Thank You

It's nice to make friends. Find common ground with other souls who though they've traveled a different path than you, now share in your same checkpoint or resting place. Kindred spirits who've experienced much of what you have too, and have lived to tell the tale. Mature folk who've somewhat been there and done that and have lived to tell about it. Those brave souls who've tasted death and chosen life and who, encouraged and strengthened by Spring imagine this could be all there is, but are left to be reminded there is something 'other'. Those nice folks who've lived the soulful life, and know no religion which strives with others, is ever going to describe their experience in totality. Those nice fellows who have sat and listened to a sermon and walked out the church doors to a world that is still as incomprehensible as it was before. This is to those young experiencers who knew before I, and allowed me to continue in my ignorance, knowing I needed to hit the same brick wall they already had, and would need to find my own way about it. This is to those graceless souls who have said if not by grace, then love, and if not by love then by force, and if not by force, then by that last strength, being flexible and accomodating. Thank you to those who suffered while I laughed beside them, me ignorantly rubbing salt in their wounds, and they looking beyond me and not making a pact of vengance against me (though I deserved it).

In short, thank you, from little ol' me.

The Secret

The Mystery that drives all mysteries. You can only observe the splendor of the sun, you cannot experience it in it's fullness without frying your eyes and going mad. You can put it into words, but cannot communicate it other than it being stripped bare of all it's glory, all it's impetus, it's terrible magnificence. It's like being told to write a short story on the feeling happiness, when a novel, an encyclopedia would not do to express the feeling obviously.
And then there are the real secrets. People who have stood out from the crowd and come to whisper in your ear what only you and the deliverer shall know.
It is a sort of enlightenment, where holy writ, except that which is natural, is eschewed for the everyday, and most importantly where experience and empiricism must bear out the facts.
Truly, it is written all around you and in you, and in the earth, the moon, the sun, the ptolemaic system, the fixed and unfixed stars, where Nature is the great guide and is telling truth at every turn.
To be able to grasp the world as it is, where one is rewarded and another punished, where Fortune and Fate are played out in the music of the Muses, and more, still find this world, as it is, to be beautiful (terrible) is a symptom that the Mystery has been grasped though not held.
How can one truly share what one has experienced, felt, seen, heard and held, with the guarantee that the truth has been shared honestly? Truly, one cannot do such a thing.
Irony of ironies, no wonder Socrates spoke in ironies, by opposites, by negation, the statement of what something is not, this is the beginning of being able to accurately describe the experience.
And most, it is an experience.
You experience the worst guilt, the worst suffering, the most quiet and intensest pain, and you look back on it all and say, please, please may I drink more from this bitter cup? for the wisdom and growth you've gained from all of it.
Heresy is your new dogma. You look to those who've cursed you and told you to die and all you can offer them is everything, and a peaceful hug and a holy kiss.
And Mnemosyne is your patroness, your goddess, who thankfully will not allow you to forget any of it, but will continually remind you of it, that the experience, so intense initially, is attenuated then flattened out over days, nights, weeks, months, years so that the suffering may be enjoined and you be united with it, it becoming your best friend.
This is as close to that song, that love song to pain, I can come to sharing my experience.

Passed

While the politicians, scientists and now even bishops and ministers are eyeing the future to claim their respective stakes in it, and while there are that class of non clerical souls whose hopes have been dashed, yet are rearing families and are contributing to society, polity, and family, these last can be those degeneratively reminiscent ghosts in the machine who, not looking forward, yet find their hope in the past, and in so doing, have engendered the clumsy, at times convoluted language of the past, and hence carry it forward, if only by translating it into the present.
The ancient greeks bemoaned the youths of their day and longed for the good ol' days. Cumulatively speaking, and perhaps most friendly to Judaism and Christianity, Stoicism, which seemed to be the pagan monotheism, called for a dispassionate attitude toward life, where one was to prepare onesself for the buffets of Fortune, and to accept the nastier side of things with equanimity and even inner grace working outward. This is an important time, when Death was prevalent, where around four in one hundred men reached the age of fifty, and much less than this women and children.
In the face of Death, Eros offered a counterbalance in first the greek, then the greek alexandrian, then the roman way of life. A gentleman, while married, could still make congress with his slaves, who were his property, as long as the shenanigans were kept under wraps, beneath the calm, poised veneer of gentlemanly society.
In this dichotomy of Death and the Ultimate on one side, and ribauldery on the other, the Stoic declared the refined man showed constraint, if not restraint, in the passions. The pagan was shown to be capable of a moral life much like the jew, and this is what most impressed the primitive christian fathers of the day. Had not the greeks and romans developed an attitude, an ethos, that mirrored the hebrews, the church fathers never would have looked to Plotinus in the way they did and as an intellectual, if not spiritual forebear.
The pagan, who surely made a favorable impression on both Jesus and Paul, their exhortations and reasonings gave props to the exterior forces within which they were flourishing. And even before, at the epiphany, the Magi, thought to be either arabian or persian, followed the star of the hebrew king, and in their turn honored this newborn royal at his birth. These Magi, certainly made other appearances to other kings, be they roman, persian or greek. And yet there is no story of them being converted, or more needing conversion, in the canonical gospels.
So this is why some look to the past, before christianity became the darling of empire. There is seen to be a wild, rangy, completely undogmatic free exchange of ideas between all the prophets of orthodoxy as well as heresy. Simon Magus, the Gnostic, was branded with 'simony', the want of gaining spiritual power by purchasing it with gold coin. But he was only reasoned with, and certainly not burned at any stake. The most violent either Jesus or any of his original followers became was Peter when he cut off the roman guard's ear, which Jesus promptly repaired, and Jesus Himself, when he attacked the moneychangers in the second temple, but giving them no more harrassment, than to drive them from His Father's house.
So there is Liberality, in Grace, in thought, in philosophy, in religion, found in patched throughout the past where the promise of freedom and democracy and liberty can thrive, and the most number can be the most happy most of the time. 'If we've done it before, we can do it again', I might say here.
Looking to the past, in many respects, is like a respectable way to revolt against the ways are tending. If the church is become too dogmatic and has stripped the sacred Cosmos bare of all manner of spirits, demons, angels and archangels, and attempted to bury the Magic that has always validated it in all of it's many guises, and one feels like one is missing something, then since one can't remember the future, one can then remember the past.
Personally, a reason I look to the past is because those people were closer to Birth. Birth of the Individual. Birth of the family. Birth of the town, the city, the state, the country, the empire. There is something about beginnings, primal they are, creating order from chaos, where tribal man dusts himself off and trods to the city in hopes that if he can make it there, he can make it anywhere. And the problems man then grappled with were the important ones. The shortness of life, the ubiquity of injustice, how to properly worship the Divine, what place was man in the Cosmos. All haunting questions that in the past have been answered, only to be lost, and now then have been gained again.
But enough.

Anima Mundi

Some flowers are solar, and follow the sun in it's course through the daytime skies. Other plants are lunar, awakening to greet the moon in it's rising and falling. The sun pushes the wind which brings in a front which requires me to sport an umbrella for the day. The moon pulls the Ormond Beach tide, bringing the salty waters up to my toes while whisking away the sand beneath my feet as it recedes. All this interconnectedness, this cooperation of the Cosmos and the Individual! The philosophers saw man in the Cosmos, and Cosmos in the man. Just as the Sun shoots it's rays to the moon, which in turn reflects the rays to the Earth, my heart shoots it's rays to my mind, resulting in right action and kind words, reflected to those around me. When one considers all the likenesses between self and Cosmos, and all the interconectedness of things, it is easy to see why the Ancients conceived of a Universal Soul, where foul matter, in the Sun, the Moon, the Stars, the Earth, and the stones, metals, vegetation and animals is animated by the Soul. This Soul, the Soul of the World, in Latin is called the Anima Mundi. And if nothing else, we do live in a World in Motion. The heavens are lively in their whirl about the axis mundi. The Earth lives and breathes as sure as I do. Animal, vegetable, or mineral, the Universe is certainly charged with life! Evelyn Underhill, in her book entitled 'Mysticism', said that the Universe comes from Life, Life does not come from the Universe. And when Jesus promised us Life, and Life more abundantly, I think He included in this the dawning that I share Life, and Soul, with the Life-charged Cosmos. The soul, according to western mysticism, embodies thoughts, emotions, and expresses personality. And surely we can look upon the World, and see that the stars, the heavens, the earth, then nature, all express personality and at times, even thoughtfulness. There are coincidences, synchronicities, chance happenings, all that point out there might be more to the Universe than mere randomness. The soul, again in western mysticism, is the meeting place of dumb action and intelligent thought. It is the bridge between that mortal lower animal part in man, and that higher, spiritual realm in man that survives Death. One can look upon the tree whose buds produce fruits, which in turn produce seeds, which go on to produce the sapling, a circular manifestation, a soulful representation of the anima mundi. Where birth, growth, decay and rebirth are found in all their guises, these are manifestations of the world soul. And as we acknowledge these monads in ourselves, we realize we are an individual manifestations of the whole, mimicing the divine found throughout Creation.

Nihil - Or Wholly Other

When I was a kid, I used to do a thought experiment. I would start with myself, continue to the earth, on to the moon, mercury, venus, sun, and the rest of the solar system, pass some asteroids along the way to the galaxy, continue on to the fixed stars, and keep going on into space, going back, back, back in time as I went, and what was there? I would always draw a blank. The best term I could use to describe what was there was 'nothing'. If there is something that is transcendent, that is so great it causes all of this we see, surely, to the untrained eye, it would be a blind spot and wholly unrecognizable, as there would be no environment, no frame of reference within which to grasp it as something. From this side of eternity, it would surely be 'nothing'. In mysticism, this 'nothing' is the center of the spiritual universe, termed the 'Ain Sof'. That unintelligible no-thing, the unmoved mover, that is beyond even the first cause. This principle is wholly self sufficient, so none of it, without 'accident' , leaks out so as to be perceived. So, how can we even dream up such an idea, if it cannot be perceived? Something went drastically wrong somewhere. There was a breaking of the vessels, a cosmological fall, and emanations of this no-thing took on form and matter, becoming part of the intelligible matrix of things. So we do experience nothingness. We try to remember something at the opportune time, and draw a 'blank'. We have some new experience that shakes us so that we can't put the thing into words. We have deep, dreamless sleep, and feel completely refreshed upon waking. Each of these, though physical in nature, point to this 'nothing' at the center of everything that really is 'something'.

A Mystery that drives all mysteries.

Ignition

The Fire. The Central Fire of Hestia, from the Greeks. That primordial Fire that ignites the Cosmos. The suns rays, say the alchemists, strike the earth and turn the clay into diamonds and gold and silver and lead. All these metals are said to have the fire of the sun, the philosophical gold in them. Some, like lead, are just slower than others to turn into gold. There are rocks, ruled by earth, metals, ruled by water, plants, ruled by air, and animals, ruled by fire. And Fire is the first igniter of all the natural processes when looking at the wheel of the elements. Fire dominates and initiates hot, cold, dry moist, the four ancient qualities. Fire turns to earth turns to water turns to air and back to fire again. The great cycle constantly being played out throughout the physical universe, mimicing the celestial. If you can look at the most frozen piece of ice and see the fire in the frost of it, you're starting to get a hint of the ubiquity of Fire. Fire, to the ancients, was associated with Intellect. Fire is thwarted by Air, and is at it's best when it is directed. And so goes the intellect. We don't want to be airheads, do we? We want focus when we're using our noggins, we want to direct our bodies from the top down. Continuing on, what is burning, say again the alchemists, is the sulpher, the oily flow of ignited wood. What is evaporated, continue the alchemists, is mercury. Finally, again the alchemists say, what is left after the fire has gone out, ash, is salt. These are the three manifestations of material, according to the alchemists, sulpher, salt and mercury. But the key, the key was the fire. You had to have the proper fire burning before you could turn the lead into gold. Which again points to the mind. If you want to accomplish something, you gotta have the proper attitude, the right frame of mind, in order to turn the dull, leaden experience of day to day life into something precious, gold. And the central hearth is the heart. It issues from the heart, and travels to the head and results in right action. But the secret is, it all begins with Fire.

Continuum

I read, or heard, once, that Life is like being adrift on a vast ocean, and needing to rebuild the entire boat plank by plank. The existentialists certainly described our plight quite aptly. We are constantly thrown forward, from birth, into circumstances we have very little control over, and are hard pressed to understand them. It doesn't take much of an imagination at all to see the absurdity of things. And ugliness, if looked for, can be found at every corner. And our perception is so limited, not really cosmically geared (yet) to take in all the details. I mean, do you remember what you were doing on February 17th of last year, right off the bat? Besides working, or celebrating a birthday. I mean, right off, what color shirt were you wearing? Were you in jeans or slacks? I mean, cosmologically, a year ago February is but a split second, yet what do we know, even personally, about what went on? This is because from birth, we've been trying to play catch-up. We have this conscious mortal earth bound self that does the primary perceiving and limits what we can see and experience. All we can say with certainty is things tend to be a certain way. But we don't know really the sun will rise in the east tomorrow, or that the moon will course through the day and night skies. These are but predictions and guesses at what may (should) transpire. Realizing consciousness has only provided us with a partial picture of our lives, we can see where all the darkness comes from. And space. We, phenomenologically, have so many gaps in our understanding, so many unnoticed things, as in the mood of a coworker on a certain day, heck, even the mood of a spouse on Thursday of last week! No wonder darkness falls! But the sun does shine, and we do have moments of transcendence, moments of grace, moments of clarity and this is where all the light comes from! And then there is of course intuition. We can shortcircuit the neocortical logical center and go straight to the heart of the matter. If a child is endangered, or we are about to do something stupid, we can react without thinking and properly to boot in the first case, and turn on a dime in the second case, and avoid disaster in both cases! But intuition has it's costs, in that experience is blurred, and we may perhaps may not know or remember how we saved the child when it's all over, and we surely will never know what all pitfalls we have avoided by turning on a dime! So, what is an answer? To realize that life is a continuum. We are floating down the stream whose beginning or ending is infinite. There is that part of ourselves that can perceive this flow when we're not in the lockstepped, clock dominated, day to day rush of things. If we are doing something we enjoy, time can fly by, and things can just 'click'. The Universe seems to appreciate this sort of mindfulness and rewards us during such times with good experiences, pleasant times, stillness and equanimity and calm reposes. We can step outside the linear scientific time we've become so accustomed to and just let things happen, and more, experience things as they happen. These, I have found, to be some of the most rich, rewarding times and experiences I have ever known.

Ex Nihilo

Out of nothing. No form, no stuff, no precedent. Thus 'Creator', that One who transcended Art by making something from nothing. Today, we are artistic, rearranging Nature to produce something that is 'new' . When Michelangelo created his 'David', did he wonder whether it was the best of all Davids? I don't think so, and even if he did, from his perspective, he wouldn't have known if it was the best of all Davids. I realize now I've used 'creative' where something original is supposed to have been produced, but really, I should have used 'artistic', or 'produced' where something, not necessarily original has been 'brought forth'. The vast expanse of the heavens, the fixed and wandering stars, the moon, the sun, the earth, the orbs, all of this being original. The best of all worlds. Where even the greatest suffering must produce progress and betterment.