Friday Thoughts

Isn't the goal of a life to develop such a large mask wardrobe that if someone stumbles behind the doors, they’d never get to Narnia?  Life as being lost eternally in the mask wardrobe.  (Bergman as a cinematic master of this truth.)

Yoga, if it subjects itself to anything but itself (breath, spirit, animating, the natural action of air), becomes a practice of spiritual Botox.  Yet this is what we typically see:  morality, convention, artifacts, reputation, money competing with and dominating the breath--which in life is nimbleness.

In the old equation, one can only accept love into one’s life to the extent one accepts death—which is to say, in life, grief.  Grief as a magic carpet of being.

Human #1:  Are you a writer?

Human #2:  Let’s just say I have an unusually intimate relationship with creation.

The depths to which one accepts pain in oneself are the depths to which one accepts pain (and hence anger, mistrust, imperfection, love) in others, to which one accepts the world.  Much of technological society is constructed to stretch a kind of plastic wrap around this pain; but by mitigating pain in this way, we mitigate our acceptance of the world, others, and ourselves, and live increasingly in illusion.

My parents gave birth to me physically.

My children gave birth to me spiritually.

Perhaps the biggest challenge of migrating from heaven and hell to earth is the gear shift into a kind of oneiric first gear.  Earth is slow.  The benefit of having experience in heaven and hell is that one has learned to move quickly and is not surprised on the occasions when heaven and hell erupt on earth and rapid action is required.  Like animals who sense a tsunami before humans (who have derooted themselves from the rhythms of earth), so the one who’s been to heaven and hell and returned to earth can anticipate eruptions, feels the distant movement of clouds and rocks.  This is the task of the modern human:  to find nature in the city.  But the only place it can be found is deeply buried in the body.

Some lines from Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia:

Live between divine forgiveness and the torment of your soul.

We must listen to the useless voices.

You must stretch the corners of the soul like a sheet.

It’s the so-called healthy who have brought the world to ruin.

God governance.  We develop our own principles, often unconsciously or paraconsciously, for recognizing the divine in ourselves and in others, for managing awe (and so overwhelment) and thus keeping the divine in perpetual check.  (The cosmic chess game never ends.)  When doing this with a degree of consciousness, humans can begin damming the divine, begin using it for certain purposes.  (Our bodies are spiritual steam engines which we’ve only just begun to understand and exploit.)  In short, god is now simply another technology.  (Will we, some centuries hence, if we survive in any meaningful sense, struggle with the same problems of excess in the divine realm as we do now in the realm of nature?  Too many dams.  Ecotheology problems?  Or is the divine, being infinite by nature, not subject to such abuses, and is that the key?)

Friday Thoughts

I wish to establish systems for those who live outside the systems established by the systems to look after those outside the systems.

One builds and maintains diversity through structure in the postmodern world.  But in order to lead this building, one has to be diverse oneself:  to include within the self—and to possess the techniques required to cope with this inclusion—contradictory, irreconcilable, irreducible voices and values.  Technology (of which structure is a form) becomes Spirit’s (spirits’ ?) strategic partner.  God cannot enter humanity except through technology.  This is the breach, the wound, at the heart of Spirit presently.

I live now at the limits of language.  I speak from a space outside of language, using language to translate the silence, the emptiness, of that space.  An odd convergence of Wittgenstein and the Tao.

Authentic subversion is not perceived to be subversive, as it is unseen by the instruments of standardized power.  Authentic subversion is the subtle, slow workings of Spirit to alter the blind drive of nature through almost imperceptible acts of love.

Human 1:  Things aren’t what they seem.

Human 2:  Things are just what they seem.

Myth is subject to life, the body; history is subject to myth.

The vatic function is a function of geometry, a paying attention to the shapes of relationships.  The entropy of the average life is indirectly proportional to attention to relationships, to the vatic function.  The prophet resists entropy—to the extent possible permitted by physicality—by allowing him or herself to be contained by the empty spaces within the particular shapes given to him or her. 

I stay healthy by being legion, by indulging (accepting, observing, recording, listening, explaining) the diverse voices.  In so doing, I defeat Christ, and the pigs into which Legion was cast are safe, and the mad man remains in his cave in the city, and there is no messiah to cast Legion out.  This is the new good.

There is a community of the violated hiding in society.  This community refrains from violation because they have seen, they have felt, what violation does.  This is ethics and it is born from darkness.  This community works silently, subversively, cunningly, in little chunks, to undo the tsunami of violation that occurs each second on this planet.  Justice thus happens far from the marketplace; it is a form of art.

Perhaps what hurts most deeply in existence—the core acceptance which society is structured to resist—is that all the stories are valid, they’re all equal, they all must be authentically encountered.

The difference between vision inside something and outside it.  We posited God as a necessary fiction to expand our sight, to expand consciousness.  But now we posit what we call a non-fiction to perform the same function.  What is the discipline of this?  What are its methods?

Mrs. Vogler in Bergman’s Persona:  what happens to her after she returns to society?  The post-Persona question.  What happens after one has encountered absolute silence?  Masks and actors in Bergman (particularly in Persona, Fanny & Alexander, and The Seventh Seal) as psychic, mythic, and evolutionary truths.  Persona is like a subtler, nobler Pulp Fiction.

The 21.12.12 apocalyptic phenomenon may be analogous, at a global secular level, to the Jewish expectation of the messiah millennia ago.  The end of the world may come this December, but it won’t be noticed, even as the birth of Jesus wasn’t noticed, for it will be occurring in unexpected ways, in faraway corners, in the cracks of time.  This is the truth of myth.