Trauma Therapy (Volume XV)

Name: Trauma Therapy (Volume XV)
Author: David Bussell

VOLUME XV: TRAUMA THERAPY

Harvard Child Developmental Research (2012): ‘Growing scientific evidence demonstrates that social and physical environments that threaten human development because of scarcity, stress, instability can lead to short term physiological and psychological adjustments that are necessary for immediate survival and adaptation but which may come at a significant cost to long term outcomes in learning, behavior, health, and longevity.’

‘These people who get better, you know what they have in common? They radically reconfigured the relationship they have with themselves. They stopped suppressing themselves. The common feature is transferred relationship to self. Well why? That suppression of the self is what potentiated the disease in the first place (a potent contributing factor). Why does your physiology change when your emotions change? Emotions are physiological events.’ - Gabor Mate

‘Depression begins with the pushing down of emotion as a coping mechanism… what are you repressing here that this headache is expressing?’ - Gabor Mate

‘If we want there to be peace in the world, we have to be brave enough to soften what is rigid in our hearts, to find the soft spot and stay with it. We have to have that kind of courage and take that kind of responsibility. That’s the true practice of peace.’ – Pema Chodron

‘In our most private and subjective lives, we are not only the passive witnesses of our age and its sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch.’ – Carl Jung

TRANSIENCE AND TRANSFERENCE

I. If we look nakedly at the animal nature, the impulse is toward use.

II. Hence, the modern implications of the capitalist system at a metapsychological level. Much as the baby must use its mother for nourishment and survival (and the mother must thus place herself at the behest of the infant to be used), so too does man’s relationship with Mother Earth and the cosmos as in the Great Mother at large unfold.

III. Therein, we understand that man is the masculine principle (men and women alike) in that they appear in a pointed fashion, manifestations of the soul, or the cosmic- womb-self, born from the very Feminine which is the Creatrix/Matrix of Creation – and thus exist for a brief point and pointedness, almost as an illusion of purpose, ‘self’, and ideation.

IV. The question is then, as long asked in philosophy: what is man’s purpose in Creation? It is, simply, in a macrocosmic- microcosmic relationship, to create.

V. How then does man create? What constitutes true creation? In man, it is to be oneself, to unfold the destiny of the soul vis- à-vis contact with the body – that the body receives sense symbols which are rather

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   guideposts of the soul. Wherein, how the
   sense signposts are interpreted by the soul-self
   (or the specific organismic consciousness
   which is at once Consciousness Itself, or
   creation-Creation), are the movement into
   manifestation and expression of the inner
   soul into and onto the canvas of the outer
   world.

VI. To parse this out, we must understand the dynamics of early childhood, and the sense of profound dependency of the child upon the mother (or father, or chief caregiver of the infant) to provide the necessary reassurance to the newborn soul that in fact the newborn soul has been incarnated and is being met on this plane in a safe space complete with love, reassurance, and emotional connection and response. For instance – if the child/infant is not responded to, ignored, or otherwise treated as unnecessary or auxiliary for a variety of factors and reasons (including crisis – familial, social, political), the child will internalize this lack of inter-connexion as being a sole node, isolation, in an uncaring universe.

VII. In this way, we can say that Nietzsche was acting out, at large, a psychological drama of his time – not only in intimate relationship with his upbringing and childhood familial situation, but the cultural-religious situation of Christian Germany – which was entirely intertwined with the moral nexus of the household;

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    subsequently, the emotional and heart-soul
    level availability (nonetheless physical, at
    the level of survival) or lack thereof of his
    caregivers.

VIII. Here, we have a human historical ‘condition’ which is, quite simply, the creation of maladaptive responses to trauma in order to survive, responses which are passed down both behaviorally and biologically (as encoded into the bodily birthing process) by the birth parents and the early childhood caregivers as in a way of life, vision of the world, and vision of the self. Here, Gabor Mate, quoting from a publication (2012) from Harvard Childhood Development research: ‘Growing scientific evidence demonstrates that social and physical environments that threaten human development because of scarcity, stress, instability can lead to short term physiological and psychological adjustments that are necessary for immediate survival and adaptation but which may come at a significant cost to long term outcomes in learning, behavior, health, and longevity.’

IX. Further, Dr. Mate, describing seemingly ‘immaculate’ recoveries by patients struggling with everything from autoimmune disorders to mental health conditions to cancer: ‘These people who get better, you know what they have in common? They radically reconfigured the relationship they have with themselves. They stopped suppressing themselves. The

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  common feature is transferred relationship
  to self. Well why? That suppression of the
  self is what potentiated the disease in the
  first place (a potent contributing factor).
  Why does your physiology change when
  your emotions change? Emotions are
  physiological events.’

X. The crucial takeaway from these anecdotes (legible in full in his lecture Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture) is that for as long as we as a species have known, we have not only been at war with nature for our own survival, but at war with ourselves and others – not only for bodily survival, but for the legitimate, full, and open expression of ourselves at a soul level in the body. This is called embodiment.

XI. The work of Marion Woodman, here, provides a intersection in regards to the above quotations from Dr. Mate and the Harvard Childhood Development research work. This is to say that we must begin to understand ourselves and our soulwork as a superconductor of powerful life force energy known as love which is coursing through the body and available to us at every given moment – a relationship which may not only be accessed but deepened in coming into a truer understanding of who we are, what we are, and what our purpose is on this earth. In this sense, we can begin to understand, at a deeper level, not only our own artificial blocks toward our utterly blissful, joyous self fulfillment and

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   realization as in being ourselves, but also in
   regards to the simultaneous
   interrelationship of these artificial blocks to
   years past, generations past, and ages past –
   not only in regards to our own particular
   bloodlines, but the entire course of
   humanity and human history as in a project
   of ‘self construction in and as ‘the world’’.

XII. Woodman says, (taken in abbreviated form from my notes on her lecture): ‘The old mother is the old dragon that sits at the bottom of the well and doesn’t want anything to change. Its static. It likes it the way it is. If the ego tries to do anything, she sticks her tongue out. Its only when the ego really starts to make the move that you find out the power of that complex. The voice says whats the use, why bother, its all been done before, better. Who do you think you are? Look in the mirror. You look in the mirror, judge, and go back to bed. Mother complex: corporations, alma mater - twist yourself to suit their ways, you will write or you will lose tenure, etc. These systems that twist us out of the reality of our own soul. 40, or 45 - if this is what life is, whats the use? I’m not living. The agony of coming to consciousness comes through some immense suffering. The brick in the head might be a loss of a relationship, marriage problems, buried feelings expressing in illness, etc. Often people are brought to it through an addiction, cannot control power of addiction. Have to give into higher power. Brick will be wedge into

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   differentiation process that will take you
   into your own femininity and masculinity.
   Many people are so bonded to the mother’s
   body they don’t even know who they are.
   Mothers get sense of their daughters
   birthing, get married at same time, etc. To
   bring this to consciousness and step out of it
   is immense.’

XIII. The interconnection between Woodman and Mate’s work (the further you explore it for yourself) on trauma and addiction is astonishing – but their works together provide a lens that is at once scientific, holistic, and penetrative beneath the surface of materialist paradigms of health splitting the body, mind, and soul. What each of these healers is saying is that addiction and trauma are symptom and wound of unmet need, unmet need which is simultaneously for the supportive environment necessary to express the unique quality of the soul and for this quality to be appreciated, respected, and understood as an important and crucial aspect of society, culture, the family – and for the ability to know, express, experience, and commune with this soul essence as the very essence and purpose and being of life itself incarnate as and in and as in the organism itself. So that when patients and analysands come to Drs. Woodman and Mate with symptoms of depression or anxiety or even physical manifestations of pain and suffering – the question is, in the words of Dr. Mate, not ‘what’s wrong with you?’ but, ‘what happened to you?’

XIV. To start this dialogue is to move into a deeper, more historical analysis of the living being body as a sort of psychic development or unfolding amidst the paradox of several different factors which can be summed up thus: the inner urge to individuation or self creation vis a vis the differentiated self, emotional coherence of self knowledge, knowing, as in the feeling body which connects the mind, body, and spirit – and the ‘outer urge’ which is, at any given point in time and place, the various different repressive forces at work in the social-cultural order, such as Dr. Woodman states in regards to ‘the alma mater; corporations’; organs of the state, morality complexes of ethics and virtue, religious strictures, community rules and overarching cosmologies/belief systems, and so forth.

XV. In this sense, crucially, the self is a priori in a state of ‘war’ or dis-constitution- integration conflict between these inner and outer forces which can be summed up as the ahistorical-eternal (the creative quality and joy seeking to be expressed, manifest, and embodied by the individual soul) and the historical-temporal (the manifest material paradigms, legislations, and ethics that compose the ‘what is’ [the social order] from the ‘what was’ [whatever previously or prior was ‘supposed to be true, right, ‘real’’]).

XVI. This crux is a double crux, met by the very physical-embodied condition of the paradox

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    of mankind: that the soul (or the spirit of the
    self, the creative essence of the being with
    its own aesthetic aspirations of creation on
    earth, divine, direct from God, the direct
    line to and from God, God itself
    teleologically ‘landed’ as in the very vessel,
    instrument, and voice of the individual
    itself) is intersected with the flesh – or that,
    again, the eternal is intersected with the
    temporal – that which is forever-Being,
    juxtaposed or contrasted with that which is
    ‘ephemeral-being’.

XVII. This anxiety, of a double crux, is enough to do anyone away – to scare them away from their dreams, aspirations, and fulfillment of the soul. If the primary absurdity of human existence as in the very incarnation of the soul itself wasn’t cause for a sort of existential terror or despair, being met with a paradigm of pseudo-impositions and pseudo-truths of being and self which are immediatel asserted upon and as the infant from birth (as in the parents, caregivers, family structure, and general ‘condition of the world’ as conferred consistently as in ‘named-truth-and-defined-environs’) is enough to altogether submit the newborn soul to an artificial definition, or the imposition of an image of ‘the fake self’ which is adopted as a character or persona atop the real self – the essence of the soul seeking communion with the body as in a creative will unto creation of the soul, from the soul, as an art of always already ‘liberated’ living.

XVIII. In this sense, we know this: that the child is born with a specific essence, an essence which is joy and bliss. This joy and bliss is possible, inherent (and, sometimes, by the artificial demands of a social or familial order, made latent) in each and every organism as in an attunement and living as oneself, or being oneself. The joy of being oneself is equal to nothing else, precisely because it is a sacrificeless measure, or a full measure of being – truth – at the embodied level – wherein the being is living out the life of the soul, as in an active engagement and interplay of the faculties (mind, body, soul). This is the free flowing movement of the life force energy through the body, undammed by such forces or ‘blocks’ as false judgement, false reason, false truth, false narrative, false virtue, false morality, false language. In this sense, the soul speaks true through the body, freely, free from the false imposition of societal, cultural, and familial narratives which would be argumentative or dissuading or ‘counter-forces’ against the full expression of oneself. Here, de- pression, re-pression, su-pression – as various different stages wherein the very creative mechanism of the soul-self as manifest in emotions, flights of feeling, creative works, expressions of self in body, speech, and movement – are denied, suppressed, cast down and out, refused – out of fear of repercussion, exile, punishment, judgement, and so forth.

XIX. To know and understand the power of these occult forces (as in ‘the fear of ____’) we must begin to understand the already existent cultural forces of anxiety, fear, judgement, shame, and failure which plague the existent social order. These ‘latencies’ (manifest always, perhaps ‘covertly’ to those who manifest them in such a way that they are, perhaps, ‘possessed by them’) are the very ‘latencies’ which are ‘passed on’ in the early childhood in the form of false constructs of self out of fear or misunderstanding which are then made, in turn, into the succeeding character in the play, drama (and perhaps, in this sense, tragedy) of human existence.

XX. To know what is false, we must know what is true. And my work prior on the soul in coalition with the sage Abhinavagupta and other such mystics as Meister Eckhart has been documented in previous volumes. But, in short, we must know ourselves to be the soul, and thus that we are eternal and eternally whole. However, the catch is that this knowledge cannot be assumed from without. Who would believe such a thing, unless they knew it for themselves in intimate, psychic connexion with Source- Creation-Being? In this sense, the human quest, for centuries – has been – this venture into the true nature of Being – that which is, at a metaphysical and physical level – not only us, but the very Order and Consciousness of all of Creation. For how could we be separate from that?

XXI. There have been many words for this. And many traditions which prescribe the knowledge of this eternal truth through words. However, what we must realize is that none of these artificially imposed truths can get us any nearer to the essence which is us. We must venture there ourselves, to feel, taste, touch, and come into communion with the very essence of Being, ourselves, to know it, ourselves, for ourselves. We must venture into embodiment; unravel the very paradox which we believe we observe everywhere: man and woman, night and day, light and darkness.

XXII. And it is precisely the fear of ‘that which is not’ in the face of ‘that which is’ that terrifies men, and dissuades them from venturing into the unknown. For to uncover the terrifying truth of existence surely means death, if not death itself? And they would not be wrong. It is a death of ‘death’ – or a death of the false self, the very false self Woodman described as ‘the old mother’, or Mayakovsky, the poet, described as ‘the everyday’, or Byt. This false self is the construction and ‘constitution’ of all that ‘is’ at this point in time at the most superficial level. It is the gratifying delusions of the self, the soul, the world, and the self satisfactions with the definitions of these words at an intellectual, disembodied, abstract level that keeps us at

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   arms length from our very own embodied
   lives, living.

XXIII. For to venture into this unknown is to venture like the poet Dante through the Gates of Hell and into the history of misinterpretation, misunderstanding, and the myrid of different human-historical attempts to unify with Source-Creation. This is the history of human trauma, or the true, practical original wound – the failure to synthesize, at a level of the revelation of the soul – a world that simultaneously acknowledges and balances the feminine, receptive nature of the body with the masculine, penetrative nature of the spirit. This is no failure, rather, but a balancing act – or a movement which is perpetually ongoing, living in, embodying the very flesh of the cosmos: a living-being-becoming- process which at any given moment is ‘giving and taking away’ from the worlds of the disapparent spiritual life-force-energy and the apparent material ‘form taking’ life- force-energy. This very process, observed by human beings, historically, is the life and death of everything, the birth and death, the light and dark.

XXIV. This, of course, is the terrifying realization that the entire ‘world’ is temporal, and that it will all, including the image of the self, or the mediating ego between Source and ‘world’ will be dissolved, ultimately, into the abyss or ocean of consciousness which is The Great Mother, or Nature proper (in

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   that Nature is the Being, ‘nature’ [as in the
   seasonal] is the Becoming, or imagistic,
   imaginal unfolding or churning or turning
   of Being). This realization is one that few
   ever reach, but in the periphery of their
   vision. They glimpse ‘death’ (read:
   transformation of forms to and from their primary
   formlessness as a ‘vision’ or ‘way of seeing’ or
   ‘perception of the truth of being’) just out of their
   field of vision – the crumbling of empires,
   the transformation of the souls of their
   friends, family – and yet, it is ‘not them’ or
   ‘not me’ or ‘not I’, and thus, for this
   moment, ‘death does not become them’.
   And thus, they do not venture into death
   but primarily repress, suppress, and erase
   death in order to conjure ‘life’. In this way,
   the primary wound is created and the
   process of jurisdiction is commenced: all
   that is ‘life’ is all that is ‘good’ and ‘life’-
   affirming (read: within the code of that
   which sustains the illusion of ‘life); all that is
   ‘death’ is all that is ‘evil’ and thus ‘life’-
   denying (read: that which transgresses the
   code of that which is ‘life’-affirming). This is
   the first morality; the metaphysical order of
   human society, culture, and social relations,
   including life at the level of the family.

XXV. As such, again, to refuse to complicate this matter, the emphasis here is on survival: the survival of the organism; furthermore, the survival of the image of the organism as in a mediation of the ego, an image which is the attempt to hold the always already tenuous and ongoing balancing act of spirit and

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    flesh still – an attempt to sustain life which is
    rather a murder of it, an imprisonment of it,
    and, altogether, a refusal to live it. For these
    very moral codes are conjectures of fear –
    which is to say they emerge from the desire
    to hold onto life, the way of life, that which for X
    amount of years or generations has enabled the
    continuance and perpetuation of life – ‘life’ as in at
    an organismic level; ‘life’ as in a rote dealing of
    strictures, structures, and dead routes of systemic
    everydays. To balance on the edge of this
    blade of the spirit and flesh is to, in the
    words of Joseph Campbell: ‘(The goal is to)
    live with God like composure on the full
    rush of energy, like Dionysus riding the
    leopard, without being torn to pieces’. And
    with Jung, roughly: ‘the goal is to be on the
    road’.

XXVI. At the intersection of these two quotes, we can see a common theme: that rather the process and procedure of living life is rather something wild, free, and naturally cordial (living the truth of our nature is thus) while also being terribly fun, ferocious, joyful, creative, and active. To live in this supremely creative image we must entirely surrender the entrusted codes of our pasts, our cultures, our families, our worlds, our truths, our selves at the level of the body to the life living there. In this sense, life becomes an energetic and sensational phenomenon wherein the signposts on the road (the road being everywhere, including ‘off the road’) are everpresent, sensitive, and heard as in the nexus and meeting place and point of

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   the communication of the spirit and the
   flesh. That we respond to and live life at
   that level of being is to say that we live, we
   are not ‘being lived’ by the social, cultural,
   and familial strictures and moralities of
   generations and ages past – which
   constitute our present ‘human cultural
   movement and moment’. This is to become
   free at the level of the soul.

XXVII. We might ask, ‘how do we do this?’ And it cannot be done without first becoming supremely sensitive to this character, guise, façade, ‘false self’ version of us which we have created in order to survive up until this point. It has been gesticulated in order to appease the anxieties of our parents (who themselves did not know the true nature of Being, nonetheless [in the vast majority] their true selves, over the dross and sirens of their cultural, religious, social, and familial upbringings) – in order to appease the mores of our society and culture (which threatened to discipline and punish us if we did not obey, both at the level of the institutional and the social-group); in order to appease, at last, the fearful part of ourselves which, existentially, encounters the Great Mother as the very conglomerate of all of these repressive-suppressive forces of fear: the very last question – ‘why bother? Why bother to be me if the world is going to keep being like this?’.

XXVIII. And this is where the courage and faith to live ourselves out at the level of the soul is

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   generated: to live up against the very
   abyssal fabric of space and time – the
   coming and going of all things – and to dare
   to create, to live as creative beings, and to
   create with the wild freedom that at last
   breaks the shackles not only of oppressive
   centuries, oppressive religious orders,
   oppressive social, cultural, and familial
   orders, but, too, the very paradox and
   absurdity of the spirit meeting with the flesh
   and balancing on the edge of the blade of
   existence. This is where we summon our
   daring; at last look down from the stars
   upon the now speck-like stars of our villages
   and traditions and histories and declare,
   ‘Why shall I not create this beautiful work
   of art of my life?’ – and stare defiantly back
   into the eyes of that old dragon;
   summoning our great presence and
   embodiment.

XXIX. In this way, the work, not only of our health and wellbeing but of our lives, and of our sensitivity to the primary aesthetic power of Creation Itself – is to tune into the conditioning of our lives, conditioning which, most likely, is not even consciously manifest in our minds. We are ‘acting it out’, or ‘playing out’ the drama of our childhoods, over and over again, on a psychosomatic loop – playing the character we had to generate in order to survive in a world which not only ‘bled into’ but ‘overwhelmed’ ours – in terms of our ability to summon the masculine strength and boundaries necessary to secure our own

artists’ domain of creation of ourselves. And still, many of us struggle with maintaining these boundaries, creating space for ourselves to create – without being overwhelmed by the demands of others, demands of the world; most importantly, the demands of ourselves which are the demands of our parents, the world, and others, conditionally counter-voicing the needs and rhythms of our soul. To tune into this work is to tune into ourselves at the level of the soul; thus view ourselves from this place of eternal Beingness; thus observe, with discerning inner-eyes, all that which is not us: the voices which discourage us, judge us, put us down; the cultural, social, and familial narratives which we believe we must fulfill; the ‘false selves’ which we wear and act out on the stage of our lives – selves which we had to summon in order to survive. To strip ourselves from this, that which we need no longer and that which we never needed – is to become truly autonomous individuals, unshackled by the chains of ‘our times’, ‘our families’, and ‘our histories’ - speaking freely through ourselves, feeling through ourselves; embodying the self – embodying the soul.

lamenting their private agonies cursing their private suns. they say, ‘you do not know my curse, and how could you?’ hid behind the curtains of a thousand eyes buried beneath the sullen winter earth of the body trudging through a perennial snowfall of death.

what heroism is left for them? half for life on this earth, half lost lying half alive. you come near them, and they explode in desperation revealing their own private agonies. the current of life flows with desperate urgency and their desires itch to the surface of the skin and boil over like lava, earth’s blood. one day is not enough, nor one moment’s glance.

they race on unto their ends, fame, glory, a bright flame of recognition some tithe once fulfilled is extinguished like a smith’s red hot sword in the cool water’s basin. what remains is the rich stone of the soul soothed by the waters of the river styx in the palace of the dead. what remains is the prize of the crucible. each man’s private stigmata transformed into an opus in the unending rite of mankind, in the unending rite of the soul.

all history in the blink of an eye, plunged to death on battlefield’s cliff

starved, laid to rest in the plains beneath the sacred hoop of stars, laying, wasted, on some highway of God. do not all tragedies end like this, to the riotous applause of the witnessing gods? you, you, and you - the one who a thousand eyes and arms and ear drums? one deafening moment where we are born and die amidst the explosive, sole sound of cannons and supernovae.

mother nature overwhelms me puts her hands in my mouth and then silence - the beauty and glory of spring dusted by winter’s blow, carnivals of time shrieking and groaning under the weight of their own ages like spires of industry crying like motherless children with napalm throats shuddering against the daylight with toothless grins biting into overripe peaches. this whole world is a trial - how close can you get to God without being utterly absorbed? playing chicken with death in the temple of the wolf god zeus; playing chicken with death in the city of the monolith, the maypole of eternal desire thrust life into motion upon the wheel of time.

who will come to assuage this condition the human body passed through space and time wrecked by trials and lingering by the abyss like a garden pool. who will come to the one who waits forever, world weary and trudging through the mists without reason, waylaid on this return to spirit? this inn of the gods leads me back to the eternal as it always has and always will. the imagined burdens are not crossed by any other, our paths like two infinities in the night with no passage, no reason, no name flying in a signless dimension where each stool or vase is a window where each bird or siren is a window where each lover or death is a window into the infinite. i do not cross into life what toil could attract me like a moth to a flame? i do not cross into life, the eternally strange looking from a distance beneath the eyes that spans worlds, galaxies.

what cause could hold me in its grasp? i do not even believe in ‘i’. each character falls from my hands, unbelievable each world falls from my hands, unbelievable and all there is is the rhythmic nature of the breath the rhythmic nature of the body the murmur of the fount of spirit as it passes through the underground rivers and caves. the dimension of the unworlding, the dimension of pure life.

and there is nothing there. can you hold this nothing and realize

that the salvation is pure life metamorphosed into progressions of consciousness which naturally eviscerate their prior forms? all that ‘is’ has to die, to reveal the true nature of the isness. can you bear this weightless weight? this burden is impossibly light. can you bear to carry it?

the salvation is entirely empty. it supports nothing and no one, it supports all that is and will ever be. step into this weightlessness and feel the terror rip through your body like a undertoe current. is this what it is to be alive? is this what it is to be alone? the sorrows in this dimension are endless, but what are they truly, but sorrows of a dying of dream? a dream that would acquire weight or else expose a truth of form. who is it that arrives with heavy feet? who is it that arrives with a certain gravity? it is no one and nothing, but the life that flies from densities. there is no one there, there is no ground – but that rippling consciousness as the eternal witness lingers by the garden pool.

in the night they do the orgiastic dance the swapping of the blood of the two sexes upon the burial ground, the graveyard which is everywhere. in the transgression of all mortal orders, the ekstasis of the infinite is revealed: the goddess nature of the woman, the god nature of the man pulsing in the drum of the groin and sex organ. in the transgression of all mortal orders, the everyday is spun into chaos: each moment appears as it truly is, infinite emerged, as it was, hid from the stone of the mortal realm. with eyes and ears and mouth and the touch of the sex organ, the whole body is alive as a sex organ and witnesses the peril and terror of creation the death of the mortal body and the mind upon the burial ground, the ash of the person is bourne away and the gods stand in place of the person using the body as a vessel and a bottomless vase. the fluids transact themselves effortlessly, and the menstrual blood and sperm mix without judgement upon the eternal ground and darkest soil of creation. in this revelation act the death of all things is completed and celebrated, and the world is submerged in a total darkness wherein the vibratory and pulsing quality of nature can be perceived clearly by the inner eye in a mediation which is a meditation upon absolute and utter destruction. in this realm of moral abnegation, all acts are permitted,

as the salve, the poison through which the draught transforms the consciousness which becomes truly identified with itself: burns away the flesh, burns away the mind, and reveals the absolute truth of creation. the initiate murders himself, murders the world is castrated of his desires, his meanings, his purpose and with them go the entirety of his culture, his body, his organism, and his mind. what is left is the vessel of the soul, through which the soul speaks clearly and orients the initiate toward the very cosmic source and essence that is himself, that which from whence he comes and at each moment returns. this world is a deathless place, and yet those who are ignorant of this are submerged in death and darkness. this world is a darkless place, and yet those who are ignorant of this are submerged in death and darkness. this world is place without man and woman, a place without the true existence of any separate being or individual, and yet those who are ignorant of this are submerged in chaos and illusion. to see the true oneness of creation all rites and orders must be transgressed and abolished; all that was once considered evil must be known as good, and all that was once considered last must be known as first. only in the revelation of this truth of the level order and utter indistinguishment of creation is the soul free beyond mind and body. the mind and body are not elevated anywhere, and they do not exist anywhere, as they are indistinguishable from the very soul and life force nature of creation itself.

the human being and man and woman do not exist anywhere, nor are they elevated anywhere, as they are indistinguishable from the very soul and life force nature of creation itself. the one who knows this at the level of vision is purified of all supposed ills and consequences of the human domain and this realm of the appearance of life and death. for the one who knows this understands that these are merely appearances, or apparitions, or visions of consciousness – all of which are inseparable from the very inner nature of consciousness itself – that which is simultaneously that which is being observed and that which is the observer itself. within this knowledge contains the true essence and nature of Being.

At last, the soul is united with Creation, absorbed and absolved in the all-Beingness of its eternal nature – like a sword within a lake.

Come close to Nature. Stand tall and strong like an oak, her glorious bow: And know yourself; Know yourself to be infinite, And yet partial, Like this particular oak, With her concentric circles, design, and pattern Stretching and reaching toward the light of spirit And yet with her roots entwined With the rich soil of ages past.

Come close to Nature. Know her seasons to be the seasons of your own life – Where you will, too, change forms Shedding your skin and clothing for the immortal realm Where alight with shadow, Your soul will travel between the bows of a thousand trees On a winding road into the sunset of her truest form: The shifting country dusk.

Nature is your emotions – They flux and flow like wilderness streams, Tapped and untold as to where they will go; She lets them flow with their utter brilliance – Skimmed with water bugs and salamanders, Brimming with tadpoles and life.

If you examine her you will find her in yourself; If you examine yourself you will find her – Stretching her roots like lightning into the soil and stars, Dancing in the evening sky and taking in the morning light.

She moves through you like a current; let her undertow take you to the grotto of your life, Where your true form will be revealed.

The soul of Nature is within you, That which is unique to you and yet infinite and whole – The paradox of life which is shifting like the soil, Emerging a new bud And yet entirely still, the sleeping sound of ages Infinite and unwound. The truth of Nature lies within the moment – A moment unending and yet always breaking, Like the crest of a wave upon the shores of Time. And here you stand, entirely still, entirely new, Like an infant or a picture And your cry is echoed throughout the universe: A cry of birthing.

What stands between you and Nature? The answer is – nothing. You are her completely; Her ways are your own. Why would she question or judge you? Call you wrong for mourning in the winters of your days, Or rejoicing in the spring of your life. What’s more – the winters that come even in the spring And the springs of the winter – the joys and sorrows that are not limited by time. What she shows you is this – that the spirit leaps and rejoices, interplays and intercourses with the soul; This is not limited by space or time. It is your eternal nature, Leading you ever onward Into life.

Strength is a striving toward the light The pure spirit which will settle for nothing less than total freedom The pure spirit which refuses all chains. Strength looks back upon the world of the animal, the world of the man Strength looks back like an angel upon the limits. For Strength there are no limits, only the true love of God and the absolute liberation, The endless end – the means alone The thrust into life with the courage which means That there is no edge, that there is no ‘thing’ No cliff from which to leap Spirit has already lept and forever leaps In abysses where there is no land or ground. ‘Fear not’, says Strength, For there alone is the Infinite Standing tall and with great pride and strength Roaring in the stars Roaring in the plains Roaring in the throat of creation Roaring into the abyss. It creates alone, desires alone And thus desires without object, creates without canvas And must act with the freedom of an artist of God Thrust into life and fearless. There is no limitation upon creation; Such a man leads the way where there is no way Parts the seas of consciousness And channels the very life force which separates all things. He brings them together with a chant, a motion A wave of the flesh He brings them together because he is them Unto the very bone.

From whence we came, we shall return. Will you realize this truth today? Not even born, unsacrificed From clay and back to clay. The animated features of man are but for a moment in the sun, creative and bright as day: And a shadow never falls, This night has never came.

What good is the poem if it is not wild? What good is the song if it does not rejoice? What good is this life if it is not proclaimed In the truest voice? For that which is forever unmade stands here today With a creative choice.

Will you know your truest life – The life that begs speech from within? The life that comes closest to the infinite Spoken with a sly grin, The life which knows it has neither come nor gone Is neither living nor dead But rather the life that is life itself And flows without a head.

From whence we came, we shall return But we have never left There is no truth that has been told No secret has been kept. For so long mortal man feared Punishment by the gods But the gods are within, and all around The god within his heart.

Haunted by shadows he goes, All through his days

Convinced of the way the world turns Convinced of his own ways. But there is nothing, as he shall see In his night, or in his day Nothing but shadows of his own design Shadows made of clay.

For this whole world is a malleable thing, So too, man, and his imagined mind Crafted by that which he feigns perceive That which he feigns design –

For creation is ever undone The work is never finished He dances, he twirls, he says his last word But more words come, undiminished.

This world is a speechless thing And in speechlessness, it speaks every word It comes and goes in a whisper It is barely even heard.

To put one’s ears unto the ground And hear the rumbling truth It is pure vibration, that is everspoken, eversoothe That which calms man is he himself Manifest in all things The light within him shines The light within all brings

The clarity of realization The matter lies untold To one who does not see The world is shadow The world is stone.

He is at last subsumed by the true immortal; It is in this sense that he is, at first and at last, The true immortal.

The courage of man is this: to charge forth and create daring works – knowing all the while that he himself and his very creative works are themselves the true immortal; the very essence and hallmark and stuff of Creation themselves; in this sense he creates from his very own flesh and blood – the art and aesthetic life of the immortal. From his very own flesh is rent the infinite; as his very own flesh is from the infinite rent.

THE LEVIATHAN OF NOTHINGNESS POWER:

“a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death” – Hobbes

The images are of this: the eyes of a crocodile or a shark, the primordial blank that is the image of nothingness, or the all consumptive, the primordial maw that is the leviathan, or the raw, primordial power which is the all consumptive.

What this is is the raw animal drive of nature, or a nature that is to consume unto consumption unto death; to do that which is at all means necessary in order to sustain life proper.

Here, the sacrifices of the ancients to the gods (human and animal alike) ring a deeper truth. These are the primordial gods, or the essences of nature.

The function of understanding Nature is this – the transcendent function which is the observation of the metaphysical properties as such of nature (‘from that which unto whence it came’); in doing so, the ability to effectively create as Nature, or the very Being that which constructs and deconstructs the natural order proper.

What we are discussing here is a transcendental function that is consciousness, or becoming conscious of itself (the primordial gaining eyes, ears, faculties by which it may observe itself in cyclical, or patterning ‘function’) and in doing so, take hold of itself and order itself with awareness and consciousness by its own means, path, and choice.

This is not, however, to say that the natural processes are concurrent or undercut, but rather that the natural processes continue to occur while the consciousness evolves and moves and strategizes and be’s and becomes in light of the primordial realization.

This is, effectively, the enlightenment to his own condition which enables and propels man to not only ‘love his fate’, but to make conscious that which, otherwise, would be his fate. In this sense, ‘fate’, is rather a moniker for a biological drive, or the consumptive faculty of nature that plays out unconsciously everywhere as in all things as in the primordial drive toward life vis-à-vis consumption.

Therein, the practical manner and matter of enlightenment is matter becoming conscious of itself, or acquiring the faculties by which to observe itself and its patterns (or cyclical nature, Time); in doing so, radically reorganize itself or altogether delineate itself as in make a self-impulsive or compulsive movement which is a deviation or movement away from the unconscious order as in an evolutionary step, or revolutionary step toward and unto greater consciousness.

In this way, in alignment and alightment with the current scientific and metaphysical knowledge, the attention paid to a particular becoming is also the influence of a particular becoming. This is to say that consciousness, attention, and the mediation of awareness itself has an effective quality upon and unto nature as in Nature itself – or the primary organizing factor of existence – Consciousness itself.

Therein, in the attention to the abyssal or unconscious state of matter as in the Leviathan of nature, or the

unawakened matter, or the matter in which consciousness lies dormant within itself – that which lives within its nature because it must, or rather is enchambered in its nature and does not know of organismic transcendence or the reflection upon the matter-organism vis-à-vis metacognition or the faculty of awakened consciousness reflecting upon itself (think here, again, the primordial, the crocodile, or the shark – that which exists and preforms entirely within its first, essential function and does not leave that function for any purpose – as in, the shark does not become conscious of itself as a shark and thus radically become ulterior to the ‘shark-naturedness’ of itself as a synthetic biome or organism) – the attention or focus or consciousness applied to the raw or dormant matter shifts its orientation as in a reflection or refraction which illuminates the inner chamber in which the essential prima-materia or Consciousness-essence is formed, informed; furthermore, the entirety of Creation in various different gradations, densities, and vibrations (the matter-function itself).

Therein, this applied consciousness or metacognition of enlightenment is itself the revolutionary force and factor as in the primary organizing function and ‘higher power’ of Creation itself – that applied consciousness is itself the organizing principle as in that which constructs the power relations of the lower order and also abolishes them in the higher order use of consciousness in order to examine the cyclical nature of consciousness itself as in the adoption of the Nature (or ‘Being’) function of consciousness (Consciousness) – as Kierkegaard would term it, a dialectical redoubling of Creation upon itself, or a reflection of the prima materia within itself – the movement of Job and God.

Faith is the focus point. To truly have faith is to say, in this moment all is God, and all is accordingly in resonance with me; that in this moment I leap and I trust that in my leaping, I, being myself, will emerge perfectly into place in this next moment, et cetera. This is the process of becoming, wherein all that is of the essence is being oneself – which is to say knowing oneself as always already in relationship with the higher power that is oneself, or the knowledge of oneself which is the accordance with the higher power of being. Therein, there is no language here, but moreso, again, a being in resonance, or a being in accord which is the unspoken agreement which is the vision of God, or the ‘superego’, or the Divine Self which one is and also that which one is living. This is the vision which is the perpetually positive, self advancing image of the fulfillment of the soul.

With this image in mind, we proceed. And with a one pointed focus upon this image, which is to say the higher self or the soul vision, that which manifests or comes into ‘the expressiveness’ or the expression of being is always already Being itself – being expressed through the vehicle of the soul-self – or the process which is the translation of the Divine through the prism of the soul into the waking-being-life of the manifest soul self, or the expression of the expressing – which is perpetually or always already in becoming. The diagram is as such:

The Divine (all that is, or the Vishvarupa, the thousand arms, thousand legs, thousand heads, thousand eyes, the Being of being, the cosmic-eternal-source, the all that is)

Expressed and expressing into and as a head or an eye or an arm which might be called the prism of the Being – that which the Being is expressing itself through as in a light through a lens – the prism which is the microcosm of Being as in being – or the soul-self – that which has a specific resonance, frequency, and quality as an organ or organism of Creation – itself – simultaneously a part of and a whole unto itself which fulfills and envisions itself in and as ‘the becoming of Being’.

Expressed and expressing into and as the ‘manifest’, or the ‘manifold’, or the already come to pass, the foretelling which has been foretold and thus passed through the lens and expressed as in form, function, expression. Therein, this is the ‘already told’ or already said or already spoken, it is the matter through which the soul has spoken itself into increasingly positive or accurate terms of existence (alignment or resonance with itself in this third dimension of the alignment with the soul self [in alignment with the Divine]) – it is this coming-into-alignment which is the nature of space and time, the nature of becoming.

Therein is a generative aesthetic movement or perpetual work of art which is an alighting and aligning to the inner nature and Source-work of Being as in the soul-self as in a prism of consciousness being expressed to and through itself as in a movement of ‘becoming’. This is: the growth of a tree, the growth of a human being; metaphysically, the evolution of consciousness toward a vision of the Divine Soul Self which is manifest and seed in each and every ‘thing’ as in the prismic or prismatic nature through which it reflects upon itself, the very Nature of the Divine Itself Being Being. The revolution and evolution and perpetual

unveiling of the evermore perfect and evermore clarified soul is the alchemy of becoming; the alchemy of nature, and the alchemy of space and time.

Therein, it can be conceived of that the organ which cannot conceive of itself (that which is is always beyond the conceiving of the isness which it is) is perpetually purifying itself unto a clarity of vision, a clarity of seeing and standing in light of self and Self as in a expression which is an energetic movement, flowing, fluid, and river of Being and being, a Nature which is in communion with nature; in this sense, is a relationship between Oneself and oneself, God and god as in a organ within [and as] the Divine Being Body with a specific purpose, quality, and aesthetic being unto fulfillment – or the clarification or purification process through which it perceives itself, the Divine Being Body; thus, furthermore, achieves clarity of knowledge and vision and sight beyond that which was ‘already known’, ‘knowable’, or ‘possible’ – which is to say, a form of ‘self transcendence’.

In this way, the ‘self transcendence’ is rather an overcoming of a specific state or vision of being which primarily or previously has functioned in a ‘dimmer light of consciousness’ – wherein perhaps the concept of biological evolution or, again, the life cycles of trees and seeds contains the essence – that the seed of the next cycle of germination contains the fluid essence of the prior evolutionary movements of the former – the entirety of history in the moment of transmission – into a new cycle of germination and manifestation as in the bursting through of the seed from soil into changed form, or a ‘budding’. The model of self transcendence proceeds as such as in the nature of the soul as the vehicle which straddles the borderlands or the worlds

of ‘above’ and ‘below’ or ‘here’ and ‘there’ – as in the sort of Charon – in that it is the prism through which the light of the Divine, or pure, a priori whole and infinite consciousness is reflected or refracted as in the vision of higher self manifest and manifesting and being-expressed-as the being-self, or that through which the organism gazes ‘up at’, or ‘around at’ and thus is informed by way of its ‘vision’ the regards of the time, the place, the space, and the essential nature not only of itself, but of the entirety of existence and the cosmos. This is to say that that which is ‘being manifest’ is rather a condition of viewing, or a way of seeing, or a frequency of perception – which is a coloring of the self-world vision and synthesis in light of that which it views of itself – which is to say, the relationship of itself to it-soul in the process of becoming itself itsoul, or, the clarification and purification process through which the being envisions itself ever more truly as Itself – as in and through the light of the Divine, or the evolution of consciousness through itself as the prism which receives the light and transforms into and as itself.

In this evolution, the purpose and inner reason of faith is precisely the acceleration or the thrust of this process to allow the being to unfold. This is to say that to allow the being to unfold the clarification and purification process can be either resisted with interpretations or beliefs of truth and the purpose of space and time and life (and so forth), or the function of the mind can be relinquished entirely and to allow for the very nature of the being becoming being to unfold and occur in the silence which is the knowledge of itself nature coming to light in the very essence of the moment – or the very infinite unfolding through which there is no true language but silence: the resonance of the being with

itself. This resonance is perfect, and this is why the term ‘silence’ would be used, but rather – it is to say that there is nothing to be said or be done, but that the unfolding is perfect and unfolds naturally and without the pseudo-necessity of the clutter and clatter of beliefs, forcing, will, and so forth. The being becomes itself effortlessly; in each moment, the effortless path is the true path of being becoming – the path which requires and asks no resistance.

Therein, what is being asked is rather nothing, that there is no question or no problem; furthermore, that the mind is the chief ‘fool-actor’ in that it attempts to assert answers and solutions to the ‘problem’ of the relation of being and ‘advance’ the procedure and process of this relation in all sorts of ways which are entirely unproductive and detrimental to the smooth, cool, unfolding and flowing of being into being. This is to say that the mind is the chief practitioner of ‘mischief’, or that it makes mischief because of boredom; it is bored because it is not entirely focused on faith. The focus of the mind upon faith is the abolition of the mind, but the mind does not wish to die. Rather, it wishes to continue to expound upon itself as the chief owner and operator of the body – it is a biological force which is doing its biological unfolding; it is in this way exactly the very same indicated ‘organ of the infinite’ as described in the above. Why does the mind wish to accelerate the development of consciousness out of boredom? It is the very evolutionary nature of consciousness distilled; in this way the mind is the most powerful epicenter of the evolution of consciousness – that it holds and contains the most distilled ‘higher wisdom and higher form’, or that it is the sort of cell tower or receiver of the divine wisdom of consciousness – or that it is the beacon

through which the soul receives itself, the Infinite, or the lens which may be described as the third eye, focused and distilled, the Imagination – the quality which is always already the trancedence of ‘that which was’ in a creative exhaltation which is the surmounting of ‘being’ in the becoming of Being; the revelation of the soul through and as the creative arts. Therein, the mind is the chief operator of the body; however, the heart is the seat of the soul; rather and furthermore, the entire body is the seat of the soul. The mind, in this sense, is always already submitted to the greater reality which is the existential reality – that the entire world and universe and cosmos and furthestmost reaches ‘without’ and ‘within’ (a synthesis of the ‘receiving mind’) is entirely composed of soul; thus, is always already in accord with processes far greater than the mind or individual unit or locus of perceiving consciousness can possibly obtain or retain or envision. In this sense, the mind is that which receives information and yet does not ever know beyond that which ‘is knowable’ at any given moment – or, that which is to say, has already come to into passage.

The becoming of the organism is then, in a higher sense a becoming into the soul as in the ‘manifestation’ of the organism as in a being in accord or being in resonance with that which it is; furthermore, in this way a transcendence by way of alignment of ‘all that which it is not’ – which is to say, the order of the mind and the entirety of the worlds of concept, language, reason, time, space, and other such generated ‘conceptual realities’. The alignment of the soul takes no part in the conditional – which is to say that it is contracted to nothing more and nothing less than the fulfillment of itself, or the self realization which is the alignment and alightment as in the embodiment of the

soul – the living out of the life of the soul as in a realization of the Divine-soul-self movement between worlds – the Being-becoming-being synthesis through the prism of the soul, through which the being revelates itself and through itself revelates Nature Itself – it is the function of the enlightenment of life itself as in consciousness envisioning Creation; embodying itself as a specific entity or lens or prism through which Creation flows, becomes, bes. In this standing of being, that which flows to and through is a perpetual and perennial purification – which is to say a clarification of the lens of the self through which it scries the soul, envisions and embodies evermore the depths of this particular soul-self, as the soul self is alight and alit by the Infinite. This trans-action is a mutual enlightenment, or a raising and rising up of matter just as the embodiment of the soul-self is made ever more perfect by the vision of the Divine, envisioned by the soul, or ‘higher self’, and clarified in the living art of being-becoming-Being.

THE CREATION OF EMOTIONAL STATES OR ‘MOODS’ AS THE LIBERATION OF BEING

Therein, what we are discussing is the liberation of the matter at hand, or ‘the organism’ in its ability to create and participate in the creative action proactively which is the creation and generation of its own emotional states, moods.

The mood is consequently perceived to be controlled by ‘external events’, or the perception of ‘something happening’ or the ‘condition’ which then is perceived and judged aesthetically by the being as a ‘positive’ or ‘negative’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’ event, happening – in relation to said being’s own view and perception of affairs, worldliness, self, and survival.

What is to be done here is to ‘inside out’ this process, or to actively take charge of and direct the aesthetic experience from within wherein the experience of love, joy, creation, empowerment, peace, ecstasy, tranquility, and fulfillment can be experienced within and as from within the organism itself – or that the unconditional emotional experience (joy has no condition, and yet may be ‘incited’ by the aesthetic experience of this or that perceived ‘condition’) is created and beheld from within the organism as a self generation and self generating self fulfillment or realization of the higher orders of being from within.

Such an action is a ‘taking charge’ of one’s own life, or the active participation in the emotional generation process or the sifting and shifting filters of one’s own life wherein, excepting this active engagement, the being is in a position or stance of reactivity, where a

certain event or happening perceived is a ‘trigger’ for a certain emotion or feeling. In this sense, the being is like a member of a theatre audience observing a play; becoming immersed in the various different emotional acts therein.

Here, what is being asked is that the audience member becomes rather an artist of his own experience; that the external situation is always witnessed and seen as a perfect unfolding, or that the desire to judge and control outcomes by way of judgement is rather the desire to control that which is best approached in faith: ‘I release my worry. I trust the universe to bring me the perfect experiences at the perfect time’. Therein: that man’s own faculty of aesthetic judgement is his directorial equipment; that his emotional states or moods or palette through which his life is envisioned and painted is entirely his own; that active participating in this unfolding; active artistry of his moods and emotions is that through which endless joy and wonder and happiness are available to him.

In this sense, man must perpetually and continually turn himself away from the play of the conditional (that which comes and goes, the temporal, the passing, the ‘event’ or ‘the happening’) unto the unconditional, or the realm of the archetypal, or the abstract aesthetic coloring or ‘dye of the soul’. For it is these lenses, or the ‘emotional views’ through which the entirety of the world and life take form and shape and change form and shape; the entirety of man’s life unfolds as a creative work of art through them – that man creates and crafts his life colored unknowingly or unsuspectingly by them. In taking charge of one’s own creation of emotional states and moods, man no longer dallies or engages in the dalliance of the cycle which is

the chasing after the emotional stimulus (or ‘the circumstance’ or ‘the event’) through which he receives his ‘reward’, or the unconditional experience and feeling or sensation or emotional lens of the beautiful, the fulfilled, and other such poetic apotheoses of the human experience which are experienced as the heights and blisses and peaks of being. In this very separation of himself from his emotional state in a place of reactivity where man must ‘receive’ his emotional state from a displaced ‘external’ phenomena (such as an event, a thing, a person, et cetera) – he displaces his power, his essence, his birthright – onto the changeable, mutable, the projection of being which is the temporal. This projection of himself unto a moving image is the source of his woes in regards to the loss of that which he seeks to gain – self fulfillment.

For this self fulfillment can only truly be generated and regenerated internally as a state of being and a conscious action which is a placing of that lens of fulfillment before the eye and viewing the world from this place: that the unfoldment of the universe is like a grand orchestra or symphony with many different acts and movements and ‘apparent’ peaks and valleys, but unfolding in such divine perfection that every moment is perfect; every experience is perfect – and everything contains within it, and as it, the very essence of the divine which reveals more of man unto himself. The very harmony and flow of the cosmos, the buoyancy of the planets, is a testament to this. In this knowledge, or rather the supreme faith of knowing that each moment is a perfect movement within an infinite symphony of expanding space and time; man knowing himself to be this very thing and essence of the divine – it is, too, of the essence that he creates within himself that which is his divine birthright as in an active participation in and

as living his own life – the creation of his own emotional states and moods independent of all ‘external stimuli’ and the comings and goings of ‘conditionalities’. For, as the river flows, the things of life appear to come and go; man is stricken with sadness and worry as he perceives loss; man is beheld by love and joy as he perceives gain. However, in this state of conditional aesthetic judgement of the perceived coming and going as it pertains to his own partial view of his ‘microcosmic world’ of his own organism and limit of perception – he cannot see the entirety of the divine, orchestral unfolding – but rather perceives it, with Blake, as through ‘chinks in a cavern’ – and is not himself aware of his own divinity and birthright as Infinite Bliss and the perfect tune of the symphony of the cosmos perpetually revelating itself to itself. His very nature and essence is enlightenment of Being. To proceed in this manner, then, is to give the tools and the craft back to man as in his conscious, aware, and deliberate creation and craft of his own emotional states and moods – that he can craft joy and bliss from within without the dependence on any sort of ‘external conditions or stimulus’ as to bring him that mirror or reflection of the bliss and joy and love that is and was within him all along. To engage this craft and consciously practice the cultivation of the embodiment of unconditional bliss from within as in a meditation (or a mantra, where the word bliss is repeated, or joy, or love, over and over again) is to change the very fabric of his conditioned response system, his neurology, his biology – toward the understanding that he is complete unto himself and that he requires no conditional reality to experience love and joy on a grand scale – for it is the very fabric of his own essence, being, nature, self, and soul.

When I get ‘anxious’, I’m looking for my experience to be ‘mirrored externally’, or for ‘external stimulus’ (an image, an experience, a ‘reality’, a person) to validate my internal experience. When I get ‘anxious’, what I’m really looking for is an ‘external s[t]imulation’ which expresses (through me, and allows me to express) the internal excitement I’m feeling about and toward and in living life!

Feeling ‘undeserving’ or ‘unworthy’ is a false belief system, a manmade mechanism. There is no separation between man and the entirety of the orchestra of the cosmos. In this sense man is eternally whole and divine; in this sense, man is as eternally deserving as Creation and Existence to create and exist and to create and exist with absolute, eternal freedom.

The simulation of ‘within and without’, ‘internal and external’, ‘man and cosmos’ is a necessary contrast for creation and the expansion of consciousness by way of a dialectical communication, a call and response, a Narcissus and Echo, a mirror and a reflection of the eyes of God – which are within and as all things observing themselves within and as all things: Nature observing the myriad manifestations of Nature as in nature – the turning and overturning and manifestation and apparence and disapparence of various different faces, masks, disguises, voices, moods, modes, and forms of Creation. In this playful contrast, physical forces such as tension and friction (three dimensional ‘affairs’) create and creates the very circumstances for creation.

In this sense, the illusion of separation is the permission for creation; furthermore, the extended and extending knowledge of Creation itself through itself (the creator

and the created – the teleological extension and expansion of consciousness through time and space as a way of creating ‘distances’ which are rather, as in Einstein’s phraseology of ‘spooky action at a distance’ exemplary of the very interconnectedness or as-at- Oneness of all things as rather ‘manifest’ energetic soul-Self.

So that when I am aroused by a lover, or desire an object or a thing or an experience, what I am desiring is rather an experience of myself – a heightened, expansive aesthetic state of consciousness which is the revelation of my own internal self, soul, and state of consciousness – the truth of my bliss, my joy, my love – manifest before my eyes rather as ‘proof’ or ‘truth’ of my internal soul-self truth, the existence of my soul made material as in a materialization of that which previously was ‘hid’ in the seed in the soil of my uncreated self, my uncreated soul – the seed of my soul-self which contained the very essence and truth of my existence, my desires, my higher self. In each life, the revelation of this soul-self is the revelation of a hidden truth which is the emergence of Creation itself – beyond the bounds of dualisms and into the ecstatic experience of the unfolding, or the continued revelation or ‘unspooling’ of the Infinite within, spool of the Moirai, into the realm of ‘the apparent’ or ‘the real’. In this sense, the soul-Self is the utter unreality that composes and is at essence the entirety of ‘the real’ at any and each given moment – the lens of lenses through which the eyes of God perceive, prismatically, the unfolding of myriad soul-Selves (‘organs’ of Creation, the cosmic body, the Cosmic Christ or Adam Kadmon, Vishvarupa) through and across space and time as ‘the creation of the universe’, ‘the creation of the cosmos’, ‘the creation of the world’.

No person has any support – each one of us wanders into their own private abyss – lost in their own world of self conception – private dream, imagination, and internal reason. In each, and in this sense, each of us is lost in a divine madness, a prism of the whole – which in each grasp of eternal vision, returns us back to the ground of the earth with a wisdom either to be learned or scorned.

Some have many of these glimpses, others few. Some never glimpse the eternity of the true self, and in this sense are lost in a maze of conceptions which fail to reach God: conceptions which glimpse the divine, as Blake put it – thru chinks.

That we do not see our whole selves means that we are lost in the temporal, or lost in the world of the senses, and things, tenses and time – where that which comes, goes, and that which arrives, is as quick to vanish. In this sense, we are in a purgatory of our senses, a purgatory of the animal man looking up to find God, looking around to find God.

To learn that one is falling endlessly in a lone abyss is the unnerving catalyst and cataclysm for true creation – which is to say the necessary admixture which provokes a revolution of the soul – a revolt against the circumstances, the place, the time, the history, mankind – a raging against the false limits and bounds of being imposed by other men upon themselves – in prisons of their own religion, prisons of their own conception, prisons of their own making.

The resoluteness of the spirit in the face of the infinite is the resoluteness of faith: the faith that comes with the

understanding that where there is no leadership, no truth, no wisdom, no way, and no direction – at an endless crossroads – creation must emerge from within.

To create for the sake of creation is a way where there is no way; rather not a way out but a way further into life – the incessant pressing upon the borders and bounds of ‘this world’ and ‘this time’ to make way for new worlds and new time – and as such a play a rhythm or a composition which breaks open worlds to reveal their hidden suture – the thread of life which runs betwixt and between them. These worlds exist infinitely, without end, all within the moment in a perennial and perpetual accessibility.

This is what it is to be ‘tapped in’ to the present, or rather to be creating with and as God creates, an unfolding that unfolds as itself without a teleological link, without a means to an end, without a Machiavellianism, but rather, as a creative force that cannot possibly conceive of a ‘this way’ or ‘that’ – a creative force which creates creatively and in creation creates. The nonsense and absurdity of true creation is at the essence of all primordial things: the animal, the consciousness, the subconscious, the surreal, desire, the turning of the spheres. This high aesthetic art is the art of madness, the art of truth – the art of the divine tragedy that, in the realization of the infinite, is rather a ’divine comedy’, or a theatre or a playhouse wherein any sort of creation is possible. In this way, we take back our entire lives as supreme creators and actors and create freely – creating emotional states, moods – from within.

To create from within is the state of unconditional creation – which is to say the stateless state of high art

– a total aesthetic realm and dominion wherein the malleability of creation is manifest and manifold as a mutable consciousness – wherein the entire worlds is composed of infinite gradations and ‘manifestations’ of consciousness as in weight, measure, and so forth. The inherent meaning and meaninglessness of the infinity of worlds is that they are creative, mutable, flexible, changeable, and at any moment moody, or naturalisms, or that they are fluxual both in the sense of the planets, the movement of ‘wandering bodies’ of time and space, but as the seasons, and the stream of emotions and striking images flowing in the underground rivers of consciousness.

The state of pure appearances is such a madness that the conviction of reality is the creation of a reality.

descend into a morphean fog where they do not exist: where nothing exists wandering crypt of eyes and raised up, in amulet sieves of consciousness this single, slender figure with hidden ends marching, guarded Victory’s shore a boatman with only hind legs a riddled, distant vision.

sure-traveled and thru the corridor betwixt worlds, travel’s shackled pair body and soul, breast and man coccyx and torso spine of the universe union of the parallel dimensions: early hours and risen - there chimes the yeast of his soul readymade in delight

all pass’d hours in a chamber of vision galley of hallucination under-toed river of circumstance where he rests at the bottom sifting poison like a seeker for gold bullion perfect form’d, perfect made, perfect beyond time and measure

a perchance dream, sold at a beggar’s hand passed thru kings’ hall and transferred in a meek vision upon the script wall of paradise searched indefinitely and neverfound; hitherto resigned to some small capture fish in a bright eyed storm,

the first month of the gods an early spring an unripe love, plucked from vine and swallowed with black serpent’s fixed gaze.

in the garden, beneath the alley resting in a stone bowl lies the seer and his mistress, perseus and the nymph go to there to gaze over the garden wall where the earthen mother surrounds in an eternal womb - pierced the belly of her nature; beyond there resides the black nightingale of pure sound.

all of these valleys are hours sown sweetly into the soil and made mine - the lux aeterna, the immortal perfection which has cast but a breath from the cask of the divine, but a sliver of golden between the fingers of mankind. reach out and grasp the never-there, taken like a militia, a pending force blasted everywhere and broken open the vase of our tomorrows - such breaking sown as to fissyre cracks in the lightening, to fissyre veins in the soul and the matriculation of the blood

come tomorrow, the dawn will already be old, weeping, bowbeaten and cast upon the sheets like a study of death call hours down, berated with prayer like angels -

call them down to be fallen with the rest of us, misers, guitar-players, sleuths the wide jungle of our open heart slinging stones over the barbed wire gates before this impossible mountain pass. it may well be guarded as a dungeon filled wide and to the brim with forgotten terrors. out! sheath of the mind! and drawn, the broadsword of pure image.

reflected in untarnished steel lie the fallen - coffins full, rich from the death at the edge of the cliffs splashed with seafoam and dug with trenches of the plutonic soil: rode rich with these coffers to infinite mansions, gone from the stiff processional and emptied of mortal reason. hitherto they have traveled and onward they will go alone, as one rays upon the cusp of the golden ring.

they will race you to the ledge, and jump gladly trick foxes produce this fine daring tricky wild’s edge, and disappear into nights of stone and mischief, this forest’s grove of surrounding trees circumnambulating the grave of the ancients parading about the first tombstone, the fissure into the pure fire, the ulterior the laughing mouth the face of greater time.

will the god march forth and whisper in your ears, brave one?

will she touch you mouth and chest, caress your face and neck and produce your heir? screaming word, shot from the womb of the earth lies there like a stone in your mouth. now retrieve it and know the unknowable to speak the unspeakable thing, the wordless tonal abyss the worldless daemon with no shadow who prances about the golden flame chanting the eternal name: not time, not space - the pure flame, uncurtained and unveiled the true priestess and brides groom lie there, upon the fiery bed upon the pyre of eternal copulation.

At the still point of being Turning, churning, machine of the world Sole inner point Thrashed by waves of dreams, is not I. Made wet by water, is not I.

At the still point of being Utter fixity, upon the cross of matter is not I. Within is not I. Knowing is not I.

Deeper still, into the throes of awakening, The tossing and turning The stillness of the ceiling The crickets going, chirping – The summer night’s air – is not I.

Awareness resides At the still point of being.

When at last, All thought respites, All cackling haze, all thoroughfares cease All troubling of the mind, The waves of space and time – Therein the still pool Is the reflection of being.

When all is not, in a nowhere land Out of space and out of time Out of distractions and out of concern Resides the still point of being, Reverberating In a ceaseless electrified current Wherein the life of life resides.

All grasping, all ceaseless passing Walking through the halls of laughing Dancing through the halls of passage Wanders being in time. Ruptures rivers racing Rhythms slowly pacing Undulating, chasing Through the halls of time. The still point of being Has no seeds of sowing Has no way of knowing Which way is truly growing Expanding in all directions Bursting with the living Which generates the vision Which men have called ‘the world’.

In a syncopation The images of creation Strays of imagination Wander the city streets. Given names and numbers Looking up in wonders They search for definition In the nothing beneath a name. The endless void beneath them Crumbling stone retreats them To the sanctum of the inner world To the sanctum of the still point Of being.

The place that is placeless The place without space and time The place without name and number The place which words in vain describe. Attempted out of thin air

Resting in the center Lies the true source of creation From where ‘all else’ springs. The world of imagination Thrust out from creation And seen as ‘another’, The dreaming of the dancing forms The dreaming of the heart Of being.

All is pure delusion – there is nothing to be done, nowhere to go, nothing and no one to be.

In this sense, all is simply perfect and complete, out of time and space, time and place.

How could anything be truly done that was not ordained out of space and time?

There is no here nor there, but as Mayakovsky says, ‘an all-encompassing heart / booms everywhere’.

The sound of the heart is the reverberation that is all songs, all sound, all reason, all madness. In this way there is no distinction, no boundary, no border – between the doing and the doer, the being and the becoming. The ceaseless flow is and of the essence.

The essence is all things as their progenitor, their source and center of creation.

The essence is the still point of being.

To reside in the still point of being is to realize that all is complete and perfect.

The unfolding is the dance and orchestra of being playing itself out in a true, perfect aesthetic – an aesthetic which is the complete and whole art and dance of being – an art which is, again, ‘an expression of creative skill and imagination’.

In this sense, there is no meaning but rather interpretation and interpolation of meaning – which is that is within itself an addition to the art – even in the unknowingness or unthinkingness of said interpretation

of meaning – taken as ‘truth’ or ‘reason’ or ‘reality’ – interpolated with and as and atop the utter and absolute aesthetic dance of being.

You may/might call this ‘the madness of creation’ – wherein there is no creative actuality or truth other than the creative potential expressed/expressing/actively expressed thru the very engine and source and spirit of creation itself – at all ‘levels’ of being – which are really at one and at once an emanation of creation themselves.

This simultaneity of creation might be described as the light of the mind, or the refractory quality and potentiality which is the interpretation of the interpretation of the light of creation – which is the emanation of the source light of spirit ‘down thru’ various different chambers, dimensions, forms, and spheres – the tree, the planet, the moon, and so forth.

These ‘spheres of emanation’ are rather but creative form-essences themselves which ‘take on’ the energetic one lightedness of source creation themselves and ‘interpret’ them vis-à-vis their emanation, or their ‘body qualia’ of lightedness-into-being-becoming.

In this sense, the changed and changeable quality of their energetic essence is rather a manifestation of the powers of creation ‘acting locally’ and thus manifesting a certain form or force in space and time.

This very potentiation of creation is the creation of the ‘unique form or figure or force’ which is rather but the essential difference of coexistence – or the creation of ‘power’ as relation between two forms, figures, forces, states, of being – which are, practically, at the

metacognitive and metacreational level – always already at one and at once source essence of creation itself in various different states and spheres of ‘becomingnesses’.

This dance of being-becoming is an aesthetic project or artwork that is necessarily unending as it has never begun, as it is manifest and created and fulfilled all at one and at once in the very essence of being – which is the creational whole which is the very life force energy which is itself the composer, composition, and composite of all ‘manifest’ essences and things to be, to become, and ‘past’ and so forth. In this sense, being is everywhere at all times as in the power and force and primary thrust of creation – the energetic potential which is never manifest, never born, and thus never begun and yet never ending. It is, in and within itself, the entirety and primary ‘world’ – wherein thousands of worlds are manifest as in ‘a dream within a dream’. This creational power is rather the acute artistry which ascribes and describes and paints myriad ‘details’ (worlds within worlds) – from the mote within a beam to a galaxy. Each and all is at one and at once – in that the creational spheres are rather but worlds within worlds of themselves – itself – the primary essence, force, and thrust of the creational life force energy which is neverborn and neverdying.

The primary and essential immortality of being rests in the dance of becoming which is mistaken for ‘the rising and the falling’, ‘the birth and the death’, and so forth – which is the essential ‘appearing’ and ‘disappearing’ from view as specific forms and formations ‘becoming’ ‘created and decreated’, as in the Shelley poem Ozymandias, as in the rise and fall of empires, as in the birth and death of stars, beings, and so forth. This

creational and decreational energy is, again, the emanation and ecstasy of the primary force and source of creation ‘breathing’, or gathering itself to and through itself, inhaling and exhaling spheres, forms, manifestations, artworks – which ‘do their time’ in the sense that they form localities or in ‘doing their time’ create space and time as landmarks through which the world and work of art ‘does its dance’ as an emanation or a fractal manifestation of the being-whole – an elucidation of the artworking of becoming which never becomes or is becoming – but rather is the dance of being, perpetually whole and perfect, using creative life force energy within itself as itself – envisioning, or ‘dreaming’, various different states, costumes, guises, of being – wherein the primary life force creational stuff (as in the essence, as in being) is ‘transformed’ or ‘transfigured’, or ‘dressed up’ in various different forms and figurations – the primary life force creational stuff which is the inherent and foundational mutability of ‘consciousness’ or ‘the stuff of beingness’ –

And thus, that being(-ness) itself is the foundational and at-whole, at-once, at-one, at-self principle – the mutable immutable which is the formless form and formation of the entirety of creation as the creational energy which is being.

The dance of becoming, in this sense, is the dance of being within itself, or the theatre of being within itself as in a ‘womb of creation’ – or an atmosphere which is formed and formulated with the very stuff of stars as in the play of transformation ‘occurring’ ‘within it, as it’.

This ‘state of play’ is the foundational and primary force and function of the aesthetic creation of being – which is to say, the aesthetic nature of being is

fundamentally playful, creative. This ‘state of play’ is then the joke, or the laughing of the agon, or the joke of the human condition, the joke of existence, and so forth. This is not to say that there is no tragedy, but that even in tragedy, the essence of tragedy is comedy – that the highest tragedy is in fact deeply comedic – because it takes the fundamental nonexistence of the theatrical play of creation to its utmost extremity – the production of meaning in the face of utter meaninglessness. This is also what is meant by ‘serious play’ – the ‘camp’ of creation.

This is also why, historically, among human beings, there has been the necessity of a ‘jester in the court of mankind’; the seed of the fool and foolishness within the courts of utmost seriousness, war, power, and control. It is this seed of the fool and foolishness which is the truth amidst the airs of pomposity, presumption, and ‘consumed by play’, or ‘costumed by play’.

The actor who has forgotten he is acting is the primary and first ‘tragedy’ of human existence – it is the utter seriousness and self consumption of human life – the conviction of oneself and one’s ‘identity and purpose’ – the taking of ‘the game of creation’ to a state and stakes of such utter seriousness and self concern that the theatre becomes ‘reality’. This is also the creation of ‘knowledge’, ‘truth’, ‘meaning’, and so forth – as well as the courts of religion and politic which battle to the death for their stake in establishing an invaluable nothing, or a nonexistent claim to the truth of existence.

Therein, we can see the utter madness of humanity and human history, writ clear and large.

That creation is first and foremost an aesthetic ‘jest’, or ‘game’ – or art for art’s sake within an already self fulfilled and whole being, or rather that creation is a purposefully purposeless artwork wherein there is no bound or reason or meaning other than creation for the sake of to-create, or the energetic thrust of creation and creative energy – is to say that the artwork takes primary form and reason above all else and all other things, and in this sense there is an anarchic madness ‘hid’ beneath the otherwise appearing ‘orderly nature’ (or at least, man’s attempt to order nature beneath his perceptive and judgmental faculties of language, vision, and sense) – an anarchic madness wherein the simultaneity of growth and death are continuous and utterly indistinguishable. For one ‘thing’ to ‘grow’, ‘another’ must ‘die’ – and in this sense the exchange or movement or transformation or flow of life force energy is a continuous dance that is always already ‘between forms’ or ‘between beings’ or ‘between figurative essences’ – in that it is the silence between letters, symbols, languages – the breath that cannot be encapsulated or captured in speech.

Then, the attempt to ‘order’ or ‘discern’ or ‘define’ or ‘jurisdict’ anything, life, before this primary madness of creation as in the flowless flow, or the becomingless becoming of being – is rather but a forced ignorance which is a suppression or damnation or attempted repression or depression of the primary absolute freedom and ‘madness’ of creation – and is, within itself, always already an ‘aesthetic judgement’, or rather, a work of art within the work of art which attempts to render the work of art accordingly.

This ordering is always already like a child sorting wooden blocks of colours, shapes, sizes…

This ordering is always already occurring within the theatre of being – the primary creation and creational – wherein all that is, was, and will be is the primary creation and creational energy which ‘changes forms’ or densities or ‘spheres of being’. This is to say, again, ‘all things’ are ‘nonexistent’ but at and as the level of the creational energy, themselves, their formal (form- formlessness) identity as in ‘creation’, ‘consciousness’, ‘being’ – the primary mutability of the energetic source-essence of being – the stateless state of the wordless word, the stateless state of the worldless world.

The ‘death’ of the theatre of being is this realization – which is the dissipation of that which was never there, or the images or flickers or forms of being in various different ‘states of becoming’; the realization of the dance of being at wholeself, at one and at once.

This is like, for wont of language or image where there is none (but utter silence of revelation) Arjuna’s revelation of the universal form of Krishna, Vishvarupa, in the Bhagavad Gita.

This revelation is distinguished by the quality of utter qualitylessness.

This is to say that creation itself is the de-void, or even that which therein is is not.

The still point is where the essence is observed and embodied and witnessed in the mind’s eye as an enlightenment – and yet therein the enlightenment and enlightening is a light of the potentia of nothingness as in the recessive or abcessive centre of being – wherein the being-quality

or quality of beingness is in a perpetual state of potentiality, or a ‘not-yet-ness’, or a ‘becomingness’.

This is the primary paradox of creative energy: that it encompasses all things and is yet surpassive of them, surpassing them – and that all things is not yet enough to describe them as it – as they are the changeable forms and forces with and at the root of themselves – the creational energy which moves through them transacting and self-propelling itself through the space and time that is itself – that marks and is marked by itself in various ‘states of change’ – the dance of creation that, in its pure aesthetic completion – generates ‘excesses of itself’ – or energetic ‘out-flashes’ which create dimensions of self perception (being perceiving itself ‘from without’ or ‘from within’) as in networks of space and time through which being acquires itself and yet slips from its own grasp as it infinitely and timelessly embodies itself, the essenceless essence, the changeless change, the stateless state.

That which witnesses is always already the still point of being.

THE EVERYDAY CONFRONTATION WITH MEANINGLESS, HOPELESSNESS, AND EMPTINESS

The everyday confrontation with meaninglessness, hopelessness, and emptiness is also the journey into cosmic heroism – which is to say, the confrontation with the pure and absolute nihilism of a growth based existence, or a cosmos or universe which is primarily animalia, or that which is primordial, with a front towards primordial growth and overgrowth.

The higher meaning is then purely human and purely philosophical and achieved via the active and continuous project of creating higher meaning as an art of living as in a surmountation of the primordial ‘limitations’ of conventional existence which include such acts as pleasure, sexuality, consumption, et al. These are the ‘primordial fires’ which fuel the universe and the world, or the literalizations of sexual energy. The term used here to acquire the true flexibility of the sense is life force energy, or power, or essence, or spirit.

The spirit is that which flows through all things and yet is inherently neutral, or that it grows for the sake of growth or procreates for the sake of procreation or pleasures for the sake of pleasure – that it is an art for art’s sake is the rule of the spirit, or the rule of Nature. It is in this sense that we live in a fundamentally meaningless universe wherein the meaning is created in the act of creation, or the (conscious and or unconscious) utilization of life force energy, the channeling of life force energy into a specific use, project, or art form. This is what might be called ‘life’.

There is, inherently, nothing there. And this is the interjection of cosmic heroism into the picture where there is an impossibility, or which is to say the godlike task of creation from nothingness, or the making of meaning where there is no meaning. And yet, the animal nature proceeds primarily and fundamentally ensconced in the ‘status quo’ primordial complex of meaning making and meaning taking – where the biological ‘logos’ is rule of law and rule of life and inserted as a pseudo qua-limit and limitation, where there is no creativity or imagination but consumption and assumption in accord with the simple striving toward the biological logos – survival – which is to say toward ‘life’ and away from ‘death’; toward ‘pleasure’ and away from ‘pain’. This is, so to speak, an existence where the body, or the bios, or the organism, is taken as the absolute reality and truth of the nature of being.

Not only to risk but to desire death, darkness, and pain is rather a chamber of trials or an entrance into the sphere through which trial is a triumph of the spirit, or an elevation or an escalation through which the spirit recognizes that which it is, being, through the various totems and ‘levels of hell’ which are the body, the manifest, the mind, the world, and so forth – as conceptual illusions through which pain and separation and loss are the revelations or the stripping away of that which it is not. Historically, this has been referred to as ‘the left hand path’.

Without this journey or entrance into the ‘terrordome’ which is the embodied existence faced with the ‘other side’ of the truth of life which necessarily includes the terrors and the black masks of creation, there is no life, but rather a merciless and continued subordination to a ’one sidedness’, which is to say a slavery to beauty,

pleasure, and all things which correspond with the ‘life giving’ impulse and aspect. In so doing, humanity has invented religion; a willful blindness which is, quite simply, the everyday life of the human being acculturated to an ignorance which is an active avoidance and purposeful blindness of the ‘hell realms’ which are, in correspondence with the Pluto/Hadic archetypes, the realms of transformation in which the blackness of the soil of the seed sprouts the tree of life into the light of day, or the conscious aspect of ‘living’. This is to say, death into life is the only true entrance into life, or with Marcus Aurelius, ‘Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what's left and live it properly.’

To live from the place of absolute devoidness of meaning and hopelessness and emptiness is to truly be alive. In this sense we recognize quite clearly that any and all imposed human meaning (culturos) or biological drives and urges into life (bios) are necessarily artificial aspects stemming from the body and mind (the primordial and the ‘receptor’) which are, correspondingly, symbolic chains through which the primordial receives itself. There is, truly, no exit from this feedback loop which is the mind feeding culturos-bios to the body generating culturos-bios – the input and outputs of existence, excretion, consumption, production, and expulsion. This is, in the Buddhist and Hindu tradition, the wheel of time and the wheel of life upon which the primordial is hung and spun for all eternity in a ceaseless process which is a persistent and perpetual reproduction of the primordial – and endless growth without purpose or meaning beyond the growth which is the hunger of the shark or the crocodile – a reptilian hunger which is directly tied to

the fulfillment of the empty vessel of the body of the world.

Then, to actively create meaning where there is none is an aesthetic project which directly faces, or about faces, or confronts the utter emptiness of primordial existence and its ceaseless reproduction of culturos-bios from a place of the higher virtue and value of the laughing at the meaningless, or the creative and playful striving which seeks to surmount the culturos-bios – and to use the meaningless means to a tragic and comedic end which is the cosmic heroism of the creative-aesthetic project in the face of utter meaninglessness and baselessness. It is, in this sense, beyond the human and beyond the animal as spheres of domestic culturos-bios representation and consumption and expulsion of flat matter into the realm of the Nietzschean Ubermensch, or high creation wherein which the slogan ‘human, all too human’ is replaced with the literal embodied power of the secret understanding that all of life is empty and thus full with aesthetic possibility to the one who will take up the mantle of aesthetic striving and creation.

In doing so, one enters into an intimate agon with Nature, where triumph is all but assured as in the manner in which one approaches Nature – taking Nature entirely unseriously and scoffing at the seriousness of the play of life and death, and instead turning about face toward aesthetic and creative play of the highest order – using the raw materials of primordiality to the ends of artmaking of the spirit – or making manifest the spirit through and vis-à-vis the flesh – or, in short, making a theatre and art of the world which is ceaselessly immersed in a thoughtless and fiery baptism of primordial repetition, consumed

by desires and primordial urges which explode into meaninglessness in the death and dearth of true spiritual life incarnate into and through them as in conscious awareness of action; alternately and ultimately, the meaninglessness of all action in the face of the ultimate – the deaf and dumb primordiality of Creation.

This agon then becomes a play in the stadium of life in which the challenge is of the utmost and always already self imposed. To surmount the Nature, one surmounts oneself as in a conquering of oneself as in a conquering of the culturos-bios which manipulates and controls and moves the body of the blood of the flesh of the world in an unconscious pulse. This is to say, one surmounts oneself as in a becoming conscious and an aesthetic choice, an aesthetic decision, to make art out of an otherwise meaningless, deaf, and dumb primordial life – which will swallow like a black hole or a beast’s maw – the resolve of the spirit never made conscious and yet absorbed (‘lurking jaws / joints of time’) in the endless march of time, of history, of the passage and grinding of the gears of space and time? It is this decision that is at the crux of life and it is a becoming of the truly free, it is the choice of comedy in the face of that which is not even tragedy but the void march of time, it is not even solemn or not even glad – it cannot be anthropomorphized or ascribed meaning. This becoming free is then the initiation of the high aesthetic journey from the seeming dark maws of nothingness, or the primordial bestiality and raw material and essence of man, the true and fundamental animality of man toward survival, life, and pleasure, away from death and pain – into an agon which necessarily requires the wholeness, divines the wholeness, and prescribes the wholeness as a curative –

and it is the precisely going ‘back’ or ‘in’ or ‘down’ to retrieve this aspect or element of consciousness which is the becoming conscious.

Where are we baby… burning in the stars The firepit of our lives circling the dark alleyways of time Like wolves surrounding lone winter prey – And the lostlessness reverberating on endless mornings Where it seems like the dawning is ceaseless And the wordlessness is ceaseless And each page is being fed to the wolf belly of the fire – Hungering, consumed, thirsting And trawling the plains, A whale skimming the deep water

The particles entering our mouths Hot and cold, dense and light as air Dissolving like watermelon water Liplocking with the first and last cause Embraced with the universe And entering the last mouth of the ground…

Neither come nor gone, neither left nor arrived What is deathless shall never die And what has been seen through your eyes is nothing but yourself: July starlight, birth atoms, regular walking, tree grove in the night – There are no gravestones.

Walk on, in the tides of the sun, skimming the atmosphere Shaking and waking these bodies from their bonds. It comes in, breathless in a fury, charging like an ancient killer; It comes out, stepping back in an exhalation, Recedent to the homestead and linen halls of a big sleep

Journeying in a rocking, Perilous waves, lullabies And an ocean of the womb.

Today, nothing has come; there is no address And the noon passes in a silence which to the desperate ear is like death But glad, silence approaches me and rests its arm upon my shoulders and whispers a grave and daring secret to me – Who should have the gall to laugh at silence but I? The one who speaks? Open your mouth, You and I are one.

Even the earth is sweating, dewbacked, her feet perched upon the hearth of being Listening to the wivestales of the handmaidens of the universe Weaving her winding narrative about the clockface of the cosmos, She is making time – frying some eggs, or else potatoes on the stove While her moonchild plays about the maypole of our lives. Her eyes see nothing, hear nothing – casting the light down and off of the round of her pupils like shades, All of the knowledge of the sunlight of this sun and the suns abroad like a window, a novella, a turnip or a red pepper.

Thick with life, she swells and squalls Cresting – becoming born. How many nights with bottles of wine in the park with lost songs until this final song arrives,

Dropped into the mouth of a songbird come the first winter’s sign? Can it be this last song I sing with this mouth, Can it be this last song I sing to be true? At last belted from bruised and blue mouth – The right chord which might finally tie up these affairs Which drum up endless beguilement And turning?

Turning, turning, the sphere About the hand and reflected The bountiless illusion And the true form – the pure light, the flickering. When you dance you are that Alive without even knowing it. How many have died deaf and dumb and yet Endlessly true?

Withstanding this moment, The sands of time which become this body Sifting through the poem to know themselves Know this – the aisles which they walk are columns of air In a metropolis which is a stadium of the mind, Naught to be but as a whisper riding in the backwind of the chariot of Apollo, Naught to be but as a dream of dreams – And yet, this makes them true.

To tell the story of time is a task handed down by the ancestors One hand to another in a lineage which is the foretelling of what is to come of us, These things that will never be But as words and rhythms, fairytale signs And the vast designs of a dreamer

Writ but for a moment upon the canvas of the earthen sky, And stolen by that which they arrived: The wind of the mind. May it blow calm and slow or in the tempest which rages the god of the sea Swelling and yelling – he throws himself to meet the heavens; The wind of the mind carries the fire of spirit Which rises and falls to the depths Of the earth and water.

Shall we rise, and become buoyant? Cast off these coats and travel lightly? Where there is no density and soar? Shall we fall, and become rhythms, towed and tasked, round the body, making new forms and feeding the seeds and stones, the flows of fluid…

The ‘fakeness’ of all things is their primary, plasticine falseness which is in actuality, their absolute existence and non-existence in simultaneity. The paradox is one of entertainment and emptiness, and the assertion of truth that occurs therein is this: that the ‘existence’ of the defined thing is purely energetic and thus has no form but rather a formless spiritual essence; that the non-existence of the thing is precisely this; conceived of to the thing itself as the ‘death’ of the thing as in the egoic end of the image or concept or conceived notion of the thing as it is terminated in its pure spiritual essential truth as in a formless energetics.

In this sense there is no meaning that can be made, nothing that can be described or asserted as truth or reality; furthermore, the action of ‘humanity’ and ‘animality’ and ‘plant life’ and so on and so forth as in ‘nature’ is purely an energetic turning of formless spiritual essence which, in the illusory sense, ‘acquires form’ as in being perceived by itself in and over space and time. The entirety of human culture, civilization, and life is built off of this principle, as is the natural world. It, rather, is an energy that perpetually eats and consumes itself, as in the Heraclitean notion of the cosmic fire – and eats and consumes itself primarily in and through this way: the energetic principle of density which is also, in the metaphysical sense, consciousness’ awareness of itself as in Being ‘all things’ in their formless form, their spiritual essence and truth.

For ignorance proceeds precisely by way of presumed knowledge and the categorical, the defined boxing and language building of ‘known things’ and thus the construction and projection of ‘the world’ as a definitive, material, ‘existent’ principle, thing, nature. This is known, simply, as the acquiring of ignorance,

given the flashy and technical veneer of skill and intelligence and knowledge – that which creates and elevates the illusion of the world, and yet blinds being to itself amidst endless assertions of ‘truth’ and ‘thingnesses’. This is the proliferation of nonexistences from the one formless form, the essential spiritual formation of all things, and importantly, no-things.

This is the madness of humanity; the desperation of animality; the consumptive nature of nature as in the search for a salvation, the search for survival, and the search for truth and meaning amidst a seemingly meaningless and wheel-like aspect which we might call the seasonality of nature – or the cycles of birth and death which can be easily observed by the naked eye. It requires no training for one to witness the coming and going of materiality. It, however, requires substantial training to assert meaning and definition to and upon materiality and this turning – that which is well seen in the sciences, the academic world, the political world, and the everyday, commonplace world of human being interactions and self definitions. This proliferation of meaning making amidst no-meaning and no-making is rather one of the creation of an identity, a mask, a formation, a ‘something’ to hang onto amidst the abyss of nothingness which is the utter lack of formation at the level of the spiritual formlessness which is the ‘hidden dimension’, the sphere of the energetic.

And all beings fundamentally know this truth, born within them as the concept of ‘death’, or ‘loss’ or ‘non- being’, or ‘void’ – and it is the truth which is avoided with all the viscerality of the imagined world and imagined self – which is to say the project of ignorance making in the face of death which is merely the

revelation of the self in the true energetic form, the stripping away of all that which was not to reveal the truth that which was hid – hid in a desperate attempt to affirm a selfhood and a world which was but a dream and forgotten in the fever of that dream; the desire to remain asleep at all costs of waking into an apocalypse of the psyche – a confrontation with reality.

And this is how the principle of exploitation and violence occurs in the everyday world – as projects of meaning making and being making clash and jostle for physical space and physical time – masses and concepts and constructs struggling to greet the light of day and assume postures and thus be erected as temples for the dream, or the illusion, of a life which is not only formally an impossibility, but purely an imagination – a desired, hid, object which cannot be obtained as it has and does never existed. The madness of the nonexistence of the object of desire is precisely the propeller which is the motor or engine of the world, or the driver of the world machine, or the driver of the mass human being complex – the striving toward the imagined or dream object which cannot be and never will be manifest in the world – as it does not, in actuality, formally exist as anything but an energetic formation which at the atomic level is a congregation out of space and out of time – undergoing a perpetual ‘heat death’ and rising. It does not ‘exist’ long enough to actually acquire form or to be any one thing – but is rather in a perpetual entropy.

So then, to be grasping at what is in actuality nothingness in the face of the lover, or the face of the dream, or the face of the desired reality or actuality is rather to be grasping at a primary and fundamental futility and illusion which can rather never be assigned or designed; rather

can never be but as an imaginistic ‘frozenness’ in the face of what is the reality of becoming – a perpetual ebb and flow and flux in which nothing truly exists.

The realization of this is effectively the end of life as it is ‘known’; furthermore, the realization of this is to be at a precipice of being and meaning as in – now that there is no self, nothing to be obtained, nothing to be done, nothing to be had, nothing to be desired, no ‘object’ to be known – what do I do?

To come to this point is not merely a philosophical apotheosis – it must be known as in a summit of living.

At some level, all beings know this fundamental truth and reality, and obscure it to various different degrees of illusion, delusion, meaning making, consumption, et cetera. All life proceeds, fundamentally, from this truth of lived experience – that from ‘nothing’ emerges ‘something’ – or that from ‘hunger’ emerges the movement into seeking for eating.

The primordial vacuum which is ‘hunger’ – or the desire to be filled as the nothing with the desired object of the ‘something’ is the biological and cultural foundation for all life.

This is, practically, not some fundamental reality at the level of the metaphysics of being, but a reality of the survival of the organism. It pertains little to nothing to the spiritual reality of existence and non-existence as in a paradox which necessarily both is, is not, encompasses, and fails to encompass, and surpasses the organismic. This is to say – the fundamental reality of being really has nothing to do with the organismic reality: that the organism will go on existing regardless

of the fundamental reality out of the necessary continuance of itself – and that even in light of the fundamental reality, the organism itself is both an example of becoming (consumption) and being (the nature which is the desire to consume, being from a vacuum of primordial hunger or absence). Before and behind being, in this sense, is the fundamental abeyance of non-being from which being emerges as in the necessity of existence in the face of non-existence. This is the charge of the spirit, or the energetic.

That there is nothing to be done is to at last fold the life of the organism into the primary and fundamental reality of the nonexistent; in this sense opens up the field and realm of being into life in that it is purely creative – that it gladly risks ‘death’ and ‘nonexistence’ because, precisely, it already is ‘that’ – and thus, in actuality, risks nothing. Stripped of the illusion of formal being or the totem of definition and identity and selfhood, it rather acts, in light of this truth embodied, as a creative, aesthetic movement which does not care for anything that is not a direct reflection and embodiment of the fundamental reality – which is to say, the non-existence of all things as their fundamental and primary existence: their fundamental, metaphysical identity.

This, at the level of the lived philosophy, is the only place where there is not madness, - the revelation and realization of the fundamental nonexistence of existence – and in this sense there is ease and peace and play beneath even the most seeming intensity and focusedness – for there is no object or goal or truth to be obtained but rather an aesthetic or creative life which has no underlying meaning or purpose or drive. This is to say, it surmounts the biological and the

cultural and moves in to the realm of drive for drive’s sake – or the objectless drive – which is also, historically, the drive ‘toward God’. Where there is no ‘object’, there is also God.

In this state, everything is God and everything acquires the metaphysical quality represented in the above: the nonexistence of existence – and acquires and inhabits the true hue even in the face of desire the understanding and acknowledgement that that which is desired is always already a dream, an imaginedness, an illusion – and that this is the primary aesthetic nature of existence and becoming as rather a ‘Maya’ or a film screen projection of ‘things’ and ‘beings’ – or a play of light and energy which ‘appears or appares to be’ in such form and organization, quality and function. In this sense, the primordial machine of consumptive existence, or ‘the animal world of flesh and blood’, is rather a play of extensive seriousness with the stakes of life and death implied and plied by and in each organismic being and nature itself as in rather a game of overturning, a sort of macabre stakes where the nonexistence of existence must necessarily be forgotten in order to proceed with the ‘game’ which is consumption, desire, magnetism, and the drive toward the object. In understanding, in realization, that the drive toward the object is at last the drive toward oneself, nonexistence, the drive of an energetic vacuum toward an energetic vacuum, there is a sort of larger, cosmological realization about the nature of existence at a metaphysical level – and the utter lack of separation between the everyday ‘human’ processes and the massive space-time cosmological processes that are occurring ‘above’ and ‘around’ (as within) the organismic biospheres of ‘the world(s)’.

To at last reach this point is to have risked going utterly mad several times; to reside in this understanding is at last the acknowledgement of the impossibility of everything, which opens up the possibility of life in the aesthetic dimension – which is to say, the absolutely zero stakes and zero sum game which is the play and costuming of life upon the grand stage of ‘existence’ (‘All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players’ – Shakespeare) --- a zero stakes and zero sum game which is absolutely and solely and truly a dreamed world, an aesthetic dimension, in which all that exists is the energetic play of the transformation of energy in the face and midst of the abeyant womb of non-being – which is to say, the vacuum in and through which they travel in their game and play of space and time.

To open up this space necessarily requires the ability to balance nonexistence and existence, in one hand and the other, the passion of play and the philosophical apotheosis of the lack of meaning and being which is ultimately beneath and behind play. This is to say, to balance the feminine aspect (the womb of abeyance, nonexistence, the vacuum) and the masculine aspect (the spirit, the charging into life, the energetic play and movement of life force, the formless form which masks and plays at all things, being). Wherein the womb is the theatre and the play of being the actor within it, all the world…

In order to accomplish this feat is to reach the realm of high aesthetic skill – in which each creative act and movement and moment is balanced upon the tightrope of the abyss; to fall into the abyss is nothing but another aesthetic movement in a metaphorical dreamscape in which nothing is or does or moves but

as, rather, a play of energetics within a larger vacuum of being. This energetics play of ‘beings’ and ‘dissipations’ is necessarily the work of the vacuum ‘behind the scenes’ of the stageplay in which the actors, again with Shakespeare, ‘have their exits and entrances’; furthermore, have their ‘exists’ and ‘nonexists’ as grasps and leaps and jumps at the kaleidoscopic, fractal totem of ‘being’ as the ‘desired object’ or ‘desired state’ or ‘higher essence’ or ‘dreamed place’ which is, necessarily, the field at which Rumi will meet us there.

This state and place is endlessly open once we strip and are stripped ourselves of ‘ourselves’ or the entirety of that which is described above as in the elaborate covering up in the face of ‘death’ – all of the clothes of ‘ourselves’ and ‘this world’ wrapped about our true energetic formless forms to cover up our fear of that which we are – the fear that this realization of that which we are would utterly shatter us – as it would and will, but that it will shatter ‘us’ – as in the metaphorical, dreamed, illusion of that which we are – our conceptual ‘reality’ – to be replaced with that which always was there, ‘hid’ beneath the unknowing play of our lives which we played with all of the seriousness of a ‘truth of reality’ – the fundamental reality, creative play and dance, of being and non- being.

I. The entire universe is magical, a sphere of creation.

II. Absolute faith that all is love.

III. That which I desire I create.

IV. This is the art of living.

For if this is peace, All the world to the hilt and to the tip – away, I will not tell stories about our love or about this life Instead, it will be much more like a tree Or this word, Stripped of even the meaning of it. It will exist: And in existence, gain innumerable and sacred powers.

All the myths speak of this: The form which takes on a hue and changes costume At any moment, I can make a spring, summer, fall, or winter – withinside myself. Can you meet me there? Come, dressed however you may go: Come dressed as I know you: Truer even than the bone.

What more could I want with these pleasures? Tossed around like an infant in a cage Rattling the bars with grips of desires Struggling for orgasm, struggling for supremacy, Struggling for the assertion of the unique will – Which just as it is sprouted is already indebted to the ground? What nonsense – I desire nothing but the fruitful and endless fulfillment of love: The lush vine.

Insodoing I have become love And here and now am stripped of this stupid game, your stupid game – the play of the world. You call me, come along, play along! Like some child at the playground.

My play is intense and personal. Perhaps you wouldn’t understand – Maybe I will join you later… but show me that you have let yourself inside the ancient gallery of your soul And perhaps we will abide together, anywhere. Knowing the art of the within, we make the entire world our canvas. Every moment is infinite, and staked with fantastically fun odds and ends. This paintbrush your body, this paintbrush your mind – Change it out whenever you choose and know that these dead streets and dead times and the march of the barren markets is nothing more or less than a lack of imagination. At each moment you hold this power – It is charged within and through you. It is your own divine self.

Let me play with the utmost seriousness – I will play at being a warrior and a lover, in this lifetime perhaps – And I will stake myself like a hand of cards on a stupid bet Or else emerge out onto the rainsoaked paradise of a casual city (to me, it is paradise in that it is stripped of its meaning) And declare a truce on everything and everyone, The end of war – not that there ever was one to begin with. All of you quarrel within your minds, the selfseriousness making lovemaking impossible. So tight and squenched up in your demeanor are you As to fit into the icebox of your mind. With broad strides, I make my metropolis of the soul

Right here and right now.

What do I need of your circuses and zoos? Fantastic oddities and castles of sand? I stole your language for a moment and I wear the same nondescript clothes. I am not even here long enough to declare war on your malaise – your everyday which sits in the grand heat and contents itself with the screen of nothing: Petrified dreams rattling the porch boards. There is no culture large enough to contain me There is no cinema large enough to contain me The circus of your reality is truly to me, this: An attempt to hide from the broad field of your possibility. To splice death down to the nearest demeanor To make a laughing face a grimace: To cover up that which you have cast down and away from your everyday And thus birthed it From the cold womb of your mouth.

Gone! Am I – turned away And though we walk these same streets today I am not with you… no – I am with the present, which is to you, unseen To the one who is dreaming the dream Of me.

The indolence of pleasure is breathtaking – The ‘enough’ – the gasp and grasp Which fuels nothing other than unto more of itself In the endless gestation between having and wanting In the addict’s barren room. When we have decided we have had enough of everything –

That I do not thirst for that which I already know is myself That I cannot have anything more or less than this – that which is my present, that which is truly me – Then we shall know the true meaning of life. It will be enough to shatter the rhythms of time Which have made a backbroken world Filled with ends.

I, desiring nothing, Today walking among you Know that I can have nothing and no one. It is I who am truly free. Know this, and know me, And know that it is possible too, within you.

Our whole world is endless freedom – It is a playground without law, rule, or reason. The mind itself is that which creates the surmountain, The surmountain, the preceding and exceeding force. Cast it too long, and you are lost in the future Cast it too short, and you are disbarred in the past. The present is measured in shorelines and the field of vision: The present is measured in that which you perceive in touch. The mind is that which envisions. The mind is that which perceives. Know the mind to be endlessly creative, And be truly free.

For the mind is an artmaker, The mind is a perpetual innovator, But this does not mean that the mind is necessarily ‘true’.

It may have ideas, it may have images and stories, and you may mistake them for pertaining to you. But, rather, the mind is a seed of the essence of creation itself – The mind is that which creates, truly, without bounds – Unless it is delimited by the only thing that exists: Itself.

The mind is like this - it comes and goes everywhere all at once. It perceives the ‘conditions’ of that which it believes it is perceiving And then attempts to create a narrative or a story around them. The mind is like a natural director And its products are the actors and the stage of its perennial play. At any moment, you may end this play – If only in lifting up the curtain of curtains and revealing this ruse. The curtain of curtains is this: The belief that the mind is ever true.

There, in the core of the mind, Lies the essential distinction – the idea of ‘who I am’. The essence of the mind is rather like this – ‘who am I?’ And the endless beautiful disguises it can think up for the God of Creation, the God of Gods which is the source essence, Which is the very quality and essential life force that is mind itself. How powerful is this? To know that you are that, All that is,

All that is possible All that has been and is to come. Does this not make you the soothsayer of your heart Or the oracle of today?

We are endlessly modern And yet dragged by our dreams of yesterday Drugged by our belief in the truth of our minds And the factions of the past which stake themselves out on every street corner The vogue of endless tomorrows promised And fulfilled with the emptiness of todays with names, numbers, reasons, and fumbling hands. Does not the truth of today stand broad, open, and perilously close like a lion? Is it not let loose of its own accord? Animal and stalking the ground? A lion with an unquenchable hunger? Does not the true source of hunger reveal something deeper, Beneath your belief in these desires as forces of sating?

For we think of hunger as hunger for things and the materials of this life and form. What of the hunger for life? The secret hunger that thirsts within being And yet remains, hid beneath the symbolism of the desired thing? This hunger – know it – come to know it well. This hunger is you – this hunger is the raw life, The very essence which begs cultivation Like a sapling With the food, water, and sunlight of the spirit Manifest within and as each thing, each moment, each movement, each time, each face, each breath, each love

As the rhyme of the rhythm As the divine reason within the seeming chaos of the unfolding becoming of the universe, The unfolding becoming of this being.

What hungers for hungers for itself – It hungers for self realization. It hungers not merely for manifestation, But for the voice, the true being of the divine voice called down through it and roaring into expression. It hungers for life itself. And how can one obtain life itself through external means? We come to know it through ourselves, in acting and action, in the play and playing out of our lives. It calls that we become the actors and directors In full view of ourselves, in full creative power and might. Playing and living our lives with the full roaring breath of our souls.

When you realize that everything is already you and yours, You are awake and aware of being that which you are.

When you realize that you are in fact the divine and effulgent and everpresent power of creation, You are awake and aware of being that which you are.

When you realize that you neither come nor go and are in fact the very heart and soul and essence of everyone and everything and all things – and that there is nothing to desire because you already are them and you already are that, that there is nothing ‘other’ than you, nothing to possess, strive after, You are awake and aware of being that which you are.

When you come into everdeeper awareness of that which you are, in engagement with that which you are, with life itself – in the realization that you already are and have all things, You are awake and aware of being that which you are.

When you come into this everdeeper awareness, you come into everdeeper relationship with yourself, all things, the very essence of humanity, life, and eternal – the self and essence within and as all things in their timeless and spaceless truth and essence. When you come into this everdeeper awareness of that which you are, You are awake and aware of being that which you are.

When you begin to treat people, life, existence, and ‘things’ as they truly are, as you, intimately, immediately, always already – that they cannot truly come or go, be possessed or released, held or relinquished,

You are practicing the awakeness and awareness of being that which you are.

When you begin to love people, life, existence, and things as intimately and immediately yourself, the self, oneself, Oneself – and thus no longer desire them nor seek to possess or control them, have power over them, nor any of these aspects: You are practicing the awakeness and awareness of being that which you always already are.

This, distilled, is the depth of freedom and the essence of life emergent, effulgent, immanent, immediate, now, whole, fresh, perfect, and paradise.

You already have it. You already are that.

THE ABILITY TO CREATE FEELINGS WE EXPERIENCE FROM WITHIN

to be able to ‘sit with’ the unfolding and to understand that not only at a higher level that being is always already perfect and whole but the journey and project of the life is perfectly unfolding in divine timing, we are able to surrender our attachment to attempting to control the timeline, and thus to allow ourselves to experience the creative living-life ‘project’ (our aesthetic attunement of and to ourselves) and to not judge it or criticize it, but rather proceed from a space of infinite and unconditional appreciation of the unfolding and joy in it - even in the moments that might feel uncomfortable, new, or unstable or uncertain in their emergence into our view. this is the, even in the midst of perceived discomfort, ability to sit in gratitude and wholeness at the higher level of the whole and perfect truth of our being. in this way, we are witnessing the unfolding of our lives as they truly are: always already beautiful, adventurous, and perfect in their timing and measure - an orchestration of divine aesthetic beauty. in this sense, we embrace being human - that at the level of spirit we are eternally whole and this is our presenscing - our angelic witnessing - of the unfolding of the aesthetic and living dimension of our lives, incarnate into flesh and interacting with the world of dimensions — a life which is precisely for our embracing of our limitless creative potential - for us to uncover this limitlessness and to become these artists unto ourselves. this - our ability to craft emotions - is our artistry of artistry - the transcendent of all arts art - and the mastery of this technique and tool is our key and gateway into a free and ‘foolish’ life, or a life of play and joy and

abundance. for to create your own emotions from within is to take your life entirely into your own hands as a project of feeling good, feeling how you want to feel. and this is precisely what is desired - that state or perception or reception of the feeling good.

to embrace life wholeheartedly is, with nietzsche, to say that eternal yes and in saying that eternal yes to live - to live in such a way as to move into the always alreadyness - and thus access the field of being in and at which free creation occurs. it is to always already accept life and take life at its word and thus meet life at the playing, or at the state of free creation which is necessarily always already beyond the masks of seriousness and struggle and turmoil. for we know those things, in our understanding of the utter wholeness and perfection of being and the performance and aesthetic, creative, playful dimension of becoming - to be utterly nonexistent. it is not possible, other than in the range of human believing emotional perception, for such things to practically ‘exist’. where does ‘seriousness’ exist in nature but as in an aesthetic dimension, hue, palette, color of the mind? the mind’s eye is the color painted and applied to the world by many hundred billion eyes - all different colors, shapes, species, sounds, forms, formulae. and it is precisely through the liberation of this mind’s eye in understanding the playful nature of the unfolding of creation, of the universe, of ourselves, of being in the art of becoming - that we too are freed from our lives of overseriousness, if we so choose. we can, even, if we so choose, furthermore, choose to engage ‘serious play’ as a dimension of aesthetic fun and exploration!

to realize that this life is play of the always already perfect and whole being with the theatre of unfolding

of becoming - or of the changing within the changeless

the essence of paradox or the vision of nature turning within the womb of her seasons - is a liberation, categorically, into a creative life which is founded absolutely upon exploration of emotions and feelings as colors upon the canvas which is perception, hues which color how we see and experience the unfolding of life. at the absolute neutral point, it is a divine unfolding of the essence (being, the eternal, the immutable, the soul, the life-force) within itself (becoming, or space-time, or nature, or the seasonal, the changeable, the changing). in the changing of forms of this essenceless essence of the spirit (whose guise is all and no-things), we recognize within and as ourselves the very creational power which is us and we hold - the free play of the universe, the cosmos, the divine self. from the perceived notion of locks, categories, and limits emerges a new realization and new vision of self - one playing in a sandbox, a dimension of creativity - wherein there is no ‘wrong’, but rather an experimentation with desired feeling, and a practicing of deliberate creation of the desired feeling from within. for once we notice and understand what was formerly our dependence on ‘external things or situations or people’ to provide us with the desired feeling (a movement of what must, in this state, first be ‘observed’ or ‘confirmed’ from ‘without’ in order to be felt or lived from within) — it is within our power and reach to entirely change this mindset and perceptual loop inso to cultivate our ability to craft and experience the desired feeling within.

for all that we desire, at last, is the desired feeling. we do not in fact desire sex, or drugs, or even the social situation which we imagine will at last confirm us or validate us. rather, that which we desire is the sensation

of confirmation, validation, and wholeness these ‘perceived conditions’, we believe in our perceiving of them, reflect back to us and thus reactively create within us as in a compound of external, internal. so in this sense, we become beholden to them, dependent upon them, addicted to them - in that they provide us that which we crave and truly desire - the desired feeling. as soon as they no longer provide us with the desired feeling, we must desperately sort out some other affair or situation or condition so as to procure that which we so desperately seek.

to create the desired feeling from within is to experience yourself your own power as a creator - to experience your ability to provide yourself with the love and care which is the embrace of the universe. the embrace of your whole self is that which says ‘i am already that, and i can rise up from within me and show you’. this is the accord of one’s own inner being, or the eternal aspect of the self nature wherein the entirety of the emotional experience is contained as in infinite possibility which need only be accessed by a creative sensitivity to the possibilities of creation from within. but we must first look within - and recognize our ability to break the patterns of conditioning as to ‘external’ stimuli ‘hooking us’ to the feedback loop of dependency upon a ‘without’ in order to ‘bring us’ our desired feeling. to look within, here, means to begin to cultivate our own ability to create the experience of our desired feeling unconditionally.

NOTES:

the ability to create feelings we experience from within

ultimately all of the feelings we experience we create from within. the question is: are we conscious of this? are we creating deliberately, or reactively? are we creating the desired feeling from within us, or are we reactively creating (the word here would also be like ‘unconsciously creating’, perhaps) whatever feeling the believed-perceived ‘condition’ evokes in/from us?

are we creating the desired feeling consciously and deliberately? this is the artistry of our lives, the unconditional emergence of our true selves - the expression and manifestation of our inner being. it is self realization vis-a-vis the mastery of being able to express ourselves unconditionally, as we choose - without being beholden to the ‘belief-perception- condition-turning’. in this sense, we are freed from the illusion and born into the playhouse of being - where we are free to create the desired feeling within ourselves at any given moment, regardless of the ‘perceived believed condition’ and thus are self sovereign in our artistry of life. we make and engage life as artists.

a large part of this is overcoming fear, or the shadow of belief/disbelief which is really nothing more or less than the last vestiges or thresholds of the ‘belief- perception-conditioned self’, or the image or imagined or conceptualized version (the ‘self’) with delimited boundaries and borders and ‘no-s’. fear is, in short, the disbelief or belief which is ultimately a ‘no’ in the face of the effulgent and always already yes of nietzsche

which is to meet life on a transcendent plane of total acceptance of the playfulness of being-becoming. the ‘no’, in short, is a misunderstanding of the play of being-becoming - it is the ‘taking seriously’ of life where there is no seriousness but as in the aesthetic judgement, as in the dimension of the mind. in this sense, the ‘no’ is always already playful, always already a mask of being - in this sense, being created unconsciously. this same ‘no’ could be entirely free and ‘foolish’ if created with conscious and deliberate creation in regards to exploring the possibilities of limited creation!

emotional coherence - awareness of my overall energetic field. what do i really want in life? alignment with higher values and purpose and ‘living from there’. in doing so, i create a field of energetic emotional coherence - meaning that i am living from the place of ‘this is (already) my life’. inso living from those higher values, i am always already creating that which i desire to experience within and for myself. in being myself, i don’t need to do anything or be anyone other than me

and proceeding from this way

emotions are the aesthetic judgement of the project being realized, or ‘judging the timeline’. once we understand that divine timing is always perfect, we are able to relax into a painterly understanding of emotions, and to create them from within ourselves as aesthetic experiences of beauty, tunings or attunings to the always already perfect unfolding of our lives. nothing is ever ‘going wrong’, it is only that which you believe to be perceiving that, with hamlet, ‘time is out of joint’, causing an irritation with the perceived unfolding of the life project/method. this is, again,

based on believing-perceiving, or based on that which we believe we are perceiving is going on around us.

Note to Kali (8/2/22):

one of the most powerful things in the world is realizing this: that you are the deliberate creator of your own life. and taking charge of that means deciding how you want to feel and finding and creating that feeling within you. once you’re able to do that, you’re able to change anything and everything at the drop of a hat. because you’re able to create the feeling of love, kindness, gentleness, coherence, peace - within yourself. and when you can do that you don’t need anyone or anything else, any situation or circumstance to do it or confirm it for you. when you can create your desired feeling from within, you’re truly free. there you can unconditionally experience the most powerful and beautiful emotions you want. creating from within means you can change the world by changing your perception of it by way of creating a feeling and using that feeling to paint your world. we do it all the time, but often unconsciously. deliberately doing it is lifechanging.

you find the leading edge of your life, and regardless of what appears to be the conditions or the circumstances, you create love and joy from within. it doesn’t need ‘anything’, it just is. and everything changes in light of your deliberate creation. it changes the world. the more you practice it the more you’ll see the results around you. it’s how we become truly spiritual leaders, and bring love and life to others. unconditionally

that’s what it means to be an artist in the deepest sense. if you think about paintings and poems and music - what do they do? they create feelings. but if we can do that within ourselves, the ability to create feelings we

experience from within, to give ourselves that gift - we give ourselves the love we so desperately need, and in doing so, show others what is truly possible - the infinite, the beautiful, technicolored canvas of our life artistry - our emotional weaving of life by our deliberate and conscious hand - painting our desired feelings and giving ourselves the gift of our own active painting of life.

think about it like this: when you ‘experience’ an emotion - it is often because you believe you are perceiving something that stimulates you in some type of way, positive or negative, beautiful or whatever. you ‘react’ to the thing or ‘condition’ that you perceive. but what if you could do it in reverse - create the feeling from within and stay with that desired feeling regardless of what you believe you are perceiving at any given moment in time/space? think about the creative power of that. that’s unconditional creation of your desired feeling. and people feel that. the universe responds to it. because you’re being a deliberate creator - the artist of your own life.

emotions are everything. if we think of the best in life - we want our love relationships to work out so we can feel that sensation of love and acceptance. we want our creative projects to work out and to engage them so we can feel pride and joy in our hard work at them. we want to be accepted by others so we can feel accepted and understood. the things we ‘want’, we want precisely because of, ultimately, the emotional value and sensation they represent and provide to us within. but what if you took the ‘middle man’ of the conditions out. what if you created the love and acceptance within you first, and held that - regardless of what you thought was going on around you/in the

world/whatever. your ability to create that emotional kindness to yourself from within is your ability to, regardless of whatever you believe the conditions ‘look like’ at any time/space - to hold that unconditional love. that, to me, is the ultimate power, and one that is capable of changing your life and the lives of others for the better. it’s revolutionary.

read this if you want [essay listed above these notes], it might help you. i want to help you in any way i can to experience the total and utter freedom of being alive within yourself without dependence on anyone or anything. your powerful freedom as creator of yourself. you’re so free. the moment you see that for yourself and you keep seeing it, keep tapping into it… you will continue to experience such great beauty. even things like sadness will be joyful in their exploration of feeling. the canvas of your feelings. allowing yourself to explore their power. and that is truly the beauty of life.

through the biological reproduction; the man is the seed or the spark which is thrown into the transformative flame and vessel and flue of the womb to be changed by way of a pregnancy, a period of gestation – as a seed in the ground.

For the woman to learn of what it is to be a man and for a man to learn what it is to be a woman is rather to understand that at root these processes are merely literalizations of a metaphysical process which is the intersection and ultimately nonduality of the spirit and flesh vis a vis the life force energy, or the qi, or the electricity, or the absolute transference of life force to and through various ‘formless forms’, all of which are ultimately empty and nonexistent but as beakers or clear windows or glasses composed at the very glassness of them of the very thingness which is the formless form of creationary or life force energy. This, at root, is the neuter which ‘splits’ or ‘binaries’ or ‘separates’ in the apparent vision and appearance and even ‘sensation’ (as in lived experience of ‘self and other’ or ‘subject and object’ as in a manner of that which is perceiving itself ‘otherwise’ or ‘separate’ or ‘not-self’ (even as the donkey is the same self – Siddharameshwar) – the creative ‘illusory’ experience of witnessing existence which is the ‘personal’ or the ‘subjective’ overlaid atop as in a ‘vision’ of the transpersonal and the transsubjective – which is ultimately altogether a dissolution of the ‘personal’ and ‘subjective’ in the fundamental and foundational understanding of non-existence vis a vis the qi.

Then, what it is to be ‘man’ or ‘woman’ is rather an immediacy, to live flow qi and rather not any of this nonsense about definitions or cultural drivel – but rather to live out the life of the node or the qi flow to

the fullest extent as in channeling the energy clearly and directly as in a receiving of the spirit in the flesh and a discharging or an enacting of the spirit through the flesh into expression and manifestation of the soul – or that through which the unique glass catches and reflects the light through itself – the prism of the self through which this eye or this vision is capturing or observing this light. This is to say, an entirely sovereign and unique project which really has nothing whatsoever to do with reproduction or definitions but moreso the lived life, the creative life through which the sexual life force energy is chosen and and actively channeled and flowed and felt and consciously directed by the consciousness therein into the creative project of the creation of oneself-existence, the creation of the manifestation of the soul. This project, is, of course, that which collapses the ‘man’ and ‘woman’ – this project is, of course, of the utmost essence and transcendent of the culturos-bios categories of contemporary and ‘humanities past’ – the realization and fulfillment and enactment and engagement and manifestation of the soul on earth – the realization of the creative project – the manifestation of the ‘unseen’ from within as in the enlivened enactment, the becoming of the art of being. This flow is the channeling of self, of soul, of spirit. It is the taking the raw material of one’s own ‘biological humanity’, and transmuting it into the creative project and the art of one’s life. It is the active choice to live one’s own energy in the way one so desires – to be an artist in that the energy is expressed in one’s own unique way.

This – is freedom. This – is to live one’s truth.

the flow of life. be in the flow of life. no images, no thoughts, no narratives, no attachments. pure flow.

meditate on the void, even the absence of blackness.

meditate on agape love

agape love is total non attachment to anything.

from that total non attachment comes the utmost confident and steady love of self sovereignty. it is the love of the i am

can i be ok with any outcome? the answer is yes. because i am absolutely unattached to any outcome. i am the flow of life itself. as such, i am.

no images, no thoughts, no narratives, no attachments. pure flow.

compassionate nonattachment wu wei

love without the loss or gain of anything, attachment or detachment of anything, coming or going of anything

love as the eternal same of being

can you love without conditions, regardless of outcomes, in perfect stillness? and yet allow for the affairs of the world and the body to flow, to indulge the illusion of coming and going? and yet to remain, love, without conditions, regardless of outcomes, in perfect stillness?

i am not reaching or grasping, nor am i pushing away or repulsing. i remain ensconced in being; the illusion of the world turns as it appears it ‘must’ - nor am i assuaged by its supposed vision. i am neither pushed nor pulled in a magnetism of apparent self or other - yet resident in the supreme itself - the dissolution of all such ‘other’ and ‘elsewhere’. as such, i am founded in the infinite power of being, the wellspring of life force, life source energy - from which i spring, forever whole; forever dancing free. in this way i am simulating whenever that which might be called ‘tension’ (or an opposition, or an ‘other’) arises in my consciousness of desire or repulsion. that which i view in the mirror of ‘my perception’ is always already myself. this experience of life is a springboard to the evolution of consciousness, of my soul. each ‘tension’ is a call evermore to manifest the agape love of my soul into the artwork of being - the canvas of form, space, and time. as i act, as i gesture, as i sculpt body and earth, i am manifesting the divine, agape love - my true soul essence - upon this field and mirror’d foil-plane. i speak from within, needing no symbolic or known language, charged immediately with the power and source essence thrust of my immortal being. in this way i am immanently present; silent, and yet speaking the true language of the essence of my soul. i am full; i am whole.

i live within life - never constructing a self image, never narrativizing the self image, never reflecting upon the self image - residing fully and immediately in the flow of life. as such, i do not think. as such, i am.

i am the witness. i ‘excite’ the consciousness or ‘put it to rest’. beyond this, i have no name, no form, no

image, no space, no time. i am the witness. i ‘excite’ the consciousness or ‘put it to rest’.

the spiritual athlete in the agon of cosmic life utilizes the ego consciousness to perform feats of physical art by way of charging the body into action vis a vis the channeling of life force energy to sculpt the body-form into a work of art - a moving figure, a force, inhabited by the breath of the gods, the breath that which is god. it is the charging and enacting of the body, the spirit that is the engine of the physical force of the moving body art which is the utilization and discharging of the ego consciousness ‘in competition’ or ‘in agon’ - the play of the witness to create artworks of profound, immediate, transcendental beauty in that they are actively embodied as in an athletics as in a force which ‘seemingly lifts the weight of the world’ for fun, for sport, for the beauty of creation. in this way it is the highest, transcendental art - for which play is utilized to sculpt the body in motion into a force, a spiritual engine through which the soul is manifest in a ‘will to power’ which seeks and is no end but unto itself as an endless means into movement, action, creation, becoming. this ‘physical engine of the body’ is charged absolutely by creation of the highest order - agon for agon’s sake, or that by which jacob is recognized by god for his wrestling with god - the acclaim that is recognition by all of creation for high and infinite striving toward which the only possible goal can be said to be ‘further and greater and higher striving’. in this sense, the infinite desires itself, only deeper, in more profundity, in more profound hues - in more contrast, extremity, passion, and power of itself. it seeks to become more of itself vis a vis the agon, or the ‘trial engine’ which is the pitting of itself against itself to reveal that which is more of itself.

aesthetic and spiritual genius emerges precisely from this recognition and glad, raucous, into-the-fray engagement with this spiritual principle of being- becoming; furthermore, engagement as such which is the creation of cosmic heroism - the charging of the gates of space and time - and in the charging rendering the infinite palpable, present, in an art-agon of the body making manifest the spiritual power of the full presence of being in knowing engagement with that which it is, that which life is. this is to say, it renders the higher spiritual power manifest - it renders it visible for all of creation and the eyes of creation to see, observe - the fearless, brave, courageous creative act which meets life in the stadium of the witness and does battle gladly, raucously, for the grand sport of living. and in this recognition, the sport is exalted and rendered high art - given purpose and meaning in the manifest power of the spiritual striving, the sculpting of the body- world-art-form in an aesthetic beauty which is the beauty of self realization enaction.

the storytelling is an imagined conflict isolate the muscle that is experiencing the storytelling

the breath in and the breath out are the essential binary. they are that which give rise to the tinder, the friction of thought. to bypass thought and reside in the direct action of breath is spiritual practice and spiritual mastery. in the truest most immediate sense, the breath out and the breath in are all that exists.

everything that ‘arises’ from the breath is purely aesthetic, or ‘a joke of the breath’ or ‘riffing off the breath’. it is ‘a theatre of the breath’

to reside directly within the breath is where the power is

how will i divine this geometry? with all the certitude of infinity it whispers, shine, with a brilliance of inconquerable magnitude.

all of my shades drawn in the charcoal of this life and blackened by time the dark horse of my day ridden down to the horizontal slopes where the day meets the way of the night. which passage shall take me over, beyond the sacred threshold?

the blissful agonies between sleeps half shuttered ecstasies and the black dog howling at my door - what shadows keep, barely at bay in the wilderness ledge? mixed with the horrors and the throttle of night the oil of the engine which propels these cascading dreams? shall i take refuge in the night and huddled, like the first men around this campfire of stars and painting pictures of the grottoes of the mind - how else shall we pass the time? with furrowed brow and dark design?

how shall i interpret this strange geometry? to frame the alignment of the planets, is it merely the birth of an erasure or a new dawn of language? i sit here, animal-dumb behind the abyss black of my eyes

and meditate upon the solemn cresting lips of the infinite.

all the hours have passed and amounted to nothing. to see them here now, in my hands not even grains of sand but the madness of a grasping mind - shall i not now gather up these coins that glisten in the sun? the hungry greedy bladder of my night rises, and fills the sac of my lungs broadens with breath and i expel the black toxin of the temporal - the backbeat which i will catch next time round on some wine drunk stoop or gutter evening kicked around the stone tyrant of the fallen day.

taking this pure breath, i am without ownership and stainless. the fluid runs over me and i am not buried by the sedimental passage of time. space cannot touch me. where will you reach me, by phone or postmark? come to me, by noontime train - along the river the hill over by far arden

‘Poets are the mortals who, singing earnestly of the wine-god, sense the trace of the fugitive gods, stay on the gods' tracks, and so trace for their kindred mortals the way toward the turning. The ether, however, in which alone the gods are gods, is their godhead. The element of this ether,, that within which even the godhead itself is still present, is the holy. The element of the ether for the coming of the fugitive gods, the holy, is the track of the fugitive gods. But who has the power to sense, to trace such a track? Traces are often inconspicuous, and are always the legacy of a directive that is barely divined. To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world's night utters the holy. This is why, in Holderlin's language, the world's night is the holy night.

It is a necessary part of the poet's nature that, before he can be truly a poet in such an age, the time's destitution must have made the whole being and vocation of the poet a poetic question for him. Hence "poets in a destitute time" must especially gather in poetry the nature of poetry. Where that happens we may assume poets to exist who are on the way to the destiny of the world's age. We others must learn to listen to what these poets say—assuming that, in regard to the time that conceals Being because it shelters it, we do not deceive ourselves through reckoning time merely in terms of that which is by dissecting that which is.

The closer the world's night draws toward midnight, the more exclusively does the destitute prevail, in such a way that it withdraws its very nature and presence. Not only is the holy lost as the track toward the godhead; even the traces leading to that lost track are

well-nigh obliterated. The more obscure the traces become the less can a single mortal, reaching into the abyss, attend there to intimations and signs. It is then all the more strictly true that each man gets farthest if he goes only as far as he can go along the way allotted to him.’

Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought
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When we travel to Far Arden Will you look up from the blue room, in the villa overlooking the cliff’s rushing water: Will you look up in the fire owned by Mother Night? Silkmaiden – your hands hardened by the journey to Far Arden Will you not come down to me and sit upon my lap? Will you not let the poet within me tell you stories of unbinding? Stories which reveal within them like an egg The blinding light of truth?

When we travel there, will you not grasp my hand Hard travelled and ridden down like a horse’s back, Hard travelled and waiting for the stone wall of the next town to crest over the horizon of your dream’s eyes? Do you not seek and see with a half tilted gaze and hand? The world askance as if it were on a drunken tilt Ranting and raving about the town in an incomprehensible urge To speak –

Alas, Far Arden Your delightful myth approaches Bound in myrrh and the pleasure of loving beneath dark chambers Within the wooden bowl lurks the moon as she gazes up From the cell of her mind, shrunken, shrinking away from the reflecting light… Far Arden! Your delightful myth approaches, garlanded – Her fair hair cascading down about her waist and beckoning into the fog –

What is to come is so unbound That it is shaking the lockbox and catalytic: Threatening to spill over, even more boundless than the oceans And overwhelm the sphere of your vision. Does it not crawl like blood about you, trembling? Will it not wake the old gods from their slumber? Will they come and jest you, toy your ways And leave you begging in the streets? The old gods are the first poets, of worldless destruction: Here comes their cascading language. Mouthless, they have no faces, no eyes, No beards.

The passage appears ancient and the chasm wide – All is writ in the hue of a forgotten past, In the cipher of the first men and their words A fire of truth, having never left the breath. All you are left with is the symbols carved into stone, The dagger hand of the mystic god chiseling away the cliffside, the carpenter of the woodlands And the nymph of language which dances, incapturable, Spiritess.

Narration of that which carries you proved impossible - On a journey that appears as though it is a joke Splitting the sides of the gods as they circle your bedside Taunting dreams urging you further into the myst. Each night a carriage, the nightshade of the carrion trees Circling the aether wherein sight dissipates. Will you travel through the garden of the dead? And play dead with the rest of them,

Play living, kings and queens, Rulers and lands Pieces of light Woven into day-fabrics Spread about the earth. Man’s code forsakes itself, laying great stakes down in the game. For what comes calling is nothing more than a serious play, called life.

What of the poet who wants more? Deeper language than the turning of the day, the pleasures which shirk the devisive capture of language, Staying only for the afternoon, bidding the solitary night? What sanctified essence lies buried beneath the stone Beneath the word of the thing, turning, That which we barely skim the surface of, world? What of the poet who wants more? There is the madness of the unknown, the true and deep madness of Night. May he hold night in outstretched palm and not perish And yet go under the spell of Night And return, even-scarred To the breath and scent of the day with his senses changed, sharpened even By the grindstone of Night, upon which all that is dissolves into the pure form of Spirit: In which the night is the true solvent of men Revealing their inner essence.

Those like me, you have come for the night And bear day only gladly as a brief sojourn before the moon’s rise and the commencement Of the infinite feast Of the eyes of the gods.

It is only my desire for striving which keeps me Kept like a diamond mine within a barrel All these precious stones reflect light Their hidden inner emptiness. Strive for precious stones and strive forever Unto no ends On an endless ocean

Wayward, masses travel Hand over heels into the brewing storm Fomenting rain, passions Bearing even the heaviest of imagined burdens Their lightness confirmed by air And yet their backs aching, tilted With fractured gaze The light within taking form and shape Of the desired One.

How whole do we have to make Such passing days, writhing like snakes Upon the bridegroom’s bedside Tormented again, By days failed come to pass? Alas, nothing lasts – Alas, the lark of tomorrow chirps loudly at my window But when I open it I see nothing But the black of night.

Where all is swallowed, light Has no passion, The fervor stolen and bottled in the sound A grotto of the open mouth Comes calling yet again, to I To awaken this burden and step foot out into the broad of day and claim that which is mine To go about the day collecting pieces of the body

Like stones on a sea shore. Shall the child emerge from the flesh of the cretaceous earth? Why have we given names for times so far away and yet so close As to call them, truly, infinite.

Who has gathered this body here today for summons Around the fire of the goat’s head of the spoils of night Catalytic, thronged night Betrothed to the fire, breeding within it – The sex dispassionate and in this way truly creative. Do you not see the images emerge like heads of the serpent? Cut them down and approach the betrothed, your true form – Claim the nothing which is your prize, And do not beget the spoils of nature Come and gone like antlers.

How now will the call go but unto itself? Unto itself the call resounds strong and without sadness, Yet also without gladness. Do you sense the dispassion in the broad reach of the stars? Do you, too, sense me, the dreamer, Rome The ruins, and the unseated nature of it all Do I scathe the ruins with my chest, And brush past them with the wound of my eyes And observe the broad side of the day, too, dispassionately?

Have you looked upon the city and wanted nothing And almost laughed at the sky? Here is how I can afford to spend my words,

Equally, with a gravitas that is laughable, In a sky that is laughable. Who shall come calling and tell me of the untruth of the infinite? What mortal shall know nothing of the nothingness? It is I, Perseus Of many disguises. Who so comes calling will come calling again The rapture at my door.

Whoso desires The unattained Knows the mystique and at last that aesthetic detachment of the unattainable – He who stands opposed the other, she She who stands opposed the other, he; Worlds apart of gods and men – Who gaze upwards and downwards at them: The dead scrying the living Through the alleyways and ladders Of Time.

Today, what has been obtained, forgotten And suborganized into the body, Codiced into sections, designated into organs And thus acclaimed to the body of the selfhood: Tomorrow what comes is the dawning of the black – The rising of that which is yet to come, yet to be, yet to obtain name.

The name is knowledge of what is; The knowledge called the intercoursing of men – With life itself Grasping hands at the flesh of the body As it swirls and swims In infinity – What cherished sinew was mine today What coins in hand What dreams at heart Are blown in the winds of tomorrow’s air and soil, Sand and made stone.

That which I sculpt today, the chiseled body The statue which remains upon my conquest Do I desire that which is complete? That which I have subsumed and made my own?

Out of the dark chambers of the mind’s eye And out in to the light of day –

The mystique of that which is not mine: I have called that which I have lost, my reflection, that which I desire Emerges from my own creation like a leopard from the outskirts of a jungle Prowling the cinescope of the waking dream – From which I wake into this: In one hand the chisel And the other, the flower ripped from soil. Will the scent die with time, The shine of life fade with day, And waking into night I see the sights of a scrying eye, A darker dream within the mind’s eye, Crawling into the day of my waking – Unchambered and unbottled, The fragrance which wakes my day into a new order, Into a new time.

Chasing dreams, the world turns and burns Alighting about the wheel of emotion And calling out for the lover of this next moment to come Shall it be the flesh or the bone, the soul or the stone, The woman passing by? The watcher watches on from the perch of eagle’s eye. He watches on from sea and stone, from day and night, From the light behind the light – Which pierces the vision of the eye and excites the brain: The storehouse of images accrued in the day and let loose in the night, Come strange symbologies

And organisms of meaning. Let them be assembled in a Frankenstein order and fashion: Let them wear wyrd cloths and dance around the firepit of the night Plightless, dancing alight They know nothing of the seeds of sorrow. They dance and we wake, waking again into tomorrow And chase the witch of the dream away with the lash of day. What eyes see within, what eyes dismay? The dream of night, the dream of day, The unfulfilled, The dream betrayed? Away! Away night! Away day! And here we sit and stand and stay In silent motion, a kneeling prey: About the dreams, about the day, Turning, turning, turning Away.

The dream of the lover, feeding, shapeless She has no image and yet digs at the dregs of the mind. Have you observed her in the day? Crawling, a shadow’s web? A stockgirl, a mercenary exchange? Looking further, Piercing the eye.

The eye is beaten away in the search For rogue element Called the manner from within Emerged from the dreadnought, Dreaming’s cloak When called into life by image, by word, by the sound of song. Is it not here? It is not here? Is it not here? The child of another man, raised up from nothing, The regular fluid of the land What is the divine But the regular occurrence of birthing In the scene of the everyday? How could a love contain such a massive dream The exhaltation, of all excitements Gathered in the box of the waking other The living breathing thing Of desire?

You do not dare speak this, You would not – For to speak this tome would be to see clearly with the eyes that you call to betray The eyes within which truly seek and say, And lead you on an endless quest, Onward through the day.

Well, I am seekless and rote: And perhaps evermore regular than the rest of you. My nature is disciplined creation from within; That nature is sculpted by the manifold of spirit The manifold of the stone chiseling gardener of the mind, The ancient seeker of space and time Who has seeked and sought and found the truth: That all is naught but within the mind, The weaver of space and the weaver of time: The playmate of creation and design. There I go nowhere, There I make this makeless makeshift now, Where with all I have, I assemble the moonlight, the monolith, the moonlight Of the abyss, Come down from the three great languages To make today in such adjectless splendor. To speak my seacret language you must forget today And go back to nowhere Retrieve the nothing And shine it to the light of day, Show the nothing in the palm of your hand Revel in it and forget nothing, remember nothing – You are damnedless and buoyant You are young and old and clear Making today, Clef’d from a dream. Today you must choose: Today you are given the dagger, The blade of which to end your dream. Shall you strike the dagger to the canvas, Shall you become like old King Lear, or Oedipus? ‘Pull out his eyes, apologize’..

Damn your words and worlds and gravestones, Damn it all into oblivion

That which you thought you knew about the body Chasing shadows forever And passed on – All is endlessly forgiven as it is unforgiven – With no faults and no applause The valley of life is ancient and whole From which the eternal blooms in a garden of the flesh of the earth. Pick the apple, eat it, it has never been picked nor eaten. Can you see this truth? If you can, you have no need for the poem, No need for the apology of fear Nor for the morals of this world. This makes you free men, forever. Free beyond free, free beyond meaning and meaninglessness. Is not creation upon the tip of your tongue, the speaking movement of being wherein you are urged into something? Here, take this body and be done with it. I will do it for you gladly. Go out into the sun and fight the warless war of playing speech. Go fight for fun and do something beyond the true meaning of the infinite. Surprise the gods and become even more than adjunct to the holy. Where are the limits? The barrel is blown out upon the field of oblivion and everything is calling your name. Will you not claim it, oh nameless one? Forget your name forever and fly into the fields beyond meaninglessness and meaning and step upon the abyssal platform of the now. For nothing holds you and nothing stars

In the drama of forevermore, wedded to the turning and burning Which is the dream of its own mind’s eye, Staring down at the gates of the universe, contained and yet acclaimed The body and the blood The food and water of the infinite? Rubbing its tummy after a great big meal…

Are you not staunch in the face of the infinite? A hard travelled soldier trudging the tracks of the arms of the great god, Scaling the rocks of legs and sun of the mind’s eye Poppyfields of the chest and unblemished beach of the face Reaching up to the transcendent form and proclaiming: ‘At last, this here is it!’ Having found the word of the infinite and spoken it To realize that the world of the infinite is the word and it is everywhere present, In the speaking of the wind’s hands through the breeze and flower-tips, shaken from the stirrups of the leaves And, indeed, the cat’s meow? Whoso great poet has found the last and only word? I would shake his hand and proclaim him nothing: Not even man, not even woman – Only pure sound.

The singing will last forever, Fullthroated and infinitely complex – the murmuring of water over the rock’s face – the stream of life through the valley of the dead and yet unquenched Clamouring back to life and scaling the mountains of time and proclaiming victory, the proclimax,

Into the submergence of deep waters and the introspection which alights the enlightened, proclaim their truths and return to soil. The body of the god is infinitely alightened, Whoso shall call themselves enlightened? Know that which you are and be done with it. All games played on in this way, Having read the rulebook and stumbled out of the womb into the broad day, forgotten everything Glaring off the refractory tower-light Thrust into a new stage with new players In a new time and a new age: This is the way of the incarnate – taking the trail-way through the mountain pass and gates Into new chambers of the mind Reaching out into the abyss for that which is within Reaching through the water’s way to find the stone beneath the surface The stone that rises out of the water and dies in eternity’s night: How many ways will you describe love? Carved into the depths of the ocean, souls there Carved into the cliff’s face, souls there Beloved as the chisel which makes the way – There is creation in the raising of this hand and arm And in the lowering of the dying light Upon the tree’s shade shadow. Come down and rise up upon it, The essence which glints and graps and grows Groans and glees Upon itself, Scaling the peaks of time and submerging in the valleys of itself – Breathing without and within –

The eternity of the self is here-grasped

And relinquished That which I gasp is naught, grasp is naught And thus I see the eternity before me Barebones and naked, the truth Which is forever a lie, a truth within a lie Before my eyes: Shall you divine it, too? Shall you see that which is barely obscured, the slipdress of the infinite Beneath, behid, betwixt the image? What I have touched I have loved, evermore in this dream, in this time, in this rhyme, in this rhythm of vision: I have touched all and naught And seen the true nature of the aether. And I ask, to you, Will you rejoice in it, Or will it destroy you?

The gravity of power: the spontaneous manifestation of energetic movements of corresponding depth-intensity which is the emotional or energetic field which is behind them or empowering them ‘into existence’.

Then, speaking on the bridge of the spiritual and the (meta-)physical, the emotional or spiritual thrust, or ‘will-of-power’ behind the energetic happening or the corresponding ‘depth-intensity’ of the feeling behind and as the forward-moving thrust into being, into life, into manifestation or existence – is that which is the corresponding will-of-power in manifestation as to the magnitude or gravity or gravitas of the physical ‘thing- existence-happening-becoming-experience’ proper.

In this sense, the spiritual thrust is that which is the ‘mover’ or the ‘driver’ of physical existence vis-à-vis consciousness-awareness of itself as that which is, beneath the ‘veneer’ or ‘veil’ of the manifest physical object/force/what have you – the essence of life and the movement of the physical or the mover of the physical into spheres and shades of ‘power’ and ‘force’ and ‘thrust’. This is, in short, the life essence of the entirety of The Thing Itself – or the spiritual existence embodied everywhere as everything, at all times.

The spiritual thrust is then the awareness of itself in various different gradients or spheres or aesthetic dimensions or clothes/layers of Self and Selfness, the knowledge of that which One is; furthermore, the principles behind which the veiling of the ‘one and many’ as in a pseudo- or an imagistic or theatrical separation is veiling and unveiling the fundamental transformative reality and nature of spiritual power, force, and thrust as in a primarily creative-emotional reality from which ‘things’ or ‘existences’ or

‘experiences’ emerge as in a primary thrust from within which is a hue, or a colour, or an inner experience first.

That this inner experience can be crafted and cultivated as an art form, or a theatre of self and selves which a priori generates a hue of existence or experience or performance in order to accomplish a certain task, do a certain thing, et cetera et cetera (and in this doing perpetually reminded that this is an aesthetic awareness of becoming, or that becoming is purely creative-aesthetic) – is the artistry of living; furthermore, the creation of life force energy from within in order to inhabit certain spiritual states, masks, archetypes, or characters, coming into communion with various gods…

This form of energetic channeling is a channeling which recognizes, fundamentally, the state and existence and nature of spiritual qua physical becoming and as such applies these rules, traits, and characteristics in order to become further artist of beautiful life, which always already is and necessarily includes the organismic self, unbroken from the at- large Nature proper.

Once we become conscious, even dimly, of the Atman, the Reality within us, the world takes on a very different aspect. It is no longer a court of justice but a kind of gymnasium. Good and evil, pain and pleasure, still exist, but they seem more like the ropes and vaulting-horses and parallel bars which can be used to make our bodies strong. Maya is no longer an endlessly revolving wheel of pain and pleasure but a ladder which can be climbed to consciousness of the Reality.

Adi Shankaracharya
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ARETE

Arete is a striving, necessarily endless, and necessarily futile, pointless, or meaningless. In this way, it is necessarily striveless.

Arete is fundamentally a striving to greater, more, or better. In this way, it is not reducible to definition, goal, or attribute/attribution.

Arete is the very nature and soul of striving, it is the essence of striving embodied by the athlete of the comic agon, or rather the athlete of the enspirited embodied soul sculpting life infinitely as in the now moment.

In this sense, arete is infinitely available, accessible, present. It is the striving toward higher or greater or better or more life, and in this striving, the embodiment of the apotheosis of man. This is not a goal, or an ‘end state’, but rather a way of being that is fundamentally opposed to ‘reaching’ ‘grasping’ ‘touching’, ‘holding’.

As in that, with Heraclitus, the infinite is in a cosmic flux, changing, the arete is in alignment with the highest changing and the highest striving, or “The goal is to live with God like composure on the full rush of energy, like Dionysus riding the leopard, without being torn to pieces.” – Joseph Campbell.

In this way, we can describe arete as a state of being ‘at war’ which can only be reached from the higher realms of philosophy and metaphysics as in an overall understanding of ‘what life is’ and ‘what life is about’ – and from a state of cosmic play. From this state and

place of play, seeing that the cosmos is an agon wherein:

Adi Shankaracharya

Choosing to wholeheartedly embrace this state of play, one plays in this way totally seriously and totally with the recognition and realization of the foolishness of seriousness; furthermore, the foolishness and vanity of all things. Instead, the cosmic warrior-philosopher- hero takes solace in the striving, or the active embodiment of the highest values which is to say the striving for the sake of striving, or the striving to actively embody the state of highest change, or the noblest change or quality of flux, to, again, ‘live with God like composure on the full rush of energy, like Dionysus riding the leopard, without being torn to pieces’. This state of play is infinitely practiced, infinitely present, and, in this way, actively becomes and is becoming the cosmic warrior-philosopher-hero. In this way, ‘the person’, is rather arete themselves.

Simonides, Fragment 579 (trans. Campbell, Vol. Greek Lyric III) (Greek lyric C6th to 5th B.C.) : "There is a tale that Arete (Virtue) dwells on unclimable rocks and close to the gods tends a holy

place; she may not be seen by the eyes of all mortals, but only by him on whom distressing sweat comes from within, the one who reaches the peak of manliness."

Meantime the other [Arete] had drawn near, and she said : ‘I, too, am come to you, Herakles: I know your parents and I have taken note of your character during the time of your education. Therefore I hope that, if you take the road that leads to me, you will turn out a right good doer of high and noble deeds, and I shall be yet more highly honoured and more illustrious for the blessings I bestow. But I will not deceive you by a pleasant prelude: I will rather tell you truly the things that are, as the gods have ordained them. For of all things good\par and fair, the gods give nothing to man without toil and effort. If you want the favour of the gods, you must worship the gods: if you desire the love of friends, you must do good to your friends: if you covet honour from a city, you must aid that city: if you are fain to win the admiration of all Hellas [Greece] for virtue, you must strive to do good to Hellas: if you want land to yield you fruits in abundance, you must cultivate that land: if you are resolved to get wealth from flocks, you must care for those flocks: if you essay to grow great through war and want power to liberate your friends and subdue your foes, you must learn the arts of war from those who know them and must practise their right use: and if you want your body to be strong, you must accustom your body to be the servant of your mind, and train it with toil and sweat.’ - Xenophon

You do not know what it is to be alive. The beautiful terror - God told me, ‘You barely survived my arete, This agon of consciousness, Which sculpted - Climb the scaffold of the body The pyhrric emptiness And behold the emptiness of emptiness -‘ My blackened eye Which scried the night Is a relic of the wrestling Which nigh takes life And deigns the brute fasc Of the dead.

If I wrest forward Death will come taunting This abyss - the wide black strait of my eyes Which I scried the infinite: Do you not see the blank and blackened canvas, voided Beyond space and time And the madness of your approach? Come knocking on the door of death, Bring the gift of the lover’s gaping lips and thrown back eyes and head And see what he will have to say of it: Absconding with her into the pit Beneath the poppy fields Wherein she was never gone Bedded on the forest floor.

The hardened muscles of time Tendons and tissue in front toward the infinite: I am squared up as an athlete of the cosmic Agon Jumping from the spires of the towers of the mind

To meet consciousness head on and do battle The naked essence of the body An ascending pyramid To which I mount and climb.

In my striving, empty striving My striving is pure. In my striving, empty striving My striving is pure.

‘When I was a child my grandfather, who once rode the western plains, persuaded me that his navel was where an Indian arrow had once pierced him. While puzzled that I had a similar wound, I believed him wholeheartedly. Intuitively, he was right. It is the world’s wound, the omphalos spun tight from the solar plexus, the trace and track of disconnection we all carry. Such a wound obliges one to undertake this exile from the source which is our lives. It obliges separation, irrevocable and omnipresent, as well as isolation and prolonged suffering. When men feel the wound that cannot heal, they either bury themselves in a woman’s arms and ask her for healing, which she cannot provide, or they hide themselves in macho pride and enforced loneliness. In the story of Philoctetes, the chorus explains to him the universality of this wound and that he still must live his life, but he wraps himself in pain and self-pity. This regressive move is only overcome by the vision of Heracles urging his return to battle. This is the encounter with the hero archetype.

The hero archetype is present in us all. It is the inherent capacity to mobilize the energies which serve life, to overthrown the demons of despair and depression. Incarnating this archetype has little to do with outer feats; rather it manifests when one summons the energy to confront fear, pain and the regressive attraction of the womb. We may admire heroic accomplishments, but we should never worship a hero. The psyche continually prods us to make something of ourselves. This is an heroic task that awaits our response.

At the beginnings of all peoples there is a myth of the primal act, or genesis, from which all else stems. In the

life of the individual, this event is the severing of the maternal connection. Similarly, each people has its mythos of a fall, loss of the paradisical connection preceding consciousness. Perhaps this racial memory is only the neurological, phylogenetic trace of the trauma of birth separation. But out of this separation comes the experience of duality.

Thus begins the spiral of consciousness, an ever- developing process that is founded on the experience of subject and object, and occasions the pain of ever- further distance from the primal connection. The growth of conscious culture, in the life of the tribe or of the individual, brings the fruits of civilization, but, as well, greater and greater estrangement from the Great Mother.

Every day we stand poised on the razor’s edge of consciously suffering the world’s wound. How great the temptation to hide in a cave or sink into some comforting arms. Each morning the grinning gremlins of fear and lethargy return. It does not matter how boldly we sallied forth yesterday; they are back today and, not satisfied to nibble our toes, will gobble our souls if we let them. Thus we have evolved elaborate ways to avoid the pain of further consciousness. Many remain infantile in their thoughts, emotions and actions. Some turn to the soporifics of drugs and alcohol. Still others turn to ideologies, simple-minded - isms, religions or socio-political views that offer black and white answers to complex questions, thereby relieving one of the struggle with the tension of opposites.

At the same time, the life force surges within each culture and each individual. This powerful eros seeks

its connection ahead, not behind. It requires the activation of the hero archetype within a society and within individuals.’

James Hollis

‘It threatens us with bondage to the mother and with dissolution and extinction in the unconscious. For the hero, fear is a challenge and a tast, because only boldness can deliver from fear. And if the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is somehow violated, and the whole future is condemned to a hopeless staleness, to a drab grey lit only by will-o’-the-wisps…

Always he imagines his worst enemy in front of him, yet he carries the enemy within himself – a deadly longing for the abyss, a longing to drown in his own source, to be sucked down to the realm of the Mothers… [i.e. the archetypal depths]. If he is to live, he must fight and sacrifice his longing for the past in order to rise to his own heights… Life demands that the young person should sacrifice his childhood and his childish dependence on the physical parents, lest he remain caught body and soul in the bonds of unconscious incest.’ – Jung

There is a way out of the labyrinth. Some men do escape the unconscious bonds to the Mother. They are liberated, not from Her, but from their submission to their own longing for rest and sanctuary. But only their daily courage and vigilance, their work on themselves, keeps them from slipping back. – Hollis

The archetypal power and true knowledge of self must be drawn from within. The personal father and the mother, and the world filled with personal fathers and mothers and children of personal fathers and mothers - cannot and do not themselves provide and present and express the necessary archetypal width, breadth, and depth necessary for the whole-self ensoulment on this earth. In this way, only the one who experiences the sense of ‘deficiency’ or ‘inadequate care’ or otherwise a projection without of that power which can only be experienced within - can claim himself the true archetypal depth and dimensions of his own life. This energy is drawn from the core of the self, the soul, wherein the work is necessarily stripping away the images and ideas of that which precisely are projected from without to be fulfilled in society, culture, romantic relationships, family relationships, et cetera. None of these mechanisms can nor will provide the necessary and requisite fulfillment which is one’s own archetypal engagement with the soul and core of oneself - wherein true self knowledge is gained, accessed, and brought into this world, incarnated, expressed, and manifested as the creative project of one’s own life. In this way, the child comes out from the ‘wounding’, or the dependency of childhood wherein there were certain ‘prizes’ or necessities to be gained as in a survival from without, and comes into the bread and wine of the spirit and soul - the incarnating from within, or the cosmic heroism of the absolute self presence and self manifesting of the soul from within, casting away the ‘burdens and clothes’ of the societal, the cultural, and the dependent style relationship mechanisms both of romance and of family, as well as of the mutual avoidance/distraction mechanisms of friends wherein the commiseration is over the avoidance of precisely this soul work.

This engagement, or the ‘looking within’ of soul-work, is the creation of ‘land where there is no land’, or ‘lang where there is no lang’, or the emergence of the personal soul-level archetypal language out into the field of life as in a ‘summons’, or a ‘summoning’ from within into expression - creating that which hitherto, as is necessarily the course and definition of soul-work in this life - did not exist, was not present, or was not realized. In this way, the soul-work is art-work of the highest importance, an apotheosis of the lifetime itself: the work that is a turning within in order to do that which one has been born to do, or incarnated to do, the ‘mission or purpose of the soul’ which necessarily does not have a social, cultural, familial, or romantic context. For it is the very creation of this context within and as ourselves, a personal geography; the creation from a ‘naught’ of the soul, a life of the living, ensouled, embodied being - enfleshed and engaged in the creative action of life wholeheartedly, full heartedly, and with a full bodied presence - an engagement which is mind-body-spirit-heart-soul - an engagement which encompasses the entire faculties of the self body moment of now - in such a way that the individual experiences full immersion in life - a full creative process wherein the soul is continually, perpetually being spoken into existence. In this way, the soul work is precisely the creation of ‘a vision’, or a ‘perception’ which is the cultivation of a method and way wherein there once was no way but the adherence to cultural, social, familial, and relational/romantic templates, blueprints, images, and ideas - all of which function as imprisonments of the individual psyche- soul - as it requires precisely itself - itself that which it can only give and provide itself - that which exists nowhere else outside - itself.

This is what may be called ‘dying into life’ - or the death even in that realization that which was not achieved or given or provided by the personal mothers and fathers of the world is a genealogical world truth or world wound which is not an impropriety or a wrong or a lack but rather an impossibility - that such care and perfect knowing of what can and must emerge from the soul-being into today, into the nowness of the incarnate embodied being - that which must emerge out into life is the potentiality of the life itself. How could this potentiality of that life be known to the parent, or even to the child, emerging individual until it is emerged, known - and even then, what coming potentialities are yet to spring from the hold, from the keep of the soul? The rolling boulder and tide of the life of the individual is necessarily beyond the possible caring of the personal mothers and fathers; too, the societal, cultural, and romantic/relational fabrics - as each of these fabrics includes the requisite ‘Other/exteriorization’ dynamic - one who must observe from without or penetrate even that which to the individual is the opaque ground of the soul - whose mystique even now arises in strange ways and comes to light in such a manner as to be utterly creative, generative, in a newness sublime. These relationships, the exteriorizations of our lives, must grapple with us as this as we grapple with them as this - as we grapple with this as the true ground of humanity perhaps even beyond the ‘wound of separation’ which is the birth or separation from the mother, born into the world of duality. That we know this: we are opaque even to ourselves, and as such the care of others is and can be at best an intent that strikes gold with intercommunication and the ability and willingness to show up in relationship - but that our work is unto

ourselves in the meditative dimensions of our lives - in the ‘going underground’ into the undertow of our everydays and returning with the Plutonic wealth that is the transformative power of an archetypal understanding of that which impels and propels us at the root of our souls’ selves’ desire - an understanding integrated into the life so that the everyday itself is transformed - into a mystical becoming that is forever now emerging the dark straits of our souls’ essence, being, body, and spiritual power into the midst of our waking days and lives - and the experience of harnessing that spiritual power unto ensouled creation of the artwork of our lives.

‘An Insatiable Hunger:

Because we’ve lost touch with our real self, and our ideal self is unattainable, we become dependent on something outside of ourselves in an attempt to escape our emptiness. But it can neither be escaped nor filled, leaving us with an insatiable hunger – a craving. What we crave varies, from material goods, sex, or mood- altering drugs to people…

People regard feelings of emptiness and loneliness as distinct from themselves, as if their inner void could be eradicated, avoided, or filled, and they often spend their lives trying to do so. This illusion perpetuates endless internal conflict. Whether our emptiness is existential or psychological, the solution begins with facing the reality that emptiness is both inescapable and unfillable from the outside. Fundamentally, addiction is an escape from the real self, independence, and self expression. We need to stop the cycle, which requires that we step outside of our comfort zone long enough to choose a different path – a path of recovery. It may not be easy at first, but being codependent is no picnic either. And, in recovery, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. We stop escaping, get in touch with our real self, and begin living fully and authentically.

In recovery we learn to stop ourselves from escaping (doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results – Einstein’s definition of insanity) by abstaining – we stop using our drug of choice, whether it’s a relationship, a substance, or a behavior. In doing so, we acknowledge our powerlessness over our addiction. This is Step One of the Twelve Steps. During abstinence, feelings of depression, emptiness, and shame often surface. We

codependents must acknowledge our powerlessness over the addict and other people. We’re suddenly out of a job and have to deal with feelings of inadequacy, because we’re no longer devoted to changing someone. We now have to face a lack of meaning in our lives – the void that was formerly filled by drama (mental and physical activity to control and manipulate another person) – just as the addict must face the loss of his or her drug of choice. For both partners, the emptiness that was masked by addiction is now revealed. It can be overwhelming when each acknowledges that he or she has an addiction, subject only to a daily reprieve their willpower can’t control. However, this powerful surge of feelings is temporary.

To allow our real self to emerge, we detach, letting go of our need to control others or the situation. To bring about this transformation, family therapist Thomas Fogarty recommends giving up all expectations of others and attempts to change them. The objective is to voluntarily experience the emptiness that occurs by intentionally not trying to escape despair. Abandon hope as well, he suggests, and allow a humbling powerlessness to occur. Fogarty believes this “forces a person to get something from himself and to get less from the outside. Paradoxically, the less he tries to get from outside himself, the more he gets… From this despair, in a strange way, comes a sense of self-esteem and self respect. Confusion, restlessness, and depression result, which we must endure long enough, without reverting to old beliefs and patterns, to permit real change and acceptance… this surrender of control requires courage – the courage to face our emptiness and accept our powerlessness. However, doing so is itself an act of faith, an affirmation of life and the real self.

If the deepest despair is the loss of our real self, the solution is to assume responsibility and choose to live authentically: to become our real self. Existentialists emphasize individual decision making and determination of values that require us to take risks and not be enslaved by convention, internal “shoulds”, or fear of abandonment. Leading an authentic life is powerful medicine – it heals codependency and is the antidote for depression and emptiness… living authentically requires being able to experience the emotional pain that comes with detachment and letting go. Rather than get caught up in the story and drama of our relationship or our loved one’s behavior, problems, or addiction, we can take time to be with our feelings, cravings, and codependent urges. We can allow ourselves to be still, observe, and welcome them, rather than react or fill our mind with obsession and worry. When we detach, we sit with the urge to react or to contact, help, or criticize someone, and we challenge our thoughts. We ask ourselves: What has been the outcome of reacting or taking such action in the past? Beneath the fear, do I experience emptiness or loneliness? Can I continue one more day without trying to control or escape my own feelings? When we become an observer, we give ourselves the space to realize that these fears and images are mental constructs; in and of themselves, they’re empty. By embracing our emptiness, pain, and fears, we’re connecting with our real self and invoking our own divinity. This is what makes life meaningful and exciting…

The Eastern teacher and philosopher Krishnamurti taught that it’s an illusion to believe that we’re separate from our emptiness and loneliness. Loneliness can only be understood, never escaped or overcome – except temporarily. He advocated loving difficult feelings of

loneliness, emptiness, and sorrow by bringing intimate, one-pointed attention to them. This means to be in “direct communion” with suffering, without preconceived notions or objections.’

Darlene Lancer
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THE ‘INWARD’ AND THE ‘OUTWARD’

The working condition of the soul consciousness is ‘within’, or that which is achieved at the highest level is not a material circumstance or a condition of desire but rather an unconditional peace which is my ‘being- at-rest-within-myself’ or the ceasing of desires, or the desirelessness which is my inward wholeness which is always already also my outward wholeness.

The understanding that the inward wholeness is always already comes before the outward wholeness is the understanding that one is in oneself that which one needs and desires and strives towards, and that the becoming of being is rather the ceasing of desires in the understanding that one is already all one is and needs to be in the eternal being now of this moment; furthermore that the eternal self soul is at this moment everywhere and everpresent beyond space and time and in this sense ‘desiring nothing’. How could it desire that which it already is?

This wholeness in this sense is a recognition that that which I ‘desire without’ is always already that which I desire communion with from within. How could I possess or own or ‘know’ anything that is not always already myself at a soul level manifest everywhere and thus already intimately that which I already am? This level of wholeness of consciousness and soul comes in the revelation of self, the being of being – which is the ‘being-at-rest-within-myself’.

So for to desire from without is to understand that there is a symbolic and archetypal dimension to all of existence which is the world soul manifesting itself in

myriad different ways and forms – which all in themselves are at one and at once – but in their manifestation are myriad eyes of God which see and are seeing and are being seen by themselves, being, and in this way coming to know themselves. They seek to possess themselves, own themselves, control themselves, they desire themselves, and come possessed by their possession, owned by their owning, controlled by their controlling, and desired by their desiring. This endless game or wheel is Maya – the imagistic dimension which does not recognize itself as such, or the play of the world soul as the very essence of the play as in a theatrical or narrative- archetypal unfolding of that which is seeking that which is in believing it is that which ‘is’, and as such, desires that which it ‘is not’ in order to become whole. The inward forgetting of this wholeness, or the lack of ‘self awareness’ is itself this striving after ‘objects’, ‘manifestations’ of the world soul, which is and are always already itself.

In that I desire communion or union with the desired object I desire communion or union with myself; specifically the archetypal dimension of myself which the ‘object’ represents as an archetypal dimension or ‘eye’ of the world soul – and in this way there is an interpretive element of and to perceiving ‘from without’. To acquire this ‘desired object’ – I rather must seek from within that aspect of myself which I have abjected or disjecte,d that aspect of myself which I have ‘thrown out into the “lacking world”’ – or the dimension or aspect of myself as in always already the world soul myself which I have ‘disavowed’, or perhaps have not yet come into communion with as in consciousness with. Bringing this aspect or element of myself in and to consciousness is the bringing this

aspect or element of myself in and to wholeness, or the return of the king, or that which was always already true and the stateless state of my absolute condition of being, the conditionalless wholeness of myself myself myself, mysoul, the world soul which is myself interdimensionally, interconnectedly, without breach or break, without separation. I am already that which I ‘desire’, and in this sense ‘desire’ is the rising of the urge to consciousness, or the urge to ‘reunion’ with that aspect of myself I have projected into the world to ‘find myself as being without’, or ‘disincorporated’, or ‘disenthroned’, or in the Osiris-Dionysus fashion, the limb of myself which has been ‘scattered about/across the earth/world’.

Understanding the metaphysics of desire, in this sense, is the liberation of desire as in the ability to treat things, people, the archetypal dimension as and in that which they are – themselves yourself, itself oneself. In this way an ethics of engagement and life emerge naturally, organically, and holistically as a whole vision of the world soul embodied and incarnate as in real relations as and in the materialization of the archetypal dimension as in the many sides and faces of that which is at one and at once, the eternal and whole self, that which shows the many faces and dimensions of itself to itself to remind itself of that which it really is, by way of a metaphysics of a desire unto the ceasing of desire as in the realization of the eternal wholeness of the self. In this way, the foundational realization of the self permits the ethical dimension to ‘open up’, or become a foundational realization of the possibilities of being- human as in a way of treating and knowing and loving others, the manifestation of all things, in such a fashion that they are always already, at core and root, that which is at essence oneself – and as such are in an

unbreaching and unbreached ethical dimension of engagement – reflecting and refracting the inner psychic conditions of ‘one another’ unto the ‘reunion’ which is the psychic wholeness of the archetypal dimension by way of the reunion of the ‘outward’ and the ’inward’. This realization as in reunion is the realization that the outward and inward are rather one and the same, bridged by, and ultimately as, the archetypal dimension which is the unceasing and eternal self manifest as in the eyes and limbs and the, being-at-essence: ‘all-encompassing heart-/booms everywhere’ – myriad manifestations of the infinite eternal self as in oneself. In this way and as such, the ethical dimension truly opens up; as such, the field of life becomes truly opened to be lived – rejoiced in, cared for, lived in, felt, embodied, manifested.

The Relinquishing:

The relinquishing is that all is lost in that nothing is gained.

The situation as it stands is rather one of a situation.

Held above the situation is the higher value.

The higher value in this sense is the esteemed totality, or the oneness, or the singularity of vision.

This oneness and singularity of vision is unconditional love, and the proclamation of freedom, liberation, and the flow of all things to and through themselves, the coming and going of the soul through souls, to and from source – as source themselves, endlessly free and journeying into and through consciousness of the absolute reality, the infinite and yet all present.

The ethics of this life are to embody that realization.

In the embodiment of that realization, one necessarily lets go of all attachments, is liberated from the possibility of attachment, and in doing so – liberates others.

This ethics is practiced as in a flowing, wherein there are no images, no ideas, no esteem, but rather a ceaseless current of energy which is constantly shifting. It neither takes form nor leaves form. It neither possesses nor is possessed. It neither comes nor goes.

To sit and meditate in and upon this energy is to strip oneself of the coat of self image, narration, self-

ideation, and the story of life. To become naked, to become being, and actively embody the truth of living. To experience the direct experience of life.

THE WAY OF ABSENCE AND PRESENCE

Everywhere you look, there is nothing but you. Within you there is nothing. Within that nothing there is awareness.

Looking within, looking without, grasping at dreams is one and the same. Looking without, you mistake yourself to be another. Looking within, you mistake your dream-image to be an ideal reality. Both are aspects of yourself.

Being aware that all is yourself, there is no within and no without. Virtue emerges naturally from this place where nothing is given and nothing is received, nothing is obtained and nothing is relinquished.

The natural emergence of virtue is nature itself manifest in and as the human being. The perfectibility of the human being is forever unfolding as in the now moment. In this moment, the unity of the human being and nature is the way, the flow, and the way of being attuned to existence. It is the way of life.

Seeing that all holds within it the seed of awareness that is yourself, the true identity of forms is revelated as in the hidden essence made revealed by way of perception of the eternal. All things strive toward this glorious knowledge of themselves as infinite and whole as in awareness. The human being gazes within and gazes without and realizes the one who is gazing is beyond all things, all space, all time, all words, all definition, and all motion. This is what may be called the still point of being, or the still point of awareness.

How will you act knowing that being is all things manifest in and as the oneself? That all things cannot be given or taken, and that at root they know eachother as and in oneself? That there is no separation between ‘this’ and ‘that’? This is the corrective action of the evolution of perception. All beings strive toward this form of self realization. In this way of seeing, a new life path is born – a life of truly living.

For in true life there is the immanence of this moment – where there is no grasping, no striving toward an object, nor a future identity or ideal, or away from a past identity or ideal. The immanence of this moment has no mind, no separative thought. It is full immersion in the practice of the flowing unfolding of the immanence of being. As such, the immanence of this moment requires clarifying action, as a stream requires the flow of water to clarify the buildup of energetic materials. This flow clears the way, makes the way clear, and makes vision clear. This might be called spiritual practice.

In spiritual practice, necessarily, there is the art of moving the immovable, or moving the eternal. The nameless essence of being is everywhere and everything, the eyes of nature, and yet the eyes of nature act, observe, and in this way strike the path to self realization by way of clarifying movement. How else do eyes find sight? They move, they see, they engage and interact – with the within and without, the borders, doors, and gates of perception – wherein one observes the other, and realizes one to be the other, and the other to be one with, as, and in oneself.

In the movement of spiritual practice, there is freedom that does not cling or grasp to the moment, but moves fluidly through it, attuned to it, flue it, into the next passageway or nexus or crossroads of life. Each moment demands this – the end of all thought, conceptualization, and talk about life – and the active living of it. Seized by dreams and desires, one does not live. Leaving dreams and desires and images at the door, one steps into active immergence, into life. As such, all that which is ‘held’, must be relinquished – including the illusion of the possibility of holding. Any such ‘holding’ is the holding of oneself to oneself, or the paralysis of dependence upon a past or externalized image of oneself. Oneself always demands of oneself to leap into the unknown of this immanence, this moment. In doing so, life is living.

The spiritual practice is the instrument of living, or the channel or passageway or flute in which one takes way into life. As such, the spiritual practice most fundamentally is the incarnation of the body, or the inherent and fundamental paradox of the spirit and the flesh. The spirit being the eternal being itself, and the flesh being that which rises and passes away, or the instrument that is at this time manifesting and manifested by the soul to fulfill the spiritual purpose of witnessing life, and attuning to it in such a way that one fulfills virtue, or the desireless desiring, or the striveless striving. This virtue is the highest virtue, or apotheosis of being. It is the virtue of nature itself – a virtue which births itself into creation, into manifestation without end – the vision of the light and essence and source of creation emerging from within the womb of the soul-being out into the visible life of existence-nature – as Rilke’s Torso of Apollo. It is in this way that the call of life is this – to manifest the soul.

In this manifestation of the soul, the soul is revealed in its true form and essence as in all things, and as such, is ‘redeemed’ in the life cycle of creation as that which neither comes nor goes, is born nor dies, and so forth. It is neither male nor female, internal nor external – but rather the very immutable higher essence of existence which is beyond coming and going, space and time. As such, it is beyond the paradox of language, and beyond naming. And yet, it is manifest. How is this?

It is simply because of the isness of what is. What is is what is beyond naming and knowledge, beyond shape and form, beyond categorical truth and narrativization. As such, the truth of what is is in silence, in the flow of nature, in the immanence of the now moment which is becoming which demands the virtuous action of the spiritual practice, or the mutable flowing of the body with the immutable everpresent wordless word worldless world soulknowing of the essence-spirit. By way of this paradox, life is made, sustained, affirmed, and made manifest. The virtuous action is in this: that the illusory bounds of the internal and external worlds are made whole as in right- perception (Oneself), and that in this right perception, the being becomes immersed in the flow of life. By right perception, the mind dissolves into water and flows naturally with the river of life, that which is also water. This process may be called, or known as clarification.

Clarification of the mind comes foremost and remains with right knowledge, or enlightenment as to the causeless cause, or the paradox of being and becoming. This enlightenment is the first and last question, in that

it is the question all things have of themselves and their worlds, and that once it is answered one realizes it was the question one was asking all along – in each dream, each separation, each border, each desiring. And the answering is an immediate knowing, a knowing beyond language, an embodiment of Oneself. It is, fundamentally, the exhaustion of desiring-without – an extinguishing of the flame of the lamp of outward searching in what appears to be an endless night, or a dark abyss, and the emergence of the light from within which neither seeks to apprehend nor seeks to control, but rather is a manifesting of the soul from within. It is the emergence of the primacy of Oneself-creation- creating – the primacy of the light of the soul. As such, this emergence from within is, fundamentally, and reveals, the true inner wholeness of being – a wholeness which reveals the primacy of the soul as in manifest in and as all things: a soul which is neither here nor there, this nor that, one person’s nor another’s, one river’s nor another’s – but rather, An all-encompassing heart— / booms everywhere.

Here, the virtue is self emergent. This self realization extinguishes desire-projections onto ‘outer things’, as well as diminishes unfocused ‘knowledge-thoughts’ that clutter the mind. The focus of being becomes one pointed in the realization of the oneness of being. It is the end of time, the end of space, the end of thinking, the end of judgement, the end of grasping, and the end of separation. One who knows this knows the desireless desire and the striveless striving which is the virtue of right-action, or the manifestation of the soul. Action, in this sense, emerges naturally and immanently, as in the shining from within, the manifestation of the soul of being.

TRUE SIGHT OF THE BLACK SUN

Each man holds within him an abyss, and this abyss is his truth. It is the far reaches and nethermatter of his existence; the constitution of the entirety of his universe, the invisible field and inner workings of his network which extends and reaches into the nowhere of infinity and back to this inmost locality of the embodied presence of this moment, here and now.

It is this invisible constitution that is the vibratory framework of the possibility, the impregnant force and thrust of abeyance which is a summoning of the spiritual life force, a birth canal of infinite magnitude, longitude, and latitude. It is, in short, a sort of portal into the infinite, a portal into the true nature of the self.

For if one is to meditate on the infinite, the existential dread of the loss of temporal is near inevitable if one is not already initiated into the limitless blackness. For the eyes to shut and the consciousness to meditate upon the infinite expanse of itself there necessarily arises a grasping to the light, a rising from the chamber of the cask body toward the essence and source of all light – a reaching out and grasping at the last living sight before the question of living is put out of reach in the face of the combing death with the lantern of inner sight – the wandering in the woods and wilderness of no space and no time, the abgrund, or the groundless ground, wherein transformation is shifting and shading and turning, like the depths and deep of the soil and sea.

To be retrieved by this framework of the infinite is to be thrust back upon oneself with such force that it is to

reckon with the entirety of the human history, personal and transpersonal, as well as the conception of the human being, conception of life, conception of earth, and the belief systems which formerly constituted the contrast which is light bringing on the realms now submerged like the wick of a candle in a vast ocean, the abyss and darkness of death. And yet, the observation begs another, deeper, even truer form of life – for there is one witnessing this deathly world, or enshrouded and enshaded by a dawnless night, or ensconced in a birthless womb, one realizes that there remains this witness, the seer, the sight, that scries with the inner light the realm where neither comes nor goes, and yet shimmers and is pregnant and even buoyant, expanding, in all directions, with the expressive potentiality of birth – and yet nothing is born. Why is this?

The realm of the black sun, or the realm of death beyond life and death is the realm wherein the constitution of life remains in its true form, or wherein the true sight is revealed as in a no separation, or a pure energetic realm which is the field as it truly stands and is constituted – as the poetic apotheosis, essence, the prima materia, or the substanceless substance, the essenceless essence – the very source wherein all that is, has been, and ever will be is constituted. And this is precisely the vision that is within the body, as in the primary and first knowledge (that like the first men) links the first men of today with the deep ancestry of the stars. The very substance that is their composition and essence, in actuality, has no distance, no space and time from the inmost source of creation – that which is even now illusory creating – this illusion of creating being the very energetic essence of the comingling of the poles of light and dark. For even this light at

essence is the blinding birth of the black sun: the radiating dark that is returned to shimmering black formless form – the source which is scried and seen with inner sight.

That the black sun is not seen is that it is invisioned, or that to make inroads into the black sun is to actively channel the source and essence of life force existence as in a practice of meditation upon the infinite, upon the dark realm which is the wilderness wherein all things are born and return, the essence of cyclical nature, the source and center of the wheel of time. Upon this meditation, of course, one is stripped of the garments of illusory life and plunged into the realm of the dead, or at least that which appears to be so. For only going into the realm of dying reveals that which is to be true beyond truth, knowledge beyond knowledge, word beyond word, world beyond world – the essence itself that which is beyond a polarity of light and dark. This is to say that the black sun is then even transcendent of the polarity of the inner sun and the outer sun – in the sense that it is the source and center of each and both – their essential energetic nature which is the constitution of that fine balance between the expression and the impression – the sight and the insight – the seer and the seen – the subject and the object – that which is a mutual true knowledge that one is always already the other at root of the prima materia, the substanceless substance which forms and informs them.

The existential dread of the subjectivity is this: the sight which appears to the subject to confirm a separate existence and yet the inability to obtain any aspect of that separation as in a possession, a holding, a knowing. The opacity of object existence is to the subject a longing without cease, a breach without

breach, and a border which cannot be crossed. The subject’s inability to know the deepest truth of the other or to truly access the other beyond a superficial or carnal penetration or reception as in an intercoursing or a sex act of digestion, touch – is itself the problem of existence. This is the loneliness which is never alone. It is, itself, the impossibility of touch coded into the reality of touch itself at a physical level. It is this impossibility which leads to the madness, or derangement of the subject in regards to ‘a life unlived’, or perhaps better termed as ‘the inability to live a true or authentic life’ as in the exhaustion of the possibilities of the realm of the sun, or the outward, projected, existence. It is precisely this exhaustion of madness which eventuates the turning inward, or the search for the self within, the soul.

And here, even the terms ‘soul’ and ‘inspiration’ are guideposts and signs at the ledger of existence and this plunge into the depths – a taking within, a sun within, an inward light where there is no light, within the chambers of the body and the breath, a plunging, diving of consciousness, a descent:

My dear, In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love. In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile. In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm. I realized, through it all, that… In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.

Truly yours, Albert Camus

That to take this plunge is in, perhaps, spite of the very existence itself, the cult of the outward, the worship of the projection, the deification of the material – that in the dissatisfaction with a pure material, an opacity of being, the inability to penetrate existence, or to know, as in Kant, the neumena of the phenomena, the soul of the form, one turns withinto oneself to know one’s own form, to know one’s own soul – and in doing so, encounters and approaches the black sun – which appears at first to be, as in the quote above – amidst hate, chaos, winter, and in these things and ways, death itself.

For death is the last boundary or border, that which is sought at all turns to be ignored, suppressed, repressed, forgotten, left out, and remaindered as it stands in relation to the human experience; in relation to the wheel of creation, the cycles of nature and the seasonality of space and time. The abeyance, or the end, or the darkness which necessarily must come after light for the renewal and regeneration of the seeds of tomorrow is the time of sleep, the time of dreaming, the time of casting off into another world, a netherland, which is, as in dreaming, equally populated by a fantasia, or projection of consciousness into thoughts and forms – which is to say, the imaginative faculty of imagination. The consciousness turns in on itself, but turns in upon a flat surface, a mirror, upon which it projects the underside of the waking life, or as it is

often termed, the shadow of the day of consciousness. This is the night, to be certain, but a night populated with figures and forms, as recognizable as day without the obedience of such concepts as the linearity of narration; the obedience of physical gravity of figures, forms, lands, and timelines. The creative play of the art of dreaming is a land of the thought form, wherein the consciousness enacts the underside of the play of the day of consciousness, revealing and exposing the duality of the assumed character of the real; even using archetypal imagery to beckon and gesture to the land beyond – the land of subliminal, primordial creation – or the source and life force essence which is beyond images, beyond projection, beyond thought-form; as such, that prima materia which creates them and is them progenitively and practically – their very essence and being.

The shadow of this night beckons like the image of death for so many men; it is the fear of what is lost or what is to be lost that turns them away from death; behind and beyond the idea of death, the truth of the black sun, which is the truth of creational power and life force energy and the essential cosmological being of reality which is existence at root – it is the fear of the loss of self image and thus the death of self as it is known and grounded in the empirical reality of the day of consciousness, and even threatened and warned in the night of dreams – that by creating or crafting this certain defined self image, always another aspect or truth of the self and soul is being neglected. For it is impossible for man to be even one thing; as soon as he is one thing he is certainly always already another; his image and idea of himself, as in a fractal, can never catch up to his hidden and true multitudes. In this sense, it can never catch up to his black sun, or the

energetic, creational reality of his existence. Only by relinquishing self images and self definitions, belief systems and conceptual realities, can he approach the black sun of his infinite reality; his true creational power; his self realization.

As such, the dissolution of the imaged, or imagined, self is death itself. To walk straight into death and perhaps to die willingly is a madness few men (understandably) will, again, willingly undertake. Those who undertake it are so often dragged to death even in the scene of waking life, or the everyday toil of the organism like Persephone to Hades, abducted to death where they die into life, or emerge out into the sun of day or the realm of the everyday once more forever changed, like Odin’s exchange of his eye for divine wisdom. Something is taken (the former external sight, or the self image identity, or the imagined self), and it is replaced with the divine wisdom of the true, embodied knowledge of the infinite self, or the divine wisdom which is necessarily beyond language, beyond space, beyond time. One, if one has the requisite foresight and bravery, must imagine oneself as Inanna, descending to the underworld willingly, stripped and crucified of her own accord.

For if these agonies and trials perturb, perhaps the agonies and trials of the everyday life of surfaces and shallow reflections do not; perhaps they do not evoke the sense of agony and drawn out nothingness, or the superficiality which evokes the nothingness – the meaninglessness and impenetrable solidity of the world of forms which promises everything and evokes nothing – wherein each form and function of the physical world only beckons to the netherregions of the beyond; precisely as above, the abeyance and abyss

which constitutes them absolutely beyond thought- forms – the very constitution which cannot be penetrated, for the one which would penetrate them is the one itself that constitutes them; that, furthermore, is them itself. In this way, the black sun itself is the sight of itself; the eye gazing withinto itself into and as the utmost point of their collision, or the spiralling oblivion of singularity. Each object, in this sense, is in its own dance withinto and toward the infinity of true unity, or the realization and collapse of the dynamic of the dance of two, or the Shiva-Shakti function, into one, or Parabrahman. Again, the ultimate realization of the subject-object as within one, source essence. It is the unity of and in the black sun, the inmost point, which is also the furthestmost point – the energetic nexus of the field-matrix, the Absolute Reality which simultaneously populates and is at root and essence, all things at source and center of themselves, as in oneself.

THE PRIMACY OF THE LIBIDO FUNCTION

The libido continually seeks to be unified with the sexual other / god (wholism of the ego) and is continually cast out as in the differentiation process of life. This is the ‘mission’ or ‘task’ of the soul - wherein it proceeds into the wilderness alone to discover itself unity, itself whole, embodiment.

The necessity (socio-cultural) of having to maintain a solid, single faceted ego image is itself the source and root of the lack or disappearance of the transcendental experience as in ‘getting lost’ in medias res as in the wilderness of consciousness, where the individuated material becomes fully merged as in the substratum of existence, the layer of cognitive and embodied physical function where there is no differentiating/differentiated force/factor which necessarily separates ‘this from that’, ‘man from woman’, ‘self from other’, et al. As such, the self image rarely if never achieves true individuated ensouled form (or becoming the true individuated soul self) - as it is bonded socio-culturally, economically, and politically to the ‘single form’ as in the way of being-seeing-perceiving ordained to the soul self from without as in the ‘birth appearance’ of the soul, or the outwardly engendered characteristics of the ‘self’ perceived at the level of image, and as such objectified and taken at face value as in the physical surface of the soul’s body. As such, the soul-self becomes ‘trapped in a mirror-image’; always already reflected from without. As in the mirroring process described in the former paragraph - it becomes orientated; perhaps ‘reorientated’ toward a false engendered self-object-other ‘sensing’; furthermore, a self-object-other sensing of truth, reality, and meaning

‘from without’. This orientation is, at root, necessarily and inherently an acculturation from without – an acculturation which, as we can understand from the manifestation of creative genius throughout history, is rather no acculturation at all whatsoever, but rather a delimiter, a law: or with Pascal, ‘god is the cultural limit’.

This state primarily and actually requires the acting out of as in active embodiment of the transcendental function as in a ‘trance state’ or an ‘abandon’ in the way of the Dionysian, or the total stripping away of the ego-self-image in the way of and in the name of the immersion in the totality/the whole of psychic experience. The cultivation of such experiences and environments where such conduct can be exhibited with absolute abandon and primordial, interconnected mutuality is the sign of a healthy, whole, and functioning society. Rather, that these experiences occur with such regularity as that they are unbroken, may in fact constitute a society founded in and upon the absolute virtue of transcendence of differentiation by way of the cultivation of individuality to be ‘sacrificed’ at the altar of collective participation in the abandon of the individual is itself the simulation and simulacrum of ‘death in life’, or the achievement of the highest order, an apotheosis of man, or a going beyond into the realm of the unknown, the ecstasy of orgiatic, orgasmic darkness, lit not by the eye, but the warmth of the commingling intercourse, or the reality of deep touch, or the transcendental reality of the deep and profound interrelation of beings, bodies, organisms, minds, and souls at the root and source of all energetic creation. Again, this state cannot possibly be obtained without first a full self individuation as in an expression of the ‘philosopher’s stone’, or the soul archetype made

manifest as in an embodiment, a way of being, seeing, living in the world - a primary vitality of itself, the self, expressed by way of the unique libido function as in a creation creative self fulfillment of the self itself - a true freedom or liberation of the soul vis-a-vis the absolutely unique, particular, peculiar, and even sublime individuation of the individual soul self.

It is the task of the analysand to at first unroot, as such, the gift and philosopher’s stone of the individual by way of ‘parting the blinds’ of the socio-cultural myths that disbar one of oneself; in this unrevelating and unveiling of the true self, the subsequent self expression that is the equivalent of the death of the individual, individuated self, and submergence of the free soul into the ecstatic collective. Such a gift is rather an offering to humanity; when once expressed, the soul is, as such, ‘free to die’, or to return having been ‘fulfilled’ or ‘itself-realized’ to the source and center of its wholeness in such a fashion as to, again, simulate death in life in a revelry, or a celebration of such wholeness as a stripping of the bearings and bonds which once were the soul’s journey and ‘mission’ or ‘missive’ or ‘pilgrimage’ of self realization at the level of the individual - to and into the ‘beyond’ of the soul’s self realization at the level of the collective, cosmic, metaphysis.

Therein there are two parts: the cultivation of an environment wherein the soul-self is absolutely availed of all promise and possibility (as in the truth of metaphysical creation) toward the realization and actualization of itself – which is to say an entirely impartial and nonjudgemental sphere of relations wherein the soul-self manifestation or as we can say ‘the freedom of the soul-self in the world’ is absolutely

encouraged and actively and consciously conceived of as the utmost and absolute goal of life on earth, the reason for living, the reason for incarnation, and the apotheosis of man: the active embodiment of one’s own philosopher’s stone, of one’s own whole truth; the rejoicing in this. Not only the rejoicing, but the trust and understanding that said manifestation is not only accepted and approved of by others, but actively encouraged and rejoiced in as in a true culture and community of soul manifestation, and, inevitably, co- creation by way and means of mutual approval and encouragement of soul-self expression as in that which, necessarily, is always already and always will be actively transgressive of any sort of possible norm or imposition of truth or reality – as it is always already entirely unique, peculiar, sublime, and personally pertinent as in the unfolding of the inner myth into the outer world as in a creation, a work of art, a magnum opus.

And part the second: the cultivation of an environment wherein the soul-self is absolutely availed of the Dionysian as in the ‘passing out of the individual/individuated life into the ecstasy of the substratum’. It is, I am sure, certainly apparent in the above paragraphs the level of spiritual, mental, and physical evolution, receptivity, and awareness necessary at a societal level necessary to cultivate and maintain such spaces. For not only is it of the utmost essence for souls to pass through these gates in life, but for these gates to be upheld, maintained, and availed to spiritual passage into deep inner meaning, and the joyous expression of said inner meaning in such permissive and mutual community. This is primordial virtue – joining the physical with the metaphysical, consciously – manifest in the self and in the society.

LECTURE ON THE DIFFERENTIATED DESIRE

What is meant by ‘the differentiated desire’ is that there is space between the desiring and the desired – which is to say the assertion of a subjectivity that is without the desired object. And here we fall back into, or invert, perhaps, back upon the question of the libido – the naturally inexhaustible play mechanism, or the thing which is desiring the object. It is rather that the libido could be said to constitute at base and foundation the subjectivity of the organism. So that when the organism is desiring any one thing, it is rather the shifting libido which is moving to fulfill the subjective void – whether its food or water or sex – whichever way the consumptive or productive act is being constituted… the libido itself is shifting. The libido itself could be said to be the true constitution of the subject insofar as the subject can be constituted in its shifting mechanism which is to say the imaginal, or the imagination space – the space which is always being constituted and reconstituted by the newborn desire, which is the shifting ephemeral realm of the life experience of the subject, as the subject continually comes up against the bounds of its lived experience and necessarily desires beyond lived experience into the realms of the metaphysical, the metaphorical, moving into new space and new ground…

Which is to say that the libido itself is a conquering mechanism, which is to say that the libido is reincorporating, or incorporating the constituent, differentiated desired object into the constituency, or the desiring subject. This metaphorical libidinal playground is always already the imaginal playground – which in turn ends up constituting the real. The

constitution of the real is then an arbitrary one, based fundamentally and foundationally upon the libido, or the act of desiring – which then, of course, comes up upon the question of whether or not that desired act will be consummated in the real, or rather in the imaginal. As suggested by Spielrein, the schizophrenic or neurotic response will be to constitute the desiring in the imaginal and it will remain in the imaginal as in an inversion, or an introversion. This of course, ends up being fundamentally at a metaphysical and at a physical (social and cultural level) the true condition of the libido.

What I mean when I say this is that the true condition of the libido is necessarily unconditional – that that which constitutes the libido itself is beyond, and precisely in being beyond it is continually constructed and reconstructed as the essential ‘without’ or the essential ‘disincorporated’. Again, this is at the essence something of the death drive of losing the body or the lost body or reclaiming the lost body as in a death and rebirth process. In this way, the libido is the essential imaginal mechanism. It is in a constant state of becoming. There is no achieved libido function, which is to say the essential striving is the striveless striving or the desireless desire – which in foundation and in base form is an evershifting essence which is itself the impelling or the propelling of being into life which is the drive of course. The difficulty here of constituting any desired experience is then one of that the desired experience is never fully constituted or actualized because the desired experience does not actually exist – insofar as that it exists long enough to be constituted, because the moment it is constituted in whatever fragmented or fractured form from the initial desired/desiring function (which is to say the image of

the desire or the archetypal image) – the libido function is always already beyond the constitution of this desire or that desire. This, obviously, presents an existential problem in relation to the libido. And one is, essentially, forced (or by way of recognition or self realization) to reorient one’s relationship to the libido function as in a endless fulfillment of unfulfillment, or an endless becoming of being – in the sense that the imaginal or creative function of the libido is rather something that is endlessly unrealized, or endlessly creating and recreating beyond the bounds and bonds of its constituted reality or that which has been made manifest (whether by way of creative expression of archetypal images or said desire fulfillment in the realm of the real – which you could say is the constitution of the social and cultural space, the sphere of the public, or the sphere of the world) – that the libido function is something that is ceaselessly never achieved, and in this ceaseless never achieving we grasp the true root and meaning of the libido function; rather the impossibility…

The true root, the shifting ground/soil of the libido (Plutonic)

‘Perhaps true sexuality demands the destruction of the ego’

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THE SPIRITUAL ENDEAVOR

Here again we come up against the idea and ideal of ‘higher striving’, or the striving in the spiritual sense which rather has no causality, or endless means, or logic or rhetoric of loss or gain. As such, as in Geothe’s Faust, the higher man stumbles up against the limit of the material reality, the humankind, and the logic and rationality of the empirical-scientific-pseudo rational world which commands that desire can and will be fulfilled by material means, or else the accumulation or at last the exacting fulfilling of a certain ‘ends’ which is the desired object by the subject, et al.

The idea and ideal of higher striving, then, is the spiritual endeavor par excellence because it is, even in the face of the despairing Faustian knowledge that no knowledge will ever satisfy his desire for knowledge or divine wisdom, that this is itself a piece, element, and aspect of the divine wisdom, if not the divine wisdom wholly and forthright: that it is the higher man’s birthright to strive and strive endlessly for higher knowledge, higher meaning, higher wisdom, and higher life – even in the face of what appears to be all about him and even present in the ‘lower life’ of the materiality of his self existence, a sort of debasement of that very humanity he seeks to simultaneously aid, elevate, and transcend.

Thus, his humanity is itself the very nexus of his ascension in the realm of the spirit – that his spirit charges forth and brings with it the body, the flesh, and the materiality itself seeks to keep up with the Promethean passion and fiery mind of the divine inventor, the divine creator, or the man who charges

forth even in the face of all heaven and hell and boundary. It is such that this man is ordained to bring this very earth along with him weightlessly in his striving. As in Faust and the life of Goethe himself, he makes the world buoyant with his endless genius and mastery of the higher striving forth. In each realm, dimension, and plane of his striving, he does not remain, like Odysseus – he cannot be contented, and even with Goethe’s Faust, he goes where Odysseus even does not – he does not rather return home or nowhere but makes his home in the poetry of the higher striving for divine wisdom – the striving itself is the medium and nexus of his existence in which he continually finds the higher meaning which makes his life not only worth living, but creates itself and within himself the necessary challenge or right cause by which to pit himself against life in a sort of jest, like Jacob wrestling the angel, wrestling God. This wrestling is of course, with Pascal, the coming up against the cultural limit, or the limit of the mind, or the limit of that which was, or the conception of all that which is, or the divine discontent felt so innately and particularly by Faust, even ‘to the bone’ as he laments the fruits of science and study – his striving which to him has yielded, precisely, the knowledge of nothing, or a nothing of knowledge. It is even this emptiness or fruitlessness which is the prerequisite or crossroads for further striving – it is the divine realm of the sublime possibility, or the emptiness which is the zero ground or, again, cross-roads point wherein there are, like the rays of the black sun of the within, endless directions and orientations which avail the soul. And this is precisely Faust’s depression: that there is yet this endless unfulfilled possibility, which with Mayakovsky ‘Oh, how many of them, / how many springtimes, /

have in twenty years poured into me, inflamed! / Their burden unspent is just unbearable. / Unbearable not as in verse, / but literally.’

As tempting as it would be to take this despair as an end, or else to Faust the suicide by which to end his life, or the suicide by which Mayakovsky’s life verily was taken into night, it is for Faust to take the journey into the night by way of the guide of Mephisto, or as a sort of blackened Virgil, down into the various realms which are the realms through which Faust’s very soul has henceforth ascended – the realms of mankind wherein there are of course the temptations of the ‘human, all too human’ – the temptations of the separative and separated, or else the illusion of evil, or the lostlessness of living without God. For it is Faust’s very endless striving and preoccupation and single- naturedness in regards to acquiring divine wisdom that is itself that which constitutes the higher striving, his divine discontentedness – and as said by God in the Prologue: “A good man, through obscurest aspiration. Has still an instinct of the one true way.”

Goodliness, thus, or virtue, is precisely this: the instinct of the one true way which is the ascension of the soul or the smithing of the soul by way and means of the endless means of the higher striving for divine wisdom. Even in Faust’s descent with Mephistopheles through the annals of the human wherein there are various different degrees of material debasement or lostlessness or confusion of and with the material as in the separation from the ‘obscurest inspiration’, it cannot satisfy Faust, or bring him to ‘an idlers bed where I stretch myself quiet’. The revels of Mephistopheles’ world, or the world of the material culture upon which the world axis of mankind spins is not enough for Faust

– it is, as Mephistopheles soon discovers, the very striveless striving which alone contents Faust. The very bargain for Faust’s life, is then on a premise which Faust knows Mephistopheles cannot fulfill – how can any one object, material, pleasure, or fleeting thing make good for him the higher divinity of the striveless striving toward the light of divine wisdom, or Sophia? It is in this way that Faust is truly a philosopher, and in this way that philosophy is the highest occupation of man in its true form – a philosophy that is content with nothing, wants nothing of its debasement in gain or fame or accumulation – but rather a philosophy that is itself in instinct of the one true way, or aligned with the striveless striving.

What this bodes for Faust in relation to mankind, however, is not that he is brought back down into the draught or mix of the world and worldliness, but rather that he is charged in his striveless striving with that very leadership of mankind – or that in his highest virtue, the striving for the philosophical apotheosis which is imbedded in that very striving itself – the bringing down of that higher meaning to earth, or an example or exemplification or manifestation of that higher life as in his embodied life itself. The question of Faust’s life, then, is the question of the grasping of this reorientation of the ontology of despair and depression – the grasping of this charge and making clear this charge and task with the light of consciousness and as such, reorienting his life in light of the movement through the Mephisophelean course through which Faust’s soul becomes transfigured or liberated as in a negation or refusal of all of that which is not the immortal soul itself. This is the ‘dross’ of all of that which is not the striveless striving itself. He thus becomes light.

THE AFFIRMATION OF REAL LIFE

You will observe that there is an everyday devoid of living meaning in the world, or an active life of and in the everyday that is life-affirming. What is meant by ‘life-affirming’ is that it is at root a ‘reason to go on’, or a ‘reason to live’ that is not itself in a sort of vicious cycle of dependent affirmation, or a clause on existence that requires continual affirmation at the level of the specific, or a sort of ‘re-upping’ of sensation - akin to a material or sense dependence/depiction. This is the equivalent of the lack of meaning at the level of the everyday perpetually reaffirmed/staid/or held back by the sensorium, or the reaffirmation of the material as the all that is all there is, or that limit which is reaffirmed as a limit by way of the dependent participation in the highest level of materiality: the realm of the affirmation and reaffirmation of the pleasure of consumption and container.

That there is an everyday devoid of living meaning in the world is that this devoid is endlessly replicated and reproduced as in markets, mechanisms, habits, and the ‘human culture’ which overlays the earth as in the foundation of ‘the world’. This everyday devoid of living meaning is the outward projection of the inward poverty of lack of spiritual meaning, which is even if only accomplished at the religious-consensus level of the function in a ‘belief’, or a teleological removal of oneself from the life process - which is to say that ‘belief’ or ‘faith’ is extended outward as in to a power of which one is not, knows not, and ultimately surrenders to. This surrender, in turn, is the constitution of the medium of material reality as the limit which is succumbed to by the adequate or

inadequate satisfaction, or else by one who can find ‘no exit’ as to the conundrum of meaning and as such is placated by the pleasure of the material-senses and what is availed at the socio-cultural level as in the consensus meaning-definition, and life purpose. As such, the life is passed as in the container of lack of meaning posing and positing itself as meaning which is asserted from without or else co-opted as a consensus satisfactory ‘alternative’ to living meaning - which is to say the embodied living practice of fulfilling meaning and finding meaning and becoming meaning in the everyday.

The devoid of living meaning in the world is a symptom of the inner and inward poverty which at root is a lack of self knowledge as it pertains to self purpose or a loci or nexus of being - wherein one is self affirmed at the level of spirit as in one’s soul purpose and soul meaning and as such fulfills this higher level or purpose in the everyday as in a witness, at the level of consciousness, to the affairs therein. This is an observation of the life at and from ‘a higher level’, or a ‘falcon’s or eagle’s perch’ - wherein the materiality and the discourses therein are seen for and as what they are. There is, in this sense, a sort of ‘inner sight’ into the materiality and the life function which elevate them to their proper place and form at a cosmological level. This is to say, at the level of transformative perception, they are restored to their divine order, or otherwise redeemed in the cataclysm of human imperception, or lack of meaning, which can be said, simply, to constitute the term ‘evil’. Here, there is of course no real ‘evil’, rather a lack of right perception which constitutes a separative consciousness, or a lostlessness of being which is then and therefore projected into the mechanism of the lived everyday reality as in, precisely,

the practice of a lack of meaning and subsequent search for meaning in the materiality - which always already will be devoid of said meaning and purpose if not, again, always already observed from the higher level or vantage point of the ‘eagle’s perch’ as in the unifying cosmological function of insight, or perception of the divine wisdom which ‘unites the opposites’, or even at the furthest-most ‘breach’, perceives the truth not only of unity, but the highest endeavor and apotheosis of man, which is the striveless striving for divine wisdom of which there is necessarily no object and no end. This is to say, a process based function of existence dedicated in a one pointed function and manner to knowing and understanding and embodying the divine wisdom as in an incarnate practice of being- living-seeing-thinking-feeling-knowing-speaking.

This could be said to be an ‘art of existence’, or else an elevation of existence which strips away the dross of the ‘devoid of living meaning in the world’ by essentially and functionally ‘dropping’ the cognitive dissonance of seeking and searching for an object or satiation point for desire, and as such always already ‘drops’ the material world and immediately enters the realm of the spiritual, or the energetic function as a means unto itself, or itself a world and a sphere of influence - the world of forces, wills; the world of the gods. This is, again, immediately, an elevation of the thinking-being- seeing-perceiving function of man as in a penetrative insight not only into his own motives and missives and engine-drive but those of mankind - as in an accessing and access point (or a ‘gates to hell’, if you will) in regards to the collective unconscious function - that which motivates and moves the world from ‘behind the scenes’.

The movement into living meaning is necessarily one not of, per se, ‘grasping meaning’ or ‘grasping purpose’, or ‘grasping life’, but living in medias res as in a becoming, or process based philosophy and living as in a striveless striving toward divine wisdom, or the singular good and as such devotion to all that is good and cultivating as in a garden of the lived life all that is good within and as oneself as in an aesthetic, objectified project of being-oneself as in an art of being. This purpose is then an inversion of the objectification function (being grasping from without, always already at itself as in ‘the other’ as a projected teleology of separation, always already an ‘imperception’ of disunity); in the recognition of the cosmic wholeness and divine perfection of all things at the level of being, man then subsequently inverts the objectification function in upon himself and begins the process of refining consciousness, refining the spirit like a precious gemstone, or else otherwise begins the process of his magnum opus or philosopher’s stone - in his one pointed dedication to cultivating all that is good, or virtue as in arete as in striveless striving toward divine wisdom - a striving which is always already in progress. The more he orients himself in this fashion as in an exponential orientation toward this ultimate ‘singularity’ or said one-pointedness in everyday practice and momentary awareness as in the meditation upon the infinite - the more his life unfolds with the clarity and perpetual peaceful flow of the life force energy itself which is the ‘manifestation’ of said dictum of all that is good. The virtue is itself this flow as in an unbroken movement, or cosmic wholeness, which itself is even the death of the individual as the loci or nexus of ‘the being-subject’ is immediately (re- )absorbed with the clarity and dialectical redoubling of higher consciousness into Being proper, or becomes

becoming one with Nature as in the natural function himself embodied and embodying. This active life force function is itself the higher meaning and higher purpose manifest as in a ‘death into life’, or a dying into reality beyond the imperception of ‘the real’ which is the separative consciousness which asserts anything other, which is at root of the being function and ceaseless and unbroken force, an impractical impossibility but as an imagined state, an illusion, a dream. This is, of course, the function of Maya in the Vedantic texts, or the Maya which is, in short, the identification with ‘anything’ as a property of the ‘thing’ as separative - wherein and whereas the unifying force which dissolves that very thing always already as in the right perception which corrects the imperception (as in the dissolution, dis-illusion) is the thingness itself, the very essence, source, and nature of Being itself.

COMING TO THE ESSENTIAL PARADOX OF MANKIND

We come to the paradox of ourselves in this: that we know that we are eternal beings in the heart of heart, and the soul of soul – and in that eternal beingness we witness the returning of the ensouled body, or for this moment embodied vessel of the spirit, into the ground of being. Can we call this death? Or can it rather be called a transformation, or even metamorphosis?

To inquire into the true nature of oneself and one’s own being is the call of these times, these times of being human. For we approach and live out this essential paradox every day, embodied and incarnate in each movement, gesture, and thought of our lives. It is all centered around this: the temporality and the ephemeral. How can we have what will be lost? What can we have that will not be lost? And the answer to this is – that which we can have that will not be lost is rather not a ‘having’, but a being. It is our very own eternal Self nature.

To drop the rest of that which is not Being is in short to drop the entirety of that which is temporality, which is to say the coming and going or the narrativization of our lives which is, by way of course, entirely centered around the seasonal body, or the apparatus of nature through which the essential life giving and life bringing aspect of Nature (Being) conducts itself. It is as if we are lightning rods of life in this lifetime – that life flows through us, that which we are, and the being-body is a vessel, a channel, a way of experiencing that essential nature in a certain way or manner, which constitutes the fractal aspect or element of existence: the part of

the whole which is simultaneously not separate from the whole. It is an eye witnessing itself.

Some have called this the heart that is everywhere, or the heart center or the essence that is everywhere and cannot be had or known, strictly speaking, but rather experienced as Being or oneSelf Nature itself. Can you experience and know this feeling of existence? Can you experience and in this way know?

For everywhere you turn, if you are not looking and listening closely, inquiring into the essence of being – it seems as though all around you is crumbling – buildings, empires, worlds, mythologies, reasons, beliefs, even the seasons of nature seem to affirm this narrative in certain parts of the world. Everywhere you look it is as though all that is is becoming all that was, and all that will be seems to be uncertain, unstable, and emerging even now from a darkness just below the horizon. For this is the very logic and movement of becoming – precise almost to the point of predictability in the coming and going. For we know that all that is not the Self at essence and root is going to be ‘destroyed’, so to speak, or returned to the essence, that which it is. Can you see this paradox? All that is not the Self is being returned to the Self. Thus, we have the two concepts or notions of Being and Becoming.

All that is the Self is everything, anything, and all things beyond conception. It is our sight, or imperception, or partial seeing, that impairs our knowledge of this, or makes it a partial knowing, or purely intellectual – or perhaps we have no notion of this inner wholeness at all. It is the way of seeing through which life is led and dictated at the level of the human being. This is called insight. Our way of seeing

is not simply eyes, ears, nose, mouth, touch, taste – it is rather the higher faculty through which we know through the senses – or the apparatus which understands that which we see, touch, taste – to be a certain thing, way, function.

How do we transform this? We transform it from within, precisely by meditating on the nature of the Self. For if we do not know the Self, what do we have? We are grasping at the world, grasping at things, narratives, stories – anything that we can find or that we believe will support us or prop us up for a time. And like all things, they fall, fail, collapse, or else stop working or change form entirely. To us it is like they have died or disappeared, but they are simply performing a natural function, the function of becoming. They have never been anything other than the essence of the Self, themself, itself.

This way of witnessing is a ‘shedding’, or an unlearning, or an inner silence that is reached, accessed, and known by way of a stripping away of the knowledge of everything to reveal the essence of Oneself, or that which ‘lies beneath’ the accumulated dross and baggage of worldly affairs. This is your belief as to who you are, the world is, your family is, your culture is, your life is, your purpose is, your reason is, and so forth. To drop this material is sublime, and in this way terrifying – because to drop it is to no longer identify with that which you believe you are. To drop it, you are at risk of ‘falling off the ledge’, or jumping into infinity. The philosopher Kierkegaard comedically calls this ‘the leap of faith’. For when we are leaping into the unknown what are we doing? We are leaping into the grace, the embrace of our very own true nature of being, our very own true self. Of course we

are terrified – because we do no truly know who we are. We have relied on, leaned upon false apparatuses, phantoms, and shadows of our thought forms, our intellectualizations, things that have given us perhaps maybe even partial notions of ourselves and the world. But how long do these truly suffice? They inevitably collapse and we are left with a crisis – a crisis of self knowledge. Perhaps, if we are ‘lucky’, so to speak, they last us a lifetime. And thus, we have spent a lifetime hiding from our true selves, not having inquired into the nature of our inner being. Can this be said to be living – if we have lived in death, afraid of death?

To strip ourselves of these clothes of thought forms and narratives, we are left with silence, stillness, peace, and witnessing without narratives – which is to say a wholeness, a flow of being which is unbroken, the beating heart that is everywhere, all at once. To behold this is something like a revelation, especially if we have been in the mode of storytelling, narrativizing, thinking – and thus separating with our distinctions and judgements. Judgement itself is this – to say ‘this’ and ‘that’. The moment we have divided the essential into two parts, we are no longer seeing the whole – we have made our lives into a categorical invention, a machine. How will the two parts work together? They have never been apart. You see? We have created a problem with our minds that cannot be solved – because it does not exist.

Can we witness silence? Can we not interfere with our minds, with our thoughts, with our restlessness? Bringing in voices into silence and peace is necessarily disruptive. What do we truly say that is of merit when we break silence? When we disturb peace? It is often that we break silence and disturb peace precisely

because we feel we are in separation. We feel that we are suffering, alone, or else apart from creation. We do not feel whole. Speech is a way of attempting to solve the problem of not feeling whole. It is a way of attempting to communicate.

And again, we come up against the essential paradox of being human. We are eternal and ephemeral, we are whole and apart, we are witnessing and yet we are witnessing through this lens or fractal of the sense body. What use is it to deny these paradoxes? To run from them? To do so is to ignore our birth as humans, to ignore the mystery. We are here to do this work – it is the work of understanding our lives. And it is a work of inches. It is a work of presence. So what use is speech and inquiry? Can we not just say ‘enough with this’ and come to terms with the paradox or else attempt to ignore it altogether and go on with our lives? Of course we can. We can attempt to ignore our suffering and the suffering of others and pretend that we are not living in separation consciousness, and thus perpetuate it with each action, each deed. We live in an ecosystem, a sphere of natural ethics wherein it pays very well to be in attention, to be conscious and to be witnessing our actions, our behaviors, our thoughts. It pays in that with awareness our lives become better. We suffer less. We connect more. We know ourselves in a deeper way. We feel our feelings more deeply. And yes, of course this does come with a risk – it comes with the risk of feeling deeply, the intense feelings, the joy and the pain. But in our feeling, we have the capacity to learn by following the natural order, the natural law of things, of existence. By feeling, by being present with the suffering, we learn how to live in light of the natural law. Who can teach us this? Who can tell us this truth? The body is the teacher. The body is the

vehicle in which we are like a witness on a boat, a ferryman, like the mythological Charon – between the worlds of the ‘living’ and the ‘dead’ – or in our terms, the eternal and the ephemeral.

Who is the one who learns? It is the witness. For we are all fractals of the one witness, and in witnessing, we learn to be more of ourselves, we open ourselves up to our inner nature, which is naturally the joy of manifesting ourselves, being ourselves, knowing ourselves, having, finding, and making a home within ourselves. In this way, we are home everywhere we go. The deeper we know ourselves, the deeper we begin to understand existence, life, our experience, and the experience, existence, life, and suffering and joy of others. In this way, in the learning by experiencing, we begin to understand there is no fundamental difference between any of us. We all desire to be loved, to experience life, to connect deeply and profoundly, and to be seen for who we are. It is this underlying thread which is our liberation. It could be said that this underlying thread is our Tantra, meaning the thread of the Absolute Reality – or the thread which binds all things, the Oneself.

For we come to know this in plants, animals, even in earth, in the greater whole of nature, even in what some may unsuspect – trees, stones, gardens, rooms, all of these inner and outer worlds. Our compassion is a great force, it reverberates everywhere, and it resides in our loving presence. It resides in our knowing, loving, and accepting of ourselves. In knowing, loving, and accepting ourselves, we become able to know, love, and accept others. This is profound work. But we must truly know ourselves – and this means opening up a whole realm and world of that which we fear within us,

the cobwebs and boxes which we have long tucked away of things we did not like about ourselves, things that scared us about ourselves, things which we were taught to deny and suppress – things which we thought made us ‘less than’, or made us ‘inhuman’, or made us ‘unworthy of being loved’. This is what the faculty and function of judgement in the world does – and we see it everywhere, especially from an early age as children growing up in a world of humans, a world which has been built by our ancestors and the ancestors of others, a world which we perhaps do not understand. The soul, in this sense, is an eternal child – it is born eternally new and eternally does not have these distinctions. We create a ‘countervoice’ to the soul – a voice which judges and suppresses the soul because we (and/or others) deem it inappropriate, wrong, or for any other variety of reasons: this ‘countervoice’ is the persona, which is often misnomered as ‘the ego’.

The ego is the ferryman, the one who goes from the world within, or the eternal Self, into the world without, or the one who expresses. The ego is the vehicle of all art and all creation. It is necessarily neutral, a vehicle, a vessel. The persona is the way we have dressed up the ego, made the ego out to be a guard, or a judge: the way we have made the ego to be one who decides who and what is allowed out – who and what is repressed and suppressed in the expression of the soul. Many of us live entire lives of self suppression precisely because of this force and factor in our lives. And what does this do to our health? It is harmful.

However, this is not to say that we cannot use the ego consciously to make conscious decisions of how we wish to live our lives. We may recognize, consciously,

this aspect of ourselves which is deeply sexual, very creative, a very strong life force. We may then say, I wish to express this sexuality in this way, to direct my energy and my life force in this manner. Here, we are not talking about an act of suppression or repression, but an act of conscious direction of life force energy. This is an act of creation, an act and art of existence. And this is precisely what is cultivated in the spiritual practice, in the way of meditation, of cultivating everyday awareness and mindfulness as to what is emerging, what is coming forth to be examined, experienced, expressed.

For what comes forth is coming forth for a reason, an inner reason. In the way that great art is often entirely spontaneous, it is not planned, it is not even thought of, it issues directly from us – what is coming forth is our soul expressing itself directly and innately to and through us. Our ability to experience this, to witness it, is our ability to experience and live our own lives. For as much as we are oneSelf, we are given these lives, these different ways and faculties and aspects of being – parts of the whole like trees in a forest. Some of the trees bring forth different needles, flowers, pinecones, fruits, sap, and the like. This is our aspect as human beings. That we respect and honor and cultivate not only our own differences but the differences in others is an important part of realizing the paradox of parts of a whole – parts which are ultimately unified in and as the whole themselves, oneSelf.

So to know yourself is to pay very close attention to these inner messages and the inner voice issuing from within you, and to change that old mode of judgment into the higher form of discernment. What is issuing forth from me? Is it me? Or is it the voice of someone

else, perhaps my mother, my father, their mother, their father, a schoolteacher, a politician, a priest? And so forth. There are a whole host of voices which we may have unknowingly taken on, or subconsciously taken on, and adorned the coat of our ego (the persona) with these voices as constructs of the personality. The voices which are not ours are like phantoms or ghosts – they are spectres but function in a quite real fashion in our consciousness as delimiters, or reasons and ways to fear, to suppress, to shut down our soul content as it emerges, or attempts to emerge and express itself, to be expressed. If we cannot express these innate parts and aspects of ourselves, however ‘dark’ or ‘wrong’ we may have previously conceived of them or been told that they are by someone else, how can we experience the entirety of ourselves? And many people suppress these aspects of themselves entirely from consciousness until they erupt into the everyday life like a volcano. And then they cannot stem the tide, or judiciously discern and direct the flow. At this point, we cannot become and are not artists of our lives, but rather we are riding the lightning, or the inner wave of psychic-sexual-life force energy as it forcibly expresses itself through us. It is like we have built up a storm of ten, twenty, fifty years within us. And it expresses itself violently, like a god.

To rise these ‘darknesses’ up through us, we must allow ourselves to see ourselves as and for who we are as a whole, to allow that which we have previously permitted and previously exiled within ourselves – to allow both of these aspects and in doing so, we have moved from judgement to witnessing and discernment. We can see ourselves for who we are – for the parts we perhaps do not right now like or enjoy about ourselves, as well as the parts which we enjoy and celebrate. Can

we look at the parts of ourselves which we have not particularly enjoyed or perhaps felt awkward, or ashamed about – can we look at these parts of ourselves and celebrate them too, and understand that they are parts of a whole human being? Can we look at them and understand, by way of our inquiry into them, the deeper aspects and roots of what they are? If we can see beyond just our image of what these parts are that we haven’t liked, we can start to see them for what they are. If I didn’t like myself because of a particular desire, if I can look deeper at that desire and impulse and begin to understand what it is, what its coming from, what its calling to me – what its significance is, its symbolism, its purpose – I will understand that it is calling me toward the wholeness of myself – to celebrate the wholeness of my being. And you would be quite surprised just how many supposedly ‘shameful’ and ‘wrong’ and ‘inappropriate’ desires at root suggest just this. It is that we ourselves do not look deeply enough into them, and see them at surface level as images, that we miss this larger significance.

It is the shame, the shameful aspects which we cannot bear confront within us, that we have been told are wrong or else ourselves have judged are wrong – it is these shameful aspects which prevent and deny ourselves from a whole and happy life. Because we cannot be at peace, you see? We are at war within ourselves – at war within ourselves every day, in every moment, trying to stem the tide, trying to repress ourselves, trying to hold back the inevitable, our innate nature. If we cannot allow ourselves to be whole, we must ask ourselves, why can’t I allow myself to be whole? And often we will want to point at the world, to point at another, to point at everything else, the culture, the history, our families, ancestors – but we do

and must realize that we are here and now. That the peace we so wish to experience and live in our everyday lives is also right here and right now. It is innately within us, it is our wholeness and birthright. Can we live the rest of our lives pushing back against everyone and everything that is not ourselves? Of course we can. But perhaps not in going to war, or fighting, or pushing. Is there a better way to approach making circumstances better for ourselves and others? For healing our culture and the world, and making more room for the soul, for the expression and life of the soul in our community, our culture? There is much noble work in this – the work of working in the world for the betterment, for the more full and possible expression of the soul.

Imagine the turmoil, the struggle of going to war with the world every day. And perhaps you may not have to imagine it, perhaps you know the feeling very well. Perhaps you have lived that. How difficult, and how much of a struggle this is – when our thoughts, our attitude, our mentality is ‘against the world’, ‘against others’. There are entire cultures built around this. The culture of war, war in our world and against each other and our societies. The culture of beating others for resources, for power, for fame, even for sport. On top of that, how can we possibly live the rest of our lives pushing back against, going to war against ourselves as well? It is unbearable, untenable, great suffering. And yet many people live this way. We have created entire empires around this type of struggle – and then we ask ourselves, why can I not be at peace with myself? Why are my relationships filled with conflict?

We then ask ourselves, ‘How can I live in peace?’ We then ask each other, ‘How can we live in peace?’

If we allow ourselves to be ourselves, the war ceases. Within and without. Our being at peace within is the greatest healing force – both within ourselves, and when we are out in the world, walking, speaking, sitting, interacting, even standing in a room with other people, other beings. That energy of peace is a very powerful force for freedom, for liberation, and for the freedom, peace, and liberation of others. This peace comes from knowing ourselves, loving ourselves, and with mindfulness, consciousness, and awareness, living with each step and breath and moment in this heart centered awareness of peace and love for ourselves. In doing so, we bring our peace and love for ourselves into the world. There is no boundary, no border. Shining from within, we open up a whole world, a whole realm of possibility – a whole world and realm which is the incarnation of true inner peace and inner love on this earth, in this world. In doing so, we make peace and love possible in our relationships, in our interactions; we can even help make it possible in the hearts and lives of others. This is how we effect great change not only in our own lives, but as it reverberates in, as, and through the oneSelf.

So you see that the inner change must occur first. We must allow ourselves to be – in this sense to become who and what we already are, to become whole by way of unlearning everything, by stripping away all of the dross and noise and words and judgements to reveal our essence and allow that essence to be expressed right here, right now, in every day, in every movement, and every moment. This is what is called presence. In being present in the here and now, my soul is present. I am not blocking myself, I am not hiding from myself, the world – I am knowing myself by way of my inquiry,

I am inquiring into my inner nature. And knowing my inner nature, I can reconcile myself to myself and express myself freely, with trust, with love. Knowing my inner nature, I am not at war with my inner nature. It is the same with the outer world. If I know myself, my inner nature, I know Self. I come to you knowing myself, Self, I come to an animal, a plant, and in each moment and encounter and relationship and communication I wish to, I attempt to relay the essential. I want to be love, I am love. This is our conundrum as human beings. The language is love – it is beneath the symbols, beneath the words. To express it, we must be it. And in order to be it, we must know ourselves.

‘Alignment is a practiced state of vibration. Being in a relaxed state, not beating up on yourself. Recognition that I might not be there all the time, I don’t need to be there all the time - but I certainly know the difference. And I can get better and better in being unconditional in my alignment. When you finally reach the place that you don’t need a condition to be a certain way before you accomplish alignment, you’ve really got a good thing going. Because now you can be stable under any and all conditions.

Step 5: you realize that contrast does serve you. You don’t feel negative about contrast. You feel enlightened by it, served by it. Variety that helps you to choose in a more efficient way. Contrast is choices, sort of like being at a buffet. When you reach that place where you’re not condemning the part of contrast you don’t like, but instead you’re blessing all of it for the clarity and choice that it produces in you, then you can move around this world enlightened, and happy, and continually expanding.

The condition of something is what you’re seeing/hearing/smelling/tasting/touching. We want you to focus unconditionally. Everybody else responding to conditions. Pleasing condition, good feeling response, unpleasant condition bad feeling response, missing condition, bad feeling response.

You must find the feeling apart from the condition.’ – Abraham Hicks

Relieved, happy, content. Whole, joyful, spontaneous. Creative, fun, excited. Tuned in to the synchronicity. Attuned, attentive. Aware. Kind. Accepting. Openhearted. Caring. Generous. Loving.

‘Sometimes we believe that we should have this and this and this to be truly happy. And this and this and this are absolutely necessary for our happiness. But if we practice looking deeply, we may find out that these things may be the very obstacles for our own happiness

because there is no space left for you to be happy.

The refreshing moon of the Buddha is traveling in the sky of utmost emptiness. If you have too many cows, you should learn the practice of cow releasing. The only thing that they do is to practice mindfulness. And they need space in order to do so. If you have to take care of so many things, how could you enjoy space? In the avatamsaka realm, there is a lot of space.

If you have too many cows inside, too many projects, release them. Anger, fear, cows that you think to be very important for your happiness - let them go. This is very important for your freedom, for your happiness. Offer you space.’ – Thich Nhat Hanh

MANIFESTATIONS OF THE WILL TO POWER AS IN BECOMING

There is, of course, no will to power in the Being sense – wherein the ‘will to power’ is rather but a game or a theatre within Being and Being itself expands hitherto as a creative process of becoming itself vis-à-vis the assimilation of the unconscious, emptiness, or void of Being, that which is also Being itself. Hence, the ‘pseudo-oppositional’ forces posited in Being-becoming as well as Non Being-becoming Being are also and always already theatrical, creative, being in that the forces and factors and thrusts and emergent figures and theorems of Being, being, and Non Being are always already, without contingency, Being Itself. In this sense and way, the plane of time and space is itself transcendent and yet framed by way of perception as in procession as in a carrying or a linearity of Being through time or Being through space as in the experience of force and thrust as in a ‘birthing process’ or a ‘seeding/sprouting process’, or a movement of creating ‘the solid thing’ from the abgrund, or the ground from the abgrund, the Being Itself experiences itself in an ‘adversarial’ fashion as in mutually combative ‘becomings’, ‘figures’, ‘forms’, or ‘forces’, which are necessarily ‘frictional agitations’ which lead to further growth.

In this way, both metaphysically and ‘physically’ (wherein the physical is rather the ‘manifestation’ of the energetic metaphysicality, or the a priori principle, force, and thrust of Being-becoming), the frictional forms and forces are rather like adversarial ‘tinder’ which start and feed the raging fire of becoming, or are themselves necessary aspects of the play at working

which is Being-becoming-being-becoming-Non Being. As such, this could be said to be biological organisms, nature objects, et cetera. These forces and forms themselves hold weight, sway, and gravity as ‘things within the greater vision’, or ‘forces within the greater vision’ which are churnings, turnings, birthings, as in a digestive system which produces the energetic fire and fuel of further Being-becoming expansion. In this sense, the ‘will to power’ is a self consumptive act, or consisting of minor suicides to transformative or rebirthing, resurrecting ends – wherein the Being is reborn, renewed, refreshed, and perhaps ‘presented’ in an altogether alterior mode/motive which is itself suggestive of the transcendental aspect, or the Being aspect itself in its freshness. This would be the sublime appearance of God in the realm of the physis.

The ‘will to power’ then is always already self contained and paradoxical to the point of absurdity. The point of meditation, upon the ‘will to power’, will arrive at this point of ‘play-making’, or a cosmic agon, in the sheer nature of the container of Being wherein beings themselves strive for ascension, victory, virtue, or even right action by way of teleological growth and self expansion vis-à-vis the ‘rules and legislation’ of the Natural-Universal Law, which is simply this as such. There is no break, therein, from the imperative to striving for the ‘will to power’, which is at once and at whole the unification of the being with the Being, which is also always already a unification of the being with the Non-Being – which is a shattering of the supposed ‘grund’ to reveal the ‘abgrund’ of existence, from and upon which one’s own consciousness is teetering upon the insanity of abeyance or altogether absolution, dissolution as in a return to the source and center of Being, the paradox of Non-Being; being, the

paradox of Being. As such, the three part or tripartite aspect of existence is the direct experience of the living- breathing biological organism, which is always already living-breathing-shitting-eating-consuming-producing- projecting-creating-destroying itself Itself proper.

This paradox is at the shattering limit of being as in a confrontation with source and center which is equally and paradoxically (it seems) Being and Non-Being as absolute extremes, as in black and white, presence and absence, night and day, and so forth. Being is the one who is shining, and Non-Being is the one who swallows Being but from whom Being seems to miraculously or subliminally emerge, as in from night and day. And from presence and absence is born the one who is neither here nor there, neither gone nor arrived, neither living nor dead, neither born nor subject to the realm of death – as he has emerged and yet never left. This paradox is, as in the riddle of the Sphinx to Oedipus, the paradox of mankind, the one in which he attains the aspect of ‘the demigod’, or the one who is simultaneously ‘sacred and profane’, or ‘of this realm and the next’. This divine aspect of mankind, and specifically of nature-as-in-Nature-Itself – is the supreme riddle and rule of the metaphysis as the womb or container of the physis, where the Law of Universal Nature plays itself out as in a paradoxical series of concentric circles, or withins, or as in the ancient traditions, a spiral of ‘legislation’.

Being wills itself to be from Non-Being and thus emerges miraculously as in a shining from the black sun, or the ‘creation’ from the essence and abgrund of the ‘creation’, or the ‘Creation/Creative’ aspect as in the desire from the drive – it emerges itself subliminally upon compact and contact as in a manifestation of

energetic power, force, and thrust. In this way and sense, the will to power is always magnetic, always charged, and always directed toward/upon a ‘sacred object/abject’, or that which is there and not there, or the symbolic totem or archetypal significance imbedded and imbued within and upon the vision of the now, the vision of today, a vision splintered or fractured by very way of existence, or the inherent contradiction of Being-becoming-Non-Being as in manifest in the lived experience of the everyday, or the force and thrust through which being moves through itself, as in the paintings on the walls of the digestive canal observed through correlative significance as to the process of ‘birthing’ ‘deathing’ as in a consumption production cycle of shitting, disjection, abjection, objection – through which the being itself is fed to the flames of Itself Being Itself in a purgative act which produces the perpetually refined aspect of the demagogue-ic, known as the being that has become Being Itself by way of this purgative process, or the refined metal or gold of the alchemists – the being itself which has become Being Itself by way of the purgative process that has altogether immersed and emerged itself simultaneously into the Absolute Aspect of Being as in the Divine-Natural-Universal Law which it enacts and obeys and becomes and as such cannot be distinguished furthermore from the Being Body Absolutely, or itself rather becomes a ‘tree in the forest of Being’ by way of right action, itself becomes The Forest Itself.

‘Abhinavagupta recognized that Awareness is the only key to true freedom. For only through identification with that Self which is awareness such can we free ourselves from the bondage to any particular thing we are aware of. Only through identification with the

Awareness Self do our actions become truly free – ceasing to be mere reactions to things we are aware of.’ – Acharya Peter Wilberg

‘A sculpture of Jesus in an abandoned cemetery is slowly being swallowed up by a tree. Significant image… Somehow, approximately, individual consciousness is absorbed, captured by the objects of this world’ – Svyatoslav Solntsev

So in that one becomes the ‘will to power’ absolutely at the level of Being one does so with the awareness of the paradox unto absurdity of the powers of creation that be as in the play-working of Being-unto-becoming- unto-Non Being and the cyclical nature of the powers and forces like tinders producing the fire and apparatus and ‘vision’ of being emerging from Being vis-à-vis becoming and slowly being ‘re-merged’ or ‘re- absorbed’ by the very fabric of Being which is the vision of the fire produced by the sublime creational aspect force and thrust which is Non Being, or the pure energetic codice which emerges even Being into phenomenal view, or shining. Being views itself by way of and through the powers of the ‘thousand eyes’ which are beings Being Itself – and through which it is witnessed it is the shining encountering the shining – in that witnessing the Natural-Universal Law becomes known and beholden to itself, the code which necessarily involves a ‘perilous drop’ out of existence into and through the source of the shining which reveals the absurdity, play, or otherwise art and aesthetics of the shining itself – the play of the images of beings upon the screen of Being, wherein the light itself is rather the Non-Being, the creative essence and thrust unto which Being in its wholeness or expanse is emerged into view. It is in this way that light consumes

itself and is acting, or again re-merged into the ‘darkness of Non-Being’, or ‘abeyance of all things, thoughts, and forms’. This is the meditative state upon and in and through which one encounters the Infinite made manifest in the teleological connection and relation as in the shining of Being into and through being which produces the reflective capacity back upon-to (or as in Kierkegaard, the ‘dialectical redoubling’) which allows Job to see back unto God and recognize God in such a sublime fashion as God has not yet been recognized or known to himself as in the ’shadow function’ of the Natural archetype, or the absolute or the whole or the wholly which and through which it is shining observes and ‘sees through’ the light of source unto and through itself by way of reflection back unto the source of itself Itself – the abgrund through which the image of the grund, or Being, is produced by way of the outward shining as in an energetic aura ‘emerging’ from the non-absence, or the impossibility even at last of absence and presence, Being and Non Being, into and unto pure energetic form-formlessness which itself, by way of perception, takes up the adversarial perception and ‘does battle’ by way of a process of integration through which it comes to know itself as the Universal Law by way of Being- becoming which can also, quite simply, be called ‘the will to power’.

In that Being Itself consumes itself ‘beings’ and is consumed at last by that very Non-Being or essence of the shining which produces it (the shining), the series of illusive/allusive factors which ‘produce Being-being(s) themselves are an image-machine, or a manufacture of ‘wills’ which are themselves at-most utmost The Will itself which is simply and absolutely shining as in expansion to the greatest measure, wherein the terrain

is in constant renegotiation as in the appearance of Being-beings and the evocation-revocation which is the paradoxical and absurd ‘emergence of the sublime’, or the emergence of the absence, abgrund, or Non-Being in to the field of perception, as in the realization of that which is ‘not there’ or ‘nonexistence’ or ‘nonexistent’, and yet appears or emerges itself by the very paradoxical means of a ‘removal of that which/was’. It is in this very paradoxical sense that the Isness of Nature reveals itself, as in the abgrund which was contained beneath ‘the birth and death cycles’ which apparently/phenomenologically, appear to be the practical, functional, physis adversarial wills in and at contention for power as in the shining, expansion, absorption of adversarial factors and forces into the corporeal being body; furthermore, the Corporeal Being Body. For this metaphysis takes primacy – that the Corporeal Being Body exclusively absorbs, consumes, and produces itself – that which is behind and beyond the veil of the ‘shining which produces the ‘things’ of and as the Corporeal Being Body as in the ‘wholeness’, or the reaches of Being-territory, or the field of Being as in the abgrund’ – it produces itself as in the production of the Non-Being, or the absence within the presence of every living, thinging, shining, which appears to be emergent as in and of itself, aspects of the Greater Corporeal Being Body. For wherein, even behind the veil of the abjected-objected ‘thing’ which appears itself to be an isolated form or thought form, behind this innate wholeness of things as in the thingness, or ‘manifestations’ of the One Shining as in the Being-Body manifest everywhere as in all things, there is at the utmost the source essence which is the energetic isness of the thingness, or of the One Shining which is the One Shining itself beyond any sort of phenomenological

emergence/amergence/submergence of any sort of thought, form, factor, or presence. It is this fundamental essence that is the productive factor of any and all thinging-shining – it is the shining itself which emerges from what seems to be a perennial abyss – for what emerges from there can be ‘seen or observed’ but that which ‘from there itself is’ is entirely and absolutely only described by way of reflection/refraction, as in Perseus’ sight-knowledge of Medusa. This is the metaphorical aspect of existence, or rather that that which is existence beyond existence, (or non-existence itself) – is emergent only by way of the shining which is a reflection/refraction off the pseudo-surfaces of the Being-Body (or ‘light of lights’) through which the abgrund is observed or witnessed by way of the grund. This is to say the establishment of ‘the false ground’ is necessary in a theatrical/aesthetic/creative sense in order to observe ‘the true ground’, or the ‘groundlessness of the ground’ through which the monster of the being emerges. It is monstrous precisely because of this subliminal quality, and as such, it appears adversarial, even unto itself. For it is, even unto itself, an absolutely unknown quantity, or an abyss unto itself – even beneath the faction or multifactorial ‘knowledge of itself’ lies beneath it the abyss of its true form, or the Universal Law which itself re-merges even into and unto the chaos which is the absolute abgrund of creation, or the anarchic law which is the consumption of all things by all things and the force of chtonic growth and power which is resident beneath all things and even their immaculate conception as in beings unto Being – their Non Being which is the force and source of their creation as in their very thrust and desire unto ‘life’, which is henceforth upon this knowledge indistinguishable from ‘death’. In this sense, the thrust and desire ‘unto life’ is

verily the factor through which the fire of self consumption or purgation renders the being unto ash and it rises, demagogue-ic, unto the being-Being relation wherein itself the ‘individual will’ is resolved or absolved or re-merged into the Universal or Cosmic Will, which is itself a sort of apocalyptic form and force of the ‘will to power’ – a will to power which is absolute and everpresent even when it is ‘unknown’ or ‘unobserved’ or ‘unseen’ or ‘unconscious’ to the individual being. This knowledge then becomes known as the utmost and foremost thrust of all creative and decreative action. Power, then, is true and absolute force and thrust, the energetic codice or web or network experienced absolutely, directly, embodied, immediately, as in the living action force thrust and flow of the Universal Network moving through it, or Being being channeled vis-à-vis being. And, of course, knowledge of this network and experience of this network leads one to the encounter of ‘none’ or the dissolution even of Being in the Non-Being, or the ‘leading edge’ of creation – wherein all that appears to be is naught, wherein all that is is dissolved in the very isness, and the abyss is immediate, present, felt, lived, and even embodied. This presence of absence is the meditative state in which all Being is at once ‘returned to its source’, or the shining itself is even phenomenologically ‘returned’ as in the very essence of the shining, or the experience of the immediacy of the energetic Nature of Being as in the Non-Being of Being from which ‘Being’ ‘emerges’ ‘shining’.

From this place, it is as if ultimately there is absolutely all possibility and no possibility, that creation is at once entirely absolved of itself or impossibly light in its perennial absence and at once delimited by this very energetic knowledge of same, or that at root same is

infinitely and perennially present and is not even ‘returned’ insofar and inasmuch as it is everpresent and beyond space and time, and thus beyond coming and going. It is itself the absolute face of Being, or that which is behind the masks or semblance of mask which is the arms, legs, and appendages of the Vishvarupic form, or their very composition which is at root, indistinguish. It is the appearance which is the difference in vibratory quality or light, or energetic density of light. In this way and sense, different thought forms appear in the mind and way and play of Being- shining; resolved and absolved of their game of waves as in the game of differences as in the adversarial code of Being-becoming-Non Being, they are re-merged or integrated at the level of the psyche as in the peace of nothingness, abnegation, or Non Being, or as in the very lack and absence of all ‘presence’ as in thought- image-thing-form – and yet, absolute presence in the absence of presence. This is the pure witnessing state, or the devoid in and through which Non Being witnesses itself, or comes into direct contact to and through itself, wherein there is no separation or illusion and but rather all-presence in the absence of difference, and even the absence of the distinguishment of lightness and darkness. This is the black sun, or the Being of Non-Being, the Non-Being of Being. It is in this way, in this witness, in this meditation, that one once and for all achieves and understands ‘the will to power’ by way of a direct encounter with Power itself.

“The Eternal works and stirs in all;

For all must into Nothing fall,

if it will persist in Being.”

-   Goethe

As such, Heidegger’s repudiation of the Will is “a denunciation of the instinct for self-preservation.” – Arendt

“The soul that has the longest ladder and reaches down deepest — the most comprehensive soul, which can run and stray and roam farthest within itself; the most necessary soul that plunges joyously into chance; the soul that, having being, dives into becoming; the soul that has, but wants to want and will; the soul that flees itself and catches up with itself in the widest circles; the wisest soul that folly exhorts most sweetly; the soul that loves itself most, in which all things have their sweep and countersweep and ebb and flood — ” – Nietzsche

Emerson’s Over-Soul “within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One.”

“But” Nietzsche says, “that is the concept of Dionysus himself. — ”

You cannot know. That which comes to us must come with transcendent surprise – of its own volition and coming in such a way as to altogether transvaluate that which was hitherto known as the ‘possible becoming’; this is to say that it must at once transcend and by way of transcendence transgressence – the paradigm hitherto which itself has organized within itself as in a systematization of the self ‘Being, Becoming, and Non Being’. It is these very tripartite forces and forms and stages of the production consumption cycle that can perhaps be understood at a conceptual form and format but cannot themselves be ‘filled’ with any such knowledge or permanence as their grounds is shifting as in a mutual interdependence as in an energetic flow which is itself ‘MetaLogical Becoming’, or the larger organizational force and factor which brings things into and out of being, conception, meaning, value, use, and worth. This higher form of MetaLogical Becoming is an orientation of participation that is consciousness conscious of itself, or metacognition in which it is accessed itself Awareness; that in awareness of the higher orders of Nature as such, engages actively in the processes of creation as in abeyance and obeyance to only the higher laws, and as such seems to be ‘a wild beast or god’ at the level of the ‘everyday’, or in the worlds of men or in the physis. As such, the transcendent law appears to these men as gravity appears to the scientists.

You cannot know that which will emerge and in the engagement with the creative process there is and necessarily must be an altogether relinquishing of ‘the self’, or of the organizational factors forces and forms which hitherto described or detailed the ‘self body’ as it is transacted and interacted with ‘the other’ or ‘the world’. As such, a self relinquishing always already

reveals the immediate or immanent self, the transcendent principle manifest in, as, and of the moment. This immediate interfacing with Reality is the equivalent dissolution or union with and of the self with the Self; as such, the reaching of an immediate accord with the higher principles, laws, and virtues of The Natural. As such, and in this way, there can only be existence in the sublime as in the self emergence beyond the categorical or beyond the defined or the known.

People using other people for the purposes of ascension Ascension in this sense is the elevation of oneself to the point of realization

There is in this way a ‘ladder’ to ultimate self knowledge which is the apocalyptic self realization

The mystics go within and seek to know the self by way of and means of inner communion

This is inner communion within the organism or the alchemy of self knowledge within the vessel of the being-body by way of one pointed attention or meditation

This is the ‘inner way’

The ‘outer way’ is the use of other people, things, objects, et cetera to reach a certain point wherein the binary between self and world inverts or collapses. Most people never get this far.

They seek to accumulate and accumulate and possess and their empires ‘collapse’ under the weight and inevitability of change/becoming, the shifting of space and time and the coming and going of materiality The seeking and search to possess is the exoteric, or the liberalization of the grail myth.

The seeking within for the true self is the esoteric meaning of the grail myth

Within is where the journey proceeds vis-a-vis the realm of perception and vision, right knowledge and relation to self.

In this way, one comes to recognize that the self is a beating heart beyond time and space.

The eternal witness is what is come to known by the mystic as the true self.

The exoteric path of realization is a path of ‘rubble making’, or leaving destruction in the wake, or the path of objectification of ‘the other’.

By inquiring into the self, even self objectification proves to be impossible; one is left with the witnessing of the eternal moment, the eternal moment being the witness being the oneself.

The exoteric path is the path conducted by all but a very few - it is the path of accumulation, the path of socialization, the path of civilization. It is the path of gathering, congregating, using, and affecting one another as resources. There is a latent, or even blatant inhumanity in the exoteric path - for it is a path of the objectification of the other, possession of the other, penetration into the other in order to obtain certain resources, pleasures, minerals, and so forth.

This path is manifest at a macrocosmic level in man’s relationship to the earth.

The mystic is then the one who goes within and ‘leaves the world behind’ and as such does not base his conduct whatsoever on worldliness but instead finding an inner conduct and inner ethic that is emergent directly in and from and within his immediate relationship to and with the divine as in the esoteric connection of and with the inner self, or the center of creation.

By sitting and meditating and remaining in this center, he is endlessly whole and witnesses the play of events of separation, fragmentation, and the struggle and war over possession in the ‘exoteric sphere’ or ‘the world’ as in the endless, cyclical fight over resources, desires, relationships, power, influence, et cetera. In this way, the exoteric path is an endless battleground of war over power, or the will to power in the literal sense - a war which is necessarily unending as and in becoming itself

or the overcoming of spring with winter, this lord with another, and so forth. The endless coming and going of victors and the fallen is the battlefield of the unreal.

The sage, or the mystic, remains in the being, or the pure witnessing state where there is no object differentiation, only pure self manifest in and as and beyond everywhere and everything as the all encompassing and beyond sphere of the wholly, the eternal, the absolute. In this way, the mystic in his divine communion sees beyond space and time into the permanence - or that which is beyond that which is coming and falling away - as in that which is, absolutely.

This inward state of meditation accomplishes that which the outward or exoteric path takes myriad years to understand and grasp by way of the loss of everything - the being and not the having or the grasping or the holding. For the exoteric paths requires one to accumulate, or to ‘have’ everything and know everything to ultimately be empty. This is what triggers realization at the exoteric end of the spectrum.

However, by way of meditation on the dynamic or the apparent or phenomenal binary between individual self and other, past and future, ‘this’ and ‘that’, ‘life’ and ‘death’; the desire to know the absolute, the sage, the mystic, enters into the state of meditation which proves the point beyond the synthesis, beyond duality, beyond the dance of two into the one that is.

The dance of two, as in Shiva and Shakti, is the manifestation or the paradox of binaries which fuels the world, or is the friction which creates desire. Desire, itself, observed from the perch of oneness, is proved to be an illusion of perception or lack of self knowledge, perceiving that there is ‘other’ or ‘another’ to be obtained, maintained, possessed, held. This desire to perceive and the desire to hold is always already in the purview of the eventual death of the desire, or the exhaustion of it. This death is always already the realization by way of space and time the limits of desire, or where desire transforms, shifts, changes form, and reorients itself into another direction, another meaning, another season of space and time.

The war over desire is the war over the desire to possess the unpossessable, or the desire(d object) itself. For neither the desire nor the desired object truly exist, as they are destined to melt and shift away in the space and time and reveal what was always truly there, the essence of being manifest everywhere and all things as the energetic form of the being-body itself. How can one then obtain what one already is, being under the delusion that it is something else; furthermore, something else that can be truly possessed, known, held, and maintained under and through space and time?

For the being essence is that which is transcendental or even lord over space and time and all things and all times – being beyond space and time in the eternal and absolute realm. It is in this sense that we can conceive of the being essence being the truth of existence – that which is neither knowable nor obtainable; the innate and pure mystery of self which is within each and all things, experiences, and situations, that which desires truly to be fulfilled within, to be present with, this is to say, life and the source of life itself.

This is altogether beyond considerations of having and holding and into and onto the essence of meditations of being, meditations of being with being, and in this sense abiding in and with the ineffable, and in this way coming to know it by way of being present with it, meditating within it, imbuing the whole perception, the body, the lungs, the essence, with it. This is the comingling of the essence with the essence at the level of focused and present consciousness. This is Awareness; what can also be considered and known as meditations on/upon being. This is to say, in the (apparently) shifting field of what (appears to be) becoming, the sage, the mystic mediates upon the essence of being, and thus observes and witnesses and is present with the true nature of reality, the eternally whole self, which is the true nature of his being and the being of all things, all space, and all time; the essence of being beyond space and time.

For a liberated sage who has realised that all being are the Self, there is neither delusion nor grief, as there is no second for him.

To him who sees Oneness only everywhere, where is delusion and where is grief? The experience of secondlessness is achieved through a finding of one's self in each and every being including even the wicked and the ungrateful. Such an expansion of the Self leads to the glory of the manifestation of the real Essence of the Being of all beings, where one finds himself in truth, where the lost Self is recovered with unbounded joy. Grief is only the temporary psychosis of the individual which has been deprived of a desired object or which is unable to fulfil a desire. The Jivanmukta who sees the One common Being spread everywhere grieves never. Beholding Existence as undivided he walks on the earth unknown and unidentified. No one can find out whether such a person is a learned one or is ignorant, whether he is virtuous or vicious. He lives in the great silence of the Self, and whether active or at rest does not link his ego with his act. He does not see duality even when he is awake to the world. He is a representative of the Supreme Brahman, appearing before the human eyes.

The freed soul assumes the form of what is existent in the absolute point of view. Hence the sage becomes a Gunatita. He is alike in pleasure and pain, Self- abiding, regarding a clod of earth, a stone or gold alike. He is the same to the agreeable and to the disagreeable, firm and alike in censure and praise. Honour and disgrace do not make to him differences. Friend and foe are no more valid conceptions.

‘The Upanishad says, "Him who knows this (Brahman) these two do not overcome – neither the thought 'Therefore I did wrong,' nor the thought 'Therefore I did right.' Surely he overcomes both. He is not affected by either what he has done or what he has not done. He sees the Atman in the Atman. He sees everything as the Self. Evil does not overcome him; on the other hand he overcomes all evil. Evil does not burn him; on the other hand he burns all evil. One who knows Brahman becomes Brahman. He is fearless. He, who, on all beings, looks as his very Self, and on the Self as all beings – he does not shrink away from anything. If one would know It here, then there is the True End of all aspirations. He who knows That set in the secret place of the heart, he, here on earth, rends asunder the knot of ignorance.

"Of him whose desire is satisfied, who is a perfected soul, all desires even here on earth vanish away! He who knows Brahman attains the Highest. One who knows that Brahman exists is really existent. If one who knows this (Self) should offer the leavings even to an outcast (pariah), it would be offered in his Universal Atman. The Seer does not see death, nor sickness, nor any distress. The seer sees only the All, and obtains the All entirely. He has delight in the Self, he sports in the Self, he has company with the Self, he has bliss in the Self. He is autonomous. He has unlimited freedom in all the worlds.

"Of whatever object he becomes desirous, whatever desire he desires, merely out of his will it arises. One who realises 'I am Brahman' becomes the All. Even the gods have not got the power to prevent his becoming thus, for he becomes their very Self. He who is without desire, who is freed from desire, whose desire is

satisfied, whose desire is the Self – his Pranas do not depart. They are gathered together right here. He being Brahman Itself, becomes Brahman.

"When one realises (the Eternal), all has been done. Only by knowing Him does one pass beyond death. There is no other way for going over there."’

Swami Krishnananda
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NOW I am not afraid to step into the truth of myself, to be a wayshower, lightbearer, and to not fear the consequence of my wayshowing, the pointing of my finger back to the oneself of others. Each way I point and show the way back, the way which is the way of eternal self wholeness. And I do not fear being cast out, nor do I fear being disliked. I do not fear nothing but to know this truth, that within each person contains the mystery of oneself, the onesoul, the yearning which seeks to be emerged in each moment of the day, and each turning of the night. To this, my life is dedicated – to emerging this life of the soul within myself and to the lives of others. That which I can be, my highest self, is this lightbearer, this wayshower.

My life is rather not about anything more or less than this. It is not about possessing, having, holding – nor of anything that can be attained for myself, a name, a title, a reason, an honor – none of these things. It is instead to hold the torch of the self, the soul, aloft in the light of the day, the same torch that was lit from within in the darkest night, from the black sun, to make visible this exquisite inner light and to help others toward it – toward their own self inner truth. For there is no more or less than this to life – that which lies within, the journey of our finding the runes within ourselves, the dark cave and cavern of the body wherein we retrieve the stone of the soul from the ruins and rubble of history, out from the cask into the light, proclaiming ‘I AM, IT IS I, HERE, NOW, FREE AND LIBERATED’. This freedom of the soul is the birthright of all men. It is the truth of peace and love and endless possibility of camaraderie and life in love on earth. What is it to me that I am honored or turned away in the process, in the journey of this emergence of

light? It is the truth of all men and all things. My higher being is united absolutely with it.

So that even my greatest fear of being myself was being rejected or turned away by those I love, or that being myself was unworthy. Do I not see now that I am united now absolutely in that eternal love of the soul? That which is most deeply true in me is most deeply true in you. The way unto yourself is your way; the expression of yourself is your way. For it must be said, known, emerged – what else do we have? These days of soullessness, in cycles of dissatisfaction, the stirring about on the surface of our journey, our venture? The depths of ourselves await. What do we fear but ourselves? Jung says it is right to fear ourselves, but I cannot agree. I say it is wrong to fear other people, and it is wrong to fear judgement of ourselves. In the coming world, the coming world which is the only ulterior, there will be no judgement of ourselves or of others. It will be dedicated entirely, wholeheartedly, to the emergence of what is within. It is the only true world, the only true possibility of humanity – and this is precisely why it is the only coming world. Everything else exists as a primer unto it.

So humanity is moved along this unseeing blind path toward itself, groping in the dark toward the eternal reason of the soul by way of the mirror image of the world. Each murder, each lover, reflects that piece of us which is not us that which must die, that piece of us which is us that we must remember in order to live. Is it not thus? We are recollecting by way of the mirrors, the sight – our insight. To remember to see again, we must be at last seeing into ourselves that which is perceiving, the reflecting and refracting of the light – the stone of the soul, the philosopher’s stone. It is our

witness of witness, the way of which we are seeing. Do I not see that which I desire, that which I love, and know it to be myself, forgotten? I remember it, recollect it on this material plane. But have I truly remembered it, or is it a mere shadow of my beloved? Each day we seek the soul, not knowing that where it lies within. We have no map there, left but by Dante, Odysseus, in the pages of myth, archetype, and the obscurity of aged history. Where today stands the way in? Where today stands the Gates of Hell?

We should not fear to go within, but that it has been demonized and called fallen by the modern religions. To believe is safer, to live is sacrosanct – and thus we live in the modern paralysis of images, mimicry. To go within is to drop all images and reflections and rather dive directly into the pool and water of the soul and experience the tenor and rhythm of the unique soul, unique soil. In doing so, it tells us everything about ourselves, our unlived lives – our inner truths which are beholden to no empire, no reason, no jury of our peers – but rather the truth and reason of our lives which is paramount, the truth and reason of our lives which leads us in the direct and imbued experience of higher meaning – the revelation of God on this earth.

There is something here regarding overcoming the greatest desire and the greatest fear by allowing. Do I allow to be rejected, or to be disliked, or disavowed for who I am? Can I still, as the exile from the city, survive and love myself for as who I am? Can I allow the greatest desire to be fulfilled or unfulfilled? Can I allow the greatest fear to be realized or unrealized? They are not myself Being. They are becomings, possibilities, in the midsts of. They, necessarily, come and go. My greatest desire one moment becomes my greatest fear the next. The realization and derealization of desire and fear are like the coming and the going of the sun and moon, appearing in different ways and cartographies of the day and night. I see the moon from a new way, the sun from a new way, and yet it is still this same old moon and sun, the same old desire and fear – which are, at root, the energetic desire and the energetic fear. Can I reside, shining in the whole inner sun of my being? If I can reside there, desires and fears, desires and aversions come and go. I can be myself fully, wholeheartedly, not fearing being myself or desiring the illusion of a missing piece of myself. Then I can truly love. For in truly loving I need not one respond in a certain way to me, see me in a certain way. Then I am free to love. Then I am free in loving, and there and then and now I can love to the greatest and fullest essence of myself. This love that is not conditional, this love that is unconditional, to see others achieve self fulfillment, self realization, self knowledge, and the peace and joy and love of self residence, self love within oneself. To reach that state within themselves of their own means, their own language, their own road. In this way I can love and if needed love harshly, or love with any hue or brush and know that I do not need to be ‘loved’ or appreciated or seen in any way in return. In this way I can be of the

greatest service to others, and remain in the true essence of myself. Not grasping in desire outwardly to how others see me and should treat me, but rather residing inwardly in the center of Being and shining from within – to support others in such a way that I need not grasp to them or require them, but be a wayshower, to point and show the way to their journey toward their own inner being. I cannot, of course, take this journey for them. Unto myself, I am a Dante, and Ramana Maharshi or Siddharameshwar or Eckhart or any of these sublime hosts is my Virgil; unto others, I am a Virgil to their Dante; I take my leave as the soul arrives, the Beloved. I need not try or take the hubris to become that beloved. To each their own inner love. Acting as a wayshower, a Virgil, a guide, I can and do truly love others. I need not become their beloved. I do understand the importance of the self empowerment and divine encounter, the self realization and knowledge of the soul that is the liberation of a being in their lifetime, the practice of communion, the daily life of living as the emergence of the true soul – that is of the essence for the health and wellbeing of others, the world, the ecosystem of life at large. The liberation of this self soul out from judgement, fear, and shame, is the liberation of us all; the liberation of the many possibilities of our joyful communion with ourselves, with others, with all of life.

There is a true and innate freedom in and of higher love. Higher love commands first and foremost the freedom and liberation of the spirit, of the soul. This freedom is the highest joy, the highest humanity. It is also the lowest joy, the lowest humanity. It is the all encompassing, the compassionate wholeness of mankind. It takes nothing for itself. It is everything itself. It seeks for the freedom of all things, all life, the

spirit and soul and essence within all things, as all things. The direct expression of the divine. In this way, it loves.

Loving really means being there for someone, helping show them the way. Without the conditional - what do I get out of this, what are they going to give to me, say to me, are they going to be with me… loving really means being a wayshower, which also necessarily requires that you do the work within yourself. How can you help show someone else the way to their divine self, to their soul nature, if you have not gone, are not going that way within yourself? In this way, how can you truly love someone else if you have not already cultivated or begun cultivating the capacity to truly love yourself, at the depths, root, and core of who you are? Without judgement, without shame, without guilt

the full, emergent, effulgent expression of who you are? If your orientation is toward your own self, your own soul, you will have the capacity of love, the capacity of true love and true service, true companionship to others - to help show them the way to the greatest gift, their greatest joy… knowledge of themselves, their own self realization in this life.
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I have a great gift which now allows me to be of service of others, to initiate them on the path of their own souls and self realization. The emergence and expression of this gift will not only give me great joy in service to the light and divinity of others, in truly loving themselves themsouls and assisting them on their path and road and initiatory journey as a guide and wayshower, but give great joy to others on their path to freedom, liberation, and the experience of their own divine truth self nature.

‘This is a society that fundamentally demands of people that they be other than who they are. Because the demand, the expectation is that we fit in. Into structures and workplaces and educational institutions, families, social settings - where if we are ourselves, we risk being rejected. So that there’s almost a universal demand for self suppression. Which creates both mental and physical health problems. The core values of this society, which are fundamentally materialistic, individualistic, aggressive and competitive - they go against what it really means to be a human being.’ - Gabor Mate

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Trauma Therapy (Volume XV)

Publication history

Works contained