What if

http://www.reversespins.com/patton.html

https://youtu.be/Sz48yT4imcM

A disturbance in the force

Well. I've hung out in the desert long enough. There are things afoot. All is not well in the state of Denmark.

I sensed something over the last five days, and I need to share this in case others are feeling it too.

On the 20th of February, I got the sense there was a large thing looming over the world. Like a big dark bubble expanding and pressing into our reality, but it was under tension. It was still retained from wherever it was coming from. It was like a thunderhead, close, but still far enough away that the sun still shone and things felt pleasant, except when you remembered it was there, pressing against the sky. It was pending all Saturday, and began to slip forward Saturday night.

Then, over Sunday (21 Feb) and Monday (22 Feb), it was released... It slithered and rolled forward like a big oily blob. It was released, it entered our reality, and passed through us. I felt a disruption afterwards. It felt like the the turbulent and chaotic wash from a speedboat's wake, the choppy waves that buffet swimmers and the shore after it passes.

After that, I felt like there were fractured notes in the world's chorus, that the harmony of the world's song was off.

This "thing", this dark bubble... it reminded me of the evil planet that is traveling towards the world in the movie, "The Fifth Element", except this was made of subtle matter. It was released, and passed through everyone, disrupted everything.

This was not random. This was generated. This forced it's way in, or was forced in.

It entered, it changed the resonating frequency, and it left a residue of sorts. Feels like it either continued, or that it dissipated into everything.

Whatever it is, we don't have to be afraid. This is OUR home.
We never ran before, and we won't start now.

And we have a tank with a cannon, and some very powerful ammunition:

Sing! Laugh! Shine your light!

Be without fear in the face of any darkness.

Live, laugh, LOVE!

In deepest winter, there still shines an Invincible Summer.

I'll be seeing you... its good to be back!

Climbing out of my pit

Well, time to dust these digital pages off and get back to writing... I'll be seeing you.

Documenting more premises of belief

First premise:
There tends to be an assumption in the majority of Western educated society that our technology will progress in linear direction with an implied geometric increase of complexity over time. However, I believe that human society evolves in a cyclic manner, with perhaps nested linear models; ultimately- there is a grand cycle of history. The idea our society is in its "infancy" in regard to technology at least, implies a dogmatic resolution to our origins. Finally, I  believe it is a fallacy to say that geometric technological progress is one of the primary identifiers of an advanced civilization.

Second premise:

There is a prejudice to materiality within the Linear/Geometric Progress faction. Our rationalist and materialist forebears have influenced our thinking. Until there is at least an integration of the material and spiritual, the rational and intuitive, I think there will be a dualistic conflict. I think that human society will progress in a nested cycle, but it will reach a limit within the material sphere of influence. In order to cross this boundary, human society, and more specifically human beings collectively, will need to transcend the physical into the meta-physical or spiritual. There is a limit to material technology. If nothing else, I believe the next step of technological progress will be and already is, into the bio/chemical arena. However, I see danger of objectifying subjects and their rights if we advance only partially. This needs to be a holistic transcending. At least an integration. The material has limitations. Quantum Physics is showing us there is a meta-physical reality that transcends pure rationality. The disciplines need to ingrate into holistic unity; imagine your math teacher singing equations while students worked problems on art canvasses that displayed not just the correct data processing, the representation of following proper algorithms and calculation, but the brilliant translation of intrinsic form, the inherent meaning of the mathematical concept. Pragmatic value? Pragmatic values are false values of a house of cards society. Fascist Capitalism is a tyrant to education and the arts. Do we want to produce well conditioned biological automatons to run the machinery of tomorrow society, or do we want to evolve as a human species, to take true leaps into another dimension of life and experience? It can't be done in splinters. We can do it for you wholesale, or not at all! It will take every village on every continent.

Third premise.

The ego needs to be transcended. I would say integrated, but I think it will always usurp the other parts of the human soul. The ego insured our survival long ago, but now it causes a constant war. It reinforces fascism in every sense, nuance and sphere of human relations. It breeds factionalism. By its very existence it insures factionalism. It is the androgynous parent of dualism. While ego exists, unity can only last a generation or two before it is toppled by the ravenous lust of "I". Furthermore, while Ego intrinsically ensures individuation within human society, the negative aspect of Ego generates its dialectical brother of positive Ego. Horus and Set, Cain and Abel, The Yin and Yang, the Left and the Right. I believe too, you must separate the "good" from "truth". Truth stands alone. Truth is pure form, it is not a reaction, a reflection, or a representation. The Good may often represent the truth, but it is always in dialectical reaction to evil. Therefore, when "good" opposes "evil", the very opposition contributes to the dialectical response of evil. "Evil" should be transcended. This is why "Religion" just produces a stalemate, an equilibrium. What is needed to break this cycle is either total entropy or no entropy at all. This to me is an impossible dilemma. However, what gives me hope is the presence of paradox in the world. For me, paradox are 'glitches in the code'. Paradox betrays a different level of reality; when this other reality intersects with our material/temporal one, it produces conundrums, cooperative dichotomies, tesseracts. So, the story is incomplete; the movie is only half over.

I'm just waiting for the house lights to come on.

                                  Tesseract:

From Norman Mailer's On God - The Vow of the Bodhisattva

I just finished reading Norman Mailer's book, "On God- an Uncommon Dialogue". It truly was an uncommon message; I was expecting the usual exegetical discussions on the nature of God and the cosmos and instead got blown away by a visceral and gritty heart to heart with a grizzled old novelist. I wonder if he ever talked with Joseph Campbell or Phillip K. Dick, because I think they would have had some good discussions. The image of the creator as an artist hooked me immediately. Very unconventional but casually profound, Mailer was still grounded, earthy and realistic in his intimations. This book was written the year he died, a synchronistic event in that the intent was to capture his unique belief system. He defies many conventions confronting religious orthodoxy despite maintaining a spiritual faith while retaining the brutal rationalism of his past atheistic stance. However, it was refreshing to have someone step out boldly while defending his beliefs intelligently and with common sense. An honest man who is aware of his imperfection but who is willing to share his fascinating view of the world and cosmos.

Towards the end of the book, the interviewer, Michael Lennon, mentioned the concept of the Vow of the Bodhisattva. Those who take the Bodhisattva Vow, renounce entry into the blessed state even when they attained perfection. Instead, they vow to stay in the fight; strive to free the rest of creation still struggling in the muck, like repeatedly Halo'ing back in as spiritual special forces to help humanity through the centuries. I looked it up and the prayer is absolutely beautiful, right along with Isaiah 61 or Prayer of Saint Francis. (I love tweaking -playfully- the nose of my conventional religious friends when I find parallel beliefs in non-Christian religions).

In the end, we are all human.
I think it articulates an excellent daily attitude.

Bodhisattva Vow


As long as there is suffering
As long as there are sentient beings in the 6 realms
May I never attain Enlightenment
And never cross over into Nirvana.


May I be a guard for those who are protectorless,
A guide for those who journey on the road;
For those who wish to go across the water,
May I be a boat, a raft, a bridge.

May I be an isle for those who yearn for landfall,
And a lamp for those who long for light;
For those who need a resting place, a bed,
For all who need a servant, may I be a slave.

May I be the wishing jewel, the vase of plenty,
A word of power, and the supreme remedy.
May I be the trees of miracles,
And for every being, the abundant cow.

Like the great earth and the other elements,
Enduring as the sky itself endures,
For the boundless multitude of living beings,
May I be the ground and vessel of their life.

Thus, for every single thing that lives,
In number like the boundless reaches of the sky,
May I be their sustenance and nourishment
Until they pass beyond the bounds of suffering.

Profoundly moving metaphors. Beautiful.

And... the parallel:

The Year of the Lord's Favor

61:1 The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor; [1]
he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; [2]
2 to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor,
and the day of vengeance of our God;
to comfort all who mourn;
3 to grant to those who mourn in Zion—
to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness instead of mourning,
the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit;
that they may be called oaks of righteousness,
the planting of the Lord, that he may be glorified. [3]
4 They shall build up the ancient ruins;
they shall raise up the former devastations;
they shall repair the ruined cities,
the devastations of many generations.

Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury,pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen

Clearing out my old Facebook Notes (5)

The Sea Again

A long time ago, I decided to cut a separate swath. It was not an error of modest declination, but a back azimuth to the paved road I had always traveled. I thought I would feel some measure of gratitude or satisfaction. Some feeling of success, but instead there is a relative unease with each new tree. I've really lost touch with a lot of things. I feel "half-awake", someone wandering forward with hidden steps.

I don't know. Thoughts no longer come easy, and my world is un-hinged.

I am watching a River Runs through It for the first time. Kind of backwards I guess, since I plan to read the book... but oh well.

I didn't watch it years ago because one of the many evangelical Christian publications my parents subscribed to slaughtered it... I still remember part of the Review... paraphrasing, "A vaguely metaphysical meandering movie mixed with fly-fishing fails to inspire only to remain insipidly unsatisfying in its religious conviction." So I never saw it, although at the time I secretly wanted to.

Years later, unbound from the bonds of conservative belief, and everyone else gone to bed a long time ago, I sit here watching. I found out today my biological grandfather who I never knew loved the book, so in absence of the written page, I succumbed to audio-visual. Not a perfect movie, but a good one. I liked it. "Life is not a work of art" just to quote real time, sitting here next to the Christmas tree, 5 days from the rolling over of another year, the crashing and tumbling of gears as the creaking clock moves forward. No, life is not a work of art, although art should be a work of life. That's probably why the really good art is hidden and often unpopular until a future generation far removed hears the message.

Every family, every life is different. Some are fascinating, some are profoundly mundane and utterly uneventful. Yet, there is a sacredness that is often only seen in retrospect. Its not even the beauty of something that we can miss. At times, the very reality of a thing is not captured until we are remembering it thoughtfully, years later, in a darkened room or watching the flames of a fire.

I can't hold onto this life, anymore I can hold onto the people around me. They walk and move and breathe. You can't hold onto people and things without suffocating reality or even worse, carving it into something it is not. Simply let it all ride. Flow.

If you hold on, you kill things.

I stopped taking as many pictures of special events precisely because of this. I wanted to make sure I made a really good memory, not worry if the battery light would come on. Seriously, how many of us really watch that hour long, jerky camcorder video of the dreadfully stretched out school sing along?

I do not want to remember my life through the lens of a viewfinder, mechanical or spiritual.

In the movie I just watched, the boys are told by their father that if they listened, they could hear the voice of God in the waters. The last thoughts of one of the boys, as the old man, is that he is "haunted by the waters". I think God, the beauty of this universe and reality, gets through to our heart by way of a random music. A gurgle brought home through fluid form that collides with solid rocks and swaying reeds. Driven by wind and the force of the transubstantiation of mountain snow, the water sings because there is no measured meter. There is no careful art. It is a wild song that comes from a heart rich with blood and earth and sadness and joy. The words of God are the random acts of brownian motion, collisions of light photons with a maelstrom of water droplets creating a brilliant rainbow. It is in the unplanned and biological exuberance of a natural rhythm that God speaks.

A certain trollish critic told me a week ago he thought my poetry was tiresome in its predictability, and proceeded to list a series of proper poetic forms I should experiment with. I don't think I am going to listen to him, because when I write, I pour out from a battered canteen cup, etched with symbols of my soul's campaigns, the contents of my heart. I suppose I could build a factory in my soul, and create in accordance with linear measurement, but I think I will dip my cup in the water that laps against the rim of that homo sapien that is called Mike.

I do miss certain things. The close bond I used to have with my sister. My children are no longer young. My childhood. A certain clarity of purpose.

As Masefield wrote in Sea Fever: I must go down to the Sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by...

I memorized that in my room on a bright Texas afternoon, reciting it standing in the center of my blue carpet, the sun warming my face, while I watching the Ash tree swaying outside my windows. Later that night, my wet hair combed carefully to one side, I carefully recited in a family talent show after a "fancy meal", the Sea Fever poem. My mom and dad clapped, and I was proud of myself.

I always liked that poem. It captured something that was just not in my heart, but also resonated something of the human condition. It melancholy longing was reassuring because I knew that someone else had felt the way I did, standing in that synthetic island of blue, repeating a poem, rolling the words around, hearing the sound of the bombers that flew over the government housing I grew up in. The sea was a distant memory of trips to Hawaii. I had never been on a boat, but I knew instinctively what Masefield was getting at. Here was a dose of his reality, and I could make it mine.

So screw that critic. I took his critique seriously until it began to damage the connection I had to the real. My real.

So I guess I've come full circle. I spent a year waking up in Iraq. Then I spent a year trying to hold onto that recovery. Now I am learning that a man must keep part of himself awake, but sometimes, it is good to sleep. Sometimes we plop in milk and sugar, sometimes we drink the coffee black. The key is never to run out of coffee.

Its a little sad, but I was reading some of Rainer Marie Rilke tonight. Here is a poem I can understand:

You playmates of mine in the scattered parks of the city,
small friends from a childhood long ago:
how we found and liked one another, hesitantly,
and, like the lamb with the talking scroll,

spoke with our silence. When we were filled with joy
it belonged to no one: it was simply there.
And how it dissolved among all the adults who passed by
and in the fears of the endless year.

Wheels rolled past us, we stood and stared at the carriages;
houses surrounded us, solid but untrue- and none
of them ever knew us. WHAT in that world was real?

Nothing. Only the balls. Their magnificent arches.
Not even the children . . . but sometimes one,
oh a vanishing one, stepped under the plummeting ball.

Goodnight!

Clearing out my old Facebook Notes (4)

I am about to go bed and had this interesting thought... Catholic theology professes the reality that an an intermediary place called purgatory exists immediately after death to purify the soul for entry into heaven by way of "widening gyre" like Dante's circles of purgatorio and heaven, people through painful awareness and suffering get rid of imperfections until they are pure enough to enter into the heavenly realm of perfect love and goodness... Many Eastern religions profess that for people to attain enlightenment, they must migrate from the wheel of Samsara "the long night of fractured identity" by way of multiple reincarnations to purge the self of the multiple layers of carnality into the Nirvana of the uniting with the complimentary paradox of all and nothing... suspending all rules of belief, if both were right, there is a possibility that we died a long time in a "real life" when we truly knew ourselves and our true identity but somehow fell into darkness, and this existence is a purgatorio of trying to find understand ourselves through the direct experience of many facets of ourselves and of the universal human experience across a spectrum of many lives. We could wrestle the angel of our discontent until we received our blessing of peace and rest in the infinity of a unified self. When you consider your life, and how short it is, and how you seem to change along life's road but deep down inside remain the same, seventy years in this space time continuum seems too short a time to truly experience life. And truly, how do we know that when we sleep, that our dreams are not another life that we live. That when we lie down in that other world, we wake here with fragile remnants of another place. I don't know. I believe there is a "somewhere else", another reality other than this one. I don't think though that the afterlife is merely"a depositary of souls". No religion, belief, faith, or lack of faith has a monopoly on the truth. A human being, let alone the world is much too beautiful and complex for a simple explanation, whether the coldly scientific or traditionally dogmatic religious. If you could catch someone without "intellectual clothes" on, they would probably say they just want to be happy, that they want to be truly who they were born to be. We are all searching for our original face, the one we had before we were even physically created. Rumi says it best: "Love is the religion, the universe its book." I think most of us live like we are putting together a piece of furniture without instructions. I think we are better than that, that we were born to "break the sound barrier, to kick ass and take names" so to speak. My whole "42" moment here, (douglas adams, I salute you), is not I guess about an interesting thought wandering through my tired mind at the end of the day. It is the attempted articulation that life is not a short sprint, a PT test over in an hour. This can't be all there is... people are too amazing to come prepackaged with the standard instructional DVD manual. Purgatorio, reincarnation, ecstasy or annihilation, I believe that Heisenberg was onto something with his quantum mechanical uncertainty principle: certain pairs of physical properties, like position and momentum, cannot both be known to arbitrary precision. That is, the more precisely one property is known, the less precisely the other can be known."

Ultimately, I hope we all leave the door open and the window unbarred. Our fingers will be cold and the wind will swirl the papers off our desk, but the sunrise will be brilliant and light up our room. I'd rather stare at the sun for an hour and live with the memory of light than live in perpetual darkness stumbling over shadows.