Archive
“Gordon Goes To Heaven”
I wrote this poem on the request of my niece after the death of one of her associate’s with severe developmental disabilities. She was struck by his Cookie Monster doll sitting by his plastic palm tree which she had always meant to decorate with christmas lights but never got around to it. Got me thinking about big questions and i wrote this surrealist thing:
The Cookie Monster sat
Under the seven foot cactus
That though never wore Christmas Lights
In this life for sure
Will shine in remembrance
Where we’ll all live the longest
If we get to live at all
The memory mansions of a communal Heaven
A place across the abyss
That is not alone
Many Many Memory Mansions
Are prepared for us for sure
Life without interaction is impossible
And Jesus said he could do it
And Jesus said he would do it
He might have said we should do it
And far greater things
Less we be swallowed up in the unimaginable
Not remembered Not remembering
Swallowed up in the divine for sure
Through the conservation of energy if nothing else
Can’t be all bad
Some noble folk seek it out
As their ultimate goal
But if its communion versus existance
Independent Existance
I stand to be here
To be Me if not I
Humility has its demands
And the Work has too few hands
And there’s shadows grow across the land
‘Midst the dappled sunlight of growth
And the warmth of gentle decomposition
The cycle turns and turns
But passions churn and burn
In their immediacy
The seeds of apocalypse
Are as easy to see as beauty
And which is more real
Only time will tell
That lying bitch
Mother of dogs
Man’s best friend
Do you remember the wolf
That you were
Or the angel you may be
May be becoming
Was a stop in the suburbs
Of arbitrary confinement
And casual nurturance
Worth a step toward the Celestial Hunt
Murderously vain about intelligence
We are
I have to say to not sound threatening
Though there’s no violence on my mind
Except the violence I see
In the stories I hear
In the papers I read
In the people I meet
Arrogant to believe intelligence
Trumps connection
That God does not preserve man and beast
And yet the socially constructed eternal soul
Of personality in interaction
Shines brighter in imagination
A fuller conception of the divine
Aids resonance
Resonance to dance
Outside the hallowed walls
Of someone else’s memory
Skating across the abyss on a name
A hope, a prayer
To soar amidst the other luminescent beings
And share our light
And shine brighter
We are all stars in time
and I swear I will try to remember
You all
In time.
“FREEZING MY ASS OFF IN ANZA BORREGO BY TEALIGHT”
After Amee and I split up I went to camp alone in the desert for some weeks. It was January so I went to the Anza Borrego desert in San Diego county. Very stark and beautiful and cold at night. The nights are long in January, so i spent a lot of time shivering in my tent thinking, reading by candlelight, and a little writing. So this would have been written in January 2002, and less a dark night of the soul then a time to really reflect on my purpose in the world. i got some good answers and it was time well spent. Anyone who comments on this post i will give a copy of my book “America: Its Land and Its People”. (Facebook comments don’t count, they have no history.)
I need to get real with people
Its easiest to do with strangers
With no history
Preconceived conceptions
Or formulaic patterns
To escape reality.
The fascination of discovery
Wonder
Total attention
The Universe condensed
To an understandable packet.
The most beautiful times
Are when that packet
Is the interaction.
The unity of two
The most difficult
To harmonize into the One.
As zero is nonbeing
And one is existance
Than two is one and not one.
Duality, the first separation
But between two is the
First Possibility of communication
A process that is One.
But if only one is being one
There is no communication
Only projections
Of the not one received by the one
And the Universe is the Other
And i am no more
Lost and forgotten
By even myself
I wander not in the unity of the One
Where I belong
Where I am nurtured
Where i am inexplicably me.
But in the Zero
Oblivion
Nothingness
The abyss
So excuse me
If I try
To make you get real
With me
I am only trying to exist.
prose poem with lots of unatributed quotes
The Kingdom of heaven is like writing in the margins. For all of the writing in the book there is always room for more words. The kingdom of heaven is within you, heaven and earth will pass away but my words will never pass away, in the beginning was the word and the word was god and was with god and everyone who loves is a child of god because god is love. Solomon says truly there is nothing new under the sun and yet i am a new creation. i sing a new song, i love the truth, i fall short of the glory of god and write obscenities in the book of life, i fall short, but the wind rocks me, i lay each night in the cradle and feel at home, i fall short, i am selfish and self centered but mostly lazy and yet i am rocked by the winds of change. i feel at home on the dusty plains, i feel at home in the snowy mountains, i feel at home in the winter’s rain. god loves a cheerful giver a forthright spirit and an upright heart. Plato says rightly that we are in a cave looking at flickering lights cast upon the darkness of our cave all these things that will Pass away. How many walls that limited Plato’s walks still stand? How many bowls from which he supped his soups or knives that carved his bread? hath not moth & rust destroyed? yet the idea of Knife guides every hand that makes to cut anything anywhere ever. heaven and earth shall pass away but my words will never die. this world is illusion only in the eye of the eternity and for now walls still stand the cave still surrounds us with darkness. but it is only contrast on the page of the limitless light of the now. dare to read your life as a book, your experiences as words on a page in the book of life. store up treasures in heaven, someday all there will be is communication, isn’t that what communion really means? but now there are walls and roads and knives and bowls and soup and bread and the stuff that Stories are made of. tales to be told when the weather just doesn’t matter anymore. heaven and earth shall pass away but my words shall never die. time is a fire that burns away all the things that in the end are dust, but star dust nothing less, “its the cosmos that gave us life its from stardust that we’re made of”. “we are all stars”. “every woman and every man is a star” because of the truth. not the idea of truth but the truth itself, the known and the unknown, the beginning and the end. just as our bodies, molded clay of life stuff, for a time, a temple of finite properties but infinite possibilities. we are born into a world in which we are a part and we live and we die like the birds in the field. but our fallible material shells generate consciousness. a self. an entity capable of knowing and being known. remembering and being remembered. the kingdom of heaven is within you. The kingdom of heaven is at hand, to be grasped. to be known to love and be loved for god is love and what is love but a knowing a being known. [the book of wisdom says the great build up walls of lies, great houses and lands and things that twinkle and gleam, that block out the light of eternity, (an experience of both truth & love) and leave them huddled alone in darkness. a land of dark despair] just as every hand that cuts is guided by the same perfect knife every heart that loves is guided by the same perfect love. God and heaven and all the saints and angels are an “a priori” assumption, a self evident fact by anyone who has ever been lost in the moment of love, the sharing, the knowing of another soul be it our neighbor or the god who made the universe its really all the same eternity, if you do it right. do you want to know if you are going to live forever? are you living forever right now? my home is the planet earth and my family has six billion children and i yearn to know their names and know their stories. i have a name, i have asked to be remembered and promised to remember. i have loved and am loved, i sing songs to the angels, i love everyone i have ever loved and that love lives inside of me. moments of eternity when we shined brighter together, lost in the moment, timeless and so eternal. heavenly treasures, stories to tell when the weather just doesn’t matter anymore because heaven and hell have passed away and there is only the word. the word is truth. the word is love. the word is beauty. the word is.
curriculum vita (a prose poem found in my paint by # calendar Dec. 06)
What is my story, what is the essence of my being? From where does come this hunger to know, to be known? Why mar the blank page? in what hubris it must lay, lie, die.
Oh to be of one and now, but what cost history, even to gain eternity, oh blessed now, the razor’s edge of existence that i can only pretend exists as by the time the light has hit my eyes its history, pure history. And oh, memory, the purest form of imagination. When the brain is eaten through with plaquey-tentacles and the mind from which is sprung is thin and patchy, the mind holds onto childhood. the earliest stories, the purest, the best, the core. oh history i sing your praise and yearn to never forget, even at the cost of the now.
My life a taut quivering string of ambivilance. the cost of a vivid imagination. There’s good reason to believe in everything. any damn thing.
At what cost freedom? At what cost power, even unsought, unutilized, unspent this currency weighs heavy in my pocket. Makes me want to walk all cockeyed, or spend it. or just fucking lay down, rest, forget, dream perhaps, not without struggle but how’s it going to drag you down, when your laying on the bottom?
intelligent design
Intelligent Design is a feeble attempt by Creationists to hide the fact they are trying to bring religion into the public schools. Their argument is that life is complex it had to have a designer. Its not science because where is your testable hypothesis? Nonetheless it has something about it that intrigues me. I am a big believer in evolution. It is a neat theory with a lot of supporting evidence. I remember in highschool biology when a student told the teacher he didn’t believe in it and the teacher scoffed and said he’d seen it in the lab. Mostly the anti-evolutionists don’t like evolution because it takes away our specialness. There is seemless and corroborating evidence from genetics, linguistics, and archeology that humanity left Africa 50,000 years ago and spread across the globe. I like the idea of the big bang happening 18 billion years ago and all the scientific evidence points to that. The fact that we are on one middling planet, circling a middling sun, in the backwaters of a middling galaxy is pretty cool and far weirder than any creation myth folks came up. But life is complex as is the universe. Complexity lends itself to intelligence. Even cities organize themselves intelligently, more user friendly than those developed by central planners. Bees do it, ants do it without any centralized authority. We call this process emergence, when intelligence naturally arises out of random simple processes. I do believe there is intelligence in our design but that does not necessarily mean there is a designer. I believe the design itself is intelligent and in that sense i do believe in intelligent design.
WET Zero
Since i got a compliment on my post on the Western Esoteric Tradition i decided to post another. The core of wet is numbers as fundamental bases on which everything else is built on. The WET built their system on the Hebrew Tree of Life. It is fairly complex to explain and i can’t claim to know all of its intricacies but i pretty much know how it works. Everything begins with what is normally depicted as three arcs representing nothingness, the nothingness of nothingness, and the nothingness of nothingness of nothingness. There are prettier names for it the light, the limitless light, and the mirror of limitless light, i believe. We might want to think of say a gas tank, it could be empty – containing nothingness, or non-existent and not just non-present, or it could even be impossible a deeper state of empty. I put this in for the sake of completion not claiming to be able to fully appreciate it in any practical way.
You can also think about things starting with zero. An interesting number mathematically and philosophically having more in common with infinity than any number imaginable. It helps us to imagine the infinite. It is the nothingness of freedom from desire, akin with Nirvana. In Tarot, or The Book of Thoth which i prefer, it is represented by The Fool. Traditionally depicted as a hermaphroditic youth dressed as a jester preparing to step off a clif with a little dog barking in the background. In Haiku form:
Fool walks towards the cliff
not hearing the warning cry
Fool does not need to
We think of nothingness as the potentiality of everything. This works on a practical level as a point of meditation. There is an emptiness that comes with meditation. If you have ever felt it, it is akin to being one with everything. An experience i can’t hope to describe. Which is why archetypes have power. Recognizing the Fool as Parsifal from the Grail legend helps us see the zero as innocence rather than ignorance and a lack of self consciousness to freely do the next right thing naturally and without effort.
Poetry Archive #1 (behavior mod. notebook 03-04)
unfinished novel page 25
(circa 2003)
don’t want to lose people
in unimportant details
but must establish
an understandable framework
to launch new memes.
as the only way to get
over the sun
enter Archetype Heaven
Unique Universal Knowledge
constructs contain ego-energy
we walk long swordblades
immutable in their truth
infinitely cruel
a tool of severity
excising kindness blob
of easy indifference to cancer
###############
selection from unpublished novel
Mitch is cold and dissatisfied with winter. a defuse chill that has begun to ache in its familiarity begetting contempt for himself and consequently the universe. He’s thinking about mirror shots and what they mean in movies, television, mitch’s mind. Watching from the outside not in a peeping tom kind of way but a stolen glance of a private place, in a public space. He has to watch to know. data collection. focus group testing, personal science. grist for the mill of mitch’s mind. working not the subconscious calculus of the thrown ball but its close kin….applied
yawning dogs
Within the last month or so i heard a story on NPR about dogs. It covered a study proving what i had already observed that yawning, which is known to be contagious, is so between dogs and our own naked primates. It also pointed out that yawning is not contagious with folks with autism, theorized to be a lack of empathy. Therefore dogs have empathy. I already knew all of the facts of the story but had not put those things together, though i am not surprised. Dogs are very emotion based. We know from other studies that dogs are more able to identify human emotions than even our close cousins the chimpanzee. To the extent that dogs have consciousness, not being able to pass the Mirror Test they presumably lack self-consciousness, i believe it is built emergently out of emotional processes unlike our forebrain centered consciousness that is presumably built out of administrative functions. Consciousness is an information process and is not to be confused with the biological processes that support it. “When the finger points to the stars the dog looks at the finger”. Self consciousness is more heavily clustered in mammals with fore brains, us, the great apes and elephants(?). But dolphins, and presumably whales though yet to be tested, pass the mirror test and demonstrate other traits of personhood (tool use for ex.- wild-dolphins put sponges on the tips of their noses to root for food in corral). A self-consciouss built out of the mammalian brain is possible. And what of bird self-consiousness? some can pass the mirror test. Consciousness built out of reptilian survival drive. Our consciousnesses, information processes, than probably carry theses subustructures of emotion and drive information systems that have the potential to achieve self consciousness. I welcome any correction on my musings on neruo-science, socio-biology, and philosophy.
am i a christian?
I got that question recently and as i often do i gave a rather bungled answer. For one i’ve put some thought into and answered regularly you’d think i’d have an answer. I do but i have lots of them, talking points depending on who asks. Sometimes none of them really seem to fit and i sputter around trying to answer the question. As with perhaps all binary questions the real answer is yes, no, neither yes nor no, both yes and no, and the question is meaningless. Its a big universe.
What i would have liked to have said might be something like this. I believe in the universe for lots of good reason. I believe in my own existance for many more. I have looked to see what i am and have some preliminary conclusions at least. I am consciousness with volition, the ability to process sensory information, remember the past, imagine almost anything, and i have some degree of self awareness. I know my consciousness arises in a process of emergence, self organization of simple routines. I believe the universe is likewise. Like my brain and body spinning off mind stuff that has achieved self awarenss it is conceivable to me that the universe has done likewise. The physical universe is perhaps 18 billion years old. I am fascinated by science and believe it is telling a largely self consistent narrative of how things came to be and see no serious reason to doubt the universe began with a Big Bang some time ago. As the first stars formed planets coalesced as well, perhaps 17 1/2 billion years ago. On one of those planets life arose which achieved self consciousness for the first time. On that planet one being had to be the first, allowing the first conversation and the creation of the information universe. Before this the universe consciousness had no one to talk to and without another there is no self consciousness. We are created through conversation. Words are the component of the internal dialogue the matrix of the self. In the beginning was the word and the word was god and the word was with god. Information has no particular location nor time. It just is. This first being achieved self consciousness and created the information universe and for all practical purposes invented god as they reflected each other. I have no reason not to think this first being incarnated on this planet as Jesus. I have had religious experiences that lend this idea credence, I don’t ask you to believe on my word but i challenge you to have your own experiences in whatever way is meaningful to you. Spirituality to me is less about what you believe and more about what you experience, though of course our experiences are mediated by our beliefs. the 2 forces that shape our higher consciousness are love and meaning. Deny a newborn love and it will die. Once we exist we can live without it, i have seen evidence of this but there is no evidence a self consciousness can develop without love. Nor can it exist without meaning. Meaninglessness would prohibit communication and we are created in a social context. No man is an island but every man and every woman is a star. A luminous being of the light of consciousness. We shine in this world and another, though it be just a story that is alright. Thats all anything is, anything real. Until its a story its existance is only as potential. probability. Reality breaks down into probability without an observer. Why is heaven referred to as the Book of Life? Jesus said both i have made many mansions and ye shall do far greater things. He quotes Psalm 82:6, ye are gods but shall die like men. Each of us creates our part in the universe of ideas. Mediated by our experiences in the material world we create a self and equip it with tools; ideas, language, stories, memories, the capacity for imagination and conversation. These are the treasures of heaven that moth and rust cannot destroy. The ideas of things are more real than the things themselves. So i am a christian in that i am a co-heir with christ. I am a child of the god that made the universe, if not by creation than observation, as i suspect the universe made god as much as the other way around. The god i tip my head to is the sum total of all things, the emergent organization of all mind in the universe, all that is and all that has ever been, and all that anyone could ever imagine anywhere and anywhen, and probably more as well. Its too big for words. All words lie in that they create necessary assumptions that obscure the total truth.
QUALITIES OF A GOOD GOAL
The difference between successful people and people who struggle is the successful individual can picture where they want their life to be and break down the steps towards getting their into achievable pieces. People who struggle simply respond to the daily crisis or the daily grind if their a bit more stable. Heres the common wisdom on setting goals.
1. Significant – A goal should be about something that is important.
2. Achievable – A goal should be something that is possible.
3. Positively Stated – It is easier to do something positive then stop something negative.
4. Measurable – You have to know whether it happened or not to achieve goals.
5. Time Limited – Deadlines make things happen.
6. Sets Up the Next Goal – Living a successful life is a never ending process of setting and achieving goals.
Multiconstruct 
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