MANIFOLD ONENESS

Swami Tripurari on Postmodernism, Loving Relationship, and the Persona of Nature

noreply@blogger.com (Mercury Redbone) — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 01:48:00 +0000

Still Monist; Not Pagan

noreply@blogger.com (Mercury Redbone) — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 16:51:00 +0000

I still use the word "Monist" to describe my beliefs in experiential mysticism. I no longer identify as "Pagan." On the one hand, I feel I don't belong to any religion; on the other, I feel I belong to several or to all. (I'm probably more in the neti-neti/not this, not that vein, though).

I am probably more "metareligious" or "metaspiritual," by which I mean that my actual religion/spirituality is about the sources of religion/spirituality rather than any established cultural forms.

I don't enjoy ritual much anymore -- that's been true for five years now. I don't have a religious community and don't attend religious events or observe a religious calendar any longer. Some of these things now seem empty and some rather silly.

Religion has never been a family thing for me, and over time, religous communities haven't been personally rewarding enough to bother with. My path is not very group-oriented and is less about "tribal" identity now than ever before. In my personal experience, group religion is far more limiting and binding than it is liberating, and I regard organized religion as generallly retardative of mystical experience.

If the Divine One(ness) is present and interactive, what need have we for all the props? At this point, they all seem superfluous to me, at least as established ensemble.

I have an unusual and "unorthodox" relationship to Father Divine and to Meher Baba. I do not consider myself a nominal "follower" of either of them, but they are more interesting and important to me than any other teachers in history, and I love them and think of them often.

Coconuts and Manonash

noreply@blogger.com (Mercury Redbone) — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 20:38:00 +0000

Meher Baba has explained the symbolism of the coconut, ubiquitous in Indian religion, in relation to mystical transcendence of the mind and its accumulated impressions:

"The outer threads on the hard cover of the coconut represent the physical body. The outer hard covering represents the subtle body with all its surging impressional desires. The inner kernel in the coconut represents the mind with seeds of impressions. And the inmost water is essentially not different from the water of the ocean, from which it is ultimately soaked up by the roots of the trees on the shore. It may therefore be likened to a portion of divinity itself.

"Now, because of the sheaths of the inner kernel, the outer cover and the thick layer of threads, the inmost water remains completely hidden from view; and the identity of the inmost being of the coconut with the ocean itself is not even suspected. So the coconut, with all the covers, is symbolically offered to the Master in order that he may reveal the inmost essence of the soul as it is.

"The Master takes off the threads on the exterior one by one. This is like relieving the burdened mind of ordinary men. It corresponds to taking from them all bodily attachments one by one and ultimately taking away from them the attachment to body itself. Destruction of the body through physical death does not solve any problem, because the ego-mind grows new bodies in new incarnations.

"Through utter non-attachment to the physical body, the soul is relieved of the limitations of the outermost covering, symbolized by the threads of the coconuts. When the hindrance of the physical body is removed the body begins to function consciously. This is the state of the Yogis.

"But the sheath of the subtle body, with all its surging desires, has also to be shed. This corresponds to the Master's breaking open the outer hard covering of the coconut. And when the obstructivity of the subtle body is removed, the soul begins to function consciously through its mental ego-body. This the stage of the advanced souls.

"The ego-mind corresponds to the inner kernel of the coconut; and the Master has to break open even this inner kernel to take the soul to its own essence, which, in this analogy, corresponds to the inmost water in the coconut. Breaking the inner kernel means that the mind of the person ceases to function completely. It comes to a standstill since the seeds that activate the ego-mind are all burnt up.

"When the hindrance of the ego-mind is removed, the Master, as it were, drinks the inmost sweet water and makes it unite with the ocean of life that He is. Lover and Beloved have become one consciously." [source]

This is in relation to Meher Baba's teaching that "The real goal of life is not death of the ego, but of the mind!"

He elaborates: "Therefore when Muhammad or Zarathustra or Jesus talked of being born once or dying once, they meant the death of the mind. Mind is born from the very beginning, even before the stone state. This birth is once, and also the death of the mind takes place only once."

"When the mind dies, the false ego is transformed into Reality. Real Ego is never born and never dies. Ego is always real but due to the mind, it feels and acts as limited and false “I.”

"Now mind goes on taking bodies according to its good and bad impressions. This taking and leaving the body is not the death either of the mind or the ego. After physical death the mind remains with its impressions. It is the impressions which make the mind take bodies, in order that the impressions might be wiped out. Consequently, the mind takes bodies according to the impressions, and the ego witnesses this. When one body is discarded, another comes up and forms, though there is a certain amount of time lag between the giving up of one body and taking up another."

The source and much more context for these comments can be found here.

Why must the mind go? This makes it more comprehensible:

"To try to understand with the mind that which the mind can never understand is futile; and to try to express by sounds of language and in the form of words the transcendental state of the Soul, is even more futile. All that can be said and has been said, and will be said by those who live and experience that State is, that when the false self is lost, the Real Self is found; that the birth of Real can only follow the death of the false; and that dying to ourselves the true death which ends all dying is the only way to perpetual life.

"This means that when the mind with its satellites desires, cravings, longings is completely consumed by the fire of Divine Love, then the infinite, indestructible, indivisible, eternal Self is manifested. This is Manonash, the annihilation of the false, limited, miserable, ignorant, destructible “I”, to be replaced by the Real “I”, the possessor of Infinite Knowledge, Love, Power, Peace, Bliss and Glory, in its unchangeable existence.

"Manonash results in this glorious state in which plurality goes and Unity comes, ignorance goes and Knowledge comes, binding goes and Freedom comes. We are all permanently lodged in this shoreless Ocean of Infinite Knowledge, and yet are infinitely ignorant of it, until the mind __ which is the source of this ignorance __ vanishes forever: for ignorance ceases to exist when the mind ceases to exist!
"Unless and until ignorance is removed and Knowledge is gained __ the Knowledge whereby the Divine Life is experienced and lived __ everything pertaining to the spiritual seems paradoxical.

"God whom we do not see, we say is real: and the world that we do see, we say is false. In experience, what exists for us does not really exists: and what does not exist for us, really exists.

"We must lose ourselves in order to find ourselves. Thus loss itself is gain.

"We must die to self to live in God. Thus death means life.We must become completely void inside to be completely possessed by God. Thus complete emptiness means absolute Fullness.

"We must become naked of selfhood by possessing nothing, so as to be absorbed in the infinity of God. Thus nothing ,means everything." [Source]

Here is the cave at Khojaguda Hill, Hyderabad in which Meher Baba did the mysterious Avataric work of Manonash that makes it possible for others. As indicated by baba, his Manonash work was carried out for “the abnegation of the personal will in the Divine Volition.”

According to Wikipedia: "Meher Baba conveyed that the spiritually significant work was done on behalf of the spiritual welfare of all humanity. Mano-Nash is simply Nirvana by another name, and the core group that passed through this stage with Baba was Enlightened in the Buddhist sense."

The folks at this temple may go a bit far, however, by having hard coconuts broken on their heads:

Here is a contemporary Hindu perspective on the ritual of breaking the coconut.

And here is the elusive "Coconut Pearl"

Who was Plotinus?

noreply@blogger.com (Mercury Redbone) — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 15:19:00 +0000

On this episode of The Philosopher's Zone, Alan Saunders talks about Plotinus. Saunders' guest is Peter Adamson, a professor in the Department of Philosophy, King's College London.

Who was Plotinus?

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Rise Up and Join the Ring

noreply@blogger.com (Mercury Redbone) — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 19:03:00 +0000

"Sat Urn, Turn, Turn" collage (rough)

Krishna's Rasa Lila as Organizational Model

noreply@blogger.com (Mercury Redbone) — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 17:03:00 +0000

Meher Baba on the One and the Zero, for 10.10.10

noreply@blogger.com (Mercury Redbone) — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 16:28:00 +0000

"God is generally spoken of as being One. We use the term One as being opposite to the Many. One we name REALITY or GOD; Many we name ILLUSION or CREATION.However, strictly speaking, no number, not even one, can depict ONE who is indivisibly One without a second. Even to call the ONE 'One' is incorrect. We do not speak of the Ocean as One. It just is Ocean. The ONE simply IS.The ONE is one complete whole and simultaneously a series of ones within the ONE. Illusion is a ZERO and simultaneously a series of zeros within the ZERO. These zeros have no value, except a false value according to their position in relation to the ONE. In actual fact the zeros have no existence - their existence is mere appearance in Illusion, the big ZERO."
From the book "The Everything and the Nothing," available as a free PDF here:
http://www.ambppct.org/meherbaba/Book_Files/Everything.pdf

A Candle in Hell

noreply@blogger.com (Mercury Redbone) — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 15:59:00 +0000

Brethren, as it is,

Justification is the light and the darkness, the right, or the image of right, that takes away the totality of wrong; the good, or the image of good, that takes away the totality of evil; the white, or the image of white that takes away the vitality of black.

When as humans we justify in human terms, we run from the total darkness of the Godless world of men We create for our own peace of mind, an artificial man-made light, an image of rightness to counteract the knowledge of total wrongness in a world that has rejected its Creator. We manufacture an illusion of good, so that all is not seen to be evil. We paint white, that which is in essence black because it has removed its [s]elf from the source of all life and knowledge. We give the semblance of truth to that which we know to be a lie.

That is the human game. When a man does wrong and knows he has done wrong, he tries to make it not so wrong by justifying it. He harms another man, feels the guilt, and then tries to reduce the burden of sin against himself; by blaming another, by reducing his awareness of the extent of the harm he has done, by pleading ignorance, by insisting that he only intended good, anything to create some rightness, or illusion of rightness, to relieve the sense of total wrongness.

That is the justification of men, the justification of self by self; a man-made light flickering feebly, but just perceptibly in the great void of Godless darkness.

And by agreement, in the world of men, they justify each other –except when they MUST blame each other in order to justify themselves. And they alternate between combining forces in fear against the common enemy of total darkness, and fighting one another for the meager and inadequate substitutes of artificial light. A man must feel justified, even if it means the whole-hearted condemnation of another man. If for him to maintain his illusion of being right, another must be shown to be wrong, then that is the goal he pursues.

The world of men is the absence of GOD, and therefore the antipodes of Heaven, which is Hell. And man carries a candle in Hell, so that he can pretend he is in Heaven.

And whenever a man feels wrong in the eyes of GOD, he tries to make himself right in the eyes of men. When he feels the darkness of his estrangement from GOD closing in upon him, he lights a candle of manmade lightness, and fights off the suffocating gloom. He justifies.

Every time he makes an excuse for his actions; every time he pretends to himself that what he has done is not as bad as it really feels to him; every time he blames his shortcomings on his background, or his upbringing, or his environment; every time he blames his circumstances on his neighbors, or his employers, or the government, or the weather; every time he blames his failures or mistakes on his friends, or his enemies, or his colleagues, or his lack of education; every time he protects his good and altruistic intonations against the knowledge of his selfishness; every time he blinds himself to the destructive consequences of his actions; every time he makes a show of good will which balies his inner feelings of distaste; every time he makes himself feel pity of remorse, to convince himself of his virtue; every time he shifts responsibility for all the ugliness and wrong around him; he justifies. He carries a candle of illusion into the darkness of reality.

For if a man can justify his state of being, if he can find just a chink of light in his world, or if not find it, then create it, then he can continue in that state of being OF that world.

That is what it is to justify. If we are wrong and we know without a shadow of doubt that we are wrong, then we MUST cease to be what we are. If what we do is evil, and we cannot escape the knowledge that it is evil, then we MUST stop doing it. No one can do or be that which no part of him tells him to do or be, and if no part of him can find even a pretence of an illusion or rightness or good in an action or state, then no part of him drives him towards it. He has no justification.

But if we can find a grain of what seems to be rightness in what we are, or create an image of rightness, even if it only lurks in the back of the mind, then we can go on being what we are. That grain, that image, drives us to continue. And if we can create the illusion of just one shadow of goodness in our actions, or at least a suggestion of inevitability which counteracts the concept of deliberate evil, then we can go on acting as we do. These tiny images of rightness and goodness and choice-less-ness, are enough to give us what we need to continue as we are.

They are our justifications.

The world of man lives in a constant state of justification.

The lie is: "...justification reveals the truth, and therefore it is the right thing to do."

Justification is one of the roads of Hell. It runs parallel to another road in Hell called Blame, which is the detonator of all evil.

And man carries a candle to light his way. And so as man believes he is moving forward, he moves in a state of illusion. The candle lights his way in Hell, so that he can pretend he is in Heaven.

In the world of men, countless bright and shiny images, dreams and illusions, burn to keep humanity justified in its estrangement from its Source of Life. Man has, in his terms, justified himself and his Godless state of being, justified his actions, justified his way of life, with everything the world has offered him.

But a few, a precious few, have stopped before it was too late. They have remembered the Light of Life. They have recalled its brilliance and its purity, and they have remembered that it was not made by man, but stems from GOD. They have seen the inky blackness of man's self-justification. They have witnessed what he calls his altruism, and seen it as no more than masked egotism. They have looked behind the protested appearances off good intention, and seen the self-interested and destructive motives which they hide.

They have looked at man, the mighty lord of all creation in his own deluded eyes, and seen an empty husk, chasing, in ever decreasing circles after an empty dream. They have known the hollowness of man's endeavors on his own account. They have seen the utter futility of his attempts to create a GOD that works on man's agenda.

And, they move forward. They have rejected justification. They OWN the Circumstances that surround them. They see what stops them, acknowledging the failure and moving forward. They stand powerfully in the giving of their Word and are responsible for their actions. They seek out a clear space to create profound thought and concepts. They uncover that which is concealed.

They reconcile opposites and watch as Blame and Justification no longer become their well traveled road.

Alone, they reach into the murky depths of the pool of darkness and feel for a hand and pull on it to reveal the man that does not know he is drowning.

And when the man is pulled out of the pool he is bent over barely able to stand, weak, in all of the nakedness of his illusions. And now he looks around him and looks at sights that he can vaguely remember from a long time ago, years past, in his youth; and the man begins to cry so deeply that there is no sound, only the pain on his face, for now he confronts the source of all of his ills, himself.

Copyright Church of the Final Judgment, 1967

PROCESS CHURCH DOCUMENTS (free download)

MISHEFA REŞ

MISCHIEVOUS CHICKEN

Some Lines by Emily Dickinson

noreply@blogger.com (Mercury Redbone) — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 01:02:00 +0000

Nature and God--I neither knew
Yet Both so well knew me
They startled, like Executors
Of My identity.

Poem 835

All Circumstances are the Frame
In which His Face is set--
All latitudes exist for His
Sufficient Continent--

The Light His Action, and the Dark
The Leisure of His Will--
In Him Existence serve or set
A Force illegible

Poem 820

The Martyr Poets--did not tell--
But wrought their Pang in syllable--
That when their mortal name be numb--
Their mortal fate--encourage Some--
The Martyr Painters--never spoke--
...bequeathing--rather--to their Work--
That when their conscious fingers cease--
Some seek in Art--the Art of Peace--

Poem 544

Some of my older thoughts about Emily Dickinson

Love Reign

noreply@blogger.com (Mercury Redbone) — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 19:27:00 +0000

Three for Brigid

noreply@blogger.com (Mercury Redbone) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 14:38:00 +0000

Here are three recent poems in honor of the Fourth Annual Brigid in the Blogosphere Poetry Slam.

Partial Address

All souls
this is
by way of invitation
confirmation
and one white stone:

No burden light save self

Holy ancient fire
when dion dys still ate
and raging ageless
angel horde,
a cloud to witness
cacophonyof Pentecost
polyphony and euphony
and you well borne
eugenides myself,
Kristophoro Myself!

-- Copper : Abdal-Ataraxia

Not Not Not Vedant

The one constant is
a tone of coherence
deathless, unthought
a taste perceived and magnified

Whatever becomes
becomes id, becomes Ego, becomes God
no superlative save All, distraction
no moralizing ante-Christ
God is Ego inside-out
only God is Real

Word with God, Word become God
God made flesh, flesh made food
food made God and God made Word
one coherent word
deathless, unthought
a taste perceived and magnified

-- Copper : Abdal-Ataraxia

Observe

Everything seems to be humming along.
There is an unavoidable force in Time that says,
"Let's just hurry, hurry, hurry through the next part."

Maybe that should not be challenged.
Maybe it is mercy,
maybe it is dexterity,
maybe it is Grace.

The bees are meeting in caves and catacombs
feeding on the honey of many seasons
and many strange flowers
and they are almost ready to swarm
for a new home and a new Queen
and none shall cut them down
or contain them.

After the eleventh hour, Witches take the skies
then it's brahma-muhurta and Sunrise.

-- Copper : Abdal-Ataraxia

Ritual for Blessing & Animating Democracy Explained

noreply@blogger.com (Mercury Redbone) — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 16:00:00 +0000

Peace! I hope to be posting more and more regularly soon. Here's an interesting video from MagickTV of interviews with organizers of a Jan. 19th ritual of blessing in Washington, D.C.. It runs about 16:30.

And here is a much longer video of the inspiring ritual itself:

What happened to the Video

noreply@blogger.com (Mercury Redbone) — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 19:43:00 +0000

The "Manifest Obama" video that I had posted here is no longer available. It was pulled by its creators after it became a magnet for negative comments after conservative sensationalist (and Mormon) Glenn Beck mentioned it in one of his typically miscontextualizing screeds.

I respect the creator's wish to protect people in the video from the misinformation and false accusations created by Beck (and presumably by a large number of his viewers).

Beck rose to prominence in the wake of America's "War on Terrorism" and is a professional purveyor of fear and cynicism. He seems unable to perceive the video as an expression of prayerful hope and sees it instead as a mingling of messianic spirituality and politics.

That's the height of irony for a believing Mormon! As such, Beck is a good bit deeper in messianic electionism, American exceptionalism, and in religion-meets-politics, than any of the things he criticizes in recent commentary.

Here are some explanations for why it was pulled: one two

Some Problems with the West

noreply@blogger.com (Mercury Redbone) — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 13:48:00 +0000

[Image available as a poster]

The prevalent Western worldview is hampered by intellectual structures and practices that limit capacity, conceptual imagination, and our ability to adapt to reality.

Here's the first and perhaps most central problem: the West thinks that more data clarifies, that more data narrows explanatory and narrative possibilities. This strikes me as patently absurd.

That sense of narrowing is an illusion, and is often no more than shutting down perception and settling-in to bias. It is not, as advertised, the refinement of objective description; it is not refinement of description in any sense except the narrative sense. Sometimes, one accepts it for safety or for power over others (especially when settled narratives reward collective bias or greed), or because of some pressing expediency. The desire for safety comes from a species of panic (in one later Greek sense) as a profound fear of being overwhelmed by the All.

Postmodern cultural experience and the practical realities of the “information economy” illustrate conclusively that more data does not mitigate narrative or explanatory possibilities. Data proliferates and quickly escapes the capacity of the human mind to hold or understand, bringing a host of contradictions and counterindications, some of which we cannot see and many of which we actively choose not to see. At the neurological level, we--these "I's" who witness and "know"--are connected to the “external” cosmos principally through analogy. Only analogic thinking can reflect its woven nature, in which terms like metonymy and synechdoche are as functionally relevant as the vocabulary of physics (and in practical terms, more so). The magical principle of correspondence asserts that poetic analogy is not merely conceptual, but actual: that resonance, association and similarity are as relevant physically as they are poetically and that they may be more accurate descriptions of cosmology than traditional notions of causation.

Settling in to a specific working narrative is pragmatic, but it’s also deceptive. A narrative that works now is not the only possible narrative, not the only narrative that will work (even to produce material results or explain phenomena), and a narrative that works now may not work tomorrow, even if all that changes is the cultural context or the felt need for the results a given narrative yields.

An inability to see that 100 data yield more narrative and explanatory possibilities than 3 data is a failure of imagination, one that reveals a suppressed or lacking aptitude or an anxious retreat from immensity. Anomalies expand narrative possibility exponentially. Concurrence means only that a tool works well for locating similarities and recurrent synchronicities, but links between data points are always narrative links. Each one of them is conceptually limited by human aptitude, organically and culturally, but in reality is infinitely unlimited and equally connected to all other things. The concept of "degree" reflects narrative and conceptual reality only, and is true only of the developmental inner world.

In its frequently short-sighted technological pragmatism and domination by industry and concepts of “progress” and “mastery,” the West mistakes expediency for knowledge. (As well as the old saws about knowledge for wisdom and wisdom for Truth).

This kind of thinking colors the world mechanistically, and with the help of pharmaceuticals creates “better” workers and better soldiers and more efficient extraction of resources, oblivious in most instances to the reality of interconnection. From this vantage, "The West" is a harnessed horse on a closed track, one small region in the Mind, and something everyone agrees is not a place. Not even in the sense that "North" is a particular point. For East and West, there has never been a ground zero.

Technologically driven knowing pushes itself only until it achieves its objective and maximizes return, usually financial profit or military power. Then it settles. It almost never tracks complex interconnections, nor asks what could be given form if the 200,000 data points assume a different narrative relationship. It is not concerned individual human experience or individualized epistemological inflection. It does not conceptualize “becoming human.” It takes being human for granted, and hence never develops beyond the starting point as a receptive slate for whatever the first narrative is that works. Stuck, and for a lifetime.

Such knowing isn't self-aware when it comes to the actual nature of awareness as narrative. Epistemology is essentially narratology. When we fail to see the reality of complex and paradoxical interconnection--at material and ideational levels—we are extremely culture-bound and miss something central to being fully human: We are very much within a story.

In its rush to “objectivize,” mechanistic knowing usually fails to anticipate, resist or transcend neuro-linguistic programming, which operates in all human symbol systems including sensory perception (which is brain phenomena produced by presumed external stimuli and broken into cognitive units like "sky" and "tree" and "beauty" and narrativized by the internal witness; it is not reality itself), language, symbol and mathematics. The West too frequently confounds the tools of knowing with the knower. We represent Lady Justice with a blindfold, but the attribute would be more accurately offered to Lady Science, at least when she’s looking in the mirror. When the empirical apparatus is interrogated, pure empiricism falls. Our own personal “taints” (or tints) all our observations and all our observations of our observations. Acknowledged or not, the soul will have its say.

Such things as Occam's Razor and the contrivances of formal logic are results-oriented expediencies, culturally validated only by technology (see above) or by collective bias (see above). Ignoring anomalies, hard core Westerners generally go beyond these kinds of cognitive limits only when the thought-structure fails to work or does not work as expected.

Archeology and ancient history also often fall prey to this trap. Anthropology less so, since contemporary methodologies encourage self-awareness and interaction with living subjects and tend to interrogate witnessing biases. I have doctoral-level specializations in the US between 1492 and 1865. The humanities more concerned with remote time periods often amazingly settle on one narrative, even when scholars of much more recent data-filled periods--like twenty years ago, or 250, or 500--acknowledge multiple narrative possibilities. This is pronounced in privileged narratives of Greece and Israel and Egypt, and also in marginal narratives like those of Marija Gimbutas or Martin Bernal or David Frawley. The truth about human epistemology makes such things as "strict reconstruction" (or even "tradition" or racial and national identity) laughable. As a scholar of more recent cultural history, the definitive claims of scholars of the ancient world look about as sophisticated as blackface.

All narratives are houses of cards in constant flux. Imagine that: standing in a dynamic house of cards. In the West, science and scholarship have strong and trustworthy dynamics of generational reconception. People get tenure by finding and selling a new narrative... and by ignoring or pretending that the range of narrative possibility isn't actually infinite. It's the West... we have revolutions, not tradition; we look for experts to manufacture and demonstrate knowledge, rather than self-consciously creating it together, with mutual and egalitarian evaluations of effectiveness.

If something seems like an exclusive and self-evident truth without potential for variation, it means only that I have found the present limit of my imaginative or cognitive or biological powers. Settling for those means settling for limitation and limited tools. It may produce much technology and much change, but it isn't growth.

Others' limitations will vary from my own.

Hermetics, Shamans, a few physicists and a certain category of very influential linguists who are more appropriately called philosophers report that grammar and poetry are better metaphors for how reality works than "law," and that the whole concept of law itself might be reflective of a certain kind of stultifying superstition that ultimately keeps us, individually and collectively, from living richly.

A second major problem with the Western worldview is that in recent generations, it has attacked the principles of similtude and correspondence and attempted to eradicate the traditional languages of magic, religion, poetry and symbol.

The West has said that resemblance is superficial or accidental and by itself is meaningless. (That it has done this even while discovering evolution is a bizarre contradiction that I can't account for). It has done this in spite of the fact that our brains are wired associatively, and we are in essence associative and symbolic beings, literally constituted in self-awareness by a very rich corpus of symbolic associations growing only through resonance. It has done this in defiance of all that is organically human, and has precipitated more alienation from nature and the body than the 1500 years of Christianity that preceded "the West".

I am experientially confident that Western causality is a misperception of reality, and that similitude and correspondence (resonance) are generally more logically valid than causal perception. Cause and effect seem to work within “woven” structures, to be contextualized by an associational reality. Causality is therefore secondary (but not contradictory or irrelevant) to correspondence.

I am analytically confident that linear causality is a limiting and unsustainable misperception. I strongly suspect that the epochal crash of such thoughtforms is the force behind conscious and bodily evolution, and is the psycho-spiritual reality behind the nearly universal mytheme of apocalypse.

We're in a magical world where there is no boundary between mind and matter. I'm going to live more and more richly.

For Navaratri, and in Devotion to Fallen Sadhaks

noreply@blogger.com (Mercury Redbone) — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 15:28:00 +0000

Ya devi sarva bhutesu, shanti rupena sansitha

ya devi sarva bhutesu, shakti rupena sansthita

ya devi sarva bhutesu, matra rupena sansthita

Namastasyai, namastasyai, namastasyai, namo namaha

To the Goddess who is bodied forth as peace,

To the Goddess who is bodied forth as infinite energy,

To the Goddess who is bodied forth as mother,

I bow to Goddess, I bow to you, I bow to you.

News report of the deaths at Sri Devi's Temple

on Sept. 30, 2008.

May this ghastly prodigy inspire reflection and wisdom.

As the cucumber is released from the vine,

so may they now be free in God/dess.

Mage of the Day

noreply@blogger.com (Mercury Redbone) — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 13:36:00 +0000

A fun and insightful few minutes. (I will add the comment that magic needn't be as strictly inward as this segment, by itself, implies).

Free Mystic

noreply@blogger.com (Mercury Redbone) — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:47:00 +0000

The most attractive self-name for me—more than Pagan or Witch (both of which I accept and use)—is Free Mystic. I like that better because it’s looser and freer, and because it describes my transcultural sources and my refusal to commit to institution or collective ideation. Dogma and tradition (as institution or role) are things I see as always confining… as things that we reach for to block Spirit when it threatens our accustomed states of being or our partial desires. In practical, interpersonal terms I’m tolerant of any tradition that doesn’t impinge on my freedom, but in personal terms I’m radically iconoclastic. I like tradition as a folk palette, but as structure or ideology or “group think,” I am hostile to tradition. I see only harm in the adoption of borrowed ideas, unless those ideas are borrowed as a wedge or stepping stone. Ideas and practices are limitations, confining and grounding consciousness in a collective that is usually more interested in money (etc) than in the Great Work of becoming conscious. “Free Mystic” expresses my conviction that experience is primary, and that the objective of my spiritual growth is the annihilation of the mind and identification with the limitless All.

At best, it seems to me, tradition is the shell of an egg. It may be developmentally necessary, but if it is, so is leaving it behind. I am a hatchling. I may someday mature to be a Rooster before the Sun… but for now I am a chick randomly-not-randomly pecking for my food and true grit—and the Hen I seek shelter with is very loose in Her parenting. My spirituality no longer depends on community or shared ideas, though I continue to find freedom and support within the loose structures of Reclaiming and Fellowship of Isis, and in the idiosyncratic forms of religious expression I facilitate or teach. The shell has become skeleton or armature that I will carry for life (with modifications), but which also must be parted with. I'm working on not being irreparably bound to my skeleton.

At worst—and most often—tradition is a prison… a collective retreat from the risks and uncertainties of the encounter with Spirit. Tradition is an attempt to control and domesticate Spirit, to render it predictable and consistent. So too is conventional reason. Convention is a false or provisional agreement that must be learned and socialized—a false union. Spirit, however, is the actual experience of actual unity as material and spiritual reality. That actual union isn’t changed by mere ideas, nor by such things as race, class and gender, nor by divisions like Christian and Pagan. It’s always there, always conscious, always full. If convention doesn’t facilitate that actual experience, it’s at best worthless and at worst hostile. For me, articulating something is a way of excreting and disposing of it, putting it to rest, letting it out for a life of its own. I try to put it down and use it as a step.

I have been trying to make religion and spirituality cognate in my mind (after years of separating them), but it’s not taking. I don’t believe it. Rather, the attempt makes me more aware that religion is typically meant to reinforce limitation and confine all aspiration to the narrow streets of the human social world.

I prefer pleasure over pain, but I prefer freedom over confinement. I value wealth and ethics and stability for the reasons that others do—relative, temporal reasons rooted in the limitations of my reason, emotion and senses. But these things are not the point of my existence and do not possess the capacity to satisfy or satiate, and ultimately they are merely a matter of fashionable twists of logic maintained or altered in accordance with perceived self-interest. Social morality and concepts of beauty are entirely malleable, ideationally and biologically. I am not a Hellene.

When I was a teacher, I had a sign on my door that said "Absolute freedom is the image of God" and one in the office that said "Authority is Illusion." I believe those things deeply, and feel both desire and obligation to mention those things (one way or another) when authority is deployed over me. There is no authority that should not be resisted, no authority that is legitimate. I am opposed to institutional secrecy enough that I don't keep secrets. With sexuality and witchcraft, "outing" is sometimes an ethical obligation.

These things can make magic; they can heal the social self and do all sorts of other desirable things. But Kosmos, God and True Self are not only what's desirable. That's only half the Truth. We do not choose--we postpone.

I do not respect tradition-as-dogma nor tradition-as-institution. I think initiatory traditions are rackets. I advise and propagandize against them. I'm against commodification or profiteering on religious/spiritual teaching. I take what works and pass it on. Anything that works from anywhere--ideas are no one's property and I won't treat them as property. Hierachy is de facto illegitimate. The worthy teacher or true guru is an anti-guru; s/he corrals and eats sheep and liberates those who would be free.

I perceive a more valuable wealth within reach, a love that is actual unity, transcending social ethics and embracing all as self, and a stability that cannot be shaken because it is rooted in Conscious Spirit. Material wealth and social stability are not worthy ends in and of themselves, and sought for themselves alone will, I believe, always backfire. Static ease is not the purpose of existence, nor is any one-sided thing like Beauty. The only thing that really must change—that all the kosmos conspires to change—is the scope of selfhood. Everything else serves this, without regard for the passing fancies of right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, left and right. The “Beauty” I have seen and seek inheres in all things, including all the things I hold in aversion, all the things I would run from. My body already dwells in a physical kosmos of that kind of Beauty… spirituality is about bringing consciousness along. All the social engineering of religion and politics and education is entirely beside the point.

So my truest passion is around the transformation of consciousness. Practice helps me to remember that all other passions are secondary, tertiary, or even oppositional to truest passion.

Life is short, all is in flux, pain shall always attend pleasure, and death is not the end.

Columbia: Dea Americana

noreply@blogger.com (Mercury Redbone) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 18:14:00 +0000

The Queen of Heaven and Earth in Her Emergent American Form.

Blog Love...

noreply@blogger.com (Mercury Redbone) — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 15:45:00 +0000

Before the Republican melee tainted the zeitgeist and significantly fouled my mood, I was very delighted that Yvonne (at Metapagan) gave the "I Love Your Blog" award to Manifold Oneness, while dmiley gave it to me for my I Am That blog on LiveJournal.

Selecting favorites is hard for me... or at least, commiting to a limited number of them in writing is hard! But fun. I'm surprised how difficult it was to narrow them to seven, but knew it was impossible to list them all. So I paid extra attention to what I was reading and inspired by over the last couple weeks or so. It may take me a while to do this properly and message everyone.

So here are the rules.
1. Put the logo on your blog.
2. Link to the person from whom you received the award.
3. Nominate at least 7 other blogs. (see below)
4. Put links to those blogs on yours.
5. Leave a message on the blogs nominated.

In no particular order, here are seven blogs I've read a lot of, that present lots of material, and that I usually enjoy (but am sometimes challenged by):

1. Owl’s Wings

http://owlsdaughter.blogspot.com/
Features “Tarot of the Week” by a talented reader, occasional posts (as for Sabbats), and delightful series (check out the recent series about the Muses, for example).

2. Self-Sufficient Urbanite

http://selfsufficienturbanite.blogspot.com/
Inspiring New Yorker tackles the chores of life with relish and innovation.

3. Hare Krishna Women

http://harekrishnawomen.wordpress.com/
With ISKCON as an early part of my spiritual experience and a major source of my hostility to authoritarianism, I am impressed by the group of women who blog here. Many have sophisticated understandings of the relationships between rhetoric and power, and use those understandings to argue for anti-authoritarian reforms and/or devotional autonomy.

4. Below the Belt

http://feed.belowthebelt.org/
Multi-contributor blog on gender; tends to embrace post-modernist concepts. A lot of variety and some surprising perspectives. Helps me keep up with current ideas and attitudes in gender studies and in the Queer Proletariat.

5. The College of Mythic Cartography

http://www.mythic-cartography.org/
This is an original site full of rich variety and lots of surprises, one that often approaches Paganism from the meta-levels of myth and symbol.

6. Same as a Wildcat

http://elorie.livejournal.com/
Intelligent southern literary Witch with an independent spirit who finds good stuff and has good ideas. Also that thing I like, variety. Both ballsy and pragmatic.

7. Medusa Coils

http://medusacoils.blogspot.com/
Several contributors. Intelligent variety. Superlative link lists every week or so.

The Divine Feminine

noreply@blogger.com (Mercury Redbone) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 17:47:00 +0000

Solstice Blessings & Altar Pictures

noreply@blogger.com (Mercury Redbone) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:27:00 +0000

It's been a while since I felt moved to develop the kind of essay I publish here on Manifold Oneness. This blog is more for the ideas and concepts I'm deeply committed to, the aspects of my practice that "stick" forever or for long periods of time. On Live Journal, I'm a bit messier--my public and locked posts there are the stuff of day-to-day, down-in-the trenches, developmental spirituality.

Since content here has been a bit slow and essay ideas are cooking, I've decided to give a glimpse of the High Altar in our Temple, dedicated to Isis-Urania and Osiris-Pantocrator. So here's a little "Isis darshan" for the Highest Sabbat. This room is set apart for the Gods, spiritual Work, and healing.

On Summer Solstice I acknowledge Creation (the primal moment of Zep Tepi in Kemetic mythos), the accession of Isis to the Hidden Name of Re, and the sovereignty of Osiris and Horus. I am also a devotee of Isis-Fortuna and Serapis-Aion, and on Dea Fortuna's Wheel, Summer Solstice is the station of "Exaltation".

Here's Mother at the threshold of Her naos, with open arms... There's a small crowned Horus Child behind Her in the corner, and beside Him in the Shadows, Anubis.

I made the naos several years ago. It's wooden and cast pieces, after late Egyptian and Graeco-Egyptian examples. It has a ramp-type plinth supporting it (symbolic of Ma'at and Her constellation). The image of Isis is the historicallly unusual one from Per Aa Tutankhamun's canopic chest. A blue lotus shell candle holder burns before Her, resting on a small blue stone offering table between two small brass snakes (not visible in the picture), and with a piece of meterorite. There are many other such things in the shrine beside Her naos--other images and things like lightning-struck oak, moqui balls, ammonites...

And here is Lord Osiris. This is my favorite image of Him. There is a crowned faience image of Lord Horus to the left (on a "perch" I made from old trophy parts). The feather in His crown is blue jay, a local bird I associate with Him for many reasons. To the right, the babboon form of Lord Djehuti. Beside Osiris's naos are crook and flail, and barely visible, flute. You can also see more of the piece of furniture they are on. It's the most special piece we have. It's an antique oak piece, sort of like a high credenza. Isis is in the chamber above, which has two doors, and Osiris is in this open, columned area beneath. There's a small cut-down offering table in front that the candle and goblet are sitting on--it "marries" perfectly for this purpose. The fruit offerings are atop an oak plant stand that I found at thrift.

We had to trim a branch off a walnut tree, hence the offerings of abundant foliage. All sorts of other things are piled in front. (I'll answer just about any question, but I see there's a bit too much to try to describe it all).

Here is the shrine to Dea Isis-Fortuna and Deo Serapis-Aion. It's a separate altar, a hearth-altar in the kitchen.

We've had "innundation" with a wetter than usual season and heavier downpours than I've seen in this town before. Yesterday evening, we got a Midsummer rainbow:

There was an impressive rainbow in D.C. the day before yesterday, too... I saw a television image of it in relation to the Washington monument that was wonderful, but I couldn't find a similar image online--it's an interesting, blessed, hopeful image of obelisk and rainbow that would be fun to include in this post ;-).

By the way, it's also West Virginia Day, commemorating our founding on June 20, 1863. I think it's a good day to do some work against mountaintop removal!

A Whimsy I Made for You

noreply@blogger.com (Mercury Redbone) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:01:00 +0000

On Unity, Epistemology and True Will

noreply@blogger.com (Mercury Redbone) — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 16:03:00 +0000

The world used to be trapped in a construct of magic, then of faith, then one of philosophical reason, now perhaps one of engineering. More likely, now is fragmented between competing camps with different kinds of power. Via the root concept of techne, the world has been returned to a form of magic. The human collective was and remains trapped in fixity of thought and misidentifications of self and other. In their broadly generative manifestations, each of these worldviews has been fictional, not actual--a justification or pretense, but not a self-aware pretext, not a conscious contrivance, not reality. They've been the foundation myths of successive epistemes. Magic, faith, reason and purposive engineering all depend on usually unexamined, but always unprovable premises. Each is equal in the strength of core foundation, including materialist empiricism with its assumptions that matter exists apart from consciousness. When translated into human subjectivity in actual practice, each has been partial and corrupt in motivation and productive of endless hegemonies. They have been progressively more tyrannous in delimiting reality and in capacity to destroy. None of them is what they understand themselves to be. All of them undermine themselves with unexamined internal contradictions that tend to manifest the opposite of what is intended, ultimately collapsing the episteme and reshaping internal, social and material worlds.

What is most needed is to understand real motivations and the dynamics of self- and knowledge-construction that give rise to concepts of purity and the consequent realities of hypocrisy and oppression. That is, the structure and flow of the self from unity to duality, from duality to manifestation, from manifestation to unity-in-diversity. That's the Great Work at the root of self-making, the citadel of self-awareness. All that matters is bridging the infinite gap between center and circumference. This goal, achieved, is eternal life. Otherwise, the self rots like all other partial things and is made anew in God's Greater Will. It's truly All or Nothing. Now.

It is not possible to "grasp" (to hold in permanent manifestation, to abidingly identify with) any single epistemology except the one that's true: To Hen. Even in its eternal diversity, the Everything is a state of unity and unity is the place of greatest power because it is infinitely comprehensive subjectivity. All ideological or imposed unity is false; unity is extant reality and everything that doesn't perceive it is a flight from reality. The "I" is a knower, and all that can be known is unity-in-diversity. The great questions and purposes are how to approach reality, how to dwell in it as more than a part. Partial nature is always subject to alternation between good and evil, pleasure and pain, enslavement and imposition. Mystical practice is an effort to elude all conceptual bonds; it does not build, but exposes what is real. The Divinized "I" enjoys a state of infinite subjectivity in a kosmos of self without any objects, and if achieved abidingly in human life results in the experience of all things as Divine Nature. Individual Will is always and inescapably subject to the conscious Will of God, manifest as what is. Control is a falsehood of the perception of objectivity by a subject who does not know its true nature; the discovery of True Will is the discovery of cognate identity with To Hen. Bliss is the nature of unitive consciousness, Truth its universal body, Knowledge its self-awareness, and Eternity its duration. Unitive awareness manifestly does not result in inaction, though it identifies with what is (as already pure and perfect); what is includes both action and inaction, and in that state the stationing of the temporal self is irrelevant. Change is a dynamic of rearrangement, infinite and purposeless (sometimes pleasant, sometimes painful) unless directed to the next more comprehensive unity. Autonomy requires winning a space in consciousness apart from all cultural conditioning; only in the return to wildness is one born again. That place is expansive enough to contain the whole, small enough to carry in the glove box.

By Blue Ontario's Shore: Whitman's Goddess for U.S. Memorial Day

noreply@blogger.com (Mercury Redbone) — Mon, 26 May 2008 15:50:00 +0000

This is a long but glorious and important poem. Its length militates against all the weakness of the internet and the ways most of us screen-read... but oh well, I want to post it anyway... because it's the most beautiful and appropriate thing I can think of for this observance...

By blue Ontario's shore,
As I mused of these warlike days and of peace return'd, and the
dead that return no more,
A Phantom gigantic superb, with stern visage accosted me,
Chant me the poem, it said, that comes from the soul of America,
chant me the carol of victory,
And strike up the marches of Libertad, marches more powerful yet,
And sing me before you go the song of the throes of Democracy.
(Democracy, the destin'd conqueror, yet treacherous lip-smiles everywhere,
And death and infidelity at every step.)

2
A Nation announcing itself,
I myself make the only growth by which I can be appreciated,
I reject none, accept all, then reproduce all in my own forms.
A breed whose proof is in time and deeds,
What we are we are, nativity is answer enough to objections,
We wield ourselves as a weapon is wielded,
We are powerful and tremendous in ourselves,
We are executive in ourselves, we are sufficient in the variety of
ourselves,
We are the most beautiful to ourselves and in ourselves,
We stand self-pois'd in the middle, branching thence over the world,
From Missouri, Nebraska, or Kansas, laughing attacks to scorn.
Nothing is sinful to us outside of ourselves,
Whatever appears, whatever does not appear, we are beautiful or
sinful in ourselves only.
(O Mother--O Sisters dear!
If we are lost, no victor else has destroy'd us,
It is by ourselves we go down to eternal night.)

3
Have you thought there could be but a single supreme?
There can be any number of supremes--one does not countervail
another any more than one eyesight countervails another, or
one life countervails another.
All is eligible to all,
All is for individuals, all is for you,
No condition is prohibited, not God's or any.
All comes by the body, only health puts you rapport with the universe.
Produce great Persons, the rest follows.

4
Piety and conformity to them that like,
Peace, obesity, allegiance, to them that like,
I am he who tauntingly compels men, women, nations,
Crying, Leap from your seats and contend for your lives!
I am he who walks the States with a barb'd tongue, questioning every
one I meet,
Who are you that wanted only to be told what you knew before?
Who are you that wanted only a book to join you in your nonsense?
(With pangs and cries as thine own O bearer of many children,
These clamors wild to a race of pride I give.)
O lands, would you be freer than all that has ever been before?
If you would be freer than all that has been before, come listen to me.
Fear grace, elegance, civilization, delicatesse,
Fear the mellow sweet, the sucking of honey--juice,
Beware the advancing mortal ripening of Nature,
Beware what precedes the decay of the ruggedness of states and men.

5
Ages, precedents, have long been accumulating undirected materials,
America brings builders, and brings its own styles.
The immortal poets of Asia and Europe have done their work and
pass'd to other spheres,
A work remains, the work of surpassing all they have done.
America, curious toward foreign characters, stands by its own at all
hazards,
Stands removed, spacious, composite, sound, initiates the true use
of precedents,
Does not repel them or the past or what they have produced under
their forms,
Takes the lesson with calmness, perceives the corpse slowly borne
from the house,
Perceives that it waits a little while in the door, that it was
fittest for its days,
That its life has descended to the stalwart and well-shaped heir who
approaches,
And that he shall be fittest for his days.
Any period one nation must lead,
One land must be the promise and reliance of the future.
These States are the amplest poem,
Here is not merely a nation but a teeming Nation of nations,
Here the doings of men correspond with the broadcast doings of the
day and night,
Here is what moves in magnificent masses careless of particulars,
Here are the roughs, beards, friendliness, combativeness, the soul loves,
Here the flowing trains, here the crowds, equality, diversity, the
soul loves.

6
Land of lands and bards to corroborate!
Of them standing among them, one lifts to the light a west-bred face,
To him the hereditary countenance bequeath'd both mother's and father's,
His first parts substances, earth, water, animals, trees,
Built of the common stock, having room for far and near,
Used to dispense with other lands, incarnating this land,
Attracting it body and soul to himself, hanging on its neck with
incomparable love,
Plunging his seminal muscle into its merits and demerits,
Making its cities, beginnings, events, diversities, wars, vocal in him,
Making its rivers, lakes, bays, embouchure in him,
Mississippi with yearly freshets and changing chutes, Columbia,
Niagara, Hudson, spending themselves lovingly in him,
If the Atlantic coast stretch or the Pacific coast stretch, he
stretching with them North or South,
Spanning between them East and West, and touching whatever is between
them,
Growths growing from him to offset the growths of pine, cedar, hemlock,
live-oak, locust, chestnut, hickory, cottonwood, orange, magnolia,
Tangles as tangled in him as any canebrake or swamp,
He likening sides and peaks of mountains, forests coated with
northern transparent ice,
Off him pasturage sweet and natural as savanna, upland, prairie,
Through him flights, whirls, screams, answering those of the
fish-hawk, mocking-bird, night-heron, and eagle,
His spirit surrounding his country's spirit, unclosed to good and evil,
Surrounding the essences of real things, old times and present times,
Surrounding just found shores, islands, tribes of red aborigines,
Weather-beaten vessels, landings, settlements, embryo stature and muscle,
The haughty defiance of the Year One, war, peace, the formation of
the Constitution,
The separate States, the simple elastic scheme, the immigrants,
The Union always swarming with blatherers and always sure and impregnable,
The unsurvey'd interior, log-houses, clearings, wild animals,
hunters, trappers,
Surrounding the multiform agriculture, mines, temperature, the
gestation of new States,
Congress convening every Twelfth-month, the members duly coming
up from the uttermost parts,
Surrounding the noble character of mechanics and farmers, especially
the young men,
Responding their manners, speech, dress, friendships, the gait they
have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the
presence of superiors,
The freshness and candor of their physiognomy, the copiousness and
decision of their phrenology,
The picturesque looseness of their carriage, their fierceness when
wrong'd,
The fluency of their speech, their delight in music, their curiosity,
good temper and open-handedness, the whole composite make,
The prevailing ardor and enterprise, the large amativeness,
The perfect equality of the female with the male, the fluid movement
of the population,
The superior marine, free commerce, fisheries, whaling, gold-digging,
Wharf-hemm'd cities, railroad and steamboat lines intersecting all points,
Factories, mercantile life, labor-saving machinery, the Northeast,
Northwest, Southwest,
Manhattan firemen, the Yankee swap, southern plantation life,
Slavery--the murderous, treacherous conspiracy to raise it upon the
ruins of all the rest,
On and on to the grapple with it--Assassin! then your life or ours
be the stake, and respite no more.

7
(Lo, high toward heaven, this day,
Libertad, from the conqueress' field return'd,
I mark the new aureola around your head,
No more of soft astral, but dazzling and fierce,
With war's flames and the lambent lightnings playing,
And your port immovable where you stand,
With still the inextinguishable glance and the clinch'd and lifted fist,
And your foot on the neck of the menacing one, the scorner utterly
crush'd beneath you,
The menacing arrogant one that strode and advanced with his
senseless scorn, bearing the murderous knife,
The wide-swelling one, the braggart that would yesterday do so much,
To-day a carrion dead and damn'd, the despised of all the earth,
An offal rank, to the dunghill maggots spurn'd.)

8
Others take finish, but the Republic is ever constructive and ever
keeps vista,
Others adorn the past, but you O days of the present, I adorn you,
O days of the future I believe in you--I isolate myself for your sake,
O America because you build for mankind I build for you,
O well-beloved stone-cutters, I lead them who plan with decision
and science,
Lead the present with friendly hand toward the future.
(Bravas to all impulses sending sane children to the next age!
But damn that which spends itself with no thought of the stain,
pains, dismay, feebleness, it is bequeathing.)

9
I listened to the Phantom by Ontario's shore,
I heard the voice arising demanding bards,
By them all native and grand, by them alone can these States be
fused into the compact organism of a Nation.
To hold men together by paper and seal or by compulsion is no account,
That only holds men together which aggregates all in a living principle,
as the hold of the limbs of the body or the fibres of plants.
Of all races and eras these States with veins full of poetical stuff most
need poets, and are to have the greatest, and use them the greatest,
Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their
poets shall.
(Soul of love and tongue of fire!
Eye to pierce the deepest deeps and sweep the world!
Ah Mother, prolific and full in all besides, yet how long barren, barren?)

10
Of these States the poet is the equable man,
Not in him but off from him things are grotesque, eccentric, fail of
their full returns,
Nothing out of its place is good, nothing in its place is bad,
He bestows on every object or quality its fit proportion, neither
more nor less,
He is the arbiter of the diverse, he is the key,
He is the equalizer of his age and land,
He supplies what wants supplying, he checks what wants checking,
In peace out of him speaks the spirit of peace, large, rich,
thrifty, building populous towns, encouraging agriculture, arts,
commerce, lighting the study of man, the soul, health,
immortality, government,
In war he is the best backer of the war, he fetches artillery as
good as the engineer's, he can make every word he speaks draw blood,
The years straying toward infidelity he withholds by his steady faith,
He is no arguer, he is judgment, (Nature accepts him absolutely,)
He judges not as the judge judges but as the sun failing round
helpless thing,
As he sees the farthest he has the most faith,
His thoughts are the hymns of the praise of things,
In the dispute on God and eternity he is silent,
He sees eternity less like a play with a prologue and denouement,
He sees eternity in men and women, he does not see men and women
as dreams or dots.
For the great Idea, the idea of perfect and free individuals,
For that, the bard walks in advance, leader of leaders,
The attitude of him cheers up slaves and horrifies foreign despots.
Without extinction is Liberty, without retrograde is Equality,
They live in the feelings of young men and the best women,
(Not for nothing have the indomitable heads of the earth been always
ready to fall for Liberty.)

11
For the great Idea,
That, O my brethren, that is the mission of poets.
Songs of stern defiance ever ready,
Songs of the rapid arming and the march,
The flag of peace quick-folded, and instead the flag we know,
Warlike flag of the great Idea.
(Angry cloth I saw there leaping!
I stand again in leaden rain your flapping folds saluting,
I sing you over all, flying beckoning through the fight--O the
hard-contested fight!
The cannons ope their rosy-flashing muzzles--the hurtled balls scream,
The battle-front forms amid the smoke--the volleys pour incessant
from the line,
Hark, the ringing word Charge!--now the tussle and the furious
maddening yells,
Now the corpses tumble curl'd upon the ground,
Cold, cold in death, for precious life of you,
Angry cloth I saw there leaping.)

12
Are you he who would assume a place to teach or be a poet here in
the States?
The place is august, the terms obdurate.
Who would assume to teach here may well prepare himself body and mind,
He may well survey, ponder, arm, fortify, harden, make lithe himself,
He shall surely be question'd beforehand by me with many and stern
questions.
Who are you indeed who would talk or sing to America?
Have you studied out the land, its idioms and men?
Have you learn'd the physiology, phrenology, politics, geography,
pride, freedom, friendship of the land? its substratums and objects?
Have you consider'd the organic compact of the first day of the
first year of Independence, sign'd by the Commissioners, ratified
by the States, and read by Washington at the head of the army?
Have you possess'd yourself of the Federal Constitution?
Do you see who have left all feudal processes and poems behind them,
and assumed the poems and processes of Democracy?
Are you faithful to things? do you teach what the land and sea, the
bodies of men, womanhood, amativeness, heroic angers, teach?
Have you sped through fleeting customs, popularities?
Can you hold your hand against all seductions, follies, whirls,
fierce contentions? are you very strong? are you really of the
whole People?
Are you not of some coterie? some school or mere religion?
Are you done with reviews and criticisms of life? animating now to
life itself?
Have you vivified yourself from the maternity of these States?
Have you too the old ever-fresh forbearance and impartiality?
Do you hold the like love for those hardening to maturity? for the
last-born? little and big? and for the errant?
What is this you bring my America?
Is it uniform with my country?
Is it not something that has been better told or done before?
Have you not imported this or the spirit of it in some ship?
Is it not a mere tale? a rhyme? a prettiness?--Is the good old cause in
it?
Has it not dangled long at the heels of the poets, politicians,
literats, of enemies' lands?
Does it not assume that what is notoriously gone is still here?
Does it answer universal needs? will it improve manners?
Does it sound with trumpet-voice the proud victory of the Union in
that secession war?
Can your performance face the open fields and the seaside?
Will it absorb into me as I absorb food, air, to appear again in my
strength, gait, face?
Have real employments contributed to it? original makers, not mere
amanuenses?
Does it meet modern discoveries, calibres, facts, face to face?
What does it mean to American persons, progresses, cities? Chicago,
Kanada, Arkansas?
Does it see behind the apparent custodians the real custodians
standing, menacing, silent, the mechanics, Manhattanese, Western
men, Southerners, significant alike in their apathy, and in the
promptness of their love?
Does it see what finally befalls, and has always finally befallen,
each temporizer, patcher, outsider, partialist, alarmist,
infidel, who has ever ask'd any thing of America?
What mocking and scornful negligence?
The track strew'd with the dust of skeletons,
By the roadside others disdainfully toss'd.

13
Rhymes and rhymers pass away, poems distill'd from poems pass away,
The swarms of reflectors and the polite pass, and leave ashes,
Admirers, importers, obedient persons, make but the soil of literature,
America justifies itself, give it time, no disguise can deceive it
or conceal from it, it is impassive enough,
Only toward the likes of itself will it advance to meet them,
If its poets appear it will in due time advance to meet them, there
is no fear of mistake,
(The proof of a poet shall be sternly deferr'd till his country
absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorb'd it.)
He masters whose spirit masters, he tastes sweetest who results
sweetest in the long run,
The blood of the brawn beloved of time is unconstraint;
In the need of songs, philosophy, an appropriate native grand-opera,
shipcraft, any craft,
He or she is greatest who contributes the greatest original
practical example.
Already a nonchalant breed, silently emerging, appears on the streets,
People's lips salute only doers, lovers, satisfiers, positive knowers,
There will shortly be no more priests, I say their work is done,
Death is without emergencies here, but life is perpetual emergencies here,
Are your body, days, manners, superb? after death you shall be superb,
Justice, health, self-esteem, clear the way with irresistible power;
How dare you place any thing before a man?

14
Fall behind me States!
A man before all--myself, typical, before all.
Give me the pay I have served for,
Give me to sing the songs of the great Idea, take all the rest,
I have loved the earth, sun, animals, I have despised riches,
I have given aims to every one that ask'd, stood up for the stupid
and crazy, devoted my income and labor to others,
Hated tyrants, argued not concerning God, had patience and indulgence
toward the people, taken off my hat to nothing known or unknown,
Gone freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young,
and with the mothers of families,
Read these leaves to myself in the open air, tried them by trees,
stars, rivers,
Dismiss'd whatever insulted my own soul or defiled my body,
Claim'd nothing to myself which I have not carefully claim'd for
others on the same terms,
Sped to the camps, and comrades found and accepted from every State,
(Upon this breast has many a dying soldier lean'd to breathe his last,
This arm, this hand, this voice, have nourish'd, rais'd, restored,
To life recalling many a prostrate form;)
I am willing to wait to be understood by the growth of the taste of
myself,
Rejecting none, permitting all.
(Say O Mother, have I not to your thought been faithful?
Have I not through life kept you and yours before me?)

15
I swear I begin to see the meaning of these things,
It is not the earth, it is not America who is so great,
It is I who am great or to be great, it is You up there, or any one,
It is to walk rapidly through civilizations, governments, theories,
Through poems, pageants, shows, to form individuals.
Underneath all, individuals,
I swear nothing is good to me now that ignores individuals,
The American compact is altogether with individuals,
The only government is that which makes minute of individuals,
The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one
single individual--namely to You.
(Mother! with subtle sense severe, with the naked sword in your hand,
I saw you at last refuse to treat but directly with individuals.)

16
Underneath all, Nativity,
I swear I will stand by my own nativity, pious or impious so be it;
I swear I am charm'd with nothing except nativity,
Men, women, cities, nations, are only beautiful from nativity.
Underneath all is the Expression of love for men and women,
(I swear I have seen enough of mean and impotent modes of expressing
love for men and women,
After this day I take my own modes of expressing love for men and
women.) in myself,
I swear I will have each quality of my race in myself,
(Talk as you like, he only suits these States whose manners favor
the audacity and sublime turbulence of the States.)
Underneath the lessons of things, spirits, Nature, governments,
ownerships, I swear I perceive other lessons,
Underneath all to me is myself, to you yourself, (the same
monotonous old song.)

17
O I see flashing that this America is only you and me,
Its power, weapons, testimony, are you and me,
Its crimes, lies, thefts, defections, are you and me,
Its Congress is you and me, the officers, capitols, armies, ships,
are you and me,
Its endless gestations of new States are you and me,
The war, (that war so bloody and grim, the war I will henceforth
forget), was you and me,
Natural and artificial are you and me,
Freedom, language, poems, employments, are you and me,
Past, present, future, are you and me.
I dare not shirk any part of myself,
Not any part of America good or bad,
Not to build for that which builds for mankind,
Not to balance ranks, complexions, creeds, and the sexes,
Not to justify science nor the march of equality,
Nor to feed the arrogant blood of the brawn belov'd of time.
I am for those that have never been master'd,
For men and women whose tempers have never been master'd,
For those whom laws, theories, conventions, can never master.
I am for those who walk abreast with the whole earth,
Who inaugurate one to inaugurate all.
I will not be outfaced by irrational things,
I will penetrate what it is in them that is sarcastic upon me,
I will make cities and civilizations defer to me,
This is what I have learnt from America--it is the amount, and it I
teach again.
(Democracy, while weapons were everywhere aim'd at your breast,
I saw you serenely give birth to immortal children, saw in dreams
your dilating form,
Saw you with spreading mantle covering the world.)

18
I will confront these shows of the day and night,
I will know if I am to be less than they,
I will see if I am not as majestic as they,
I will see if I am not as subtle and real as they,
I will see if I am to be less generous than they,
I will see if I have no meaning, while the houses and ships have meaning,
I will see if the fishes and birds are to be enough for themselves,
and I am not to be enough for myself.
I match my spirit against yours you orbs, growths, mountains, brutes,
Copious as you are I absorb you all in myself, and become the master
myself,
America isolated yet embodying all, what is it finally except myself?
These States, what are they except myself?
I know now why the earth is gross, tantalizing, wicked, it is for my sake,
I take you specially to be mine, you terrible, rude forms.
(Mother, bend down, bend close to me your face,
I know not what these plots and wars and deferments are for,
I know not fruition's success, but I know that through war and crime
your work goes on, and must yet go on.)

19
Thus by blue Ontario's shore,
While the winds fann'd me and the waves came trooping toward me,
I thrill'd with the power's pulsations, and the charm of my theme
was upon me,
Till the tissues that held me parted their ties upon me.
And I saw the free souls of poets,
The loftiest bards of past ages strode before me,
Strange large men, long unwaked, undisclosed, were disclosed to me.

20
O my rapt verse, my call, mock me not!
Not for the bards of the past, not to invoke them have I launch'd
you forth,
Not to call even those lofty bards here by Ontario's shores,
Have I sung so capricious and loud my savage song.
Bards for my own land only I invoke,
(For the war the war is over, the field is clear'd,)
Till they strike up marches henceforth triumphant and onward,
To cheer O Mother your boundless expectant soul.
Bards of the great Idea! bards of the peaceful inventions! (for the
war, the war is over!)
Yet bards of latent armies, a million soldiers waiting ever-ready,
Bards with songs as from burning coals or the lightning's fork'd stripes!
Ample Ohio's, Kanada's bards--bards of California! inland bards--
bards of the war!
You by my charm I invoke.

By the Shore

noreply@blogger.com (Mercury Redbone) — Tue, 20 May 2008 13:45:00 +0000

A mystical poem by Edward Carpenter (1844-1929), spiritual and literary initiate of Walt Whitman. In addition to being the best-selling poet of his day, Carpenter was a pioneer of Queer Spirituality, the Pagan Revival, communalism, feminism and economic reform.

ALL night by the shore.
The obscure water, the long white lines of advancing foam, the rustle and thud, the panting sea-breaths, the pungent sea-smell,
The great slow air moving from the distant horizon, the immense mystery of space, and the soft canopy of the clouds!

The swooning thuds go on--the drowse of ocean goes on:
The long inbreaths--the short sharp outbreaths--the silence between.

I am a bit of the shore: the waves feed upon me, they come pasturing over me;
I am glad, O waves, that you come pasturing over me.

I am a little arm of the sea: the same tumbling swooning dream goes on--I feel the waves all around me, I spread myself through them.
How delicious! I spread and spread. The waves tumble through and over me--they dash through my face and hair.
The night is dark overhead: I do not see them, but I touch them and hear their gurgling laughter.

The play goes on!
The strange expanding indraughts go on!
Suddenly I am the Ocean itself: the great soft wind creeps over my face.
I am in love with the wind--I reach my lips to its kisses.
How delicious! all night and ages and ages long to spread myself to the gliding wind!
But now (and ever) it maddens me with its touch, I arise and whirl in my bed, and sweep my arms madly along the shores.

I am not sure any more which my own particular bit of shore is;
All the bays and inlets know me: I glide along in and out under the sun by the beautiful coast-line;
My hair floats leagues behind me; millions together my children dash against my face;
I hear what they say and am marvellously content.

All night by the shore;
And the sea is a sea of faces.

The long white lines come up--face after face comes and falls past me--
Thud after thud. Is it pain or joy?
Face after face--endless!

I do not know; my sense numbs; a trance is on me--

I am becoming detached!
I am a bit of the shore:
The waves feed upon me, they pasture all over me, my feeling is strangely concentrated at every point where they touch me;
I am glad O waves that you come pasturing over me.

I am detached, I disentangle myself from the shore;
I have become free--I float out and mingle with the rest.
The pain, the acute clinging desire, is over--I feel beings like myself all around me, I spread myself through and through them, I am merged in a sea of contact.
Freedom and equality are a fact. Life and joy seem to have begun for me.

The play goes on!
Suddenly I am the great living Ocean itself--the awful Spirit of Immensity creeps over my face.

I am in love with it. All night and ages and ages long and for ever I pour my soul out to it in love.
I spread myself out broader and broader for ever, that I may touch it and be with it everywhere.
There is no end. But ever and anon it maddens me with its touch. I arise and sweep away my bounds.

I know but I do not care any longer which my own particular body is--all conditions and fortunes are mine.
By the ever-beautiful coast-line of human life, by all shores, in all climates and countries, by every secluded nook and inlet,
Under the eye of my beloved Spirit I glide:
O joy! for ever, ever, joy!
I am not hurried--the whole of eternity is mine;
With each one I delay, with each one I dwell--with you I dwell.
The warm breath of each life ascends past me;
I take the thread from the fingers that are weary, and go on with the work;
The secretest thoughts of all are mine, and mine are the secretest thoughts of all.

All night by the shore;
And the fresh air comes blowing with the dawn.
The mystic night fades--but my joy fades not.
I arise and cast a stone into the water (O sea of faces I cast this poem among you)--and turn landward over the rustling beach.

"By the Shore" is reprinted from The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse. Ed. Nicholson & Lee. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1917.

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By the Shore

Nature and God--I neither knew
Yet Both so well knew me
They startled, like Executors
Of My identity.

All Circumstances are the Frame
In which His Face is set--
All latitudes exist for His
Sufficient Continent--

The Light His Action, and the Dark
The Leisure of His Will--
In Him Existence serve or set
A Force illegible

The Martyr Poets--did not tell--
But wrought their Pang in syllable--
That when their mortal name be numb--
Their mortal fate--encourage Some--
The Martyr Painters--never spoke--
...bequeathing--rather--to their Work--
That when their conscious fingers cease--
Some seek in Art--the Art of Peace--