Category: Uncategorized

I’m quite angry with the world right now. I feel as if I have so little control of how things turn out, however, I suspect that this is the truth of life, somehow forgotten. At least I can now recognize the delusion in what, over the years, I have been taught. That is the teaching of our children that “they” have the power to become something that is more important than what “they” are, as they are, and that “they” as individuals can achieve and change their sense of worth and how others perceive them. And that will bring them power, wealth and a sense of importance and possibly invulnerability to life’s less pleasant afflictions.

People that I love are becoming sick and any effort to fix or distract from that inevitable reality seems to be so superficial and unreal. I’m so aware of the dysfunctional aspects of attachment to surreal ideas and that includes the nonsense of pursuing an individual sense of power that promotes entanglement in relationships and that takes me so much away from presence and the love I find in that.

I now realize that this illusive power and control that we strive for is rather unimportant and in fact it is often pretended and show that keep us from something more authentic of ourselves. It is only in presence that I can see what is real of myself and life and death. It is the only place that I can find authentic ground from where I can respond with heart to others, watching the anger and suffering and hoping to be conscious of my habitual reaction that only serves to complicate and confuse things. Something newly born in me sees how I become entangled and wont allow it to manifest. That something causes me to step back and to find that grounded space where I can let go of that needy part that strives to create and foster attachment to unnecessary things. In that I return to living in what is real. It’s not an intellectual choice but more attending to what is authentic of me,that at some point in the past I have been conditioned to ignore.

But in this I must learn to live with the inevitable pain and loss that life brings and understand that I can not find compassion and contentment in that focus of distracting myself.

To be able to see the totality of things as a familiar occurrence, involves an ability to free myself of all representations.We take language to be words, and words to be agreed-upon naming, following the grammatical laws of a particular culture, used primarily to communicate. That is, words themselves are assumed to be “empty,” though they convey meaning and those words make up our representations. Coming to an understanding that my perceptions have been influenced by these representations, many of which have been handed down from family and culture has played a part in promoting a new realization, That is that most of these words and representations have been accepted in blind faith and have gone unexamined in that acceptance and that our dependence on them may in fact take us away from more comprehensive revelations that have their influence in a non representational living experience,

But what is a child, first emerging from an existence and entirely free of every and any image to do if he is to get by in life. Nominal representations, that take the link to gesture out of words and in turn the direct experience out of representations and life become a requirement that we all become dependent on in our social conditioning which enables one in communicating, interaction and relating. We become trapped in this conditioning in that it creates a filter that limits perception and a more authentic process and experience of life.

According to Plato, Socrates, the human being, through recollection, finds truths buried within himself, that existed prior to the representations that have formed. In the traces and seeds of an otherwise forgotten state the original freedom eventually appears not as lost, but as something to be rediscovered: it is ahead of us as the goal of a liberation; of a becoming which consists of detachment from images. Whatever my knowledge may be and whatever my works may be, if in this present instant I dedicate myself to them without making them mine, if I remain as open and as free from entanglements as I was in the beginning, then I am truly detached and disposed to a totality. Detachment arises and is verified in such a “now” which is always new.

In our modern world of reliance on abstraction and representation, a majority of humans subscribe to a materialist philosophy, undoubtedly influenced by fragmented and limited representations. We’re they honest, they would admit that in their scheme of things that “non representational life”, influenced by artistic and poetic forms, can be dispensed with altogether. There is in fact a school of thought whose explicit purpose is to affirm the ‘meaningless’ nature of life and in fact that it has no place in the lives of the majority of the modern populace, who differ, in this respect, from their illiterate ancestors, in whose memories songs and ballads pointing to a more total truth had their place.

“We live within this scripted notion of existence that successfully conceals heartfulness. We perceive existence as we are scripted to do. A walk on the moon is, not different from a walk on the earth on the condition that we walk as lunatics or that we dwell poetically wherever we happen to be.”

It is possible that there is something more of our existence than what we are able to conventionally perceive and that we are missing something in our clinging to learned beliefs, opinions, conditioned hopes and needs. If we choose to investigate and explore aspects of our existence in an open, aware, experiential and creative way we might discover something of ourselves that has been lost, ignored or filtered from our realization as a consequence of our clinging way.

James Hillman writes of the benefit of returning to our innocence.” Here, innocence is not mere or sheer inexperience but rather that condition where one is not identified with experience”: it is a release (nirvana) “from the nigredo of personal identity into the mirrors of impersonal reflections.”

We see the world as we are conditioned to see the world. The challenge for me is how I might come to see my conditioning more clearly and in so doing, open to a place of heart, to embrace the world as it is, or at least to see other possibilities or ways of perceiving that promote a more comprehensive awareness.

Robert Sardello writes “Heart awareness, heartfulness, locates being fully human within the soul and spiritual center of the body, the heart. Practices of heartfulness contemplatively engage the actual organ of the heart, inwardly revealing what it is like to be incarnated in body and world. In developing the capacity to creatively radiate from the center outward, the holy, whole, nature of the human body reveals itself as intimately united with imagination, creative presence, Earthunity, and the unfolding of the livingness of all things. It feels like our natural state, forgotten long ago.”

There has been a shift “to lose oneself” in the sense that familiar bonds have been loosened and a slow slipping away has occurred. Others have come to know me in terms of externally imposed constraints and conditioning that I have come to realize has caused me to be something of a “stranger”.

Such a shift has not been a movement towards a literal end but the dethronement of something of a superficial control centre that has interfered more than it has seemed to help, in the living of life; at least as I realize life to be in my more recent awareness. Escape from this way is not a decline and it is not an end, but simply an inclination to make ready a descent by which the stranger goes under and what is left is the “departed”. Along with that there is a sense of “settling in”and an expansion of awareness in what is left.

The one “who is apart,”can be perceived to be somewhat of a madman because he has taken his way in another not so conventional direction; although it being no more insane than the erratic orientation of the stranger. The madness, however, is of a more gentle quality than what the “stranger” knew for his mind has come to pursue a greater stillness and a home is now being discovered in a “groundless ground” and in that there is a wandering of another more organic essence than what has been known.

From Pindar’s words in the Greek Lyric Odes! “to live authentically is to come forth as what thou art.”

As Father Richard Rohr quotes “it’s precisely in our humanity that we’re able to find connection with one another — and we can only access it if we’re vulnerable. The “truly human” is always experienced in vulnerability, in mutuality, in reciprocity,”.

Contemporary life is generally hedonistic in its orientation a consequence being that people seem to be confused, dogmatically opinionated and at times grasping for something to ground them in a deeper way than an indulgent life is able to. There seems as well to be lost sense of moral purpose, or a “telos” (a Greek term referring to that which in an individual provides the moral justification for society)”.

Michael Zimmerman writes that there is a general tendency that we find it almost impossible … to regard our experience just as a series of happenings; instead, we filter it through all sorts of projections and interpretations, including scientific theories about the structure of “reality,” and religious claims about the “meaning” of it all. We tend to be so purposive and willful that the world appears only as a set of goals and obstacles. In viewing the world this way, we are shut off from its primal mystery: that events are constantly happening, and that the play of appearance is going on at all.

Hillman also rejects the idea that origin is something that lies in a literal (objective) past. Attempts to trace everything to a source do not solve anything. The fantasy of objective origins disguises the psychological truth that “the ultimate source is … in the enigma … of the imaginal … in the mundus imaginalis.” (See Henry Corbins notion https://www.amiscorbin.com/bibliographie/mundus-imaginalis-or-the-imaginary-and-the-imaginal/)

The following quote by Zimmerman explores, and requires somewhat deeper contemplation, stepping out from a conventional rational explanation to a way of exploring living authentically or in Pindar’s words from the Greek Lyric Odes, a way to “come forth as what thou art.

Play refers to a time of gnosis which can be a time of awakening to an inherent knowledge and/or mundus imaginalis; a place of spiritual mysteries especially esoteric mystical knowledge. In play we rediscover this “telos”.

“These happenings (beings, events) require a place (time, absence) to happen (to be manifest). The place does not come from outside of the happening, but is intrinsic to it. Presencing and absencing happen together, or “give” themselves to each other. The play plays because it plays. We are most ourselves when we participate in this play.”

We can be so programmed in ways that we ignore the direct experience of being. It seems that so many of us go through our days making choices that ignore that awareness. When I take the time to attend to the present moment it often provokes a tear; something about coming back to realization of the beauty and struggle and wonder of life; that can only be fully realized in awareness. There is always an experience of vulnerability and sensitivity in that awareness, sometimes not easy to be with but inseparable from the realization of beauty and truth. I recognize my habitual efforts to escape from the sensitivity that these moments or realization bring and at the same time I see the futility in pursuing an ever illusive place of security. I prefer to be alone at those moments or at least to be with others in a more intimate and/or authentic way; that itself often extending and intensifying the sense of vulnerability. It is something that can’t be avoided if I am to live life fully.