Divine Virtuosity

Indefensible Amounts of Beauty - Elizabeth Gilbert

2012-02-14T20:07:00.003Z

I take Valentine's day as a celebration of all kinds of love & generosity. It's like an extra helping of Christmas to brighten up the winter darkness & cold ;-) I even tend to give presents to myself. Seriously! This year I opted for a few delicious chocolate brownies for breakfast :-) So as a little non-caloric present to anyone accidentally or not so accidentally stumbling over this blog I am adding this new video clip of a recent conversation with Elizabeth Gilbert on her latest novel & her irrational fascination with plants produced by the Intelligent Channel. I especially loved the part on the wonder of sheer useless, indefensible, indulgent, unnecessary, excessive, explosive beauty. Hope you enjoy the video too!

Feminist Mysticism – Virginia Woolf

2012-02-14T13:14:00.002Z

I have Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse on my desk waiting to be started. I must shamefully confess that I have never read any writing by her, although I am familiar with her thoughts, because they seem to be cropping up quite often in other books or various corners of the Internet. I also never really felt up to reading this particular book because I read somewhere that it might reflect Virginia’s childhood demons caused by the sexual abuse by her half-brothers. But after reading Nabokov’s Lolita perhaps even this should be manageable after all. I’d survived that one although with a lot of queasiness, like a difficult sea voyage on a stormy sea of emotions. In this confessionary atmosphere I hope I may be also forgiven for not reading too many books by female authors. This is a very strange paradox of my feminism. Most of my life I preferred books by men, I can’t explain why. Perhaps the implicit prejudice of my education is responsible or maybe even my own. My favourite author of my younger years was Charles Dickens. By the time I was 18 I read his David Copperfield a couple of times in several languages and owned a few copies of it. But I noticed recently an odd appetite for books by feminine authors. Nowadays, I have quite a few on my desk simultaneously. So I guess I am making progress in this respect. I am also planning to re-read the Brontë sisters’ Jane Eyre & Wuthering Heights. I read them many, many years ago as a teenager, but now I plan to read the original English versions.

And although I am not that familiar with Virginia Woolf as a writer (at least firsthand) I find her quite a fascinating literary personality. She was full of paradoxes and hidden dimensions. In addition to being an early feminist, she was an exquisite intuitive psychologist, existentialist, metaphysicist. Her writing is suggestive of her spiritual mysticism (going beyond the superficial empirical layer of reality), although she was agnostic or perhaps even atheist (I find the possibility of atheist mysticism quite feasible). And what strikes me most is that I am running my own existential experiment on the basis of Woolf’s preliminary research design & rough sketches (see the first quote in the list), although without being consciously aware of it. That realization took my breath away & made my eyes open wide in surprise. So I hope very much that you will find your own little shining star for your own spiritual enlightenment in the list of quotes by Virginia Woolf contributing to the project of feminist mysticism.

By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.

Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?

With some irony in her interrogation, for when one woke at all, one’s relations changes, she looked at the steady light, the pitiless, the remorseless, which was so much her, yet so little her, which had her at its beck and call (she woke in the night and saw it bent across their bed, stroking the floor), but for all that she thought, watching it with fascination, hypnotised, as if it were stroking with silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight, she had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, it is enough! It is enough!

I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee's life of the poet. She died young — alas, she never wrote a word... Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross-roads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here to-night, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh.

My belief is that if we live another century or so — I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals — and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past Milton's bogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would be impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.

Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.

The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it. The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

For ourselves, who are ordinary men and women, let us return thanks to Nature for her bounty by using every one of the senses she has given us; vary our state as much as possible; turn now this side, now that, to the warmth, and relish to the full before the sun goes down the kisses of youth and the echoes of a beautiful voice singing Catullus. Every season is likeable, and wet days and fine, red wine and white, company and solitude. Even sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life, can be full of dreams; and the most common actions—a walk, a talk, solitude in one’s own orchard—can be enhanced and lit up by the association of the mind. Beauty is everywhere, and beauty is only two finger’s-breadth from goodness.

There it was before her - life. Life: she thought but she did not finish her thought. She took a look at life, for she had a clear sense of it there, something real, something private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband. A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her; and sometimes they parleyed (when she sat alone); there were, she remembered, great reconciliation scenes; but for the most part, oddly enough, she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance. There were the eternal problems: suffering; death; the poor. There was always a woman dying of cancer even here. And yet she had said to all these children, You shall go through with it.

"Like a work of art," she repeated, looking from her canvas to the drawing-room steps and back again. She must rest for a moment. And, resting, looking from one to the other vaguely, the old question which transversed the sky of the soul perpetually, the vast, the general question which was apt to particularise itself at such moments as these, when she released faculties that had been on the strain, stood over her, paused over her, darkened over her. What is the meaning of life? That was all — a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. ... In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing (she looked at the cloud going and the leaves shaking) was struck into stability.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?

Life for both sexes — and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement — is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to one self. By feeling that one has some innate superiority — it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney — for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination — over other people.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes. Any help we can give you must be different from that you can give yourselves, and perhaps the value of that help may lie in the fact of that difference.

I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not know. I do not believe that you know. I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill.

Outwardly, what is simpler than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there for a woman rather than for a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against. And if this is so in literature, the freest of all professions for women, how is it in the new professions which you are now for the first time entering?

But the novels of women were not affected only by the necessarily narrow range of the writer's experience. They showed, at least in the nineteenth century, another characteristic which may be traced to the writer's sex. In Middlemarch and in Jane Eyre we are conscious not merely of the writer's character, as we are conscious of the character of Charles Dickens, but we are conscious of a woman's presence — of someone resenting the treatment of her sex and pleading for its rights.

In the past, the virtue of women's writing often lay in its divine spontaneity ... But it was also, and much more often, chattering and garrulous ... In future, granted time and books and a little space in the house for herself, literature will become for women, as for men, an art to be studied. Women's gift will be trained and strengthened. The novel will cease to be the dumping-ground for the personal emotions. It will become, more than at present, a work of art like any other, and its resources and its limitations will be explored.

The strongest natures, when they are influenced, submit the most unreservedly: it is perhaps a sign of their strength. But that Thoreau lost any of his own force in the process, or took on permanently any colours not natural to himself the readers of his books will certainly deny. The Transcendentalist movement, like most movements of vigour, represented the effort of one or two remarkable people to shake off the old clothes which had become uncomfortable to them and fit themselves more closely to what now appeared to them to be the realities.

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.

As a woman I have no country.
As a woman I want no country.
As a woman my country is the whole world.

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.

To enjoy freedom . . . we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose.

Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.

No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.

For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.

There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.

I am rooted, but I flow.

When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.

I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything.

That perhaps is your task--to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun out at length in the novelist's way, but condensed and synthesized in the poet's way--that is what we look to you to do now.

Beauty, the world seemed to say. And as if to prove it (scientifically) wherever he looked at the houses, at the railings, at the antelopes stretching over the palings, beauty sprang instantly. To watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was an exquisite joy. Up in the sky swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out, round and round, yet always with perfect control as if elastics held them; and the flies rising and falling; and the sun spotting now this leaf, now that, in mockery, dazzling it with soft gold in pure good temper; and now again some chime (it might be a motor horn) tinkling divinely on the grass stalks—all of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty, that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere.

What does the brain matter compared with the heart?

Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.

Come indoors then, and open the books on your library shelves. For you have a library and a good one. A working library, a living library; a library where nothing is chained down and nothing is locked up; a library where the songs of the singers rise naturally from the lives of the livers.

I feel that by writing I am doing what is far more necessary than anything else.

The most extraordinary thing about writing is that when you've struck the right vein, tiredness goes. It must be an effort, thinking wrong.

She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.

It was a silly, silly dream, being unhappy.

What is meant by “reality”? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech—and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates.

... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.

Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins--of happiness and unhappiness.

Moments like this are buds on the tree of life. Flowers of darkness they are.

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

Some we know to be dead even though they walk among us; some are not yet born though they go through all the forms of life; other are hundreds of years old though they call themselves thirty-six.

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?

Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth.

Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.

The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging.

Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it….”

The Living Species of Enchanters, Magicians & Witches

2012-02-12T14:02:00.000Z


Magic Circle by John William Waterhouse (1886). Public domain image

The intention for this post has been ripening slowly in my mind for several months, at least some parts of it. The intention to dispel some misunderstandings regarding the nature of humans. More specifically the fine miscommunication advanced by J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter about the reality of muggles (human individuals with no magical skills). I believe that even within the story of Harry Potter muggles should have belonged to folk (meta-)fiction species or listed in the Monster Book of Monsters. I side more enthusiastically with Lewis Carroll as he addressed his brain child Alice in Wonderland in the voice of the talking Unicorn exclaiming: “It’s a fabulous monster!” Yes, we all are fantastic creatures living in the wondrous habitat of a magical world! But some of us are unaware of it.

For I believe that there are no human individuals without at least a potential for some form of magical skill (they seem to be however asleep in many of us, anesthetized by our fear or that of our culture). These magical faculties may seem ordinary, common on surface but can have an extremely important positive transformative effect (e.g. artistic abilities able to enchant, deeply move and inspire or an infinite, angelic patience and endless goodness of heart). We all belong to a species of magicians, sorcerers and witches living in an enchanted world. Even our essential life processes are breathtakingly miraculous if you look really close or with a sensitive artistic squint (that’s how I used to feel as a kid during my biology classes at school most of the time). It’s just fantastic how our bodies & souls work, isn’t it? Our world is not perfect, and its beauty can often seem quite heartrendingly devastating, but it surely is awe-inspiring. How marvellously things work, and how poignantly they fall apart too.

On occasions my brain seems to do an odd thing, as if the complex switchboard in my head was suddenly hacked or short-circuited by some invisible hands. Then I unexpectedly fall into the grip of a peculiar psychological seizure and at that moment I feel as if I were truly existing within a heartbreakingly touching & tender 4D living, breathing piece of art (like the Harry Potter moving portraits but even more alive, captivating & all-encompassing). And I am one of its dynamic constituents, a miniscule contributor, and often even a humble co-creator. During those peculiar spiritual possessions I can’t help but feel filled with awe and wonder, my heart overflowing with uncontrollable tenderness. Just like Alice in Wonderland or Dorothy in Oz. I am instantly transported into a private, yet universally accessible fairyland in which light dances on the surface of things, colours seem to be breathing life, plants and animals seem to communicate in an ancient & forgotten universal language, inanimate objects seem to have a sophisticated psychological life, fairies appear to be lurking behind every tree, and people just amuse themselves with a pretend play at not having any magical gifts at all just out of sheer fun & frivolity of such an absurd idea. It feels as if I wandered blindly into the magical & feverishly bustling backstage of life & existence, behind the seemingly ordinary scenes of the empirical world. Reality and truth become one with poetry, magic & wonder.

In psychology, some skills related to empathy are often labelled as mind reading. Because our minds seem to work as subtle psychological endoscopes. We can read between the lines of the surface ripples and often with surprising depth & accuracy. Already young toddlers are endowed with these special empathic faculties, and some researchers go even further in suggesting that perhaps even infants less than one year old may have the rudimentary forms of them (they are able to subtly distinguish between the external manifestation of reality and our internal human intentions and appreciate the potential conflicts between the two). How breathtaking!

Oddly, sometimes I also wonder whether the absence of a superpower (like a complete reading of minds) or only partial presence of it can be considered as a miraculous ability. In the last couple of days I came to appreciate what a boon it is that we (I) do not have the skill of perfect mind reading. Not only because our own ideas and thoughts are protected in their private & peaceful sanctuary, but also because we are sheltered from others’ unimpressive or unsettling thoughts. On occasions, even when reading spiritual materials by current authors I encounter those rare unfortunate cases of mental exhibitionism (I do not know how to best name this phenomenon of excessive & inappropriate mental undressing). When I stumble unprepared into the explicit and unedited thoughts of some authors, I feel unexpectedly assaulted by intrusive, forced intimacy that makes me come away with a queasy feeling in my stomach and bad taste in my mouth. It literally feels like a violation of the psyche with simultaneous disturbing resonances in the body. I still clearly remember those cases (& authors), but for your own well-being I won’t reproduce any specific examples here. Perhaps you are sufficiently familiar with that phenomenon as well. At those times I am just saying to myself “I really did not want to hear this from/about you. I did not want to know…” Sometimes we make the greatest favour to others when we do not share some things. Not all cases of intimacy are comfortable, or appropriate in various contexts. But paradoxically the same occasions make me appreciate the limitation of the human psychological make up. “Thank God we do not have fully functional mind reading faculties!” I sigh with a relief. Not only our own thoughts are safely harboured in the private chambers of our minds, but also our psyches are simultaneously shielded against unwanted psychological invasions and violations by other minds. How great that is! We have the protection of a magical circle formed from our limitations & weaknesses! Otherwise we would be just like some anthropoid psychological amoebas floating in a sea of mental hyperstimulation, not having any identity, self or soul. Only by having this personalized inner spacious (with)drawing room within ourselves can enable us to crystallize into unique individuals with specific contributions to our surroundings.

On the other hand, there are some cases of mind reading that are extremely comfortable and oh so convenient! They are especially pleasant with people with whom I am close and in a harmonious, trusting (and well-tested) relationship. It feels like true magic when from almost half a word the other person understands a whole & complete package of emotions, impressions, implications, reasons. I haven’t arrived at the root of this magic ability yet (and I do not think that scientific psychology has even begun to take up the task at all), but it takes my breath every time it happens. It’s wonderful! It feels so re-assuring and so encouraging that I do not have to give any reasons, explanations, descriptions. I am fully understood anyway & loved with all my faults & weaknesses as an extra bonus. It feels definitely otherworldly & surreal! When this happens suddenly I stop seeing a mere human being at my side, instead I realize that a true angel is guarding over my well-being & happiness. This realization makes me appreciate the privilege of having this person in my life. How unreasonably lucky & blessed I am! And it motivates me to become the other person’s guardian angel in return as far as I am able. And an angel in other people’s life and praying that everyone on this planet could have such a magical being to beautify their interior world.

It’s almost a cliché nowadays to say that everything is connected to everything. I can’t help but feel a slight irritation rising in me unless this statement is accompanied by a qualifying clause. It’s a circular claim, a tautological thesis, not really leading anywhere, or at best to a sort of spiritual cul-de-sac. I think to myself then, “Ok, everything is connected to everything, but everything is also partially disconnected from everything.” We are only half connected, also in spiritual terms. That’s why I cannot read anyone’s thought with perfect accuracy (and thank God for that!), occasionally I am even not able to read my own mind ;-). That’s why it’s so important to be clear about what my intentions, emotions, memories, preconceptions, projections are, where my psychological life borders on that of another person. We need to respect our mutual distinctions not only connection. That’s why imagination is such a helpful, even indispensable skill for subtle empathic insight. It’s a great tool to model what’s going on in the other person on the basis of the information that is available to us. So the magical circle drawn around us comes to mind once again. We live in these sacred circles drawn in the shifting sands of life, we each are to some degree living in a miniature universe of our own. Our little planets’ stratospheres touch on each other, and can share some of their inner dynamism. But they can never completely overlap, we’re not completely open books to each other, and if yes then only for fleeting fractions of time. That’s how solitude is possible, how we can become even lonely, isolated, or alienated.

So on this particular limb of my spiritual journey I am gradually becoming more and more appreciative of the dis-connection from others, or only partial connection. I am actually quite grateful and fascinated by the possibilities it offers creatively, artistically, spiritually. It provides a certain gap, a small fuzzy boundary of freedom, a thin breathing sphere instead of complete & absolute enmeshment that could be perhaps suffocating, limiting & even claustrophobic. We each form a unique ring in a colourful tapestry of existence, embracing our inner open space & also holding hands with those around us. Like individual palms joined in a cosmic prayer, but still also staying distinct. Because only what is separated can be connected, otherwise there would be only amorphous, formless diffusion, confusion, dissipation. And so I am starting to appreciate even our human limitations & absence of superpowers as magical endowments in themselves.

Dare to Disturb the Universe!

2012-02-11T09:02:00.001Z

So at last I know where this popular tribal cry of spiritual warriors originates from! From T.S. Eliot’s famous poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (access the full text here). To me it’s recent news. But in case my poetic ignorance might give a cause for offence I would like to use in my defence the fact that as a Central European I was not weaned exclusively on English poetry. I was distracted by the multitude of literary influences all around me, and arrived at this realization only not long ago. So I have decided to post this excerpt from the poem in case there might be other innocents around in the world awaiting a little literary enlightenment ;-)

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

by T.S. Eliot (excerpt)

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!"]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!"]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

Butterflies and Hurricanes

2012-02-06T10:58:00.002Z

I wanted to write about the butterfly effect already some time ago. But only not long ago I got more perceptibly spurred to really put down my thoughts in the form a post. In some respect it’s a poetic name for Buddha’s dependent origination (if I am right). The butterfly effect is a technical concept from chaos theory explaining how minor factors can make major differences to the final outcomes in a causal chain of events. So even the gentle wing flapping of a butterfly may ultimately significantly contribute to the formation of a powerful hurricane in the atmosphere. And of course, what I am most interested in is what role the butterfly effect can play in our lives and our soul’s development. I do not have a theory yet, I am just in the process of mulling the idea over in my mind, turning it over in my psyche’s fingers like a beautiful round pebble. But my intuition is that the notion is perfectly applicable to our psychological life as well. That there are some unnoticed butterfly flappings often taking place in our soul outside of our awareness (with potentially creative or destructive effects). And intellectually we may not know what exactly their consequences for our lives will be. So we may not be ready to prepare alternative plans when the great waves break against the shores of our existence. So I have no final answer for that. But perhaps refining our souls, senses, sensitivities can provide an inner sturdiness & vigilance. We need to be prepared for absurdity, accident, non-sense, irrationality, chaos, failure, error. Accept them as a part of our life & let go of our unhelpful expectations. Science, intellect and reason are not going to help us in this matter, because these tools are applicable only where patterns, logic and order prevail. Paradoxically, it’s often the small things that are hardest to control (they are so easily overlooked or underestimated).

I’ve found the most beautiful & poignant illustration of the butterfly effect in the wonderful movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (one of my favourites, I watched it at least 5 or 6 times so far). Benjamin Button’s insight saying “… life being what it is — a series of intersecting lives and incidents, out of anyone's control” is a wise & compassionate observation worth taking to our heart. And his last advice (in the latter clip below) is an inspiring encouragement to live a full life even if it’s not completely in the grasp of our hands, even if it’s rarely going completely according to plan...

Subtle Science of the Heart

2012-02-05T17:37:00.001Z

Not so long ago I read an insightful quote by the physicist Max Planck about the limitations of science with relevance to human experience & understanding suggesting the following:

Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.

For me it’s just a more poetic articulation of the famous Gödel’s incompleteness theorems on a large scale. But somehow in my memory the author of this wisdom was another physicist, mathematician, and philosopher Blaise Pascal (I did not err that much in terms of the scientific discipline, although I was more than two centuries off). So I went on collecting this bouquet of thought-provoking quotations by him until I checked the other quote above and realized my mistake. So hopefully now you will be all confused & mixed up about the source of that quote just like I was by my presenting them side by side in this current post ;-)

Anyway, interestingly I found other observations by Pascal that are somewhat reminiscent and similar in tone & tendency to the Planck one (the first 3 in the list below). And thanks to this innocent error I also came to realize that one can learn a lot from Pascal not only regarding physics, mathematics, philosophy & science, but also about life, love & spirituality – the subtle sciences of the heart. Enjoy!

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

Vanity of science. Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science.

Reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it.

All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.

The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.

All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

A man does not show his greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both at once.

The power of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special efforts, but by his ordinary doing.

For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.

There is a God-shaped vacuum in every heart.

The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.

Little things console us because little things afflict us.

Let us wager the gain and the loss of wagering that God is. Let us consider the two possibilities. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Hesitate not, then, to wager that He is.

The multitude which does not reduce itself to unity is confusion.

It is your own assent to yourself, and the constant voice of your own reason, and not of others, that should make you believe.

All this visible world is but an imperceptible point in the ample bosom of nature.

To ridicule philosophy is really to philosophize.

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, sceptically of scepticism.

Kind words do not cost much. They never blister the tongue or lips. Mental trouble was never known to arise from such quarters. Though they do not cost much yet they accomplish much. They make other people good natured. They also produce their own image on men's souls, and a beautiful image it is.

It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason.

Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they see; it is above, not against them.

Early things must be known to be loved: divine things must be loved to be known.

Beauty is a harmonious relation between something in our nature and the quality of the object which delights us.

Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to a mind. This is the consummation of his difficulties, and yet it is his very being.

Wisdom leads us back to childhood.

Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts. [I especially love this one because it’s so synaesthetic.]

Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light is throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.

Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too; this is why a great and clear mind loves ardently and sees distinctly what it loves.

Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.

When one does not love too much, one does not love enough.

In difficult times carry something beautiful in your heart.

Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, and walk therein.

Crystal Clear Chorus from the Great Beyond

2012-02-04T12:59:00.001Z

The Soul hovering over the Body reluctantly parting with Life ...

How wishfully she looks on all she's leaving, now no longer her's.

by Luigi Schiavonetti. Public domain image.

Yesterday I discovered an interesting article on Guardian about the insights of dying people about their life. You can call me morbid, but I find the wisdom of people on the threshold of death endlessly instructive for my own life. I would say even inspiring, although I guess I am not supposed to say such things out loud and in public. But I can’t help it.

I must confess I have perhaps a very extraordinary relationship with death. One that, I believe, is not very common in our society. We are supposed to be afraid of death, right? And I say I am not. I’ll even admit that I never really was. There were times when I thought that it would be an inconvenient disruption to my workaholic life plans, but other than that not so much anxiety. And I know a lot about anxiety, about existential crises and similar psychological bugaboos, trust me. I just knew intellectually all my life that I am expected to be afraid. I assume that’s the positive side of living an honest and truthful life. You can not only look into your own eyes every single day without flinching, but you can face the end of your life with courage as well. I have nothing to fear, and I have no major regrets either. If death came to me this moment, I would say “Ok, let’s go. I am all packed & ready.” That does not mean I do not have any cherished plans, dreams and hopes. On the contrary. I have still some unfinished business on this planet, and hopefully will have until my last breath. And I am perfectly sure that I will be leaving with a sense of nostalgia & homesickness in my heart. But I would not want to make unnecessary drama around passing. I would not want to cling with tooth and nail to the neck of life. I would like to take that part of my journey with grace and dignity if possible. To make it easy and smooth for myself and my loved ones. Perhaps even with a sense of adventure? I figure I made peace with life, death, and the fact that I am not in absolute control over them. I understand that I cannot book an advance appointment with death. I learned my tough lessons of letting go (occasionally even with grace).

I would go perhaps even further. The Queen of Terror became a friend, a constant companion that helps me with my important life decisions. Like a special light torch that helps me focus my attention on the simple essentials. And I mean this literally. When I want to scare my relatives & friends to death (pun intended) I tell them about her. That ethereal figure that hovers often behind my right shoulder, who is beautiful & benign & I feel she is somehow related to death. She even might be death herself. Or an angel. Or an imaginative projection from my unconscious… I really have no clue. So there is another reason why I love reading the deep philosophical thoughts of dying people about passing. Some of them have practically identical experience with the personified presence of death behind their right shoulder. When I read such a description (in Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom), I felt as if my time was truly up ;-). I felt as if my heart was about to take a recreational sabbatical, such unexpected and uncanny were the similarities. Plus they provide validation of my own experiences and suggest that I have not gone completely out of my mind. Many advices and observations by these people bring tears to my eyes, not only because of their tenderness, poignancy & wisdom but because of their affinity with many of my principles. I am healthy (gratefully), I am young (conventionally too young to be bothered by death at all), and yet the views of dying people embody perfectly my personal philosophy of life that I am trying to practice day by day. I tell you, these encounters give me shivers down the spine most of the time. It’s surreal, it’s spooky. And always illuminating.

Another recent insight is that we most probably have all tried innocently the taste of death at some point. Perhaps with only the tip of a tiny coffee spoon. But we did. Maybe we have even tiptoed unnoticed on the other shore and scurried back quickly. But we were there. We are just perhaps not aware of it. My impression is that meditation probably opens the door to the antechamber of afterlife to some degree. So I have died a thousand times at least in this one life time thanks to my regular & intense meditation practice when I became one with an endless ocean of white light and ceased to exist as a solid entity separate from everything. My hunch is that part of the process of dying is the dissolution of ego, which often occurs during meditation or other psychologically absorbing activities. Ego dissolution also happens during various difficult life crises. When we soften, loose our sharp edges, become more fluid and pliable psychologically, when we get cooked by life’s transformative fire. When our old personality dies and another more loving, tender, wise takes her place. Or there are the cases of sensory over-stimulation when one feels the urgency to seek solid support in physical things in the reach of our hands or under our feet that will stop our soul from launching from our body like a spiritual space shuttle or firework. Or there are those positive experiences (e.g. becoming a parent, giving birth, realizing our big dreams…) when our hardened outer shell suddenly cracks open, we are released into a more airy, expansive space of ourselves, when we move beyond the mental border checks of ourselves. These are the examples of positive death. I am sure you can come up with numerous other examples of your own when we brush up against the Great Beyond even if unknowing.

Strangely, it is often said that many dying become uncommonly lucid & clear in their minds during their last moments. It seems when death grabs us by the collar, we are paradoxically awakened more into life by the feel of its breath on our face. Many of us wake up some more from the half-coma that we spend most of our lives in.

To cheer you up a little after this gloomy, dark post I have also included some thought-provoking quotes & a funny video clip from the movie Patch Adams (in which an enthusiastic & determined medical student tries to ease the burden of dying for a suffering cancer patient with a little mischievous black humour).

When you learn how to die, you learn how to live. Morrie Schwartz (from the book Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom)

Someone who thinks death is the scariest thing doesn't know a thing about life. Sue Monk Kidd

Truth Coming Out as Fantasy

2012-01-29T20:30:00.002Z

Neptune's Horses by Walter Crane (1892)

I read The Left Hand of Darkness, an award winning (Nebula, Hugo) sci-fi novel by Ursula K. Le Guin a couple of years ago. Amusingly, I thought it might inspire me for my doctorate. Seriously! Without any arm-twisting I’ll admit that I had some serious difficulties dedicating my undivided attention to the writing. I guess it was just not my cup of coffee ;-) A few days ago I finished reading Le Guin’s other book named TheLanguage of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction (you see, I do not give up that easily on writers) and I have a plan to throw a look at her kiddie fantasy cycle Earthsea at some point. But even though I clearly struggle throughout the writing often I feel richly rewarded by her infinitely wise, inspiring & refreshing views on life & spirituality. Check it out for yourself in the list of the quotes. Enjoy!

The great fantasies, myths and tales are indeed like dreams: they speak from the unconscious to the unconscious, in the language of the unconscious – symbol and archetype. Though they use words, they work the way music does: they short-circuit verbal reasoning, and go straight to the thoughts that lie too deep to utter. They cannot be translated fully into the language of reason, but only a Logical Positivist, who also finds Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony meaningless, would claim that they are therefore meaningless. They are profoundly meaningful, and usable – practical – in terms of ethics; of insight; of growth.

…fantasy is the natural, the appropriate language for the recounting of the spiritual journey and the struggle of good and evil in the soul.

A fantasy is a journey. It is a journey into the subconscious mind, just as psychoanalysis is. Like psychoanalysis, it can be dangerous; and it will change you.

I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth. The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.

I have never found anywhere, in the domain of art, that you don't have to walk to. (There is quite an array of jets, buses and hacks which you can ride to Success; but that is a different destination.) It is a pretty wild country. There are, of course, roads. Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby. No hitchhiking. And if you want to strike out in any new direction — you go alone. With a machete in your hand and the fear of God in your heart.

My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.

All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don't, our lives get made up for us by other people.

To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.

Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile politely and shut my earlids. I am a writer, not a caterer. There are plenty of caterers. But what children most want and need is what we and they don't know they want and don't think they need, and only writers can offer it to them.

No truth can make another truth untrue.
All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge.
Once you have seen the larger pattern,
You cannot get back to seeing the part as the whole.

To hear, one must be silent.

You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow.

You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do...

From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.

Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.

A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. ...What she had begun to learn was the weight of liberty. Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveller may never reach the end of it.

When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. or wonder who, after all, you are.

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

Light is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, life and death, lying
together like lovers in kemmer,
like hands joined together,
like the end and the way.

Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new.

Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.

To oppose something is to maintain it.

It's queer that daylight's not enough. We need the shadows, in order to walk.

It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.

We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.

The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn't have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book.

Only in silence the word,
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying life:
Bright the hawk's flight
On the empty sky.
The Creation of Éa

As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.

While we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices... Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.

Truth is a matter of the imagination.

When we're done with it, we may find—if it's a good novel—that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having meet a new face, crossed a street we've never crossed before.

My soul is ten thousand miles wide and extremely invisibly deep. It is the same size as the sea, and you cannot, you cannot cram it into beer cans and fingernails and stake it out in lots and own it. It will drown you all and never even notice.

To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.

You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

But we, insofar as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. We must learn to keep the balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility.

If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.

We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark, and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.

Living in a world that is valued only as gain, an ever-expanding world-as-frontier that has no worth of its own, no fullness of its own, you live in danger of losing your own worth to yourself. That's when you begin to listen to the voices from the other side, and to ask questions of failure and the dark.

In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can't lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won't move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it ... To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it--everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not interactive with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer's mind. No wonder not everyone is up to it.

All they're trying to do is tell you what they're like, and what you're like—what's going on—what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies. “The truth against the world!”—Yes. Certainly. Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it.

Change is freedom, change is life.
It's always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don't make changes, don't risk disapproval, don't upset your syndics. It's always easiest to let yourself be governed.
There's a point, around age twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.
Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go unbuild walls.

In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves; it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.

A scientist can pretend that his work isn't himself, it's merely the impersonal truth. An artist can't hide behind the truth. He can't hide anywhere.

It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man's hand and the wisdom in a tree's root: they all arise together. My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.

And he began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.

Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it is heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed.

Progress means nothing to presence.

One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies...

Man's singularity is his divinity.

It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self - ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality, the truth which I recognise in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness - that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.

The body is an arrangement in space-time, a patterning, a process; the mind is a process of the body, an organ, doing what organs do: organize. Order, pattern, connect. . . . an immensely flexible technology, or life strategy, which if used with skill and resourcefulness presents each of us with that most fascinating of all serials, The Story of My Life.

Success is somebody else's failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty.

The Dark Emissary of Light

2012-01-27T13:27:00.002Z

Satan in His Original Glory by William Blake (1805).

Public domain image.

Yesterday, while reading a book I unexpectedly came across an interesting interpretation of the concept for spiritual darkness. The author suggested that the word Lucifer stands for “light-bearer” in Latin (derived from lucem ferre). I honestly admit I had to catch my breath and if I had not been sitting already I would have had to sit down. What a new, breathtaking perspective on the dark! And then I did a little more research and found out that there are some more surprises lurking behind this unexpected & somewhat paradoxical name for the evil. It also signifies the appearance of the planet Venus on the dawn sky; it is the herald of the new day after the end of night. So Lucifer stands for the “Morning Star”, “Day Star” or the “shining one” (from Hebrew). Interestingly, Jesus has been often referred to as the Morning Star, even Latin lucifer in some cases. Now I have some nagging questions stubbornly sitting in my head whether Lucifer could also in psychological terms represent a mythological personification of the dark night of the soul, a difficult descent into the murky undercurrents of one’s spiritual life, into the gloomy and treacherous underworld of one’s self, a deep plunge from the grace of the daylight ego (Lucifer was an archangel banished from heaven because of his pride & ambition), an incarnation for the spiritual surrender to the powerful gravity of the unconscious (expansive, non-verbal, subliminal consciousness). Lucifer has always been associated with both light & dark, as a messenger of light he must have been connected to the dark too. So I think I’ve found another fascinating support for the idea of how the dark gives birth to light, how ascent follows descent, how clarity emerges out of confusion, how insight arises from innocence… So wonderful!

Light is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, life and death, lying
together like lovers in kemmer,
like hands joined together,
like the end and the way.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

Poetic Fireflies - The Revelatory Luminosity of Myths

2012-01-25T15:39:00.002Z

Fairies, goblins, angels, demons, muses, elves, deities – supernatural beings – have been making visitations of my mind recently. At least in the shape of concepts. ;-) I just wondered if there is any other way of looking at these ethereal creatures than just dismissing their physical existence. What if experiences featuring them have some legitimacy, at least on a psychological level? What if they are glimpses, flickers, sightings of unknown facets of our psyches reflected in the intricate hall of mirrors of the empirical (physical) world? Sometimes when contemplating our own species I wonder whether we might be just another category of mythical creatures to ourselves. There is so much we are innocent of when it comes down to our own psychological make-up, such a vast “alien” interior territory. The same applies on an individual level. We are a sort of mystery to ourselves if we look with honesty & sincerity. And if we look with this open attitude we may also realize that myths provide a valuable illuminated mirror helping us to see aspects of our lives that lie in the depths & darkness of our existence, deep under the surface of the busy everydays. Myths have always operated under the liberties of poetic licence so they were never created for literal interpretations from the beginning. Their appreciation, understanding, enjoyment, educational even transformative benefits presuppose a set of extraordinary skills – symbolic language, visionary intuition, finely cultivated mind-reading (empathy), exceptional perceptive sensitivity, poetic imagination… In the compilation of quotes I have discovered some truly enlightening & eloquent alternative views on myths. Hope you like them!

But what if on some level we are made of sound? What if in the beginning was the Word? What if the music of the spheres is no myth? What if we ourselves are a harmonic convergence? What if the holographic grid of our being is a linguistic and musical interface between higher-dimensional light, which might be considered a form of divine thought or intention, and sound in higher-dimensional octaves? Sol Luckman

Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description. David Herbert Lawrence

Fantasists, whether they use the ancient archetypes of myth and legend or the younger ones of science and technology, may be talking as seriously as any sociologist – and a good deal more directly – about human life as it is live, and as it might be lived, and as it ought to be lived. For after all, as great scientist have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope. Ursula K. Le Guin

Myth is not what we most readily - most facilely, and typically abstractly - take it to be: "exotic stories" from cultures unlike ours. Myth is a mode of culture itself, which precipitated those stories and gave them their power and form over the mode of mentality or personality to which it is a historical-psychological correlate. Myth is a way of being, a mode or dimension of subjectivity, an organic system of concretely grasped value principles concentrating the meaning of human life into a pre-philosophical metaphor, a nuclear parable or potent allegory: we recognize it in primitive or premodern peoples, we see it briefly in the sparkling imagination and spiritual life of children, before our distinctive modern culture crushes their morale and introduces them to the prison of compulsively literalizing ways of seeing things, the prevailing prosaic, banal, fact-ridden existence to which literalized and abstractivized mentalities can of course see no alternative. Moderns know myth, as they know anything, only as what they have dissected it into, what they have "scienced" or intellectualized. Kenneth Smith

Myth is the practical metabolism of our soulish life, the logic of our obsessions and oversights for which we have no language or code. Myth is the "morality" that the ineffable puts upon us, our unaccountable imperatives, our inexplicably selective clarity and obscurity, the mortal one-sidedness of our talents and wits, the passion and apathy that make such a transient passage through our hapless minds; that weave a pattern of fatality others will see before we do. Myth is distinctively human or sublime higher-order instinct, the "reason" in culture that reason knows not of. Kenneth Smith

Art or culture or philosophy must ply its genius today against this most prodigious opponent in all of history - human self-obliviousness, man's deific powers of denial and delusion, the nescience buried in the heart of science. Art must keen its scalpel for one sure incision, it must razor the bladder of an inflationary corpus of hypertrophic beliefs so deftly that the violence is only felt after the fact. Delusion must be lanced like a boil bloated to purple distension: art is not the play of pretty illusions - entertainment is that whoring pastime - but rather righteous and wise disillusion, judicious severing of a malignancy. Art is far from amoral; it is in crusade against lying and trivializing conventional morality and must transcend that snake pit of corruption, certainly; but amoral it is not, in no way is it free to be neutral and objective. Art is either the lancet of a higher truth, a law superior to any of man's pleasant and flattering rhetorical reasonings, or else it has no authority, no right to command anyone's attention. Art traffics with the divine, that is, the hidden or occult, the mythic, which is after all of the very essence of man, the stuff his character and even his life are ultimately woven from. A wise society knows to have contempt for egomaniacal poseurs playing onanistically with art supplies, and a foolish society imagines that "art is whatever artists may do." Kenneth Smith

Myth is the quintessence or ultimate archetype of intuitive / right-brained / gnosic / creative thinking: it is the paradigmatic concentration, application, task, teleology, and mode of energy of this kind of figurative or concretizing thinking, that seeks to make truth "graphic" or palpable, revelatory or feelingly authoritative rather than just permitting it to dissipate and be volatilized into one-sidedly abstract terminology and ideas. Myth is a strategy of analogical and metaphoric truthmongering, related to the concept that medieval philosophy of rhetoric (John of Salisbury e.g.) called "eloquence," the truth put in its most persuasive form. Myth is not petty truth but truth in a grand mode, it ruptures the artificial apparatus of false distinctions and dysrelations, the conventional or doxic septa that separate organically related issues from one another: myth is the infinitization of the finitized world-order that ordinarizing or mediocritizing intellect/ego has perpetrated all across society (modern society most especially). Myth makes truth whole-mindedly experienceable rather than schematically or formalistically skeletalized and arid, bled white of all the energies of life. In the warfare between what the Old Testament calls the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge, myth is knowledge fighting on the side of life, against the "deathworks" of nihilistic consciousness and science. Kenneth Smith

"Intellect" seems to itself the whole universe of conceivable possibilities and in this way and for this reason it rejoices over its liberation from the narrow or myopic cosmos of intuition, the feeling-life within which animals and infants and idiots are bound. But just as there are physically vocalizable sounds that are not contained in the English alphabet, and difficult/unnatural/alien combinations of letters (diphthongs and consonantal blends) that English does not like or permit, and foreign or other-cultural comprehensions of experiences and concepts that are not able to be translated or framed in terms congenial to Englished and modernized and bourgeoisified mentalities, so too there are qualitative energies and energetically blended relations and flavors of meaning that are utterly lost in the transformation of personality from the mode of intuition to the mode of intellect. Abstractivist mentality of course never MISSES anything that has dropped out or been edited from its more primitive to its more sophisticated ("rational," "conscious") modalities. Myth - as a modality of mind to which the entire superstructure of mythos-culture is anchored, and out of which its cosmos of concepts and reasons and purposes is elaborated - is one of the most fertile and prodigious of these "logically" eclipsed or dethroned world-forces. What "culture" is and what values it is harnessed to, and what ultimate range of personality-types it subserves, is radically transfigured from mythos- to logos-culture. Kenneth Smith

The poet of today ...is profoundly inhibited by the dearth of shared consciousness of myth. Our current motivating ideas are not myths but ideologies, lacking transcendental significance. This loss of myth-consciousness I believe to be the most devastating loss that humanity can suffer; for ... myth-consciousness is the bond that unites men both with one another and with the unplumbed Mystery from which mankind is sprung and without reference to which the radical significance of things goes to pot. Now a world bereft of radical significance is not long tolerated; it leaves me radically unstable, so that they will seize at any myth or pseudo-myth that is offered. Philip Wheelwright

It helps to regard soul as an active intelligence, forming and plotting each person’s fate. Translators use “plot” to render the ancient Greek word mythos in English. The plots that entangle our souls and draw forth our characters are the great myths. That is why we need a sense of myth and knowledge of different myths to gain insight into our epic struggles, our misalliances, and our tragedies. Myths show the imaginative structures inside our messes, and our human characters can locate themselves against the background of the characters of myth. James Hillman

One is almost tempted to say that the language itself is a mythology deprived of its vitality, a bloodless mythology so to speak, which has only preserved in a formal and abstract form what mythology contains in living and concrete form. Friedrich Schelling

I used to read the myths of love

Now I have become

the mythical lover

Rumi

I believe imagination is stronger than knowledge - that myth is more potent than history. I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts - That hope always triumphs over experience - That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death. Robert Fulghum

True myths may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes. You look at the Blonde Hero--really look--and he turns into a gerbil. But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you. The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about fifty years ago, and Apollo spoke to him. "You must change your life," he said. When the true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life. Ursula K. Le Guin

Just as the introduction of the irrational numbers ... is a convenient myth [which] simplifies the laws of arithmetic ... so physical objects are postulated entities which round out and simplify our account of the flux of existence... The conceptional scheme of physical objects is [likewise] a convenient myth, simpler than the literal truth and yet containing that literal truth as a scattered part. Willard Van Orman Quine

Mythology is the womb of man's initiation to life and death. Joseph Campbell

The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth. Joseph Campbell

The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you. Joseph Campbell

Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth. Cyril Connolly

All the great legends are Templates for human behavior. I would define a myth as a story that has survived. John Boorman

Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny. George Santayana

Each time, storytellers clothed the naked body of the myth in their own traditions, so that listeners could relate more easily to its deeper meaning. Joan D. Vinge

For the myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious. Thomas Mann

If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic. Ursula K. Le Guin

The point of mythology or myth is to point to the horizon and to point back to ourselves: This is who we are; this is where we came from; and this is where we're going. And a lot of Western society over the last hundred years - the last 50 years really - has lost that. We have become rather aimless and wandering. J. Michael Straczynski

To try to write a grand cosmical drama leads necessarily to myth. To try to let knowledge substitute ignorance in increasingly larger regions of space and time is science. Hannes Alfven

We each have a personal myth, a vision of who we really are and what we want. Health means that part of what you want is to give to others. George Weinberg

We can keep from a child all knowledge of earlier myths, but we cannot take from him the need for mythology. Carl Gustav Jung

Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life. Joseph Campbell

Myths and creeds are heroic struggles to comprehend the truth in the world. Ansel Adams

Old myths, old gods, old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our mind, waiting for our call. We have need for them. They represent the wisdom of our race. Stanley Kunitz

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see - it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life. Robert Penn Warren

Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflection. Roland Barthes

Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words. Italo Calvino

… myths and mythology wasn't to give meaning to life but to give us an experience of life, an experience of vitality in being alive. Joseph Campbell

Mythologies, in other words, mythologies and religions, are great poems and, when recognized as such, point infallibly through things and events to the ubiquity of a “presence” or “eternity” that is whole and entire in each. In this function all mythologies, all great poetries, and all mystic traditions are in accord; and where any such inspiriting vision remains effective in a civilization, every thing and every creature within its range is alive. Joseph Campbell

There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to realize myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have succeeded, this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is realizable. Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is. Eugene Ionesco

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts. Salman Rushdie

Myths are about the human struggle to deal with the great passages of time and life - birth, death, marriage, the transitions from childhood to adulthood to old age. They meet a need in the psychological or spiritual nature of humans that has absolutely nothing to do with science. To try to turn a myth into a science, or a science into a myth, is an insult to myths, an insult to religion, and an insult to science. In attempting to do this, creationists have missed the significance, meaning, and sublime nature of myths. They took a beautiful story of creation and re-creation and ruined it. Michael Shermer

How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all people, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. Rainer Maria Rilke

It is, therefore, a mistake to regard myth as an inferior mode of thought, which can be cast aside when human beings have attained the age of reason. Mythology is not an early attempt at history, and does not claim that its tales are objective fact. Like a novel, an opera or a ballet, myth is make-believe; it is a game that transfigures our fragmented, tragic world, and helps us to glimpse new possibilities by asking 'what if?' - a question which has also provoked some of our most important discoveries in philosophy, science and technology. Karen Armstrong

Myth is, after all, the never-ending story. Joan D. Vinge

Mirror of Love

2012-01-23T10:09:00.001Z

A stunningly beautiful & kind angel saves the life of a desperate man contemplating suicide. In the touching & breathtaking video clip below Angela teaches Andre how to become his own angel in his life and perhaps that of others by showing him how to love himself. The video passed my usual tear test with flying colours. I ended up with rivulets of tears flowing down my cheeks. So, so infinitely beautiful & tender! Underneath I have also given the trailer of the movie Angel-A (by Luc Besson), I have not seen it yet myself. A wonderful reminder that perhaps our only job on this planet is to stop blocking the welling up of love in our heart and get out of our own way ;-) In the least we can serve the world around us as beautiful, living mirrors of love. Enjoy!

The Marvel of Meditation & Spirituality

2012-01-22T22:08:00.001Z

I have had an indistinct inclination to write a post about meditation (and my motivations relating to it) for quite a long time. I got a little push this week so perhaps now the time is ripe. This musing is intended not as a promotion of the Buddhist mindfulness tradition, but I would rather like to think of it as a humble personal confession.

I had felt the timid tug of my heart attracting me to meditation and Buddhism before I even became more seriously entangled with both. And of course I successfully ignored this seemingly unreasonable attraction for many years. I honestly do not know quite clearly why I have singled out Buddhism of all the religious movements. Was it the down-to-earth pragmatic life philosophy at the heart of this Eastern religion? Or the emphasis on compassion and the halo of gentleness emanating around it? All I know that it was not just a superficial vague fascination with something exotic & unknown. In the beginning, even when some of my Buddhist acquaintances suggested to me that I try meditation I was resisting fiercely. This would have seemed like backstabbing my sharply carved out identity as an atheist (the pretty militant species). It felt somehow like a threat to my individual independence and intellect. Or were these just the fearfully anticipatory tremors of my ego knowing that its unquestioned rule might come to an end?

But luckily (now I can acknowledge it) I had my own close encounter with the legendary suffering that Buddha talks about in the first sentence of his 4 noble truths. It was not the previously relatively harmless, manageable form of pain. This was the sort which burns you deeply, leaking up into your bone marrow. Life’s acid test of how much difficulty you can bear, and ruthlessly showing what you are truly made of inside under your surface persona. Wherever I looked in my life everything seemed crumbling. And it’s consequence was not a little hitch in my previously smooth linear life trajectory. It was an existential derailment that lead me to question many of my previously firmly held assumption about how the world and my mind worked. I needed some advice and guidance while I was hanging up-side down suspended in a sort of existential vacuum. And not even psychological counselling helped. I could actually almost hear the inner conversation of the counsellor sitting opposite me with his feet on a small coffee table and arms folded behind his neck saying to himself, “Why haven’t I asked this of myself before?!” and scribbling feverish mental notes of what I was saying, the tough existential (and obviously purely rhetoric) questions that I was putting. At that moment a dead certainty with a queasy feeling weighed on me that I was completely alone in this. That the only person who could help me with my situation was actually me. It was quite a terrifying recognition even for an independent and emancipated intellectual. In that moment I knew too, that my idolatry to the atheist gods – science & psychology, was dead too. I nearly could hear the coffin click shut behind my back. It all needed a different tack, I needed to understand the irrational. Reasoning & rationality had run their course. I needed to set out into those reaches of life that are far beyond the limits of the province where things make perfect logical sense and everything glistens in the cold sheen of reason. Luckily by this time I had been already meditating regularly, and my mindfulness practice provided a reassuring compass on my ventures into the obscure unknown expanses of life by means of ancient spiritual methods (studying poetry which I could not stand as an atheist became one of them).

Meditation and other techniques of spiritual exercise has served me as a psychonautic vessel in which I have travelled through the outer space and explored my internal universe while I have been mapping the variable spiritual territory (including the irrational). It has become my secret diving suite taking me to the bottomless depths of the deep blue within, the magical carpet delivering me to experiences I have not even dreamt of, a transcendental ladder leading me to all kinds of states of consciousness I could reach for, a magic portal opening into a new miraculously renovated world in which I was living and which was living inside of me, an enchanted mirror in which my true, more rounded, whole self seems to gradually appear in clearer outlines… Meditation feels liberating, like releasing the genie from the bottle. Its practice complemented with additional spiritual study and reflection has launched me onto a personal revolution, an inner liberation movement against my former limited way of life fighting for the principle of health, sanity & overall well-being. A visceral riot against the absolutist tyranny of the Queen Intellect with the King Ego ruling over my life and my various colourful inner characters with an iron fist. After this, even inner anarchy can have an aftertaste of sweetness once the bitter parts subside.

I think that there is a close similarity between Buddhist mindfulness meditation and various forms of prayer, so if you have more experience with the latter just substitute it every time I say “meditation”. Prayer is in my case (as I can’t formally pray) just a childish, unmoderated, direct conversation with God, with all of Being. Anyone accidentally listening in to my inner instant messaging with the Divine would have an amusing moment I can promise that. In those not too frequent instances I speak to the world and my own unconscious at the same time. And sometimes when in need for consolation I am just sending out an animated S.O.S. signal with my heart into the darkness in case it might be picked up against all odds in the vast universe. So this is the explanation why I prefer writing about meditation, I have more experience at it. To me it is an exercise in mental hygiene. And subjectively it is a very enriching experience. It feels like having an internal power shower, an inner purification from unconstructive thoughts, mental states and calcified habitual patterns. It brings peace and calm to my psyche. Often I reach such a blissful state of peacefulness or I unexpectedly feel such an inexplicable gripping objectless, unconditional love and tenderness that I end up with tears running down my face while I sit on my meditation bench. I read somewhere the Catholic mystic Teresa of Avilla describing (with some envy) her nun companions in her convent achieving similarly deep psychological states of bliss during prayer. So I assume there must be some similarity in the benefits of both meditation and prayer. For this reason, although I do not know about the particulars of their prayer, I always encourage my Muslim acquaintances to pray whenever they can. Mentally it can have analogical effects like a pleasant long walk in terms of achieving tranquillity. Like taking one’s psyche for a restorative stroll, like airing one’s soul, like releasing one’s essential inner exuberance off the leash. I think prayer and meditation are a gesture of nurturing one’s soul if it’s done with the right attitude and intention. They are part of a theoretically well-founded and empirically verified ancient psychological technology available to everyone and almost for free (or minimal financial expenses in comparison with psychotherapy or counselling that far are more exclusive). They are spiritual methods for cultivating important psychological virtues such as awareness, sensitivity, flexibility, patience, love, compassion, humility, modesty, clarity, concentration (presence), courage (facing difficult feelings), interest, curiosity, gratitude, appreciation of one’s body. I could perhaps carry on forever in listing the benefits. I personally felt that meditation had a great awakening & stretching effect on my sleeping imagination too. And it may not have only positive consequences on one’s individual quality of life, but also on interpersonal relationships (patience, compassion, generosity, thoughtfulness, empathy, cooperation).

On the other hand, I know some people who have most probably spent thousands of hours in prayer, and it still does not have the same calming effect on them. My hunch is that the benefits show only when some sort of baseline/default openness, receptivity, mental nimbleness, generosity, humility, intention, motivation… are present. I have no other explanation yet. Because, as I have observed, these people have shown great resistance towards internal change also in other areas of their life. Their psyche does not seem to be soft, humble & pliable enough to receive these benefits. Their minds do not seem to be a good working material for some reason for the fingers of spirituality. No cure works with 100% efficiency & reliability even in medical science. So if prayer and meditation fail to have effect on some people, it does not mean that the whole mental method is flawed. Some have just worked out a kind of resistance against it, they have psychologically inoculated themselves against the formative influences of the world around them. For others they may have literally life-saving & positively transformative benefits. I do not know, I have not worked out the secret yet, but this is my current working hypothesis.

All I know is that my spiritual journey has turned out to be a pirate adventure of a former perfectionist, a healthy, yet frivolous, heresy of a scrupulous atheist. My encounter with meditation and spirituality started me on a journey full of awe & wonder, although fraught with challenges, difficulties & painful sacrifices. But it was an existential shake up that I desperately needed to get out of my limiting pigeon hole in the academic Ivory Tower. Thanks to it I discovered and quickly picked up a new world language – that of poetry and it has become an essential perceptive prism that helps me see even the most mundane, ordinary thing with an aureole of sanctity. This new poetic perspective fills my life with magic & enchantment. The world has become a half-completed canvas just waiting for the finishing brushstrokes of my soul. A true artist single-mindedly adores her object, caresses it with her senses, mind & soul. And a mystic is this artist’s spiritual kindred. Except that her artistic object is the whole world & all of life, she is a lover of the All. By becoming a mystic I am not that dependent anymore for consecutive translations by another writer to show me the beauty & poignancy of the world, I’ve found that poetry is living, breathing inside of me. And that poetic tenderness now colours almost everything that my mind comes in contact with.

I am aware that I cannot serve you with any hard data or references to peer-reviewed research articles. Honestly, I was never really motivated to do any systematic scholarly research on this, because the benefits of mindfulness meditation & spiritual practice have been so great for me, that any academic research becomes utterly irrelevant in the light of my actual experience. The matter is too intimate and personal to spoil it with dry academic study. I cannot guarantee that if you try meditation your life’s adventure will become equally magical like mine. But who says that your journey cannot be even more wondrous? However if meditation and prayer are not your cup of tea find something else that works miracles on your soul in your own way. The opus magnum of your life is waiting for you.

Ode to the Irrational

2012-01-20T15:15:00.003Z

My former PhD supervisor used to call me “excessively rational” when being fussy & idealistic. I think it was meant both as a compliment & criticism, usually expressed with a sigh of exasperation ;-). But that was some time ago. I have hopefully changed since. I have learnt to make peace with the irrational. More than that! I find irrational even fascinating & full of poetry. I am actually often glad that life is not strictly rational, predictable. And my God, it’s good that it sometimes does not work out the way I want it to! Today I know that the irrational is just the other (perhaps vaster) face of reality & existence that I was not willing to accept for a long time because it would have meant loosing some of my own precious illusions about life (like having full control over it). So as a proof that I have changed, that I am no longer “excessively rational” (and aggravating some poor overworked academics) I have prepared this post with a list of quotations. An ode to the irrational! Enjoy!

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words. Vladimir Nabokov

The rational mind of man is a shallow thing, a shore upon a continent of the irrational, wherein thin colonies of reason have settled amid a savage world. Wilford O. Cross

Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness. George Jean Nathan

I think it would be very foolish not to take the irrational seriously. Jeanette Winterson

It is even possible that laws which have not their origin in the mind may be irrational, and we can never succeed in formulating them. Arthur Eddington

It is not to be forgotten that what we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts. Thomas Huxley

It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational. Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Nothing is perfect. Life is messy. Relationships are complex. Outcomes are uncertain. People are irrational. Hugh Mackay

The fact that logic cannot satisfy us awakens an almost insatiable hunger for the irrational. A. N. Wilson

The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories. Margaret Walker

How did reason come into the world? As is fitting, in an irrational manner, by accident. One will have to guess at it as at a riddle. Friedrich Nietzsche

Humour is that which most efficiently recognizes that we are living in an imperfect world, with imperfect arguments and things that are insane, illogical, and irrational. And the only way we can live with that fact is to laugh. Unknown

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand. Nadine Gordimer

The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it. Friedrich Nietzsche

Human beings are the only creatures who are able to behave irrationally in the name of reason. Ashley Montagu

Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the madhouse on all the mystics of history. You cannot take the region of the unknown and calmly say that, though you know nothing about it, you know all the gates are locked. We do not know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable. G.K. Chesterton

Cheering on the Spiritual Atheists

2012-01-18T21:15:00.007Z

Alain de Botton just stole my idea in his latest TED talk Atheism 2.0! Where can I send in my letter of complaint?! ;-)

Now, seriously, I’ve found his talk truly fascinating & inspiring. Especially, because the possibility of spiritual atheism has been on my mind for some time (the muse shows some signs of mentally promiscuous behaviour ;-). And although the notion of "spiritual atheism" may sound paradoxical, like a mocking oxymoron, I find it a reasonable, realistic concept. I would actually say, that I developed from a militant spiritual atheist through the stage of moderated spiritual atheism into an anarchic mystic (I do not obey any external religious authority). I am sorry for the unappetizing name, I felt I have to call my current self something for clearer conceptual comparison, but otherwise I prefer being only a "mystic" or "spiritual seeker" on everyday.

So I feel like I have a slight hunch what it means to be an Atheist 2.0, with spiritual (humanistic) values held alongside a strong premise "Of course there is no God, deities, supernatural spirits, angels!" Even during the 3 weeks when I thought of myself as a Buddhist I still considered myself atheist. After one year of regular Buddhist mindfulness meditation, when I was still not a mystic, not even a theist, a friend of mine told me: "Katarina, you are a very spiritual person!" It was meant as a compliment, but this statement knocked the wind out of me. I gasped, and was on the verge of getting offended. I responded, "What do you mean? I do not even understand what the word ‘spiritual’ in your sentence stands for?!" For a long time the word spiritual and religious meant the same thing, “believing in a transcendent God”. But it does not any more. Long before I had my intimate encounters with the transcendental, long before I even took up mindfulness meditation, I was spiritual. I just did not know back then. I professed very strong humanistic values, in support of life, dignity, justice, decency, honesty, compassion… I received a deeply spiritual upbringing in the absence of a particular name of God, and I grew up into a spiritual adult. Without explicitly knowing I was even consistently cultivating my spirituality through voracious reading of psychological, philosophical & classical literature works all with an underlying humanistic message, diligently studying the implicit curriculum of a spiritual atheist’s gospel.

On the other hand, I have known quite a few strictly religious people who pray frequently, regularly attend their places of worship, outwardly follow the scripts of their religion and yet at the bottom of their heart they are rock-solid atheists. Because they violate the unwritten rules of human decency, because they do not care the least about the dignity and sanctity of other’s life, because they make almost everyone around them miserable (including their family members), because the material (money, wealth, status, possessions) carries a higher value than the spiritual in their eyes, because their actions show that they do not believe in the actual reality of the spirit. For them, God is dead. These are another strange lot – the religious atheists. Just to add another paradoxical notion to this musing.

So I want to cheer on the spiritual atheists (or Atheists 2.0). Because this planet needs more decent, spiritually sensitive people whether they are religious, atheist, agnostic, non-affiliated, vaguely theist or whatever. Spirituality, in my view, is a matter of personal preference, individual choice, a leap of imagination or a result of subjective experience (I became a mystic against my will, reason, or permission), even aesthetic taste. Becoming spiritual is like falling in love; it’s not a logical conclusion from a string of rational premises. Science will never prove or disprove your individual choice of friends, or romantic partners or your most significant life decisions. The same applies to spiritual belief. Because at any given moment, science is loosing the race with life & reality by light years. For me, spiritual atheism was just a temporary intermezzo, a phase in my spiritual development (which was, quite frankly, challenging in spite of this gradual, almost organic evolution – just an innocent pun dedicated to the famous militant atheist Richard Dawkins, a resident of North Oxford who amusingly believes in imaginary, ethereal creatures named “memes” - an analogue of cultural genes). For others it may not be only a stage, but a way of life. And a quite noble one at that. Perhaps Earth would not even bear carrying billions of mystics on its surface. Who knows?! And today as an atheist turned mystic I am not ashamed to say (take me most literally): “Of course I believe in fairies, fairy tales, the spiritual wonderland supernatural spirits, angels, daemons, creative muses, life’s magic, mystery of being and the exquisite poetry of existence composed by a gifted Divine Virtuoso!”
What if there is a lonely planet somewhere in a parallel universe where it's inhabitants are singing tales of legendary, mythical creatures called humans?

So I say ‘Thank you’

2012-01-16T15:45:00.001Z

The Virgin Holding the Sleeping Child, with St John

and Two Angels by Bernardino Luini (1485–1532).

Public domain image.

I’ve wanted to compile a list of Meister Eckhart’s quotations for some time, but it seems that every time I gave a preference to another topic. But his time has come at last today and I am glad. When I was reading through his thoughts I was moved to tears, I had to catch my breath and my heart skipped a beat. At how courageously and directly he expressed his spiritually unconventional and innovative observations. And how his perspective on the divine resembles that of the Asian ones (e.g. the Buddhist emphasis on compassion, and the Hindu notion of human divinity). Of course, Meister Eckhart was a mystic too and was fiercely persecuted by the Inquisition for his theological & mystical creativity. What an inspiring heretic experimenter with religious dogma! I hope you enjoy the poetic beauty & tender compassion breathing forth from his words.

An artist isn't a special kind of person; each person is a special kind of artist.

The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.

We are all meant to be mothers of God...for God is always needing to be born.

A little visual art intermezzo:

Just because I love it so, here is a touching detail of the painting above. The tenderness flowing from it feels to me almost physically tangible, like an unexpected gentle wave of love washing over me with a soft hint of baby smell. The painting provides quite a powerful syneasthetic experience to me!

If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, 'thank you,' that would suffice.

God is at home, it's we who have gone out for a walk.

Truly, it is in the darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us.

“Jesus might have said, ''I became man for you. If you do not become God for me, you wrong me.''

. . . all blades of grass, wood, and stone, all things are One.

Treat all things as if they were loaned to you without any ownership - whether body or soul, sense or strength, external goods or honors, house or hall . . . everything.

A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don't know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Do exactly what you would do if you felt most secure.

One person who has mastered life is better than a thousand persons who have mastered only the contents of books, but no one can get anything out of life without God.

Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.

The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God as if he stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge.

The outward man is the swinging door; the inner man is the still hinge.

The outward work will never be puny if the inward work is great.

The price of inaction is far greater than the cost of making a mistake.

There exists only the present instant... a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence.

To be full of things is to be empty of God. To be empty of things is to be full of God.

What a man takes in by contemplation, that he pours out in love.

You may call God love, you may call God goodness. But the best name for God is compassion.

Be willing to be a beginner every single morning.

Spirituality is not to be learned by flight from the world, or by running away from things, or by turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, we must learn an inner solitude wherever or with whomsoever we may be. We must learn to penetrate things and find God there.

Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness.

Wisdom consists in doing the next think you have to do, doing it with your whole heart, and finding delight in doing it.

Love is as strong as death, as hard as Hell. Death separates the soul from the body, but love separates all things from the soul.

My Lord told me a joke. And seeing Him laugh has done more for me than any scripture I will ever read.

Run into peace.

There is something in the soul that is so akin to God that it is one with Him... It has nothing in common with anything created.

We must come into a transformed knowing, an unknowing which comes not from ignorance but from knowledge.

True intelligence operates silently. Stillness is where creativity & solutions are found

The most powerful prayer, one wellnigh omnipotent, and the worthiest work of all is the outcome of a quiet mind. The quieter it is the more powerful, the worthier, the deeper, the more telling and more perfect the prayer is. To the quiet mind all things are possible. What is a quiet mind? A quiet mind is one which nothing weighs on, nothing worries, which, free from ties and from all self-seeking, is wholly merged into the will of God and dead to its own.

The seed of God is in us. Given an intelligent and hard-working farmer, it will thrive and grow up to God, whose seed it is; and accordingly its fruits will be God-nature. Pear seeds grow into pear trees, nut seeds into nut trees, and God-seed into God.

If you were in an ecstasy as deep as that of St. Paul and there was a sick man who needed a cup of soup, it were better go you that you returned from the ecstasy and brought the cup of soup for love’s sake.

Dancing with the Invisible

2012-01-15T17:28:00.000Z

This is most probably my all-time favourite scene from any classical Chinese wuxia (martial arts) film ever. And I even haven't seen the movie House of Flying Daggers ;-) (but I plan to do so in the near future). I just love the idea of this subtle, yet energetic dance battle with an invisible dance partner - a sound echo. And I also delight in the combination of a dance performance with playing a musical instrument, an utterly fascinating and extraordinary notion. Also the fine attention to the minutest detail in terms of aesthetic presentation is quite admirable (like falling of the shattered pieces of china on a beautifully coloured butterfly motive). Delicious! I feel that one can see this effortless grace & elegant visual poetry (on various levels) only in Far Eastern movies. Hope you like the clip too!

Divine Poetry in Motion

2012-01-12T15:38:00.002Z

I am thinking of spoiling my self, pampering my soul by seeing this in the spring - the latest, 2012 Shen Yun Performing Arts demonstration in artistic virtuosity & modern magic. In case I might inspire you to commit a similarly innocent heresy against rationality. ;-) By the way, the title of this post is actually not even that far from the meaning of the Chinese word "Shen Yun" (divine harmony/rhythm in motion). Just watching the video gives me spine tingles in my belly ;-)

Basking in the Brilliant, Beneficent Shade of Trees

2012-01-09T12:30:00.003Z

So it seems, I am not the alone with my profound reverence of trees as ancient sages, perennial natural philosophers, gentle intuitive preachers. I often feel that trees are my kindred, that there is an invisible chord between us. I’ll even admit, although it’ll make me seem foolish in the least or ripe for a psychiatric ward at worst, that often I feel as if some sort of hidden communication was taking place, as if some kind of beneficent influence was flowing from trees in my direction. I feel protected around trees, fully accepted, as if staying in the presence of a deeply wise & compassionate intelligence. For me trees are not what they seem, that’s just the appearance, a sort of playful camouflage, a mischievous game at hide-and-seek. Often when I look at trees, when my vision softly strokes their strong branches and tender green leaves in an awed mix of aesthetic admiration & spiritual worship, their magnificent beauty & immovable vitality takes my breath away, melts my soul and brings tears to my eyes. When I see a wounded, damaged, sick tree, I feel my heart painfully gripped by a cruel hand. I just can’t help feeling like this, and I can’t explain it. It’s utterly irrational… The funny thing is that as a little girl I wanted to become a tree doctor, and made innocuous attempts to heal the wounds of some trees in the neighbourhood. But this deep communicative connection is a relatively recent phenomenon, only a few years old affair, after I became a regular mindfulness meditation practitioner. Maybe meditation only helped reveal something that was already there for a long time. I really don’t know.

But I must say I have never read a more beautiful, more poetic, more articulate, more celebratory piece of literature about trees than the passage of Hermann Hesse’s Wanderings (with an excerpt underneath).

And imagine, trees are only one of the many living species of magic beings on this enchanted planet! Humans are, of course, another…

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death - wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farm boy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

Hanging Out With the Buddha

2012-01-08T10:24:00.002Z

What if you could meet the Buddha or Jesus face to face, in real time? Now, in the present time? How would you respond, what would you feel? Just playing mentally with the idea gives me shivers... Merely watching the trailer for the movie The Man from Earth makes my spine tingle. I've watched this film around 4-5 times, and I plan to see it again at some point. Every time I ended up with tears running down my face, completely captivated, deeply moved. Although the whole story takes place on one single set, with a only a handful of actors, produced on a low budget, there are only a few movies that fire up one's imagination like this one (in my opninion). Perhaps even thanks to the simplified external effects. On the other hand, some friends to whom I recommended this found it boring or perplexing. I however felt that it directly spoke to me. It's up to you. But I heartily recommend it to you!

Breaking Open Instead of Falling Apart

2012-01-06T16:25:00.004Z

I will openly admit that I am no fanatic Oprah devotee (most probably thanks to my European distance). But from time to time I discover some shining gems of inspiration coming from the hands of her production team (like the interview with the neuroscientist Jill Bolte-Taylor who found Nirvana through her brain stroke or the presentation of Dhamma Brothers – a diligent group of prisoners practising hard-core Vipassana meditation in a maximum security facility). And I also deeply appreciate the writing of Elizabeth Lesser (shown in the video clip underneath). I especially liked her book Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow. One of the wisest and best written books on the intimate association between life’s difficulties & spiritual growth I’ve read in the last few years. I have had a library copy in my London home for a few months now. I read it once, and would like to return to it soon. I also recommended it to several of my female friends and relatives. I find the metaphor of an opening bud struggling to break itself free into a beautiful flower immensely aesthetically compelling, spiritually enlightening & existentially meaningful. So if you are curious to hear a little more, have a look at the short video clip below. And as a little delicious bonus I have added some wonderful thoughts by Rumi (that most probably served as inspiration for Elizabeth herself). Enjoy!

What was whispered to the rose

To break it open

Last night

Was whispered to my heart.

The wound is the place where light enters you.

Sun, Moon, Stars & Hearts

2012-01-02T10:14:00.000Z

I wrote last time that I felt seasonally sentimental. And this mood still seems to last. So while I was recently reading trough the quotes by the Nobel Prize winning writer Hermann Hesse they brought tears to my eyes. Nothing new for me, I guess. I was moved by several of them. And that was the secret sign that they are worth sharing…

All the books of the world full of thoughts and poems are nothing in comparison to a minute of sobbing, when feeling surges in waves, the soul feels itself profoundly and finds itself. Tears are the melting ice of snow. All angels are close to the crying person.

In the beginning was the myth. God, in his search for self-expression, invested the souls of Hindus, Greeks, and Germans with poetic shapes and continues to invest each child's soul with poetry every day.

Natures of your kind, with strong, delicate senses, the soul-oriented, the dreamers, poets, lovers are always superior to us creatures of the mind. You take your being from your mothers. You live fully; you were endowed with the strength of love, the ability to feel. Whereas we creatures of reason, we don't live fully; we live in an arid land, even though we often seem to guide and rule you. Yours is the plentitude of life, the sap of the fruit, the garden of passion, the beautiful landscape of art. Your home is the earth; ours is the world of ideas. You are in danger of drowning in the world of the senses; ours is the danger of suffocating in an airless void. You are an artist; I am a thinker. You sleep at your mother's breast; I wake in the desert. For me the sun shines; for you the moon and the stars.

We kill at every step, not only in wars, riots, and executions. We kill when we close our eyes to poverty, suffering, and shame. In the same way all disrespect for life, all hard-heartedness, all indifference, all contempt is nothing else than killing. With just a little witty scepticism we can kill a good deal of the future in a young person. Life is waiting everywhere, the future is flowering everywhere, but we only see a small part of it and step on much of it with our feet.

Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go.

Being Happy. There is no duty in life except the duty of being happy. It is our only reason for being in this world. With all our duties, all our morals, all our commandments, we seldom make one another happy, because these do not make us happy. A person who is good can only be so when he is happy, when there is harmony within him, in other words, when he loves. This has been the rule, the only rule, of this world - thus taught Jesus; thus taught Buddha; thus taught Hegel. For each of us the only thing of importance in this world is his own inner self - his soul, his capacity for love. When this is working, we may be eating plain porridge or cake, we may be wearing rags or jewels - but the world will be resounding in the clear tones of the soul. It will be a good world, a world going on in proper order.

People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.

A magic dwells in each beginning, and protecting us tells us how to live.

In each individual the spirit is made flesh, in each one the whole of creation suffers, in each one a Savior is crucified.

Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else. Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.

Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin.

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

There's no reality except the one contained within us. That's why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself.

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.

Within us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we ourselves.

Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.

To hold our tongues when everyone is gossiping, to smile without hostility at people and institutions, to compensate for the shortage of love in the world with more love in small, private matters; to be more faithful in our work, to show greater patience, to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable from mockery and criticism: all these are things we can do.

Oh, love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.

We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.

I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.

When you like someone, you like them in spite of their faults. When you love someone, you love them with their faults.

There is no escape. You can't be a vagabond and an artist and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man. You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover. You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing. Don't try to lie to yourself. You are not a solid citizen. You are not a Greek. You are not harmonious, or the master of yourself. You are a bird in the storm. Let it storm! Let it drive you! How much have you lied! A thousand times, even in your poems and books, you have played the harmonious man, the wise man, the happy, the enlightened man. In the same way, men attacking in war have played heroes, while their bowels twitched. My God, what a poor ape, what a fencer in the mirror man is- particularly the artist- particularly myself!

Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again.

One never reaches home,' she said. 'But where paths that have an affinity for each other intersect, the whole world looks like home, for a time.

What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find.

Gaze into the fire, into the clouds, and as soon as the inner voices begin to speak, surrender to them. Don't ask first whether it's permitted, or would please your teachers or father or some god. You will ruin yourself if you do that.

Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.

We are sun and moon, dear friend; we are sea and land. It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other's opposite and complement.

Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them.

Each man had only one genuine vocation - to find the way to himself....His task was to discover his own destiny - not an arbitrary one - and to live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one's own inwardness.

I wanted only to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?

You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves. A whole society composed of men afraid of the unknown within them!

We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.

You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation...and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else.

Your soul is the whole world.

No permanence is ours, we are a wave that flows to fit whatever form it finds.

Most people...are like a falling leaf that drifts and turns in the air, flutters, and falls to the ground. But a few others are like stars which travel one defined path: no wind reaches them, they have within themselves their guide and path.

Because the world is so full of death and horror, I try again and again to console my heart and pick the flowers that grow in the midst of hell.

The diabolical thing about melancholy is not that it makes you ill but that it makes you conceited and shortsighted; yes almost arrogant. You lapse into bad taste, thinking of yourself as Heine's Atlas, whose shoulders support all the world's puzzles and agonies, as if thousands, lost in the same maze, did not endure the same agonies.

One can beg, buy, be presented with and find love in the streets, but it can never be stolen.

What you call passion is not a spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world. Where passion dominates, that does not signify the presence of greater desire and ambition, but rather the misdirection of these qualities toward and isolated and false goal, with a consequent tension and sultriness in the atmosphere. Those who direct the maximum force of their desires toward the center, toward true being, toward perfection, seem quieter than the passionate souls because the flame of their fervor cannot always be seen. In argument, for example, they will not shout or wave their arms. But, I assure you, they are nevertheless, burning with subdued fires.

What we can and should change is ourselves: our impatience, our egoism (including intellectual egoism), our sense of injury, our lack of love and forbearance. I regard every other attempt to change the world, even if it springs from the best intentions, as futile.

She stood before him and surrendered herself to him and sky, forest, and brook all came toward him in new and resplendent colors, belonged to him, and spoke to him in his own language. And instead of merely winning a woman he embraced the entire world and every star in heaven glowed within him and sparkled with joy in his soul. He had loved and had found himself. But most people love to lose themselves.

Once it happened, as I lay awake at night, that I suddenly spoke in verses, in verses so beautiful and strange that I did not venture to think of writing them down, and then in the morning they vanished; and yet they lay hidden within me like the hard kernel within an old brittle husk.

We who bore the mark might well be considered by the rest of the world as strange, even as insane and dangerous. We had awoken, or were awakening, and we were striving for an ever perfect state of wakefulness, whereas the ambition and quest for happiness of the others consisted of linking their opinions, ideals, and duties, their life and happiness, ever more closely with those of the herd. They, too, strove; they, too showed signs of strength and greatness. But as we saw it, whereas we marked men represented Nature's determination to create something new, individual, and forward-looking, the others lived in the determination to stay the same. For them mankind--which they loved as much as we did--was a fully formed entity that had to be preserved and protected. For us mankind was a distant future toward which we were all journeying, whose aspect no one knew, whose laws weren't written down anywhere.

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God's name is Abraxas.

O how incomprehensible everything was, and actually sad, although it was also beautiful. One knew nothing. One lived and ran about the earth and rode through forests, and certain things looked so challenging and promising and nostalgic: a star in the evening, a blue harebell, a reed-green pond, the eye of a person or a cow. And sometimes it seemed that something never seen yet long desired was about to happen, that a veil would drop from it all, but then it passed, nothing happened, the riddle remained unsolved, the secret spell unbroken, and in the end one grew old and looked cunning . . . or wise . . . and still one knew nothing perhaps, was still waiting and listening.

Whether it is good or evil, whether life in itself is pain or pleasure, whether it is uncertain-that it may perhaps be this is not important-but the unity of the world, the coherence of all events, the embracing of the big and the small from the same stream, from the same law of cause, of becoming and dying.

We consist of everything the world consists of, each of us, and just as our body contains the genealogical table of evolution as far back as the fish and even much further, so we bear everything in our soul that once was alive in the soul of men. Every god and devil that ever existed, be it among the Greeks, Chinese, or Zulus, are within us, exist as latent possibilities, as wishes, as alternatives. If the human race were to vanish from the face of the earth save for one halfway talented child that had received no education, this child would rediscover the entire course of evolution, it would be capable of producing everything once more, gods and demons, paradises, commandments, the Old and New Testament.

The sacred sense of beyond, of timelessness, of a world which had an eternal value and the substance of which was divine had been given back to me today by this friend of mine who taught me dancing.

. . . gentleness is stronger than severity, water is stronger than rock, love is stronger than force.

Was it not his Self, his small, fearful and proud Self, with which he had wrestled for so many years, but which had always conquered him again, which appeared each time again and again, which robbed him of happiness and filled him with fear?

There were now and then, though rarely, the hours that brought the welcome shock, pulled down the walls and brought me back again from my wanderings to the living heart of the world. Sadly and yet deeply moved, I set myself to recall the last of these experiences. It was at a concert of lovely old music. After two of three notes of the piano the door was opened of a sudden to the other world. I sped through heaven and saw God at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defenses and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart.

Every ego so far from being a unity is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. It appears to be a necessity as imperative as eating and breathing for everyone to be forced to regard this chaos as a unity and to speak of his ego as though is was a one-fold and clearly detached and fixed phenomenon. Even the best of us shares this delusion.

The only thing of importance to me is being able to love the world, without looking down on it, without hating it and myself - being able to regard it and myself and all beings with love, admiration, and reverence.

An enlightened man had but one duty - to seek the way to himself, to reach inner certainty, to grope his way forward, no matter where it led.

Yes, what we are doing is probably mad, and probably it is good and necessary all the same. It is not a good thing when man overstrains his reason and tries to reduce to rational order matters that are susceptible of rational treatment. Then there arise ideals such as those of the Americans or of the Bolsheviks. Both are extraordinarily rational, and both lead to a frightful oppression and impoverishment of life, because they simplify it so crudely. The likeness of man, once a high ideal, is in process of becoming a machine-made article. It is for madmen like us, perhaps, to ennoble it again.

Demian is about a very specific task or crisis in one's youth, which continues beyond that stage, but mostly effects young people: the struggle to forge an identity and develop a personality of one's own.

Not everyone is allotted the chance to become a personality; most remain types, and never experience the rigor of becoming an individual. But those who do so inevitably discover that these struggles bring them into conflict with the normal life of average people and the traditional values and bourgeois conventions that they uphold. A personality is the product of a clash between two opposing forces: the urge to create a life of one's own and the insistence by the world around us that we conform. Nobody can develop a personality unless he undergoes revolutionary experiences. The extent of those experiences differs, of course, from person to person, as does the capacity to lead a life that is truly personal and unique.

For the first time in my life I tasted death, and death tasted bitter, for death is birth, is fear and dread of some terrible renewal.

Our god's name is Abraxas and he is God and Satan and he contains both the luminous and the dark world.

At about the age of six or seven, I realized that of all the invisible powers the one I was destined to be most strongly affected and dominated by was music. From that moment on I had a world of my own, a sanctuary and a heaven that no one could take away from me. Oh, music! A melody occurs to you; you sing it silently, inwardly only; you steep your being in it; it takes possession of all your strength and emotions, and during the time it lives in you, it effaces all that is fortuitous, evil, coarse and sad in you; it brings the world into harmony with you, it makes burdens light and gives wings to depressed spirits.

If a man does not think too much, he rejoices at rising in the morning, and at eating and drinking. He finds satisfaction in them and does not want them to be otherwise. But if he ceases to take things for granted, he seeks eagerly and hopefully during the course of the day for moments of real life, the radiance of which makes him rejoice and obliterates the awareness of time and all thoughts on the meaning and purpose of everything. One can call these moments creative, because they seem to give a feeling of union with the creator, and while they last, one is sensible of everything being necessary, even what is seemingly fortuitous. It is what the mystics call union with God. Perhaps it is the excessive radiance of these moments that make everything else appears so dark. Perhaps it is the feeling of liberation, the enchanting lightness and the suspended bliss that make the rest of life seem so difficult, demanding and oppressive. I do not know. I have not travelled very far in thought and philosophy. However I do know that if there is a state of bliss and a paradise, it must be an uninterrupted sequence of such moments, and if this state of bliss can be attained through suffering and dwelling in pain, then no sorrow or pain can be so great that one should attempt to escape from it.

Life, Light, Love

2011-12-28T15:50:00.000Z

Around this winter Christmas-New Year festive period I seem to be more sentimental than usual. Being sentimental, soft & emotional is a temporary exaggeration of my character, a gentle stretching of my soul. And this particular festive season hits me with a double impact ;-) Because I perceive the New Year celebrations as a shadow festival to Christmas, a chronological celebratory doppelganger, I also receive a double dose of Life, Light & Love. Both occasions are about re-birth, renewal, warmth & tenderness. So I thought that I would take advantage of this strange, peculiar mood for concocting this little post.

In am wishing you all the best in the baby tender New Year with this little spark of inspiration underneath. May your next year be filled with Lot of Life, Light & Love!

Sound when stretched is music.

Movement when stretched is dance.

Mind when stretched is meditation.

Life when stretched is celebration.

Ravi Shankar

Lotus Light

2011-12-22T16:29:00.001Z

To everyone who might read this post, near and far, known & unknown, celebrating during this period or not, I am wishing magical, wonderful, miraculous Christmas & a Blessed New Year!

May you be graced with good health, loving company, happiness, peace, harmony, inspiration, wisdom, dreams come true, true treasures of life and goodness in any manifestation that could enrich & enhance your own life and that of your loved ones.

With best wishes

Katarina

Beauty of the Full Catastrophe Living

2011-12-20T14:43:00.001Z

At My Most Beautiful is one of my most favourite songs by R.E.M. of all time. And after all those years since their album UP, the video clip is available at last. So I thought I would share it here. And if the full catastrophe living scenario shown in the clip feels very familiar, you can congratulate yourself that you are not a lone, unlucky alien from a different planet, but rather a full-fledged, ordinary human being... I had to smile while watching the video, because I definitely have had a couple of days in my life eerily reminiscent of the series of unfortunate events portrayed here. Hope you like the song!

Following the Scent of Bliss

2011-12-11T15:05:00.000Z

A few inspiring thoughts from Joseph Campbell’s book Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation…

Your bliss can guide you to that transcendent mystery, because bliss is the welling up of the energy of the transcendent wisdom within you. So when the bliss cuts off, you know that you’ve cut off the welling up; try to find it again. And that will be your Hermes guide, the dog that can follow the invisible trail for you. And that’s the way it is. One works out one’s own myth that way.

You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there’s a way or path, it is someone else’s path; each human being is a unique phenomenon.

The idea is to find your own pathway to bliss.

Mythology begins where madness starts. A person who is truly gripped by a calling, by a dedication, by a belief, by a zeal, will sacrifice his security, will sacrifice even his life, will sacrifice personal relationships, will sacrifice prestige, and will think nothing of personal development; he will give himself entirely to his myth. Christ give you the clue when he says, ”He that loseth his lose for my sake shall find it.”

Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual,” points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot.

So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others.

The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature. [from the Power of Myth]

Musical Mysticism & Spine Tingles

2011-12-10T13:24:00.002Z

Some more music's here (in connection with the previous post). This short video clip from the movie August Rush always sends shivers down my spine. Especially given the fact that the explicit message of the film is that "Music is a harmonic connection between all living beings". Even this mere sentence gives me goose bumps... It appeals to me because it suggests that there is some invisible, immaterial, yet detectable dimension of existence to be tapped into for those whose senses are sufficiently fine tuned. When I watch & listen to this clip its as if my spine awoke to its shadow identity of a peculiar musical instrument responding with subtle resonances to those secret notes from that strange, tantalizing realm of harmonic connections. So I am inviting you to a little innocent experiment. Watch the clip below and listen to the quiet whispers of your own spine. Whether it has any cryptic message for you from that wonderland beyond...

Mental Jewellery & Beauty of Gray

2011-12-09T21:26:00.002Z

Aaaah! I have not been listening to any music at all for weeks. And perhaps this is the explanation why I feel so tired & blank. Or maybe it's just that time of year: winter, end of year, Christmas. I currently feel like I just want to curl up for a comfortable winter's sleep.

But music is my addiction, it makes me thrive, it wakes me up, and often it moves my body. So as a gesture of generosity towards myself (and others) I had my dose today. It also occurred me that I have not posted that many entries on music recently. So here is one for you, the video clip with Live's songs Heaven & Run to the Water.

P.S. Mental jewellery and Beauty of Gray are (album, song) titles related to the indie rock band Live.

If you can, skip the first 5s for the clip below please.

Angels & Airwaves – Unearthly Music from the Unconscious

2011-12-04T19:11:00.000Z

A couple of weeks ago I finished reading the book Drawing on the Artist Within by Betty Edwards (famous for her other book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain). I did not complete the drawing tasks (I may do them later however), because this time I was mainly interested in the story about the right brain & the unconscious. I feel these two are somehow closely related, but I am not quite sure yet how exactly. I felt especially inspired by some quotes in the margins beside the main text of the book (a few of them I have listed below).

Several of the thoughts in the book nicely link up with some of my recent reflections about the unconscious. Which is, in my opinion, a rather inaccurate term for a more expansive, deeper, non-verbal form of consciousness. I have a sense that the title “panoramic consciousness” would perhaps suit more to the phenomenon (according to my own experience & the observations of some deeply perceptive cultural figures). Perhaps I will come up with or encounter a better title, but I definitely think that the “unconscious” is most unsuitable & misleading. I find our willingness to exclude so much of our life from consciousness just because of its non-verbal character infinitely strange. I find it not only strange, but extravagantly silly as well. Thanks to mindfulness practice I got into a habit of paying more attention to my own thoughts (this is not identical with buying into their truth value). I can often verbalize their content easily, but this does not make them any more rational or truthful. I must admit often I am quite taken aback by their irrational statements. And even more frequently I have no idea whatsoever what their origin is. They just come and go, and I either grab them or release them. On occasions, these thoughts do not seem too useful, practical or even constructive in any way. But by (psychological) definition, they would be considered conscious because they have such a good potential to be verbally articulated. On the other hand, quite a few insights, revelations, intuitions, imaginations, bodily realizations would be considered “unconscious” because of their great difficulty of verbalization although they often incredibly contribute to my personal growth, mental clarity, spiritual development, psychological maturity and quality of life. I just do not agree with the simple equation implicit, yet so pervasive in current psychology that conscious = verbal. I would say that that other, panoramic consciousness (conventionally known under the alias “unconscious”) communicates with/through us in a different tongue, in the form of sensations, perceptions, images, symbols, intuitions, inspirations. These are the means of a peculiar communication, an extraordinary messaging system - angel-language (I chose the name just for the aesthetic pleasure of it). Some psychologists (e.g. James Hillman) suggest that our encounters with the muses, daimons, angels are actually also psychological phenomena, perhaps an inner contact with our own depths felt as a strange consultation with another, alien being.

I know, this may sound pretty woolly. And I will not quarrel with such impressions. I am quite aware that my hunches & observations are only loosely connected this time. I guess what I am trying to communicate is that the unconscious is not unconscious at all. On the contrary, its consciousness is most probably much more expansive & profound than the awareness of our verbal self, the inner storyteller, the tireless chatterbox. Also it is not raw, primitive, indiscriminative, savage, but can be a great source of delicacy, discernment, sensitivity, tenderness, presence & brilliance. It has its own way of communicating to/with/through us perhaps somewhat analogical to the universal & comprehensive language of music (a non-verbal mode of communication so effortlessly delivering emotions, sensations, even images). So after all, angels & airwaves may have actually more in common than just the A at the beginning. ;-)

And here are the fascinating quotes from the book I mentioned earlier. Hope you find them inspiring too!

The mind in creation is a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this arises from within … and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or of its departure. Percy Bysshe Shelley

Before embarking on his life as an artist, Vincent van Gogh wrote of his yearning to be creative, which caused him to feel like “the man … whose heart is … imprisoned in something. Because he hasn’t got what he needs to be creative… Such a man often doesn’t know himself what he might do, but he feels instinctively: yet am I good for something, yet am I aware of some reason for existing! … something is alive in me: what can it be!

We have to regard it as our sacred responsibility to unfold and develop each individual’s creative ability as dim as the spark may be and kindle it to whatever flame it may conceivably develop. Viktor Lowenfeld

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his….

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility than most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another. Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are uknown, we knowers, ourselves to ourselves: this has its own good reason. We have never searched for ourselves – how should it then come to pass, that we should ever find ourselves? Friedrich Nietzsche

Painting is complete as a distraction. I know of nothing which, without exhausting the body, more entirely absorbs the mind. Whatever the worries of the hour or the threats of the future, once the picture has begun to flow along, there is no room for them in the mental screen. They pass out into shadow and darkness. All one’s mental light, such as it is, becomes concentrated on the task. Time stands respectfully aside. Winston Churchill

The intuitive is most accurately understood as a speeded-up, subconscious logic, parallel to conscious thought, in all save its greater delicacy and fluidity. Usually the deeper meanings so often ascribed to the intuitive more properly belong to sensory apprehension. Here resides the ineffable. This kind of experience is fundamentally non-verbal but it is not inarticulate to the visual and other senses. Intuitive in the verbal universe is always potentially explicable. Intuitive in the plastic sense, in all the arts, including poetry, is a matter never probably, capable of conscious verbalization. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

One should not think slightingly of the paradoxical; for the paradox is the source of the thinker’s passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without a feeling: a paltry mediocrity… The supreme paradox of all thought is the attempt to discover something that thought cannot think. Soren Kierkegaard

Poet and artist William Blake told his artist friends, “You have the same faculty as I [the visionary], only you do not trust or cultivate it. You can see what I do, if you choose.” On once occasion he said to a young painter, ”You have only to work up imagination to the state of vision and the thing is done.”

Every creative act involves …a new innocence of perception, liberated from the cataract of accepted belief. Arthur Koestler

At some stage in the process of creation the creative product – whether painting, poem, or scientific theory – takes on a life of its own and transmits its own needs too its creator. It stands apart from him and summons material from his subconscious. The creator, then, must know when to allow it to direct him. He must know, in short, when his work is likely to be wiser than he. George Kneller

The thought is not something that observes an inner event, but, rather, it is this inner event itself.

We do not reflect on something, but, rather, something thinks itself in us.

The thought does not consist in the fact that we see something clearly, which has evolved itself in us, but rather, than an inner development emerges into this bright region. Robert Musil

Poet as a Metaphysical Traveller

2011-11-28T17:48:00.000Z

Once more accidentally, I encountered a lovely, inspiring quote by Joseph Brodsky (the first one in the list below) while reading Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing by Frederick Franck. And I found it so enlightening & beautifully articulate that I thought I would search for some more perceptive insights by the author. It was definitely worth it, because I discovered some more valuable words of inspiration. Enjoy!

Every poem I write is an immense intensification of what I perceive. Whosoever writes a poem, does so above all because writing poetically is an extraordinary stimulant to one’s perception of the world. The one who, in his longing to relive the experience, becomes addicted to it, is a poet. (Joseph Brodsky in his acceptance speech of the Nobel Prize)

There are, as we know, three modes of cognition: analytical, intuitive, and the mode that was known to the Biblical prophets, revelation. What distinguishes poetry from other forms of literature is that it uses all three of them at once (gravitating primarily toward the second and the third). For all three of them are given in the language; and there are times when, by means of a single word, a single rhyme, the writer of a poem manages to find himself where no one has ever been before him, further, perhaps, than he himself would have wished for. The one who writes a poem writes it above all because verse writing is an extraordinary accelerator of conscience, of thinking, of comprehending the universe. Having experienced this acceleration once, one is no longer capable of abandoning the chance to repeat this experience; one falls into dependency on this process, the way others fall into dependency on drugs or on alcohol. One who finds himself in this sort of dependency on language is, I guess, what they call a poet. (another, extended translation of the paragraph above from the same speech)

For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey.

I do not believe in political movements. I believe in personal movement, that movement of the soul when a man who looks at himself is so ashamed that he tries to make some sort of change - within himself, not on the outside.

Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

For darkness restores what light cannot repair.

When hit by boredom, let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface. The idea here is to exact a full look at the worst. The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor.
Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one's mental equilibrium. It is your window on time's infinity. Once this window opens, don't try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open.

The eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention.

A poet is a combination of an instrument and a human being in one person, with the former gradually taking over the latter. The sensation of this takeover is responsible for timbre; the realization of it, for destiny.

For aesthetics is the mother of ethics.... Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth.

In the works of the better poets you get the sensation that they're not talking to people any more, or to some seraphical creature. What they're doing is simply talking back to the language itself --as beauty, sensuality, wisdom, irony --those aspects of language of which the poet is a clear mirror. Poetry is not an art or a branch of art, it's something more. If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological, indeed genetic, goal. Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a read, commits an anthropological crime, in the first place, against himself.

The Magical Shadowland

2011-11-25T19:29:00.000Z

This is the 250th (Yay!) post on this blog and I thought that a pinch of magic & wonder & artistic virtuosity would be a suitable start for the occasion. Instead, I found more than a bucketful of inspiration, although I was not even consciously looking for it. It was secretly buried in the amazing & mind-blowing performance by the Pilobolus Dance Theatre named Shadowland. So breathtakingly graceful! Enjoy!

Nature is a Poet in Love

2011-11-24T19:25:00.001Z

Today I discovered this stunning audio-visual meditation by the cinematographer Louie Schwartzberg on TED. This beauty needs to be shared! Prepare yourself for some breathtaking images & touching words. For some more aesthetic wonders pop in here.

The Praise of Folly

2011-11-21T20:13:00.001Z

Today I was inspired to watch this video in praise of foolishness... Perhaps a certain kind & degree of craziness is sometimes necessary, even healthy, in the pursuit of a good life. I found the short clip quite moving.

The Mystic Scriptures of Nabokov

2011-11-17T19:13:00.003Z

So I am back again with Nabokov. His work often truly inspires me, but also insanely bores me on occasions. Perhaps I am just not a short story person. The last time I read one was as a part of mandatory reading at my secondary school (if I am correct, some pretty good stuff by Guy de Maupassant). I will openly admit that at times I struggle through the book of Collected Stories which is as thick as a good old Dickens novel (like David Copperfield or Little Dorrit). But even trudging through the less enjoyable parts offers some rewards. Like my new discovery of another mystic element in Nabokov’s literature. Currently, I have very few doubts that Nabokov was a modern mystic, most probably not officially affiliated to any formal religion, perhaps creating his own spirituality with analogical creativity that is so typical of his art. I may be wrong; I do not pretend to be an expert on his biography. But time and again, I encounter passages in his writing (surprisingly even Lolita has a couple of them) that to me seem deeply, deeply spiritual, reminiscent of descriptions of a psychonaut’s experiments and empirical observations of the spiritual province reported by a talented alchemist of the soul. But equally they may be examples of an atheist’s finely cultivated aesthetic sensitivity. However, these unusual portrayals of the extraordinary stretches of consciousness or magic vanishing tricks featuring the complete elimination of the usual sense of self seem to suggest to me that Nabokov had an unlimited pass beyond the veil of physical reality onto the other shore of existence. And I don’t think that they are just ingenious creative artefacts resulting from his refined artistic skills. Vladimir Nabokov himself often admitted that he liked to add some true events or experiences from his own life into his fiction. Another reason why I do not think that these mystical moments are not only literary devices is that they ring a bell spiritually. There seems to be a certain level of consistency of Nabokov’s mystical descriptions with those of other spiritual mystics.

This time I discovered such a gem in one of his short stories named Terror (with some excerpts below) from his collection. And with this piece Nabokov has firmly established himself on my list of artistic sights to visit on my spiritual excursions. Some of his writings open hidden portals in our own minds into other dimensions of existence. If you have a chance to access his short story collection, make sure you definitely read this one.

[excerpts used for non-commercial, educational purposes]

… I would emerge from the trance of my task at the exact moment when night had reached the summit and was teetering on that crest, ready to roll down into the haze of dawn; I would get up from my chair, feeling chilly and utterly spent, turn on the light in my bedroom, and suddenly see myself in the looking glass. Then it would go like this: during the time I had been deep at work, I had grown disacquainted with myself, a sensation akin to what one may experience when meeting a close friend after years of separation: for a few empty, lucid, but numb moments you see him in an entirely different light even though you realize that the frost of this mysterious anesthesia will presently wear off, and the person you are looking at will revive, glow with warmth, resume his old place, becoming again so familiar that no effort of the will could possibly make you recapture that fleeting sensation of estrangedness. Precisely thus I now stood considering my own reflection in the glass and failing to recognize it as mine. And the more keenly I examined my face – those unblinking alien eyes, that sheen of tiny hairs along the jaw, that shade along the nose and the more insistently I told myself “This is I, this is So-and-so,” the less clear it became why this should be “I,” the harder I found it to make the face in the mirror merge with that “I” whose identity I failed to grasp.

When I came out on the street, I suddenly saw the world such as it really is. You see, we find comfort in telling ourselves that the world could not exist without us, that it exists only inasmuch as we ourselves exist, inasmuch as we can represent it to ourselves. Death, infinite space, gallaxies, all this is frightening, exactly because it transcends the limits of our perception.

…

I was no longer a man, but a naked eye, an aimless glance moving in an absurd world.

Beauty of a Broken Heart

2011-11-10T21:20:00.000Z

Today I thought I would dedicate a post to the beautiful idea of bodhicitta that I encountered in Pema Chödrön’s book The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times. Bodhicitta is a Sanskrit word that is a composite of two parts – bodhi – awakened, enlightened, completely open & citta – mind, consciousness, heart. So translating the meaning of the Buddhist notion of bodhicitta into Western terminology, it means awakened consciousness, soul, heart-mind.

Pema Chödrön provides a wonderfully clear & moving description of the concept by saying that:

Sometimes the completely open heart and mind of bodhichitta is called the soft spot, a place as vulnerable and tender as an open wound. It is equated, in part, with our ability to love.

…

An analogy for the bodhichitta is the rawness of a broken heart. Sometimes this broken heart gives birth to anxiety and panic, sometimes to anger, resentment, and blame. But under the hardness of that armor there is the tenderness of genuine sadness. This is our link with all those who have ever loved. This genuine heart of sadness can teach us great compassion. It can humble us when we’re arrogant and soften us when we are unkind. It awakens us when we prefer to sleep and pierces through our indifference. This continual ache of the heart is a blessing that when accepted fully can be shared with all.

I truly fell in love with this perspective on spiritual awakening, because it sounds so immanent, human & close to home in contrast to some other lofty descriptions of enlightenment. Probably only a broken heart can open up completely to & cradle the world’s suffering and transform it into the radiance of compassion shining outward, sending the transmuted prima materia (suffering) of the heart’s alchemical transformation back to its original source – into the world. And I realized that the concept of bodhicitta probably has some application outside Buddhism too. I re-played in my mind all the various icons of religious figures, saints, holy people recurrently portrayed with an open, warm, radiant heart, and an aureole around their head. Both these graphic elements represent the same thing – bodhicitta, the awakened heart-mind (radiance shining from both heart & head).

So perhaps this imagery gives us a clue that spiritual awakening happens by means of a break-down, break-through, tumbling of the protective walls that we continuously build around our psychological life. It often occurs after a painful, raw encounter with life which carries out an open-heart surgery on our existence and ruthlessly cuts out all the deeply cherished, but misleading ideas about our own psychological identity from our centre. That remaining open, tender heart-mind is the lasting signature mark that life leaves on our psychological constitution after the lifesaving operation (lifesaving because it resuscitates us into a richer world & richer experience of our selves). Thus bodhicitta comes into existence after we have been broken in by life itself.

So as an attempt at spiritual ecumenism (because I often approach spirituality primarily through a Buddhist lens) I thought I would use a lovely image of Jesus. But God, I must admit I met some powerful internal resistance while searching for pics on the internet that would seem appropriate & aesthetically appealing. All of them appeared a little too inspirited and animated. The problem is that, in my experience, quite a few people have such iconographic representations on the walls of their homes while they themselves often lack any basic human decency in their everyday interactions (at least in the region where I come from). But never mind, this cannot truly contaminate the original pure meaning of this imagery. And I as you can see, I am trying to work on that inner defiance…

The Divine Synesthete

2011-11-07T12:31:00.004Z

So I have come across another interesting piece of poetic evidence supporting my suspicion that God is a synesthete (as I suggested in one of my previous posts). This time I struck lucky during my stroll in the extraordinary treasury of the beautiful Occidental haiku gems composed by the poet-priest Angelus Silesius. The one about synesthesia is the first in the list of sparkling & shiny word chains.

In Spirit senses are
One and the same. 'T is true,
Who seeth God he tastes,
Feels, smells and hears Him too.

God is a pure no-thing,
concealed in now and here:
the less you reach for him,
the more he will appear.

God, whose love and joy
are present everywhere,
can't come to visit you
unless you aren't there.

When quitting time, I am
Myself eternity.
I shall be one with God,
God one with me shall be.

By the will art thou lost,

by the will art thou found,

by the will art thou free, captive, and bound.

The rose is without why

It blossoms because it blossoms.

If Christ were born in Bethlehem a thousand times and not in thee thyself; then art thou lost eternally.

When the Ten Thousand Things are seen in their Oneness, we return to the Origin where we have always been.

When challenged to explain the Absolute I shall fall still, I shall be silent as a mute.

Paradise is at your own center

Unless you find it there

There is no way to enter.

The one awakened

Liberated

Sees all things as one

Unseparated.

The rose that

With my mortal eye

I see

Flowers in God for all eternity.

A Cup of "Wherever You Will Go" at 4pm

2011-11-05T16:15:00.001Z

I never expected to find a simple commercial to be graceful. But I have to admit that I love watching the 1st video clip below. Perhaps it's the sea scenery, water imagery, the clean spaciousness that always appeal to me. Or maybe it's my agelong appreciation of the song Wherever You Will Go by The Calling. I even like the stripped down, lazy (in terms of speech articulation), strolling version sung by Charlene Soraia. I thought there might be someone else besides me who would experience this quirky, beautiful advert as an aesthetic treat for the senses...

God is a Synesthetic DJ

2011-11-04T20:54:00.001Z

So the evidence and the number of authors suggesting that there is a potentially interesting link between synesthesia and spirituality seem to increase. My latest discovery is the book by Maureen Seaberg Tasting the Universe: People Who See Colors in Words and Rainbows in Symphonies (a spiritual and scientific exploration of synesthesia). The book provided me with a fascinating excursion through the varied landscape of synesthesia, in addition to frequent aha-moments and gasps of surprise ;-)

As I mentioned in several previous posts, I am a synesthete suspect myself (with the motion-to-hearing version), most probably since childhood. But in addition to this, I also noticed that thanks to intensive spiritual practice my synesthesia seems to have spilled over to my other senses, it can now involve any of my senses, combining in any possible way. Also, my senses feel to have become more acute and sensitive overall (not always a pleasant thing especially in noisy London with all the police & ambulance sirens whose sound makes me feel as if a pair of invisible hands was sticking knives into my ears). The same applies to my empathetic ability. Sometimes it feels as if someone had sloughed of a thick layer of protective armour previously enveloping my whole psyche & body. Although it feels good to be more intimately connected to the world and people around me, I will also admit that I sometimes feel like a snail without its shell – unprotected, vulnerable, exposed, homesick (missing the safety of the snail house). And I think that I can easily pick the culprit responsible for these processes from the identity parade (line-up) which is mindfulness meditation practice.

On many occasions, I literally had a sense as if my body & mind had been secretly tinkered with, re-aligned into a new composition, re-formed into a new arrangement. As if my interior had been transformed into a bizarre internal workshop inhabited by various little artists & artisans busily decorating me from inside. And the fact is that I do not have much of an insight into the process of internal refurbishment that is taking place within me. I can observe only the effects of it (the expansion of my synesthesia, increased acuteness of my senses, greater emotional connection, decreased competitiveness, lowered judgemental & over-critical tendencies…). On extremely rare occasions I can gain fleeting glimpses into the work through accidental break-downs in the artful mechanism of internal camouflage…

So while reading Maureen Seaberg’s Tasting the Universe I had a truly breathtaking insight. That God must be a synesthete, because divine consciousness is said to be perfectly unified, integrated, coherent and harmonized. It’s in some respect a transgressive form of consciousness, because it does not respect the conventional divisions and boundaries between the senses and different psychological faculties (feeling, sensing, thinking, intuition, imagination…) as they exist in most human beings. Of course, God is a synesthete! What an obvious, completely logical conclusion! Now I understand why I feel sometimes so dizzy, disorientated, con-fused & mixed in life. My spiritual practice is literally shaking me up, like a strange human cocktail of spirit & matter! All the various levels of my being are perhaps gradually being woven into a more unified fabric, synchronized through the ingenious set up of the musical mixer, equalizer & turntables regulated by the Glorious Transcendental DJ!

So as an appetizer together with a recommendation, I thought I would post some short quotes from the book…

Pharell Williams believes that synesthesia is a communion with God. Dr. Bushell, a leading medical anthropologist told me that ancient Buddhist texts imply there is no enlightenment without synesthesia.

And for the first time, I advance the theory that synesthesia is nothing short of grace, evidence by the Buddhist belief that it must be present at enlightenment. Indeed, according to two scientists I interviewed, the colourful forms that synesthetes see – the photisms – may actually be a form of quantum awareness.

…

To me the photisms I see and the other impressions I receive are harbingers of a higher plane of reality than exists outside of this physical world of shadows. They feel pure and elemental and from the ultimate source, perhaps even quantum.

Zen master Dogen exclaiming upon his enlightenment:

“Incredible, incredible, inanimate things proclaiming dharma is inconceivable, it can’t be known if the ears try to hear it, but when the eyes hear it, then it can be known.”

The Mysterious Face of Mystics

2011-11-02T17:15:00.002Z

This time I thought I would do a little innocent research about my tribe – the mystics. Found some truly fascinating compromising material, as one would expect… ;-)

An enchanted world is one that speaks to the soul, to the mysterious depths of the heart and imagination where we find value, love, and union with the world around us. As mystics of many religions have taught, that sense of rapturous union can give a sensation of fulfilment that makes life purposeful and vibrant. Thomas Moore

In mysticism that love of truth which we saw as the beginning of all philosophy leaves the merely intellectual sphere, and takes on the assured aspect of a personal passion. Where the philosopher guesses and argues, the mystic lives and looks; and speaks, consequently, the disconcerting language of first-hand experience, not the neat dialectic of the schools. Hence whilst the Absolute of the metaphysicians remains a diagram —impersonal and unattainable—the Absolute of the mystics is lovable, attainable, alive. Evelyn Underhill

Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight. Milan Kundera

Deep down, all of us are probably aware that some kind of mystical evolution is our true task. Yet we suppress the notion with considerable force because to admit it is to admit that most of our political gyrations, religious dogmas, social ambitions, and financial ploys are not merely counter-productive but trivial. Tom Robbins

I carry a torch in one hand
and a bucket of water in the other
with these things
I am going to set fire to Heaven
and put out the flames of Hell
so that voyagers to God
can rip the veils
and see the real goal.

Rabi'a al-'Adawiyya

I played the veena until my heart turned into the same instrument. Then I offered this instrument to the Divine Musician, the only musician existing. Since then I have become His flute, and when He chooses He plays His music. The people give me credit for this music which, in reality, is not due to me, but to the Musician who plays his own instrument. Hazrat Kahn

Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science. Henri Bergson

Mysticism occurs whenever a human being sees the separation between the natural and the supernatural, between the temporal and the eternal, as overcome. Albert Schweitzer

The new meaning of soul is creativity and mysticism. These will become the foundation of the new psychological type and with him or her will come the new civilization. Otto Rank

There is a kind of mysticism to writing. Irvine Welsh

God guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He that sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow-bone;
W.B. Yeats

Lower vibrations exist with material reality, higher ones with mystical reality, and a full vibrational spectrum with expanded reality. Dr. Valerie Hunt

Mysticism is: a. An advanced state of inner enlightenment. b. Union with Reality. c. A state of genuinely satisfying success. d. Insight into an entirely new world of living. e. An intuitive grasp of Truth, above and beyond intellectual reasoning. f. A personal experience, in which we are happy and healthy human beings. Vernon Howard

Pseudo-mysticism seeks to evade reality; authentic mysticism wants to live it. Vernon Howard

Mysticism is not this or that particular cup on the table; it is the water poured into all of them. Vernon Howard

Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak the same language. Meister Eckhart

We follow the mystics. They know where they are going. They, too, go astray, but when they go astray they do so in a way that is mystical, dark, and mysterious. Ryszard Kapuscinski

The immediacy of mystic experience simply means that we know God just as we know other objects. God is not a mathematical entity or a system of concepts mutually related to one another and having no reference to experience. Muhammad Iqbal

The scientific observer of Nature is a kind of mystic seeker in the act of prayer. Muhammad Iqbal

The word “mysticism” comes from a Greek word, mysterion, …[which] comes from another root, myein, which means “to keep one’s mouth shut”…Mysticism means you have come across a truth which makes you dumb. It is so big, so huge, so enormous that it cannot be contained in any word. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

The fact that modern physics, the manifestation of an extreme specialisation of the rational mind, is now making contact with mysticism, the essence of religion and manifestation of an extreme specialisation of the intuitive mind, shows very beautifully the unity and complementary nature of the rational and intuitive modes of consciousness; of the yang and the yin. Fritjof Capra

The language of the mystics cannot meet the language of science and reason, but nevertheless in a world that craves experimental testimonies it will be always one of the roads by which our contemporaries can find God. Rene Vouillaume

When human beings have been fascinated by the contemplation of their own hearts, the more intricate biological pattern of the female has become a model for the artist, the mystic, and the saint. When mankind turns instead to what can be done, altered, built, invented, in the outer world, all natural properties of men, animals, or metals become handicaps to be altered rather than clues to be followed. Margaret Mead

Mystics always hope that science will some day overtake them. Booth Tarkington

The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love. Meister Eckhart

In its quest to discover how the patterns of reality are organised, the story of modern science hints at a picture of a set of Chinese puzzle boxes, each one more intricately structured and wondrous than the last. Every time the final box appears to have been reached, a key has been found which has opened up another, revealing a new universe even more breathtakingly improbable in its conception. We are now forced to suspect that, for human reason, there is no last box, that in some deeply mysterious, virtually unfathomable, self-reflective way, every time we open a still smaller box, we are actually being brought closer to the box with which we started, the box which contains our own conscious experience of the world. This is why no theory of knowledge, no epistemology, can ever escape being consumed by its own self-generated paradoxes. And this is why we must consider the universe to be irredeemably mystical. Bob Hamilton

Here in this body are the sacred rivers: here are the sun and moon as well as all the pilgrimage places... I have not encountered another temple as blissful as my own body. Saraha

Religion is nothing but institutionalized mysticism. The catch is, mysticism does not lend itself to institutionalization. The moment we attempt to organize mysticism, we destroy its essence. Religion, then, is mysticism in which the mystical has been killed. Or, at least diminished. Tom Robbins

Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the madhouse on all the mystics of history. You cannot take the region of the unknown and calmly say that, though you know nothing about it, you know all the gates are locked. We do not know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable. G.K. Chesterton

If there is anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me. But this was shown: that in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love. Julian of Norwich

PS: I Love You From Earth

2011-11-01T18:38:00.001Z

It seems I am gradually getting the knack of getting lost & accidentally stumbling upon some completely unexpected treasures on the way. Sometimes it feels like unconsciously, but very purposefully training a hidden sense inaccessible to my intellect... How strange! So one of these random finds has been this beautiful & moving video clip below. It brought tears to my eyes, again. Hope it inspires you too!

Mystical Kierkegaard

2011-10-31T13:49:00.006Z

I read Søren Kierkegaard's Either/Or & Fear and Trembling when I was a teenager. Yes, and I also read Aristotle’s De Anima while I was still at secondary school as a light reading to complement my study of advanced medical books on neuroanatomy. What can I say. I have always been infinitely curious! :-). I found his writing & philosophy quite interesting back then. But I honestly cannot say that it gripped me. Thinking back, perhaps these encounters with existential philosophy were somewhat premature. I could not match them with my life experience, so there was no real substance for a deep resonance on my side. I was an atheist at that time so a lot of what Kierkegaard wrote trickled around me with minimal impact. It was like encrypted poetry with imagery I could not decode in the absence of a spiritual lexicon. Recently however, while reading a book by Kazimierz Dabrowski on personality development through positive disintegration, I came across the first quote in the list below. And the encounter literally knocked the wind out of me. The quote got me by surprise quite seriously. I almost felt an urge to check the floor beside my bed to ascertain whether I would see my soul picking herself up from the unforeseen intellectual flop. Somehow, I did not realize that such a prominent philosopher would this openly deal with mystical experiences in his work. So I could not rest until I found more mystical thoughts by him. Perhaps now the time is ripe to re-read some of his works again… Hope you find Kierkegaard’s thoughts as enlightening & inspiring as I did. Warning: Check carefully where your soul steps while reading through the quotes below! ;-)

In states of highest spiritual tension man feels that he himself must know something, decide something, do something, and that in this no one can replace him… Some people think that the essential thing in mysticism is the ardent seeking of absolute truth. They are wrong. The first, deep motive is always personal and moral, namely the salvation of life, the problem of suffering in the spiritual order of things... When a man suffers, feels his guilt, and worries about his own redemption, then the problem of being and its purpose becomes a personal issue for him.

Just as in earthly life lovers long for the moment when they are able to breathe forth their love for each other, to let their souls blend in a soft whisper, so the mystic longs for the moment when in prayer he can, as it were, creep into God.

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.

And this is the simple truth - that to live is to feel oneself lost. He who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce.

Geniuses are like thunderstorms. They go against the wind, terrify people, cleanse the air.

The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.

A man who as a physical being is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him.

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

Be that self which one truly is.

Because of its tremendous solemnity death is the light in which great passions, both good and bad, become transparent, no longer limited by outward appearences.

Don't forget to love yourself.

During the first period of a man's life the greatest danger is not to take the risk.

Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.

Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in every generation may not come that far, but none comes further.

God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.

Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living.

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.

Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth - look at the dying man's struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.

Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself.

Love is all, it gives all, and it takes all.

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.

Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wonder whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid.

Personality is only ripe when a man has made the truth his own.

Purity of heart is to will one thing.

Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.

The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.

The more a man can forget, the greater the number of metamorphoses which his life can undergo; the more he can remember, the more divine his life becomes.

The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.

The truth is a snare: you cannot have it, without being caught. You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you.

There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life's highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death.

There is nothing everyone is so afraid of as being told how vastly much he is capable of. You are capable of - do you want to know? - you are capable of living in poverty; you are capable of standing almost any kind of maltreatment, abuse, etc. But you do not wish to know about it, isn't that so? You would be furious with him who told you so, and only call that person your friend who bolsters you in saying: 'No, this I cannot bear, this is beyond my strength, etc.

To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.

Trouble is the common denominator of living. It is the great equalizer.

What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.'

I stick my finger into existence.. it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? What is this thing called the world? What does this word mean?

The most common form of despair is not being who you are.

There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys: they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked the sum out for themselves.

In order to swim one takes off all one's clothes--in order to aspire to the truth one must undress in a far more inward sense, divest oneself of all one's inward clothes, of thoughts, conceptions, selfishness etc., before one is sufficiently naked.

The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.

If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating as possibility!

It is very dangerous to go into eternity with possibilities which one has oneself prevented from becoming realities. A possibility is a hint from God. One must follow it.

God does not think; he creates. He does not exist; he is eternal.

It takes moral courage to grieve; it requires religious courage to rejoice.

There are two kinds of geniuses. The characteristic of the one is roaring, but the lightning is meagre and rarely strikes; the other kind is characterized by reflection by which it constrains itself or restrains the roaring. But the lightning is all the more intense; with the speed and sureness of lightning it hits the selected particular points - and is fatal.

No grand inquisitor has in readiness such terrible tortures as has anxiety and no spy knows how to attack more artfully the man he suspects, choosing the instant when he is weakest; nor knows how to lay traps where he will be caught and ensnared as anxiety knows how, and no sharp-witted judge knows how to interrogate, to examine the accused, as anxiety does, which never lets him escape...

The way to love anything is to realize it might be lost.

When one has once fully entered the realm of love, the world - no matter how imperfect - becomes rich and beautiful, it consists solely of opportunities for love.

A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it's a joke.

The proud person always wants to do the right thing, the great thing. But because he wants to do it in his own strength, he is fighting not with man, but with God.

One must not think slightingly of the paradoxical…for the paradox is the source of the thinker’s passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity.

How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it and why was I not informed of the rules and regulations but just thrust into the ranks as if I had been bought by a peddling shanghaier of human beings? How did I get involved in this big enterprise called actuality? Why should I be involved? Isn't it a matter of choice? And if I am compelled to be involved, where is the manager—I have something to say about this. Is there no manager? To whom shall I make my complaint?

What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?

Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it? I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others that at last their true nature could not reveal itself;... In every man there is something which to a certain degree prevents him from becoming perfectly transparent to himself; and this may be the case in so high a degree, he may be so inexplicably woven into relationships of life which extend far beyond himself that he almost cannot reveal himself. But he who cannot reveal himself cannot love, and he who cannot love is the most unhappy man of all.

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand...

No, I won't leave the world--I'll enter a lunatic asylum and see if the profundity of insanity reveals to me the riddles of life. Idiot, why didn't I do that long ago, why has it taken me so long to understand what it means when the Indians honour the insane, step aside for them? Yes, a lunatic asylum--don't you think I may end up there?

If you want to be loathsome to God, just run with the herd.

...even the richest personality is nothing before he has chosen himself, and on the other hand even what one might call the poorest personality is everything when he has chosen himself; for the great thing is not to be this or that but to be oneself, and this everyone can be if he wills it.

Fine Tuning the Musical Instrument in Our Head

2011-10-26T12:13:00.000+01:00

One more random, accidental discovery... Often these seem to be the most valuable & illuminating ones too. This time it's a beautiful & inspiring video clip by the RSAnimate (Royal Society of Arts) named The Divided Brain by the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist. One interesting lesson that I've come away with thanks to this video is that perhaps the human brain as such is more inherently integrated than divided. That maybe the dissociation of the cerebral hemispheres is to a degree caused mainly by the dissection by the scalpel of culture rather than nature, by the excessive cultural preference of one specialization (most often the analytic & calculating left half) over the other. That's why it is even more valuable to see a scientist passionately calling for the much needed synchronization of our mental life. Highly recommended!

Hymn for the Unconscious, Ode to the Irrational, Chant of the Soul

2011-10-25T21:15:00.001+01:00

I am so incredibly glad that Evanescence are back at last! I find their art endlessly inspiring. And their latest single What You Want is just like that too. Actually, with the mesmerizingly raw bass guitar riffs & unfettered drum beats, I feel that the song unleashes quite some resonant explosion! The poetic imagery in the lyrics & the video clip is fascinating too, in my view. I perceive it, as I already stated in the title of this post, as a "Hymn for the Unconscious, Ode to the Irrational, Chant of the Soul" in modern, rock dressing with powerful vocals. Also the incarnation of the night-time, antagonistic, dark Aphrodite, inviting her followers for a submersion in the oceanic depths of life & the expansive consciousness ("unconscious"), leaping beyond the railings of our own limitations into the open space of being (in contrast to emerging out of sea foam in the more conventional, daylight portrayal of the Greek Goddess of Love). Do you think that the purple veil fluttering behind the running Amy Lee is just a mere coincidence? (Purple is a colour symbolizing spirituality, a mix of red - love & blue - wisdom). But enough of my rambling... I tell you, just check out the fantastic video & lyrics below.

WHAT YOU WANT

by Evanescence

Do what you what you want, if you have a dream for better

Do what you what you want till you don't want it anymore

(remember who you really are)

Do what you what you want, your world's closing in on you now

(it isn't over)

Stand and face the unknown

(got to remember who you really are)

Every heart in my hands like a pale reflection

Hello, hello remember me?

I'm everything you can't control

Somewhere beyond the pain there must be a way to believe we can break through

Do what you what you want, you don't have to lay your life down

(it isn't over)

Do what you what you want till you find what you're looking for

(got to remember who you really are)

But every hour slipping by screams that I have failed you

Hello, hello remember me?

I'm everything you can't control

Somewhere beyond the pain there must be a way to believe

Hello, hello remember me?

I'm everything you can't control

Somewhere beyond the pain there must be a way to believe

There's still time

close your eyes

only love will guide you home

Tear down the walls and free your soul

Till we crash we're forever spiraling down, down, down, down

Hello, hello, its only me

infecting everything you love

Somewhere beyond the pain there must be a way to believe

Hello, hello remember me?

I'm everything you can't control

Somewhere beyond the pain there must be a way to learn forgiveness

Hello, hello remember me?

I'm everything you can't control

Somewhere beyond the pain there must be a way to believe we can break through

Science is a Ladder, Art is a Winged Flight

2011-10-23T22:59:00.007+01:00


The Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci as a cosmography of the microcosm (cosmografia del minor mondo).

Today, I got into the mood of exploring what some wise figures of the human culture have to say about Art & Science, putting them next to each other in a single sentence or a whole paragraph. And what I found seems quite fascinating & instructive!

Do you believe then that the sciences would have arisen and grown up if the sorcerers, alchemists, astrologers and witches had not been their forerunners; those who, with their promisings and foreshadowings, had first to create a thirst, a hunger, and a taste for hidden and forbidden powers? Friedrich Nietzsche

Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis. Karl Kraus

How far will chemistry and physics ... help us understand the appeal of a painting? Hazel Swaine Rossotti

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom. Albert Einstein

Art and science have their meeting point in method. Earl Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

During human progress, every science is evolved out of its corresponding art. Herbert Spencer

Exact science and its practical movements are no checks on the greatest poet, but always his encouragement and support ... The sailor and traveller, the anatomist, chemist, astronomer, geologist, phrenologist, spiritualist, mathematician, historian and lexicographer are not poets, but they are the lawgivers of poets and their construction underlies the structure of every perfect poem. Walt Whitman

In scientific matters ... the greatest discoverer differs from the most arduous imitator and apprentice only in degree, whereas he differs in kind from someone whom nature has endowed for fine art. But saying this does not disparage those great men to whom the human race owes so much in contrast to those whom nature has endowed for fine art. For the scientists' talent lies in continuing to increase the perfection of our cognitions and on all the dependent benefits, as well as in imparting that same knowledge to others; and in these respects they are far superior to those who merit the honour of being called geniuses. For the latter's art stops at some point, because a boundary is set for it beyond which it cannot go and which has probably long since been reached and cannot be extended further. Immanuel Kant

Science and art are the handmaids of religion. François-Alexandre-Nicolas-Cheri Delsarte

Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process. Franz Grillparzer

Science is continually correcting what it has said. Fertile corrections... science is a ladder... poetry is a winged flight... An artistic masterpiece exists for all time... Dante does not efface Homer. Victor Hugo

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious—the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Albert Einstein

The subject matter of the scientist is a crowd of natural events at all times; he presupposes that this crowd is not real but apparent, and seeks to discover the true place of events in the system of nature. The subject matter of the poet is a crowd of historical occasions of feeling recollected from the past; he presupposes that this crowd is real but should not be, and seeks to transform it into a community. Both science and art are primarily spiritual activities, whatever practical applications may be derived from their results. Disorder, lack of meaning, are spiritual not physical discomforts, order and sense spiritual not physical satisfactions. Wystan Hugh Auden

There shall be love between the poet and the man of demonstrable science. In the beauty of poems are the tuft and final applause of science. Walt Whitman

He who possesses science and art,
Possesses religion as well;
He who possesses neither of these,
Had better have religion.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Art has a double face, of expression and illusion, just like science has a double face: the reality of error and the phantom of truth. René Daumal

Art includes everything that stimulates the desire to live; science, everything that sharpens the desire to know. Art, even the most disinterested, the most disembodied, is the auxiliary of life. Rémy de Gourmont

What would life be without art? Science prolongs life. To consist of what—eating, drinking, and sleeping? What is the good of living longer if it is only a matter of satisfying the requirements that sustain life? All this is nothing without the charm of art. Sarah Bernhardt

I cannot then believe in this concept of an anthropomorphic God who has the powers of interfering with these natural laws. As I said before, the most beautiful and most profound religious emotion that we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. And this mysticality is the power of all true science. Albert Einstein

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better. Andre Gide

There are two kinds of truth; the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art.... Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery. Raymond Chandler

Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth. Cyril Connolly

Science is for those who learn; poetry, for those who know. Joseph Roux

Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings admiring, asking and observing, there we enter the realm of Art and Science. Albert Einstein

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. Isaac Newton

Science does not know its debt to imagination. Ralph Waldo Emerson

The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living. Jules Henri Poincaré

Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of it, from materialism and theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt that they were much too simple. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth that are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy. That is the reason why I have no philosophy myself, and must be my excuse for dreaming. John Burden Sanderson Haldane

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art. Will Durant

Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops. H. L. Mencken

Nature composes some of her loveliest poems for the microscope and the telescope. Theodore Roszak

Art is science made clear. Wilson Mizner