Millennium Feast

 

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Dance

If we could use extremely high-speed photography to watch our bodies (we would need high-frequency light well beyond the optical range of our eyes to do this), we would see that energy was constantly annihilating itself and creating nodules of matter as it did so. We would see nodules of matter disappear and give birth to bursts of energy—pure light—as high-frequency photons. It would appear to us like a macabre dance of great and terrifying beauty.

~~ Fred Alan Wolf, StarWave

Body Electric, Body of Light

Light is the lover. Light is the state where photons can experience the total lack of individuation marked so exclusively by electrons. Our bodies, our sexuality, our entering into the state of loving communion is inherent in our photons and electrons. We are the "body electric." We are the "body of light." The dance of light and matter is the root "cause" of all emotional experience. It is also the root of thought. We could say that through the universality of the quantum wave function all "things" feel and think, love and hate.

~~Fred Alan Wolfe, StarWave

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About Every Person

There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.
~~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Deeper

the quest of the art is
the movement of soul

through these appearances

to live what love is
most deeply

and nothing less will do

.

The Eden Project

All relationships begin, and end, in separation. Through the bloodweb of our mothers, we start out connected to the pulse and rhythm of the cosmos. And then we are torn from the Mother, separated from the cosmos, separated from the gods, separated forever. And we close all the relationships of our lives through that separation we call death. We live our lives estranged—from others, from the gods, and worst of all from ourselves. Intuitively, we all know this. We know that we are  our own worst enemies. We never stop seeking to reconnect, to find home again, and in the end we simply leave it in a different way. Perhaps there is no home to which we can return. We can't return to the womb, though we try. So we live, always homeless, whether we know it or not. [11]

Nothing has greater power over our lives than the hint, the promise, the intimation, of the recovery of Eden through that Magical Other. No wonder, then, the dismay, the horror, of losing Eden again, when its precincts were glimpsed from afar. Who would want to live on, having lost it yet again? The repeated loss of Eden is the human condition, even as the hope for its recovery is our chief fantasy. Yet, we all know that the Other, a simple, flawed human being just like ourselves, can never carry the full weight of our Eden project. Nor can we carry the Other's. More than half of all popular songs mourn this loss of the beloved Other. "Who are you," "I don't know you anymore," "You've changed," "You've broken my heart"—that is, failed my Eden project. But since my Eden project, my desire to go home through you, is essentially unconscious, I am unaware of its origin in myself and can only blame you for this great disappointment. [50]

 

~~James Hollis, The Eden Project; In Search of the Magical Other

Chanting in the Field

It is one, it is a unity, it is ourselves.

The shaman, through sacred action, reveals this unity. It is the way of compassion that opens in the course of this revelation. The shaman then is a master of play, dancing, and chanting in the field of human suffering. And through these acts, the people are awakened from the nightmare of sickness to the dream of Paradise. Playfulness and absurdity sharply rouse the slumbering ones. The beauty of poetry and the ferocity of keen wisdom remind the forgetful ones. Compassion and poise heal the diseased ones. The world is revealed, remembered, and celebrated. The ancestors and Nature-kin are again in the sacred circle.

While I stood there, I saw more than I can tell, and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being.

Joan Halifax, Shaman; the wounded healer

 

 

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Huxley

The literature of religious experience abounds in references to the pains and terrors overwhelming those who have come, too suddenly, face to face with some manifestation of the mysterium tremendum. In theological language this fear is due to the incompatability between man's egotism and the divine purity, between man's self-aggravated separateness and the infinity of God. 

Aldous Huxley

.



Let them love, let them remember

God Himself, the father and fashioner of all that is, older than the Sun or the Sky, greater than time and eternity and all the flow of being, is unnameable by any lawgiver, unutterable by any voice, not to be seen by any eye. But we, being unable to apprehend His essence, use the help of sounds and names and picture, of beaten gold and ivory and silver, of plants and rivers, mountain-peaks and torrents, yearning for the knowledge of Him, and in our weakness naming all that is beautiful in this world after His nature—just as happens to earthly lovers. To them the most beautiful sight will be the actual lineaments of the beloved, but for remembrance sake they will be happy in the sight of a lyre, a little spear, a chair, perhaps, or a running-ground, or anything in the world that wakens the memory of the beloved. Why should I further examine and pass judgment upon Images? Let men know what is divine, let them know: that is all. If a Greek is stirred to the remembrance of God by the art of Phidias, an Egyptian by paying worship to animals, another man by a river, another by fire—I have no anger for their divergences; only let them know, let them love, let them remember.

 

Maximus of Tyre

[2nd c. BCE]


.

Peter

My friend Peter Ainslie died on April 2, 2005

seven years today
hard to believe

.

Black Door

nearness awayness

the pulsing of this

all the way down
all the way up

all the way out
all the way in

i can see you now
simultaneously

coming and going
through that black door

adding something new
to this awareness

of the passion
of it all

in the rejoicing
of its

ALLNESS

leading what is
for ever attracting

MORE VASTNESS

on the borderlines
when our limits shout

LIMITLESS

 

 

.

Rilke

We are, above all, eternal spectators

 

looking upon, never from,

 

the place itself. We are the

 

essence of it. We construct it.

 

It falls apart. We reconstruct it

 

and fall apart ourselves.

~ Rilke, Duino Elegies

 

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Infinite Distances

But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

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Basic Cinemaesthesia

The earliest recorded "mental maps of the world" in all cultures contain factual, objective truths about the world, as well as general beliefs about invisible forces that influence the processes in the world.

Kai Woehler, The Search for the Meaning of Space, Time, and Matter (27)

~~~~~~~~

Our primordial capacity to experience "mental maps"—as framed here by Kai Woehler—is the origin of cinemaesthesia.


.

So Who

thanks be for excellent sleep
there were (continuing production) dreams
woke well

contemplated the images gathered around my bed

and felt

{{ cosmic drama }}

none of the images more pervading than
that of earthrise from the moon Apollo 11

what i felt

intuited

was a lightning link from conception to birth
and from birth to integral awareness

or we might say cosmic awareness

as i pondered the other images
from the World's Columbian Exposition
that you sent

the images of George Eastman

the early images from Kingsport at the
advent of industrialization
and a world away

the early images here of the Mission
in the 1880s not so long ago and yet
a world away

the cosmic Impulse

ever-presently conceiving blastocysts
motivating every life form and every awareness
at all scales in all possible dimensions
in the field of all possible experiences

in which context the natural-attitude as may be
characterized is always in transition

all world-defining reference-coordinate complexes
are structures formed pragmatically

and not prepared for radical paradigmatic disruptions

say the perception of earthrise
as a new framing

say the deluge of transmutations of mid-19th-early-21st centuries
a period of less than two hundred chronologistic years

and we are called
to the stage

that most ephemeral camera oscura
as birth to conception to cosmic drama

life-and-death boarding area


.

I took myself out to Jacks

it's too huge--the ultimate scale and dimension that matters is:

>>> incomprehensibility <<<

the integrality of the incomprehensible

the nonconceptual

our unceasing and inescapable judgments
lend some dis/continuous contribution to
the in/comprehensibility as it flows

with and/or without applause...

a tower appears on an island in a river...
a holiday approaches... a festive moment...
a funeral congeals...
a functional work of art of any sort configures...
an apparition... an illuminated glass...

no perceiving the incomprehensible
without some fragmentary fractal

comprehension


.

Dearly Departing Hypnopompia

hypnopompia


limbic

lively limbic

alembic



they are all in a jet-lagged world
coming and/or going

in the liminality the baggage one checked
might come out at baggage claim
as a different life

a superpositional sense of interchangeable lives

turnstile lives...

lives in perpetual transit... trance...
transition...

...but you already have a lover... or a husband...
or a wife... a child... a life...
a street address, somewhere... a whole biography...
your own personal history channel... somewhere... remember?

with a cell phone one's situation is no longer linked
to a land landing landed line locality

one's domicile is cellular and protoplasmic

thus the alembichttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alembic

from the limbichttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbic_system

the limbic alembic
Zosimoapparat

operating at the borderline, on the edge...
of emotion, behavior, long term memory, olfaction

laughter at the agent's podium

where departures are arrivals
determinations slippages lettings-go
and various impositions vaguely configuring
in the lower upper middle level
accelerating/decelerating

Boarding Area vortex

Hypnopompic Dreaming

pulling off some gathering, complex, meetings, directions, angles, dimensionsand in the end aware that all this has taken place and is concluding and has concluded

in my basement in Tennessee my play area and space of infinitely malleable imagination
all has been moved out after the conference and only cleanup remains and only my daughter lingers to assist me

things are shaping up and i am feeling a completeness and thoroughness and satisfaction
when the final step somehow seems to be sweeping off--as a child i used to do with water--the whole floor

with burgundy wine

my daughter assists as i pour out this wine across the floor and use the broom to spread
it evenly

at one area, where the floor appears deeply black, black as the blackest earth, but this is cement, the deep red wine on black creates a mirror surface that is wonderously and magically powerful

through the basement windows the full light of day, from up there, from beyond that mundane level, is streaming

as we quietly go about this task

 

 

.

Ikkyu

You do this, you do that
You argue left, you argue right
You come down, you go up
This person says no, you say yes
Back and forth
You are happy
You are really happy


.

Is there a paradise anyway?

I'm waiting for the ferry,
But where are we going,
And is there a paradise anyway?

Besides,
What will I,
Who see you everywhere,

Do there?
I'm okay where I am, says Kabir.
Spare me the trip.



Songs of Kabir
tr. by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra