Monday, October 29, 2012

Calming The Storm


Full Moon / October 29th, 2012 / 6 degrees Taurus


"We look after nature, and we mamos see that you are killing it by what you do. We can no longer repair the world. You must. You are uprooting the earth, and we are divining to discover how to teach you to stop." -Kogi Tribe


Warning after warning, it matters not. We continue to thrive amongst our sins and spoils--truthfully so--as if our rotten deeds secured us a sacred place among the stars. And here, the illuminations given precursor a dire reality--one that has been foretold, time and time again, dutifully ignored.

Mercury speeds into the focused and impassioned Sagittarius, emerging from the depths of the great Void. He has learned much in the mystic throes of the weaponized Eagle, and returns with dark and sunken eyes.

As his vision returns, and strength fastens, the Messenger is struck by massive waves, the Ocean, at once, seemingly challenging the young god's discourse. An erupting, violent force, the storm, led by a ferocious Neptune, chastises him: "You have been beyond my reach, boy, for far too long!" 

The Winged One is smart, however. He swirls within the coming rain, and wind, and fog, dancing throughout the onslaught, the sharpness of his newly-breached sign granting him concentration to further on.

"I have come bearing gifts," he cries out, consumed by the glaring Neptune's eyes, piercing him through the clouds. "The truth is what you seek!"

"It is too late for truth," Neptune replies. "My waters are angry. My waters are cold. They seethe for justice."

"Then, allow me to deliver it," Mercury states. "They shall have it. I will direct your anger, like lightning, through the children of Earth. Send them a message, perhaps."

The storm seems to subside momentarily, as the angered, emotional Ocean God grasps his mighty trident and lunges it at Mercury, where it lands at his feet. "So be it."

As the Messenger and the Dreaming Harbinger delve into our reality, Mercury, for once, tames the great Neptune, who surges and wretches from within.

"It's just his time of the month, right?" Mercury chides to his brother Mars, the warrior having been called to assist. 

"I feel it is yet another warning," Mars replies. "Soon there will be no leash upon the Great Leviathan, and his rage will be tenfold. For now, we remain steadfast and strong, and hope this brief insight is enough. What of the Conductor and the Death Lord? What messages do you bring from the Void?"

"Ah, they remain at standstill. I have heard whispers of wars beyond dimensions, though I may have only caught a shimmer, or two, of what mysteries they unfold. It seems that they have laid down their arms, if only for a moment. Neptune's storms will subside, eventually, and the matter of life will continue. The damage will be less than unhinging."

"For now," the Warrior replies.

"For now," the Winged One repeats.

And yet, it is the Earth who is at war. The Moon rests in Taurus, charged with Pluto's destructive criticism. Our Sun, as well, tiptoeing through Scorpio, takes council with the cold, icy planet. The three remain in secret slumber, reflecting peacefully amidst the raw power that will eventually crumble our consciousness. 

Bodies begin to change. Those on Earth that remain silent, and still, in quiet meditation, notice them first. Wings sprout from the arches of the back. Some white, some black, some gloriously colored. Soon, everyone comes to know themselves in a different way.

Those who can bravely soar through the storm, up and above the heavens, and wait peacefully among the stars.



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Sunday, October 28, 2012

This Just In

Obama: "It is important for us to respond big and to respond fast [to the Frankenstorm]. We're going to cut through red tape and we're not going to get bogged down in a lot of rules." 

Alex Jones: "Obama's manipulating the weather using HAARP"

Republicans everywhere, circa Nov. 7th 2012: "Alex Jones was on to something. They stole the election using the storm as a cover for chicanery. Look, he even said so himself." 

And that was the day that Alex Jones became their prophet. He then proceeded to have a totally "sober" debate with Glenn Beck, who so totally knew that it was actually one of the many machinations of a nefarious international cabal of Masons and financiers, puppet-masters, if you will. They concluded their day by so totally NOT smoking dmt and so totally NOT talking to the clockwork elves.

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Thursday, October 25, 2012

A Fable In Six Parts





As the canopy neared the falling man, the rush of momentum was enough that he felt he’d never stop, and the ground would only continue rushing past him, layers of sediment beneath the earth parting ways—the call of gravity startling the rock and earth as a great school of fish.
Stone would shuffle apart, only ever barely missing the man’s tumbling body, until he reached the core, where he might gaze upon the fiery heart of the planet before continuing on to what could only be perceived as nothingness.
Alas, waves of air condensed around him, signifying a shift in the falling man’s imagination, preparing his body’s consciousness for fatal impact upon the very real jungle floor.
It happened instantaneously.
First, branches snapped at the struggling remains of his parachute, and he prayed statically to remain uncaught in the untamed chaos whipping around him.
His left ribs shattered from sudden contact with a thick, protruding branch, leading him to suddenly detach his chute in a desperate attempt to get out. His body spun and his back checked the long side of another tree, and he continued falling furiously through the thick, humidified air of the tropics.
The ground met him in triumph, where he landed straight and stiff as a board, just the way he was trained months before. It was bare, except for a jutting stone that caught his left shin. He felt the muscle and bone strain; thankful it was only that much. The man let out a cry of pain. His hands clutched the planet, to feel for direct embrace.
That was supposed to be the easy part, he thought.
After a few moments, sounds of the jungle resumed where they’d been startled by his sudden appearance upon the earth.


Thursday, October 18, 2012

Children & the Great Blur - On the Initiation of Childhood Innocence, by Guido Mina di Sospiro


All children suffer when they are born to varying degrees,. This is no pessimistic life-is-an-illness-with-a-terrible-prognosis-because-its-outcome-cannot-be-but-fatal rigmarole. Far from it; however, only occasionally childbirth is an entirely smooth process, and psychologists of all schools cannot stop telling parents how important it is to reassure the newborn immediately, to establish the “bond” with the mother, etc., etc. It must be owned that there is a sharp contrast between the liquid womb environment and the outer, dry world of sharp lights and loud sounds. Childbirth can indeed be seen as, or actually be, a trauma.

At any rate, after a successful delivery—let us assume it is a vaginal one, the labor has been brief and the pregnancy as devoid as the delivery of any complications— the infant is in a state which could be defined, if somebody cared to be frank about it, catatonic. It will take months for the infant to start crawling. Later on, the upright posture will be a hard-won conquest. The first vaguely articulated words will send the elated parents into ecstasy, especially when it is their first child who utters his/her first words. But the fact is, it takes and infant about three years, give or take, depending on how “precocious” he might be, to start to come out of the BLUR.

This “blur” designation1 not only sounds remarkably unscientific and unpoetic, but patronizing, which is the opposite of what I mean.

Natural sciences tell us that only humans are helpless for so prolonged a period after their birth. Mammals specifically are all quicker in getting out of the unconscious, or “blurred” state. It is a necessity of nature, lest they should fall prey to all sorts of dangers. The human child, on the other hand, is... stoned, or “blurred,” for a frightfully long period. Most parents the world over rejoice when she starts giving signs of her
coming into her own, by which they mean, her conscious state. An ancient Tamil love poem recites:

... Now that our child has learnt to play,
I feel like one who has virtues attained.

Westerners in particular seem obsessed not only by the notion of extracting the infant from the blur like a bad tooth, which is naturally understandable for in life one does need to have his wits about him—and the sooner the better—but by the far more epigenetic notion of instilling into him the largest possible dose of collective consciousness. By age eighteen, the child, now a girl or boy, will be steeped into the stagnant waters of her/his society’s canons—moral, aesthetic, religious, intellectual or otherwise. Her/his unconscious, the “blur” (s)he was born into, will have been forgotten.

Language is a great ally in this amnesiac process. In monolinguistic environments in particular, those in which the concept of translation, with all its implicit ambiguities, is an entirely foreign one, a language directs and defines the boundaries of the child’s mind. He is faced with rules at every moment, and a rational, causal approach is impressed upon him. Simply put, be it arithmetic, or English, or whatever: From A, follows B; From B, C, and so on.

Yet, it is no easy chore for the child to emerge from the blur. The blur seems to linger, with its blurring effects which the rational, modern-day medicine (wo)man (the elementary school teacher) must get rid of.2

A child’s logic—inundated by lower-order referential processes, and by a (refreshingly) “butterflylike” non sequitur structuring—bears a striking resemblance to that of some dreams.3 So does his (highly tentative) geometry, by which I mean, spatial sense. Very little Euclid to be found there to be sure. His cerebral syntax appears as though it has gone thorough a total immersion in Dadaism, while his temporal perception has very little to do with time intended as mere duration—no concept of the past or of the future, for one thing.

The child is blurred! will comment the rationalist. Let’s help him out of the blur. That is the primary, if undeclared, aim of schooling.

The child knows the secret! will utter the mystic, wondering at the seemingly uncanny prescience of the little one.

A few years ago I was fascinated by logics and, at the same time, was a happy father for the first time in my life. I couldn’t help writing down some of my child’s rejoinders, which at the time struck me as eminently illogical. Similar things were said, later on, by our other two sons, at about the same age. Also, having been for two seasons the soccer coach of two different teams belonging to two different age-groups—6-7 and 8-9—my observations might claim to be a bit more than parochial. (The teams numbered 17 and 13 players, respectively. Ethnically, the children were of diverse backgrounds. There were mainland-Chinese players, Brazilian, Cuban, Cuban-American, WASP, Italian, Mexican, etc.)

There follow some examples:

My son at 2 years, 8 months. An instance of semantic interpolation, in the guise of a
song. I sing:

“I love you dear, oh yes I do / when you’re not near me, I feel so blue...”

He replies, singing the same melody:

“I love you daddy, oh yes I do / when you’re not near me, I feel so... yellow!”

2 years, 10 months, at a restaurant. I say:

“They make wonderful fried fish here.”

My wife adds: “Their mashed potatoes are good too.”4

Our toddler, after having gulped down plain tap-water, holding the glass adds:

“They make wonderful water, here!”

Same age, early morning, our bedroom. I ask T. to brighten the room by opening the curtains. He pulls the rope connected to them downwards, but the curtains close up even more tightly. Then, instead of pulling the parallel rope so as to open them—which rope, nota bene, is the same one, looped around a pulley—he pulls the same one, but this time upwards, and gets, if awkwardly, the desired result.

His logic was actually right on target: it is illogical to presume that (in the elementary mechanistic world) one might get the opposite effect by doing the same movement. If one kicks a ball forward, such a ball goes forward. To make it go backwards, one must kick it backwards, certainly not forward. Likewise, if one has to pull downwards to shut the curtains, then one must pull upwards to open them.

2 years, 11 months. He shows me a model car of a Ferrari in 1/24 scale.

“Look daddy: if you turn the front wheels, inside the steering wheel turns too!”

3 years. T. has been pestering us for a bit too long. I ask him:

“T., please, go play in your room.” To no avail. Then I try: “T., I invite you to go play in your room.” Now, that works! (It only worked once, naturally, but the point is: the verb to invite brought pleasant associations to his mind, from the many parties he had been invited to.)

I could go on, but I think I have illustrated the point sufficiently. Some of the above could belong to an updated Sufi repertoire of anecdotes and stories meant to extricate the would-be Sufi from the prison of linear- and pattern-thinking.

That is, roughly, what I call the blur. The blur is an inborn, endogenetic capacity we all have when just born and, although on the wane, through childhood, for a truly “other” forma mentis.

Many great sages have spent their lives trying to remember. Offhand, I can think of the Sufis’ Dhikr5, whose ultimate goal is a remembering of a very profound sort; Giordano Bruno’s De Memoria, his most esoteric work; Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu; Rupert Sheldrake’s The Presence of the Past; etc.

On the other hand, we all rejoice when children acquire their awareness, our collective consciousness, and the capacity for thinking rationally. They are out of fairyland, into the real world. But how real can it really be?

My contention is that the spirit, ostracized from the Drunken Universe—the Great Blur, or Overmind, or Other-ness or, from an Eastern perspective, the Tao—when suddenly confined in a fetus, and then in a child, suffers. That may account for all the crying that accompanies early childhood, more or less pronounced according to the individual child’s personality. A newborn is a maladapted wretch, a spirit who, having long partaken of the Great Blur, is now involuntarily forced to forget and forego its very nature, and conform to the asinine pedantry of life in the real world.

By extension, a man’s whole life (a man’s more than a woman’s, for in my opinion a woman is less divorced from her former state of excellence, although she may be entirely forgetful of it) is one of misguided convulsions, unless he tries to remember. The Great Blur, the Overmind, is not only behind us. It runs a parallel life, it is with us, if only we open up to it. When death will come, if we shall by then have remembered (albeit as incompletely as circumstances will allow), the transition back to the Great Blur will be presumably far less painful than its opposite was, i.e., the inception of our life on earth.

Is there a connection between the whirling dervishes’ incantatory dance and the children's delight in
merry-go-rounds? There is indeed. While adult mystics engage in such a circular dance so as to enter an altered state and “remember,” children can ride on a merry-go-round for hours without any dizziness.

From personal experience, I know that, at my age, I cannot endure much more than a few minutes of merry-go-round without feeling the symptoms of motion sickness.

As for children, oughtn’t we consider them as little people? After all, they are little indeed and, as they grow in size, their Otherness diminishes, their blur is forgotten, and we are delighted to welcome one or many more stolid representatives of this species gone astray.

Our thirdborn, 2 and ½ years old, is remarkably “aware.” It is no wonder: with an extroverted personality, the eagerness to emulate his two older brothers, and a multilingual household where English, Italian and Spanish are spoken interchangeably, he is rapidly acquiring consciousness. Our niñera, a sweet 50-year-old woman from the Domincan Republic, is from time to time amazed by his remarks, and exclaims: “¡Como save ese niño!” (Literally: How much does this child know!). From the Great Blur’s standpoint, however, her interjection could be paraphrased thus: “This child is unlearning (or forgetting) at a very sustained pace!”

At the end of teenagehood, the child-adolescent “comes of age.” Thanks to the completed assimilation of the collective consciousness, (s)he becomes a rational idiot, for his/her painstakingly acquired ratiocination is but full-fledged asininity. The more idiotic the adolescent proves to have become, the more delighted his teachers are, displaying all the misérable vanité des (idiots) savants.

But children, our God-given little people, children, aren’t they pretty... gnomes? “Gnome” from the Greek gnómê: judgment, opinion, purpose. Their early utterances—the “alien” ones, the ones we deem nonsensical—might be recognized as a gnomology, an anthology of aphorisms emanating directly from the Great Blur. Their sweet, miniature physio-gnomy does tell us something, just like the gnomon, the pin of a sundial, tells us quite straightforwardly the hour of day—provided the sundial be aligned correctly, of course.

Shouldn’t we revere the gnosis of our adorable little people? I do not invoke the renunciation of the body and things terrestrial, far from it. I am simply at variance with this frenetic deletion of everything apparently irrational and “other” that our society forces upon our offspring. Let them indeed learn geometry and grammar and what have you. But let’s keep the door, or Portal, open. Let it be clear that Euclidean geometry is wonderfully practical for architects and engineers, not for anything profound; that grammar tackles language, not the Logos; that religion is (at very best) the butter, not the milk it originally came from.6

Doctrine will impoverish and eventually falsify any sort of gnosis, no matter how transcendentally truthful. There probably is no predetermined path leading back to inner knowledge. What should be stressed, though, is that Sapientia, Sophia, the Logos, are, and we all knew them when we were part of the Great Blur. Why forget all that that, and then even repudiate something that we do not even vaguely remember anymore?

--

1. I wonder how Piaget, to name but one illustrious child psychologist, would jump at it?

2. Even the child's chronic state of wonderment at everything new she/he comes to know may be interpreted in a rather unusual way: It is really her/his “blurred” unconscious that is appalled by the pedantries and cheap thrills it is going to have to put up with during this brief interlude of terrestrial captivity.

3. It is no surprise that the newborn child sleeps 16 to 18 hours, at least half of which is D-sleep. Conversely, the young adult human spends 16 to 17 hours awake and 7 to 8 hours asleep, of which perhaps 6 hours are spent in S-sleep and 1.5 hours in D-sleep. Both S- and D-sleep, on the average, decrease slightly with increasing age.

4. Incidentally, this dialogue is awful! It sounds like a TV commercial! Also, I don’t like either fish or meat!

5. Is there a connection between the whirling dervishes’ incantatory dance and the children's delight in merry-go-rounds? There is indeed. While adult mystics engage in such a circular dance so as to enter an altered state and “remember,” children can ride on a merry-go-round for hours without any dizziness.

6. Naughty me—I am so tempted to write, rather than “butter”, “rancid, mouse-eaten cheese”!

--
Guido Mina di Sospiro is an award-winning, internationally published novelist born in Argentina, and raised in Italy. He belongs to an ancient aristocratic Italian family, and grew up in Milan in a multilingual home.

He trained as a classical guitarist and studied orchestration with the Swiss conductor Antoine-Pierre de Bavier, who had been Wilhelm Furtwängler’s favorite pupil. The Hungarian composer Miklós Rózsa, who wrote the soundtracks of “Ben-Hur,” “El Cid,” “Double Indemnity,” etc., and won three Academy Awards, used to spend his summers across from the Mina di Sospiro’s seaside home in Italy. Then in his seventies, he took young Guido under his wing and acquainted him with the University of Southern California, where he and Arnold Schönberg had taught composition.

At twenty, after attending the University of Pavia and making a feature film that premiered at the National Cinémathèque in Milan, Mina di Sospiro left Italy to attend USC School of Cinema-Television. Among his mentors were Ernest Lehman, Hitchcock’s favorite screenwriter and, later on, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, the celebrated English editor and publisher, who launched among others William Boyd, Peter Ackroyd and Paul Theroux.

Mina di Sospiro’s novel “The Story of Yew” (the memoirs of an age-old tree), published in the UK, is permanently featured on the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and has been translated into many languages, as has “From the River”, the memoirs of a mighty river. Both books have met with critical acclaim.

Mina di Sospiro currently lives in the DC area with his wife and their three sons, and travels often to Europe and elsewhere so as to promote the various editions of his books.

He has recently completed the novel “The Forbidden Book,” co-authored with Joscelyn Godwin, the noted scholar of western esoteric tradition.

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Monday, October 08, 2012

Kali Yantra Variations


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Amar Shadh Na Mitilo

Amar sadh na mitilo was originally composed by Kamalakanta Bhattacharya and is here sung by Pannalal Bhattacharya. It describes a person who is highly dissatisfied by the cruelty and selfishness of society. The poet desires to escape this world and prays to Goddess Kali for shelter. The lyrics translate to English as follows:
Ma,

My desires are not over, my wishes are not fulfilled.
Everything is coming to an end, o Mother.
From the first day of my life, I wish I would call you,
to take me on your lap, o Mother.
Nobody in this world, loves,
This world doesnot know, how to love
Where there is only sharing of divine love
My soul yearns to be there.
After getting hurt, I gave up desire
After suffering, I´ve forgotten worldly wishes
I have cried a lot, cannot cry anymore
My heart is torn apart.

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Monday, October 01, 2012

STOP. YOU ARE NOT A MACHINE




This message brought to you by reality.

Now, what are we going to do about it?


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