LSD and the Bomb--From review of book of the beats in India

[Robin Landseadel]

One of the things I picked up this time in Vineland that I never  
thought of before was Van Meter flashing a "shin" hand gesture at  
Zoyd. When I went on about Leonard Nimoy in "Wheel of Fortune" I was  
pointing to that "Thousand Suns" equivalency: all through Gravity's  
Rainbow is a terror of illumination. The Crying of Lot 49 is [on one  
level] all about illumination that's withheld.  And this fear of  
illumination appears to come from an old Jewish concept, the idea that  
a glimpse of God would be so overpowering as to destroy the viewer:

	"The reason you don't look is because the belief is that the Shekhina
	enters the sanctuary to bless the congregation. We're told the light
	of God could be fatal to a human if you saw it. You should not see God
	face-to-face, and Shekhina is God's presence on earth. When she comes
	into the sanctuary the light could be fatal. That's why you cover your
	eyes. I went, "Oh. Wow.”

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0812&msg=130995&sort=date

Some good stuff in here as well:

	More than anything else in Trekdom, the Vulcan salute says
	to me, "Here there be Jews." It also provides a diplomatic way
	for me to greet female Trekkers at conventions without shaking
	hands. (Orthodox Jews do not shake hands with the opposite
	sex. I suppose that would also hold true for intersexed alien species.)

http://www.pinenet.com/~rooster/v-salute.html

Remember just before Zoyd's little trip through the TV glass [stunt  
glass] that Van Meter flashed Zoyd the Vulcan Power Salute. The Rabbi  
shielding the congregation from a "Thousand Suns" by holding up the  
"shin" gesture is yet another context for "Against the Day."* And Zoyd  
is jumping into the light [again.]

On Dec 11, 2008, at 10:20 AM, rich wrote:

> Robert Oppenheimer knew Sanskrit. Quotations from the Bhagavad Gita
> flashed through his mind when he witnessed the first atomic explosion
> in New Mexico in 1945: 'Suppose a thousand suns should rise together
> into the sky: such is the glory of the Shape of the Infinite God.'
> Reading that same chapter of the Bhagavad Gita in Darjeeling in 1962,
> Allen Ginsberg thought of something else: the coloured wheels of
> psilocybin-induced visions. That two of the 20th century's most
> consciousness-altering inventions, the atom bomb and the LSD pill,
> could be conjoined under the sign of the mushroom cloud is just the
> sort of thing that convinces poets of the doctrine of secret
> correspondences in nature, of a transcendental logic ruling reality.
>
> maybe convinced OBA as well

* And Against the Day also plays with the "shin" hand gesture and  
"Star Trek."