Seeing

“What,” it will be Questioned, “When the Sun rises, do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?” O no no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying “Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty.” -Blake

what do you see
when this vast panoply
opens up before you?
guinea in the sun
host around the Son

there's a clue here
a key to the Real

Gabriel's Oboe

How Big Is the Universe?

All rights belong to the Guardian and Newton.

Reflection

There is a town in north Ontario

With dream comfort memory to spare

And in my mind I still need a place to go

All my changes were there.

Neil Young

My memories know only a wild freedom

On snowy winter nights I would often ride the snowmobile out to a place overlooking my hometown. It was fitting that this small snowmachine was called an "Elan", for it was during these nighttime runs, darting along winding trails as fast as the shadows receding from the headlight, that I would be filled with a pure and powerful sense of living, of an élan vital: a powerful creative force. This was also a sustaining force, seeing me through some of my most difficult moments. Standing upon the summit of my solitude, the glowing lights below -filtering through a million gently falling wonders- warmed and comforted my heart. I suppose such moments are purchased with great sums of money, or hastily lived during a weekend away. Such moments might be the point of life for some, the whole reason for such industriousness and labour, though I suspect that so much work is often rewarded by other things. I will never cease to be amazed by the commercialization of experience.

There are such places in my dreams... places I once haunted like a ghost. They contain no trace of me now, like a lake reflecting the flight of geese over its water. Once upon a time I flew over them.. now they fly over me.

Existentialism

I refute this notion of existentialism that we are "thrown into" existence, that we find ourselves suddenly in this or that place or time, that even at the dawn of consciousness we find ourselves suddenly with a story or interpretation. No, this idea too easily suggests that "I" somehow pre-exist, that it is "I" who am thrown into something, that there is something or Someone there to throw in the first place. It makes too much of consciousness, as if it arrives a completed project from somewhere else. I detect here also the modern mechanical notion of the human subject.

I counter this with the immortal Watts who rightly criticizes the mechanistic worldview of modernity, the implication of the notion of the great Architect who constructs the universe, the idea that reality is a kind of machine. Human consciousness is not uploaded to a body, or installed into a biological machine, ready to run like a software program. No, for Watts organisms should not be said to be "put together", but to grow, like (using Watt's example) an acorn into an oak tree. In this sense development is organic. We see these perspectives played out in the difference between a child asking "How was I made?" (the typical Western question) and "How did I grow?" (the Eastern child's equivalent- to generalize). Consciousness then is as organic as the brain it arises from. It is not "thrown into" existence, it grows out of it and is it.

This then is the solution (elaborated by Watts) to the state of mind produced by our human confrontation with the vastness of the cosmos (see comments previous blog). For the one who believes in a separation, a fundamental difference between what's "out there" and that which is the essence of the human subject, there can only be fear and trembling when faced with such vast cosmic being (as separate from my own being). But when one realizes that humans themselves grow out of this cosmos, as an oak tree out of an acorn, or an acorn out of an oak tree, does the fundamental attitude not shift? The cosmos loses its sense of otherness, becoming instead the very ground of our existence, the very substance of the human subject. To put it another way: We are the stuff of stars.

Dust and Shadow

This is the deepest visible-light image of the cosmos. Just let it soak in a bit. There are nearly 10,000 galaxies here. That's about 800 trillion stars. Each one of those little discs is a galaxy. Each galaxy contains billions of stars. Has one picture ever contained such things? The Earth orbits a star in a galaxy similar to some of those galaxies, but the light from that star would hardly be visible in such a panorama of suns and space. Its light would add nothing to the display of 10,000 galactic ensembles. God help us from looking into that void. I can hardly bear it. "Pulvis et umbra sumus": We are but dust and shadow...