The Purveyors of Sensation

The CARNIVAL! The festival of the flesh, what's not to like?

We are led and driven in life by sensation. The existential needs of the animal express themselves in sensation: hunger, thirst, varieties of comfort, the list goes on and on. Sensation is external to Pristine Awareness and yet elemental to the survival of its corporeal expression. It could be posited that all animal behavior is a response to sensation, and the statement "I want this, I need this" is a tacit admission that this wanting is external (though perhaps essential) to this "I".

Of necessity sensation is baked into our repertoire of behavioral norms, and this makes us vulnerable to manipulation by psychological parasites. The transparent cynicism of carny front-men comes to mind, and the "sensational" appeal of extravaganza, religious and secular. In his autobiography the American artist Thomas Hart Benton casually remarks that "The wealthy are dependent upon artists for the paraphernalia of their pretensions." Which is to say that a certain category of art produces a certain complex of psychological sensations for a certain social class. From the subtle to the gross we find everywhere the imprimatur of sensation.

Meditation is the cultivation of the silent Self which is the true litmus of the bitter and the sweet.

The Sacred and the Profane

Religions tend to crystallize around an assumption that there exists a realm of the Divine which must be sought out, sought after, and that one should find ones Self in subordination to the realm of the sacred. The supposition implied here is that there exists a pedestrian realm, a profane realm, that exists in parallel with the sacred, and that one must appeal to to the Divine in supplication, worship, and devotion in order to have access to this miraculous realm.

There is no separation. The motion of nature is like a child's merry-go-round: the Divinity of existence in a whorl that confutes the efficacies of Awareness.

Hence the inestimable value of meditation.

A grain of sand is a hurricane of Divinity.

The Light of Warp and Weft

An opening bud, flowers into the light of the sun which is the source of its existence

Pristine Awareness awakens into that vibrant Awareness which is the fabric of all that exists