The End of Slumbering Gnostic

For personal reasons, I've decided to let this blog go. It doesn't feel like a funeral. It feels as though I am putting a toy boat on the sea of cyberspace. The toy boat will go where it pleases. My intervention is not needed.

Thanks for reading, matrons and patrons of the Vast Internet. May all your creative ambitions bear the sweetest fruit.

The Imagination:

Never lose the part of you
that sings innumerable songs
with one, all-encompassing thought.
Never break the bonds of golden mind.
Throw out doubt and self-reproach.
Dive deep.
Deep below the flimsy dross.
Cosmos and psyche are indivisible
down there.
The ocean of consciousness is the true medium.
The message is infinite.

At the dawn of history,
Man built the pyramid of thought.
To this very day, he continues the project.
It shall never cease,
for as long as the stars shine within,
the imagination shall shine equally as bright.

A pantheon of ideas in flux:
The turbulent sea of neural nets
and synaptic seahorses.
Sharks bite ruminations, whales swallow
reveries.
Schools of dream-fish drifting through the deep.
There is the chasm, of course.
The deepest philosophies dwell in its great gap.

At the dawn of herstory, Woman built of a womb of thought.
To this very day, she incubates all myths and legends in it.
The womb shall never cease, for as long as zygote-revelations and
embryo-inklings are needed for the future of the universe, the womb
shall have its place.

The Imagination: the temporal map of hyperspace.
The reflections and refractions and reverberations of High Energetics.
We shall honor it until our biological lease is up.
And even then, we must realize the skeletal remains
stay behind while the mind-probe in us takes off.
Distant topographies await it.
Distant worlds need it.

In the Imagination,
The trees and the forest are One.
In the Imagination,
The radial-mind scans the unconscious skies.
In the Imagination,
all time is sacred.
In the Imagination,
All nations are treasured.

May the Great Jewel in us lead the way…

Colonizing the Last Asteroid

Self-referential asylum;
den of blathering “I’s”;
honeycomb of mirrored selves.
Language, that pearlescent injection
of silky syntax, comes at high noon.
Muted birdsong comes in through rare
windows.
Warm and fuzzy feeling rise within,
intimations of the beyond.

Some have been able to break free of the
asylum, psychically speaking.
They hornswoggle the mind-doctors:
“Yeah, I took that semantic dope…not!”
They always break out at midnight when the
guards of the cortex are snoring.
Once blocks away from the fenced-in
grounds, they tiptoe towards the gates
of paradise, and laugh, laugh, laugh.

Laughter is all there was, is, and forever will be.
Particles, waves, and wavicles all are simply oscillations
emanated from the Meta-Laughter-Box.
Dolphins and Doldrums:
different aspects of the Great Giggle.
There will be a time when laughter colonizes the
last asteroid with the best apocalyptic joke.
She will break apart, chuckle wildly, and dissolve into
the torrid sun.

We may spend most of our time in a self-referential
asylum, but at least our best friend, laughter, is trapped in there with us
Well, trapped until the cortex-guards snore…

The Mantra From Outer Space

In order for something to survive the plummet into the earth’s atmosphere, it must be as deceptive as a spy and as strong as an ox. The atmosphere doesn’t like foreign invaders. This is why the atmosphere succeeds in dumping an incendiary substance all over those wayward asteroids and setting them ablaze. It triumphs over all the space communists disguised as interstellar debris, or at least this is how the legend goes.

Frequencies sent from the Galactic Center have the best way of breaking into the earthly vault (without the aid of guns). The satellites pick them up in the ionosphere, and they’re decoded by scientists wearing thick, haughty glasses. Most of the frequencies resemble garbled psychobabble, but every once in a while, when the mood is right and the instruments are impedance free, something genuinely unique is discovered.

One chilly November afternoon, while all the scientists were growing moustaches in support of prostate cancer research, the Mantra broke into the decoding equipment like some kind of aural interloper at a party of sterilized sound. “Moo-Rack-Ra-Moo-Rack-Ra-Rack…My Cosmic Plate Is Never In Lack.” It sounded silly, primitive, puerile, outlandish, and ridiculous. Nonetheless, it was the musical message the Galactic Center wanted to share with the denizens of earth and maybe even uranus.

“Scientific Quackery” was the first journal to publish an article on the discovery of the Mantra. The populace guffawed and chortled, slapped their knees and the knees of kitties. The Mantra was parodied and ridiculed on Saturday Night Live. Kim Kardashian even liked to use it at the end of specious conversations with the plastic people of the entertainment industry.

Some say the asinine irrationality inherent in the Mantra itself caused it to fall from the vogue heights of celebrity stardom because A) it was asinine and B) it was irrational. It lacked that hipster edge that would give it that everlasting shine. Underground it went. It went below ant colonies, and mantles, and crusts, and subtelluric stalagmites.

Maybe the Mantra will climb to the surface again? Maybe more mantras will be decoded by the moustache-sportin’ men of high science? Maybe the Galactic Center will become silent, and grow wise in that silence?

No one knows what is in store for this earthly vault. No one.

Gentle Mind

We know nothing of the world that arises
with the lazy sun, the dawn that leaps
forth from the bottom of a twilight pond.
We only know the mental abstractions we slather
and smear over every new day.
The stark world, the one that always divests
itself of its old clothing, will forever remain
beyond the reach of the needy hands of thought.
What we think of the world is only an internalized
echo of a world that once was.

To wake each day and imbibe the potion
of wonder is to strip down naked and let the wild in.
To wake each day and imbibe the potion of habit
is the close the blinders on this mutating,
transformative power we call "Life".
The choice is ours.
The grand book wherein we write ourselves into
existence will eventually be replete with a tangle
of choices.
The wrong ones are chains.
The right ones are wings.

The planet is a carnival of perspectives
and perceptions.
I see this now.
As clear as day.
This is why we must be prudent
when it comes to the language we
share with others.
A maligned language can inject the ebola
virus into the right arm of the Gaian body.
A few harsh words here and there takes an ax to
the World Tree.

I support the Gentle Mind,
the one that drinks that wondrous
potion every morning.
It is the one that becomes that dawn every morning.
It is the one that outruns all of our sluggish, heavy
thoughts.
It is the one that truly feels the Pulse of Life.

The Phantom Limb

I can still feel it.
Its ghostly presence never lets me forget.
What was once flesh and bone is now something ensnared
in the pulpy marrow of memory.
The cold limb dangles from the socket, but not really.
The cold limb has a felt immanence to it,
but not really.
This is the problem with the appendage haunting:
it eludes but it remains close like some kind of
conflicted lover.

Surely this problem will sort itself out.
A psychosomatic disturbance of the insistent
and insidious sort.
Surely it will sort itself out over time.

I know there are others like me.
Those poor, wounded individuals
torn apart by war or a pox that infects
the cellular tissue.
They live like me, and feel the unmistakable
haunting like I do.
They grasp at the sweat-ridden sheets with a spectral
arm of elusive dexterity.
They find it hard to sleep.
They find it hard to work.
They partake in the good fight against
the deceptions of the ghost, and the autonomy
of the phantom appendage.

Cut it off, doc.
Not the ghost arm.
That would be impossible.
I am talking about the mind.
Cut that off, doc.

War of the Worldviews

In the realm of science fiction, there is an ongoing battle betwixt humans and hostile agencies which are dispersed throughout the capacious cosmos. The battle plays out in literature, television sitcoms, movies, comics, and even theater. The aliens have powerful ships that shoot matter-melting lasers, or fleets that outnumber ours, or even an intelligence that outwits ours. Usually and miraculously, we somehow defeat the hostile agencies right at the last moment. We, the cosmic underdogs, somehow pull off an upset victory over the unruly, slimy, and incensed aliens. Go humanity!

If I were a materialist--an animate thinker shackled to the reason-wall in some dank secular cell--I would view this ongoing battle as an anthropomorphic drama. The aliens are strictly an elaborate construct of a finely tuned imagination in the materialist's schema. Nothing more, for there is nothing more beyond the firing neurons that make-up the heavens and hells of imaginative thought. Conversely, if I were a spiritual explorer--an animate thinker who tries to discover or unveil the metaphysical truths inherent in nature and reality--I would view the ongoing battle as a necessary drama that values the imagination and the divine basis of all of our colorful thoughts.

The materialist: the imagination is the epiphenomenal vomit of overactive neurons. The spiritual explorer: the imagination is a holographic thought-medium that creates matter. Who is right? Who is wrong? Mind before matter, or matter before mind?

In the book I am currently reading, "War of the Worldviews," Deepak Chopra goes head-to-head with Leonard Mlodinow. Leonard defends the position of people like Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins. Deepak Chopra defends the position of people like Ken Wilber and Amit Goswami. Leonard prefers reductionism. Deepak prefers holistic understanding. The writing from both scholars is engaging and thought-provoking, and the topics they explore--the emergence of life, mind, and everything in between--are deeply philosophical, relevant, and important in this postmodern age of clashing paradigms and paradigmatic synthesis.

Deepak defends the paramount role of consciousness in evolution. Leonard derides it. Deepak says evolution has a purpose. Leonard denies the teleological angle altogether. Deepak says the cosmos is moving towards a state of endless complexity and conservation (evolution is in an eternal state of mutation). Leonard says entropy will rule the roost at the end of the cosmos, and disorder will reign supreme at the end of time. Thankfully, Deepak and Leonard have little faith in the mythological perspective of religious zealots.

Back to the book, and the battle against those dreaded space pirates!

Occupy The Creative Matrix

For the protesters...

One is either in charge of one's destiny
or subordinate to the destiny of systemic progress.
One is either a conscious organism or
a somnolent machine.
One is either an embodied soul
or a random number in the data-bank of some
impersonal meta-computer.
One is either heading down the right path or
heading towards oblivion.
One is either aware or not.

Wake from your sleep, sweet child.
The time is ripe for revolution.
Corporations are at it again.
They have turned on that odious mechanical hand
that steals our wealth from our back pockets.
Everyone is insolvent.
Everyone feels used.
They have it all, and they are just
sitting on it.
If a great conflagration swept over
the earth, they would surely fly to another planet
in ships composed of all our precious resources.

Sweet child, they're the 1%, the true minority.
They're the plutocrats, the tyrants, the shadows
that control.

One is either questioning and wondering
or despairing and dying.
One is either building a better world
with imaginative strength or accepting
the insipid nature of the given.
One is either transcending the limits
of culture or reinforcing them with every word.
One is either alive to venerate the fleeting
happiness of each being or is alive to broadcast
enmity and self-loathing in every direction.
One is either at peace or not.

Sweet child, rage against the dying of
the light!
Hold this globe in your intrepid hand and shower
it with your best tears.
May the best crops rise from her splendorous soil.