TWO

The associations of sleep with death, and of each of these with knowledge and revelation, is prominent not only through the non-empiricist traditions of philosophy - from the presocratics to the theosophists [1] - but beyond into the psychedelic and synchromystic traditions of our times. [2]  The fragments of Heraclitus refer repeatedly to sleep not as a absence of consciousness but as an alternative to it, as real and vivid as the waking state:

"The universe for those who are awake is single and common, while in sleep each person turns aside into a private universe". 

"During the night a man kindles a light for himself.  Just as when dead-but-alive, with sight extinguished, he contacts death, so when asleep-but-awake, with sight extinguished, he contacts sleep". 

"Dying is all we see when asleep; sleep is all we see when awake".

For Rudolph Steiner, the "dream experience" is something that takes place not only in an alternate state of consciousness but in an entirely different world:

"What dream experiences offer to thoughtful consideration is a multi-coloured interweaving of a picture world that conceals within it certain rules and laws.  This world of dreams seems to display an ebb and flow, often in confused succession.  In his dream life, the human being is freed from the law of waking consciousness that fetters him to sense-perception and to the rules governing his power of reason".

Why should it be that in sleep we are closer to death than in the wakeful state?  The implication is that being awake actually obstructs our view of the deeper reality - "death" -  not in the sense of the extinction of life but in the shamanistic sense of a mystical intercourse with the divine, outside of space and time.  Conscious life is a kind of death, which itself is a kind of a forgetting.  We must become "dead-but-alive" - we must "contact" death, and in doing so, contact life. [3]  

The Greek word ἅπτεται - lights up, contacts, kindles - in Heraclitus' association with fire, has clear shamanic connotations; likewise, Steiner's description of "dream life" as "freed from the law of waking consciousness" paints sleep as a kind preview of death, something to be mindful of at all times in the midst of waking life.

Parmenides, Heraclitus' contemporary, is known as the "founder of Western logic" - Socrates referred to him as "Father" but what we know today as 'logic' bears little resemblance to the thinking of the presocratic shamans.  Parmenides' journey takes us not into the rarefied air of cold abstraction but down into the land of the dead, of unreason - Tartarus, as far below the earth as heaven is above. [4]  His poem is presented as a divine revelation, [5] received through the shamanic practice of Hesychia and dictated by the goddess Persephone, wife of Hades and queen of the underworld but worshipped as well as the goddess of new life in spring. It is the same motif that runs from Parmenides' world through to ours: reason comes out unreason, life out of death.  "Life is a dream already over", wrote Kerouac. St Paul suggests a similar idea in 1 Corinthians 15:36-38 as part of his exploration of the nature of resurrection, Christianity's version of the spacetime-rupturing theophany:

"A seed must die before it can sprout from the ground.  Wheat seeds and all other seeds look different from the sprouts that come up.  This is because God gives everything the kind of body he wants it to have".

The use of an agricultural metaphor, for the Greek-fluent Paul, is worth noting.

In Philip K Dick's VALIS, Horselover Fat, who exists in the first and third persons as both narrator and protagonist - his name, we learn, being a Greek-German bastardization Philip ("lover of horses") Dick ("fat") - discovers that "the Empire never ended", that "real time ceased in 70 C.E. with the fall of the temple at Jerusalem [and] began again in 1974.  The intervening period was a perfect spurious interpolation aping the creation of the Mind".  It's an epiphanic moment:

“It was as if I had been shaking all my life, from a chronic undercurrent of fear.  Shaking, running, getting into trouble, losing the people I loved.  Like a cartoon character instead of a person, I realized.  A corny animation from the early Thirties.  In back of all I had ever done the fear had forced me on.  Now the fear had died, soothed away by the news I had heard.  The news, I realized suddenly, that I had waited from the beginning to hear; created in a sense, to be present when the news came, and for no other reason”.

It's this that puts poor Philip in league with Parmenides, Moses with Muhammed, Sun Ra with Rael, and so on. [6]  The theophany, the breaking through of the sacred into the profane, occurs to the prophet in solitude - at the summit of Mount Sinai, in the depths of Tartarus, aboard a UFO or at the end of long journey on back of the winged horse Al-Buraq.

Death - sleep - solitude - silence.   Peter Kingsley emphasises how the only description of any sound in Parmenides' poem comes through the Greek word Συρινξ (syrinx), referring to piping, whistling or hissing.  [7]  On his arrival in Tartarus, the initiate was to make a hissing sound, thus beginning, "the jounrey into a greater reality...a journey made through silence, in silence and into silence.  The noise of a syrinx is the ultimate password.  It's the sound of silence".  Of stillness.  Of what Kingsley describes as hesychia, the practice of shamanic incubation.  A state of sleep, of absolute stillness, of being dead - but alive.  It's a state of affairs that can only be described paradoxically.  Language is of the mortal world but silence is the sound of the other world: silence is the sound of God.  So to express the reality of God in words will always sound like contradiction; just as silence can not be expressed as sound.  "What can be shown, cannot be said".

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