Jim and I as artists were on an icon watch. Throughout history, waves of cultural changes generated new symbols and new psychological tensions. Time and flux were the coordinates. Now flux was accelerating. It was no longer slow and horizontal. Flux was now steeping vertically. As the world bonded tighter and tighter into an electronic village. Different cultures with different rates of flux were colliding and stressing around. Like a rotating karmic helix, this weave of flux and time was now generating faster and faster alignments.

At a crucial point a violent set of pressures forced the psychic energies to disperse. This was the great dance of SAMSARA. Greek drama was filled with examples of alignment, tension, and release. That's why Jim dug the classics. The standard kind of release was SACRIFICE. Sacrifice released the pressure and allowed the energies freedom to work out new alignments and repeat the cycle ad infinitum.

The joining of the waves at the helix node was like a transfer point for the VORTEX. The Tibetans used symbolic offerings instead of real sacrifice in order to release the energy and clear karma. That's what the feast was all about. The Tibetans called it Ganachakra. You did this at the end of the puja as an auspicious offering for the psychic release just concluded.

Icons accelerated psychic alignments and were destroyed and transformed in the release.This was hairy stuff. Icons signaled energy patterns that had power. They were karmic fractals releasing new energy and information. That's how alignments could be mapped constantly. Only pure awareness freed one from the karmic helix.

Vertical flux was the key. It was like a hyper-alignment of VORTEX CHANNELS which transposed energy in a powerful way. You could almost see the energy go up, down, in and out, and rolling through too. The very discovery of our helix was just such an event. Jim was jumping now. INSIGHT, PROCESS, and MAPPING were becoming ONE process; and they resonated in a very powerful way. Life itself was now VERTCAL. The HORIZONTAL was a convenient illusion. Life was just a helix of TWO VERTICAL interweaving on a constant basis.

Jim and I watched a special PBS series on the Sixties. Jim was going ape-shit as he watched his life go by on the flat screen. He was a boomer. I kind of was at the tail-end of the curve. Jim just sat glued to the tube. He rapped about how the education system, the media, and most of all MUSIC took center stage in the conflict zone. The Sixties was an icon war.

One hundred years earlier, the North and South had fought a war with fire and steel to release the tension of psychic alignment. It was a hard war. Jim witnessed and lived a much softer war. Our culture was now more complex and could release tension in a softer way. I felt things were not so bad after all. We were in great shape! Piles of food were heaped up on the altar and we offered up a huge Ganachakra to the guides. They had come through again. They always did, Legacy. It was cool! Poor Abe Lincoln, poor JFK. These guys got caught in the middle of the helix node and were goners! All the energy got caught in that one point and it had to DISPERSE. Yeah, these guys were the American helix martyrs. Would the blonde bomber be next? Would Jim and I be next? Who could say.

Swami was amused by the helix idea. He liked it. But he wasn't so sure about Jim's Buddha fantasies. He felt the global village was finally here. But that the global consciousness needed to guide it wasn't around just yet. Swami felt global institutions were useless. I thought a leisure society based on these free digital consumption cards which then doled out by a network of PCs was still too radical an idea even for the Blonde Bomber. There were also too many vested interests in the current status quo, even if it was no longer really working.

I mean energy and info were still caught in a money funnel. The elites wanted it this way. The STATUS QUO had to be preserved. I then drove back to Oakland. The world was changing. Iraq was being bombed one last time even as the Blonde Bomber was dancing with kids in front of the Lincoln memorial. A new era was just around the corner. A new twist in the helix was about to unfold to the tune of " We are the World. "

Information was such a slippery lubricant. Life was becoming faster and more abstract in the cyber age. Response time for anything was now getting shorter and shorter. VERTICAL FLUX was taking over and society was cracking up for a new kind of release. The mind now had no place to rest. Energy and information were looping and linking on so many levels. " Oh, man, oh man! " Yelled Jim. " Idiots are on parade and madness is filling the airwaves. " I couldn't agree with Jim more.We were ALL. We could be ALL. We could certainly use ALL to aid ALL for whenever for whatever. We certainly had the tools now.

All was rise and fall, purge and release in mythology and history. It could be all acted ut symbolically by priests. Karma could be tracked, but only meditation could release. A crazy idea like jobless growth could one day become an offering in the cyber-age. This was the big insight.