Intro:
Ancient Gnosis and the Galaxy

(A sarcastic yet revealing glimpse of January 2001)

Right now I am sitting in the little director’s chair in this picture. I’m facing east, a stone’s throw from Interstate 70, and a cold late-January day in Denver is seeping through the plate glass to my right. I got home at quarter to one last night, after a day of cube-culture, playing the game of being a cog in the wheel of the Great Experiment.

I’ve carved out some space in the basement, next to the furnace, where I can continue “the work.” The furnace is warm, kind of smelly, you know—gassy.  But I burn incense, sometimes copal. It’s 10:00 am and I’m drinking a beer. Breakfast beer. Guess that’s not much different than a breakfast burrito.  You can see a lot in the picture: cover art from my books, an early 1900s opium pipe, an orange-red fish-food jar containing the tiny itty-bitty German bells I made in sixth-grade, winning an award for the smallest. That’s next to the picture of Ellie and I on the high shelf. Maybe you can enhance that area; maybe it’s 2076 and you have that technology in your wristwatch. Oh, notice on the extreme left the front part of an old typewriter. Smith Premier, 1889. Wolfram gave me the Sri Yantra picture (next to the pipe)—he’s on Santorini for the winter— and Megatron’s nose is poking out over there. He’s wearing the triangular necklace a spirit friend gave me at the Gathering in ’85. Another pipe is behind a book, Guénon’s The Great Triad, but I haven’t smoked it in months. That suitcase on the floor has some treasures in it—most hilariously, my jam-packed universal folder from high school, preserved in situ, circa mid-1982. The computer screen’s on, and the data flying through the hard disk is Ancient Gnosis and the Galaxy. A book that’s been cooking for almost two years. The birth of it always happens much faster than the gestation, gotta push it out, focus. Take it out of the oven carefully when it’s just right.

An unlikely introduction, but aren’t you getting tired of the predictable? This space, in northwest Denver, is where it began. And where it was done. We’ve been here 26 months. I can’t think of a better orientation to what follows. There were other places—closets, garages, rented offices and basements. Selling parts of my book collection, losing jobs for pursuing the work, and blessings and synchronicities. Lots of other stories to tell. This is the latest, and I’m wrapping it up as I approach birthday 37. Fifty-two tzolkins. Very appropriate, but that's another story too.

Late January 2001