Well, you know that I love to live with you
But you make me forget so very much
I forget to pray for the angels
And then the angels forget to pray for us
(—from, So Long, Marianne, song by Leonard Cohan)We are moving from perspectival viewing to aperspectival seeing. Where everything is looking from everywhere and everywhere is being seen.
for here there is no place that does not see you.
You must change your life.
(—from, Archaic Torso of Apollo, poem by Rainer Maria Rilke )We don’t see angels because there is nothing to see. Angels are the intelligence behind everything that is. Mostly, we cannot see behind us. Mostly, we cannot read situations. And if angels are the intelligence behind situations, and we are ignorant of the readout of situations, then we need help with literacy.
There is no intelligence the equal of the situation.Arrive anywhere, intelligence is there. Leave anywhere, intelligence remains there and is waiting for your next step, next arrival.
(—from, Love, poem by Charles Olson)
Many arrivals make us live
(—from, Manifestation, poem by Theodore Roethke)Angels are arrivals at situations longing to be seen.
Who is like God
Heals
Strength
Beauty
A powerful life-force
Helping across
Seeing God
There are only two ways:
Create the situation (and this is love)
Or avoid it. This also can be Love.
(Charles Olson, Love)
Now, to get something absolutely clear, you must understand that angels are not humans who have died and gone to heaven. Angels are a different kind of being altogether. For most of the Church, angels are pure intelligences (that is they have no physical bodies) and are among God’s first created beings (insofar as we can talk about creation being ordered or taking place in time). Angels are guiding principles of creation. Stratford Caldecott goes so far as to identify the kinds of animals mentioned in Genesis 1.24 (not each specific animal but the fact that God created them of, or according to, every kind) as angels. He writes:
“I am sure the Book of Genesis still contains many mysteries. We read the story of Adam naming the animals, and then we discover that at least one of the animals in the Garden is an angel. The serpent is that creature of God sometimes called the Archangel Lucifer. What if all the animals in the story were angels? In fact, what if the story is about the relationship of the archetypal Man with archetypal Angels: and the archetypal Animals are none other than the angels of tradition” (The Radiance of Being, 54).
(Angels in Creation: Reflections on Our “Older” Siblings for Michaelmas, 9?29/16, by David Russell Mosley)Intelligence behind the manifestation of each thing. A resignation of presence.
God is
what is
coming
to beThere is no future and no past.
A: (9. 1. 9. 1. 9) (The answer fluctuates according to the ability of the human being to understand the question.)
A: Nein, one; nein, one; nein! (The answer indicates both a definite response as well as a dyslexic misspelling.)
The Present
For the present there is just one moon,
though every level pond gives back another.
But the bright disc shining in the black lagoon,
perceived by astrophysicist and lover,
is milliseconds old. And even that light's
seven minutes older than its source.
And the stars we think we see on moonless nights
are long extinguished. And, of course,
this very moment, as you read this line,
is literally gone before you know it.
Forget the here-and-now. We have no time
but this device of wantonness and wit.
Make me this present then: your hand in mine,
and we'll live out our lives in it.
(—Poem by Michael Donaghy,1954-2004)There!
“Nobody can discover the world for anybody else. It is only after we have discovered it for ourselves that it becomes a common ground and a common bond, and we cease to be alone ... (--Wendell Berry, A Place on Earth )
And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our feet, and learn to be at home.” (-- Wendell Berry, The Unforeseen Wilderness: Kentucky's Red River Gorge)You are alone with the Alone.
Little Elegy
Oh how he loved his cup
and now he’s dirt
under the pine trees
–Li PoA moment of silence at Soup Kitchen
for our saint of the quick grip, faking
a side stitch to hide the bottle under his coat,
for his taped shoes and worm-eaten watch cap,
that clarifying fish pier scent, raw-grained
and terrifying smell of the skids,
how little it takes to wake up over a grate,
half-dissolved in shadow and mist–
half-dissolved, but still blissed out, bantering
with buddies, flailing on icy streets,
then catching hold of a lamppost and nodding
to it, to the sky, the glittery walk,
to a passing taillight, an old belief,
foolish or fearless, that everything’s sacred,
and now he’s gone.
(--poem by Betsy Sholl “Little Elegy” is from Late Psalm (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004).That grate is not far in the dream from which I wake shivering.
For me, that there's something "out there" and that I'm here no longer meant anything, because every time I thought there was something out there, it turns into inevitably something opposed to me. Something I have to define myself against, whether that's God, or whether that's a Christian, or whether that's a Muslim, or whether that's a Buddhist. And that's not my experience.
My genuine experience of life is that there is nothing "out there." This is all there is. And when you see the seamlessness of it all, that's what I mean by "God." Every tradition has that. Every morning, three times a day since I'm five or six years old, I've been saying, "Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One." Right? It's one of our few creedal statements, the Shema. Three times a day, since I'm six years old.
If you ask what 9/11 really did, it made me understand the truth of that. The truth of that, "Everything is one." Not that there's some guy hanging out there who has it all together, who we call "One," but that it is all one. We all know it deep down. We've all had those experiences. whether it's looking at our child in a crib or whether it's looking at our lover or looking at a mountaintop, or looking at a sunset. Right? We've all had those experiences. And we recognize, "Whoa. I'm much more connected here."
That's what those firemen had. They recognized; they didn't have time to think about it, right? Because actually, if you think about it, you begin to create separations. They didn't think about it. All they knew is we're absolutely connected. We're absolutely connected to the 86th floor. Well, that's where God is. That's not where God is. God isn't anywhere. That's what we mean when we say God. ...
(--from, Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero, PBS interview, Rabbi Irwin Kula, winter 2002)Words take on so much more when they are deeply felt.
Stones: Stones are very slow stories with secret memories of fire inside. If you just put a stone on a table it becomes an altar, and a temple appears around it.
(—John Tarrant, in Meet the Blue Dragon, Lion’s Roar, 31july19)Dont make anything out of it.
Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Characterby Kay Redfield Jamison, 2017It’s a hard and distressing disease.
All’s misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
(—from his poem Epilogue, 1977)
[Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible . . . . all things were created through him and for him [Colossians 1:15]. . . .
But Teilhard felt that the full cosmic significance of this vision and its physical reality had been overlooked among his coreligionists. . . .
When Teilhard tried to stress the cosmic aspect and bring it forward as a central motif in the Christian view of reality, his friends were embarrassed. . . . Teilhard apparently had an instinctive grasp of something which he was not free to express under the terms of his tradition. Yet it was a vital feature of his own system, in fact, it was the bond which he so desperately sought between his God in heaven, taught by his religion, and his God in the earth, taught by science and experience in life. The story of his life is the story of his struggle to bring this darkly sensed Mediator into such a form that both sides of him could live with it. It was a terrible conflict, but it produced a great many beautiful fruits both in his writings and in his own character. . . .
The central conception in Teilhard’s notion of the cosmic Christ is that “the universe forms one natural whole, which finally can subsist only by dependence from [Christ]. That’s the main thing.” [1] Teilhard sees himself as “the evangelist” of “Christ in the universe,” one who preaches Christ as containing “all the unyielding immensity and grandeur of the world.” [2] His “fundamental vision” [3] as expressed in The Divine Milieu is of Christ as All-in-everything, in its reality and in its future.
When some say we are meant to dwell in God, they are suggesting something much deeper that one might suspect.(— in, Cosmology: Part Two, All-in-Everything, Beatrice Butreau, in Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation, Wednesday, September 4, 2019)
I. ‘BEABLES’ AND INDUCTION
When I was in graduate school in Scotland, I was told the following parable by my advisors. An economist, a mathematician, and a logician were on a train traveling north. Just after they passed the Scottish border they noticed a single cow standing in a field. The economist remarked, “That cow is brown. All cows in Scotland must be brown.” The mathematician replied, “No, one cow in Scotland is brown.” The logician quietly but firmly muttered “No, one side of one cow in Scotland is brown.” There are many versions of this parable involving a variety of professions and there are any number of lessons to be taken from it. It is usually meant as a dig at one of the particular professions that is included, especially when told by a member of one of the other professions. At the heart of the parable, though, is an open question: how much can we reasonably infer from a given observation?
It is worth noting here that my advisors were both mathematicians. As such, I always had the impression that the parable, as they told it, was meant as a dig at both economistsand logicians. Clearly the economist has over-extrapolated from the given data. That point is hardly up for debate. But has the logician under-extrapolated? The fact is that our intrepid travelers do not know if the cow is the same color on both sides absent additional information. It is entirely possible that the mathematician, in casually suggesting that the cow was entirely brown, was wrong. Yet, in our own experience with cows, most of us would probably think it highly unlikely that a cow had such asymmetrical coloring as to be entirely different on either side.
...
For the purposes of science, the existence of certain things is taken as self-evident. I may awake tomorrow to find that I am actually a Buddhist monk living in a monastery in the Himalaya and that my life as a physicist was nothing but a dream. The logician mightrightly point out that I can’t disprove that. But it doesn’t help me in the here and now where, dream or not, I am a physicist. As one unnamed reviewer in Philosophical Magazineonce put it, science is the “rational correlation of experience” (as quoted in [13]). In order to ‘do’ science we must have some common base from which we can build our theories. So we assume that certain elements of our collective experience simply must exist. In fact the logician in the parable does not deny the existence of the cow nor even that one side of the cow is brown. The denial is only of an inferred experience. The logician takes the phrase “rational correlation of experience” literally in that none of the travelers ‘experience’ (observe) the other side of the cow. They can only rationally correlate what they directly experience. Of course that’s a problem for quite a few theories. Here is where Bohr and Bell are right; the world of our direct experience is classical[*].
(from, Bell’s Theory of Beables and the Concept of ‘Universe’Ian T. Durham Department of Physics, Saint Anselm College, Manchester, NH 03102(Dated: May 8, 2018)
From one's perspective.[* What is the definition of classical physics?clas·si·cal physics (klăs′ĭ-kəl)Physics that is based on Newton's laws of motion and does not make use of quantum mechanics and the theory ofrelativity. ♦ Classical mechanics refers to Newton's laws of motion and other principles of mechanics based on them.Classical mechanics does not work when dealing with bodies (such as electrons) moving at speeds close to that oflight, or when making measurements of atoms and subatomic particles. These phenomena can only be described byquantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. ](--The American Heritage® Student Science Dictionary, Second Edition. Copyright © 2014 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. )
It is the self consciousness of the collapse and meaninglessness of our spiritual reality which has lost the efficacy to provide us with the live meaning of our being. Gebser's uniqueness consists however in his profound insight into the today's situation of our spiritual reality. Namely, as mentioned above (at the beginning), he saw a transition of the structure of consciousness and its confusion resulted from the struggle between the power of conservatism and the surge of the new consciousness and its phenomena ready to make a leap.
This Gebser calls the integral structure of consciousness which is revealed in the aperspective world whose characteristics are becoming evident in visual arts, music and sciences and philosophies.
One of the characteristics is disclosed in the concretion of time, whose early emergence may be evidenced in projective geometry with its symbolic form of sphere, Mozart's music (don Giovanni et al), further cubism, surrealism and tachism in painting, the emergence of the modern physics, several philosophical attempts of concretizing time from its abstraction as a whole (Bergson, Nietzsche, Jaspers and Heidegger). Another feature is the overcoming of Reason and rationality by transcending duality, rejection of reductionism, liberation from atomization (including egoistic individualism),
being free from space and scientific objectivism.
More positively said it is the pursuit of integration of all separation, isolation, fragmentation and opposition by concretization of time as a whole. By so doing, reality becomes transparent. This Gibser calls diaphaneity.
In the face of the desperate threat to our humanity from the above mentioned deficient forms of the mental, perspectival structure of consciousness, Gebser's ultimate goal is to properly understand this new emergent reality consciousness by exploring concrete phenomena of the structures of consciousness as its principles. Thus in order to actualize that this new spiritual reality, when more intensified, becomes more real and effective, we must have an explicit awareness of this spiritual reality.
In his approach Gebser is rigorously phenomenological in the widest sense (although he does not officially admit it). Gebser attempts to explore and reveal the intentional correlation between the various structures of consciousness and the cultures as the correlates of these projections of consciousness. His concept of doiphany is precisely the procedure and attitude in which what is concealed is to reveal itself. The self-evidentness of our mundaneity has to be put to the "epoche", and the concealment of our everyday doxa must be demolished, thus we are drawn out of our mundane attitude and shifted to the attitude of diaphany or transparency such that the genuine reality is to disclose itself to us as it actually is.
(from, TAO AND THE APERSPECTIVAL WORLD, For Cultural Studies Conference1990, At University of Oklahoma, by Eiichi Shimomisse, California State University)
“The cosmotheandric intuition is the totally integrated vision of the seamless fabric of the entire reality… the undivided consciousness of the totality” (The Cosmotheandric Experoence).“There are not three realities: God, Man, and the World; but neither is there one, whether God, Man or World. Reality is cosmotheandric. It is our way of looking that makes reality appear to us at times under one aspect, at times under another. God, Man, and World are, so to speak, in an intimate and constitutive collaboration to construct Reality, to make history advance, to continue creation: (The Triniity and the Religious Experience of man, London and New York 1975).
“If the Christian message means something, it is this experience of the cosmotheandric reality of all being, of which Jesus Christ, true God and true Man, is the paradigm. In Christ Matter is not on its own, nor is Man on one side and God on the other; none of these intrinsically united dimensions surpass the others, so that it does not make sense to affirm that Christ is more divine than human, more worldly than heavenly, or vice versa. The veil of separation has been torn, and the integration of reality begins with the redemption of man” (Culto y secularización. Apuntes para una antropología litúrgica, Madrid 1979).
Vocation to Solitude — To deliver oneself up, to hand oneself over, entrust oneself completely to the silence of a wide landscape of woods and hills, or sea, or desert; to sit still while the sun comes up over that land and fills its silences with light. To pray and work in the morning and to labor and rest in the afternoon, and to sit still again in meditation in the evening when night falls up on that land and when the silence fills itself with darkness and with stars… to belong completely to such silence, to let it soak into the bones, to breathe nothing but silence, to feed on silence, and to turn the very substance of life into a living and vigilant silence.
—Thomas Merton from "Thoughts In Solitude" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1956). (louie, louie)Silence of morning.
