turning away

when the burley man

stood in doorway of his agenda

nothing else entered room

from the creative void

We begin eleventh year of poetry group at nursing facility. Twice a month for an hour.

At conversation on porch at hermitage solitaries claim their idiosyncratic preferences.

We are only what is taking place.

lived through

Reading about Robert Lowell, his poetry, manic-depression, and family history of mental illness.

Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Characterby Kay Redfield Jamison, 2017

It’s a hard and distressing disease.

Still, one does what one can with what one has.

“Darkness honestly lived through is a place of wonder and life.” (Robert Lowell)

He also wrote,

All’s misalliance. 

Yet why not say what happened?

(—from his poem Epilogue, 1977) 

prête à partir

As nears what nears

Good dog weakens

His caretaker has gone to the mats

Keeping close

As what seems to be closing

Comes closer

In the earth

What is Christ? Whatever Christ is, Christ is in the earth.

Where is Christ? Wherever Christ is, Christ is in the universe.

Teilhard de Chardin looked in.

In is where what is resides and reverberates.

And generates energy to actualize expansion to everything we consider to be the outer or exterior presentation to everything else in the realm of encounter.

The within of existence — that which stands in, before and beyond,

 [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. 

(— in, Cosmology: Part Two, All-in-Everything, Beatrice Butreau, in Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation, Wednesday, September 4, 2019)

When some say we are meant to dwell in God, they are suggesting something much deeper that one might suspect. 

beable, this spiritual reality

Just what it looks like.

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)

[* 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. )

From one's perspective.

What, then, is the aperspectival view?

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 students I'm studying with this semester will have to forgive me my going-over-the-time.

A faculty member yesterday said I've a reputation for doing so.

I didn't know it was noticed. 

from ramon panikkar's website

Cosmotheandric or theo-anthropo-cosmic (dimension) 

“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). 

The cosmotheandric intuition expresses the all embracing indissoluble union, that constitutes all of Reality: the triple dimension of reality as a whole: cosmic-divine-human. The cosmotheandric intuition is the undivided awareness of the totality." What Panikkar proposes is to live so open to this triple dimension of reality, open to others, to the world, and to God that we might achieve harmonious communion with the all: the cosmotheandric reconciliation. It is a matter of an experience more mystical and ineffable than philosophic in the traditional sense, but it breaks the customary philosophico-theological molds.

The cosmotheandric dimension is another way of expressing the radical Trinitarian conception of reality (cf. later discussion). The triadic structure and the trinitarian conception in RP are not merely in his thinking but also in his methodology, and he even organizes his writings in triadic structures as in the case of his “novenas” (three times three).

Cosmotheandrism, "the goal and fullness of all religion" (The Trinity), is an indispensable concept for understanding panikkarian thinking. The cosmotheandric intuition, the cosmotheandric mystery, or more precisely although less euphonically, the theoanthropocosmic reality, reveals that it is relationship that unites the divine, human and cosmic reality.

Understanding this vision requires the perspective of advaitic non-dualism and of radical relativity (cf. later discussion), and a new innocence that overcomes the fragmented vision of reality that we humans have in order to achieve that understanding and unitary experience of the reality in which we are immersed.

This new innocence “has been freed from the longing for perfection, which necessarily implies being better than the rest… It is pure aspiration… [It is situated in] the realm of pure grace” (La nueva inocencia, Estella 1993). The aspiration to harmony “is established in reality when we are in accord” and presupposes good humor, sweetness, serenity and peace, which are “manifestations of the structure of reality”. It is not the ingenuous dream of wanting to recover paradise, but rather “the healing, in modern Western culture, of the wound the Enlightenment inflicted by separating epistemology from ontology, by making knowledge the hunt for the object by the subject”. Thus, “no part of the dichotomy between the object, the objective thing disconnected from man and the subject, subjective mind”, falls outside the “concupiscence of objective knowledge”; rather the new innocence envelopes knowledge and the knower in the same act because it knows that the one is not given without the other”, without the relationship (Ibid.).

“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).

nothing here

Mind. Itself.

No me. No you.

See this

See everything

to sit still

Labor Day.

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. 

science and non-duality

I finally heard the cliché.

Listen to the cliché, David Foster Wallace said.

The cashier said, "Have a good one."

And I heard it -- the koan invitation.

To have

a

Good

One.

look back; looking’s here

Perhaps we’ve never been safe.

The emerging narrative is that if you feel wronged it is your prerogative to shoot and kill anyone in your path.

If you are someone with power, you mock and insult anyone you wish.

I do not like shooters or arrogance without decency.

My dislike is useless.

I choose, instead, to become what I am not.

I talk to a man in a hospice room about Robert Lowell, about manic depression, about the ways we disappear inside a chaos of disarray, a mind gone away from itself.

Psychiatry sits without remedy.

Poetry walks without destination.

Philosophy thinks about peach cobbler.

Two dogs down the hall, one on bed, one on floor, wonder when their human will wake up.

August ends and September dawns.

Mind is what is, appearing before us.

If we lose our mind it is because we lose the ability to face, with grace, that which appears.

In a chaotic world — in a chaos of social, economic, unseeing foundation, and unloving distraction — we have no need of one another.

So we destroy one another. Just as mind tries to destroy matter, just as we become addicted to resentment and revenge, just as desolate disconnection reasons that all’s misalliance. Why bother saying what’s happening.

The peach cobbler tastes good. Like long desired equanimity.

Here.

Here’s looking at you!

Go on.

Look back.