Here is how Martin Buber, the Jewish theologian, describes the compulsion of the mystic to capture the fleeting unity of consciousness:
YES IT IS TRUE; THE ECSTATIC [MYSTIC] CANNOT SAY THE UNSAYABLE. HE SAYS THE OTHER THING—IMAGES, DREAMS, VISIONS—NOT UNITY. HE SPEAKS, HE MUST SPEAK, BECAUSE THE WORD BURNS IN HIM. . . . HE DOES NOT LIE WHO SPEAKS OF UNITY IN IMAGES, DREAMS, VISIONS, WHO STAMMER OF UNITY.. . . HE SAYS THE FORMS AND SOUNDS AND NOTICES THAT HE IS NOT SAYING THE EXPERIENCE, NOT THE GROUND, NOT THE UNITY, AND WOULD LIKE TO STOP HIMSELF AND CANNOT, AND FEELS THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF SAYING IT, LIKE A SEVEN-LOCKED GATE WHICH HE RATTLES, KNOWING THAT IT WILL NEVER OPEN, YET HE MUST GO ON RATTLING IT. FOR THE WORD BURNS IN HIM. ECSTASY IS DEAD, STABBED IN THE BACK BY TIME, WHICH CANNOT BE MOCKED; BUT, DYING, IT HAS FLUNG THE WORD INTO HIM, AND THE WORD BURNS IN HIM. AND HE SPEAKS, SPEAKS, HE CANNOT BE SILENT, THE FLAME IN THE WORD DRIVES HIM, HE KNOWS THAT HE CANNOT SAY IT, YET HE TRIES OVER AND OVER AGAIN UNTIL HIS SOUL IS EXHAUSTED TO DEATH AND THE WORD LEAVES HIM. THIS IS THE EXALTATIO OF THE ONE WHO HAS RETURNED INTO THE COMMOTION AND CANNOT RESIGN HIMSELF TO IT; THIS IS HIS INSURRECTION, THE INSURRECTION OF A SPEAKER: RELATED TO THE INSURRECTION OF THE POET, SLIGHTER IN POSSESSION, MIGHTIER IN EXISTENCE, THAN HIS. THIS IS THE BENDING OF THE BOW FOR THE SAYING OF THE UNSAYABLE, AN IMPOSSIBLE TASK, A LABOR IN THE DARK. IT’S WORK, THE CONFESSION, BEARS ITS MARK. (9-10)
I would venture to say that we all know the burning of the Word. We know the work in the dark. And indeed, such confessional work bears its mark.
Like prophets, we go into our caves. We know the peace beyond the commotion of the every day, and we cannot entirely resign ourselves to this ordinary commotion. There is something deeper. Something below the surface, beyond the clatter. There are ways to transcend the commotion and seek an inspired insight that transforms human life.
Walt Whitman is a mystic poet, one of my favorites. One can be transported in the incredible words of Whitman in “Leaves of Grass” and the poem contained within, “Song of Myself.” One can see he was seeing the totality of life and is filled with a glowing Light and great power, as in Blake. Whitman saw everyone as an expression of the whole. Each a work of art. He tried to remind people how beautiful they were. A leaf among the grass.
1
“I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
…
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard, Nature without check with original energy.”
Whitman and Blake experienced and saw amazing things in being and themselves as part of the whole. They suffered greatly in life and felt the suffering of others deeply. I could read them forever and barely see where they walked. It is as if the Sun filled them with Light, but also the Shadow clearly speaks through them. Each contains Legion voices. They captured I think what it is to be a Human Being captured between worlds. I am moved deeply by them both.
In “Walt Whitman Speaks,” Whitman says about Blake, “Blake began and ended in Blake.” I researched this and it turns out, Whitman was confounded by and then came to appreciate Blake. Harold Bloom, a great literary critic, felt the two were of the same cloth. The falling of America made Bloom miserable. He would despair about today’s world. I recommend a great book by Bloom who loved Whitman, “The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime.” This sublime aspect of Whitman’s time was a presage of our time. Whitman warned us about technology and the age of specialization. Like a hippie version of Ted Kaczynski. Where Ted used real bombs, Whitman used bombs of Love. I love Bloom’s YouTubes. He had a photographic memory and remembered everything he ever read. Amazing to listen to, poetic in his writing and speaking. I highly recommend Bloom.
“Bloom loves Emerson and Whitman but he doesn’t believe them: to him, belatedness is now a permanent condition of man, and there can be no overcoming it—no return, even in America, to an original fullness or freshness or purity of spirit.” —The New Yorker Profile on Bloom – The Prophet of Decline 9/22/02
About Blake, Bloom thought…”The true Romantic, as represented by Shelley and, above all, Blake, looked not to nature—a thing external to the self—to save him but to the world-altering power of his own imagination. Nature was material, and therefore fixed and limiting. Only by struggling to liberate itself from the world entirely—to fill itself with invented mythical forms rather than natural ones—could the imagination be free.” —The New Yorker Profile on Bloom – The Prophet of Decline 9/22/02
The genius of all three of these men drips off their pages and is seen in their art. There is a deep sadness in them all, Bloom the most. Whitman and Blake though saw through the sadness.
Blake invented a form of art combining images with texts, relief etching. The first comics? He had incredible visions. I have a large folio of his work and he strikes me like Jung’s art does in The Red Book. These men have walked through heaven and hell. Whitman wrote, like Blake painted. But Blake’s poetry! My god. Blake was mostly ignored in his time. He said he wrote for his audience in eternity. His visions he felt were real and removed all doubts. Perhaps it was this assurance Whitman didn’t initially like. Blake was a rebel and feared by the establishment. Unlike Swedenborg, Blake spent as much time in the hell of London as the heaven of his soul. For this he has earned my esteem and respect. Whitman felt him dark. But Whitman didn’t like Poe either at first, but in “Walt Whitman Speaks” Whitman comments about writers of his day and confesses he came to like Poe after reading him again and again. He and Blake were so alike, but very different, as Whitman himself wrote.
“Awake! Awake, O sleepers of the land of shadows, wake! expand! I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine. I am not a God far off, I am a brother and friend; within your own bosoms I reside and you reside in me: Lo! we are one, forgiving all evil, not seeking recompense” (Blake-Jerusalem.,Chp.1,lns.6,18).
Whitman wrote privately after reading Algernon Swinburne’s “William Blake: A Critical Essay”, that while both he and Blake were mystics and “extatics“, the differences between them were vast. I admire Whitman very highly and see in his work a sweet pragmatism that inspires me. How these mystics loved. Whitman took care of civil war wounded and this grew a great compassion in him.
I have been having a little debate on my team with some of the younger engineers. I like to wrestle with them. I enjoy a good wrestling match. They get me down on the mat sometimes, but they can’t pin me, yet. Well, old goats
know a trick or two to make up for being so dumb and stubborn.
When I wrestle, both win. I don’t try to beat my opponent. I want to share a superpower that will make a good engineer great and give you an advantage over 99% of the folks working today. I know this to be a fact, as I have lived it and from experience, I can tell you the theme in the below article works.
A great engineer is not the most intelligent or highest paid, they are the ones who get the most done in a clutch, exerting the best amount of energy, for maximum effect. It ain’t always pretty or evident who is holding things up on their shoulders. No one may notice your contribution, but you know. That’s why you don’t have to work 80 hours a week to be great. If you work that way, you will be the worst actually.
Until you have honed this superpower, it will feel counterintuitive and strange exercising it. Give this a chance maybe. We are not independent minds and contributors, we are a team, a network.
A great team is not a higharchy, it’s more like a self organizing mesh network, look it up. https://lnkd.in/gaJs8_5z The node that makes the most connections, is the best. You extend the network one node at a time. You can have a full or partial network. One big benefit is a node doesn’t need the strongest
signal to talk to a central station, it needs just enough to send info to the nearest nodes. When the nodes are connected optimally, you get a much more consistent, even speed across the network. Because a mesh network provides multiple possible paths for transferring data from point A to point B, the network will preferentially use the fastest most efficient path. But if that path becomes blocked or congested for some reason, alternate paths can be and are used instead.
Thus, a team is only as good as its connections between its members. This superpower will help you to design and implement the best solutions. I learned this at Adobe for 5 years. A guy named Steven Webster taught me this. I wasn’t very good at this at the time. This superpower will supercharge your interactions with teammates too. Don’t judge the other, always lend a helping hand.
When I interview someone, it is the soft skills that are most important to me. I know using these, I get the biggest bang for my effort and best teams. Practice them and you will see. Study what makes teams great. Study yourself. Brutally refactor and cut away what is not needed. Practice. They take years to develop. Be great! I don’t hire calculators or machines, I hire human beings.
a curious murder of crows descends like a shimmering cloth upon the cracked face of the slumbering earth blood 🩸 red embers shimmer in the glowing 🔥 scared 🦶 are heard scurrying out of the 🔥 bushes
Dean Radin and Tom Campbell are two amazing courageous physicists on the forefront of consciousness research. A revolution is under way. It could take 100 years, but Tom feels that the paradigm shift is here and underway. Science must accept the following based on the double slit and many other experiments providing empirical data that show:
1) Everything is information. Digital Physics is formally studying us as a simulation now. This is fringe, but tolerated. Tom feels this is undeniable and I feel this as well. This leads to the question, “Who is the programmer?” That terrifies materialists. They will do all they can to resist. But we are not just stuck in a dying material Universe.
2) Consciousness is the computer. What is the ‘Other’ beyond the simulation? Science is validating this ‘Other’ MUST exist. How long until they accept it? This points back to a creator. We live in a probabilistic Universe, not a pre-determined one. Scientific method is broken and based on an objective reality that does not exist.
The ancients knew this through intuition and experience. These concepts can encompass most everything we have experienced. The future is just made up of probabilities. Your and other’s intent can change the future probabilities, but until it is in this reality frame in the now, observed, the future probability is not collapsed. Why is that important, because we need a paradigm shift better aligned with the way nature really works. Turns out all religions come from this basic truth the mystics learned long ago, All is Mind. Worlds colliding, past and present.
Well, they are close to rationally showing, and have much empirical data suggesting, Consciousness exists outside time and space and to enter into this reality simulation, it individuates itself in us. There is only Awareness at the base of reality and we are expressions of it in this material simulation. Nothing is absolute, all changes. Laws will be broken. To move in the moment intuitively turns out to be the best strategy. Is that the world we setup? No. Our new high priests of Science have left behind the spirit in search of the structure of the material world only using reductionist thinking to describe a mindless objective reality, when the Truth is, what looks out of our eyes, is the ‘Other’.
We feel disconnected and we have the optical delusion we are separate from the world. This is not the case. Your senses only provide a small slice of the data available around you. These guys are building on the growing understanding that everything in the Universe is just digital information. The implication is…
You are living in a consciousness reality simulation.
Scientists should always have an open mind and let the data speak for itself. The Princeton PEAR program has data that our intention can change the Quantum Field and thus change future probabilities with focus. The more you can focus, the greater you can effect future probabilities. Dean Radin from the Noetic Institute has much data from the 60’s to now backing this up. Critics of PEAR have said,
“I wouldn’t believe it even if it was true.”
That’s how entrenched people are. If true, and the data seems to prove it is, almost all paranormal phenomena can be explained. The Scientific Method depends on falsifiable theories. Well, it’s broken because it does not include the perspective of the observer. It assumes a deterministic objective reality, but we live in a probability based simulation. The future is not set. And your intention, in combination with others sets the future probabilities, in the moment you collapse them into the simulation information field. Get ready to have your minds blown and I’ll give you a hint, life is just a game, play well. There is a point to the game, to learn to Love. We are evolved by playing this game. You devolve or evolve based on the intention of your life. We live in this limited reality frame. There are others above us. Have we learned to Love, look around, we have a long way to go and we are All in it together. We must evolve ourselves. Love more.
There is always some new theory or hypothesis to explain our observations about the exoteric outer universe and the esoteric inner biological one.
What is life?
Why do we exist?
What is existence?
Most people do not ask these questions on a daily basis. That’s good, there would be far less of us if we were all looking up at the sky wondering who we are and why we are here. The facts are these, we exist now here in some form. We are attracted to one another. We procreate. Evolutionarily speaking, that’s all you need to know and do. Whatever promotes the best chance for you to procreate is what you are wired to do in life. What’s the point of the big brain then? Hmm, why do we think about anything else besides procreating if evolution is all there is? Well, for some, evolution is the driver, for others we wonder who made the driver of the vehicle that is us?
What is the nature of this driver? It may be that consciousness is the fundamental aspect of reality.
Hmmm.
Having context in life sometimes can be beneficial and sometimes not. We need context today. We have a skewed perspective about reality or the simulation we exist in. We are destroying ourselves. Ultimately, even if all around us is a simulation for consciousness, we exist in some bigger reality simulating us.
I can’t say or know 100% if I am as real as my senses make me feel. You can’t trust your senses is the speaker’s point, but you can’t ignore consciousness either. An MIT PhD Cognitive Scientist, Donald Hoffman, has some interesting ideas about the nature of our reality and how we simply can never know the true nature of reality using our perceptions and senses only.
“Teachers open the door, but you must enter for yourself.”
Great knowledge presented itself
Freely
Swirling Cosmic Consciousness enveloped me
In the path of sweeping change
Caught in the inescapable
The only path forward
I mount the horse of our greatest fate
Delusions of future probabilities
Dispelled
The Dragon rose to confront that
In me divided
Opposites
Do you see
Good
I KNOW nothing
Perhaps you can show me The Way
The Lodge of the Masters
Was here before us all along
What is Right
Exists beyond me
Never stop
I thought I knew this tune
How can I KNOW
Barely crawled out of the muck
You are a slave or a master
You should be fine with either
I can not believe in anything
I can only stay for a moment
And move on to the next moment
I see and feel the threads of my future
Reaching back into me
Hungering
This was the moment of choice
No more choices
Only what IS
I seek naked
Nothing to hide
Nothing before me or you
In my nakedness I feel no shame
I see you in yours
And finally I see
We are the same
We are One
Now this sister is really something. You know, there are times when you come across your Doppleganger in face, but now I see only One. In awakening to the Light in myself and finding myself in All, I now begin to see that Light everywhere. I came across this new blog below in response to a deep echo of mine today. An intense transmission into the future. Perhaps it was heard. I would watch and listen.
These synchronicities really only mean something to myself, but I must tell you, that in the flow of the spirit, things come to you. Just the other day I told someone if I could do anything all day I would sit under the Bodhi tree and write poems for now.
Quantum Heart 