Shards of the Diamond Matrix
Selections from the Notebooks of Lance Daybreak
by Erik Davis
Originally appeared in FringeWare Review, no. 5
In January, while attempting to scrounge up my first
assignment for
Wired, I visited a Tibetan Buddhist
monastery located in the Indian state of Karnataka.
Along with
their usual tasks, the young monks at Sera
They were inputting rare and crumbling woodblock sutras
onto cheap
XTs. Under the auspices of the Asian
Classics Input Project, mountains of this digital
dharma eventually
found its way onto freely-distributed
CD-ROMs and the Internet.
One evening, after the monks served me a bowl of
noodles and beef
my vegetarians self choked down out
of politeness, an older monk sidled up to the table.
Furtively he
reached into his maroon robes and handed
me a thick dog-eared notebook, wrapped in a pair of
sweat socks. He
made sure I secured the book in my
satchel, but when I asked what was going on, he only
smiled, bowed
and walked quickly from the dining
hall.
I unwrapped the package late that night. The words
"Open the
Folds!!" were scrawled on the notebook
cover and the sticky pages gave off a faint odor of
opium. The
yellowing pages were covered with a minute,
seemingly impenetrable scrawl. Like a printed circuit
or a magical
grimoire, the indecipherable density of
these bug doodles signified, and when I returned to the
States, a
microscope confirmed my suspicions: the
scrawl was a dense molecular text, written in English,
and
employing a curious variant of the arcane Chinese
art of microscopic calligraphy.
The author himself turned out to be no less arcane,
though in a
manner far closer to home. His name was
Lance Daybreak, and a subsequent call to a Southern
California pop
historian corroborated his claim to be
one of the first surfers to hang around the Santa
Monica pier in
the late 1940s. In fact, all Daybreak's
assertions about his Stateside activities checked out.
After
getting his B.A. in archeology from UCLA in
under two years, he did a long stint as a merchant
seamen and
treasure hunter. In 1965, he enrolled in
Stanford, where he was working on a thesis that
combined Maturana's
cybernetics with Nagarjuna's
second-century Madhyamika Buddhist philosophy in order
to solve
some dizzying problems in data sets and
computational linguistics. Socially, Daybreak covered
all the
fronts: he huffed it over the Bay Bridge for SDS
actions, designed psychedelic light shows for the
Pranksters and
the Family Dog, and cranked out
idiosyncratic code with the hackers at SAIL. In 1968,
Daybreak
either dropped out or was expelled. On
July 20, 1969, the day Apollo 11 landed on the moon,
the man left
for Asia.
It's here that Daybreak's tale becomes pretty
ludicrous. In the
manuscript, he claims to have somehow
eluded the Soviet authorities and entered East
Turkestan. There, in
the savage gullies of the Karakorum
Mountains, a few hundred kilometers southwest of the
Taklamakan
Desert, on the southern fork of the
ancient Silk Road, he "discovered" an unknown
and isolated
people—the ngHolos. Though the lay ngHolos
had settled down into a sedentary life of subsistence
farming,
weaving, and hash-growing, the community's
religious order of monks and nuns, known as the
Virtuous Ones
remained nomadic. The Virtuous Ones
wandered on foot or horseback through the
"Folds:" the high passes,
hidden valleys, and endless plateaus of
their severe mountain surroundings. But Daybreak's
descriptions
also make it clear that for the Virtuals, this
bleak physical environment "unfolded" into an
abstract, visionary
realm, a constantly-shifting locus of cosmic
memory and oracular landscapes haunted by demons,
"alien gods" and
insectoid Buddhas. Daybreak
repeatedly cites one of the ng Holo's countless slogans:
Here your
eye does not follow the warp of the
land. Here you follow the warp of your own eye.
To judge from his tone, Daybreak does not seem to have
gone insane
or sunk into the mire of narcotic
psychosis. I choose to read his text as I read
Castaneda, with an
open mind not particularly concerned with
anthropological accuracy I wouldn't really be able to
judge anyway.
In any case, from the fragments I've
been able to decipher, the Virtuous Ones—or "Virtuals,"
as Daybreak
sometimes calls them—are
fascinating. Their radically eclectic and syncretic
religious
philosophy juggles elements from the various faiths
that passed along the Silk Road—gnostic Manicheaism,
Mahayana
Buddhism, Mongolian shamanism,
Catholicism, heretical Sufism, Taoism—without trying
to tie them up
into one grand system.[1] As Daybreak
writes, "The path is a network of paths."
Even more fascinating that the ngHolo's religious
collages are
their spiritual machines. In the early 17th
century, a Jesuit named Francis Lumiere brought the
first clock to
the region. Daybreak writes: "Having long
since assimilated whatever Christian motifs that
compelled them,
the ngHolos found the man's
uncompromising theology obnoxious and his clothes in
poor taste.
But they loved his machine." The lay
community put great store in their bronze prayer
wheels, whose
constant revolution supposedly generated
the compassionate energy that kept dreams alive and
that cloaked
the Virtuous Ones from wild animals and
enemies during their mystic peregrinations. Inspired by
Lumiere's
device and ngHolo beliefs about the
cosmic implications of metallurgy, a Virtual nun named
Aieda made
the spiritual link between metals and
mechanics. Along with the somewhat baffled Jesuit, she
set about
applying the clock's mechanism to the
ngHolo prayer wheels.
Their subsequent machine not only relieved the peasants
of the
daily chore of spinning the wheels, but it led
within decades to a number of inventions, including
irrigation
pumps, automated pottery wheels, and a
programmable loom used to weave the mystical patterns
of the
ngHolo's rugs (apparently, they never
bothered making more clocks). Aieda believed that the
punched cards
used to program the looms—an
incomplete Italian Tarocco (tarot]) deck still
venerated
today—allowed the ngHolos to communicate with
the "Metal-mind," the spiritual consciousness
that lay asleep in
all metals and was awakened through
metallurgy.
After a yearlong nomadic meditation, during which she
never stopped
walking, Aieda "received" the
knowledge of how to program open-ended and
unpredictable
combinatory sequences into the mechanical
looms. The spontaneous patterns that appeared on
subsequent rugs
were read as auguries from the
Metal-Mind. Despite a tradition of symmetrical mandalic
forms, the
ngHolo rug patterns Daybreak
reproduces from this period show a striking asymmetry,
density, and
self-similar fractal dimensionality.
Daybreak reports that the ngHolos were mythologically
prepared for
this development because of one of
their quasi-Manichean metallurgic myths. While the four
elements
familiar to the West—air, earth, fire, and
water—were considered to emerge from the earth's
eternally fertile
womb, metals were considered the
remains of the Alien God's semen, which had fallen upon
earth
following a celestial tantric rite. For the
ngHolos, metals were not only sacred but contained the
potential
"seeds" for a powerful galactic
consciousness. Through the slow process of metallurgy,
these seeds
would ripen into Metal-Minds, which
were imagined to be (or at least represented
iconographically as)
colossal grasshopper bodhisattvas. At the
end of the world, these beings would shed the material
substance of
their magical green-grey bodies until
only the metallic shine remained. Millions of these
ghostly and
angular light-bodies of light would then
combine into a boundless and collective temple that
would draw the
Alien God back to earth.
Aieda interpreted the gears of Lumiere's clock as the
grasshopper's
mandibles, and the random patterns
from the loom as the first stirrings of the Metal-Mind.
Though a
few traditionalists labeled her a heretic,
Aieda's work transformed ngHolo spiritual life. The
dense patterns
emerging from the loom were magically
mapped onto the semi-mythic landscape of the Folds,
where they
formed an immense and lucid matrix of
mind known as the "Jewel-Net". Daybreak calls
this net "a symphony
of interpenetrating mandalas, an
immense and luminous enfolded architecture." The
ngHolos came to
believe that the Jewel-Net maintained
its coherence through the the automated prayer wheels
and the
psychic intensity generated by the ngHolo's
most dangerous and esoteric rites: equestrian tantra.
Daybreak estimates that by the 18th century, the
Virtuous Ones
lived an almost entirely psychic existence on
the Jewel-Net, their nomadism having shifted from the
Karakorum
mountains to the more visionary and
abstract plateaus of the Folds. For apparently, just as
the myth
had predicted, the Jewel-Net was growing.
In the Tibetan regions to the South, the Nyingmapas and
the
shamanic Bon follow the terma tradition, which
holds that the sage Padmasambhava hid hundreds of
sacred texts in
the earth (and the spirit realm), texts that
would only be discovered centuries later by tuned-in
lamas (the
so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead is such
a text). Many were encoded in mystical "Dakini"
scripts.[2] The
ngHolos carried this tradition into the
Jewel-Net, where hundreds of thousands of encoded
sacred texts were
uncovered—or "unfolded"—from
their visionary plateaus: texts of theology,
philosophy, history,
iconography, sacred geography. Various
spiritual beings co-operated to decode these
"treasures." Using a
collective form of the ars memoria, or
memory palaces, picked up from Lumiere or another
Jesuit,[3] the
Virtuals then stored, swapped, and
recombined their termas throughout the ever-expanding
Jewel-Net.
The overwhelming amount of this information, combined
with the
ngHolo's already intense eclecticism,
resulted in radical spiritual anarchy. Reflecting the
philosophical
shift from transcendent renunciation to
immanent becoming, the plateaus of the Fold were no
longer
considered to be "revealed" forms of spiritual
reality, but as spaces created "on the wing"
out of the infinite
potential of the Jewel-Net. Lineages broke
down into splinter groups, impartial agnostic
"librarians",
iconoclastic magicians, and "anti-monks." As the
Virtuous Ones continued to discover, interpret, and
store an
increasingly boundless supply of termas, they
formed constantly shifting and precarious alliances,
frequently
struggling with rivals through endless debates
or magical "pattern-wars."
By the time Daybreak arrived, most of these fierce
power struggles
had relaxed. The following comments,
which "unfold" a number of the ngHolo's
countless mnemonic slogans,
describe the more balanced
philosophy that developed after generations of nomadism
in the
Jewel-Net. The slogans are in italics, and the
text is all Daybreak's, except for a few of my
explanations which
appear in brackets. Much of Daybreak's
text remain thoroughly obscure.
Selections
The eye is furrow, seed, and source. The eye symbolizes
attention.
Everything follows from attention, and
the awareness of attention is the beginning of
awakening: "the
cock-crow." The Jewel-Net pre-exists the eye
only as a field of total potential. Attention cuts
furrows into
this field, preparing the ground for the objects we
perceive—the seeds—to both appear and find a place.
But this grid
of furrows and seeds, of points and
tangents, is not enough to produce
"reality"—you need the "source,"
the energetic of desire or fascination
that operates "behind" the eye, to water the
seeds. This eye of
attention is like a spring which can choose its
direction of flow, though over time this spontaneous
power is
reduced to a habit. But awareness and control
begin with this awake gaze, and it should be
cultivated.
The Virtuals recognize the inevitability of constantly
producing
reality, at least as long as one has not
achieved "the flight of gnosis." The plateau
grows to fit your
shadow is one slogan which Jungians would
probably enjoy. But since ngHolo society was evenly
divided between
agriculture and nomadism, they
pictured this reifying tendency in profoundly
ambivalent terms. Our
habits of perception and action are seen
as ruts as much as furrows. In this sense, seeds are
materialistic
delusions that karmically grow into
something larger and more demanding than they initially
appear.
Sift the seeds, they warn. Some Virtuals
interpret Adam and Eve's expulsion from Eden into the
toil of
agriculture as a fall into the ruts of perception.
The rain that feeds the wild poppy falls from the sky,
they say,
indicating the "pure production" that is to
be aimed for: a spontaneous growth of unpredictable
objects
generated from the ultimate field of emptiness
(the "sky-like mind" of Ch'an).
We ourselves are nothing but seeds grown within furrows
dug and
watered by the attention of others.
Assessing the value of this prepared plot of land that
is our
"given" world is of primary spiritual importance.
The path towards the Jewel-Net comes through preparing
our own
ground, for the furrows dug by the
attention (our patterns of perception) in many way
determine the
seeds, or objects, that will appear.
(Because they farmed on hillsides, ngHolo plots are
rarely regular,
but follow the various possible folds of
the land). So we should carefully prepare the patterns
of our
attention, its mode of organization, its blend of
curves and grids, randomness and order. For the ngHolos,
the
chaotic woven mandalas that issued from the
loom of the Metal-Mind were occult keys to these
patterns. But the
ngHolos also emphasized the supreme
momentum of rootless flight, the nomadic spread of
weeds and wild
poppies rather than the conscious
cultivation of philosophical or material ground. As a
famous slogan
puts it, I become mushroom, without
root, my dharma seeds scattered to the wind.
* * *
The soul weaves Indra's net.
Following the anatman doctrines of Buddhism, the
Virtuals insist
that any fixed notion of self, even the
Universal Self, is an illusion. At the same time, the
ngHolos
emphasize that the self and the world are
constantly produced, that the cosmos is both network
and void. The
allusion here to the Hindu myth of
Indra's web, which the ngHolo's fused with the image of
the
universe as pictured in the Avatamsaka
Sutra[4]: an infinitely nested and interrelated
monadology in which
each singularity reflects and embodies a
boundless totality.
The Virtuals did not deny the conventional self, but
rather filled
it with space and emptiness. They call this
"weaving the net." Like a net, the
conventional self or ego is
something we toss into the infinite potential of
reality in order to "catch" our karmic
desires, but it too is
composed of emptiness[5]. If the net is too thick
and tightly-wound, it will retain everything, for there
is no void
to escape into, and everything will become
very heavy and egocentric. If the net is too loose and
weakly
bound, it will not function—larger catches will
break its threads, and the smaller will escape.
We never stop weaving the net or trawling the world of
potential.
Newly woven patterns catch new fish. Of
course, the net of the self relates to the larger
Jewel-Net. For
the ngHolos, the fractal mandalas of the looms
were the keys to maintaining the conventional self
while weaving
them into this larger pattern of multiplicity.
* * *
The path is a plateau.
For the ngHolos, the notion of a spiritual
"path" is a misnomer,
for spiritual reality is an endlessly proliferating
manifold. The path is a network of paths, a plateau.
One can not
"follow" a network, but must constantly
probe it. Each footprint is a node, which constantly
re-produces a
number of possible directions. Arrival and
departure are fused. As such, immediate and fragmentary
spiritual
tactics (including these slogans) are prized
more than grand strategic methods which attempt to lay
out a
well-organized hierarchy of stages towards
gnosis. Many Virtual Masters achieved fame not for
their diligence
in pursuing one of the ngHolo's countless
philosophical cults, but for the specific topology of
the plateaus
they created as they moved through different
and frequently antagonistic fields of thought and
experience.
* * *
Webs mar the Jewel-Net.
The Virtuous Ones contrast the image of the suppleness
of the open
net with the centralized and sticky
organization of the web. In a web, the self becomes a
spider, a
solidified, grasping ego which sits at the
center and relates everything to itself. Because a
tremendous
amount of power over others can be generated
through webs, black magicians worshipped the spider of
their own
egos. The greatest ngHolo necromancers
would clandestinely seed patterns in the Jewel Net in
order to
"catch" the eye of others, adepts who would
slowly become bound in an immense pattern they believed
to be a new
revelation. This "revelation" was
actually a web, which would capture the victims in a
paranoid
spell. Many such victims went mad or become
so convinced of having discovered the ultimata pattern
that they
would be ostracized from the collective.
Jewel-Net healers would often attempt to free such
individuals by
binding them in "devotional webs,"
patterns of compassionate paranoia that would
"kill the spider."
* * *
The flow extinguishes the flame.
An even more aggressive form of magical Jewel-Net
combat was the
flame. After binding their opponents in
a web, vengeful Virtuals would them destroy them with
psychic fire.
Those victims who were too caught up
in the web of their illusory convictions to release
themselves
would be unable to move, and would either
suffer greatly or return the flame. Like the Tibetans,
the ngHolos
believed that the violent flames were
ultimately compassionate, in that they destroyed the
unregenerate
selfhood. Still, the Virtuals prefer to
contrast flames with the flow of water. By flowing, one
escapes
through the path of least resistance,
dissolving the web of selfhood and extinguishing the
flame. The
flow also becomes the subtlest and most
powerful form of counter-attack: the unceasing yet
gentle pressure
of water eventually erodes the hardest
rock[6].
* * *
The horseman is poised as he flies through the night.
Found on many prayer wheels, saddles and shrines, this
slogan
contains both an exoteric and esoteric
meaning. Esoterically, it refers to a crucial component
of the
astounding Virtual art of high-speed equestrian
tantra. Exoterically, it refers to the quality of
balance needed to
properly navigate the Jewel-Net: the subtle
contrast between the knowledge you accumulate and your
beginner's
mind before the new. Given the
encyclopedic density of the Net, the Virtuals obviously
put great
emphasis on the proper gathering,
organizing, and storage of termas. But as the masters
say, The
greater your store, the slower your flight.
The greatest Net nomads are as naive as they are wise,
know when to
jettison information, and avoid the
hoarding of knowledge for its own sake. The
"web" here also
symbolizes the spider-nests that grow around
stored or hidden containers. By compassionately sharing
this
wealth, you unbind yourself from the sticky
burdens of knowledge.
* * *
Answer the Call with a Call
Here the ngHolos alter a crucial element of Manichean
soteriology
[science of salvation]. For the
Manicheans, the couple "Call" and
"Answer" are hypostasized
[simultaneously considered abstract concepts
and mythological beings], and result from the
separation of the
fragments of cosmic light imprisoned in fallen
matter and the Voice of the Alien God who calls these
sparks to
redemption.[7] The ngHolos mapped this
communication system onto the Jewel-Net. Delivering and
receiving
information, the Virtuals would take on
the roles of Call and Answer, foreshadowing the final
apocalyptic
communication with the Alien God. But
the roles would continually change—individuals would
always Answer
the Call with another Call, thus
constantly fluctuating between master and student, God
and
aspirant. Cosmic knowledge was both
continually revealed and continually displaced, and the
transcendence of the gnostic flash was woven into the
phenomenal world of the Jewel-Net. The Folds became an
incandescent
matrix of communication, a
perpetually postponed apocalypse.
* * *
Crack the dawn!
The Virtuals seek many different modes of gnosis or
enlightenment.
This slogan refers to one of the foremost
of these "horizonless goals:" the gnosis of
"staying awake", or
more specifically, always waking up. This is the
most exalted yet everyday mode of enlightenment, one
which is not
attained so much as continually
rediscovered. There is only waking up and rubbing your
eyes . One
of the techniques to developing these
moments—which we err in considering
"states" of consciousness—is to
allow these very slogans to
randomly erupt in the mind. Spontaneously
"mad" behavior, tricks,
and optical illusions are also common
approaches, but the moment they become fixed as
"techniques" they
begin to lose their efficacy. The point is
to cut against established patterns—to "kill the
Buddha," as the
Ch'an patriarchs say. For example, rather
than staring at a beautiful object that catches your
eye in the
market, observe how others relate to the object.
As in English, ngHolo's Indo-Chinese dialect contains
the image of
the dawn as a "crack" or "break." The
peasants believe this crack is real—that a day
literally ossifies
over its 24-hour period, trapping the earth
inside a cosmic shell. The shell is then ruptured by
the rising
sun. But the Virtuals play with this image to
emphasize both the violent and nurturing aspects of
"always waking
up". On the one hand, perpetual gnosis
constantly rends the dreamlike illusion—or more
exactly, the
tentative construction—of your present plateau.
On the other hand, such gnosis pervades the mind with
the empty but
pregnant emptiness of the glowing
dawn sky.
Some compare perpetual gnosis to a chick breaking
through an
endless series of nested eggs. While this
image of gnosis as a movement through a cosmic
collection of
Chinese boxes may remind Westerners of the
"existential" myth of Sisyphus, the Virtuals
saw it as the supreme
affirmation of perpetual nomadism. In
contrast to Sisyphus, with the heavy burden of his self
and his
ceaseless linear ascent towards a goal, the
Virtuals open up a perpetual field of becoming.
Cracking the dawn
not only continually grounds the lucidity
of gnosis in the present moment, but it also cuts
against the
mind's tendency to make gnosis a goal. Even
cosmic knowledge must be rent if it becomes a web. The
nomad knows
that there is no escape, for
liberation is achieved only in the act of flight.