"As human beings, we have imaginations, intuitions, and moments of awakening that disturb us into awareness of dimensions of circumambient reality that we can only name on our own as Mystery. And yet our feet mire in the clay of everyday toil—getting and giving, spending and being spent—in the struggle for survival and meaning. In the midst of contingency, suckled on uncertainty, we spend our blessed and threatened years becoming selves through relationships of trust and loyalty with others like us—persons in communities. We attach to one another in love; we struggle with fidelity and infidelity; we share our visions of ultimate destiny and calling; our projections and hope; our moments of revelations. We are language-related, symbol-born, and story-sustained creatures. We do not live long or well without meaning—that is to say, we are creatures who live by faith" - James Fowler

Young Blood - The Naked and Famous

Musically, this song captures one hell of a beautiful mood!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdO85Qf4Poc&feature=player_embedded

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

The Promise - Tracy Chapman

If you wait for me then I'll come for you
Although I've traveled far
I always hold a place for you in my heart
If you think of me If you miss me once in awhile
Then I'll return to you
I'll return and fill that space in your heart
Remembering
Your touch
Your kiss
Your warm embrace
I'll find my way back to you
If you'll be waiting
If you dream of me like I dream of you
In a place that's warm and dark
In a place where I can feel the beating of your heart

Remembering
Your touch
Your kiss
Your warm embrace
I'll find my way back to you
If you'll be waiting
I've longed for you and I have desired
To see your face your smile
To be with you wherever you are

Remembering
Your touch
Your kiss
Your warm embrace
I'll find my way back to you
If you'll be waiting
I've longed for you and I have desired
To see your face, your smile
To be with you wherever you are

Remembering
Your touch
Your kiss
Your warm embrace
I'll find my way back to you
Please say you'll be waiting

Together again
It would feel so good to be
In your arms
Where all my journeys end
If you can make a promise If it's one that you can keep, I vow to come for you
If you wait for me and say you'll hold
A place for me in your heart.



http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Jack Engler

"You have to be somebody before you can be nobody".

- Jack Engler

The Old Ego Dies Hard...

"The old ego dies hard, such as it was, a minister of dullness, it was
also an agent of security".

- Samuel Beckett

Cutting Through...

There is a spirit
you rarely experience.
Now, the groceries

I Am...

Uniquely manifest
within the tensions and boundaries
of an always emerging
mysterious interrelation
of unknowable origin
and self-reflected
in the clarity and shadows
of the self and its relationships
from passing perceptions
understood as moments
on a line conceived as time
starting at the retrospectively created idea of birth
and ending at the imaginal projection of death
deducted from the existing patterns of life
held for the security of consistency
for my needs, hers, and
the safe rearing of young
all while being nonspecifically locatable
from one perspective to another
but nonetheless hewn in flesh, breath,
warmth, nutrition, movement,
flux, lineage, community, heart, energy, rhythm, passions, friendship,
skill,
language, light, pattern, care, parent,
exploration, curiosity, freedom, void,
stillness, breeze, texture,
sweat, sex, desire, blood, hair, howl,
cower, scream, avoid, deter, suffer,
envelop, ascend, sleep, approach,
yield, recall, dance, stretch, birth,
witness, agree, create, destroy, covet,
and above all
love.

Great Summary of Robert Kegan's The Evolving Self

Okay – now, let us apply Piaget's insights about how knowledge develops in successive layers not to thinking maturity, but rather to social maturity, a topic rather dear to the hearts of most people visiting this website, I expect. The questions to ask now are:

• Are there successive layers of social maturity (e.g., appreciation of the social world and of emotions and how to manage them) that people experience as they develop?

• If so, what are those successive layers of social maturity?

• What sorts of problems arise when you get stuck in a particular stage of social maturity and fail to mature further?

These first two questions are addressed in "The Evolving Self", while the third question is addressed in Kegan's follow-up book, "In Over Our Heads".

What Kegan has to say in "The Evolving Self" can be summarized (I think) in this manner:

• Social maturity does evolve or develop in successive layers just as does cognitive maturity, progressing from the most simple understanding to more and more complex understandings of the social world.

• More simple appreciations of the social world, and of human emotions are fundamentally inaccurate, and not a good fit for the actual complexity of the social world, but they nevertheless represent the best people can do at any given moment.

• More complex appreciations of the social world evolve into existence as a person becomes able to appreciate stuff abstractly that they used to appreciate only in concrete (obvious, tangible) forms. This is to say (using Kegan's terms) that people are initially embedded in their own subjective perspective. They see things only from their own particular point of view and fundamentally cannot understandwhat it might be like to see themselves from another perspective other than their own. Being unable to understand what you look like to someone else is the essence and definition of what it means to be subjective about yourself, for example. Being able to appreciate things from many different perspectives is the essence of what it means to be relatively objective.
  

• New layers of social/emotional development occurs as people become able to finally see themselves in increasingly larger and wider social perspective. For example, the moment I am able to understand for the first time what another person is thinking or feeling, I have made a sort of leap forwards out of subjectivity (me being trapped in my own perspective) and into a view of the world that is a little more objective. If I can understand what someone else is thinking and feeling, I can also imagine myself as I must look through their eyes and my self-understanding becomes that much more objective. This sort of expanded awareness represents an emergence from embeddedness in my own subjective perspective and the growth of my ability to see things from multiple perspectives at once.

• This process of becoming progressively less subjective as you mature, and thus more able to appreciate the complexity of the social world, repeats itself multiple times in a given lifespan (assuming people do continue to mature as they age and don't simply get stuck!). Each new layer of awareness; each expansion of perspective that a person grows is simultaneously both more objective; offering a better, wider perspective on the social world than did the prior understanding), and also less objective then the understanding that logically follows next.

• Where does this progression end? Theoretically, it ends in some kind of Buddha-like state of enlightenment, where everything that can be understood objectively is understood objectively and there is no more subjectivity to be embedded in anymore. More practically, it ends when we reach the level of social maturity that most of our peers achieve. Few people ever become more socially mature than the majority of their peers.

  
  

‘a trembling experience of oscillation between I and non-I’...

I know that timid breathing. Where
Do I begin and end? And where,

As I strum the thing, do I pick up
That which momentously declares

Itself not to be I and yet
Must be. It could be nothing else.

- Wallace Stevens

Hall of Mirrors

If I build it
I will come.

There's nothing but me here
and forever lonely I'm not anymore.
Inspire; the many mansions open their doors.
Expire; what I was dies to who I am
now.

If I build it
I will come

I was always only ever you.
Every other me just circumstance, just survival.
Inspire; I climb the castle's walls
Expire; all of existence becomes, and becomes
again

If I build it
I will come

No longer a feint wonder, a silent question
A fragment of a fragment forever reflecting
Inspire; it lifts, yeilds, delivers me
Expire; Delivered, Delivered, Delivered!
Delivered! Delivered! Forever,
Delivered!

Addiction and Developmental Arrest in the Ego-Self Axis

The Ego-Self axis as described by Edinger (1972) reflects a developmental pathway that is traversed in the process of individuation. For normal individuals, the path reflects a continually changing set of goals and directions which shape and give meaning to life experiences.The path itself is characterized by the numinous draw of the teleological Self (Jung, 1969; Gray, 1996).For many addicts the archetypal Self has been overshadowed by the demands of addiction and ceases to provide either a base for personal definition or a direction for growth.By reintroducing a sense of Self and its promise of individuation, the therapist provides a motivational foundation for overcoming addiction.In order to provide continuing, conscious experience of the Self, the author uses techniques gleaned from the work of Milton Erickson, Robert Dilts (1990), and Wyatt Woodsmall to assemble personal experiences of competence, personal- adequacy, and hope into what he terms a Feeling Toned Vector (FTV) which becomes a source of personal direction and a background for personal choice.

Addictions are characterized by several behavioral traits. Peele and Brodsky (1991) note that addictions include "the single minded grasping of a magic-seeming object or involvement, the loss of control, perspective and priorities...(p. 42).Other significant behaviors associated with addiction are: social isolation, loss of self respect, depressed mood, and lack of motivation. They often include a loss of futurity beyond the next opportunity to engage in the addictive behavior..

Transformations of Frustration - A.H. Almaas

"The animal soul is not a cruel human who has lost her heart. As we come to understand this manifestation, we begin to see that its exaggerated destructiveness and hateful quality are actually reactions to frustration. Because the instinctual self is not allowed to be powerful and effective in getting its way, its power turns into destructive hatred and heartless reactivity. The particulars of the structure connect with one's early history in relation to power, control, destructiveness as well as the need to protect the vulnerable and loving heart. When we are finally able to experience this animal form without either rejection or judgment or acting out, it transforms into its original form. This turns out to be an animal kind of power and energy, calm and confident, peaceful but ready to act with full power and energy. The opening of this experience removes the negativity associated with frustration".

- A.H. Almaas

Unreal Imagination Exists - Andrew Olendzki

Unreal Imagination Exists

Understanding the Buddha's paradoxical view of reality

-by Andrew Olendzki

One of my favorite expressions from Buddhist literature is the three-word opening line of theMadhyantavibhaga, a late Sanskrit text attributed to Maitreya, the Buddha to come. The phrase, which nicely captures the subtle, paradoxical view of reality so unique to Buddhist thought, is abhutaparikalpo'sti, and translates as something like "unreal imagination exists."

The middle word, parikalpa, is the noun and is based on a term that most immediately means "capability" or "feasibility." With the prefix parithis word takes on the sense of something contrived, determined, or invented. Here it refers to the understanding that the mind and body are constructing a world of experience--each moment--out of the raw data of sensory input. Others might see this as the functioning of a conscious spiritual essence, but Buddhists regard every moment of consciousness as a synthetic event that is cobbled together out of presenting conditions, only to pass away as those conditions change to make way for the creation of a new configuration. The name given to this process in the opening line isparikalpa, a constructed, arranged, worked-out fabrication of some feasible or appropriate version of things that we can take as a plausible semblance of reality for the purposes of stumbling from one moment to another. Such is the nature of human experience, all wishful thinking or projected hopes aside. It is an illusion, the outcome of a potent imagination.

The first word of the phrase is an adjective, describing this product of our imagination as unreal, not truly existing, not grounded upon any ontological foundation. The verbal root,bhu, simply means "to be," so the negative form of that, abhuta, quite strongly says that it does not really exist. This is a remarkable insight, one that pulls the ground out from under almost all other forms of human understanding of the ultimate. Existence is one of the primary definitions of God and soul in Hinduism (along with consciousness and bliss), and for the Buddhists to say that such a reassuring reality does not underlie the functioning of the mind and body was as challenging to the Buddha's contemporaries as it is to us today. Yet this is what he saw on the night of his awakening: the world has no abiding essence.

The third word is a verb, asti, another form of "to be," and simply declares that this imaginative act we call ourselves and our world, which ultimately has no basis, nevertheless "exists." That is to say it appears, it is an event that occurs, it arises again after it passes away, it is present to experience, it serves as an object of awareness. This third word takes us away from the theoretical and into the practical realm of meditation and daily life. Even thoughthe mind is synthesizing a virtual world, andeven though this imaginative connivance is ultimately ungrounded in anything "out there," it nevertheless is phenomenologically present. We have the option of paying careful attention to the flow of experience, and thereby of participating intimately in the manifestations of consciousness. When such conscious engagement is tempered by the first and second words--the insubstantiality and imperfection of it all--we gain back at least as much as we have lost. The bird in hand is a rich unfolding of phenomenological texture and nuance; the two in the bush, not worth pursuing, are merely conceptual and emotional urges to feel grounded in something transcendent.

It is often taken for granted that all religion points beyond the here and now to something wholly other, and that the value of this is entirely derived from the value of that. I think the Buddha had a very different view, one that is particularly suited to the post-modern world we are beginning to inhabit. The ontological ground has been pulled out from under us by every discovery of the new sciences over the last century, and increasingly isolated islands of religious bedrock are surrounded by shifting currents of diversity. The conventional wisdom has always been that we would be lost without some kind of transcendent grounding, and that human values, aspirations, and responsibilities would flounder without divine guidance.

The Buddha appears to have seen it the other way around. Clinging to a rock while being battered by waves only causes damage, while letting go and learning to swim freely in the changing waters can result in a great sense of meaning and well-being. We can accept the fact that our world-building apparatus is imperfect (parikalpa, and even that our world and our selves are not ultimately real (abhuta), while at the same time learning to pay ever closer attention to the flow of experience that is presenting itself to awareness (asti). We can rely upon the self-organizing principles of nature to build for ourselves a meaningful world, as long as we take care to do so in healthy rather than unhealthy ways. Having seen the empty nature of it all a long time ago, Buddhists went on to organize a way of life around such qualities as kindness, compassion, truthfulness, understanding, and, above all, around practices of heightened awareness. These factors are inherently valuable because they contribute to skillful living.

I understand that everything I know and do is a product of imagination; and I can accept without difficulty that it is ultimately unreal; but I'm glad it exists, and will engage that existence with as much conscious awareness as I can possibly muster. This is plenty to work with, and it inspires me to make the very best of what is present for myself, those around me, and for the collective whole. The future well-being of us all, said the Buddha a long time ago, lies in the direction of less conceptual attachment to views and more mindful awareness of phenomena. The simple opening line from the Madhyantavibhaga can serve as a good reminder of that.

Sublime contemporary translation of Canto I of Dante's Inferno by Mary Jo Bang

Stopped mid-motion in the middle
Of what we call a life, I looked up and saw no sky—
Only a dense cage of leaf, tree, and twig. I was lost.

It's difficult to describe a forest:
Savage, arduous, extreme in its extremity.
I think and the facts come back, then the fear comes back.

Death, I think, can only be slightly more bitter.
Good comes from bad but before getting there,
I have to describe in detail what else I saw.

I can't say for certain how I entered it;
I must have become so tired
I ended up following a bad path.

The wooded valley I'd just plodded through
heart-rending terror,
Dead-ended at the foot of a hill.

I looked up and saw the sun
Was on the body of the hill's high spot:
torch for the path to the lost.

The lake of fear that had filled my heart
In the night I had passed in such sadness,
Calmed somewhat when I saw it.

Like someone breathless after an escape
From deep water who stands at the side of the pool
And looks back on the danger and trail of close calls,

That's how I looked back—my mind a stopped top
In the middle of a turn—for a glimpse of where I'd been,
A place no one has ever survived alive.

I rested for a while and then
Started up the sandy slope. My willful left foot rose
While the right foot trailed behind.

Suddenly, at the foot of a rise, just where the hill begins
Its steep incline— I saw a mottled leopard,
Light, agile, and very fast.

It shadowed the future so closely, that it kept blocking the way
And time and again I thought I should go back
And retrace my steps to where I'd been.

It was daybreak, the sun in the sign of Aries, the same
As it was when the first clock started, the spring
Set by the hand of a love supreme

Who set in motion all beautiful things. All this
Disarmed my fear of the beast with the freckled coat.
I was reassured by the fact of morning

And the hint of spring—
But the promise hollowed
When I caught sight of nothing less than a lion.

He seemed to be dead-set against me, head high
And ravished with hunger. It made not only me
But even the air around him seem nervous.

And after him, a she-wolf appeared, her frame so emaciated
Her body seemed defined by the cravings
That had caused so many to live in misery.

Looking at her bitch-kitty face,
I felt a sense of solid defeat, and lost sight of the hope
Of climbing any higher.

Like one who at a casino wheel whispers sweet nothings
To his winnings but when it's his turn to lose whimpers,
"How did we come to this?" and wrings his hands,

So was I, just like that sad sack, as the impossible beast
Inch by inch, drove me back into the shadows
Where the sun keeps a stopper in its mouth.

I was rushing backward into ruin
When I saw one whom, given I'd been alone for so long,
Seemed no more than a mirage.

There on that waste land, I called out,
"Take pity on me, please, whatever you are,
Ghost-man or tangible man."

"I was once a man," he said, "but now I'm not.
Both my parents, both Lombardi, were born
In Mantua. I was born late in the day

Of Julio Caesar and lived in Rome under the sword
Of good Augustus, back when the gods were false
And told sweet-talking lies.

I was a poet, singing songs of Aeneus—son
Of honest Anchises—who found his way back by boat
From Troy after vain Ilium had been burned to black ash.

But you, why are you returning to this tedious plain?
Why not climb the peaked mountain
Ahead of you. It's the ultimate end and means of all pleasure."

I said, "You're Virgil, aren't you? You're that rainmaker
Who creates a torrent of speech that turns into a riptide."
Then I felt bashful and hung my head.

"The best and the brightest in the class
Of poets, a far-famed bell, I read you and loved you and hope
That what I learned from you then will now serve me well.

First of all the authors and Master of me, I borrowed from you
And to you I owe any inkling of the passing success
I've been lucky enough to accrue.

Can you see the beast I had to flee? Can you save me
From her? You, Mr. Ubermensch, you Mr. Man
Of the World. I'm trembling with fear."

When he saw that I was now in tears, he said,
"In that case, you must leave this rock
And no water and the sandy road.

The cat that drove you back and made you cry
Ends the life to any who try
To pass her on their way through.

She's insane and insatiable. She eats more
And that just makes her more malignant with craving.
She kills all she comes in contact with. All with whom she comes.

She takes many to her bed and many more are coming
Until the day the big dog comes
And tracks her down and dastardly does her in.

The dog doesn't need property or money but lives on
Knowledge, love, and truth. He'll come at the end of the year
When Castor and Pollux arrive dressed in matching felt caps.

He'll save a once-regal country, glimpsed in the distance
Of time, and once fought for by those who died
Displaying great gallantry, and those who were gorgeously loyal.

He'll search for her in this city and that, chasing the bitch
Back to the hole where Envy first undid her chain and choker
And pointed her to the brick road that beelines into the world.

As we go forward from here, stay at all times behind me,
And I'll play the part of your guide. It's my plan
To lead you through a place never-ending, i.e., eternal

Hell, where you'll hear the worst kind of wailing,
See the ageless shades writhing in pain,
Sense their vain request for a second death.

After that, you'll see those who are happy
In the heat of the fire because they hope at some point
To pursue the path to Purgatory and so achieve a Bible clerk's bliss.

To those, if that's where you would go, up and farther up,
You'll need another escort, one more honored
Than I am. When I leave you, I'll leave you

With her. I can't enter the city of the Emperor,
So says He, since I was pagan and outside His unbending laws. He says
I'm smudged by Adam's ink and ergo must live in Limbo.

He reigns in all parts of the empire.
His city is there; so is His chair, poised at the edge of heaven.
Happy are those He asks in."

And I said to him, "Poet, I beg of you,
By the God you never knew, help me out of this Denmark
Which threatens to go from bad to worse. Lead me

To where you just mentioned, so I can see the door
Of Purgatory and meet the angel at the Gate and, along the way,
See the dolorous souls who are designated DAMNED."

Then he set out, and I at his back.

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Robert Sapolsky on Faith

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

George Hardwell on Avoidant Attachment Pathologies

As you might have noticed from some of my posts either on this blog or on Facebook, I've been besotted with the insight of attachment theory recently. Apart from the obvious clinical upsides of solidly grounding my new career in this discipline, it has had strong breakthrough implications for my worldview, therapy and insight into the trials of the relationships i've had through my life. In particular, i've been able to see deeply into the ways that my secure approaches have been frustrated resulting in anxious and, at times, disorganised patterns. Simply having knowledge of the interactions of these constructs has given me a tremendous grounding anchor in times where the chaos of life and relationship has been too strong. I've also been able to notice the predominance of avoidant strategies in those I've shared relational settings with. This excerpt from George Hardwell in particular has spoken to me at great depth, allowing for legitimacy of the projections which have silently pervaded many of my interpersonal and intrapsychic relations. I post it here both in the hope that someone else may one day also find it useful, and also as a symbolic gift to myself marking the boundaries which I have improperly allowed to be breached in the past and should never breach again.

What does the avoidant personality look like, and why does this result in silent divorce?

There is a personality type that is associated with avoidance of risk. Such persons are basically in flight from life and use manipulation and control to consolidate this flight.

One rule of life is that the greater our fear of life the greater we need to control. Frightened and insecure, such people will control in order to remove the risk of living. They will control appearances to ensure approval. They will control their family members to reduce risk.

A less extreme Avoidant Personality brings death to the marriage relationship, and their partner's self-confidence and identity, over longer time with less obvious abuse. This person may be male or female. Female patterns are often more subtle; not in the open, harder to detect. Husband may not know what is going on. She can quite easily keep up appearances while avoiding intimacy, undermining the individuality of her partner and escaping true marriage into silent divorce - a pretend marriage.

Silent divorce is fine with the Avoidant Personality. In silent divorce they have the emotional stability they desire - without intimacy. They have the status and safety of being married. If her partner stays in this silent divorce it could become the death of him. He will be trained to avoid expressing emotions, confronting issues head on, talking about 'negatives,' raising any objections to their life style and her increasing control of their life. This could manifest in him with emotional problems such as depression and 'an anger problem'. It may manifest as physical disease - some sickness. It might increase any tendencies in him to find escape in drinking, drugs, gambling or sexual addictions.

In a marriage with an Avoidant Partner both of the partners begin to deaden within, the heart sickens, the spirit languishes, one lives with constant residual depression and a search for life outside of the marriage becomes as search for life, love at the emotional and spiritual level. One strongly hungers and thirsts for that which will lift one spirits, heal one's heart, rekindle one's passion and bring the experience of community and intimacy to one's soul.

Go back to bed...

"True wisdom gives the only possible answer at any given moment, and, that night, going back to bed was the only possible answer. Go back to bed, said this omniscient interior voice, because you don't need to know the final answer right now, at 3 o'clock in the morning on a Thursday in November. Go back to bed, because I love you. Go back to bed, because the only thing you need to do for now is rest and take good care of yourself until you do know the answer. Go back to bed, so that, when the tempest comes, you'll be strong enough to deal with it. And the tempest is coming, dear one. Very soon. But not tonight. Therefore: Go back to bed..."

Elizabeth Gilbert taking a moment to rest in Eat Pray Love.

Map of Dante's Hell

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Jenny Owen Youngs - Fuck Was I

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

On Memory...

"You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing."

- Luis Bunuel

Neither This Nor That

Some toil among the objects,
Others dwell among the light,
Others still traverse the inner,
But very few fully abide.

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Wash Me Clean

If all the world could take a moment
To cradle back into slow motion 'cos it's all moving too fast
You had your shot you took your chances
All through you'd battle for the answers you were brave 'til the very last

Just like a wave on the ocean
There's forces that run so deep
I'm falling into the temptation
To let it wash all over me
Come and wash me clean
Come and wash me clean

A nervous step into the future
While the present shatters all around you
it's all moving too fast
And now the footprints of your failures
Seep into the safety of the harbour
leave it all in a dark past

Just like a wave on the ocean
There's forces that run so deep
I'm falling into the temptation
To let it wash all over me
Come and wash me clean
Come and wash me clean
Come and wash me clean

Sightreading

I want you to be able to
abide
as a witness
to the choices that have been the noose around your neck.

Breathe.
Breathe not about these choices.
Not around or among them.
Breathe. Here. As it is.
Abiding.
Only abiding.

Breathe.
Breathe through the defence.
Not for victory's sake.
For intimacy. To know that
this is it.
Never to be resolved
to
it.
Never answered.
Simply to abide
in it.

Breathe.
Breathe through the defence.
Breathe as the breath.
You do not have breath.
Breath is you.
The you that is nothing.
Merely abides
in equanimity
while the noose unravels
what it will.

Breathe.
Without effort.
Take breath.
Give breath
to the one eternal
chance to simply
abide.

... here is the truth.
... only intimacy with what is here.
... only "What now?".
... only the gift bestowed on the brave of knowing into what will be.

... and that will be my chance to see you.

The Third

When there was one,
one might have had a chance, for

When there was two,
too much had already passed, for

When there's a third,
third makes two come last, for

When there's not two,
too long, one's bypassed, for

When there's just one,
one's a fourth trespassed.

Cold-Blooded Old Times

Cold-blooded old times

Cold-blooded old times

Cold-blooded old times

The type of memories

that turn your bones to glass

turn your bones to glass

mother came rushing in

she said we didn't see a thing

we said we didn't see a thing

and father left at eight

nearly splintering the gate

cold-blooded old times

Cold-blooded old times

Cold-blooded old times

Cold-blooded old times

the type of memories

that turn your bones

turn your bones to glass

and though you were

just a little squirrel

you understood every word

and in this way

they gave you clarity

a cold-blooded clarity

Cold-blooded old times

Cold-blooded old times

Cold-blooded old times

though how can I stand

and laugh with the man

who redefined your body?

how can I stand

and laugh with the man

who redefined your body?

those cold-blooded old times

cold-blooded old times

cold-blooded old times

The Calculation - Regina Spektor

You went into the kitchen cupboard, got yourself another hour
And you gave half of it to me
We sat there looking at the faces of these strangers in the pages
Till we knew 'em mathematically

They were in our minds until forever but we didn't mind
We didn't know better

So we made our own computer out of macaroni pieces
And it did our thinking while we lived our lives
It counted up our feelings and divided them up even
And it called that calculation perfect love

Didn't even know that love was bigger
Didn't even know that love was so, so
Hey, hey, hey

Hey this fire, it's burnin', burnin' us up
Hey this fire, it's burnin', burnin' us up

So we made the hard decision and we each made an incision
Past our muscles and our bones, saw our hearts were little stones
Pulled them out they weren't beating and we weren't even bleeding
As we lay them on the granite counter top

We beat 'em up against each other
We beat 'em up against each other
We struck 'em hard against each other
We struck 'em so hard, so hard until they sparked

Hey this fire, it's burnin', burnin' us up
Hey this fire, it's burnin', burnin' us up
Hey this fire, it's burnin', burnin' us up


http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Consequence of Sounds - Regina Spektor

My rhyme ain't good just yet,
My brain and tongue just met,
And they ain't friends, so far,
My words don't travel far,
They tangle in my hair,
And tend to go nowhere,
They grow right back inside,
Right past my brain and eyes
Into my stomach juice
Where they don't serve much use,
No healthy calories,
Nutrition values.
And I absorb back in
The words right through my skin
They sit there festering inside my bowels

The consonants and vowels
The consequence of sounds
The consonants and vowels
The consequence of sounds

Got a soundtrack in my mind,
All the time. Kids-
Screamin' from too much beat up
And they don't even rhyme,
They just stand there, on a street corner,
Skin tucked in
And meat side out and shot,
And I'd like to turn them down
But there ain't no knob.
Run into picket fences
Not into picket lines.
All this hippie-shit for the 60's
And another cliche for our time. But,
But a one of these days your heart
Will just stop ticking,
And they sorta just don't find you till your cubicle is reeking.

The consonants and vowels
The consequence of sounds
The consonants and vowels
The consequence of sounds
Ahh ah ah ah ahh ah ah ah

Did you know that the gravedigger's still
Gettin' stuck in the machine
Even tough it's a whole other daydream.
It's another town it's another world,
Where the kids are asleep, where the loans are paid
And the lawns are mowed.
Whad'ya think?
All the gravediggers were gone?
Just cause one song is done
There's always another one,
Waiting right around the bend,
Till this one ends,
Then it begins
Squeaky clean, then it starts all over again.

The weather report keeps on
Tossing and turning,
Predicting and warning,
And warning and warning of,
Possible leakage from news publications and,
Possible leakage from news TV stations.
That very same morning right next to her coffee
She noticed some bleeding and heard hollow coughing and
National Geographic was being too graphic,
When all she had wanted to know was the traffic
"The worlds got a nosebleed" it said
"And we're flooding but we keep on cutting
The trees and the forests!"
And we keep on paying those freaks on the TV,
Who claim they will save us but want to enslave us.
And sweating like demons they scream through our speakers
But we leave the sound on 'cause silence is harder.
And no one's the killer and no one's the martyr
The world that has made us can no longer contain us
And profits are silent then rotting away 'cause

The consonants and vowels
The consequence of sounds.
The consonants and vowels
The consequence of sounds.
Ah ah ah...

My rhyme ain't good just yet,
My brain and tongue just met,
And they ain't friends, so far,
My words don't travel far,
They tangle in my hair,
And tend to go nowhere,
They grow right back inside,
Right past my brain and eyes
Into my stomach juice
Where they don't serve much use,
No healthy calories,
Nutrition values.
And I absorb back in
The words right through my skin
They sit there festering inside my bowels

The consonants and vowels
The consequence of sounds
The consonants and vowels
The consequence of sounds 

Critical Run Sydney

Critical Run Sydney is an art critique series with the purpose of campaigning to bring the widely acclaimed Emergency Room exhibition format to Sydney.

Emergency Room is an exhibition format created by Danish/French conceptual artist Thierry Geoffroy. Its purpose is to create a space where artists can contribute daily to current social debate. Free of proposals and waiting lists, Emergency Room allows artists to respond to todays issues immediately by providing a free space to exhibit.

Part of the Emergency Room format is a certain perfected system and savoir faire executed and taught to the collaborating artists by the ER staff. Punctuality is a keystone when the artwork of yesterday daily at 12.30 p.m. is removed from the Emergency Room to give space to the artwork of today. This ritual is called “The Passage” and is the central element of the constant changing Emergency Room. Some days 20 artist will turn up for the Passage, other days only 10. On rare occasions the alerting apathy of people is proven by nobody showing up. Other days the news of the day will start a storm of reactions from outraged or thrilled artists, creating a creative explosion of awareness to be witnessed by all the lucky visitors and media present at the time of the Passage. Here the true energetic symbiosis of the artist as representative of the public opinion is revealed and fed back into the media channels.

Critical Run Sydney are hosting a series of Critical Runs over the next couple of months. After the innaugral run over the Harbour Bridge last Saturday, they're repeating the format this Saturday afternoon on the timely topic: Is social media ruining our lives? They're meeting at 3pm at the corner of Oxford St and Crown St and running down Crown Street to Cleveland St, Surry Hills. Run starts at 3:30pm sharp.

For more information on Critical Run Sydney head to the Emergency Room website, check out the Critical Run Sydney facebook page, or email the Critical Run Sydney team at micromergency@gmail.com

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Pisco Sin Fronteras - Burners Without Borders

Pisco Sin Fronteras - Burners Without Borders from Kelly y Jefe on Vimeo.

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Hereafter - Parallel Lions

Long day
into a long night
Someway
through my life
Found you,
cold street,
cold hands,
cold feet.
You were so pale,
so lost
and lonely.
You said
“Someday,
someone
is gonna want me”.

I tried to save your life,
but you’re always on the edge of it

And every little comfort I found in you,
I’m becoming less of myself it’s true.
I don’t want to stumble in your hereafter.
I ask about the places that you have been.
You tumble into silence, silence, silence.
.. and you,
talking isn’t something you do.

Long day
into long night.
Someway
through your life
You say,
“No way,
no one
could ever want me”

I tried to save your life,
but you’re always on the edge of it.

And every little comfort I found in you,
I’m becoming less of myself it’s true.
I don’t want to stumble in your hereafter.
I ask about the people that you’ve been seeing.
You tumble into silence, silence, silence.
… and you,
talking isn’t something you do.

We’re becoming less of ourselves it’s true.
You tumble into silence, silence, silence.
… and you, talking isn’t something you do.


http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

"Rights without duties, claims without responsibilities and pleasure without cost".

Roger Scruton is a man of many (often questionable) faces, but in this case, but I'm partially sympathetic to the way he summarises the total absence of critical reason in the psychedelic worldview which arose in the 60's - an aberration which for me devalues the potential generative possibilities of psychedelic research (e.g. MAPS).  Given the last couple of posts, you can't half tell how I'm wearing away at these questions for myself at the moment...

"If the value of LSD is that it expresses and brings to fruition what was going on in the 60's, then I think that's a strong argument against LSD - becasue what was going on the 60's is something that I believe we now have to recover from. It is very difficult to summarise the 60's worldview, but I think one could say very briefly in a nutshell it was the attempt to have rights without duties, claims without responsibilities and pleasure without cost.  The real cost of having any peaceful enjoyment of the world is that one maintains institutions - one makes a sacrifice to preserve one's inheritance.  This was something that the young people of the 60's were reluctant to do, and LSD ministered to that reluctance.  It told them that even the most sublime experiences, the ones of religion - which people had thought in the past came through considerable sacrifice, worship and surrender - that even that experience could be had on the cheap...

... whatever the actual intensity of the experience, to call it religious has nothing to do with it's intensity, it's to interpret it as having a certain meaning.  When you administer to yourself a drug which you know is affecting you by producing a chemical transformation in the brain, and you're deliberately engineering that, it's very difficult to sincerely interpret this as a visitation of the divine spirit or the revelation of a transcendental world.  It's simply an act of self-deception to put that kind of religious kind of interpretation on it, I'd have thought".

- Roger Scruton

I think it's important to note that Scruton doesn't deny the existence of a transcendental perspective.  This from Wikipedia:

"Scruton is indebted to the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whom he credits with providing the definitive philosophical response to Descartes' view of consciousness. Mark Dooley compares his Wittgenstein-influenced philosophy of language to that of Richard Rorty. Scruton contends, following Immanuel Kant, that human beings have a transcendental dimension, a sacred core exhibited in their capacity for self-reflection".

"... a dedication to a way of life which can indeed be very much reinforced by experience, but experience isn't the point of it"

"Taking drugs to get into the presence of God is barging into the presence of God. If you just go and have an experience, you're simply not equipped to recognise the experience for what it is and to react to it in the right way. So for that reason, no, I wouldn't take drugs - there's so much more to religion, indeed almost everything more to religion than having experience, it's a dedication to a way of life which can indeed be very much reinforced by experience, but experience isn't the point of it"

- Professor Richard Swinburne.

More fascinations from Steppenwolf

"There is much to be said for contentment and painlessness, for these bearable and submissive days, on which neither pain nor pleasure is audible, but pass by whispering and on tip-toe. But the worst of it is that it is just this contentment that I cannot endure. After a short time it fills me with irrepressible hatred and nausea. In desperation I have to escape and throw myself on the road to pleasure, or, if that cannot be, on the road to pain. When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols, to provide a few rebellious schoolboys with the longed-for ticket to Hamburg, or to stand one or two representatives of the established order on their heads. For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.

It was in such a mood then that I finished this not intolerable and very ordinary day as dusk set in. I did not end it in a manner becoming a rather ailing man and go to bed tempted by a hot water bottle. Instead I put on my shoes ill-humoredly, discontented and disgusted with the little work I had done, and went out into the dark and foggy streets to drink what men according to an old convention call "a glass of wine," at the sign of the Steel Helmet.

So I went down the stairs from my room in the attic, those difficult stairs of this alien world, those thoroughly bourgeois, well-swept and scoured stairs of a very respectable three-family apartment house under whose roof I have my refuge. I don't know how it comes about, but I, the homeless Steppenwolf, the solitary, the hater of life's petty conventions, always take up my quarters in just such houses as this. It is an old weakness of mine. I live neither in palatial houses nor in those of the humble poor, but instead and deliberately in these respectable and wearisome and spotless middle-class homes, which smell of turpentine and soap and where there is a panic if you bang the door or come in with dirty shoes. The love of this atmosphere comes, no doubt, from the days of my childhood, and a secret yearning I have for something homelike drives me, though with little hope, to follow the same old stupid road. Then again, I like the contrast between my lonely, loveless, hunted, and thoroughly disorderly existence and this middle-class family life. I like to breathe in on the stairs this odor of quiet and order, of cleanliness and respectable domesticity. There is something in it that touches me in spite of my hatred for all it stands for. I like to step across the threshold of my room where all this suddenly stops; where, instead, cigar ash and wine bottles lie among the heaped-up books and there is nothing but disorder and neglect; and where everything--books, manuscript, thoughts--is marked and saturated with the plight of lonely men, with the problem of existence and with the yearning after a new orientation for an age that has lost its bearings".

A View From The Top - NightWalkers Blue Mountains Wild Endurance Training Walk

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

More pearls from Steppenwolf

"These horrors were really nonexistent. A man of the Middle Ages would
detest the whole mode of our present-day life as something far more
than horrible, far more than barbarous. Every age, every culture,
every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and
its own strength, its beauties and ugliness; accepts certain
sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils.
Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages,
two cultures and religions overlap. A man of the Classical Age who had
to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as a savage
does in the midst of our civilisation. Now there are times when a
whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of
life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand
itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence.
Naturally, every one does not feel this equally strongly. A nature
such as Nietzsche's had to suffer our present ills more than a
generation in advance. What he had to go through alone and
misunderstood, thousands suffer today."

One of many brilliant passages from Steppenwolf

I'm having a second crack at Steppenwolf, and today again came across this old passage which blew me away the first time I read it:

"I have already given some account of the Steppenwolf's outward appearance. He gave at the very first glance the impression of a significant, an uncommon, and unusually gifted man. His face was intellectual, and the abnormally delicate and mobile play of his features reflected a soul of extremely emotional and unusually delicate sensibility. When one spoke to him and he, as was not always the case, dropped conventionalities and said personal and individual things that came out of his own alien world, then a man like myself came under his spell on the spot. He had thought more than other men, and in matters of the intellect he had that calm objectivity, that certainty of thought and knowledge, such as only really intellectual men have, who have no axe to grind, who never wish to shine, or to talk others down, or to appear always in the right.

I remember an instance of this in the last days he was here, if I can call a mere fleeting glance he gave me an example of what I mean. It was when a celebrated historian, philosopher, and critic, a man of European fame, had announced a lecture in the school auditorium. I had succeeded in persuading the Steppenwolf to attend it, though at first he had little desire to do so. We went together and sat next to each other in the lecture hall. When the lecturer ascended the platform and began his address, many of his hearers, who had expected a sort of prophet, were disappointed by his rather dapper appearance and conceited air. And when he proceeded, by way of introduction, to say a few flattering things to the audience, thanking them for their attendance in such numbers, the Steppenwolf threw me a quick look, a look which criticized both the words and the speaker of them--an unforgettable and frightful look which spoke volumes! It was a look that did not simply criticize the lecturer, annihilating the famous man with its delicate but crushing irony. That was the least of it. It was more sad than ironical; it was indeed utterly and hopelessly sad; it conveyed a quiet despair, born partly of conviction, partly of a mode of thought which had become habitual with him. This despair of his not only unmasked the conceited lecturer and dismissed with its irony the matter at hand, the expectant attitude of the public, the somewhat presumptuous title under which the lecture was announced--no, the Steppenwolf's look pierced our whole epoch, its whole overwrought activity, the whole surge and strife, the whole vanity, the whole superficial play of a shallow, opinionated intellectuality. And alas! the look went still deeper, went far below the faults, defects and hopelessness of our time, our intellect, our culture alone. It went right to the heart of all humanity, it bespoke eloquently in a single second the whole despair of a thinker, of one who knew the full worth and meaning of man's life. It said: "See what monkeys we are! Look, such is man!" and at once all renown, all intelligence, all the attainments of the spirit, all progress towards the sublime, the great and the enduring in man fell away and became a monkey's trick!"