. CHAPTER SEVEN .

CHAPTER SEVEN

Development of an Idea: Empty Lands Under the Gaze

Fig. 80 'French meet the Aborigines in 1804 on the Victorian coast. Note; it is not a teepee or lean-to outside the tent of the explorers, bottom left. It is a camouaged arrangement of long-barrelled shot-guns. Shooting sticks the Aboriginals called them. (Source: Massola1969, facing p. 39.)

Introduction1
This chapter concerns the fully extracted dualistic mind operating in and upon the world. If judgement of this mode is suspended, the way it worked would still offer an erudite account of the psycho-technology of a dominant mentality. In the previous chapter it concerns mainly the LL and the LR of Wilbers (1996) quadrant model (Fig. 16) or, (see Fig. 82), as the perspectival subjective eye of the gaze peered into space The whole mindspatialized world by the nineteenthcentury.
1. Fig. 81. Image of the Rainbow Serpent, Kabul, underlies the Aboriginal sense of place and unity with the land, as living force of the Earth Mother. This has other resonances besides magical totem. Archetypally the ancient coil of serpent-energy is almost universally associated with the first Mother (Gimbutas 1989, Baring & Cashford 1993), a reminder of the alchemic uroboros and the Kundalini energy in yoga, coiled at the base of the spine. It is representational of immanence in nature, and of a unifying energy and force.

Fig. 81 Rainbow Serpent. (Source: Oodgeroo Noonuccal, and Kabul Oodgeroo Noonuccal [Kath and Vivien Walker] 1988)

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In the era of navigation (from fifteentheighteenth centuries), as the mental enframement projected out on to the world (which could equally be seen as planetary space, or cosmos), all was caught into this mythicomagicomarvellous gaze of the mental one possessing the transcendental eye-of-god, its distance and authority upheld from out of a well-established, metaphored mindspace.2
In deserts, on mountains, in jungles, on Pacific Islands men were trying to observe the unobservable the extent of the universe. What they observed in fact, was the ever more refined calibration of their instruments (Dening 1998:28).
The Perspectival Mental Eye

TIME

HISTORY

SPACE

. Mythic & So, if there is a template, for example, of an idea of the South Seas when Captain James Cook stood for the first time on the black sand of Matavai in Tahiti, he did not see the residents of the semiotically emptied space. Where am I? was calculated, it was 17 2915S and 14 938W (Dening, ibid., p.27). In Fig. 80, indigenous Aboriginal inhabitants of Australia Felix are recipients of this gaze in the first moments of contact with Europeans. The egoic subjective mind sees emptiness in space (whether of the world or as worldbody); the magical world of unity with nature (in all its facets) had already been evacuated of numinous content (back in Europe, over hundreds of years of Inquisition and subjective entrainment of religion), and so there was no manalike oneness with a cosmic mother to connect the new modern man with a pagan world, Eastern or ancient one, gone (in these cleared heads). Mental man could look out on space and see only his projections, or his plans. Or he saw the spatialized emptiness he would bring to life, and if anything foreign moved in that pristine emptiness as (hermetically sealed) place, it would be impelled to conform to his idea of the world or be destroyed, for, categorically, there was no room in the new world except for those of one mind. To the colonizers it was liberating (redemption); to the others it was something else, from ideas of occupancy, to ethnocide or genocide. (See Lindqvist 1998.) The bell-jar of air-pump technology had found a social equivalent and experiment, possible because of an already instilled emptied psychic space. It allowed, for example, the landscape to be seen as empty, or emptied, once it was named (like Adam, from Genesis, applying his god-given right), so anything that hence moved in the landscape died or was dead because the vital breath (the sense of sacred connection between earth and the human spirit) had been ignored or removed by the scopic
(At base this is what is worked upon) underneath the distant stare.

Magical worlds

MATTER

Fig. 82 THE GAZE. (See n.2.) The chaotic body is disciplined by surveillance, eyeing, which metaphorically cuts a line through content, spatializing matter below. (Source: Diagram, Author.)

2.

The gaze relates to Foucault s (1979) Discipline and Punish interpretation. He aligns it with the disciplining of the unruly body by surveillance. In fact the title of his book in French uses the term surveiller for discipline, indicating their proximal meaning. The gaze in his work refers to the organizing of space and humans under the Panoptic eye. It is a type of location of bodies in space, a distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposition of centres and channels of power of intervention of power (ibid., p. 205). Here the gaze is also defined by its power to control subjects as objects in space, ordered and sequenced in time.

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intruder on the whole). This is an alchemic concept. But there is empirical evidence that it is true, summed up in the application of the biblical concept of terra nullius.

Terra Nullius
Navigators of the Age of the Exploration, with their human cargo of hydrographers, botanists, missionaries and mappers on board longships, projected their introjected perspectival minds (msc)3 on to terra nullius and its population south of the Equator; it was difficult for them not to. Noahs sons did not inherit this land after the Flood as only antediluvian creatures were thought to inhabit it, or nonhumans (see Flint 1992). (The TO world spheres, Figs. 5253, were introduced to example this mindspatial containment of the world, one in which Aboriginals or indigenous could be interrogated in mind, against the biblical arrangement in which south or the back of the world could not contain human inhabitants.) On to the great South Land (Australia) the great sailing ships clipped. The transcendental mental vision was a new faculty that could be a pernicious master, seeing itself above an empty expanse it could ostensibly take command of and then underline that reality with cannon or shot. In terms of consciousness structures, the mental mode was approaching the magical or the archaic life of the its (objects or non-human life).

Fig. 83 English shooting Aborigines near Geelong, 1803. (Source: Massola 1969) A rie is crossed over a spear on which an explorers foot rests. In Fig. 34, with the inception of the mental mind, the East (as other) is won by spear. In Versalius, Fig. 78, victory is over the chaos of nature and woman by surgical knife. The new world is won by guns and ries over arrows; and so the increments continue. After each spate of power -taking by violence, token lessons are seen in retrospect, as similar engagements continue in the race to overcome all uncontained nature.

While Gebser (1991) lauded the development of perspective (of the mental mode in
3. mindspace containers

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the West), as the eighth great achievement of mind and consciousness and the speciality which made it great, there were significant dangers of attaching mind and consciousness to the mental mode and holding it above everything else. When opposed, it could turn to a sense of justified, even righteous, diabolical aggression, and simply not see what it was doing because its violence was turned on objects so far beneath its gaze, they did not matter, or failed to materialize to a containment which, by dent of mind construction, they were already excluded out of, and so were magically cleared, existing not there. In this line of thinking, to even suggest it was wrong to dispossess the indigenes, prior occupants, was better not remotely held in mind, because this then accorded the indigene a rightful place in the scheme of things (the mind-spatial world) already denied to them from Genesis, so who was to argue (with God)?

The Arrogant Eye and the Canvas of Emptied Space

Fig. 83b Jan Provost 1465-1529 A Christian Allegory (detail). The eye in the sky stares out from its red and yellow ocularis-eyeball-andcloud eye-socket. Beneath it, a blue orb has the earth at its centre, sun and moon orbiting, suggesting all the skies and universe, are beneath the Christian cross and the ocularis beyond. Christ and Virgin stand on the clouds, as Christ the warrior, with sword in hand and frowning countenance is a personification of Mars or Mithras; the Virgin-Venus holds peace symbols including the dove ready to take flight. The Christian panoply symbolically represents war and peace, the figures stand beyond earth; nonetheless the eye is drawn to earth as the center of attention. Meanwhile, the authority outside time and space mediates what exchange is possible under the proselytizing terms of reference. There is only the one, male god watching all moves; and this personality or character is introjected into his subject-followers who then share the panoptic vision and its scopic divine right of valorizing what is seen, or unseen.

The stance of the Occidental eye-I had moved to a position outside the world, dome, or metaphoric vault of the heavens to peer down into the expanse as if empty, below. Gebser (1991) claimed the Oriental vault itself was empty, so too others in sacred traditions still connected to an old matriarchal ordering aligned to earth, agriculture, nature, womb, all below a transcendental idea of eminence, thought to be exclusively possessed by minds that had moved to the eye-of-god positioning. By the time eighteenthnineteenth century explorers minds considered Australia, the mentalperspectival mind was in place, and somehow defined, even etched by spectacles of uniform, navel and civil, drill, prisons, asylums, uniformity, clocks and panoptic surveillance (Foucault, 1979, 1984, ed. Rabinow). Uniforms provided a fitting dress in which the eye, as principle organismic feature, was off-set. The goal was authority, over everything.

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Those that administered the panoptic eye were akin to the alchemical one-eye peeking through the ocularis in the sky, depicted in oils in the Renaissance as the place of the Father God looking down from above (For example, Pontormos 1525 Supper

at Emmaus and Jan Provosts (1465-1529), A Christian Allegory). Sky god and those
with a panoptic vision shared features: subjects who could overseer as authorities the object beneath their view.
There is the logic operating in The History of New Holland that if the indigenes cannot be seen, they do not exist. The reliance on specular analysis is particularly interesting. Sight is the principal method of information gathering, and that which is not tractable to this information formation is simply rendered non-existent (Ryan 1996:163-4).

Sturt specifies nothing visible inhabits the desert ... but the ant (ibid.). The fact that the native Aborigines were timid and wished to avoid observation, and while the explorers knew native population existed and there was often evidence of their habitation, it still led to their conclusion that the land was uninhabited.
The central arrogance remains ... the assumption that the explorers vision is all-encompassing which serves the utility of the explorers and justifies the conclusion: the discovery of an empty and promising land ... The joy of finding [it] empty is that the mechanics of dispossession are disguised at the very beginning of the process, and no further justification for the usurpation ... or civilising of heathen inhabitants, need be entered into ... (Ryan 1996:164).

Further, because the Aborigines failed to extract or produce wealth out of their land, they were regarded by the eye of the European as already going out of existence, what is more the eye of the European willed it so:
I sat in the fading light, looking at the beautiful scenery around me, which now for the first time gladdened the eyes of Europeans; and wondered that so fair a land should only be the abode of savage men; and then I thought ... of their anomalous position in so fertile a country, and wondered how long these things were to be (Grey, 1:207, cited in Ryan ibid,. p.170).

The mental mode may with the flick of the eye discern the utility of a situation. Associative links may be pre-arranged, as referent points on a grid do not admit additional interpretations outside of the enframing, but interpret new material, referentially, back into it. For example, in the explorers of Australia, the mindgrid was in simplified form as follows: to seek new lands and claim them; collect specimens unseen in Europe and/or novel; to seek gold, riches, spices; to round the above up for the King; to keep a steady supply of food and water, and certain spoils for self; to convert the heathen to God. (See also Latour 1987.) Moving step-by-step into the new environment, the colonist, similar to a perspectival artist plotting his grids, filled the empty canvas of the lands with his mental projections. The dominant psychtechnology (technology of mind and consciousness) was the allseeing eye, fortified by a myriad of constellating technologies of hydrography, cartography, botanical illustration, the bible, proselytism, ships, guns, trinkets, iron pots, cannon, shot, fanfare, costumes, and methods of survival. What the explorers carried

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with them, and which organized the paraphernalia of the outwardly seen voyage, was a mindmode of magisterial noos. Without any collective sacred connection to bios, nature, or the Mother, any exchange was primed for disaster; on vastly disproportionate grounds of understanding, from blacks to all others, meeting meant violence was to follow as noos (extracted) clashed with bios (embedded). If, as Gebser (1991) writes, the mental mode can look on the empty vault of space, or by extension, the womb of nature, the natural world, and see it as unoccupied, empty, then extracting what it contains will not matter, for it is empty anyway. Is this a paradox, or sleight of mind for those accustomed to a certain mindspatial duplicity? Rationale surreptitiously may continue along these lines (whether consciously recognized as a stance or not): if one is unhappy about clearing away what stands in the way of possession of the emptiness, it could be claimed (from the rational standpoint) to be a perceptual delusion in ones own mind to try and protect what ostensibly (for the perspectival mindspace containment) just isnt there. The living reality (of others) having been demolished (of embodied realness), relegated to the periphery, and willed back to the margins and darkness out of which they vexedly come, means furthermore, one could simply will them out of frame and then deal with them swiftly outside it, for what one metes out to them, out of sight (and so out of mind), can be silenced in the clear belljar of a completely devitalized, emptied and so clear conscience in-frame. One way of looking at this problem, because problem it is, is that it can be construed that what is true and has meaning from a magical standpoint, or, for that matter, from the existentialintegral or nondual sensibility, has no meaning from the fixated mental and perspectival position. From its narrow containment, others are either empty, emptied or de-materialized, nullified and absent to egoic presence. By disembodying them, as they have no place in the biblical scheme of redemption (particularly if they dont follow it), they can be happily denied existence. They have no veracity. The eyes have it (noos); or the word (logos): other than that (and apart from the glitter of gold or glory), there is nothing. For this reason, there is a basic problem in Gebsers (1991) attempt to connect primordial psychosomatic actualities, to a body and soul unity (p. 384), while at the same time, he retains an attitude, prevalent in the centurieslong dominant Occidental stance, which can look up into the nightsky, the Oriental dome, grotto or cave and see them all as empty (p.10). This appears to be part of the long prevalent, empty-earth syndrome. The gaze of white man clears the lands, renders them (and other peoples), empty, and therefore ready to be improved upon by the superior designs of occupier. In the same movement, body, worldbody (as whole earth), as well as celestial body that incorporates all space and all spaces, once representative of a somatic being born from out of the womb and great space of the Mother, is also emptied, rendered a vacuum (even as all
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manner of cybernetic systems will then emerge to try and fill it). So the empty space is, in fact, a heavily contested battleground. Brought back out of skilful abstraction, it is recognized, moreover, that the battle takes place in the everyday world, every day, over real objects of engagement in wars and confrontations. Its not just a clash of civilizations, but of minds. However, the trick of rational consciousness validates the subject eye/I bearing down on objects, retelling the narratives of the world, cultures and civilizations, after one story-line, its own, in a willing erasure of the diversity of human consciousness and experience, with erasure also of a possible return to vital instincts, and also ones instinctual mother.

Arising into the Emptied Space

Psychologically, Gainsboroughs Mr. and Mrs. Andrews of the eighteenth century (Fig. 79), had their psyche-ic origin in an inward wasteland separated from biological being, earth as mother, and womb as container image worth remembering. This factor, at the ontological level, is well expressed in The Ecstasy of Father Birelli, Fig. 84. It reverberates with Fig. 78, Versalius title page, indicating the triumph of the extracted mind and mentality out of biological tissuebeing, finally freed from it. One ties together the most inner directives (of a religious nature) and compares them to the most important active moves on the environment and others, which supposedly are generated out of pious hopes of cultural belief. In this way one can follow moves in mind and psyche and drive them back, re-clarified, to their originating moments in mind, so as to see what is to be learned for a more integral, that is, whole consciousness. The white-frocked priest, as disembodied spirit, rises. Within this image and attitude is contained a derivative stance as seen in white colonists and explorers. In fact, Fr. Birelli perhaps represents the sacrosanct ideal. Because earth, earthmother, world body and immanence within nature had been separated from, as well as the menstrualblood connection, gone was another interface, the embodied human axis as grounding factor; this connectingpoint of gravity is removed from on an inner level. As the saint leaves behind the blood/fluid-medium that connected him to a mother (physically, vitally, psychically, spiritually), in her place his world stretches out as a lightfilling emptiness of newfound space the (bloodless and devitalized) womb, sanctified by word (logos) and perceptive eye (noos), alone.4

4.

Join yourselves therefore to the Church, your spiritual mother in accordance with the 318 holy Fathers. For your all-holy mother, the Church, waits to embrace you as her true children, and longs to hear your voice Hasten then (The Henotikon of Zeno, 482 AD, cited in Bettenson 1943:124-126).

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