Footnote to Howl - Allen Ginsberg

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
The world is holy!
The soul is holy! 
The skin is holy!
The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!

Everything is holy!
Everybody's holy!
Everywhere is holy!
Every day is an eternity!
Everyman's an angel!

The bum's as holy as the seraphim!
The madman is holy as you my soul are holy!
The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy!
The ecstasy is holy!

Holy Peter!
Holy Allen!
Holy Solomon!
Holy Lucien!
Holy Kerouac!
Holy Huncke!
Holy Burroughs!
Holy Cassady!
Holy the unknown buggered and suffering beggars!
Holy the hideous human angels!

Holy my mother in the insane asylum!
Holy the cocks of the grandfathers of Kansas!
Holy the groaning saxophone!
Holy the bop apocalypse!
Holy the jazz bands marijuana hipsters peace & junk & drums!

Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements!
Holy the cafeterias filled with the millions!
Holy the mysterious rivers of tears under the streets!
Holy the lone juggernaut!
Holy the vast lamb of the middle class!
Holy the crazy shepherds of rebellion!

Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles!
Holy New York!  Holy San Francisco!  Holy Peoria & Seattle!
Holy Paris!  HolyTangiers!  Holy Moscow!  Holy Istanbul!

Holy time in eternity! Holy eternity in time!
Holy the clocks in space! Holy the fourth dimension!
Holy the fifth international! Holy the Angel Moloch!

Holy the sea!  Holy the desert!  Holy the railroad!
Holy the locomotives!  Holy the visions!  Holy the hallucinations!
Holy the miracles!  Holy the eyeball!  Holy the abyss!

Holy forgiveness!  Mercy!  Charity!  Faith!  Holy! 
Ours! Bodies! Suffering!  Magnanimity!
Holy the supernatural
extra brilliant
intelligent
kindness of the soul!

A lovely Monday afternoon...

 

 

The Mirror of the Other

"What if I should discover that the poorest of the beggars and the most impudent of offenders are all within me; and that I stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I, myself, am the enemy who must be loved - what then?"

- Carl Jung

Lost Verses

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Consciously Relating to a News Addiction by Meditatively Engaging with the News - Robert Masters

[The following is a transcript I made of a segment from the January 30, 2010 conference call with Robert and Diane Masters on Embracing the Dragon: Working with Individual and Collective Fear. This transcript is created and published with the permission of the participants (Bob, Robert, and Diane).]

Bob: I think that the collective fear, the media, that whole issue is fascinating to me. What came up in going through that was thinking my greatest fear is that people and places and things that I love will be harmed, and I spend a lot of time reading the news — I use that in my work, in teaching, because we work with current events and so partly my job and also partly my addiction [is] to look at headlines and it generally throws me off [laughs] every day. It generally depresses me or fascinates me but also drags me down, and I get to the point where I don't even like to —

Robert Augustus Masters: You know, the news is a type of food and many of us feed on the news — and it's not a very healthy diet, and so all those headlines immediately get us into our heads, right? And we don't often tune into our bodies. You probably are watching the news, and your guts tighten up, but you don't notice it, and I think most of us could use with a news fast — not where we are completely out of touch, but if we want to know what's really going on in world news, we can probably skim a page on the Internet in less than a minute. Yet I've had clients — mostly guys — who will spend maybe two full hours a day, or more, studying the news, wondering why they're feeling so anxious, why they're overeating, or drinking, or getting stoned a lot of the time. [It's] because they're absorbing a lot of shit that they don't have to absorb. And I think it's so important, if you are staying current with the news, to also stay current with yourself, to keep in touch moment-to-moment, "How am I feeling, have I had enough?" Sometimes when we're eating unconsciously, we'll eat way past the point where we should have stopped; same with watching certain news, or certain shows, we intuit it's off for us, but we just override that, and we keep stuffing ourselves with the food, we keep watching the same news show — it's like watching a bad movie, we know it's a crappy movie, but we're sitting there hoping it'll get better. An hour and a half later when it finally ends we go "Why? Why did I stay watching that?" It's almost like we were mesmerized, we didn't want to get up from our seat or flick the movie off. Same with the news. 

Of course I'm not saying not to do it, I'm saying: Do it as a meditation, almost like you could sit there, the next time you're watching the news, count your breaths while you're watching, tune into your belly, really read it, and when you feel the first signal to flick it off, do that. In other words, treat it as another opportunity to get more conscious. And I'll say one more thing here. We've often seen clients who get obsessed with the darkest of the dark in the news. They get so caught up in the conspiracy theories that they end up increasing their fear level to a really dysfunctional level — because they're so focused on what's not working, what's wrong, where it's going to go, how corrupt everyone is, and on and on and on — and there is data to support a lot of the claims, but the overall sense of, kind of a low-grade paranoia, doesn't serve anybody. So that can happen too, I'm not saying it's happening to you, but I've seen it happen a lot. 

Bob: Right. Yeah, I'm in a position to be passing this on to other students, and I have to be careful not to just overload them too, they get depressed. They're studying war and studying chaos and studying breakdowns —

Robert: What you could do, Bob, in part, is introduce to them the fact that hearing this stuff has an effect on us viscerally, physiologically — talk about that, so that becomes part of the curriculum too, not just the data, but also the sensory part, the feeling part, and the agony. If we hear some horrendous thing, great tragedy somewhere else in the world, and we just hear it as data, and the next moment we're listening to something about some movie star's hangups, we've bypassed so much feeling. And what you could do with those students is have them stay with it a little longer, breathe, say "What happens when you consider what's going on in this part of the world? Breathe into it, let it hit you in the heart. If it makes you cry, good. Feel it, let's take time to feel." When you watch a typical news show, there's so much information, we get overloaded and saturated, and we lose touch with what we felt. It's like a nurse going from patient to patient to patient in the hospital, not being able to process what's just happened on the very difficult circumstance, and her compassion fatigue increases, to the point where the next patient she's going, "Oh, I don't want to deal with this, I don't care about your cancer or the fact that you're dying, who cares?" We don't want to reach that place where we are just so numb we don't care, and all we're receiving then is data, data smog.

Bob: Right! Thank you.

Robert: You're welcome.