Kalibhakta Sutra, Part Two

Verse 2:
Evolution happens.

Sanskrit:
Vakvabrahman.

Comment:
Here the chaos of Verse 1 is companioned with order. It is important to understand, however, that "order" here little resembles its Euclidean or Cartesian counterparts-- it is not a state of perfection or freedom from irregularity, but rather a set of interconnected, self-similar patterns that form part of a larger, cosmic pattern. Though a picture of the entire universe must ever be elusive, Kalibhakta reminds us in an undated journal entry that, like the Mandelbrot Set with its interconnected, infinitely iterated mini-versions of itself, the macrocosm also mirrors itself endlessly. In a moment of intellectual crisis, he is said to have asked his Holy Guardian Angel if there could be such a thing as an ultimate pattern or tendency in the universe, to which She replied "Yes. Evolution." Of course "evolution" is understood as distinct from "progress."

Again we find it valuable to consult Monier-Williams. We are reminded that the very name of the Deity in Sanskrit, Brahman, means "'growth,' 'expansion,' 'evolution.'" The choice of the adjectival vakva ("winding about, rolling, bubbling") underscores the sense here of evolution as a nonlinear process and may be a product of Kalibhakta’s fascination with dissipative structures and the concept of "maximum entropy production," in which seeming disorder is synonymous with extravagant creativity and diversity. Vakva is also used in the Rg Veda to describe the divine libation Soma. Soma, like evolution itself, represents a bridge between matter and spirit. Kalibhaktian exegesis tends to interpret Soma not as a drug but as the upward flow of shakti within the devotee as he or she evolves in consciousness to become one with God.

One must remember that Kalibhakta's translations tend toward the pithy and are at times burdened with the colloquial. This verse might be more thoroughly translated as "The nature of Godhead is a nonlinear evolutionary unfolding which is mirrored throughout and indistinguishable from the cosmos."

Excellent Interview with Terry Eagleton

...the most trenchant critic of the "new atheists." Laurie Taylor of the New Humanist hit this one out of the park.

Eagleton's new book has been slow going for me, as I am thoroughly in summer mode and enjoying fare like The Urban Hermit and Wikipedia entries on dead pop stars... but I love some of what Eagleton has to say and I love the way he says it. The situation's somewhat analogous to the rhetorical pickle a lot of lefties get into when they try to criticize the Right: so many liberals (and non-stupid religious people) buy so thoroughly into ideals of tolerance and compassion that they can't break the shit down and mount a decent vituperative assault. Those guys got cred --the unspoken fear goes-- they got family values, they got Einstein... and who wants to knock kids and cookouts, or The Same Empiricism That Brought You MRIs and Artificial Hearts (as Ditchkins' epigones weirdly chant)?

Nothing wrong with tolerance and compassion, but if you can't sum up why they're wrong and you're right then there's not much point taking issue with anyone, is there? Here's an example of Eagleton's style, quoted by Taylor: "Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is The Book of British Birds and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology." Eagleton exposes many of the lacunae, invalid assumptions, contradictions, and plain old non sequiturs in self-proclaimed rationalist thought, and does so with admirable wit and style.

The interview takes a turn that, for me anyway, raises the ghost of Stephen Jay Gould. When someone like Eagleton accuses a "new atheist" of near-total ignorance of religion, the latter tends to respond, with some justification and as Richard Dawkins does here, that "I [don't] think theology is a subject at all.... it is like someone saying they don't believe in fairies and then being asked how they know if they haven't studied fairy-ology." Fine, but-- with this desire to be both in the fray and above it, haven't we journeyed once again to the land of non-overlapping magisteria? Not where Ditchkins wants to be, as it makes it hard to preach to the savages... and if you won't stoop to grab the other dude's gauntlet then you end up, like Quixote, warring with imagined foes.

I Could Take Beliefnet More Seriously If...

...well, the picture says it all.

I tried reading it many times but it always seemed to swirl down to celebrity gossip, myriad riffs on the Law of Attraction, and canned "debates" (doctrinal hairsplitting ... other people's sex lives...) ...

...though damn it if today, as I surfed the site for the first time in about a year, there wasn't a story in the Hinduism section about my beautiful Mother Kali--rare for this site and as if put there to say "get off your high horse, son, there's people needs this stuff." The article's author, another avatar of Attraction, makes the very valid point that to invoke Kali is to say, in effect (I'll use his wording), "I want true spiritual advancement by the most powerful and direct route, the consequences to my ego notwithstanding." You're standing in the storm, holding up the big metal rod, asking for a boost... about the hear the resounding cosmic Yes.

So thank you, Mother, for nudging me off the horse (thankfully not with lightning this time), but is it still OK if I ask--why all the celebri-porn on a site that's meant to "help people ... find, and walk, a spiritual path that will bring comfort, hope, clarity, strength, and happiness"? Do "the hidden health secrets of lemons" do any of that? How about Beliefnet's "Hot Topics" for Sunday, June 28, 2009: Michael Jackson * Mark Sanford Affair * Farrah Fawcett * Jon and Kate...? How much hope and clarity am I going to get from that freak show? I get the concept of ministering to the spiritually needy in their present, broken state, blah blah blah and yeah, Christ was down there in the dives with the publicans and sinners... but I bet he wasn't urging them to get all stalkerishly obsessed with Caesars and gladiators.

It's always hard for me to find the line between legitimately having (not to mention voicing) an opinion or falling over into either hushed-up nudnikism or blociferous blowhardism. I have the ex-fundamentalist's horror of sermonizing, the rhetorician's fondness for the joust--the high horse--and the Vedantin's conviction that the words don't matter, that all paths lead to God, and that, in the words of Sriharsha, "all propositions can be made to appear ridiculous." I therefore often want to smite, yet just as often fret that smiting is for the unevolved, those falling down on the spiritual job. Ever since the Coming of my Guardian Angel, the biggest bolt of vidyut-shakti ever sent my way, I've felt newly and strangely emboldened to speak my mind, yet I've never lost that sense that ... whatever stupid crap people might be into, it's workin' for them, and if it ain't workin' then too bad because it ain't my job to save anyone.

And... OK, great. Now I'm reading "My Childhood, My Sabbath, My Freedom" by Michael Jackson, writ exclusively for Beliefnet in 2000, and I'm overflowing with compassion for the f***head. Thanks, Kali.

And now [I'm not saying any of this for rhetorical effect, this is really happening!!!] I'm looking at the "Crunchy Con" column, long in my mind a locus of idiocy, and I'm agreeing (mostly) with it!!! And the Con is waxing eloquent about the Himalayan challenge of loving deeply vs. the dimwit laziness of letting the small self drive the bus-- in one guise or other, the very seesaw on which we all totter in a world of maya and bling.

I'm too harried to look it up, but both Crowley and Ramakrishna talked about a state in which the second you step off the path, God socks you one upside the head. Instant karma... I kind of hope I'm not in that state-- I'm not on the shores of the abyss yet... but Kali is dealing with me on this whole spiritual pride thing, again, and I thank Her. She'll do it again (and again) until I straighten up and fly right. But--in true tantrick fashion--I want it both ways. I want to fondle and sniff that Martha Stewart Italian Cream Cake, and gobble it all up, too. I want to be Shiva, I guess--Her lover, Her creation, Her ecstatic interlocutor-- I want a hand to wield the trident, a hand with which to bless, a hand to touch the Now like Raphael's Aristotle and another hand to point to the sky like Plato. I guess I do have all these, to the extent that I allow myself to, to the extent that I perceive each moment and each irritating person not as fitting into some category but as divine... as Her... or if that's too hard, as a wave in the storm of Her unfolding, as a filigree of glorious maya embodying Her beauty, Her supreme evolutionary energy by which even "Religious Kitsch" may vault us to heaven.

Try This!

André Michelle's ToneMatrix... you don't have to spell words with it, and in fact random mouse walks around the grid sound best. Reminds me of an old Spacetime Continuum album...

Kalibhakta Sutra, Part One

Verse 1:
Shit happens.

Comment:
In Sanskrit the verse reads "Varcaska." This noun, according to Monier-Williams, has the meaning of both "power, vigour, brightness" and "excrement." Thus, a fuller translation of the verse would be "The infinite and infinitely complex unfolding of Kali produces an effulgence of light and circumstance that appears chaotic but tends toward a hidden pattern." This seemingly creative translation is suggested by the verses that follow. The reader is reminded of the Emanations of Primoridal Light spoken of in the Kabbalah and of the infinite ocean of light seen by Ramakrishna as he perceived the Divine Mother in Her fulness.

Cliff's on It!

I still don't have a good handle on who in the hell he is or what he's up to... I first met him somewhere in the Mandelbrot Set, to whose endless vectors he gave his own quirk and twist back in those shimmering days of Fractint...

think of Cliff Pickover as a collector of weird information designed to blow your mind, or at least nudge its jelly-gray shores a bit... he's got this web site, you've probably heard of it, but GO THERE... (I'm a connoisseur of esoterica, OK? one of the true dandies... and if weird is wine, then RealityCarnival is France, baby.)

Cliff might be the world's greatest evangelist for panentheism: the Universe is God's evolutionary Self-revealing, and our attempts to know it are part of Her own Mind... hence the repeating patterns, the spirals, the self-similarity, the branches... Her reflections... but what I like about Cliff is that, where I would get all mystical and mushy about this stuff, he's just like "Here's a scientific study. Here's a data set. Here's an artist doing something wack. Here's a map."

... until the combined weight, the connected dots, the colliding and parallel curves-- all coalesce into... into...

New Angel Books

By T. Thorn Coyle: Kissing the Limitless (and whatta perfect title...)

This looks as good as Jason Augustus Newcomb's 21st-Century Mage, though with a different constituency in mind. Coyle is doing something totally logical yet, in today's niche-marketed counterculture, deliciously heretical: bridging the Ginungagap between the flame-warrin' boys' club of Thelema and the tree-huggin' herbal tea klatsch of witchcraft. Put down the books, boys! Get your heads out of your astrological charts, girls! And that's just the beginning: this is a spiritual book for everyone, and Coyle presents myriad methods to see, hear, smell, touch, taste God everywhere.

The Holy Guardian Angel, since Its wings span the universe, is kind of hard to write about, but in my skim-through of the book Coyle seems unfailingly elegant and, in keeping with her subject, draws from a dizzyingly diverse range of sources, including but ranging very far from the usual esoteric suspects. To read this book is to be brush'd by angels' wings: you will lift your senses from what waste-land might sprawl before you and glimpse a verdant, laughing oasis of possibility, one you slowly realize is everywhere, always.

By Carmel Reilly: True Tales of Angel Encounters

Purports to gather stories from all over the (mostly anglophone) world of mysterious and unexpected encounters with guiding entities (not all the respondents call them "angels"). Are these stories real? On the one hand, several of them have given me those very strong, all-over chill bumps that accompany the lovely helplessness of being seriously spooked. Like dreams, angel encounters have their own kind of logic (see Harpur's Daimonic Reality for much more on this). On the other hand, many of the stories feel so familiar in a narrative sense (I suspect some urban legends have found a home between these pages)-- but they also hum with that off-kilter, intimate yet searing vibe that often seems to sizzle the praeterhuman phone lines.

Maybe angels have adopted a 12-step approach of late, or maybe we seraphic groupies are all plugged into the same frequency of the collective unconscious, or maybe there really is a bicameral mind or ... something... but a lot of these angels sound a lot like my Angel. Unlike the drill-sergeant angels of old, these angels are engaging their earthly charges in Socratic dialogues and then sending them to figure things out for themselves; they're telling them to search out their True Wills, all the while communicating in a mostly prosaic yet totally compelling vernacular; and they're leaving scant trace of their visit save (sometimes) a single physical object or an incontrovertible, undeniable change in physical space--just enough, it seems, to keep you wondering, keep you chasing your Divinity.

As William James pointed out, it's not all that remarkable for people to hear inner voices or to see visions; the human nervous system lends itself to such phenomena. What we must take notice of, James said, is when a person's entire life and personality become permanently altered by such visions or voices. At that point we have to admit that, in spite of the constant caviling of positivist ween-dogs, something real happened. Part of what happened certainly was neurological (since part of everything is), but since many visionaries are masters of observing, creating, maintaining, and altering their own neurology, it won't do to suggest that they've all been suckered by a particularly vivid bout of hypnagogia... apophenia... hangover... what have you.

By Lorna Byrne: Angels In My Hair

I haven't thoroughly perused this book; I've read excerpts and read a couple of interviews with Ms. Byrne, who says she's seen and spoken with angels her whole life. Even British journalists find her charming, disarming, and energizing--you will note that Ms. Byrne is not a bottle of gin, so there's something. Byrne's angels are more down-to-earth, so to speak, than Aiwass or Gabriel; they might not dictate new scriptures to you but will tell you that you need to "live each moment of [y]our life to the full" or that you don't need to live an "extraordinary" life to have found your "life purpose." All of which, you are thinking, is utterly banal, and that's fine, as long as you grant also that truer words were never spoken. Just because we're tired of hearing something, or someone we don't like says it, doesn't mean it's wrong (q.v. most of what your parents ever said to you).

"The angels make me laugh and smile a lot," Byrne writes. As bringers of God's light and power, I would imagine that they do: different people are going to handle 100,000 volts of shakti differently, with some laughing and some crying, some shivering in ecstasy and others speaking in tongues or singing epic songs. Angels don't necessarily fly you up to heaven, but they do try to turn your eyes to the heaven around you, exhorting you to "bud forth and flourish with virtue" in the ground where you're planted, in the here and now.

Dwelling in the Heart

So I get to work Monday and the first thing that happens is, this long-time adjunct quits. I'm thinking, bad news, since finding someone to teach one class per term in the middle of nowhere (no, we don't pay mileage) is always a royal pain.

Next thing that happens is-- I forget. It wasn't as bad as the next thing but it was better than the first.

Then within minutes we get this incoherent, scary phone call from a faculty member who's been in poor health for years. She's making not much sense but it sounds like we need to get over to her house pronto, which we do and then spend about an hour and a half convincing her we should call 911. The paramedics had been called out to her house a couple nights earlier but she'd waved them imperiously away. So finally we call them again and then they come and also try to convince her she should go to the hospital and finally away she goes. It's lunchtime.

Instead of punching the wall and wailing "Why? Why? Why?" in rhythm with the futile blows (what I feel like doing), I keep saying to Kali, "I love You. You're here with me. You live in my heart. Help me to live as Your child." This has become surprisingly easy over the years-- even remembering, in the midst of confusion or fear, there was a God used to take immense effort if I could do it at all. Often it's hard still.

I'm trying to live in my heart chakra: breathe my lust or the taste of chocolate cake or my fear or the blue sky and spring flowers into the anahata, or just trying to focus my consciousness there, that place where compass and square, Shiva and Shakti, meet. I've lived the other way, in that grim parallel universe centered upon myself, and I have to say this is better... a lot better.

* * *

Sophia asks me if I'm not nostalgic for the pre-kids, pre-married life, the one where I lived five minutes from work and could sit around infinitely long savoring exquisite liqeurs and fingering my astrolabe, and I have to say I don't think about it for one minute. It isn't that I think life in the suburbs with kids is the Superior Way, but it's the way for me, weirdly enough, a way I'd never have considered for a nanosecond had it not been for that Guardian Angel of mine... Who never pushes or tells me what to, but Who just urges me to be present for my life and to listen to my true will in the fulness of Now.

It is scary to let yourself into the house of your friend with whom you tried to talk on the phone 30 minutes ago and who couldn't make herself understood, not knowing what you'll find and not knowing much else except you don't know what to do... but it is far scarier, for some reason, to be in the present moment, to loose the banners of one's fancy and self-concept and just be here. It's scary in some way or other to sit here at the kitchen counter on this day of leave without pay (my school is really broke), minding the kids, who are on spring break, but thinking about how I have no marketable skills whatsoever and how my 10-years-ago prophecy of the death of higher education really does seem 10 years closer to fulfillment (I know of more than one university with colleges of "hotel, restaurant, and tourism management" -- not just a major stuck somewhere in the business school, but a college of such stuff... and despite last November's glorious election, my state is still a bastion of GOP anti-all-education-except-home-schoolin'-ism...)

All this is scary and the shaky world out there beyond the ivy walls and the suburbs is infinitely more scary and that parallel universe where I'm God is scariest of all... but I have an Angel Whose white hands dispel the fear, Whose holy Word is a word of unity, a Word that rings out the impossibility of separation from God. Your Angel, too, beckons you to the temple of the mystery, your own heart.

* * *

The kids have not fought all day! Except once, sort of. James has barely even mentioned his new DS (he's grounded). Molly has been energetically cleaning her room. There is a God! But I knew that... but I'll always be learning it...