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[Begun on the 9th, and re-commenced on the 13th.]
The fushigis continue to outpace my ability to blog them. Even now, even though I sat down tonight to write a memoir of inertia, my inertia has kept me from writing it and I found myself writing silly Zenish fushigi things instead.
And now, I will begin with music from last night’s small fushigi, mostly because it involves the joy of listening to Laurie Brown’s The Signal and how her music interacts fushigish with my life. I had Laurie’s music in my ears as I was writing a letter to my sisters. We had had a reunion the night before. I hadn’t seen the one sister since 1991 the other since 2004. We shared our own paths of survival and recovery from the trauma we’d experienced under the charismatic and sociopathic cult-like charms of our mother. (That’s for another story.) I began the letter struggling to describe how I felt. I wrote “I am smiling at how easy and peaceful, perhaps even tranquil, the time felt to me.” As I was writing that, I heard Laurie Brown introduce the next song with, paraphrased, Alana Yorkebringing ‘comfort, peace and tranquility’. How often do you hear or read the word tranquility these days? And yet as I’m writing it Laurie’s is speaking it. Anyway, I went and found the song from The Signal’s play logs because it is quite beautiful. Enjoy: Song of the Piano Man.
And tonight there was a funny fushigi. It began with my beginning to share on FB a small miracle, or magic, in its own right: Thursday [yesterday, the day of my reunion] I received an email from the Readwave reader/writer webpage that my total story and poem reads there have reached 10,000. That ‘milestone’ occurred on the same day I met with a sister I hadn’t seen since 1991, which is some kind of milestone. While a little amusing, that is not the fushigi. And, funny enough, as it turns out she is married to a writer! Too funny, how life goes. And even funnier, he is not a mainstream writer, as he explores the liminal areas of human experience. Jasun Horsley is fascinating, and an excellent writer and podcaster.
When I went to share my 10k milestone on FB, I wanted to be clever, and find some quotation on the limits of words. That words have limited functionality and are prone to creating serious miscommunication is a regular theme in my writing. I began to flip through a few of my books. After a few unsuccessful flips, I came across this one in a book that I bought today: How to AwakenMost students of Zen apply themselves to mindless zazen [meditation] — a grave error. [It is to be remembered] that the mind is transmitted and enlightened by itself. The non-sentient cannot attain the Way. Students today can’t seem to grasp that to feel cold or warmth, hunger or fullness, is to be mindless and on the right path (61).Zen: Poems, Prayers, Sermons, Anecdotes, Interviews. Translated by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto.
Nice! I thought to myself. And marked it with a sticky for later, when I would put together this blog.
Well, for some reason, I decided to take a quick look at the other book I bought at the same time as the Zen one. It is Mr. Palomar by the amazing Italian writer, Italo Calvino. And this is what I read!Ch. 1: Reading A Wave
The sea is barely wrinkled, and little waves strike the sandy shore. Mr. Palomar is standing on the shore, looking at a wave. Not that he is lost in contemplation of the waves. He is not lost, because he is quite aware of what he is doing: he wants to look at a wave and he is looking at it. He is not contemplating, because for contemplation you need the right temperament, the right mood, and the right combination of exterior circumstances; and though Mr. Palomar has nothing against contemplation in principle, none of these three conditions applies to him. Finally, it is not "the waves" that he means to look at, but just one individual wave: in his desire to avoid vague sensations, he establishes for his every action a limited and precise object.
Mr. Palomar sees a wave rise in the distance, grow, approach, change form and color, fold over itself, break, vanish, and flow again. At this point he could convince himself that he has concluded the operation he had set out to achieve, and he could go away. But isolating one wave is not easy, separating it from the wave immediately following, which seems to push it and at times overtakes it and sweeps it away; and it is no easier to separate that one wave from the preceding wave, which seems to drag it toward the shore, unless it turns against the following wave, as if to arrest it, Then, if you consider the breadth of the wave, parallel to the shore, it is hard to decide where the advancing front extends regularly and where it is separated and segmented into independent waves, distinguished by their speed, shape, force, direction.
In other words, you cannot observe a wave without bearing in mind the complex features that concur in shaping it and the other, equally complex ones that the wave itself originates(3).
And that was perhaps an almost perfect example of a writer using words to move beyond words and, at the same time, embodying the antithesis of the Zen teacher’s lament that student of life cannot live within the ‘natural’ order of life. So delightful.
This was almost immediately followed up with a delightful‘analytical’ version of Calvino’s Mr. Palomar. I found it in The Nature of Personal Reality by Seth/Jane Roberts.As mentioned (in Chapter Four), the conscious mind is a portion of the inner self; that part that surfaces, so to speak, and meets physical reality more or less directly.
You are mainly concerned now with physical orientation and the corporeal materialization of inner reality. Therefore the conscious mind holds in ready access the information that you require for effective day-to-day living. It is not necessary that you hold in steady consciousness data that does not directly apply to what you consider your physical reality at any given "time." (Pause, one of many.) As soon as the need for such data — aid, information, or knowledge — arises, then it is immediately forthcoming unless your own conscious beliefs cause a barrier. The exquisite, precise and concentrated focus of your conscious mind is quite necessary in physical life. It is because of this highly selective quality that you can "tune into" the particular range of activity that is physical (95).
I decided to search a bit more, and a flip or two later I came across something from the Chandogya Upanishad. I read it in The Upanishads, translated by Eknath Easwaran:Narada, approached the Venerable One, Sanatkumara, and asked him to teach him. The Venerable One replied, “tell me what you know, and then I will teach you what is beyond that.”
“I know the four Vedas, Rig, Yahur, Sama, Atharva — and the epics, called the fifth. I have studied grammar, rituals, mathematics, astronomy, logic, economics, physics, psychology, the fine arts, and even snake-charming. But all this knowledge has not helped me to know the Self. I have heard from spiritual teachers like you that one who realizes the Self goes beyond sorrow. I am lost in sorrow. Please teach me how to go beyond.”
“Whatever you know is just words,” said Sanatkumara, “names of finite phenomena. It is the Infinite that is the source of abiding joy because it is not subject to change. Therefore, seek to know the Infinite (188-9).”
How does all this tie into a family reunion? Each of us related our struggles out of the deluded illusionary world our mother had made up for us. We had all come to the awareness, had woken up in Zen language, that our mother’s world was ultimately an empty and psychologically poisoned one that only words and the blind who will follow them have the ability to make manifest. Only words have the power to create ideas and ideologies that are completely disconnected from the real world, a world that is comprised of the complexity of our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual beings. We each of us had, in our own unique paths, left the cult of ‘just’ words that our mother adeptly made. And ‘cult’ is not my description. Some time after breaking off communication with our mother, our eldest sister described her shocked realization that the documentary on cults she was watching was describing our childhood.
Today was a day with three tiny but remarkable fushigi. The last one today began two days ago. And like all great ones, it began small, with my deciding to look at The Nature of Personal Reality: A Seth Book by Jane Roberts. I decided this, in my mind anyway, because I have been thinking about my path from childhood and its soul destroying trauma, to paraphrase a sister, to peace and the beginnings of joy for the first time in my life. And Personal Reality was very very important in that path.
So I flipped open to a random page in an unread old copy of the book. (I loaned away my thumbed copy many years ago, and it is not likely to return.) And I flipped open to Seth talking about the effects of massive doses of LSD as a therapeutic tool. When I read it I smiled at his discussion about the birth, death and rebirth of consciousness, because I recently posted a similar argument in Kubrickon as it relates to the problem of consensus versus consciousness. I posed the following question: With [M.L.] von Franz’s comment [in her interview ‘The Way of the Dream’, that consciousness can be easily absorbed back into unconsciousness], it struck that there may be a relationship between consensus building and the unconscious. Here's my thought: what if consensus is the means by which consciousness struggles against annihilation by the unconscious? The collective consensus is the counterbalance to the collective unconscious. The challenge or conundrum or irony of it is that for our consciousness to be saved from the darkness of unconsciousness requires that we dim the light of consciousness enough to join with the masses and become, hopefully, not a fully unconscious member of the tribal consensus! LOL!
From Jane/Seth:
[Sidebar! I’m listening to Laurie Brown on CBC R2 ‘The Signal’ talking about being alone with the opportunity to rest, repair, heal as I am preparing to transcribe the following. She was introducing the song ‘In My Solitude’ by Del Bel. The contrast with my subject felt healing and appropriate. And bloggable.]In therapy using massive doses of LSD, a condition of chemically enforced insanity takes place. By insanity, I mean a situation in which the conscious mind is forced into a state of powerlessness. There is a literal assault made not only upon the psyche, but upon the organizational framework that makes it possible for you to exist rationally in the world that you know. The ego, of course, cannot be annihilated in physical life. Kill one and another will, and must, emerge from the inner self which is its source.
Under such enforced conditions, you are literally facing egotistical consciousness with its own death in an encounter that need not occur — and while the physical body is fighting for its own life and vitality. You are bringing about a dilemma of great proportions (176-7). Toronto: Bantam Books 1980. ISBN 0553248456
Tonight, just before coming up stairs to write (in Kubrickon supposedly), I opened the book that arrived in the mail on Monday from the UK. The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit by Donald Kalsched I bought it a that recommendation of my sister while we were talking about surviving childhood and some of the ways we can be set back by inner archetypal energies created in that childhood. From the introduction:… I will be using the word “trauma” to mean any experience that causes the child unbearable psychic pain or anxiety. For an experience to be “unbearable” means that it overwhelms the usual defensive measures...The distinguishing feature of such trauma is what Heinz Kohut called, “disintegration anxiety,” an unnameable dread associated with the threatened dissolution of a coherent self.
To experience such anxiety threatens the total annihilation of the human personality, the destruction of the personal spirit. This must be avoided at all costs and so, because such trauma often occurs in early infancy before a coherent ego (and its defenses) is formed, a second line of defenses comes into play to prevent the “unthinkable” from being experienced (1).
[I am still listening to Laurie Brown, this time she mentioned “Lost in the All” which is the closing song of the movie The Samaritan with Samuel Jackson about a man struggling to grow out of his criminal past. That was kind of interesting, with the subject of growing out of our childhoods. But then it got really weird because, when I went to find the YouTube link, the one below it on the search results screen is Bastille - Things We Lost in the Fire. Why I note this is that about a week ago I was struggling to remember the name of that movie. I am not even sure why, except maybe it is about a family and people struggling with harsh life events and destructive choices. I loved Things We Lost in the Fire, and consider it to be one of Halle Barrie’s best performances. It also stars Benicio Del Toro in a great performance.]
End of the first fushigi of the day. Now for number 2.
It began, oddly enough, with another random book flip. For some reason I wanted to break the routine of work with my co-worker this morning and flipped open my office copy of The I Ching. And, as is usually the case, the hexagram was perfect, because of the feeling of work in the office. I flipped to p156, Six in the third place of #40 Deliverance. And I allowed my eyes to take me to where they wanted to go, which was Confucius’s comment:Carrying a burden on the back is the business of a common man; a carriage is the appurtenance of a man of rank….
And then I proceeded with my day, which included a surprise requirement to visit a job site. And — OMG, this is funny, I didn’t realize it until just now! It was a job site, and I needed to open a service vault, and — Laurie brown is talking about a book called, I think, The Importance Of Waiting as I write this! Too funny! … And I needed to open a service box, but had to wait while men came by with a load of supplies they were pushing on a large dolly of some type. Except the last man, the biggest, who was carrying on his shoulder a very large and obviously heavy thick blue coloured plastic pipe of a type I’ve never seen before.
Anyway, where was I? Right. I got the pictures I needed and when I got back to the office I was very surprised to see that the man I had helped yesterday get a 34x44 inch colour print for his workshop had thanked me by leaving a copy of a CD he’d made on my desk. He was a stranger to me, here from Toronto to put on a type of software architecture course. And so a bit later I plugged in Mike Beauchamp’s CD ‘Welcome Mat’. This is a moving CD! The heart and feeling comes through very powerfully and the CD is well produced and sounds excellent. Mike’s vocals are, perhaps, a bit rough, but the heart and feeling he conveys more than makes up for that. A delightful listen and a heartfelt gift that really touched me. I listened to the CD without looking at the track names — the liner doesn’t have them, while Windows Media Player played it in the background. And the hairs on my neck pricked a little when I heard Mike singing: Bear Their Burden
He will not bid the stones
turn in to bread today
easing his pressing hunger:
for the hungry and the poor
of the world cannot,
and he is in the world
to bear their burden.
He will not circumvent
frail humanness today,
denying his mortality:
for even the mighty
of the world cannot,
and he is in the world
to bear their burden.
He will not seek the throne
of a kingdom today,
no selfish wealth, no vain glory:
for the outcasts and the hurting
of the world cannot,
and he is in the world
to bear their burden.
Now for bed. It has been a long day and a long week.
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