On Liberation Through Illusion
Advice on Living and Dying in Nooteboom , Beckett and The Tietan Book Of The Dead
Both the novels Malloy and The Following Story tell the story of a character dying in much the way that is described in the Tibetan book of the Dead. Malloy is a very confused man, very uncertain and in allot of pain. He is decaying, both mind and body, but refuses to accept his death by continuing to falsify sad stories. In The Following Story, Herman Mussert is not very involved with actual life. He has only one affair and this is the subject he thinks of when people normally see their whole lives flash before their eyes, because this is the only thing interesting that has happened to him, the only time he lost the separation between him and the world. Neither man is acceptant, or even aware of his being dead, but both reach for a form of understanding in concurrence with the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
My theory, displayed through these books, is that to enjoy life, you must accept what Nietzsche calls ‘the preconditions of life’, including death. This requires a mysterious mental maneuver, what the Tibetan Book of the Dead calls a ‘setting to face,’ in which one realizes the oneness of all things as mind-based illusion, emanating from the Dharma Kaya, or the unformed state of Liberation, which is associated with a clear and/or radiant light. What we learn from these two wayward ghosts, and a few other works I will mention by way of conclusion, is that one must accept the transient nature of existence, not being over awed or angry with it, but allowing one’s self to bathe in the beauty of the illusion. In concurrence with the Tibetan Book of the Dead, this means recognizing the hallucinatory nature of all things, even as we sometimes extol and beautify them.
The Good Book
Now this ‘extolling’ or ‘reveling’, on the surface, seems a dangerous statement as regards the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The book clearly states that one may not reach the desired liberation because of “being over awed and terrified” by some of the illusions one sees after death (Book of the Dead 107). The meaning of this statement all hinges on the meaning of the word ‘awe’ to the translator. Did translator Evans Wentz imply here the modern, popular or demotic, use of the word to mean only wondrous and beautiful, as in ‘awesome’? The Oxford Essential Dictionary defines the word awe as “reverential fear or wonder”, but the juxtaposition of the word ‘terror’ seems to imply that it is the ‘fear’ part of the word which is to be avoided (Dictionary 38). The Tibetan Book of the Dead elucidates what should be feared as well as what, it seems implied, should be revered:
“a light of dull green colour from the (wrathful ones) proceed from the cause of feeling of jealousy, coming side by side with the Wisdom Rays, will shine upon thee. Meditate upon it with impartiality- niether with repulsion nor attraction. Be not fond of it… At that time fear not the glorious and transparent, radiant and dazzling green light, but know it to be Wisdom” (Bardo Thodol 117).
Much of The Tibetan Book of the Dead deals with the appearance of lights to the deceased. It seems that some of these lights, particularly the dull ones, rising from negative reactions, are not to be held with fondness. The Book of the Dead also tells us to merge with other lights, the more clear and luminous ones, and that this is the way to liberation. In fact, the whole book is a repetition of this same process, because most souls don’t accept the first clear light they see, but withdraw from it in fear. The book tells us that “because of the power of bad karma, the glorious blue light of the wisdom… will produce in thee fear and terror and thou wilt wish to flee from it,” residing with other illusory, though less ‘clear’ or ‘pure’ lights (106). This, we are told, “is an interruption to obstruct thee on the path to liberation” (107). Therefore, while The Tibetan Book of the Dead tells us that we shouldn’t be terrified, it seems that reverence is implicit when the bright lights of wisdom are being described as being “shining… glorious,” and “dazzling,” or, “so radiant that thou wilt scarcely be able to look at it” (106). This reverence then, would be reverence for illusion, because all the things the dead man sees are illusions. Some of them are good, “issuing from (his) own heart, being (either) a product of thine own pure love” or, in the case of the wrathful ones and terrifying ‘duller’ lights, jealousy and fear (121). These ‘wrathful ones’ and lights are embodiments of one’s own inner negativity, and seek to encourage negative feelings in the dead man in order to scare him from Liberation (143).
The Lost Ghosts
Mussert and Maloy are both rather unpleasant dead men, both having unhappy illusions because that’s what their mind creates for them. While Malloy is stern, unhappy and cruel, Mussert is a sort of spineless recluse. They are the souls who have not yet recognized the light, have not achieved “liberation through recognition” of the light, and they instead become confused (Book of the Dead 97). They occupy the state “when the consciousness-principle getteth outside the body” where they “sayeth to (themselves) ‘am I dead, or am I not dead?’ (and they) cannot determine” (98). In ‘low brow’ terms, their stuck in the bardo between life and death, a state similar to that of Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense.
One way the fact of their death is shown, is their lack of association with the body from whence their ‘consciousness principles’ have departed. Malloy forgets his physical ailments. He cannot remember which of his legs is the stiff one, sometimes forgetting that he had a stiff leg at all when in a ‘real,’ living or non-liminal, state the pain alone ought to be enough to remind him (Malloy 38). In his confusion he not only forgets his name and the name of his mother, but actually thinks he is someone else, claiming, “if ever I stoop, forgetting who I am, or kneel, make no mistake, it will not be me, but another” (37). He also states that he only consumes six quarts of beer a week, though before he forgets his name, he also says that he “quite like(s) getting drunk” (112, 37). In his confusion, fearful of recognizing his state of existence, he is clinging to a life that is gone. “Mostly I just staid, in my jar, which new neither seasons nor gardens” he says, possibly referencing an urn,
“but in there you have to be careful, ask yourself questions, as for example whether you still are, and if no when it stopped, and if yes how long it will still go on, anything at all to keep you from loosing the thread of the dream” (49).
Nooteboom leaves much less to argue against the fact of his hero’s death, as his hero even meets with a woman who had previously died in the novel, telling stories of what he remembered as they discover his corpse (Nooteboom 114-115). The hero, like Malloy, also undergoes disassociation with his body and the body of other spirits around him, saying that:
“our bodies seemed undecided as to whether they really wanted to be there; I had seldom seen a group of people with so much missing…shoulders, feet disappeared from view, but our eyes were not in the least disconcerted… sought out the eyes of others as if thereby to exorcise the threat of wholesale disappearance” (Nooteboom 102)
In the beginning, both Malloy and Mussert are incapable of accepting what has happened to them. This is much because they couldn’t accept their own lives while they had them, the ‘conditions of life,’ that is to say, their place in “the link between killing, mating, eating, changing –the voracious, serrated chain that is life” (41). Mussert says himself that, “one probably can’t become enthusiastic unless one already partly consists of… plastic oneself, and no longer believes in the existence of free will” (12). This is to say that one must be pliable and acceptant of fate (even when it disagrees with our ability to free choice) in order to feel the kind of reverence we spoke of earlier, in either death or life. It is this lack of acceptance in Mussert which made him withdraw into bookish seclusion after the loss of his lover, claiming that “life’s a bucket of shit that keeps being added to,” and it is this lack of acceptance that makes it hard to realize his own death (44). Even though “the word goodbye is drifting in the air around (him)… (he) cant seem to catch hold of it” (44). He clings to that which is gone, his dead language and his estranged lover, and is living a kind of half-life long before he is dead.
Malloy’s problems with death also reflect his problems with life. Malloy does not reject death due to love of life. He hates life and God alike. He, like Musset, cannot accept one or more of life’s conditions, and so whines with a “daily longing for the earth to swallow (him) up” (81). But his negativity toward life exists within him, not life itself, for he holds death with equal aversion. He says, “the confusion of my ideas on the subject of death was such that I sometimes wondered… if it wasn’t a state of being even worse than life… I found it natural not to rush into it” (68). For him life and death are equally dreaded, it is “misery to stay, misery to go” (42).
Malloy’s problem is that he doesn’t recognize, “The Clear Light of Pure Reality,” and “(his) present intellect, in real nature void… (are) the very Reality, The All Good” (Tibetan Book of Dead 95). He even speaks once of a light, an “alien light which must have once been (his),” and then again, of a “kind of clawing towards a light and countenance (he) could not name, that (he) had once known and long denied” (42, 148). He could not, at first, acknowledge that the radiant light is one with he himself, or that “love is in the lover”, so he worries over trifles such as whether or not he had ever known true love if it so happened he was partaking in anal sex, instead of vaginal, or if having a beer before communion made the rite worthless (Nooteboom 51, Molloy 57).
The Setting to Face
Malloy is less trained in the art of “the setting face to face” process (or mental maneuver) necessary for a smooth, quick liberation (Book of Dead 95). He does, however, come upon some realizations about the illusory state of the death bardo, in which he may be said to be trapped. He states, “it is at the mercy of these sensations, which happily I know to be illusory, that I have to live and work” (Malloy 111). He finally begins to see that the whole story, lights and all, are a product of his mind. “For who could have spoken to me of Molloy,” he asks himself, “if not myself, and to whom if not myself could I have spoken of him?” (112). Here Beckett shows that this man’s ghost is finally beginning to merge with the unformed, or Dharma Kaya, a state which is identified by the radiant, clear light. Nonetheless, Malloy begins his story again, in obeisance with TS Elliot’s dictum, right where he began. But instead of “know(ing) it for the first time”, he seems to live out his death loop much the same anguish, never to cease what the Book of the Dead calls the “intense illusion” that causes us to “wander in samsara,” ceaselessly tortured, incapable of “abandonment of hallucinatory fear, awe and terror” (Elliot 59, Book of Dead 201). Here chooses the samsaric loop over liberation, saying that “to see yourself doing the same thing over and over again fills you with satisfaction” (Molloy 133).
Mussert, perhaps because of his knowledge of transformation gleaned from Ovid, is much more familiar and competent with this process than Malloy. He draws on his knowledge from Maria’s class on the dead rat providing a habitat for birthing beetles to help him understand that “everything is connected with love” (Noteboom 41). He uses this knowledge, channeling bravery from Socrates, to accept his death, though unlike Socrates, he has no illusions to immortality (91).
Then, as his life story closes at the end of the second half of the book, Mussert begins to see his union with the clear light and everything. He recognizes that he is like a pilgrim, revisiting the sites of his life and says, “like the lights in the city below I would descend to the river, the broad, secret stream of darkness, above which dancing lights traced their course, fluorescent letters on a blackboard” (55). He “let(s) go of the rail… let(s) go of everything” including Beckett’s “thread of the dream” (Nooteboom 115, Malloy 49). He finally embraces “the euphoria of farewell,” (114). In terms of the Book of the Dead, Mussert tells an illusory story, “caus(ing his) naked consciousness to be recognized as the Clear Light…” so that he, “becometh permanently united with the Dharma Kaya (so that) Liberation will be certain” ( Book of the Dead 97). Unlike Malloy, who uses his false story-telling mostly to torture himself, Mussert’s story of illusory memories and boat rides serve to set him free, in much the way the self manifested illusions of the bardo can. Through this ‘mysterious mental maneuver’ into the state of Liberation, Henry Mussert is capable of forgetting his aversion to kitsch, allowing “the most pedestrian details (to speak) volumes” as he accepts his death, standing at the ship’s rail listening to the beauteous riot of frogs, birds, trees… the river… all of which are illusion (95, 114).
So what?
The wisdom here is not contained in these books alone, just as this knowledge isn’t for the dead alone. These books and others from class detail the inner workings of the alchemical, ‘mysterious mental maneuver’ required to change that which we do not wish to bear into beauty, as gold is seduced form lead.
Mussert’s emergence from seclusion into acceptance, or the pure unformed mind, is like the emergence of Molloy from his imprisoning jar of denial. It is a mental maneuver, “like a crumbling of all that ha(s) always protected (one) from all (one) was always condemned to be” (Molloy 148). This acceptance is a necessary component to the mental maneuver which allows us to see everything as a passing illusion whose only purpose is to be enjoyed, Nirvana. As our minds draw near to Dharma Kaya, the divine unformed, we see the world, life and death as just this sort of illusion. Not an illusion to be destroyed or hated, but to accept and, sometimes even revere. Perhaps it is Prospero, master illusionist, who illustrated it best when, at the end of The Tempest, the illusory happenings of the play having expired, he walks to the audience and says to them that the work of all this stage magic, like the story crafting of Haroun’s father, was merely to please the audience and nothing more (Tempest 163).
Carl Jung, in a forward to another sacred Tibetan text, said that “in Buddhism, we shall inevitably find that… opposites condition one another, that they are really one and the same thing” (Jung xiv). Therefore, life and death, to the liberated Buddhas, are the same. “The fire and the rose are one,” because “time future and time past are eternally present” (Elliot 59, 13). Therefore, Mussert’s final acceptance of death and love of the world can also be applied to life. For as Nooteboom says, “we are both present here, still” and we have the choice to affirm or deny our existence (Nooteboom 57). We still have time, while living, to follow the wisdom of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and hold all things, as illusion whose essence emanates from the beauteous clear light which is essentially our own, purest selves.
“And so we seemed to belong only to the water, two light-headed fools among the workers, fools who were not part of the real world, but of the sun stabbing the water, the wind tugging at her dress” (Nooteboom 55).
“The All-Good Father and the All-Good Mother, the Great ancestors of all the Buddhas… The Divine Father and the Divine Mother, also will come to shine. These forty-two, perfectly endowed deities, issuing from within thy heart, being the product of thine own pure love, will come to shine. Know them…. These realms are not come from somewhere outside (thyself). They come from within the four divisions of thy heart” (Book of the Dead 121).
Bibliography
1. The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Ed. W. Y. Evans-Wentz. London: Oxford University Press, 1927.
2. Jung (commentary). The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation. Ed. W. Y. Evans-Wentz. London: Oxford University Press, 1954.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Friday, April 16, 2010
Mental manuever
In the book of the dead, there is allot of emphasis on the ghost of the deceased remembering that all the things he sees are emmations of his own true mind, and the implication is that this applies to those who live as well, especially because a ghost trapped in the Bardo might not even know it is dead, exampled in the low brow "Sixth Sense" movie.
This is something I wrote awhile back, trying to describe this kind of state of mind, the transition out of one state into another, out of egoism into oneness, in this case.
Sacred night that lasts too long, and in the morning frantic buzzing and looking out windows at a rising sun to loud rock and roll with the neighbors all tossing and turning and wishing somewhere that you’d die or move out.
Given time, both these hopes will come to fruition.
Its too small in this house, where thoughts gain in urgency and the ceiling presses down on me leeringly.
I have a bad neck. My feet are flat. My lungs are weaker than most and yet I fill them with smoke and cough throughout the winter. I am loud when drunk. I cannot stand the empty boredom but rush to fill the space with a thousand trivialities, complicating my life to no result, signifying nothing. In the end, there is only tears and even these are a poor expression of how I feel. Now is the time, here in this hour, with the cat piss stinking socks and the barn wood swirling truths, let me hold my hatred from a distance, laugh at it and rise above it not through its destruction but its castration as a pastime, a joke, another triviality.
I passed a bush cloaked in rough draperies of ragged bark, dappled in green gray moss that clung to life in the winter cold. The bush stood out before me, impressed its silhouette upon me so that I saw it etched across my face, and at once it was as though it were growing from a sapling right before my eyes. It’s darkened silhouette shot up from the ground and splintered outward into frantic tendrils sheathed in sky. And I was those tendrils, a spiritual copulation and commingling of high and low, a metaphysical awareness that all things were essentially all other things, and that their inter relatedness made their borders and boundaries stale, hollow, obsolete, cold...
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew tree are one.
Can you keep track of my tenses?
This is something I wrote awhile back, trying to describe this kind of state of mind, the transition out of one state into another, out of egoism into oneness, in this case.
Sacred night that lasts too long, and in the morning frantic buzzing and looking out windows at a rising sun to loud rock and roll with the neighbors all tossing and turning and wishing somewhere that you’d die or move out.
Given time, both these hopes will come to fruition.
Its too small in this house, where thoughts gain in urgency and the ceiling presses down on me leeringly.
I have a bad neck. My feet are flat. My lungs are weaker than most and yet I fill them with smoke and cough throughout the winter. I am loud when drunk. I cannot stand the empty boredom but rush to fill the space with a thousand trivialities, complicating my life to no result, signifying nothing. In the end, there is only tears and even these are a poor expression of how I feel. Now is the time, here in this hour, with the cat piss stinking socks and the barn wood swirling truths, let me hold my hatred from a distance, laugh at it and rise above it not through its destruction but its castration as a pastime, a joke, another triviality.
I passed a bush cloaked in rough draperies of ragged bark, dappled in green gray moss that clung to life in the winter cold. The bush stood out before me, impressed its silhouette upon me so that I saw it etched across my face, and at once it was as though it were growing from a sapling right before my eyes. It’s darkened silhouette shot up from the ground and splintered outward into frantic tendrils sheathed in sky. And I was those tendrils, a spiritual copulation and commingling of high and low, a metaphysical awareness that all things were essentially all other things, and that their inter relatedness made their borders and boundaries stale, hollow, obsolete, cold...
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew tree are one.
Can you keep track of my tenses?
Friday, April 9, 2010
Paper Ideas
Okay, not totally sure yet.
But I'm thinking about this:
The God of reason is usually equated with the sun. This is how Apollo is talked about in Nietzsche (in contrast to Dionysus) and Jesus is often shown in the center of the sun, playing on the pun in English. Blake's creator god was also shown in the center of the sun with his compass in hand, measuring out the dimensions of the universe.
So, if the world of God, dualistically seen as seperate from this world, is the world of light and reason, then this world is the world of darkness, where we see with our vegetable forms, and according to Plato and Blake, we miss the bigger picture.
Elliot says, to let the dark come upon us, and that this is the way to discovery. He also says that the way up is the way down. So, if we can truly be here we will finally acheive the mysterious mental manuever of snatching the Kingdom of God from out the sky and slamming it down to earth: making it real and manifest in all things, because all things are contained here, in the rose: "a lifetime burning in every moment."
When we know this we have gnosis, recognizing the God Abraxas within us and without (with the double meaning of 'outside' and 'lacking'). Perhaps then we can know the wheel from the immovable hub, recognizing the unity of plerosis and kenosis, the yew tree and the rose. After that, Malloy and Mussert (both ghosts trapped in the illusion of the bardo, clinging to the past) can let go, see the remnants of the past in the present and fade, fade, fade away...
But I'm thinking about this:
The God of reason is usually equated with the sun. This is how Apollo is talked about in Nietzsche (in contrast to Dionysus) and Jesus is often shown in the center of the sun, playing on the pun in English. Blake's creator god was also shown in the center of the sun with his compass in hand, measuring out the dimensions of the universe.
So, if the world of God, dualistically seen as seperate from this world, is the world of light and reason, then this world is the world of darkness, where we see with our vegetable forms, and according to Plato and Blake, we miss the bigger picture.
Elliot says, to let the dark come upon us, and that this is the way to discovery. He also says that the way up is the way down. So, if we can truly be here we will finally acheive the mysterious mental manuever of snatching the Kingdom of God from out the sky and slamming it down to earth: making it real and manifest in all things, because all things are contained here, in the rose: "a lifetime burning in every moment."
When we know this we have gnosis, recognizing the God Abraxas within us and without (with the double meaning of 'outside' and 'lacking'). Perhaps then we can know the wheel from the immovable hub, recognizing the unity of plerosis and kenosis, the yew tree and the rose. After that, Malloy and Mussert (both ghosts trapped in the illusion of the bardo, clinging to the past) can let go, see the remnants of the past in the present and fade, fade, fade away...
Mussert: prophet or putz?
I read James' blog about how Mussert is never really living and, to paraphrase "let one girl ruin his entire life."
I hadn't really thought of loathing the character, myself. Actually, I liked him, even found his bookish, sort of nerdy refusal to leave home, kind of endearing in a pathetic kind of way.
I did, however, see his problem with clinging to things which are already gone, or dead, his love life the former and latin and himself being the later.
BOth of my roommates have now enjoyed the book, after my ranting about it for an entire weekend, and they had some things to say on the subject.
Roommate 1:"He's such a self serving, snide little fuck."
"Snide?" I said, "Fuck?"
"At some point he even says he's practiced the art of getting people to leave him alone by using big words..."
"I remember that"
Roommate 2: "He makes fun of that chick's husband for being athletic just because he loathes the world outside his apartment."
Roommate 1: "Yea, I think she even says that he could stand a couple of situps."
"But he fades into universal oneness, embraces all casts all faces and all nations (to quote Wu Tang) and ascends to the level of the acceptant dead where there are all those colors and then the one, radiant, white light!"
Roommate 1: "Yea... but he's a fucker."
"???"
"Look, the fact that the one thing in his whole life he wants to spend any time thinking about is this brief affair with some woman, the climax of which is him tearing through playground, getting his ass beat by her husband only so that he can go into a depression because DIndia dies and he could never admit to himself that he found her attractive..."
So there you have it. It seems allot of people sort of hate Mussert. The man deffinetely has (had?) some problems, but I dont know. Does anyone else want to weigh in on this one? How did you like Mussert as a person? As a narrator?
I hadn't really thought of loathing the character, myself. Actually, I liked him, even found his bookish, sort of nerdy refusal to leave home, kind of endearing in a pathetic kind of way.
I did, however, see his problem with clinging to things which are already gone, or dead, his love life the former and latin and himself being the later.
BOth of my roommates have now enjoyed the book, after my ranting about it for an entire weekend, and they had some things to say on the subject.
Roommate 1:"He's such a self serving, snide little fuck."
"Snide?" I said, "Fuck?"
"At some point he even says he's practiced the art of getting people to leave him alone by using big words..."
"I remember that"
Roommate 2: "He makes fun of that chick's husband for being athletic just because he loathes the world outside his apartment."
Roommate 1: "Yea, I think she even says that he could stand a couple of situps."
"But he fades into universal oneness, embraces all casts all faces and all nations (to quote Wu Tang) and ascends to the level of the acceptant dead where there are all those colors and then the one, radiant, white light!"
Roommate 1: "Yea... but he's a fucker."
"???"
"Look, the fact that the one thing in his whole life he wants to spend any time thinking about is this brief affair with some woman, the climax of which is him tearing through playground, getting his ass beat by her husband only so that he can go into a depression because DIndia dies and he could never admit to himself that he found her attractive..."
So there you have it. It seems allot of people sort of hate Mussert. The man deffinetely has (had?) some problems, but I dont know. Does anyone else want to weigh in on this one? How did you like Mussert as a person? As a narrator?
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Christina's blog is off the chain!
Allright, as far as most influential blog overall, this is hard, one because they all offer so much and two because I, sadly, have not been really aware of all of them very long. Technology! A computer! -NOw there's something you can throw, Christina.
ANd with that I will say that, right now, the most influential blog I see is Christina's. Her blog on "THe three hour tour" in responce to what Sexton said about having only three hours to live, serves as a kind of reminder to me. NOt a reminder of my 'truest self' but of the state of illumination in general.
Shw writes:
"Even now, as I have no idea when my end (beginning??) will be, I have a sense of taking everything into myself. I used to be obsessed with the idea of capturing all the....beauty....the value of this world"
And I have known this feeling. Back before what I lovingly refer to as my own personal descent from grace, I experienced a period in which I shunned friends and social gathering, not from fear or lack of love, but for certain alchemical practices whereby I might have caught the burning embers of hell within my hand and cried out to the ebbing tounges of flame and called them roses.
I sat beneath a mulberry tree nightly, pouring all my attention into it, then focusing for long periods on putting all my attention into nothing: pointlessness, I would even sometimes walk the four acres of our ranch, in mimesis of the Islamic journey to Mecca, counting out three small steps before enacting a three part bow.
In this slow pointlessness I felt I could truly percieve the world.
She writes:
"It was, rather, a certain process. I would be struck by something....the exact light of a tree-branch lit by a street lamp....the quality of the sound of a single drop falling from an icicle into a mud puddle...the divinely infinite reflection of the sky on a street wet from recent rains. Rather than seek to capture it, memorize it, assimilate that vision into myself, I would identify it. I would give it the time and the attention it deserved in that moment, and having paid that spark what it was owed, I let it go."
In this state, the state of actual and raw experience, perhaps a portion of this is what Lear meant by "the thing itself" or 'the bare forked animal", we do not need to fit things into philosophies, capture with images or words, or even think a damn thing. This is Malloy sucking stones, but not in the kind of frenzied or obsessive sense, but a revrential sense of the innanity of life, the awareness expressed, not by Malloy, but by Beckett, who is aware of the whole P2c2E, creates it, spins it as a yarn out of nothing. He knows who malloy is, even if malloy doesn't, and we know who we are when we prostrate ourselves before the beautiful, take arms against despair and lift our hands to the sky.
Yes, this is not just personal realization, but apotheosis, a joining with the highest forces of the universe that exist behind the veil, bursting through the cracks with a radiance we only sometimes are capable of noticing.
But I see another parrallel here, and it is maybe less universal.
You see, I too would concern myself greatly with rather or not I was living fully, and would make sure my practices and secret rites were performed nightly, for the cult of Apollo was never my bag, and I would chastise myself if I missed a night for it constituted a lack of fidelity to the devine -the adultury against the holy by entering into the worldy that our Hebrew brothers spoke of.
At some point my practice wained, and I told myself that my impulses, all of them, were part of this world I was lifting.
I stopped being so goddamned highbrow in my practice of enjoying very mundane, or lowbrow, points of beauty in the world.
I accepted my impulses and in many ways became more whole for it. But this acceptance gradualy dimmed my radiant eyes, the edge of my knife grew duller, and in this spirituality I see the notion of the wheel of fortune. Samsara. Auroboros, or the more recent name: the eternal return.
Have any of you ever read THe Devine INvasion, by Phillip K Dick?
In it, a boy is born of Yahwey, who, in an attempt to avoid the satanic and tyranical government on earth, has been hiding out on a distant planet. The boy is Yahwey's spirit, or at least a part of him, and he is always saying that he "has come to bring a sword." That is, he is sick of that which is unholy in the world and wishes to bring about its destruction. But when he spends more time with a young woman, who is another devine emanation or aeon, he learns that all things are one. They see the beauty in all things, the most transcendent state. But then they even understand the purpose of the devil, and though they have locked him up, he turns into a cutesy wootsey little goat that they pick up out of the cage and admire. Her they are echoing Lao Tsu's idea that 'the high rest upon the low' or Jesus' idea that the kingdom of heaven is when the high becomes the low, and that this is the true kingdom of god. Of course when this happens satan escapes that he might again sow distrust and anguish in the hearts of men, leading to despotism, tyranny and another turn of the wheel.
ANd with that I will say that, right now, the most influential blog I see is Christina's. Her blog on "THe three hour tour" in responce to what Sexton said about having only three hours to live, serves as a kind of reminder to me. NOt a reminder of my 'truest self' but of the state of illumination in general.
Shw writes:
"Even now, as I have no idea when my end (beginning??) will be, I have a sense of taking everything into myself. I used to be obsessed with the idea of capturing all the....beauty....the value of this world"
And I have known this feeling. Back before what I lovingly refer to as my own personal descent from grace, I experienced a period in which I shunned friends and social gathering, not from fear or lack of love, but for certain alchemical practices whereby I might have caught the burning embers of hell within my hand and cried out to the ebbing tounges of flame and called them roses.
I sat beneath a mulberry tree nightly, pouring all my attention into it, then focusing for long periods on putting all my attention into nothing: pointlessness, I would even sometimes walk the four acres of our ranch, in mimesis of the Islamic journey to Mecca, counting out three small steps before enacting a three part bow.
In this slow pointlessness I felt I could truly percieve the world.
She writes:
"It was, rather, a certain process. I would be struck by something....the exact light of a tree-branch lit by a street lamp....the quality of the sound of a single drop falling from an icicle into a mud puddle...the divinely infinite reflection of the sky on a street wet from recent rains. Rather than seek to capture it, memorize it, assimilate that vision into myself, I would identify it. I would give it the time and the attention it deserved in that moment, and having paid that spark what it was owed, I let it go."
In this state, the state of actual and raw experience, perhaps a portion of this is what Lear meant by "the thing itself" or 'the bare forked animal", we do not need to fit things into philosophies, capture with images or words, or even think a damn thing. This is Malloy sucking stones, but not in the kind of frenzied or obsessive sense, but a revrential sense of the innanity of life, the awareness expressed, not by Malloy, but by Beckett, who is aware of the whole P2c2E, creates it, spins it as a yarn out of nothing. He knows who malloy is, even if malloy doesn't, and we know who we are when we prostrate ourselves before the beautiful, take arms against despair and lift our hands to the sky.
Yes, this is not just personal realization, but apotheosis, a joining with the highest forces of the universe that exist behind the veil, bursting through the cracks with a radiance we only sometimes are capable of noticing.
But I see another parrallel here, and it is maybe less universal.
You see, I too would concern myself greatly with rather or not I was living fully, and would make sure my practices and secret rites were performed nightly, for the cult of Apollo was never my bag, and I would chastise myself if I missed a night for it constituted a lack of fidelity to the devine -the adultury against the holy by entering into the worldy that our Hebrew brothers spoke of.
At some point my practice wained, and I told myself that my impulses, all of them, were part of this world I was lifting.
I stopped being so goddamned highbrow in my practice of enjoying very mundane, or lowbrow, points of beauty in the world.
I accepted my impulses and in many ways became more whole for it. But this acceptance gradualy dimmed my radiant eyes, the edge of my knife grew duller, and in this spirituality I see the notion of the wheel of fortune. Samsara. Auroboros, or the more recent name: the eternal return.
Have any of you ever read THe Devine INvasion, by Phillip K Dick?
In it, a boy is born of Yahwey, who, in an attempt to avoid the satanic and tyranical government on earth, has been hiding out on a distant planet. The boy is Yahwey's spirit, or at least a part of him, and he is always saying that he "has come to bring a sword." That is, he is sick of that which is unholy in the world and wishes to bring about its destruction. But when he spends more time with a young woman, who is another devine emanation or aeon, he learns that all things are one. They see the beauty in all things, the most transcendent state. But then they even understand the purpose of the devil, and though they have locked him up, he turns into a cutesy wootsey little goat that they pick up out of the cage and admire. Her they are echoing Lao Tsu's idea that 'the high rest upon the low' or Jesus' idea that the kingdom of heaven is when the high becomes the low, and that this is the true kingdom of god. Of course when this happens satan escapes that he might again sow distrust and anguish in the hearts of men, leading to despotism, tyranny and another turn of the wheel.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Alchemy, Gnosticism, Noteboom...
In Alchemy it was thought that purification through heat could turn base metals to gold. Some of the ancients also thought heavy metals like mercury could purify the body. Now we know they cause insanity. But there are still things we can learn from these ancient poetic expresions of truth. Though they are not always acurate representations of the world in a scientific sense, they are expressions of human thought, and metaphors for spiritual journey.
ever noticed when you salvage a bunch of pallets for a bonfire that the only thing recognizable from its original shape are the nails? The strongest, heartiest thing? Maybe our souls are like that, maybe they are as Plato says, indestructable, immutably pure and unhindered by the physical constraints the gnostics believed to be the cause of all our suffering, distraction etc. So should we all jump into a blazing inferno to dwell with the gods? No. Such a simplification is necesary in dualistic thought perhaps, but not in the modern world and not in Noteboom.
Noteboom knows the theories of transmutation and migration of the soul but will not leave off without giving us a modern interpretation of them. He denies an everlasting soul, claiming rather that his body will merge with all things, his illusory barriers seperating self from other will come down. He will nourish soil. He will feed crops with his cropse corpse.
Zach has an awesome blog in which he speaks on the pain of living, and compares the world to the matrix but is the point of alchemy really 'self knowledge', as in knowledge of the seeker, as apart form the world? Or is it harmonization with the world soul, all existence, including the physical parts, though the gnostics saw this as the part to be transcended, it is after all, the only part we pretend to be sure of, and likely the part that these spirit worlds are mirroring. And hey, wouldn't this kind of thinking transform the painful, changing world of birth and death into something beautiful, like turning lead to gold?
So, as relates to dualism in Nihlism, do we really need to condemn the physical world in which we live in order to reach a higher state of conciousness? Noteboom says no. In The Folowing Story we see that the alchemical purification is not a redemption that hates life (as is necesary under the tennents of dualism), but a union of life's ever changing forms under the recognition of it as a totality: the One God who, in gnosticism, was formed of 'profundity' and 'silence.' like the disapearance of the boat passenger's bodies (all but the eyes).
Ha!, speaking on the original God being silence: Word, according to wiki's article on gnosticism and aeons, dosn't even exist until its partner, man. So if you are looking for the language of the gods, and wish to eschew that of the demotic look no further, just shut the fuck up.
Fade like Noteboom.
And in twenty minutes, when doctor Sexton comes in with a gun, and asks you what you used your last moments on earth for, tell him you put your shoes away...
This acceptance of death is unltimately an acceptance of the conditions of life, of life itself. And I think that this is a spiritual version of the adaptations found in nature. These adaptations, Zach says: "allows for the perfect pattern of overlapping web of self-fulfillment. Everywhere in the world is found beautiful harmony, where one plant or animal has learned to live with and thrive off of the achievements of another species through a perfect expressive dance of love and sex and birth and death."
That being said, I will now be silent as the God, follow my own advice, shut up, crawl into bed and join the realm where all things are one because all of our language is, yes, I'm saying it, some six hundred pages of demotic drible... are dream interpreters and Joycean scholars alchemists?
ever noticed when you salvage a bunch of pallets for a bonfire that the only thing recognizable from its original shape are the nails? The strongest, heartiest thing? Maybe our souls are like that, maybe they are as Plato says, indestructable, immutably pure and unhindered by the physical constraints the gnostics believed to be the cause of all our suffering, distraction etc. So should we all jump into a blazing inferno to dwell with the gods? No. Such a simplification is necesary in dualistic thought perhaps, but not in the modern world and not in Noteboom.
Noteboom knows the theories of transmutation and migration of the soul but will not leave off without giving us a modern interpretation of them. He denies an everlasting soul, claiming rather that his body will merge with all things, his illusory barriers seperating self from other will come down. He will nourish soil. He will feed crops with his cropse corpse.
Zach has an awesome blog in which he speaks on the pain of living, and compares the world to the matrix but is the point of alchemy really 'self knowledge', as in knowledge of the seeker, as apart form the world? Or is it harmonization with the world soul, all existence, including the physical parts, though the gnostics saw this as the part to be transcended, it is after all, the only part we pretend to be sure of, and likely the part that these spirit worlds are mirroring. And hey, wouldn't this kind of thinking transform the painful, changing world of birth and death into something beautiful, like turning lead to gold?
So, as relates to dualism in Nihlism, do we really need to condemn the physical world in which we live in order to reach a higher state of conciousness? Noteboom says no. In The Folowing Story we see that the alchemical purification is not a redemption that hates life (as is necesary under the tennents of dualism), but a union of life's ever changing forms under the recognition of it as a totality: the One God who, in gnosticism, was formed of 'profundity' and 'silence.' like the disapearance of the boat passenger's bodies (all but the eyes).
Ha!, speaking on the original God being silence: Word, according to wiki's article on gnosticism and aeons, dosn't even exist until its partner, man. So if you are looking for the language of the gods, and wish to eschew that of the demotic look no further, just shut the fuck up.
Fade like Noteboom.
And in twenty minutes, when doctor Sexton comes in with a gun, and asks you what you used your last moments on earth for, tell him you put your shoes away...
This acceptance of death is unltimately an acceptance of the conditions of life, of life itself. And I think that this is a spiritual version of the adaptations found in nature. These adaptations, Zach says: "allows for the perfect pattern of overlapping web of self-fulfillment. Everywhere in the world is found beautiful harmony, where one plant or animal has learned to live with and thrive off of the achievements of another species through a perfect expressive dance of love and sex and birth and death."
That being said, I will now be silent as the God, follow my own advice, shut up, crawl into bed and join the realm where all things are one because all of our language is, yes, I'm saying it, some six hundred pages of demotic drible... are dream interpreters and Joycean scholars alchemists?
Monday, March 29, 2010
los drugas
Orsi makes a great point about drugs and how they are not neccesarily needed. The evidence that shaman/ vision seekers and mystics from each and every spiritual tradition have messed with whatever it was around that could introduce their minds to another state of being, often perceived as a different 'realm.' The Arabs ate hash, the Scythians smoked pot, avinida muscaria for everybody in Europe (there is even a picture of this mushroom on a fresco from Rome titled, 'the tree of life', so yea, maybe even Jesus was a shroom-head)... search for images on google.
But some Buddhist sects purport similar states of conciousnes just from sitting still for hours on end, and when the Lakota Suoix wanted to talk to the spirits they deprived themselves of sleep and sweated intensely, and when the Celts wanted to divine their next king they ate pounds of raw meat! Im sure, sleep deprivation and food poisoning can make you trip balls, probably the same state Mohamad was in (drug induced or not) when he ascended to heaven on the dome of the rock.
BUt what about just staying still and meditating? Could it be that when we merely stop distracting ourselves that we emerge into a kind of conciousnes not bound by normal rational rules of nature, but ones of symbolism, like those of the spirit world?
I think it is so, that we can all reach the prophetic state that Blake was so fond of, and, like Dorothy, we only need what we have to get us there -but dont make a drug your only ticket, that leads to a kind of spiritually justified dependence. And none of the ancients thought increased dependence on corporeal things was any good.
Instead, we ought to see stressed importance on drugs in spirituality as a kind of bastardization of a revolutionary state of mind, a castration of spirituality into the eunuch of blind consumerism. Borring. Dull. Predictable. But most importantly, and in the style of the water genie: sterile, impotent, degenerate, non-creative, lacking in: rigor, virility, potency, vitality, vigor, semen/vaginal fluid.
Hippies...
;)just kidding, not all of you.
But some Buddhist sects purport similar states of conciousnes just from sitting still for hours on end, and when the Lakota Suoix wanted to talk to the spirits they deprived themselves of sleep and sweated intensely, and when the Celts wanted to divine their next king they ate pounds of raw meat! Im sure, sleep deprivation and food poisoning can make you trip balls, probably the same state Mohamad was in (drug induced or not) when he ascended to heaven on the dome of the rock.
BUt what about just staying still and meditating? Could it be that when we merely stop distracting ourselves that we emerge into a kind of conciousnes not bound by normal rational rules of nature, but ones of symbolism, like those of the spirit world?
I think it is so, that we can all reach the prophetic state that Blake was so fond of, and, like Dorothy, we only need what we have to get us there -but dont make a drug your only ticket, that leads to a kind of spiritually justified dependence. And none of the ancients thought increased dependence on corporeal things was any good.
Instead, we ought to see stressed importance on drugs in spirituality as a kind of bastardization of a revolutionary state of mind, a castration of spirituality into the eunuch of blind consumerism. Borring. Dull. Predictable. But most importantly, and in the style of the water genie: sterile, impotent, degenerate, non-creative, lacking in: rigor, virility, potency, vitality, vigor, semen/vaginal fluid.
Hippies...
;)just kidding, not all of you.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
