And yet, the universe is not everything that happens, but much, much more. Because, if those parts of us that analyze, those parts of every living being — the eyes, the compound eyes, the camera eyes, the antennae with batteries of chemoreceptors, the lateral lines of fish, the ears with trembling cochlea, the osmic cells in the nasal passages, the taste buds, the organs a spider uses to feel vibration and the organs a tick uses to sense carbon dioxide, the touch receptors of the skin, the ones that twist around every fiber of muscle in the oral organs of the Sarcoptes scabia, the ones that feel cold and heat, the ones stimulated by the otolithic stalactites of the organs of balance and the hundreds of thousands of other senses that simultaneously ingest the vibrations of matter — if these vulvae, if these tentacles adhere to the symmetry of the stars, there is still everything that we cannot perceive except through the super-sensory organ of thought, a super-symmetry, structures twisted around themselves that annul, at a higher level, the flow from the past toward the future, from all toward nothing. The universe, at a higher level than the visions of galaxies and quasars, is reflected in itself, in a super-mind, whose foundation is memory. There is a universal memory, a memory that encompasses, houses, and destroys the idea of time. There is Akasia, and Akasia is the savior of the universe, and beyond Akasia there is no hope of salvation. She is the eye in the forehead of All, encompassing the history of All and all that is, was, and shall be. In Akasia there is no death, or birth — all is coplanar and all is illusion. All of the world’s events, and every particle of substance, and every quantum of energy are present in transfinite light, there, in Memory. And if our thought (by which we perceive, in privileged moments of ecstasy, Akasia) would ever be able to turn back upon itself — perhaps by adding a seventh layer to the neocortex or by creating another, bizarre, organic basis for itself — the way that once, in the mind of a fur-covered being, awareness turned on itself and became consciousness, we might be able, like the angels, to detect the Memory of the Memory of the world, and the Memory of the Memory of the Memory and so on and so on, infinitely. And if conscience became prescience, reflecting itself in itself, it would then become omniscience, rising above this telescoping memory to see the center of the rose with infinite petals, to see the enchanting spider that weaves illusion, modeling it quickly into universes, spaces and times, bodies and faces, with its infinite, articulating legs.
We ourselves, although an unimportant organ of the world, are in some way the entire world. The All is everywhere at once and in every moment. The shuttle’s first pass through the weft that began to describe the world — the way a rod, spinning quickly, creates a dense, still circle, or the way the sweeping spot of a cathode-ray tube creates a televised image — has stamped the same configuration onto all the fragments of being, from the bottom to the top, from the holon to the holonarchy, from the eon to the pleroma. Every object, imaginable or beyond imagination, in a poor example of universial homogeneity, has a bipolar structure. Everything has a dual structure, like magnets, with poles oriented in opposition. Animal and vegetable polarities are paired everywhere, in every object. The first belongs to space, the spirit, searching, and movement. The other belongs to time, the soul, and immobile passivity. We find masculine and feminine, sulfur and mercury, yin and yang in the emblem of the hill in light and the hill in shadow. We live in two media, just as a tree lives in both the air and earth, its branches aerial roots, and its roots underground branches.
The bilateral symmetry of our organism — our two arms, two legs, two cerebral hemispheres, two eyes, two lungs, two kidneys, and two gonads — often overshadows the subtler symmetry of top-bottom, the higher and truer symmetry. Our diaphragms, like walls between two kingdoms, divide our bodies into two zones with opposing polarities. Above our diaphragms, we’re dominated by the signs of air and fire, while below, we’re dominated by water and earth. It is easy to see that our arms correspond to our legs and our pelvises to our scapulae, but strange correspondences link the organs of our thoracic cavities with our abdomens. Any study of embryos will show that the heart corresponds to the liver and the lungs correspond to the intestines and kidneys, however diverse their morphology might appear. If we examined the entire, magical symmetry of a man hung upside-down on an imaginary Saint Andrew’s cross — the symmetry of a larva, the symmetry of a being whose evolution is incomplete — we would find the most fantastic, bizarre, and dizzying correspondence, and differences as well, between the organs at the ends of his body, in between his arms and in between his legs. The head corresponds to the genitals, and all our mystical, animal faculties are concentrated there. The cerebral hemispheres and the testicles or ovaries are the same organs, but opposing polarities pushed them toward opposing functions and forced them to diversify their morphologies. The brain moved toward the animal pole, which shaped it into an organ of relation, spatiality, and internal and external exploration, while the gonads anchored themselves in the fertile substance of time. And both, in different planes of existence, live and bathe in immortality. The sublime universe appears to us in the orgasm of the mind and the syllogisms of fecundity, in the sperm of the brain and the memory of the ovaries. Under two different faces — angelic and demonic, masculine and feminine — the sublime universe appears to us, touches the blood-filled jewel in which we live.
Space is Paradise and time is Inferno. How strange it is that, like the emblem of bipolarity, in the center of a shadow is light, and that light creates shadows. After all, what else is memory, this poisoned fountain at the center of the mind, this center of paradise? Well-shaft walls of tooled marble shaking water green as bile, and its bat-winged dragon standing guard? And what is love? A limpid, cool water from the depths of sexual hell, an ashen pearl in an oyster of fire and rending screams? Memory, the time of the timeless kingdom. Love, the space of the spaceless domain. The seeds of our existence, opposed yet so alike, unite across the great symmetry, and annul it through a single great feeling: nostalgia.
We are animals of nostalgia, abjections organized by geometry, as though our genitor spat into the cup of a lily and created us there, out of phlegm and perfume. But, unlike Akasia, because our memory only knows the dimensions of the past, our nostalgia is amputated, partial, a feeling that takes metaphors as reality and contorts itself around half-truths. We all have memories of the past, but none of us can remember the future. And yet, we exist between the past and future like the vermiform body of a butterfly, in between its two wings. We use one wing to fly, because we have sent our nerve filaments out to its edges, and the other is unknown, as if we were missing an eye on that side. But how can we fly with one wing? Prophets, illuminati, and heretics of symmetry foresaw what we could and must become. But what they see per speculum in aenigmate we will all see clearly, at least as clearly as we can see the past. Then, even our torturous nostalgia will be whole. Time will no longer exist, memory and love will be one, the brain and the sex will be one, and we will be like the angels.
We know from our cerebro-spinal trunk that we are the larvae of an astral being. With the marrow of our spines as its root and the two cerebral hemispheres in our skulls like two fleshly cotyledons, they perfectly resemble a plant in the first stages after sprouting. Their flesh is the earth into which they were sown and whose resources they will exhaust, and our brains will also be consumed and will wrinkle like a walnut kernel inside its dry fruit. Two small leaves will burst from its center, tender and filled with light — wings of the soul, wings of the spirit that will depart from the hothouse of this world, vested in the glory of a heavenly body, to be planted in a new earth, under a new sky.