The Art of Solipsism

“Art for art’s sake.” The statement is inherently solipsistic. And in a survey of the art considered to be “modern” it must be admitted that solipsism is a distinguishing characteristic of the “modern”. In music, in sculpture, in painting, in architecture, in literature; we find the same stamp. This does not mean that it is bad, and of course the best of it is quite good; but if it is solipsistic, then it is solipsistic: and it is obviously and blatantly solipsistic. What interests me is the phenomenon of the genius of a culture turning in upon its self, and becoming its own subject matter. When art no longer serves truth, beauty, and good; should one not ask why? And for that matter what was ever in it for culture with that “truth, beauty, and good” thing anyway? Is there any reason that it should not be abandoned?

At present we exist in the so-called “post-modern” era, but the solipsistic narcissism of the “modern” era has inoculated the popular mind. There is a navel-gazing element awakened by modernity that must be assimilated if culture is to advance beyond self-worship. Art cannot but express the seething flux of human aspiration, and perhaps the “modern” period is the cultural equivalent of the adolescent’s rebellion against the constraints to will imposed upon individuals by the dictates of society.

If so, then it is a milepost on the path of cosmic maturation. And when we have become the future we will look upon these creations as charming mementos from our rambunctious youth.




Bad Art


a lot of people these days don't trust themselves to know bad art

well, you can always tell bad art
because it needs an essay to prop it up


and a crowd of boot lickers and apologists to appreciate it

Word and Symmetry

The existence of words is made possible by the mind's spontaneous recognition of symmetries. Trees, for instance, share common elements that could be described as the symmetries of tree-ness. The symmetries of tree-ness can receive an additional mental symmetry in utterance. 

This utterance becomes a cultural artifact, and we say something has been named. When the culture of utterance achieves a palette of symmetries that enable communication of even the most rudimentary sort we have a language. Crows have a language. Dogs have a language. Almost all animals have a repertoire of utterance as behavior cuing specific symmetries found in their environment; i.e. a language. None of these languages seem rudimentary to their native speakers because any language is limited by the physical ability to form sounds, and by the native ability to recognize and bring into the field of consciousness, symmetries. 

Words do not symbolize their referents. Words become part of the mental symmetry of their referents; and symmetry is the foundation of the recognition of anything what so ever. To perceive something is one thing and to recognize it is another. What ever the reality of trees may be the only way we know anything about them is through information assembly in the brain. The assembly of this information into meaning requires the spontaneous recognition of symmetries, and utterance becomes an integral element of the corresponding symmetry. Words do not re-present their referents; words are an integral element of presence.

In My Opinion

Harboring opinions is like keeping pet vampires.

A Poem

it is not the Fall that saddens

the honey-brown forest floor and black branch rivened sky
hold promise of a Spring
the sun is with us
and the birds of winter warm the yard

it is the Winter
we approach a Winter with no end but the abyss


we dwell not upon it
but within




so let us warm ourselves at the fire of the moment
and build that fire to make radiance the fruit of our existence

and in so living


never die






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Counting From Zero

Considering the mystery of being is rather like a mathematical problem. In mathematics it is necessary to start counting not from one, but from zero. 

Most systems claiming some inside track on reality start their consideration from an arbitrary point: say, man as a spiritual being. This is tantamount to a mathematics that starts counting from, say….seven, or twenty one, or any other quite real number that has its true value only when the counting starts at zero. Starting from a pre-existing point of value shifts all subsequent value judgments, and makes it quite impossible to make any accurate declaration about anything other than heat and cold and similar self-descriptive elements of the real. 

All things must be compared to the existence of nothing at all.

Much Ado About Nothing

Between molecular atoms loosely hung by shared electrons is Nothing

 

Between the galaxies spinning in loose knit groups is Nothing interspersed with very little 

Born into Nothing and Nothing permitting it’s expansion 

This universe and all within must have a number

But there is no end to Nothing 

Nothing is beyond the reach of Nothing 

Nothing is everywhere 

Everywhere there is not something 

Nothing can be found 

In want of Nothing we lose the meaning of all things 

An insight gained to Nothing’s nature must be treated as a treasure 

For then 

We have Nothing to lose

Sense and Sensibility

It can be taken as self-evident that the awareness associated with animal life is all of a piece. Creatures great and small exhibit the same faculty of cognition of an exterior world. This mysterious quality has been called “awareness” or “consciousness”, but pasting a word over a mystery does not dispel our ignorance of its true nature. 

So awareness is everywhere the same. It expresses itself in ways unique to the experiencing organism's sensing faculties, but awareness is simply aware. Humans share this property with all animal life forms, and the difference between mice and men is not in what is doing the driving, but in the capacities of the vehicle being driven. The brain is not an organ separate from the body. The hazy tentacles of nerve strands reach through the entire fabric of the body, and the brain is the nodule of nerve cells that ties them all together. It is a complex physical form necessitating a well-understood transmission of electrical impulses that supply the brain with a flow of information about the outside world: information that in the brain becomes experience: awareness. The brain of every creature is as much a part of its physical configuration as its mouth, and the brain and the body are all about filling the mouth, and filling the mouth is all about the continuance of the awareness attached to it. Every creaturely form is simply a form of awareness feeding. The brain and the accompanying senses exist as a necessary element of the continuity of awareness. Reproduction (which is a continuation of the same awareness) and physical maintenance both rely on awareness acting upon impulse rising from the physical shape of the brain. Senses are in place to provide information necessary to the rise of impulses necessary to the continuance of physical form, which is necessary to the survival of individual awareness. As awareness, through millions of years of refinement, has sophisticated its capacities to experience and to survive we have its latest experiential hot-rod: man. 

In man, awareness has created a dangerously advanced feeder. In most creatures the limitations of physical form assure that the senses will have limited opportunity for exploitation. In man the exploitation of the senses is limited only by the imagination; and man is gifted with a powerful imagination. In most creatures the fact that awareness is wholly identified with its creaturely form is made harmless by the limitations of its form. In man the fact that awareness is wholly identified with its creaturely form is a cornucopia of un-necessary exploitation of the power of sensing. The hypnosis common to all animals as to the true nature of being is, in man, a luxury that the world can ill afford.

Refectory

Chipmunks have nibbled my ’49 Dodge brake lines 

Kitchen trash will molder in its high-sided bed 

And wood-rats will have a fine home 'til I get round to a fix 

A bear tore up the kitchen last week 

The rock that fasts the big doors downstairs easily nosed away

The .45 is kept at hand 

The woods folk find nourishment where can 

Questioning only the urgency of absence 

All creatures are winged mouths But for apprenticeship

Seeing: In and Around

The fact of sight as a physical phenomenon is one thing, and how what is looked upon is seen is quite another. One individual looking at a certain spotted salamander sees a loathsome slimy crawly thing; another sees the beautiful living vestige of an entire eco-system. One is seeing around the thing; projecting imagination upon it as if covering it with paint. The other is seeing within the thing; imagination drawing up meaning like an old-fashioned hand pump draws water. Sight is a physical phenomenon, but seeing has a meaning component that is wholly dependent on how one looks at things. How one looks at things is wholly dependent on the training (or lack there of) of imagination.

Spring Talks on Spring Walks

With friends I walked an Ozark hollow

In the time of spring flowers 

Seeking a place to sit we had to laugh 

For there was none 

And scarce room for feet 

So luxuriously had the warm days awakened the earth to life 

Perched on a moss-covered limestone ledge we mused 

How odd Where one can’t find a place to sit 

Another will go with a bulldozer 

Consider the Lilies

If we accept the Bang as read and don’t worry too much about the other side of it, a rather beautiful picture emerges: primal matter coalescing into hydrogen atoms, hydrogen atoms pushed together by the shadowy call of forces yet unexplained, proximity and pressure giving life to massive glowing spheres in which hydrogen is squeezed together forming more massive atoms up to the weight of iron, stars explode with pressures creating even more massive elements and spewing them all into endless space where they coalesce into molecules and again into second order stars, some bits left behind forming little balls known as planets, on some planets temperate conditions permit the formation of exotic molecules making copies of themselves, a molecule exhibits the field phenomenon described as awareness, over a period of millennia awareness refines the nature of its wakened state by building ever more sophisticated stacks of molecules, and I sit here brooding on the beauty that surrounds me.

West Window Poem #3 

Sunset colors silence the imagination 

First quarter moon brilliant against the blue 

New leaves glow as if from inner light 

Circling our incandescent dot 

This ponderous bit of left behind sun 

Traverses the immense dark desert 

And here 

Every hot day is swelling life into spring 

Green Consciousness

The words consciousness and awareness are similar to the word energy, and unlike the word green. Green is the event made inevitable when electromagnetic energy of certain wavelengths hit the optic nerve. Consciousness, awareness, and energy are described in terms of their affects. And cannot be descirbed in terms of the nuts and bolts that are the substrate of manifestation for those nuts and bolt are a complete and utter mystery. Every life form without exception is a form of feeding. And what in every case is fed is awareness. The universe has mouths in variety that defy imagination, and in every case they feed the same cosmic principle.

Daddy Longlegs 

Little blind men tap their way across the forest floor

Bending to drink the dew that beads upon brown leaves 

In moments of power seize an injured moth 

In moments of terror flee the wood ants jaws 

They scuffle with each other 

Or they congregate in piles 

They tap their way across my table or my shoe 

I think what differs most between us 

Is that men 

Like gods 

Are subject to compassion 

While spiders 

Though endowed with similar appetites

See no further than the reach of their legs

Free Will

It seems to me utterly ridiculous that the question of “Free Will” is still batted about. Will always has an object. We don’t decide what is important to us: and what is important to us determines saints and sinners. Will always serves something and in best case desires dignity, not freedom. No one does anything of free will because there is no such thing. If nominally we wish to create such a category that’s fine, and we all know what we’re talking about. But those who commit heinous acts are those in whom will is the least free. The inability to exercise freedom with dignity justifies freedom being taken away. 

There is willing freely, but there is no free will: those in whom will has abandoned humanity have no right to the term.

Possessing the Will 

The painting is not in the brush 

Nor music in the lute 

Or books in the pen 

It is not the hand that builds 

Nor is it the mind that thinks 

 But that will is turned to these ends 

Impulse and Idea

One element common to animal life forms regardless of the topography of the nervous system is impulse. Behavior is a kinetic response to impulse, and every creature comes replete with a set of impulses suitable for the survival of its unique physical configuration. If we would dissolve away everything but impulse from a tiger and from a lamb we could still tell them apart, though we would find the same primary urges to feed, fight, and fuck. Impulse is the instinctual goad to behavior. Without impulse there is no behavior, but impulse in no way implies conscious awareness or thought. Creatures with no brain at all exhibit impulse, and in creatures with brains, impulse is in every case responsible for the kinetic activity of thought: conscious awareness is not necessary or implied. Impulse is specific, and idea emerges from impulse. Both are kinetic. Awareness is generic and emerges as a property of intelligence considered in the broadest possible manner. Awareness is a field phenomenon. The most striking difference between one human being and another is the point of impulse at which awareness is engaged.  

Choosing Choices

Cows choose grass 

Dogs choose bones

 

 People make all kinds of choices 

Make Nice

Any form of government will do if people would just be nice to each other. 

Revolution is a Song of Hope 

When history has no answer to the question it has posed 

and oppression’s dark grasp constricts the heart 

When ideas are empowered over happiness 

and opportunity’s lustrous glow dims Flickers And goes out 

They talk of revolution 

Each foaming fleck of tide perceives itself possessing a direction 

And revolution is its song of hope 

The moon it is 

That pipes tide's tune 

And the singing flecks of tide’s ovation 

The pull 

The sweep 

Of history’s dark sway 

Assures the next dark movement of its day 

And to the small still-rooted reed 

Their song of hope is the birth-cry 

Of the next oppression 

The Chicken, the Egg, and Virgin Birth

Just for the fun of it let’s conduct a little imaginary experiment. Let’s take a cubic meter of space and shield it from all penetrating particles and all pervasive waveforms, then let’s identify and remove all bits of anything that exist within our test cube. What we have now is a cubic meter of nothing. And not your garden-variety colloquial nothing, but the real thing: real nothing. Our defined space is wholly empty: but there is room only for what will fit within it; the gorge point at present would seem to be matter at the state found in the interior of black holes.

There has to be nothing or there wouldn’t be room for anything (this was pointed out to me by my precocious daughter at age six). The presence of anything defines space, and perhaps defined space is the ultimate nature of everything. Absolute nothingness is devoid of properties, and string theory could be described as nothing achieving propertyness. As to why it would do that, well that is another question….perhaps it was bored.

Absolute nothingness has no dimensions, no time, no space. And all it takes to create an eternity of endless space is for the merest infinitesimal something to take form. Everything that exists (including an idea) has the true measure of its existence only when compared to Nothing.

So it is obvious that Nothing, in the first Virgin Birth, was somehow pregnant with Space-Time. And the rest is history.

The Real Non-verbal World



There is no real non-verbal world
Of which no accurate pronouncement can be made


With conjecture or without
The stone falls
No contradistinction left or right
Anymore than up

And though the illusion that opposites exist
Will serve as fact of common sense
The properties of all things and phenomenon
Are not
And cannot be
Contained
They exist not in contrast


Everything that exists
Exists at once
And all movement in this net of simultaneity
Called the Universe

Is some degree of lateral


In the real non-verbal world



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Light and Dark

Allusion to “Light and Dark” may be the most ancient religious metaphor in common usage: the forces of Darkness, the transforming power of Enlightenment. And always light and dark are presented as a contrast of opposites. Well, they are not.

Darkness is the abode of light. Light does not displace the dark: light infuses the dark. And those who would eschew all familiarity with the dark are just as misguided as those who would romantically embrace it.

Manichean separation of elements sets them at war. Darkness is given a power that belies its inherent passivity. Light is left homeless in a vacuum of ignorance: agar plate for dangerous imaginings.

Self-knowledge is not concerned with protecting the thought-forms of naivety, but with informing the dark with light.

Shadows


The setting sun has set the sky ablaze

Trees loom black
Shadows reach long

There are shadows without
There are shadows within

Vacancies in luminance
When perceived appear


As creatures of a nether light

Industrial Feudalism

Feudalism is the default system of human communal intercourse, and we have in the space of some few hundred years made an epochal shift from agrarian feudalism into the age of industrial feudalism. Industrial feudalism has an identical hierarchical structure to agrarian feudalism but is based on the production of goods to such a point that even agriculture is subsumed as an industrial product. There are lords; there are serfs. Lords own the means of production. Serfs are bound to labor in production no less than they were a thousand years ago, and the middle class as an economic class is a falsehood. The real middle class is not the management class serf, but rather the artist, craftsman, and small business operator. And again this is unchanged from its previous agrarian constellation.

Government is quite another matter. A democratic republic is founded on the common dignity of all beings, and on a rule of law dedicated to such principles. All government is imperiled by hubris, disenfranchisement, and ennui.

Reciprocal respect for the dignity of individuals is the only hope for civility to survive civilization. And if we are unable to grant to others the dignity of their confusion then there can be no dignity at all.

Equality

we hear a lot of preaching these days

about equality

there is no equality

never has been

nothing is the equal of anything else

equality as an ideal denigrates the low

and debases the high

it is an idea invented by the jealous to enflame the ignorant

and it is an affront to nature

the sanctity of our uniqueness is the foundation of human dignity

and the test of dignity is as we extend it to others

this is the sum total of all the equality that ever was

A Fairy Tale

Once upon a time on a far distant planet there lived a band of omnivorous monkey-like creatures. Being omnivorous succeeding generations naturally selected a penchant for violent alpha males. Dependence upon violent alpha males, and the survival-enhancing trait of cooperation, naturally selected a penchant for obedience. The omnivorous monkey-like being was also on a systematic rising curve of intelligence.

They did very well for themselves and were soon not only able to defend themselves from larger dangerous animals, but also to exploit larger dangerous animals to whatever purpose. In some small millions of years they had established complete domination of their biosphere (no small achievement). The cumulative thought-forms of their technologies were quite impressive and the average member of their communities had not a care in the world.

Unfortunately the instinctual penchant for violence and the inclination to obedience inseminated their advancing technologies, and they ultimately destroyed not only themselves but also the natural system that produce them.

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Putting an End to Theological Speculation




There may not be a heaven


But most certainly there is a hell



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Food for Thought

It seems to go unnoticed that somehow the food we eat is transformed into conscious awareness.

Madness

How do we know if someone is mad (as in crazy)? They live in a dream world? Their thought is unhinged from organic reality? They value to obsession various products of the imagination?

It fits most human beings on planet earth, and is not a crime against human dignity. Most people are well intended and nice enough just as they are. The problem: soldiers everywhere think they are on the right side.

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At the Confederate Museum


The daughters of the Confederacy have a button from General Lee’s coat

And they have Stonewall Jackson’s canon
They have the bullet riddled battle flag of an overrun Ohio brigade
And a hipbone with a Minnie-ball lodged in it

And they have letters by the score
From the hands of men and boys swept up by war
To their women


On the street outside
The crowded Shenandoah Valley smelled of sulfur
(Dupont)

And there, so near
The gentle Blue Ridge


This purple mountain majesty
Was it any solace to the eyes of dying soldiers blue or grey
Whose blood now lives the flowers
Of Virginia fields



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"What is the Meaning of This"

Meaning is relative, and an element with no relationship to another has no meaning. The meaning of any act or object is determined by the content of relationship. The musical note G has a different meaning sounded in a void, or in a G chord, or in an E chord, or in a C chord. G is the identical vibration in each case, but it’s meaning is different. 

The categories of meaning sentient beings can form are like music: limited and infinite. In the music of being, it is normal to sound the chord life strikes, rather than sound a chord of one's choosing. We can not choose the meanings that occur in us for they are spontaneous elements of pattern recognition. Dogmas, convictions, and faiths, like tuning a musical instrument, predetermine the way any note of being will resonate in the soul. Objectivity amounts to a lack of intellectual investment in predetermined resonance, and an ear for harmony and discord.

The surface of a sphere is a limited infinite plane the center of which is everywhere.

Imagination Education

For all paeans to imagination, imagination is an under-rated and misunderstood faculty of mind. Here's how it looks to me. For those who imagine otherwise I suggest we define our terms. Imagination is a self-generated perception: no more, no less. 

We live in a universe that is as it is whether we have an idea about it or not, and our sensory perceptions enter the brain as electrical stimulations from physical contact with a co-existing universe. To understand the assembly of these stimulations into the mystery of experience would be to understand the nature of life itself. As yet no one has stepped forward with this information. Creative imagination is a subset of the primitive faculty of memory. A huge survival advantage is to that creature able to compare and contrast the shapes of previous experience. These “shapes of previous experience” exist only as thought-forms. As the ability to harbor these thought-forms grew with advances in the shape of the brain, imagination emerged as a faculty of Mind. It is quite a breakthrough when you think about it. It is all molecular action-reaction up to the emergence of experience. Experience is more than the sum of its parts, and is the only new thing in the universe; when experience assumes a thought-form something that never before existed has come into being. Thought-forms exist physically as shapes of electrical activity in the tissue of the brain, and I suspect that the same idea would occupy a similar shape in the tissue of any brain that entertained it. 

That we can control our thoughts is a clear demonstration of some small primacy that mind has over matter. The fact that we can not create an idea for which we do not posses the necessary thought-forms, lays bare the extraordinary importance of education. The less we know, the greater our freedom to pin the imaginary tail on the inconceivable donkey.

Self Love

The phrase “Self Love” is used usually in the context of an auto-eroticism that makes self an object of worship: always a sign of deep interior imbalance. But there is another kind of self-love the absence of which is the mark of imbalance. The love of mother for child, the love of nature, the love of art, these have elements of a true and appropriate regard for one's self. And just as in a mature erotic relationship one's self is dissolved in mystery, if one has not encountered self as mystery, one has not encountered the self.

Art

Art is a tricky subject these days because anything goes. If I defecate on a paper plate in some novel way and I call it art, then by definition it is art. And I might even get a museum show. And since my achievement is so remarkably novel it must be considered high art as opposed to pretty pictures which clearly are mere decoration…wall candy we could call that. Whatever we consider to be art, it must be admitted that art is a cultural Rorschach not an objective social product: what we consider to be Art tells us a great deal about ourselves, and tells us nothing at all about Art. 

Art is an intentional structuring of the imagination through the vehicle of the senses. In our troubled times of anomie the the arts attract the endeavor of lunatics and sociopaths because opportunity exists for aggrandizement in capturing naive imaginations. Much outrageous art (though it may even be fun) is the product of such of beings. There are individuals, reasonably sane, of various talents, who wish to find for themselves some importance. These artists often do very good work; but though art may be an avenue to some degree of status, even drugged out tramps will be issued an artistic license if they are persistent enough. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who can make a living with a box of paints, or a musical instrument, or a pen, is OK in my book whatever illusions they may labor under. And lastly there are those whom Art has called to herself. 

My theory: Art is coeval with the most distant emergence of tool making, monkey-like, progenitors; and as the curiosity of these progenitors expanded into the unseen connections between things Art was there to enable the invisible to enter a world of form. Delights that never before existed, and truths beyond the reach of ordinary communication: these I believe to be the historical domain of Art. And in St Thomas Aquinas’ “Summa Theologiae” you will find a description of the responsibility of the echelons of religious orders that exactly fits my understanding of the responsibility of the artist.

Bad Art 

Lots of folks don’t trust themselves 

To know bad art when they see it 

Well, you can always tell bad art

 

Because it needs an essay to hold it up 

And a crowd of boot-lickers and apologists 

To appreciate it .

A Failure of Imagination

Strange as it may seem the world of humanity in which we find ourselves is one that has been imagined into being. Wars, art, politics, national boundaries, doctrines of every stripe, the form that the familial instinct assumes, automobiles and blenders: every aspect of what we call civilization is the product of the human imagination. And all it would take to end war, and poverty, and a wealth of other human suffering is humanity to begin to imagine in a different way. But that's not going to happen, is it.

By Decree 

Why should not the fish 

Make free use of desert sand to spawn 

 Let it be so 

And the birds 

In stately groves of kelp beneath the sea 

Let them nest henceforth 

The whales 

Do they not ache to share the meadow 

With their bovine brethren 

Let it be done 

And lastly 

Let all mankind Love one another 

Principles of Personal Growth: 101

The ordinary process of human personal growth proceeds entirely by accident and according to the whims of nature. And that’s OK. There are those however who experience a nagging absence of closure in the life that accident and nature provide: who are therefore called or pushed to an attempt to see beyond the veil of the ordinary. Well, it’s a jungle out there and even in the field of consciousness raising there are predators, quicksands, and parasites. 

One of the dangerous vulnerabilities of the spiritually curious is the inclination to be something before one has discovered what one is. One wants to be THAT without having understood THIS, and thus the blind have led the blind for millennia. The way it works is like making a topiary of a shrub. The aspiring individual encounters an attractive form in the spiritual jungle and gravitates to systems that will help them shape their Self accordingly. Some of these systems are extremely sophisticated, and topiaries are not a bad thing. However, though these forms are often quite lovely, this is certainly not the path to greatest fruition of human potential. 

There is a polarity of influences in personal growth. There is moving away from the dark and there is growing to the light, and interestingly enough both of these natural inclinations lead the same direction. The dark is not going anywhere. We will always be rooted there, and draw nourishment from its mystery. White light is the blend of all wavelengths, and if we are not distracted by red or blue or yellow it leads one way. We will never be more than we can be, and we can always be less than we are. The question is what are we, and what fruit are we destined to provide the universe. Fruit is the product of flower and comes of itself through environmental pollination. We have little influence concerning fruit. This is a crucial point. It is a tragic truth that many individuals, even those with great potential, spend their energy aping some fruit rather than gathering the light that would naturally produce the flowering of awakened Awareness. We can never be more than we can be, but we can experience at the limits of our being. And it is in living in the limits of our being that we gather the most light. And it is that light infusing the dark nature of our selves that inevitably produces the growth that leads to the flowering of awakened intelligence.

We always must begin from where we are, and nothing can be given for which there is no resting place. The first requisite is the will to be attentive: sleep, in its many forms, comes of itself. 

Didactic Bluebird 

There once was a bluebird 

Who convened a group of chipmunks 

In order to expand their horizons 

“Realize your untapped potential 

 Spread your wings and fly” 

And soon the chipmunks lined up 

And flapping their little arms jumped off the stump 

Bruising their noses somewhat severely 

The bluebird flew off 

In search of chipmunks of greater insight and ability 

And certain of the chipmunks go daily to the stump 

Hoping this time 

To get it right 

Look Ma, No Aegis!

At a certain point in the process of individuation it becomes necessary and natural for one to abandon all intellectual aegis. And in fact it might be accurate to say that where there is aegis individuation is not. And it is the element of aegis in religious institutions that is their value as well as the limiting factor of their value in the process of spiritual evolution. So long as there exists aegis in the structure of our world-view we are leaning on imaginings. Even if the principles of said aegis are unerringly reflective of what is real, so long as we cling to any aegis we have only the reflection of what is real: we have not entered the real.

If in your travels you meet the Buddha, give him a high five. If you meet the Christ, do unto him, as you’d like in return. “We don’t need no stinking aegis!”

Truth, Beauty, and Good 

Life-dreams 

Cloud faces on the smoke haze of consciousness 

Coalesce and smile

 

And slowly metamorph

Though it is our habit to restrain them 

The heart's wind is not our own 

Save it runs our mill 

And the faces in the clouds are fleshed imagination 

If we lose Truth 

 And Beauty 

 And Good 

 What are we to imagine That will satisfy .

One Planet, One Problem

Ozone depletion, resource depletion, pollution, rising oceans, the rise of the mean temperature of the earth, the incident of civil disorder: these and their ilk are not separate problems. All civilization-threatening inconveniences are merely spoor of the true specter that is stalking the earth. Many young people are, while in high school, introduced to the classic fruit fly experiment: a single female and a single male fruit fly are put in a five-gallon bottle with about ten pounds of sugar. The population rise is swift and dramatic, as is the precipitous crash to zero. There is still plenty of sugar left.

Property ownership is a necessary element to civil order, but mankind is a guest on planet earth. We've seen photos of earth taken by night satellite. Mankind’s electrical success blazing in all its glory looks to me, for all the world, like a patient with an advanced case of smallpox. The planet is running a fever and the prognosis is not good. Like some virulent disease we have overcome nature’s checks against our proliferation, and like some virulent disease, our unchecked numbers will eventually and inevitably destroy our host. Nature will set about exploiting the new opportunity created by the collapse of the present natural order, but for those of us dependent upon civil order it is not going to be pretty.

There exist what seem to be insurmountable obstacles to any efforts other than treating symptoms. Corporate greed, insensate territorial imperatives, innocent insouciance, and the urge to fuck, are not going away any time soon. The sky is falling, but it falls very slowly in human terms. The roar of the falls can be heard quite distinctly, but we may already be in the inescapable suck of the gorge.

And as our good ship “Humanity” slowly sinks beneath the waves of time we shall hear a lot of officious talk about how the deck chairs should be arranged.

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Lord Kelvin’s Birthday


At a gathering not long ago
Speaking with a friend
We conversed thusly


“Lord Kelvin calculated

(you know how those physicist dudes
have always been fascinated with building mathematical models
of things that are real?)

That if you tagged every molecule in a pint of water
And then stirred that pint evenly into all the seas of all the world
And if you then took up one pint from any part of any sea on earth
There would be found therein
One hundred of your tagged molecules

Plus or minus ten"


What the good Lord Kelvin wished to demonstrate
Is the inconceivable minuteness of the molecule

But it made me think of some mere million gallons
Of industrial vomit



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Time and Space Revisited

There is a lot of loose talk these days about time and space. Which is interesting since no one knows what space is, and time is apparently an intellectual construct. Energy has the same problem. If you look at the physics guy’s talk about “energy” (you know, E=MC2 and all that) you will find that there is no description of what energy is: we must content ourselves with an account of what it does. Space, it seems, does nothing; and time is the mathematical trajectory of energy.

Insofar as I am capable of understanding it, the latest theoretical model has matter as wiggles of space. Well I’m down with that, and I can picture a photon departing a distant star (no acceleration mind you) as a rift in space that has no discrete reality other than the event that is its existence. And I can picture a point in supposedly empty space that is crossed by the rifts of rippling space from every light-emitting object that does not have something blocking its way. Hardly empty, I’d say. In fact it seems to me we have here a gelatinous fabric of wiggles of space that will sometimes coalesce by an inherent affinity in the nature of wiggles into what is known as matter. So wiggling space is the fact of quarks; quarks are the fact of sub-atomic particles; and atoms are the stuff of which we are woven. Consciousness (whatever that may be), insofar as we know, arises only from certain very specific stacks of matter, which is in fact merely space with an attitude: indicating that consciousness is a spatial event engendered by temporal energy fields (whatever that means).

I consider this self-evident. It has far reaching implications with regard to individuality and territorial imperatives; and this holds interesting portents with regard to the limits of conscious awareness and our supposed aloneness.

Experience

The old saw “you can’t take it with you” could not be more wrong. It is quite true that you can't take it with you if you sit on it, but if you turn it into experience there is no place for it to go but with you.

Experience is the fact of our existence as sentient beings, and experience is the only thing that we truly possess. Some have said that experience is actually what we are, but it is obvious that if there were no timeless empty vessel, the shifting iridescent pool of time we know as experience could not exist. If there were no clay there could be no bowl. 

 All physical possessions, all emotional bonds, all pleasure and all pain, reduce in the soul of being to states of experience. Experience is the taste of being amidst the flux of the meaning-saturated gestalt. Some say the ultimate mechanics of experience are, and will remain, wholly mysterious; but since it is us, it is merely an exercise in self discovery. What could be simpler! 

One of the great and beautiful mysteries of life is the gift that individual beings have to shape and to cultivate patterns of personal experience. For this reason a single event presents different a experience in different participants. We bring to experience the colors of our being and paint such meaning as we are able. Conversely experience shapes us in an endless feedback loop that in its best case spirals toward cosmic maturation.

We often meet, in the difficult times in which we find ourselves, a tragic misappropriation of experience: a misappropriation responsible for most of the appalling grief made inevitable by beings in whom the mind rules experience rather than experience existing as the articulator of the mind.

Hunter Gatherer and the Moral Imperative

Let's consider what categories of instinctual inclination the hunter-gatherer animal must possess if it is to survive, if only to inquire about the placement of those primitive imperatives in these august days of advanced civilization. It seems to me obvious that an inherent aptitude for recognizing opportunity in the broadest possible sense of the word must be an inevitably survival enhancing trait. And we must add that the exploitation of it's environment is the only path of survival open to any organism. These attributes seem self evident. It is certainly obvious that the human creature is inherently adapted to self-serving exploitation of it's environment. “Self serving exploitation of environment” could manifest as tilling a garden or robbing a liquor store. What makes criminal behavior "criminal" is its effect in the lives of others.

Empathy is not a subset of “self serving exploitation of environment”. Empathy is the spontaneous apprehension of oneself in another.

Some men rob you with a six-gun and some with a fountain pen.

Democracy and the Rise of Fundamentalism

These days, when the word “democracy” is spoken in hushed religious tones, it is well to remember the founding fathers of the United States designed a republic with inherent checks against the politically unsophisticated masses. When reading “The Communist Manifesto” it is well to ask if there is any reason to expect a government of and by the proletariat to be better than the bourgeoisie at resisting the corrosive temptations of power. And when Lenin stated that religion was the opiate of the masses he meant not that it brought euphoria, but that religion soothed the pain of unpleasant social realities with an anodyne of imaginings.

An unpleasant side effect of the right and proper social leveling that we are experiencing today is a degree of grass roots hostility toward intellectuals and objectivity. No one would expect the mathematical ability of the median individual to match that of a professor of mathematics. But in the field of public discourse one opinion must formally be accorded the same weight as the next with no recourse to any scale of reality. Belief is accorded the same weight as knowledge, and if I think two and two make five a serious discussion of the matter is in order.

This is a deplorable situation and perhaps irremediable. Confusion and presumption and the ensuing chaos will have to play themselves out. And if humanity survives its planetary adolescence we can expect some semblance of maturity to emerge of its own accord.

Keep your seat belt buckled.

Lore, Legend, Myth: the Evil Yes-Man

Let us set aside hocus-pocus of every stripe, and talk about Soul and Spirit. Soul and Spirit are not the property of religious descriptions of reality: Soul and Spirit are perceived aspects of being that must be accounted for in even secular myth building. 

What is the existential nature of the Soul? What is it within us that we discover and then notice as our very own “Soul”? Taking the human animal as we find it, Soul is a haze of potential latent in the human mind. The capacity for love and loathing, for desire and disdain, the inclination to be and not to be, all yearnings to and fro rise from the latent potential which is the Soul. Like a trout rises to the fly or flees a shadow in response to perceived configurations in the field of reality so is the nature of the Soul. 

That the Soul does not choose to rise: that it is drawn, and that it does not choose what to find attractive, any awakened awareness will discover for itself. Spirit is the element of being which determines our response to the voice of the Soul. Everything the Soul is capable of is not attractive to a given Spirit: not every inclination will engage our will. And it is here, in the nature of our willing, that the Spirit displays itself. As an example let’s take sex. It is the soul that is the repository of the sexual inclination, and then it is the Spirit that determines how sex is configured in our lives. And any apparent maturation of the Soul is the result of the Soul consigning itself to the will of an awakening Spirit. This is the story told in the fable of “The Ten Bulls” that we find in Buddhist lore. 

So the Soul and the Spirit are arguably experienced as organs of mentation. And mentation here need not be confined to the kind of supposed intentional thinking we find in humans. Unless we are ready to dismiss lower animal behavior as a matrix of tropisms it is obvious that they too posses these organs of mentation. It is certainly obvious that they experience joy and suffering; and if this joy and suffering reduces to tropism, what does that say about human suffering and what does that imply about that in our selves to which we say yes or no? And what is it in the creature that possesses the yes-no imprimatur? Which brings us to the question of good and evil. The soul is an iridescent haze of potentiality. There is no evil that is not private good. It is all about that to which we say "YES".

The Invisible Man Delivers Pizza to a Mannequin

Reality is unitary and seamless. Throughout history those with some intuitive understanding of the fabric of reality have had to resort to metaphor and to parsing in order to transmit to others something of what to them is obvious. There exist myriad systems that claim to have the inside track on the real thing. Some systems are thousands of years old and some are proudly nouveau. But every one of them is simply a different way of slicing up the same Cosmic Pizza. 

One slices a pizza to make it manageable: possible to consume with some degree of order. All systems from Vajrayana to Eckankar to Catholicism make the same claim with regard to revelation of reality. There is only one Cosmic Pizza and though it can be sliced into a jigsaw puzzle, it cannot be made more or less than what it is; and while the best of these systems have genuine technical advantages over an unconsidered view, the worst of these systems could be described as “The Emperor’s New Pizza.” Not to make light of these things, but none of these systems are anything other than a useful technology for slicing the same Cosmic Pizza and for noticing how it is put together. Systems that are wholly invented are wholly useless at best, and wholly dangerous at worst.

Which brings us to the Invisible Man. We cannot see the Invisible Man because he is invisible. But if we dress him up: presto, there he is. So another way of considering the system thing is as the Invisible Man's tailor. Be the garments simple or garish, no matter how you dress him up the Invisible Man is just as he is. And heaven forbid that we should touch the naked form. I, being a ploddingly typical male, find myself preferring the Invisible Woman in Lycra.

Then again the system thing is like dressing a department store mannequin. Of course the clothes fit! In the best of cases whatever the style, the cloth is cut to favor the figure. In the worst of cases the figure is merely a format for a flight of couture fancy. But in the beginning and in the end there is only one Cosmic Pizza, and the Invisible Man is just as he is, and the department store mannequin is unchanged no matter how you dress her up.

Reality is unitary and seamless.

Satori

It is best when discussing reality to avoid romanticized terms. Mysterious meanings are detrimental to productive discourse, and words buggered by generations of dilettantes and poseurs are difficult to use effectively. Though it often seems those who use the word “enlightenment” should have their mouths washed out with soap, it must be admitted that satori is a factual potential in the repertoire of human experience.

Followed back far enough the word Zen translates roughly to meditation. But the fact of Zen as it exists is predicated upon an event known as satori, and it is satori that has historically given Zen its unique flavor in the chocolate shop of spiritual discipline.

Satori is not the property of Zen. It is not unheard of that epiphanies of seismic proportions occur in minds that have never heard the word “satori”, never considered courting enlightenment, and in minds that couldn't care less. The thread upon which enlightenment events are strung is preparation. Preparation might be willed or unwilled, negative or positive, solitary confinement or consummate freedom: preparation is the first requisite. But a properly kindled stove needs the right spark: satori is a spontaneous event that no amount of preparation can provoke on its own. The laid up fire is a reasonable analogy. Kindling and heat-wood may sit unlit until the sun explodes: a spark is necessary. Any element inadequate, and an entire box of matches will not suffice. Soggy wood and the kindling flares briefly and in vain. Insufficient kindling and the once in a lifetime spark sparks in vain: blah, blah, blah.

The event resembles a river that in flooding cuts a new, very real, simpler course through its erstwhile meandering path. Thought travels shorter distances to traverse the same territory. Mind infuses a human vehicle, and is found identified with all that the brain requires of “human experience.” Mind in a dog is trapped in a dog experience: there is Mind, there is dog; there is dog mind. There is a bird brain in a bird, and therefore a bird mind. It is rare, but it does happen in humans, that Mind experiences something like an alignment of normally opposing polarizing lenses and the light (there all along) floods through.

Satori is is not technically a spiritual opening: satori is a physical change in the way the brain is inhabited by Awareness.

The Quality of Mercy

Mercy is a human quality that may exist as psychological tropism, which is to say as a spontaneous reaction to the experience of empathy. Perhaps this explains the behavior of the merciless, if so it would justify their elimination from the gene pool. The quality of mercy is one of mankind’s few redeeming features, and it would be a very good thing if it were consciously cultivated in our children in place of the current cultivation of the competitive imperative. Almost everywhere we see something good happening as a product of human intent, mercy is a quality of that goodness. And everyday the news is dominated by the behavior of the merciless.

Compassion is an experience, empathy is an emotion; mercy is an act. Mercy is an exercise of will in intended beneficence. And outside of mercy entering into the cumulative will of human-kind our children are assured to inherit a hell world.

Dignity and Posture

Much remarkable work is being done today in the study of animal social dynamics. The dynamic of these interactions includes more than just inter-specie behavior, for intra-specie transactions are the very stuff of which ecosystems are woven. Human social dynamics resemble more the “intra” than the “inter” when it comes to specie watching; for amongst us, the lions and the water buffalo exist in analogue full-fledged configuration (not to mix a metaphor), and pecking orders exist intra and inter. The ins and outs of who can dis whom and with what degree of subtlety differ not in kind or quality in the human being than any barnyard or pristine jungle animal. We see it everywhere in every social circumstance: in church, in business, on the highways, and in the interactions between alleged “friends.” Almost everywhere we look we find a dearth of genuine self-importance, and a maneuvering for limited resources of social position. It is as much a part of the human animal as breathing, and as unpleasant to deal with as walking barefoot through a feedlot. We can count ourselves lucky if in our lives there exists a small handful of people in whose presence we do not have to be on guard. It seems to me posturing is so germane to the human creature that it is intra-specie invisible, and were it not for "manners" and mechanical acquiescence to social convention the Hieronymus-Boschian reality would be apparent to even the most hoplessly occluded. It is as if leg-humping dogs were so ubiquitous as to be accepted, and therefore not entering into notice. We find our place in this fray to our weal or our woe taking it all personally, and if by some unfortunate surfeit of awareness we should recognize the movement we are still trapped in its sway.

It has to do with a fragile sense of dignity, and a primitive territorial imperative. If we do not take up the space that is properly our own someone else most certainly will, and if we do not extend to others the dignity of their own confusion then there can be no dignity at all.

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Getting by in Buzzard Land


In lieu of conversation
The sound of concomitant rending
Tearing
Of some dead thing

There is no malice
This is just what buzzards do
And is the result and intent of their dramatic overview


If you wish to be left alone in buzzard land
Merely demonstrate that you’re alive

If you wish to get close to one
Play dead



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Toward a Theory of Mind

It seems quite remarkable that so little is known about Mind. We have the science of psychology, and we have the recent ability to observe electrical activities in the brain; but nothing is known considering the fact of experience. The fact that photons striking the optic nerve result in what is known as sight, the fact that shock waves propagating through atmosphere result in the creaturely experience known as sound; these (and all) elements of what is known as experience are wholly mysterious. 

It seems to me that experience implies an experiencing matrix. There are conflicting religious doctrines about souls and such, but there is the obvious fact that were there not an experience generative event exhibiting singularity that was somewhat motionless in the flux of time, there could be no point of reference about which an experience could accrue. I think that this “motionless in time” feature is a place to look for what we can know about mind simply because it is self evident. 

Time seems to be the invention of Mind. The event that is the existence of the universe appears to be a seething present of accidental inevitable elements possessing trajectories. Trajectories make the universe predictable if a mind exists to do the math, but outside of Mind there is just the fact of existence with no past, present, or future: and therefore no meaning.

Meaning is a temporal event that can only be generated from the outside; which is to say from a standpoint of relative motionlessness vis-à-vis the trajectory-bound non-moment of now.

One difficulty in the quest for a theory of Mind is the complication presented by the human nature of the mind that would busy itself with such pointless trivialities. It is natural that human-ness would be invisible to the human mind, for otherwise, as in the classic millipede story, normal activity would require more conscious regulation than is conceivable. At the same time here we have place to start. Can it be otherwise than that human-ness is something that happens to Mind because of Mind’s existence in a human brain? The brain is a physical form necessitating, which is to say making inevitable, certain forms of experiencing; this includes intellectual, emotional and physical experiencing. These experiencings are “I feel” for the individual mind: but for it’s existence the experience could not be made inevitable. We are postulating mind not as a spiritual property, but Mind as an inevitable epiphenomenona of certain material arrangements that perhaps “wake-up” space or something: hell, I don’t know.