The Great Inward Odyssey

In Ben Okri's fabular novel, Astonishing The Gods, the nameless character is abandoned by his nameless guide at the precipice of an abyss. "All around emptiness bristled like a snowdrift. The white winds whipped the last spaces on the highest mountain and all he could see was the pure whiteness of oblivion." In following this gaze into the seemingly unspeakable, we learn that the character was actually standing before an alchemizing bridge. He journeyed on. Fire, a conflagration of mystery, perturbed him. Water, an oceanic presence of confusion, caused him to thrash about and move backwards, not forwards. When the character found courage and equanimity in the tumultuous predicament, the water sure enough transformed into an ethereal air. At this time he noticed that the air itself was populous. "As if in a mist, he saw whole peoples rising from the depths of a great ocean, rising from the forgetful waters. Then, with a fixed and mystic gaze in their eyes, he saw them building a great city of stone, and within it the mighty pyramids and universities and churches and libraries and palaces and all the new unseen wonders of the world. He saw them building a great new future in an invisible space." As he flailed his limbs in the oracular space, the nameless character realized the bridge was nothing more than a dream. Like all dreams exalted in the airy empyrean, they were destined to plummet and reacquaint themselves with the ground. The character eventually makes it across the bridge of self-discovery. When the guide returns, this is the conversation they had:

Boy: "I don't think I will ever understand."
Guide: "Understanding leads to ignorance, especially when it comes too soon."
Boy: "But if I don't understand how can I carry on?"
Guide: "It's because you don't understand that you carry on."

March 22, 2009- Liminality and Puddles

A puddle is a small accumulation of liquid, usually water, on a surface. It can form either by pooling in a depression on the surface, or by surface tension upon a flat surface. A puddle is generally considered to be small enough to step over or shallow enough to walk through, and too small to traverse with a boat, raft or submarine.- Wikipedia

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow- T.S. Eliot

The four seasons and the four elements are always in a state of transition, a state of desirous becoming. We find ourselves in spring for now, but soon the world will be green and torrid. The green and torrid will then metamorphose into the colorful and chilly. The colorful and chilly turns into the barren and frigid. This cycle repeats itself maybe forever.

I like spring because it imparts to the naked mind--your mind, my mind--all that is nascent and sprouting. In spring we have intimations of what is to come in the summer. We can see things slowly unfold from the center that is present in all things. We can see puddles desiring to evaporate or maybe flow underground. We can see the gnarled and naked branches tickling one another (the tickling causes the foliage to grow). We can see beauty in dirt, puddle reflections, the torpid movement of the clouds, and even in wildlife coming out of domiciles made of earth or wood, or a shrewd collection of both. In spring we can see the world moving towards the consonant goal of summer. I like the work spring attends to.

Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, Summer, Autumn, Spring, Winter, Spring, Summer. A seasonal remix, a tossing together of the elements in the salad bowl of creativity and expression. No matter where we stand--whether it be at a bus stop in June or a park in October--we're always standing in between. Birth, life, and death are never clearly defined in this in between, because one birth leads to one death, and one death leads to one birth. To separate the reality of birth, life, and death is to engender a true absurdity. Such an absurdity would be a blatant impossibility. This is why we always have a liminal vantage point when it comes to our relationship with things. A vantage point is only possible in the liminal.

Namaste.

The Outer War Shall Never Surpass The One Waged Within

When one thousand teakettles smash simultaneously, don’t worry.
When the river gobbles up all your budding dreams, don’t worry.
When everything abandons you, don’t worry.
Hold your esteem high like a twisted branch.
The Buddha will reach down and break it,
and then put it back together with stronger glue.
The Buddha just asks that you fight the good fight,
march the good march,
improvise on the good drum…

What most people don’t realize is that there are two holy wars. The “al-jihad al-asghar” is known as the lesser holy war, while the “al-jihad al-akbar” is the greater war. The lesser war is the one we see plastered on all the television stations. “Allah is greater than Christ.” “Allah drives a limo, Christ drives a pinto.” That kind of thing. Dogma eats Dogma. Fundamentalism vituperates Fundamentalism. Conversely, the greater war, the holiest of holy wars, is fought behind the eyelids. It is all about aligning the pipsqueak self up with the Eternal Self, just like the moon sometimes lines itself up with the sun.

It is all about worshipping eclipses, isn’t it?

Krishna called Arjuna a “Foe Destroyer”, but he wasn’t referring to a man who bludgeons miscreants skulking behind a burning bush. He was referring to the Kshetra (battlefield) within, the place where one activates the greater potentials of existence. Krishna wanted Arjuna to know he was a Foe Destroyer of all the insidious, lecherous, and contemptible things within, not without. But then again, if you follow the eastern texts closely you will notice that they do say another important thing: there is no distinction between within and without. Well, I guess Krishna just thought Arjuna was too attracted to his weapons, or at least his bulky ones.

The inner war starts when the Knower (subjective self) thinks there are things “out there” to be known (objective facts). When the knower starts to look for answers “out there”, the Knower starts to desire too much. This fervid and incendiary desire absolutely wreaks havoc on the Knower, because the Knower will never stop until the object of desire has been assimilated to his or her liking. For example, the object of desire may be a grilled cheese sandwich. Because one sandwich never satisfies, the Knower keeps going back for more and more. The desire for more and more fuels a subtle addiction, and the Knower gets lost in a labyrinth of multiplicity. And we all know what happens in labyrinths—we get lost.

Something churns in me, but it isn’t the threnodies of liberation, the overtures of greatness. I only feel the churning of much mental yoke.

In “Revolutionary Psychology”, one of Samael Aun Weor’s succinct studies into the nature of esotericism, there is a chapter about the lack of stability in the ego, and how we react to different situations with a different mental voice. In other words, instead of being like a resolute statue of pure will, the ego is more like an ugly spider web where all the silvery filaments disagree on the general foundation of the spider web itself. He acerbically notes that “The wretched intellectual being is similar to a house instead of one lord, many servants exist who always want to command and perform their own whims.” So, in order to transcend these bickering internal voices, we need to pull everything to a central point, a point of desireless unity. This is known as the “Labor of Hercules”.

Is it a labor of love too?

For Instant Enlightenment, this is the test:
Can you love during ever-increasing heaven and hell?
Can you love in all directions, inwardly and outwardly?
Even during moods of disgust and pain and shame and death wishes
doubling unto themselves in a tight knot of loneliness and searing torment, can you love?
If you cannot love, nothing changes. - David Deida, Instant Enlightenment

An alchemical analogy:

We should view ourselves as alembics—alchemical flasks—that store the fluxing forces of nature. Because these fluxing forces of nature contend for supremacy within the alembic, we must be very careful when it comes to how we view these forces, especially when the strife within manifests as an incontrollable strife without. Many souls have drowned in their alembics when the whirring and whirling forces within have a reached a type of maximum velocity. This is why we must slowly sublimate the fluxing forces within, which allows the vapors to austerely rise to the flask’s neck. This is known as a willed catharsis.

Mickey Mouse: The willed catharsis could also be called the “great cry within the great war”, right?

Minnie: That is quite a question coming from a figment of someone’s imagination.

True symmetry, the feeling beyond the great war, is perfectly depicted in Mc Escher’s lithograph, “Development I”. In it we see that the once fought-to-be feuding elements of light and darkness—the stygian reptile and the opalescent reptile—are really moving outwards from a concentric point of absolute meaning. The elements in turn create the chessboard of order, and the chessboard in turn is a place of play and unity.

Cyclical Ambient Mesmerism

I feel compelled to explore musical spaces that are far removed from the noise rock milieu. By looping sinuous sounds and droning notes with the help of a digital delay pedal, a super-shifter pedal, and an e-bow, I find I can create multifaceted aural textures that work directly with the right hemisphere of the brain. For years I was concerned with creating music that piqued the interest of left hemisphere deconstructionists and analysts, but now I am more interested in touching the intuitive in the listener. Sadly, the intuitive is what is denied, eschewed, rejected, and ostracized this day and age. The left hemisphere has taken over like a wrathful despot, and is wreaking havoc on all aspects of the world. The musical gestalt--the whole sonic spectrum of vibration, light, and form--has become clouded over by a left hemisphere that is trying to pull away from the whole just so it can live on a marooned island of abstraction. Creating "intuitive music" will help people find insight in internal spaces previously unexplored. It will also help create a balance between the hemispheres.

The Primeval Sound of the Eternal Lion

Many of the images we see are constructed out of sound. Imperceptible frequencies coalesce to create holographic images in the mind's eye, and this process is mirrored in the outside world (which really isn't outside at all). This means that sound is a fundamental property of creation in a corporeal and incorporeal sense. Without sound, pure light would remain static and have no way of propagating itself. Without light, pure sound would have no medium to exist through. This means that everything would cease to exist without the roar of the eternal lion, the eternal lamp, and the primordial waters which allows all souls to float.

Serpentine and Sacral

I find that if I wake up (usually at dawn), read a few pages from a book, meditate, and then go back to sleep, the dream world becomes incredibly colorful and pregnant with lucidity. When I adhered to this routine this morning, it felt as though my dream body--or soma pneumatikon--had a tender and brief kundalini experience. In the lucid dream world, I was aware of my body lying on its side and I was aware of my surroundings. By my feet, or should I say just below my feet, I felt a temblor that burgeoned and intensified if I just listened to it and only it. The quake must have been the base or serpentine energy rising from the earth. Like a behemoth emerging from a mythical and mystical ocean, the presence of the energy felt powerful and massive. When this energy infiltrated my body, my surrounding dissolved into a whirring, throbbing white energy. I said to myself, "I must be in the central channel of conscious attention. This is where the world and self are truly felt to be one." I soon awoke after this realization, slightly chagrined over the fact that the experience was over, slightly elated that it transpired. I am going to continue with this practice or routine and see what else I can discover.

Hand Awareness

We use our hands for many different tasks. We explore the tactile world with our hands. We gesticulate with our hands. The yogic adept describes heightened states of awareness with hand-symbols (mudras). We reach out to others with our hands. Our hands know how to surrender. The child and the adult consult textures through fervent fingers and eager palms, or fervent palms and eager fingers. The quadruped and the biped both benefit from having hands.

Hand Awareness--or HA for short--helps us activate the dormant intelligence of our five fingers. When the intelligence of the hands is awakened, we start feeling the multidimensional reality of the world. Surfaces are transformed into tactile expressions of immense depth and subtlety. The skin becomes a landscape. The felt world becomes more real.

One simple exercise helps us activate the intelligence of the hands. This exercise is as follows:

For a few minutes each day, focus on your hands and only your hands. Focus on the beauty they effortlessly exhibit. Focus on the blood flowing through them. Focus on the convoluted nervous system that teaches them new tricks. Focus on the creative power they act as receivers, transmitters, and conduits for.

Now try to imagine a universe without hand intelligence. Try to imagine a world without "helping hands". It is next to impossible, isn't it?

Conclude the meditation by saying to yourself, "I am grateful for my hands." This exercise will surely awaken in us all the reality of the infinite hand.