It's Not for Me

It's not for me to try to lead you on your own personal path to Enlightenment.  My own path suffers from a dark cast of mind and a lifelong lack of spiritual discipline.

But the Greatest Avatar Ever to Have Emerged from the State of New Jersey, Whose Multiplicity of Names Shall Remain Nameless, insisted in his lifetime on two things -- (1) that we empty our minds; and (2) that we unclench our minds.

The first is well understood, if extremely difficult in the execution.  It is the shutting down of the internal monologue, via meditation or tai chi, for example.

But what does it mean to unclench our minds?  

In that ancient and much-beloved documentary series, "The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau," Jacques and his minions would often find sea anemones on the ocean floor.  Their many tentacles waved in lovely patterns as they hunted for plankton or other little things to eat.  But if an intruder such as Jacques touched them even with a light finger, they would withdraw instantly into a tight, protective ball.

The New Jersey Avatar admonishes us to open up to the world, whatever it may bring.

 

At the Risk of Blasphemy

Could the intensity of the devotion to Jesus Christ as personal Savior that we have seen lately, and the sheer numbers of people who feel such devotion, conjure Him out of thin air, making Him real after all, for believer and non-believer alike?

 

Un Cheval Andalou

I will start this one with an acknowledgement that it is all from memory, and that the memory is not always reliable.  But I will also argue that in this particular context it does not matter.  A Jungian therapist once said to me that it makes no sense to ask whether the dream has been remembered correctly, because there is no dream other than the recollected one.

"Un Chien Andalou" -- "An Andalusian Dog" -- is a justly famous, hallucinatory little film that Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali conspired to produce in the 1930s.  It shows us a succession of nightmarish vignettes.  In the one that stands out to me today, a young gentleman in fine clothes stands in a large and equally fine drawing room.  He is chained to a grand piano.  A dead horse, flayed, lies atop the instrument.  The man is struggling to drag himself and his burden in small steps towards an attractive woman who stands across the room.  (She could cross the room to him unburdened, but it seems that she is indifferent.)

A not-so-subtle message of the vignette is Sisyphean; that is, a tremendous exertion is being made in a hopeless cause.  But beyond that, it is a reminder that our cultural and social affectations are but expressions of vanity in a world that is governed at a deeper level only by blind and base animal instincts.  

I think of the scene now because it seems to mock my late fixations upon two things that are linked in my mind -- the possibility of transcendence and the imminence of right and proper judgment.

And yet, all can be reconciled if we see the entirety of "Un Chien Andalou" as a playing out of one man's descent into Carl Jung's netherworld, his shadow world.  On this view, the netherworld is a real, subconscious world that is shared by us all, and only by immersion into it can we reach the form of transcendence that Jung himself achieved, and that he referred to as personal integration.  

Jung would call this "science."  Without disparaging it, others might call it "mysticism."  With a little tweak to Arthur C. Clarke's oft-quoted aphorism, we may say after all that "any sufficiently comprehensive and advanced science is indistinguishable from magic."

 

We Need a New Theory of Memory

When we take into account that everything we know, we know because we remember it, how can it be challenged that there are simply too many memories to fit inside even the largest individual cranium?

• "Daddy, how do you spell 'clapboard'?"
• The fact that Susie Wiles is the daughter of Pat Summerall.
• The color of your first pencil box.
• How much salt to put on the skin side of a duck breast before pan frying it.
• The cylinder configuration of the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine that powered the P-51 Mustang in WWII.
• The difference between magnetic and true north at Boston in 2025.
• The section of the Internal Revenue Code that governs intercompany pricing within multinational corporate structures.
• How to close a window in the Windows operating system.
• The purpose of the indentation in one button only among the many buttons of a Crucianelli accordion.
• The taste of a blade of grass.

And so on and so on.

"The idea that the brain is a computer is simply a metaphor."

But if all of our memories, broadly understood, are stored elsewhere, the implications of that are profound indeed.

When we each reach our point of personal extremity, do we release the memories in a structured way?  Are they organized in "arrondissements" around a core?  Or are they all held, democratically if you will, for the life review, the review in which you will experience vividly the impact that your pilfering of that yellow pencil box from the lost and found had on its true owner?

 

Slip Sliding Away

Any personal feeling of:

• Transcendence
• Vindication
• Absolution
• Communion
• Completion; or
• What the Russians call "byez-a-pas-nust."  It often means "security," as in "KGB" -- the Committee of Governmental Security -- but more literally and more commonly "the condition of being without danger."

All slipping or slipped away.

 

It's a Holographic Universe

Or so the theory goes.  Accordingly, the Source Consciousness resides in you in its entirety.  But also in a blade of grass.

That is something worth chewing on.

 

In Prayer, Does Purity of Intention Matter?

A man of true faith has no reason to call upon the name of God.  His heart is One with God; why would he cry out to Him?  He can better worship by sitting in silence.

And so the intensity of my prayers is a measure of my cowardice.  And if our God is a Gnostic God, like the God of the Old Testament, He reacts to such prayers with resentment and even spite.  Perhaps this is what Jim Morrison of the Doors meant when he said, insistently, that "you cannot petition the Lord with prayer."