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.

.



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



.

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.

The Necessity of Joy

The natural state of any creature is joy. I say this not from a standpoint of speculation or attribution but from the standpoint of having lived my life in the midst of nature. From earliest childhood I grew up hunting. But when as an adult I came to live with the forest creatures I had to give it up having recognized the horrors that my simple pleasure wrought in their already complex existence. I even launched an attempt to live in peaceful coexistence with the mice and the wood rats, but alas there was a failure to communicate. The more obvious examples of animal joy are accessible to anyone: the gamboling calf, the rough tumbling of a puppy, the kitten with its ball of yarn. What about the caterpillar on its twig or the snake basking in the sun? There is no sense in quibbling about degrees or demarcations, for we will soon find ourselves arguing about whether or not they have souls. As for me, it is self evident that life is not only conducive to joy, but feeds on joy. And though sorrow may reduce to a separate state it, is most certainly a deficit of joy. There is some thin ice here, and it is not my intention to delve into brain chemistry or socio-pathology: I merely wish to hold up as fundamental the inclination of all creatures great and small to joy, and to point out that was not joy the natural inclination, sorrow would be no burden. The earthworm on the drying sidewalk; the unfortunate human trekker lost in some vast desert: I posit that the distress differs neither in kind nor quality nor volume by weight.

Whether or not the inner configuration we know as joy is familiar to the rabbit and to the wolf is perhaps an open question, but that circumstances can obliterate any creaturely access to joy is beyond question. It is also beyond question that untold millions of human beings lead joyless lives. Joyless because limitations of environment assure that it will be so. Elaborate studies have been done with rats. It has been shown that at certain levels of population pressure a cornucopia of otherwise unknown antisocial behavior emerges in laboratory populations: and this in circumstances of ample food and water.

Gender Issues

A quiet revolution is taking place as we speak. Advances made in the ability to look into the physical-electrical activity of the brain are about to put a great deal of the nature-nurture question to rest: and of course the answer to the question is yes. With regard to the physio-psychological implications of gender it has been found that our brains are at least as different as our bodies. And as someone who has been married three times, I cannot imagine that this should come as a surprise to anyone.

Integral calculus is not the issue here: we are not in any way talking about intellectual ability, or moral rigor or matters related in anyway to the dignity of individuals. It strains credulity to declare that there exist no Darwinian stumbling blocks in the gender minefield, and science is just about to take the guesswork out of the argument. The differences in our bodies are a clear study in Darwinian differentiation, and there is every reason to expect that these differentiations include configurations of the brain that predispose an individual to this nuance, or that, in the realm of problem solving. And it also seems to me that historically speaking, it is time for the Feminine to come to the fore.

A Word About Government

There is no reason to tax one's intellectual sensitivities over questions of government systems or government styles. Governments of all persuasions, left to their own devices, collapse from within due to the cumulative plying of advantage by individuals in positions of responsibility. The collective corruption of individuals is the greatest single threat to public well-being, and the best system that could be arranged for the conduct of civil affairs is one that provides checks against the private ambitions of public persons. Outside of this, any system will do that can get the mail delivered: which is to say that legitimate problem solving is the spontaneous domain of human genius, individually and collectively. 

We can trust the process only if we can trust the processors, and realizing that public scrutiny will interfere with their personal agendas, the true enemies of freedom and justice are like cancers that do not oppose the body: they merely wish to feed upon it. Vigorous openness is humanity's best hope. In such an environment political systems will find their rightful place as honest global sheepdogs.

Psychotropism and Soul

As the means of seeing into workings of the brain become increasingly sophisticated we are apt to see a turf war between the caretakers of the soul and the pillars of science. It has recently been discovered that the absence of empathy sometimes displayed in autism is due to the lack of what have been termed “mirror neurons” in the brain. Mirror neuron is a name given to a category of brain response first noticed by experimenters upon monkeys. They found if one monkey performed certain simple behaviors that an observer monkey exhibited brain firing mirroring that of the performing monkey. A researcher whose field of study was autism wondered if a lack of mirror neurological activity might explain the absence of empathy found in some cases of autism. Subsequent experimentation determined this to be the case.

Might there be a bell curve of mirror neurological capacity with the likes of Mother Teresa at one end, autistic dysfunction at the other, and all the rest of us somewhere in between? If it were so it would certainly explain a great deal, and soon our instruments of experimentation will be sufficiently evolved to know. If it is so then empathy and compassion take their new place as emotional tropisms. And the laboratory regimen used to make this determination would probably be sensitive enough to make the same kind of determination about sexual disposition, predisposition to violence, and a host of other personal oddities. If much of our vaunted individuality turns out to be as mechanical as a wristwatch, where does this leave self-determination and the soul?

Actually it puts the burden right where it should be. It’s not what we are; it is what we do with it. Within the varieties of personal potential the question remains: What is the Who?

Awakening the Intelligence

There is a theory of language acquisition postulating that language is biologically constellated, and that words do not symbolize their referents. The implications of this view are: meaning is immanent and words become conduits of meaning by an imbued association acquired in the natural process of socialization. This seems an observation rather than a theory, and once understood it provides an opportunity to touch upon a fundamental property of intelligence.

From birth we are accustomed to forming observations into utterance, and through the vehicle of utterance we are able to convey such information as can be swaddled in words: made intelligible. But understanding is nonlinguistic, or perhaps better said: prelinguistic. And for all its efficacy, the habit of language predisposes the mind to live in words rather than meanings, and to consider that hearing words it has gotten meaning, and that framing words it has expressed facts. The innate intelligence that makes words inevitable is the substance of any power inherent in words, and context determines what is derived by the limitations of intelligence in any attempt at communication.

Be as they may, the implications of slicing time; it does not take language to build a clock. A large and very simple element of the awakening of the intelligence is the cultivation of the native prelingual comprehension of one's surroundings that is the foundation of normal waking consciousness.

Emptiness, Suchness, and the Meaning Saturated Gestalt

The terms Emptiness and Suchness will be familiar to students of Eastern thought. Emptiness is not the emptiness of bucket or chair. The normal emptiness of bucket and chair is an element of Platonic Form, of which my understanding is that the essential necessity of an object's function is the truth of its universal form. This is a thought provoking view, but there is another school of thought considering all forms to be Empty. Suchness refers to the observation that things are radically just as they are.

Emptiness refers to the fact of existence: of thing: of all. No thing contains anything in the Platonic way. If we insist that a baseball contains horsehair, or that a can contains beans, we are right as far as that goes; but let us consider "object" in a consequence-free matrix. For a pig a bicycle is meaningless: the seat, the handlebars, the wheels; utterly without implications. For this pig the bicycle is Empty in the way the way we are trying to convey. All things are Empty. They couldn't contain anything if they wanted to. Mind fills them with content the same way water stays in a bucket: by law of accident. When this is recognized, things can be seen as they are.

Once we get our mind around the Emptiness thing, we are in a position to understand what is meant by Suchness. No thing can deviate from the fact of it's existence: every Thing is absolute presence. Any and every Thing is flawlessly and exactly it's being: the perfect example of its Self, totally and radically existent, be it a philosophy or a grain of sand. This is Suchness, and Suchness is Empty.

Suchness and Emptiness by their very arch-reality are indifferent to human meaning, but only when we have an understanding of Emptiness and Suchness are we in a position to recognize that all life takes place in a meaning-saturated gestalt.

Does a Dog have Buddha Nature?

hmmmm

Birth and Death

The life that lives in you has been continuously alive since the miracle of the first replicating molecule. Through all the shifts and turns of evolution, through crash of comet and explosion of volcano, through times of feast and times of famine, through war and and in peace, that life has managed to split off a haploid cell to find it's complement and press forward into the unfolding eternal now.

Now that’s a lot of responsibility.

Happy Halloween

Though the emptiness of space within an individual atom vastly overawes the cumulative space occupied by protons, electrons, and neutrons; the world of our experience is one of hard facts. And in spite of the fact that all physical forms are comprised mostly of empty space, physical objects catastrophically fail to pass freely through one another. It has something to do with the rejection mechanism of like magnetic fields. And what about magnetic fields? They seem to pass freely in the fabric of space as an immaterial phenomenon: an immaterial phenomenon with influence that is widely utilized yet not understood. Awareness has properties similar to magnetic fields. It shares with magnetism an apparent immaterialism that is dependent upon arrangements of matter. And like magnetic fields awareness does not appear to have a granular structure. Awareness seems dependent upon nervous systems, but I suspect that the fact of awareness itself is one of space and not of matter in much the same manner as the magnetic field.

Using this vision of awareness as a starting place: if we imagine the field phenomenon of the awareness of any given creature, and then imagine away the physical structure that makes that awareness inevitable, suddenly all creatures look remarkably alike…… kind of like a Halloween sheet-ghost. Chipmunks and elephants: a glowing nodule trailing a diaphanous gown.

All Nude, All the Time: Toward a Contemporary Gnosis

In the scientific community it is standard practice to stand upon the pedestal of the known to get a peek at the yet unexposed lovely curves of the yet unexposed real. And it is these successive peeks at naked reality taken from successive pedestals of established fact that have given us duct tape and automobiles. Science does not concern itself with the unknowable but rather uses the known as a tool to plot the form of the yet unexplored knowable. If something is real its existence cannot forever go unnoticed if we know how to look and have the necessary tools of examination. If we are curious about what is real, we must search about us from a known position and find what further step can be made, and so move from the known to the knowable: rather like a blind man with his stick tapping his way down an unfamiliar street. And like the blind man if we scorn the petty little red-tipped stick of what we truly and actually and honestly know, and boldly launch into the unknown leading with our imagination, tragedy of some sort is all but inevitable.

One of my favorites from the annals of ancient Zen is the statement “one should never speak of that about which no accurate pronouncement can be made.” This has an obscure but prescient relationship to a statement of my own invention concerning the all too human inclination to "pin the imaginary tail on the inconceivable donkey." A great deal of precious Reality is cast aside as humanity builds shrines to house the envelopes in which it came. We will never see the sunrise by looking west. The word “God” is not a dirty word, but our imaginings insulate us from facts. The ultimate nature of the fabric of existence is wholly mysterious and wholly present. It is not made more sacred or more responsive to our supplications, and in fact is distanced from the core of our personal being, when we paint a face upon it.

Fast Forward

No one knows what matter is. Scientific theory provides reasonable hypotheses, and perhaps ultimate matter boils down to circular wiggles of empty space. Space cannot be devoid of properties if it is capable of form, but that’s not the point. And what about the ambient pressure of the bang? Is it possible that like creatures in the depths of some cosmic ocean we have our being in an environment of intense pressure that we have no way of detecting because it is impenetrably ubiquitous? Whatever the yet undiscovered facts of the matter may be, we can say for sure that a haze of subatomic light-speed behavior is responsible for the plodding world of fishes and loaves in which we find ourselves.

Stacks of atoms. Everywhere we look we find mere stacks of atoms in those careless arrangements made inevitable as individual atoms attempt to fill outer electron shields by sharing electrons with some amenable fellow atom. These liaisons are more or less enduring according to the mutual benefit derived, and it is a simple flux of inevitability that gives us this or that molecular configuration. The mechanics of these goings on are so well understood that we now have huge factories that do nothing more (or less) than stack molecules to be pilled or bagged or boxed, and then shipped off to do their inevitable fluxing out there somewhere for the alleged benefit of all mankind. We know a lot about molecules. They are mere stacks of atoms.

But why then should a mere stack of atoms possess conscious awareness? And speaking of conscious awareness what is the nature of, say, sight? The vision of the forest that occurs in this mind as I look out through the forest has a real existence. What is the nature of its exsistence? Some have said that the immediate experience of a given mind is the only thing that it can claim with total certainty to be real. What's with that? But I digress. The question is: why should a mere stack of atoms possess conscious awareness (let alone life)? It has to be something about the way the atoms are stacked, because other than that we are looking at perfectly ordinary molecules. Perhaps it is a field phenomenon created by the behavior patterns of the shared electrons that hold the DNA molecule together. No one knows, but it is apparent that life must somehow inhere in matter.

Plant-animal distinctions start at the level of single-celled life forms. And though these distinctions are sometimes hazy there exist unambiguous examples of what seems to be volition on the part of one-celled creatures. I suppose we could describe the amoeba’s “catch and consume” behavior as a tropism thing or some such; but the fact remains it does not notice, pursue, and consume it’s prey by accident. Primitive nerve systems seem to be the facilitators of awareness and not the progenitors. Fast forward to the human brain.

Whorled Peas

Idea is the currency in which the imagination trades. Ideas are the matchsticks with which mind builds its intricate models. An idea is a specific, uniquely identifiable, construct of the imagination; and regardless of the relative validity or congruity to objective fact: all ideas are imaginary. Any single idea will be found in an aggregate of its fellows in an elaborate tinker-toy structure: a world-view. The fact that world-view is a construct of imagination is not a bad thing. It is the only way world-views can occur. Everybody’s got one whether they are aware of it or not, and even inspiration must enter imagination as idea if it is to make itself known.

A world-view is a complex ice palace of conceptualization. Were that ice to all melt away the objective world would be the same, but we would not. Real is real whether we have an idea about it or not, and it matters hugely if our efforts are to make conceptualizations as contiguous as possible to the real; or if we gloss the real with a paste of preconception. The world-view can be seen as a house of cards: one idea-card supporting another, supporting another, and so on in an elaborate mutually supportive structure. What if some cards are not from the print shop of objective fact? What are the implications if some elements are wholly invented: products of the imagination having no referents in objective reality? In such a case the house of cards stands only with continuous effort of imagination. Should some shock from the real dispel said imaginary element, the whole bit must collapse. Unless said shock occurs in the form of an epiphany.

Epiphany is the lightbulb moment: that moment when under the unseen influence of pattern recognition our conceptualization suddenly finds itself in magnetic alignment with previously unseen elements of the self-evidently real. A light comes on. This real element or potential was there all the time, but its existence could not enter our imagination to work its work upon our world-view as its existence was sub-liminal. Subliminal: existing (or potentially existing) but beneath the limiting horizon of our conscious awareness.

Misunderstandings of every stripe, from world wars to marital strife, are the inexorable side effects of incongruent world-views: of unsympathetic stacks of imaginings. Violence is most usually an attempt at problem solving. And it’s not going to happen: that nations or organizations or individuals will voluntarily subject the complex house of cards, which is their very intellectual existence, to the simple non-imaginary universal inner appeal for dignity and self-determination.

The situation is quite hopeless. And by the time the obvious becomes apparent to the hopelessly occluded the world will be a shambles: chaos. Epiphanies are where they find you, and though horses can be led to water they cannot be made to drink. But if there is any hope for humanity it is that individuals are subject to epiphany. I saw a sign once, painted on the window of an empty storefront in Eugene Oregon. It said, “visualize whorled peas.”


I'm on it.

The Informed

Informed Sources

Informed sources are a criteria of judgment where knowledge exists we have no way of attaining through our own efforts. The Earth is round. Who says so? For most of us the roundness of the Earth is hearsay. We say we know such things because people whose business it is to nail down facts have made determinations, and because anyone with the time and resources to make a determination would arrive at the same informed position. The great body of human knowledge can be accepted as fact because it is is “over-determined.” At a certain point it must be admitted that anyone making the proper effort will uncover for himself or herself that the Earth is round.

Years ago I had a mad-scientist acquaintance in thrall of ideas of perpetual motion. He made drawings and elaborate charts and had pages and pages of mathematical equations. He also built exotic devices that never quite worked. He showed me the math for his latest romantic device which was not quite working. Looking at the math I pointed out to him that he had neglected to factor in time: and with time factored in, his machine showed up as a no-gain system with an immense amount of drag. I said: “You know, two and two equals four; everywhere in the universe, every time.” He looked at me wild-eyed and exclaimed with an expansive gesture, “But what if once in a while……….” Here stood a man not intimidated by over-determination, by facts: in short, a lunatic. Freedom of thought was a defining characteristic of his personality and in time it brought him great grief.

Our faculties are our only source of information. The store of fact accrued by century upon century of serious minded individuals is a powerful magic-wand, and we share in this store in so far as we make it our own. We make it our own by accepting it. We accept the store of accumulated knowledge because we trust the system that produced it. That system could be described as methodical reification: a system of observation and objectivity in an endless feedback loop that never quits checking its notes.

Ultimately we are our only source of information: how are we to make of ourselves a vehicle capable of perceiving the real? My old buddy's imagination always had its thumb on the scale of his perceptions, so his reckonings always included generous dollop of pure imagination. That unperceived, supinely accepted, generous dollop of pure imagination brought to grief almost every thing he ever tried to do, and he was a very energetic man. For all his boundless energy he never paused to consider the difference between imagination and perception.

The Circumvention of Ambiguity


Wood Betony
And tiny blue-green herbs
Amongst the thatch of dry red-brown fall grass


The function of intellect is the circumvention of ambiguity
And the path of affinity is one of truth



Thistle down

Goose feathers

Popcorn

Choices

The Problem with Sex

The problem with sex is, “Sex? No Problem!” In its complex socio-political rise from animal rutting, human sexuality has undergone a remarkable evolution of potential. There exists a spectrum of possibility running from the ridiculous to the sublime.

 

Sex has its roots in the collective unconscious, and even in this august creation, humanity, there it must remain. Rooted in the collective unconscious, sexuality blindsides both the best and the worst of us. Everywhere you find us you will find us two by two: all but without exception every human being on the face of the earth is the product of male orgasm upon the instinctual object of its fascinations. That female orgasm is a more subtle science speaks to the fact that it is not necessary to procreation. That said, without question female sexuality must be the complement in its urgency to that of the male.

Homo sapiens is considered the thinking animal, but there is another way of thinking about this. The frontal lobe is as much a spiritualizing faculty as an image-producing machine, and the distinction might be made that humanity is the spiritual animal. That those who deny themselves the luxury of imaging a God may still confront a spiritually charged mystery speaks to the fact that religious forms emerge from a spiritual incline, and not the other way around. Perhaps religion reduces to collected thought-forms emerging from a spontaneously spiritual creature. And perhaps it is wholly natural that a spontaneously spiritual humanity would put an anthropocentric spin on the mystery that the seed of unknowable matter is the Father of all knowable form in the otherwise unknowable empty Womb of space.

But we are speaking here of sex, and the configuration of human sexual experience. There is no need to delve into behavior. The thoughts, yearnings, and compulsions peculiar to the sexual impulse are familiar to all, and for every individual find their own historically statistical constellation. The behaviors specific to sex are limited; the meaning generated by the exercise of these behaviors is not. Looking at some examples of sexual behavior the thought occurs, “As a thing to do, no one would pick that out of a catalogue.” As in masochism: would an unsoiled being surveying a menu of human potential say, “Yes! I’ll just have that masochist thing?” Someone schooled in the subtle secrets of masochism perhaps (consenting adults and all that).

As for me, give me a sexual existence that is awakened; where the sexual transaction becomes ground for a decidedly spiritual conversation. Until naked spirits intertwine we are ever clothed in personalities and touch only through the burlap of our humanness. Humanness can be seen as soil, which exists that the Universe might grow souls upon it. And the flower of an enlightened sexuality (which can be discovered only from within the fragile prism which is precisely its coming into being) is destined to bear what fruit?

Untitled Love Poem #33

the light reflected from a leaf

and the light from your eyes

are they the same

it cannot be

even as I am

light must be changed

for having touched you

Christmas Past

The New War

War was different than I had expected. I had years of experience on nuclear alert pads in Europe and in Asia. Baby-sitting A bombs: two planes (F-100s, the “lead sled”) uploaded and on the pad. Ready to go when the whistle blew. Three other F-100s we flew daily keeping the bugs out of them until rotation to the pad. It was good duty. The bases were small, tiny even. The food was good. In both Asia and in Europe, alert pads were in rural areas where life carried on as it had for centuries with little encroachment of the benefits and ills of industrialization. I liked it, and I liked working on those war-machines in the open air. In all kinds of weather: subzero cold and a thirty-knot wind, one hundred degrees plus and no breath astir; keep them flying. It was a rewarding robust life for a young man, and one in which I came to realize a world of rings within rings of total nuclear devastation just waiting for the right mistake to be made. I couldn’t imagine the Russians so stupid as to set off the unstoppable cascade of devastation, and I knew that the US would never precipitate the conflagration; but what if…….and what about all those innocent people.

One day word came down that a squadron of RF101's in northern Japan would deploy to Vietnam. They were asking for volunteers to go with them. I had been trained on the system, and what the heck: hazardous-duty pay and check out a real shooting war. It seemed like the thing to do at the time.

I arrived in Vietnam in July of 1966. I was 21 years old. I had volunteered. I left the following July. I have never gotten over that year, and I don’t care to. I can't forget the crushing stupidity, the wanton destruction a powerful nation can bring down upon a hapless population emerging from 19th century colonialism. I found out later that Ho Chi Min had fought at the head of an indigenous army alongside the British in the struggle to drive the Japanese out of then French Indochina. In South Vietnam Ho Chi Min’s birthday was a big deal. I asked a Vietnamese acquaintance what that was all about. She said, “You know George Washington? Ho Chi Min Vietnam's George Washington.” I asked, “Then what's this war about?” She shrugged her shoulders. And what about that Pacific-Rim domino theory? We haven’t heard much lately about the irreversible falling of those communist dominoes have we?

Once the killing starts there are plenty of reasons to stay at it. Anyone who is in favor of building guns and bombs rather than textbooks and pencils is deeply misguided. If was spent half the money building schools as is spent preparing to kill people; half the money building infrastructure as is spent preparing to destroy infrastructure; half the time inveighing for dignity and understanding as is spent proselytizing for an at best morally neutral mercantilism, the world would without question be a better place.

I still see the dead. I don’t want to forget the dead. It would be shamefully wrong to forget the dead. The dead I met were mostly enemy dead; shot dead while doing their dead level best to see me dead. And dead is dead and the killing goes on with newly minted enemies and new and more efficient tools of killing. There are no new justifications; only newly killed human beings.

Youth at War 

A youth at war 

I was one once 

Volunteering for adventure, to serve my curiosity 

Adventure’s appetite can be sated 

Not so an inquiring mind 

Bar fights

Fire-fights

Heroes and braggadocio 

For all that I most remember 

An old and naked man 

A skeleton draped with shrunken skin 

Weakly pawing atop a mountain of trash and garbage 

And a fine athletic friend on the Saigon River 

Drenching sampans with the slalom ski 

Haunched in black pajamas they sat expressionless 

Under their coolie hats 

And I remember thieving children 

Running the streets Like packs of wild dogs 

The Shy

Grail Quest

The Holy Grail and the search for it. Drink of the cup from which Christ drank? Consider the conservation of personal consciousness. Usually personal consciousness flows like water poured on the floor: running wherever gravity leads. To awaken consciousness it must be conserved. Consciousness cannot be conserved if it cannot be contained. Meditation is the means by which we create a vessel capable of consciousness containment. Meditation is the smithy in which we forge a Holy Grail capable of containing the drink of which Christ drank: awakened Awareness.

The Christ Within

The Christ within is no less real 

Because it is our fabrication 

No less than automobiles 

Or atom bombs 

Chop Wood

Zen and Hocus Pocus VS Chop Wood

Zen of this, Zen of that; there is a lot of honky hocus-pocus about Zen, ascribing to its adepts a mystical perspicaciousness unmet in ordinary beings. The word Zen is a Japanese transliteration of the Chinese word Chan, which is a transliteration of the Sanskrit word Dhyana, which translates in English to “meditation.” In a first millennium anecdote an acolyte inquirers of the master the essence of Zen. The master brandished before him his hossu. This act brought enlightenment to the acolyte. The hossu, which had become a ceremonial scepter, was the dried tail of a horse or donkey used as a fly-whisk. The adept was poetically suggesting our practice of meditation as the means of whisking away gnats, flies and mosquitoes of idle thoughts. Only that mind not in a haze of idle thoughts is in a position to address the question of the real. A mind not in a haze of idle thoughts acts without mediacy, and the outside observer will see a sometimes-preternatural perspicacity. It is this “sometimes-preternatural perspicacity” that has given rise to the Zen of this, the Zen of that, nonsense. Another first millennium adept once said that Zen (read meditation) is merely the brick with which we knock at the door.

.



Chop Wood, Carry Water


In sweltering heat or a foot of snow
A bucket in each hand
I walk this path

Water to drink
Water to wash
Water arousing the mystery of water


The hand that poured concrete around an oak barrel
(the stave-marks remain)
Scrawled 1927 on the lip of the basin
From which I clean the silt
And chase the frogs
That creep under the lid I made against the detritus of nature



I sometimes sit by the spring
My mind dancing with the virgin water
From the spring to the creek
To the James, then to the White, and on to the Mississippi

And finally at home
In the great ocean



.

Consider Winter

The Devil's Hat Trick

The hat trick is one where a rabbit or some such, is magically drawn from an empty hat. The Devils hat trick is a disappearing trick: a trick where we become convinced that we grow spiritually by means of self-mutilation, and subsequently disappear up our own ass.

There are many systems teaching that the extinguishment of ego is possible and desirable. Were I the Devil, I would go about whispering such in minds spiritually curious. What part of us would wish extinguishment of ego? Extinguishment of ego is an egotistical pursuit. We would not engage in such self-hypnotic pretzle-twistings did we not wish to see ourselves more spiritually handsome creatures.

Ego is no enemy any more than skin is an enemy. Healthy ego is as necessary to our well being as healthy skin. We attempt to extirpate ego from our behavioral repertoire at our peril. Like skin, ego is a sensitive outer layer protecting the complex structure beneath. Ego’s sensitivity provides valuable information about the environment, and upon ego's strength or weakness depends much of our success in the manipulations necessary to the quality of our survival. Ego ergo I go, and if we seek first to be wholly Aware, ego can (kind of like a sheepdog) be left to do its job with minimal supervision.

Freak Freely 

Freak freely 

What have you to gain or lose 

Except the idea of your molded self 

Or the tenuous respect of uptight others 

Or the chance to have a lot of stuff 

Or an insight into your true face 

Or the devotion of true friends 

Or a few things worth having 

Freak freely 

Your instinct to survive will not evaporate 

From the heat that is inevitable when first you begin 

And if it does 

The world is better off without you 

So freak freely

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