Were you aware that at one point in time the Earth had only one season? Sure, according to the Greeks that is. It was always summer and the harvest continued forever. That was until the daughter of the Mother Goddess was abducted. When Demeter, the Goddess of nature and Earth, allowed her daughter to wander off to pick flowers, Hades, God of the Underworld, took this opportunity to steal away with Persephone to the underworld and make her his bride. It was at this point that summer ended and fall began as, in her sadness, Demeter refused to allow anything to grow.
Much later, well into winter, Demeter was able to ascertain what had happened to her daughter. Hermes was dispatched and upon the rescue of Persephone, it was learned that she had eaten from the fruit of the Underworld, the Pomegranate. It was only a little though, but this married her to Hades nonetheless and made her the Queen of the Underworld. It was determined by Zeus that she could spend part of the year with her Mother on Earth, but that she must also spend one month with Hades for every pomegranate seed that she ate. Her mother, Demeter, now mourns her daughter’s descent every year to the underworld and thus nothing is allowed to grow during Persephone’s time away. Persephone has also become the guardian of Death’s secrets and cannot share with anyone that which she has learned in the underworld.
An interesting twist to this tale is that of the role that Dionysus played in it. Due to Hera’s jealousy of her husband Zeus’ cheating ways, she had the Titans persue and destroy Dionysus, the illegitimate son of Zeus. Finding and retrieving the still beating heart of his son, Zeus transformed it into a pomegranate, which Hades fed to Persephone who then became pregnant. Dionysus was born again in the Underworld and later returned to live in the light among men as the God of wine, madness, and ecstasy. There is hope, even in the fall.
I have a need to illuminate my present state. (I wish my state was more present.) I'm in the middle of a psychic drama. It is a crisis of sorts, and I became really aware of it yesterday as I was having a conversation with a Shamanthat makes house calls.
I'm currently lacking a cosmology. I, personally, don't have a "complete mythology" that infuses my world with a mystical wonder, a sense of order, and perhaps a purpose.
This really became evident in my conversation yesterday as I tried to logically solve paradox. One (likely) can't unite opposites w/ logic and the mind. And this leads into something interesting. My mind tends to see Either/Or. It is the idea of versus. James Ratte pointed this out in a response to my emotional show of attempting to kill my blog avatar, by sugessting the idea of AND. How about instead of either/or which is the path of imbalance--which is the black and the white, one moves into the grey of AND?
--Thanks James, beautiful advice.
A practice is not about the results of said practice. It is the doing. My practice is writing [obviously], and it doesn't matter what I'm writing so long as I'm writing--Which is all well and good if I didn't have this ego!!!!
I have limited time. My synchromystic pursuits take the time I could be writing fiction. I have two plays, one short story, and my novel that are all demanding attention. These won't go away, but sync compels me otherwise. . .[And then all this competes w/ my children for attention. . .]
I dressed this past Halloween as John Constantine. His opponent is the devil. Our western mind thinks in terms of versus and overcoming. Perhaps I should stop fighting the devil, and embrace and integrate this darkness that I've been fighting since late summer. It's just my unconscious after all.
Forgive me. I'm in limbo. I need to find my path and begin walking. I'm in the darkest part of the forrest, engulfed in the belly of the whale, and I'm searching for light. I'm ready to be reborn!
"Glósóli" [ˈkl̥ou̯:ˌsou̯lɪ] (Icelandic for "Glowing Sole"[1]) is a song by Sigur Rós, released as part of their 2005 album Takk... Together with "Sæglópur" it was the first single released from the album, available as a download only release on iTunes in America and Europe respectively.
The name is a combination of gló- from the verb að glóa meaning "to glow, shine, glitter" and sólimeaning "sole." The second element of the name, sóli, shares its grammatical stem with the word "sól", meaning "sun". In combination "glósóli" can be understood as a childish way of saying "glowing sun". . . Wikipedia
Should I give this post another crack after it's early fame(?) at the sync whole?
I'm a mess. I'm feeling like I'm becoming Faust. I keep going down and down this damn rabbit hole, but I know what's down there. IT IS A MIRROR. I can't even read the conspiracy shit anymore. There is no evil outside power. It is just too silly. Yes there is power, but most of the nasty shit is not conscious. Natural systems flow. They move away from obstruction and yield complex structure. There is very little design actually in this world of ours.
so?
What is truth,
and then. . .
how should one live?
--our problems?
J.C. said that we lack a complete mythology and favored one tribe--humanity.
D.Q. said civilization is our problem. (good luck there!)
E.T. thinks the next evolutionary step is buddha for all (?)
--to all be totally now. Must we become animals again and abandon our civilization, a civilization that requires thinking ahead and looking back, the enemies of the now?
A.C. --I probably don't know enough, but my understanding is that he professed that we are all gods and therefore can do what ever we want. Dan Brown agreed in his Mason lovefest, and Jay-Z postured like he was a 5%er with inside secret knowledge of the working of the universe.
M.P. thinks we can fix it all by fixing food. This means cultivating local communities and solutions.
E.O. also believes in local solutions made by local groups.
B.M. wants to limit CO2 in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million because he believes burning fossil fuels is our problem.
G.M. thinks that we really don't need stuff to display our value (cuz it already there!)
Does your path or belief system have and ending or goal? Could that be a problem? Or does that order one's life and gives it its meaning?
--my suspicion is that if anything isn't real, it's our virtual lives. What am I doing broadcasting all my synchronicity? This is the devil, right? It is selfish of me to [w]hole-up as much as I do. I don't want to be a shaman. I'm creating a record of my mind, but to what end? I don't believe in the ascension. I can't do that. My messiah is Charlie Brown. We are not special.
So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen.
But I must say that I'm getting very strong Jupiter sync lately. And as I'm a localist [now], I guess I would tell you that I read my sync microcosmically. Jake and Jim are telling me to be the father.
The sync whole is selfishness. My unconscious is continually spiting messages out to me, about ME!
People are the treasure. I have a home. I have people. I don't need to become a supertramp to learn the value of life. It feels like I'm saying goodbye?
So on Monday, I read this and then responding later that day, I had this trouble:
This was tremendous. I spent an hour this morning responding to it and ended up laying out my own complete understanding of sync--basically as close to my working philosophy of life as I could get. I even had a number of links. Then I accidentally hit "log off" when I was scrolling up to reread this great post. . . Great work guys. Why no love for Lloyd Dobbler? He is now. "I can't figure it all out tonight sir, so I'm just going to hang with your daughter."
So, a number of things have come together over my weekend. Everything has conspired in my life to try and recreate this deleted response in a more concise, poetic, and almost philosophical way.
This long winded and rambling response that I deleted mentioned Charlie Brown, the idea of not being special, the idea of Christ Consciousness and the "evolutionary" purpose of life, The Akira cult hoping for the explosion of Tetsuo, an attempt to return to the garden, the duty of the father, the scientific idea of parallel worlds, Mark Everett and his father who invented this theory, myths that reflect our modern science, changing our myths, and the German word "Jein" which both means yes & no.
It was great. Really! And then I deleted it.
Afterward, I wasn't as frustrated as I could have been. I began listening to a couple of shows from one of my favorite radio programs: Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett. She's foxy!
And her voice is super sexy! Anyway the first show I listened to interviewed "The Happiest Man In The World". It featured this great quote by Einstein:
“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
The show is great. Perfect timing too, because it addresses the questions I have. Here are some as put forth by the guest, Matthieu Ricard in his book The Quantum And The Lotus:
"Is there a solid reality behind appearances? What is the origin of the world of phenomena, the world that we see as 'real' all around us? What is the relationship between the animate and the inanimate, between the subject and the object? Do time, space, and the laws of nature really exist? Buddhist philosophers have been studying these questions for the last 2,500 years."
To continue, SOF offers a chapter from this book on their webpage: "The Universe in a Grain of Sand"
The Interdependence and Nonseparability of Phenomena
The concept of interdependence lies at the heart of the Buddhist vision of the nature of reality, and has immense implications in Buddhism regarding how we should live our lives. This concept of interdependence is strikingly similar to the concept of nonseparability in quantum physics. Both concepts lead us to ask a question that is both simple and fundamental: Can a "thing," or a "phenomenon," exist autonomously? If not, in what way and to what degree are the universe's phenomena interconnected? If things do not exist per se, what conclusions must be drawn about life?
Here are more questions the book addresses:
Did the universe have a beginning? Or is our universe one in a series of infinite universes with no end and no beginning? Is the concept of a beginning of time fundamentally flawed? Might our perception of time in fact be an illusion, a phenomenon created in our brains that has no ultimate reality? Is the stunning fine-tuning of the universe, which has produced just the right conditions for life to evolve, a sign that a “principle of creation” is at work in our world? If such a principle of creation undergirds the workings of the universe, what does that tell us about whether or not there is a divine Creator? How does the radical interpretation of reality offered by quantum physics conform to and yet differ from the Buddhist conception of reality? What is consciousness and how did it evolve? Can consciousness exist apart from a brain generating it?
So let's flip the coin and look at what I've been consumed with--The Destruction of The NaturalWorld. How do we square that?
Take this piece in The Progressive by Naomi Klein that I was reading on this morning:
So what was Sarah Palin telling us about capitalism-as-usual before she was so rudely interrupted by the meltdown? Let's first recall that before she came along, the U.S. public, at long last, was starting to come to grips with the urgency of the climate crisis, with the fact that our economic activity is at war with the planet, that radical change is needed immediately. We were actually having that conversation: Polar bears were on the cover of Newsweek magazine. And then in walked Sarah Palin. The core of her message was this: Those environmentalists, those liberals, those do-gooders are all wrong. You don't have to change anything. You don’t have to rethink anything. Keep driving your gas-guzzling car, keep going to Wal-Mart and shop all you want. The reason for that is a magical place called Alaska. Just come up here and take all you want. "Americans," she said at the Republican National Convention, "we need to produce more of our own oil and gas. Take it from a gal who knows the North Slope of Alaska, we’ve got lots of both."
And the crowd at the convention responded by chanting and chanting: "Drill, baby, drill."
Watching that scene on television, with that weird creepy mixture of sex and oil and jingoism, I remember thinking: "Wow, the RNC has turned into a rally in favor of screwing Planet Earth." Literally.
But what Palin was saying is what is built into the very DNA of capitalism: the idea that the world has no limits. She was saying that there is no such thing as consequences, or real-world deficits. Because there will always be another frontier, another Alaska, another bubble. Just move on and discover it. Tomorrow will never come.
I was also reading this though too about this gal:
Every month, a group of Ayn Rand enthusiasts get together at the Midtown Restaurant, on Fifty-fifth Street, for a discussion of Objectivism—the philosophy, expressed in Rand’s novels, that celebrates the selfish individual over the collective, and argues that laissez-faire capitalism is the only just social system.
"Falling fertility may be making poor people’s lives better, but it cannot save the Earth. That lies in our own hands."
Again though, is any of this real? And where is this going, right? I'm mean what is the point?
Exactly!!!
Last night, I read this in the tub. Really this is some of the most incredible writing that I've read in a long time. There is no design, we are here because this was the path in which the water flowed most easily. The same result can be derived from our health care system which can then inferred about life and evolution? Yeah it's complex, but designed?
Our country, enterprise, and life is completely defined by the development of the car according to the author of the piece, Rich Cohen. It really is an amazing study of America and its development through the lens of our literal "driving force".
Read this quote from the first daredevil race car driver as an indictment of where our world is headed:
"This damn thing may kill me but the records will show I was going like hell when it did."~Barney Oldfield
The Ethan Allen Highway, known on maps as Route 7, which starts in Canada, fifty miles below Québec, at the confluence of Hudson Bay and the St. Lawrence Seaway, wanders southin the distracted way ...
I love how the piece ends too:
I could end here, with Curran in his suit, behind the desk in his father’s office, a living man closed in the tomb of a pharaoh, but I prefer to end with a vision I witnessed a few days earlier, as I was leaving the Buick dealership in Wilton. Turning out of the lot, I was passed by a truck carrying, on its flatbed, a prototype of GM’s electric car, the Volt, which many believe will save the industry. It was painted marbled green and covered with stickers and writing. Though it will not reach the market until 2010, it was being shown around dealerships, where it might offer hope—a life raft on the horizon. Passing above the used Malibus and Cobalts and Aveos, some blue, some gray, all dirty, the Volt looked like a young Buddha, the boy-child reincarnation of an ancient lama soul, raised on outstretched hands above the troubles of this world.
So? Before bed last night, I was corresponding with a young, sweet girl about "life". She has only questions and no answers(she's 21), and that's pretty much right and it. But anyway, I came up with a better, more concise response to the initial blog post that began this whole deal as well a response to this girl's questions. It is not an answer, but maybe a path? And it makes sense to me right now.
Know that everything you do is one continuous mistake and absolutely perfect. You are where you are, but you have the power to stay, or go, or just be. "Do what thou wilt", but know that you aren't the only person in this world, and thus without charity, it’s worthless. The medium is the message.
Abe's Axe is a symbol. Like the firey wand of Hermes, it is the conduit for bringing into action manifestations from the creative imagination. He is not killing vampires so much as freeing living dead men. The great emancipator would like to bring you into the 4th dimension of consciousness. He is going to have to kill you to do this, though. Or, actually, just annihilate your ego to transport you. In this instance, his axe is the craft. A craft is both a transport and a skill. The magician's wand is both. A pen can be mightier than the sword. What's your craft? Use your symbol well. . .
This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experience that can meet us.
~Rainer Maria Rilke
and where we thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god;
Joseph Campbell
Good morning Mr Magpie
One for sorrow, Two for joy, Three for a girl, Four for a boy, Five for silver, Six for gold, And seven for a secret never to be told.
