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

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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]


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Peter

My friend Peter Ainslie died on April 2, 2005

seven years today
hard to believe

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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

 

 

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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)

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


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