My Limits of Achievable Reality

My Al-Anon sponsor, one of several mind-blowing spiritual teachers Kali has seen fit to send me, called me the other day. "We were sitting around before a meeting, talking about you, and no one could believe what's happened and where your Higher Power has taken you--it really goes to show that we don't write the script--" for our lives, for the universe...for the next five minutes. Oh, we collaborate with the Author sometimes...but...

A lot has happened since I started this blog, some of it on schedule and some of it just plain unscripted and, if the writing were left to me, unscriptible. During the worst times--not that I've had bombs dropped on me or been diagnosed with metastatic cancer, but we all have bad times...during the worst times I fell back on the childish mantra God has a plan for me and it's better than anything I can imagine. I'd say this over and over, not believing, just repeating, begrudging the Deity Who (my teachers assured me) endorsed such contemptible platitudes, such infantile trust. I'd say it and say it and say it and somehow I started believing it enough to keep going, though a wolf pack of voices in the dim mental wilds still howled that I was fooling myself, that doom would rise as sure as the sun...but as the Mundaka Upanishad advises, I strung the arrow of my Self on the bow of mantra and let fly. The wolves fled, the sun rose, but no doom. It's not, it turns out, so bad being God's child...and in fact, Her plan has turned out to be as improbable and miraculous as a Bollywood romance.

Saturday Sophia and I are getting married. For years she was my friend and I dared not even think about her in any other way (though it took everything I had not to think those thoughts). The first full post I ever wrote on WiHW has Sophia's name encoded in it; she was the one I could tell about weird experiences and weird ideas that I'd share with no one else save Grigorss (and he's safely 3000 miles away, ensconced in his Hollywood mansion). Being with her was sheer heaven, no matter how stressed we were or what private hells we were enduring (we never talked about those)...but nothing was ever going to happen between us. It was too late and we'd made choices that were too different. So there was no point thinking about it... but I did, chastely (listen, people--for me, that's saying a lot!!!), hopelessly...and when it unexpectedly did become possible for something to happen, Sophia very kindly but firmly told me that it wasn't going to, ever.

And my Guardian Angel said the same thing, but Her version had an "unless." At first, all I could hear was the no... because the "unless" involved all those horrid spiritual disciplines centering on giving up, surrendering, trusting God, placing no expectations upon people or events, facing the fact that the universe owes me nothing--that my fondest, deepest desires might be nothing but self-defeating daydreams. My dear Angel, infinitely loving but strict as hell, seemed bent on turning me into an Aghori, and, ya know, eating charred remains from a skull-bowl might not have seemed half-bad compared to the mini- Dark Night I felt falling around me (at least it would have been more colorful than sitting down at the computer every day to work on the research project I had going).

To make it short, I had to completely surrender Sophia, give her away to God, release all wishful claim to her and any expectation of any future anything involving the two of us, down to an innocent cup of coffee at Starbucks. We didn't talk or see each other for months, and I surrendered and surrendered, aided by a magnificently apocalyptic Kurse Go Back song whose refrain goes "Every human has the right / to be mentally free." Sophia had that right, and I did, too--free of my obsession with her, free of my need to find a Beloved, a soul-mate, The One. I flung my heart against the iron gate of my wants, against the black bars of what I thought should be, could be...hammered the black iron until...it didn't shatter. It just wasn't there any more. And I was outside the walls, the walls I'd mistaken for a horizon.

Sophia and I started talking, and we started hanging out (I know I'm tellling the story at cartoon speed), and we found that hanging out or talking on the phone or chatting online or emailing each other was all we wanted to do. She was depressed and I wrote her a horoscope every day (unfailingly accurate since it always covered whatever she'd just told me she was going through). She wrote me staggeringly insightful emails and elegant, witty cards--and even poems! We found out the hard way that pay phones in Paris automatically disconnect your call after an hour. We skittishly, gingerly began to weave our lives, our hearts together...and the strands held, strong as spider's silk, and so we wove more. Sophia gave me the immeasurable gift of her trust, I still don't know how, and...we're getting married Saturday. She is her Divine Mother's image--well, actually, we are, together, creating this love, this life, hand in hand, heart in heart.

Southern Gothic

Sophia, me, and the kids are driving down a country road; it's close to sunset. We're going to meet her uncle at his cabin in the woods so we can borrow his pressure washer.
We turn onto a dirt path, heading west, and the reddened sky looms over us, bleeding through tall dark trees.

"This is starting to look like Evil Dead 2," I say.

Sophia says, "Everything in my family looks like Evil Dead 2."

Why Sophia Is My Shero

Because at 2:00 in the morning, when there's sewage backing up into our house so fast it's outpacing an eight-gallon Shop-Vac and I'm swearing like Harlan Ellison uncovering a copyright violation, she can think of reasons to be grateful.

* * *

Guru, since you say that gratitude is the most beautiful thing on earth, what is the effect of gratitude on man and God?

Sri Chinmoy: When an individual offers gratitude to God, immediately his receptivity increases. His vessel becomes large. Then God is able to pour more of His Blessings into the person or enter more fully into that vessel with His own divine Existence. God is infinite, but only according to our receptivity can He enter into us. God is like sunlight. If I leave this window open, sunlight will come in here. If I keep all the other windows closed, it cannot come in there. The more we offer gratitude, the more we increase our receptivity and capacity. The more windows we open, the more God enters into us with Light, abundant Light, infinite Light. When we offer gratitude, immediately God's Light comes pouring into our being.

from A Galaxy of Beauty's Stars

Apologia, Inc.

Apologia, Inc. strikes another blow in the eternal war with True Unbelievers, Ltd. ... Roger Scruton, a little less inscrutable and a little more lucid than usual, has penned an anti-Dawkins/Dennett, et al. whup-down in the virtual pages of Axess... teetering at times perilously close to stained-glass Cartesianism, though lite on the piffle (but, my goddess, what was all that folderol about various "conditions" and how "astonishing" they all were/are/is????).

I set it as my blog epigraph today, but since epigraphs on Blogger don't show up in the archives (they didn't used to, anyway), I want to share with you one of my favorite lines from Scruton's essay, in all its direct, noble, Henry Adams-esque beauty: "The great tapestry of waves and particles, of fields and forces, of matter and energy, is pinned down only at the edges, where events are crystallized in the observing mind."

OK, I wouldn't have gone with a passive verb in the final clause. But... a lovely and important riposte to the wishful thinking of materialists everywhere and their dorm-room dream of atoms and the void--the Real as a load of billiard-ball kibbles scrupulously adhering to the Ideal Gas Law... Scruton gets into a very interesting and admirably pithy meditation on consciousness as he approaches his peroration (even giving a shout-out to my homie Krishna!!!), including further wonderful observations that I'm tempted to quote but want to make you read because Scruton is one of the good guys and seems to evolving towards the tantric-empiricist school that includes, among others, Yours Truly and chaos theory rock star Stuart Kauffman (I swear I'm going to blog about Kaufman's new book, and the linked article...one day... )...

if you ever wondered what Nietzsche meant by "God is dead," and how that could actually be an affirmation and how Nietzsche could actually be a deeply spiritual writer--the answer is in the last three paragraphs of Scruton's essay, though he's a bit more nostalgic, it sounds like, for the C of E than for the Eleusinian Mysteries.

What else is going on? Sophia and I are finally scheduled to close on our new house tomorrow, after many scary and frustrating delays... "Temple of Doom" might not be the best name for it, since it's not just mine but Sophia's and her kids'... "Temple of Webkinz"?? "Temple of Cartoon Network"? "Temple of Algebra"? It will be a temple of love... and poetry... and the Divine in all Her polyfloral, mellifluously shifting forms... growing vinelike up the walls of matter to kiss Herself in the sunlight of spirit...

PPS

I killed the spider.

James wouldn't stay away, and though it isn't necessarily the man's job to deal with bugs, I felt it was my dharma and not Sophia's. Sophia, Kali bless her, is such a kind and compassionate and loving person that she was nearly beside herself, feeling bad for me (and my intended prey) in this unfortunate no-win choice. The spider, for her part, sensed what was coming; though she had endured daily visits from curious onlookers without so much as stirring in her web, on the Fateful Morning when I lifted the rusted water meter cover, she immediately began to run...

but you can't outrun Death, or Raid, and soon the deadly dark jewel of an arachnid writhed among the cast-off silk strands and insect corpses of her own death-dealing, and, with merciful speed, writhed no more. Before spraying I apologized and said a mantra a couple of times, so the black widow might have a good rebirth... which maybe she's had by now, two weeks hence--maybe her nimble legs now twitch in a finch's egg or amble their obedient way through ant tunnels... maybe her little dandelion soul blew over the road and over dusty vacant lots into a gray silk sac between fence wires, from which scores of baby spiders now burst into summer's fireball birth...

some to die in a day, some to spin webs of their own, some to mother the next meteor-spray of spiderlets to spread silk throughout the land... to adorn branches and fences with deadly, lovely strands... to weave the future...

On the Preservation of Life

"Gimme a break, Dalai Lama," squeaked my co-worker as I captured the spider in the Styrofoam cup and whisked it towards the door, towards freedom and safety.

The co-worker and I had both recently seen Brad Pitt as Heinrich Harrer in Seven Years in Tibet--let's get the monks to do zomezing induztriouz und blonde, like digging a ditch! But--nooooo, the pajama boys work in slo-mo lest their spades bisect a worm. That's the stereotypical Buddhist ethic, and though I am not a Buddhist I'm often confused with one since I follow one of Those Eastern Religions Where They Chant, Worship Psychedelic Posters, and Don't Kill Anything.

And I do try not to kill anything...though I am too literal-minded to be a vegetarian: I didn't snuff the chicken (nugget) or imprison the (veal) calf. My non-killing includes spiders and all manner of bugs and, yes-- worms, even the maggot that crawled out of the bird that Sophia, her son, and I buried after it had, a couple of days earlier, collided with a shed window. I mourned for the little fly larva's dislocation into a harsh new world of non-bird-innards; I worried that it would starve.

My non-killing is arguably not even a religious tic, since I've always been this way. I felt bad for bugs even as a kid--but no, not always--since I do remember a time when, armed with my clear plastic bug-catcher, I scoured the grasses and shrubs in search of the velvet ant, the eyed elater, the wheel bug, only to clap the lid on when I found them and leave them in not-so-benign neglect until they perished.

How old was I then? 4, 5, 6--yet at some point in my childhood I remember a thought-tide that soaked me: the old ways are wrong (was I 8?)... the bugs have to go free, and that the older kids who stomped on puffer fish they pulled up from crab traps were another, savage species. And that non-violent me has become "me," has replaced and superseded and overwritten all previous Kalibhaktas--and has made me feel pretty good about myself. I don't have to bear the guilt of the killers, but don't have to bear the silliness of the Vegans, either.

But becoming a part of Sophia's family is changing this. Her son, James, is 6 and at that bug-catching, stone-turning, frog-adopting age, the age of discovery. As his accomplice in many of his expeditions I've found myself faced with a choice: tell James to leave the caterpillar or the spider or the frog or the turtle alone (and interrupt his discovery of the world, his own search for the Mind underlying nature, and for his own Mind) or let him catch and maybe kill a worm or bug (and feel the guilt--but also feel the perspective, so speciesist but so irresistible: what is the life of one worm for a moment in the awakening of one boy?).

To embrace God is to embrace death, as part of the Plan, and for me it is also to embrace the awakening Self within everyone... the Self that stumbles over its alphabet until one day it can read Five Little Ducks with no help; the Self that wonders why we must die; the self in whose inner Smithsonian resides a discarded chicken bone found in the Target parking lot...the Self who grows beyond childish things to see the Light beyond its inner horizon, the opening Eye in the triangle of the heart.

I don't mean to romanticize childhood (or death...or God...)...not that they need romanticizing... but James is my teacher in his approach to the creation, which he approaches as a creation: why this? why that? --as if there are whys, which the 25-year-old me scoffed at but the 44-year-old me knows to be true. There are whys, and we're here to find them and because them, to discover and inhabit them. Chaos theory tells us that you can't unscramble an egg, and common sense tells us that to make an omelette you have to break a few eggs... and the dead face a better, evolutionary future, the Gita and other scriptures tell us... the dead bug and the dead Myanmar flood victim...and this may not make death any happier an occasion, but it shows us death's true role: Creator, Mother of beauty... James's awakening to his place in the world can only take place in the world, and the world, famously, notoriously, is soaked in death, soaked in the twinned essences of its bursting and withering blossoms, its knowing and unknowing leaves, its red and black, and sun and moon, and sex and death flowers...its cocoons and webs.

But who can know any of this? Who can know a cosmos without touching, without catching, without imprisoning or capturing some part of it, some part to compare to one's heart, some speck to press to the cheek of our intuition and feel its pulse, its kinship? We should let it go, lest it die, but our lives depend on the deaths of others, our histories as species or individuals rest upon mountains of dead...and we want to live and so we try to care for the worms, the spiders...the black widow Sophia let alone, that one that dwells in the water-meter cave in her front yard--she ordered Jim to steer clear and surely he will (the meter's also guarded by fire ants)... the web of danger, of mystery: our longing to embrace the world, our fear of being embraced...our deep sense that our life, our dear, close heartbeat, is but a brief breeze in some limitless sky.

(P.S. And now Sophia tells me that the meter reader will kill the black widow the next time he comes...and that she almost went out and got it... oh my god, the humanity-- or arachnidity, I guess... I'm reminded of the time--surely I blogged about this?? --early one morning driving through north Texas, a not-yet-fully-launched radio station playing "Feliz Navidad" over and over and over though it was June, and the mist rising over the highway, and as far as the eye could see: turtles, turtles in their dozens and hundreds, each creeping across the road that was filling up with more and more cars, and thus more and more potentially crushed and suffering reptiles. I wanted to save every last turtle, and I squirmed in my seat as the car rushed on, but there was literally a turtle every few feet, and the road stretched for miles... there was no saving them even for a squadron of do-gooders. Eventually my Al-Anon kicked in and I understood: I am not responsible for every turtle in Texas; each of them has its own fate, as do I, each of us a star with its own path, twinkling in life or in death in the body of our great Mother Sky... )

As Above, So Below

Science Daily: "Brain Waves Pattern Themselves After Rhythms of Nature."
Math dude: Consciousness = chaos...hallucination is to "reality" as branch is to root.

Online Dreammachine:

yours truly has been fantasizing about this since I first got a personal computer, back in the day of the 286. Fractint became WinFract became Fractal eXtreme, and lo, still there was no virtual Dreammachine...until now. And it works...you do have to sit close to the monitor, and other details of set and setting doubtless apply (I first used it while blasting The Who By Numbers and sipping absinthe; think, rather, Out of Stillness, yogic breathing, and incense...).

One morning in my youth I was riding a train, had been up all night on ginkgo and gotu kola, reading Nicole Brossard (talk about set and setting!) and I closed my eyes in exhaustion just in time for the train to enter a forest and the sun to fragment itself into limitless flashing daggers speeding between the trees...the light-play resolved itself variously into sea-waves and peacock feathers--an entire visual field of Krishna's peacock feathers elaborating themselves into flames of thought footnoting Nicole's Lovhers... it was Her, calling...

At Last--a Fractal Approach to Evolution

This interview is very exciting, and it's followed by some good links.

Sample quotes: "Scientists usually study natural selection at a single level, such as genes or individuals or even a population...but it takes place at all these levels simultaneously, and what happens at each scale resonates through the web of life..."

"Neo-Darwinian evolution isn't fixated at one level. It's being applied at different levels -- but in a given study, only at one level. There's been arguments: Dawkins argues that it happens at the gene, others at the level of individuals, and others at the level of species -- but there's now more of a growing consensus that it happens at all these different levels, and we don't understand how that comes about."

"When you get into the notion of different levels, you deal with problem of selection at different time scales -- for instance, when you talk about a particular individual, it's about what happens during their lifetime. They either make or don't make children. When you talk about human populations and human dynamics ... what's the time scale over which selection is happening there? It's not individual anymore. It's a longer scale altogether.... What time scales are relevant? It seems you end up with lots of different possible time scales. How do you unify all these different mechanisms taking place? And why are there all these different levels? That's the fundamental thing that makes life complex. And those points aren't accounted for by Darwinian evolution."

I've said before on this blog that, in my Crackpot Theory of Everything, evolution is the primary spiritual and physical mode of expression, the Divine Mother's signature in four-dimensional space. I remember fondly and with only a little embarrassment talking with one of my co-workers about creationism, and my talking turned into a mini-rant and I spurted out something like "So you have these chemical processes that give rise to amino acids that resolve themselves into photosynthetic organisms which, over countless millennia, become thinking entities that are able to uncover and reflect upon their own ultimate origins. That is the greatest story ever told!"

Ancient seers told this story, too; is it naive to think that the quantitative and visionary accounts are two groping hands each with their peculiar purchase on the elephant?