White Light: Thought in White Heat--corporeal hulking thoughts

Of sound Mind & body==absolutely no drugs coursing thru my body on this occasion, as generally I can say.

Is there any folly in this? I'm trying to capture this one time out in front of the house on Williamsburg, when some innervoice came to a halt & I felt the wind of like a loud gun shot, with the requisite moment of dis-ease like I was floating away. --damned frightening!! We think. I was a "Driver back in Khartoum." (Paul K's song title) Guns were drawn, the iconography of the mind has the TV stupidly play--its antennae reflecting, alarmed. --folks that are more adept than me, and that can mean MORE awake, than folks who can't socially adjust in the first place & tout their physical & financial departure from the pack are the ones negligible in the travelogue coursing me through my condition. And thus I am wondering about who has gotten to a liberated mind, thru inner-peace, and esoteric observations. Take the old man or woman on the block--how do they stand in the wind? What self-conceptualization has given them the mind over the matter? I want light in my world--negativity has no places. Those that alienate a more compassionate perspective aren't in fact an individual I need to alter my path for anyway... I'm the first one there, & it is just me & you & I can't be the last to leave--to paraphrase Dylan.

Sitting out in front of the house, on my lawn chair by the garage, trailing away from me was the garment like the veil of an existential wind...my emotion & solid state that my motive til then was plain, leaving me in a wake of irresoluteness. I looked around and found myself in rarified air. The seat of awareness--say this sorta power spot=porch sittin'--seemes constituent with a floor of consciousness I could articulate, but not with words--but rather reflexively & potentially. I was looking for a solid state, a peak moment that I was a part of a spiritual reckoning--and had kind of an auditory hallucination. I could hear a flangey radio--the conversation in my head threatening that the vocal fountain now scrawling across some projected field around me would soon trail off, but with no clue that an innerVoice is my recorded self. If I were in front of some media providing apparati, it seems only the object in focus suggests I am welcomed when I reflect something like a message in the outward fact, while qualifying I ReALLy would have known & where have I been, it had been waiting. There is something monarchical about being in that much control when what is yours "closed' behind eyelids is just as the sleeping physical world saying contentedly, "go ahead, lay your head--I'm really the dream!" This being a viable notion I felt ultimately determined by, but now has been eclipsed as vast as a shadow behind the sun, rather than maybe my profile as casting a shadow yet by the sun--it has its own, as in the field of reason. Some bird flew across the immediate skyline & was a stark reminder of my sentience having consciousness bound by ignorance that slowly terribly intangibly I'd evolve from it. The corporeal hulking presence of a pathetic mind suggested to be some reprieve beyond the heated conditioning I was always trying to answer for. I look into space like it was as tactile as a hot iceberg, 85 % of its life submerged, but evidenciary just so. I perk up, it threatens denial. I adjust on my haunches, it bobs forward. Then as if hands moulded from my consternation I imagined grabbing some mental nomenclature as if like grandma's couch I am there til asked to go out, outside for awhile, quit lingering--was not the spectral shore I'd get warm & fuzzy about & my languid posturing held high til I peeked into brighter light and out of my constraints. Emotion was never missed, I watched what I saw... "I watched what I saw" is the words & concept I got from the French existential poet Artur Rimbaud. Consciousness acquisitive as the anthropos hand trusted to take what is just proximal in my awareness--like I can grab my objet du choseisma= if my French is correct, this means the object "doing"--a thingism, is cold filtering of the peripheral statement of presence. LIGHT plateau - dark CORRIDOR; white black white black: I watched what I saw! The last TIME we gave ourselves to the moment may have been our last reFLECTion before the veil of tears reMINDed us that IT had been a Karmic death.

I remember walking over to this cemetary, the main one here in Lexington in a similar haze back when REd Fly Nation was making music--the band I was in. Getting out of our downtown abode, book in hand about alchemy, the sun seemed to say I had enough time to find a conscious pocket & commiserate on a Then unknown-- It was evening time, but no social reproach in that I am my own worst critic, would sucker me into being something I couldn't or wouldn't live up to anyway. Like Bob Marley says--my then constant companion--"Music a godly thing." And the good company I kept in the place where humans were interred, was made of an indefinite chorus. There was something in the river of sight to which I belonged...the eternal world was the temporal one. And all the deceased pointed to it!!
***The 3rd st. house we lived together in, the 6 of us, had me undetermined where I'd remain--if only to get the ball rolling, a current taking me into the bounds in which my then girl-friend vested her critique of our relationship, to which the plain suggestion to me was get-on-board. Literally I walked out of the house(apt) toward the settling evening air, out across the street from Lexington cemetery, & sat under a tree in the parking lot. Still enough sun, like I say for the conscious pocket, was gleaming for an allowance of alliterative resolve--my esoteric book defied the lack of patterns I'd forsaken, & given me something at stake. (I think the author was Madame Blavatskii, her mysticism-something book I stole from Sqecial Media, which considering the beneficence of the place I felt almost blasphemous.) If the coffers of the compassionate void grants us a powerspot now & again, I knew it wasn't for the moment instructive to bide those places AMONGST--(too bad, I know). But I prized the connections in relationship as something to get back to, if only... & for me that was clearly defined in the stands of trees which rustled w/ otherness, & in which I sensed the impending thunder (which we all heard), & yet I was left naked w/o a rain dance. I could look at her image-the old photograph on the back of the book for long moments sometimes. She was gesturing, seemingly to me, but definitely in some ascetic quality as if iconography was the hand in contortion upon the side of her head--to herself-- maybe that certain energy for sustained meditation is met that way...like the quality of a plain room is characterized=or some tabernacle as I felt to be contained by, painting lightning in the air with my thoughts!!

ASceTiciSm****continuity since Oxford

I think Life & Human stupidity is all due to the need to have resolve, completion whether it is realistic to or truthful, it doesn't matter. Heads UP or heads down? I often wonder if it's valuable to be left with merely a question in our nerve. So, if something is said about a sense of your condition, tho' being indicated may not be other than the river & fray of ego fulfillment--why jump in? If I can have a Half Thought, there can be an accompaniment of illustration in mind--yet a bit of intellectual tension that we "can't" just jettison all that mind sore...something going on that is really solitarian. I like to think that my mind is vast enough that nothing is actually rhetorical!! So, again, an unfulfilled prone moment is a lot of tremor of emotional & nervous activity, compelling me to be the listener or student. I started a thread in this hid' rec'd blog a couple of days ago that is perhaps only in my mind significant, that my experience in Oxford was a jumping off point into accepting a certain mundane condition not easily torn asunder-- was just me standing before the proverbial wall. So, if the ubermensch within would have just gone around it rather than be stuck in distraction as the dostoevskian "underground man" I may not have been able to kick the crystal palace over and dispatch something that I knew a lot of others would themselves forever be indicated by==hopefully I am right about the materialism whose sway I am out of... One evening at the youth hostel, where I was staying, I stepped out to the lighted halls and sat in an asana posture (expectant so to speak) so that something of my studies would impact me, because otherwise it hadn't. Looking at the Yiddish before me was all the wonder of a verdant forest, yet no boughs to encumber me and give security that I'd find my way out. I wondered if it was that Hebrew language was the only lexicon thread to Judaic antecedents leaving Yiddish a mamma loshn (mother tongue--a Germanic language written w/Hebrew characters) with me yet as an orphan, as if Hebrew was an academic control I couldn't apply beyond to something else as the vulture of cultural should have a direction meaning multiply... I was surprised how social convention had convened my mind, maybe there is something more freeing I knew I could obtain--that the institution/academia in mind was flotsam at great pains having knowledge borne into a massive current--only observable release was a goal. So by that I mean, perception is become actionable--and the spirits albeit undifferentiated were romantic, faith was in the rational/ soul would not be quenched!!
There was a question on the Raw Wisdom Tribe thang about "emergent subjectivism." And there seems to be not much substantial to imagine as the concept behind the title...so, it is entirely what we make of it I guess. One chic asks about why folks need constant reinforcement. Like the duty to self? doing ritual over & over as the days go by. So, my answer was that the verity of our ascetic attendance changes--the balance of our effort to believe as deeply each & every time is not going to be constant. Sometimes the long ends of the day may be before you, other times you will have been in between the threshold of a mountain and 1/2 way to your destiny, with only the mountain to avail consciousness and very little to adduce in what we project into. That is why the acquisitive mind gets in the way. Weird propriety. As if like wow, so I found out I can answer for a certain attention I have to my MY condition. The big deal is purely emotional caprice/ answers are a dime a dozen. I want to be light as feather--as Bob Marley relates. "As if he had wings," he says. As soon as I am comfortable with any idea--the first thing I do is try to topple the effect. The pulse of escape creeps into my pores relinquishing the pained stutter of bad self, purity is a distant dream!! ISn'T IT "scientific"/ or rational to say ALL symbols of Eternity are in this life (this World)? Scientists are destined to an imminent reality. Therein lies a religious overtone to this example.--the health of our life-force. That mythos narrative, giving us ritual comfort food, can indeed be based upon rational principles. I liked what I just read of the Hindu Vedas. This ascetic saying that ritualism is delivering us to the summation of truth is a convenient edification.--that the performance of Vedic duties is acting on plurality. But if we take other Vedic liturgy - as the prescriptions on the Ultimate Reality=embracing Truth--we are talking epistemology, w/o lending a value statement to existence or non-existence because of the defect of appearances. Appearances go away as soon as Reality is Known. When reality is known, experienced-forms no longer imprison us...pure intelligence is ascendant!! Nor would there be differences with knower & the Known... also diverse forms of cognition, in this case Vedic duties (ritual albeit), attenuate plurality & we are lost in a terrible cycle thus, when Reality is Not Known. So, to become One with Higher Ground is not to take on a god-like manifold, but rather KNowledge of self--dharma thru the episteme of relationship with what is observable is Religion at its most viable.

RASTAfari proximated in Oxford & soon Israel abroad, briefly studying Yiddish

In Oxford--raining as one should expect in England--I stand in a tree, the solid state I could imagine in natural architecture of the skyline in definition, like here in Ky. Certainly the roiling hills & dark weather is Kentuckian. It seemed that some undifferentiated giant was smattering sprinkles of rain on me, teasing me--and I'm already feeling vindicated, because I knew not enough rain would come & ruin my bookbag & clothes. By a tennis club the day before, I got on the local double-decker bus & asked Norman an African, probably Jamaican, for some smoke. Clearly, like the drug train courses thru the same conscious map in this guy as it does me, my radar was on in situations like this & prooves illicit behaviour gave me the pass... The reggae sounds' path is what I meant to parallel my Jewish instincts as diminished as I felt it was then--Israel & Egypt now on the horizon. I went to a Rasta club which looked a little diminished itself that night--Norman must have pointed me to it...a little off the main drag, where I witnessed a legless man in a wheelchair down bottle after bottle of red wine. The club is as close to Jamaica as I knew I'd come--but ethereally, I was already there. Egypt is however a pivot in a similar goal soon to be trod (by me & my man Rob). Like a dinner with stars & moon I was out-played--in my prevailing disconnect, by a motivated academician, this other Jewish guy, in his pristine dorm kitchen--where we sneaked some of bubby's chicken soup. He let me crash my last night of the month I stayed there in Oxford, at his flat--so the bus would be conveniently met the next day. Still, my time there was black magic speaking=records as my literary path, music as the godly thing, so I could determine the Jewish motive as a terminus. I met a French guy studying at one of the colleges--he's the one turning me toward a Black Panther, Brixton stylee: Linton Kwesi Johnson in his rhetoric, verging on a dialect I'd maintain in dream-scapes of what ever it meant that the third world man is the Trees, & the cosmopolitan suit was destined to wander the forest alone. But as LKJ's reggae forebearer says, "it don't rain on one man's house..." yet as Bob Marley's humanity comes across, some have merely nothing but "old brown" to call home!! So, turning this into a moralism, look at the flood victims on that Salvation Army commercial--or to my point about suffering imbibed by us existentially to wit: the guy at the bottom of some stairs, maybe at some public restroom, whose past hasn't placed him prone to any significant future, & his future is linear=from point A, a pained sentience, to point B, confused reckoning that he doesn't know any other way to ask, why ME? **=**Jewish missionizing was kinda there--in a convenient stranded audience I'd become - doing Jewish studies at Oxford...and not far off the guilt fingers laying a yarmulke 'pon my wayward head at the Western Wall, haKotel. My brother having done these travels before me, scholarly & bohemian--said to me once about being in Europe proper, by the Vatican, "this is one Jew whose soul they won't put ecclesiastical claws in..." something to that effect!! Akhenaton beat his stagnated Holiness to a kind of worthy worship more akin to perhaps "our" ascetic view--3500 or more (?) yrs before. Apollonian antecedents are definitely present in the Christian iconography... (Apollo is associated with the Sun's virile potential--and is correlated with the Christian view of G-d) Bab-ilui (Babylon) means gate of the gods--I imagine a god therein as a solar diety as well. There is no evidence, by the by, that Moses was monotheist due to Egyptian origination. To belabor the point, it is an obvious apposite sense of self-actualization to announce our submission to the sun, what is interesting is the Hindu value put on G-d the InEffable as transcendant from the Known. The known being Brahman, who manifests all that IS. So the Sun IS--and what is behind it is an Endless Notion--a Void Ocean. This Limitless is the Tremendum & Fascinans Jews meant when the sun is submitted to an even Higher Ground. ****Red Fly Nation circa psychedelic dispensations had Rob smuggling a couple of hits of LSD, now having made Jerusalem our major stop-over for this trip to include Egypt--This was the (i) hit solution I deigned to take as if I could get more exposed to a Jewish awareness, since dropping all preconditions was the actionable tabla rasa when dropping Acid.
Like a flight thru my nerve, high up, one moment seized, a note or two takes hesitancy & a babel of thought, making an un-nuanced few hours surface. Like the police at the corner of the street/alley from where we sauntered by, the police state now translated as I'm looking down upon a separate-likening from the norm. Rob & I squeezed into the razor's edge moment, and a narrow alley's passage, while I looked down & hear the Palestinian detained--his verbage waning from the tether toward what I grappled with--in my mind--now all confused. Lights strobing but not ecstatic, and only because no siren hollering, I'm quiet in my own thoughts before an all-nighter doing LSD or whatever some unknown chemical purporting to be Rob's acid. Then that night, I want to become mused by some Jimi Hendrix (& Coltrane was the obvious choice), but nothing was ringing true to an inner-attention & sounds having arrived the days before clotting up boredom are now all dissipated. Downstairs in our kitchen--at the youth hostel near Meir Sharim--an intense early settlement of ultra-Orthodox Jews & I barely looked at a welcome door as if turning to them I wouldn't already be understood. I find myself vaulted into a need for conformity-where families meet over breakfast, but the day arising doesn't beckon me, I languish like a Siberian gulag inmate stretched thin of any soul-greetings i.e. the sun won't be screwed for fun, the food has the taste of my sweat, people crowd me though only one other is in the room. And I can't see thru the skein of pale-self, language has no vital amenity=it's just heat under my arms, gray morning emblems, and a reckoning of filth. The pulse of escape creeps into my pores relinquishing the pained stutter of bad self, purity is a distant dream (this was my personal collaboration with the ungranted few moments--the wait I maintained as if the prayers I meet in arisen chambers are a fat soul of plenty that the religious might bestow unwittingly upon me.)--& now no choice to avail the garment of existence is unwilling to give me the propriety of the middle of the room (my room) where I stand and feel like turning circles as a dog would to assimilate into a new posture.
--

Near Calico bluffs outside Las Vegas

Newbury, Ca. Standing over my shadow

Tea & kabbalah: The Project of my Worth

What's his name Whittington? (the bookstore owner, downtown Lexington) said he always liked to go out to the woods, take refuge in a cabin with a bottle of whiskey & commence to read Dostoevskii. The fog & forest din should make us project the concretized & xenophobia Russians as Joseph's vari-colored biblical mantle--a buffering garment, but imbued objectively as a stranger before the spectacle of some new yet old culture. I always think of some nod East via Gandhi & his brahmacharya way, when drinking plain-lemony soda water. It is as if my appetite gets prone, acute, so turning toward some relevant invention for self-actualization the motive becomes my new mean. Many folks believe in rituals for their various green teas. Tea generally gives me some atmospheric refuge--& depending on the coffee, I imagine Lonely Planet's Ethiopian exploration with the coffee made & roasted over fire before the traveler. My meekly made soy Ethiopian mocha, but boiled in a pot is as close to the scented Turkish variety heralding the reigns of my senses like I am back in the banana fields/moshav in the West Bank...taking that 10 o'clock am break, after getting up before the sun. (Moshav Fatsa'il) In Egypt I drank helba which is cardomon seed tea; karkadea--hibiscus tea, highly sweetened red as the dust arisen in the desert horizon obscuring the yellow of the sun manifesting in a red glower. And the obvious choice - chai, whose Arabic version is just as it is in the Jerusalem yeshivah's samovar, where I was in my moment of peak consciousness--drinking it in the confines of the institution, as opposed to the finite scholasticism & religion all rhetorical & conflicted in mind like classes WOULD have been this phenomenon. (Honestly, there is a lot I give due to the Rabbinic teachers, tho' liberating moments in those classes' cognizance were somehow standing before the chainik or samovar.--a day's objective glance back as if pilpul is what I was learning to do...at least gaining insight to contexts therein.) The Black Tea. The black tea in its heavy kettle drew one into presence & persona of Euro-Judaism - his/her temporal remains stark & hot in contrast from the then December air making cold exudation stone floors rehabilitated. ***Mental apostasy is all I can attest to. Living toward self-Realization is only a road to traverse if we had sign-posts/symbols that avail those who trod (like Israel, like Egypt) with the Motive to plant his/her next step. This begs the question, in the case we don't live in a symbolic universe--then when are our thoughts elevated enough making things Thus? To maintain a state of meditation in the entirety of a day -*vipassana*-a deep aside may just be the center you find from without, & it is enough... If you are running away from yourself, look at the path that colluded in your effort to jettison Point A the intangible You, to Point B--the spectral shore that is infinite in your mind, even if the "ancient rosy colors behind your eyelids" (Kerouac) sought self effacement... I looked into so many shadows of nearly an empty mind's reckoning, that the query I projected into that loam of self-space, was the irony that fact was my fiction. I decided to put down the menu, & just eat... No more deliberation. I guess, as sort of a cop-out I imagine my "creativity?" as part of something macrobiotic. So, rather than seek out a Certain crowd, I stand in the place where I live. (Unfortunately, that mimicks an REM song title.) Honestly, I am as provencial as those who more obviously look concretized in their particular condition. But, I seriously want to get with it, as some suggest. I bet if you read the bio (maybe in wikipedia) about Bernard Malamud there is a good example of someone who lived in quite solitarian circumstances--& thus has a ground-of-being he sees as constituent with the maypole he circumambulates 'round. Today--this am. I'm going to check out something by Alan Watts--it is a Jesus-placed Buddhist thang & well from him it'll get into cosmic myth & nothing terribly reflective of the ditch standard religions' ritual lays on us. If the Sky is the Limit, then looking up into the light is the distance strung - the project of my worth!! I have about 6 of Gershom Scholem's books & the one I want to get back to is that tome about Sabbatai Tsvi--the false messiah. Anyway, I like the idea that Metatron, **Upon the Throne** is the angel who writes the Adherent into the book of life. According to one account, the one known, Scholem says Thoth is equated. Yeah, Mysticism may have begun with the Book of Enoch being expounded upon by the Geonim & the other two generations of Talmudists, the Amoraim, & Tannaim =Is what I read in Scholem's words. But, fully,-- as the conventional atmosphere for Jews, they were developing kavannot (focus prayers, so to speak) like less than a 1000 yrs ago. I read in Suleiman Ibn Gabirol--this Seferdic Jew (Spanish) --a book about him and translations of his piyyutim (poems) that he brought in this intent--of G-d being proximal, before Nachmanides in France in the late 1200s--whose Midrash & Mishnaic writings delivered a blow to the rationalism of Moses ben Maimon only a generation or two before. So I close my eyes, then persist! Now, I'm acquiring from which is a lesser result of objectivity, merely its potential; just darkness, that indeed has a beginning, a rosy colored ancient intra-mantra slavery w/provacative patterns=I'm alone! If what I began to record means motive, then this must be the essential form in which my consciousness will ultimately take if I am as I think I am, rooted into karmic ineffectiveness--here after! I keep a basic rhythm that I could go back to, and only when I knew I had gone far enough beyond the reach of identifiable solace it had just given me, the sense that spirituality is rationalism seems proven. (I keep the lines out before the tie that binds.) So, not to dismiss Maimonides, rational self-improvement always has its place.