Note from Meeting with Desani

Look closely at where we come from. We are on a journey. We need tools, devices. Take from the past those good procedures as instruction from a revered teacher. Use them carefully, and when the present generation gives them up to the future our children will enjoy and appreciate what we did. Our acts should leave a residue, an accretion, on the gemstone of human history that gives clarity and brilliance. They will, if we seek knowledge, love, truth, and beauty, and do good deeds according to standard cultural norms.

Besides the great lord who is omnipresent there are everywhere smaller lords too. Some are tiny, infinitely small.

For whatever activity undertaken, there is a spirit for that doing and that spirit in time gets a life of its own, gets self awareness as it goes on. These acts eventually become forms of worship.

Knowingly or unknowingly our acts, ritualized and regularly played out, constitute worship, praise of spirits. The meditator eventually becomes the object of meditation.* These spirits range from the infinitely small to the infinitely large, from the most terrible evil to the most beautiful good, and so on.

Doing good enhances goodness. Goodness is the reservoir drawn from when acts of kindness are done. And it is thereby increased. These acts are like accretions. Charity grows by use. Doing right this time makes it easier the next and so forth.

Worship must have been discovered not invented.

Where the concentration is, there is the persistent, the lasting, the permanent. That to which attention goes is that which returns. In a sense to attend to something is to put consciousness into it, to bring it to life, to self awareness.

If born a warrior one concentrates on being such. One works at the tasks of warriorhood, makes the craft a permanent feature. So the warrior lives on generation after generation, life after life. The consequence is that the craft gets more efficient as time goes on. The power of war machines grow. The display of the hardware more and more glorious, awesome. There is no end to it except maybe annihilation. Probably the essence of the warrior is the death wish. The wish to be free.

*From the Bhagavad-Gita “Worshipers of spirits and goblins go to spirits and goblins, worshipers of the departed fathers go there, worshipers of me come to me.” (Krsna)

On Experience

At the moment of supreme focus there is nothing there. The dichotomy, that is, between experiencer and that experienced disappears. We say, “lost in the moment…” to explain this. What happens is a melding of the ego, the mode of the experience, and that being experienced. He who loves his God disappears, God disappears, all remaining is “love of God”, for instance. In a “Zen” sense, if you take the well known phrase, “when hungry, I eat” and change it to “when hungry, eating” you have a sense of what is meant here, assuming the eater focuses on eating to the total and absolute exclusion of all else. The void, into which all stimuli disappears at the moment experience arises, for one who has total concentration, subsumes the whole of creation in a kind of quasi death. This is rapture, for the acolyte, pleasure, for the seeker thereof, adventure, for the mountaineer, and so forth.

On Will , Faith, Instinct, Reason, and Thought

My use of the word Real below is as an aspect, a recognizable face (facet), of the motive force, spirit, that informs all that is. One could as easily use other words such as God, the Truth, the One, and so forth. This note ties in with much of what is written elsewhere in my blog and takes a step or two towards making a case for free will.

My reading of Blaise Pascal Pensee 340 wherein he observes that animals will but can’t do math leads me to contemplate that there can be will without thought. Consider that will as principle preexists thought in that sentient life must emerge, become self aware, evolve a sense of cause and effect, and develop the use of symbols before the emergence of thinking itself. I am suggesting that thinking in the anthropomorphic sense does not occur for every order of being but that will perhaps does. The Real itself is a kind of being but does it observe the consequences of action within itself and think to affect those consequences by offering different action? Or does the Real rather through an exercise of will set creation in motion and let the consequences work themselves out? I don’t think the Real apart from utilization of the self conscious faculties of created sentient beings has self awareness. I do think it has awareness itself but in the sense that one is aware equally of all that is in every particular as well as in total, that awareness can’t be reflexive. It is only when awareness, consciousness, enters into a part of the whole and looks back on the whole from the standpoint of a separate being that self awareness enters into reality. So I think thought is an expression of consciousness in adequately developed sentient life forms. Furthermore in the Real awareness is something possessed in the sense that it exists as a potentiality awaiting the arising of conditions suitable for its emergence.

Consider also that instinct is related to will while reason is related to thought. So animal’s instinct is a more primitive expression of the principle of will than in man while reason is similarly an evolute of the development of thought.

This brings up the question of whether faith is the opposite of will. I think not exactly. Faith is not intention but the yielding to intrinsic intention, existential will. Seeing there is something in the nature of existence that in reality is beyond my understanding, while I apprehend benevolence therein, I yield, that is, suspend “my” little will to preexisting will, that exists potentially and really in the very stuff of being. That, I think, is faith.

Verbindung II


Here is a black one. It is acrylic on canvas. Something tightly bound, it is. A presentation, a setting held firmly in place, a vast mystery as to origin, as to what exactly is going on, as to purpose, meaning, emotion. Is it love? Is it not? Perhaps it works to express and expand consciousness. Maybe it is so tightly held that any such expression is futile. Is it a surd? Is it without reason? Perhaps. But how can one possibly know whether it is not some kind of heuristic energeia? My intention is that it is the latter. It is self learning potentiality embedded in the kernel of the Real itself as a kind of meaning the expression of which is an infinite ingress of fractaling purpose.

Entelechy II


Entelechy II was my recent gift for Kristi Ann Harris. It wasn’t really her 24th birthday gift but it was close. She says it is her favorite. We have had long discussions about the use of black in my art and it is of course significant that she chose a white piece for her own. I told her black represents the existential void which idea she finds disturbing. Kristi has lately taken to the path of faith so I explained that it is on faith that the void, with an infinite subtlety, becomes full of the divine. Nonetheless unless sustained by a belief system of some sort it can shift back to everlasting emptiness yawning at our feet. All creatures must cope with this teetering on the brink of meaning and not meaning, of purpose and not purpose, of love and not love, of God and not God. It is our intention that foreshadows whether our path is into nihilism or solipsism, or deism. It is our determination that takes us into everlasting darkness of the abyss or into the redeeming light of infinite bliss which is union with the divine.

Oil on canvas.

Entelechy I


Entelechy is from the Greek entelechia. For Aristotle it meant being at an end. This is oil on canvas.
Don’t know if you believe in the spirit world but those two “entities” towards the right of the painting represent “disembodied” spirits. One has a sort of eye while the other is a little vaguer but you can tell they are both “watchers”. They have their existence in subtle bodies, matter still, but more ephemeral than ours. They are mostly transparent and sort of like gossamer but they have appetites which they feed by watching, attending to, the activities of human beings. This is sort of like the vicarious experience we have watching a play or a movie. They aren’t very smart. They are just appetites. Their existence consists of parasitic attachment to particular indulgences of their hosts and in fact their hosts often do these indulgences at the urging of the watchers. Of course they are not the end within, unless you lose your will to theirs. The end within is the secret fire under the domed hierarchical form, the pyramid, and is heuristic energeia. It is eternal, imperishable, and has the quality of conferring individuality. It is existential mass. It is capable of being or not being any actuality and is continuously self learning new actualities. The entelechy of potentiality is actuality.

Ritual Object


This is a found objects assemblage I did. All of these art pieces I will publish here were done about the same time, i.e., 1970s, during the period of my life when I fancied I wanted to find validation as a visual artist. I entered contests, won prizes, and such, even showed my stuff in a museum in Austin once but my other interests trumped this effort and I gave up the idea of making a living at this. At any rate I found a certain kind of fulfillment in these creations and my attraction to them has not diminished over time. In their creation my mind was beautifully, exquisitely focused. I like reentering these states of consciousness. I have had opportunities to give these away to family and friends over the years and even to sell them on a few occasions, but the price was never sufficient to make me part with them. I am glad I still have them around but would like to share them. So I will put them here.

dense tearful dance

if can you too where want did dense tearful dance
(propensely waiting for falling me)
and little lubricant folly for hidden things,
reality slips concretely between ego’s soul
i tend to manhood by degrees of you
(wait for me please, after all)
my petty exhortation is your echofile.

generally any particular thing loving knows,
this or these that those
(where why and wherefores see
wait for me can’t you please).

while being allowed hollows hallowed thoughts
suffering goes where wild wind blows
as long gaunt ghosts before time
we tend our seems as dreaming deems
(but really is merely and lovely plain
please wait for me, and anyway)
dreaming deeds is doing
all nothing does.

Verbindung


Acrylic and found objects on panel by me circa 1973. The theme in my mind to which I was attempting to give aesthetic expression was of human life being in the grip of an infinite regress of technology where only efficiency was of value. Today we might speak of this sentiment as relating to the so called singularity.