The Language of Unity
An Interview with Jack Cross by Lakshmi Narayan
So begins my interview with Jack Cross in a conversation about the English/Latin Alphabet, Geometry and Altered States of Consciousness. Jack and I met 15 years ago when I owned a small company called Shamanismo which organized Ayahausca journeys to the Amazon. Jack called one auspicious day to learn more about Shamanismo and mentioned during our conversation that he wrote poetry in his Ayahausca journeys. I found that hard to believe because Ayahausca is such a powerful and usually nauseating substance, but curious, I asked if I could see a few of his poems. Thirty pages of transcendence later, I called Jack back to invite him to do a journey with me.
This would be the first of many beautiful, intimate and terrifyingly powerful journeys with Jack, who was WAAAY down the Rabbit Hole and taking notes. Jack wasn’t just writing poetry, he was taking apart the Alphabet, he was un-spelling words, un-telling story, and a new story was emerging, and a very old one, a story not about what we say with words, but about what the structure of words say about us, about our Consciousness, about the shape of reality.
Those journeys have brought me to this day, to this interview, to this person, and “strong and sweet are these words, like the fragrance of orchids.” I will always remember Jack sitting on my floor, with the dictionary and the I Ching, his face and long hair drenched in the light of his laptop, his words floating upon some invisible Geometry, half goat, half man, intrepid, Oceanic. Jack is a sage, a Shaman of The Word, who he speaks for, only you can say.
Lakshmi: Jack, a decade has passed, and a wink and a snap since our journeys together into the netherworld, what have you been doing, who are you and what do you do?
Jack: Professionally, I’m an entrepreneur, and for the last 10 years I have been engaged in an effort to mine, process and refine precious metals with the goal of self-funding an organization called The Sacramental Defense Fund, which will endeavor to raise awareness about the Sacramental experience and defend our God given Right, and our Constitutional Right, as Americans, to practice our religion. My “religion” is the ism of the Shaman and my Sacraments are ACTUAL Sacraments, Hallucinogenic, Psychedelic, Entheogenic PLANTS. Unprofessionally, I’m an ecstatic poet.
Lakshmi: When people think of Shamanism, they think of healers, not poetry.
Jack: Bard and Bardo, it’s perfectly supernatural.
My journey into Shamanism wasn’t to heal myself or anyone else of physical ailments or disease; it was to find a technique to get inside, to heal myself of ignorance, to find God.
In journey after journey, I began to see words as I had never seen them before, I began to see not only the “intrinsic meaning” held of morphemes, but I began to see meaning in the Geometric structure of individual letters and I began to realize that I was seeing things that I did not know, and that my culture did not know, hence, the “hallucination.”
In my ob-liter-ation, dismembered, dismembering The Word, I was ciphering Light and words were my ashes.
Lakshmi: Why do you say “ACTUAL” Sacraments?
Jack: Churches have “Sacraments,” things they call Sacraments, they have Altars, and they “give” Communion. From my perspective, this is the oldest fraud on the planet, the ACTUAL Original Sin, born in Genesis of a Forbidden Fruit. The so-called “Sacrament” is a placebo and nothing is altered and there is NO Communion. These so-called religions link-back to nothing because their primary concern is to perpetuate their own fictitious existence at the expense of the faithful. FAITH IS IGNORANCE WITH EXCELLENT MARKETING! Faith and Knowledge, Gnosis, are mutually exclusive. We don’t believe in what we know, we Know It, and one better, WE ARE IT.
It is imperative that we understand the difference between Faith and Knowledge, and a wafer and a Wayfarer.
Lakshmi: Why is it imperative?
Jack: Let me say it this way, epistemology is a branch of philosophy that investigates the limits of human knowledge, “epi-” is a prefix in loanwords from Greek where it means “upon,” “epistle” is “a letter and message” and “-ology” means “the study of,” all that remains are modifiers and the symbol of the Serpent Tree, the “S” and the “T,” conspicuously hanging from the branch of love and wisdom, two forks of one tongue, offering a bright read Apple dripping with the nectar of Human Knowledge. Bite! We must wake up, individually and collectively, or die in our sleep.
Lakshmi: You say that hallucinogens are Sacraments, what do you think about people that say that hallucinogens are drugs?
Jack: Hallucinogens ARE drugs and simultaneously THEY ARE Sacraments. But for those persons that think hallucinogens are not Sacraments and are ONLY drugs, I think the fullness of their understanding awaits them and I wish them a safe and beautiful journey on a d-iffi-cult path.
From the beginning of time or at least from The Beginning of Judaism, this Truth has been hard to swallow, in fact, forbidden; Man Fell into Time from Eternity at the precise moment an author of Law forbade the consumption of a plant and threatened a penalty of death. His-story, religion and the un-Altered State began here, and it reverberates still, in the violence of a question.
Lakshmi: Tell me about your name, you changed your name to Jack Cross, why?
Jack: We are given a name at birth, arbitrarily, and sometimes in life, something happens that changes the course of our life, or completes it, for me, it was the discovery of Sacraments and on one particular journey, I resolved to take the name of Jack Cross, to express the two fundamental objects of my experience, a Jack Pole and a Cross. So profound is the Journey, occasionally, one leaves the quaint and arbitrary upon the Altar, under Shiva’s foot.
Lakshmi: What do you mean when you say a Jack Pole and Cross are the “objects” of your experience?
Jack: Allow me to take you on a little journey inside a SYMBOLIC death and resurrection experience, an amalgam of many journeys, minus their exalted beauty and placid terror…..close your eyes, if you will, and V-isualize your pineal gland, a small cone-shaped organ located in the center of your posterior forebrain. Forty-five minutes ago, you swallowed a Sacrament, and we are sitting together with only the sound of my voice, and Enigma. The phosphenes of the Sacrament have begun to light up your pineal gland, like a Christmas tree, a conifer. You are melting into the kaleidoscopic wings of a Butterfly…and you catch IT with SURRENDER. The Tarot morphs, Fool, Devil, Hanged Man, Hierophant, YOU are THE I in the Ching! You emerge in-S-ide your-S-elf, en-T-ranced by a ray of incandescent Light, you S-quin-T, and the light, as light does, con-V-er-T-s to the configuration of a cross… A CROSS MADE OF LIGHT, this is your own organic co-ordinate system to allow you to find The Middle Way THROUGH your or-deal.
As you direct your at-TEN-tion toward the cen-T-er of the cross, you realize that YOU, your e-S-sence, is without sub-ST-ance, your consciousness is no longer standing-under The Serpent Tree, it is in it, and YOU are IT, the “I” and the “T,” YOU are The Serpent AND The Tree. Polarity collapses. You have gone Holographic. YOU are Life’s Flowering Culmination, YOU are GOD COMING, and you, The Ecstatic, in pure love and discipline, take your pen into your clammy hand and re-c-ord; If expressed Geometrically, the letter “J” is a third ordinate, a fifth and sixth prong of an object known as a JA-ck, the ob-J-ec-T you played with as a child, in the game of JAX, it hangs inside of a cone, represented by the letter “A,” and is followed by an “X,” an inter-cardinal cross, a crisscross, a Christ Cross. We en-T-er the “T” of en-Trance, and then we eXiT… and the continuity of your life comes rushing back… YOU ARE THE CHILD OF THE GODDESS, AND YOU ARE AWAKE!
You can now resume control of your television set.
To find yourself in space, you need THREE charming ordinates. Location! Location! Location! The Self is the Real Estate.
The “Transcendental Object at The End of Time” is The Jack Pole in The Cross of Consciousness, re-pre-S-en-T-ed literally, in letters, by the “J” in the “T” of ob-J-ec-T itself. Its spell-ing defines its Geometry.
The rungs of Jacob’s Ladder are made of A-ngels, and A-ngles, and two very important morphemes, “JA” and “LA.” The “J,” the en the T ladder, the Tenth letter of the English Alphabet, and the first letter of Journey and Joy, is an axis pole, THE AXIS POLE, J-oining a metaphysical and etymological Heaven and Earth together, it is the c-en-T-er pole of The World Tree, the J-AX-is Mundi and the extraordinary extra ordinate and extra pole of extrapolate. The Pole runs directly inside a cross that is created by the averaging of light inside a cone, our pine-AL G-LA-nd, the S-eat of our Consciousness, which is expressed as our letter “A.” JAh is not a name of God, would JAh’s Son, The Healer, say, it is a Geometric and literary device, a map, a description in morpheme structure of the location of a psycho-spiritual event. The e-V-en-T is a psycho-logical crucifixion, a momentary collapse of polarity and duality and Time, it is the A-Sc-en-T into Heaven, into the two hemispheres of the Human Mind. It is the Holy Sin of Illumination by Hallucinogen.
The “L” of h-AL-Lucinogen and h-AL-Le-LU-JA-h, of ALchemy and ALter, of LAdder and LAbyrinth and LAnguage and LAw and LAughter… is a square, h-AL-f of a cross, and the ad-JA-cent “A,” a cone, is The Compass of Compassion, The Eye of God.
The Compass is measuring the re-L-A-tionship of AL-L things, expressed geometrically as vertical and horizontal co-ordinates. Plane Cartesian co-ordinates are designated “Y” and “X.” In genetics, “Y” and “X” represent male and female, respectively. These are the DOUBLE YOU in the “W,” expressed as two “U’s” or two “V”s” (UU VV) and the “–ord” of Word and Lord, is for ordinate.
Lakshmi: How have you constructed this symbolic world?
Jack: I haven’t constructed a symbolic world, I’ve de-con-ST-ru-c-T-ed it, and I have dispelled it. I did not create the linguistic devices of myth and metaphor and allegory. I did not create the Archetypal, Geometric and Alphabetic Mind. I did not say that God is The Word or associate “Him” with Alpha and Omega, the first and last letters of the Greek Alphabet. I merely say that His & Her fingerprints were left at the scene of the crime and that there are structural elements of the English/Latin A-lpha-B-et that ARE an AB-ST-raction of a psycho-S-pi-ri-T-ual event, and THE e-V-en-T, is the “V” in [the] “T,” The Serpent in the Tree of Knowledge.
The prefix AB- of ab-ST-raction, and Alpha-bet, is a negation of IMAGE and means “away from” and “ST,” the next two letters, are the images that are being taken “away from,” they are the first two letters required to spell ST-ructure. The “S” and “T” are The Serpent Tree, the con-ST-ant found In The Beginning and at the end of the queST and ChriST, in maSTer and mySTery and deSTiny, in beaST and monSTer, in monaSTery and EaSTer, in superSTitious and STudious and STupid and STable, and you can’t spell, or un-spell S-ecre-T without them.
The “ST” morpheme is a symbol for the reconciliation of polar opposites, achieved by the smalle-st of all sacrifices, and the hardest one to make, appropriately, it is the abbreviation for Saint; It is The Cosmic Serpent dying to a paradox of polarity and duality and Time and living forever in a Tree. This is the Cosmic Agreement MEM-OR-i-AL-ized in the AL-phabet, an in-V-en-T-ion of the Human Mind and the con-V-en-T-ion of re-LA-tionship we at-tempt to circum-V-en-T in ignorance.
Lakshmi: It sounds like you’ve confused the images of the Serpent from the Garden of Eden with Christ’s Crucifixion.
Jack: That’s correct. A common theme in Shamanism is “Soul Retrieval.” The Geometric encoding of the word “retrieval” implies that a Soul or Psyche can be fragmented and that it can also be re-TREE-V-ed, brought back, re-pair-ed and healed and made whole by the “T” in the “Tri-” of THREE, The Third Ordinate. This is why we try because we ARE The Third Ordinate, The Child in the pair in the “T” of our Parents. The morpheme “UL” in soul means light, and both soul and spirit begin with an “S.” The “S,” needless to s-ay, is the Cosmic S-erpent, the S-upreme S-ymbol of Power. Serious could not begin with any other letter. Everything else, re–S-pec-T-fully, is a pet.
The image of a Serpent hanging from a Tree and the image of Christ hanging on a Cross are structurally, THE SAME IMAGE. In the HIGH AL-T-ered ST-ate that I am speaking of, po-LA-rity, protagonist and antagonist, co-l-LA-pse into a Sin-gu-LA-rity, a hologram. “Con-” means with and fusion is the goAL because out of this psychological “crisis,” one learns the Thou Ar-T and S-ci-ence of re-con-ci-liation. In Communion, The Two become One.
Lakshmi: Can you tell me about the overall premise or point of view that influences the way you take apart language? Is there a method to your madness?
Jack: It is said that English is a bastard language, I say, it was born of a Virgin. The Geometry and esoteric function of the letters of the English/Latin Alphabet ARE remnants of a death and resurrection experience, an Altered State, caused by the use of an ACTUAL Plant Sacrament, POINT BLANK! There is no authority, not linguist, philologist or priest who can V-AL-id-ate this perspective, but the Buddha’s laughter is infectious and compelling, to the In-it-i-ate. As for method, and madness, I surrender and receive.
Lakshmi: You emphasize the letter “V,” what is its significance?
Jack: The Uni-V-erse re-V-olves around the letter V! It’s what makes ob-V-ious what it is. The prefix ob- means “upon,” the implication being, that when you’re upon the “V,” things are obvious. “V” is the first letter of V-ision and the Roman numeral for fi-V-e and “V” is the sign of V-ic-T-ory and PEACE. If you were born of Eve, “V” is the center of space, where-V-er you are. You can transpose a “V” with the numeral 5 and with its geometric representation, a PENTAgram, a “P” EN [a] “T,” a POLE in a TREE, this is the fractal Geometry of POETRY. The Pole is The Serpent and the “T” is The Tree. And you can sometimes transpose a “V” with an “F;” the Volkswagen is the Folks-wagon. The “V” of V-ibration and V-oice transliterate into the letter “S” of S-ound. The “S” is what I like to call the God of Letters, because it has a nice ring to it…The God “S,” is a s-inuous s-tructure comprised of BOTH Yin and Yang, BOTH, an in-S-eparable relationship bound together by a Sacred Oath. In re-V-erse, “H” is an aspirate, “T” is a cross and the “A” and “O” are The Alpha and Omega. Con-V-ersly, in Christianity, when you S-in, you are asked to re-PENT. What could this possibly mean, structurally, but to return to five, to re-T-urn to the cen-T-er of the Cross, to mod-i-FY your consciousness and beha-V-ior! And for the geometrically inclined and the detail or-i-en-T-ed, there’s a “V” in both Sa-V-ior and De-V-il, a Greek PENTA in CarPENTer and SerPENT.
The “V,” the “S,” the 5, the pentagram, the “P,” the Pole, the “J” of the Jack, are S-ymbols of the S-man, the S-up-er-man, the Man and Wo-man of Gnosis, the She-man, the Middle Sin Man, the S-JA-man, whose symbol, the Caduceus, is still used today in Medicine.
The “GN” morpheme of GN-osis and diaGNosis and coGNition and siGN means Knowledge and the “I” of GNos-I-s is the Pole of the Caduceus and the “S’s” are the Feathered Serpents of our DNA. These “S’s” can be transposed back to “V’s” to spell “VIV,” meaning li-F-e, or, to li-V-e. You can see the “V” of Venus and Vagina in the Middle of the “M” of Matter and Mater and Mother.
No matter the number of floors or stories, the T-O-P is always the P-en-T-house, implied, there is nothing HIGHER than FIVE, or a Pole en [a] Tree, a Tee-Pee, a cone, and no matter the number of rivers that are received by the Ocean, they are numbered no more than THREE, as TRI-butaries. This is metaphysical and Geometric encoding of language and Key to unlocking the Holographic Structure and Landscape of Universal Mind. Implicit is the structure and sublime are the seams. There is no eloquence without FIVE. It is the quintessential number, the stylized b-ORD-ered line that binds and divides.
This same Geometry is expressed linearly in the Sumerian symbols of the sexes, of Venus and Mars. When you superimpose the symbols of Venus and Mars, one upon the other, moving the cross of the female symbol inside the now single circle of BOTH images and place the arrows tail of the male symbol inside the circled cross, like a Third Ordinate, at 45 degrees, resting the arrows head on top of the circle, like a wizards’ conical cap, worn cock-eyed, by his archetypally humiliated persona, the dunce and clown, The Jack-In-The-Box, you can see this same Geometry being expressed, or hidden by abstraction. This is the Geometry of the Union of Masculine and Feminine principles on a journey, a tra-J-ec-T-or-y, through The Ankh, The Egyptian Key of Life. (need diagram here)
You can also connect the lines of the “wizards cap” with the ends of the vertical and horizontal ordinates and then draw a line to connect and close the open section of the “L.” What you get is a circle, re-ST-ated linearly as a cross, reconciled by a pentagram, which is for good reason called The Triple A. This is the image of the Geometric A-pple hanging by its ST-em, The Forbidden Fruit of Communion with The God Within.
This is The Communion of The Two that become One, which is what the word CO- MUN and UNION means. The CO- of Communion is a morpheme for “two” and “MUN” means “world,” as seen in all that is mundane and in all that is not, The Axis Mundi, The World Tree. This is the -union implicit, WHERE the Two become One, at the top of The Holy Mountain, in the c-ONE of The Promised Gland, and these are the two, the Yin and the Yang of our divided sexuality, two id’s, di-V-id-ed and bound together by a “V,” half of its double, the “W,” j-oined together by the tenth letter of the English Alphabet, the letter “J,” tilted in two dimensions, at 45 degrees, at The Angle of Repose, of re-ST, of PEACE. This is the UL-T-i-mate re-LA-tionship, alphabetically; an “S” and a “T,” and numerically, a 4 and a 5, and this is The Pa-th and Ma-th to Oneness, to obliteration, to decimation! FOUR is The Cross and FIVE is The SerPENT, CRUCI-FI-ed and FORTIFIED. 4-5-Oneness, this is The Place where poetry happens, in Fahrenheit, at the i-GN-ition point of paper.
Lakshmi: That’s a lot to wrap one’s mind around. You draw from different cosmologies, you refer to yin and yang, from the Chinese, and the Communion and Serpent which are both Christian and Hindu with elements of geometry and spelling. Where and how do you combine this information? Is it part of the etymology of the word? Is there a more unifying cosmology behind it?
Jack: Cosmologies and religions are art-iculations of men USING WORDS to create God in their own IMAGE. Vertical and horizontal aren’t Christian or Hindu or Taoist, they’re Geometric, and the characteristics of Yin and Yang, female and male, are not the exclusive property of the Chinese, or of any other cult-ure. In Christianity, the Son of God reconciles conflict by His sacrifice on a Cross, a wooden version of an entheogenic plant induced death and resurrection experience, an Archetypal, Geometric and arti-factual reference to a psycho-spiritual crucifixion of polar, dualistic consciousness dying and being born upon vertical and horizontal co-ordinates made of Light, used to organize spatial relationships inside a cone, a pine-AL gland.
You don’t think the Romans knew of more efficient methods of execution? The pun-ishment for challenging secular power with Authorship of The Word is archetypal. Crucifixion is a punishment of humiliation, and sedition against the State is the crime of a Tree Son. The nomenclature of our “Justice” system is riddled with the Geometry of The Jack and Cross. The Jack is expressed in the “J” of ju-stice, in ad-ju-dication, in ju-risdiction and in ju-dge and ju-ry, and the Cross is the Court, a quadrant system, like a quart, a quarter of a gallon. A GAL is a Woman and in the case before us, The Woman in question is The Goddess, blind folded and holding our hearts in Her scale, a Latin word meaning ladder. Crossing without authority is ille-GAL and is called “JA-y Walking” and The Third Ordinate, the reconciling element of conflict and polarity, is now the symbol of DO NOT. Some will dance and some will keep you from it, having forgotten the spell, their sentence is time.
Christ said He was “The Way,” and if so, He most certainly was a Taoist. A “T” is a cross, an intersection of vertical and horizontal co-ordinates and the “A” and the “O” are The Alpha and The Omega, The First and The Last letters of the Greek Alphabet. The Tao IS The Way!
The Archetypal and Geometric substructure of language is what existed BEFORE The Beginning of literacy, of letters, and it cannot be found in any dic-tionary, by definition, and if it could be, I would not be pointing to the Moon, a symbol of the Divine Feminine.
This is an Archetypal, Geometric and Alphabetic decipherment, a cross referencing of language modes, sex and polarity, col-LA-psed into a hologram, a Holy Grammar, a trans-LA-tion trance-ending spell, collapsing Time and sloughing off the skin of ignorance. WHERE, is in the Mind, a Communion of both hemispheres, HOW, is with a Plant Sacrament, and the unifying co-S-mology behind these words is Geometry arising from a Well of sex-u-AL-i-T-y held in bALAnce by the suppression of one’s breath.
Lakshmi: “Sexuality held in balance by the suppression of one’s breath?” Is that a tantric or yogic practice?
Jack: Maybe so, though, I know very little about the practices of either. For me, it was a very intuitive response, to keep me, I thought at the time, from possibly dying of laughter.
My first entheogenic experience involved the ingestion of a “heroic dose” of 5 grams, what I would soon come to think of as a tongue-in-cheek pentagram, of psilocybin mushrooms, as I heard tell that five-grams is The Door O-PEN-er. As I initiated myself into the Mystery, I began to see associations that I had never seen before, and I began to laugh uncontrollably, so uncontrollably that I was unable to utter a single word for the duration. My diaphragm was quivering very rapidly and it occurred to me that on my next journey, I should attempt to suppress my laughter by relaxing my diaphragm with my breath, by e-X-h-AL-ing and holding. O-XY-gen begins with an O, a circle, a symbol for everything and the “X” and “Y’ should be obvious by now. The human body is an in-ST-rument of En-Ligh-TEN-ment and Temple Doors are made of eyelids.
Lakshmi: You mentioned the intrinsic meaning of morphemes; is there a dictionary that explains why morphemes mean what they do?
Jack: I am unaware of a morpheme dictionary per se, but the meanings of morphemes are well known, the WHAT is known, but not the WHY. There is a Geometry of Consciousness; it is the subtext of text, like intrinsic meaning itself. The implication points to the tri-une nature of Consciousness. The Godhead morphs in a morpheme and men see it not.