The Spiritual Imagination

Looking to the East is something a lot of people from our generation has assumed, and identifying with Mother India is one endless avenue of study I keep asserting--probably more seriously because of its cultural presence than anything ascetically promulgating otherwise. I wonder about Deepak Chopra's discussion of Krishnamurti--we can be certain there is a surmise of his influence in Chopra's vast literary endeavors. I am currently reading "The Jews of Kerala" by Fernandes--that is in Cochin...a really ancient Jewish community, whose success and end is due to the open-ness on one hand in the Hindu presence, & unfortunately caste-dispersions otherwise. In a timely way, when I was coming back from Ontario a couple of yrs ago now, there at our hotel in Toledo we watched an interview on L. King w/ Chopra. I felt less homeward bound than actually a nurturing domicile in the bigger conscious map when listening to auspicious words always the good result when seeing some one mind crossing water, or in this case, the silent walls of a ubiquitous urban hotel. I like the fact I feel I owe leaden consciousness to imminent thinkers exacting ever new power spots, I otherwise may have missed in the frenetic rush of a life incomplete...
Does "meditation" elude you in the impact that only in brief glimpses (of that elusiveness) you would be sustained by--otherwise? Because, now I am back in a better place--yet the looming feeling that I can't maintain centeredness makes me sometimes opt for LESS of a reprieve. Say, the reprieve I imagine as in an auspicious read regarding, yes even, meditation...which is the mundane day begging at the scholarly self to lift up the veil dulling my spirit. So, just talking about as in intra-mantra slavery--a conversation with one's self, doesn't translate in moments when attentiveness would otherwise be attractive, and motivating. The plateau I am received upon is sometimes something my intellect propounds, yet meditation through my processing all the torpidity of a day, has this same illustrative wave crashing at the doors of wakefulness... And if I am already half-FULL of exacting just what interests demand of me, I can't see meditation as a goal unfortunately.
**Woe death, spare me on to another year!! And Death is used as a the reason why spirits should be conjured (ignorantly I might add). We have spirit as the motivator behind the equinox of the Minds, and then we have spirits as some ancestry event we think we get indicated by--which I don't agree with, other than Knowledge of self being the goal=no miracles. The definition for "spirit" is so broad, I tried to hone down just what we affect that makes continuity with community imminent.
Rumi says, "These spiritual window-shoppers,
who idly ask, 'How much is that?' Oh, I'm just looking.
They handle a hundred items and put them down,
shadows that hold no capital." ***This is what I love--it goes to the head of those who persist that the promise in this life, is in fulfillment that something extra-sensory holds something fateful. "Shadows that hold NO Capital." That is an important statement: we are the currency of a temporal norm, & tho' we may have elevated thoughts, & presume all that glitter is gold - spirits?, in our folly, tho' we know, in reality, there is a material-void. Emptiness is an ascetic goal, because that is the condition in which we live--actually. Once we briefly match that, it is incumbent upon us to relinquish the control the gold had on us. That being "SHADOWS that hold no capital." IS not a provisional statement. IT means just that.
> The part about emptiness pertains to the Chopra
> Tribe. But in asking a relevant question as to this spirit imbiber's line of discussion, Does Memory Leave you
> in the past? via existant spirits--definitely
> pertains to his thread in Raw Wisdom Tribe. The
> memory part as to a communities' memory seems, in
> his mind, to validate belief in spirits: I'd say
> in terms of what Stevie Wonder
> sings, If You Believe In Things You Don't
> Understand, You Suffer. I got that RUMI quote
> from his poem (ghazzal) called Noone.
I think it is in everyone's capable hands to move around leaden consciousness to give substance to an otherwise Empty world. Knowledge is in the negation of what is--once we do that, we define things by that which it is not. This is epistemology: knowing WHY we know something. In asceticism, and what I get from Deepak, is that we need to address our striving/ our source of suffering. So, ego telling us that we deserve security because we can control the outward fact, is NOT looking at the inherent emptiness that the world defies us to understand & corral in our presumptive minds. Corral if we must, but it is an endless cycle around the mulberry bush unto weariness--then our Wakeful Attention begins to dull... which is harder to observe, and the vulnerable human condition with all our distractions will inevitably deter us from seeing our folly. Emptiness means we would have to answer for less, thereby seeing our insignificance in relationship with Higher Ground... THE goal!

Let me draw a comparison with Chaim Potok, his value as an ascetic in Americana, & Deepak--another Man of Reality enthused transient Identity annihilator. Deepak depicts depth that is reasonably an Aside, we'd abide, had we observed we're only here for a little while. Potok, whose name means Gate--a name he assumed probably for iconographic reasons, expresses continuity of Ultimate Reality, say G-d as the Center of Awareness/ maybe Mind, then our conventions that represent G-d: In judaism, The High G-d is an early anthropomorphic understanding, In Christianity, the convention maybe Holy Ghost & Son...and all these over-lap, and only some make accessible the Ideal we may find self-realization therein. The point of Reference is relationship with mutually arising community, and his/her intercession on our behalf toward compassion. Deepak is a nod east, and uses Western language as worthy allegory for iconoclast sensibility... I imagine, reading elsewhere--yet he may have said himself, that had the intermediary space intra-atomically been eliminated, our mass in 5 or 6 foot frames would be smaller than a grain of sand...this may suggest, I'd think, that that is where the soul resides, in our cosmic now--enveloped as we are with the space of self.

THE VOIDANCE DENIZEN

Gandhi had a beautiful definition for RELIGION--and believer is not it, & SCience either--maybe?, you decide! HE said RELIGION is SELF REalization. What is wrong with that? Many folks are tending to lump literalist conventions with religion proponets. The propitiation one does, as long as it is not advancing miracles, allows then an imaginative narrative indicating ones' self making an ideal of self-actualization. THAT would be good, NOt BAD. In my opinion, there are a lot of folks running from traditionalist habit because they are afraid that THAT language is ALL used up... I have a shirt saying something case & point: IN Hebrew it says, The People Of Israel Are One. Now that sounds stupid in MY acts toward ascetic fulfillment. BUT, the definition of "Israel"--is He Who Struggles With G-d. And Not Just G-d, but THE HIGH G-d. So, now we see that a High G-d is in a distant pleroma. THat distance equals relationship is a concession we all have in the Human condition. G-d as Higher Ground?--Higher Ground is all of our intent where we would want to be received in a sense that thru our humility we might be identified with that THING that has Consciousness as a Goal. This is all very Rational, you see. So science may equal Religion.
There is a Talmudic anecdote that says, "entering the ocean from one of its corners, you take in the essense of its whole." This is from Pirkey Avoth, The Works of Our Fathers. **I brought that book up into the Catskills Mts, while on vacation, at about age 15--probably 1981. It is a Jewish environment. --It is a Moralist Tome. And the corner I want to look out from, back against the wall of hindsight, was the mood of the philo-air I would & could seek then all around me, consumated with a motive to look at this doctrine. I thought about identity (the INNER-SELF), like nothing could possibly affect the biologic reality that we are in a sea of cultures, in a paradoxy--(seemingly two very at-odd realities). Any one of those Ideals as important as the next. The apparent sense that I'd grow up in proximity to "this" version of the Human Condition--I thought, alright I'd concede (it is before me after all, Rt?), I'll look into it--with no guide in fact but drinking in One Drop of the Ocean at a time. Try to drink it all at once, and you get poisoned, as the Buddhists say. So, the fire of resolve to ME, speaking of my intent, has everything to do with not conceding to the Impute of Fidelity one assumes from "loyalties--I knew rather there were flaws, & thru those doctrinal realities would I be "subject" to the Deep, as the Ocean/Void is called in Bereshit (Genesis). Sometimes you can only take the path to the ocean's edge, but not get in--a commentary on the Compassionate Void, in Buddhist thought as Alan Watts related. And how ineffective it is to think we meet Ultimate Reality, think The Ineffable (do we get IN the Ocean?)--as in Job where G-d doesn't come to court EVER--is where we attempt to define relationship as if immediacy is detained. (immediacy = inner self)

I think it is somewhat illuminating.
This idea my cousin conveyed about the randomness of our enduring mind, is in fact exactly how I'd describe, well w/o being dismissive of his resolute ideation, almost exactly, that is. But as we say, a young mind, green, creates these avenues which through our growing older, we no longer diverge into new paths. And the immediacy of knowledge, its alliterative potential, is in the eye of the beholder, wouldn't you agree? Our moral choices can be to a lesser extent poorly adhered toward, because to the effect that we think this is a choice, we wouldn't be able to see the forest for the trees. IT is these value statements that would make accessible OR not the open-ness to new wisdom or the subject under a new teacher. Does that make sense? Now make the leap: We are entering a dialogue about "thought." And thought is fear. If we fear it, we hate it--& if we hate, don't we in effect LOVE it? Because as Bob Marley says the thing we refuse, is the thing we can use. (the promise of the head cornerstone) So what of thought: if we refuse thought, then we use its catalyst i.e. the outward fact. But this means creating centers from without, not within. And within, if at all possible, is only a potential, a half-light, a question in our nerve that is lit, and lastly as a half thought while the answer is always outside the box. Which we had better get really used to, because there is nothing on top but a bucket & a mop & an illustrated book about birds. Lastly, again we are random, fragmented, so we fulfill this desire for constancy by projecting in the moment=process=impermanence.
"Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
This much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream." Edgar Allen POe ***sounds like Kerouac residing near Mt Hozomeen as a park ranger, fire-watcher. He says to the effect, Avalokiteshvara lay your diamond hand upon my brow--then something which now I only can claim as my reasoning in perspective over the illustration I conjure like I lay under the same midnight sky, which is, Avalokiteshvara when asked to get this dross materiality jettisoned so we can evade the prison of senses. "Is but a dream within a dream." as Poe relates, has us deliberate... The walk we walked on ice, the hell where a clarified bell was rung--reminding us it was not made for us, the foot in another's shoe, all not for nothing... WE dream, thereby we exist. It is the principal.

If there is thought, then there is the principal to thought, the simple beginnings. If there is intelligence in the world then there is its beginning, the intellect. For every condition there is its potential. This simplicity is known as G-d, according to the rationalists. If we dream, thereby we must exist. To exist then whence that energy promoted reflection upon the necessary condition, there is a principle to existence. Though it may be beyond a dualistic approach as our minds accord, still one may necessarily expect a principal behind that value.

This dharma stuff is, in my view, only to make us practical thinkers. This idea about he/she who goes away to find the light within, only to be received by the community to which they identify in an integral willingness to take on self-responsibility, is what we all can do when we sacrifice origination thinking. (meaning, thinking your beginnings IS answer, modifies all subsequent beginnings thus we languish in intra-mantra slavery!!) Had we the experiences that were lessons applied to every relationship, then no willingness to provide substance to our myriad path --the unfolding & dissolving our lives take, would be given. So, when do we jettison self-preservation, to otherwise don a new garment of self-expression in the language of our adversaries? To become objective about our fellows, leaving them so that renewing your experience with them makes the grasping ego no longer what we consent to, is Buddha's way, Jesus', Moses', Muhammed's, and any of us that sacrificed socially conventional blather for the alliterative bump in the road, we all must necessarily cross, are trying to chant down Babylon. **I just read last night in Karen Armstrong's The Bible, The Bible we inherited has more violence than the Quran--should be known considering the bad rap the West gives the 3rd of the 3 monotheisms.
"We're simply over-connected now and expect everything tomorrow." is this woman's feeling, somewhat adept I'd think, that I expand on. Do you mean we EXpect TOMoRRow's everything? Because it is an essential point. That we can look at cyber-communication as the same dynamic or attempt at bridging distances like letters used to, is also very interesting to me. The vast dispersion of the hangers-on in relationship with the 70 million killed from 1939 to 1945, when whole communities left neighbors behind thru immigration, it was letter writing that contained the thread to these relations had they cared for--to connect to pre-war reality. For most of us here, grandparents' scenarios is merely a stone's throw--my grandpa=Pap, was born in 1896. I knew I was seeing a 19th century connection my nieces & nephews would not know fully. Mom & Dad lived lives on the cusp of immense industrialization--the urban thing very real in their life time, yet urban sprawl hadn't come upon them as we saw quickly envelope us in our having received the reigns of the new day.
My sense of it, is really a developing thing (my friend and his last mention about his Mom is case & point.). I walked around the grocery store with Mom & Dad the other night & seeing the older generation around us, made me double take who I had assumed were the people giving context to my youthful remonstrations. Yet, now I am characterizing them as the Other--folks like I see aRoUnD us/ vulnerable, in fact... Nabakov deals with this: the shadow before we children came along as portending Mom's & Dad's vibrating-on in this temporal kingdom imprisoning us--then the voidance which is this world carrying-on after we receive the astral plane. So, today as any day, I trod with an image of loss & expectation on either side of me, like my parents (mind appearance) are coalescing with each step forward I take. I jump from this point like imagining the antediluvian images of Mom banging the grocery-basket down the aisles as if some image is still viewable of her eclipsing where I will yet be received... all very sad to imagine that I used to NOT be--and will NOT be again!!

Meditation or hitbodedut as is read in Abraham Abulafia's Jewish Yoga (?)

This is something I keep trying to narrow down. Other images of Dahab, I am not yet done with, like sitting in those tents eating banana pancakes. My question is, Do you actually see memories' lapse? It seems to me nothing is rhetorical in mind, so we have a key to a more immense sense of continuity than our mnemotechical complacency imprisoning us. If we have all that color in mind, it certainly is a lot intermediary space striking me as a pallet for better integrated moments if we'd only just say what it is. The uncertainty means its marginal utility--we could have believed consciousness is there to be won, necessarily when we sit by the still water...Here below is a pivotal memory:
Our poverty was nothing like a poverty, which we saw in the then Bedouin village (Dahab) just getting its only second establishment (!?) wiTh electric. No amenities to us were the things used for the basics of ablutions performed in some kind of order these Bedouin saw fit; as in who would go to the well first, who eats first etc. Rob seemed to neglect an affinity maybe with anyone who dared to make themselves presentable, i.e. natives there, or people back home. The stylee I feel I catch too, looking at the pre-occupied countenance of just anyone=she or he so comfortable, yet unknowing they look to inner-attention--is that knowing we are fully what we want in such short spans. Spans luckily in enough of a pitch, the mask we wear betrays nothing about the tent-poles of consciousness collapsing in upon itself--upon the statement of presence having become two-dimensional, tells us the mind is the real G-d behind the praise of universal suns as its beginning as reason. Around the time the twelve year old girl showed up selling cheap scarves and us realizing she was really selling something else, Rob was squinting in a side door mirror of a car trying to shave. The reflection I imagine as my eyes' blind spot, are the paces I stepped past looking like power-spots gone awry--I want my eyes' sight to fall like a turbillion, til thru sheer momentum the world will seem to collude in our lost selves in the under-housed hot icebergs that is all this life of experienced-forms. Take don Juan's Yaqui profession, its beginning has the reader follow an ill-disposed protagonist considering a room as the microcosm. In the desert, next to an infinite Red Sea (read REd as actually its rightful name the Reed Sea.), has something less gratifying yet wholly necessary making us feel it is incumbent upon us the voidance-denizen to stand unitarian & solitarian (say, collusion supposed).
Hang on to your hat--this is allegorical. "for the world has to see G-d as an active participant in humanity not some remote philosophical theory," some theist suggests. Then, what is the definition, of El? He is the High G-d. You say philosophical remoteness is a deliberate act to refrain from our heavenly duties: THat G-d is On-High leaves every other place vacant, is what I say. OR another way to attenuate this distance--in the positive, rather than G-d remaining remote, IS IS IS thru Distance we are to find Relationship. Here is the philosophical notion: The light at the end of the tunnel is where we meet that which is our project of our faith that releases us from suffering if possible. Meanwhile, the tunnel's end, if you will--this Cosmic house (olam), has an immediacy which eludes us. Yet the Clarity that is Relationship say in the light of day, the direction we aLL are headed, is still attenuated thru whatever means the Believer of ANY faith chooses. You say These others will come to this light by the means with which YOU fulfill YOUR responsibility. Do you not see the folly in that sense of YOUR condition? In judaism, according to Wiesel, our suffering is not alleviated just knowing others suffer too. That our condition is between You & The Creator. So lay off that others who you feel can't make the grade. That is not for you to judge--yetser hara (egotistical), in your thinking that the mutual arising of Communities outside of Orthodoxy are doomed. The great Jewish rationalist from 800 yrs ago, Maimon said to know what these other communities say of our prophets is legitimate, and a tool for our own learning... there is no BUt But there. He is saying it is valid. He also acknowledges Belief flourishing before Judaism--the Hoodo (Hindus). That's right Dude--before US. I read this in Guide to the Perplexed. That is called anthropology. I don't run from science any more than I do from ignorance--I don't fear it. To expand on the premise that Distance equals Relationship: The bulbul, nightingale of the Arabias, closes its eyes--its eyes alighted to the singular dweet of his repose in the Tiamah (the Judaic tohu from Genesis, or tehom)--desert, void. "Nothing" of the social organism is engendered- other than the rays of the High G-d who receives his meditation or "recitation" on Distance (this may be deism--an I and Nature relationship). The Reply is none other than the last look he'll take before the seduction of the prodigy of his self-possession.
I have to say U2's artistic & timely way of giving over what MLK contributes to the humanitarian dialogue--in the late 80s?, characterized something I wasn't able to do...never threading the needle til then. And my bestFriend who I traveled Israel & Egypt with dropped Malcolm X into an awareness I need more of--because he seems to bring regard for the American polity toward Islamic things more evidently relative than maybe once was=thank you the ascension of Black Consciousness here & now. But, finding my mystics in another Arabia, in regard to Gandhi, had been an interest of mine before then (sensitivity to civil rights reality)--I knew the connection, but our national heritage due to MLK's efforts had eluded me, something caged in black & white filmage, yet no one speaking to me as a recipient of eternity on trial thru art as the conduit of history personified. U2 said to me Christ worship has a better condition than the dogma made apparent til then, which was the expectorate of Blue laws here in the bible belt--we felt marginalized or just bored by therein...! Consciousness was the weigh station in gray matter I felt more attune to, an abject loss (taking into consideration thought's elusive attributes) in fact from being readied to deal with people as I saw in normalcy--the place I'd run to, in mind, but was where MLK will remain with these others who transcend common language, ideas & complacency. Like I say to the Blacks I am relating to daily at my work: I rise & fall with those in common with the Jewish thing in Culture's importuning efforts, I can't let loose of, thus respect the strong bond of his/her elation that their heritage is become held in High Esteem now in more & more avenues to trod. FRom Jewish student of life motives comes NOT having to go around the corner to see Islam as a point of reference to a braver community... our languages of ecclesia has crossed paths in so many ways, I'll be chasing this dragon as the project of my worth forwards...!!!
So from memory and how semblance of thought is the project of only barely the immensity of experienced-forms, Arabia & the dismissing of those who assert invective about the diversity we have before us here in the US, to now meditation=how does contemplation demonstrated in the intensity of the watery thoughts as merciful identity, instruct us even as hesitantly thoughtlessness gets misplaced?
But what does it do for you?--not what do other's waver instructions over meditation...telling us how. Here's my point that I thought was the intent of this thread I read. There was this William S Burroughs thing I read I think in Cities of the Red Night, he talks about being a transient rather than a receptacle. So, in that we have ideas per meditation, the levels of visualization--if we had attained vipassana=a sense of deep resolve throughout the long ends of our day--Then as per instruction, we may topple the effect of what any deliberative thought has us expect to obtain. So we jettison even the vessel of that cognitive limit/ throw out the window that we'd receive an ideal circumstance... No end resolve, just release...& thereby ironically we get set prone, the incumbent feeling of trodding the middle path, because of the solitarian sense of expectancy of nothing having our back, so we stand before insignificance, like in a bird's eye view, makes relationship in its greatest potential. This is MY intent. I want to be synthetic as to any doctrinal studies purporting to be advantageous. Krishnamurti is even more iconoclast...one's whose "discussions" are an exercise in learning to think. Believe me it is only a primitive attempt generally undertaken 'til self-preservation is eliminated.
As the iconoclastic cultic expression evolves i.e. we'll do better than our predeceased selves, I would like to link to the last remorseful confusion--this is what I know I projected. **I mention confusion, because I courted it, till confusion became torpor & white noise, and torpidity yields to fragmentation/ of the Mind/ & thus humility binds me to reckon my motive only to be the observer--and be very good at it. It is good to be IN the Know. If we can answer for ourselves at all, and not through the pretension of social ego in any kind of weird striving--saying I am, in any one moment, like I am this span of time as a fine awareness--is the I AM of futility. So maybe now some Jazz to listen to freeing up intra-mantra slavery, playing on my jam-box, & this is my reprieve. Jazz, with its distinguishing instruments--one can find what each of these artists means in a kind of voice, & I'd imagine the map of digressing emanations: drums up front, bass pondering expanse, sax like birds calling me outside (where consciousness IS).

Jazz & Truth: Seeking the Inflated Tear

When the band (Red Fly Nation) was together, Joel the guitarist/vocals construed direction typically at least from my convoluted perspective, which is this--as I see what mattered to me then. We would many times listen to various musicians' product as the session went on, which as I couldn't perform myself, there was no leaning on any erudition that of the way things could or should sound like. So when things would dwindle down to discussion, at least then I courted sensibilities, "I am now amongst!" This was expectation. As the iconoclastic cultic expression evolved i.e. we'll do better than our predecessors, I would link to the last remorseful confusion--this is what I knew I projected. So maybe now some Jazz was playing on our jam-box, & this is my reprieve. Jazz, with its distinguishing instruments--one can find what each of these artists means in a kind of voice, & I'd imagine the map of digressing emanations: drums up front, bass pondering expanse, sax like birds calling me outside. ** Surmising the plain hearth, I gathered the concept of having sought release w/ the musicians I ran with, now years ago. The mayhem-tree (I dubbed) down on campus seemed to be the transition in place, of place, allowing me to yield to the currency of norm, which I now objectify for its strangeness--its a good thing, I feel--nothing to prove. Now there is nothing outside of me, drug or otherwise, which would leave me gainful of expression--I am movement, life's grand reward, a positivist's momentum. Why I sense my concealment, at all, as it has never changed, is almost beyond realization: I could be scaling the exterior of life's edifice, a house, wanting to get in--or already confined to the "bamot" (immemorial, worshipped space-literally " in the desert"/ hebrew) with expectation on par with the cosmic--either way I am buffered by exaltation. When Kabbalists are acceding to higher chambers of belief and knowledge, it is due to their concealment that they can bury the heart of the "other-side" into mother earth & define their opposition to it. I am the convergence of wanting in and getting out. ~~~**The author, Wieseltier, feels less is revealed w/thanks & praises of "heaven" than the hard reality that things go away. Death is imminent. Death is the harder truth, he thinks. So why, I ask, is death the substance making the soul feel more refined in the continuum of our condition...hopefully a substantial life? The black & white of this dialect implies Matrieya, a Buddhist practice--a transformative action to find the taste of the sun in this open wound life. What if it were possible to hold reality in this hand--the shadows in my mind compelling me self-reverently, whereas relief of our pain--say standing in the lighter reference of now, somehow generates ALMOST nothing as gratuitous to remark upon this world as pained as we find it? I contend "light as a feather as if he has wings" B. Marley's words--probably something biblical but from where I don't know--IS our usual condition. (don't think biblical here--it is not the point, the pt. would be just as I say: we can't yet contain death.) What to do in THESE moments? Things seem brighter. Sounds seem louder. WE seem insignificant--promoted by less of a "deep-aside." In this instant, in that moment, why do we contend a lapse? Did we require to renounce death so adamantly that the new day wouldn't be born w/out it? Less is there to hold on to, had we only the bright light of day? If we were so freed up, why does complacency haunt you so? You think truth is only suffering? Truth is, only when we are entirely unencumbered to ask why. AND Why Now? of anything that contains you. If it is the sky: the sky is the limit. Scrutinize even the obvious moment, not just the shadow lurking in consciousness. Self-possession seems the goal of so many... I say WATCH the day you let go of THAT. Watch what you see, as Rimbaud said.

A few weeks in a transection of Pharaonic days

To the extent that we were excessively using hashish &/or tobacco together or separately, one might assume there were periods when we lived in a thick dullness abiding the intensity from our brand of liberty, to its other extreme-a void, whence the harsh Arabesque sun of Iffriqqa shone past the clarity and into the mishap of confused reflections e.g. at the Tea house, presuming as I was, some dot of angst would color an otherwise unhealthy unknowing.

There is a boulevard stretching toward the train-station, our admittance to this village, and to the other side our pension, which we'd hoof down away from every day wondering at what non-paying wonders we would have divulged to us in our hikes around the village. It had a Banque there on it, at which one Sunday we had our travelers' cheques cashed. Everything seemed off from the current of modern access, as if 80% of all you could see was submerged, but seethed. Toward my freedom of youth I'd admonish myself self that big fish authorial entities would in fact show me how little they cared what sensitivities I contained in contra-distinction like the others bearing in my path. Like the Governmentally controlled bank we passed each day. The mosque on the other side of the side of the village where we stayed was another such place. A Midnight Express scenario played out in my mind, as much as I could think about it, while considering entering the mosque, which we did-and formidably w/ SHOES. We actually looked around for some object to pilfer from it, however there was nothing within and still I wouldn't have gone through w/ it. By the coffee/tea house before the boulevard & closer to our youth hostel, the place was called Television-Cofe (sic), Magdi the owner told us Jimmy Carter had been right by his place one day only a few years back from then, and then commenced to scatter a few glasses full of water out into the sandy-ridden road? to keep? the dust down. (Hosnei Mubarack had only been in power maybe over a yr at this point--Sadat's power expunged & bureaucracy work-a-day as usual) Far from re-allaying a sense that this was memorialized space, it seemed as if this little African man looked to the promise of an immense cosmic polity that would help people and lift them up-and this is part & parcel the power spot we sought & could sanction (merely his humanity, that is, not the content of his beneficent admiration:- "J. Carter?") No, rather: Power spot is supposed.

The roseate-colored neoned mosques; the US Air-force emblem on the pack of gumless rolling papers; the call of the muezzin, but mostly from radio programs-all a theophany from Higher Ground, is predominant in my drawn experience, there in Cairo, knowing that the smells of the reeking first Egyptian, we met, if sensed in a moments hesitation-brings on the corporeal-reality of the struggles in a desert life--the plain heat. Adel was just then embracing Islam and the quiet message of my Jewishness seemed broadcasted across the dark experience of this translation to a view of their ministry.
Backing away from excesses-whether it be pop-imagery or a volatile self, pushed visualization into mean moments, thinking back to '86 in the Sinai desert on the Red (Reed) Sea. Illustrating my cause was a continual inversion of attention otherwise un-authorial 'til I reckoned green-tiled mosques as an arbiter toward self-actualization. I glanced upon the pedestrian giants at whose feet I sat-the ones in the sky friendly and cognates of those relations whom I already knew.(having nothing to do w/ giants, but everything to do w/ illusion) I don't conceive of hashish use as criminal, but when a scarf selling early-teen Bedouin girl came to our hut, probably offering something other than garments, I felt un-averred from weird thoughts that my American-advantages could have any relevance here. Rob over by someone's car-door mirror trying to shave, accumulated my dissonance, as if nothing could be put-together to make whole a sense of activity recognizably as adventurous. There was no balance between his lackadaisical contentment & my sole motive=motive. Typically at this point it was just denial of release from release, meaning the travelogue becoming my narrative was liberating to the extent I could contain this vision in the New ancient world, & in this case again this young girl as any Egyptian would do gave me the keys to the reckless kingdom of herb-smoking. She took us where we could get a couple of handfuls of bud processed down to shake, into the heart of the Bedouin compound and facing our torments of strangers in strange lands, where we could only somewhat enthuse for our sanction.

My good buddy dates an African American chic & from some evening talking to her it seems, she doesn't ascertain identity consciousness anymore than someone who only has an immediate family thru adoption--meaning her projection into where she's come from is stunted outwardly, & inwardly she identifies with a community at-large--a reprieve in contemporary zeitgeist as if it applies. Anyone may or may not care about distinct relationship ties--yet I glean a good vibe off of Black America thru his/her adversity...following the conscious party into music and literature. This satisfies yet leaves me wondering where the terminus of her conscious map begins & ends. This is not a slam on the adopted obviously, this is rather how we plug in, & to whom would represent blood ties, as that, in the end we are all related.

I just know I have to let the knife cut me. Walking across the street this am. groggy from staying up last night, that measure of peeking morning light, & peaking coolness in the air layered in inclement stratum--I often wonder how at some point all the movement in the fray is actively construal in my convalescence: meaning I walk amongst the tall trees of a day's energies, and I presume it at the center of my graph=at once, & then other times it's merely a goal, & not even an objective one. It makes our minds blink Right? makes our gait in our stride more certain or more haunting. So mind is made up of thought tools which are cars abound, making my stride ambient in its current. And just as I see these recurring experiences, same person or bldg before me--things, yet I have the presumption of its conveyance...so I push, rub up, just as things do me. It hurts a little, but we are "of" the world possibly lessening reasons to be IN it--therein lies the dubious identity thing. That we believe we are in EXILE, sometimes makes us ill-define ourselves as "objects" with no choice but to move from here Point A to there, Point B. Yet we just proved everything else is in flux...we have only the right to observe. What can be more than that?
Black bubble bouncing ryddim (Linton Kwesi Johnson, a Brit Black Panther) still in a white hiss in my head from Fazed Cookies last night (a Rolling Stones cover band), now here at work, I push up in the folds of thought, where I had ducked yesterday talking to a Sudanese fellow--his Mom, Egyptian, and the distance he thinks others should go to see his sense of One-world, has me wondering why he thinks anyone is missing out anyway. You have to care, & I do--I'm there. Dude was a little weary of the consumerism relegating haggle to what we don't participate in. He thinks about the auspicious query he has which we supply with a track toward cyber ubiquity. He knows of Hamza al-Din (oud player), probably well--IS Nubian like him... has the shade of desert acacias seared like tattoos an Urban world like ours manifestly lost in its ploy toward independent identity, we lost in our theodicy to find deist nature the One G-d people of N. Africa, themselves attenuate because of lonely-actionable resourceless struggles into possible privation makes this man & that woman measurably worship Him.

Kubrick's Barry Lyndon as a step into a Jewish motive on my part

My friend said: "The word supernatural I notice doesn't seem to be a stumbling block for you as it is for many many others. To me and others who realize (I think you do) supernatural does not mean un-natural or fantasy..."hypernatural to show that it is something that is natural as natural as God or Nature but is an aspect and facet of nature we as humans find beyond our realm of explanation and that science or natural reasoning cannot explain." Ahh, I like that he deliberates unto the threshold, which is what I call a spectral shore--he is calling the point at which we go on faith, rather than the rational. However, in reality we may ponder the imponderable, but the unknown doesn't fluctuate --yet we do. A new definition for the "high" came to me last night, finally making sense. In Arabic the word for herb & hashish--ashishin, something to this affect, similarly is Hebrew, is defined as "fluctuate." Last night--and those two words are pregnant to me-- I'm watching this Stanley Kubrick film, I'm high & with it, and then I saw that I was imagining the static events of this sublime film--"Barry Lyndon" w/Ryan O'Neil, in a way that at the furthest reaches that I term time & place went on the chopping block--call it the spectral shore--somewhere when I went on faith. I could see my mind was refusing to consider transition thru the movement of dialogue & warm vistas. In fact, what was really the fullness of the moment was breath & pulse and then a comfort in my heart seeing a peasant trod a path into a town--was deliberate as my physical soul being attended to. He was crotchety & driven, intense & the project of the worth I imagined in the lives surrounding the Jewish shtetl. The heart is a ditch of blood, we throw ourselves upon its banks to consumate relationship--according to Kazantzakis. In that moment, my imaginative narrative begged for objectivity because I was only seeing a Jewish template with the Greek author as an enabler. And the reason why I was comforted was because knowledge gave me a leg up from the heart's woe unto emotional release... It was beautiful. This was not TV, these folks as characterizations in the anthropos, didn't have the fullness of the resourceful answer-ridden world of today--it was rather the surfeit of shorter lived lives, work a day, survival of the fittest which in our resource replicating society -knowledge as commodity is impelling longevity without the survival & psychological instincts to match it. So, I met those instincts truly in the safety & promise of edu-tainment repose, from which ironically I wouldn't easily be prized. The Jewish motif only I was seeing was partly something I imagine in the structure of my old synagogue, and also a literary reference from Elie Weisel's, All the Rivers Run to the Sea, but the Sea is Never Full--something to this effect. ...an image of his Grandfather looking down from the roof's eves, & the thought occurs to Weisel that his Zadie predicted rivers of blood being spilled, as the past immerses into its calamity & ubiquitous flow as relationship gets swallowed in pathos. And my prosaic thoughts on this laid me prone to a Fiddler on the Roof scenario, if not dispensation I coordinate and attune thoughtlessness toward through sheer willfullness...feeling blessed, thanks to exquisite imagery from Stanley Kubrick's film.
***

2001 Space Odyssey was hypnotic enough for me in a long interim w/o psychedelia per the use of psycho-tropics. It is amazing from a certain disconnect many of us have gone through, the engaging requiem of cinema as much as relationship has us sustained, can come to the rescue, proving there is nothing which has left us behind. A friend once said, nothing is worth doing unless you are catching up. Like the dragon surfeits our condition once we believe continuity is found, & off we go toward accompli a priori. A Clockwork Orange, had that sublime Singin' in the Rain refrain at the end of the movie. Just that frightened me in the perfection of its cinematic message, like now it was incumbent upon me to be the synthetic well of happiness through all the machinations of urban mischief. I thought, it was a high bar to meet--but the clarity was the rule...so why wasn't I (clarified with resolve)? I studied Russian at U of Ky, and the patois was engaging--and my literary edifice from the stuffed shirts of Russian culture went right on the chopping block!! If you reckon Evgenii Zamyatin--his black humor, and his small book WE which is easy to find, was a piece that influenced the writing of 1984. A utopian thang & to quote: Doest thou love the fog, D-53? No, I fear it, O-90!! O-90 says: If you Fear it, you Hate it--If you Hate it--You LOve IT!!
***Guess which one was the male protagonist--& which one is the female temptress//which happens to be unto his chained Mind being liberated...
~~~~In front of the media-driven world into what is behind it, my perspective not to quite enjoin this fray of glitter ^^ at the house I lived in for 27 yrs...

Bob Marley always sanctioned my worries. That at any one moment, just stepping into the visual context of the cold-lampin' room--mine or being outdoors thinking things in the vista are making appearances as thru windows, was a lot of mental mischief that seemed damned necessary in my patient wait for a better day...and yeah, now IS all good.
Vipassana is mentioned in a book about Kabbalah as similarly recognizing the deep aside in our condition in spans of meditational projects for extended periods of time, and thus a state of mind when self-knowledge is vital & in continuity=no longer merely an aside... Well, I had looked into the light, usually peripherally, & saw streams rather than just its glower casting broadly throughout. I tried to see how long I could look distantly so the image would grant the dimension where I knew nothing else was present--just how a camera under a desert sun takes one or a couple strands of rays' radiance, you know is only caused from the lens playing tricks on the sun which wouldn't yield even without this mischief. Even now I'm back alone a lot, tho' encumbered by relationship this time. Before I was blanketed by the remoteness of the (social)conventions of the known--the foot was on the other shoe. Then at Eastern State Hospital--also where William S. Burroughs did his rehab time--just to live by example of powerful minds, (the 6 weeks in 1993 they locked me up--during which time Zadie passed away), I remember becoming terribly objective about self-hypnosis...thusly "arresting" or capturing alive an awakened moment I knew I alone would bare witness to--threatening that, all the while making desperation desire's brain--desire for peace of mind! I wasn't escaping any addictions, but rather in transition in finding the right (mild) psychiatric drug/ a psycho-tropic, to attend to impending confusion. This is a problem: the rationalizing away of life rich pageant, yet mine is a success story. The mind tends to take us as quickly from the seat of imagination into non-grasping - mounting lack of control I mean, just as this cosmic house IS for a little while--in our perception--we're encouraged to transpire...

THe Gauge narrative

Without already being on psychotropics, I wouldn't be able to partake. The month or so I spent in Egypt--so long ago, was when I was at peak use--smoking hashish/ shisha & herb. My distraction, not surprisingly, was equaling that extreme environment in a lot of ways. A French-Egyptian dude was dubious in this regard. He ended up running off w/40 bucks of ours which we thought would have obtained opium for us. ($40.oo could have kept us in hostel-comfort for probably 3-4 more days, had we not lost it.) In his ploy to get more $s before the deal went south, he tried to get us in better digs--but she the proprietor saw thru him, warning us, but we didn't listen. A weird feeling of dementia as like multi-directional staircases in M.C. Escher's art, made the very sense of cause a priori for a conscious map fall weakly into an abyss of Kairowan imponderable lapse. I wouldn't trade those times for anything safer, tho', I literally felt locked out of the passport to the vulture of culture, swearing always that any ritual as distinguished as thanks & praises allows (social conventions eluding me), I'd be as relevant to Ascetic Standards from a **limb where I saw everyone else pinned**--paraphrasing Leonard Cohen. The surprise is self-scrutiny deserves desperation & that desperation is desire's brain... was leaving me in the mean not valuing society much. Had I been confident, I would do just fine--but there was a lot of common self-instruction nowhere in my grasp. Herb provided an existential survey of the fat soul of plenty that living a real travelogue was considerably all within one house; what I did beyond the duty of hearth & home, was exactly the same whiling away as I would anywhere...just being present!!
***There is a book by an English author, Rory Stewart, about his meander transect across Afganistan 2002-3. It is excellent. I was reading this the while I was up in Ontario,Canada--Iron Bridge, far from the 3rd world, but with the then alliterative path, somehow the effect of privations met under the haze of drugged linear thought, opiates in the case of Pashtunis and the other mutually arising communities, as I read along. For some reason--I guess because it was such a fresh experience, up in the outlands of Canada, that book hit me in a much more esoteric spot. Again, because the choice to level out vast distances, securing a prone moment, though I wasn't getting high, was an idea easily asserted as in how a contact-high would. The author's little images he drew of the folks out across the expanses he trod, were rough shod just how my thinking is, as if I alone piece together the land imbued w/First Nations, I am seeing for the first time. If you haven't read it--you'll see when you do, it stands alone. There are other writings of his about walking across other Asian countries...: his communing amongst villagers of all types is an archetype in humanity. He had an ole fucked up dog--was given to him--& if not for him he would have died. It is amazing how even in the demise of existence, the mind portends the light to be met as IF...(we behold our safety without it being eclipsed). In a great wintry expanse part way thru his trek, he was all weary, hungry & thus vulnerable to the bitterCold. He gave up laid back in the ice/snow upon the margins of a frozen lake--describes the apparent forgiveness for his ineptness leaving him vacillating - emotionally like saying, "How could I just give up?" To, a welcome home, illusion of bodily warmth, which was illusory enough that it became evident to him he'd better just get to shuffling on. Down from the MT in all respects, he noticed the world glossed over, colors imbibed--totally existential, like until then, he was upon the surface of the moon, & now in a varied-formed personified forest-of-life his adventure takes on rational motives again=the telling of it.

HERE's a THOUGHT, wrote that thing the other am. subject Being, Crystal Worship __per Lumiere's blog piece, from TribedotNET::: Thinking about you--my friends, as others, as if some one thing I do, I try to anticipate that there is only an audience of one as a recipient of the valley of time strung in a few moments, when thoughtlessness gives me space... I bet you can imagine, there is somehow someone way more complex than your usual sense of relationship, if you are to come off creatively.
The characters in Refer Madness, tho' I'm not furthering something illicit here--have kinda old filmy auras, made by the old technology, but it emphasizes certain inward looks on the actors faces...(yet, I must otherwise project this reflection on others, as self-reflection, in as much as they are doing it--so M J would be conducive to this kind of experiential sense.) At the translation from the self-conscious masks we wear, the mirror always so willing, & our hearts only covet brief glimpses... sometimes like white sheen of expressions determine confidence the human condition has named you. I couldn't see anyone seeing Me--before my spiritual apostasy, & at one point the field of what I clearly saw as containing my aura reduced & begun to look less of a product of who I once was.. Into the blue, and even leveled off out there, but not remotely feeling understood at all. Sometimes I was so enrapt and yet couldn't tell anyone. I was like, if they could see what this is doing to me...if only!! It was like we all have the burnishing sun availing us of its wisdom, but I sat in its corporeal shadow--its proffer, yet not the center of its project: my person & yours.

Where the green ants dream, like pillow armies in my mind

Last night I felt so high on contentent, a singularity was approaching like an awakening seemed in the offing--but nothing in my mind seemed plaintive for holding court with the spirits I imbibe--like I'd be psalmful. I like Russian imagery sometimes in the wee hrs, because the looming encumbrance of the midnight sky portends the containment Russians - Russian Jews, even the ChukChi Natives in the eternal night of Siberia--anyone in the xenophobic lands of this mystic Eastern corruptable disconsolation. Last night I held no key. Had I, then marbled red, bloodclotted jellied emotions would have my familial good conscience warm & fuzzy, as I enumerated so many other times, even lying in twilight dreams when my eyes are dreaming while imagining they're opened... The impulse to grasp the arm of my father's mother, yet not the Russian side of my family, still is the guardian angel of my imagined spirit narrative, made my hand feel like razors were slitting the tactiled pressure points in the severance of the meet & greet I had with her. The cold Winter's heart of the season seems to be the scrutinized self-preserved ideal, too. That I am out of it means quite a little bit to me--the nature & nurture of my instinct is that smoke in neighbors' hearths, had been sensed so many times wandering in the suburban streets since I was a kid, that being out of it, alights a question in my nerve that's lit. Something about survival--how its procured, especially in a world culturally imbued around rituals of seasons in & seasons out...that the impermanent record we transcend & defy would have been actionable nights like mine should have been. Tolstoy per Gandhi's acts toward purity is the utility of the studies' nod east I feel in a direction of the plurality of my conscience, so instructed from my known heritage into Gandhi's lent vision...in a purdah of distance strung, relying upon an ever new message from what only gets marketed to me by my own standards.
~~Nothing dreamt, a solid state orderly green vista, just sky & earth had captivated me, holding out the last rescue of the peace my old neighborhood had to offer—its extension out over by the farm on Parkers Mill not 3 mls from the airport. I read there Isaac Babel’s Cossack stories of deprivation, mystic churches, impoverished Jews, war. The emblems probably a 100 yrs ago of the stumble into the Soviet early days, a percussive revolution in cognizant immediacy, were perhaps a tachanka, a kind of military wagon, not unlike the zeitgeist we associate w/ the military industry as in the US—how it performs in our environment (fashion, culture, social demise), & horses—the sentience-of-promise in front of me there under a pine tree looking off into their field on this ubiquitous Ky horse farm. The loom of an unknown destiny untethered then in my life, had me look closer at what was intermediate space in everyone’s life in & around me & made it important to me. I called it my own, lived up to MY expectations, & gathered no more than wall flowers, but enough of a kind of inner-attention to bring it all to the table when the new day arose. **~~When it is twilight & we're tired sometimes harkens back to childhood, in the pleasure of dream-scapes we anticipate even Now.
Sleep, ethereal dream-time coming over me would be reductive, right.? For instance, we aren't calculating what next must be done, but lingering rather in a place of security--in peripheral dream-scapes of self-security... still, your promise of a thread from youth til now, may not demand that one should replace imagery w/ some concept Now at hand--"naturally" tuning out and emotive comfort. But in fact, daily we've done everything possible to maintain the adventure of self-revelry--and its proof when the kaleidoscopic resultant piece of art is proffered--the thing we scribe in the looming retiring room. But, the memory isn't topical right then for some reason. It IS you and your product--then. But the sleepiness for me only sometimes IS a waxy envelope I--myself, my spindral curiosity, push up into its folds. I read, late (...for me, before I succumb). And the images go on trial, because the impetus to close the circle and live only for that perfect image, is a motive that doesn't go away. But I want that space First--then I would see what it is IN my waking life that would give me dreams & night visions. And entirely IT is one little clue of spatial quality. I notice how my eyes seem to adjust to maybe a glossier focus--instead of maybe this plateauing affect Not occurring at all (this effect would foreshadow what one supposes right before sleep comes on--something during evening activity). And it won't always. So, back to the imagery--leaving your emotions be--and making room for an Awakened state. How does the yesteryear have anything to do with what you'd do to It, NOw--not Once was...? =there, no piece of mind need be left behind.
I had this dream of my pseudo-illness, could have been how Valerie's ill-health now gets intimated in my self-mythologized narrative... More than that it may be what my sentient well-being yields to as a method to promote the health of my soul. She's reminding me perhaps of the doors I have yet to close so that babylon's rules can get bastardized enough to let me get my hands upon its meaning. The deficits in language comes to mind because we all mutually arise, while observations thus are lost because we aren't reading the writing on the wall... It is hard to know what it is that is coming in from the cold, upon the threshold of the life experience we must react harmoniously to, if we are to get over the little trouble. Dreaming I was still sick--after a few weeks back of a recurring sinus & respiratory problem, my mind fired on it about the inconvenience of it all--which that is where the matriculate empathy for others is fully the shared moment... We somewhat turn away from that pivoting crowd who had lifted us up day after day, because maybe like an injured dog, we go to our little forest digs and heal and wonder over our diminished ability to have that physical synchronicity with others. We so badly need others to complete us, fitting the puzzle of the daily grind with those immediate goals we love to obtain. I laid in bed when I actually was sick, longing out the window into the sunny day. The running dialogue in my head a little impaired with dull pain, and then with just enough awareness, it was as if the gloss of all that part of the day I can't for the moment attend to, came to me like I was still being watched over. It was a promise--it is there when we watch what we see, to quote Rimbaud. Maybe I have sought the near & dear enough, but left unattended the more disparate relationships' portents. So, my family may be baring the fruit of knowledge that is of a spiritual nature in the human condition, while others are all mind, some are soul adventurers, still others have the animal corralled = physically adept, and this happens to be their fulfillment of the archetypes of humankind's condition. This is a kabbalistic notion, how we make up the nomenclature of anthropologic creation. The nomenclature of this physical world is sometimes conscious props, messages that certain folks pass to we the receiver of an Ideal set of circumstances. The human condition is about THIS big=I'm holding my fingers a half inch apart, so obviously consciousness will intersect, is my thinking. Hopefully there will be a fantastic universe to apply ourselves to, from this extra-sensory cognition.

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.

when fact is Fiction, & TV is reality (borrowed U2 lyric)

The psychiatric doctors said that w/schizophrenia the mind is like a 1000 TVs going on at once... so in a murmur between nods of my reading regimen IS not going to make fade the noumenon that is the fray of dialogue I tend to answer for--with the pseudo-Norm. Besides, it is active entertainment if you see the silent threshold in between talkingHeads, just as the Corner of the room emits in a wall of vibratory properties, like soothing white noise. I dig bookSpan--watching plain imagery, people just blathering, but w/language as the field of something sensorial, IS very iconoclast & I can maintain I am not dragged into some nowhere Zone. In Buddhist thought the face is a translator, different masks in optimal moments when you're actively listening, give us a sense we are indicated by the experential--whereas the grotesque spectacle of smilingLying faces from the yackBox, means our nature adapts to something a little more aloof. & if we're aloof, maybe we take less seriously flow of consciousness type dialogue--even if it is merely our own perception to see it as such. Creativity is in the eye of the beholder, it is a threshold we've decided the character meets, whether they intended to or not... I just want to attain real objectivity in people's self-expression. Camus says something about actors acting a piece a 1000 times & what it is that is possible to derive from their performance, discussed in Sysiphus!! "the organs of consciousness work w/One & Against itself" as Nietzsche depicts--requires dormancy, says Camus, to run efficiently. & the patternic reality--the call & response of dialogue we have been carried away with, makes the riffs & peaks illumine something other than content--which we can bet would be dull--but something abstract & less linear is the detail of our kaliedoscopic mind. **Moving from a Wide Open perspective to a Corridor of Trees is just the mental faculty it takes to cohere what is perfected in Thought & then Actionable. One would not any longer deliberate on the esteem granted us thru our art if only & forever we came in from the Cold toward encumbency of presence of mind, & stayed there. However Light dark Light dark is the road we take. At A Certain pt. that portal we take into a creative purging of the moment will seem forever behind us. For instance, all this experience which is the sum total of identification w/the Now, is assessable when I look upon the familiarity of my environment. Before it was merely that I knew its foci, but now I tend to justify it. Two days ago, over in the Captain D's parking lot, I began to assess the billboard w/U2 on it, which seemed to be an emoting of penultimate inner-sensei - I felt someone out there, generally had a positive easily self-required message. People would actually be helped by those guys, & well we all need help somehow, so "help" was a good thing to imagine. *** George Harrison's guitar gently weeps, just as Kerouac's broom gently sweeps. Harrison lives in the urban myth w/cosmic implications just as the Eastern Nod of Kerouac has the Here & Now i.e. the cosmic life of Americana objectified under Mt. Hozomeen--when he was out in one of the national parks for a few months as a ranger. The world sleeps, our minds require dormancy, so that we peak in moments of repose & awaken to language which lights the fire simmering under the malaise of nothing having much to do with Us anyway. ** Listening to Magical Mystery Tour--really the only Beatles stuff I grew up with--always laid a layer of philosophical air descended from the eves, upon exigent views beyond immediate walls, while I tried to mirror little jips & caricatures--chipping off pieces of that totality. I thought it was popular asceticism & I wanted to yield to something deeper--just maybe the key would be found in proximity to the distance strung... Somehow I knew looking under the streetLights of the night all-ahead & paved ubiquity, was interesting, & yet the key was in the alley off the beaten track.
To conclude, I have a techni-color thought. I have this image of "a sad man wanting to stand up in my eyes" from Elias Khoury, a Palestinian author contemporary with Amos Oz--the Israeli author/Peace Now activist. The sad man is the sand's collapse like "ancient rosy colors behind my eyelids" (Kerouac) where something called Mine sought oblivion. One peak moment was in front of the tube sitting down by the fire-place--w/Dostoevskii's character in mind-- Alyosha burying his face, & in his case turning toward something, & in mine--turning away! If you've read very much of Kerouac's stuff--or Buddhist writings otherwise, you may have come across a meditational technique called vipassana. It is something about illustrative thought=imagery consigning the incidental space with more meaning. Well, somewhere between some loss in the sensorial & habit, dross conventions thru the TV kinda left me numb, & there was what I imagined as hooks in the ceiling (a scenario of the reproven Karamazov father) & a lot of fire in a spectral shore making TV the enemy... I threw away the Outward Fact somehow--& Americana went with it via that damned yack box.

Alliterative yet non-fundamentalist in terms of religion

That mostly no one I know has an intellectual goal, is rather the way of the world, so all I can do is attract someone subtley & hope he/she awakens to a bigger picture in their own way. If you see from this I tend toward the abstract, then my sense of temporal reality might be plain & studious unto something else--like something more intense we all kinda expect as a release or relief: believe all that is there too!! But brother, I am a reading fool & it has granted me an objectivity I didn't have so many yrs ago...so hopefully imminent transition is what I am wired for, & is the appearance of single-mindedness anyone could understand. This perspective is about concealment: I can only do so much for an-other & if they don't see that life is a problem because its simplicity is eluding us from our striving, I am not going to be an example of striving to show then that that is going to be effective. *** An Ineffable G-d is the strict Jewish & Islamic sense, not a Personal god--has an iconoclasm feeding the greed of my consciousness. But that 3/4ths of everything we see is submerged beyond the requisite perception, appearances suggesting that there is an immeasureable energy... this is a Theist Ideal//even Pagan I'd imagine--and we can call it the Deficit we Fill with Meaning that our Direction in Life, our path means multiply: Noumenon, enumeration, Intellect. We are necessarily acquisitive & self-conscious, though deriving an objectivity & being understood in light of it remains on par with Ego-centricism. It All is Personal, somehow. This is the point; a spiritual sense of our condition doesn't have to be Unknowing & satisfaction therewith. And if you say you have questions, you question--you're not done yet, then you prove my point about Rationalization--that this is our faith. Query is Spirituality. When we sit in the pew & the cant is spiritually uplifting then we look at the rosy coloured mourn of those old ladies, & the lines of age that an old man's hardwork seemingly terribly fateful/magnificate, then we are at the peak of a moment=its convergence of Time Place & Community. To Observe this, we are necessarily in the Heights of the Noumenon, Intellect, the Rational. Yet the Mind asserts we must live up to an expectation that we have made the Right Choice, & More than that the mind asserts we have made a Choice et al!! Spiritual equals Rational=it can't be clearer than that. *** So, what are we renunciating, you may ask? Well, why should belief not be attended to? MY answer is Be Careful what you wish for. In the end G-d provides everything--meaning we become reductive & we problematically don't know that there is much more to life (at the expense of belief!). Therefore when we see that G-d doesn't come to court & we see that not much is really going on...that our lives don't have substance we want to be filled with??...this is just our Minds trying to put a value statement on our Condition: Right Wrong Good Bad True False. Isn't this the mistake Adam made having eaten the fruit of the Knowledge of Good & Evil? One way to look at it! Hell, we can do that til kingdom come, what good is it? Are you asking for G-d in your life? Because if you're asking then necessarily G-d is somewhere other than before you. So renunciation is killing the Desire. Remember answers are a dime a dozen. Ask if you must (as to what TO believe), but belief is only taking up a certain amount of space where relationship OUTSIDE of us would rather be what we attend to. Simple Logic.

Olam--Kehilla--Ulema-Talmid=One World, eternal in this life

I've been dreaming of my bro. lately--the oldest, in Ca. Even now I can't believe my memory 'flect w/such consignation (as opposed to resignation) fine details of these night travels. Down by the Univ. Hosp. there's a bldg on the corner w/those checkered bricks one could easily climb had he wanted to. There was a bldg like this, its facade covering a masjid (mosque) & we were across a plain of grassy field from it=me, my bro., & some folks I think I've imagined thru discussions from the abstract Tribe.net folks, who regularly I wouldn't see--tho' am regularly supposing their presence. We were listening to some music choosing intervals when one & another would put on their choice. I thought Mark was in the same office that still contended the Muslims couldn't liturgically recommend this entertainment as strictly firangi-Western, because some Muslims would indeed not try to coerce these social settings. And then the question was, did we need to get the approval of this local cleric, being in vicinity of their prayer-house? Meanwhile, Mark puts on something, in the dream, that my mind illustrated, but wasn't auditive (just visual). We were listening to stuff like Baaba Maal (Senegalese), & that Talking Timbuktu album w/Ry Cooder & Ali Farka Toure. And one album came to mind but I couldn't verify the sounds arriving, was Raichal Edon--an Israeli w/Ethiopian players, singing in Hebrew, Amharic & Arabic--not to mention the banner patois of Rasta variety in at least one of their songs I've heard. This type of rhythm, hypnotic down on the One-Drop--as Reggae is desribed, has even more imbued culturally, an extent of vast distances & fealty to mysticism...if only the parameters of the dreamScape allowed, I would have brought down the blue dome (in the whiteHot sky) of the pleroma above, & figures would have taken flight... The sense of the setting also reminded me of Laneer H.S. up the street from where we lived when I was first drawing conscious maps the 1rst 6-7 yrs of my life--in Texas. The bare-ness of the H.s. up at the the top of the hill always portended an endless Summer to me...Texan climate all adulterated in my thought: Think (of our) Sefardic Synagogue & deserts!! Here at work, recently, I asked an Iraqi woman about the word Takkiyah. She thought for a minute & was clearly not someone who practiced it. Rather, the Indonesian woman I asked once before, took a cold but academic stand to it--acknowledging this is about "concealment." The Dar al-Harb, World of War, in fact is implicated. The idea is that a Muslim, & at the suggestion of the Iraqi, a Shi-i, would harbor distrust--she said Hate, & then not show outward signs of this, but graduate to the norm w/out the opposing "group" knowing their real intentions. Also, a Moslem (the farsi pronounciation) from Bombay had come by here.--we discussed the Akedah. This is the Sacrifice of Isaac, by Abraham. I thought I kinda remembered, but he reminded me that this word meant Faith (?). Clearly this gentlemen was a grander student of people's differences, & having a sense that a beginning point is not always in one's own backyard, but centers from without: A Jew, an Evangelist et cetera. THink mutual arisings. (He spoke of a Christian over-wrought on their Good News THen on offer to him--the Moslem...but affably.) There is Urdu script written on some of the Indian paintings Mark brought back from India, hanging on my wall--but this Bombay man (he says rather than Mumbai), knowing Urdu, recognized it rather as Arabic, & thru his basic understanding of the language didn't see any Urdu words he knew as such as Urdu. In light of the nod East, I've been listening to Ravi Shankar & Ali Khan lately. The measure of Ravi's sitar's thrum in some octave containing its frequency that gets 1/8ed, 1/4ed, 1/2ed etc, has images concretized in the murmur of my senses. The entitlement I feel I get from understanding the scrawl of ancient musings in its hypnosis, makes me question that "ANY" way of expressing how I get lifted from it--is lacking. It was entirely the palate of diet consciousness, but not as if I'm at the table of Indian culture...rather just the Village of One World, ...whiling away under some tree, unsatisfied yet prone w/my vital resources, & focused upon my ephemeral body like it is a measure of something greater than its pain.

Identifying Islam, With Judaism--as a Jew

You may question after reading this, how could he LOve "blankety-blank blank," & why does he defy identity calling himself blah this & blah that? The reason is that--what I love is not contingent upon commonalities of presumption, but rather the patterns in revolutions in thought. If I'd divorced knowledge from thought, I'd have faith: but I reckon the womb of understanding (is this the seferah Binah?) is arisen by whatever label we give it! **I added to this just to clearUP some concepts. In the example of etymology in a recent debate w/a friend, he mentioned the consonantal root to Kaddosh..., but just because a word has more involved in its telling, the very articulation=guttural, he said, doesn't seem to imply that it can't be older than its more prefigured context. (meaning yeah it still could be older) Aum is old, changing the subject, but a complex whistle is just as antediluvian in the broader aged-world sense, askew to just the biblical. I mean just before the before of the bible & axial age. According to K. Armstrong--& I read it in a couple of her books--kaddosh is defined as Separateness--it is like our word existential. (QDS is its root; contemporarily think al-Quds, Jerusalem.) This is the feeling the Priest imbibes in the inner sanctum of the Temple. This ancient word probably predates El & Baal & Marduk etc, tho' was used in co-ordination w/these gods. You must get Armstrong's book, A History of G-d. That in gnosticism Logos is stretched to fit the personal ascension of said adherent, is only one aspect of what mysticism would be defined by--the direction this post is going in. She speaks about all trads. (what we'd expect!). In its array, I dreamt about Islam last night, telling a Muslim that the shirt I wore was not meant to offend. They proscribed their right to wear things that may chip away at what we'd assert as the Compassionate Edifice in our Paths, if we did the same to them. There was laughing, adrogyne (funnily) with the women in Americana social situations, yet probably just palpable only to me--I adduced. I definitely felt answerable to these Believers--these Faithful on the other hand, because in the end this is most elusive to care about at what point we'd meet at the equinox of the minds, making all asunder part of the answer, rather than the problem. In Islam the idea of a concealed community, not making outward remarkable & observable actions that may bring harm to the ulema--community of the faithful (a real practice), is instructive in the covert & cryptic office I obtain in the "feeling" that I too am a Muslim...in a converse way & in other cases a Hindu. (the thing that flew into my head as if I never consciously turned toward it--but felt a draw to an Ideal--not really any Cleric's calling as such, but an ideal. Which I bet thru your studies so bespoke of an integration of Middle-eastern types?) Now obviously, perhaps, I know no Muslim rituals, wouldn't "witness" to their ideology--but reckon the commonality in the uses of language. Think Moses ben Maimon here, when he said other trads that speak of our prophets are also educational to us, & should "if possible" be indulged in. Hindoos figured prominently in what I read in The Guide to the Perplexed (that one excerpt)--still Islamism would be the more obvious, but I simply haven't come across it in extant (except from Geniza docs). Talking to a man who heralds the masses as one vast organism, has me sing out I Love Islam--in the dream. I can't get to that-without steps having started w/Judaism. But Judaism doesn't typically paint broad strokes to tolerate a world imbued otherwise w/responsibilities toward the Ideal in other faiths!! ...yet I do, & my Jewish identity isn't left behind. So if it isn't me actively leaving behind the obvious choice in my spiritual progress, then in meeting what is foundering at the edges of Jewish Thought has relationship in DreamTime.