the mountains of Syria and Turkey to the Mediterranean Islands, and moved back into Europe over the next 6,000 years. It is also believed that a further diffusion occurred when some of these wandering nomads split east into the Indus Valley, ultimately moving to China, and from there across the Pacific Ocean to Central America and northern South America. Combined with the earlier Bering Strait emigrants, it is certain that by 6,000 B.C. these native peoples were also widely distributed throughout the Western Hemisphere. As they were, in the Americas, in Asia, Africa, continental Europe, and in the Near East, the metaphorical evolutionary pendulum continued to swing. With the introduction of the ability to reason, logical "masculine" functions began to dawn. The LEFT BRAIN And The RIGHT We know today that one result of the evolutionary sorting out has left differences in the human brain. So says Ruben Gur, director of the brain behavior laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania. Gur's findings are that "there are several dimensions of brain functions that correspond to some of those differences, [such as] the part controlling action-oriented responses [is] more active in men." This active "masculine" mode of consciousness resides primarily in the linear, verbal, and logically oriented left-brain. "The part of the brain thought to control more symbolic emotional responses [is] more active in women." 7 That is, the right brain, what has been termed the "area of the taboo, the sacred, the unconscious, the intuitive, and the dreamer" - and what you might also say is a gateway to the Land of Oz - is considered the seat of the "feminine" mode of consciousness. 8 Not surprisingly, this right sphere is also where the old or so-called "primitive" brain still resides. In Stone Age times, under sway of this "primitive" brain, individuals had evolved a process of supernormal awareness which allowed them to continue, let's say, to see the particles of energy hugging space round the trees. We find it later in depictions of the expanded human energy field painted as halos or auras round the heads of saints, or more recently, the colorful splay of energy captured in kirlean photography. It is that place "somewhere over the rainbow," leaving the barren plains of Kansas to enter a colorful world of munchkins and talking daisies, or bubbles of insight and intuition carried on the breeze. It is a lingering, yet persistent vision of the unity found in all things, a wholeness which some may think is lost. They are wrong. For Stone Age man, those individuals who knew this unity, the world of the masculine at the same time combined with theinnate ability to mediate or maintain the feminine realms of consciousness, were the homosexuals, the followers of the Horned Gods, and they were duly revered for that.The NEW STONE AGE and The BRONZE AGE ~ c. 8000-2500 B.C. With the onset of the New Stone Age, grain agriculture and stockbreeding began. They were the staples of what we call the first "high civilizations" of the world. Living in huts, the people communicated by beating out their messages on drums, not really so much different from the latter day "Morse code." Only the medium had changed. They developed a myriad number of musical instruments, methods of tattooing, and religious societies, too, and they fashioned the proverbial fig leaf with clothing made from palm fiber and from bark. There was also the lore of the rites of animal and human sacrifice and of spooks and goosebumps and things - a journey to the land of the dead. Society continued to evolve. Village life settled into "a barnyard economy," and pottery, weaving, carpentry, and house building were added to the repertoire of skills. In Europe and central Asia, the peasant villages united under tribal chiefs. Smaller villages specialized in particular arts and crafts. The population continued to grow. More strategically centered communities assumed the size and function of market towns, and, in the Near East, the Sumerian civilization spread out to the suburbs, expanding into the Mesopotamia valley where they became the ancient Egyptians. Amidst all the hub and buzz of growing commerce there remained the continued association of womanhood with the idea of a Great Mother Goddess, represented now not only as the metaphorical depiction of all of nature, but as a metaphysical symbol, too, "the personification of the power of space, time, and matter, within whose bounds all beings arise and die." 9 Indeed, in ancient Crete and also in Egypt, her arms and legs were shown touching the earth as four pillars holding aloft her body, the canopy of the sky. The cult of a dead and resurrected god was also present, as were other associations of the horned bull, or a horned goat with the goddess, as well as those of a dove and a double ax. In fact, in the descent of the workings of prehistoric magic, the homosexual followers of the Horned Gods became the original male priests, "dedicated to such things as magic, learning, poetry, music, and prophecy. There are also some considerations which go to show that this class of Intermediates [meaning gay] did actually tend to develop faculties like divination, clairvoyance, ecstasy and so forth, which are generally and quite naturally associated with religion." 10The priests began to make bricks, too, and temples were for the first time built. People began to worship a world-generating union of the Earth-Goddess on the one hand, with the Lord of the Sky on the other, the pairing of a divine queen with (variably) her son, lover, or spouse. Quite literally, you went to church to get laid. This was a period of great unfolding, yielding all the basic elements of the "high civilizations" of the world.around 3500 B.C., ornamental art and crafts had reached a considerable level of refinement, and the concept of the wheel evolved. The temple areas of the Near East increased in size and importance, as did the priestly discoveries, including the creation of the astronomical calendar, functional electroplated batteries, and the development of a science of mathematics, coordinating the measures of space and time. With the appearance of a system of numbers and the art of writing, documented history began. Every civilization of the world is thus thought to be but one limb of a great tree rooted in the stars. Whether it is called male or female, heaven or earth is ultimately one side or the other of the two-sided cosmic coin, or as the neurologists might parallel it today, it is reflected in one side of the brain or the other. Perhaps more accurately, in the beginning both sides were one. 11 The metaphor of the pendulum as evolutionary process is that it will ultimately go the great round, returning to this beginning, a union of the opposites to create a third, quite different way of being, a way of experiencing life that you could say is a bit queer. And if you can so imagine, it is that point from which gay people, the embodiment of the first human being - Original Man - start from today. Or put another way, just as by the time of written history the whole cultural complex had crystallized into the mystical idea of the microcosm of the individual and the macrocosm of the universe, each visible as an expression of the one essential form of all, so, too, is it the unitary reality of gaiety. 12The BIOPSYCHOPHYSICS OF GAIETY Today, the major brain studies conducted on gay men show gay men are predisposed to access parts of the "feminine" or right-brain in a way that women do, too, and in a way - quantifiably different - that "straight" men do not. That is, the gay man's hypothalamus, that part of the human mind "haunted by animal spirits and the ghosts of primal urges," is different than in the brains of non-gay men and about the same size as in women. 13 Thus, gay men, in one of the deeper senses of our effeminate nature, are in reality "like a woman," whether we've been conditioned to embrace it or not. The implications of the findings may be more telling when you consider some of the different aspects of just what's been found.The hypothalamus, what is often thought of as a prime "center," is, in part, more of a way station, like a bus stop or a room at the YMCA. It is a concentrated bundle of fibers which can be traced in even smaller form to specific nuerons. The neurons themselves are activated by one system of energy and then led across, or "transduced," to supply power to a second. This process is similar to a telephone receiver, the base of which is plugged into an electrical current. Then it starts to ring. It is set into action to produce vibrational sound waves - the energy of "non-physical states" - of a sort which resonate in your inner ear. The neurons, similar to the phone cord and receiver, "transduce" quantom electromagnetic energy - "non-physical states" - into "physical state-energies." It is not exactly the same, but similar to how energy patterns form into awareness or consciousness for the mind to access and assimilate. Think of the way your head rings or ears burn when someone is gossiping behind your back. Every living organism - birds, butterflies, flowers, trees, dogs and other human beings - is a system of tiny batteries which generate "non-physical" energy, creating a perceptible field around it. No substance, including rocks and dirt, exists without possessing consciousness of, at least, this kind. Take a different example. Light is electromagnetic energy. The neural impulses are triggered by energy in this form, delivered to the hypothalamus, and from there transferred like some little train chugging along on its tracks to light up on arrival, so to speak, at the pineal gland, what is also known as the mystical "third eye." It is a center of extraordinary sensitivity to "non-physical" fields, energy which scientists in the areas of bioelectromagnetics and parapsychology now believe enhances such things as mental telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition, as practiced, for example, by the gay priests during their Mesopotamian days. Furthermore, to receive the radiation of such energy does not need to be taken in through the five physical senses. You don't need your eyes, ears, fingers, tongue or nose, per se, to know that someone's thinking about you. The hypothalamus can directly access this "non-physical" energy flowing hither and nither, taking it in directly through the skin and the skull. It is, in part, the biopsychophysical means by which matter, energy and consciousness interact. And according to the brain studies, gay men and women are similar to one another, and different from non-gay men, in that prime "center" which deals with some of these interactions. For gay men, however, the findings about the hypothalamus are not the only difference. The average person functions at 10% of potential. That's all the "conscious" mind can do for you. "But the mind has many dimensions, and the untouched potential lies at a deeper level than we ordinarily use." It rests in the "primitive" or old brain which is equated with Original Man, "[the seat of a] subconscious pattern that makes the individual super aware." 14 For gay men, this potential for super awareness, it seems, may be quite literally how reality is structured. That is, recent studies have also shown that there are more connections between both the right and left hemispheres of gay men's brains than in other people's - different from not only non-gay men, but also different from women. In fact, an area of the anterior commissure, part of the structure responsible for integrating the operations of the two hemispheres of the brain, is found to be 34% larger in gay men. 15 Put another way, gay men possess part of the means, at a rate of one-third greater potential than non-gay human beings, to travel down the Yellow Brick Road, accessing the holistic, passionate, and intuitive functions of the feminine right brain while at the same time maintaining an integral connection to the analytic, logical, and intellectual processes of the masculine left brain. Even at the so-called "norm" which non-gay people have devolved to, the ability to integrate such polar aspects of awareness into a complementary whole has given rise to some of the highest achievements of all times.It is perhaps not overreaching at all to say that it is precisely because of such an innate predisposition to such unitary experience that the gay contribution to healing, esoteric literature and religion, as well as in the arts overall, has been enormous - an interior reality finding outward expression in the most basic cultural impulses of life. By the same token, it is also the very same unitary reality that is mirrored in the universal presence of all the myths, legends, and traditional tales written about and populated by queers. The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss once wrote that "myths signify the mind that evolves them by making use of the world of which it is itself a part." Although seemingly different, they share a single reality. It is an ancient, ancient belief. That is, the myths of gaiety are "an image of the world which is already inherent in the structure of the mind." 16We're not in Kansas anymore. End FOOTNOTES: Full Citations The Biopsychophysics of Gaiety
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